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Update I - The Framing Device So Nice, They Used It Twice
♪ BGM: Title Screen - boss.mp3 ♫
Well, here we go again.
♪ BGM: Options - blood003.mid ♫
As a sidenote, I do recommend listening to the music. There's a certain charm that comes with these MIDIs, and I kind of regret not showing off the music in Düsterburg and Vampires Dawn. That might just be personal nostalgia speaking, though. Still, I recommend giving them a listen. Anyway, we kick things off with a list of controls. These are your basic RPG Maker controls, so there's nothing out of the ordinary here.
Now, our first choice is that of difficulty. And I'm afraid that as seems to be more and more the norm with my LPs, I'm going to have to call an audible before we even start. You see, at the end of the Vampires Dawn LP, I held a vote as to which difficulty we want to use, and how we should act in the game (good or evil, basically). The vote ended in favor of good and easy. I liked this, because I figured that translating the game was going to be enough work. However, now that we have an actual translation to work with, I think that I need something to counterbalance that.
As such, we're going to be playing on Hard. Because I've come to realize that what people like most about my LPs is my suffering. However, with this comes an extra caveat: I'm not going to guarantee that we're going to be playing the goody-two-shoes. I'm going to attempt to do that, but I make no promises, primarily because I've heard that the difficulty in this game does not fuck around. So if I have to play dirty, well, that's going to be what it takes. Still, I'm going to have to run up against a brick wall for me to abandon the plan. But enough fussing around about a difficulty we haven't even seen yet, let's move on.
No thanks, we'd like to see the intro.
♪ BGM: Intro - awakening.mid ♫
First off, we get our developer logo with a bat flying across the screen.
We then cut to four people riding horses in a thunderstorm. Who are they? Where are they going? Fucked if I know!
However, the unfamiliarity quickly fades away as we welcome back an old friend: The bloody text that talks about vague, over-arching stuff. In the interest of having less screenshots of the same stuff, I'll transcribe the rest of the text.
TO DESTROY ALL VAMPIRES
BROUGHT LIGHT INTO THE NIGHT
WAS THAT THE END?
WAS THAT THE BEGINNING?
WAS THE EVIL DEFEATED?
WILL IT EVER END?
I also feel the need to point out that at one point during that scene, the four jump their horses over a gap, and they float in mid-air for over a second before falling back down. Gravity does not work like that. Anyway, the screen fades to black.
We then cut to this strange scene.
The guy with the weird hat uses some sort of magic to really fuck up these guys in robes, and we get more text.
WHAT WERE THEY?
WHAT ARE THEY?
AND WHAT WILL THEY BE?
And after the guy with the hat kills everybody...
...we get our first evil laugh of the game! We're off to a flying start!
♪ BGM: Bad Night Story - vamp9.mid ♫
We then cut to a familiar set of characters.
Well, here we are! Welcome to your new room, Simon!
Well, it looks okay, I guess... But I don't understand why we are going to live in the castle now.
Now don't be like that, Simon. You know that your father is part of the king's guards now! And every royal guard gets the honor of letting their families live here in the castle.
Hrmpf... His new job simply means that he will have even less time for me!
Oh, Simon... At least you still have me! And my room is right next to yours!
Great! Now I can hear your snoring every night!
Hey, don't mock your old grandpa! I don't snore!
You do! In fact, your snoring is so loud that even our neighbors complained! They thought we had a whole sawmill in our basement!
Well, maybe I do snore a little. I'm not getting younger, after all! But I do know a good way to make sure you're going to sleep well after all. A good... or rather BAD night story!
Oh yeah, Grandpa! Your stories are the best!
I know, I know. I'm not known as "Gonrad, the Story-Teller" in the entire country for nothing!
Grandpa! You're not even known in the next village!
There you can see what kind of story philistines they are! But what are we waiting for? Shoo, shoo, to bed with you!
Grandpa! I'm already 15! I'm not a little child anymore!
If only you would act like that...
Why is every old person like that?
Why is every young person like that?
All right, all right! I'm going to bed! But only if you'll tell me a good story. Perhaps you could continue telling the story of Valnar and Alaine?
If you finally go to bed, yes!
Like in the last game, Grandpa here is going to ask us some questions that set certain options in the game.
Like this?
This is the "blue with blood frame" option.
This is the "dark blue with plain frame" option.
This is the "grey with blood frame" option.
And this is the "oh my god what the fuck is this" option. Oh, sorry, it's the "red with a fire frame" option. I end up going with the classic, the blue with blood frame option.
After this, Grandpa gives us some options on how we want the dialogue boxes to enter the screen. Growing from small to large, fading in, or coming from the bottom or the left. I pick the "growing from small to large" option because that's the default. I'm not going to make GIFs of those options because let's face it, you're hardly ever going to see these animations. Moving on...
I'd say... 1) Fast - 2) Normally
Gotta go fast.
Do you want the story to have many, or rather not so many battles.
I'd say... 1) Not so many battles - 2) Many battles
Hm. I distinctly remember forums poster "a cartoon duck", whom I have to refer to like that in order to not make it sound like I'm even more insane than I already am, telling me in no uncertain terms to pick the former option here. Let's go and dig that post up...
a cartoon duck posted:
Related to the difficulty when the game asks you how many fights or whatever you want, I strongly suggest you pick the lowest option. It's been a while but I remember that option not doing what any sane person might expect it to do.
Yeah, that sounds pretty much like a warning. So of course I'm picking "many battles". Because I'm thick. However, this isn't entirely just me being really stupid, but rather being very curious... in a stupid way. "That option not doing what any sane person might expect it to do" translates out to "this is a dumb thing, and it will be very interesting to see the dumb thing" for me.
Of course, the reason I'm so readily jumping into this is that I have the capability to go back and change things thanks to the RPG Maker editor giving me godlike powers over the game. So if things become absolutely unbearable, I can reverse course, and you get to enjoy me ramming into a brick wall head-first in the meantime.
And do you want there to be many puzzles for Valnar and his companions to solve, or not?
I guess I'd rather say... 1) Rather not so many puzzles - 2) Many puzzles
Oh, I already know I'm going to regret this one, too. But if there's some really dumb and complicated puzzle that makes me tear my hair out, I want to see it. And I know you want to see it, too.
Do you still remember the first part of the story? Or did your young head already forget all of it?
Uh... 1) ...I still remember everything! - 2) ...please tell it again!
No sense in skipping the recap - get some of you that didn't want to re-read the first LP back up to speed a bit quicker.
You really forget everything already? Well, fine, I'll quickly summarize it again. So... the story had five main characters. Valnar, Asgar, Alaine, Abraxas, and Vincent Weynard. These five determined the fate of all vampires. The story began with the young warrior Valnar, who had a terrible dream!
him. And so, he visited Dr. Jarn one night in order to get a painkiller. After he was finally able to get back to sleep thanks to it, he was woken up by a scream. His girlfriend was gone, and a giant stain of blood was covering the ground. He went outside and discovered a blood trail leading to the nearby mountain. There he found a cave in which the vampire Abraxas was holding Aysha in his hands, and then thrusted a sword into her heart. Valnar was knocked out by Abraxas afterwards. He woke up at Dr. Jarn's place and immediately went off to find his beloved Aysha.
As a sidenote, I'm going to keep the mistakes I do notice in, just for consistency's sake - like the "thrusted" thing above. If I do correct an error, it will be either because the sentence is incomprehensible without it, or it happened subconsciously in transcribing (this font the game uses does not play nice with my OCR software, sadly).
him into a trap and turned him into a vampire. From that moment forth, Valnar was plagued by constant self doubts.
She had been decapitated, and was therefore not able to be revived through normal ways. Asgar needed the blood of a human who slept with a vampire. And as Asgar knew, Aysha was a vampire. Valnar never suspected that, until it became too obvious even for him. The three of them later found Aysha hanging on a tree. Abraxas' sword was still inside her heart, but Valnar wanted Asgar to use the resurrection spell, that had already worked perfectly fine on Alaine, on Aysha. But Aysha wasn't truly dead, because, as you know, a vampire is only truly dead when their head was removed from the body. That's why the spell failed, of course, and Aysha turned insane. She escaped and the three started to search for her. They found her deep in the Shadow Forest, where her connection to Abraxas came to light.
pretext that she loved him. There was also Vincent Weynard, a priest who began the Holy Crusade against the vampires after they appeared one day out of nowhere and threatened humanity. Vincent hunted and killed almost all vampires, and was appointed high priest of the church because of that. One day, he faked his death after giving the prophecy he would walk the earth again one day. But as it turned out during the course of the story, he was actually the employer of Abraxas and the creator of all vampires. He'd found an old spell book, which he used to create the vampires. Valnar, Asgar and Alaine found and killed Vincent, and due to the power the book held, Asgar turned insane, and a fight between Asgar, Valnar and Alaine broke out. Alaine and Valnar fell in love with each other over the course of the story, and so they fought together against Asgar, who wanted to destroy the world. in the end, he lost, and from then on, he lived as a Blood Spirit. Because as you still may know, a vampire continues to exist as a Blood Spirit while suffering endless pain, without any hope of salvation. That's how it usually is, anyway. As you may remember, vampires are not afraid of sunlight or crucifixes. Only by being decaptitated can a vampire truly die. Garlic, of course, doesn't hurt them, either. But if a vampire doesn't have enough blood in their body, they get enraged and they can no longer control themselves properly. If a vampire suffers too great injuries due to weapons or magic, they fall into Rigor and must hope that someone heals their wounds. Until then, they are unable to move. A vampire that didn't fall into Rigor can, if they have enough blood, heal their wounds on their own. But this could obviously take a while, depending on how severe their wounds are. But back to the story... so Asgar was now a Blood Spirit and suffered pain beyond his imaginations. But first, I think I'd better close the curtains, then we will have a better atmosphere here.
Oooh, spooky.
At any rate, we stopped at the point where Valnar and Alaine took the book to Valnar's house. There, they were pondering on what they should do next. After a while, they decided to drastically change the fate of one human. But even before that human was born, they became involved in a dramatic event... it all began on a beautiful summer day. The little Nyria wanted to play outside, but she had to help her mother, who was lying in bed with a small fever... but the weather in Thyrik was too beautiful for Nyria to stay inside all day.
And with that, our story begins. I'm going to try and keep updates on the shorter side this time around, so this is as good a time as any to cut. Next time, we'll listen to the story of Nyria, a character that made absolutely no appearance in the first game, but is still related to something from there.
Also, here's the artwork we saw this update in a slightly higher resolution from the game files:
Valnar, looking somewhat more edgy than the last time we saw him.
Asgar, looking 100% less like a dark elf now.
Alaine, having gotten somewhat more pale since the last game.
Vincent Weynard, with a really shit-eating grin.
Oh, and just to mention this right away, don't expect the portraits to look exactly like this artwork either. Our vampires aren't going to look quite as pale as they do here.