Just then, Leene’s bell starts to ring. This is Symbolic, because according to some random kid in the other square, “People who hear Leene’s bell ring lead interesting lives!” Of course, by that logic, everybody in town will live an interesting life, since the bells ring every morning. Whoops, game designers.
As a male gamer, I am completely okay with this blatant fanservice.
HaremPants gets up, smacks her ass for the fanboys, and decides to check to see if Punk is all right. Before he can even sit up, though, she starts whining about how she dropped her pendant when she ran into Punk. “Don’t tell me I lost it!” she wanks to herself as she wanders around in a circle and pretends to look for it. Using my superior Man!Skills, I easily find the pendant, which was lying on the ground four feet from where HaremPants ran into me, and return it to her. Then she forces me to show her around the fair because I’m “a true gentleman,” which I interpret to mean, “I want to get in your pants.” …Hey, wait a second!
A useless, waify woman in exotic, unrealistic, and geographically unsound clothing, unable to complete the simplest of tasks without male reinforcement, forcing her way into the party and expressing interest in eventually getting freaky with the male lead? Can it be that I’ve encountered a Mary Sue already?!
Apparently it can, because I am then given the chance to rename “umm… Marle” (as she so assertively puts it). She shall henceforth be called M!Sue, because the game designers didn’t give me enough spaces to fit in all seven letters of “MarySue”.
Because I want to punish M!Sue for forcing her way into the party so early in the game, I decide to try some more mini-games. The first one I find is “Lucca’s Robot Trainer,” according to a nearby NPC. (He also tells me that Lucca and her father are done setting up her Fantastic New Invention, meaning I can go there to advance the plot now that I have M!Sue in tow.)
Anyway, Lucca’s Robot Trainer, rather than being an obscure game of button mashing and prizes that are not proportionate to the work done, is an enormous singing cat robot. “They call me Gato, I have metal joints, beat me up and earn 15 Silver Points!” he sings as I try to stop laughing at how ridiculous he looks. It’s a damn good thing the point of the game is to beat on his ass, because 1) he’s so annoying he’s just asking to be smacked, and 2) I don’t know if I could take the shame of losing a real mini-game to a gigantic rapping robot named Gato.
This guy’ll pay you to beat him up! …Like we needed the incentive.
Two minutes later, Gato is defeated and M!Sue and Punk are Victory!Dancing. “I lost, you won, here’s 15 points, now wasn’t that fun?!” the masochistic bastard sings. I fight him one more time so that M!Sue levels up and I have a total of 30 Silver Points, and then I leave to exchange my Silver Points for Gold Points. (For those of you playing along at home, 10 SP = 50 GP. I have yet to figure out the economics behind that one. “Here, I’ll give you some Silver that I won for free. Will you please give me five times as much in Gold?” Crazy, crack-smoking, game designers.)
With 150 shiny new dollars in his greedy little hands, Punk decides to take M!Sue to see Lucca’s invention. She wouldn’t be a Mary Sue if she didn’t give into her urges to make even the simplest scenes last much longer than they need to, though, so before I can go to the screen with Lucca’s invention, I have to wait for M!Sue to buy some damn candy. She takes as long as she possibly can to decide between two different colors of cotton candy, while I have to sit without moving. If I press any buttons, she whines about me being impatient and takes twice as long as she would have originally. She finally decides, stuffs her greedy face, and I get to advance the plot. What a pointless wonderful exchange that was.
“Step right on up, any of you who have the time and the courage! Our ‘Super Dimension Warp’ is the invention of the century!” Taban yells as M!Sue and Punk walk onscreen. He walks over to one of the two impressive-looking machines in the courtyard. They look like glass platforms with large metal umbrellas and lots of random computer parts sticking out. As cracked up as that description sounds, it IS fairly accurate, so that gives you an idea of the kind of drugs Lucca must be on to have thought this stuff up. Taban points to the UmbrellaMachine next to him. “To use it, jump up here…” Then he walks across the courtyard to the other UmbrellaMachine to continue his explanation, “..and you’ll get teleported here! It’s the masterwork of my beautiful daughter, Lucca.” By “masterwork,” I assume he means “large and impractical way to use excessive resources to transport oneself a distance of five feet and take four times as long to do so as walking would.”
Lucca, who was standing under one of the UmbrellaMachines during the whole spiel, spots Punk. “Where have you been!?” she demands angrily. “No one wants to try the Telepod! How ’bout you?” Because what else are friends for than to try out your potentially dangerous inventions for you? M!Sue isn’t any help either, because she jumps up and down like a five-year-old and yells, “It looks like fun! I’ll watch while you try it out!” I bet she was one of those kids who could get their parents to buy anything for them by dropping to the floor and crying to holy hell in the middle of a store.
Lucca tells Punk to hop into the left pod, and I oblige like the good dog boy I am. She and Taban do some stuff with the random computer parts on the UmbrellaMachines and Punk gets transported from one UmbrellaMachine to the other by way of exploding-into-a-bunch-of-sparkly-things. The crowd is impressed, and they show it by saying, and I quote, “Oh wow.” Well, I don’t know about you, but I find that quite convincing. Then M!Sue pipes up. “What a kick! I want to try it, too!” Famous last words, right there.
Lucca must notice just then that M!Sue is there, because she turns into Jealous!Lucca in a New York minute. “Hey Punk, how did you pick up a cutie like her?” she demands, acting for all the world like a jealous girlfriend instead of somebody who only keeps Punk around to be her guinea pig. M!Sue doesn’t even dignify Lucca with a response and says, “Hang on, Punk! I’ll be right there!” This is Clue Number One that Something Bad™ is about to happen. Clue Number Two is the big deal that Taban makes out of the whole thing. “Behold, ladies and gentlemen, as this vision of loveliness steps aboard the machine! Let’s be sure to give her a big hand when she reappears!” The Third and Final Clue comes, again, from M!Sue. “Don’t go away. I’ll be right back,” she says reassuringly as she climbs onto the left UmbrellaMachine.
Let’s see here, we’ve been told three separate times in the past minute that the following scene is about to go off without a hitch. Can anybody else feel their Spider Senses tingling? How about the giant lumps on your heads from repeated blows with the Foreshadowing Mallet?
As Lucca and Taban start to do the same stuff with the random computer parts as before, M!Sue’s boobs start to sparkle. Oh, wait, that’s her pendant, I just couldn’t tell the difference with these crappy sprite graphics. Good thing M!Sue mutters to herself, “My pendant…” to clear up any confusion. That was subtle, game designers.
Any further mumblings from M!Sue are cut short as she explodes into lots of little shiny things, just like Punk did. Unlike when Punk used the UmbrellaMachines, however, M!Sue gets sucked into a Big Blue Portal that magically opens up en route to the other machine. That’s gotta suck. The Big Blue Portal closes, and M!Sue is gone. Taban gets rid of the crowd, and Lucca mumbles to herself about how “the way she disappeared… it couldn’t have been the Telepod!” Yeah Lucca, your magic warp machine had NOTHING TO DO with the way M!Sue was sucked into a Big Blue Portal and made her disappear. Everybody will believe that one. Only not.
That’s gotta suck.
I’m ready to write it up as a tragic loss and move to pocket the pendant, which M!Sue dropped again, the stupid butterfingers, but Lucca thinks that Punk is being a BigBraveMan! and takes his climbing into the UmbrellaMachine as a sign that he wants to be vaporized too. “Listen!” Lucca says dramatically. “I don’t know where this machine is going to send you, but we haven’t any other choice. That pendant seems to be the key, so hang on to it Punk, and brace yourself!” In THAT case, it’s doubly convenient that M!Sue dropped her pendant before being sucked into the Big Blue Portal so Punk can use it to follow her. That M!Sue, always thinking of others.
Lucca and Taban start up the machine again, and Punk is sucked into the Big Blue Portal. I was secretly hoping that it wouldn’t work and M!Sue would just be lost forever, but now it looks like I have to save her and everything. God damn it.
After watching a screen with some trippy wavy blue lines for a while, the Big Blue Portal spits Punk out on top of a mountain. Punk climbs down the mountain, mercilessly slaughtering all the creatures he encounters along the way, and finds himself in Truce. Only the sky is really dark and yucky looking and half the houses are missing. A quick reconnaissance mission around town lets me know that everybody and their brother is angsting about the war with the Evil Wizard, Magus. I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that this is the War Truce Won 400 years ago that I learned about at the Millennial Fair. That would make the year 600 AD. That explains the smoggy air, only not. Maybe it’s from all the weed the game designers are smoking.
Since one particularly helpful NPC tells me that they found the Queen, who had until then been missing, wandering around in the mountains a little bit ago, I make Punk head for the castle. When I get there, the guards harass Punk and he cries like a little baby. Then, a woman who looks like M!Sue but is wearing a dress and is therefore not M!Sue comes down to tell the guards to knock it off. This woman must be the No Longer Missing Queen. Wow, she sure got back into the swing of things quickly. She’s been rescued for, what, three minutes? Anyway, she says that she wants to have a talk with Punk in her room, wink wink, and that the guards are to let him pass.
Loading ...Thoroughly scolded, the guards allow Punk to enter the castle. On his way to meet with the Queen, he talks to every NPC he can find, and every single one of them comments on how the Queen is either not acting like herself or looks much younger than she did before she disappeared. The only person who doesn’t seem to notice is the King. Or maybe he does notice and just wants to boff a teenager and claim he thought it was his wife all along. You decide.
The castle is a pretty big place, so after a few wrong turns, I end up in the tower with the King’s Room at the top. As I wonder why in the world the King and Queen need to have their rooms separated by an entire castle, Punk hears somebody muttering through the wall. It’s the Chancellor, and he takes the opportunity to yell, “Impossible! She was in a secured room!” aloud to himself before running away in a most sinister manner. I certainly hope he isn’t talking about the abducted Queen or anything, because a BackStabbing! advisor to the King would be too much of a clichéd theme, even for Square, right?