The “fun” begins as the party is looking for a way inside the structure, and instead finds a puzzle with the thinnest possible veneer of sense of place and function. This will be a pattern. One “room” (this is still on the outside, so the ceiling is just a couple of black holes, no big) contains four pairs of destructible pylons, with a monitor displaying a number behind each pair. The second room has corresponding monitors corresponding to mounted mechanical arms that are clearly going to unlock and open up a hole in the floor. Hitting the pillars moves a big cement cylinder above the arms either left or right, until the arms retract into the waiting open hole inside the cylinder (yes, slowly, and with robotic grunting). Once all four have been retracted, the floor pulls apart, revealing a waiting elevator. Despite the fact that the cylinders rotate verrrrrrry sloooooowly and that this is a convoluted and yet still deeply insecure method to allow access inside, it still feels too easy and I expect the elevator will only stop at floors that are labeled with a prime number or some fucking thing. But no! It goes up and down on demand! Like an actual elevator! This, too, must be some kind of trick. I refuse to accept elevators that aren’t designed for maximum misery.
And yet! And yet. While the big E.S.-sized airlock at the bottom of the elevator shaft, and the bigger room inside with the E.S. landing platforms, would indicate this is the way inside, once Shion disembarks and heads through the human-sized door, she finds nothing but a pathway cordoned off from a larger room, dead-ended with a single large red button on a console, which activates an E.S.-sized lift in the room. And can she go back to the mechs and bring them straight to this lift? Oh my, no. The way forward may have required going down this elevator that for all the world looks like the main access port (and actually is, eventually), but the gang must first, obviously: return to the outer surface and blow a hole in the siding to create an opening, move through a series of catwalks that are blocked by huge pieces of sheet metal and can only be passed by slicing them off and sending them careening down on the heads of the no-doubt minimum wage independent contractors working below, then make use of the lift that Shion activated earlier, and finally, on the way up, blow up the giant crates that were stacked in the humans’ path for no reason and could only be destroyed with E.S.-sized Boomsticks, and only are in range when the lift is halfway between floors. I wouldn’t characterize this fort as a place of work in the way I did the Phallus of Nephilim, but there are still human beings on this buttplug that have to get from point A to point B, if only to go to the bathroom.
This will, somehow, get worse, but for now let’s focus on the elevator ride past those pesky boxes, and the door beyond. This large chamber has pulsing, glowing red veins along its walls, and a lone, mech-height large button set into a console in the wall opposite the door, which may as well have a sign reading PRESS ME DADDY. Asher, Moonbeam, and Zebulun clank, glide, and buzz like a hummingbird, respectively, over to it, credulous as you please, only to have the doors slam shut behind them and two familiar…ish A.M.W.S. swoop down from their hiding places high in the ceiling. “My name…is Richard!” uh, Richard says. “I assume you remember.” I freely admit if he hadn’t said his name I might have forgotten it. Richard drones on that he doesn’t have time for games (only for talking about not having time for them), says he grows “weary of these encounters” at this, the second one ever, and finally his A.M.W.S. brandishes an ancient and crusty sword to start the boss battle. They really should have rushed that button instead of stopping to listen to this guy.
At first blush, this boss fight isn’t that different than the first time, except now everybody’s in a big shiny robot body, and Shion is here, meaning Richard is no longer the most annoying fuck in the room. I dump Moonbeam for Zebulun, now that healing is a thing I give a shit about. That she spends most of her time healing herself is, however, not lost on me. After Asher and Zebulun have been caving in Pilum’s helmet in with abandon to the tune of 10,000 HP remaining, someone–maybe Hermann? Who knows, it’s a fucking text box–says that there is “something wrong” with Richard, I guess beyond the fact that he’s a weird little prick. And on his next turn, some EXTREMELY URGENT yellow text announces, “Madness overcomes Richard!” SPACE MADNESS. Unfortunately for me, “madness” just means that he hits harder and boosts a lot, not that he spends whole turns giggling like Albedo or attacking his butler. Honestly seems pretty lucid from where I’m sitting. Focused, even!
That is, until a few rounds later, when he teleports to a corner of the room, loads up a delightfully phallic (and matching pink!) laser rifle called the Naglfar Third Portable Weapon, and over Hermann’s panicked protests, levels it at Zebulun. He hits his mark, and a good deal more, blasting a hole in the wall that ruptures the entire station. This eventually loses me the fight, as if it doesn’t seem like everyone present has bigger problems now. I wonder if my strategy could have prevented this from happening, and switch on attempt #2 to beating on Scrotum, to no avail–Richard still goes nuts even after no one’s touched him and even with Hermann tossing his heals down a garbage chute, but this time Moonbeam swaps in to take and then survive the hit that Zebulun could not, and that makes the difference. I swear, sometimes I am capable of learning and improving. It’s true!
I don’t care how it worked out for me, I cannot be mad at this.
You may be wondering if boss battle logic–and in particular, this series’s boss battle logic–is going to lead to there not being a hole in the side of Ormus at all. For once, no! The hole is very much there when the battle ends, leaking atmosphere into space. But nobody seems to notice or care. Moonbeam hits the button that was the whole (yes, I almost typed “hole”) point of coming all this way, and observes as tiles fly up from the floor and form a bridge between two human-sized doors halfway up the walls. In the room with a gaping hole leading directly to vacuum. But I’m sure our heroes will definitely put on some space suits with magnetized boots before using this bridge. Safety first!
Of course, this now means the party must return all the way to the top of the structure, go back down the elevator, get out of the E.S. again, and walk past the exploded crates to reach this bridge that’s now casually suspended above certain death. The good news, I suppose, is there’s nowhere else from here to backtrack, which means they’re leaving the craft behind for a while and won’t be walking a mile to hit one switch to open some other fucking door back at the very beginning. I think. The night is young.
The situation with the hole in the side of the fortress is even more insulting when you remember the E.S. have to enter a goddamn airlock chamber between the elevator and the landing platform. At some point the game devs remembered that humans need air to live, and then just forgot.
ANYWAY. To reach the death bridge in question, Jin (now in the lead because I like watching him awkwardly shuffle in his kimono) must traverse a series of ladders up to the same level as the mech elevator. I mean, I guess it’s good to have rungs to cling to if–and this is a total hypothetical–some dipshit fires a laser rifle from KOS-MOS’s yard sale in your pressurized environment and sucks all your air out. But I’d also think there’d be a fucking elevator, for all the other times! And to go with ALL THE OTHER ELEVATORS!
This really is not the crusade I envisioned dedicating my life to, but when man plans, CHAOS!!! laughs, right?
Seems fine.
Since Jin crosses the death bridge without incident, and I’m trying not to be mad that something, anything, in this game happened without incident, let’s move on to the bizarre area beyond it. The party emerges into what looks like inside of the stronghold’s walls, cabling and transformers crackling with purple electricity stretching into the distance. A series of ramps leads further down, and the ramps are chock full of more U-GEE assholes dressed like Hoth-issue Stormtroopers. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised there are active patrols of what seems to be a fucking crawlspace, given that it’s apparently the only way to access the lower area, but Ormus’s floor plan is taking on some real non-Euclidean dimensions in my head. Anyway, the Stormtroopers are largely no big deal, despite their penchant for making a big over-animated production out of throwing hand grenades, and the fact that some of them hover out of melee range in gun-mounted teacups like Bowser in Super Mario World. But put a pin in me saying that, as nothing in this series stays tolerable forever (hi Ziggy).
To descend all the way into the tapered end of the buttplug, Jailbait (Jin had to go because he was having a hard time hitting the Flying Bowsers) is confronted with, HUZZAH, another elevator. A puzzle elevator! My life is complete. A handy computer console provides instructions: “The elevator rests on an industrial weight-resistant coil. Place cargo on the platform to lower it by degrees. It can be raised again by removing the load.” Removing the load, aka turning this game off.
The weights are standing in a precarious column next to the elevator platform, and of course they must be knocked onto the platform to use it. But there’s no action in this game for pulling stuff onto a platform, only to use the force of the Boomstick to push. That means you can’t be standing on the elevator as you use the weights to drag it down. Thus, hating myself for every second of my life that I’ve ever given this series, I have Jailbait push all the weights labeled in green onto the elevator, destroying the alternating blue weights, then have him descend the nearby ladder (every elevator’s best friend) to catch up to the elevator, which is now at the bottom, and then destroy the lowest remaining weight to send the platform from level 8 to level 7 (yes the bottom level is the highest number, and that is the least of our problems), where the door to the next area is. To review: Jailbait just activated an elevator, sent it careening to the bottom floor with no one on it, took a ladder down to board it, and then took it up one floor. There is also nothing at all on any of the levels except 1 and 7, so the ladder (OR THE ELEVATOR) could just go between those two and save everybody a lot of trouble. But I’m sure the rank-and-file U-GEE Stormtroopers really enjoy solving a puzzle every time they have to get to their lockers for a granola bar or a replacement oxygen tank because someone blew a hole in the outer hull again. Keeps the week from really dragging, you know?
It’s like if the only way you could get into your laundry room was to load the right amount of laundry into your dumbwaiter, walk down to the basement, get inside the dumbwaiter, and shove some laundry out.
The next room, by contrast, is a straightforward passage from one functional area to the ne–sorry, I couldn’t get through that with a straight face. It’s another room with a puzzle that literally only makes sense as a puzzle, and that has no other function than to be a puzzle. If I started a side blog that is like McMansion Hell, but just pointing out when dungeon puzzles only exist for their own sake and make no sense in the context of their location, would any of you read it? I’m thinking about doing this.
This one, in fairness, has not ignited an ember of rage in the pit of my soul the way the last one did, mostly because there are neither elevators nor ladders. Jailbait finds a shiny tile floor, almost always code for “coated in a layer of Superglide,” with several blue-gray metal cubes in “random” spots. Jailbait can use these blocks to create a bridge between this side of the room and the one on the other side of a wide gap, by using the lubed floor to slide them around until they go over the side in the right spot. Typical Zelda shit, except I can’t wave this away by citing the all-powerful pig wizard who specifically designed the rooms to frustrate his reincarnated nemesis. Just some bureaucrats-turned-terrorists who worked for MOMO’s dad.
And I haven’t even gotten to the best part! On the other side of Jailbait’s newly constructed bridge, there are five more crates, these in green, denoting, per the instructions for How to Leave This Room that are apparently standard in here, that they only move one tile at a time instead of flying frictionlessly like the blue ones. Jailbait must use these to build a second bridge to the right side of the room, where a Segment Address door awaits, and if those things had faces this one would have the knowing smirk of a real smug fuck. Does Jailbait possess the decoder to Segment Address door 13? Hahaha, you’re cute.
Jesus Christ, at least the space whale that swallowed a shopping mall kind of looked interesting.
A save point awaits in the next room, which at least means that fucking red door will be easy to access later. I’m taking whatever silver linings I can find, guys. One of them: did you know wine comes in boxes? Fucking outstanding. Let’s keep going.
The final obstacle to traverse before reaching the bottom of the stronghold (by the way, do they even know what they’re looking for in here? I posit they absolutely do not) is, well, more or less a bunch more elevators, but that’s only because I’m being a shithead, as these are more like teleportation tubes. Yellow ones transport down, and blue ones up. That’s pretty simple, except they’re arranged on circular walkways but with conspicuous, suspiciously puzzle-like gaps in them, and there are fucked-up Realians straight from the Island of Doctor Mizrahi patrolling between most of the tubes, and there’s treasure to find at several of the dead ends. But the surfeit of elevator puzzles pretty much broke me down to my component parts (an impotent voice yelling from under a blanket, a clawed hand clutching a coffee mug full of rosé) and this therefore almost seems tolerable. Also, a legitimate fucking miracle occurs: Jailbait comes across a Segment Address door for which he already has the key! The concealed chest contains Secret Key 9, which opens a skill called Expansion Pack. This seems like it will be some exceedingly dumb shit, but what it does is give characters an extra equippable skill slot, and that is, to my extreme shock, awesome. What is happening? Next I’m going to find dogs and cats living together, or an elevator that just goes up and down when you push a button. Whatever is left of my soul does not know how to process such divinity.
When Jailbait leaves the Segment Address closet, flush with unexpected success, he finds that all the Realian monsters have respawned. Ah, there’s that crushing disappointment I was missing!
Finally, a green teleporter tube (this one goes up and down, revolutionary shit) transports Jailbait down, past a loading screen, to the bottom of the stronghold, where a diamond-shaped structure of gunmetal gray, supporting via cabling a smaller-but-otherwise-identical structure, is hovering just above a pool of water. This is in the very bottom tip of the buttplug–is this a new material for sex toys? Like a waterbed, but for your ass? Another thing to look into when I regain corporeal form and can do more than yell about elevators and drunk-shop online (so far, a skirt and some ballerina flats, thank you for asking). In the hopes that he will find some kind of self-destruct button inside (LOL, how stupid would that be?), Jailbait takes the last, insulting, blue teleportation tube up one level and enters the larger diamond’s inner sanctum.