Let's Play Monmusu Quest: Paradox! part 17

The Gold Mines and Tunnels to Tartarus II

This is part 17 of my playthrough of Monmusu Quest: Paradox.  The first part of this lunacy began back here.

It turns out I was right to do the slug tower before the gold mines.  For the purposes of this blog anyway.  The gold mines are too short for a single post, but overlap nicely with tunnels to the next location.  They share most of the same monsters anyway.

The gold mines can be found north of Midas Village here:

As with the other dungeons so far there are three types of the monster girl.  Two are the returning Roper and Meda (I have no idea what she is – she seems to be a monster-girl-arized version of Dragon Quest’s Lunatick).

I was certain the roper girl would eat you in the castle regardless of happiness.  And that’s true of the 10-happiness scene.  She leads Luka off to a quiet part of the castle where she knows she won’t be disturbed and then wraps him up in tentacles and dissolves him into delicious meaty mush.

You really should know better than running off with the predatory girls, Luka.

The 100-happiness scene looks like it’s going to go exactly the same way.  Except at the end the roper girl does spit him out (metaphorically) telling him she doesn’t eat her friends.

Remember, always use safe sex, Luka.  Feed your monster girl plenty of meat beforehand.

The third monster girl in the gold mines is a ragamuffin girl wearing a pumpkin for a helmet.  Not my type.  She looks more waif than waifu.  She’s a wizard and an extremely squishy one.  She can occasionally use Silence on the whole party, not that it helps when Barnny is using her SP attacks to turn her into a pincushion.

The lump of gold is found at the bottom of the mine.  Walk into this passageway.

And it’s at the end of the tunnel.

Take the gold back to the dude in the weapon shop and boy does his selection improve.  Gold everything.  I’m guessing gold has different properties in MGQ-verse that make it have better stats than steel.  His new selection also simplifies a lot of the equipping.  If a party member can equip it then buy it as the gold stuff is better than everything available so far.  The only exceptions to that being the bow and wand found in blue chests.

Now, fully geared up in gold, it’s time to brave the dangerous path to the second Tartarus location.

At the time I was thinking I might have to switch the party around as abusing the XP gain of the Bondage Rope item combined with my tendency to keep grinding an area until I’d recruited everything and seen all the different drops had left my regular party feeling a little overpowered.  Running into the new monster girl, Candle Wax Girl, in the tunnels quickly disabused me of that notion.

Three of them glooped up the party and set everyone on fire.  Nice combination of fetishes for the Bad End – a slime girl made out of hot, molten wax.

They’re an annoying monster at this stage.  They’re quick and tend to act first with annoying binds.  They also have fire attacks that hit the entire party (Not so good when the highly flammable Vanilla is in the party).  They didn’t seem weak to pleasure attacks, or any of the Barnny the Hunter’s special attacks.  I wasn’t even sure what race they were.  I thought they might be some kind of slime girl.

They’re not.  They’re actually the first Ghost race the player encounters.  Despite using fire a lot it turns out it’s also their weakness.  Which sort of makes sense given that they’re made out of sentient wax.

I should have probably caught the hint when the chest outside the tunnels gave me an anti-fire accessory.

Putting Rami back in the party made this section a lot easier.  The candle girls are the only new appearance.  The other monsters are ropers and medas, with the occasional orc or rabbit girl in the outside sections.

On the other side the monsters go back to the standard leech girls and wolf girls found across the rest of the Ilias continent.  Before heading directly off to the second Tartarus pit Alice suggests resting in the ruined village to the north.

The village has been destroyed and looks similar to the ruins of alt!Iliasville.  There are only two buildings that can be entered – a ruined inn and the ruins of a cook’s house.  We know it’s a cook’s house as there are stories about this village once playing host to a legendary chef who was lost when the a catastrophe befell the village.  This is confirmed when Luka finds a stash of recipes.  Alice is very sad at the loss of a great cooking talent.

Also in the cook’s house is Ilias.  She’s also planning to investigate Tartarus II for similar reasons as us.  She believes it’s the path to a parallel world(s).  There’s some other stuff but I’ll probably have to wait for Dargoth’s full translation as the automated stuff was in gibberish mode.

Her slime girl retainer has a friendly chat with Lime.  Both are happy with their fun adventure.

Okay.  Tomorrow it’s time to descend into Tartarus II

Let's Play Monmusu Quest: Paradox! part 16

SLUGS!!!!!

Where we at now?  Part 16.  Man, and I bet we're 2.nothing% into the game as well.  I'm still going to be writing this when I'm old and my teeth are falling out.  The Monmusu Quest: Paradox playthrough first started back here.

Right, time to pack the wellies and waterproofs.  Things are going to get extremely slimy.

The first quest from Midas Village is to sort out the slug problem in Midas Village.  The source originates from a tower in the west.  This tower.

(by this point you might want to start using the various Encounter Half abilities/accessories.  I had four parties of lusty orcs, bee girls and other assorted monster girls throw themselves at my feet in the journey to the tower.  How there are any human males left in Ilias continent I have no idea.)

Right, slug girls.  When it comes to creating a sexy (YMMV) monster girl the standard approach is to start with the famous ones of myth – your mermaids, harpies, lamia and the like.  Then, if you're feeling creative, you can invent other types by splicing different organisms to sexy women.  Conceivably that could include slugs.  I mean we already have things like spiders and octopuses.  And slugs and octopuses are both molluscs after all.

But at what point does someone go, "You know, one slug girl isn't enough.  What this game really needs is more slug."

(says the person planning to write "Sandwiched by Slugs" later this year)

Slug tower is a whole load of more slug (but no snails funnily enough).  The original slug girl isn't present, presumably because she'd be woefully under-levelled at this point.  Instead we get two new designs.

Slugs tend to the goth end of the fashion market apparently.  Although the one in the nun habit seems to be legitimately into the worship of a god that hates her.  Which is fairly hardcore goth when you think about it.

(renounce the false Goth music and embrace your lord and saviour, Black Metal!)

That one's likely showing my age.

Ah that picture of the girl with the wide-open mouth from the promo material – it's sister slug's temptation attack.  And, in a surprise for this game, she just wants to wrap her slimy tongue around our cock rather than us.

The Bad End sees her go down on her knees between Luka's legs.  I could say something about altar boys and priests, but I suspect I'm already beyond my limit of allowed risqué material after the sections with Mini and the loli bandits.

Sister slug is very well behaved for an MGQ monster girl.  At one point in the Bad End it even looks like she's going to let us go afterwards.  Then she asks if we'd like to accompany her on a pilgrimage and that becomes Luka's new quest.  There are worse fates in this world.  Like the one about two paragraphs down.

Not sure I trust sister slug's mate, the yellowy one, though.  Something in the way she's licking her lips.  She seems a little too fond of meat.  Careful there, Luka, it's not always your semen the girls are after.

Ulp, too late.

Did I remember to warn you the MGQ series occasionally shows really gruesome Bad Ends where Luka is eaten alive by the monster girl in a really gruesome manner?  That one might have slipped my mind.

She also eats you alive back in the pocket castle if you request the wrong sex favour.

Really eats you, team-mate or not.  Luka has to make the trek back from Hades and respawns back at the gate to the castle.  This is the first monster girl that happens with I think.  It also surprised me as it had different artwork.  Up until then I'd assumed that most of the requests either duplicated the Bad Ends with slightly different dialogues or were new scenes like Lime's Slime Heaven.  Now I'm wondering what else I might have missed as most of the time I've been avoiding losing (walking back from town is annoying) because I figured I'd see the scenes in the castle after recruiting the monster girl.

Predation is just one of Elizabeth's (the carnivorous slug girl) five scenes back at the castle (six counting her Bad End).  That part of the game is a little random.  I think the only criteria determining how many scenes a particular monster girl gets is how enthusiastic their artist is for drawing them.

With Elizabeth you get a slimy paizuri scene

And various sex scenes

Including one that touches on the fact a lot of slugs are hermaphrodites

(although I suspect some could have quite happily gone without being shown that).

Kudos to the artist (I think it's UN_DO) for putting in that little bit extra.

At the top of the slug tower the slug boss is actually three bosses.  They're having sticky fun with some poor (jammy) lad.  He's nearly out of baby juice, so it's rather convenient Luka happened to come along at this precise moment…

The slug queen is a three-in-one boss.  She counts as a single target, but has three separate attacks.  Barnny's Land-Dweller Killer attacks whittle her down to no HP eventually.

After beating her Luka tells her about the slug epidemic in Midas Village.  The slug queens admit they might have got a little carried away with reproduction.  But it's okay, they'll just copulate for pleasure from now on.

That works, I suppose.

The slug queen(s) can be recruited to the party.  This requires Luka proving he has enough love for the slug race.  It can be done by feeding the original slug girl enough lettuce to get her happiness above 100.  She then gives you a slug medal which can be presented to the slug queens as proof.

The slug queens also like lettuce and their 100 happiness H-scene is oddly beautiful in a weirdly mystical way.  Certainly imaginative and worth a look.

(I did consider posting it here, but I'm also conscious that what I'm doing here could be seen as not much different to the posts of all the CGIs that appeared on some sites within a couple of days of Paradox coming out.  For that reason I will be deliberately omitting some material.  The artists and creators of Monmusu Quest: Paradox have done a good job.  Please support them by buying the game so they'll go on to make more.)

That's the slugs exterminated in as much as Luka ever exterminates anything.  Not that it makes any difference as Midas Village is still infested with slug girls.  Flora, the legendary maid, says that's okay.  It was the same last time.  The numbers dropped to manageable levels over the following year.  Poor slug girls, they die so young.  Anyway, that's the Maid job unlocked.

Tomorrow it's time to get some gold so the nice man in the metalsmith shop can make us some glittery new gear.

Let's Play Monmusu Quest: Paradox! part 15

The Medal Queen and Midas Village

We’re at part 15 of the Monmusu Quest: Paradox playthrough – the grim log of a hapless author destroyed by a JRPG.  The madness starts back here.

A bitty episode today, I’m afraid.  It’s more new locations discovered and endless NPCs to talk to.

Just north of the harpy tower there’s a little palace-type thing.  Entering puts us in a wood outside it, though.

A slug girl, earthworm girl and leech girl are hanging out outside a hut.  They like it here because it’s damp.  I think they’re all NPCs just here for flavour purposes, but it might be because I don’t have the right party composition to trigger further dialogue.  At this point Luka’s harem is already so big I doubt I’ll get a chance to try them all out, let alone level them up.  It’s like Pokémon all over again and I needed to learn MS Access to figure that out (yes, I was that geeky).

The house contains another battle-fucker – Meirin.  She’s some kind of martial artist, I think, and her technique is the titjob.  They must have run out of time on her artwork as it’s just the same sprite with a semen splash added at the end when Luka – predictably – fails to hold out.

If you do beat her you get some kind of martial arts scroll.  There are a number of accessories like this and I haven’t figured out what they do yet to be honest.

Carrying on north and we find some kind of teleporter that teleports us across the water to a small island.  The first structure (the one we’re teleported into) is the North Ilias Monastery.

I think this is another tutorial area.  There are various NPCs talking about advanced jobs and attributes.  This is a little worrying as I’m using every dirty trick I can think of to boost XP and Lime is still only a level 9 thief.  I’m guessing this will make sense later.  Maybe.  There’s some stuff about attributes and + systems that machine translation hasn’t a hope of making clear.  I guess experimentation is what it’ll have to be.

Outside the monastery and there’s one other structure on the island.  It’s a palace found in an oasis.  Sadly the monster girls are the same standard wandering monsters for the Ilias continent we’ve already seen many times before.

The structure next to the oasis is the palace of the Medal Queen.

This is where you can trade in all those small medals that keep turning up in various barrels and pots.  The trade list includes various items, job certificates and you can even ask the queen herself to join the party with enough medals.

That’s probably not happening for a while.  Currently I have a mighty 6 medals.  Three is enough to unlock the Noble job and that’s probably better than a sword I can’t use because of giving everyone in the party all the greedy jobs.

There doesn’t seem to be anything else to this area at the moment.

Next stop is the Midas Village.  That’s the next quest hub and it’s to the north-east.

Midas Village has a slug problem.  There are a ridiculous number of slug girls crawling around.  The old chap by the entrance explains it’s been a bad year and they have a bit of an epidemic of them at the moment.  He also fills in with other bits of information.  There’s a gold mine to the north (overrun with monster girls) and a famous but retired Maid lives in the village somewhere (the source of the certificate to unlock the Maid job).

There is definitely a slug girl problem.  The NPC normally charged with teleporting the player to places of interest is complaining because a slug girl is currently doing their job.  The preacher used to reset the respawn point has been replaced by a slug girl in a nun habit.  The normal preacher is over in the corner, apparently being ‘tended’ to by his own slug harem.

There’s even a slug girl roaming the cow fields to the west.

“Moo.  I’m a cow.”

Um, yes dear.

There’s a useful shop in this area.  The maid in the field (if you have recruited the orc girl she’ll be standing next to her) sells various meats.  These are useful for raising the happiness of the more predatory monster girls back in the pocket castle.

There is a battle-fucker.  She’s dressed as a maid and hangs around outside the house of the maid of legend.

She’s another handjob specialist.  No wonder monster girls are so tempting – do none of the human girls shag?

Actually, you’ll want to boost Luka’s HP high enough to win this battle-fuck as soon as possible.  Her reward is a useful accessory that gives 1.5x Job XP with no drawback.

There are two quests originating from Midas Village.

The first is from the blacksmith in the shop.  He needs a chunk of gold from the mines in the north.  Fetch that and it will unlock a whole lot of shiny new gear.

The second is given by the legendary maid.  Back when she was in her prime there was a similar slug girl outbreak.  It originated from a tower out in the west.  She went there and defeated the slug queen responsible for flooding the land with an epidemic of slug girls.  She thinks the same thing has happened again and tasks Luka and party with defeating the slug queen.  As a reward she’ll hand over the certificate that unlocks the maid job.

So more setup today rather than frantic fighting and fucking.

The guide I’ve been following (yes, I know it’s a cheat but as the alternative was wandering the realm without the faintest idea of what to do, I did what I had to do) suggests doing the gold mine first.  I did check out both locations and as the monster girls found in the slug tower appear before the monster girls from the gold mine in the monsterpedia I think the tower is supposed to be the next location.

So join us tomorrow for sexy… uh… slug girls?  It’s going to be slimy and icky, isn’t it…

Oh, and if you're enjoying this so far and on the off chance you want to show your appreciation with a small financial contribution.  I don't have a Paypal button or a Patreon account.  Instead I ask people to check out my ebooks.  This is better.  I still get money and you get more wickedly sexy content along the same lines as MGQ and similar games.  The books can be found on Amazon and Smashwords.  Please give them a look if you've liked what you've read here so far.

(really should have picked a blog post with more sex in it before putting in the ebook plug)

Let's Play Monmusu Quest: Paradox! part 14

The Harpy Tower

The epic playthrough of Monmusu Quest: Paradox continues.  The first part was posted back here.

Currently we’re looking for the harpies as they’ve all buggered off somewhere.  Some of the folks think it might be to a mysterious tower to the north.  Before then we might as well check out (translation: steal all their stuff while they’re buggered off) the harpy village.  It’s the big tree next to the village.

The harpy village is a ghost town.  It’s also a little weird to navigate as there are hidden paths around the back of the tree that take the player higher up.  If you’re wondering how you’re supposed to reach the higher branches, look for the sign post and then walk into the tree trunk.

Right at the top we find Nero drinking tea (out of his own cup – he brought it with him) in the chief’s house.  He has the answer to why all the harpies have vanished.  They’ve been infected with a virus that turns them into uncontrollable nymphomaniacs.

Hrm, isn’t this MGQ-verse?  I thought every monster girl was already an uncontrollable nymphomaniac.

Anyway, because the infected pose a risk to the humans around them, the queen has quarantined all the harpies off in a tower to the north.  The weird thing about the virus is everyone thought it extinct thousands of years ago.  More evidence of timey-wimey weirdness likely originating from the Tartarus pits.  If Luka can travel into the future of a parallel world then so too can ancient travellers from the past.  One of them must have brought the virus with them.

Nero, who clearly knows way more than he’s letting on, has a cure.  It’s the rare fruit of some kind of world tree.  I don’t think that location was in the first series.  Might be wrong though.

Armed with a cure, we toddle off north in search of the tower.

There’s a big forest and a whole lot of nothing in this region.  The monsters are the same bee girls, orcs, rabbit girls and sparrow daughters as before.  The tower is next to a lake at the north fringe of the big forest.

We knock on the door and tell them we have a cure.  A harpy opens the door.

“Forget the medicine.  Let’s have sex!”

This will not be straightforward.

Actually, the tower is fairly straightforward.  And a little dull.  There’s nothing new here.  The harpy and harpy twins return from the first game.  The other wandering monsters are the same sparrow daughters we’ve already fought (and fucked).

I think I might have got a little lucky with having the right people in the party.  Harpies have annoyingly high evasion and dodge most attacks.  I found this out later when I returned to the tower to try and recruit the harpy twins.  I’d noticed that the Slime race picks up a couple of anti-harpy skills around level 6 or 7.  I figured that was a hint the game was expecting Bunni and Lime to be useful in this section.  Unfortunately, damage bonuses only apply if you actually hit the target and the slimes are about as accurate as the England cricket team after a night on the piss.

The tower has three floors and on the top floor is a returning boss from the first series – the lovely harpy queen.

Despite desires on spiriting Luka off to be her babies-forever husband, the harpy queen was (sort of) one of the good guys.  Given that the human and harpy village are already co-existing, it was going to take something like this nympho-inducing plague to give Luka a reason to fight her.  She does try to fight the effects, but it’s Luka, and every monster girl in the planet wants his man meat.

As with the first series, the harpy queen is the first to employ a Counter stance (where attacking sets the player up for an instant loss).  I was wondering if Paradox would bring that back and how it’d be implemented with the party fights.  The game asks me if I want to attack and I wisely decide to hang back while queen harpy is showing her funky moves.

After the fight we find out that the quarantine is going to have to continue.  More powerful individuals need more of the cure and the harpy queen is so powerful that curing her would leave nothing left for her people.  Her solution is to stay in self-imposed quarantine.

This is also a convenient excuse to leave the harpy tower open for future visits.  If you didn’t pick up either Reina (the normal harpy) or Pina & Pii (the harpy twins), you can come back later.  I’d advise much later – the harpies are a damn pain to hit.

I’m not 100% on it, but I don’t think the harpy queen can be recruited this chapter.  I think this is a quest for future chapters.  It will be interesting to see if she’s been given any new H-scenes.  In the castle Reina and Chun (sparrow daughter) only have one request scene at 10 happiness.  Pina and Pii have three (they like bananas) and I think the 50 happiness might be new, although I can’t remember exactly how many scenes they had in the original series.

Back at the now populated harpy village and there’s some more story background.

In the harpy queen’s house one of the harpies tells Luka and others that a trio of powerful demons visited the queen right before the epidemic started.

Oh hello, first sighting of the succubus trio.

Morrigan (her name translates to ‘harpoon cancer’ amusingly):

Lilith:

And Astaroth:

Machine translation doesn’t help too much with what was said, or it might be that it was too late at night and my eyes had gone blurry.  Alice is a bit surprised at the names.  Sometimes demons might be given the names of a trio of infamous and powerful succubi from the past, but it’s considered bad form.

(uh oh, I think these might be the original name holders)

Alice decides the best plan from here is to investigate the second Tartarus hole in the east, but as it’s a bit difficult – and dangerous – to get to, they should visit Midas village in the north and get some better equipment.

Before then there are a few minor sub-quests to fill in now that the harpies have come back.

Talking to the harpies in the item shop with Vanilla will expand her inventory in the pocket castle item shop.  Harpy wings (an item to teleport to any town previously visited) will be available to buy.

Rami, the ludicrously busty imp, wants to fly.  She’s not too good at it (“too much air resistance” as Remi and Rumi joke).  Talking to a harpy in the inn will suggest she jump off the top of the mountain the slimes inhabit next to Iliasville.

With the harpies now back a couple of new characters can be recruited.  Tiny Lamia (her name is even Teeny) can be recruited from the Sutherland Inn in Iliasburg.  She’s of the Lamia race and likely the first recruit with the Maid job.  She also takes on running the inn in the pocket castle and the party can rest there for the ultra-cheap price of 1G.

The unfortunate harpy, Pyhar, can also now be recruited from Pornburg providing you have Amira in the party.

That’ll do for today.  I’ll pick it up again tomorrow.

Let's Play Monmusu Quest: Paradox! part 13

Happiness Village and where have all the harpies gone?

And we’re up to number 13 in the Monmusu Quest: Paradox playthrough.  I posted the first part back here.

Last time the story kicked up a notch as Luka and party went through Tartarus and found themselves in a parallel version of MGQ universe where Luka didn’t challenge Granberia in Iliasburg and they saw the consequences of this as the future world was scoured clean by Ilias’s angels (also be worth remembering that this is information only the player would know – Paradox!Luka also didn’t challenge Granberia in Iliasburg because the White Rabbit was there instead.  We still don’t know what the hell is going to happen in the third, Paradox, universe.)

Back in their timeline and Alice calls a war council to plan what to do next.  Once again you’ll have to forgive my lack of Japanese reading comprehension for not being able to fill in the exact plot.  From machine translation the gist of it is Alice is going to continue to hunt the White Rabbit for answers, but they should also look for Luka’s father, Marcellus, to find out why Luka is able to do things he really shouldn’t be able to do.  In the meantime the plan is to head off to the harpy village to investigate rumours of mysterious disappearances there.

Before we do, there’s another quick job quest to complete.  Before the journey into Tartarus an engineer at the excavation site asks to see an example of the unusual technology that can be found in Tartarus.  We’ve been through Tartarus and picked up some unusual items.  Showing them to him will earn the certificate to unlock the engineer job.

This is where my notes and first impressions from two different start to get jumbled up.  As I talked about back here, Paradox has a main story progression that requires tagging the correct flags in order.  Miss a flag and you can still head off to the different parts of the map, but some dungeons are closed off and the NPCs required to advance the story don’t appear.

This happened to me first time around as I didn’t find Amira and wandered cluelessly through the wilds.  Back then I was using the returning monsters from MGQ as a clue for which area I should be in at any particular time.  So far they've appeared in roughly the same order as they showed up in the original series.

This seemed to hold as bee girls started showing up when I went west.  Luka (obviously) succumbs to their temptation attack and gets licked all over with a long tongue.

This was also one of the spots where I thought the re-use of scenes from the original didn’t quite fit.  During the Bad End the bee girl taunts Luka about him enjoying the taboo act of putting his willy in hot monster girl pussy as this is against Ilias’s decrees.  That held true for the original series, but in Paradox-world Ilias hasn’t been seen for 30 years and humans seem a lot more relaxed about co-existing with monsters.

There are two brand new monster girls in this area – orcs and sparrow daughters.

The sparrow daughters are wearing animal costumes.  That seems so vanilla and unlike MGQ I immediately suspect something must be up.

But no, they are actual harpies.  Losing gives the typical harpy, babies forever ending.

As common for a lot of hentai games, orcs in MGQ-verse world seem to be a type of pigman (or rather pigwoman).  They’re lewd, crude and very much on the voluptuous side.  The first time around they also disabused me of the notion this was the correct place to be as my party got battered by some solid club swings.

They also have curly vaginas that are very good for getting men to come apparently.  Luka at least gets to experience some nice sex before being dragged off into slavery.

A fun thing.  After recruiting an orc girl (Hip) to the party, as long as she isn’t selected for one of the eight party slots, she starts showing up in the towns and villages being orc-y and rowdy (apart from Pornburg – that’s too much even for her and you’ll find her cowering up on the hill).  This can block the gambler off if you manage to recruit an orc before carrying out the ‘look for Amira’ quest in IliasBurg, but is easily fixed by putting her in the party.

Amira also does something similar, but with a sub-quest.  She hides in each of the settlements and finding her rewards the player with stats-boosting items.

The next settlement is Happiness Village and in Paradox everything is flipped from MGQ.  In MGQ the village had a critical shortage of men because the harpies had carried them all off for breeding purposes.  In Paradox it’s the harpies that have buggered off somewhere and it’s all the men that are upset that their harpy wives have all run off.  I don’t think Ilias’s decrees are taken very seriously in this village (and another reason to regret not taking Ilias – her impotent anger at being on the ground and seeing what humans and monster girls are getting up to with each other would probably be very amusing).

The battle-fuck location is up in the top-right corner of the village.

Hmm, did Luka just pay for a handjob off a boy?  Oh well, I suppose it broadens the mind.

There’s also a useful fairy blacksmith in the village.  She can imbue some armour pieces with wind stones.  This becomes very useful when we come to fight harpies.

According to rumour, the harpies have all flown off and secluded themselves in an ancient tower up in the north.

Guess that’s where we’ll be off to tomorrow then.

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.