But first, a cutscene. We’re back in Rita’s space dumpster…uh, the Demon HQ, where we see Lord Zedd, Blankie, Squatt and Scorpina staring intently at Mother’s incubation tube. As her cocoon pulsates and we hear a gross heartbeat sound, Mother groans from within that she can “hear the voice of pain…the voice of sadness”. Don’t worry, that’s just me. Of course, she’s totally talking about the dying Guardians, who don’t seem to be faring too well with their whole “Stop this alien bitch from being reborn” crusade. They’re probably wondering if they can get a refund on their trio of Heroes.
“I can feel the screams of the human fools releasing me from these cursed chains…” Mother goes on, ramming home the point that she gets off on the cries of the suffering, or something. Tearing his eyes away from his precious mama for a few scant seconds, Lord Zedd faces his subordinates and triumphantly declares “We are almost there. Feelgayer is practically ours!” Blankie isn’t totally convinced and confesses that he’s still worried about the Cliché Trio, because apparently having the means to evaporate an entire fucking town isn’t enough to deal with three incompetent wankers who have already lost two out of the three statues they were told to protect. Whatever, game designers. If your villains don’t even have confidence in their own abilities, how am I supposed to take them as a threat?
Scorpina seizes the opportunity to rag on the one who converted her to demonhood her rival, accusing Blankie of screwing up “not once, but twice”. Uh, he did more than you’ve ever done by destroying one of the Guardian Statues, so lose the attitude, Scorpina. Realizing that she’ll need to take action to back up her sass, she volunteers for the next crack at the heroes, claiming she’s sure she can “accommodate them”. And now I’ve just had another mind-searing mental image, this one made even worse by the fact that I know numerous fanfics have sprung forth from that very line of dialogue. Thanks, brain!
Squatt starts freaking out because he’s somehow outraged that this mere woman wants to do something other than make him a sandwich, forcing Lord Zedd to intervene before Scorpina can slash his rotund arse with her giant scythe. He babbles some crap about the Elw and humans fighting back when they’re pushed into a corner — hard to take seriously when one considers that the Elw have all left the planet and the only humans actually doing anything to fight the Demons are the paragons of stupidity otherwise known as Rudy, Indy and Cesuelia — and reiterates that they can’t afford to make any mistakes until their “Lord Mother” (WTF?) has been revived. By “revived” does he actually mean “completed her reassignment surgery”?
Wait, is she trans or something?
For the love of God, Squatt doesn’t take this as a cue to shut the fuck up — he begs his comrades for the chance to show them what he can do, and goes on to claim that he will “bring the heads of those humans and line them up right here”. For some reason, that just cracked me up; I’m picturing the party members’ heads stuck on poles like a coconut shy, with the Demons throwing balls at them like they’re at a fair. This is how my mind works, people.
Loading ...Squatt still hasn’t finished pissing me off, now wailing “Not you too, [Lord Zedd]! I’ll show you…I’ll show everyone what [Squatt] can do.” And with that, he turns tail (literally) and flounces off to his room, the fragments of the bad poetry he’s going to write churning around in his pea-sized brain. Well, probably not, but the visual amuses me, so that’s what I’m going with. As soon as he leaves, Blankie hisses at Scorpina “You have such a temper, my fellow duke”, eliciting what feels like my 17th “What the fuck?” of this recap. If the Demons are doing this cute “giving ourselves noble titles” shtick — which is fucking weird in itself — shouldn’t Scorpina be a duchess? Then again, with Mother now being referred to as a lord for some ungodly reason, I’m getting the impression that gender identity isn’t exactly a black-and-white issue in the Demons’ household.
Blankie and Scorpina both leave (not together, I hasten to add), leaving Lord Zedd alone with Mother once again. With his creepy, Oedipus complex dialogue from the last recap permanently seared into my mind, I’m all ready to recoil here, but it turns out he only wants to spew some exposition, not indulge in any icky Mother-loving. Phew, crisis averted — for now.
“It’s been 1,000 years since we came here,” he tells Mother, even though she should probably already know this, despite being in a cocoon and all. “The loss of our home planet, Hiades…we came to this planet to make it our home…” he continues, oblivious to the fact that Mother is undoubtedly rolling her eyes inside her shell and willing him to shut the hell up. But now he’s on an ineffective-villain roll. “Power rules all. This place will belong to us. Only then will we…” Grow personalities, perhaps? We’ll have to wait to find out what he was going to say, because Mother seizes the millisecond-long gap in his ranting to shake a few more pieces off her cocoon, providing an ominous cliffhanger as we fade out.
Why is it ALWAYS 1,000 years since the legendary cataclysmic event?
OK, let’s just pause for a second. I promise this won’t take long, because I know you’re all dying to get back to the thrilling action here. So, the exposition we’ve just heard indicates that the Demons arrived on Feelgayer a thousand years ago (as for how they got here, that’s a can of worms for another day), triggering that nasty war against the humans and Elw that we keep getting beaten over the head about. So what happened after they lost said war? Did they just laze around playing Angry Birds for the next millennium? Why have they only just resurfaced now? Did anyone put any kind of thought into this? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not exactly chomping at the bit for any more Power Rangers Villain screentime, but it would be nice to have even a hint of whatever they did during the period of time between the end of the war and the fall of Arctica.
Loading ...Aaaand we’re back with our inept protagonists, who have somehow managed to find their way back onto the world map. After a quick visit to a trader’s caravan to stock up on Light Shrooms and other herbal remedies, they wander around aimlessly until they find another Elw Pyramid. One quick trip into space and back, and they land inside yet another pyramid, this one a stone’s throw from Port Timney. They inspect a handy sign warning of imminent death should they stray into the nearby desert, make a mental note of its location for when they’re inevitably sent there on some quest or other, then finally enter the town, hoping its inhabitants haven’t yet been sucked up into the Mothership like the populace of the previous stop on their magical mystery tour.
*insert innuendo here*
Rudy instantly determines that Timney, a bright and breezy seaside town, is his kind of place — not only does it have awesome BGM, a cool sea breeze and its own PENIS Meister, it’s also full of seamen! Oh, and the last Guardian Statue is supposedly here, which is another plus, I guess. Sidling up to one of the many Village People-esque sailors meandering around town, Rudy plucks up the courage to ask him out, but can’t seem to get the words out. Curse my muteness! he sighs, then tries to flutter his eyelashes instead, only to be rebuffed with a smattering of exposition. Apparently, ever since pulling up a “stone statue” from the seabed, their captain’s luck has run dry. The plot, she thickens!
It would be funny (to me, if nobody else) if this statue turned out to be, like, a bust of Cesuelia or something, but to anyone who’s ever played an RPG before it should be pretty obvious he’s talking about the last Guardian Statue. How it ended up in the sea is anyone’s guess, however. The next stop on the info trail is the favourite haunt of any self-respecting sailor, the local pub. Inside, a magenta-haired tavern wench accosts the party and mentions someone named Captain Bartholomew, stating that he’s “a nice man, in spite of his strange antics”. That alone would normally raise concern, but her next sentence seals the deal: “Can you help him out? He seems a little depressed…” Fucking great, Rudy thinks. A town full of hot sailors, and I get saddled with their deadbeat captain and his “strange antics”. This is so not my day.
Is it too soon to say ‘lavender marriage’?
Captain Bartholomew himself — if he is in fact an actual seafarer, and hasn’t just taken a cue from the Demons and assigned a random title to himself — is sitting at a table a few feet away, deep in thought. Not yet ready to endure the self-pity, angst, and any other awesome qualities Barty no doubt possesses, Rudy heads across the room and speaks to a male NPC loitering at the bar. This dude starts excitedly gossiping about some kind of feud between the captain and some other waste of skin named Drake, which seems to be the source of Barty’s depressive funk. Rudy probably rolls his eyes at this, as do I, seeing as neither of us has the time for this shit.
Well, it looks like helping the good captain is the only way we’ll get a shot at the Guardian Statue he fished up, so Rudy resigns himself to his fate. Before lending Barty a shoulder to cry on, though, he procures one last nugget of info from the guy at the bar, and I need to give you the exact quote: “The captain told Drake that he was going to use the ‘Crystal Bud’ to propose to his beautiful girlfriend. Now he has to get the ‘Crystal Bud’…” And the beautiful girlfriend, I’d wager, not that I’m judging him prematurely or anything. But the more important point to this is the exceedingly fruity-sounding ‘Crystal Bud’. I have no idea whether it’s a literal bud made of crystal, or if it’s just a gay fancy name for some kind of engagement ring, but either way, it’s pretty strange that an oh-so-masculine sea captain would choose such an unmasculine-sounding trinket to make his proposal…unless he’s hiding something, of course. Maybe all those sailors have been getting some high-seas lovin’ after all.
Cue the violins already.
Of course, the other possibility is that ‘Crystal Bud’ is yet another drug reference (the young whippersnappers tell me that “bud” is a slang term for marijuana, and the crystal part of the name could refer to meth or crack, whichever you prefer). This would indicate that Barty plans to drug some poor unsuspecting girl and make her his beard while she’s under the influence. I really hope the gayer explanation is the correct one.
Finally plucking up the courage to address the captain himself, Rudy makes the Feelgayan Sign Language gesture for “Spill the beans on what you need our help with”, sits back and waits for the tide of whine to wash over him. Bartholomew sighs melodramatically over the mess he’s gotten himself into, then mopes “If I don’t stop drinking, it’s going to get the better of me.” Dude, I have the same problem, but I don’t really have any other option if I want to keep recapping this series without going crazy. The gist of his problem is that the elusive ‘Crystal Bud’ currently resides in the lovely-sounding ‘Maze of Death’ (why couldn’t it be in the ‘Garden of Sunshine and Bunnies’ or the ‘Straight Path of Rainbows and Flowers’?), and he foolishly made a drunken boast to his ex-boyfriend longtime rival Drake that he already had it in his sweaty clutches. Apparently, if he’s unable to produce the bud in time for his upcoming nuptials, he’ll become a laughing stock and Drake will gain the upper hand in their feud. Uh, “will become”?!
This is all so ridiculous that I don’t even know where to start (maybe the fact that these people are supposed to be in their thirties and are engaged in the kind of playground squabbling most people grow out of before they hit their teens). The ridiculousness is ratcheted up a few more notches when Barty starts wailing about everything going to shit as soon as “that damn statue” showed up. Because the Guardian Statue totally made him drink himself into oblivion, make a boast his alcoholic backside couldn’t back up, then wallow in self-pity instead of actually doing something to rectify the problems of his own making. And I actually like this character. I suppose it’s just one more example of the negative impact these games have had on my faculties.