[Click here to start from the first progress log]

The header image is of a reproducible softlock that happened to me, wiping out a fairly large chunk of gameplay since my last save. Another softlock occurred after I beat the game and started a new one (to mess around with values and see what actually happens if you manage to pay off your debt, but the softlock happened before I started Cheat Engine and was 100% the game’s fault). Of course, beating Void Monsters wasn’t a simple matter, and I have some pretty major complaints about the way things ended up going down because what you’re told and what ends up happening are two different things. Being sabotaged by this was infuriating.

First, some bug stuff

There was a patch today that fixed tent 23 being inaccessible, which was nice. Sadly, the person I was looking for in the desert wasn’t there, either, nor was she in any of the other tents I rechecked. Another thing that was changed is that certain NPCs can be moved through so that they don’t block you, which is a pretty great change. The second city also has a guy selling maps in it now. That would have been helpful early on, though it’s strange how prohibitively expensive they are.

The last thing I noticed was that the slowdown in a certain area was fixed. The game still gets bogged down sometimes and chugs to a crawl (or temporarily freezes) when a lot of people are wandering around, but this area was the worst offender at certain times of the day, and it’s much more comfortable to move through now.

This is a video I made of the same area pre-patch. It’s a night and day difference.

There are still some really annoying bugs, though. At one point, you can discover an area sealed off by the villain that has three places for you to summon monsters with runes. I had enough runes to summon two of the three, but when I came back after obtaining more runes, the ladder wouldn’t work anymore, nor could the puzzle that unsealed the area in the first place be solved again. The monster was unattainable.

Finally, there’s the softlock, or at least the one I know how to reproduce. You can obtain mobile crafting stations so that you can craft from your inventory, and I somehow ended up with two tonic crafting kits. It took a little figuring out, but it eventually became clear that quickly selecting a crafting station you own more than one of from your inventory by button-mashing causes it to be selected twice, causing this error to occur. And despite what the error text says, pressing F8 does nothing.

Stick to the plan, game

At one point, the thieves’ guild basically disowned me after some plot happenings that don’t seem like they can be avoided, ensuring that the only real path forward was to rescue the villain’s estranged sister from the prison. She then sent me all over assassinating the rest of her family and targeting the bank’s income stream, and all for the purpose of ensuring that I had a straight shot to the villain once the final showdown came around. I had something like 25 days to prepare for it, so I decided to do all of this as early as possible before focusing on sidequests to level up a bit. Then the sister informed me that it was now suddenly 2 days because the villain took notice of me assassinating most of his family. That was the first curveball.

Two days wasn’t long enough to do a whole lot, so I decided to speed up time (using a pocket watch item that I picked up from who knows where) and get right to it. Having killed the family members and void monsters who would otherwise stand in my way, I used up most of my stat-boosting cheeses and went through my unused void monsters’ magic to give my party members buffs. All of this would only apply to the very next fight, but the game had made it clear that all of that busywork was so that the villain would be unprotected. Then I got there to fight him and he revealed that void monsters don’t die, throwing me into back-to-back boss fights that I hadn’t only already gone through, but that I recruited monsters from. I was literally fighting monsters that were active party members. By the time I reached the boss, all of the buffs were gone, and both he and one of his monsters spammed healing spells, ensuring that my non-buffed party couldn’t finish him. They died, and it was cheap.

I reloaded a save from before I went to face him, and it turns out that buffs don’t get baked into the save. Or maybe they were lost somehow else. Point is, I had no cheeses and no buffs. Annoyed beyond belief by this point, I went to the Purchasing Guild to sell off all of the items I’d been hoarding, making an obnoxious amount of money in the process and ensuring that I’d be dealing with little “gold obtained” bloops until I finished playing. All to afford some more stat-boosting cheeses.

After the cheeses were purchased, I warped to the final confrontation, beat the back-to-back void monster fights, and then used up all of the stat-boosting cheeses before taking on the final boss. The fight still took awhile because of his party’s constant self-healing, but they eventually went down and I got some text about how I saved the world, blah blah blah. Then I was given the option to either end the game or keep playing. Before all of this, I would have kept playing a bit to see how the post-game content goes, but I was so fed up that I ended the game in annoyance.

All choices end in combat

Of course, there was still one more thing to check, so I started a new game and used Cheat Engine to raise my gold to 800,000 pieces. Then I went around paying off people’s debt, which didn’t seem to do anything but increase the world’s prosperity. Then I went in and overpaid my own debt. That’s when the villain automatically warped me to the final area, only this time I hadn’t leveled up at all and his family members remained alive. The very first family member wiped me out, and this is where it became clear: you can choose a secondary job to make money, but your primary role here will always be as a stupid monster-fighting jRPG character. There’s no way to farm your way to the ending. If you don’t grind your levels up a bit, obtain a bunch of monsters, and make sure that they have the best equipment and attacks possible, you’re screwed. While that gels with the otherwise confusing decision to have both overworld monster fights and random encounters, it nevertheless feels like a betrayal of all of the different mechanics at play here.

[Click here to go to Void Monsters: Spring City Tales log #3]

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