#bitching playthrough

But I also find him irritating (in an actually frustrated way, rather than gleeful) because he's a clumsy tool of the narrative, especially here.  Did the test groups have high attrition numbers through the keep?  Is that why you need to have the villain just constantly on the overhead announcement, reminding you to be mad enough to continue?  If testers were ditching the game, could it have actually been the fact that we've had a couple of massive tone shifts and the gameplay is wildly different for the penultimate dungeon?

(It could be worse, they could've put Pitioss in the main plotline.)

And then there is what he says. There is something to be said for a game bringing up the implications of combat.  Goodness knows Lara Croft and that Uncharted guy never realize how many people they've killed in a particular area (at some point I feel like the Bad Guys are justified in attempting to kill the singular person who is murdering *all* of them)

But they're trying to bring this up in a game where I--as Noct--apparently haven't managed to defeat to death *any* of the human combatants.  So, if this is an attempt at massively re-framing that MTs are not soulless robots, that I should feel guilty about blowing them up with a lightning flask when they all jump out of a dropship and stay in a convenient huddle, that could be an interesting goal.

Except.

I can see the racks of inactive and already non-functional MTs.  There has been nothing given to show that they eat, sleep, or have any functions outside of combat activation. They are less sentient than the wildlife we've been fighting with minimal moral concern.  Sure, they have been scourged since they were 'too young to suffer ego death' but then they were incubated and unconscious until they could be canned in their armor.

Luna, our healer of the scourge, does not get to deactivate MTs by healing them.

They have already been killed in every way that mattered.  If anyone has been out murdering infants, it is the empire who created them, and trying to put that guilt on me was always going to fall flat.

This feels related to every time a villain attempts to blame the hero for not saving a person from the villain's plot, when the villain's plot is the mechanism of death.  And to quote Speed, "You're not the Asshole, he is."

I'm not the asshole here.  If someone should be feeling guilty, perhaps it should be the guy on the PA, who helped invent the Mass Produced Orphan Powered Soldiers.

It is made worse by the fact that Noct doesn't actually seem to be taking in any of this.  He has minimal reaction and could just as easily be seen to be ignoring Ardyn.  That Prompto has to reiterate that he was supposed to be an MT means that we are repeating the point a lot.

So who is Ardyn talking to?  If it's to Noct, i don't think he's listening, which at least spares me from having to argue with Noct for trusting the villain here.  If it's to me, I recognize that Ardyn is full of shit.

And then, as soon as we reassure Prompto that he's one of us--which he is; he got to live and grow, and all that in Insomnia--it will never come up again.  There will be no moral dilemma about continuing to fight MTs.

So, the Regalia.

This car is part of the scale issue that's present throughout the game.  Kinda like when a room is too large not because it needs this amount of space, but because it's the setting for a boss fight.  The Regalia is larger than every other car because it's made for all four of the boys to sit in it without clipping, and to leave them able to move around in a way that's both very impressive for the programming, and really alarming on the safety.

Because the Regalia is larger, it means that the truck that shows up to move the Regalia must be large enough to accommodate--and thus Cindy's truck is freaking gigantic.  It's the largest vehicle in the game.  There are places I'm almost certain it cannot drive without hitting things.

Back to the Regalia.  It is a land barge.  It should have an abysmally large turn radius and require sixteen point turnarounds instead of the clean U-turn animation.  And it should have poor fuel economy.

Because the boys are left to move around all the time, and the way they are flung by brake checks, I don't think it has any seatbelts.  It is a hardtop and a convertible, so all of the roof folds into what would've been the trunk.  A loading screen is trying to convince me that the hood has gull wing doors, and that maybe that compartment is the storage?  If so, does that mean they think the engine is in the trunk with the roof? The fuel cap is perilously close to the driver's seat, which leads me to believe terrible things about where the fuel tank is.  The doors open away from each other and do not have a center door post to latch to; there are no nader bolts.  Because it's a convertible it has no roll frame.

As presented, the Regalia is a deathtrap of a car, even before the game tries to tell me that we can totally make it a Rad Monster Truck (which gets stuck on unbreakable shrubbery) or Airplane Transformer (save before takeoff, landings are a 50/50 chance of killing everyone onboard).

On the game where I was grinding long drives for AP, I discovered that listening to the in-game MP3 player and taking a long drive would, more often than not, crash the game when parking.

I am deeply amused by the fact that clipping a guardrail puts cracks in the windshield.

My favorite detail is one that I missed in the first playthrough, as it was only clear in the upgrade screens: the hubcaps.

"Oh, I'm being slightly secretive about being a prince traveling through with my dad's car.  Which has royal license plates and has the king's name on the wheels!"

Tangential details that are fascinating: The chocobo footprints on the car have three front talons.  All the chocobos in the game have only two.

IT IS TIME!

The Mini Mart of Hammerhead Garage! Part One here!

I love the missing panels and tarnish.  Perfect aging design.  Also, perfect use of that plastic triangle bunting to give the shark teeth.

This building is also entirely to blame for me trying to track down the utilities here.

If you look too closely under the awning (as I turn up the brightness on the screen again, because man, all of these turned out really dark):

We have the support frame for the awning and two substantial wire bundles that don’t have much of a destination.  Also, delighted by the slightly hovering wires for the lights.

Looking back down is a problem:

There are hoses littered all over the place, which aside from being trip hazards, they’re gonna get run over.  The pile of tires behind the garage make sense.  The pile here in what really should’ve been a second lane for fueling makes less sense.

My biggest issue though is that fire hydrant.  For one, if there weren’t a single fire hydrant in the game, I wouldn’t have noticed the loss, as there are no fire engines either.  But this one is here, in the middle of the goddamn parking lot, without a single bollard to stop a person from running it over in Action Car Chase fashion.

Fire hydrants also need water mains, and now I’m on a mental tangent about what the underground utilities look like here, because underground fuel tanks are cartoonishly larger than you think they should be.  There’s also the problem of where you’d be parking the fire truck to access this hydrant, if the fuel station is on fire.

Time to count electrical meters!

Meter #1!

Meter #2!  I am also curious about what type of plumbing this is, with the smaller lines coming off it.  If it’s a gas line, we’ve got some real weird issues from the meters on the other side of the building.  Also, love this wiring job with the leftover coil just hanging out. 

Meter #3 in white and #4 in gray!  (is that a valve on the horizontal run of conduit?  Do I have to go back and check?)

So yeah, either we’ve got a history of not using the same equipment when hooking buildings up to the grid, or the developers are using utilities as greebles and we’re not supposed to think about it.

Anyway, on to my favorite corner:

Yay! All my gas meters are in one place!  There are six current meters, a space for one more in that set, and an empty bracket for one more on the right that looks defunct.

Let’s take a closer look at the corner!

*cries in plumbing*

There are so many pipes to work around.  Why couldn’t we work on a different corner where we didn’t try installing these valved water pipes in front of the gas, the black pipe thing, and what might be a building heating/cooling system?

Well, at least they’re strapped to the wall.  That’s good.

Also, I think there’s like four different comms boxes here.  Not sure, and even less sure why we’ve got that one on the left moved so far from where the wires emerge, to make sure that it’s going to be a bitch to fix that pipe if we have to.

Or maybe we just add more pipes at that point.

Special mention to the pipe sculpture out in the plant border:

Cid: I’ve got like fifty of these one foot long threaded pipes and a whole box of T’s and shit.  Guess I’ll put them together or something.

Overall: I love that they didn’t make a bunch of blank box walls and call it a day.  On the other hand... utilities do things and they don’t cease to exist when they cross the ground or the wall.  Where does the water main come from?  The natural gas?  The electricity?  Looking at the ruins of Keycatrich and Crestholm doesn’t give me any degree of confidence that there’s maintenance.

Oh Hammerhead.  Love this place and the slowly rusting shark aesthetic.  Feels like early design because it doesn’t have Standard Restaurant Asset and Standard Fuel Station Asset.

What it does have is a bunch of trip hazards in the parking lot and not a single labeled Probably Hazmat Container.

First, less dusty and artistically oblique view:

We’re going to come back to the map problem that’s also part of this shot, in that the Imperial base to the north and one of the statue ruins over Keycatrich are visible in the distance to the left.  This world is small.

Just in Hammerhead, left to right, the Camper Caravan, Takka’s Diner (with shark windmill), the main sign partially blocking the mini mart, and Hammerhead Garage itself, from which the entire outpost/rest stop/settlement takes its name.

There is no evident residential space, though there is a balcony over the minimart, under the awning, with plants on it.

The entrance:

Right alongside the driveway, waiting to be run over, the first of the hoses, cables, unlabeled tanks, barrels, and inexplicable piles of rebar.

The Camper:

It’s perfect.  There’s the vinyl awning that is probably a pain and a half to extend or retract, and I already know the 70′s/80′s color scheme of the convertible table bed.  Here are the white plastic chairs that were the bane of Lovely Listing back in the Can Has Cheeseburger days.  It’s even on jacks to level it, and has those awful folding steps at the door.

If it has utility hookups, it’s not currently using them.  This is where using recognizable things becomes a problem; if everything looks familiar, then I start applying familiar logic to it.  A semi-permanent placed trailer, real world, would be better served also hooked up for black and gray water drainage and water/electricity in.  Also, there isn’t a single truck we’ve seen that’s capable of towing it.  Not only are there no vehicles with pintle hitches (for the lunette eye on the tongue of this trailer) but I have yet to find a vehicle that has so much as a receiver for a hitch.

Lots of spare tires on vehicles though, which I approve of.

Takka’s Pit Stop:

This building doesn’t have a back door, or any external utilities.  There is no air handling unit for there to be a vent over the grill.  I suspect many code violations in the kitchen.

And honestly, I wouldn’t have noticed the missing utilities, except for the Mini Mart having so many that I’m giving it its own post.

So we’ll skip directly to the Garage:

Lovely little hangar, air handling vents on top and a line of windows and AC units down the side walls.

Not entirely sure why we’re protecting some of these tires with the tarp shade, but I approve.  There should be more tarps and duct tape in Leide.  Also, this is the only side with apparent utilities, as there’s the electrical box 2/3rds of the way down the building.  Also, aside from the large hangar door there are two other doors that both wind up in the same side office.  Not sure if this tarp and tire combo counts as blocking an exit or not.

Bigger problem with the building is that I can’t take photos from the inside is the inside.

The back office cuts off one of the outer windows and there isn’t nearly enough junk around.  That aside, if you put a car on this lift and raise it, the ceiling fan is going to hit it.

Appreciate that they took the time to design the ceiling though.

Out back:

More unlabeled tanks, abandoned hoses, piles of cable, and unlabeled drum storage.  There’s also the edge of the silo, which wouldn’t be terribly out of place except there’s no road where it’s standing and I see no means by which it is either loaded or unloaded.  Just hanging out, bein’ a defunct silo.  As you do.

Anyway, on to the more severe code violations that should absolutely exist in Leide.

Hammerhead at Night, from the Highway:

And from the back:

In a world where demons daemons appear in the dark, there really should be actual safety code that covers how many lights are needed, how far apart.  I can make an entire tangent about highway lighting in the real world, and minecraft player guides for what lighting is adequate, but really... the only reason things don’t spawn in Hammerhead is because they’re not programmed to, not because they’ve reached an appropriate amount of illumination.

Images that did not make the cut: The trash can/tipper cart that’s labeled Exineris, which either means they’re the ones providing trash pickup clear out into Leide, or that this is the Standard Asset for trashcans.  Also, the Ice Machine, because that Standard Asset appears all over the place.

Oh man, I keep forgetting the title card and I refuse to screenshot it because it makes me snicker unkindly.

I should admit, my first impression of the boys was incredibly sarcastic.  I’d had enough encounters with Latin to really roughly determine that the crew is Fire Science, Quick Silver, Flower Friend, and Night Light Sky.  I’ve since forgiven the Latin Glossary naming convention, as it makes it easy to localize names for OCs and, honestly, I’ve picked weirder naming conventions for stories before.

Out of the flash forward and into the fire:

...Gonna just put a pin in Insomnia’s Map.  That’s a whole tangent for another time, tied up in the development goals, where they fell short, and my comedic frustration about no two depictions of nearly any location actually matching.