14 - The Temperance Movement
(Originally Posted May 24, 2024)
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Last time, we explored Singapore, ate a bunch of delicious food, and mercy-killed a zombie infectee. Time to ride the cable cars!
-> Yes
-> No
We flash sideways to Abdul and Joseph's room.
This is a reference to Doraemon, a long-running comedy manga/anime starring the eponymous robot cat. Doraemon's a cultural institution in Japan, akin to Bugs Bunny or Garfield.
TV: There's -- a --
TV: There's -- a -- traitor -- in -- your -- midst
TV: Be -- ware -- Ka -- kyo -- in!! They're -- working ---- for ---- Dio!!
The channel flips to a man in a shadowed room.
Joseph: Dio!?
I wrote "I just told you!" as a joke and then it turned out it was the very next line. Can't all be winners.
He contributed to taking down Tower of Gray. It was mostly Joseph.
The game lets you hit the Inn's food vendor and the vending machine before starting this next event. I don't really stock up and I end up regretting it.
You ever think about how wild the coconut is? It can support almost all human needs singlehandedly. You can eat the flesh, squeeze it out for coconut milk and oil, drink the water or let it ferment into alcohol or vinegar, boil the sap into sugar, use the husks as fuel, cut the trees for timber, and they can handle growing in sand with saltwater irrigation.
You can also bang the shells together to make horse noises.
One annoying thing about Part 3 in particular is that it portrays almost every incidental character in the various countries the crew visits as either a Wacky Stereotype or outright some kind of crook trying to swindle foreigners. It's only going to get worse from here on, too.
That said, if some rich lily-white asshole was visiting my coconut stand, I would upsell that shit like crazy.
As noted in the previous update, Singapore has restrictive laws and no qualms delivering extreme corporal punishment. It accordingly has some of the lowest crime rates in the world... but it's a Foreign Country so of course some pickpocket is right here.
I believe this is more specifically referred to as a "torture rack" maneuver.
Eight years from now these kids are going to fucking love Pokemon.
Jotaro and Cascada walk off, but Kakyoin stays leaning against this palm for a moment.
I know how stories work, we all get it, but just once I wish a character wouldn't say "nah, it's nothing..." when something weird is going on. Even if the kid can't see Stands, she was on the orangutan tanker with the rest of us. She knows some shit is up.
I'm pretty sure this isn't true no matter how you look at it; the cable car only goes to the Sentosa resort island and back. My main memories of Sentosa involve a hotel room that was infested with ants and really smelled of piss - the concierge said they didn't clean rooms unless a given guest stayed there for more than three days - and the cafeteria serving me a hamburger with a moldy bun, but that was many years ago and I imagine the area is completely redeveloped now.
This is another mostly cosmetic choice that affects a few lines of dialogue. Cascada ain't afraid of no heights.
I guess they did get ice cream after all.
Of course, Jotaro easily hefts himself back onto the balcony.
We could just stay and let Jotaro handle this himself, but at some point that's just not engaging with the premise of the game. Jumping on also gives us a whopping +3 to Jotaro's FP.
He's got a point, considering Quicksilver is a long-range arm cannon. Long-range attacks don't fall off as hard as Short-range, but they're still affected by such things.
Once you hit 10 FP with a character, they start referring to your by your nickname. This ought be amusing going forward.
Sometimes I worry if my original additions are true to NendoTairiku's intent for the player character or otherwise off-base (especially since I'm typing this not knowing if last update's stuff landed well or at all), but then we get text boxes like this and I feel a little better.
Fuck this guy. Remember those NPCs in Singapore telling us to try running away from fights that seem impossible? They meant Rubber Soul. He's got absurdly high Durability and HP for this point in the game; last week I described Shocking Blue as a difficulty spike, but Rubber Soul has a good 150% of that guy's HP.
He loves to use this move, which sucks both HP and SP from all party members and hits us with the "Digest" status, doing 10%+5 HP damage per turn and halving our Power and Durability.
Star Punch is supposed to be the Defense-bypassing piercing attack. It's that bad.
Even The Machine's elemental laser beams do scratch damage.
Rubber Soul can effectively only be damaged when he takes on the guise of another party member, which changes up his moveset and lowers his Durability from "Impossible" to "Tough".
Helpful, but more to make him lose his turns rather than racking up damage. That Venom Cannon did about 80 damage, and Sun Laser gets up to around 140.
Is anything more annoying than a boss enemy who keeps hitting you with Drain attacks?
I said "What the fuck??" out loud to an empty room when this happened. My RPG rule of thumb is that against mobs I can put off healing until I'm down to 30% HP; against bosses, 50% unless the game indicates they're charging a big nuke attack. That was 79% of Cascada's max HP.
A normal player is meant to hit Escape at this point. But The Machine will continue fighting until her last breath (please ignore that she is K.O.ed right now).
I forgot about this basic skill every character has and spent a solid two minutes sifting through my inventory for a revival item.
The form Rubber Soul takes not only influences his moveset, but the stat-boosting drop you'll get if when you defeat him. Jotaro gets you Speed, Kakyoin gets Durability, Joseph gets SP, and both Abdul and Polnareff get you Power.
I was feeling a little guilty about breezing through other fights. No longer.
I had to .gif this bit because even while reviewing the footage I could feel my own frustration.
I finally land a Damage over Time effect after The Hose failed to cause bleed three times in a row. Remember, they're all percentage based, so even if his Durability is through the roof, he'll still take damage.
Across the whole boss battle, I burn through probably half of my good curatives; the rest restore so little that using them would be a waste of a turn. Picture both characters dropping to low HP and 0 SP, then me spending two to three turns spamming items for maybe one turn of blasting.
I definitely wasn't struggling to stay alive, I was totally just waiting for him to go back to Fake Kakyoin so I could bring the fight full circle. Yeah.
"Do you understand!?" was Rubber Soul's catchphrase in the manga but I don't believe it actually made it into any of the game's textboxes, so this is a weird vestigial bit.
I always felt like Araki pulled the trigger on this a little too early seeing as it's Polnareff's entire motivation. He's been part of the team for barely four updates and we're already prepping his Fated Adversary to appear next week.
I wouldn't call Cascada a brat, myself. I think this dialogue box is the same even if Jotaro is rolling solo, in which case the runaway girl ends up on the cable car.
I don't think I could last anywhere near five minutes in the ring with Tyson, but I would absolutely give it a shot for 100 million dollars. Hell, I'd split the pot with him if he went easy on me and we'd be good, right?
The sprites are unclear here (not helped by things going differently than in the manga) but Jotaro somehow uses Star Platinum to separate Cascada from Yellow Temperance.
And, in just the next car over...
See you next time!
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