Wednesday, April 01, 2015

Let's Play Monmusu Quest: Paradox! part 12

Where the fuck are we now and… STAY. ON. THE. ROAD!

Hello and this is part 12 of my continuing playthrough of Monmusu Quest: Paradox.  The first part is here.  Yesterday Paradox finally took the gloves off and unleashed the crazy fucked-up smut the MGQ series is famed for as we ran into some very odd monster girls in the first Tartarus dungeon.

At the bottom of the dungeon Luka opens the door he shouldn’t be able to open and steps into…


Silent Hill?

It’s a village/town and something is not right.  I imagine if this was any other type of game all that purple stuff covering everything would be pulsing like blood vessels.  Asking the local standing next to the door tells them that this happy place is called Remina.

Uh oh, this is probably bad.

Again it requires knowing a little of the lore of the original MGQ series.  In that, Remina was a settlement thought to be wiped off the map by monster girls (in reality Ilias’s angels) in a mysterious catastrophe 30 years ago (also echoing the history of Paradox).

Talking to another girl causes her voice to degrade into static and she suddenly morphs into another one of the hiding-under-the-dress insect girls and attacks us.

We are definitely not in cute loli beast girl world anymore.

Inside the house is a boss fight against the tentacle/scylla girl that was showcased in some of the promotional artwork.


Her temptation attack is to open up an orifice in the end of one of her tentacles.

Luka, as you do, thinks it might be a good idea to stick his dick in there, much to the displeasure of the rest of the party, and gets sucked all the way into a rather tame (by MGQ standards Bad End).


Tentacle girl can be recruited to the party, but you have to step outside the house and then walk back in and talk to her.  Thank you walkthrough guide from nameless internet person as I’d probably have missed that.  The tentacle girl doesn’t speak.  Her dialogue machine translates to “coming up” or something similar, but I suspect that’s a mistranslation and she’s doing whatever the squid equivalent of nya nya! is.  Sonya calls her Nuruko as she’s slimy.  That’s… uh… nice, Sonya.

At the end of the street things get even weirder.  We walk through the door at the end and…


Okay, so what the fuck is going on here?  This looks like some kind of bridge across a massive gulf.  It also resembles the region Luka ends up in every time he dies.  There’s even a magic circle at the end of the path.

That takes us back to the entrance of the Tartarus pit.  Or does it?  The tents and everyone are gone and the ground looks scorched.

The White Rabbit pops up again.  She’s also surprised to see us here.  It sounds like it might be something to do with Luka, but neither the White Rabbit or machine translation are clear on this.  She vanishes again, briefly, before popping back up and leaving a cryptic warning to stay on the road.

Back on the world map and things have changed.  The elf forest has been burnt down, the bridges smashed and the towns in ruins.  Iliasburg looks like it’s been wiped off the map entirely.


What was that thing about staying on the road?

Oh.


And.


I remember them.  They were the bad angels that showed up in chapter three of MGQ.  Luka kicked their ass.

Ah, but that was a Luka that had found all four elemental spirits, had defeated all four heavenly knights and Alice herself in combat, and unlocked his super-powered angelic side.  This is a Luka just starting out on his adventures.  Our party is a collection of cute-because-they’re-not-all-that-powerful loli bandits, imps, and a monster lord sealed away in a juvenile form.

These fights do not go well.

I did have an imp survive to the third turn, but only because she was exceptionally lucky with her dodge rolls.

Yeah, stay on the road.

At the end of the road Sonya and Luka are traumatized to find Iliasville in ruins.  Skeletons are everywhere.  They can recognise some of them.  The one with the hunched back was probably the village chief.  That one with damaged right arm was Lazarus.  The well is filled with bones.  Unfortunately it’s not really possible to convey horror effectively with RPG-maker graphics.  It’s clear that the story has transitioned to a more serious chapter, though.

The story gets a little weirder as they enter a fully stocked graveyard and Luka finds first Sonya’s grave and then this:


Welcome to alternate universe land.  Luka’s diary next to the gravestone confirms it.  Someone else had written at the end that Luka fell bravely trying to defend the village from the first wave of killer angels.

Reading further back reveals the reasons.  In this universe Luka never challenged Granberia in Iliasburg.  Instead he realised the adventuring life was not for him and returned home.  Consequentially that meant he didn’t go off on his adventures trying to mend divisions across the world and because of that no-one was able to stand up to Ilias when she decided to wipe the world clean.

If that paragraph makes no sense at all because you’re unfamiliar with the original MGQ story, there was a moment in the original series where the player could choose to confront one of the heavenly knights, Granberia, despite clearly being outmatched.  If the player chose the cautious approach it resulted in a Game Over.  This universe played out the consequences of that decision.  Rocks (or rather angels) fell.  Everyone died.

Alice reasons it must be some sort of alternate timeline.  She also realises it’s all connected to Luka.  She demonstrates this with a Harpy Wing.  Normally this item should teleport someone to a place they’ve already visited, but here, in the alternate world, it does nothing for her.  Luka shows he’s the key to these multidimensional shenanigans as when he uses the Harpy Wing it teleports him back to the Iliasville of their time and space.

The plot thickens.

To be continued… tomorrow.

8 comments:

  1. As much as I prefer Alice I am now honestly curious what loli Ilias' reaction is if she is in the party during these scenes. I mean you'd think it would be a bit of a strain on relationships to visit a world where one of your party members killed off everyone you knew and loved.

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    1. I might play through again when the game is fully translated. Seeing Ilias's lines in these situations would be interesting as there are multiple ways they could go with that character.

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    2. I found this to be very interesting, as this DOES delve into one of the "What ifs" of MGQ.

      This is why I'm hopeful of this game. From the way it's going, it looks like it not only takes a different approach, but that it's going to expand and be even bigger than MGQ.

      Kudos to you ManyEyedHydra, for making this walkthrough.

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    3. Ilias keeps giving us "..."s when it "apotheosis" is mentioned (in relationship to these transformed people in Silent Hill Town, for example). Add in that in the original game, she tried to fuse Dark and Light Magic... well, there's also the point where, when you go to Iliasburg with Ilias, the White Rabbit explains that it's not "darkness" covering the world, but "chaos", which is a mixture of Light and Dark.

      So, right now, I'm guessing in Remira they tried to combine Light and Dark magic, succeeded, but not in the way they wanted (a book does mention a failed experiment), and everything went Half Life.


      That being said, Ilias isn't nearly as impotently outraged by stuff as I had hoped. Except for suggesting... interesting solutions (The Imp in the field in Iliastown? Behead it and use its blood as nutrients for the soil. The Loli Bandits? Behead them! - and after they cry "Ok, ok, we won't kill you. Only 30'000 years of forced labor!". And when they help out in town? "Yes, toil in argony!"

      There's a guy in the unnamed slum who believes Ilias is just a fake, a myth. Her reaction? A calm "I'll remember your name. Look forward to judgement day."

      So, it's less impotent outrage, but you do have a tiny Old Testament rathful god at your side.

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  2. Another point to make is that this alternate world as far as I know CAN'T actually be the world from the first game if Luka returned home. That is in that world Sonya did not exist as far as we know (her mother died before having her in that timeline), and Lazarus was on a different continent.

    So its like we are getting an alternate version timeline of a alternate version timeline. As Captain Janeway of Star Trek once said concerning time paradoxes and such "it all gives me a headache."

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  3. Press Q or W on world map to bring up... world map.

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  4. I kind of figured this was a universe Illias already took over, but man to find out it was because Luka backed down to Granberia and never went on his adventure. Now that is interesting.

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  5. Desert Eagle28/04/2015, 23:33

    The sounds Nuruko makes are "kyu". Try imagining a pokemon voice actor saying that repeteatedly in a cute voice. :P

    The interaction between Nuruko and Sonia is cute. It seems that Nuruko sees Sonia as a mother of some sort, and follows her everywhere. She's pretty much the mascot of my team. :)

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