Let's Play Monmusu Quest: Paradox! part 33

Sidequest Roundup (The Return to the Ancient Shrine)

What we up to now, part 33 now?  This is my playthrough of Monmusu Quest: Paradox, the first part of which can be read here.

It's a short post today as I catch up on some side quests and various other things before we head off to the Forest of Spirits to recruit Sylph.

The bulk of the side quests are associated with the loli bandits that run the various stores in the pocket castle.

First up it's time to get caught up with Vanilla.  The next item she's looking for is advanced medicinal herbs.  Because these posts are organised slightly differently to how I play through the game, I tipped off the end point to that a couple of days ago in the Monte Carlo slums.  First up Vanilla needs to go to the item store in San Ilia.  He suggests going to Monte Carlo to find the source.  That person is the Erika dude that runs everything in the slums.  He's the guy you're taken to after giving the letter of introduction from Lazarus to the guard on the door.  If you have Vanilla it will trigger the relevant dialogue and upgrade the item shop to sell advanced medicinal herbs.  I still don't know whether this section was just for Vanilla's sidequest or is needed to trigger the Eva mission.

The other store in the castle is the weapon store managed by Papi, the dragon loli bandit.  She can be taught to manufacture mithril items.  To do this take her to the blacksmith in San Ilia and choose the exit option from his dialogue rather than using the cancel button.  Papi will ask him if he can train her.  To do this he requires a Proof of Faith.  At the time I already had this and I had to look up where I picked it up from.  It's given out as a reward by Christie, the succubus nun, on raising her Affection to 10 (or maybe 100).  Feed her plenty of sausage (oo er, missus) and she'll give it to you.

The next bit was more of an accident as I hadn't really been paying attention to the other side quests apart from the ones needed to upgrade the castle stores.

The problem I usually have with these Pokémon-style games with massive rosters of characters you can play is figuring out which ones I should be concentrating on levelling up.  I normally try to level up everyone and it takes forever.  At some point I figured I should probably be concentrating on the important plot characters and ones with multiple races (Alice is the best example as she starts with five or more base races.  Hild and Page 65537 also have multiple base races).

While backtracking through past areas in an attempt to pick up monster girls I missed first time around, I ended up back in the ancient shrine at the Luddite Village with both Promestein and Hild in the party.  This triggered some new events.

Promestein notices something on the computer by the entrance.  It's mainly incomplete info, so she suggests looking deeper into the abandoned institute to find out more information.

At a second computer she finds out the lab was also studying apoptosis.  She conjectures Hild might have been created to fight against whoever was destroying the world, although there's still no indication of who created her.  She also remarks that Hild has a lot of unnecessary functions for a machine designed to fight and kill stuff.  At this point we also find out Luka is a mathematical genius who didn't think it was anything special.

At the third terminal Promestein has the realisation that her being pulled into Tartarus was not an accidental by-product of her research, but deliberately triggered by the shadowy master of this research institute.

The last thing to investigate is the capsule Hild emerged from.  Promestein identifies it was keyed in to Luka's genetic structure and primed to open when he touched it.  The others point out the paradoxical nature of this given the research institute is considerable more ancient than Luka's tender 18 years (assume coming of age means the same thing as it does here).  Promestein thinks the whole institute is from the future of the parallel world and sent back into their past for some reason.

Could the unknown master be an alternate version of Promestein?  There's a sense to that.  MGQ-verse Promestein was ultimately destroyed by Luka.  The parallel world Promestein (the one where Luka never went on his adventures) would likely have been scoured from the world along with everything else when Ilias decided to start again.  Both would have incentive to meddle around with the past to prevent their future demises from coming about.

That's my thinking aloud, btw.  Nothing in the game suggests it so far.

Oh yeah, should probably include some lewds otherwise people get the impression MQ:Paradox is just another JRPG.

While backtracking I picked up some of the monster girls I'd been missing.  The Insect and Doll races seem to be the hardest to recruit.

UN_DO's spider girl has some new artwork for her 100 Affection scene, I think.

I don't remember this from the original.  In fact, so far it's been UN_DO's girls that have the extra scenes (the original slug girl and someone mentioned the Cursed Doll from Chrome's mansion also has a new scene).  I find UN_DO's artwork to be a little hit or miss, but they should be applauded for creating the extra content (Elizabeth, the slug noble, is a standard wandering monster and has about three times as many scenes as most bosses).

The Bandersnatch from the wastelands around Monte Carlo has one of the weirdest fatal request scenes.  She wanks Luka off with the oversize hand and he just sort of… dies.

Her other scene is a bit of big-boobed Paizuri.

Then there's Hild.  She only has the one request scene, but hints there might be others if we can find her some Dangerous Swimwear.  Not sure where that is.

The request scene is different to her Bad End scene, so we don't get the cutaway shot of the contents of Luka's testes being sucked up.  Instead we get a cutaway shot of her machine insides doing various things to Luka's fleshy member.  There's some bits with warm, high-viscosity gel that look 'Aaah…', and other bits with spinning metal cogs that look a bit 'Eeee!'

Personally I'm not convinced high-speed whirring metal cogs and soft, fleshy sex organs go together so well.  In fact, I'm not sure I want to think about it too much in case…

Damn, too late.

Curse you, evil imagination!

Oh well, tomorrow it’s time to head off into the forests for a frolic with the fairies.