Curate of Curiosities

We now return you to the adventures of Ramona Vasquez as she tries to pay her rent. To recap, last we saw her, she gained a third party member, dealt with some vigilantes and the local wildlife, and met a black market merchant named for genitalia.

Enough sidequesting, let's move on with the League quests before some other adventurer gets to them first. Our next mission is to deal with a monster smuggler. You know, in a world crawling with magic-infused monsters, it only makes sense that someone out there would try to weaponize them.

The only building that we know of that would reasonably have room numbers is Ramona's apartment.

No sign of our smuggler here, unfortunately. Looks like whatever she was trying to breed got the best of her before we could.

Proto-angel? Don't tell me this smuggler is trying to re-enact Evangelion or something.

Unfortunately for our heroes, our target isn't actually dead. And it's very possible to do this quest before recruiting Kyrie, and thus, end up going back to the bar to turn in the quest, only to find out that the target is still at large, and, more importantly, not get the full quest reward.

Time for a rest...

One of the perks of being an adventurer is having explosives delivered to your house, apparently.

Inviting your new friends to your apartment is a good opportunity to bond, talk about Drakengard 3's final boss, just hang out.

But you're going to have to deal with the trafficker sooner or later. And the one person you go to to track her down is none other than the landlord.

As if shaking her down for rent wasn't bad enough, he's now letting criminal activity be conducted right under his nose.

Good thing you catch up to her just in time.

One question: these monsters she has with her are hatchling angels, right? I'm just saying, someone or something has to have laid the eggs. Either there are these weird breeding experiments going on, or we may have a bigger problem than smuggling on our hands.

You know what, enough of that. Let's see what else the adventurer life has to offer.

The Tower is the game's main dungeon. Its main gimmick is that its layout is randomly generated, classifying it as a Mystery Dungeon. If you've ever played a roguelike, you'll know what to expect.

However, it's not truly randomly generated. There are a number of preset floor layouts, and when you enter a new floor, the game selects one of these layouts at random.

On top of having the raccoons and slimes that you've already fought before, the tower is also full of wandering enemies that are minibosses in their own right.

They have a chance of dropping this tie, that can only be equipped by Ramona. I guess here she's in her natural element, huh? Note that it increases her magic stat, which she starts out with one point in, and has no use for whatsoever.

The tower is divided into strata, with five floors apiece. The final floor of each stratum is a safe zone, where you could save (at least, in earlier versions) and warp back to the entrance, and from there warp back to whatever safe zone you visited. There's a worldbuilding reason for this too; this dungeon was formed from a magical crystal that started popping up after the alien came to Earth.

And this dungeon in particular was at one point an office building that dealt in user data. In case you don't get it, this game merges two of the creator's main interests; RPGs and bashing the state of the modern world, particularly corporate culture.

While this room may be a save zone, it has a boss right at the end. He approves of Ramona's fashion sense (which is just the dress code from her old job) but not that of her partners.

This boss starts out simple enough...

Then he rings up a few of the first bosses that we fought. And just in case you thought "Wait, we're higher level than last time, this should be easy," remember that enemies scale to the party's level, so they're a bit stronger than the last time you fought them. You do have more party members this time around, so it's nothing you can't already deal with.

You might be familiar with Chainsaw Man if you've spent enough time on social media in the past year or so. Ramona here is a fan of a lawyer-friendly equivalent, and learned all her fighting skills from watching it.

More bounties!

The Mimic, a shapeshifting monster and master of disguise. Actually tracking down the beast is nearly as tricky as actually facing it in combat. Patrick from the bounty office tells you that since it's not good with faces, it will try to disguise itself as someone wearing a mask. Sure enough, one of those kid adventurers I mentioned earlier wears a mask, and can be found south of downtown, trying to pick up a loan....as well as near the tower at the same time. Never mind that hanging out downtown is a bit less weird that hanging out in a bar that serves alcohol.

Then you fight it, and it might be the most annoying bounty so far. It tries to copy Ramona (poorly), which somehow charms Devon and Kyrie such that they hve lowered attack, and since they're your main damage dealers, it will take quite a long time to bring this creature down.

The Legendary Raccoon, which has a small chance of appearing whenever you rummage through the trash, which you have no real reason to do after the start. What's more, it runs away after enough turns have passed, and I simply cannot take it down before it does so.

Bubos of The Four heavenly Rat Kings. The bounty office has an entire office dedicated to these vermin, but this is the only one of them I can actually challenge at the moment. Sadly, he's not one that I can actually kill. He opens the battle by inflicting an incurable damage-over-time effect on your party, and can inflict poison and bleeding for even more damage. Just to add insult to injury, he can drain the party's health, and inflict bleed at the same time.

While we've earned quite a bit of money from these odd jobs, it's still not quite enough to pay off the rent. And keep in mind, the rent does go up over time, so we need a way to get money fast.

Remember the loan office that I mentioned just now? It's where you can borrow money from the local crime syndicate. I'm sure that they're a perfectly trustworthy bunch, so let's take just enough to fill out our balance.

Hannah Heart-Attack? Real scary. I wonder how she'll react once it comes time to collect.

But it doesn't matter, cause now we can finally pay off the landlord.

But of course it's not that simple. It's never that simple. And since we don't have enough to pay the loan, she's going to take our lives as payment.

I'm sure that it's possible to beat her at this point in the game, but I'm not willing to take any chances with an endgame-level foe.

So this is the game so far. You try everything you can think of just to make a few more dollars, only for your landlord to move the goalpost the next day. And God forbid you try to make things just a little easier for yourself. If you do, you'll just be met with the cold steel of a broadsword. Because that's apparently the most effective way to punish debtors in this day and age.