Rejection: Of Typical Enemy Design

There are four doors in the area I start in, outside the camp. One, the southwestern one, is empty. The southern one is where I went last time and has all the stuff. Another, northeast, is just an empty room. The third, southeast, is just a shortcut to the area before the boss fight. So, if I'm going to be doing any grinding, it's going to be against a single soldier with a knife, because some of these soldiers names are kind of lame. Why not Soldier Knife, Soldier SMG and Soldier Machine Gun instead of Soldier Japan, Soldier Mustache and Soldier Alice?

Since I'm starting this one off on a bad note, what's the deal with this music track? It sounds like someone noodling on a keyboard trying to be atmospheric? Right, well, I'll just turn the music off while I'm doing this and listen to something else. Which doesn't really help when you have a constant beeping going on. Sigh...

About thirty minutes and twenty dead soldiers later, I'm a level higher. I don't seem that much better. Maybe I took the wrong bit of advice from the bossfight and I should have tried something else, but still, a level is a level. I'm handily taking out Soldier Japans with the knife now, so maybe it is better than I give credit for.

I take into effect my plan, rush for the two guns and all the goodies, then save back outside the camp. Really hoping those refills and heals aren't limited. As I go towards the boss, I spot two side areas. One just has a single soldier, but the other is another corridor with the odd sniper and three side areas inside it. Two contain weapons. The second, which I enter first, gives me a Minimi, with 500 shots of ammo, but it burns through about 14 per trigger pull, the other has a rocket launcher. (About is probably accurate, since it does seem like these weapons burn through variable amounts of ammo)

Which gives me a difficult choice of which weapon to throw out. Do I toss the magnum? They both serve the same purpose, except that with the magnum I can fire 30 times versus 1. I need to test the rocket launcher again W to fully understand my choice, so I'll gamble that I need both and say farewell to the P90. So I go over back to the area I was just in, since I'm about to die, I figure I'll get more ammo for it from the chief. Turns out it's one of the disposable rocket launchers, serves me right for not remembering that the M72 is the one nicknamed LAW.

This isn't because I killed W, this is because the LAW hits everything on the screen.

The LAW definitely works as I hoped, basically a screen nuke. Upon shooting the rocket, everything within sight dies and I get this message, which I don't quite understand, except that my target scanner has been entered.

It's pretty clear what has happened afterwards though, which is that there are a million soldiers I need to kill. And that I now have an upgraded version of my system OS. Thankfully, this area has been all about grabbing ampules, so I have a good amount to restore whatever damage I take. I run out of ammo in both the M16 and the Minimi, which forces me to rely on the revolver. I end up reloading because I thought it would be better to take the P90 instead of the Python, but decide to keep it as is anyway.

In the actual fight, enemies respawn here until you take out the leader, who is naturally behind twenty soldiers, so you need to get lucky with W and save the rocket launcher or just rush then retreat once he's dead. Pick off the stranglers and then there's more dialog. First we get an in-game message telling me that K-Ko killed the leader's entire squadron.

This guy's chin sure has increased in size.

Then we get this. He's actually happy that a child beat him. K-Ko, asks why he did this terrible thing before he's going to send him to hell. The leader asks if she thinks anyone in the world would take them when they could turn into zombies at any moment. (Possibly will be turn into zombies, given the next sentence) K-Ko asks what he means, and he talks about how important people were evacuated to Tokyo, whereas the rest have been abandoned. K-Ko asks about the message she heard about protecting the refugees.

He says something like "That one, Colonel Kihara's daughter", which suggests a plot twist or that Colonel Kihara's daughter is responsible for this. Then something about "the cabinet ministers putting up with cheap-looking humans" and finally something about her fathers and the ilk being but a small fraction of the groups around. K-Ko doesn't believe this, because he's a murderer. He says that because she killed the army, the government will no longer see them as just a nuisance. K-Ko says that her father is a good person who contributed to the rebuilding of Tokyo.

He then says something about a rebuilding project, with K-Ko's response implying this is suspicious. The rebuilding of Tokyo is apparently a threat to the plans of the world. How so? The dying leader says something a bit tricky, since he might have said a double negative, but seems to be that this is a blessed era for the unliving. I still have no idea what's so strange about the project, but I guess the implication is it's related to the zombies. He dies and K-Ko talks to herself, about what the meaning of what he said was (So it is confusing?), and gets a keycard.

And now I guess I go back to camp. Level-up to level 6, which seems to put me up to fairly impressive, for now, stats. I briefly worried about my health, but the battle gave me ampules afterwards, and now I have twenty. More than enough to sacrifice so I don't die getting back to camp. Only...there aren't any enemies hanging around. At all. So it's a straight shot.

Uh...this isn't good. She says something unsubtitled, which I don't quite understand but comes off as you'd expect someone returning to see their friends slaughtered. This is...a problem. Remember, I don't have much ammo and now my health is limited to how many ampules I can get. Outside of friendlies and hostiles, nothing in this area has given me either. The music, oddly, is back to the standard music that played in non-water areas earlier. Guess I should go through whatever was behind the army.

It's the area of Shinagawa I first arrived at. Guess I'm going to Shinjuku now, but first I should pick up that Glock. It's quite lucky for me that I tried to avoid picking up ammo, since now I have no choice. Enemies on the other hand, prove somewhat easier. The Obasan and Tobi zombies are easy to kill, but Hells Angels tank knife and M-16 bullets still unless I'm real close. On the positive side, unless I'm real close I'm invulnerable to it's attacks.

The radar says there's something to the left, but there's another enemy here.

What about Meguro? Does the improved OS with it's fancy targetting system help? Not really, just in a general, you get a warning if something is next to you. The "radar" (?) system at the top kind of offers something helpful, since it does tell you the general direction. Warnings on the right however, tell you when an enemy is within range, which is very useful. I go to the old camp to look it over then go onto Shinjuku.

Seeing as there's no enemy behind me here, "WARNING RAID" apparently means someone is close to me.

I forgot that there weren't Hells Angels here, but rather Metals. I can grind this guy out if need be, which is good because I may need to. I've got 28 ampules which I believe corresponds to about 7 full heals. That said, I need to explore first. There's another area not too far to the left of the transition into Shinjuku.

I wonder if I should give this game credit for having several newer zombie archetypes while also having several that aren't a thing outside of it.

And we get this guy. He expands his stomach to attack. An Otaku? Fat guy? No...it's a bigfoot. I must have missed that part of the bigfoot lore. There's another kind, more fitting just a bit of the way in. This seems to be a maze, a part I figure out when I get turned around and go out the way I came, finding another door to an area full of enemies.

Well, the knife isn't as effective as I thought against Metals, I guess I'm going to have to grind Bigfoots. So against the other enemies I've discovered that my M-16 is very effective. What are they guarding? A M-11, or the 9mm cousin of the MAC-10. You know, the crappy SMG that gangsters in '80s action films carry around. This is the lower caliber version of that. I wonder if I was supposed to gamble on this area earlier to grab that rather than get it now, since this SMG progression seems like the exact opposite it should be. Better it than a Glock though.

Let's explore that maze...and OH, CRAP, AN ELEPHANT. This may have been slightly underwhelming, since I then kill it, dealing over 100 damage a shot, with the M-11. As I quickly discover in my experiments wandering around, that's because the M-11 is functioning how the P90 should be functioning. Er, should be functioning as if this were a Stargate game. It shreds enemies. It's dealing more damage than the Python, which I can't quite wrap my head around.

Random chance serves me well in getting through this area, but even though I make it through and don't have a reason to return, I reload and make a proper map. (Not to mention running out of ammo) Because ammo is now at a premium, it's time to see what's going on with the Glock. It does good damage for a pistol (18 against a Metal), but better yet, it has no recoil. If I had a reason to have a non-magnum pistol, I'd carry this one around. I still have a problem with it being unreliable as far as hitting things go, but that's probably just because enemies in this area move around too much.

Items in this area are often given at the end of a long tunnel, with plenty of enemies. I find my replacement for my Glock in a Mauser. Weird change...and it only has 41 bullets? So it's another magnum...? No, it's just a pistol. It does more damage, but that's about it. It's not exactly a high amount, and damage per carrying capacity is lower. If I were planning on keeping it, I would be greatly disappointed in it.

Seemingly to make up for the loss of basically any infinite health restorative, the north part of Shinjuku has a lot of medical supplies lying around, without any enemies nearby, and I mean a lot. And then I see Shinjuku camp pop up as I'm about to enter a door. Interesting...

There's a doctor and the leader, everything is back to infinite supplies. The leader talks about it more in a musing way, they had more safety in the past. And of course shocked that the government would do this. Which isn't as absurd as in some examples where people don't know that the government is looking out for its own interest in a zombie film, since the average person wouldn't know much about it. K-Ko then says it isn't the army but a division of it. I wish I had K-Ko's optimism about it.

My actual objective at this point seems to be to find K-Ko's father. Seems, because I'm getting little direction. Eh, so long as I map things out I won't have a problem. Speaking of which, the area is oddly divided up into two areas, the area leading to the camp and Shibuya, and areas called to "Shinjyuku", which I don't think is a thing, but I've never been to Tokyo. (Then again, an Elephant implies the presence of a Zoo, which I also believe is lacking from Shinjuku)

Now free to knife enemies without burning through supplies, I discover that the Redames are actually weaker than the Bodycons. I guess since the latter are "body conscious", that means they work out? Have I said this game has weird logic? This game has weird logic. This area seems to be pretty consistent, Redames sometimes don't deal damage up close and die quickly, Bodycons can deal damage, and Metals are dangerous.

Not the exact same spot, there are just a lot of rooms that look like this.

Onto Shinjyuku, as the entrance south is full of Metals, I'm just going to break out on the entrance next to the camp, which is full of Shinjyuku's weirder enemies. Bears, who look like giant wolves, rock monsters and birds. Bird-women...with guns. They're clearly the toughest of the enemy selection, since sometimes they tank M-16 rounds and they don't take much damage from the knife. Bears are the weakest of this group, since they actually die to a couple M-16 bursts. Which, ironically enough, is now my weakest gun since I picked up the M-11 again.

But as I continue to fill out the map, I notice that some Birds are dying to my knife quickly. So there's a very extreme gap in damage output, which I knew, but sometimes happens even when you seem to be close. Or perhaps there's a variation in an enemy's strength within a group? Oddly, I feel like being more RPG-like under the hood might be to its detriment considering that on the surface it's all about getting levels for me. Something the game seems to be blocking off, as I seem to not be getting any new XP at this point. Possibly not, but the game was giving me strange messages about the monsters getting shocked which didn't seem to have any other purpose.

I stop after having filled out Shinjyuku, rather, the part of Shinjyuku that's east of the camp. It doesn't connect to the part near Shibuya, so we'll find out what's the deal with the elephant later. That doesn't mean that this wasn't a useful bit of exploration. There are no items, but this gives me two paths out, one east, which is Shinjyuku sewers. That's surprisingly like Meguro from a glance, albeit the enemies have increased in strength. The other, is Nagano, which has no enemies, but does have a door that my keycard can open. Obviously, I'm going to get a nasty fight when I open that door, so I'm going to prepare for that, which in the only method I currently can prepare for, getting another level.

This Session: 4 hours 50 minutes

Total Time: 12 hours 40 minutes