In our last installment of Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, which was also our first installment, we learned a few key facts: this game is creepier than a jungle gym full of Tiduses, Alexandra Roivas is really fucking smart, and naming a character “Penis” is rather amusing when you’re a 12-year-old prepubescent gay recapper. As far as the plot goes, we’ve just finished our first flashback in a centuries-long tale of death, destruction, and Pokemon-themed buttplugs. To refresh your memory, way back in the ancient past, Penis Assthrustus, the Centurion-turned-evil-zombie, aligned himself with Charmander, the evil Pokemon god. In the present, Alex Roivas is all “Shit, my grandpa had weird taste in books.”
Speaking of which, now that Alex has completed the very first chapter in said disturbing book, the Tome of Eternal Darkness, she “officially” acquires it. I bet that’s a load of fun to carry around in the old purse. With this tome in her possession, she now magically has the ability to read that glowing page mounted on the wall behind the desk. Heh, I said “mounted.” She wastes no time in grabbing it, mainly because I’ve already exhausted everything else to do in the house.
The page, which is either very old or very shitstained, is a Chapter Page, according to our friend Random Expositional Text Dude. This is where I get confused. Okay, the Tome is probably a little thicker than your average Harry Potter book. Either the Story of Penis takes up the entirety or, more likely, there is more content in the book. Regardless, this still doesn’t explain why obtaining a single page suddenly allows Alex to read a whole new chapter. It has writing on it already, so maybe we’re supposed to assume that without this one page, Alex — even with her giant grad student brain — couldn’t figure out what’s going on in the remainder of the chapter. Whatever.
When Alex receives this absolutely essential page, RETD informs her that this lovely, heartwarming chapter is called “The Binding of the Corpse God,” clearly destined to be the next Disney movie. She immediately begins reading even though she didn’t bother to sit down first. It’s that much of a page-turner.
Strangely enough, this latest chapter is narrated by Edward Roivas, even though it’s not about him. What a fucking attention whore. “I cannot say what was the true beginning, nor am I sure of its end,” he wanks over the familiar Photoshop-filtered chapter image. “So, perhaps here is the best place to start: I am reminded of ideas I first encountered in Sir James George Frazer’s book ‘The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion.'” Wait, why am I still typing this out? This is a ridiculous amount of filler, even for me. Summary: blah, blah, blah. Actually, his next statement is rather fitting: “We are overwhelmed by our very human need to weave a web of meaning where there may be none.” This certainly explains a lot of things, such as 35-minute class presentations on Xenosaga as well as the existence of pretty much every gaming message board ever.
He also says that people like to explain away unexplainable phenomena as gods and demons, but then starts babbling about how “legends are born” when people encounter gods. But if we’re talking about actual gods here, then why all that stuff about how people just make up gods? At least put something in there like “And sometimes, there actually are gods involved, such as gods representing the sacred starter Pokemon that manifest themselves in colored sex toys.” No need to be confusing.
This big glob of pretentious bullshit segues us into our latest flashback, which takes place in “Angkor Thom Region, Cambodia, 1150 A.D.” A young Asian woman sits in the entrance to a stone building, reading a book. The Tome of Eternal Darkness, to be exact. A jungle is visible in the background. A light bulb may have just gone off over your head — yes, this is the penis/vagina temple from the painting in Edward Roivas’s study. And the girl, the instruction booklet tells me, is Ellia, a dancer/slave in the court of Suryavarman II. I’m sure a Google search would give me some more useful information on King Surya and the time period in general, but I’m going to be lazy and get all my facts from the game itself. Stay tuned.
Ellia reads aloud from the Tome: “Thy time is done, Great Ancient. Forever in shadow will you be, Master of Chaos! And to fade to nothing in obscurity will be thy fate. My master has planned many millennia for this day. It is the true chaos of all things that you now must be entombed amongst the beings of flesh and bone.” Yes, I just typed all that out again like a sucker. Swinging around like a hyperactive three-year-old on a bad acid trip, the camera fades into a scene of Penis Assthrustus just as Ellia’s creepy little girl voice fades into Penis’s masculine one.
Our favorite zombie with the skirt and feathered headdress stands before the many-armed woman statue we saw in Alex’s hallucinatory session. Also as we saw in that session, the statue sits directly in front of a giant pulsating purple blob packed full of eyeballs and orifices. This guy would be a hit in Hyrule. During some more of his blahing, Penis addresses this quivering mass as “Mantorok,” meaning that in my Pokemon-themed naming scheme, it’s Mewtwo. I doubt that there’s as much fanart of this Mewtwo raping the shit out of Ash Ketchum, though. Enjoy your nightmares.
Penis blathers on to the mute Mewtwo about how his hizzouse is totally cool and shit, but too bad, because his slimy purple ass is toast. Except he sounds about one thousand times more pretentious than that. Seriously, if this guy typed this shit out on the internet, he’d be on Fandom Wank faster than you can say “My headdress is pastede on yay!” Then, although Mewtwo is supposedly this total badass godlike being, he just sits there throughout this entire speech and lets Penis cast a spell on him.
A series of nine purple glowing runes surround Penis on the floor, casting shafts of purple light upwards. Whatever Penis is doing to Mewtwo will, apparently, prevent Mewtwo from continuing to imprison the three starter Pokemon. I’m not sure how this works, but Penis wouldn’t lie to us, so we’ll just take him at his word. Mewtwo roars like a beef jerky zombie, probably saying, “Okay, I’ll continue to sit here and blink my many eyeballs while you finish up your destructive spell against me.” Finally, Penis utters his last threatening sentence, then pounds the ground with his fabulous new spinal column scepter (complete with bony pelvis and ribcage!). The camera heads up to the ceiling to allow us an overhead view of nine pillars crashing into the outer edge of the giant squishy Mewtwo, complete with giant gouts of blood and monstrous screams of pain. Although with that many orifices, you’d think that Mewtwo would be used to penetration from giant phallic objects. Maybe Mewtwo’s just a 12-millennia-old ancient who can’t get any.
I saw a porno like this once.
The sexy gangbang cuts directly back to Ellia, now standing up so we can see her dancing costume. Now would be a good time to go over what we know about the culture of 1150s Cambodia, based on the game info:
1) Dancing slave girls wore hot pants, halter tops, and metal shin guards, looking suspiciously like an FFX-2 Yuna.
2) Dancing slave girls were highly literate.
3) Dancing slave girls sometimes wandered off into jungle temples to read.
4) Dancing slave girls liked to read books bound in flesh and bone.
It’s not just a game, it’s a history lesson! Ellia pouts, “Not even these mythical fables can keep me amused. There has to be SOMETHING to do around here… I only wish something that fantastic and of higher purpose could happen to me.” See, it’s all ironic and stuff because she thinks the Tome of Eternal Darkness is fiction, but it’s not! Boy, is she in for a surprise! I also like how she’s all bored and shit, when it becomes obvious in about two seconds that she hasn’t even stepped inside the temple. Like, DURRRRRR!!!! That’s like Squall stepping into a room where Seifer is lying naked on satin sheets, surrounded by candles and copious bottles of lube and then getting pissy because the doorway is so boring.
Anyway, after Ellia’s Disney-esque “I want adventure!” declaration, the stone doors to the temple slide shut, right on cue. I bet this is where she meets her handsome prince and they embark on the obligatory mistaken-identity hijinks before eventually living happily ever after, right? Right? Whatever the case, I get control of Ellia here and notice that she’s wielding a saber.
5) Dancing slave girls carried around bladed weapons in case of combat.
6) Dancing slave girls didn’t bother to change out of their dancing costumes or put on shoes before entering into possible combat situations.
The main room of the temple shares some features with the underground temple where Penis searched for the sacred buttplug — namely, pillars and torches. And of course the whole thing is made of stone. Obviously, this one has a more jungly feel to it as well as other differences I don’t really care to list. In the main entrance chamber, Ellia walks over a starter Pokemon symbol motif, just so we know that this ties in to the rest of the game. If I didn’t see some Pokemon symbols, the game might not make sense to me.
Her eyes look closed to me. Don’t tell me RETD is talking out his ass.
Ellia approaches the statue of the upper half of a woman with four arms. I know it’s a woman because she has naked boobies. A fabulous amulet circles the statue’s neck, glowing in that “You know you want to touch me” way. Of course Ellia takes it, not only because it’s just that tempting, but there’s really nothing else to do in the entire room. Predictably, another stone door slides open. Before I regain control of Ellia, RETD the giant blabbermouth tells me that the necklace is of the magical healing type, so if I happen to suck bad enough to get hit by, say, zombies, I’m not necessarily screwed without the ability to cast magic. I obviously don’t need that, since I’m the best gamer ever and there are clearly no zombies anywhere in this temple.
BOOBIES!!!!
The newly-opened door connects to a smaller room containing a fallen beef jerky zombie and three candles all in a row. Ellia is not all “Oh fuck, gross, a dead body!” so she either has no personality, or the court of Suryavarman II has its fair share of mummified corpses lying about.
The candle setup looks quite similar to the one in Grandpa Ed’s secret study, but I’ll describe this one anyway. Only the third candle is lit. A simplistic painting or carving above the trio of candles shows the sun at the horizon on the far right. I don’t think this exactly requires a genius-level IQ to figure out, but RETD helps us out anyway, by pointing out that the sun design indicates a certain time of the day — and maybe the candles do as well (HINT HINT!!!!!!). Since Ellia has undoubtedly read tons and tons of books in her free time, she’s probably encountered riddles much more challenging than this.
The candle and the painting obviously match already — this is our “control” set-up. So Ellia leaves the room and its dead body, heading through the next door. And this is where things really get fun. By fun, I mean fun in the way that having sex with Tidus and Seymour at the same time is fun. In other words, not fun. For this is our very first trap corridor. And definitely not the last, since the game designers wouldn’t pass up a chance to make me as miserable and suicidal as possible. They’re jealous that my penis is so much bigger than theirs, see. And since I’m a 12-year-old homosexual with a tiny willywonker, that’s saying something.