Everyone agrees that a rest might be nice so they send Hoff back into the pub to ask if they offer rooms for travellers.
"oh no sir"
"Madam"
"SIR."
"But you're not even--"
"--Round these parts inns aren't where you go to spend the night. It's the guilds as take in guests round here. You'd be best off talking to the miners guild since they're the most hospiptibable..."
"Oh... ok... That seems like a strange arrangement but fair enough..."
Hoff turns to leave and catches Konny's eye. He nods and gives a little wave - unaware of what a total cow she is. She's taken by surprise to see him back in again and goes "sssssssssssssssssssss" as though she'd been doing it ever since they were in here just now.
"Oh give over with that nonsense" Amine mutters as she returns to the table with the shot glasses.
Outside, Hoff guides everyone over to the Miners' guild house. Inside they're greeted by a rosy cheeked lass who appears to have no idea that the guild ever offers hospitality.
"Would you like to know what's for supper" asks the cook in the large kitchen we find.
"oh yes please!"
"Meatballs and stew."
"Sounds delicious!"
"I expect it will be!"
"When is it served?"
"What's it to you?"
"Well... We'd like to be at the table... so we can have some... it really sounds marvelous! Indeed it smells marvelous too!"
"Have some? Why, what do you think this is? A dispensery for urchins! Get out! Get out of my kitchen!"
The buxom cook plants the butt of her ladle between Hoff's eyes and hurries the team out of the room.
This town is confusing. I suppose the developers wanted it to have a distinct feeling from everywhere else in the world they'd created - but making it prohibitivly expensive to buy anything and having no-where you can get a proper rest makes it not so much distinct as impossibly elitist.
The team spend ages wandering around the guild house looking for someone, ANYONE, who'll offer to let them spend the night here - up the point when they stumble into an actual mine! The back of the house seems to extend inside a mountain or something as the walls turn to hewn rock and there's suddenly mine-cart tracks stretching into the living rooms.
"Oh, I thought this was just the guild house!" Dirr says in surprise as she trips over a discarded pick-axe and staggers into a side-table, toppling a decorative vase and knocking a pile of glossy life-style magazines onto the floor.
"Where better to start a mine..." pipes up a bearded, robed, wild eyed gentleman "THAN IN YOUR OWN HOME?!!!!"
"I'd say that, based on all the dust and clanging pick-axe noise, almost anywhere would be better" murmurs Dirr, rubbing her sore toe. But Siobhan - impressed by the sudden increase in topless, sweaty masculinity is better able to take the stranger's point...
"...I say" starts Hoff "We were told that you jolly miners might take us in for the night? Since there isn't an inn?"
"We'd be ever-so grateful" flutters Siobhan
"Siobhan? Since when did you start helping?"
"I'm just tired is all. I'm absolutly DESPERATE to get out of these tight fitting, constricting clothes and writhe around NAKED for a bit... In my sleep naturally..."
"Um... oookaaaay... So sir, as you see, we're exhausted and would all very much like a place to rest. And apparently snake about the place - Oh stop it Siobhan!"
The wild eyed gentleman glances at Siobhan where she's squirming and flexing on the floor, apparently just stretching out her legs after a long day's tramping around in a desert. But stretching them out in the way that she's apparently learned off of a Ministry of Sound music video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekJzn5F_DFs&feature=related (not relaxing here, but you get the idea)
"You'd better no try and steal our secret" he turns to Tom and says.
Tom, who is busy feeling things he'd never expected a fully plate-mailed woman matting her ankle-length hair with dust and chewing gum could make him feel, has to blink himself back into the conversation "sorry - what were you saying?"
"Our secret. I know you want it. You LUST for it."
"sorry - what were you saying?"
"Our secret. The secret how how to DRILL for minerals. To POUND the earth for them. To THRUST after them."
"Sorry - what were you saying?"
"Look at me when I'm talking to you!" the man slaps Tom across the face but it's hard to tell if our hero has noticed.
"Listen. We're just here to see if you miners will put us up for the night! We're not interested in any secrets!" Hoff puts in. If he just perceivers he's SURE he can overcome the fact that a usually terrifying warrior \ windswept beauty is doing the worm across the floor looking like a tribble from where she's gyrated her impractical locks into the dirt and get a sensible response from this stranger. The trick is to just not notice the whole thing. Not even notice that she's now got one of her feet knotted into her do and is gurning in suppressed pain while she tries to sexfully untangle herself.
"But I'm NOT a miner! I am a MOUNTAIN PRIEST!!!!!!"
"Oh... so... why're you here?"
"THE SECRET!!!! THE SECRET is why I'm here!!! The mountain priests are the keepers of the SECRET!!!!!!!! Without us, the miners cannot mine lest mother earth send monsters and plagues and mysterious catasstrophies to punish them!"
"oh... So... You perform some kind of ceremony to placate mother earth for them? How interesting..."
"Interesting... But SECRET!"
"And this secret... Only you mountain priests know it yes?"
"Exactly! And no-one else EVER WILL. It is what makes our dreadful little town in a desert that no-one can get to by land or sea so rich!"
A secret? A secret that the Dji Cantos don't know? But the Dji Cantos are the planet's self-appointed intellectual elite. These plebeian Mountain Priests shouldn't be allowed to have secrets from the secret council that runs this planet. What is the point of being a member of a super secret, palace island dwelling, know-it-all mastermind organisation if these oiks are going to know how to mine for ore without suffering the divine backlash and not tell you about it?
Hoff's blood starts to boil. It's not often that this happens, but having grown up as part of a knowledge cult being told that you're one of the cleverest people on the planet and laughing at all the IDIOTS with their not-even-real gods and their travelling by land and sea instead of teleportation - other people keeping secrets from him is one of the few things that really pushes his buttons.
As the priest walks away and Siobhan's writhings turn from the alluring to the animal-trapped-in-a-net-style, Hoff turns to Tom.
"Follow that man Tom. I'm going to help Siobhan--"
"What about me!? I stubbed my toe! And my mother was a prostitute!"
"--Oh alright. I'm going to help Siobhan and Dirr. I need you to follow that man and get his secret."
"...his what now?"
"He has a secret. He helps the miners mine for ore without having plums of wasps swarm out of the walls of the caves. I must have that secret."
"...Really? But why? What does it have to do with--"
"JUST DO IT TOM. Do it for your old friend Hoff..."
"Oh, is it some kind of science / research thing then?"
"Yes... Yes that's what it is... go get the secret. Just go"
And so Tom wanders off , Hoff starts to unpick Siobhan who now looks like the cake out of Great Expectations. Only ginger.
At this point there's an unexpected stealth mini-game. It's really very strange and not just a little out-of-place feeling. Tom (on his own) must wander up a corridor without letting a guard see him. The guard walks back and forth up the passage, but conveniently never ever looks into the massive parking-bay-sized alcoves to the left and right.
I guess that by the time this game was made there wasn't a bulging genre of stealth titles the developers could've ripped off. Or maybe it's more that they knew the audience wouldn't have any real expectations of how a stealth section should work. Either way, by today's standards "Stealth" in Albion means walking cheerily down a corridor but making sure you don't whistle or pass the time of day with the guard.
At the far end of the corridor, the mysterious mountain priest is busy settling down around a camp-fire with some miners.
"Ah. Now that we're finally in the depths of the cave, hidden from prying eyes-- wait! Who goes there!"
"Why 'don't worry sir" pipes up one of the miners "'tis only Blindas Abat - the guard! He's patrolling the passage to make sure no-one's sneaking in! Good evening Blindas... Blindas? BLINDAS! OVER HERE! STOP TALKING TO THAT HATSTAND! Oh never mind..."
"Anyway. Let's get this ceremony over with. You chaps've got a lot of mining to do today".
The ceremony is long and boring. There's lots and lots of chanting and dancing (which is described via a text box rather than animated in any way) but Tom is able to pick out that the only important part - the bit that ACTUALLY stops monsters coming and ripping the flesh from your bones - is the words "UMAJO DANU!!!!"
Later - outside the hostel once Sionbhan is cleaned up and Dirr has a plaster on her toe ("this is why you should have shoes on you know", "But Hoff! Our god's tabboo clothing!", "Pfft... your gods", "Pardon?", "oh nothing").
"Ok. Let's just sleep in the desert and go."
After a quick and unsatisfying rest the four of them strike out across the barren sands northwards - following Konny's advice and planning to visit the jail. There must be SOMETHING significant about the jail after all. Otherwise why mention it?
The desert is massive. SERIOUSLY massive. I think that the game has a limit to how big each out-door section can be before you have to cross over into another "screen". That limit takes roughly 2 minutes to walk across I'd say (assuming you can make it without having to go round anything) and the northern deserts of Umajo are made up of something like 4 screens of almost completely empty space.
As a games developer myself, this approach to the use of seemed insane to me at first. Vast, VAST empty landscape? Without even monsters in it?
But I think that what the developers have achieved through it is actually quite interesting. It's not completely featureless desert - you're constantly being tantalised by landmarks (big rocks and streams) and there's a genuine sense of exploration here. All you know you're meant to be doing is going north - but there's so MUCH of this place! It's incredible!
I spend a long long time weaving back and forth across the landscape checking to make sure I'm not missing anything (although I'm not at all able to be sure I haven't). At one point I find out that I must be going the right way because a wild-haired gentleman passes me going the other way - "Oh, right, I'm like, going to fetch food and whatever for the prisoners right? I don't wanna sound too 'OOooooeeeee' but it's basically my job right?" The man has his furiously red hair piled onto his head and his facial hair is rigidly trimmed to give an impression of highly tamed and probably 100% fictional ruggedness. We watch as he minces away - his bandy legs presumably sewn into his skinny skinny jeans.
The sun beats down on us and we keep on track. I think that what makes this section of the game seem to mental to modern game developers's eyes is that there's so much space used for such a small benefit. These days every inch of a game is VERY VERY VERY expensive to build because it has to look beautiful. That's why Final Fantasy 13 is so much more linear than all the previous games in the series - the environments are so expensive to make these days that you can't just casually bung a gigantic free-roaming desert in there to soak up a couple of hours game-play time.
I guess that if Graphics had stayed tile-based (so that it probably took these guys exactly as long to build all this desert as it does to wader across it) then maybe the game-play of being lost and exploring a wide open area with no guide at all might've been explored more over time. But I fear it's actually something that's been ditched as impractical (and, since it wasn't ever really a style of game-play that ever got honed, boring) these days.
After a little while's traipsing around the place the team cross a land-bridge where the sea comes close in on both sides of the desert. Suddenly giant worms pop up out of the ground (these baddies have rather dramatic entry animations that trigger when the fight starts - I thought I was watching a cut-scene at first, then the battle grid opened and I realised I was in a fight) and kill everyone immediatly.
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Ok. So we're stood outside the city. We've stolen the secret of whatever it was from the miners and we've had a little rest.
Suddenly the prospect of being gloriously lost and leisurlyly exploring huge expanses of desert is no fun at all any more. Second time round I'll know exactly what isn't there and there won't even be the mild mysteriousness of what might be beyond the next hillock.
I decide that this time round I'll stick to the left hand edge of the landmass. The monsters I saw came out of the sand before, but all around continent - where the desert meets the sea - is a mud border. I figure that the monsters won't come out of that so I set off up the left and side of the island to have another go at finding that jail.
After a considerable time I pass the food-fetching guy coming the other way again. "Oooh 'ello! I'm just tootling my little way da'n to the big smoke where I might purchase some viands of refresmenty goodies for them there gents restin' at 'er majestie's pleasure! 'Pips!" and off he goes.
Still later we pass the land bridge again - and I'm pleased to say that my stick-to-the-mud theory proves correct! I am un-molested by worms!
However the game does inform me that everyone's statistics have permanently been "greatly reduced" since they've been out in the sun for so long!!
Eventually we reach the jail - although at first I didn't know what I was looking at since it's just a big rock with a door - and it's locked. No amount of lock-picks or shouting gets any response and eventually everyone just dies from being out in the sun too long.
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Ok. I'm really not impressed by Konny's tourist information. I'm going to give this jail one last attempt and then give it up as a bad lot. Certainly the plot hasn't REQUIRED that I go there yet.
This time I decide to be a little clever about it. Instead of setting off immediately I wait for Russell (that's what I'm calling the back-comb-barnetted food guy from desert) to turn up at the town gates.
I don't want to talk to him because he seems quite irritating BUT - I hide round the side of the city walls until he swans into town.
My plan is to slip-stream him into the prison. He'll lead me there (hopefully along the shortest route) and when he goes in to feed the prisoners I'll duck in behind him!
Here he comes!
The plan works perfectly. It takes a long time to get across the desert (I get ambushed by loads of worms because Russ refuses to stick to the mud - presumably because it'll ruin his cuban heels - but "flee" from them thinking "I wonder why I didn't think to do this first time round") and my stats are permanently lowered by the sun again. But eventually we arrive the prison and I can duck in behind our hapless meal-man.
Once inside, spike pop up out of the ground behind me and I'm basically trapped. Also, there's some bald bloke in there who says "You can't get out now... it's so nice to have someone... to TALK to..." but then doesn't offer any further conversation options. He gives me a lever handle though...
"If you can figure out the spike puzzle... You can leave..." he drools. What kind of tourist attraction is this? There's no gift shop, I'm probably going to be sexually assaulted and killed by the prison guard and there's nothing much to see here anyway - not even a button to press to hear a tape-recording of an actor reading a memoire of someone who worked here in the 1800's.
In the back room are the prison cells - but only two of them are occupied. One by a VERY jaunty man who spends his time dancing and philosophising (you can't talk to him properly - you can look at him dancing and he'll say something cryptic). And the other by a misunderstood nurse.
"one of my patients died while I was looking after them and now they've locked me up!" she complains.
Since there's really nothing else to do, I make her a deal. I'll let her out if she gives me something valuable in return. She agrees and says she'll meet me back in town to give me my reward.
So I free her, solve the bald pervert's spike trap puzzle and set off back to the town. In the process, everyone's stats are dropped again by the sun and Tom is killed by a worm that ambushes us before he could flee).
Never mind though - soon we'll be reaping the rewards of a good turn. Nelly (that's the name of the mis-understood nurse) will give us something cool and it'll all be worth while!
Oh wait. No. That doesn't happen. I'm greeted at the city gates by a little girl who says that Nelly just stabbed her mum to death and that there's going to be riots because some idiot let a very dangerous killer out of the prison. In order to prevent the social un-rest we try and track Nelly down (it being our fault in many respects that she's got free) but on attempting to search the mines in the miners guild again a bug in the game kills all my characters.
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Re-load.
I hate Konny.
