Oh, I bet you do.
I think what I’m trying to say here is that, for her role in this game as the supposed Smart One, Mia sure is being a Shion right now. Anyway. Mia leads Alex, Squeak, and her “disguised” mother to the east end of the Magic Guild, to the entrance of the Crystal Tower, at the top of which they will find the Star Chamber. Yes, that means that Gams is being held in the head of one of Vein’s two prominent penis towers. On the way out of the jail, one guard pretends to be asleep while Mia is escorting two of his prisoners out of captivity, while the other simply assumes that if Mia is letting them out, she must have permission to be doing so. I really wonder if Alex would have even needed Mia’s help in escaping.
They proceed through the rest of the guild without anyone even batting an eyelash at them, including two more guards they pass on the way to the eastern wing. That’s constant vigilance for you. But as they reach the door to the Crystal Penis, a voice cries from behind them, “Wait! Mia!” and Nash comes huffing and panting up to his lady love. Nash knows that they are on their way to the Star Chamber, which must have strained his deductive powers to their limits, given that they’re standing right in front of the damn door. Mia doesn’t want Nash to risk his life helping them, since Lemia might execute the lot of them for daring to enter the Star Chamber at all. But regardless of the danger, Nash insists upon coming along. When Mia says it’s her duty to go as the next leader of the Magic Guild, he retorts, “And it’s my duty as a member of the Magic Guild to assist my future leader!” The boy is this close to spilling his squishy feelings of love for her all over the hallway carpet, but chickens out at the last minute and says he feels obligated to go and help Gams, and also that he doesn’t want Alex hogging all the girl-saving glory. Alex momentarily considers yanking Mia’s Bromide 1 out of Nash’s pocket and letting Mia see it–it seems Nash could use a serious kick in the ass to make even the smallest move on this girl–but more pressing matters are at hand.
Don’t worry. Mia will look cool, too.
With that out of the way, Mia approaches the entrance. “In the name of the Goddess Althena…” she says with her Serious Business Face on, “I banish the magical seal placed upon this door!” The screen flashes white twice, and the double doors fly open of their own accord. Turning around, Mia says they should hurry up and do this thing, “before someone finds out what [they]’re up to…” Who’s going to bust them now? Isn’t everyone who could bust them up in the Star Chamber already? And isn’t Mia’s whole purpose here to confront Bitch!Lemia? This is not an espionage mission. It’s pretty much the opposite of that, in fact.
The décor of the Crystal Penis is pretty far out–my God, there are crystals everywhere! In this first room, five blocky phallic crystal pillars stand in the center of the room, probably serving no structural purpose other than to look masculine and impressive. Alex proceeds further into the room, but is quickly rebuffed by an invisible forcefield. Mia rushes to the rescue with some quickie exposition: “The Crystal [Penis] is a holy place, blessed with special magic by Althena herself,” Mia tells everyone. “Only the Dragonmaster himself can enter with armaments in place…” Nash whines that it’s going to suck fighting monsters with only magic to help them. Ironically, that isn’t much of a problem for him or Mia–Alex is the only one who’s going to be up a creek on this one.
Or not. The strategy guide has a suggestion for me: use a Dragonfly Wing, the purpose of which is to teleport the party to the beginning of a dungeon. It just so happens that the exact start point for the Crystal Penis is beyond the forcefield, which means that using a Dragonfly Wing gets our party past the forcefield without having to ditch their weapons. Now, I am very grateful for this tip, because Alex may as well be a second Squeak without his sword, but it is slightly ridiculous how self-congratulatory the strategy guide is about pointing out what more or less amounts to an exploitable bug in the game. Especially since this guide is published, not by an outside party, but by Working Designs, a party naturally disposed to needing to know about this stuff. It’s not like they had to conduct a police investigation to discover how to use this–as they smugly refer to it–“quite clever” trick.
Armed with their weapons, Alex, Mia, and Nash ascend to the second floor of the tower to fight their way through several dozen laser beam-shooting mirrors. Mia quickly proves herself to be the non-useless mage of the party–though she’s only one level higher than that lazy-ass Nash, she has fifty more magic points than he does, as well as a greater range of attack and support spells, all of hers either fire- or ice-based. Nash is a great deal faster than her–again with that–but it doesn’t seem like her speed really matters when everything is generally dead by the end of her turn. I like her. She can stay.
The other type of monster on the second floor (with plenty more to come on the third floor) is the Plasma Fiend, a terrifying specter made of oozing green ectoplasm. Well, that’s what I would say if it weren’t just a palette-swapped version of the fireballs from the Meribia sewers. Which it so is. These delightful fellows rather enjoy biting Alex on the face. I have no idea how it would feel to have a monster made of fire plasma bite you, but it’s probably less than pleasant. I’m sure Alex would probably feel it comparable to having long talks with Gams about her feelings.
Loading ...Alex and Gang meet another monster on the third floor, a creature called Blood Lord. The “blood” aspect of this guy is lost on me, since he’s more or less a floating, crystalline humanoid creature with a phallic, pointed shaft below his torso instead of legs. Maybe “blood” refers to his penchant for fucking Mia’s shit up from all the way across the battlefield. Dick.
I won’t bore you with any further details of battling random monsters, because those three–along with a floating red crystal palette-swapped from the type in the White Dragon Cave–are literally the only things in this entire place. “Monotonous” doesn’t quite do it justice. Along the way Alex collects a number of mildly shitty items from treasure chests, wondering in the process why there are treasure chests in here, since the Crystal Penis seems to be nothing more than an elaborate (and flamboyant) staircase up to the Star Chamber. Then again, why are there treasure chests anywhere? But these are the sorts of questions that lead, not to answers, but to headaches, so let’s just forget about it.
Gangbang!
On what I believe is the ninth boring-ass floor of the Crystal Penis, the party hears Gams, somewhere close, singing her same old La-La-La song. Squeak unnecessarily tells us it’s Gams, like, no shit, while Junkie!Lemia achieves her first moment of lucidity in the company of the teenagers and says, “So beautiful…it warms my heart…and my mind.” She even starts to recall her elusive–and non-obvious!–identity, but the name is just out of her mental grasp. “What’s stopping her from remembering her identity, Alex?” Nash asks with this total abandoned puppy look on his face. I realize that Nash wasn’t in the party when we went over this particular point, but seriously, shut up. Even better, Mia piles on to my misery, “And how does [Gams]’s song have the power to restore her memory?” Am I going to have to carve “I FUCKING GET IT” into my own forehead to get the game designers to stop with this shit? Squeak says they’ll get their answers to all these questions and more once they get to the Star Chamber. Right. Even if they did get all their questions answered, they’d still be all, “Who is this lady in the mask? Why does Gams have magic powers? I bet our good friend Ghaleon will help us figure it out! DURRRRR!!! DURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!!”
I just tried to drown myself in my coffee. It didn’t work, but it was delicious!
After the party clears out the monsters in this room, it’s straight to the Star Chamber, a room that looks like the inside of a planetarium. There’s some kind of magickal circle on the floor, at the center of which Gams is standing, singing her stupid song. Watching her from the periphery are Bitch!Lemia, Ghaleon, Royce, and…why, that’s Fellatio. I wonder what on earth she’s doing here. Because I’m a dumbass. She asks the others, “What’s happening? Do we know if she’s the one?” Royce tells her to shut up and be patient, but Bitch!Lemia is all out of that particular virtue. “How many more of these girls will we have to capture until we find the one we need?” she grumbles. The timing of this statement is slightly strange, since, as of right now, we only know of two singers–Gams and Lann’s crooner–who have gone missing. There will be many more later, of course, but I would think Bitch!Lemia would be able to sit through two singing auditions without losing her shit. If Simon Cowell can do it, anybody can. Ghaleon, for his part, says nothing during this exchange. I’m sure he knows that, as the only male in the room, he’d be completely ignored at best and scorned as an evil oppressive man at worst.
The camera pans up to the entrance to the Star Chamber, a normal portal carved out of the same crystalline walls as the rest of the tower. Seeing the wall and door kind of destroys the floating-in-space illusion the chamber was previously creating. Such that it was. Alex and the others spill out of the doorway and onto the magic circle to break up the party. After Bitch!Lemia rips a strip off Mia for daring to interrupt this very important Magic Guild Board of Directors meeting, Gams starts shrieking like a fool. “Alex! Oh, Alex, I’m so glad you’re alright!” she cries, her eyes and mouth unattractively wide. Switching over to the Sad Face, she says, “These people have been forcing me to sing their evil songs…”
Wait a minute.
The song that Gams was singing before Alex came up the stairs to this room was the exact same song she always sings. Me and my tin ear for MIDI musical talent again. She even has the audacity to say that they made her do it or they would kill Alex. Because Gams, Lunar’s Number One Attention Whore, really needs to have her arm twisted to sing, especially to sing a song she’s subjected us to thousands of times already. This is just wrong all over.
Loading ...Squeak gets his hackles up about these bitches “hurting” his precious Gams, while Mia pleads with her mother to stop the insanity. “I have shown nothing but leniency and forgiveness for your delinquent behavior…” Bitch!Lemia snaps at her non-daughter, “and THIS is how you repay me? By releasing my prisoner and disrupting a sacred ritual? Your punishment shall be swift and brutal, my wretched little offspring…and your friends deaths shall be even more merciless!” And she sends a bolt of red energy flying at the group. Christ, what crawled into her ass today?
Bitch!Lemia yells at Ghaleon to “help” them complete the ritual. He hems and haws, like he would even have to think about this (like he would have stood here and watched this go on this long!) if he were on the side of the good guys. But before Ghaleon can make up his mind, Mia cuts in. The attack from Bitch!Lemia was the last straw–her true mother would never be so mean to her or try to harm her, blah blah maternal love yadda. She calls out Bitch!Lemia as the fraud she obviously is and whips out Althena’s Mirror…which was in Alex’s possession, not hers, but let’s just roll with it. “Shine, mirror, shine!” she yells. “Show all the true soul of this impostor!” Bitch!Lemia’s all “Whuh?” and shields her eyes from the white-screen-inducing flash of the mirror.
Hilariously, though, nothing happens. Bitch!Lemia has a long laugh at Mia, who is aghast that the mirror didn’t reveal her mother to be some kind of acid-spitting gorgon. Personally, I’m waiting for Mia to drop her so-far unflappable saintly demeanor, and start screaming, “You’re not my real mom! My real mom wouldn’t give me a ten-o’-clock curfew and hurl fireballs at the captain of the rugby team just because I invited him to my room! I HATE YOU!!!”