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AweStriker posted:Is... is that Liam O'Brien as Krumly? Ryan Drees in the first game, Liam O'Brien here, yes.  Part 48: Geldoblame's Request While we're out and about, we can't forget about our good buddy Geldoblame! He's done so much for us, like...uh...give us this wonderful sidequest.
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May 5, 2023 21:52
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Part 49: The Revenge Tour In more exciting news, it's been a while since we checked in with all our friends on Team Promachination. We should uh...fix that. E: Also, I will be flying on Friday so you will have to find that video on my channel until I can post later in the evening. Artix fucked around with this message at 23:14 on May 8, 2023 |
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May 8, 2023 21:53
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Part 50: Blast From the Past Just a quick one today as we wrap up our sidequest gauntlet by paying a visit to a *really* old friend.
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May 13, 2023 12:15
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Artix posted:
Loving the generic "Battle Win!" dialogue from our party members each time they murder one of the Promachination Pals.
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May 13, 2023 19:17
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The whole battle in the past thing is very confusing to me, and I've been trying to pay attention to the lore. Who was wiseman fighting an enormous battle with? Why didn't our Malpercio pals go ally with them instead? Who were the children of the earth planning to murder with their godslayer robots before Malpercio showed up? 
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May 14, 2023 11:32
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Part 51: Vega, Machina Metropolis Our list is all finished up, so it's time to dial up the plot and see what Baelheit's been cooking up while we were busy murdering his stooges.
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May 15, 2023 20:44
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The fact that a continent-sized airship went unnoticed is hilarious to me. Like it would have taken decades to build, employed thousands of workers and I don't wanna even think about how got the materials without consuming their entire island. Maybe Alfard was made entirely of metals beneath the surface and is just hollow now? God I love JRPGs and the anime nonsense they pull to have a super cool flying fortress 
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May 17, 2023 02:12
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Mathwyn posted:The fact that a continent-sized airship went unnoticed is hilarious to me. Like it would have taken decades to build, employed thousands of workers and I don't wanna even think about how got the materials without consuming their entire island. Maybe Alfard was made entirely of metals beneath the surface and is just hollow now? It's basically a Monolith staple to whip out a floating mechanical continent that was always there but just never noticed by anyone for thousands of years at the 3/4s mark of their games. Xenogears does it like three times between Shevat, Solaris, and Mahannon.
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May 17, 2023 06:14
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Xenoblade 2 goes there as well, which is a game that owes basically its entire world design and aesthetic to this series.  E: I guess all three do, technically, but 2 and 3 are the most blatant about "oops surprise mechanical fortress area" Artix fucked around with this message at 14:58 on May 17, 2023 |
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May 17, 2023 11:23
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So are Verus and Geldoblame cool with the daughter of our enemy hanging out with us, or was Millie's deal explained to them off-camera?
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May 18, 2023 02:04
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C-Euro posted:So are Verus and Geldoblame cool with the daughter of our enemy hanging out with us, or was Millie's deal explained to them off-camera? Given Milly's father, I would be *shocked* if they didn't immediately know who she was the first time she walked in the door and considered her either an acceptable risk or that her being around Sagi and potentially spying on him was less dangerous than anything else she could be doing in the capital. Part 52: The Championship Match Before we go give Baelheit the business, let's go cure anime cancer with the power of incredible violence. Artix fucked around with this message at 22:09 on May 19, 2023 |
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May 19, 2023 22:01
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...It has a knockoff X-Buster. Sure, throw in a Xenosaga reference, why not do it?
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May 19, 2023 23:16
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Part 53: Tarazed It's time for the final dungeon, and what have our boys in the art department cooked up for the occasion? Oh, one room. Just one? Well...I guess we'll see if we can make it work. Block A:  Block B:  Block C:  Block D:  The star is the location of the afterling, and with the exception of Block B you enter and exit from the same elevator. For that one, the bottom elevator is the one that goes to Blocks A/B/Main and the top one goes to B/C/D/Main. Artix fucked around with this message at 23:04 on May 22, 2023 |
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May 22, 2023 21:55
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Who the hell designed this dungeon? Suda51?
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May 22, 2023 23:23
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Some Alfardian defense contractor made bank off of that design.
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May 23, 2023 02:07
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Yeah, the curve across the bottom of that screen is crying out 'this is part of a circle', baffling. The oddest thing about the Japanese text on that screen is I can't find a single mention of anyone discussing it on the English internet or any google results for what it appears to say. Though, I imagine it was entirely unreadable after the gamecube video output was through with it so there's no 15 year old gamefaqs posts theorising over it. Lyrics seems possible enough since it has 'you', 'me', and 'love' in it.
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May 24, 2023 11:38
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Yeah... this final dungeon brings to mind various pseudo-randomly generated bonus dungeons, which is not where you want to be with a mandatory and technically designed one.
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May 24, 2023 12:19
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Part 54: The True Mirror The fight against Baelheit is pretty good! The, uh, everything else around Baelheit is...not. He does have a bitchin' boss theme though. Also! We will be off next week since Fedule had the absolute audacity to *checks notes* be out of the country for a wedding. If the rest of my dates are right, the finale should be up June 9th. Artix fucked around with this message at 22:13 on May 26, 2023 |
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May 26, 2023 21:49
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Can at least say the VAs go hard in these scenes. Especially Baelheit's VA.
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May 27, 2023 09:28
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I'll be honest the reveal that the top two politicians in the empire were both power hungry megalomaniacs makes far too much sense. Verus' reveal also explains why he had so much patience for Sagi's failures. The only thing he didn't get was the PR for having one his agents win, he didn't actually care about stopping promachination and he wanted the afterlings dead anyway. It was just a straight up power struggle for Verus, he had no ideals to uphold. So far I'm actually liking the whole segment, I just wish it'd been foreshadowed better.
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May 27, 2023 13:23
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I've never seen Fedule's train of thought get more absolutely wrecked than it did by a that one gunshot. Holy poo poo.
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May 28, 2023 05:39
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Lore-heads will recognize the same spirit grove on Mira where Kalas also received his guardian spirit  A more ambitious plot might have had Baelheit's spirit and Kalas' spirit be the same entity, but that seems tough to pull off with you being able to name your spirit in both games (not to mention the VA hoops that the games have to jump through for that).Speaking of VAs, loving how Baelheit's and Milly's are both bringing their A-game, juxtaposed with Verus' bringing his S-game (the "S" stands for "silly").
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May 31, 2023 05:05
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drat can't believe the high ranking fascist politician in the evil fascist empire was an evil fascist politician. I understand the temptation to go full Palpatine with your final-final villain reveal but yeah there really wasn't any build up there at all. It would have been just as effective to have Verus remain as his calm and (supposedly) calculating self, if less hilarious. But on the other hand  so, you know, that's worth something.
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Jun 2, 2023 04:48
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They just made him so obviously and unrepentantly evil lmao Also Geldoblame's evil because his idol and crush called him old and ugly
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Jun 2, 2023 08:29
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He develops terminator eyes, that's a pretty good trick.
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Jun 2, 2023 11:33
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I was on more-or-less the same roller coaster as Fedule. I actually kinda dig the reveal about Milly, though. Becoming zealous in your pursuit of promachination because it saved a loved one makes sense. It's a theme that could probably have been explored more. I agree that Verus as cold and calculating would be much more effective--it would contrast with the high emotion and passion that dominates this section.
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Jun 3, 2023 01:26
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We will almost certainly go over some of this in our credits outro but honestly the biggest problem with the game is that there just...isn't a second half of the game. Like in the first game, once Kalas betrays you, you get A) a sequence with Xelha where you go to the ice castle, B) a rescue sequence where you get Kalas back, and C) the entire Children of the Earth bit where you get the artifacts and Melodia shows why Malpercio is the big villain before D) you finally reach the endgame sidequests and the final dungeon. In this game, you get the reveal that Sagi is a Malideiter, you fight your way out of the Vega construction site, then uh...yeah that's basically the end of the game. It would have been trivial to space out some of Baelheit's reveals by making you go to Verus, find out about Tarazed, and then go refight the Promachination Crew and get some of those plot twists there; something like "oh no Milly got hurt fighting Valara wait why is your arm all machina what the gently caress?" before finally sending you to Tarazed for the final dungeon. Plus, you know, it avoids the whiplash of "what the gently caress Baelheit you shot your loving daughter"
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Jun 3, 2023 02:16
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Also, defeating the big evil guy, only to have him killed by ... a dude with a limp who secretly does not have a spirit helping him. Like, if he had come in, transferred the control codes for the entire fortress to himself as he's now emperor*, and then used some machina turrets to almost-kill Sagi and co, then it would at least feel like a reasonable time for a reveal. It feels like he's jumping the gun a bit with cutting all ties to his somewhat-useful underlings. *There wasn't an immediate succession when the other guy died, so did Baelheit have time to implement a chain of succession, or is Verus just really, really confident that he'll win the next election?
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Jun 5, 2023 03:34
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Part 55: Tarazed's Core In which we take the fight to Verus and deal with the world's most whelming final boss.
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Jun 5, 2023 21:34
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There's probably a way to write the Verus-Wiseman twist(?) with a little more foreshadowing. Like have Verus as an additional parallel to Sagi and Baelheit, where Verus knows that this presence in his life isn't a guardian spirit but he lies to people about it anyway. The rule around guardian spirits are virtually non-existent anyway so go nuts IMO. Also, ignoring everything else going on right now, I really thought we'd get one more Giacomo sighting here at the end. We haven't seen that fool since the end of Disc 1, and he was talking a ton of poo poo then!
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Jun 6, 2023 02:08
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 Are you sure about that?
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Jun 6, 2023 02:51
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Part 56: The End Despite everything, we have found our way to the end of the game and it's...fine. The last few hours are obviously rushed and (probably) unfinished, and it fumbles large parts of the plot, but it's not a bad game. Just one that needed some more time in the oven, and wasn't going to happen because it launched like, two months before the Wii. Of course, "needed some more time in the oven" describes like 90% of Monolith's catalog dating back to Xenogears, so I guess take that however you will.
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Jun 7, 2023 21:35
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Artix posted:
Xenogears needed some "not having close to 50% of our budget gobbled up by Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" too in addition to more time in the oven
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Jun 7, 2023 21:44
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I'm now imagining Sagi trapped in the Chair Dimension from the back half of Xenogears.
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Jun 8, 2023 00:54
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So I'll confess that someone LP'd this game on this site years ago, and I read/watched that whole thing so I remembered a lot of the broad plot strokes going into this. Hearing you talk about the ending feeling rushed now, yeah I can totally see it. I wonder if anyone involved with the game ever floated the idea of pushing it back to be an early Wii title, though I suppose they would have then been legally obligated to staple some silly motion controls onto it Also I love the goofy post-credits stinger with Geldoblame, even if it makes zero sense in context. Why are we giving this election loser's secretary (E: chief of staff?) the literal keys to the kingdom? Why does he suddenly want the End Magnus when Verus' plot was just to steal Baelheit's machina program? Why is this the first name-drop of Georg when the whole plot was kicked off by science experiments gone wrong? But they did a cool remix of the Alfard/Imperial theme from OG BK so all is forgiven. C-Euro fucked around with this message at 21:19 on Jun 9, 2023 |
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Jun 8, 2023 01:56
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C-Euro posted:So I'll confess that someone LP'd this game on this site years ago, and I read/watched that whole thing so I remembered a lot of the broad plot strokes going into this. Hearing you talk about the ending feeling rushed now, yeah I can totally see it. I wonder if anyone involved with the game ever floated the idea of pushing it back to be an early Wii title, though I suppose they would have then been legally obligated to staple some silly motion controls onto it Also young Geldoblame's crazy face is identical to old Geldoblame's crazy face, so yeah consistency. But yeah, Geldoblame becoming emperor and becoming BK1 Geldoblame in terms of characterization seems like a storyline that was cut for time but they HAD to address anyway because, well, he's the emperor in the first game so they can't just ignore that.
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Jun 8, 2023 04:28
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nine-gear crow posted:Also young Geldoblame's crazy face is identical to old Geldoblame's crazy face, so yeah consistency. But yeah, Geldoblame becoming emperor and becoming BK1 Geldoblame in terms of characterization seems like a storyline that was cut for time but they HAD to address anyway because, well, he's the emperor in the first game so they can't just ignore that. you get called old and ugly once and it sets you on a path of evil. Thanks for the LP, and for all the padding the game does these last 3-ish episodes feel like a sprint
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Jun 8, 2023 22:14
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In Japanese the first 'o' in Lolo is long, so it's not quite as much 'the same as Palolo but without the Pa'. Classic name localisation issue which in partial fairness doesn't have any great solutions.
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Jun 9, 2023 00:37
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nine-gear crow posted:Also young Geldoblame's crazy face is identical to old Geldoblame's crazy face, so yeah consistency. But yeah, Geldoblame becoming emperor and becoming BK1 Geldoblame in terms of characterization seems like a storyline that was cut for time but they HAD to address anyway because, well, he's the emperor in the first game so they can't just ignore that. There's probably an interesting story you could tell about an underqualifed but otherwise unassuming ruler coming into power during a full-blown political crisis, seeing the huge military apparatus that their predecessor built but never used, and making that their entire personality. But a mid-00s jRPG that was being rushed out the door probably isn't the place to tell it.
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Jun 9, 2023 01:58
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Considering the last two (and a half if you count Verus) emperors had been murdered in quick succession I'm not surprised the other senators weren't too keen on the job. It also has amusing ancient rome vibes with just appointing the nearest vaguely legitimate guy to the position. But yeah, good LP, but you can just feel the game buckle as it fails to support itself without the cut plots and content.
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Jun 9, 2023 14:07
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