Tales of Vesperia - Let's Recap the Plot!
Mar. 12th, 2013 03:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xyzzysqrlOkay readers and not-so-readers, it has been like 20+ posts now, and it's time to see if I can recap the plot-so-far of Vesperia. I estimate we're about halfway through the game, which is nice. The Vesperia.txt file so far is 272KB of text. For reference, the full Final Fantasy 12 playthrough was 264KB.
I've been trying to really get the detail and goofiness of Vesperia down in these entries, but we're still a good way from the finish. If you folks want less detail, more detail, less dialogue, more dialogue, whatever you like, you can feel free to suggest it. I am kinda trying to present this stuff in the best light. Someday I'm going to do something like embark on a full series playthrough of the Kingdom Hearts games (like when 1.5 ReMix gets a US release) and I'd like to make sure everyone's happy before I drop into a project that'll takemultiple months the rest of my natural life. Still, I have been really enjoying playing just a little bit each day, bumping along steadily.
Soon these posts will be further augmented and that's kind of exciting to me too. Still, as much as I enjoy doing this, it makes me nervous as hell. It's kind of an extended, day-to-day version of that time back in high school when I was riding around with friends in their van and they grabbed one of my mix CDs to play on the drive and I spent the entire ride trying to figure out if everyone hated my taste in music and plotting how best to hurl myself out the side door into traffic if the answer was yes.
Okay, enough of that. Let's see if I can lay what's happened so far out in a coherent order.
Part 1: The WaterChip Core
Our critical new vocabulary words for this game are "aer", which is a condensed magical energy, and "blastia", which is a kind of magical producer that takes in aer and outputs something else. The blastia in the Lower Quarter of the Imperial City, for example, puts out fresh clean water when it's working. As the game starts, it's broken and the townspeople have pooled their money to hire someone to come fix it. Unfortunately the person they paid is an imposter, pretending to be a famous blastia expert named "Mordio" as an excuse to get his hands on the blastia core and run off with it.
This prompts Yuri Lowell to take action. A former Imperial Knight and self-proclaimed protector of the Lower Quarter, he and his dog Repede promptly go on the trail of this Mordio imposter. Within hours of the theft, he breaks into the mansion where the imposter was staying to look for clues and is arrested for breaking and entering. During his stay in Imperial prison he meets a man named Raven, who helps him break right back out again.
The prison is an annex to the Imperial Castle, which seems like slightly poor planning but what do I know? Anyway, this allows him to meet another escapee, "Estellise Sidos Heurassein", or "Estelle" for short. She is a princess who is next in line for the Imperial throne, and is thus normally not allowed out of the castle. The game pretends this is a big secret to reveal dramatically later, but it's really not fooling anyone so let's ignore that whole awkward mess. Estelle is looking for the imperial knight Flynn Scifo, a friend of Yuri's. Flynn is being pursued by assassins, and Yuri clashes with one of them, named Zagi, as he and Estelle escape. Zagi promptly develops an unhealthy fixation on Yuri.
Leaving the Imperial City, Yuri and Estelle head off in pursuit of Flynn. They find the road blocked off at first due to monster attack, but President Kaufman of the Fortune's Market guild gives them an alternate (but more dangerous) route to use and implies she'd enjoy working with Yuri in the future if he survives the trip. While passing through the forest the two meet Karol Capel, a cowardly but resourceful young boy. He had been hunting a rare beast to help a nearby city heal their giant tree barrier-blastia, so they assist with that, and pass straight through that city on the way to Aspio, city of mages.
In Aspio the trio locate Rito Mordio, genius blastia researcher and Imperial scientist. She is not a man, she is not a blastia thief, and she IS rather offended by Yuri's insinuations that she might be. To clear her name she leads the party to investigate a blastia smuggling operation in some ruins, where Yuri finds a few men dressed like the false Mordio was. The party captures one of the thieves and follows up on that investigation, heading to the port to cross the ocean. On the way they witness a mysterious dragon rider destroying blastia.
In the port city, they find Flynn! You remember Flynn? Flynn is investigating a corrupt local magistrate named Ragou. As the party assists him, they learn that Ragou is connected to the smuggling operation and is also a dick who feeds children to monsters for fun. Pursuing Ragou onto a boat, the party clashes with Zagi again and the boat sinks in the fracas. Ragou is captured, but freed due to his high position in the Imperial Council. Also on the boat was Barbos, the leader of a guild called the Blood Alliance. The group sets out after them next.
Acting on information from Raven, who showed up again while we weren't looking, Yuri and company end up pursuing a group they thought to be the Blood Alliance. Instead they turn out to be the Hunting Blades, one of Karol's old guilds. Karol has a reputation for joining guilds, taking advantage of their stuff and training, and then quitting when called upon to actually do things. This leads one of the Hunting Blades members, "Nan", to yell at him a lot. Karol has a crush on her, so this gets the kid down.
Anyway there is a fight and a blastia is destroyed by that dragon rider. I'm just pointing that out because that's a thing, otherwise this whole sidetrip is pointless. While leaving that scene, Yuri and the gang are arrested once more by Imperial knights. This is where we learn Estelle is a princess officially. It was still obvious. Prince Ioder (whom the party saved while on that boat back there) pardons them of their crimes.
The party then travels onward to Dahngrest, city of guilds. There is a running theme where every time they go to a town the blastia acts up and/or monsters attack. In Dahngrest, they meet up with the head of the guilds to ask about the Blood Alliance. While they're in town, Flynn shows up to broker a peace treaty, except someone swapped out his letter of introduction for a declaration of war. Whoops.
Yuri and company investigate this and discover Ragou and Barbos behind it. There is a scuffle and the dragon rider shows up again. Yuri begs the rider to help him pursue Barbos, and she does. Her name is Judith, and she is super-mysterious.
Also Barbos owns a magical flying chainsaw sword. Wanna point that out. Wanna jump up and down and beg for one for Christmas.
There is a fight on top of a giant tower and Barbos dies. Yuri finally gets the blastia core for the Lower Quarter back. Flynn successfully stops the war before it gets started. Ragou is apprehended. Estelle is prepared to return to the castle. Flynn is promoted to Captain, leader of his own brigade. Life is good.
Ragou is yet again let free due to his rank and connections. Fed up with the system and seeing no way to enact change as Flynn does, Yuri stabs Ragou and his bodyguards to death in the middle of the night. Their bodies are found days later, far downriver.
Part 2: The Poison of the World
The next day, the town is attacked by a giant talking monster bird. It seems to be there specifically to hunt down Estelle, and calls her "The Poison of the World" before being driven off by enormous cannons. Meanwhile, Karol approaches Yuri with an idea. Why don't they form their own guild? Thus, Brave Vesperia is born. Their first job: To guard the princess as she seeks for the truth of why the monster attacked and spoke to her.
In the first town they come across, they find one of the Imperial Knight Captains by the name of Cumore. He is abusing his power by making the townspeople slave away and do his bidding, as well as conducting deals with a man named Yaeger, who turns out to be the head of the guild who sent those assassins after Flynn. The group breaks this up and moves on, finding President Kaufman in need of assistance at the docks. She needs a crew to help protect a shipment of hers. Brave Vesperia signs on.
There is an incident with a ghost ship, during which the group find a sealed box containing a crystal called a "clear ciel crystal", or "Apatheia". Raven has been looking for one of those for reasons he does not disclose. The boat is over a thousand years old, and was en route to deliver the crystal to a town called Yormgen. They take it with them.
They then travel to Nordopolica, where Belius (the local ruler) refuses to talk with them about the talking bird monster (Phaeroh). She will only see people on the evening of the new moon. Yuri is then persuaded to enter a fighting tournament by "Regaey", who is Yeager in the most transparent fucking disguise ever seen by humankind. He does, and Zagi (now with a cybernetic blastia arm) crashes the tournament to try to kill Yuri some more. He fails.
Heading further into the desert in an attempt to find Phaeroh, the group finds a cave with an aer krene in it. Aer krenes are a thing I didn't mention previously but they've come up in the story. They are dense concentrations/producers of aer. They continue into the desert and pass out from heat exhaustion. Upon waking up, they find themselves in Yormgen. It seems to be a place frozen in time. The townspeople think the ghost ship only left a short time ago. They also encounter Duke, a white-haired man who has been hanging around the blastia and aer krenes they encountered previously. He is very mysterious and has a sword that destroys apatheia.
We do not know his fricking deal at present time. He refers to Estelle as "The Child of the Full Moon", a reference to local mythology. We do not know what the deal with that is either.
Passing back through the desert, the party finds that Cumore is again abusing the innocent civilians of the Empire by sending them on forced death marches through the desert looking for Phaeroh. Yuri confronts him in the middle of the night and herds him into a quicksand bog, killing him.
Flynn arrives and reveals that he knows about the murders Yuri's been commiting. Yuri's back on the wrong side of the law. There is a debate about what justice is. It's pretty philosophical. Now on the run from the knights, Yuri and company penetrate a blockade and head for Nordopolica, to meet with Belius on the eve of the new moon in hopes of learning something more about what the deal is with Phaeroh and Estelle and possibly Duke.
...AND THAT... IS THE STORY SO FAR.
I've been trying to really get the detail and goofiness of Vesperia down in these entries, but we're still a good way from the finish. If you folks want less detail, more detail, less dialogue, more dialogue, whatever you like, you can feel free to suggest it. I am kinda trying to present this stuff in the best light. Someday I'm going to do something like embark on a full series playthrough of the Kingdom Hearts games (like when 1.5 ReMix gets a US release) and I'd like to make sure everyone's happy before I drop into a project that'll take
Soon these posts will be further augmented and that's kind of exciting to me too. Still, as much as I enjoy doing this, it makes me nervous as hell. It's kind of an extended, day-to-day version of that time back in high school when I was riding around with friends in their van and they grabbed one of my mix CDs to play on the drive and I spent the entire ride trying to figure out if everyone hated my taste in music and plotting how best to hurl myself out the side door into traffic if the answer was yes.
Okay, enough of that. Let's see if I can lay what's happened so far out in a coherent order.
Part 1: The Water
Our critical new vocabulary words for this game are "aer", which is a condensed magical energy, and "blastia", which is a kind of magical producer that takes in aer and outputs something else. The blastia in the Lower Quarter of the Imperial City, for example, puts out fresh clean water when it's working. As the game starts, it's broken and the townspeople have pooled their money to hire someone to come fix it. Unfortunately the person they paid is an imposter, pretending to be a famous blastia expert named "Mordio" as an excuse to get his hands on the blastia core and run off with it.
This prompts Yuri Lowell to take action. A former Imperial Knight and self-proclaimed protector of the Lower Quarter, he and his dog Repede promptly go on the trail of this Mordio imposter. Within hours of the theft, he breaks into the mansion where the imposter was staying to look for clues and is arrested for breaking and entering. During his stay in Imperial prison he meets a man named Raven, who helps him break right back out again.
The prison is an annex to the Imperial Castle, which seems like slightly poor planning but what do I know? Anyway, this allows him to meet another escapee, "Estellise Sidos Heurassein", or "Estelle" for short. She is a princess who is next in line for the Imperial throne, and is thus normally not allowed out of the castle. The game pretends this is a big secret to reveal dramatically later, but it's really not fooling anyone so let's ignore that whole awkward mess. Estelle is looking for the imperial knight Flynn Scifo, a friend of Yuri's. Flynn is being pursued by assassins, and Yuri clashes with one of them, named Zagi, as he and Estelle escape. Zagi promptly develops an unhealthy fixation on Yuri.
Leaving the Imperial City, Yuri and Estelle head off in pursuit of Flynn. They find the road blocked off at first due to monster attack, but President Kaufman of the Fortune's Market guild gives them an alternate (but more dangerous) route to use and implies she'd enjoy working with Yuri in the future if he survives the trip. While passing through the forest the two meet Karol Capel, a cowardly but resourceful young boy. He had been hunting a rare beast to help a nearby city heal their giant tree barrier-blastia, so they assist with that, and pass straight through that city on the way to Aspio, city of mages.
In Aspio the trio locate Rito Mordio, genius blastia researcher and Imperial scientist. She is not a man, she is not a blastia thief, and she IS rather offended by Yuri's insinuations that she might be. To clear her name she leads the party to investigate a blastia smuggling operation in some ruins, where Yuri finds a few men dressed like the false Mordio was. The party captures one of the thieves and follows up on that investigation, heading to the port to cross the ocean. On the way they witness a mysterious dragon rider destroying blastia.
In the port city, they find Flynn! You remember Flynn? Flynn is investigating a corrupt local magistrate named Ragou. As the party assists him, they learn that Ragou is connected to the smuggling operation and is also a dick who feeds children to monsters for fun. Pursuing Ragou onto a boat, the party clashes with Zagi again and the boat sinks in the fracas. Ragou is captured, but freed due to his high position in the Imperial Council. Also on the boat was Barbos, the leader of a guild called the Blood Alliance. The group sets out after them next.
Acting on information from Raven, who showed up again while we weren't looking, Yuri and company end up pursuing a group they thought to be the Blood Alliance. Instead they turn out to be the Hunting Blades, one of Karol's old guilds. Karol has a reputation for joining guilds, taking advantage of their stuff and training, and then quitting when called upon to actually do things. This leads one of the Hunting Blades members, "Nan", to yell at him a lot. Karol has a crush on her, so this gets the kid down.
Anyway there is a fight and a blastia is destroyed by that dragon rider. I'm just pointing that out because that's a thing, otherwise this whole sidetrip is pointless. While leaving that scene, Yuri and the gang are arrested once more by Imperial knights. This is where we learn Estelle is a princess officially. It was still obvious. Prince Ioder (whom the party saved while on that boat back there) pardons them of their crimes.
The party then travels onward to Dahngrest, city of guilds. There is a running theme where every time they go to a town the blastia acts up and/or monsters attack. In Dahngrest, they meet up with the head of the guilds to ask about the Blood Alliance. While they're in town, Flynn shows up to broker a peace treaty, except someone swapped out his letter of introduction for a declaration of war. Whoops.
Yuri and company investigate this and discover Ragou and Barbos behind it. There is a scuffle and the dragon rider shows up again. Yuri begs the rider to help him pursue Barbos, and she does. Her name is Judith, and she is super-mysterious.
Also Barbos owns a magical flying chainsaw sword. Wanna point that out. Wanna jump up and down and beg for one for Christmas.
There is a fight on top of a giant tower and Barbos dies. Yuri finally gets the blastia core for the Lower Quarter back. Flynn successfully stops the war before it gets started. Ragou is apprehended. Estelle is prepared to return to the castle. Flynn is promoted to Captain, leader of his own brigade. Life is good.
Ragou is yet again let free due to his rank and connections. Fed up with the system and seeing no way to enact change as Flynn does, Yuri stabs Ragou and his bodyguards to death in the middle of the night. Their bodies are found days later, far downriver.
Part 2: The Poison of the World
The next day, the town is attacked by a giant talking monster bird. It seems to be there specifically to hunt down Estelle, and calls her "The Poison of the World" before being driven off by enormous cannons. Meanwhile, Karol approaches Yuri with an idea. Why don't they form their own guild? Thus, Brave Vesperia is born. Their first job: To guard the princess as she seeks for the truth of why the monster attacked and spoke to her.
In the first town they come across, they find one of the Imperial Knight Captains by the name of Cumore. He is abusing his power by making the townspeople slave away and do his bidding, as well as conducting deals with a man named Yaeger, who turns out to be the head of the guild who sent those assassins after Flynn. The group breaks this up and moves on, finding President Kaufman in need of assistance at the docks. She needs a crew to help protect a shipment of hers. Brave Vesperia signs on.
There is an incident with a ghost ship, during which the group find a sealed box containing a crystal called a "clear ciel crystal", or "Apatheia". Raven has been looking for one of those for reasons he does not disclose. The boat is over a thousand years old, and was en route to deliver the crystal to a town called Yormgen. They take it with them.
They then travel to Nordopolica, where Belius (the local ruler) refuses to talk with them about the talking bird monster (Phaeroh). She will only see people on the evening of the new moon. Yuri is then persuaded to enter a fighting tournament by "Regaey", who is Yeager in the most transparent fucking disguise ever seen by humankind. He does, and Zagi (now with a cybernetic blastia arm) crashes the tournament to try to kill Yuri some more. He fails.
Heading further into the desert in an attempt to find Phaeroh, the group finds a cave with an aer krene in it. Aer krenes are a thing I didn't mention previously but they've come up in the story. They are dense concentrations/producers of aer. They continue into the desert and pass out from heat exhaustion. Upon waking up, they find themselves in Yormgen. It seems to be a place frozen in time. The townspeople think the ghost ship only left a short time ago. They also encounter Duke, a white-haired man who has been hanging around the blastia and aer krenes they encountered previously. He is very mysterious and has a sword that destroys apatheia.
We do not know his fricking deal at present time. He refers to Estelle as "The Child of the Full Moon", a reference to local mythology. We do not know what the deal with that is either.
Passing back through the desert, the party finds that Cumore is again abusing the innocent civilians of the Empire by sending them on forced death marches through the desert looking for Phaeroh. Yuri confronts him in the middle of the night and herds him into a quicksand bog, killing him.
Flynn arrives and reveals that he knows about the murders Yuri's been commiting. Yuri's back on the wrong side of the law. There is a debate about what justice is. It's pretty philosophical. Now on the run from the knights, Yuri and company penetrate a blockade and head for Nordopolica, to meet with Belius on the eve of the new moon in hopes of learning something more about what the deal is with Phaeroh and Estelle and possibly Duke.
...AND THAT... IS THE STORY SO FAR.
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Date: 2013-03-16 05:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-17 01:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-01 06:19 am (UTC)So I googled 'xyzzysqrl dreamwidth' and it linked this post as the top result.
Which is relevant 'cos I'm playing Vesperia at the moment.
... I'm easily amused, and this amused me.