After waltzing through the completely ineffectual gate, Rudy decides to start off his intel-gathering with a hearty round of Talk to Everyone. The first NPC he encounters mentions a recent spate of abductions, where random people disappear from their beds then reappear a few days later with no memory of the incident. Now, unless Feelgayer is being visited by alien greys, we can safely assume this revelation is linked to the blond amnesiac wandering around the world map, not that any of the characters manage to connect the dots themselves.
I don’t know, maybe?!?!
Next stop, the pub. The bartender rambles about the rumours that the Arctican Kingdom fell to the Demons (as depicted in the opening sequence) but I’m more perturbed by his appalling punctuation abuse. A few more townspeople mention the mysterious abductions, just to hammer poor Rudy over the head with the fact that this particular plot point is going to be important. He also notices several tantalizingly out-of-reach treasure chests, all blocked by immobile NPCs and protective dogs, which I take as Gigantic Clue #3 that something bad is going to befall the townspeople before long. I do wonder how many of these Gigantic Clues we’re going to get before the catastrophic event in question actually occurs.
‘ZOMG, I didn’t know Doris Day was in town! I have to get her autograph!’
A kid running around outside the equipment shop excitedly tells Rudy that “Calamity Jane” has been spotted in town. Now, I know some artistic license is to be expected in a game like this, but as we’ll soon see, the Calamity Jane of the WA universe is hilariously different to her real-life counterpart. Doesn’t stop me loving her as a character, of course, but I’m getting ahead of myself here. I still have half the town to extract useless information from, after all!
Before that, though, a quick visit to the Magic Guild is in order — Cesuelia has some new Crest Graphs to scribble on, see, and she’s really going to need more than three spells in her arsenal if she wants to be taken seriously as the world’s protector. Having created mainly offensive magic so far, she decides to go for something a little different this time, and opts for the Escape and Berserk Rage spells (naturally renamed “GTFO” and “Nerdrage” by yours truly). With my immature sense of humour satisfied for now, Rudy calls in at the local “[PENIS] Meister” who poses the truly thought-provoking question of “Shall I work on your [PENIS]?”
This NEVER gets old.
Rudy spends a couple hundred Gella having his “Hand Cannon” upgraded (that extra 4% accuracy had better be worth it!) before resuming his half-finished Talk to Everyone duties. Disappointingly, nobody else has any juicy Calamity Jane gossip to pass on, with only a few mentions of an imaginatively-named monster prison known as the Cage Tower to whet the party’s appetite. One person in particular — who is either Stetson Dude or his identical twin — proposes a connection between the tower and the town’s abductees, most of whom were discovered ambling around outside it. Because nobody in this game can investigate anything themselves, he gives Rudy the key to the tower and asks that he and the others look into it. Yep, just like that. Never mind that these guys could be anyone — obviously the most logical means of getting to the bottom of the mystery affecting the entire town is to entrust it to three complete strangers who just showed up ten seconds ago. This place deserves everything that’s coming to it (and I hardly think that counts as a spoiler, given the wagonload of anvils that the game designers have dropped on our heads already).
The strangeness surrounding the Cage Tower is the only lead they’ve been able to find, so Rudy and pals resign themselves to yet another dungeon-crawl before they can even start to look for the second Guardian Statue. On the way out of town they stumble upon a previously unexplored house, in which resides a blind little girl who reveals she can “tell good people from bad by the sound of their voice”. Oh, goody. The Littlest Blind Girl declares that Rudy is “a very nice person, but [he] has had many bitter experiences…” I’m guessing she’s also gifted with telepathy, given that Rudy speaks about as often as Lassie.
That’s what being a recapper does to you, kiddo.
Out of curiosity I change the party order and discover that The Littlest Blind Girl does in fact have a condensed personality analysis for the other party members, too; supposedly, Indy is “very virtuous, but also very easily hurt” while Cesuelia is allegedly “a strong woman, but has not reached [her] full potential yet…”. So clearly this girl’s full of crap, and even worse, she repeats her “I have a special gift!” introductory speech every time a new character addresses her, making her sound like some kind of robot. I guess she and Rudy have more in common than I initially thought (whoops, another spoiler!).
Ever the anthropologists, Rudy and the others leave The Littlest Blind Girl home alone and set off for the tower, which, according to the world map, is an isolated structure standing smack-dab in the middle of a barren, rocky area. However, upon cutting to the local map, it’s clear that the tower is actually situated in a grassy area surrounded by trees. It’s no wonder the abducted townsfolk of Saint Centour keep returning from the tower in a bewildered state if this is the kind of mindfuckery they have to deal with.
Clearly the World Map Designer and Dungeon Map Designer aren’t on speaking terms.
Taking in the height of the humongous tower, Rudy is a little nervous as he opens the door with the suspiciously-modern looking “Key Plate”, which resembles a 21st century security keycard. I do wonder how that ended up here. The tower itself has a quasi-irritating layout which requires moving up and down floors via numerous staircases to proceed, but it isn’t annoying enough to waste recap space on (I could be filling it with penis jokes and non-sequiturs instead!) Just as unremarkable is the monster set for the area — winged hellhounds that even Cesuelia can take out in one hit, and floating white blobs-with-faces called Critters, both of which have already appeared on the world map. So, Rudy has to ascend a boring tower populated by boring enemies, with not even a phallic-shaped monster among them. On top of that, he’s no closer to obtaining the second Guardian Statue and he’s still travelling with an Indiana Jones knockoff and The Insipid One. This is most certainly not shaping up to be a good day.
Loading ...But wait! A few floors up, Rudy happens upon an unexpected treat — a new upgrade for his PENIS! Until now, he’d only been able to target lone enemies with the “Hand Cannon” mode, but the new “Prism Jism Laser” attachment allows him to ejaculate a shower of rainbow rays into a group of opponents. Two points: yes, it does look as gay as it sounds, and yes, this is the second time in this recap that I’ve immaturely changed the name of an object to contain the word “jism”. Hey, I may never get an opportunity like this again, so cut me some slack here.
Fabulous!
Of course, the big question here is why a PENIS upgrade should be lying around in here (in a nice new protective case, no less) when this place’s sole function is apparently as some kind of monster prison and PENIS users are about as numerous as Shion’s brain cells. But Rudy isn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth, especially if said gift horse enables him to spray his enemies with rainbow spooge, so he loads the new cartridge into his PENIS and continues along the collapsing walkway…wait, I didn’t mention the God damn collapsing walkways yet, did I? Okay, so on numerous floors of the tower there are these rooms containing vast, wall-to-wall holes that can only be traversed by crossing some narrow walkways made up of square tiles. The tiles shake and collapse once the party steps on them, giving only a second or so to move onto the next tile before the current one collapses and falls away into the darkness, taking the unlucky party members with it if they’re too slow (just to clarify, “slow” refers to the party’s movement speed, not their mental faculties — if it were the latter, I’d be stuck here all century).
Sounds simple enough, right? And it is, providing the player remains calm and takes things slowly, instead of trying to dash across the walkway and inevitably falling off the edge to their doom due to the tank-like running and steering physics that make it impossible to turn a corner without first grinding to a halt. Fortunately, the game designers seem to have predicted me some gamers having difficulty with these sections, and made the decision that falling off a platform into a bottomless pit shouldn’t result in a messy and painful death; rather, such a mishap will only result in the party being warped back to the entrance of the current room, with a miraculously-restored walkway for them to tackle once again. As nonsensical as it is, this is one decision I’m most definitely not complaining about.
On what I believe is the 6th floor of the tower, Rudy encounters something else that makes him think the gods are smiling upon him — not content with throwing him a bone in the form of a PENIS upgrade, they now bless him with a random battle against a non-boring monster! The “Larva” is…well, I’m not sure I can adequately describe it, hence the picture over there. It’s some kind of punk caterpillar on steroids, I guess? Rudy is particularly intrigued by its flesh-coloured horn and matching tail, but that thoughtless philistine Indy slays it with a well-aimed Psycho Crack before he can take a closer look.
What is this I don’t even…
Vowing not to let Indy polish his PENIS for the next week, at the very least, Rudy sighs and steers his companions up yet another flight of stairs. The next floor sees them thrown into another battle with a trio of Hellhounds, which Rudy liquefies with a blast of Jism Ray, before they hit a roadblock in the form of an annoying and nonsensical puzzle. Ooh, the best kind! A triangular plaque on the wall states that “The sun rises from the east, and sets in the west. The sun rises from the east again to light the path for the insecure”. This riddle directly pertains to a trio of staircases below — Rudy must first head up the easternmost stairs, then come back down using the westernmost set, before finally heading back up the eastern staircase to emerge in a new area. Whichever way fanboys might try to dress it up, this is just fucking stupid — by their very nature, shouldn’t stairs always lead to the same damn place, unless this place was designed by the same architect who built Hogwarts?
After climbing yet another bunch of stairs, and fortunately not ending up back on the ground floor or something, the party finally emerges on the roof of the rain-lashed tower and happens upon a peculiar floor carving surrounded by a trio of crystal pillars. Such an arrangement might set off alarm bells in any sane human being, especially in view of the fact that this building is called the CAGE TOWER and was designed to CAPTURE MONSTERS. Needless to say, our brain-deficient heroes walk right into the centre of the contraption and find themselves encased in a trippy multi-coloured energy prison. I think this rivals “Ooh, what does THIS button do?!” for sheer idiocy in a videogame, and the scary thing is, it only gets worse from here.
The most hallucinogenic cage ever?
For some reason the party can’t just step out of their technicolour “cage”, despite the fact that it’s little more than some discotheque-like swirling lights projected onto the ground, so I’m just going to assume there’s some super-technical, highly-complex science going on here and that the game designers didn’t just pull this whole setup out of their rectal passages. Not that I believe it. As the three dunces stand around gawping at the pretty colours beneath their feet, an orb of white light appears before them, then grows and shapes itself into our old “friend” Blankie. Just when I thought this dungeon couldn’t get any more annoying, too!