With the awesome Gaydar in hand, Rudy gets the hell out of Milama, content in the knowledge that he can now add it to the list of bumfuck towns with confusing layouts he never needs or intends to visit again. Granted, that list is depressingly short right now, but he’s in a “glass half full” kind of mood today. Until he enters the Sand River, that is. It’s a dimly-lit cave, which should be more than enough to indicate how Rudy and I feel about it, but I’d be remiss in my recapping duties if I didn’t recount every agonizing minute it takes the Cliché Trio to traverse the place. You’ll thank me later.
The first point of interest in here is an albino monkey sitting by the entrance. Its entire purpose in life seems to be waiting here for a human being with the ability to communicate–and I thought I had it bad, having to recap this dungeon–so it’s fortunate that Cesuelia now has the Wand of Animal Abuse to hand. Once it’s been brain-damaged enough, the monkey squeaks at the Trio to follow it through a secret passage. If it had any sense, it would lead them straight into a deep chasm or pool of quicksand as revenge for thwacking it upside the head, but instead it dutifully guides them through an unseen gap in the wall. “This cave has a river of sand,” it remarks once they get to the other side, because we totally wouldn’t have picked up on that little detail from the dungeon’s name. Jesus, the poor thing really has been brain-damaged. Looks like Cesuelia isn’t so sweet and innocent after all, and I sincerely hope the Guardians punish her for this when they look upon the trail of four-legged vegetables she’s leaving in her wake. While it has a brief moment of lucidity, the albino monkey warns the Trio not to fight the flow of sand, and also not to get lost. Good one, Bubbles. With me on the other end of the controller, asking them that is like asking Miles Edgeworth not to wear fuchsia.
Next thing, you’ll be telling me there are Dodongos in Dodongo’s Cavern!
Up until now, the Sand River hasn’t seemed so bad. But once the group heads more than ten feet inside, the full extent of its horrors are revealed. First, like I said, it’s dimly-lit, and when everything on the screen is in varying shades of yellow and brown, navigating the place is harder than trying to find Tidus’s brain cell. In addition, the dungeon is spread across multiple levels, because apparently staircases are such a fucking natural feature of cave systems. And, like the pungent diarrhea frosting on a multi-tiered shit cake, there are numerous one-way sand-flows, some of which can even carry Rudy and the others all the way back to the entrance if they’re unlucky enough to rest a toe on the wrong pixel. Fuck this place. Fuck it with an unlubed cactus.
Finally, the Trio escapes onto the world map to encounter yet another stretch of barren wasteland. Variety! There’s an “herbal remedies” wagon stationed nearby, like they knew people would be reaching for the nearest illegal substance as soon as they emerged from the fucking Sand River, so Rudy takes the opportunity to hoard as many Light Shrooms as the inventory system will let him carry. Fortunately, the undoubtedly picturesque, thriving town of Ship Graveyard lies a short distance to the north, so at least he doesn’t have to trip his balls off in the middle of the desert.
Isn’t that a little…forward?
As expected, Ship Graveyard is a Podunk shithole populated by idlers clinging to the glory days when the town was a bustling port. Nowadays, though, the only ships arriving at the harbour are in pieces. One aimless NPC helpfully gives Rudy a potted history of the place–apparently, its original name was simply “Yard”, but due to the huge quantities of driftwood that now gather at the shoreline, a group of passing Dream Chasers decided to grant the town its “horrible” current name. Yeah, shame on those heartless heathens for pointing out the obvious and not appreciating the scenic beauty of this desert oasis. They don’t deserve to live in this little corner of paradise! A few feet away, a teal-haired woman eschews the history lessons and instead basically asks Rudy if he wants to see her stuff. OK, she’s actually talking about a nearby dungeon, but the name “Pleasing Garden” sounds far too much like a euphemism for lady parts for my liking. I know this series doesn’t exactly stick to convention when naming its many, many dungeons, but come the fuck on.
“The Maze of Mirages inside the Pleasing Garden is a maze of illusions,” she awkwardly overstates. And at the centre of this maze, I guess, one would find the–no, I’m not going there. Random Teal-Haired Dungeon Guide–who, I’m fanwanking, is a relative of one of the Elw MSoUD Guides–continues to wax lyrical, and oddly specifically, about the Pleasing Garden. Over 3 or 4 text boxes, she reveals that the party must retrace their steps to dispel an illusion (yay for backtracking!), take a straight at the second cross section, and then go left on the way back. “I wonder why?” she finishes. I wonder why the hell she knows so much about the place, to the point where she’s giving detailed directions, without ever having been there, but such suspensions of logic are par for the course in this game. Just enjoy the ride.
After Cesuelia pays a visit to the local Magic Shop to inscribe a handful of new spells–none of which I can think up amusing nicknames for, to my frustration–the group encounters an old woman doddering about outside. She swiftly takes it upon herself to tell them all about the town’s resident down-and-outer, an ex-Dream Chaser named Dan. A while back, so the story goes, Dan and his wife Anna decided to explore the Pleasing Garden together (that’s nice for them, but I sure hope they didn’t do it in public). At some point, they got separated in the maze and instead of looking for his wife, Dan the Douche essentially left her for dead and came home. Nice.
It’s all well and good listening to someone gossip about this tragic incident, but Rudy figures he should pay Dan a visit in order to get the full story. Not that he really gives a shit about the guy or his dead wife–Rudy is simply becoming savvy to Feelgayer’s social conventions. Like an Inn, an Items shop and a PENIS Meister, every town worth its salt must be home to a self-pitying douchenozzle waiting patiently for a group of passing Dream Chasers to run an errand for him, perhaps in return for a useful item. He knows how this game is played.
Of course, Dan the Douche is in the midst of a solo pity-party when the Trio enters his house. Not only did he leave his wife to die horribly, she also dropped her bracelet somewhere in the Pleasing Garden. He claims he needs it back to give Anna a proper burial, rather than, say, her bones, so you just know that shit is going on eBay as soon as he gets his clammy mitts on it. One previous owner (deceased). Good condition, apart from several small scratches incurred when owner was being brutally murdered. Lowest price, free shipping! Check out my store for more items!!
As Cesuelia sheds a few tears at Dan’s heartrending story, he proudly claims he was once “a hotshot Dream Chaser”. The dude might as well just wear a sign around his neck reading “tool”. While we’re on the subject of Dream Chasers, I should probably start calling them Dragon Chasers, given the immense amount of thinly-veiled drug references we’ve seen so far. Plus, it’s likely that anyone living in this crapsack world has been driven to narcotics at some point–I mean, I’m tempted, and I only have to pay infrequent visits to the place.
Dan the Douche is still playing on the sympathy of these fools. “As you can see, I can no longer walk…” he claims, regardless of the fact that his sprite is clearly standing up. I could chalk this up to the game designers being lazy and not wanting to create a special sprite for him–Lord knows it wouldn’t be the first time they’ve done something like this–but I’m choosing to believe that Dan here is simply a lying twat who can’t face up to the fact that he abandoned his wife to save his own sorry skin. Naturally, the Trio agrees to retrieve Anna’s bracelet, even though this little fetch quest has absolutely no bearing on their mission and will consume precious time they could have spent trying to get to Arctica. This is one of the major issues I have with Wild ARMs’s pacing, even though I love the game to death–the characters will frequently go off on random and arbitrary assignment with zero connection to their actual objective, negating any sense of urgency the game tries to present. I know this game is hardly the sole offender when it comes to this, but it’s all the more jarring when I’m being continually hammered over the head with the importance of stopping Rita Repulsa and her minions. But hey, I guess retrieving a fake-cripple’s bling is more important than the threat of the entire planet being razed.
Scavenge…sure. Rudy can see the hole in your jeans.
Finding the Pleasing Garden is, appropriately, rather like finding a woman’s clitoris–if Tidus were the one attempting to find it, that is. Unlike most of the other dungeons and towns on the world map, its location is invisible, like it’s just a regular patch of desert. The fun just isn’t letting up in this recap. Eventually, Rudy finds and enters the site, only to find a small red teleporter in the middle of the sand. He’s sick to the back teeth of teleporters by now, but unlike its Elw MSoUD cousins, at least this one doesn’t send him into space–instead, it drops him onto an enormous floating structure with a checkerboard floor pattern. My eyes hurt looking at it even now, so I’m probably going to have a migraine after half an hour of trying to find my bearings in the inevitable maze beyond. Such fun!
A completely unnecessary U-turn brings the gang out by another teleporter, which spirits them away to a long horizontal corridor lined with a million tall windows on one side. The mid-day sun blazes through each of these windows, making it hard for Rudy to see, but even so he manages to spy the hidden doorway disguised as a window and bypasses the decoy passageway to the south. Ha! Try harder, game designers!
I won’t go into too much detail about the rest of the dungeon, except to say that the much talked-about maze is pretty much a couple of identical-looking crossroads and a veritable buttload of Rudy’s favourite things in all the world–teleporters. Needless to say, my attempts at guiding the Trio through the labyrinth are woeful. I actually had to look away from the screen at one point because I was so embarrassed and increasingly angry at both the game and my inadequate sense of direction–watching footage of myself bumbling pathetically around a dungeon never gets any easier. Anyway, Rudy eventually finds his way out of the maze, and I somehow avoid ending up on the local news. But we’re not out of the woods yet.
Immediately after escaping the maze, the group find themselves in a room with a large sandpit in the centre and Ominous Music throbbing away in the background. The very specific choice of BGM for this particular chamber indicates that the sandpit hasn’t been left here for passing Dragon Chasers to sculpt a sand phallus sandcastle or two, so Rudy grips his PENIS, Indy draws his sword, and Cesuelia gets ready to use up all her MP and die in two hits. It soon becomes apparent that something is moving around beneath the sand, creating an Ominous Shuffling Sound. Between that and the Ominous Music, I get the feeling the game designers might be trying to tell me something is about to go down, but I wish they weren’t so subtle about it. Maybe some piles of bones or bloodstains on the ground would help me realize I need to be prepared for a possible boss fight.
I’m too busy trying to work out what the fuck this actually is to be intimidated.
Luckily, a horn-like protrusion is sticking out of the sand to the south, clearing up any ambiguity about the nature of this room. Whatever monstrosity the horn belongs to is happily moving around the perimeter, minding its own business and certainly making no effort to attack the party. So, naturally, Rudy decides to plant a bomb right in the middle of the poor thing’s path. Even when its full body emerges, clearly dazed from the explosion, the creature isn’t hostile; it just stands there while the party attacks it. On the battle screen, I feel even sorrier for the “Gigamantis”–although it was clearly intended to appear threatening, it looks about as dangerous as a puppy due to its unfortunate blocky model. Seriously, it looks like a bunch of schoolchildren were let loose with a stack of cardboard boxes and some green paint.
Understandably, the Most Polygonal Mantis Ever defends itself against the asshats who tried to blow it up with no provocation, but even its multi-target lightning attack isn’t enough to compete with Indy’s Fast Draw and Rudy’s Jism Ray. After a few rounds, Gigamantis goes to the big sandpit in the sky, for some reason leaving its head behind. Even in death, the poor creature is robbed of any dignity; Rudy chucks its severed head to trip a nearby switch and lowers a barrier to the south. In the adjoining room, the Trio nab their third tool of the recap, a Grappling Hook for Indy. Hey, guys, it’s not a whip! He’s totally not an Indiana Jones ripoff after all! Like a kid in a toy shop, I’m eager to test out this new toy, until I realize the sprite graphics make it look like Indy’s shooting the grapple out of his groin. Um, ow. Feelgayer’s equivalent of the Disembodied Item Describer claims that the Crotch Grapple can hook onto “many things”, much like the Moneyshot. For reasons which will soon become apparent, he’s a fucking liar. For now, Indy hot-foots it out of the room, excitedly looking for something to latch onto. Rather him than me.
It’s like a Prince Albert gone hideously wrong.
As I backtrack through the sandpit room, it suddenly hits me that the layout of this entire ruin makes no sense whatsoever (try to look surprised). Even though the Gigamantis (RIP) wasn’t exactly an effective weapon against intruders, surely it would have been better placed nearer to the entrance, thereby eliminating curious interlopers without the need for the ridiculous maze? Then again, maybe I’m still salty over the whole maze ordeal and can’t be trusted to look at these things objectively. Maybe this is actually the most perfectly-designed dungeon ever, and I just can’t see it through the tears of blood. Maybe I need a drink.
Since I’m already nitpicking about this dungeon, I’m also going to pose the question of why whoever built the place decided to give it such a pleasant-sounding name. I mean, if you wanted people to stay the fuck away from the treasure it holds, surely it would make more sense to give it a scary or foreboding title? Calling it the Pleasing Garden is just asking for tourists to come along with their picnic baskets and e-readers. Seriously, Mysterious Dungeon Creator, you may as well have just gone the whole nine yards, called it the Flower & Fluffy Bunny Rainbow Paradise and offered free cupcakes to every visitor. God.
Looking at this is making me wince.
In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m not exactly enjoying my time here. Fortunately, we’re almost at the end. Another spot of backtracking brings the Trio to a bottomless pit they encountered earlier, but this time Indy notices something that looks like a hexagonal oil drum placed conspicuously on the other side. Such objects are one of the things his new Crotch Grapple can hook onto, and by “one of the things” I actually mean “the only things”. With Rudy and Cesuelia clenched in between his buttcheeks, he thrusts and extends the Crotch Grapple, which can somehow take the weight of three adults AND a talking rat. I don’t even want to think about the strain on Indy’s nether regions. The door on the other side of the gap leads to the ruin’s final room, which therefore means the Trio couldn’t have progressed further without murdering the innocent Gigamantis. I still feel like a dick.
Another pointless teleporter whisks the Trio to a small chamber housing Anna’s bracelet, which, according to the narration, is “emitting a sad light”. What in the fuck. Are we seriously trying to ascribe emotions to light emissions now? This, readers, is what happens when you try and fail to make something needlessly profound. The location of the bracelet raises many questions, not least how the hell Dan the Douche and Anna managed to bypass the maze, the Gigamantis AND the fucking bottomless pit, seemingly without using the Crotch Grapple, but I’m so happy I can finally leave this place I don’t even care.