Curate of Curiosities

Previously on Skylight 2, we bumbled around for a while, bullied Tyler, met knockoffs of our party, hired a snobby hipster, and found out that our old friend Simon is now working for the villains.

So we're at the start of the game's sixth chapter (of eight, if the number of chapter files in the game's directory is any indication). At least we don't have to suffer through this for much longer.

Remember how in the last game, there was a TV show based on GTAL's adventures? This game has something kind of like that...

Do you think that this show's emphasis on philosophy and sexuality could reflect some...inner turmoil on the part of The D regarding these subjects?

Actually, I think it's best not to think about this too hard.

In this game, there's only one reason that anyone would bother flying to the northern part of the country in large numbers: because they're villains and are holding their base there. But how are we even going to get to Nunavut anyway?

Hey it's the plane we used to fly all across Canada last game. Though I've seen no mention of biomachines or anything like that. I guess the mission based structure of this game doesn't lend itself well to collectathon sidequests.

Welcome to the island of Axel Heiberg. The very first mission we get there is in a map that's just a giant square. I didn't put a whole lot of focus on the map design so far, because quite a few of them are as uninspired as this.

The mission after that is a bit more interesting. While most of it is outdoors, there's an alcove where you're safe from the cold. A good thing too, seeing as there are several enemies with flamethrowers.

The inside of the Severin base is practically lousy with Hunters. But they're behind walls that you would normally activate with the computer terminals scattered around the area, so I decided that I'd rather take my chances with the rocket launcher guards...wait a minute, why would the security inside the base be given rocket launchers? Especially in narrow hallways? That sounds like a recipe for severe structural damage and personal injury.

Especially since John A is here, and that for whatever reason, Fitzpatrick still needs him alive.

So it looks like this is the part of the game where all of the major villains start lining up to get beaten by the party. Okay, I guess we need them dealt with expediently before we wrap this whole thing up.

I've got a bad feeling about these bosses' HP totals. Anyways, getting to him's a bit tedious, his Golems are dangerous, but only in close range, and his strategy is to pick at you from dark areas, but as long as you have someone staying close to him, he shouldn't be a problem.

Next up, we face up with our old friend again. I'm concerned about the implications with regards to his role in the previous game. Like the rest of the party, his character wasn't very well established (outside of that business with the Queen of the Underworld), but the game goes as far as spelling out that even then, he was part of Severin. I'd check if there were any clues at all of his true allegiance back then, but you know how I feel about the prospect of playing through Skylight again.

He may have seemed intimidating back when all his forces were bearing down on us earlier, but he's kind of a joke here once you get past the snipers and Hunters guarding him. The only potential problem is his health regen, but it shouldn't be hard to outdamage it.

Unsurprisingly, wherever he is, the Bismuth Golem is close behind, ready to crush the party. Now that I think about it, I'm not fully sure what its purpose is. The most obvious comparison you could make is with the Impossible from Skylight 1, but there, it was a constantly looming threat throughout the game's second half, and although its purpose isn't explicitly revealed, we can at least infer it from its resemblance to the Indestructibles. The Bismuth Golem, on the other hand, feels a bit redundant, and not just because it's a bigger Golem.

You know, distractions tend not to work when you announce them. But Erin manages to get a clean shot on him right after, so what do I know?

Oh wonderful, the Golem's leaving. Wait a minute, no! He was the only one who could stop it! It's going to bring about a retread of the Impossible plotline!

I really should have timed this better, but while Tyler managed to pull off his distraction, one of the guards got the same idea of shooting him in the back.

So now Tyler's dead. Now who's going to spout horny jokes in every single cutscene? Who's going to download porn onto Bethany's laptop? Who's going to suggest that the team investigate a strip club for clues on a drug deal?

At least with Fitzpatrick worn out, we can finally put him down.

Right, like I haven't heard that before. Summoning a giant rock monster that can easily be set to rampage to help the country.

Probably not. You're not the reason that he got this idea of being a hero cop in his head.

Our team's little spat with HR has somehow made its way to the federal government, here represented by the guy from a couple chapters ago who killed two people with vines.

As that symbol nonsense from last game has indicated, the blame for literally everything bad that has happened around GTAL is placed squarely at Melissa's feet, and so it is decided that the entire group, spanning the whole country (wait, doesn't the T in GTAL stand for Toronto?) will be disbanded.

Never mind that the group already has a reputation for having saved all of Canada. Never mind that there are somehow still Indestructibles running around, and that they're the only people willing to do something about them! Won't someone think of the military-industrial complex?

Wow Dean, I didn't know that you were a weeb.

Did you think his antics weren't annoying enough? Right after this, he mocks Tyler's death, then waltzes up to GTAL headquarters to blame her for ruining his life. Okay, now I want to know what his purpose is. All we've seen him do is make speeches slandering GTAL in front of half a dozen people at a time.

The one major event the game attributes to him, the resurgence of the anarchist group NDC, is only mentioned in a cutscene taking place far away from him. Of course, I shouldn't be surprised to see yet another half-baked, underexplored plot point in this game.

At least someone in this city is making sense regarding this band of knockoffs.

Well, here's a welcome sight. Looks like our meddling in Axel Heiberg has managed to free John A.

He tells us that Fitzpatrick was the good guy all along, and was only working with Severin in order to find a way to kill their real leader. So there's a bigger villain that we haven't seen before? How predictable.

There's an even bigger surprise: since we're now one man down, he'll be joining us for the last leg of the adventure.

As far as being a replacement for Tyler is, he's surprisingly underwhelming. On paper, he's meant to be a stealth-focused unit, but I've barely even noticed that this game has stealth-based mechanics. And his health is about as low as Bethany's, except you can actually upgrade his. The one thing about him that sticks out is that he has eight item slots compared to the rest of the party's four, and he joins with a stock of medkits and fire bombs.

Meanwhile, Toronto's on fire. Again. At least we get to see it this time. Its perpetrator is Nett, another member of Severin, who blabs a bit about society before pointing his flamethrower at GTAL. So there's another one for the chopping block.

Nett here doesn't seem to be as much of an asset to Severin as Fitzpatrick was, yet he somehow has just as much HP. This is not a good sign for this game's difficulty curve. What's more, he has a flamethrower, which can burn the party's coats off and leave them vulnerable to the cold.

However, there's a bit of a quirk with his AI. He won't move or attack if there's no one in range of his flamethrower (about five or six spaces), so even though he managed to take out my front-line fighters, he's basically a sitting duck.

The Bismuth Golem has managed to do what the Impossible couldn't, and bring the fight right to GTAL's doorstep. This is the real reason Nett and his goons set Toronto on fire, since Golems are weak to fire, a huge Golem should be weak to a huge fire. But he failed to account for the possibility that Fitzpatrick would have engineered it to be impervious to fire. Did no one learn anything from the Impossible?

But we have a plan. Have Ashley fire a bullet that dissolves Skylight Symbiote (that we never even knew he was making) then beat on the pieces of the golem until they stop moving.

Anyways, let's talk about Ashley's character for a bit. His introduction also introduces the indie engineer subculture to the setting, which I worried would be a source of cheap jokes about real-world artsy subcultures. And...I turned out to be right; in the few scenes where Ashley shows any semblance of personality, he comes across as really snooty, which could serve as a springboard to a character arc, but we all know that The D places characterization at a lower level of priority as making the graphics not suck. And let's not forget, he idolizes a man who makes art pieces out of semen.

As is apparently usual for spur-of-the moment plans like this, Ashley's plan works, and instead of something like the Impossible, you just fight a bunch of glowing rocks. They don't even hit all that hard. And they're the last boss that you fight before the chapter ends, in case this wasn't disappointing enough. Yep, this looks like another endgame rush job.

It's the last day before GTAL is disbanded, but we have one last mission. John A has tipped us off that the true leader of Severin is hiding in Skylight Medical. That's right, the very place where all of this started so long ago.

Also, Dean Lea is still in town. Sadly, we don't get to teach him a lesson. Nor do we meet those other guys he was with when we first met him. So what was the point of even having them around!

Time to break into Skylight Medical. This would be pretty scary if this game didn't make Indestructibles a complete joke. Seriously, we're in the eighth and final chapter, and I've been one-shotting them consistently since chapter 2. Normal enemies with rocket launchers are more dangerous than them, to say nothing of that one boss who had one.

The first mission when we actually enter is one of the more interesting ones in the game. It's a square, like a number of other maps, but divided into nine cells. You start at the rightmost cell, and the exit is at the leftmost cell. You can try to go straight towards the exit, but that leaves you stumbling through the dark at the mercy of the guards and Hunters. However, there's a computer terminal right near the starting point that you can use to light up the area and activate alarms to lure the enemies away from the path, and then close the security doors behind them to keep them from pursuing you. It would be nice if the game had more of these kind of missions and less where you drag your party across an overlong hallway to fight a boss with jacked-up HP.

Ultimate weapon? Where was it when one of your associates was burning down Toronto to try to stop Fitzpatrick's so-called ultimate weapon?

I wouldn't call this an ultimate weapon, unless your goal is to psychologically devastate the party, but even so, I don't feel that the party liked him that much. Zombification aside, didn't we last see him getting knocked into a pit? How'd Severin manage to get him in a mostly intact state?

And here I was thinking that 9999 would be the hard limit for enemy HP.

The good news about Zombie Tyler is that he's basically just a souped-up Phantom...oh wait, that was actually the bad news. There is no good news at all. Like the Phantoms, he only uses unarmed attacks, but does more damage with each consecutive attack. Because that's just what we needed for an endgame boss fight, a soft time limit!

Fortunately, we do have an ace in the hole. Maxing out Bethany's pistol and rifle skill trees gives her the ability to do triple damage on the turn that she switches from a pistol to a rifle. Combine that with the fact that you do double damage the turn after defending and we have her doing around 4000 damage a pop, far more than the rest of the party (except maybe Gregory) put together.

While turn-based RPGs are no stranger to game-breaking setups of this nature, usually you can manage pretty well without them. Here, it's basically the only strategy that I could find to defeat this boss before he rips the party apart. And even so, he did end up wiping out the party on the first two attempts!

After that is Saffron, the last of the Severin Ghosts. She's a bit annoying, but she's nowhere near as tough as the five or six Phantoms that we fought off while trying to reach her. At least this boss fight actually sort of relies on strategy, rather than being a damage race.

And now, we face the true leader of Severin.

It's him. The guy that's appeared all of twice over the course of the game so far.

I guess he's supposed to be a twist villain, but it's not all that effective since a) he hasn't received any characterization whatsoever, and b) his very first appearance had him murdering two guys with vines.

So not only is he the real head of Severin, not only is he ultimately responsible for the creation of the various forms of the Skylight Symbiote that GTAL has been forced to deal with in both games, but he's also been apparently pulling the strings of not only his organization, but Canada's government, for most of the more than 100 years that he's been alive. How cute, The D thinks he's Kojima all of a sudden!

So, since he's immortal, how on earth are we supposed to deal with him? Simple! We beat him up, then shoot him with another Symbiote-dissolving bullet! But this is much easier said than done, because...

Alessus has the single highest HP total of anything in the game that we've fought so far. I get that he's immortal, but come on! Every turn, he will release symbiote on the floor surrounding him. His strategy involves letting it build up, then blowing it up in the party's faces. In the meantime, he's trying to pick you off from a distance with his infinite-range vines.

Yeah, this Skylight Symbiote can do anything. Turn people into monsters, develop a hive mind, turn spare combat suits into close-quarters combat units...

In other words, the same strategy that you, the player, were taught when the Golemers were introduced near the start of the game. And the really sad thing is, it's very easy to turn this strategy against him, as no less than three of your party members have a fire element attack.

Like with the first Skylight, I did record the final battle and ending in their entirety. But there's a problem: this boss fight is, to put it in the most delicate way possible, boring as all hell. Yes, it's of comparable length to the final boss of Weird and Unfortunate Something Something, but at least that game didn't have you slowly navigating your cursor to each party member in turn, and selecting the same mostly ineffective attacks over and over.

I did record this fight and upload it to the Internet Archive, but instead of embedding the footage here, I'll instead give you this impression of how this battle must have felt like for Alessus, seeing how he spent most of it on fire:

But eventually we prevail. And more easily than with Zombie Tyler, at that.

So that was Skylight 2. I don't think I've ever played an RPG this draining before. As I've mentioned, I don't have a lot of experience with turn-based strategy games, so I didn't expect to tolerate this game any more than last time. But maybe I have been acclimated to the sheer badness of The D's games, as I thought, after the first 4 or 5 chapters, that this was at least, better than the first Skylight. But as I got through the game's final third, not only was I faced with damage sponge boss after damage sponge boss, but the writing got more and more contrived and underdeveloped.

Dean Lea, for instance, has all the makings of a recurring villain, given that his appearance and mannerisms serve as a contrast to Melissa, but all he manages to do is gloat whenever something bad happens to the party, because the game forgot really quickly that he was the one who murdered the Ladykiller. What's more, you'd expect to eventually deal with him yourself, but no, the group just walks right past him when they encounter him in the endgame.

The Severin members fare a bit better despite having less screentime; not only are they on the party's radar since the start of the game and faced in turn during the endgame, but each of their actions has a direct, tangible effect on proceedings.

As mentioned before, Alessus falls flat as a surprise villain, since his introduction makes it all too obvious that he's up to no good, and he only appears in one other scene before the finale.

Then there's the manner of how the game handles its continuity with its predecessor. Over the second half of Skylight 1, after meeting John A for the first time, you unlock a section of the story recap menu where he tells you about the organization that is secretly pulling the strings of the plot. Optional lore snippets like these are fine. What isn't is when you are expected to have read them in order to understand later scenes, or when characters practically mention them by name, as has clearly happened both in this game and in Skylight 1's endgame.

So, that was the last Dragoon Entertainment game whose full version was available for free on the dev's website. The D did indeed host his next two games on his site, but they a) cost money, and b) were eventually taken down. That means that, now that I've beaten Skylight 2, the bulk of my documentation of The D's games is finished. There's still some more material to go through, even though they're now mostly inaccessible.