Curate of Curiosities

A Fiendish Slog

Getting this far in the game says just as much about me as it says about the creator.

Because the game has done such an excellent job of characterizing its main cast, allow me to recap just in case you've forgotten who's who:

Remember the zombies that the gang fought a while back? They're made by some scientist using some chemical on people. For whatever reason, handling the chemical also affects her, so she wears a cape to block it's effects. Why am I telling you this just now? Because after the scene at the pyramid, there's a scene involving her and Redfast. Redfast isn't exactly pleased that most of the population of one of the planet's few populated areas has been zombified.

So he cuts her cape off, causing the chemical to stat working its magic on her. Yet despite her pained reaction, she is actually mostly unaffected by it. And then Fleming punches his face off in one hit.

Anyways, our next goal is the town of Pyrez, but since we're still in the neighborhood, maybe we should explore more of the Devil's Playground.

This mountain was literally built on top of the bones of an entire city's worth of people for the purpose of...something. Given the dearth of populated settlements on this planet, Thormia really should be a bit less blase about carrying out sacrifice rituals like this.

Next stop, the Thalassa Labs again. It's filled with more nondescript hallways, weirdly tanky soldiers, zombies, and doors that may as well be painted on. The one door that isn't just so happens to contain the last piece of the key that you no doubt have forgotten about.

And right down the hall from there is an even bigger surprise:

How did they manage to get it halfway across the planet in one piece? Who cares, now we have two different ways of getting back to Earth.

Because the pacing was starting to get a bit too sensible here, a miniboss literally pops up out of nowhere

We deal with it the same way that we dealt with the rebel gang and nearly every other boss we fought: turtle up until someone gets an extreme, then go ham.

Right after this, we run down a hallway and get bum rushed by a whole bunch of soldiers. They're hideously tanky, even by this game's standards, but they're also really easy to run away from.

Well, that explains why he went down so easily, but what did that accomplish other than killing--wait a minute, the one time that fighting him actually poses a bit of a challenge, he gets killed for real?

Thormia is invincible for the whole battle, but the problem is that you need to survive for a certain amount of time, well after you would have gotten the message.

The exit's right there, but so is Fleming, the woman responsible for the destruction of Tara's hometown and that one easy miniboss encounter in the pyramid. Despite the fact that Thormia's forces are closing in, and Thormia himself is on his way to Earth, Tara runs after her, away from the rest of the party. Now why is Fleming here, of all places? Simple, she wants to kill Thormia in retaliation for Redfast ripping her cape off. It's about as good a motivation as anyone else's.

This boss fight here represents the culmination of everything wrong with this game's design. While you don't actually have to win this battle, losing this fight means losing Tara for good. The problem, Tara simply cannot survive two hits from Fleming unguarded. The one and only strategy that I've found for Tara to survive this battle involves, you guessed it, defending until her Extreme activates, then going on the offensive. And even then it requires a bit of luck; she can inflict a status that blocks off healing, which can hobble any strategy that depends on the fact that defending during Extreme heals you.

All this to keep a character that I almost never used past this point alive!

Now that Thormia has the key, he's going to take the portal back to Earth for...something. So what was the point of us running around for the pieces? And moreover, the first piece we found was in the hands of some random corpse. And it's not like it was in an out of the way area, either: it was right next to where the Pursuit landed, so what was stopping Thormia's goons from just grabbing it while they had the chance?

But of course, I already know the answer: because at least one of the JRPGs that The D has played has had this exact plot point, and he thought that if he just copied it wholesale, it would look more authentic! Who cares about cohesiveness in storytelling when you can just stimulate the part of the player's brain that recognizes games they played when they were 10! And judging from Something Awful's reaction, it couldn't even manage that!

Behind the barrier is a lava cave that's somehow already populated with Thormia's soldiers, even though the barrier opened only five minutes ago.

There's also a miniboss encounter with more of the same enemies that you fought about ten million of since the game started.

At last we face Thormia at the planet's core. No idea why it's easily accessible from a tunnel that's clearly at surface level.

Hey, it's the climactic battle, so instead of just one screenshot, I'll Now you can see the game's strategic, in-depth combat system in action.

Riveting, isn't it? It's nice to see that turning into a dragon magically makes him vulnerable.

You know, I just want to go five measly minutes without having to ask what the point of this quest was. We land on this planet to find something to stop the demons, we find nothing. We gather the pieces of the key, Thormia grabs them anyway. We face him while he's on his way to Earth, and he just waltzes through the portal like nothing happened!

We happen to be practically right next to the headquarters for Cook's demon-busting organization, who in turn lead us to the just as close Monarge Tower, where the demons first began their assault on the planet.

Meet the Legend Viper of Thunder, who rules over Earth...Steve. Normally, I'd say that the D is running out of ideas, but it's not like the rest of the game is all that inspired.

You know, if it weren't for his immortality pendant, Cook's habit of getting stabbed would be awfully embarrassing.

And now that I think about it, all of the characters in this game look like something that a 12-year-old would draw in their notebook while recovering from a concussion.

Meanwhile, in the tower proper, Steve is torturing Pound with his lectures about Diamo, the one Legend Viper who we haven't seen so far, baby trapping him and Thormia, then absorbing the babies' souls for more power. For being all-powerful, the Legend Vipers seem incapable of keeping it in their pants.

The only thing you really need to know here is that Diamo's the one who really started the Demon Rush, using her own soul to create the demon army. But there's the question, what did she seek to gain by blowing up her own planet? And furthermore, does this mean that she's okay with the necromancers experimenting on her soul to make the demons more powerful? And what effect would this have on her, if any?

Monarge Tower introduces a new breed of interchangeable trash mob: mages with prosthetic arms that can stun you. The most notable thing about it is this miniboss guarding Pound. Despite its name, it's no harder than anything else in this game, nor is it any better drawn.

You certainly can challenge Steve without rescuing Pound, but I'm not willing to take chances.

I guess out of all the Legend Vipers, he's the most realistic. He knows that there's no way to way to stop the Absolute Siphon from being formed, since Thormia and Diamo would have made their way to Earth even if the party didn't get involved (no need to rub in our faces how pointless this quest was, Steve!), so he tries to somehow claim its power for himself, using all the souls entombed within the tower. So why is he so concerned about what his fellow Legend Vipers were up to?

On to the fight. He can be a bit annoying what with his Thunderbolt that hits hard and has a wider than you'd expect AoE, but nothing that turtling and taking a few pot shots with Pound can't deal with.

His being a Legend Viper like Thormia, Steve shrugs off his defeat like it's nothing. While he was torturing Pound with his lectures, he got him to reveal the secrets of necromancy that will allow him to become one with the tower.

Unfortunately, things don't go as he expects, indicated by the accompanying particle effects being black rather than multicolored, and he disappears into the tower. You only see it for a couple frames, but he actually explodes.

That's right, he's dead, and all because Pound deliberately gave him the wrong instructions on how to use the souls he had stored up. So on top of the Legend Vipers being incorrigible horndogs, they're also not very bright.

Because that's where we were told to go to begin with?

It's not our fault that your Legend Viper is a gullible idiot who didn't bother testing the methods that he obtained through torture! And now, because we happened to be there when he died, you're going to throw us in jail for doing our goddamn jobs!?

I'm not even kidding--this guy sics security on us, but we manage to give them the slip. Good thing their next destination is the next town over!

And there, who else do we see but the mayor of the town of Viento? Yes, the same guy who gave us that long exposition dump early on when we visited. He somehow managed to comandeer the Pursuit ant take it back to Earth. Yeah, at this point, we're just coasting from one nonsensical plot contrivance to another.

At least now we can properly explore the world, though if it were any other game, it would feel like more of a reward.

Meet Alberto's sister, Anna. At least we now know where he gets his attitude from.

You're forced into using Claire as she sneaks past like two DEST members and boards their plane to rescue Jimmy.

And then you fight Kevin again. It's the same as usual, except you have to deal with two fragile, underleveled party members.

And there's our last party member! At this point the game opens up, and now you can freely explore the whole map that we barely even set foot in before. Or you could try to storm the final dungeon and get immediately pulverized.

But I'm not going to play any more of this game. Instead, I'll shed some light on how it was put together.

The game was developed using Game Maker, an engine I'm already familiar with. In fact it was the very first game engine that I used when I started game programming 10 years ago.

I remember that I used a decompiler on a number of games made with this engine, particularly those that were featured on the Yoyo Games Sandbox.

The coding for this game can only be described as YandereDev-tier. I'm not sure exactly how things worked in this version of Game Maker, but I'm pretty sure that it supported escape characters in string. Granted, I looked through the documentation for this version and found no mention of this feature.

You know how most 2D RPGs have their maps constructed out of tiles? Given the plain look of this game's environments, I initially assumed that the same was true here. But nope, all of the maps in this game are made of one or more 640x480 GIFs.

If that was too normal for your liking, have a look at the way the game loads the maps in question, and most of its other assets, for that matter. In the game's code there are a number of "load map" functions, each of which goes through several possible map names one by one to check if the map name given as an argument matches. If the first function can't find a match, it calls the second function, and if it can't find a match, it calls the third function, and so on. Oh, and they all run on else-if statements, just as I expected. Come to think of it, I did notice that the game was taking awfully long to load certain areas.

Now, guess how the game handles the overlong exposition vomit that it calls cutscenes. Would it store its dialogue in a neat little database to be read from when needed? Nope, the game's dialogue is handled the same way that the maps and other assets are: each piece of dialogue that appears in the textbox is assigned a name, and when the game needs to display it, a name is inputted into the "display dialogue" function, which checks it against several possible options, then outputs a certain hardcoded string upon finding a match. It's not necessarily a bad way to handle things, but from personal experience, I find coding dialogue this way to be tedious, so I prefer to keep dialogue in an external database that the game can read.

You'd think that by examining the game's source code, I'd solve the mystery of why the game uses up more than 300 MB of RAM. While trying to run it through Game Maker 6, it used up nearly 200 MB while it was booting up, which I thought would provide a clue as to what was causing this. I then had the idea of using the engine's built in debug feature to run the game files, and although I found nothing too out of the ordinary there, I did find the path leading to the game's temp files.

I went there and found nothing that would reasonably require this much RAM to fun. Nothing except for one seemingly innocuous DLL file: DX3D8.dll. That's the file used for the Direct8 graphics library. Multiple copies of it, in fact! Not just that, but there was also a folder featuring multiple copies of the game's background music files. As if just one copy wasn't grating enough! In the meantime, I checked out my own Game Maker project, and its executable was only around 50 MB and used slightly more than that in RAM. And I remember back when I worked on it, I tried to find ways to optimize it so it used less RAM. At least now we know that Game Maker itself seems to be partially responsible.

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