[Click here to start from the first progress log]

The good news is that chapter 3 avoids including any further Scooby Doo moments. The bad news is that I’m already sick of Lae’s three helpers and their lazy personalities, and the dialogue being static makes having to sit through it all the more boring. I’m also finding that the controls aren’t a suitable replacement for those of the previous games; where having each trap set to a button allowed you to be creative with your timing and always know where you were at in a chain, having everything stuck onto the cross button makes it far too easy to lose track of where you are in the chain and screw up a trap combo. The whole thing is just clumsy.

I bought a few new traps, but the only one of any real consequence is an upgrade to the push wall that’s faster. Given how I was complaining in the last progress log about the speed of the default wall, the arrival of this upgrade was certainly timely. There’s also a claw ceiling trap and an electricity-shooting wall trap that I bought, but they’re kind of awkward to use and/or time correctly (as you’ll see in the videos).

Zeno Shin escaping means that everyone knows about the group of “witches” now, so there’s a coordinated attack that they have no choice but to flee from. This is a pretty lazy excuse for a location change, but I’m on board anyway because I’m not a huge fan of the starting area. There aren’t enough trap-friendly staircases.

Zeno’s unit and their activity apparently fall under the purview of a government minister named Gallagh Belgosh, which sounds like a secret wizard name but isn’t. He was excited to hear of the news Zeno brought back for some reason, and formed a unit specifically to attack the castle. That’s not surprising, of course, as governments/royalty are always part of a conspiracy in these games (which is one of the few Deception traditions that goes back all the way to the first game).

Whatever the conspiracy in this game is about, the government seems aware of the Holy Verses’ existence and is anxious to get their hands on them. Gallagh is joined by this smiling guy named Vale, and if there’s one thing I know about lazy anime archetypes, it’s that smiling is code for “this is an absurdly powerful evil character.”

Is it just me, or have there been an inordinate number of thief-type enemies already? They can be especially annoying since they can ninja jump past stairs, avoiding my boulder trap in the process, but the faster push wall makes up for that by allowing me to hit people with boulders across the room. Anyway, you can see the claw’s total failure to reliably grab enemies in this video, and the blast bomb also somehow has no effect at 6:48 (probably because they wandered into it after the trap was triggered). This is why I always end up falling back on throwing boulders around.

Another staple of the Deception series is wonky camera angles during character introductions and death scenes, and while this could be seen as a negative, it makes me a little happy seeing this still be a thing. Anyway, this picture is of Hernan, and something you’ll notice in the video is that Hernan gets away. Except he doesn’t; characters in previous games had to run to the door to escape, whereas I was actively pushing Hernan into a trap when the game decided to allow him to randomly get away. I considered restarting, but decided to keep playing for the moment.

Vale tricks Gallagh into agreeing to personally fight should things continue to go badly (presumably condemning him to an inevitable death for fun), and his expression here highlights the fact that he has light-colored eyes despite usually squinting. Those two things are also telltale signs of an overpowered anime villain.

This is the video where you can see how badly my internet sucks, and each time it goes out a popup shows up to tell me all about it. This is why I don’t review games with always-online DRM. Back to the game, though, I decided to capture a character and play around a bit. In the process, another character named Monique got away. Losing two characters in a single chapter would ordinarily be a restart, but Monique’s bio states that she’s secretly in love with Hernan, so both of them escaping felt like fate. Also, I kept walking into green room traps after confusing them for a healing circle because the healing circles in Trapt were greenish-yellow. That was my bad.

Gallagh finally storms into the mansion and catches everyone off-guard by telling them that he knows that they’re daemons, mentioning that he wants their Holy Verses fragments. His reasons seem entirely driven by selfishness and the daemons call him out on it because apparently there’s no saying about “the pot calling the kettle black” in this universe, but he has a fragment and that means he has to die.

I died for the first time in this mission, and that really boils down to getting hit by a lot of long-range attacks while trying to be fancy. That means that the first 16:21 of the video is of my first attempt (which involves looking at bios and weaknesses), and everything after that is a no-nonsense, frustration-fueled boulderfest. Choke on it.

An earlier level had an electricity mage. This mission had a fire mage. Both were annoying in their own way, and the statuses they inflict are as bad as ever, but I’m less irritated by them than I am worried about the possibility of future ice mages. Being constantly frozen in place (and stunlocked, basically) is the worst.

With Gallagh dead and his piece of the Holy Verses obtained, Lae and her helpers abandon the mansion (and possibly blow it up in the process—Vanilla brought that up and Blueberry agreed with her about “cleaning up,” but it’s difficult to tell if they’re joking or actually being serious because the tone is all over the place in this game).

Vale had mentioned that he was present to finish the job in case Gallagh failed, but that was either a lie or something that he forgot about, because he instead decides to be all mysterious and report what happened. He never mentions who he’s going to report to, but it’d obviously have to be someone in the government who’s important enough to overlook Vale sending a minister to die for no obvious reason.

All right, I have no idea how experience works in this game. How do 688 points translate to 2,200 “humiliation exp” while 27,210 points translate to 4,010 “elaborate exp”? I’m not even sure what experience does (the dual currencies of Ark and Warl were confusing enough already without adding in another currency to deal with), but I suspect it might dictate the type of traps you unlock. Like getting a lot of blue “elaborate exp” unlocks things such as a better push wall, while avoiding yellow experience keeps me from getting more rakes and pumpkins and other stupid traps.

[Click here to go to Deception IV log #2]

The post Deception IV – The Nightmare Princess: Progress Log #3 appeared first on Killa Penguin.