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A Bea in Your Bonnet
Don’t you know me, Kansas City? I’m the next chapter of the Let’s Play! Right here on August 28, Spring Day. A scientist created an android boy powered by springs. He sprang to life. Get it? Sprang…
Previously on Wild Arms 3: It looked like everything was going to be good forever, but then Shane got it in his head that he wanted to “help”. Now we have to fight through a whole dungeon to make sure he doesn’t sacrifice himself to the planet or some silly/genocidal thing.
So we just slayed the (a?) hydra, which was the guardian beast of the Guardians. Guess it will be clear sailing from here?
Still more dungeon to go, though.
Tingle senses tingling.
Never gonna give you up, bombs.
This treasure room includes at least one Imitator.
We are well past the point of caring about these boxboys.
Virginia just obliterated the whole pack with one mystic’ed gem.
Talismans generally sound useful, but…
Talisman grants the ability Resurrection, which has the possibility of allowing a party member to survive a fatal blow. It is all based on PS and FP, but I believe the maximum chance of a revival is still a meager 15% or so. Doesn’t seem worth the effort.
Immediately valuable treasures are available, too.
Moving on.
Shane did more walking for this quest than he did all game.
BRACE FOR INCOMING PUZZLE.
Just dust off the tablet here…
Okay, sure. Already have that white breath out and ready.
So we have an invisible path that is only (temporarily) revealed by Gallows’s ice blast.
The nice thing here is that Gallows pivots while using his Freezer Doll. This means you can rotate around and scope out the area as often as you desire.
This puzzle only exists for one room, but if you fail/fall at any point, it is back to the start. Best to be cautious and assume you have no spatial memory in the dark.
And that’s our last puzzle for the day. All that is left…
Is a family reunion.
“I’m helping, dammit!”
The kid’s going full Cloud Strife! Somebody stop this!
This would be an excellent time to use your Freezer Doll to cool things off, Gallows.
More hydra?
More hydra.
We’re doing that end of the game thing where a unique creature has a color swap like three rooms later. Meet Salamandra.
Hydra was water-based. Looks like Sally has gone to the toasty side.
Complete with activating Flaming Zone, this is a fire dragon through and through.
Flaming Zone will boost the damage of Volcannon Trap about as high as it can get.
Though these fire attacks won’t do a lick of damage if you are equipped with Fire Wards. Considering Fire Wards are all but required if you want to do the Wild Arms 3 bonus content, now might be a good time to distribute those Fire Rings.
So this guy has an ice weakness, right?
But it is another situation where hitting the weakness incurs an immediate counter. If you have a main caster (it’s Gallows), definitely equip them with a Fire Ward.
If you are still in Hydra mode from the previous battle, note that Sally does not heal, and using fire on it would be a terrible idea. Just smack it if you don’t have any ice abilities handy.
Compared to the relative “puzzle” of the Hydra, this is just a straightforward slugfest.
Yet again, a reward that would have been useful for the fight. That has been happening a lot since Humbaba…
Oh. Good. More pointless boss fights.
Seriously! We don’t need to see some lightning lizard next!
Brother versus brother.
“And where were all these mythical beasts when we could have used them!?”
“And if the dream child told you to jump off…”
“Yes. Immediately.”
She wasn’t wrong!
Hug attempted and denied!
The translation/localization for Wild Arms 3 is really great, but they could have sprung for a thesaurus for this one. Something like “the covenant” sounds more appropriately creepy.
Shane is trying to draw on the power of Filgaia to grow stronger, but even he admits it could go poorly.
“Already started the whole thing… would hate to quit now because of a little thing like the destruction of the planet.”
Look out! Stuff happening!
Go with what you know.
Stop hugging the light this instant!
His heart is in the right place.
Bro is getting tired of this nonsense.
Yes? We covered this.
Yeah! Get Socratic up in his ass, Gallows!
Woo!
Yeah! Your memories suck!
Sad Johnny Mnemonic.jpg
“I’m the big guy! You’re the little guy!”
“You have a future that doesn’t involve getting eaten by lizards all the time!”
“Chill, my brother! Chill!”
Aaaaaand it works.
Been here the whole time, Shane.
Woo! World saved! Twice in 24 hours!
He just said that!
Teamwork makes the dream work.
Just like back in the intro!
… Does anyone remember that part at this point?
“… who is surprisingly good with math.”
That’s our Gallows! *canned laughter/applause*
And that’s that for our adventure at the Sacrificial Altar. Let’s take a moment to talk about Gallows Carradine.
As was noted last update, each of the final dungeons are meant to focus on one party member. As you have no doubt realized at this point, Gallows gets today’s feature. This is a quest to save Gallows’s brother, 90% of the puzzles here were solvable via Gallows’s tools, and even the two bosses had solutions that were primarily based on Gallows’s magical skillset. Inside and outside of the script, this was the Gallows show, and everybody else was just along for the ride.
And, since Gallows will be in that “along for the ride” position for the remainder of Wild Arms 3, we may as well take a look at how Gallows has matured over the course of the adventure. We started with a guy that desperately wanted to escape his own destiny and see the world, but he got sucked back into his “destiny” almost immediately. From there, he initially seemed to be a reluctant participant, but some significant events with the Prophets and Janus got Gallows’s back up, and, while he still had an overriding philosophy of “freedom is best”, he also identified that anyone attempting to shackle the freedom of any other person (or god) should be stopped.
In short, Gallows stayed true to his beliefs, but found a reason to fulfill his mystical destiny: he fights so everyone can have the same freedom he himself enjoys.
And then we have today’s adventure as the culmination of all that. Obviously, Gallows must stop Shane, because a world that has detonated thanks to a careless priest summoning hydras willy-nilly is not a world where anyone can have freedom. But even beyond that, we get a lovely moment for Gallows where not only does he have the opportunity to save the world and his brother, but also do it through the “destiny” that he had initially forsaken. This is not the first time that Gallows embraced his pillar-ness (recall that Infinitum ended with a plan for time-manipulation that 100% relied on Gallows’s holy powers), and you could easily make the argument that Gallows’s impressive magic stat has been his greatest strength in the party all along; but here is a straightforward, palpable example of Gallows saving everyone though his exceptional lineage.
Oh, and being a good, caring brother, too.
So if this is Gallows’s featured moment, it is a great note to go out on.
Back at the start of all of this, the narration noted…
“… he has yet to realize the true meaning of his actions. Little does he know that it is his very lineage and destiny that gives him such strength…”
Yep, sounds about right. Good job, Gallows. You embraced all of yourself. And Shane! So that’s, like, 150% embracing!
Now we proceed to new business.
Virginia’s Daddy Sensors were blocked while deep in the dungeon, but the alarms are all blaring now.
Reminder: we last saw Werner fighting an unstoppable golem in a castle that then flew into the sky and then exploded.
That is the last hug for the update! I swear!
At no point did you consider it might be a good idea to just, ya know, visit?
“Yeah, the solution was love. Do you know what love is, Daddy?”
Virginia’s self esteem should have its own level up screen.
“I mostly just shot a hydra. Twice!”
But someone arrives to put a damper on things.
Shane recognizes our recurring creepy little girl.
So does Werner. Buh?
The last time she had dialogue, she was simply identified as “Girl”. Now we have a name: Beatrice.
Probably because Werner knows who he is looking at.
So Beatrice was the “dream child” all along… And it was the dream child that gave Shane prophetic visions of Siegfried… And it was because of Shane’s visions that Granny assembled the ark scepters… and it was because of the ark scepters that our party came together on that train… Beatrice has been behind everything from the beginning!
And she can turn herself into television static before teleporting away. That’s new!
I guess she was blocking the sun?
“Is Beatrice my mom?”
“What? Gross.”
Lades and gentlemen, It’s exposition o’clock.
Summoning a hydra is curiously bad for your cholesterol. We’re still trying to figure out why.
Later, back at the yurt.
This is Virginia playing it cool with her father.
“When we finally arrived at the Yggdrasil System after searching for the cause of the world’s decay…You were pondering about the darkness beyond Yggdrasil, were you not? Please tell us… What happened behind the scenes of the Yggdrasil accident?”
Clive finally demands answers to questions that were ignored like a month back in game time.
“That was no accident…It was an act of evil…The tragedy began in the same manner as it did the boy. One of our colleague’s minds was taken over by a demon…”
Great! The destruction of the world has a cause that we can punch.
(Flashback to more laboratory-based times.)
Note also that this was heavily foreshadowed by Duran’s journal back at the research lab.
Character Portrait Virginia is so excited by this news.
Duran was the man in charge of the generator, and Beatrice wormed her way into his brain. Just for clarity’s sake, we will confirm that Duran was one of the original seven Yggdrasil researchers, but we have never actually seen him (beyond one possible appearance in an old photo). Like Jet’s clone daddy, Duran was a coworker of the Prophets, but did not survive the experience.
“Beatrice, who concealed herself in the information library Hyades, took advantage of the fact that she herself is composed of electric signals…She managed to connect with people’s minds…dreams, which are also composed of electric signals…That is what happened to Duran, but I’m sure there are plenty of other victims…”
All of this has been foreshadowed by NPCs, books, and Siegfried talking to himself, but here is the rundown: Beatrice is a dream demon. She originated in the demon internet, and she is technically still “there”, but she can invade people’s minds because of electricity-based technobabble.
“The dream-demon, due to her unique composition, is hardly capable of affecting the real world herself. However, she can manipulate people by controlling their minds through dreams. That way, she was able to reach out to the real world, without having to directly intervene.”
The good news here is that Beatrice is absolutely a dream creature, so she has no physical body. Siegfried was actively downloaded and “overwrote” Janus. Beatrice can only think at you really hard.
But, as we have seen, she is really good at manipulating… uh… teenagers.
“I dunno. Dream stuff?”
“She was really into you guys killing Siegfried. Now that that is over, I guess she wants to kill me? I don’t know. I’m still trying to grapple with how my prophetic vision ‘power’ was apparently a literal internet troll.”
Beatrice doesn’t socialize. Got it.
Legitimately, I don’t see anyone willingly cooperating with Siegfried. Guy had his own agenda for days. The prophets only joined up because they were a pack of compliant nerds to the bone.
“You guys good with all that? Great. I’m gonna go break the internet.”
“What!? But I’ve got all my photos in the cloud!”
Clive, I say the same thing about Twitter every day, but sometimes you just have to let it go.
“I haven’t seen my adorable daughter in days, and nobody remembered to invite my family to the party last night…”
Suddenly! An earthquake or something!
A mesa. Have I ever said “mesa” before in this Let’s Play? It really is a mesa-based world. I should have said mesa before…
Oh, guess there are other things to worry about.
Let the kid sleep, Gallows!
New dungeon detected.
How’s that whole “she can’t affect the real world” thing working out now, Werner?
“Yes, Daddy. Right away, Daddy.”
It is a father’s solemn duty to reboot the modem.
“You heard the only man in my life that matters! Let’s roll out!”
To distant shores!
Next time on Wild Arms: The word “technorganic” is a threat.