65 - Cheating a Dragon
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Last time, we watched Hol Horse try and fail to perform nasal surgery via pistol. This time, we tackle one of the game's most infamous sidequests.
There are no bespoke FP events once you get to Cairo, so unless you're grinding them out for Iggy, the ranks are pretty much set in stone.
We can't actually begin the sidequest I mentioned until after we deal with Pet Shop. Even so, I walk around the map and prod at things a bit.
This combination attack implies Abdul is always holding back as to not cause collateral damage, which I guess makes sense. If JoJo had been widely popular when I was in school, there probably would've been power scaler arguments on if he'd win against Colonel Mustang from Fullmetal Alchemist.
He would, obviously. Magician's Red has fine control over all fire.
Remember, we trigger Pet Shop by entering and exiting the inn enough times.
There we go.
There are no differences here other than a notable Chaos Mode event in the sewer segment. Alas, we're already disqualified from getting it due to the prerequisites involved; you need several other Chaos Mode things to trigger throughout the playthrough.
Last time we ran from this battle to get to said sewer segment. Current Iggy can take this chicken though.
Iggy's Durability stat is innately pretty low, but he also has a uniquely powerful Guard command that's twice as effective as anyone else's. You probably don't want to be guarding in the first place in this kind of game though.
In most turn-based games, guarding tends to feel like a waste of a turn; killing the enemy one turn faster is almost always the better choice. The classic way to encourage its use is to telegraph that the enemy is charging up some kind of huge attack that will fuck you up next turn. Guard or die.
From a certain point of view, you could argue that both healing and guarding fulfill a similar purpose of "preventing HP loss", but healing tends to feel better than guarding. In my opinion, healing is a more active action with immediate feedback. You generally know your HP and can quickly math out how effective restoring it is.
Guarding is more opaque. You probably reduced the damage you took, but by how much? Is it by more than the net gain of spending a turn healing afterwards? And If the enemy doesn't even attack that turn, you've wasted your own.
In Shin Megami Tensei's Press Turn battle system and its derivatives like Persona's One More, you gain extra actions by hitting enemy weaknesses, causing turns to snowball; but they can do the same to you. Guarding prevents this effect, making it a bit more useful than usual. However, ideally you simply build your party in such a way where your weaknesses are covered.
A simple variant is to give the Guard some kind of additional beneficial effect so it has extra utility, like a self-buff, a counter-attack, or a Tank/Cover function. Bravely Default's "Default" command reduces damage taken and increases your Brave points, which let you stack extra turns on top of each other for big actions later.
Infamous SNES RPG The 7th Saga tried to deal with this problem by doubling your physical attack the turn after guarding. In theory, your average damage inflicted stayed the same, but your average damage taken was reduced. In practice, many enemies had high enough Defense of their own that they couldn't be effectively damaged without guarding.
7th Stand User doesn't really do any of that. You're far better off just buffing your stats.
We needed to defeat Pet Shop first because we can't do this sidequest without Kakyoin in the party.
With Kakyoin in tow, we...
Go to sleep.
This should just be "Can I take a look?" because if you answer "Yes" to "Do you mind?" it means they shouldn't do something!
If this sword absorbs the power of Stands, then the next step is obvious: get the whole squad in on it.
The game asks you every time if A) you want to show the sword to your party member (obviously yes), and B) if you want to destroy it after it absorbs their energy (obviously no).
Older releases of 7th Stand User have random bedtime events. You would have to sleep at the inn over and over until the pertinent conversation triggered. And it's not like you can just try with each party member until it works; the sword has to be charged up in a specific order. If it weren't for the R Patch giving special bedtime events priority, I simply would not be doing this quest.
That's right; Kakyoin again. Imagine thinking he was done and trying with Iggy or Jotaro hundreds of times.
The sword is always a usable battle item, but its specific effect changes every time it absorbs energy. A better man than I would have shown off every step.
Imagine saving and loading like fifty times to get this event, then clicking "Yes" out of habit. That's rubbing up against Evil game design.
This version of the sword is pretty solid, but it will permanently break if you use it more than once or twice. You'll have to start from scratch by getting a new one from Utah.
With this final step (that apparently has an absurdly low chance of occurring without the R Patch), we get the Godly Emerald Sword... which is like, fine. Certainly not worth the trouble.
Also, this is a trap option. There's a way to go even further beyond...
First, a reset. We need the Broken Sword.
You want to bring your strongest possible setup for this. You need your strongest possible setup, and for us that means the power to Stop Time.
Next, we head for the Northwest corner of the Cairo map.
Let's get a drink.
This mysterious mercenary only appears in Cairo if you managed to persuade Hol Horse when he attacks you with Boingo, which means he's exclusive to the Submarine Route. Kind of a weird requirement for this otherwise one-off character, but whatever.
There's probably some tomfoolery going on with the Deus Ex Machina armor behind the scenes, but holy shit look at those stats.
Mask's another AI-controlled party member with a bunch of gun-type attacks, though unlike Gallahad or Stroheim, his work on Stand enemies.
And, sigh, I suppose while we're at it...
Midler's hanging out at the souvenir shop.
There's this weird little alleyway right behind the hotel.
[knock-knock!]
We haven't been here since Update 50! The right side door is unlocked now.
If you've reached Cairo and have absolutely zero Badges of Honor, this is pretty much your last chance to grab one to pay for NG+. We have plenty, so I'm not going to! I've had enough instant-death boulders for a lifetime. You can check it out for yourself.
Instead, we're here for the Sanctuary, where all the dead characters hang out. There's a lot of dialogue here, so ready yourself for a wall of screenshots.
Neat that they made sure his dialogue here reflects that we got that specific Mariah event.
To refresh your memory, this is the user of Wheel of Fortune, last seen tied to a cactus on the Pakistan-India border.
A few of these Submarine Route exclusive characters still show up here if you're far enough into the story. Killing Silver Fox was optional though.
Frankly while I could come up with some kind of snarky commentary here, I think I'd rather just move on.
This corpse was here last time, too.
Soon, soon...
Well, good for those two, I suppose.
An axe, you say? Let's check the river ourselves.
The first and third options don't do anything. Instead, let's kill this asshole.
Cars and his cohorts ACDC and Wham were the main villains of Part 2. He's an ancient superbeing who originally created the Stone Mask that Dio used to become a vampire. Much of Part 2 is about him seeking the "Red Stone of Aja", which, when combined with the Stone Mask, allows Cars to ascend and become the Ultimate Life-form. Effectively invincible, Cars is only defeated by blasting him into space, where he futilely floats forever.
We unfortunately didn't bring Joseph here, but he does have a bit of unique dialogue:
If you come here on your very first playthrough, you fight regular Cars, who is much easier. We're stuck with Ultimate Being Cars, a superboss only really surpassed by joke fights against the developer of the game and the boss of the super-secret evil ending.
You might be thinking, wow, good damage! But Ult. Being Cars regenerates 999 HP and 100 SP every single turn.
This is why I went out of my way to grab Mask and Midler. Every little bit helps.
Sometimes you gotta Time Stop just to pop some curatives, but that only prevents everyone else from acting during their turns. They still get turns, so Cars is still regenerating.
Here I realize that maybe I shouldn't have brought Midler along after all. Mask is AI controlled, so he'll spend his turns trying to revive her instead of keeping on the pressure.
Remember, Phantom Blood is the 100%/100% full-heal-even-from-KO item. Literally two seconds later:
Star Platinum: The World's attack hits twice. Ideally you've buffed Jotaro up enough to where he's doing over 999 damage with both hits combined to make sure you're outpacing the regen.
Next, Ultimate Being Cars will use this move every 20 turns and when his HP drops below 30% (which might be multiple times!):
This boosts everything, including things that literally no other skill in the game does. Healing status effects and boosting stats, sure, fine. It also increases all elemental resistances. And remember how all attacks are calculated in this game?
Unlike Durability, this isn't something you can debuff with the right moves. You just gotta deal.
No HP damage on Mask because this move also just has an Instant-KO chance.
This fight is no fucking joke.
ffffFFFF
This would be way easier if only I had direct control over Mask because I could spam these debuff shots. If memory serves me right, only four player Stands have debuffs like this that aren't attached to status effects.
Oh right sometimes he just regular heals too.
This game is mocking me. I am being mocked.
At this point I throw my hands up in the air and reach for the burlap sack of perma-boosters.
Here's as good a time as any to show off the basics of using Cheat Engine, with our stock of Sunlight Remedies here as an example.
First, we open Cheat Engine.
Cheat Engine is essentially a memory editor. The hard part is figuring out which bit of your computer's memory to edit. To start, we click the glowing button in the top left, which opens a sub-window:
This is a list of all the processes currently open on your PC, though I've of course whited out most of it. Each one is using some of your memory, and we need to tell Cheat Engine which part to focus on. We're clearly going with 7th Stand User here. Once it's hooked in, we can actually start.
This is the important section if you're a layman like myself who doesn't know a damn thing about actually doing code and whatnot. We're trying to change a specific value in the game: the amount of Sunlight Remedies we have. We know that's precisely 98 of them, so we can leave the Scan Type as "Exact Value".
The Value Type is more complicated. 1 byte has 8 bits (0/1 binary switches), which means 4 bytes hold 32 bits: every possible combination of 0s and 1s across 32 numbers.
00000000
00000000
00000000
00000000
A 4-Byte value consequently can store any number between 0 and 4,294,967,295. Alternatively, between -2,147,483,648 and 2,147,483,647. Most static values in most modern games will be within this range, so you can usually leave the Value Type at 4 Bytes.
However, I happen to know that 7th Stand User is built in RPG Maker 2000. It's much simpler than most modern games; items cap out at 99. They're probably just single byte values: between 0 and 255. (Also I tried with 4 Byte and 2 Byte and couldn't find the value, so there was a bit of process of elimination involved.)
So let's set the Value to 98, the Scan Type to Exact Value, and the Value Type to Byte, then hit First Scan.
Okay. The 7th Stand User application currently has 144,282 different Byte values that are at 98. Our number of Sunlight Remedies is probably one of those. We need to narrow it down. How do we do that? We scan again, but only from the current list.
If we tab back into the game and use one (1) Sunlight Remedy, that means the value has changed from 98 to 97. We can search for Exact Values that are now 97 out of the selection of ones that were 98 by hitting Next Scan.
Depending on how much information you have access to, you might have to pick a different scan type. But we know the number this time.
And look at that! Out of all those 144,282 values that were 98, only one of them decreased to 97 when we used one (1) Sunlight Remedy. That means this value is how many Sunlight Remedies we have! If we double click on it, the value gets sent down to the bottom of the Cheat Engine window.
From here, we can change it all we want, or even click the checkbox on the left side to lock it to a specific value. We can have effectively unlimited Sunlight Remedies, or whatever other item you want to duplicate!
With this, boosting everyone's stats to levels where they can survive against Cars takes a scant few minutes.
And now you know pretty much everything I know about using Cheat Engine. Obviously, use at your own risk. You're liable to crash the game entirely if you just start messing with random values. Better to just search for cheat tables created by kind internet folk.
Time for the runback.
I still make sure to buff up for a few turns. These moves can push your stats past their listed 999 values on the status screen.
Holy shit, Midler did more than 50 damage! Wow!!
It's still a huge slog, but we aren't losing 1-3 party members on every multi-target attack anymore.
Finally!
Cars' Right Arm is an extremely important item that will come into play at a later date.
An enormous sigh of relief escaped my body when this message popped up. This is the item we were looking for. You can only get it from Cars, with a variable drop rate (yes, even in the R Patch). The game rolls a number between 0 and 63; if the number rolled is smaller than the number of times you've beaten the game, the Red Stone drops.
This file has beaten the game four times. This was a roughly 1/16 chance and I got it on the first kill.
SAVE THE GAME! SAVE!!
With the Red Stone, we can finally go back to the hotel and wrap this up.
I finally fucking did it.
"Ascalon" is the name of the, well, sword (sometimes spear or lance) of Saint George, a Christian folk hero. He's most famous for an 11th Century tale where he saved a princess from a dragon, codifying various dragon-related tropes and aesthetics across Western Europe.
The sword was named after a major port city in what is now Israel. Ascalon was a major strategic and commerce hub for thousands of years until the Mamluk Sultanate razed it to the ground in 1270. Other than the sword, Ascalon also lends its name to the derivatives of the "Ascalonian onion", including the scallion and the shallot.
As for what it actually does in 7th Stand User... we'll find out another time! See you again!
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