6 - Bugs on a Plane
(Originally posted March 29, 2024)
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Recap: If Dio isn't defeated within 50 days, Holly's own Stand will kill her. Cascada has signed on to this mission, For Great Justice. But she does need to tell her family that she's going to spend her summer vacation traveling to Egypt to hunt down an evil vampire.
She gives us some Sweets (25%+10 HP/SP), probably the most consistently reliable healing item across the entire game. Good kid.
Pops gives us 1000G, enough for twenty (20) drinks from the vending machine outside. Travel expenses indeed.
Now you may think from this option that stomachaches or getting sick might be something we need to keep an eye on; you're not supposed to drink water in places you aren't used to, after all. They aren't.
I wouldn't call this a trap per se, but if you pick the first option, you have declared to the game to make you susceptible to the Stomachache condition, which can force your character to run to a bathroom while in the field. The Sickly trait is worse, because it creates an invisible exhaustion variable that can land you in the hospital (expensive) or force you to rest and skip the timer forward a day. There are actual reasons you might pick these, but definitely not on a first playthrough.
Cascada is The Machine anyway. She don't need no stinkin' medicine.
And for our final order of business before leaving Japan, we hit up the 7-11 to stock up on some travel essentials.
A girl's gotta be prepared.
Speaking of, fighting off more Murderdolls on the street gets Cascada to Level 6, where we get the Laser Beam skill; our first all-targeting attack. The Machine's ascent to power continues.
Let's hit the road!
Dio: Looks like they're coming... to Egypt... Joseph... and Jotaro... is it......
In the manga/anime, Dio is using something akin to Joseph's Stand here (thorns, spirit photography) to spy on the party; the implication is that it's Jonathan Joestar's Stand. The way I've always thought about it is that because of the Stand trickle-down effect on the Joestar line, Dio's Stand has all of their powers in at least some form.
Impressive cobbling together of a plane from tile assets, honestly. The cloud background also constantly undulates, creating a decent sense of motion.
Right on cue, a giant fucking beetle appears.
I hate bugs. One time in Malaysia when I was about 11-12 years old, an Atlas moth landed directly on my chest and that shit put the fear of God in me.
Japan loves contrasting rhinoceros beetles (kabutomushi) and stag beetles (kuwagatamushi). Think Kabuterimon and Kuwagamon, Metabee and Rokusho, Kamen Rider Kabuto and Kamen Rider Gatack.
Imagine the sound of buzzing insect wings directly by your ear, but the insect is the size of your head and also making wet schloppy noises.
Magician's Red, Hermit Purple, Hierophant Green, Star Platinum... if you haven't noticed by now, the Stand name motif for a while is going to be [Tarot Card] + [Color]. It eventually moves on to just straight up band names and music references, which is why Cascada's stand is Quicksilver.
I looked this up and the closest match I could find was the Pan Am 103 incident, where a bomb caused the plane to crash in a residential area in Scotland, killing 270 people. A Libyan former airline executive was convicted of the bombing in 2001.
Tower of Gray zips over to the other side of the plane, behind a row of sleeping passengers.
In an instant, Tower of Gray pierces a column of bystanders!
(Massacre!)
This giant bug is painting on the wall with five severed human tongues skewered on a giant needle. JoJo has always been sort of horror-adjacent and it's easy to forget just how gory it can get.
We used to smoke on planes, so, I mean. Maybe burning up a bunch of oxygen would probably be fine as long as those masks still drop from the ceiling. With a Stand, you could put it on yourself and the person next to you simultaneously!
The way it was explained to me, any hit to the head that's strong enough to instantly knock someone unconscious is a hit that's likely killed them instantly.
And we enter the actual boss fight, and it's our first time with a full party! I like how Joseph starts out at a higher level than the rest, because he's already been on a bunch of bizarre adventures.
Everybody is automatically inflicted with the "CantFind" status, which basically means they cannot target the enemy. He'll just dodge every attack.
Like so.
In the manga, this was Kakyoin's time to shine as the Newest Party Member; he stretched Hierophant Green out into a net that Tower of Gray couldn't avoid. Here, while CantFind means we can't target him, we simply use attacks that don't require a target.
Often, you're going into this fight with only Kakyoin and Joseph having multi-target attacks, and the two of them are perfectly sufficient to take down Tower of Gray. But Cascada got a fancy new Laser Beam and she's itching to try it out.
To enforce the tutorial aspects of this fight, Tower of Gray has abnormally high defense unless you're hitting him at the correct range. Jotaro's stats are high enough to actually offset the CantFind status somewhat, and him landing a surprise crit in the first turn after all those story bits would just be silly... But it does mean that Cascada's shiny new attack is absolutely useless unless Tower of Gray moves into Long range.
A couple turns of Kakyoin and Joseph blasting him wraps things up pretty quickly.
Joseph books it to the front of the plane, followed shortly by the rest of the party.
Silly as it is, I like this bit because we just confirmed that this guy doesn't have a flesh bud and is usually just a gun for hire. Dio's power and charisma is so insidious that he's inspiring even opportunistic mass-murderers to give their lives for him; it seems the flesh buds are required only for those who might otherwise resist his wiles.
All those times Jotaro skipped school, he was actually practicing his negging skills.
This is genuinely one of my favorite gags in the entire series. Gets me every time.
Next time, we've got a whole new hub map to explore!
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