Wednesday, January 31, 2018

Let's Play Monmusu Quest: Paradox [part 2] - 44: Demon Invasion

Beginning

<- Previous: Succubus Village (alt)

We were in an alternate world, hanging out with one of the great heroes of the past (who coincidentally happens to be travelling with one of the worst villains) when we got a message all heck was breaking loose back in Luka’s world.

One harpy feather later and...

Our newest recruit

What is Black Alice doing with us?  She got sucked into the warp and followed us back into our world.  Fortunately, she seems quite tickled at the prospect of going up against the demon armies and joins the party.

This is probably for the best.  As a party member, she’s fairly OP.  Despite only being level 40 or so, she has access to the tier 3 Black Mage jobs and her trait is to double-cast black magic.  With the right gear and stat bonuses, she can dish out a helluva lot of damage.  So yep, it’s probably a good thing she pitched in on our side.

She is also a bit... not there.

I think someone recommended keeping her in the party for her comments.  I concur with this.  Alice is a fruit loop.  All hell is breaking out around her and she talks about tea parties (before dishing out five-digit damage double fireballs).

I think I can say I’m on team Black Alice at this point.

Originally, I was going to break this part into four posts covering each city, but I think it’s time we push on and get this series done before part 3 comes out.  Also, while there are plenty of new encounters, I’ve a strong reason to believe we’ll be seeing them as regular encounters in other locations (for reasons that will become clear later).

Right.  Grand Noah, San Ilia, Sabasa and Grangold are all under attack.  Technically, it doesn’t matter which order you do them in, and at one point I did get confused as to which was the first (I may have rushed to the other cities to see what new monster girls were around to “play” with).  The monsterpedia is fairly helpful here.  It lists the new monster girls in the order elves, mermaids, spiders, vamps.  So we’ll start with Grand Noah (which is where we warp to after the distress call comes in anyway).

Grand Noah is under siege by a combined army of elves and fairies.  The random encounters are various low-level elves and fairies we’ve seen in previous locations.  They’re still at the same level and therefore not really a problem.  Also present are various fixed encounters where the monster girl character sprite is visible and usually in the process of molesting some unlucky (or lucky) townsfolk.

The giantess girl in the town square is fairly hard to miss.

I wonder who we're supposed to fight...?

There is also a carbuncle girl (I’m guessing this is a fairy-tale reference) molesting a priest on the bridge to the coliseum.  These are one-time encounters.  There are also recurring encounters (respawns every time you come back to the city) with new girl Elf Amazoness and original series Trick Fairy.

I’m not going to put Bad End details here just yet as I suspect we’ll be running into these girls again.

Various routes, including the road to the coliseum, are blocked by mass fighting.  You’ll need to head towards the castle where you’ll find the androgynous-looking Queen Fairy marshalling her troops from behind the lines.

Sweet child of the 60s

Queen Fairy was a boss fight in the original series that specialised in sending various lewd plants into Luka’s pants.

The boss fight managed to drag out for an age because my party is effectively Alicetroemeria, Luka and a ragtag punch of other characters I’m running through the Maid job to pick up the value-oriented Job XP +50% ability.  After this I did some switcharounds because I didn’t want every fight to take thirty minutes with the risk of a party-wipe if they managed to nail the one character capable of actually doing anything.

What happens after beating Queen Fairy is a bit of a surprise to me.  In the original series she tag-teamed with Queen Elf and I was expecting that fight to follow this.  Instead Queen Fairy calls back her army and vacates the city.

Hmm, I suspect we’re going to have to track her back to her home turf.  That mountain outside Yamatai?  Although Queen Fairy and Queen Elf were located on their own island in the original series, if I remember correctly.

Anyway, that’s Grand Noah clear.  Time to move on to San Ilia.

San Ilia is under attack from the mermaids.  I think this is a slight change to canon as the mermaid queen attacked Port Natalia in the original series.  Once again the wandering monsters are various mermaids from previous locations.

The new encounters are the mermaid general from the original series and a new mermaid knight.  There is also a mini-boss encounter blocking off the route to whoever is leading the mermaid encounter.  This is new girl Lorelei.  She offers to give us a nice bubbly bath massage, which is rather tempting...

Bubble bath soapy massage?  Sign me up!

Oh well, that’s what save’n’reload is for.

Leading the army is the mermaid princess from the original series – El.  She gets blasted back by a cannon and we confront her in the central square.

The littlest mermaid

Alice knows her mother has a hatred of humans from a Little Mermaid thing that didn’t work out too well and is sad that hatred has been passed down to her daughter.  El wants to prove she’s good enough to be next queen, which means beating us and taking the city.

Beating El is enough to call off the assault.

Now I spot the trend.  The deputies are leading the armies while the real queens are being held back as the inevitable boss fights in their own bases.  Unlike with the elves/fairies, I know where that is for the mermaids.  It’s on the road from Plansect to Gold Fort.

That’s two cities cleared.  Next is Grangold and spiders.

Again the random encounters are various spider girls from MQ:P [part 1].  There is a new type wandering around with their own map sprite (and also fighting the golem in the town centre).  They are a group of very kitsch arachnes drawn by the same artist who did the succubus harem.  I like them and like their Bad End and will be sure to show it off when we “lose” to them in the arachne base.

The deputy boss fight is more like a deputy boss rush as we fight first the tsuchigumo and then two of the arachne lord from the original series.  Unlike the elves and mermaids, the spider queen is here in person.  But we don’t get to fight her.  After we defeat the arachne lords, the spider princess shows up at the entrance to the castle.  She’s looking for the King of Grangold, who isn’t in the castle because it got blown up in the fight with alt!Tamamo.  The king is currently in his temporary warehouse HQ.  He emerges to blast away a few of the rank’n’file arachnes.  This draws the attention of the spider princess, who jumps over for their epic boss battle.

Hey, star of the story over here.  Shouldn’t you be fighting us, Miss Muffet?

We get another new spider girl to fight against instead – Atlach-Nacha.

A titty spider to go with the titty flies?

Woo, Clark Ashton Smith ref.  Atlach-Nacha was the spider god in one of his weird stories – “The Seven Geases”.  That story can be read here, but I wouldn’t get your hopes (or other parts) up.  Atlach-Nacha is male and conventionally monstery here.  A gender-flipped version did show up in an Alicesoft visual novel (that was porny).  Funny to see a Cthulhu mythos monster (that isn’t Cthulhu or a shoggoth) show up in such things.

I did have a “The Seven Geases” porn-parody type story/novel on my todo list.  Maybe that could be the original fiction serial I follow this series with?  (Spider girls, snake girls, one huge slime girl, plus one hapless protagonist.  Probably good for a laugh.)

Goddamn it, so many ideas.  So totally disorganised when it comes to writing them.

Anyway, back to Atlach-Nacha and... that’s a lot of tits.

Despite the fearsome name, she doesn’t even get proper boss music.  She does have a lot of tits, though...

She exploited our weak point...

I don’t think Atlach-Nacha is meant to be any kind of boss.  If you fight her properly rather than throwing the fight to see what she does with those many tits (she uses them to squirt aphrodisiac silk around Luka until he’s all cocooned up and spurting his life away in her cunt), you’ll find out she’s vulnerable to status combo tricks like trance/intoxicating pitcher and can be beaten in one turn.

In keeping with the previous two cities, we don’t get to fight the queen of the race as Spider Princess calls a tactical retreat.

That’s three cities clear.  We also get a new recruit as King of Grangold joins the party afterwards.

Last is Sabasa.  I’m a bit hazy on this one as I did bits of it out of sequence.

As you enter the city, Sara will run off citing a need to defend her people.  We have to take the slow way through Sabasa fighting vampires along the way.

Or rather, one vampire, as the only non-Loli-Bandit vampire we’ve seen so far is the generic vampire girl found in Grangold Desert.  She is joined by other non-random encounters – Conquista and Vendetta.  Later on we also get the Setouchi-special Elder Vampire.

There are two mini-boss fights required to free Sabasa.  Carmilla and Elizabeth show up from the original series.

Do you think they'd say yes to a threesome?

Carmilla is fought at the half-way point, which unlocks the way to fight Elizabeth deeper in the city.  Elizabeth has Sara trapped by what looks like a horde of vamps.  She taunts Sara by telling her she’s going to enslave the whole country.  At which point Sara reveals her heritage as the daughter of the sphinx.

Oh hello, does that mean we’re going to get Succubus Sara.

Oh yes.

That's the Sara we've been waiting for

After blasting away the minion vamps, she rejoins the party for the boss fight.  Again it’s like the previous three cities.  Defeat the lieutenants and the invasion is called off.  I guess the game is saving the vampire queen for the vampire base, wherever that actually is.

That’s all four cities saved.  So it’s time to return to Grand Noah to plan the next move... which we’ll do next post.

But before then, we might as well get to know Sara’s new succubus body better.

Totally worth a trip to Hades

-> Next: The Open Open Seas

6 comments:

  1. Sara has an interesting insult during her talk with Elizabeth.
    It turns out that in MGQ, vampires are an offshoot of succubi. She dismisses them as an inferior, dead-end mutation that has deviated from the succubus ancestor Minagi. Which was probably machine translated as something like "bewitching calm", fyi. All of the Six Ancestors' names are written in Kanji.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's a cool bit of background. Yup, that's the stuff I miss with machine translation. Really grateful to people filling in the gaps in the comments.

      Delete
  2. If you don't mind me asking, why do you occasionally refer to monsters as demons? Is it to contrast them with the angels?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. They seem fairly interchangeable in MGQ universe. Demons tend to be on the opposite side to Ilias and her angels. The angels are often fairly monstrous as well in this universe.

      Delete
  3. That spider girl ... mm mm! MGE has also included some Cthulhu mythos monsters, although they have all been pretty disappointing interpretations so far.

    Making that Seven Geases your next serial sounds good; I'm up for anything involving spider girls.

    ReplyDelete
  4. BillyMasakado02/02/2018, 09:14

    Yep totally worth that trip :) Succubus Sara is awesome.

    ReplyDelete