Let's Play Monmusu Quest: Paradox! part 43

Lucia's Tower (Introducing Edwina Fleshlight-Fingers)

We're at part 43 of my Monmusu Quest: Paradox playthrough.  If you're fresh here and don't know what the fuss is about, I'd suggest starting here.

Last up we had a choice between two mad sorceresses/alchemists and went with the one with the bigger tits, Lucia.  As people have pointed out, this was probably not the correct choice given her tendency to feed you to her giant grub pet if you ask for a bit of nookie back at the castle.

The tits are a lie.

The grub is the truth.

Oh well, at least we've resolved the little civil war down in this grubby (sorry!) little corner of the world to both Sara and Alice's satisfaction.  Alice thinks it's time to go and contract the second of the elemental spirits (rather embarrassingly, I still haven't figured out how to use Sylph correctly so far).  Sonya also lets us know that the town further north, Saloon, makes some strong crystal weapons that will be handy when it comes to exploring the third Tartarus pit.

Before then there is another location we haven't visited yet – Lucia's tower.

The tower is to the south of Witch Hunt Village.  As the war is over, Lucia's forces – a succubus nurse, cute l'il oni and slime girl with very big hands – are happily supping tea to the left of the entrance.

Normally that would be that, but Paradox as a game is very careful to make sure there are no Lost Forevers.  Rather than force the player to do enough finangling between Lily and Lucia so that they have an option to recruit both sides' forces, it takes the pure gameplay decision of just opening up her tower afterwards and treating it as a generic dungeon.

The tower is a bit of a maze with plenty of loot stashed in chests (and no fucking pots!).  There's no story part to be done here as we've already recruited Lucia, but there are three new monster girls to add to Luka's Harem (as well as further chances to recruit the Worm Villager and Iron Maiden if you haven't already got them).

The first is another out-of-sequence returner, the succubus nurse from chapter three.

She's the first to put the highly dubious incontinent state on characters.  She had quite a variety of artwork in MGQ: Chapter 3 if I remember correctly, which will probably mean a lot of different request moves in the castle.  Unfortunately, one of those probably features her using that giant syringe as a suction pump.  It will be good to have a trained nurse doctor in the castle… maybe.

Then there are two new brand new monster girls.  First up there's the spunky little oni.

In keeping with her mythological heritage she's one of many club specialists that can be utilised.  Her temptation move is quite sweet as well.

"Let's have sex!" makes for a refreshing change over "I'm going to swallow you and flood you in digestive juices."

The other is a specialised slime girl/automata cross with sex toys for fingers.

Edwina Fleshlight-Fingers was made to harvest sperm from either willing or unwilling donors.  Because of her protean nature she can change the shape of her fingers to match her 'partners's' specifications exactly.  Every sperm bank should have one.

Her Bad End has her give us a comprehensive milking with her squishy fingers.

Lucia might be the badder girl, but her forces seem a little more pleasant and less toothy than Lily's.

Let the Lily vs. Lucia debate rage on.

There's not much story in this section as we already cleaned that up going through Lily's mansion.  I suppose I could have been more thorough and used a side save to check out the alternate pathway, but to be honest I'm only barely keeping on schedule and the game is grindy enough as it is.

Hmm, an earlier finish does give me the perfect opportunity to plug my books again.  Check them out if you like reading about bad girls giving out sexy bad ends.  And only some of them eat people, honest.

Tomorrow its time to return to the desert in search of Gnome.

Let's Play Monmusu Quest: Paradox! part 42

Lily's House of Fun (Ah, Fuck! Pot!)

Welcome to part 42 of my Monmusu Quest: Paradox playthrough (for part one, go here).  Last off we were left with a choice – Lily or Lucia.  Mad sorceress/alchemist crazy or... uh, mad sorceress/alchemist crazy.

For this playthrough, and having no real clue as to the various benefits and drawbacks of either, I decided to side with Lucia.  She sounded slightly more reasonable than Lily.  I was also basing it on what I knew of the characters in the original series, not that that's relevant as both characters are slightly different to their MGQ counterparts.

Also, Lucia has the bigger tits.

Caveman snark aside, I doubt there's a correct answer here.  TTR loves playing around with shades of grey (no, not those Shades of Gray!).  It will be interesting to see if this choice has later repercussions in further chapters.

It also gives the game a little bit of replayability (Ha, like there isn't already with a 100+ roster of characters!).  This time up I picked Alice and Lucia.  When the English translation comes out I'll run with Ilias and Lily.

After we inform Lily we're here to punch her lights out, she sensibly uses her magic to chuck us out of the front door of her mansion.  It then becomes a conventional dungeon location.

In one of the rooms to the left I notice two chests.  One of them is suspiciously placed.  Obviously a mimic.  Now let's take a look in these pots first...

Oops.  I should have been more concerned about the pots.

Honey Pot is an upgraded mimic.  She has a similar suite of attacks – the one difference being a lash-all tentacle attack instead of mimic's devour attack.  As with mimic, she's designed to be way harder than the party the first time she's encountered.

And she is.  Luka can go toe to toe and his anti-ghost heroism attack in particular does a lot of damage.  The rest of the party (particularly the back line crippled with Bondage Rope) can't.  And...

At least she's not as predatory as mimic.  Her Bad End is to soak Luka in her ecstasy honey and squeeze out his seed forever.  Those are usually considered the better MGQ Bad Ends.

Ah, fuck! Pot! indeed.

A quick jog back to the mansion, some more exploration and...

Ah, fuck! Pot!

Okay, that's enough pot fucking.  The Honey Pots are a bit too hard for the current party.  I think we'll leave off checking any pots for treasure until we've levelled up the rest of the party a bit.

Monster girl encounters are the same as encountered in Lily's mansion in the previous series.  So we get the weird'n'wonderful iron maidens ( \m/ ) and suck vores.

Despite their unusual appearance, the suck vores are female.  TTR had to add a scene to the original MGQ showing a girl transforming into one just to show that.  I've also been told they're adorably cute when you recruit them, but as of writing this I haven't managed to recruit one to verify this.  Even with 100 affection and a 2x Recruit Chance ability on Luka thanks to the Demon Trainer job they're (and this is true for pretty much all the monster girls in Lily's mansion) still coy.

The new monster girl is one that was previewed on TTR's site previous to Paradox coming out.  I'd forgotten she was coming up to be honest.  Both me and machine translator make a hash of trying to figure out what her name is, so I'm just going to go with Bitey Scylla for now.

She is disconcertingly toothy.  In her Bad End she advises Luka to stay quiet and not struggle otherwise things might get bitey.

Hmm, sit back and let her suck all your man juice out, or struggle and get bitten in places we'd rather not imagine teeth being near, ever.  Talk about Hobson's Choice (or not, I'm getting my metaphors wrong – the correct one I meant is Morton's Fork.  Or is it Sophie's Choice.  Yeah, let's quit while I'm behind and move on.  And not think about teeth.)

The worm villager also shows up, but she appears to be a fairly rare encounter.

There are some steps leading downstairs, but trying to go down them results in the party being teleported to the first floor instead.  There's a crystal-ball-shaped item in a chest on the first floor here

that Alice informs us will be able to break the magic on the steps down.

The steps take us down into Lily's dungeon.  Her mind is clearly not in a good place.

We find her in her study at the end of short corridor.  She says she acts for the oppressed and that we can still change our minds.  I consider it, mainly because I know Lucia's area is the tower to the south of the village and I'm not sure if beating Lily here locks it away from the player for good.  I've got a previous save anyway, so it's time for a battle.

Hmm, Lily, don't you think this is a little forceful for a temptation attack.

Near the end she makes another plea for us to change our minds.  She mentions how Lucia has been her assistant ever since she was a small girl.  The game gives three option and to be honest, machine translation doesn't make any of them that clear.  I go with the second option, which results in a fight to the end.

Afterwards Lily acknowledges her defeat, but rather than her join the party as has happened with every fight so far, the game ominously tells us Lily has lost her mind.  As suspected, we can recruit either Lily or Lucia but not both unless in NG+ or hacking the game.

Going back to Lucia she tells us Lily had become obsessed with the voices of the oppressed and it had driven her mad.  Then her portrait changes to something a little more sinister and she says something I didn't catch but causes Luka to give the "............." response.

Oops, did we fuck up after all.

My worries about Lucia's area being locked out should the player side with her turn out to be unfounded.  Paradox as a whole has been very careful to make sure every area can be returned to by the player.  On beating Lily, Lucia's tower in the south opens up.  We'll have a nose around there tomorrow.

Let's Play Monmusu Quest: Paradox! part 41

Witch Hunt Village (The Choice)

Welcome to part 41 of my Monmusu Quest: Paradox playthrough.  The first part of this insanity can be found back here.

Currently we're off to Witch Hunt Village to play peacemaker in demon civil war.  It's not the easiest place to get to as we have to circle around the edge of the mountain range to the north.

The northern deserts have slightly different monsters.  Crocodile girls and cobra girls from Sphinx's pyramid become regular encounters.

Once we get off the sands it's time to see some brand new monster girls.  Big Spider.

Big nope.

Her temptation attack is to wrap our dick in sticky silk.

Then it's nope and even more nope as she climbs on Luka's back and a tube comes out of her abdomen for intensive sperm sucking.

The artwork didn't hit the spot for me at all with this one.  Her head is a weird size, her expressions odd and the colouration makes it look like she has a beard.  Nope, nope, nopity nope (and I even quite like arachnes).

Because it is such a long way around the mountains I decide to leave off the temptation attacks until I reach the village.

At the village someone in witchy gear meets us and tells us there are no problems.  Lily is the feudal lord and everything is in hand.

Both Sara and Alice, who have various ruling claims to this area, acknowledge they have to get to the bottom of what's going on.

We run into one of the villagers.

Yep, nothing to see here.  Nothing at all…

Her wormy arms are a power gifted to her by Lily.  The village used to burn witches and the men used to treat the women abominably.  Lily put a stop to this and everyone loves her.  There isn't a male character in the village that isn't either an old dude or young boy.  This is not suspicious in the slightest…

The battle-fucker also has a witchy look to her.  A little too manic.

She does have variations in her artwork, which is a change.  To be honest, I think the battle-fucker thing has been one addition to Paradox that hasn't really seemed necessary.  This might have something to do with my irrational hatred of the sound of a saxophone.

Lily greets us at the entrance of her mansion and takes us to one side to give her story.

Yep, they massacred all the dudes.  But they deserved it, honest.

Hmm, if you say so, Lily.

She asks us if we'll help her to put down the resistance by taking out opposition leader, Lucia.

We don't have to make the decision now.  We decide not to and after leaving the mansion a representative of the other side asks us to come along and hear their side of the story.  The opposition is hiding in a house on top of the hill in the upper north-east corner of the village.

A previously-locked door is now open and Lucia can be found in the basement.

I didn't remember Lucia being so endowed in the chest department in the original series.  That might have been because I was too busy trying to stop her gobbling up Luka with her giant grub arm last time around.

In the previous series Lily was a mad alchemist/sorceress that took over the village as revenge for how she'd been treated by the village.  Lucia was one of her 'experiments' and got her revenge by gobbling Lily up.

This time around Lucia was Lily's primary research assistant.  This civil war has kicked off over a difference in ideology.  Lily wants to spread her cure out across the world to care of the evil menz everywhere.  Lucia thinks that will end up in the power being abused and twisted so that it's a tool for the strong to oppress the weak.

Okay, so it looks like we're getting another choice between characters.  As with Alice and Ilias at the beginning I guess it's a case of picking whichever one we want in the party.

I'll sleep on it and make the choice tomorrow.

Let's Play Monmusu Quest: Paradox! part 40

Grandoll (Moar Succubus!)

This is part 40 of my Monmusu Quest: Paradox playthrough (part 1 here).  Now with 100% more succubus.

Last up we'd just returned from the succubus-induced wreckage of Luddite Village and Queen Sara had stepped down to become Swordmaiden Sara (When what we really want is Succubus Sara).

As an aside I think I'll also echo my disappointment in how Sara is handled in the party.  She's single race Human.  I was expecting her to be dual race Human/Succubus.  None of her request moves utilise her succubus form.  This is odd given that Paradox has been extremely efficient in re-using the art assets from MGQ and Succubized Sara had a ton of CG scenes in MGQ: Chapter 3.  It makes me think those aspects of Sara will be 'unlocked' at a later point in the game.

Back to the story.  A guard bursts in with a message from the Witch Hunt Village.  Its real name is Magian Stare (ok, it probably isn't, but that's what machine translation spits out).   Civil war has broken out with demon fighting demon.

In the original MGQ series Witch Hunt Village was the fiefdom of mad sorceress Lily.  Sounds like she's having a harder time of it in Paradox.

Luka agrees to take the detour to sort it out.  Alice agrees.  It's a fight between opposing demon factions and as she's the demon lord she should get involved.  She also thinks it will be good training before they tackle the 3rd Tartarus pit.

Witch Hunt Village is to the west, but as it involves a substantial detour around the mountains Sara suggests stopping off at Grandoll (my translator says Grand Dole, but the reasoning given behind Grandoll in the comments from a couple of days back sounds better) on the way.

Getting to Grandoll is a little awkward as involves circling around the top to cross the right bridges.

One of Sara's guards meets us at the entrance to the town.  He's having a little difficulty concentrating.  A succubus has taken over the theatre and her presence is distracting everyone.

So what's in Grandoll?

Hmm, I think I found the battle-fucker.

Her name is Melody and dancing is her speciality.

Unfortunately for her, my Luka has done a little too much battling on my mission to find everything and recruit every monster girl.  He's a little over-levelled (I think TTR recommends characters should be around level 24 at the end of Paradox chapter 1.  My Luka is already at 27).  It's not even close.  Luka still has 300 HP left even after Melody has done her sexy dance.  The reward is the Dancing scroll.

At this point I should confess it took me a very long time to figure out what these open scrolls are actually for.  Skills are all grouped under classes (White Magic, Thievery, Mercantile, Dancing).  The different jobs and races all have access to various skills.  If you move a character to a job/race that doesn't have access to the right skill class, they will still know the skill but will be unable to use it.  Equipping them the relevant skill class scroll will enable them to use the skills they've learned even if their current job/race doesn't allow it.  This is very useful if you want to, for example, level Remi up in Magician after maxing out Priest and White Mage and still be able to access her White Magic skills.

Ilias is also in town, still with only an entourage of a slime girl and dog girl.  She and Alice finally find some common ground.  The cookies of Grandoll are delicious.

There's a house where one dude appears to have a harem of around 10 mermaids.  Well, if you've got the dosh…

Grandoll is freakin' huge.  I wonder if TTR got a little carried away when building these settlements.  Talking to the various NPCS unlocks more rumours.  Everyone loves Saki.  The war has shut down the weapons store.  Everyone thinks Grand Noah's ant girl forces are going to batter everyone in the war.  Gnome is to the north and some people are baking bread for Gnome day, whatever that is.

Oh, and there's another mafiosa type running things.  They have a massive mansion in the north of the town.  There's a rumour the Don might have been involved in an attempt on Robo-Pope's life (before he became Robo-Pope).  We're allowed in because of our connections to Erika in Monte Carlo (at the time I wondered what that actually did, now it seems to be a checkpoint on a rather long side quest).

The Don is upstairs.  His name's Merlin.  Hmm, that name seems familiar from somewhere, and not the Arthurian legend.  He gives the standard villain justification speech about controlled evil being better than uncontrolled evil and how the former Sabasa king understood that enough to leave him alone.

After we leave there's a cutscene where a very slick-looking Lazarus crawls out from hiding under the table.  Ah, this Merlin was the same dude that was part of the original adventuring party with Lazarus and Marcellus.  Hmm, shenanigans menanigans.  I'm guessing TTR is seeding stuff here for future chapters.  Unsurprisingly, Lazarus seems just as untrustworthy as his MGQ-series counterpart.

Then it's time to head off to the theatre to deal with the succubus.  The theatre is full of Saki's adoring fans.  She's currently bouncing around on the stage.  We go up and challenge her for good, decency and that sort of thing.

Like a plonker, I do the save-to-reload-later-and-see-Bad-End thing, only to save right over.  Thankfully, TTR added the Hades section for people that wanted to re-fight the one-off fights.  One quick thrown fight later and we see Saki's Bad End.

She drains Luka to death in an after-hours live sex show-cum-execution.  Yeah, she's probably a bad girl.

After being beaten Saki is sad that her show is being shut down.  Then she notices we travel a lot and asks if she can come with us for 'Saki's World Tour'.  Why yes, we'd love to have the gorgeous and sexy pop superstar join our harem… cough… team.

UN_DO's monster girls so far have had multiple scenes with a lot of variety.  So it's a little disappointing that Saki's three request scenes are all variations on the same pose (although each has additional options).

One of them is amusing in that if Luka abstains from masturbating over her sexy new costume, she sprouts some feelers and jerks him off anyway.  Even MGQ's milder-looking succubi have a bit of the Lovecraftian to them.

There are additional scenes with Saki that are similar to her Bad End.  They involve unlocking some additional content by speaking to the stage manager with Saki in the party.

At first the manager is depressed about most of his audience leaving now that Saki has gone.  Nice one breaking it, Luka.  Come back to him with Saki in the party and it unlocks the option to put on various stage shows depending on which monster girls have been recruited.  There are rewards for each show, but mostly they're there to provide laughs as various monster girls try to put on a show but end up trying to eat each other or injuring the audience.  Saki's extra scenes appear at the bottom of the menu – Saki after hours – where she'll put on a sex show involving Luka.  The gold cost for each is waived if Saki's affection is taken up to 100 in the castle.

Right, that's enough fun and games (and the theatre shows are worth checking out even though they don't have CGs).  Tomorrow we continue the journey around the mountains to Witch Hunt Village.

Oh, as we're at 40 posts (and nearly 40K words), I suppose I should put in a plug for my books.  If you like what you've read so far and like to read about sexy (and bad) succubi doing sexy (and bad) things, you might want to check out my ebooks.  They can be bought from Amazon here, or Smashwords here, or directly from my publisher here.  This is the best way to support what I'm doing, and you'll also get plenty of sexy reading material in return ;).

Let's Play Monmusu Quest: Paradox! part 39

Succubi, Succubi Everywhere!

This is part 39 of my Monmusu Quest: Paradox playthrough, which began back here.  If you're a succubus fan and one of your criticisms of Paradox so far has been too many weird fuckin' monster girls, you're going to really enjoy this segment.  Maybe.

We're on the way back from Sphinx's pyramid with what is hopefully a cure for the errant Queen Sara.  Off to the throne room we go.  The guards try to insist only Luka can go forward, but they're not exactly competent and it's easy to shove past and enter the throne room.

Now all we have to do is to talk Sara into drinking this little vial of blood…

Yeah, that was never going to happen.  At least we've made her go full monster, I suppose.

Why fight, Sara?  I have a big room in my personal pocket castle just for fun stuff.  And sausage.  Plenty of sausage.

Um, yes.  Tempted.  Very tempted.

Resist, Luka, resist.

There's no point succumbing here anyway.  Wait until we get her back to the castle.  If she's anything like MGQ: Chapter 3 succubus Sara she'll have like a billion request moves.

Beating her gives us the opening to force-feed her Sphinx's blood.  She's just starting to come back to her senses when a guard rushes in to tell us the Luddite village is under attack by the three succubus sisters.

What, more succubus action?  Hubba hubba.

The old Sara returns as she rushes off to get changed into armour.  Actually, we probably want succubus Sara to be honest.  Plucky swordmaiden Sara was a bit useless in the fighting department if we're being brutally honest.

Thirty minutes before we get there, the succubus trio arrive at Luddite village.  The villagers claim they're under the protection of the Goddess.  Somehow I don't think that's going to help them much.

Some guards bravely rush in.

Yeeps!  Redshirts obviously don't get the benefits of tasteful fadeouts before being turned to dried-up husks.  Morrigan evidently doesn't believe in the virtues of foreplay.

Astaroth says she's kinder.

She grabs the nearest dude and moments later he's on the ground naked and she's on top of him, big boobs swaying away.  We even get animated pixel sex in the main RPG exploration/navigation screen, which I wasn't expecting to be honest.

Lilith also wants in.

Which means more animated pixel sex as she gets on top and even bigger boobs start swaying around.  To say I'm looking forward to seeing what Lilith's Bad End scenes are like would be an understatement.  I also have a horrible feeling we won't be seeing any until chapter two.

Hmm.  Hate to say this, dears, but this looks a terribly inefficient way to massacre a village.  I don't think succubi are exactly suited to this task – just give us a few days or so while we bonk every single man to death one-by-one.

Ah, that's why they have Morrigan.  Vicious little bitch, isn't she.

She bamfs around the screen and huskifies all the hapless observers.  It looks like she's frying them with lightning, but the sound effect is the same coming sound effect the game uses whenever Luka loses.  For some reason my imagination creates an image of her magic causing her victim's cum and energy to burst out of their cock and balls in a devastating cumplosion.  And because my imagination has already pictured it, that means you poor bastards will probably be reading about it in a story someday.

Luka and crew arrive in time to watch Astaroth and Lilith finish their 'meals'.  Sex with super-hawt sex demons is indeed hazardous to the health.

It looks like we're going to be fighting Astaroth.  Before it all kicks off Morrigan lets slip something she shouldn't.  Not that it matters.  My machine translator gets as far as 'chaos-ization' and gives up.

Astaroth is a proper boss fight.  She has an annoying mass-seduce attack that results in the entire party piling on Luka in a mass orgy.  And then her temptation attack.

Don't stick your dick in there, Luka.  Goddammit!

Her Bad End is death by tits as she wraps them round our hard-on.  Bouncy, bouncy, bouncy, bouncy, urk…. [fade to black].

This is where I take a slight pause to try and work out how to level up characters and re-organise the party.  There are so many choices in the game, it's easy to get lost.  It's something I might look at in more detail in a subsequent playthrough (likely when the game is fully translated).  For now I don't think I can go into more detail and keep to this daily schedule.  There is a lot to play around with in Paradox.

I've been using both imps (Rami and Remi) for most of the game.  This is where they really shine as they are resistant to both wind and pleasure attacks.  The rematch takes a while as Astaroth has a lot of HP.  For some reason she doesn't use the mass-seduce attack and I ignore her temptation move and carry straight on to the victory scene where she looks pissed off at being beaten.

She's not properly beaten.  They never are.  But she's not in the mood to escalate her power to murder Luka right now.

In an odd twist she reveals she's acting to save the world.

You what?  I'm sure all these dead dudes lying around might have a different opinion on that.

Astaroth reveals it's all part of Alice's mother's master plan, which she neglected to inform Alice of.  Astaroth seems unhealthily keen on a rematch versus Alice at some point.  Now I'm confused.  I thought the Lilith sisters were one of the Big Bads and now it sounds like they're pawns of an even Bigger Bad (Good?).

Astaroth departs to leave Sara to look tearfully at all the dead bodies.  Back in Sabasa she makes the decision to abdicate the throne so she can follow Luka and fix whatever mess the world is in.  It might also be something to do with the fact she now has the freedom to run around twatting things with a bloody big sword.

There's no time to rest, though.  A guard rushes in with another problem.  This time it's the Witch Hunt village.  More on that tomorrow.

Let's Play Monmusu Quest: Paradox! part 38

Pyramid God… uh Sphinx

Righty Ho.  We're off to the pyramid to ask the Sphinx how to cure her badly-behaved great-great-great-great-[insert how many greats you figure would fit in a 1,000 years]-great granddaughter.

If none of that made any sense, you'll want to start here and then continue reading through the other 37 parts of my Let's Play Monmusu Quest: Paradox series (why on Earth did I agree to this lunacy).

Before running off back into the desert there's another Vanilla sidequest to update.  This time the mercantile-obsessed vampire wants advanced throwing stars.  She's wondering which of the item stores on the Sentora continent to enquire at when Luka points out they might as well ask the same guy we got the basic throwing stars off.  Job done (it's the samurai NPC back at the Ilias temple in Iliasville in case you've forgotten).

Now for the Sphinx.  Her pyramid is out in the desert almost straight west from Sabasa.

Standing by the entrance is a friendly scorpion girl.  She asks if we're on the trial of the dragon.

Not really.  This universe's Sara seems more interested in succubising virile young men than chasing after Granberia.

Where are the heavenly knights anyway?  I thought we'd seen Tamamo earlier, but that was just me failing to parse the badly-translated Japanese correctly as it was the White Rabbit in disguise (thanks for catching that, Yuuto and others).

But don't answer the heavenly knights question – no spoilers… ;)

The scorpion girl also warns us that the mummies inside can petrify unwary adventurers and offers to sell us the gold needles needed to cure petrification (This is possibly a scam – none of my party members has been petrified so far).  I suspect Vanilla will be back here at some point when she decides to upgrade the item shop to include gold needles.

As the NPCs mentioned back in Sabasa, the pyramid is chock full of treasure.  At the end of every blind alley is a treasure chest and even the Nefertiti lamias of the top levels start throwing gold at us like it's rice once we get their happiness high enough.

In one of the chests (I think it's the green chest) is another fancy XP-modifying accessory – Shoes of Happiness.  Normally I'd be excited by 150% XP with no drawbacks as I'm the greediest McGreedison when it comes to bonus XP in RPGs.  Oddly, they're not that good in Paradox.  At this point Job XP seems harder to come by and Bondage Rope is still just a better way to level up characters on the back row (assuming I'm understanding the math and mechanics correctly).

Enough game mechanics, anyone might get the impression this is a normal computer RPG and not the filthiest of filthy hentai sex games.

Sadly there are no new monster girls in the pyramid.  All are repeat encounters from the previous MGQ series with the scorpion girl added to make it up to the usual four encounter types per game area.

So we get the aforementioned mummies:

The aforementioned Nefertiti lamias:

And something called a cobra girl despite well, see for yourself:

What is it with those claws?  I can only think it was drawn by someone with a vague impression of what a cobra is, and possibly got it mixed up with an armadillo in their head.  Or – more likely – about halfway through they decided she needed moar weird and grafted some additional Lovecraftian appendages onto her.

I'm curious to see what cobra girl's Bad End is.  It can't be the same as in the original as in that one she strangled Sara to death while taunting Luka over his inability to hold back from coming in her tight pussy.  In Paradox she's no less sadistic.  Her joy at strangling both Luka in her coils and Luka's cock in her muscular pussy is quite perverse.

Might want to make sure you've plenty of sausage on hand before interacting with her back at the castle, Luka my boy.

As predicted, the Nefertiti lamias are similar to the zombies of Chrome's mansion and fairies of the Forest of Spirits in that they count as a single entity when recruited.  They're also like the slug queen Meltei in that they count as a single entity with multiple attacks when fighting.  With four attacks, the same as our party, they would be an awkward encounter if it wasn't for lamias' crippling weakness to cold.  Barnny's ice arrow is very effective at freezing them solid.

Then, at the very top of the pyramid we run into one of the WTFiest monster girls of Monster Girl Quest's first instalment.

Back then we hadn't seen the Forest of Nope, or seen Delphinus's oldest of Old Testament interpretations of angels.  Monster Girl Quest was going to be this interesting hentai game with sexy succubi and other monster girls.  Then Sphinx:

Huh, am I supposed to fap to this?  How?

Welcome to the Monster Girl Quest universe.

The second dialogue option is to challenge her to a fight.  Don't be stupid, Luka.

The guide I'm following advises not pissing Sphinx off.  Probably a good plan.  In the original series she was an unwinnable fight.

The first option doesn't appear to be helping much either until Alice explains the situation.  How do we transform sweet Princess Sara back to her original human form?  Oh, we can't.  Once her monster blood awakens that's it.  It's also the reason she's out of control now as she's neither one thing nor the other.  Sphinx offers a typically MGQ solution – force her to go full monster.  This will allow her to get control back of her body and shake off the influence of whoever's pulling strings in the background.  Sphinx gives us a vial of her blood and tells us to make Sara drink it.

Uh… if you say so Sphinx.

We'll see how that works out tomorrow.  (It's going to be a fight.  You just know it's going to be a fight.)