Friday, February 4, 2011

Secret of Evermore #6 - Ascent

The bridge to Ebon Keep has finally been fixed, which eliminates the need to go through the Dark Forest again. This is called "making sure the game has any fans left".
I may have lost Nathan's Hot Dogs sponsorship due to my ties to the Yakuza, and I may no longer be allowed to drink while writing, but this should turn out well.




Ebon Keep may be on the rise again, but the castle itself is still ruined and depressing.

Tinker shows up in his new flying ship, Windwalker. "What a magnificent contraption!" says Hot Dog while sipping tea.

He can build a rocket to send our hero to Omnitopia, but first he needs a bunch of parts.

This part is great. Now that I can fly around, I can revisit the earlier districts. Perhaps most interesting for me right now is being able to see what the world looks like from the air. Here we see the chessboard, flanked by Ivor Tower and Ebon Keep.

There's Nobilia. For some reason I kept getting black boxes on the screen while flying.

There are two fairly large and seemingly out of place islands in the world. Both have something in the middle that looks possible to land on, yet neither can be landed on. The green island, in particular, clearly has a building in the middle of it.

I wonder if these are unused locations? As far as I know, the game doesn't have any secret areas. These two islands are intriguing, and I wonder what the story is.

Our hero rides the wind to Prehistoria, where the Sacred Dog statue looks on creepily. Backtracking is something that is often unwelcome in games, but in this game it's pretty cool to revisit the earlier locales.

After nearly getting DROPPED INTO THE VOLCANO, our hero finds...

...this, the first of the three parts needed for the rocketship. This is by far the easiest one to get.

Blimp hands over the best collar in the game if you talk to him as The Dog. Personally, I think that Spot guy has gotten way too much credit.

Returning to the bugmuck brings back memories... memories of a few hours ago in the game.

WHAT THE HELL?

Indeed, returning to Thraxx's lair shows us that a new...whatever these things are...has moved in. Coleoptera is much more powerful than Thraxx...but I'm much MUCH more powerful than I was then.

The hero THWACKS her/him with charged up Crusader Sword slashes. It still takes a while, because Coleoptera has the highest boss HP in the game outside of the final battle, as far as I know. It totally dwarfs the HP of everything before this. The bosses in Gothica have an average of 3-4000 HP (a small improvement over Prehistoria's overpowered Salabog, with his 2000 HP), but Coleoptera has like 12,000 HP.

Battle over, and I get the second of the three items I need. A formidable opponent, but the outcome was never in doubt. I like that the chaotic, primal Thraxx theme played for the second and final time in the game here.

So, my question is...how did this thing get here? Are Coleoptera and Thraxx just children of the Big Bug whose corpse takes up the whole Bugmuck? It'd explain how they got here. It makes me glad the Big Bug itself isn't still alive. What a dark game.

Back in Nobilia, our heroes learn just how hard guarding can be.

Horace is in charge here now, and ill tidings are afoot. It seems that the foolhardy Tiny has made off with the last item I need, and shacked up with the vicious, gnome-like Oglins.

Here he is. Time for a "boss fight". Tiny doesn't attack, he just throws Oglins at you. The problem is, all the Oglins can be one-shotted, and in the event that they get through with their attacks, they only hit for like 4 damage. A common problem with the wildly unbalanced second half of Evermore. So basically, one could just leave the game on all night and the Dog would single-handedly dispatch all the Oglins this guy summoned, plus you'd level up often enough to keep you from ever dying.

Seriously, give it a try. Hell, if one wanted to level up all of the hero's weapons, they could switch control to the dog and leave the hero to kill everything for a while.

In my case, I let it go for a good half hour or so while I did homework, and the Dog attack finally reached its max level. In the past, he'd get there around Antiqua at the latest, but this time around I was aggressive with getting my own weapons levelled up and there wasn't much left for our boy Hot Dog to slay.

Once Tiny is reached (Protip: Step into the same portal over and over until you get to him...it's random), he gives up without a fight.

The rocketship is complete! If you're lucky. I suggest saving before turning in all the items, because sometimes the game bugs out here and thinks you didn't return anything, causing the game to be un-finishable. Hooray!

Anywhere near oft-maligned Fox News commentator Ann Coulter's nether-regions, you mean?

"It was '93...we were drunk. Brother."

Turreting: It's what all the teenagers are doin' these days!

::funky porn music plays as the rocket slowly lifts off::
 
Here we are, Omnitopia. The fourth and final district. It hovers in the skies over Evermore. Hot Dog also goes through his final transformation, becoming a robot dog.

He also doubles as a toaster, it seems.

Hey! Hot Dog is a sensitive man!

A lot of Evermore's creepier things re-appear here, like the weird engine from inside the volcano. This place is basically the control room for Evermore. Which is creepy in and of itself. From the looks of things, Evermore itself is a little moon with a space station hovering over it regulating everything.

Our hero gets the Neutron Blade, the strongest sword in the game. This is the last time I have a shot of a new weapon, since Omnitopia's weapons look exactly like Gothica's weapons. No cosmetic changes, unlike the first two areas.

Besides that, the Bazooka obsoletes these weapons anyway. Speaking of the Bazooka, occasionally the game defaults you to a different ammo for some reason. Sometimes when you're just walking around, the game switches your ammo to an inferior type without telling you. Suddenly, you hit for vastly less. I wasn't sure why I was hitting for less until I checked my ammo and saw that Cryo Blast had un-equipped itself. Re-equipped it and I was hitting for the normal amount again. Also...you have infinite ammo, because the bazooka is glitched. Oh, you wacky game.

Hot Dog flies through space and blasts stuff with his massively overpowered new laser weapon. He is a dog of few words, and lets his laser beams do the talking.

 Cleaning robots patrol at all times here, making sure the environment is as sterile as possible.

It's important to shut the lights off in the greenhouse. Why? To disable those flowers. They're indestructible, and they hit for 999.

Here's a rematch of the game's intro, as our hero does battle with GuardBots in the alarm room.

I guess the password and get into Omnitopia's secret area, where the secret boss lurks. There are two panels here, each one with a malevolent Carltron face that appears sporadically. This is actually a difficult fight, because they NAIL you with alchemy attack after alchemy attack for large amounts of damage. Other than that it isn't too bad, another stationary boss that is only vulnerable when it shows its weak point. Their HP is on the low side for this point too, maybe 3500 each.

After you destroy one panel, the game goes into the whole victory routine, with the screen lighting up and our hero celebrating. I thought beating one panel ended the fight. Then, the boss music restarts and the other panel is still there launching attacks at you. I'm pretty sure this is a bug. Come to think of it, I'm not even sure why this fight is here. It isn't part of finishing the game, or all that difficult. It's just...there. Points for the creepy static TVs in the background.

The reward for winning? A bunch of these. Doesn't matter though, because the game is bugged and you have unlimited Bazooka ammo. For the second and third tier shots, that is. For the weakest shot, (Thunder Ball?), the ammo indeed works correctly. Particle Bombs are the second tier, and thus bugged with infiniteness, so getting these is totally useless. Cryo Blasts (the tier 3 shots) are also bugged and twice as powerful as these, which makes this reward...well, beyond useless. Once you buy a few Cryo Blasts, you're set because you won't run out.

It's like...it's like they stopped bug-testing this game completely after a certain point.

Coming soon... the grand finale.


2 comments:

  1. Sometimes I wonder why I supply the energy to my mortal enemy who should be a best friend to me!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Those flowers haunt my nightmares.

    ReplyDelete