Let's Play Monmusu Quest: Paradox! part 35

Abandoned Village (+ that cutscene)

Another day, another post of the seemingly never-ending Monmusu Quest: Paradox playthrough.  This game is certainly value for money.  This is part 35.  Part 1 can be found here.

First up, there's a bit I missed off in San Ilia.  I would have included it in the Side-Quest round-up of a couple of days ago had I spotted it sooner.

The first time visiting San Ilia there is a staircase that's blocked by a guard.  At some point he stands out of the way (I'm not sure when – it might be after doing the guard duty quest for the pope).

Those steps lead down to some kind of secret tech lab.  The scientist dude will give you some more machine type things.  I think they're for the Engineer job, but I don't know for sure as I haven't made much use of that job at all so far.  Talking to one of the dudes will also give you the item required to unlock the Gunner job.

Back to the main storyline and it's time to head west.  We've already done the Monte Carlo stuff, so it's time to continue on along the road.  Further along is the abandoned fishing village.  All the inhabitants have vanished.  There's an investigative team from Sabasa trying to figure out where everyone went.  The only clue is a note saying they've gone to live with God.

Backtracking to the east along the south side of the mountain range reveals the entrance to some tunnels.

Here was where I was a little unsure of the sequencing.  After leaving one of the houses in the abandoned village Alice suggests pushing on towards Sabasa.  The walkthrough I have suggests going back to the cave.  What I did do originally was head out across the desert.  Then I noticed the monsters in the caves appear earlier in the Monster Library (this game's monsterpedia).  As a result I've rejigged the playthrough notes a little and put things back in the sequence I think they're supposed to be done.

Right, so we're looking for some missing villagers.  Also, the item needed to recruit Chrome is supposed to be around here as well.

There's another new encounter in the caves – centipede girl.

She's another returning monster girl appearing out of sequence.  I think she originally appeared in the Forest of Nope (Plansect Village) in the second chapter.  I don't know why she has another three centipede heads sticking out of her ass.  Maybe her inspiration is more from a mythological centipede demon rather than MGQ's usual approach of grafting porn star body onto whatever living organism the encyclopaedia happened to fall open on.

The cave loops around on itself.  Near the end there's a choice to carry on to the Puppet-master's Tower or investigate the lower levels of the caves.

We exit the caves and step out onto a plateau.  To confuse matters, the monsters that appear here are a jump above the monsters in the desert on the way to Sabasa.  It doesn't matter as there's not much to do here, yet.

Entering the Puppet-master's Tower triggers a cutscene.  This caught me by surprise as the guide I'm working from said the tower was locked and doesn't open in this chapter.  I'm not sure if it was because the person writing the original guide wanted to avoid spoilers, or if the cutscene only triggers under certain conditions (Looking for the item Chrome wants.  Currently not having the item Chrome wants).  Luka is met by a mysterious masked figure.  Luka asks if they have the item Chrome wants and is told it can be found at the bottom of the caves before being evicted from the tower by a mysterious magical force.

The masked figure is either a mysterious figure known as Shadow Pongee or a servant of them.  Shadow Pongee is a powerful demon that keeps themself to themself.  Alice imparts what she knows on them, and also mentions that her mother warned her not to mess with Shadow Pongee.

Then there's a cutscene in the tower, but it's a bit spoilery, so I'll shift it to the end of the post.

As for Demon Thread Chrome wants, it's in a chest at the bottom of the caves.

I wasn't able to find the villagers.  I think they might be in the tower (which is now locked).  This is probably not good for them.  Mad scientists need their spare parts…

Now we have the Demon Thread we can recruit Chrome.  Recruiting Chrome also recruits her buddy, Frederikastein.  Chrome is like Eva in that she has a ton of different job levels.  Her stats also reveal what she actually is.  I've been wondering that from the first MGQ series.  Her race is given as Imp, which is a little surprising as sex-obsessed imps develop into the even more sex-obsessed succubi.  This probably explains why Chrome is only a level four imp.  She's too interested in playing around with dead body parts and being little Miss Herbert West.

Next up it's time to head off into the deserts.

..

And now for that spoilery cutscene.

Back in the Puppet-master's Tower the masked figure is up in the throne room.  Then we get our first sighting of Black Alice in a very literal example of 'power behind the throne'.

Black Alice is still unequivocally evil.  Oh, wait.  Did I catch that right?  This Black Alice sounds like the same Black Alice from the original story.  She mentions how being infused with the 'White Rabbit' (In MGQ this was an experimental mixture of holy and demon elements that turned already monstrous monster girls into Resident Evil-esque abominations) was not enough to defeat the unblessed hero (Luka, in the original series).

Then we get a whole load of brand new boss characters as the game introduces some new sub-bosses for Black Alice.  I don't think TTR has even spoiled any of these on his website or blog.

I was too busy taking screenshots to catch names or details on them.  I also wasn't paying attention enough to spot if these were existing boss monster girls or artificial creatures created by Shadow Pongee to mimic mythological monster girl deities.

And that's not all of it either.  Shadow Pongee has been a very busy mad scientist.  She's been using a fusion of zombie and doll techniques to resurrect previous monster lords.

There's the 9th:

The 10th and 11th (combined into one because much of their bodies was missing):

And even Black Alice's own grandmother, the 6th:

Little Alice, I think you have a lot of unresolved issues.

As for Luka, it looks like a boss rush through the entire Monster Lord lineage is in our future.

I think this is TTR's way of saying, "What, you thought I was running out of ideas.  Look, still got all these."

Let's Play Monmusu Quest: Paradox! part 34

Forest of Spirits (More Spoilers ahoy)

This is a daily series documenting my playthrough of monster girl hentai game Monmusu Quest: Paradox.  If you've just joined, the first part can be found back here (and then there are a lot of parts to read through).

It's time to head off to the Forest of Spirits to find and recruit the first of the elemental spirits – Sylph.  This is close to a direct re-run of the original series.  The monsters are also the same.  There are:

The twin fairies.

Assorted fairies.  There are six of these and they attack in various combinations of three.  When recruited all six are counted as a single character.  This is the same as how it was with the zombies in Chrome's mansion.  I suspect UN_DO's lamias in the Sphinx's pyramid and the slime girls in Undine's fountain will likely be treated the same way.

Elves.  As well as new addition, Brownies.

For the brownies, because there are two of them they get two attacks.  The same is true for the twin fairies.  Because of this it's possible to get some annoying fights where the opponents have more attacks than Luka's party.

Fairies do have a minimise magic spell, but as the negative status wears off at the end of combat it's not something to worry about.  My party at the time was heavy on pyromaniac magicians, and shrinking them didn't seem to affect the boominess of their spells at all.

Elf's temptation scene is… well… tempting.

I wish they'd done it like this for more of the monster girls.  Most of the time the art change, if any, seems to come after selecting 'Please do naughty things to me.'

NPC fairies hint about a scary monster wandering the woods.  That was Chimera Dryad in the first series.  It's hard to see how it could be in Paradox as Promestein, the mystery figure from the first MGQ chapter, is on our side (maybe) this time.

Sylph is at the end of the forest, up in the north.  She's fun and playful, but we still have to fight her to prove our worth in wielding her.

The fight is straightforward enough (I had both Remi and Rami in the party, and imps are resistant to wind magic).

Right, we're about to go into spoilerific territory again.  If you'd rather wait to be surprised when playing the game yourself, I'd skip the following section and rejoin us tomorrow.

..

..

The walkthrough I've been following has some ominous lines for this part of the story.

-Fight and recruit Slyph at the end of the forest
-Watch a cutscene
-Facepalm
-Reminisce about the quality of part 3's writing

The music goes ominous and a mystery sprite shows up.  Given the walkthrough comments I wonder if the game is going to punk us and have it turn out to be stupid and non-threatening.

Not Chimera Dryad.  Kinda looks threatening.

It's some kind of berserker armour.  It screams 'Angel!' a lot.  And then 'Extinction!'  Then it attacks with a cool battle theme.

It's another hopeless boss fight.  The berserker armour wipes the floor with us in next to no time.  It's about to follow-through and finish us off for good when Nero steps in.

He's not alone.  Alice the 17th is there as well.  She asks if Luka and his party are okay and whether she can leave the crazy armour to elder brother.

Wait, what?!  Elder brother.

If Alice the 17th is Luka's daughter from the original MGQ-verse then this is a pretty strong implication Nero is Luka's son.  This is in keeping with the end of MGQ, where Alice was expecting twins – one a human boy, the other a demon girl.

Very interesting.

Alice (17th) spirits the party to safety while Nero hangs around to fight the armour.  Nero looks pretty badass.

Yep, ridiculously badass.  We get to control him for the fight and he's about a level bazillion and something.  So many options.  I get him to throw comets at the berserker armour.  I remember that being good in Final Fantasy 7.

It's a shame the artwork for the armour is a bit iffy.  I can see it's trying to draw on the same melted-angel weirdness as Luka's sword from the original series.  The colours and contrast don't really work.

Berserker armour takes a lot of comets to the face before going down.

Then it's time for more cutscene.

This time I think we're in the parallel world.  Their Micaela is explaining to Luka and Alice the origins of both the world and Luka.  Ilias and the first monster lord were created out of opposing light and dark elements.  Luka's mother was an angel.  She was engaged in the first revolt against Ilias and fled to live as a mortal on the world below.  She fell in love with Marcellus, Luka's father, and the rest – as they say – is history.

In the parallel MGQ-world anyway.  This world's Micaela has already met an untimely end.  Luka's dreams reveal the truth and he wakes up with the realisation of his not-quite-human lineage.  This causes an in-game change as it opens up the Lowly Angel race for him.

Sylph reminds him she's in Luka's head.  And is also outside in the castle grounds.  I still haven't figured out how the elemental spirits work in Paradox.  I'll have to look at Luka's skill menu a little closer.

I'm not sure what the walkthrough guide found facepalm-worthy about the cutscene.  The awkwardness of the dream revelation of Luka's half-angel nature, maybe?

Anyway, Alice comes in and suggests it's time to head for Sabasa.  As it's a long distance away across deserts, wastelands and mountains she suggests we go to Monte Carlo first.

Ah, we might have done things a little out of sequence here, given we've already done the Monte Carlo quests.  Oh well, let's press on further westwards… tomorrow.

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.

Let's Play Monmusu Quest: Paradox! part 32

The Hunt for Eva (Just how many skills do you have?!)

Hello and welcome to part 32 of the epic Monmusu Quest: Paradox playthrough (the first part can be read here).  I seem to have slipped to later in the day for the updates.  I'll try and get on top of that.

Last up we visited the slums of Monte Carlo and a wannabe superhero sent us off on a mission to track down the succubus who's been stalking the back alleys.  We agreed for truth and justice and other hero-y things.  And not because our target is a succubus and can screw our brains out in more ways than we can count.  Honest.  Ahem.

Succubus Eva is hiding out in some hills close to the slums.  I guess that's these hills.

New area means new monster girls.  Tarantula girl and Minotauress come back from the previous series.  Minotauress is very eager to tell us how much she likes eating beef even though she knows it's sort of like cannibalism.  I'm not sure of the logic behind this, but she has a ginormous axe so I'm not going to argue.

There are some new monster girls.  Bandersnatch:

And Sabotless:

That's the name spat out by the machine translator.  I don't have the slightest idea what that's supposed to mean or what she is.  She doesn't appear to be any organism cross I can recognise and I don't recognise her from mythology either.  At first I thought she was an Insect, then I recruited one and saw she was a type of Scylla.  Turns out my first instinct was partially correct as a dig into her Jobs & Races reveals she's a dual-race Insect Scylla.

She wants to be pirate, I think.  Her temptation move has its own artwork.

It's a little… toothy for my tastes.

Her Bad End is also a little scary.  She threatens to bite Luka's dick off if he ejaculates prematurely.  I'm not sure that's the problem here, love.  To be honest I think Luka deserves a medal and a long and successful career in the porn industry for managing to stay hard through all this.

It turns out she's only playing (and the Bad End is even more playing).  That's in keeping with the overall style of the MGQ series.  Despite the vore and other squickness, the artwork never depicts Luka being mutilated or actually shrivelling up like a raisin as a monster girl sucks all his fluids out.

(I'd have written a scene with her biting it off.  You know I would.  That's because I have a black cancerous mass of utter sickness squatting in my intelligence.  Make your readers worry the turn of each page might result in a landmine going off in their face.  That's the fun of writing.  Hyuk hyuk.)

Eva is easy to find.  Just go straight north after entering the hill section and you'll come across her tent.

Eva is living on hard times as the party members note.  Then it's a fight.  Eva has a similar temptation attack to the first series where she turns around and reveals her ass.

Resist, Luka, resist.

After winning the fight Luka tries to get Eva to stop molesting the inhabitants of Monte Carlo.  Eva has a huge strop about how things are so hard for her at the moment and forces her way into the party.

Sure Eva, you can come along with us.

Blimy.  Eva has been around.  There's an obvious joke at her circumstances in that she's a maxed-out, level 10 Unemployed when she joins the party.  A check of her Jobs & Races reveals she has tons of job levels all over the place.  Flirt, maxed out.  Fortune Teller, maxed out.  Levels in Cook, Nurse, Prostitute, Thief and Maid.  Eva has clearly been around the block and back again.  As her trait is Dexterous Poor Succubus, she can also use all of these skills regardless of her current job.  This makes her close to the ultimate support character, like all the loli bandits merged into a single character.  Although all this versatility does come with the drawback she might not always follow orders.

Turns out Eva is a very talented woman.  She has many skills.  Like... um... this:

And this:

And this:

And this:

And don't forget this:

Or this:

And even this:

*raises eyebrows*  What is it with the armpit sex?

Oh yes, Eva has a bunch of skills that are an… ahem… asset to the party.

(Now if you'll excuse me I need a good lie down and several bottles of zinc pills.)

Back in Monte Carlo, Kaiser rewards us by unlocking the Hero of Justice job.  She also reveals her other role as a battle-fucker.  Examine her costume thoroughly, refrain from soiling it and she'll reward you with the Burning Soul(?) accessory.

I said there'd be more sex this time.

Tomorrow I'll clean up a bunch of side quests before we head off to find our first elemental spirit.

Hmm, given that this post does have a ton of sex, I reckon this might be a good time to sneak in a plug.  Do you like sexy succubi like you've seen so far?  You'll find plenty more hiding within the pages of my books.

Let's Play Monmusu Quest: Paradox! part 31

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