Curate of Curiosities

Previously, we followed the adventures of Melissa Mills, who I almost never actually used for most of the game, as she rose through the ranks of the police force, while at the same time dealing with the various gangs, cults, and other factions trying to use a nanotechnological version of the T-Virus to their advantage. Jealous at her runaway success some of her fellow officers defected from the force, and managed to get ahold of something that combusts when it comes in contact with the mutagen, and releases it into the atmosphere, without properly testing its effects on its surroundings first.

So now Canada is on fire. And millions are dead.

Sure, this includes all of the Indestructibles, but it left the Impossible unharmed, you know, the one Indestructible that we absolutely want dead.

And, to top it off, an anarchist group is taking advantage of the chaos to start smashing things up.

See, I told you shooting the generators was a bad idea, Melissa.

So, do you want to see how the city of Toronto has changed in the wake of this massive firestorm? So do I, because the game puts up this facile excuse right when this chapter starts to avoid having to change any part of the map!

This is the perfect metaphor for this game's story: a bunch of people suddenly showing up to antagonize the heroes and each other. Between this and the in-game TV series, it seems that that one Something Awful thread really got to The D, and now he's trying to preempt any criticism that his games receive.

Tyler, realizing how little use he's been to the group so far, decides to take Bethany to Kitchener, which, like Winnipeg, is also somehow accessible from Toronto by subway. While not as unbelievable as before, it's still like taking a subway from New York to Philadelphia.

Speaking of, I wonder how the Americans would react to Buffalo, Detroit, or Seattle suddenly catching fire when the Anti-Symbiote was unleashed?

Also, notice how they're only facing one enemy at a time. Where was that mercy when Melissa was storming the mansion from last chapter?

It's you again. For some reason, Melissa's read the reports that he left in the menu, and she knows that John A's connected to the group that created the Symbiote. I thought that after the reception his first game got, The D would learn not to expect players to engage with his games on this level. Regardless of what he expected, this whole scene feels nonsensical.

For whatever reason, at this point in the game, the story tries to beat into your head the importance of symbols, and how Melissa serves as one to GTAL, and by extension, the people of Toronto. I can see why everyone would see her as such, as she's recently become the public face of the organization. Although from what we've seen so far, there are more people that want her dead than support her, I don't think that this is the best way to view the situation at hand. It feels like The D suddenly remembered that he was making a JRPG, and felt he had to put in some big speech to make it seem like this game had actual themes in what passes for its storytelling.

These have to be the most self-defeating anarchists I've ever seen. Sure, now this Impossible is working in your favor, since it's blowing up major population centers, but what happens next? Sure, the nation's infrastructure is broken beyond repair, which is apparently what you guys want, but now you still have an unstoppable colossus running around, and there's nothing stopping it from going after you.

So these are basically this game's equivalent to DEST. They try to use a major disaster to their advantage, their motives are utterly incomprehensible, and they have a really dumb acronym.

So, Tyler and Beth get locked up (seems to be a theme with GTAL at this point) and the rest of the team has to storm the base and rescue them.

Four rocket launcher guys. Heavy firepower aside, they're not all that hard.

It looks like The D thought he was onto something with that symbol speech, so when Melissa tries to confront Alicia, who I'm pretty sure was in the last villainous group we dealt with, they talk about how they're the symbols for their respective groups before dueling. Now Melissa I get, but Alicia? I barely even knew that she existed before this chapter, and I'm pretty sure that the NDC did too.

What is with The D's habit of solo boss fights? At least Alicia is nowhere near as infuriating as Fleming was: while she'll often get two turns for every one of Melissa's, she does so little damage that it doesn't matter.

RIP Alicia. I literally had no idea that you used to be part of the force.

While we were cleaning out the rest of our defected coworkers, the Impossible managed to make its way into our province, so now we need to distract it to stop it from smashing up a mining town and ruining what's left of Canada's economy.

The Impossible truly lives up to its name here. Total invincibility is par for the course with unwinnable boss fights like this, yet, given what we see it doing to every city in its path, I'm surprised it didn't just one-shot the party right there.

Since this game didn't have enough plot contrivances, we're called back to Toronto by someone who claims to have a way to kill this creature.

This is Solomon Gaines. We met him a long time ago. In fact, he was the boss that I mentioned that gave me a hard time. Here's how it went, he's accompanied by an Indestructible, who's normally weak to fire, and a Neohuman, another victim of the Symbiote, who's weak to acid. On his first term, he'll buff his and his allies' resistance to those elements. I'm sure you can imagine how fighting him under these conditions would go.

Now, since he's the one responsible for creating the Impossible, he of course knows how to kill it. The reason that it's invincible is that it has something called a Biomachine embedded inside it, and if we could somehow short it out, we could make it vulnerable. We just tried to fight it ten minutes ago, you could have told us then!

It turns out he has a biomachine of his own, which is the reason for his rather abrupt change of heart. Because screw organic character growth when you can just have a magical artifact do it for you!

But that's not all these things can do. Once Solomon hands it to the party, all of a sudden, the machine starts reacting to Bethany's presence, somehow causing her to suddenly catch on that her co-workers were the ones sneaking Melissa's nudes into her desk. Because these things run on Elon Musk's brain chip technology, apparently.

So, quick question, I've brought up that The Demon Rush felt like a bunch of JRPGs stuffed in a blender, and this game so far has felt a bit more restrained in that aspect, if only due to its more grounded, near-future setting, but do you think that The D was inspired by Final Fantasy X when coming up with this Impossible plotline? Think about it, both of these games feature a nigh-indestructible creature laying waste to the populace, with a hidden weakness that's only revealed late in their respective stories.

Remember how late in the Demon Rush, we got a spaceship that allowed us to explore anywhere in the world? Now we have a seaplane that for now, only serves to take us to Vancouver, all the way across the country to our next exposition dump.

Vancouver mainly consists of this single-room building and a street corner. Friggin' Mario Kart had a better representation of the city than this. They talk some more about symbols before getting to what we really need to hear: where the rest of the biomachines are.

From here, we have two options: head straight to Ottawa and fight the Impossible, or run around and gather the other character's biomachines scattered throughout Canada. And by "throughout Canada," I mean in the handful of cities the party already visited.

Fortunately, one of them is here in Vancouver. It's right at the end of a dungeon that's not unlike the base we just went through.

You can just tell that The D was running out of ideas in the lead-in to the finale. Every normal enemy encounter in the dungeon, and in fact, in this entire chapter consists of the same three enemies: one flamethrower guy, one rocket launcher guy, and one shotgun guy.

That's a whole lot of guns. Hope you came in with a full synergy bar.

The biomachine we get here belongs to Simon, and increases his max SP, so he can pump out more heals, and health regeneration.

Back in Toronto, there are two biomachines to be found. Tyler's is under the medical facility where this whole plot started, being held by someone we've never met before. It boosts Tyler's max health, not that we really need it.

Out of some twisted sense of fairness, Erin's is in the hands of this absolute joke of a boss. It boosts her already impressive speed.

One of them is in Melissa's hometown of Halifax, guarded by yet another horde encounter. It boosts her defense, because that's basically the only thing she's good for.

And the last one, belonging to Gregory, is in Winnipeg, which the party visited back in chapter 2. Or rather, the burned-out ruins of Winnipeg.

It's in the possession of none other than Gregory's father. He tries to unlock its power for itself, but finds to his disappointment that it arbitrarily resonates more to his son...?

This...is pretty jarring. For the past five chapters, this game has been a relatively grounded sci-fi thriller crossed with a police procedural, and now it decides to rip of some shonen anime out of nowhere?

This attack is called Phenomenon Flare. Sound familiar? Probably not, but for those who don't know, it's also the name of Thormia's ultimate attack in The Demon Rush. Yes, that one attack that's louder than anything else in the game.

As shocking as it is to see this guy jumping in the middle of the battlefield and going ham with a rocket launcher and flamethrower, Thormia's version simply had more oomph.

The Biomachine we get boosts all of Gregory's stats. Appropriate for someone who seems to have no particular specialization.

So now that we're properly prepared, we can finally bring the fight to the Impossible, who is on his way to Ottawa, the nation's capital. As Solomon told us before, we need to divert an immense amount of electricity from the city's power grid in order to disable its biomachine. This, for some reason, requires three of our party members while the other three stay back and deal with actually killing the creature.

Which means we'll have to deal with Melissa's slow ass and Bethany's fragile ass. Joy!

What's more, the diversion team still has to fight a boss battle anyways, since the NDC won't let you get in the way of their really short-sighted plans to destroy Canada.

The second-to-last battle in the game is against one of each enemy in the game, with grossly inflated HP. It was this battle where Tyler really shone. He specializes in bare-handed combat, and how it works is that it deals more damage with every consecutive attack. With a bit of patience, he can eventually do enough damage to take out each of these goons in one or two hits.

With them taken care of, the Impossible is now vulnerable, and our remaining party members can go in for the kill. Ladies and gentlemen, you're about to see the only recorded footage of Skylight's final boss ever uploaded to a non-streaming platform!

I didn't expect something called the Impossible to be a walk in the park, but this was just unfair! The party that fought it on my first attempt not only was very fragile but had very little means to recover once party members started dropping. But then, during one attempt, I noticed that whenever there was at least one party member one space away from it, it would exclusively use an attack on them that pushes them away, completely ignoring any other party members. At that moment, a light bulb went off. I could bring someone optimized for defense, and speedy enough to act before the Impossible took another turn, to trap it in an endless loop.

Sure, Melissa's the most defense-oriented party member, with her skill tree having a particular focus on shields, but she's slow enough that the Impossible could easily get off one of its more dangerous attacks before she could approach it again. But as it turned out, she wasn't the only member with an aptitude for defense. The other one was, of all people, Simon, the designated healer. If you've played nearly any other RPG, you would not reasonably expect a healer to be able to take hits very well, not helped by the fact that Simon had the second-lowest base HP. But with a shield equipped, he ended up taking around 30 damage out of his max of 70. Still a lot, but still preferable to the boss going after Bethany, and mitigated by his innate health regeneration. However, there is a consumable item that gives a defense buff, and under it's effect, he only takes 14 damage. Defending reduces it even further to 7. Why am I not surprised that the strategy to defeat the final boss in a Dragoon game involves turtling?

And with that, the Impossible, the creature that has ravaged Canada, is dead, yet GTAL isn't out of the woods just yet. Due to that symbol nonsense from earlier, the military wants us dead too, and two of our party members get injured. But it doesn't matter anymore, Canada is safe, I'm done with this game, and I no loger have to pretend that I care about its plot!

And that was Skylight. In many ways, it's one of the most frustrating games that I've ever played. Not only because of the gameplay or story, but also because of what it represents. We now know that The D is capable of improvement, seeing as it fixes a number of issues that The Demon Rush had, such as UI visibility. In terms of presentation, it now looks like something that you'd see on the front page of Newgrounds, rather than an MS Paint nightmare. However, not only does the gameplay still suffer from the balance issues that plagued its predecessor, but the story, while slightly easier to follow, is still a struggle to engage with. Furthermore, as I've mentioned, it feels like the endgame was a bit of a rush job what with the sudden introduction of the biomachines and the complete lack of encounter variety.

If we assume that The D started work on this game immediately after The Demon Rush was released, then this whole game would have taken around two years to develop. This would likely explain the lack of enemy variety and uninspired endgame, as well as the balance issues. While at first glance it may seem impressive for a single person to create a project of this scope in such a short period of time, when you actually start playing the game, it eventually becomes obvious how many corners were cut.

One last note: although The Demon Rush was developed using Game Maker 6 (at least, according to the decompiler I used), this game was developed using XNA Game Studio, a game development platform created by Microsoft. Microsoft ceased support for this engine in 2012, and it was later reworked into the free and open-source Monogame engine. Neither of them are as immediately well known as Game Maker or Unity, but the latter has been used for several high-profile indie games, such as Celeste or Stardew Valley.

I bring this up because it is very likely that when Monogame came to replace XNA, The D started using it for his later games. One of the first things that the engine promotes on its website is its support for a number of contemporary game platforms, and it is almost certain that, emboldened by this, got the idea of submitting his later projects to Sony. And that is the very reason that I played through this game, because I believe that it, rather than The Demon Rush, was the first step in his rise into becoming himself a symbol, one of a game console manufacturer's lack of quality control. I mean, that game whose trailer I showcased had Skylight in its title; did you think that this game wasn't related to it?