When Roxas enters the Wankhouse, his friends are all chowing down on some blue popsicles. Just as I’m about to comment on how uncool it is they didn’t wait for Roxas before tipping over the ice cream truck, Hayner hands his lover a popsicle. Aww. As they sit around slurping, Chumlee takes a breath between licks to ask, “Do you guys think we’ll always be together like this?” Chum, buddy, it is way too early in the morning for this maudlin bullshit. Olette humors him by saying she hopes so (just kidding, she can’t wait to turn 18 and tell these gross boys to fuck off for life), but Hayner asks, rightly, “Where did that come from?” Chumlee admits he doesn’t even know why he’s asking, but Hayner has some bad news for him anyway. “Well, I doubt we can be together forever,” he says. “But isn’t that what growing up’s all about?” Growing up is also about doing more than sharing a popsicle with someone you like, wink, but I’m sure Hayner is just not saying that part out loud. Anyway, he goes on, “What’s important isn’t how often we see each other, but how often we think about each other. Right?” Sure, that sounds good. “I never actually see my friends, because I’m a lazy, misanthropic shut-in, but I think about maybe seeing them all the time! How thoughtful of me. I AM AN AMAZING PERSON.” Chumlee makes fun of him accordingly, like he isn’t the one who started everyone down this sad road.

It turns out Hayner is in a funk in general today. Olette wonders if they’re still feeling the effects of “yesterday’s memory thief.” Is that what we’re calling those now? Who can forget that wonderful time Roxas stood next to a person, while someone took a photo? And then did that like four more times? MEMORIES. But Hayner shuts that shit down. “Nuh-uh,” he says. “You know what it is? We don’t want summer vacation to be over. That’s all!” Wait, these kids go to school? This isn’t some Lost Boys planet where nobody ages? I mean, I know we already have one of those, but this place has a definite air of being stuck in a time bubble. No spoilers.

Chumlee and Olette shrug at each other, like they’re basically fine with Hayner telling them what their feelings are. That said, he does have a suggestion: that they go to the beach, which they haven’t done once this summer, and this is an unforgivable oversight in the mind of Hayner, Oiled-Up Beach Bunny. He turns around after ranting about “Blue seas! Blue skies!” to see his three friends smiling vacantly, but with vague “Honey, no” expressions. “Maybe you forgot,” Roxas says, “but we’re broke.” But Hayner, who insists that he is “smart,” has an idea of sorts to gin up the cash. I can’t imagine he’s going to whore out Roxas to Seifer, since Seifer knows he can get that for free just by arching an eyebrow.

Before Roxas can catch up with his friends, who have all left to enact whatever Hayner’s perfect plan is, he gets one more tutorial, this time on using the save point located in the Wankhouse. Basically, I have to press triangle this time around. Super hard! I note that the save data refers to this location as “The Usual Spot,” which sounds like something Edgeworth would write in a hasty (but perfectly scripted) note and have the bailiff pass along to Phoenix. So…I wonder when Hayner and Roxas started letting Chumlee and Olette hang out here. That was generous of them.

Just like Olette did the day before, Chumlee doubles back to tell Roxas to stop playing with himself and get the lead out. Once Roxas is outside, Hayner announces that they’re going to Market Street and the three of them take off without him again. You know, they wouldn’t have to keep backtracking to urge Roxas along if they would wait for his ass for once. So he can figure out where Market Street is after being ditched by his friends, Roxas obtains a map of Twilight Town. The overwrought item screen that announces this–a text box would have sufficed!–displays both a map and a compass. That is ridiculous. Are you telling me I don’t have to travel through five more screens just to get the item that provides context for the map? Talk about coddling. I bet the boss key is also already in Roxas’s pocket, ramrodding away at the fold of his wallet.

Once again in control of Roxas, I notice a new conspicuous item in the street: a black-and-white skateboard with EXTREEEEEME detailing and little bat wings. I wonder what gnarly bro this belongs to! Whoever that awesome dude is, Roxas totally steals his skateboard and zips through the alley to the next street. He rounds the corner to find his friends staring at another poster for the Struggle. “Just two days to go,” Hayner says. He adds, thumping Roxas in the chest, a little too-casually, and putting his arm around him, ditto, “You and I have to make the finals! That way, no matter who wins, the four of us split the prize!” So Olette and Chumlee don’t even have to enter whatever the fuck the Struggle is, and they still get cut in? Fuck that. Twilight Town is revealing itself to be a total nanny state. Roxas insanely agrees to this idiocy, while C+O blandly encourage them to earn for the Wanker Collective. Roxas and Hayner bump elbows and Hayner says, “It’s a promise!” I guess this is some kind of no-homo pinky swear. And I beg to differ.

But this Struggle prize to be split four bullshit ways is not part of Hayner’s beach plan. No, his actual plans are…smart and sensible? What? First, he asks somebody else to do the math on how much they need. A train ticket to the beach is 900 munny, and he figures in 300 additional munny per person for buying sno-cones and shit. “A total of 4800 munny,” Olette says. For this feat of basic math, I will amend her role in the group to be the Smart One, since I’m so glad she now has a function other than her girl parts that Hayner and Roxas find terrifying. Speaking of, the couple gently bickers about what the spending money should be for, with Hayner in the pretzels camp and Roxas sighing, “Well, there’s always watermelon,” despite his man’s admonition that “They’re, like, 2000 munny apiece.” There is no watermelon in the Twilight Town bread lines, son! “Pretzels it is,” Roxas says.

As for what they have, Chum’s sitting on 800, Olette has 650, and Roxas only has 150 (he needed more skateboard decals). And how much does Hayner have? “That’s 1600 munny!” he announces. “We need another 3200.” OH, DO WE? He runs off, saying they can earn the rest via odd jobs, before anybody can upbraid him for spending his entire allowance on watermelon-flavored lip gloss.

The kids agree to meet at the train station before the end of the day, required cash in hand. Roxas is left standing in front of a neon-lit “HELP WANTED” bulletin board. The board has three jobs listed, and if you’re thinking, “Cool, that’s one job for each person other than Roxas’s freeloading man,” I laugh mirthlessly at your naïveté. Of course Roxas is going to do all of them, while Chumlee and Olette mill about and tell him they’re “trying hard.” Sure. And Hayner is “supervising.”

The first available job is for “Mail Delivery,” and is fairly straightforward: Roxas, on his skateboard, must deliver letters to five different recipients on Market Street, and do it as quickly as possible to earn extra munny. I am quite sure no post office in the history of mankind has incentivized fast service, but fine, I’m not complaining. The explainer screen lets me know I can perform “various tricks” on the skateboard with square, circle, and X. I have no idea why Roxas would do this when it would just slow down his time, but I do not live and breathe ollies and kickflips, so what do I know?

His first attempt is an absolutely brutal 1’06″03, as I repeatedly fail to grind down the guardrail into a jump to reach his last delivery target, a pigeon. (In fact, two of the five recipients are birds. Don’t look at me.) And before anybody gets smart with me about bagging on Roxas’s trick moves, the grind maneuver is done with triangle, so blow me. The postal worker, who is wearing red crocs and clearly hates her life, sighs and hands Roxas 10 munny. But thankfully, he can keep doing this job over and over again, delivering letters to the same three people and two pigeons, and keep collecting munny and improving his time. Whew! I was so worried I’d only be able to play this amazing mini-game once! On his second try, Roxas does everything perfectly and hits a perfectly respectable 0’13″66, earning 50 munny. And now that I’ve proven I can do it well, I’m never doing it again.

Next! Roxas accepts a job labeled “Cargo Climb,” in which he has to use a Struggle dildo to whack at a wagon with a big flesh-colored sack on it until it makes it up the Market Street hill, into some dude’s garage. I am concerned that Roxas is aiding and abetting some kind of theft–the sack could be full of unmarked bills, or stolen car parts, or stolen body parts–but munny is munny. “If pushed at the right time, the cargo will move further ahead!” Roxas is told. “Moving the cargo could be dangerous, so be careful!” Translation: keep your head on a swivel for the 5-0, man.

What it actually means is that attack combos can sometimes lob the entire wagon into the air, and hitting it again at the right time can knock it a good deal farther up the hill. But not hitting it at the right time results in the stolen cargo giving Roxas a concussion. And hitting these combos is critical–without them, it’s easy to end up treading water and barely moving the damn thing up the hill at all, especially when badly placed hits can send it careening sideways for almost no positive gain, and then a negative gain as Roxas struggles to run into position on the other side of the street. So it is to my surprise and delight that Roxas lands two perfect combos on his first try and knocks the contraband wagon into the chop shop garage in 0’19″83, barely fast enough for the max payout of 50 munny.

At this point, you might be wondering how the fuck these kids are going to make all this cash in a reasonable amount of time. If each job maxes out at 50 munny (largely the case), and they need 3200 munny, that’s (*consults Olette*) 64 performed jobs on the day, all perfectly executed, or 16 per kid, and come the fuck on, we know that isn’t happening. They probably would be better off pimping out Roxas.

Roxas tries not to think about this as he accepts the third, final, and worst job on the board, “Grandstander.” This game is simple: there is (another motif!) a flesh-colored ball in the middle of the courtyard on Market Street. Roxas must use his dildo bat to whack that testicle into the air and keep it airborne for as long as possible so the crowd of onlookers does not stone him to death for displeasing them. This is all for the benefit of some little girl who simply wants to give people a show, and Roxas putting on a public display of teenage eroticism will just have to do. I mean, even Tobli put more thought into his showmanship.

If it sounds simple in theory, that’s because it’s dog-fuckingly difficult in practice. Or to get real, I’m just really bad at it. Roxas even gets five different tries to impress the crowd with his ball-slapping, and the best I ever manage is 11 consecutive hits before it hits the bricks. And my several other tries bring the average way down, to the point that Girl Tobli goes, “I bet I could do a better job than that!” Well, get to it, missy, nobody is stopping you. The minimum to get 50 munny out of this exercise is 20 hits. Let’s not talk about Grandstander anymore.

I cannot believe I’m saying this, but thank god there is a second bulletin board with additional mini-games available. I don’t think I could handle Roxas’s fundraising burden if these three were all I had to choose from. Roxas can find the other jobs board in the Tram Commons down the street, the same area where all the shopkeepers keep their creepy Polaroid wall shrines to their favorite blond twink-stud. They’re all insisting that the Struggle is going to bring in so many people and so much business that they’re too busy preparing to keep their shops open. This is a pretty flimsy excuse for the shops not being available to our boy yet, but also, judging from how creepy and empty this town is now, I’m guessing the Struggle tourism boom might bring in a dozen people.

First up is “Poster Duty,” in which Roxas must put up 20 adverts for the Struggle in as short a time as he can manage. Wait, I just did this shit. Was there some trend in game design in the mid-aughts toward role-playing as a high school student advertising a car wash? Is the next mini-game going to be going door-to-door and selling three-flavor popcorn tins? (Please do this, guys. I would rule at it, because I’d sell all the popcorn to myself. Thanks in advance.)

Like Shion’s run at this, Roxas has designated areas in which to hang posters, and here they are even helpfully marked with yellow squares on the walls. The fact that he’s hanging 20 of the things should be balanced out by them being much smaller than the person-sized digital behemoths Shion dealt with, except some of the yellow squares are in tight clusters of three, so the upshot is just as spammy and unattractive as the Miss Miltia campaign. The one saving grace is that there is basically nothing else decorating the ample walls of downtown Twilight Town, because nobody lives here and nothing happens, except for this amazing event that will singlehandedly rescue their flailing economy, minus some tax breaks for the International Struggle Committee that are barely even worth mentioning.

Thanks to me picking a pretty good circuit for poster-hanging completely by accident, and remembering that Roxas gets little boosted jumps from spamming circle to hang the posters even a yard out from the target, he finishes with a pretty decent time of 1’09″43. Better still, the potbellied, mustachioed, Ken Kratz-looking motherfucker in charge of the Struggle promotion gives Roxas a whopping 100 munny for his efforts. That’s almost enough to tolerate the sexts he’s been getting from this guy.

The fifth available odd job is “Bumble-Buster,” which is even less enticing than sexual harassment from the Struggle ‘Stache. “Bee Careful! [Sigh.] There are bees everywhere! I need them taken care of!” Who has the time to put up a want ad in the middle of a bee swarm? At best, shouldn’t this read, “BEESBEESBEESBEARGHARGHARGHARGH”? I have some questions for this maybe-dead person. But in the meantime, let’s murder some insects. The explanation screen has some wisdom for Roxas about how the bees behave, but none of it matters, because it doesn’t change Roxas’s general strategy to flail his dildo bat around like an emo whirling dervish until there are no more bees. This works as well as it ever does, and after a couple of tries–did I mention the bees can somehow parry?–Roxas finishes his extermination in 0’17″56 and earns 50 munny.

The last task in the docket is called “Junk Sweep,” providing me a fun mental image of Roxas tying a feather duster to his penis and dancing pantsless around someone’s living room. Naturally, reality is much more boring. Roxas is standing in a dead-end alley with his dildo bat, charged with destroying “junk,” which mostly looks like old circuitboards and iron frames welded together in box shapes. This task is untimed, but the challenge is to destroy all the debris with as few sensuous strokes of the bat as possible. He has to make each thrust count! The upshot is that there is a right way to do this. Roxas’s combo hit will send a junk box flying into other junk boxes and destroy the lot, so it’s simply a matter of hitting the right box from the correct direction. For keeping himself to 10 explosive strokes, Roxas again gets 50 munny.

I’m sure that was very fascinating to read. But I bet this is the last time I’ll have to recap a big glut of mini-games. Bank on it. Speaking of banking, Roxas is currently sitting on 570 munny. This is a sad, tiny amount that will make Hayner sigh and say he didn’t want the king-size churro at the beach anyway, but not to worry about it. Roxas cannot abide that possibility, so he decides to keep working until he can scrape together 1200 munny–a number he arrives at all on his own and totally not an arbitrary sum suggested by GameFAQs for gameplay reasons. He probably just wants to tell Hayner he brought 100 munny for every inch of his dick. Anyway, he’s going to accomplish this in what I deem the most efficient, admittedly boring way: running Poster Duty seven more times, since it offers more munny than the rest and is pretty hard to fuck up, even for me.

Fast-forward to Roxas skateboarding his skinny ass up to the train station, exactly 1200 munny in his pocket. (I may have done something to get 30 munny instead of the seventh Poster Duty run–the point is, I was looking at my phone the whole time.) “Whoa-ho Roxas! You’re the man!” Hayner says. Oh, Roxas is beaming. “We can even buy a watermelon now!” Okay, wait. Roxas started with his 150 munny. So really, by getting up to 1200, he is doing the bare minimum, assuming the other three also pony up 1200 each (I know, I know). So I don’t know how the 2000-munny watermelon is in play, but then again Hayner is not the Smart One. But for his outsized effort to earn for the group, a black screen tells Roxas, “You’ve become quite dexterous,” and awards him two ability points. It’s possible he and Hayner are doing something behind this black screen and that’s where this newfound dexterity is coming in, but let’s say it was all the poster-hanging. Sure.