7 - Hong Kong Food Tour
(Originally posted April 5, 2024)
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Last time, the Squad crashed off the coast of Hong Kong and split up. The rendezvous point is lunch at the Jade Garden restaurant, but until then Cascada's got nothing but free time.
Get used to this screen because it's the "inn" template used for basically the rest of the game, no matter where on Earth we are. This is a universe where Holiday Inn somehow took over the entire hotel business.
Aside, since I'm thinking about hotels: I played Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth recently and it threw me for a loop to play one of those games taking place somewhere I've actually been. I stayed in the same hotel as Kiryu, with the little pool visible from the street right around the corner from the International Marketplace.
Mom is right. If we want health, we should talk to the guy in the cartoon chef toque.
Xiaolong bao are steamed buns; the bamboo steaming basket is the "xiaolong". Some places like Shanghai use the phrase to refer specifically to soup dumplings, where a gelatinized stock is diced up and wrapped in the dough.
Twice-cooked pork and mapo tofu are both Sichuan dishes. The pork is simmered and then stir-fried in a wok, hence twice-cooked. Mapo tofu is an infamously spicy stewed tofu dish. The "mapo" means roughly "pock-faced granny", allegedly the owner of the restaurant in Chengdu that popularized the dish.
...Oolong tea is tea. It's partially oxidized, so it's got some characteristics of both green and black teas. In Japan, it's a stock "fake alcohol" drink because it's got a similar brown shade as whiskey.
Think he saw that old dude explode in a shower of blood?
I think that the "R" patch changed this? I haven't actually tried yet.
(Note from the future: it didn't)
Inns usually sell some basic curatives. I buy some dumplings and rations and immediately regret it for reasons we'll get into shortly.
And, of course, you can sleep at the Inn for a full recovery. We don't, because...
There's a fair bit of leeway, honestly, but you probably shouldn't hit up the inn more than once per location. There are other ways to recover, though they can get a bit tedious or expensive.
If you've read Part 3, you might think you know who these two powerful Stand users are. You'd be wrong.
Best my research could figure, "Jatbunjan" is a Cantonese slur for Japanese people. We'll get to Tiger Balm Garden in the next update.
Kinkaku-ji is a famous temple in Kyoto covered in gold leaf. I remember it mostly because of a Douglas Adams anecdote, where upon learning the temple had burned down and been rebuilt, he asked if it was really the same building (aka the "Ship of Theseus" thought experiment). The guide told him, "It is always the same building."
Four steps down the street, Cascada is immediately ambushed.
The Delinquents of Hong Kong. They die fast and don't hit particularly hard, but they're the fastest mob yet on the world map. All enemies will chase you on sight, but the Martial Artist can leap three squares instantly. If one starts chasing you in earnest, you probably aren't escaping without entering a building.
So we enter a building. The inn is roughly in the top-center of the HK map, and this restaurant is directly east (right), at the far edge.
Just maid cafes, I guess (disclaimer I have never been to a maid cafe and I have no intention of doing so but I did watch Akiba Maid War and that show is pretty good despite the title, trust me).
Which Chinese restaurant dude? There's like four on this block alone.
Hong Kong style douhua is super soft tofu in syrup. Think a custard or pudding like texture.
Heading south past the tram, you can get a good look at all three new encounters. God forbid we spend two minutes in HK without being hounded by these assholes.
Steel's book in the third update mentioned these things, including that they're generated by the Stand Alhirt. The actual Al Hirt recorded the theme song for The Green Hornet, a show about the eponymous white masked hero and his foreign sidekick Kato (famously played by Bruce Lee). If this sounds kinda like The Lone Ranger, it's because they were created by the same people.
The hornets themselves have less HP than the Martial Artist, but they do exactly what you think a stinging insect type enemy might do in a video game.
Damage over time (5%+1 per turn), plus damage ticks every few steps on the overworld. Assholes.
We drink our single antidote after the battle. Later, I stock up on Oolong Tea at the hotel, which also cures poison and restores way more SP (22%+20).
Next up is the flameskull Burns, a substantially more dangerous encounter. They're durable enough for two Sunbeams (a Heat Ray still drops them in one, though) and will blast you for pretty substantial damage.
This also lights you on fire, which is another damage-over-time status (3%+1 damage per turn), though thankfully it doesn't persist after the battle and usually wears out on its own.
The Machine's body count increases.
Unfortunately, heading south just leads to a dead end alley-way.
If we had a Stand that could fix his car, we'd get a stat-boosting item out of this. Instead, Cascada must simply backtrack through the gauntlet of enemies, looping back south around the outside of the alley.
Aaaaand there it is. Picking the "chubby" character type means you're saddled with an invisible variable that can inflict the "Hungry" status while you're on the map. It'll consume a random food item from your inventory on the spot with no recovery; if you don't have any, you're stuck losing health every few steps and Berserk status in battle until you do eat something. None of the other character types have any downsides, to my knowledge.
Hong Kong has a ton of food vendors that I used to regularly heal and this still cropped up often enough that I lost my entire stock of Rations and Dumplings from the inn. It sucks and is needlessly mean spirited.
Congee is rice porridge. Most in Hong Kong would never call it "congee", they'd call it "juk". "Congee" comes a Tamil word that spread to the Portuguese and then to the English-speaking world; it always confused me as a kid why seemingly everyone except my family called it congee. My father used to make juk for breakfast by boiling rice, ginger, and fish in a slow cooker overnight until my mom made him stop because it made the whole house smell like rice, ginger, and fish.
Hot cola is also definitely a real Hong Kong thing. Coke boiled with lemon and ginger is a folk cold-remedy in those parts.
There's this pond in the center of the map surrounded by NPCs meant to showcase various optional events available to different Stands; this guy would point us to a hidden stash of money, for example. Quicksilver gets precisely none of these here.
Sorry lady, Ryu has no interest in romance. Quicksilver isn't exactly going to set a romantic mood, either.
Cascada has about 1200 at the moment, having spent about half of her cash on food (inflation is no joke). We can get 20 by beating up a Martial Artist on the street. 1G is nothing.
He'll keep asking until we give him 10 total, one by one.
The Machine is a Champion of Justice (When It Suits Her). She will even help racists.
Crazy DX is a permanent stat boosting item. The Darbitol we got from beating Kakyoin is one too, but it increases Intelligence.
Sorry, buddy. All Cascada could do is put you out of your misery, and that seems maybe a step too far.
North of the pond (directly next door to the inn) is a souvenir shop.
We pick up a tea set for mom and dad, but we're practically broke afterwards. Sis can get her own goddamn stuffed panda (due to circumstances in the next update, we do eventually end up with enough cash to get her one offscreen before leaving).
I have something like four or five clay teapots from a family vacation in Beijing that have never once been used. They're all sitting on a shelf somewhere. I don't drink much tea.
Sounds like something to investigate!
This restaurant is the Jade Garden, our objective, so we don't go inside. Always save progress for last!
Getting gaslit by your own special ability sucks.
No explanation needed for once. It's fish balls. On a skewer. Usually curry flavor. Moving on.
This is a big flat rice noodle rolled with a filling and then cut into pieces. "Cheung" means intestine, due to the look of the finished product. "Fun" is just noodle.
Also visible in this screenshot are a bunch more enemies; the encounter with three Lv1 Murderdolls is still around HK to help lower level players keep up.
The upper west corner of the map is... another restaurant.
The most famous form of siu mei is char siu / chashu. When I was a kid I learned what char siu bao were before I learned how to properly use a knife and fork.
We head back south to the west of the pond.
This is basically a waffle, but with hollow spheres instead of a square grid. If you've ever had taiyaki or even fortune cookies, that's basically how it tastes; a sort of eggy batter.
Hong Kong's first 7-11 opened in 1981. By 1989, there were over 200. It sells the same stuff as the one in Japan plus some new curatives, and I pick up a couple Special Chocolates (15%+10 HP/SP).
The instant we walk outside, this dude whose sprite reminds me of Scarmiglione from FFIV tries to mug Cascada.
On the other hand, does anyone think The Machine would dare allow some hooded hooligan to rob her, even for pennies on the dollar?
Stones rise from the ground, combining into a towering golem!
Rhinocerose has pretty high defense. Freu doesn't. This is meant to be your tutorial that sometimes (often) you should focus on the user, rather than the Stand.
I wasn't keeping track of my SP, and there was only enough juice for one Heat Ray... but that's all we needed. Freu ended up low enough that a stiff breeze could knock him over. If you don't kill him that fast, he's got pretty hard hitting physical attacks.
His Stand vanishes accordingly.
He gives us an Experience Tablet, another stat-boosting item that can increase our max HP by 5.
Next to this guy is Kishibe Rohan from Part 4, creator of Pink Dark Boy. If we talk to him, he gives us a tutorial shpiel that was in one of the PDB books earlier.
Utah's Stand Saints summons a Burns along with it, meaning they've got three attacks per turn. They can burst you down pretty easily, especially if their status effects land. Saints uses a lot of wind attacks that might cause BlowBack, and of course the Burns can light you on fire.
A Heat Ray brings Utah fairly low, and I start using the all-target Laser Beam attack to try and squeeze a bit of extra EXP out of the fight by getting a simultaneous kill. Unfortunately my HP gets dangerously low and I have to focus the guy down.
About Stand battles
Are you not used to Stand battles yet? Whatever, here goes. Well, first of all, there are a lot of different types of Stands. For example, my Saints can fight separately from me, and use its own judgement to determine what attack to use.
This trait comes in handy... For instance, I can attack while it heals, or we can pull off complex combination attacks. However, if its health drops below a certain point, it can no longer function.
Because of that, Stands like mine are especially weak to poison and moves that inflict continuous damage. I'm still working on a counter-measure...
Some Stands share their body with their host. These types have powerful physical attacks, but almost no defense techniques. Because of this, they're the easiest Stand to master. In addition, their base stats are very high... However, they're useless against far-away opponents and can't take a hit.
There's also the opposite type - independent Stands that are completely separate, and don't transfer damage to the user. To defeat them, you have to get at the person controlling it. These types can be difficult to control, however. It's more like barking orders at a solider than anything. Of course, if the user runs out of strength, the Stand is rendered ineffective.
But these Stands can always recover as long as the user is unharmed... Because of that, they might even be the most dangerous type. The one caveat is that they get weaker the more they regenerate... If you defeat enough of them, they won't be a threat.
Try to keep mental notes on these traits as you fight different Stands. I think preparation is the most important part of a battle.
About mid-bosses
What do you mean, "mid-boss"? 💧 You mean like me and Freu?
Actually, now that I think of it, I've been seeing a lot of Stand users around lately. I'm not sure what the cause is, but you're likely to encounter them wherever you go.
Be careful not to bite off more than you can chew... You might want to bring a friend with you. That way, you'll both grow from the experience and strengthen your bond.
And with that, we've exhausted the Hong Kong map! Having almost died against Utah, I get worried about the next plot beat and grind up a bit. Eventually Cascada reaches that magic number...
See you next time at the Jade Garden restaurant!
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