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justwantsafety(Continued from here.)
So Serph and co. kill the two men Harley had had with him. Then they went deeper into Svadhisthana, despite Harley's panicked attempt to get them to leave, and find Harley in another room.
Although you know which one Harley would prefer you pick, you have to say yes to progress the story.
This part amuses me so much.
See-- when you get up to the upper level, to go across the wall, to use it as a bridge, the guy's still standing there in front of the switch. I managed to angle the camera such that I could see the floor just behind the raised wall (a feat in and of itself, thanks to DDS's camera, heh) and Harley was not there.
But his soldier's still standing up there.
And how do you get down, after you beat that guy and lower the wall? Not back the way you came, no -- you climb down the ladder that's located... well, when the wall is raised, it's on the side of the mezzanine that you were cut off from, the side Harley was on.
Which means that that guy who stood up there to guard the switch? He could very well have simply climbed back down the ladder to follow after Harley in running off, if he really wanted to.
With Harley's "scream and run" reactions at this point, I sincerely doubt that he was focused enough to have ordered the guy to stay. He probably ran again just after the wall went up, without another word.
The fact that the guy stayed up at the switch was his own fault.
I wonder if it tasted like chicken too. P:
Any rate, maybe he stuck around because he was hungry and wanted to try his luck with eating Serph? Obviously that didn't work out so well for him...
At this point, you can either lower the wall and climb back down, or just climb right down, and be on the side of it that Harley last was... and then head through the door after him.
Blah blah, hallways and rooms and items, more random battles...
And finally, you reach what looks rather like their mess hall, complete with tables and a small Karma Terminal and a Life Terminal.
The Terminals... I am so sorely tempted to write a lot of them, and especially what they do, off as being merely a game mechanic that doesn't translate over to a more realistic depiction of things. Yes, I know they're commented on by the NPCs... but that's what you call an in-game hint system. Game mechanics don't always seem to translate over very well to story-canon things. If Serph and co wander around without battling for long enough, the game tells you that the party feels hungry, and therefore their HP has decreased. If this were really how it worked, why can't the Junkyard's inhabitants simply eat rations -- or heck, just split one between a few of them or something, to recover the itty bit of HP that going hungry will take down, once in a while? Or just use Dia or Media on each other, and then refill themselves at a Life Terminal once they run out of MP? (or just use the Life Terminals straight off, but that's the more expensive way to go about it.) But then that'd nix the whole thing about going hungry for too long meaning the demon takes over, which we know they didn't, or else how would you explain what happened at Anahata? Because Varna never takes over Serph, even if you have him run around Ground Zero for an hour, until his health is next to nothing.
Details tangent: there are four low tables here, not quite a foot high, with a large rug under each. There aren't any plates or bowls to be seen, but at each of two tables are what look like three wine glasses and a somewhat-emptied bottle of red liquid, sans label. On each table, one of the three glasses is lying on its side (did it get dropped/knocked aside due to someone's hurry to get up and leave, on hearing what was going on?) One table's bottle is down to roughly 1/3rd full, and the other is maybe 2/3rds, maybe only closer to 1/2 full.
So, we don't know what's in those bottles, except that it's red. According to DDS2, the Embryon, at least, hadn't had alcohol before. I'm going to guess that since Sera probably hadn't either, it isn't in the Junkyard... but I don't see why it couldn't have been something else. Fruit punch? Heck, maybe it was just red water. Bottle appearance doesn't always correspond with contents, or else people would get drunk off Reed's gingerales and Jones Sodas and stuff, right?
All around the hall are various little crates, against the walls and railings, like you see elsewhere in the base... but so far, I haven't found anywhere like a barracks, or bedrooms, like in Muladhara. Curious, hm. (Since I doubt that this means that the Vanguards don't sleep, I'm going to again write this off as something that doesn't translate to a more realistic take on things. This means that for all the detail they put into Svadhisthana, the game's depiction of it isn't factually accurate, just accurate in spirit, like for things like the decor style and overall layout.) I also haven't seen things like on the shelves at Muladhara... if you look around closely enough there, you'll find littler containers -- bottles and jars and whatnot -- here and there, like on the shelf/closet area above the head of the bed Sera was in, during one of the cutscenes.
I took a detour from the mess hall, actually. I went downstairs and through another hall, then upstairs and through another short hallway to the outside, and found the courtyard where there's a cutscene just before the waterway missions. Except, you know... no cutscene yet.
The courtyard is just like it is in the scene where it's featured later on... except, that one access hatch in the ground is concealed. You know which part I mean -- a bit to the back, and somewhat in the center, of the lower area you have access to, at this point. There's a faint change in the floor tiles' pattern where it is, but those sorts of pattern changes aren't conspicuous out in this courtyard, as the flooring changes like that in other places too. It blends in very well; I'm not surprised that no one knew about it before... or maybe just hadn't thought about it, or didn't realize. Who knows.
I watched the water patterns in the courtyard for a while, since it's an animated texture that overlays the ground's normal textures. Curiously enough, all the water was heading for the edge of the courtyard past the concealed tunnel entrance. I guess it makes sense -- it all runs off the buildings' roofs, down to the ground, and from the ground, into all those little chasms that interrupt everything, like the one running through the middle of Muladhara, finally ending up in the waterways, and flowing into the Sea of Milk, under the Temple.
Makes me wonder about the bases' foundations' stability, though. If they've got all those huge crevasses running through the middle of them, that suggests at least somewhat unstable terrain. I know the Junkyard isn't really, but at a glance, one would suspect, right?
And then I can go even further on this tangent with another detail observation... and I think I will. I do realize that the PS2 has limitations, and that the programmers and artists had enough on their plate to focus on as it is, without getting as nitpicky as this... but I saw no drainage spouts on the buildings. No rain gutters, no holes to the sides or corners against the rims of various levels of architecture, and no water spilling over the edges from buildup and overflow, either. I even loaded another savedgame, to get past where the yellow wall was on the way to the courtyard, to take a look around lower in that little pit. No water was coming down the sides of the cliff-walls there either...
SO ANYWAY! On with the game.
I went back to the mess hall, and past it, just around the corner, were two Vanguards ladies, standing ready to fight.
Harley isn't the only one thinking that the Embryon are out to kill them.
Since the barricade scene, Harley hasn't managed to calm down or pull himself together enough to do much of anything -- including give anyone further orders, beyond "Raise the wall" back there. Everyone's been scrambling like mad once word reached them of what was going on -- that Serph was leading a party into their base, and hunting them down. Since that barricade scene, there's been no lack of random battles... and really, five hundred people, all crammed into this area of the base? I'm actually surprised there haven't been more NPCs visible... but then, the SMT games' style is to have the random-battle enemies be unseen until the screen suddenly changes, and oh hey, a battle! Unlike in the Persona games... sigh. Ah well. Write that detail off as a game mechanic, yes, but the point still stands... the Vanguards are all fleeing, running around, trying to stand and fight the Embryon, all without much coordination, or else they'd be more successful than this, surely. At the very least, they'd all be thinking to attack en masse, or something, to wear them down. I mean -- near enough five hundred soldiers, all crowded into one not-so-huge base? Then again, there're getting mowed down by the Embryon... and the base got divided up with those colored walls... which again, I'd like to dismiss as another game mechanic. Because seriously? What in the world.
The demon thing, I can understand... it was a fundamental change in the way the Junkyard worked; the whole demon thing there was a test, as revealed in DDS2. But the random item-holding containers suddenly appearing too? What's wrong with letting the Tribes simply keep restocking from the Vendor? Why don't the Tribes open the containers they find in their own bases, instead of leaving them for Serph?
It just doesn't translate over into a more realistic take on it very well. Ugh, logic-headache, go away!
The door just after those two women:
I would like to point out two things here.
One, Harley's stuttering. He can't even speak straight.
Two, he makes a mad dash for the door to his left.
Until I put up a map or something, let me just explain it like this. This room you encounter him in? There's three doorways to enter and leave it by. One on the east side, one on the north, and one on the west. Serph entered through the east door. Harley fled through the north door. If you continue on through the west doorway, there's a short, straight hall which branches south, and if you continue on straight west, it brings you to the east door of an almost identical room, with the same three-door configuration, though that room's west door is currently concealed by another of those switch-controlled walls. In fact, the eastern door is the same as the western, except the wall right in front of the eastern door is currently lowered into the floor, and thus not blocking the way. So the west room looks like it only has two doors, east and north.
Harley is already in the west room when you arrive.
The hall that connects the two rooms' north doorways is longer than the little hall that directly connects the two big rooms' east and west doorways... in fact, it's about twice the length.
So, to sum, when Harley took off, there? He covered about twice the distance Serph and the Embryon did, in a shorter time. And Serph doesn't walk places, on the "dungeon" screens. He runs everywhere.
Stuttering, and running that fast? That's not just nervousness, that's panic.As if this weren't already abundantly clear.
On entering that second room:
This line is apparently quite a topic for debate. Instead of going into it in detail here, since I've already rambled enough as it is, I'll just write up something for it later and post it separately.
Suffice to say, I don't believe he was thinking straight enough to fully understand the consequences of his words, at that moment.
Maybe after he'd calmed down and all, but I don't think much else was going through his mind besides "OMGOMGOMG" and stuff.
Back to the gameplay.
Each time you re-enter the rooms, alternating between them, Harley will have beaten you there again, repeat one of those lines, sprint off to the other room, and then Heat will speak up.
Good advice in theory. Unfortunately, Heat's never had experience with this sort of behavior, and never tried to corner a scared animal. You don't want to corner them, usually. They just freak out worse. You want to calm them down, you give them some space and reassure them that you're not going to be hostile, otherwise they'll just keep seeing you as a threat.
But Heat doesn't understand what fear is, except that it means that they have the upper hand. Ugh.
Then again, it might've worked if they'd left the wall where it was and split up -- have Argilla and Heat stay at the east exit of the west room, under orders not to attack him or do anything beyond simply keeping him from exiting through that doorway... and then chase him through the north door of the east room, to follow him into the other again, and block that path back out. Huh.
So anyway. From the little hall that connects them side-to-side, you take that split that goes south. After a little bit, you find a switch that messes with the walls in that west room -- it lowers the west wall and raises the east. When you do that....
He's out of his mind enough that he doesn't even pause to question why his base is being manipulated, or who's doing it. He just keeps on running.
On second thought, maybe someone should've blocked the west and north doors of the east room, and flushed him out through its east door instead, into the rest of the base. I don't doubt that they could've herded him right out of his own base if they really wanted to.
Here, you just go back to that part of the base, and follow him once more. This time there aren't really any other big detours to worry about. The path leads up to his strategy room, or office, or whatever you want to call it -- it's on the upper floor, directly above the entryway of Svadhisthana. Right before its door is another relatively big area, with a small Karma Terminal and another Life Terminal.
You'd think that if someone were to go that far into the base while needing to heal, they'd be pretty dumb. After all, in the pre-explosion Junkyard, why would you wait until you were at what was essentially the heart of the base, before you tended to the wounds you got while outside it? Because you certainly wouldn't have sustained those wounds inside said base, would you.
It just doesn't make sense... maybe they were thinking to account for an invasion? But then why would the Terminals even work for anyone who doesn't live there? That's just aiding your enemies, as evidenced. (Yes, that's right. When you're not in your own base, you are the enemy. The invaders. The ones who are not supposed to be there in the first place.)
Oh well.
One thing left... try to confront the cornered Leader.
This won't go well, as you already know.
(Continued here.)
So Serph and co. kill the two men Harley had had with him. Then they went deeper into Svadhisthana, despite Harley's panicked attempt to get them to leave, and find Harley in another room.
> A presence can be felt beyond the door.
> Open the door?
- Yes.
- No.
Although you know which one Harley would prefer you pick, you have to say yes to progress the story.
(Harley is seen here, just standing there hyperventilating or something, shaking.)
Harley: Yeaargh! Raise the wall!!
(the Vanguard on the upper level throws a switch, and a wall is raised between the Embryon and Harley. They then need to take a detour, to the upper level there, to confront that soldier.)
This part amuses me so much.
See-- when you get up to the upper level, to go across the wall, to use it as a bridge, the guy's still standing there in front of the switch. I managed to angle the camera such that I could see the floor just behind the raised wall (a feat in and of itself, thanks to DDS's camera, heh) and Harley was not there.
But his soldier's still standing up there.
And how do you get down, after you beat that guy and lower the wall? Not back the way you came, no -- you climb down the ladder that's located... well, when the wall is raised, it's on the side of the mezzanine that you were cut off from, the side Harley was on.
Which means that that guy who stood up there to guard the switch? He could very well have simply climbed back down the ladder to follow after Harley in running off, if he really wanted to.
With Harley's "scream and run" reactions at this point, I sincerely doubt that he was focused enough to have ordered the guy to stay. He probably ran again just after the wall went up, without another word.
The fact that the guy stayed up at the switch was his own fault.
Member of the Vanguards: There's a voice in my head... it keeps saying... devour... Keep devouring... Devour more...
(and then the battle with this guy, a Cockatrice. Looks like a giant, mutant chicken.)
I wonder if it tasted like chicken too. P:
Any rate, maybe he stuck around because he was hungry and wanted to try his luck with eating Serph? Obviously that didn't work out so well for him...
At this point, you can either lower the wall and climb back down, or just climb right down, and be on the side of it that Harley last was... and then head through the door after him.
Blah blah, hallways and rooms and items, more random battles...
And finally, you reach what looks rather like their mess hall, complete with tables and a small Karma Terminal and a Life Terminal.
The Terminals... I am so sorely tempted to write a lot of them, and especially what they do, off as being merely a game mechanic that doesn't translate over to a more realistic depiction of things. Yes, I know they're commented on by the NPCs... but that's what you call an in-game hint system. Game mechanics don't always seem to translate over very well to story-canon things. If Serph and co wander around without battling for long enough, the game tells you that the party feels hungry, and therefore their HP has decreased. If this were really how it worked, why can't the Junkyard's inhabitants simply eat rations -- or heck, just split one between a few of them or something, to recover the itty bit of HP that going hungry will take down, once in a while? Or just use Dia or Media on each other, and then refill themselves at a Life Terminal once they run out of MP? (or just use the Life Terminals straight off, but that's the more expensive way to go about it.) But then that'd nix the whole thing about going hungry for too long meaning the demon takes over, which we know they didn't, or else how would you explain what happened at Anahata? Because Varna never takes over Serph, even if you have him run around Ground Zero for an hour, until his health is next to nothing.
Details tangent: there are four low tables here, not quite a foot high, with a large rug under each. There aren't any plates or bowls to be seen, but at each of two tables are what look like three wine glasses and a somewhat-emptied bottle of red liquid, sans label. On each table, one of the three glasses is lying on its side (did it get dropped/knocked aside due to someone's hurry to get up and leave, on hearing what was going on?) One table's bottle is down to roughly 1/3rd full, and the other is maybe 2/3rds, maybe only closer to 1/2 full.
So, we don't know what's in those bottles, except that it's red. According to DDS2, the Embryon, at least, hadn't had alcohol before. I'm going to guess that since Sera probably hadn't either, it isn't in the Junkyard... but I don't see why it couldn't have been something else. Fruit punch? Heck, maybe it was just red water. Bottle appearance doesn't always correspond with contents, or else people would get drunk off Reed's gingerales and Jones Sodas and stuff, right?
All around the hall are various little crates, against the walls and railings, like you see elsewhere in the base... but so far, I haven't found anywhere like a barracks, or bedrooms, like in Muladhara. Curious, hm. (Since I doubt that this means that the Vanguards don't sleep, I'm going to again write this off as something that doesn't translate to a more realistic take on things. This means that for all the detail they put into Svadhisthana, the game's depiction of it isn't factually accurate, just accurate in spirit, like for things like the decor style and overall layout.) I also haven't seen things like on the shelves at Muladhara... if you look around closely enough there, you'll find littler containers -- bottles and jars and whatnot -- here and there, like on the shelf/closet area above the head of the bed Sera was in, during one of the cutscenes.
I took a detour from the mess hall, actually. I went downstairs and through another hall, then upstairs and through another short hallway to the outside, and found the courtyard where there's a cutscene just before the waterway missions. Except, you know... no cutscene yet.
The courtyard is just like it is in the scene where it's featured later on... except, that one access hatch in the ground is concealed. You know which part I mean -- a bit to the back, and somewhat in the center, of the lower area you have access to, at this point. There's a faint change in the floor tiles' pattern where it is, but those sorts of pattern changes aren't conspicuous out in this courtyard, as the flooring changes like that in other places too. It blends in very well; I'm not surprised that no one knew about it before... or maybe just hadn't thought about it, or didn't realize. Who knows.
I watched the water patterns in the courtyard for a while, since it's an animated texture that overlays the ground's normal textures. Curiously enough, all the water was heading for the edge of the courtyard past the concealed tunnel entrance. I guess it makes sense -- it all runs off the buildings' roofs, down to the ground, and from the ground, into all those little chasms that interrupt everything, like the one running through the middle of Muladhara, finally ending up in the waterways, and flowing into the Sea of Milk, under the Temple.
Makes me wonder about the bases' foundations' stability, though. If they've got all those huge crevasses running through the middle of them, that suggests at least somewhat unstable terrain. I know the Junkyard isn't really, but at a glance, one would suspect, right?
And then I can go even further on this tangent with another detail observation... and I think I will. I do realize that the PS2 has limitations, and that the programmers and artists had enough on their plate to focus on as it is, without getting as nitpicky as this... but I saw no drainage spouts on the buildings. No rain gutters, no holes to the sides or corners against the rims of various levels of architecture, and no water spilling over the edges from buildup and overflow, either. I even loaded another savedgame, to get past where the yellow wall was on the way to the courtyard, to take a look around lower in that little pit. No water was coming down the sides of the cliff-walls there either...
SO ANYWAY! On with the game.
I went back to the mess hall, and past it, just around the corner, were two Vanguards ladies, standing ready to fight.
Member of the Vanguards: They've chased us this far... the Embryon...
(Battle commences with two empusas.)
Harley isn't the only one thinking that the Embryon are out to kill them.
Since the barricade scene, Harley hasn't managed to calm down or pull himself together enough to do much of anything -- including give anyone further orders, beyond "Raise the wall" back there. Everyone's been scrambling like mad once word reached them of what was going on -- that Serph was leading a party into their base, and hunting them down. Since that barricade scene, there's been no lack of random battles... and really, five hundred people, all crammed into this area of the base? I'm actually surprised there haven't been more NPCs visible... but then, the SMT games' style is to have the random-battle enemies be unseen until the screen suddenly changes, and oh hey, a battle! Unlike in the Persona games... sigh. Ah well. Write that detail off as a game mechanic, yes, but the point still stands... the Vanguards are all fleeing, running around, trying to stand and fight the Embryon, all without much coordination, or else they'd be more successful than this, surely. At the very least, they'd all be thinking to attack en masse, or something, to wear them down. I mean -- near enough five hundred soldiers, all crowded into one not-so-huge base? Then again, there're getting mowed down by the Embryon... and the base got divided up with those colored walls... which again, I'd like to dismiss as another game mechanic. Because seriously? What in the world.
The demon thing, I can understand... it was a fundamental change in the way the Junkyard worked; the whole demon thing there was a test, as revealed in DDS2. But the random item-holding containers suddenly appearing too? What's wrong with letting the Tribes simply keep restocking from the Vendor? Why don't the Tribes open the containers they find in their own bases, instead of leaving them for Serph?
It just doesn't translate over into a more realistic take on it very well. Ugh, logic-headache, go away!
The door just after those two women:
> A familiar presence can be felt beyond the door.
> Open the door?
- Yes.
- No.
(Harley's standing there, shaking visibly, still entirely beside himself with fear.)
Harley: G-get away from me!
(He turns and flees.)
I would like to point out two things here.
One, Harley's stuttering. He can't even speak straight.
Two, he makes a mad dash for the door to his left.
Until I put up a map or something, let me just explain it like this. This room you encounter him in? There's three doorways to enter and leave it by. One on the east side, one on the north, and one on the west. Serph entered through the east door. Harley fled through the north door. If you continue on through the west doorway, there's a short, straight hall which branches south, and if you continue on straight west, it brings you to the east door of an almost identical room, with the same three-door configuration, though that room's west door is currently concealed by another of those switch-controlled walls. In fact, the eastern door is the same as the western, except the wall right in front of the eastern door is currently lowered into the floor, and thus not blocking the way. So the west room looks like it only has two doors, east and north.
Harley is already in the west room when you arrive.
The hall that connects the two rooms' north doorways is longer than the little hall that directly connects the two big rooms' east and west doorways... in fact, it's about twice the length.
So, to sum, when Harley took off, there? He covered about twice the distance Serph and the Embryon did, in a shorter time. And Serph doesn't walk places, on the "dungeon" screens. He runs everywhere.
Stuttering, and running that fast? That's not just nervousness, that's panic.
On entering that second room:
> A familiar presence can be felt beyond the door.
> Open the door?
- Yes.
- No.
(Harley is already there. He's shaking and breathing hard, just like before.)
Harley: I'll give you my territory and my hideout... Just leave me alone!
(He sprints off, to the north, just like before.)
This line is apparently quite a topic for debate. Instead of going into it in detail here, since I've already rambled enough as it is, I'll just write up something for it later and post it separately.
Suffice to say, I don't believe he was thinking straight enough to fully understand the consequences of his words, at that moment.
Maybe after he'd calmed down and all, but I don't think much else was going through his mind besides "OMGOMGOMG" and stuff.
Back to the gameplay.
Each time you re-enter the rooms, alternating between them, Harley will have beaten you there again, repeat one of those lines, sprint off to the other room, and then Heat will speak up.
Heat: Try something new. Block the path and drive him into a dead end.
Good advice in theory. Unfortunately, Heat's never had experience with this sort of behavior, and never tried to corner a scared animal. You don't want to corner them, usually. They just freak out worse. You want to calm them down, you give them some space and reassure them that you're not going to be hostile, otherwise they'll just keep seeing you as a threat.
But Heat doesn't understand what fear is, except that it means that they have the upper hand. Ugh.
Then again, it might've worked if they'd left the wall where it was and split up -- have Argilla and Heat stay at the east exit of the west room, under orders not to attack him or do anything beyond simply keeping him from exiting through that doorway... and then chase him through the north door of the east room, to follow him into the other again, and block that path back out. Huh.
So anyway. From the little hall that connects them side-to-side, you take that split that goes south. After a little bit, you find a switch that messes with the walls in that west room -- it lowers the west wall and raises the east. When you do that....
(Harley is shown running into that west room again, from the north door, as the walls switch. Finding the door to his left now blocked, he doesn't hesitate to go through the door to his right, instead, as that one is now unblocked.)
He's out of his mind enough that he doesn't even pause to question why his base is being manipulated, or who's doing it. He just keeps on running.
On second thought, maybe someone should've blocked the west and north doors of the east room, and flushed him out through its east door instead, into the rest of the base. I don't doubt that they could've herded him right out of his own base if they really wanted to.
Here, you just go back to that part of the base, and follow him once more. This time there aren't really any other big detours to worry about. The path leads up to his strategy room, or office, or whatever you want to call it -- it's on the upper floor, directly above the entryway of Svadhisthana. Right before its door is another relatively big area, with a small Karma Terminal and another Life Terminal.
You'd think that if someone were to go that far into the base while needing to heal, they'd be pretty dumb. After all, in the pre-explosion Junkyard, why would you wait until you were at what was essentially the heart of the base, before you tended to the wounds you got while outside it? Because you certainly wouldn't have sustained those wounds inside said base, would you.
It just doesn't make sense... maybe they were thinking to account for an invasion? But then why would the Terminals even work for anyone who doesn't live there? That's just aiding your enemies, as evidenced. (Yes, that's right. When you're not in your own base, you are the enemy. The invaders. The ones who are not supposed to be there in the first place.)
Oh well.
One thing left... try to confront the cornered Leader.
> Sounds can be heard from within the room.
> Open the door?
- Yes.
- No.
This won't go well, as you already know.
(Continued here.)
