Back in main gameplay mode, M’lady swiftly shoots down my theory by expositing, “Panakeia is our blood…when turbid and stagnant, is it not possible for me to teleport? Even still…I must obtain the Gemini circuit!” I just love it when villains randomly blurt out vital information they should really be keeping to themselves. Noticing a lifeline in the form of a still-unconscious Claudia, she basically tells the party she’s going to climb back inside the girl to escape their wrath, accurately surmising that they’d never harm a hostage. Predictably, everyone stands with their mouths agape and watches her do just that, without thinking to, I don’t know, shoot her with their already drawn weapons. With a dramatic arm gesture she rapidly dematerialises, becoming several orbs of red energy which transfer to Claudia, who then wakes up. It’s such fun trying to describe all this. M’lady!Claudia totters off into the adjoining chamber without resistance, while the entire building suddenly starts to shake, as ancient ruins in videogames are prone to do at the most inopportune moments. Taking up the Mantle of Justice for the first time in this recap, Vagina calls her a coward and takes off after her, the guys in tow. But the surprise awaiting them when they catch up to M’lady the Bodysnatcher is an absolute humdinger, making all the other shocks and unexpected reveals we’ve seen in this recap pale into insignificance.

‘Calm down, dear! Let the men handle these things, and don’t worry your pretty little head about it!’

Is everyone sitting down? Stiff drinks to hand? Something sturdy to hold on to? Then let’s go. We fade in on a very familiar pair of white jeans, whose occupier is standing next to a kneeling M’lady. Oh my, it’s Anus! Who would have expected we’d be seeing him again so soon? Truly, this hour of game time is delivering on the unpredictability front. I’m not sure why, but Anus has reverted to his human appearance — perhaps his ill-advised fishman look was just an experimental phase — while his douchebag nature remains intact. “Hey, isn’t it my duty to dispose of them?” he bitches, apparently not aware M’lady is teetering on the knife-edge of insanity. “I mean, you’re just here to look for the artifact, so that you can complete your fortress or whatever.” Or whatever. Clearly, M’lady and her fellow robed creeps didn’t have enough confidence in Anus’s brainpower to brief him on the exact nature of their work. Still, this doesn’t deter him from talking down to M’lady, who’s probably going to shove a chunk of broken glass into his crotch at any moment: “I appreciate your work ethic, but you try to handle too much at once. That’s why things don’t work out for you.” He turns to Vagina with a wave, finishing with, “Right, Princess?” This fucking guy. “[Anus] Cascade…You’re…” Vagina manages to get out, her jaw somewhere in the bowels of the Earth. Because she’s SHOCKED, you guys. To be fair, the last time she saw Anus he’d just fallen down the shaft of a tower and was wearing several tons of masonry, so her reaction is understandable. Hell, I’m still not sure how he was still breathing when M’lady and her pals found him.

Anus begins to walk towards the group, no doubt in readiness for more pointless back-and-forth, but the ruins choose this exact moment to remind us they’re collapsing — by dropping a huge chunk of the ceiling on his head. Anus being buried under rubble is dangerously close to becoming a running gag at this point. But, appropriately for such a surprise-filled recap, all is not as it seems. After a quick screen flash, the enormous slab of rock is no more, and Anus is standing unharmed, once again in merman form. So…his ridiculous new transformation grants immunity to falling debris? I don’t even know anymore. Then things get even more ludicrous, destroying the universe with the impossibility of such an occurrence. The camera starts going haywire, treating us to a variety of arty shots as the Phantom Text God daubs Anus’s monologue across the screen: “My body has been eroded by the Dark Spear Soul Edge against my will…So my previous body has been eaten away, but now I’ve been endowed with the body of a demon.” Heh, “endowed.” The scene is now bathed in a dim, strobing red light, like we’re in a Resident Evil lab and someone just pressed the self-destruct button. The whole effect is quite silly. Also, if Anus’s original body has been eaten away, how come it looks like he can switch back to it whenever he pleases?

Sadly, turning into a demon fish hasn’t diminished his love of megalomaniacal ranting. “I’ve done it. I’ve obtained the power that surpasses all! The power to dominate all!” he shouts into the blackness of the screen. We get a few more rapid fade ins and outs, and the fucker switches forms between each one, like he’s just showing off at this point. Ugh, just start the inevitable boss fight and get it over with. Bullshitting that he can transform by simply “triggering an impulse” inside his body, Anus ultimately decides on his aquatic incarnation for the upcoming battle. The Guardians sealed inside the party’s Mediums start freaking out now they’re in the presence of a demon, prompting Gallows to claim, “They’re afraid of [Anus]…No, they’re afraid of what’s inside him…” Hey, I don’t see Dario anywhere. Oh, right, he means the whole “demonic influence” thing. Well, I can understand them being afraid of Anus’s ghastly new look, but I hope they can manage to pull themselves together, because I kind of need them for the next two minutes or so.

Fabulous!

I’ve already fought this dick like a hundred times, and at no point will these battles ever be interesting, but New and Improved Anus has one unfamiliar trick up his sleeve — a new attack called “Negative Rainbow,” which essentially involves him using Soul Edge to jizz a mass of multicoloured lasers all over the party. In short: extremely festive major ouchies. I didn’t think it possible for Anus to become even more gay, or even more annoying, but he somehow managed it. Luckily, he can only deploy his overpowered rainbow spooge every second turn, so Gallows can easily heal in between loads. Yes, this means Gallows is actually being useful for something. I’m as shocked as you are. Anyway, it doesn’t take long at all for Clive and his superior PENIS to put Anus on his…well, anus. For what feels like the fifty-eighth time. Afterwards, he feebly blames his loss on the “time lag” between his thoughts and actions, not being 100% accustomed to his new powers yet. Hey, at least when I use that excuse, I admit the alcohol may have played a part.

Hilariously, M’lady tells Anus to back off, vowing to deal with the party herself. Because that was working out so well for her. Anus replies that her mission was to retrieve the Gemini circuit, and that killing Vagina and the others would be disobeying her orders, though a handy internal monologue implies he really just wants to take them out himself. As an aside, what is the Gemini circuit? If it’s the neon dildo Clive nabbed from the hole in the wall, M’lady never took it away from him, and if it’s some other object we haven’t seen, then she’d obviously already located it…which would render her little plot to lure the party here, and therefore this entire painful dungeon, completely pointless. I don’t really want to contemplate the possibility that my suffering was all for nothing, so I’ll file this puzzler in the bulging mental folder marked “Shit that doesn’t make sense” for the time being. M’lady backhands Anus for his insolence, snaps that they need to report back to base, and then teleports them both out of the scene. Praise be to any and all deities out there. The Unclean Mark kindly waits for a Black Screen of Instantaneous Evacuations to whisk the party (and the unconscious Claudia) out of danger before finally collapsing in on itself.

Yeah, those things that don’t exist in this game.

Fade in on a cosy campfire scene, somewhere in the badlands surrounding Titty Twister. As Claudia gets her head down under a rock — seriously, that girl sleeps more than I do — Vagina grills Clive about his previously unmentioned wife and kid. Sheepishly rubbing the back of his neck, he insists there never seemed to be a good moment to bring it up. No man in history has ever used that excuse. Fortunately for Clive, he doesn’t have to explain why he was spotted in one of those saloons the other week, as Vagina swiftly changes the subject to Anus’s miraculous survival. Gazing deeply into the flames, she says she didn’t think it was possible for someone to transform their appearance so drastically. Someone’s never been to a drag bar. Moreover, Anus’s extreme makeover is merely a symptom of a wider problem: the Mediums, acting as the vessels for the Guardians, shit their pants when NuAnus showed up, meaning that whatever force is now inside him is a threat to the entire planet. And according to series lore, the demons are pretty much the only race that would fit the bill. This isn’t difficult to put together, so it’s fortunate that the party figures it out instantly, negating the need for a drawn-out exchange in which they painstakingly assemble all the facts. Just kidding! We still get one of those.

*disgusted noise*

Once they’ve established that the demons are real (um, didn’t they already know this?) and that one of them is in all likelihood now inhabiting Anus, the gang wants to call it a night. But Gallows isn’t finished! Showing remarkable insight (and I’m going to just assume this was some kind of translation error), he remembers that his gay little brother Shane had prophesied the re-emergence of demons in his dreams, and that his amazing granny Sophia had probably anticipated the coming events. “We’re all just marionettes being forced to dance by invisible strings!” he drama-queens, unwilling to accept the fact that he’s just a player in his grandma’s scheme. I’d have used “dummies” in place of “marionettes,” personally, but I guess the analogy holds water whichever way it’s phrased. So, Sophia orchestrated the meeting of three Drifters capable of invoking the power of the Guardians (plus the annoying grandson she wanted out of her hair) and sent them off into the wasteland wielding the Mediums, hoping they’d be able to combat the emerging threat. We kind of already knew all of this three recaps ago, but the reminder is appreciated. As if on cue, each party member’s Medium suddenly produces an orb of light, which spirals up into the air and flies around spastically for a while. These orbs combine to create a single larger ball, which eventually shoots off into the night sky…to the southeast, according to Clive. Hey, I usually have to interrogate random NPCs to find out where to go next! It’s so exciting when the game decides to mix it up a little!

Kidding again! Yes, even though the game has literally just told me the direction I should probably be heading in next, I still have to go play Talk to Everyone with the…unrefined denizens of Titty Twister. Back in town, the gang say their goodbyes to Claudia, who’s finally both awake and not being possessed by a batshit narcissist in a bedsheet. She demurely says she doesn’t have anything to give them in return for saving her life, but Gallows assures her that her smile is reward enough. I’d prefer money or a large quantity of alcohol, thanks. Actually, while we’re on the subject of Claudia, I’m still scratching my head as to why M’lady even needed to use her for her little scheme. If she just wanted to entice the party into the ruins (whether to recover the Gemini circuit for her, or simply to dispose of them before they could throw a wrench into her group’s plans), why was the Claudia ruse even necessary? It’s been demonstrated several times already that one only has to mention an ancient artifact or priceless treasure for these dickheads to hurl themselves headfirst into danger, and Anus would have been on hand to confirm this. Nothing about this segment of the game makes sense, and it’s looking increasingly likely that the whole thing was contrived in order to hit the player with the revelation that Claudia wasn’t who she seemed to be. I could just about accept this if the actual twist was exciting and presented well, but it was glaringly obvious from the outset that something was up. It’s like the game designers were having some kind of internal competition to see who could come up with the shittiest and most obvious plot twist. Anyway, Angela shows up to chastise Claudia for her tardiness, and then frogmarches her back to the saloon, possibly for a good whippin’. Claudia just meekly goes along without even trying to explain what happened, which is just the icing on this completely nonsensical episode, as far as I’m concerned. Then again, “I was kidnapped by a bipolar scientist lady who took over my body in an overly elaborate plot to lure a group of Drifters into the nearby ruins for her own nefarious purposes…honest!” probably wouldn’t fly as an excuse, and with good reason.

I don’t know what irritates me more — the green text, or the unnecessary funetik aksent.

After another revelatory discussion which sheds new light on each of the characters (Vagina: WHY ARE MEN SO DUMB, Gallows: CHICKS CHICKS CHICKS, Jet: I’M A LONER, Clive: PLEASE DON’T ASSOCIATE ME WITH THESE IMBECILES), I’m free to gather information. By which I mean I have to drop in at the saloon and speak to Claudia. Who probably could have given me this hot gossip in the previous scene, but that would have saved me a few seconds of game time removed the illusion of player agency, and we can’t have that. Happy to catch up with the people she hasn’t seen in an entire minute, Claudia discloses that a “customah” once told her of an ancient shrine for Guardian worship, located to the southeast. Hey, that’s the direction the weird light from the night before flew off in! What a coinci–oh, OK, I’ll stop.

I think she just summed up the feeling I get when I recap this game.

So, back to the World Map and my favourite new activity of the recap, equestrianism. The shrine to the southeast, known as the “Lunatic Garden,” is literally a stone’s throw from Titty Twister, so I manage to find it with both sanity and controller intact. I don’t think even I could have screwed up here. Inside the shrine, the camera does an artsy establishing shot as Gallows complains, “I don’t know ’bout you, but my stomach feels like it’s bein’ clawed at from the inside.” That would be the knife I’m thrusting through the screen. Of course, this is another example of the Mediums reacting to a negative energy force, because we were all evidently too dense to pick up on this the last time it happened. I wonder if they’re also reacting to the negative energy I’ve been giving off ever since I tried to jump the Claiborne crevasse for the first time?

As dungeons go, Lunatic Garden is fairly unremarkable; there are the usual plethora of locked doors and corresponding switches, so we’re hardly breaking new ground here. But wait! Before long, Vagina’s progress is blocked by a raised platform, with a suspicious phallic lever nearby. Now, you might assume the solution to this “puzzle” is as simple as pulling the lever to lower the platform and open up the passage to the doorway beyond. Not so fast. This particular lever is also blocked, by an assortment of pillars (which are also phallic, natch). What’s a Drifter to do!? Well, as it happens, all Vagina has to do is explore a small chamber off this main room, where she finds a chest containing…the “Steady Doll” Tool. If you cared to remember — which I certainly didn’t — Gallows already has the eyebrow-raising Freezer Jizzer Doll, a fez-wearing stuffed duck which can extinguish fires with its sticky loads. Its cousin here, according to the Phantom Item Describer, is “manipulated by a lesser spirit,” but to me it just looks like Gallows is assembling a collection of handheld, supernatural sex dolls. No need to thank me for that mental image. Since the game designers thought they were being too vague by placing this chest near an inaccessible lever and hoping we were savvy enough to put two and two together, the Phantom Item Describer continues, “For example, this doll is capable of pressing a switch from afar.”

I don’t know about you guys, but I’m pretty sure I’m supposed to use this doll somewhere. But where? And how? These hints are no help at all!

Disclaimer: batteries not included. The manufacturer cannot be held liable for any injury incurred through misuse of product. Have fun!

Eventually, I manage to summon up the required brainpower to solve this mindbending riddle, and have Gallows chuck the doll (which resembles a little girl with pigtails, for reasons I’m probably better off not knowing) at the lever. Hey presto — the raised platform sinks into the floor, and the party can continue onward. I sure hope the other puzzles in this dungeon aren’t so opaque. Throw me a bone here, game!