Anachronox #14 - The Battle of Limbus

Limbus is Fifty Shades of Brown. It might be understandable though since it has apparently been the battleground between what can essentially be coined as "good and evil" (in this game it's "chaos" and "order" though) for a long, long time. We're just in time for another round it seems.

It looks like someone had a bad curry in here.

But first we mess up the front guard of the people who are safeguarding the Universe, woopsie. This is actually one of the more difficult fights I've done in this game and I have to use several of my resurrects before they finally go down. The boss, of which there are in fact six, have a clever system where only three of them fight at any one time, and three are in the back row (behind a force field and untargetable) healing. Then they constantly swap back and forth meaning you have to focus your fire if you want to ever get them down.

They're not as stupid as they look.

Killing the guard means I can get into the town of the people who guard the galaxy, you might even call them the Guardians of the Galaxy, I guess. They are surprisingly un-furious considering what I just did, though they do chew me out a bit for it. It doesn't help that the probe that the space-flower just sent down turns out to be another wave of bad guys trying to achieve something that will allow them to destroy the Universe. I get to replace the front guard with one of my own (Rho) and also the back door (Democratus) in case they choose to come that way (they do). The people give each character some cannon fodder of their own to help out as well and that's going to come in handy because the enemies pack a punch.

Their thing is unpronouncable names.

Boots on the other hand gets the honorable duty of manning the massive planetary defense gun with which I get to shoot down enemy landing parties. Why they would leave such an incredibly important task in the hands of someone who has clearly already done a huge mistake is curious, though I guess it helps that it seems Boots is the Chosen One fabled in some wall paintings.

The prophets even knew what I was going to wear.

The fighting starts and we start kicking ass. I was picturing something along the lines of the little tactical event in FFVII where you get to place troops on a map, but it's nothing like that. Rho and Democratus get attacked in turn and it's just regular battles. Not overly difficult either, fortunately, though I feel like it's a lot down to my little aides who take pretty much all my fire. I don't want the Universe to be destroyed.

We are victorious, of course. But it's only temporary. We still have to prevent the bad guys from entering our universe and tear it up (what we have been fighting has been some sort of front force). The main guy of the Limbus people tells me to go talk to some special agent named Roweidekhalicon (yeah I had to look up the spelling on that) who happens to be in South Anachronox (which is where we started the game). In fact he turns out to be Rowdy who owns the bar from which Boots did his work before we got caught up in this whole "save the universe" business.

So many casualties.

Rowdy tells us that to close the portal that would allow Chaos to enter our universe we need the keystone. The keystone is somewhere in the Mystech Tunnels. Remember when we went down there and found some sort of weird stone that the mob boss took from us? Yeah, that thing.

That means it is time to settle the score with the mob boss, named Detta. He pretty much runs Anachronox and has had Boots under his thumb for a long time. If I understood it correctly he is also the indirect cause to Fatima's untimely death. We have many reasons to go after him.

On the way to deal with him though we run in to Rukh, the cool looking detective that we have been lending a hand a couple of times throughout the game. He asks us to meet up at the hotel in South Anachronox to help out with one more thing. When we get there though it turns out someone got there first. Nooo, not Rukh! He was the coolest, especially considering he was barely even in the game. He should have his own spin-off.

Destroy the universe, fine. But don't mess with my Rukh.

Our only lead is a picture of the attacker that Rukh managed to take just before he was attacked. You'd think that's a pretty good lead, but I have no idea who it is. I happened to have Rho in my party and she mentions she saw the guy somewhere on Sender Station Station. But on SSS it's still night so practically everyone is gone.

Instead of going off on a wild goose chase I decide to deal with Detta first. As much as I want to get vengeance for Rukh I feel like saving the universe has some sort of precedence, I am sure he would understand. The closer I get to Detta though, the more it feels like this is going to be some sort of final conflict. Especially when the game straight up tells me "are you ready for this because there is no turning back?". Uh, I guess Rukh will have to be revenged in some other playthrough then, I am sorry Rukh. 

Every character has also told me they need better weapons. Do they mean need them or do they sort of just want to imply that there is a better weapon? How dire is this need? How difficult is Detta going to be? It's not like anyone gives me any kind of hint on where their best weapon could be either. Your best option is to revisit all old areas with all your characters (though you can only bring three at a time) and talk to everyone you meet, again. While this sounds like so much fun I just... don't want to do that. 

The game is very good at getting a balance between us lazy people and the people who might find that completionist business fun though. If you do happen to put in the man hours and run around to find better weapons you'll have access to them earlier, but as a lazy person I can also wait to a little bit later in the game and most of the weapons will be accessible in the shop. I am ok with that. Unfortunately there is no such system for finding more skills, but I hope I've got the most important ones already.

Detta, I am coming for you.