57 - Stands Killed the Radio Star
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Last time, we braved the fictional warzone of West Bengal. This time, we're going to take down a pirate radio station.
The real life Sundarbans is a whole region, not just a town. It is also the world's largest mangrove forest, as opposed to this game's depiction of West Bengal being Yet More Brown Desert Land.
Guess where we're headed?
Next to the entrance here is the only functional vending machine in the entire West Bengal region.
We're fine on curatives right now and rolling with the Lv50 Blowjob Brothers mean nothing'll survive for long anyway.
In my restless dreams, I see that town... with a fully functional airport and multi-story radio tower...
This is presumably the destroyed village we saw last time.
There isn't actually anything notable about this restaurant. I just wish I had some mutton curry right now.
...What makes sheep meet "mutton" instead of "lamb" is the age of the animal, though I believe this is mostly a rule of thumb rather than a legal definition. Think the difference between "beef" and "veal".
The military doing worse things than the terrorists they're supposedly meant to be stopping? Say it ain't so.
My understanding is that it's quite difficult to try an "Around the World in Eighty Days" trip in modern times because airplanes have understandably muscled out most other forms of intercontinental travel. You'd probably have to arrange passage on freight tankers.
Alright, time to actually tackle the radio tower.
Alas, this is a Let's Play, not a speedrun.
When I think of radio tower dungeons, I naturally think of Pokemon Gold/Silver. 7SU's Game Boy stylings might be doing some of the lifting there too.
I find a cluttered storage room like this to be a surprisingly humanizing detail. There are no items to pick up here or anything, it's just junk off in a corner that inevitably accumulates over time in any place inhabited by human beings.
Despite the Speedwagon Foundation's findings in the late 80s, as of 2025, the patent is still pending for the self-restocking vending machine.
The bathrooms are also a needless-but-appreciated detail; how many buildings in video games have toilets? Though I suppose there was some need to have the assets, considering the number of times Polnareff gets jumped in the restroom.
And really, "Can you pet the dog?" is kind of overplayed these days. We should be asking, "Can you flush the toilet?".
Now just a minute here. We've established that while normal people can't see Stands, they can see Stands that are manipulating physical objects. This guy's just being plain ol' willfully ignorant!
See! Speedwagon's physical attack of swinging a sledgehammer works! Tutorial Man told us about this shit a million years ago!
Too bad the way things have shaken out in this Let's Play means Deep Purple's basic attack never really comes up. It's quite good.
The trash cans are the main enemy of the Radio Tower. They are everywhere and will chase you.
Right, so, for those of you reading who haven't read/watched JoJo, Speedwagon's signature attack is that the brim of his bowler hat has razor blades in it, Odd Job style.
is... is this that "worldbuilding" thing
Jokes and historical inaccuracies aside, this is just solid meat-and-potatoes NPC dialogue. Referring to other things happening in the world! Mentioning locations you may or may not have been to! Wow!!
We've gotten conflicting reports on if "terrorists" or the military are the ones bombing local towns. All the dudes in that base off in the corner of the map were going crazy, but they were also all locked inside. Meanwhile the military has been shooting at us the entire fucking time.
Besides the trash cans and locked doors, there's also rocks falling on us. Some of these are on set tiles, but others are randomly roving the map.
DJ Inc and Raul are named after the band Lipps Inc. and the musician Raul Midón, respectively. I'm not sure there's any actual connection between them in reality, though the real-life Raul is also blind.
SIGH
Bathrooms still empty, though it is again a point of interesting realism for each floor to have a pair of them.
That's the second floor sorted.
You're stuck with the Tired status effect on this entire floor. Tired means you move at half speed and take a bit of damage every step, which makes it a fairly true-to-life ailment.
I assume you're keeping score. We're being chased by trash can mobs, the ceiling is falling on us, and we're moving at half speed. Fun!
There are several possible musical sources for the name "Deja Voodoo", but the Stand name narrows it down to the sole album of English rock band Heavy Stereo.
If Deja Voodoo got a chance to take a turn at all, he'd use attacks that inflict Stop status and whittle the party down while they're unable to act.
The guy has barely 300 HP as it is, so chances are he's dropping in a single round even with a normally-levelled party or while saddled with Gallahad and Miriam.
More importantly, we're no longer slowed down while on this floor!
Here we have a cameo from Part 1. Dire and his cohort Straits were Ripple-users who showed up to help Jonathan Joestar battle Dio. His signature move was the Thunder Split Attack, where he traps an opponent's arms by doing the splits in midair. Dio counters this by freezing him solid, a move he never uses ever again.
Why would you ever use ChatGPT or whatever the fuck when you can write NPC dialogue like this? I'm serious. This is comedy.
Here is the way my brain works.
I wanted to put a Speedwagon-out-of-time joke here so I looked up the history of chocolate bars to see what would have been on the market in the 1880s. I found out that Fry & Sons developed the first solid chocolate bar in the 1840s and Cadbury released theirs not long after. It also turns out that the two companies merged in 1919, but this version of Speedwagon is from Part 1 in the 1890s so that's fine to ignore.
Now my first instinct was to have the punchline answer be neither, since as somebody who grew up in America the main chocolate bars I think of are from Hershey's or Nestle. But context wise, the characters are in India in 1989. So for proper authenticity I have to go look up what brands of chocolate were being sold in India at the time. I found an archived newspaper article from 1988 describing the marketing competition around chocolate bars, which noted that Hindustan Cocoa had over 80% market share at the time.
Turns out Hindustan Cocoa was just the Indian branch of Cadbury at the time, and in fact they changed the branch's name back to Cadbury in the 90s. And in 2010 Cadbury was bought out by Mondelez aka Kraft Foods, one of the biggest food corporations on the planet, known for using child slavery to harvest their cocoa beans in Africa. So I spent at least one anime episode's worth of time researching something completely inconsequential for a joke that no longer makes sense, we have learned nothing of value, and I made myself sad.
On the east side of the floor is a makeshift infirmary, and only one bathroom! Huge difference!
Let's backtrack down to ditch the chocolate.
Sevendust is an American rock band. I'm not sure where the "Alice" connection is from, though it might not be anything in particular.
Despite Stands being the manifestation of the user's fighting spirit or whatnot, it isn't unprecedented in the series for them to have something resembling a mind of their own.
Alice has a scant 50 HP and will explode into gibs if we do pretty much anything. This is not helped by most of Deep Purple's attacks being multi-target. I do appreciate the foresight in having our AI-controlled party members Hold Back here, which forces them to automatically guard every turn. Otherwise the nukes might come out to play and that'd just be a bad time for everyone involved.
Cascada probably would have just busted out Sun Laser or something, but it's time to actually use Brainstorm for once.
If you're rolling with Gallahad and Miriam, Miriam shoots a tranq dart instead.
S I G H
Sunlight Remedy permanently raises all stats by 1 and HP/SP by 2. The dedicated single stat boosters are +3 and +5, respectively.
We head back up to Deja Voodoo's floor, which has multiple stairways leading up.
My cursory research says that this is French for "ripple" rather than some kind of more multi-faceted joke. Just as well, I'm tired of researching pointless things.
The treasure chests contain five each of Overdrive SY (3% HP, 20%+60 SP) and Ripple-Infused Wine (5%+100 HP, 5%+5 SP, full party).
Back down and up towards actual progress.
There isn't really anything else on this floor other than the zombies. We make our way westward.
If you've been paying close attention, these sprites should look familiar. Back then they were just "Dark-Skinned Man" and "Jovial Man", since we don't encounter them on the manga route.
Aside: Though India became a nation proper rather than a British territory in 1947, it maintained a Governor-General as representative of the British monarch until 1950, when the Constitution of India was formally enacted and a President elected.
Despite the posturing in the dialogue, there are no ill-effects from simply blasting these assholes to hell. And, as we've seen many times, Darkness status doesn't do much against multi-target attacks.
I assume the "meatloaf" is referencing musician Meat Loaf.
I assume DJ Inc's dialogue was mistranslated or something, seeing as he runs away immediately after saying he wasn't planning on running away.
Now we can check the room behind the duo.
It was no coincidence that our town was attacked... All of it was deliberately planned by the military. A sacrifice for the "greater good" of the war...
What's more, the leaders of the guerillas responsible were secretly in cahoots with the military. This war is all business. They have no intention of helping anyone.
According to Raul, those rotten soldiers got it in their head that it was a village of guerillas, giving them free reign to kill without remorse and have their way with the girls... Bastards!
But things aren't gonna go the way they want them to from now on... With our powers, Raul and I will crush all those with ties to the military... We'll use the Slaves of Fate to our advantage...
Now that Raul and Inc are dealt with, the locked door on the second floor opens up.
Time for OC lore!
It's been one short month since our town was destroyed by the soldiers and guerillas. Even Alice, the orphan, has begun to see Stands. She can't control it yet... At this rate, it might take over her mind completely. There's not much I can do... For now, she can only control trash cans in the radio station and unleash energy...
Those Slaves to Fate know all about us and our Stands. I want to turn them down, but if I do, they might attempt to eliminate me... I can't let anything happen to Alice. If I play my cards right, I might be able to use the organization for my own gains and wipe out those damned soldiers. Raul and I will work with them for now.
I'm scouting for Stand users in Karachi. I found one guy who slaughtered all his superiors at work. He's a total psycho, but his power will be useful. Vins, a higher-up in the organization, has distributed zombies for us to use. Seems like her Stand power can turn humans and human corpses into those things.
Man, she creeps me out... Nah, I've seen corpses scattered like litter on the battlefield. That shouldn't faze me. These circumstances must be driving me nuts.
A bunch of officials in the organization have been invited to a party at a rich guy's mansion in Saudi Arabia. What a lucky break! With them gone, I can go to the headquarters and gather some intel about the other members. If I know their Stand abilities, I'll have a huge advantage against them.
They say some Stand users are coming to Sundarbans. Apparently, they want to fly a plane out of here. I doubt they'll make it out of the warzone in the mountains, but if they do reach the town, we're in trouble. Better find a way to deal with them...
Classic "your motives are reasonable enough but you've lost all credibility by causing indiscriminate slaughter" villain stuff.
Surely nothing will go wrong with this plane ride. See you again!
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