9. Zone 3 Part 3
We've arrived at the bottom of the smokestack, which is littered with sugar. The Batter has no examine text for it however. Hello fine sir, perhaps you can direct us to-
Oh. Uh. Lets just go downstairs instead...
I'm The Batter, and I jumped down the chimney.
Even next to an oven filled with burning corpses this game doesn't lose its sense of humor.
I figure in the original French it refers to a "pipe system" rather than a "sewer system."
Though perhaps the director of Zone 3 has overlooked that addiction is a madness of its own.
Who's responsible for this?
Are you... you bringing me sugar?
The director is responsible. He... he's in Area 4.
A surprising amount has been written on the subject of drugging people in order to work them as slaves or keep them loyal, perhaps more than any of us would prefer to think about, but one of the serious drawbacks to such a practice is this incredible apathy and malleability we see on display here with the sugar-addled Elsens. They are loyal only so long as the subject directly correlates to their supply being maintained. Beyond that they care about nothing.
The Batter's examine text here contains his usual detached demeanor.
I calculate that's the end of this facility.
We are unceremoniously deposited back on the railway track.
Zacharie surprises us from the rail car.
One of the better meta jokes in this game.
Ahaha, of course, of course. That's what I thought. I have an Access Card for the monorail. Let's hurry to Area 4 to meet that mysterious director.
The screen shakes a bit and the background outside the windows changes slightly to indicate movement.
Guess its up to us.
Look like a lone Elsen blocking the tracks.
Attempting to walk away from the rail car elicits a refusal from The Batter. Zacharie doesn't seem to react to the situation if we go back in and talk to him.
As expected, talking to the Elsen triggers a battle. If you've been avoiding Elsens when they become agitated this might come as a surprise to a first time player, but since half of our interactions with Elsens in the LP so far have ended in combat its less shocking.
The Critic-burnt has no attacks, other than to shout for help which does nothing.
As there's nowhere else to go and The Batter refuses to flee, the only way forward is to put this nutcase out of his misery.
Notably, the battle gives us no loot or experience.
Zacharie, either ignorant or oblivious to what happened, sends us off.
The track that plays over this section, Endless Hallway, is divided into a couple of different loops that are all combined together with the combat loop in the official soundtrack. The version I'm placing here is a custom cut I've made that includes all the loops except for the combat loop since its rather obnoxious.
As you may have guessed by the track name, we're placed in a long hallway filled with doors. Typical for most games, the majority of these doors are locked.
The third door The Batter tries opens though, to a room with a desk that bizarrely goes through the wall and into the next room over. The chairs are blocking the note, so the desk has to be pushed into the other room to get to it.
It took me until just now to realize that the desk that goes through a wall is almost certainly a reference to one of the more memorable scenes from Terry Gilliam's
Brazil, where the main character gets promoted only to find that
he has to share a desk with a stingy coworker on the other side of his office. The desk is a rather pointed metaphor about bureaucrats struggling against each other for power or even just the ability to do their job. (The word bureaucrat literally means "desk power".)
Funnily enough, in Brazil much of the technology is also based on a convoluted system of interconnecting pipes and gaskets that transfer both air and apparently power somehow from dwelling to dwelling. Zone 3's pipes transport only sugar, but they are ever-present in the architecture and visual look of the facilities much like they are in Brazil.
Checking the next room over allows us to read the note, which reveals this cryptic diagram.
That's it for this section.
Eventually though, we come across a wandering Elsen in a lab coat with a very unfriendly expression.
As you can no doubt observe, the combat track for Endless Hallway is rather grating. I've heard somewhere that its supposedly a MIDI arrangement of Pepper Steak but with all of the instruments set to obscure percussion, but I can't discern enough of the melody to actually figure that out for myself.
One of the doors opens to a brick wall. If I ever have fuck-you-money I intend on buying a large building just so I can have one room bricked off to prank guests like this. I'm not really sure why the game insists on having a more "horrific" battle theme tune for this section when its really not any different from some of the fights we had just getting out of the treatment room.
The labcoat Elsens don't even say anything before or after the battle.
Since the path to the lowest level of the railway station is blocked, I head to the east. This door set apart from all the others must be important.
The buttons on the right are unlabeled, but according to that diagram earlier they correspond to Z (up), B (right), D (down) and J (left). We have no code to try though, and given that there's no A button I don't think the Konami Code will work here.
Again I could just avoid all these fights but I would like the XP.
The first one we get to say anything to us immediately leads to something of a miniboss battle. There are a couple of possible meanings for the word Pastel relating to the arts, but Pastel is also the Spanish and Portuguese word for Pastry which would seem to fit in with the sweets theme this zone has.
The gimmick of this battle is that the Pastel Burnt is invincible, and will spawn Elsen heads from its mouth that need to be destroyed four times in order to kill it. Due to the limitations of the RPGMaker engine the monster isn't actually invincible, instead having 99999 health, so a dedicated player could infact sit there and really chip away at it, but the battle still won't end until you kill the heads anyway.
Otherwise, the battle is essentially like fighting a trumped up Calvary Burnt. I give the Silent Symbol to Epsilon since I want that attack power boosted for multiple strikes.
The music box plays the track heard over the scenes with the small child coughing after the end of each boss battle.
A lot of samey walking around here. Almost this entire section is pointless except for the music box.
One room takes us to something that looks like a set of dormitories only even more cramped and lacking privacy than the ones we've seen previously. Here Zacharie offers us a trade for the music box we found.
I'll wait on that. He has nothing to say when you decline.
This room contains an invisible chest with a Friday in it, a special item that grants a bonus to Competences. I give it to Epsilon.
Looks like there's nothing here.
Out of ideas, we're forced to return to Zacharie. But I make sure to save first.
wut
Q : I don't understand what's happening in this game.
A : That's normal, more or less. Things may become clearer to you as the game progresses, but I can't guarantee it.
Q : Are there any secret codes to unlock stuff?
A : There is one, namely this one: Down - Left - Up - Right - Z - J - B - D - B - Start.
Q : Will there be an OFF sequel?
A : We are thinking about it.
Motherfucker.
Obviously, I saved to avoid this, so I reload. In retrospect, its no surprise the door to the controller room is located directly next to the level's only save point.
Time to meet the man, or whatever it is, in charge here.
Yeah sure pal, whatever.
Hmm. Maybe they mean business here. Fortunately, so do we.
Remember how I said forever ago that some of the puzzles in this game involve figuring out how the numbers are oriented on the keypad? This is one of them. The 1 key is located on the bottom right, with the numbers proceeding sequentially to the left and then up, each row restarting at the right.
The puzzle isn't so hard to figure out with the code right there on the wall. We're given a red save block just before the next area.
Two long bridges over an indoor moat keep us from our final destination.
I'm The Batter, and I've come to purify you, mister director.
Purify? But that's ridiculous! Nothing justifies this drastic measurement! The Queen's sent you, hasn't she? Naturally, it's the Queen. It has got to be her. Whoever it was, I refuse!
Its no question of choice. You're the monster that rules this horrible manufactory. I'm here to make you atone for your sins.
Monster? Horrible manufactory? This is my fortress of happiness! My wall against the specters! The people here were happy, before the phantoms came.
Incidentally, I still don't understand why the dead won't just disappear.
I've seen some interpretations of this line take that to mean that the specters actually have nothing to do with the sugar factory, but that has to be the most braindead take I've ever seen of this game's events. We
literally saw specters flying out of the smokestack The Batter jumped down, its hard to get more concrete confirmation than that!
Oh, but of course, the ghosts, I mean. They are the souls of the dead... Has that thought never occurred to you? Its only logical...
... So... You have nothing to do with the phantoms?
Again, we saw the damn things being produced by his factory. He might be lying to us or to himself, but I'm more inclined to believe he's supposed to be oblivious.
I'm Enoch, guardian of Zone 3.
I've waited literally years to make a joke comparing Enoch and his gigantic fat ass to the gigantic fat ass of Youtube Skeptic/Grifter
Mike Enoch but he's passed so far into irrelevance that most people reading this thread probably won't even recognize his name.
My role consists, like the one of the other guardians', of forming the energy sent by the Queen Mother to a solid context. I am the living engine of Zone 3. The Queen relies on our kind to make living spaces for men. We are a little like gods, drawing the infinite power of the sun to sculpt our worlds into the nothingness.
Ahaha, I love that metaphor. Yes, like gods... Precisely.
You demented child of evil. The last grain of sand has fallen through the hourglass of your life.
Certainly not! No matter how strong you are, you can't overcome my massive physique!
I'll be honest, the first time I played this I didn't expect him to actually get up and start moving around. I thought this would be like the Gizmo battle from the first Fallout.
Combat begins, but there's no red Boss Battle background.
EXCEPTIONAL. Fun fact, apparently in the 1.0 translation The Batter says "Fuck" here which was later confirmed to be a mistranslation.
It takes me a few attempts to actually manage to flee successfully.
Enoch doesn't just appear, he drops in from the top of the screen and makes it shake when he lands.
Accompanied by this hoppy ragtime tune, The Batter needs to run down these convoluted paths to escape from Enoch.
He manages to make it out of the first bridge.
Eventually I get The Batter stuck on a corner and Enoch manages to catch up.
Getting caught just triggers a repeat of the previous battle with Enoch being invincible. Again he's not technically invincible, but actually managing to defeat him just causes the game to react like you fled anyway and awards you no XP.
Its unclear where to go from here. One of the hallways is blocked off though, so I try heading back towards the rail line.
The fuck
Every single door is blocked, and there's nothing to find, and no Elsens wandering the halls. No specters to encounter either.
Eventually we make it back to the rail line, and the creepy ambience cuts out to dead silence.
Miserable runt! Cold water eel! I had to drag my body chock-full of fat substances through the pipes of my own domain... It was hard and humiliating, but... I'll eat your hopes for survival like a block of sugar... ...with delight! (... puf...)
What an idiot... You've tired yourself, exhausting your strength without taking your poor endurance into account! Victory is now within my clairvoyant reach...
Sweet Jesus.
I don't think so pal.
Enoch is absolutely huge, like fighting a mountain. He has health to match. The first move he likes to use, Dramatic Crescendo, weakens the effectiveness of our spells by some unknown factor.
I counter mainly with Alpha's poison-inflicting ability, Awaited Embrace, which seems to be a mixed bag. I've seen it do a fair bit of damage in this battle before, but in this case I don't have a single screenshot showing the poison damage actually taking effect on Enoch. That first Dramatic Crescendo must have really nerfed our spellcasting.
Dramatic Irony is capable of inflicting Furious, which when it happens in this battle can actually be pretty inconvenient if it hits The Batter or Omega. The sprites that show attack effects are so tiny you can barely see them.
A lot of this battle boils down to me just wailing on the fucker since I need to conserve The Batter's mana for healing moves.
I quite like Enoch's boss battle music, which apparently translates to "The Face Of A Murderer" from Portuguese. The bouncing percussion sounds very much like something that would accompany a big flabby gunt-man running around, with an occasional piano riff breaking in, apparently left over from the much more relaxed The Race Of A Thousand Pounds up above. The later parts of the song have a siren going off, indicating to me anyway that the battle is so catastrophic its causing quakes and disasters throughout the rest of the zone and setting off alarms in the factory complex.
The battle is slow. Omega and especially Epsilon don't have much to do, so they spend most of the battle just using regular attacks. Alpha's Awaited Embrace does me little good this battle though I keep trying it. The Batter doesn't really have the mana free to waste on anything except his healing moves. One of Enoch's abilities, Law of Causation, inflicts Poison which can drop quite a bit of health from the target.
Trigger Element is a fairly low impact attack that Enoch uses infrequently.
On and on the battle goes. I have to recover both Alpha and The Batter's mana twice as it progresses.
Climax is a nasty surprise that Enoch pulls out, dealing roughly 300-400 or so damage to everyone in the party. However, whenever he uses this attack, it means he's close to death.
Finally.
Enoch drops such an impressive amount of XP that the entire party levels up.
So... the hero has destroyed the beast... But do you know what you have just done? This zone, deprived of its guardian, is now destined to disappear... And the men who live here, whether they deserve it or not, will fall into the nothingness, never to return.
You've been defeated, Enoch, guardian of the third zone. This land is now pure.
The fadeout happens as normal, but we don't see a reaction from the child.
If what he said is true, then what has become of the other zones?
Next Time: Return to Zone 1
