“Well now, I’m certain you must feel refreshed!” the attendant gushes after they’ve dressed again. “Your skin is absolutely radiant!” Nash’s skin is always radiant, peon. But the boys apparently didn’t get their fill of not-so-vague homoeroticism, so they hand over another bar of soap to hop in again. The attendant thinks they are concerned with hygiene, like that has anything to do with this. The next scene requires me to insert the second game disc, which I consider enough of an inconvenience that this one had better be really good. Like, “Phoenix and Edgeworth travel to the moon and have a three-way with Kyle” kind of good.
Manly!
And oh, are the game designers sadistic motherfuckers. The second scene features a slow pan up Nash’s naked body, in a Squally Stance, tiny wiener carefully hidden from view. When the camera reaches his face, we see Nash staring lovingly at himself in a hand mirror, while Squeak takes in Nash’s nudity with a horrified stare. And yet, Squeak does not turn away. Maybe horror has turned into curiosity?
Well, now that one minute’s worth of three men (and one flying cat) bathing together has taken up the majority of the recap so far, let’s move on to less fun stuff, like Meryod Forest. The first monsters the party encounters in this small, but horrible, stretch of forest are called Brain Lickers. These lovely creatures are yet another entry in the One-Eyed Monster family album, but they are also vaguely penis-shaped and have gaping, herpes-ridden mouths on top of their heads. They also enjoy curling up into a ball and whacking Kyle in the face with their tails. I have no clue why they keep doing this to Kyle in particular–it could be his proximity to them, or it could be that they figure a dude in fur-trimmed hooker boots doesn’t mind being slapped in the face with a diseased penis.
Inflamed penis!
Like every single monster in Meryod Forest–for the record: killer bees with phallic stingers, Gorgon monsters with mouth-eyes, and toads that lick humans to get high rather than the reverse–the Brain Dickers are highly resistant to magic and weak to physical attacks, demoting Mia and Nash to paperweight status for the duration of the area. The quick way to get through the forest is to use Alex’s Flash Cut in every single battle, since it will reliably kill everything on the field. But since Star Lights are still at a premium, I practice some restraint and only do this for 75 percent of the battles. What can I say–it’s fun as hell watching Alex’s sword ejaculate all over a group of monsters for big fat red numbers. Also, this forest is a slow, agonizing parade of poisoned and dead party members without leaning on Alex to do all the work.
After skipping as many monsters as possible, finding 2000 silver and yet another motherfucking locked chest, and blowing my wad of Star Lights on Alex, the party emerges from the north end of Meryod Forest and can now travel to the architectural disaster that is the village of Meryod. The surely intelligent citizens of this village decided back when they founded the place that the best location to build their homes was on a rickety series of bridges over a strait separating two peninsulas. It’s like if the earliest humans that migrated across the land bridge into North America said, “Let’s hang out here, wait for the water to come back, and build a shanty town out of plywood on top of it.” Squeak describes this as “amazing,” because he’s stupid. “No, the amazing part is that these hicks managed to nail anything not related to them,” Nash quips. As we’ll soon see, he has a point.
Kyle wants to find the “Magic Guild” (oops!) test-giver as soon as possible, and with that in mind the party sashays onto the bridge. Just so we get the point that Meryod is filled with Swamp People, the Walmart greeter near the Althena statue says, “Welcum ta Meryod! Weer all famely here!” Indeed they must be. He goes on, “So I thot I’d give ya uh neighborly warnin’ ’bout that bridge over yonder. Ya see, it’s rotted, so be careful thar!” Now, if it were me standing on this glorified beaver dam, I’d listen to the guy who lives here and presumably has some experience with unsafe structures, no matter how much he sounds like Larry the Cable Guy. But Jessica, Kyle, and Nash are basically like, “Fuck it, how bad could it be?” and make the stellar decision to run across. It should be noted that the bridge ahead of them leads to the other side of the strait and out of town, so it’s pointless to even go this way when the person they’re seeking is in Meryod, but Nash and Kyle will not be denied their opportunity to look manly and brave after they just got soapy and naked together at the hot springs.
This was impossible to see coming, but when the kids are in the middle of the bridge, it creaks and cracks in a most alarming fashion. “Hey, what were those strange sounds just now?” Kyle asks. “The creak and the crack?” Oh, that was the game designers straining to come up with some more game time padding. We’ll hear that plenty before we’re done. Jessica and Mia are just finishing stating the obvious–that the bridge is breaking apart–when it does exactly that and drops all of them into the drink. Squeak follows them downstream, keeping a carefully composed look of worry on his face to mask the inner chuckle he’s having at their misfortune.
Ew.
By the time Squeak catches up, the group has been separated and spread out all over the docks of Meryod. He reaches Alex first, and after confirming that he’s okay, he immediately bitches that their giant cannonball splash got his cat fur all wet. Oh, poor you, Squeak. On their way to fetch Nash, who’s just one dock over, Squeak scolds a dirty old man who laughs at them: “Hey gramps, if you’d have warned us not to try to cross it…we wouldn’t have fallen in!” Yeah, because no one tried to do that. Also, Squeak didn’t even fall in, so he should really shut up.
Jessica is a short distance from Nash, dancing in place in front of a house. On the dock leading to her, Alex finds a young boy who thinks his reflection in the water is another person who is having a staring contest with him. The people in Meryod aren’t very smart! Do you get it yet? Oh, and they’re also not very attractive–Squeak tells a woman looking in what she thinks is a “magic mirrer” that she is “bug-eyed, triple-lipped [I don’t know what this means], snout-nosed,” and trails off as he runs out of insults. Note that all of the sprite citizenry in Meryod looks just like the sprite citizenry in every other town. So we’re supposed to assume that either this woman’s hideous visage is not relayed by sprite graphics, or Squeak is a misogynistic jerk who thinks women who aren’t as absurdly attractive as Gams, Jessica, and Mia are eldritch abominations deserving of scorn. God, Squeak sucks today.
Anyway, Jess is thrilled when they finally show up, because every Hatfield and McCoy in town is trying to hit on her. And the only creep allowed to leer at her is her dad Kyle, thank you very much. And we can see that Mia, to the west, is having a similar problem, as her sprite is standing with her back to the water, backing away from yet another mulleted man of Meryod. But before they can go save her, because she looks like she’s got this handled anyway, the party enters the house Jessica was standing in front of, which happens to be the home of the town carpenter. He promises to fix the bridge tomorrow–like that kind of break would be fixed in a day–while his son gushes about seeing Reza’s own Lily sing in some festival, and the boy’s mother frets that his crush on this girl means he might marry an outsider. I would apologize to Squeak, since I’m now picturing everyone in Meryod with the Innsmouth Look, but he still only felt the need to insult the appearance of a woman, so he’s still a dickhole.
On the way to Mia, the party passes by one of the men who sexually harassed Jessica, though he insists he didn’t do anything wrong and she hauled off and slapped him anyway. Jessica laughs and calls him a loser. I mean, maybe he did try and get an upskirt view or something, but it’s at least possible that Jessica, being a bitch, totally overreacted to a weird local handshake or something. Also, if this guy really wants to see Jess in various states of undress, all he needs to do is rob Squeak like that guy in Reza. It’s not like they’ll retaliate. Worst-case, they’ll embark on an even longer and dumber quest to earn the right to ask nicely for the picture to be returned, and really, that kind of describes the entire game.
Now, the guy cornering Mia is definitely a pervert and deserves the slap that Mia gives him, but we already knew that, because Mia isn’t a varsity-level mean girl that would freak out over non-lecherous niceness. In fact, she is already over it and says, over Nash’s protests that this guy should be executed, that they should get going and find Kyle.
Kyle, as Jessica predicts, can easily be found inside the tavern, getting shitfaced with the Thieves’ Guild test-giver. Though Kyle has his Drooling Drunkard face on when they enter, he seems sober enough when he asks Alex where the hell he’s been. Oh, just “saving” damsels in distress, nothing much. Kyle, meanwhile, has gleaned from the incoherent man across the table from him what the Thieves’ Guild test entails: they have to travel back south to Damon’s Spire and steal something of value from it. Giving this item to the bartender back in Reza will get them membership to the guild. I would once more like to register my disbelief that this is in any way easier than or preferable to finding the man who stole the White Dragon Wings and beating the shit out of him. But Mia is all interested in meeting Damon because he is known as the “keeper of knowledge,” so I guess this is just the convoluted excuse to let him impart his wisdom on our heroes. One more thing: to enter Damon’s Spire, one must know the “secret words,” which Kyle’s drinking buddy has written in a notebook that is now in Kyle’s possession. Returning this notebook later is going to be a pain in the ass, but Alex is apparently not allowed to just read and memorize (or copy) the words and give the man his notebook back immediately. Sigh.
That’s racist.
After Kyle skips out on the bar tab, which makes Jessica all emo because her boyfriend is a criminal savage, the gang leaves Meryod, chattering among themselves about Damon and his Spire of Exposition as they walk. And since Alex does not possess the White Dragon Wings, they are forced to travel again through Meryod Forest. I hate Squeak so much right now.
The second trip through my favorite forest ever is about the same as the first, except that I have to lean on my Alex crutch even more, because I’m trying not to use any of Kyle’s MP. Why would I do that? Well, as the gang reaches the south end of the forest, they run into a rather odd new piece of outdoor décor–Jessica’s recently acquired statue of her father. (So lifelike!) As this discovery ushers in a melodramatic soap opera tune, Jessica breaks out of wherever she was hiding in Alex’s body to yell, “What…what the…? Daddy?! What are you DOING out here?” An excellent question. The kids gather around Statue!Mel while Jessica prods at him with her healing hands. “Jessica…my dear Jessica…” Statue!Mel says, somehow, “please don’t leave me here! It’s so cold…so lonely…” Well, maybe you shouldn’t have wandered out here all by yourself, Mel! Hey, wait, how exactly did he do that, anyway? Kyle is obviously thinking just that when the light in the forest briefly flickers, and then he puts two and two together and shoves Jessica out of the way, just in time for him and everyone else in the party to be turned to stone. Glad he only thought to remove Jessica from harm. I know she’s his girlfriend and he supposedly likes putting his penis in her, but now the world’s last hope for a new Dragonmaster is a marble curio. On the other hand, so is Squeak. Yay!
Jessica, knocked on her ass, asks what’s happened to her friends, because it’s not obvious or anything. She gets up and attempts to heal Kyle, but it’s as ineffective as ever. When nothing happens, instead of, I don’t know, murdering this evil creature that impersonated her father and just attacked her and her friends, Jessica mopes to herself because, by some cosmic accident, she is now all alone in the world. Come on Jess, get with the program.
Faux!Statue!Mel (I guess that means he’s made of plastic) senses that Jessica, in her state of dipshittery shock, is vulnerable. “Come to me, Jessica,” he creeps at her. “Join me…join your friends. You will live forever…and you will never be alone.” Don’t do it, Jessica! I’m sure another man will come along to give your life meaning! But Jessica is off in La-La Land, so she’s all, “…yes…” because surely her real father would tell her to kill herself.
Now I’m picturing Mel as a pistachio.
Perhaps due to Jessica’s attempts to heal him a moment ago, but more likely because of his TWOO WUV for her, Kyle breaks out of his petrification and states the obvious: “Mel would never ask his daughter to join him in death, you monster!” And if he’s not Mel, says Kyle Logic, that means it’s okay to beat the shit out of him. Time for a solo boss battle! Kyle decides to take on “Plaster Mel” all by his lonesome, hence my desire to keep him at full HP and MP up to this point. Why Jessica can’t join in on the fun is beyond me. It’s not like I need her to kill her own dad, fake or real–I just want her to fucking heal. This is basically a repeat of Alex’s fight with Mel, except Mel’s been converted to grayscale and I have to actually win this time. But with a good supply of Healing Nuts, Kyle gets through the fight just fine on his own. Suck on that, Alex. Maybe Kyle should be the Dragonmaster.