The Space Pirates That Don't Do Anything

Well.

I've decided that yes, I needed some kooky space-pirate action after all and broke out Rogue Galaxy.  You know, I thought I was hot stuff; I did kinda just slaughter my way through about every game I've tried out in the last year or so (except for Kingdoms of Amalur due to a really nasty glitch and Grandia due to the gaming equivalent of diabetic shock; don't play that after a 'serious' game whatever you do), including some fairly challenging ones.

I was wrong.  Rogue Galaxy now stands as the first game in a very long time to get the distinction of knocking me right on my ass in the first mini-boss fight.  I had to actually spend some time level grinding just so I could last long enough to hit of the blasted freaks; even then it was a very close battle.  The subsequent boss was easier (but still no joke) and hopefully I've learned this game's measure, but we shall see.

In any case, the game itself is pretty fun, with some nifty concepts in place.  You start off with the protagonist Jaster Rogue, a name humorous on several levels; you have a play on 'just a rogue' plus a well hidden Star Wars reference to 'Jaster Mereel' (I probable misspelled the last name there), a name associated with Boba and Jango Fett, appropriate because Jaster here is mistaken for a big scary bounty hunter.  Then you wind up on a pirate spaceship that's also a ship, with sails and rigging and an anchor, the works.  Screw Bowser, this bad boy prowls the star lanes and takes names like a boss!  Yes, we have a total Treasue Planet thing going on here.

Well, we shall see what comes of this.  There's some other fun things in store, hopefully, so hopefully we shall find a whole new way to bring doom upon the poor mooks.  The Harvest never rests!

When Bad Guys Have Mommy Issues

Well, Atelier Iris 2 was beat fairly handily a night ago, and overall it wound up being a lot of fun.  The final battle actually managed to be tense without forcing out copious amounts of cheese on either side.  The world is saved and the Harvest must turn aside to root out more of the unworthy.

More or less for the hell of it, I pulled out another old friend, and jumped back into a playthrough for it.

Do you remember the old days, when one game effectively turned JPRGs from niche games for geeks into mainstream masterpieces?  When most problems were solved by hunting down the nearest bishie prettyboy and knocking the crap out of him?  A time when racing giant chickens for hours on end was something almost respectable, since it was the key to the grandaddy of badass summon spells?

I remember.  Final Fantasy VII.  I can sit there like a hipster tool and go on about how I loved RPGs long before I encountered this one (mostly because it's true), and dig myself deeper by going on about how I still go out of my way to nab new ones (if you didn't notice that already, than this blog is totally pointless).

But I won't.  I will tell you about how I spent the night at a buddy's house way back in the day, who happened to have a Playstation and a copy of FF7.  Him and some acquaintances kindly fired it up and let me take it for a spin; got to Wall Market before I had to turn it off and do something else.  I will tell you about how I went out and got my own copy and a guide from Best Buy, and then proceeded to connive and hoard and outright steal lunch money so I can afford the damn console too.   I came close to turning into a nasty little monster back then.  Thank God it didn't turn out worse.

But you know what?  FF7 is still a fine game, and thanks to a bit of luck and a very good friend, I still have that original copy in my stack.  I admit that there's some nostalgia influencing me, but it's still a nerdy joy to fire it up and fiddle with your Materia collection and wreck corporate douchebags and watch Cloud randomly trip out.  I still say that Cloud's biggest issue is that he got so close to nailing Aerith, but he couldn't go through with it so Sephiroth whips out his blade and does the deed himself.  Double entendre ahoy!

I'm really just going ahead and fooling around with some sidequests for the moment, mostly because I'm between new games and a bit undecided.  There's only so much chocobo racing I can stand, but I want Knights of the Round (if you played this game, you know why), so I'll be shooting up and inbreeding chickens for a bit.  Still not quite sure what game to try next, but I'm thinking space pirates are in the near future now.  We shall see.

Ending a Mad Dream

Here we are again; a final dungeon.  I already tore my way through the thing and walked back out, so I can bit of extra grinding and fiddling with the crafting system.  Talking Sword Sauron is probably quite bemused at my antics.

I've always found the Temple of Creation to be something of a disappointment (except for the kickass soundtrack Battle in the Sunlight), since it goes right back to generic looking pillars and tiles, with only a hint of unique elements, and recycling a much earlier tileset (granted, it's the cool looking giant runestone tileset).  It stands in contrast to the characterful Vintavne dungeon most players have just been through.

Otherwise, things are progressing quite well, and really i'm just holding off beating the game again so I muck about a bit.  I've actually progressed a fair bit faster than normal, to the point where I don't have the main character's final weapon and best move unlocked, and thanks to the lessons I learned from Rorona, I've actually managed to make several of the more expensive-to-make combat items a lot more practical to produce.

It's been a blast, and playing a game that relies on harvesting materials and making your own gear just has its own special charm.  There's a lot of things to love in this game, and though there are some rough spots (the storyline is usual JRPG fare, the dungeons are blocky and like to recycle graphics, there's a couple of battle backgrounds that do weird things if the screens gets too busy or flashy) it's still very much a joy to play.

I'm probably overthinking it and speculating a bit too hard, but there's just enough hints and similarities to make me wonder if Gust (the developer behind Atelier) wound up with a bunch of old Square employees that wanted make good World of Mana games really bad.  The colorful drawn backgrounds, the emphasis on quirky elemental spirits (with some really freaky elements represented), and the emphasis on Mana and a goddess-like figure that controlled it (complete with a great disaster that ultimately sealed her away); there's just too many paralells.

In any case, the game is coming to a close, and I'll pull out a new one as planned.  As I've already mentioned, I pulled out Iris 2 for a bit of walking down memory lane and as a mental palate cleanser, and it was very much worth it.  I'm still not sure where the Harvest will go next, maybe something involving space pirates or a guy who punches demons or fantasy Western gunslingers or something.

I'm Significant

Screamed the dust speck.

Hmph.

Anyway, the Atelier Iris 2 campaign goes well in hand.  Finally got the big bad empire on the run and got the whole party together, so it's time to take care of business and tear through something resembling a unique dungeon (to be fair, Vintavne is actually pretty flavorful and interesting to go through).

I've forgotten how much the challenge can get ramped up in the combat once you close in on the endgame.  It's actually something kinda nasty, yet a pleasant surprise.  You smack your way through Fort Zeyung and Riese Palace, tearing through a ton of imperial minions (Riese Palace alone gives you more encounters with enemy soldiers than most players would face from their Gesthalian counterparts throughout all of Final Fantasy VI, not counting Veldt rematches) and thwarting Theodore McTwit, and then you delve into some dungeons and the mooks knock you on your ass.

An then there are the bosses.  They're some of the most flavorful and unique things I've seen in an RPG, and I'd really like to see more like them.  You start facing a short series of clockwork magitek automata, with lots of flash and freaky moves and light shows; compared to the variations on the usual fantasy critters, they come out of nowhere and give this game some much needed character.  The sad part is that they seem to have been made even more rare in the PS3 Atelier games; I never faced anything even close to this stuff in Rorona, and I've only had bare hints that anything shows up later.

They really help give the Atelier games a character of their own, and to be fair there are a decent bunch of regular enemies that are fairly unique and characterful in their own right, and even the variation on the usual suspects have their own flair.  Ghost enemies are actually outright immune to normal physical attacks and like flinging freaky fireballs and hexes.  You encounter poison-elemental dragons (that are green no less), and while they are palette-swaps of normal dragons, you see them among their firey brethren (along with zombie dragons), and in the same place you face swarms of Charmander ripoffs that also have stone/poison and ice conterparts in the same place.  The dungeon in question is a cave full of magma and brimstone, where most RPG designers wouldn't even think of putting in non-fire critters, much less ice-elemental ones as regular encounters.  And the evil totem poles are hilarious.  They hoot snippets of tribal chants while they try to kill your party.  The demons are about what you'd expect, except that you can turn them into Elvis jackets for some reason.  The next time you bump into an impersonator, remember that their getup is made from pure evil!

Well, I'm off for some rest and then the Harvest begins anew.

Alchemy, Dear Boy

Ah, the old crafting formula:

Step 1:  Unleash the Harvest
Step 2:  Toss the proceeds into the cauldron
Step 3:  ALCHEMY
Step 4:  Profit!
Step 5:  Unleash the Harvest again

I'm not quite sure why, but there's something really satisfying about this Atelier business.  Maybe it's because there's a real sense of player agency when it comes to what you get to make your toys from and what to do with your shinies.  Maybe it's because you can actually make your own, better shinies from the shinies you find.

This series pretty much renders the Harvest to its essence; you go out and smack crittters, cultivate plants, and mine rocks, and then use them to fuel your crafting rampage.  I can see why there is some suspicion among the series's population, and why there's such a sense of discipline and need-to-know and iniation among alchemists.  Talking Sword Sauron alone came across like what would happen if a Captain Planet villain was actually competent and wound up with magical replicator technology.  Damn if this isn't fun, though.

Things are coming along quite well in Atelier Iris 2.  I'm already pretty close to the end of the game (Atelier games are many things, but 60 hour epics they are not) and I'm taking a brether and just fiddling with the Dragon's Den, a nice little arena where you can battle certain series of monsters for XP and prizes.  On top of all that you get to keep the cash and item drops, so some planning and a bit of luck can really grow your material stash like crazy.  It's great if you feel like level grinding, but really you're just here to grab rare alchemy ingredients (like the crazy expensive mana orbs), plus do amusing things like turn demons into Elvis impersonator suits.  Whoever thought of that one is awesome, by the way.

Well, we'll see what happens when I finally get back to the storyline.  The Harvest Never Rests!

Mixin' It Up

The Atelier Iris 2 campaign is going quite well.  I'd forgotten that it could be an absolute joy to play through.
Regarding the last post, I had meant to make a contrast between Iris 2 and the "traditional" Atelier series formulae, and why some fans understandably abhor the Iris series.  Traditional Atelier tends to have low-fantasy, small-scale stories, where the protagonist maintains a workshop, fulfills NPC requests and rarely ventures more than a week or two from home base.  Iris 2 has a focus on a pair of protagonists, one venturing forth to a whole different world, triggering a grand quest to save everything with a band of colorful RPG characters; the second does the usual workshop schtick, but eventually does the same thing.  Traditional Atelier might have no real villains (the closest Rorona had was just a watered-down more-pragmatic-than-evil chancellor, and he was mostly letting off steam from dealing with the king's murderhobo antics), at worst having big nasty demon to be put down.  Iris 2 has an evil empire, the local branch run by a foolish yet dangerous fop, with access to some nasty magitek gizmos.  This empire is being manipulated by a powerful swordsman seeking the power of alchemy, who is being in turn manipulated by Talking Sword Sauron out to take over the world.

But it's still Atelier, and a lot of the fun comes from going out there and hunting down recipes and materials to make cool stuff.  There's some crazy stuff like a potion that turns wimpier monsters into stuff like Rubik's cubes and CDs, a cookie that lets you talk to certain critters, tiny hammers that immediately turn ore veins into usable stones, and three grades of potion that at like Miracle-Gro on crack to give you all sorts of flowers and fruits and things (some plants even become elemental crystals, how does that even work?).  This game has 12 different elements, each with a elemental embodiment known as a Mana (with a 13th Mana representing the ultimate force of creation).  The game's combat system only acknowledges four damage types (plus physical and non-elemental magic), but that's ok; we'd wind up with the kookiest type system outside of Pokemon otherwise.

Fun fact:  While you don't wind up with a lead-into-gold formula that most people think of when the word alchemy comes up, you do wind up with a semi-secret, indirect method to make infinite cash:  the Holy Evergreen.  It goes as follows:  Once you get the Wonder Grow and Huffin Water recipes, synthesize a Wonder Grow substituting in Huffin Water instead of the Ailhie Fungo.  This results in unlocking the Holy Evergreen, a salable Alchemy item. You can do the same thing with Huffins, but they have to be harvested, using the water instead means you can use Mana Synthesis to make the ingredients.  Use Mana Synthesis to crank out lots of Heal Herbs and Huffin Water, and make tons of Holy Evergreens for 70 cole a pop!  In game terms, one Wood element (to make the Heal Herb) plus one Water and one Aroma element (the Huffin Water) equals 70 cole.  These are all ridiculously easy to find and farm (Marmel Forest, I'm looking at you), so producing and selling this in bulk is the easiest way to crank out tons of cash.  It's practically required if you want the recipes in Riesevelt before you get kicked out and have to wait until much later in the game to get.  I know I covered this in a Wreckonomics post, but it bears repeating and amplifying.

Mad Science Skillz

Welp, that was hilarious, but I forgot to actually bring up the contrast in the last post, in the paragraph making the contrast about Atelier Iris 2 and traditional Atelier games.   Suffice to say that Iris 2 is a typical JRPG adventure with Atelier crafting mechanics tossed in, while your traditional Atelier game is all about running an alchemy shop, chilling with buddies, and maybe wandering off to a nearby dungeon for materials.  Makes you wonder what sort of insanity and hijinks are in store when I finally pop in Mana Khemia.

Anyway, things are progressing pretty well.  Exposure to Rorona gave me the impetus to fiddle with the crafting system now, and it's yielding some good results.  Potions heal better, debuffs are actually somewhat consistent and reliable, and alchemically produced bombs wreck more faces now.  Combat items are now worth it.   It was a source of minor frustration that offensive items were obviously supposed to be a big part of the combat system, but suffered from the traditional problem of not being particularly better than stabbing things the old-fashioned way.  Other games in the series didn't have the problem (hell Rorona made them borderline broken relative to normal techniques).  I guess is that without that exposure, we just have a fairly normal RPG on our hands.

But I must go for a while.  All Hail Flashbang Poe!

When Your Sword is A Jackass

But that jackass is pretty much Gandalf in stabby form.

So, having inexplicably gotten the True (AKA best of the generic) endings in Atelier Rorona, I put down the controller for a bit.  I had some IRL issues to handle, and my work schedule for the last few days could be best described as chronological schizophrenia.  That's over with for the moment, and I picked it back up.

I did a bit of thinking.  I wanted to go ahead and play the sequel, Atelier Totori, and already tracked down the next sequel, Atelier Meruru (which still sounds like a basset hound bay), but I kinda needed the break from the long chain of new games, and decided to return to an old friend.

I popped in Atelier Iris 2:  The Azoth of Destiny.  It's still a blast, and a pleasure to play.  It's very much an Atelier Series game, but there's much more of an emphasis on the RPG and storytelling aspects.  You've got the crafting, and quiet alchemy chick that hangs out in town and gives alchemical goodies to the locals, but there's also a second protagonist that does traditional RPG stuff like save the world and loot stuff and harvest the unworthy with flashy moves

His sword is also sentient, and a smug smartass.  Seriously, the local Merlin equivalent decided that the Dark Side is totally awesome and used the Philosopher's Stone to become a talking +7 Sword of Alchemic Doom (instead of y'know, straight up immortality or something), and tried being Alchemist Sword Sauron.  Then, his apprentice was all "Shut up evil, Imma Alchemist!  Bah-ZAM!" and did the exact same thing.  Stuff exploded, people died, alchemy and alchemists were locked up in a pocket dimension, but a nice one where alchemists could chill with Mana spirits and make cool stuff, and Good Guy Azoth decided to be like Excalibur and hung out in a pedestal guarding the pocket dimension.  Bad Guy Azoth lurked in a cave or was sealed away or got stuck in a pawn shop hitting on the Alicorn Amulet somewhere until Liam O'Brien showed up a thousand years down the road and decided to start wrecking shit and now all hell is breaking loose.  I'm not making this stuff up.  Gust is hilariously awesome like that.

Anyway, I can see why the hardcore Atelier fans were somewhat unhappy.  The whole down-to-earth, shopkeeper fetch quest and character scenes stuff was sidelined for classic tearing-about-the-countryside antics.  Crafting is pretty straightforward, no real chance of failure, and materials have uniform quality and properties, compared to the constantly changing variables and required experimentation and notation through trial-and-error.  The combat is quirky; only designated alchemists can whip up items on the fly in combat, but everybody can use the goodies now, and special moves use a growing and depleting meter (kinda sorta like a fighting game's super meter) instead of MP (or worse, HP like Rorona), and is much more serviceable than traditional Atelier fare.  You wind up fighting an evil empire and then Alchemist Sword Sauron triggers an apocalypse to capture the titular Iris, who happens to be the incarnation of the Mana Goddess and the game's little magical waif, so now he has the power and intent to bring the universe into Age of Sigmar and make everything terrible.  Naturally, you whip his ass.  It's a far cry from all the small-scale, run a magic items shop stuff.

But, y'know what?  I like it a lot.  It's a wonderful change of pace, and rekindled my love of crafting stuff in games.  It's simple to start but can be hard to master.  It has some of the prettiest graphics I've ever seen; between the wonderful hand-drawn backgrounds and the happy li'l mana spirits, it's pretty much the awesome Seiken Densetsu/World of Mana game everybody's been waiting for since, well, Secret of Mana itself (hell the plot pretty much kicks off with a big sacred tree vanishing and mana going to hell, add in the evil empire being manipulated by an ancient bodysnatching sorcerer for fun).

Wow, I'm really fanboying out here.  Oh, and don't forget:  This is the game that gave us Flashbang Poe, the Gun Mana.  A little wood fairly that acts like a dirty old man, and brings the dakka with an kickass magical doomcannon.  All hail Flashbang Poe!

Well, That Was Unexpected

It's something of a surprise, to be sure.

After a whirlwind of IRL events, I managed to get enough quiet time to tackle the final assignment of Atelier Rorona.  I didn't pull the evaluation grade I would like, but thanks to getting mostly perfect tens, I could pass and beat the game.

It's a funny thing; an important part of the game's mechanics revolves around turning in items for the big assignments, then using the rest of the in-game time as you see fit.  It's fairly simple in practice:  Do what it takes to get a passing grade (noted as "Complete" on the screen), preferably with a full ten out of ten stars, then use the remaining time to undertake jobs for the local folk and delve into dungeons (to trigger and fuel more jobs), plus do special jobs for party members and shopkeepers.  I'm not quite sure yet, but the final assignment seems to trigger much more lenient and doable collection of jobs for the NPCs.  This worked out well into my favor, since part of the ending requirements are tied to your in-game reputation, which is raised by completing the jobs at the palace counter.  It came as a pleasant shock, to be sure; going into the final assignment, I was barely at 51%, and managed to ramp it up to 94% without much trouble.

It's still funny, how this game is pretty much one big fetch quest.  It's even funnier that it can be loads of fun.  I can't think of many games where I enjoyed tearing about town, handing out goodies, and playing delivery service for the kingdom and suchlike.  Usually RPGs treat this stuff as a necessary evil, but Atelier games turn this into your bread and butter, and actually make it enjoyable in and of itself.

For anybody curious, part of the endings involves which NPC you wind up making your best friend/beau, and despite getting a perfect 100 value for Cloud Sigfried Sterk, I wound up having poor innocent Rorona paired up with Gio.  The guy is more than old enough to be her father, and happens to be the damn king to boot, but A) values were different for that sort of thing back then and B) he's awesomesauce anyway, so I really just had a good laugh and moved on.  And C) the pairing is no more than implied anyway.

Gio, AKA Ludwig Giovanni Arland XIII, is one of the better ideas I've seen in a while.  He's a JRPG character, with all the quirks and tolerance for weirdness that entails, that wants to be an Elder Scrolls protagonist really badly.  His whole shtick to to sneak out and leave Minister Bad Touch in charge so he can tear about the countryside and unleash the Harvest upon the wild and wicked.  This, plus the fact that he does all this in a swank outfit and a damn sword-cane, qualifies him for Rorona's contribution to the "awesomesauce RPG characters that reside in my hall of honor" list and a place with such luminaries as Jade Curtiss and Bacchus D-79 (AKA Space Elf Robocop).

In any case, my final verdict for Atelier Rorona vanilla (I didn't grab any DLC, and there is a remake, named Atelier Rorona Plus), is Recommended, especially for fellow RPG buffs that are looking for something a bit different.  It's far from perfect (I miss Iris' two dimensional backgrounds a lot), but what this game offers is actually pretty well put together, and the emphasis on time-management and multiple playthroughs helps play to its strengths.  You actually are encouraged to do a bit more planning than 'grind for a while, then conquer the unworthy, grind some more' that a lot RPGs expect, and it encourages a bit of mental agility.  It'll take a while, and even veteran gamers will have some missteps, but the learning curve it pretty forgiving, and once you get the rhythm of things going, this game is quite rewarding.

Stay tuned.  I have no idea what the next campaign will be yet, but rest assured that the Harvest will continue!

Surviving The Long Night

Well, that actually went much better than anticipated, really.

I managed to tear my way through Night's Domain in Atelier Rorona, and it was actually a good deal more fun than I expected.  For a game that was all about finding stuff to make the best goodies, it's good to find a bit of challenging combat encounters here and there.  There is a bounty system in place, which will spawn in mini-boss and boss level critters, but unless you're dedicated to straight monster eradication in a given playthrough, they tend to not be worth your time (both in-game and out).

I'm moving ever closer (and much faster than expected) to giving a final review on this game, and I'd like to touch a few points; I'll likely bring them up again later, but I need to get them off my chest anyway.

First, the time-management aspect.  It's both kind liberating and very restrictive.  The only real gripes involved here is that trying to get requests that involve more than minimal gathering and dungeon-crawling can get really frustrating, really fast.  Things got better as I progressed through the game, but I managed to fail several requests early on, and it probably compromised my in-game reputation enough to lock me out of the better endings.  The good news is that this is the kind of game that lets you figure out your mistakes fairly quickly, and being intended for multiple playthroughs means you can actually put a fair bit of planning into your little excursions.  All in all, you get to give your brain a good workout, and actually figure out things like efficiency and a bit of long-term strategy, and it works pretty damn well.

The combat is still the weakest overall part of the game.  It's not bad, and it's actually fairly well-balanced internally, but it's fairly bare-bones (especially in the era this game was produced).  It's a bit of disappointment after the intricate combat mechanics of the Iris series, and just really give the sense of spectacle its predecessors had.  It's still turn-based, with basic attacks, flashy skills (but fueled by HP), with a special emphasis on tossing out the fruits of your labor to rain doom upon the unworthy; it just doesn't the oomph.  It also has the classic RPG problem of letting your plow through mooks early on, then smacking you upside the head with the next tier of critters, making for annoying speed bumps.  The combat difficulty curve is always hard to gauge, even for experienced developers, so it's pretty forgivable.  The curve here has been sharpened by the time management aspects, which can make grinding counterproductive.  But hell, this is still a game that takes all those (traditionally useless) offensive items and turns them into the harbingers of the Harvest.  Have fun tossing alchemic dynamite, explosive snowmen, and giant sweetgum balls upon your foes, then up the ante with things like blasting them with cannons, unleashing elemental blasts o' doom, and summoning meteoric death from above.  Why the hell doesn't anybody respect alchemy in this game again?

In any case, the Harvest must continue, and the forces of badness shall be reaped to fuel the cause!

Wow

So.  It took a good while, but I finally got a TPK in Atelier Rorona.  I wasn't even sure it was possible, but there you go.  I waltzed into a late-game dungeon, brought along my preferred team (Sterk and Gio, in anyone cares), and managed to tear about the first few areas without much more resistance than usual.  Hell, I took having to actually use curatives as a pleasant surprise.

Naturally, pride goeth before the fall.  I found these angry shadow griffin things (pretty much the local griffins in a goth phase and all toughened up by constant incense and raged up by constant MCR), and boy howdy, did my dudes get wrecked.  It was like the game had finally realized that the critter population had little to challenge an experience RPG'er.  It felt a lot like jumping combat difficulty from "aw look at the cute critters let's keep this at Super Mario RPG (easy, but still awesomesauce by the way)" to "heh, you're in the realm of eternal night now, so welcome to turn-based Dark Souls, bitch!"

It proved an inconvenience, but hell, I've never pulled off a perfect first run in an RPG (I think), and it's good to stay a bit humble.  You gotta know the game has some teeth somewhere.

The only real problem now, is:  What the hell do I do about it?  Rorona has some the nastiest passive anti-grind mechanics I've seen this side of Romancing SaGa, so I can't just stop plot progression and blitz a few dozen freaks for XP (at least without risking a Bad Ending, and I'm in part 11 of 12), and making gear takes time, and I don't have the resources to make the top-tier stuff anyway.  I guess that all I can do is just not go in that direction, and hope I can score enough goodies to stave off the machinations of Minister Bad Touch anyway.

The game is still a good deal of fun to play.  I'd forgotten how much I'd enjoyed a good Gust game, and this one delivers.

Release The Harvest is All Your Finery

Well, I managed to cram in a bit more of doom and errand-running in Atelier Rorona.  Things are going fairly smoothly; I think that I'm a bit behind in material grades, but I'm muddling through and smacking the unpleasant nonetheless.

It took me a hilariously long time to figure out something blatantly obvious.  Astrid, the local abrasive creep-o-chick, shares a voice actress with friggin' Mad Moxxie!  It had been nagging me for weeks, knowing the voice was very familiar, even as the character left me in a bizarre state that mixed annoyance and bad vibes.  I'm not sure if they went a bit overboard, or if they went for making her rare good moments even better in contrast.  In any case, she is not to be dismissed lightly.  She is to be exiled with great ceremony and jubilation.

Anyway, the bitz keep pouring in, and the mad loot is still getting cranked out.  I'm still confused why Minister Bad Touch hates alchemy and the workshop so damn much.  He probably can't stand Astrid either, and the whole eminent domain thing is just an excuse.