I mentioned in the comments on my last post that I don’t bother with JRPG stories these days because they’re all “power of friendship will save the day” or “mankind needs no gods!” in the end. Barely a day after I made that comment, Atelier Online (the useless game I said I would drop but haven’t yet) proved me right again with the usual friendship song-and-dance.
First Sorrel said “We beat you because we’re not alone!” but I didn’t get a screenshot of that.
Then Anise-Hyssop put the screws in with the classic “We have friends and you don’t!” Nyaa nyaa~
This is pretty much the same way we taunted the last boss in Tales of the Tempest, so it was really nostalgic. Teasing someone about being a friendless loser is supposed to be the reserve of the jerk jock in American teenage movies, but it’s okay when we do it, because we’re the good guys. Nyaa nyaa~
And no JRPG would be complete without the gang letting pathetic mid-bosses escape so they can come bother us again and again. Gacha games are especially cowardly because they don’t want to be too dark or controversial, plus if they manage to successfully redeem the bad guy they’ll be able to release them as a gacha character. For all those reasons and more, I didn’t take the whole “Calendula is going to kill us all” saga seriously. Even the supposed massive horde of monsters he released (or so the story tells us but we never saw them) was dealt with without anyone being seriously injured. What a sissy game.
So anyway, after we taunted him, Calendula ran away. But if/when he comes back, we shall taunt him a second time! we’ll be ready to beat him again because we still have friends and he doesn’t. I didn’t say that, Angelica did:
I’ve actually fought plenty of mid-bosses who came as a team, or who were the head of an army, or of an evil gang, etc etc. Point is, good guys aren’t the only ones that can have friends, or comrades, or companions, There are bad guys out there who have friends, but hey, maybe they aren’t relying on their friends, or trusting each other, or their bonds are weak, or maybe they’re not doing it quite right. Either way it never helps them when push comes to shove, because we’re the good guys and they’re not. Nyaa nyaa~
Starting Persona Q in the next five minutes, let’s see how long it takes them to trot out the usual cliches. Look forward to it!
This reminds me of that one game that cleverly turned the tables on the player: we had the big baddie in our posse all along without knowing it, and the supposed bad guys were actually the good guys. And they were the lonely and isolated ones, while Mr. Big Baddie was popular as heck and adored by the whole crew. That made for a really neat plot twist that played on our ingrained RPG biases and took the mickey out of us seasoned RPG players.
Which game was that? Doesn’t ring a bell.
Stella Glow. Who would have though that sleek basterd Klaus was the main antagonist in disguise? Certainly not me, that’s for sure. Although the game totally took the piss out of me there, I couldn’t help but being delighted and thinking ‘well done, Imageepoch, you really got me good with that one’. I love when RPGs shake and surprise me — all the more so as with us being the RPG veterans we are, it’s become quite hard to floor us indeed. 😜
Naw, I had Klaus pegged either as evil or a sacrificial lamb all along, and I knew the lingerie witch wasn’t actually bad. Klaus because of harem RPG tropes (no one can be more attractive than the hero) and the witch because of general RPG shenanigans (99% of the time, the initial baddies are not the real big bads). And Stella Glow was still packed to the gills with the usual friendship and “power of the bonds between us” business.