[Click here to start from the first progress log]

There are these temple-type places that you can visit in each city, and merely entering is enough to expand the number of void monsters you can bring with you into combat. That goes a long way toward countering how annoying the random battles are, but exploring is still a bit of a chore. I only know where two of the three cities are located because every attempt to find the third has been a long trek through areas with random battles culminating in an unpickable lock. The second city was easy to find because a quest gave me explicit directions for how to get there. Now I have a quest that takes place in the third city, but I can’t find it because there are so many branching paths that lead to dead ends (often with a chest or two to make it slightly less aggravating) that I’m hesitant to waste my time looking.

A bigger party finishes combat faster

The video above is of a dungeon-type area. It’s totally optional and I could have ignored the quest entirely if I was so inclined (this is something I really like), but I figured it would be best to get a feel for as much of this game as possible. Something I started to notice around this point was that having a full party really reduces the strain of random encounters. They can still be annoying—especially since they seem to scale to your level, or perhaps what’s happening is that they become more powerful as the days pass—but being able to hammer the attack command and get through most fights is definitely a good thing. It’d still be preferable to remove random encounters entirely and rely on the glowing enemy encounters that you can avoid, but I suppose this is good enough for now.

The way you obtain new monsters is by using runes gained through quests and a card-matching minigame on symbols on the temple floor. Lighting up all symbols spawns a new monster to use, and you eventually end up with a whole bunch of them. Far more than you can use, even. You can swap these monsters in and out of your party, thankfully, and even abuse their magical abilities to heal the party after combat (party buffs that have cooldowns can also be used, but only once if that monster isn’t in your active party because cooldowns only cool down in combat).

The story of how I became a master thief

My character is named 7THIEF, and I don’t know exactly why. The THIEF part was a reference to Zelda: Link’s Awakening, as Link’s name is permanently changed to it whenever you steal from the shop, and I felt it was apropos given my intention to steal everything that I could here. Looking back, I think the 7 was an accidental button press. However it happened, I assumed that it was some “beginning symbol” showing you where the start of your name was, so I didn’t think to try and erase it. Thankfully, I’ve put quite a bit more thought into how I approach thievery.

Void Monster’s story is that your parents were murdered, and while looking for a journal promised to help provide some clues about what happened, I noticed a vendor out at night when everyone else had left Spring City’s town area. That was strange enough that I circled back to see what they had, only to realize that they were selling seeds. Including Seed: Sand, which is the type that grows into lockpicking material. Up to this point, I hadn’t spent money on anything in the hopes that I’d find someone selling these crucial seeds (which I’d been acquiring by wandering into people’s homes and rummaging around in their plants), so I spent all of my money to buy 198 of these seeds. Then I stole the journal and planted all of the seeds, only returning to the thieves’ den to finish the quest when I had enough materials to craft a stunning number of lockpicks. That was awesome. One thing that’s slightly less awesome is that new items have a little parade over the main character’s head whenever you acquire them, so crafting all of those lockpicks led to over 15 minutes of little bloops reminding me that I have lots of lockpicks now.

I only crafted the first three tiers of lockpicks, but I had found several master lockpicks already and was able to use all of the sand seeds found from that point on to craft more of them. With that much lockpicking equipment, my heart became set on celebrating with a big score: I had to rob the Spring City bank. This is the very same place in which you pay off your loan (if you’re so inclined; I am not), and breaking into it causes you to get into a fight with a guard. The first time I tried this bank robbery, he mopped the floor with me. When I came back, however, I did much better than expected—hence the video starting mid-fight. Once I had killed the innocent security guard, I started lockpicking all of the vaults. It was glorious.

I wish you could move through NPCs

The number of times an NPC will stand on a bridge or in a doorway in just the right way to make it impossible to get past them is a problem. You can’t push them, nor can you move through them, so becoming trapped is a very real possibility. If not for a ring I found early on (somewhere on the main character’s property, as memory serves) that warps back to the house, I could have lost huge chunks of valuable time standing around waiting for an NPC to get out of the way. Some of the things on the ground also can’t be moved through for some reason, which can make avoiding ball of light enemies tricky when you’re not familiar enough with the area to know which areas you can and can’t move through, but that’s ultimately a minor qualm.

[Click here to go to Void Monsters: Spring City Tales log #1]

The post Void Monsters – Spring City Tales: Progress Log #2 appeared first on Killa Penguin.