Vampire: Bloodlines part 15: Big Finale
Dec. 13th, 2013 01:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xyzzysqrlHere we go, the big finale. We've gone off to find Nines and get him allied up to help take down the Kuei-Jin. Will it work? FIND OUT NOW.
Let me ramble for a moment.
One of the things I really dislike about Vampire: Bloodlines is the contextual loading screen tips. There's a rotating bank of them and they change every time you progress to a new 'chapter' of the game. Sometimes this provides helpful information, like that tip about how to block that caught me and several others off-guard. And that's cool! I approve of that.
However at other times it's been less helpful, like the many tips about the tzimoose before they even showed up. Or, in this case, how for the last couple missions the game has been constantly referencing and driving home how INCREDIBLY THREATENING werewolves are, and how much it sucks for vampires to deal with them. Man, the Sabbat are pretty bad all right but aren't you glad you're not fighting a WEREWOLF right now? Taking a shotgun blast to the chest hurts all right, but WEREWOLVES are REALLY nasty! You know, Vampire Hunters believe in God, but VAMPIRES believe in WEREWOLVES.
(okay maybe we're not going that far)
So. Y'know. When Nines shows up looking incredibly nervous? Guess why.
That's right, it's because they sent me, of all people, to negotiate terms. And actually the terms are coming along quite well! We meet on a mountainside next to a tram lift, and the peace/ally talks are coming along briskly.
Then Nines realizes the nearby forest is on fire and -- yes, freaks out. No, the fire wasn't set to kill US. We have to get OUT of here. And then the tram takes off down the mountain without us, and it's a three-minute wait for the next one.
"We gotta find somewhere to hide until it come bAAAAAHHHH" says Nines, who is descending down the mountainside quite rapidly in the jaws of a twelve-foot-tall werewolf. ... Bye Nines! Then Ashe turns to spot the OTHER werewolf, and it becomes a game of hide and seek with a three minute timer.
WEREWOLF TAG:
Player One is the Vampire. The vampire can run inside buildings, yell "SLEEP!" at Player Two to make him stand there briefly, die and cringe in fear.
Player Two is the Werewolf. The werewolf can punch the doors off buildings, smash through skylights, kick down walls, punt Player One into orbit, swat all the bones out of Player One's body, materialize from hyperspace while unobserved and is twelve feet tall and six hundred pounds big.
The chase continues up and down the mountainside and through the doors of the local planetarium. Also, there is a LOT of dying and reloading. At one point Ashe ends up crammed awkwardly in the bathroom, standing on top of the toilet, repeatedly jumping over claw swipes and too pinned to leave. (That prompted a reload.) Eventually I hatch the perfect plan. If I turn the power on to the observatory dome... and open the huge steel doors... and lay in wait...
...then the werewolf would lose me around the huge dome and I'd just sit there until the timer ran out and the tram comes. Huh. Okay. In a way I'm glad. I really didn't want to have to kill the big guy. I sneak carefully back down through the planetarium, out the door, and into the tram st--
Big fluffy son of a bitch WAS WAITING FOR ME IN THE TRAM STATION and damn near took Ashe's head off her shoulders. With one last millisecond-delaying "SLEEP!", she dives into the trolley and rides it on down the mountain. ESCAPE.
Too bad about Nines, though. I'm mentally rehearsing the "He died a hero protecting my life" speech when Jack pulls up in a bright blue Camero and drags me in. Back in the old Santa Monica lair, he explains: LaCroix has called a blood hunt on Ashe for murdering Nines in league with the Kuei-Jin. He's been spinning it like Ashe was his daughter, brought up to take his place in the world, but cruelly betraying him...
FUCK. We're being set up as having betrayed him AND WE DIDN'T EVEN GET TO ACTUALLY BETRAY HIM. That's the part that REALLY STINGS.
Anyway, Jack explains that we've got Choices to make. We need to get to the cab, get in, and decide where "we feel safest". But first, we've got to fight off every vampire in the city on the way. Good luck, Ashe.
It's like Amateur Night as every thuggish vampire in the city chases Ashe down the street. What do you GET if you "win" a blood hunt, anyway? A blue ribbon and a year's supply of turtle wax? Anyway, with them cleaned off the streets it's time to make a choice. The cab driver talks Ashe through a few choices, but y'know... let's analyze our options.
We could:
GO BACK TO THE PRINCE
Pros: He paid us pretty well up until this latest fiasco.
Cons: Has been trying to have us killed via suicide missions pretty much since Day One. Has lied to us repeatedly. Nobody likes him. Has a weird mania over a stupid box.
VERDICT: This is stupid.
GO JOIN MING-XIAO
Pros: Has been quite polite and well-mannered. Has been quite honest with us. People already think we're in with her.
Cons: Is a stranger from a strange land. Also, is a member of a faction that wants to EXTERMINATE THE ENTIRE SPECIES OF WESTERN VAMPIRE ATTENTION ATTENTION THIS LADY WANTS TO GENOCIDE US.
VERDICT: What do we get? NOTHING. THIS IS STUPID.
HOOK UP WITH THE ANARCHS
Pros: Damsel is awesome. Nines has always been... somewhat decent to us, except the part where he told us to fuck off back to Camerilla Country.
Cons: This really doesn't benefit us at all.
VERDICT: This is not STUPID, it's just... against type.
STRIKE OUT FOR OURSELVES
Pros: We know what's best for us.
Cons: Can't rule over a one-room apartment.
VERDICT: Meh.
No... no, there's one plan left. The Prince is... unfit to rule, because he is a lump of buttcheese and ALSO because he is not very GOOD at his job. Seriously, the tangle of schemes he tried to weave just clumps together and sits there in a heap. There's nothing that holds them up. No elegance. What we need is someone ELSE ruling LA. And to get him out on his ass, we need Primogen support. We need the one vampire in serious power who has never yet tried to screw us. One who owes us a favor.
We need Max Strauss.
Strauss is rather pleased to see Ashe, and even MORE pleased that even with Prince LaCroix stabbing her in the back she's willing to play ball with the Camerilla. He lays out a three step plan:
Kill Xiao.
Kill LaCroix.
Appoint a new leader.
...naturally, Ashe will be doing the first two while he does the third. Siiigh.
What follows is a cross-city spending spree as Ashe buys blood packs, body armor and ammo. Oh, and someone sends us a helpful email reading "Don't open it." because HEY YOU SHOULDN'T OPEN THE SARCOPHAGUS HAVE YOU FIGURED OUT YOU SHOULDN'T OPEN THE SARCOPHAGUS HEY DON'T OPEN THE SARCOPHAGUS god -damn- enough already.
Incidentally, the character model for the "Body Armor", the heaviest armor in the game, is a very fancy black leather trenchcoat with what appears to be absolutely nothing underneath it. Presumably STYLE keeps attacks from landing.
Well, we'll test that. Step one: Ming Xiao. ... Wait, what's this? Yukie, why are you lurking in the shadows outside the Kuei-Jin temple? "My sword is still angry. We will kill ghost people?" she asks. "FUCK YEAH WE WILL KILL SOME GHOST PEOPLE" I decide. Roll the (censored) transformation footage, we got a magical girl party!
Yukie, in addition to her own magic sword, ALSO brought along a rapid-repeater crossbow and turns out to be quite the archer. The pair of us clear out the grounds and the top floor, then Yukie bows out. She has her own battles to fight elsewhere. Just for a minute I have kind of a pang. I wish there was an option to drop this. Pledge my blade. Buy a plane ticket and leave the city with Yukie. Ask her to be the Larva to my Miyu, maybe without the tragic backstory.
Ashe plunges deeper into the temple alone. Before long the basement... well. It looks like Toshiro Mifune redecorated the place. It is long, mazelike, and packed full of mooks who serve the primary function of the mook: To yell "STOP RIGHT THERE" or "FREEZE" and then get knocked on the floor.
The problem with this bit is ... it kinda drags on and on and on and there's MORE mooks and ANOTHER sub-basement, and by the time it's asking me to put jade elephants and dragons on pedestals I almost don't -care- anymore? Can we just ASSUME I already have the dragon on a pedestal? It's me we're talking about here. C'mon.
Ming Xiao turns herself into a giant slug creature. It doesn't help.
Kill Xiao.
From there it's back to the taxi, and from THERE to the LaCroix tower. The guards try to stop Ashe. THAT doesn't work either. Unfortunately, partway up the building the elevator cuts out, so Ashe is forced to scale the rest of the way on foot, through guards, through black-ops dudes in full body armor, past the guy LaCroix mind-controls into strapping bricks of C4 to himself and running at Ashe. From him we get some explosives, which we stuff into an elevator and John McClaine that load up to the top floor, where it blows up a bunch of mercenaries.
Even the Prince's Sheriff gets in on the action. The huge dude wielding the Buster Sword can apparently turn into a 30-foot-wide GIANT BAT. ... Why can everyone turn into cool shit but me?
In the end, he falls as well, and the Prince makes one last stand at Dominating Ashe. She laughs at him. He's a small, weak man who believes what's in that sarcophagus would give him power. Strauss takes it away, puts it in a warehouse forever. It doesn't NEED to be opened. Whatever LaCroix thought was in there doesn't even merit looking at.
And so that brings a close to the tale of Ashe, Vampire Princess. Strauss presumably takes up rulership of LA. Ashe presumably stays on for a while as his right hand enforcer, but LA is a small town and it's a big world, and frankly if only you're number two you're not trying hard enough.
Still... not a bad social climb, for two weeks of effort.
Next time, final thoughts and misc stuff.
Let me ramble for a moment.
One of the things I really dislike about Vampire: Bloodlines is the contextual loading screen tips. There's a rotating bank of them and they change every time you progress to a new 'chapter' of the game. Sometimes this provides helpful information, like that tip about how to block that caught me and several others off-guard. And that's cool! I approve of that.
However at other times it's been less helpful, like the many tips about the tzimoose before they even showed up. Or, in this case, how for the last couple missions the game has been constantly referencing and driving home how INCREDIBLY THREATENING werewolves are, and how much it sucks for vampires to deal with them. Man, the Sabbat are pretty bad all right but aren't you glad you're not fighting a WEREWOLF right now? Taking a shotgun blast to the chest hurts all right, but WEREWOLVES are REALLY nasty! You know, Vampire Hunters believe in God, but VAMPIRES believe in WEREWOLVES.
(okay maybe we're not going that far)
So. Y'know. When Nines shows up looking incredibly nervous? Guess why.
That's right, it's because they sent me, of all people, to negotiate terms. And actually the terms are coming along quite well! We meet on a mountainside next to a tram lift, and the peace/ally talks are coming along briskly.
Then Nines realizes the nearby forest is on fire and -- yes, freaks out. No, the fire wasn't set to kill US. We have to get OUT of here. And then the tram takes off down the mountain without us, and it's a three-minute wait for the next one.
"We gotta find somewhere to hide until it come bAAAAAHHHH" says Nines, who is descending down the mountainside quite rapidly in the jaws of a twelve-foot-tall werewolf. ... Bye Nines! Then Ashe turns to spot the OTHER werewolf, and it becomes a game of hide and seek with a three minute timer.
WEREWOLF TAG:
Player One is the Vampire. The vampire can run inside buildings, yell "SLEEP!" at Player Two to make him stand there briefly, die and cringe in fear.
Player Two is the Werewolf. The werewolf can punch the doors off buildings, smash through skylights, kick down walls, punt Player One into orbit, swat all the bones out of Player One's body, materialize from hyperspace while unobserved and is twelve feet tall and six hundred pounds big.
The chase continues up and down the mountainside and through the doors of the local planetarium. Also, there is a LOT of dying and reloading. At one point Ashe ends up crammed awkwardly in the bathroom, standing on top of the toilet, repeatedly jumping over claw swipes and too pinned to leave. (That prompted a reload.) Eventually I hatch the perfect plan. If I turn the power on to the observatory dome... and open the huge steel doors... and lay in wait...
...then the werewolf would lose me around the huge dome and I'd just sit there until the timer ran out and the tram comes. Huh. Okay. In a way I'm glad. I really didn't want to have to kill the big guy. I sneak carefully back down through the planetarium, out the door, and into the tram st--
Big fluffy son of a bitch WAS WAITING FOR ME IN THE TRAM STATION and damn near took Ashe's head off her shoulders. With one last millisecond-delaying "SLEEP!", she dives into the trolley and rides it on down the mountain. ESCAPE.
Too bad about Nines, though. I'm mentally rehearsing the "He died a hero protecting my life" speech when Jack pulls up in a bright blue Camero and drags me in. Back in the old Santa Monica lair, he explains: LaCroix has called a blood hunt on Ashe for murdering Nines in league with the Kuei-Jin. He's been spinning it like Ashe was his daughter, brought up to take his place in the world, but cruelly betraying him...
FUCK. We're being set up as having betrayed him AND WE DIDN'T EVEN GET TO ACTUALLY BETRAY HIM. That's the part that REALLY STINGS.
Anyway, Jack explains that we've got Choices to make. We need to get to the cab, get in, and decide where "we feel safest". But first, we've got to fight off every vampire in the city on the way. Good luck, Ashe.
It's like Amateur Night as every thuggish vampire in the city chases Ashe down the street. What do you GET if you "win" a blood hunt, anyway? A blue ribbon and a year's supply of turtle wax? Anyway, with them cleaned off the streets it's time to make a choice. The cab driver talks Ashe through a few choices, but y'know... let's analyze our options.
We could:
GO BACK TO THE PRINCE
Pros: He paid us pretty well up until this latest fiasco.
Cons: Has been trying to have us killed via suicide missions pretty much since Day One. Has lied to us repeatedly. Nobody likes him. Has a weird mania over a stupid box.
VERDICT: This is stupid.
GO JOIN MING-XIAO
Pros: Has been quite polite and well-mannered. Has been quite honest with us. People already think we're in with her.
Cons: Is a stranger from a strange land. Also, is a member of a faction that wants to EXTERMINATE THE ENTIRE SPECIES OF WESTERN VAMPIRE ATTENTION ATTENTION THIS LADY WANTS TO GENOCIDE US.
VERDICT: What do we get? NOTHING. THIS IS STUPID.
HOOK UP WITH THE ANARCHS
Pros: Damsel is awesome. Nines has always been... somewhat decent to us, except the part where he told us to fuck off back to Camerilla Country.
Cons: This really doesn't benefit us at all.
VERDICT: This is not STUPID, it's just... against type.
STRIKE OUT FOR OURSELVES
Pros: We know what's best for us.
Cons: Can't rule over a one-room apartment.
VERDICT: Meh.
No... no, there's one plan left. The Prince is... unfit to rule, because he is a lump of buttcheese and ALSO because he is not very GOOD at his job. Seriously, the tangle of schemes he tried to weave just clumps together and sits there in a heap. There's nothing that holds them up. No elegance. What we need is someone ELSE ruling LA. And to get him out on his ass, we need Primogen support. We need the one vampire in serious power who has never yet tried to screw us. One who owes us a favor.
We need Max Strauss.
Strauss is rather pleased to see Ashe, and even MORE pleased that even with Prince LaCroix stabbing her in the back she's willing to play ball with the Camerilla. He lays out a three step plan:
Kill Xiao.
Kill LaCroix.
Appoint a new leader.
...naturally, Ashe will be doing the first two while he does the third. Siiigh.
What follows is a cross-city spending spree as Ashe buys blood packs, body armor and ammo. Oh, and someone sends us a helpful email reading "Don't open it." because HEY YOU SHOULDN'T OPEN THE SARCOPHAGUS HAVE YOU FIGURED OUT YOU SHOULDN'T OPEN THE SARCOPHAGUS HEY DON'T OPEN THE SARCOPHAGUS god -damn- enough already.
Incidentally, the character model for the "Body Armor", the heaviest armor in the game, is a very fancy black leather trenchcoat with what appears to be absolutely nothing underneath it. Presumably STYLE keeps attacks from landing.
Well, we'll test that. Step one: Ming Xiao. ... Wait, what's this? Yukie, why are you lurking in the shadows outside the Kuei-Jin temple? "My sword is still angry. We will kill ghost people?" she asks. "FUCK YEAH WE WILL KILL SOME GHOST PEOPLE" I decide. Roll the (censored) transformation footage, we got a magical girl party!
Yukie, in addition to her own magic sword, ALSO brought along a rapid-repeater crossbow and turns out to be quite the archer. The pair of us clear out the grounds and the top floor, then Yukie bows out. She has her own battles to fight elsewhere. Just for a minute I have kind of a pang. I wish there was an option to drop this. Pledge my blade. Buy a plane ticket and leave the city with Yukie. Ask her to be the Larva to my Miyu, maybe without the tragic backstory.
Ashe plunges deeper into the temple alone. Before long the basement... well. It looks like Toshiro Mifune redecorated the place. It is long, mazelike, and packed full of mooks who serve the primary function of the mook: To yell "STOP RIGHT THERE" or "FREEZE" and then get knocked on the floor.
The problem with this bit is ... it kinda drags on and on and on and there's MORE mooks and ANOTHER sub-basement, and by the time it's asking me to put jade elephants and dragons on pedestals I almost don't -care- anymore? Can we just ASSUME I already have the dragon on a pedestal? It's me we're talking about here. C'mon.
Ming Xiao turns herself into a giant slug creature. It doesn't help.
From there it's back to the taxi, and from THERE to the LaCroix tower. The guards try to stop Ashe. THAT doesn't work either. Unfortunately, partway up the building the elevator cuts out, so Ashe is forced to scale the rest of the way on foot, through guards, through black-ops dudes in full body armor, past the guy LaCroix mind-controls into strapping bricks of C4 to himself and running at Ashe. From him we get some explosives, which we stuff into an elevator and John McClaine that load up to the top floor, where it blows up a bunch of mercenaries.
Even the Prince's Sheriff gets in on the action. The huge dude wielding the Buster Sword can apparently turn into a 30-foot-wide GIANT BAT. ... Why can everyone turn into cool shit but me?
In the end, he falls as well, and the Prince makes one last stand at Dominating Ashe. She laughs at him. He's a small, weak man who believes what's in that sarcophagus would give him power. Strauss takes it away, puts it in a warehouse forever. It doesn't NEED to be opened. Whatever LaCroix thought was in there doesn't even merit looking at.
And so that brings a close to the tale of Ashe, Vampire Princess. Strauss presumably takes up rulership of LA. Ashe presumably stays on for a while as his right hand enforcer, but LA is a small town and it's a big world, and frankly if only you're number two you're not trying hard enough.
Still... not a bad social climb, for two weeks of effort.
Next time, final thoughts and misc stuff.
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no subject
Date: 2013-12-13 10:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-12-14 03:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-12-14 02:31 am (UTC)C'mon, that never happens in the real stories. Did you open it and reload in a previous run-through or just check what happens online? :D
no subject
Date: 2013-12-14 03:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-12-14 05:37 am (UTC)Strauss will have men look into it.
TOP men.