For reasons that now seem flimsy at best, I thought it would be a neat idea to revisit the optional boss Angelic Hairball now that Marvy is a badass and has recruited some people who are at least fit to hold his jock. The Angel Furry is not a problem in itself–he even gets the Golden Hammer out of murdering it–but giving Marvy a second goal to reach in these ruins leads to me getting hopelessly lost for at least (*checks notes and sighs deeply*) 40 minutes, fighting and eventually running away from frustratingly frequent glowing resurrecting skeletons, zombie unicorns, packs of devil panthers, and stone golems with giant arms and tiny skinny legs. I actually leave twice and teleport back to Obel because starting over is easier than finding my way in the middle of the place. I’m gonna go ahead and blame the strategy guide for printing one of the worst dungeon maps I have ever seen in my life. No, this isn’t my fault, what are you talking about? I have one of the great mental compasses. Perfect sense of direction. You hear it more and more.
Marvy finds The Dreaded Travis, a skinny redhead with a tiny ponytail and a weaselly-but-handsome-I-suppose face, hanging out by the lone sad tree behind the ruins, where he once found Rikie moping about her dead husband. “Oh…I guess there are some people who can actually get this far…” he says. Marvy asks him what he’s doing here, which is a solid question for absolutely anyone who is ever here. Turns out Travis enjoys solitude and correctly surmised this would be a good spot to get it. When Marvy ignores this hint and asks Travis to “lend [him] [his] strength,” wink, Travis considers it. “I don’t want any trouble…” he finally says. “However…if you guys bring me ‘Escape Talisman’…I’ll think about it…” Thank the lord, Marvy planned ahead and does indeed have just such an item. But is seeing the fucking thing in Marvy’s fanny pack sufficient for his needs? Readers, it is not. “Prove it! Use it right now… Open it up from where it says ‘Items’ and use it… Go on…” Okay, first of all, Rat Boy’s Disaffected Gen X Cousin, Marvy knows how to use a fucking item. Second of all, watch this! Boy, is your face about to be red!
Marvy, don’t be a creep.
…Wha… HEY, WAIT A MINUTE!
This fucking guy!
Marvy is quite ready to let Travis rot in these ruins, and later in hell, over this, but finds his toned calves carrying him back through the ruins a-fucking-gain. I am incandescent. You could bake brownies with the heat coming off my head. When Marvy gets back to Travis, he seems mildly surprised that Marvy bothered coming back. “You must be angry, rightfully so…” he notes. “Oh, all right…I’ll lend you my help…” He can lend Marvy his help in loading himself into a cannon. But without Marvy getting a final confirmation that, being real, he’d just go forward with anyway, Travis hops in his Pokéball. Welcome to the Seaward, asshole! Marvy looks forward to never using you but signing your paychecks anyway!
Marvy, what did I just say?
I said Marvy had one last recruit, but that wasn’t, strictly speaking, true–Travis brings the Seaward to 107 misfits and useless idiots. I think you all know where this is headed.
Marvy teleports his fleet to Mordo Island. For no reason, as this is not something he’s ever felt the need to do before, Marvy talks to the man hanging on the docks who normally indulges in trading post gossip. “You won’t believe me when I tell you, but…” the man says. What, that rum is going for a princely sum in Na-Nal? Marvy believes that entirely. He’d drink heavily if he lived there, too. “I was looking out at sea the other day, when I saw… A person just floating in the ocean! Isn’t that crazy?!” Oh dear. Marvy, who has seen his share of both sides of being set adrift, figures he should look into this. Probably just some more Iluya dead bodies, though, right?
Mordo has barely disappeared from the minimap on the ship screen when Nico, peering through his spyglass as I assume he is doing literally 24/7, spots something floating in the water. That something is very obviously a half-dead Slowe Fingerbang, spread eagled across a broken ship’s mast floating in the water. Nico shouts, “Hey! E-Emergency!! Man overboard!!” I mean, I think Slowe is still technically on his ship. For what it’s worth. He seems fine.
He’s faking it.
A black screen hauls Slowe out of the water and onto the deck, where he can be surrounded by Marvy and his former friends like they’re staging an intervention. For what, I don’t know. His addiction to being a twat, I guess. Slowe stares morosely at all of them, his tattered rags trying to communicate, “I have hit rock bottom,” but his still-immaculate hair and the perfect horizontal bottom edge of his dingy crop top actually saying, “I have further to fall before my vanity deserts me.” As is the norm in this group, Slowe speaks first. “I’m at your mercy…” he breathes. Nineteen actual seconds pass in stony silence as Slowe shuffles his feet awkwardly. It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s agonizing. Finally, Jewel asks Marvy, “Wh-What should we do?” Marvy is presented with two options that do, in fact, constitute a real choice: “He can’t be forgiven. Off with his head!” or “Perhaps we should let him join us…” A third option, “He has to live in the confessional room until I’m satisfied I’ve heard every apology he can think of,” does not present itself. Too bad.
Now, it is of course sorely tempting to let Marvy give in to spite and give himself the bad ending, after all that Slowe has done: namely, undermined and gaslit Marvy his entire life, deserted him after a terrible trauma, framed him for murder, turned their home island into a Vichy state, (badly) ran an anti-pirate task force at the exact moment Marvy became a pirate, hypocritically became a pirate himself, and last but not least, thought he could get out of all of that by wearing a series of increasingly sexy outfits. But let us be honest with ourselves and admit there was never any chance of Marvy doing this. He still loves this empty-headed, arrogant, beautiful man. And he wasn’t about to drag him out of the ocean just to kill him anyway. That’s just more man-hours Marvy has to pay for.
When Marvy makes his pronouncement, Jewel sniffles and wipes her eyes as Slowe asks, “Are you sure?” Don’t make Marvy say it twice, man, because he might not. And he’s going to talk some more, because he’s still Slowe, and even having a rope for a belt doesn’t change a man that much. “I have no choice but to acknowledge how powerless I am… I knew it. I knew it all along…” Wow. He’s really going with “I’ll join you now that I have literally no other option”? If he did not add, “Thank you…” to that little speech, he might have just talked Marvy into the plank after all. Slowe and Marvy stare unblinking at each other while their friends close in around them, Keneth coming this close to standing between the two of them and seemingly thinking better of it. You could lose a hand in there right now! Be careful!
A black screen provides the rather anticlimactic “[Slowe] has joined us!” and returns me to the fleet sitting on the ocean. I assume a day or so has passed, long enough for Marvy and Slowe to adjourn to Marvy’s cabin and have a long talk and so on. Physically exhausted but mentally clearer than he’s been in weeks, Marvy walks downstairs to check in with Desmond and put Slowe in his battle party. Astoundingly, Slowe is still level 8, which I believe is exactly the level he was at the time of the infamous “MY ARM” incident. He really doesn’t believe in hands-on management of his men, does he? Luckily, the Suikoden experience system makes this a pretty trivial matter. The larger problem is the state of Slowe’s wardrobe. He’s still in his gross castaway rags, which are now also wrinkled from spending several hours on Marvy’s floor. This will not do.
Now, given that Slowe did not board the Rudderless with a trunk full of clothes–nor with anything other than the hunk of mast he was floating on, an object Marvy is considering having Gareth and the mermaids fashion into a dildo for their one-year anniversary of this reconciliation–Marvy can’t just tell him to put on something else. Nor can Marvy put in an order with Phil for a jumpsuit made entirely of lace garters, because…well, I don’t know, but let’s just assume it has to do with Slowe still being too much of a finicky, snotty prick to wear anything made by, ugh, a pirate tailor. No, the only way to outfit Slowe in a way befitting his new station as Marvy’s Eternal Cabana Boy and Apology Blowjob Provider is by…fishing. I am already regretting letting Marvy be happy.
Specifically, Slowe’s three other ensembles can be found by dredging them up with Shiramine’s net around three specific areas in the Island Nations. I assume this is because Slowe tossed each outfit in the ocean as he realized this one, somehow, was not the arrangement of cravats and stockings that would finally bring that silly Marvy to heel again. The clothing I am of course focused on here can be found in the waters around Iluya, so it is there the Rudderless sails.
I remembered this being a pain in the ass the other times I’d done it–surprise, I have never been inclined to let Slowe hang around if he’s not going to look hot–so I did a fair amount of Googling to make sure I was doing it right and not wasting my time. Estimates for how long this would take were anywhere from “however long it takes to sail around Iluya one time” to “maybe an hour” to “never, this game sucks.” Cool! Great. It is thus with a mixture of concern and optimism that, after having Shiramine cast out his net, I begin sailing in a laborious, listing circle around Iluya. If you’ve ever done a grind in any game for any rare thing, you surely know this feeling: intellectually sure it’s going to be a time- and soul-sucking exercise in futility but secretly hopeful that you will be the special person who gets the drop after 10 minutes.
Friends, I do not get the drop in 10 minutes. Or 20. Or 60.
With random battles to deal with (and, whatever, Slowe needs the levels anyway), each lap around the island takes about five minutes, at which point I put the brakes on and have Shiramine see what he’s got. After the third lap that has resulted in nothing but Failure Urns and sardines, I turn the recording off, as I’m already several hours deep in this thing and didn’t want the entire file to get bricked because I was insistent on having a full and complete record of all the sailing I did. But I do keep track of how long I’m at this thing, because what I do want is full disclosure of how much of a disgusting sucker I am for pretty but mediocre men wearing lace-up leather vests.
Leaving aside the gay erasure of this shit, they are still very much at It’s Complicated.
Which brings us forward about an hour and 45 minutes, which I guess is over 20 circuits of Iluya, when Shiramine pulls up his net to reveal Failure Urns and sardines and Slowe’s Pirate Garb. At this point I can say I was fully in the donut hole of hope, in which you are convinced this item cannot possibly exist and will never appear before you, but are so pot committed to seeking it that you just keep going on autopilot. Anyway, Marvy has to speak with Slowe in order to, I suppose, sweet-talk him into a little wardrobe change. This version of Slowe has had all the defiant haughtiness beaten out of him by his repeated and hilarious self-owns on the high seas, so he’s all sweet and almost submissive as he asks if his current clothes suit him. “Are you preparing for a costume ball?” Marvy asks in reply. That’s a funny way of telling him his clothes are as trashy as he is, but can we at all blame Marvy for being a little mean here and there with his newest recruit? I, for one, cannot. Slowe is affronted, but remembers his place and immediately uses a black screen to change into something probably less comfortable. Marvy now tells Slowe he looks like a “noble warrior,” and Slowe, uh, “agrees” that these duds suit him much better. That is not what Marvy said! But in the name of cohabitative harmony with that ass, he doesn’t issue a correction.
Gaveling in this meeting of the Thirsty Bitch Club
And it is here, with his life in a shockingly together state and at the least emo he’s ever been, that we will leave Marvy Gaye for now. Next time…holy shit, is it the end of the game? It kind of snuck up on me! Well, here’s hoping for a noble but brutally violent death for King Lido in part 11!