I'm starting Live A Live, and I'd like to report back on my findings regarding the first scenario I played.
You're playing Clint Eastwood's Man with No Name, and you're tasked with saving a town from a gang of bandits. Problem is, there are 13 of the gang and only 2 of you - Clint and his uneasy ally, the bounty hunter who's after the price on his head but has put aside their rivalry to help the townfolk - so you're tasked with scrounging up materials for traps from the town to thin out the bandits' numbers in the 8 hours you have until the gang strikes at dawn.
When I heard of this gameplay premise, I thought it was going to be a tower defense-ish challenge relying on the strategy of how and where to lay down your traps. That's not the case, though; you're just finding materials under a time limit, leaving trap placement to the townsfolk. The challenge, then, turns out to be How Fast Can You Ransack an RPG Town. Like much apparently in Live A Live, it's a play on RPG conventions: can you identify where hidden items are likely stashed in RPG village furniture? (Incidentally, make sure you drop stuff off at the saloon intermittently; don't be like me and collect all the stuff and then give the townsfolk their assignments, or most of your slowpoke cowpokes will run out of time to set their traps, rendering their contributions useless.)
The reason why I'm writing, though, is what happens after the showcase boss fight, where the number of enemies you'll face will differ depending on how successful your trap-setting was. You'll always face the gang's leader, though, and upon his defeat, he'll...transform into a horse.
This should have been a full screenshot, but I was too shocked to get one. You understand.
The horse will then run away. The townsfolk will then recall how the gang was rumored to be the remnant of the 7th Cavalry - Custer's regiment - said to have been wiped out in a battle with the Sioux & Cheyenne (Little Bighorn). One of the townspeople will then draw the only logical conclusion:
The story offers nothing to gainsay this and leaves her word as definitive, so, yes: we are meant to conclude the leader of the gang, the final boss of the Western scenario, was an evil horse who survived Little Bighorn and sustained itself on the hatred of those killed there. It is the Zeromus of horses.
In the post-credits scene, Clint's bounty-hunter rival will catch up with him on the prairie. He hitched a ride...on the Doom Horse, Destroyer of Worlds.
Unfortunately for him, Doom Horse shows no loyalty to one of the men who engineered his defeat, turning tail and leaving him in the lurch while Clint rides off into the sunrise.
I've played only a little over an hour of this game, but I'm fairly confident it's going to be great.
First, it's time for one of those dreaded "my apologies I haven't been posting" posts. The last quarter of the fiscal year is an extremely busy time in my profession (translation), and I've had a couple personal crises on top of it. The upshot has been massive neglect of any project or obligation that hasn't been related to either. I have people I've needed to contact back for months (believe me, that sounds even worse to me when I type it); I have one big Lunar project on which I haven't wholly kept my end of the bargain; the last update on the Clock Tower novel translation was before Christmas; the Angelique Luminarise website has massive updates unotuched by my precious commentary; and I noted that the most recent backup of my main site on archive.org was part of an initiative to save "rapidly dying" websites. It's not that I haven't made progress on my various projects; it's just getting to the finish line on each. My sincere apologies to anyone I've slighted here.
Before all the above descended, I had a second go with Zakuro no Aji, whose plot drastically changes between runthroughs - which ends up making the above bitchin' ukiyo-e triptych strangely relevant to this post. Let's find out why, shall we?
You'd think Valentine's Day would be a time for Angelique, but Yue and Vergil apparently got asked 10,000 questions each, so let's talk about a different type of love: that which Paradise Killer inspires.
Honestly, I could just post screenshots and say, "Just look at this thing":
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