Spoilers for some events and possible explanations of Ghostwire: Tokyo
Butch:
I did get some in after all and holy hell am I confused!
I know Looty well, and I am grateful to have him around in times like this as he is very good at unraveling and explaining completely batshit plot lines. The bananas. The tapestry of bananas, the banapestry, as Femmy says.
Smell that? That's the smell of bananas.
I'm in the middle of doing something at an apartment building. Y'all with me?
Feminina:
I think I got to about that point. There are some bananas, all right. I have no idea what's going on.
I do have one thing to say, which is that the 'summon tengu' skill is TOTALLY WORTH IT. I was getting up on so many roofs, it was great.
Actually two things: WHY do I have such a hard time with the freaking kappa?! It can't possibly be as difficult as I am somehow making it, and yet I just can't get near the damn thing.
Butch:
I will wait for Looty to explain this shit to me, because....I...well, then.
Dude, I totally want that skill. NEED that skill. I spent way too long looking up at a building that I have to take a reading from, not being able to get in, thinking "I bet that summon tengu skill would be the cat's ass right now...."
Dude, I do not know why you are kappa challenged. I just did the one and I found it easy as pie. There really was no trick to it. I think you're overthinking it.
Feminina:
I must be, but dude. I'm not even thinking! I'm skulking around out of its sight until it starts eating the cucumber and then creeping out from behind the pillar towards it. I don't know what else I can do, but it always sees me and disappears!
It's completely stupid how hard this is. Siiiiiiigh.
Loothound:
Yeah, I was watching Femmy trying to do the Kappa stuff. She doesn't get really worked up about much, but it was all getting very heated. I couldn't figure out what was going on either. On the face of it the mission seems pretty straightforward, but that Kappa got some sixth, seventh, and eighth sense thing going on.
So I got a lot done, but I didn't get to advance the main story as much as I'd like because of the interesting—if very frustrating-thing they did at the start of Chapter 3. Which thing, you ask? The thing where they're all "Your next story mission is so deep in the fog that it can taste what the fog had for lunch yesterday," and you're all like "But horrible fog death," and they're all "Relax, you're good." I looked through Codex entries for a while trying to figure out what I was missing. After fighting off the urge to twist that vibrating noise box of a controller into splinters, I said "hell with it" (only a lot less politely) and just started hitting up side missions. You both already knew this, but the trick is that the way forward is revealed during one of those side missions. Which one? Why the very last one left on the map.
Seethe.
I'm sure at some point I will encounter the vast bananas to which you refer, Butch, but I'd like to take a moment to rant about my most hated of enemies. The emmer effing invisible blob monsters. Oh, they're usually invisible—cool. They don't show up on spectra vision—okay, well at least I can see their footsteps from the right angle. They're too tough to take down with a quick extract—annoying, but eventually you beat them up enough that they melt and die.
What? They don't die when they melt? They actually teleport to a new location and you have to find their invisible ass all over again? That sucks. Wait, THEY CAN LEVITATE SHIT AND THROW IT AT YOUR ASS LIKE DARTH EFFING VADER GOING AT LUKE LIKE HE'S TRYING TO WIN A PRIZE AT THE EFFING CARNIVAL!!! Also, apparently they can still see you through walls, or I was just straight up panicking running the whole time and completely lost track of where it was. Let's just say that my walls are lucky that I was drinking beer out of a can and not a bottle.
Seriously, that is a monster load of abilities for a monster to have. Plus they're ugly and I bet they smell horrible. At first I thought that I had run into a whole pack of them, but it slowly dawned on me that, no, there's just one and he's laughing at me. Those guys suck, and I hate them way more than even those lady snake things that can swim in concrete.
Sorry, had to rant.
Butch:
Invisible blob monsters? Lady that can crawl through concrete? Where the hell are you? I've met neither of these. We playing the same game?
Plus, which side quest had a shrine?
That's weird, man. I just swam behind a statue until KK was all "NOW!" and then I went and boom done.
Maybe you got glitchy kappa.
Feminina:
Grrrr...kappa...my arch-nemesis...
That is a righteous rant.
I think I know the blob you mean. I too thought there were about 5 of them, all hurling traffic cones at me. Uncool, blob guy.
And yeah, that thing with the 'main quest' objective being way out in the fog IS kind of a nice way to force us to do some of the side missions they so carefully wrote for us, but also probably frustrating if you're just trying to move along. The way they told us to with that whole "Mari is in danger, the ritual is starting, we've got to get over there!"
I only just met the pavement-snake ladies myself. I'm not sure why they revealed themselves to Loothound first. Probably because he's cool.
Butch:
Hurling traffic cones?
How did I miss all of this?
Not that I am upset I missed this, as it sounds like it sucks.
No, my most hated baddie are still the halloween ghost puppets that make that high pitched chattering. I see those, I die. I can't figure out how to beat them, run from them, deal with them.
Loothound:
They're just called Invisible Walkers or something basic. It was my second time running into one, and I can't figure out why the first time was so much simpler. I'm not sure how you haven't seen them yet. The snake ladies I first ran into pretty early on, and I didn't find them nearly as annoying. Femmy hadn't seen them either when I first bumped into them, but she knows them now…
The ghost puppet things are definitely not fun, but I have mixed feelings since they remind me of the Pokémon Mimikyu, so is a favorite of mine. I cleared all of the side missions trying to figure out how to get to the fog gate thing, which is the next story mission. As far as I can tell, there's nothing I've found in my unfogged area that I haven't 't completed. So it'll be full steam ahead on story mode for the next couple of sessions.
I may have run into these things so early because a lot of times I explore maps by working my way around the very edges first. It helps me be more thorough. I remember the first time I ran into snake ladies I was at the very eastern edge of the unfogged area trying to figure out how far I could go. It was on that huge highway that runs northeast to southwest through about the middle of the map.
Feminina:
I know we both did the quest with the spirit who couldn't go to the bathroom because the other spirit kept moaning for toilet paper. Talk about mundane concerns holding you back from the afterlife.
Although I suppose I also wouldn't want to face the next world with a full bladder, or an unwiped butt. Not dignified, you know. Probably does weigh on the mind.
Butch:
Ah, that one. I was thinking I'd do some fake rumination on themes on that one, but even I couldn't forge the jokes.
Admit it: You were totally expecting a nasty fight after delivering the toilet paper. I certainly was. But then, doesn't one always expect a fight coming out of a public bathroom?
But all that being said, what other quests have you done, Looty?
Loothound:
Jeez, Butch, do you want my whole CV? Okay, I've done all of the main missions from Chapters 1 and 2, I've captured 2 floating paper yokai, the slab yokai that was hiding the guy's apartment, and the hopping umbrella yokai. I did the girl's spirit in the hotel, helped a little girl find her mother, purge a bloody (but very pretty) tree, Jesus red the moon for Ed, purged the hoarder, found clean water for the old man, beat the evil landlord for the old woman, found a haunted doll on the roof, and went to see a dog about an one. Oh, and I found the first raccoon tail object thing. I think that's everything, but I probably forgot a thing or two somewhere.
Feminina:
That tree was pretty!
And according to the codex, legends of cherry trees being beautiful with the blood of corpses buried under them are common in Japanese literature. Kind of reminds me of the Tale of Genji, which, if you've never read it, is chock full of literary allusions that are so completely lost on me (1,000 years later and not Japanese) that I could barely follow even the careful explanations in the many, many, thoughtful footnotes.
The point being, there's probably a lot of references that are going to go over our heads, even with the helpful codex entries. But such is life.
Oh, speaking of nasty fights, I got caught in the demon-fog-parade. I was just going about my business and looked up and they were on top of me. I wound up in one of those otherworldly arenas and had to fight a TON of Visitors of all descriptions. I haven't been using 'wired in' that much because I'm always saving it for a bigger fight, but it did come in handy in this case.
Butch:
How did you get up to the moon place?
God, I suck at games.
I got caught in the parade once, and died, cuz I suck at games.
Now, I'm very keen at tracking it and seeing it coming. I watch from afar. They can throw their evil cursed beads at others.
There's probably some running joke on some Japanese comedy show about ghosts and bathrooms we missed, too.
Feminina:
Also, that joke is based on a 600-year-old poem about night-flowering reeds, because literature.
The moon buildings are probably easier once you can summon a tengu, but I got up on all of them before I had that skill. You just have to poke around to find the way up. Then you get that cryptic comment from Ed about how the readings are perfectly normal, proving it really is the moon, UNLESS they're normal because he expected them to be normal...
Butch:
Man, I poked! I poked and poked!
Dammit.
You made that up about it being a 600 year old poem joke.
Feminina:
I mean, I ASSUMED it to be true, but I suppose yes, I also made it up.
Butch:
You had me going for three and a half seconds. I salute you.
Loothound:
Yeah, I got up there without TenguAir as well. So you didn't get the reference before about Ed's cryptic moon comments. Understandable, though. I continue to be surprised at how many things are climbable in this game.
The bathroom quest WAS a bit surprising. I don't know that I was expecting a fight (thank goodness, 'cause I don't think I could have handled a Sterculius/Golgothan fight in a public toilet), but I thought there would be something else to it. Just a straightforward case of the spirit conduit being backed up.
Did either of you find the voice recording of Ed left on the Fluidity of Spirits? It spells out what Hannya's goal here is… Found it at a random phone. I'll hold of on what it says, unless people want to hear it now.
Butch:
I....think I did?
I certainly have learned much.
Feminina:
I don't remember such a recording, but I also might have and just not really noticed the implications. Go ahead and discuss if you want.
Loothound:
Okay, so what Ed says isn't 100% clear, but apparently when a living being dies it releases an energy (ether) that is drawn from the underworld, which crystallizes when it reaches our world. Basically, the being's spirit and the ether swap places during the transition of the spirit to the underworld. Normally, that's a one way process. Hannya is apparently trying to reverse the process, and be able to send ether to the underworld to draw back spirits. Ed makes it sound pretty monstrous, but I'm not sure I get how the mechanics are supposed to work.
Feminina:
Well, that kind of accounts for the way ether looks like crystals...I suppose the Visitors are created from this energy because they are manifestations of emotions, or whatever, and that's why we retrieve it when we disintegrate them?
So if Hannya is trying to collect it to bring back souls, what does that say about where we are in the 'real world/afterlife' debate? We see both spirits and ether all over, so maybe that's a vote for us being in an in-between place.
Hm.
Loothound:
I'm not so sure about that. There's another Ed recording about corruption, and that Hannya was trying to take over this part of Tokyo because of the amount of corruption in people's hearts or something. I'd need to listen to it again, but it definitely sounded like this part of Tokyo is being specifically targeted, and the corruption of the people would become manifest. I'm leaning towards the real, but cursed, cursed Tokyo theory.
Feminina:
The codex entry on Akito does say that his deal with KK returned him "completely to life" or something very decisive like that, which would suggest that he is running around alive in the real world (mostly...all those strange arena fights aside).
Butch:
Oh, is that the one about "the veil being lifted and we'll see the real Tokyo?"
As for the reversal of the process, not sure how I missed that, but I missed that. That makes some other shit that I learned the other night make a lot more sense. Not total sense, but more sense.
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