Okay, we don’t actually get to see the hot dude flop onto the deck, because the moment plays out under a Black Screen of We Can’t Animate This, We Spent All Our Money on Jeanne’s Boobs, while Ugetsu wails, “Shiramine?! What on Earth is HE doing here?!” When the scene returns, we find that Shiramine has harsh eyebrows and a high bushy ponytail, like Mitsurugi from Soul Calibur, and he’s dressed in a purple bathrobe and white boy shorts. This makes him sound way more attractive than he is in practice, but Marvy is hard up and not picky. Shiramine only says, still dazed, that he was fishing a moment ago, before complimenting Ugetsu on his amazing boat. Hey, sweet cheeks, don’t insult your new sugar daddy, okay? But Ugetsu actually does the boss a solid and points out that this is “Mr. Marvy’s” show, and asks if Shiramine can stay on board and help him fish. Shiramine seems a little too fixated on Ugetsu, so Marvy is concerned about what they’ll be getting up to without him, but he’s obviously not going to say no.

Marvy has some alternative suggestions for what to do with the net.

Now that he’s secured someone who’s not Keneth for the purpose of christening the rear deck, Marvy puts together another party with Mitsuba, King Lido, and Jeanne, and warps back to Nay Island. After some much needed leveling for the latter two, he finds Marceline standing under a tree, ready to fight again. You’d think Marvy stole her Hambo or something. (I’ll stop.) This time she is even more vicious, and beats down my sorry-ass party within three turns, thanks to, I believe, Shining Wind, the spell with the big fucking dragon. King Lido did not sign up for this shit. But thanks to Marvy’s cabin being two seconds away from Viki, it’s easy to save early and often, and the second time she goes down, albeit with Marvy and Jeanne alone alive, with about a dozen HP each. Afterward, she swears, “I’ll never forget this!” and disappears again. She’d better have a damn good justification for trying so hard to murder Marvy! (Spoiler alert: hahaha, no, of course it’s going to be stupid.)

With Marceline taken care of until way later, Marvy decides to do some relaxing fishing with his new boyfriend, and his new boyfriend’s ugly friend. Outside of Nay, they pull up the net, and we switch to another voice-acted cutscene. These fishermen sure are getting their share of screen time. And Shiramine says, in his first voiced lines, “Oh ho, nice one! A big catch!” Oh, you guys, I am full of regret. Shiramine sounds like Steve Urkel impersonating Ringo Starr. It is death to all boners. Anyway, this big catch Marvy’s now ex-boyfriend is checking out has more than just fish and crabs and Marvy’s broken heart: the three of them have caught another fucking mermaid. This day is getting better and better.

Shiramine is getting ready to pitch the unconscious mermaid back into the ocean, and I am noticing he has unattractive skunk stripes in his ponytail on top of everything else, when Lilin emerges from inside and says, “Lilan!” For the record, Tuna!Shion puts the emphasis on the first syllable, like “LEE-lan,” which makes me eagerly await the arrival of her other sister Leeloo Dallas Mermaidpass. Shiramine asks “Lady Lilin” if she knows this other mermaid, so he’s also an idiot, and Marvy is pissed at his invisible controller for getting him all worked up over this guy. A black screen later, Lilan has been freed from the net and is awake, telling Lilin of her escape from the “bad people” along with their other sisters. Lilan, the youngest of Lilin’s Catholic mermaid family, has a multi-tiered bowl haircut and gigantic golden gills hanging from under her bangs. I hope they’re gills, anyway. They honestly look like big floppy labia, but Lilan is 14 and I don’t want to think about this. Lilan agrees to stay with her sister on the ship, Shiramine adds that this has “turned out for the better,” and Marvy contemplates throwing himself to the waves.

Seriously, look at those goddamn things.

Amusingly, after Lilan has joined up, Marvy still gets to see the results of the haul from the net, which turns out to contain a couple dozen sardines, plus Lilan. She’s even on the list, like she’s an interesting seashell and not a teenage girl.

Marvy’s next order of business is to find an island–specifically, the island he was marooned on with Paula, Keneth, and Chiepoo. Not only does he have to go back, but he has to go back to recruit another fucking mermaid. Life is a cruel joke. Multiple guides insist that the island is between Nay and Middleport. It takes roughly 25 minutes of sailing to find the place, because it’s further south than a direct line between Nay and Middleport would indicate, and because there are random battles every three fucking seconds in this goddamn game. It then takes–and sweet Christ do I wish I were making this up–another 15 minutes to figure out how to make landfall. There is a convenient-looking sandy beach visible when the ship approaches from the west, but apparently that is not the exact right spot to dock, and the massive ship has to lurch all the way around the island, with yet more random battles, until it comes to another almost identically convenient-looking beach that is the exact right spot. I swear that most of the time I consider this game to be unfairly maligned and actually kind of fun in its own way, but right now I am with every spittle-spraying fanboy in saying this game sucks out loud.

Yup, that’s definitely Shion.

Since the end run of this infuriating excursion is a mermaid, Marvy naturally enters the cave where he first met Lilin. Halfway to the lake at the back, a man named Taisuke shouts at him, “Who’s there?! N-Now’s not a good time. Let me get dressed first, so stay right there!” I already know Taisuke is not a looker–because even though Marvy hasn’t seen him yet, his portrait is right there as if they’re face to face–but RED ALERT, RED ALERT, NAKED MAN DETECTED. Marvy’s social graces and sense of boundaries have long since been stomped out by the universe’s cruelty, so he decides to be a creep.

‘Sure thing. She’s in this burlap sack filled with bricks.’

Of course there’s not really any full frontal happening, unless the pool water is crystal clear, because Taisuke is submerged up to his neck. And the stuff from the neck up, again, is not inspiring. This game is a murderer’s row of bad haircuts, ferret faces, and jug ears. Marvy’s sigh echoes off the cave walls. Taisuke asks Marvy to go outside so he can get dressed, and he means all the way outside. Dude, Marvy isn’t even interested anymore. But he does as Taisuke asks and leaves, only for Taisuke to stop him on the way out. “W-Wait!!” he cries. “I forgot! My clothes are outside the cave! Can you get them for me, please?” Did he seriously strip on the beach and then walk naked all the way through the cave? And now he’s suddenly shy about being naked? What the fuck?

Incidentally, if Konami ever cared enough about this game to do an HD remaster edition (haha, no), I would demand an extra scene from Taisuke’s point of view, as he fights through squirrels and Zubats in his birthday suit, his dong flapping in the stale cave air.

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Marvy finds a small blue bundle labeled “Taisuke’s Clothes” on the beach, and returns them to him. So now he can recruit him, right? Or at least put a bag over his head and have some fun? Nope! Taisuke asks him once more to wait outside so he can get dressed. Maybe he should have just walked back to the beach naked and gotten his own fucking clothes. Obviously streaking through the cave is not a problem for him. Seriously, fuck this bullshit. Marvy goes outside again, and then comes back again. This is three round trips through this stupid cave he’d already spent too much time in, just for one guy. Anyway, Taisuke is dressed in yellow and beige when Marvy returns, wearing nothing that looks like it could have come from that blue bundle. Whatever. Taisuke informs Marvy that this is a “full-blown ocean hot spring,” and the last thing Marvy wants to do is be fully blown in here at this point, but he’s just in a shitty mood now. Taisuke is noting this because he is a bathmaker, and offers to build Marvy a bath on the ship he shouldn’t even know Marvy has, I guess as an apology for all that entering and exiting the cave nonsense. He also offers to replicate various baths from around the Island Nations if Marvy takes him to study them, as if Marvy would be so derivative.

Holy shit!

No sooner does Marvy exit the cave than he needs to reenter. On this fourth round trip, he meets Lilen, a squirrel blacksmith. Just kidding, she’s another fucking mermaid. Lilen’s scales are purple, and she’s doing this weird pose in her portrait where she’s making fuck-me eyes and looks like she’s just about to run her hands through her hair. It looks like she’s posing an Herbal Essences ad. All Marvy has to do is tell her he knows Lilin, and Lilen is good to go. Thank god he doesn’t have to run through the cave six more times or pick up her dry cleaning, though if she does want to put some clothes on he isn’t going to stop her.

Back to the ship! I should note now, before I forget later, that Rat Boy is Marvy’s official rowboat chauffeur to and from the ship. This means that Marvy and Rat Boy probably spend hours every day together off-camera, and it’s probably miserable for our hero. But it’s probably the only job Rat Boy’s capable of, since he’s spent his short life as a Walmart greeter for ruins no one visited. And Marvy knows it could be worse, too.

Once Marvy has checked out his new bathhouse (Taisuke helps him make it look like the one on Mordo Island, for a lack of actual interesting options), he spends the rest of the afternoon outfitting his sadly lady-heavy fighter squad, which mostly means teleporting back and forth between the three available trading posts to make money for high-end metal bras and blacksmithing upgrades. He even wins a Pirate King Crown from Bang’s lottery, something I still can’t believe happened even as it’s on my screen, and obviously Bang can’t believe it either, because he’s a dishonest scumbag.