Unfortunately for Pope Zera, our heroes are overdue for an exploration of the city along with a round of Talk To Everyone. The first stop is a pasture full of some sheep. They gush about how awesome it is to live in a city that is watched over by Granas and how everything there is just perfect and religion is awesome!!! There are also some sheep-like animals, called squeak-baas, grazing on the grass. The squeak-baas, which are more baa than squeak, are really freaking cute and somewhat make up for the horrors I’ve had to endure for the rest of the recap. What can I say? I’m a sucker for cute animals. One woman mentions that a nearby squeak-baa is stubborn as hell. “I know JUST how you feel! I’ve had to take care of one particularly STUBBORN anima–er, Songstress,” Ryudo replies. Which would be a lot funnier and less icky if he didn’t want in her pants. Ryudo continues to project Mary Sue and his obvious eagerness to see her onto everything anyone says to him. It would be nice to find a single conversation that doesn’t revolve around her. Seriously, shut up, Ryudo. But he doesn’t, and continues this trend into the city proper. No one cares — not the people of St. Heim Papal State, and certainly not me.
Right. ‘Maternal.’
After dealing with that crap-filled bunch of dialogue, it’s almost a relief to speak to the people who don’t trigger Mary Sue jizzfests, even if they have nothing of import to say. Even the lady who blatantly hits on Tidink is a welcome alternative. But then things take a serious turn for the worse when the party enters a nearby library. This is not to be confused with the library in the Cathedral, but that doesn’t mean it’s not chock full of Sunday School lessons for me to read. And for the sake of thoroughness, I do. The library’s shelves are packed with books, but there are only two stories I’m allowed to read: “The Holy Light” and “The Light of Lord Granas.” Which are the same exact God damn thing, if I’m not mistaken. Each is divided up into volumes, and each volume is several paragraphs long. I guess in a game where a day lasts half an hour at the most, the books can’t be all that long either. Not that I’m complaining that there’s less of this stuff to read.
He’s probably happy he doesn’t have to deal with all the assholes inhabiting this place.
Okay, I said I’m recapping this to be thorough, but honestly, I just want to share my pain. If I have to suffer through this, so do you. Let’s dive right on into the fascinating tale found in “The Holy Light,” shall we? A very long time ago, people lived under the benevolent gaze of Granas and the world was perfect. But oh noes! Valmar showed up and royally fucked things up with his evil darkness. A huge battle ensued between Light and Darkness, and this battle was fought by people. Think of it like that opening scene in Lord of the Rings. “And so began the Battle of Good and Evil, fought without ceasing upon the fields of eternity, day yielding not to night,” the book pretentiously continues. I just wanted to give you an idea of the actual text I’m translating here. After the bodies piled up, Granas and Valmar decided they needed to settle things once and for all. You think? “What, did [Ludo] write this?” Ryudo wonders sarcastically. Hee.
God, I hope we don’t have to find Valmar’s Taint.
We then establish that “The Holy Light” is a “dumbed-down” version of scripture and is meant to be read by the “common folk.” Not that this is high literature by any means, but it’s still way too pretentious for the general populace to suffer through. They should add pictures or turn it into a comic book or something. Hey, they’ve done it with the Bible. Ryudo establishes for the fifteenth time this recap that he’s not too fond of religion which means that he’s never gone out of his way to read any scripture, but he’s heard this basic story before.
Somewhere, there’s a fanfiction about this.
And that was just Book I! Yes, there’s more. Book II resolves Book I’s cliffhanger — Granas kicked Valmar’s ass, slicing a giant buttcrack into the earth and generally messing with the planet. And he’s the good guy! We already knew this, having heard it several times when traversing the Granasscrack, and we already knew the next part of the story, which is Valmar’s sealing. Valmar’s Moon — remember that too? — appeared afterwards. “It is written that when the moon burns in remembrance, so misfortune will soon follow.” So Valmar’s Moon means bad shit is about to go down. That would follow with what we’ve seen of it previously. So Book II was even more unnecessary than Book I. Plus, when Ryudo makes another obligatory statement about how boring this all is, Skye tards, “You should at least be familiar with everything you find boring or difficult to read. Chances are, they’re all important.” I wouldn’t go that far. As a recapper, I can quite confidently state that most boring shit is unimportant. Maybe this is the game designer’s meta commentary on Grandia II.
Loading ...Book III continues with Valmar straining against the seals, trying to escape. Granas had such a tough time fighting off Valmar, so he created the sun “to restore the ruined land” and then went into hibernation mode. So neither the sun nor moon existed before this whole thing went down? No wonder the people were all fighty and stuff. “Does not the light of the sun shine even now? Does not the land await the return of its True God? May the Light come quickly,” the book finishes dramatically. Ryudo’s appropriate response is, “Does not Ryudo tire of this? Does not he want to put his fist through this book? May his suffering end quickly.” I feel the same way — not just about the book, but about the game. When Tidink asks Ryudo which part pisses him off so greatly, the Geodude replies, “The part that says, ‘Whoopee for Granas. Let’s run about happily, trailing brightly-colored ribbons from our hands.'” I didn’t exactly get that out of the text, but maybe Ryudo’s been playing too many Zelda games lately. Both Ryudo and Tidink agree that the book is a wee bit biased, and Ryudo wants to hear what the other side has to say. It would probably be a lot more interesting, that’s for sure.
This sounds like Twink’s paradise.
So that was the entirety of “The Holy Light.” While it did drone on and on in terms of recapping it, it doesn’t exactly fill out a whole physical book unless it’s written in 5000 point font. Even the Bible managed to pad its pages with all that “A begat B” stuff. The other book in the library, “The Light of Lord Granas,” is the even more dumbed-down kiddie version of the story, but manages to be even longer. In this one, people were all bitchy and violent at the beginning, but then Granas appeared in a big ball of light, which made everything happy and peaceful. Ryudo agrees with me that it’s sappier than hell, then wonders how many fragile little minds have been “totally warped by this bogus story.” Judging by the people we’ve met so far in the game, pretty much everyone. “You have to admit, this is quite a major work,” Tidink lies. Yeah, this text that the game designers wrote is right up there with the finest pieces of literature. How much must books suck in this game for that to be considered “major”? It turns out that Ludo’s people, primitive beasts that they are, do not follow these teachings. Ludo has never even heard any of this bullshit, which kind of surprises me since they’ve been expositing all over the place about Granas since he joined the party. In response to Ryudo’s question, Ludo describes what the tree-hugging hippie beast-men teach their young ones: “The sun also rises and the sun also sets. The rivers run into the sea and the sea is not full; the rain returns unto the heavens.” It’s all about the circle of life or some shit. Not that Ryudo’s any more respectful of these beliefs. “Tree grows, beaver eats tree, tree falls, beaver builds dam. More trees grow. I get it,” he snots. Hee…”beaver.”
Chapter 2 of “The Light of Lord Granas” is a rather…different interpretation of the battle between Granas and Valmar. Valmar is described as “a scary monster” who “[made] traps to catch people” with daaaaaaarkness in their hearts and turned them into monsters. Isn’t that the plot of Kingdom Hearts? With his giant phallic sword, Granas smote the monsters who attacked the good guys. The battle took a really fucking long time and all the monsters died. Then and only then, Granas decided it might be a good idea to fight Valmar, a.k.a “the king of the monsters.” Even though this version of the tale is less frightening than your average Harry Potter book, Ludo thinks it’s way too violent and scary for the children. Come on, kids see worse stuff than this on their daily cartoons. I guess Ludo is one of those people who wants to foam pad the world so that kids don’t experience any negative emotions ever.
This talk of demons causes Ryudo to say he’s never met a demon personally. In unison, Tidink and Ludo contradict him, naming Millenia as the demon(ess) in question. “But even if she is the Wings of Valmar — which doesn’t make much sense — she’s not like the chumps in this story,” Ryudo says. I get that they’re trying to cram down our throats that Millenia has a good side, but how would Ryudo know she’s not like the bad guys in the story? There wasn’t anything beyond a vague, basic description of them. Maybe they all had giant boobs and used crossbows as weapons.
Yes, it would take months to organize the books in this dinky library.
The — thankfully — final installment of this Sunday School lesson reiterates the part about Granas killing Valmar but becoming wounded in the process, the big scary moon appearing in the sky, and Granas creating the sun so that his people wouldn’t be such chickenshits about the whole thing. “Lord Granas said, ‘I will watch over you. If you keep your heart pure, Valmar will never appear again.’ Then he went to sleep,” the book reads. Ah, the old “Do what we tell you or you’ll go to hell” that religions are so very fond of. Even though Granas is still in sleep mode, he still watches over his people. Ah, the old “Even though our deity isn’t directly helping us out, he’s still there…yeah” that religions are so fond of. Man, I am just feeling the angry e-mails flowing into my inbox as we speak.
After some more post-reading dialogue that establishes that Tidink is a good kid and Ryudo was a bad kid who was thrown out by his meanie parents, the group reads the last two books in the library. One is something boring about squeak-baas. The other contains the words to a religious song that doesn’t seem too impressive on paper. However, Ludo is sure that Mary Sue’s amazing singing voice will bring the words to life. Yes, we wouldn’t want to forget about Mary Sue and her goddess-like singing ability for two seconds or the plot might fall apart.
At last, I’m done recapping all the crap in the library. As all this random reading and ChoadChatting has padded the overall recap to an unacceptable length — and it’s all the game’s fault, not mine at all — I’ll be splitting the recap here. I would say that you should feel proud of yourself for making it through the multiple retellings of that lame religious story, but…well, you’ll see in Part 9. Hey, get back here!