Karen didn't hold anything back that time. I don't really get any of this, but I get the feeling she really wants to kill me. I somehow managed to beat her. Green and Korea took a beating but they refused to go down.
After the fight, Karen said something about a portal and ran off toward the Great Hall. I wondered if I should stop her, but then someone made that decision for me. As she ran, a cloaked figure appeared from the building ahead and stabbed her through the chest with a sword. I'm sure I've seen that sword before. The figure then turned to me and beckoned me forth, before disappearing into the building.
Even though Karen now lays dead in a pool of blood, I can't seem to find any remorse for her. My thoughts remain focused on only one thing: getting to the Great Hall and finding out what's really going on in this world.
Now, more than ever, I'm sure I'm on the right track.
Fixed that plothole. I'll send Drakuaza the repair bill.
Moving along now, we find this.
This is Victory Road. Or, as it's known in this hack, the Shrine Maiden's Graveyard. This is something we are not doing.
This
and this
are things that we are doing instead. Because these are things that when done earn us this.
Flash will be of small comfort in this particular dungeon, but it will be at least SOME help to be able to actually see.
This
is
what
we're up against here. See all those holes and ladders? They basically connect to different areas of different maps and it's pretty much random. Going up a ladder may take you to one area, but going down that same ladder will take you to a different area entirely.
But, hey, at least we can finally take care of one problem now that we have... Flash...
...
...
Oh that is such bullshit. This is the first dungeon we've even had the chance to use Flash in and now you're not even letting me use it?
To make things worse, I can't even find a guide for this place. And even a map isn't going to be remotely useful here. I bet most people just look at this and say "screw that, where did I put the walk through walls cheat?"
Yeah, no. We're not doing this either. Not in this installment, at least. In fact, I know EXACTLY what we're going to do this installment.
You see, folks, I'm NOT the first person to LP Touhoumon Insane. It would have been hard to beat this person to the punch, afterall. Not only did they LP the game first, they seem to have a much higher opinion of the game than I do.
That person... is Evangelion001. If that name doesn't ring any bells, then let's put this a different way:
Let's watch Drakuaza LP his own ROM hack.
Starting with the second rival battle.
Two things to make note of here. Firstly, at this point he would actually seem like he's just demo'in the hack. Nothing wrong with playing through a battle or two to show off how challenging the hack is going to be, right?
Which leads to the second thing... his levels. He actually grinded up to roughly the same levels as the rival. Something which made this battle... nothing special, really. What can we tell from this "demo"? That you are going to grind. A lot. To be fair, it at least looks like he's doing the grinding legitimately. So he's not doing anything you can't do yourself at that point in the game. Assuming you have the patience.
I like his notes for this battle. He increased the stats for the three fairies so "at least now they have a slot in our teams" Yeah, cause a 20-25 point increase just makes them SO comparable to Last Word puppets.
All in all, though, at least this video seems like a legitimate demo.
Which is more than I can say about his battle against Tenshi.
Wow. Just wow. Wish the Tenshi I fought had those levels. Wish my Chen knew Earthquake at that point in the game. Wish my Mystia knew Aeroblast. Wish I had access to moves like Blizzard, Leaf Blade, and Aqua Blast that early in the game. And the movepool for Tenshi's puppets is seriously nerfed by comparison. So what changed between this version and the version I played?
Well, if we look down at the comments for that video, we see exactly what changed. Apparently he "realized" that people would be about level 30 by the time they got through Death Forest. This assumes that 1) People are actually wandering around blindly in there instead of, you know, finding a guide and 2) That people are fighting every random encounter, thus draining their puppet's PP and forcing them to turn back. If you're actually wandering blindly through the forest, you probably aren't going to do that.
I also like how he said he "edited" the forest. No, Drakuaza, you rather blatantly copied the map data from Touhoumon Lunatic. Why the hell would you even WANT to do that!? Touhoumon Lunatic, unlike this hack, DOES actually implement a lot of interesting ideas. The bullshit dungeons, however, are NOT one of them.
Incidentally, he somehow almost loses this fight in spite of his cheated moveset. Any good romhacker would note this and think "Hmm. Maybe I should tone this down a bit." But no, not him. Instead he does the exact opposite. He also complains about "Jewtube" messing up the audio. No, that's audio desync from using VBA's build-in recorder. And Jewtube? Really?
Next up is Cirno. At this point one would wonder if this is really supposed to be a demo, but it's pretty clear he's just doing this video for kicks anyway since he loses. Also, check out the tags. He clearly added a buncha memes as tags just so his video would get more hits.
This time around he has the three starters and they're all shiny. So he's obviously just demo'ing this battle for kicks. "Lawl look at me lose to Cirno! She's TEH STRONGEST!"
The next video is another one that could be passed off as a demo as he's showing off the first battle with Link. Apparently this was new to the hack at the time and could "determine a new ending". I suddenly feel like I have made a terrible, terrible mistake.
This battle is also at a lower level than the one I faced, incidentally. We're also starting to see Last Word puppets on Drakuaza's team now. We even get to see him evolve one, which gives us a rather interesting view of his inventory. Wow, that's a lot of noob candies, Drakuaza! But you wouldn't use those, right? Afterall, only NOOBS use those because they can't GRIND! On that same note, check out the comment by DanielofDarkness. I just hope that guy was being sarcastic...
The next video would seem to be a demo as well based on the info. I guess people were having trouble with Iku so Drakuaza decided to show that you don't need to grind a bunch to be able to take her on. Wait... people were having trouble with Iku? What?
Things start to get a bit less demo-y in this video, though, as he opens the video with an animation of Flandre blatantly ripped from Bad Apple. He also overlays the video with a rather... dark-sounding theme. Soon enough, by the time the battle is starting, the music is revealed to be a remix of "U.N.Owen Was Her?". He's really drumming up the whole Flandre thing, huh?
I don't know about anyone else, but by about the 2:30 mark I REALLY wanted this music to just end. Maybe it was just me but it seemed like it was getting louder as it went on. Really getting hard to listen to. And there's way too much going on. You've got a higher-pitched version of the actual U.N.Owen theme with that added dread-sounding overtone.
Oh, hey, and now they added screaming. And here I am critiquing the music more than the video. But there's not much to be said, really, aside from Drakuaza needing a team of Last Word puppets to... Okay, seriously, who the hell made this remix? TOO. MUCH. GOING. ON. It's really starting to sound obnoxious. Why the hell did Drakuaza go with this? Oh, wait, because it's dark and edgy. Geh. Sounds like they added the sound of claw swipes or something now.
Anyway, it looks like you actually struggled a bit there, Drakuaza. But it seems like we both agree on one thing at least. The battle with Iku is nothing. And it only gets easier from there. Now please never use that music again. Ever. My ears can only endure so much.
Let's look at the commentary a bit for this video. In particular, GarlyleWilds. He seems to be trying to stealthily call Drakuaza out on this whole overleveling business, but it goes over our genius romhacker's head.
Next up, because Drakuaza apparently went here immediately after clearing out the Team Rocket headquarters we have the fourth rival battle. Now we're definitely into LP territory. And just plain showing off. He calls this the battle "between good and evil" and even has Renko walking in slow motion at the start. Drakuaza, you nitwit! You can't expect us to care about the plot if you don't tell us what the goddamn plot is!
Wait, is he actually using Ominous Latin Chanting for this video's background music? Dude, this battle isn't remotely as epic as you think it is. It's not even that good. Not to say that the music is bad, just sounds kinda... generic-ish. Actually now that I think about it, the music doesn't quite seem to sync up with the vocals.
Hmm. Sounding a bit better now, about 2 minutes in. Guess this music just has a bit of a shaky start. Still doesn't sound great but, again, it's not terrible.
Here I am again critiquing the music instead of the video. Well, we can see that he likes Bayonetta. But he hasn't changed the critical hit/super effective messages at this point in the hack. I'm more than willing to bet he cheated for that shiny Reimu, too.
But, hey, at least he's not being one-upped by some random LP'er in this battle. I actually fell apart a bit here if you recall because I went in totally unprepared. Incidentally... go take a look back at that particular battle video of mine and check out who left a comment.
Going back a bit because he apparently uploaded this video before he started doing an LP and back when he could actually be said to be legitimately demo'ing the hack, we have the second battle against Link. We can tell he was still doing it for demo's sake because he doesn't use any fancy music or anything.
There's not much to say on this particular video... though the comments seem to think otherwise as both call it "epic". Erm... were we watching the same video? He demos the battle and then faffs about. That's about it. "Epic" would be if he executed some amazing strategy, or if it was an incredibly close battle that he barely won in the end, but this? I wouldn't even have anything to comment on if you two didn't say anything!
Let's do one more for this installment. The battle with Yuyuko. This video starts off fairly standard... and then something begins to play in the background. I'm not sure because that opening bit to the music is pretty damn loud and obnoxious.
The music doesn't sound TOO bad once you get past that intro, but still not that great. At least now I can tell what it is. It's a remix of Yuyuko's theme. I don't think rock really suits Yuyuko's theme, but at least he's using the actual character's theme this time instead of an U.N.Owen remix.
Ah, and I see someone noticed the "sepia tones" video effect in Windows Movie Maker. Yeah, I saw that there too. Can't say I've been tempted to use it though. He seems to be utterly convinced that these battles are epic though. And the music starts out kinda mellow sounding at this point but that guitar riff got annoying in a hurry. They say there's no accounting for taste, but I don't think Drakuaza exactly listens to the highest quality music. Surely there's better remixes than this he could have used?
Seriously, would have been good but that guitar needs to be smashed.
And then the music gets obnoxious again and Drakuaza actually loses a puppet against Yuyuko. His LwMarisa, "Sheman", is in pretty rough shape too. By the way, wouldn't "Sheman" be a better name if the puppet was actually, you know, male? Anyway, you needed more ExWriggle in this team. She kicked Yuyuko's ass for me.
Seems someone didn't like this video, though. Drakuaza gets one low rating and he throws a fit, saying "To the one rating low, Lol, Jealous much?" and disabling ratings for the video. Drakuaza, no one is jealous of you. No one.
Also, XxXBeastKingRyuXxX? I must respectfully disagree.
Anyway, that's enough looking at Drakuaza's stuff for this installment. I'll cover the rest of them tomorrow and then maybe get out of this god forsaken graveyard so I can finish this hack once and for all.
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