53 - Devils, Trains, Devil Trains
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Last time, we had almost no Chaos Mode tomfoolery. This time, let's change that!
We're once again going to start off Singapore with the Devo fight.
We rolled one of the more boring possibilities for Ebony Devil here.
That is, the protagonist notices this instead of Polnareff. Big whoop.
The rest of this goes basically as normal.
Again, even though Bradio's got several levels up on Cascada, Deep Purple has substantially less damage output than Quicksilver due to the range falloff. A lot of these early fights are more of a struggle.
Since we have access to it earlier than normal courtesy of Deus Ex Machina, might as well show off Deep Purple's ultimate attack, Contaminate.
Befitting Deep Purple's status as a Control-type Stand, it's a move that attempts to inflict all non-specific status effects simultaneously. Useful, but not the skeleton key that Wave-Motion Gun was.
The second phase moves into Short range, finally letting Bradio hit his full damage potential.
One down. Next up for Singapore is Yellow Temperance.
Normally, that cutscene with Joseph and Abdul doesn't happen until you're gearing up to leave Singapore, which makes sense because Kakyoin has to be available to hang with in the hub zone. But if Bradio is the traitor, that means we're the ones being impersonated by Rubber Soul. And it's happening right now!
This starts an invisible timer.
We've got about five minutes to book it down to the Trade Centre and catch the cable car.
You don't get to choose if you jump on the gondola or not in this case. You automatically join the fight.
Rubber Soul still has insanely high defense in his normal form. Even juiced up Jotaro can't do much about it.
I do use Contaminate to land a few status effects, but more just to pass time until he decides to become vulnerable.
With that done, Singapore is also done.
Because we had to rush over to catch the fake, we don't actually get the chance to do all the hub activities in Singapore. I'll load a save next update and do all those normally.
This is an additional line added by the "Pervert" tag we got back in Japan.
Well that wasn't there before.
This sequence conveniently serves as a brief snapshot of how the game looked when I first played it without the R patch.
In Update 41 we fought Scribe Ani and I mentioned he was from a Part 3 side novel. He was from the second half; Absalom here was the villain of the first half. The actual battle from the novel takes place right after the N'Doul confrontation, so we're a bit early.
I think I mentioned this before, but in many East Asian languages, the words for "four" and "death" are pronounced similarly. Hence the arrival time.
I am picturing this whole sequence like an anime OP, where everyone uses their special moves to attack the sky.
The whale in question was named Monstro in the 1940 Disney movie and is a particularly annoying level in the original Kingdom Hearts. As far as I can tell, the 1911 silent film version was the first to make it a whale; in the original Le avventure di Pinocchio it's a gigantic dogfish (a type of shark).
The cables tying up everyone suddenly vanish!
Pesci and his brother Prosciutto are villains of the week from Part 5, which takes place in Italy (could you tell?). They get to star in this aside because they attack the heroes on a train during their original appearance.
The fully unique Chaos Mode events have noticeably more typos than the rest of the game. Understandable, since they'll only be seen by a tiny fraction of players.
And we're off to the races. First, a quick glance at our new temp.
Pesci's character class here is listed as "Manmoni", a typo of "mammoni", which is roughly Italian for "momma's boy" and has certain specific cultural contexts that we don't need to get into.
"Hit!" is his only real ability besides some basic skills, and we have to use it to beat Absalom.
The map here is a confusing mess (on purpose). Many of the buildings are meant to be floating in midair, so you can move under them... and so can the train. It's constantly chasing you down and starting battles before you get much chance to react.
The gimmick here is that Satanic Coupler almost always gets a pre-emptive strike on you, allowing the invincible Shockwave enemy to put up its buff and become basically invincible. Then, after hitting you a few times, it flees and we repeat the cycle on the overworld map.
You have to use Beach Boy to hook Satanic Coupler. Then, any damage done to Pesci is also inflicted on the enemy.
So you want Pesci to get beaten up as much as possible while also making sure to keep him alive. It's an interesting setpiece, but I don't know if I'd necessarily call it fun...
Once you've done enough damage via Pesci, Satanic Coupler stops getting full surprise rounds and you might actually get in a couple turns to damage it normally.
...it still hits you with status effects though.
As far as I recall, there are a bunch of unique overworld sprites here not used anywhere else. The McDonald's sign stands out.
Finally, Jotaro gets a turn in.
Time Stop usually causes a color invert effect on the background, but since this is a flat monochrome image, nothing actually changes.
Defeating Satanic Coupler gives us 666 EXP, naturally.
In most translations of the canonically final book in the New Testament series of Christian folklore, 666 is the "number of the beast", a plausibly-deniable reference to the Roman emperor Nero via Hebrew goroawase. Though Nero died of suicide 20-30 years earlier in the timeline, contemporary fandom theories held that he would return and resume his tyrannical reign.
These days, Nero is "internet famous" in the form of a busty blonde woman with a penchant for skimpy red outfits, but I'll leave you to research that yourself.
See you again!
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