It's a game with the good kind of bugs! Let's Play Bug Fables

[Explopyro]

72: Dawn of a New Day



Right, let's get this celebration started!

82 - Team, We Did It! (Recommended listening!)



A triumphant victory fanfare plays, and we see confetti in the skies over the Ant Kingdom as the camera pans down over the plaza.







It's great to see such a joyous mood in town!
Heheh. All we've gotta do is go get our super reward!



This pops up as soon as their conversation ends, and we're given control. Let's check out the achievements first, then have a look around (lots of people to talk to here!).



Here's the one we just got, for completing Chapter 7.



We got this one last update, right after finishing the battle.



Look how crowded the Plaza is! Lots of characters we know have come to congratulate us!

Before we start talking to everyone, let's check the banter.

...We did it.
Frankly, it's a bit surreal.
It was a super, super long mission...
But we saved everyone! Heheh, being famous too doesn't hurt!

Honestly, it's a bit surreal for me too. What a journey this has been. (I definitely underestimated how much work this LP would be going in, and certainly didn't think it would end up taking me nearly two years to finish. I say that as if we're done, of course; we've still got quite a bit of content left.)

If we check the banter for any of the characters, we'll see this one:

Woah! Everybody's here!
Many of the people we helped are here...
It's pretty nice, huh.
This is what I meant, Vi. Helping others truly becomes a reward!

This banter is actually hinting at something: sneakily, this is a reward for being thorough with our sidequests. Several characters won't be here unless you've completed the quest associated with them, so if you're rushing through you might see fewer people here. That said, I don't know precisely who, or under what conditions; someday I do want to do a minimalist challenge, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.



If we try to leave by heading south, Leif will say this and stop us. We're locked in for now until we finish seeing the ending.

Right, time to talk to everyone! We'll just start with who's closest.









Looks like Pibu and Nero get along! That's nice to see.



This is cute.



It's been a while since we've seen Cerise!



But Tanjy's not here! And he's the strongest bug I know!
......
Let it go, Kabbu.

Heh. Put a pin in this, I guess, Tanjerin is around here somewhere.

Next up are the chefs.



Naturally. Word of my skill was sure to spread.
Hahahaha! Kut, you must polish your social skills too!

You may notice Fry is blocking the path to the east; we can't leave that way.



Samira's here too. (Not far from where she usually hangs out around here, actually.) We'll have to remember to see her again once we're in the postgame, since we've finally heard all the songs and unlocked them for purchase. That will have to wait, though.



It's Eetl! Remember Eetl? (He runs the quest board in the Explorers' Association, he's one of the first bugs we met.)



You worry way too much!

He has a very emotional reaction to seeing we're okay. (Interestingly, his sprites don't reset after we're done talking to him, so it looks like he just doesn't stop tearing up once he starts.)



I shall sit back and enjoy the show from backstage this once.

(MM is blocking off the theatre entrance, as you might expect.)



Over by the quest board, we have Utter as we might expect, but Ven and Anna are here too.



It's probably not a surprise Utter would say something like this.





These two seem grateful.



Right, time to start in on the other side!





Eophi and Mun are here too. Mun strikes up a combat pose when we speak to him, but I'm sure he still has a lot of training to do.





Here's Terrie and her sister (and the Bug Ranger Plushie we gave them!). It's good to see they're happy.



Who could forget about Janet? (Kabbu.) We'll have to challenge her in Spy Cards sometime.



Hehe. Thanks, Chuck! Enjoy the feast!

I still love seeing Chuck's happy pose.





Thanks for your patronage too, Team Snakemouth.

Blocking the west side, we have the Ant Kingdom shopkeepers.



Heheh. It was nothing!

Over by our house, we can find Beette. She's still grateful we took it off her hands.



I just wanted to be the first to say you're awesome!
Aww...
Thank you, Chubee!
You're awesome, too.

Chubee's here too. I kind of wish I'd talked to her first, now.



Right. Onward! Even Jayde's come.



Err, thanks for believing in us.
You've gotta have some party stew later!

Is anyone ever going to disabuse her of the notion we're the real Bug Rangers? (I kind of hope not.)



Alex still has a one-track mind.





Carmina and Shay are apparently trying to play cards here!





Yatanta and her brother even came. (Reprising the scenario from their quest, too.)



Over here, there's an ant guard we can talk to. They've definitely seen a lot.



Before we continue north, we're not quite finished here! Let's head into the inn.





The innkeeper is excited for new business.



The Termacade owner is hanging out in here, too. (And I'm sensing a bit of a theme...)



If we head upstairs, we can find Doppel with Bub and Rob.



I'm... so relieved...
Seeing the world was great, but nothing beats coming home.

Looks like the Ladybug Exile might have finally been rescinded?



Right, where to next?



Let's check inside our house.



Uh. We have a squatter.



Nothing here, though!
Oi! Get out of our house!

Well, that certainly happened. Let's just go, shall we?



There's more to see up on the roof!



...Just this once.

Even Astotheles came, though he's in disguise. (Let's just hope he doesn't try to start any fights with Elizant while he's here...)



Right, to the next level up!



What's this? It's the dev team!



Fuutes.



Comfy.



Genow.



Mar.

(If you look closely here, now that we've moved the camera a bit, Comfy seems to have a Blue Ranger Plushie. I wonder how many of those were made?)





Effo and Poppy. These two only tell us their names.



But this party's making me late for breakfast...
...What do you mean it's lunch time!?

Soto here is a bit more talkative.



Tristan and Oma are here at the back.



This is about what we should have expected.



I wrote you a s-*burp*song! CHECK THIS O-*burp*



He starts playing a... song?

83 - A Virtuoso's Tribute (Recommended... listening?)



Uh, okay then.

As I understand it, this is a bit of an inside joke among the dev team: Tristan the character is always drunk (and, other than this, can be seen in the Underground Tavern) because the real Tristan Alric had another gig performing music in bars.

82 - Team, We Did It!



Right then, there's nothing more to see here!



So let's head on north.



Did you think we were done? There are so many more characters! (There's something just so satisfying about this, getting to talk to everyone while the triumphal music plays.)

There's a new banter here, too.

Everyone here has supported our journey...
We couldn't have done it alone, that's for sure.
And that's ok! When you work together you can do cooler stuff!
...You've matured, Vi.
Four bees' worth!
...Thanks.

(I wonder if they ever plan to explain that reference for Leif, or if they're just going to leave him guessing about everything that happened before they met him.)



As you might imagine, Neolith is excited to plumb the Roaches' knowledge.



Mothiva, thank you for helping us!
...! O-Ohohoho! It was nothing!
......
Thanks.

I'm not sure if feeding Mothiva's ego is wise, Kabbu. Maybe she's learning?



Zasp continues being friendly.



The Mayor came all the way from Defiant Root, too.





Aria and Venus are here. (I don't think it'll ever be explained why Aria's so insistent on keeping Venus a secret, when Venus herself doesn't seem to care.)





Gen and Eri find us an inspirational example.





Meanwhile, Celia and Levi seem to disagree on what they want to do next.



Onto the bridge!



Let's, uh... let's say we figured it out.

Heh, that's right, we never did go back to explain that. And, honestly, given the Doctor's predilections Leif's probably better off keeping it to himself.



Being professional sucks sometimes... I-I mean! Thank you so much for everything!

Meanwhile, Crow just wants to play cards.



Honestly, at my age it feels like it's not my problem... but it's nice to see things turn out fine.

I think this is the calmest we've ever seen Professor Honeycomb.



Also, Hawk is here with his family! (For anyone who didn't figure out his connection to them yet.)



Hehehe... I'll bake you a cake later. Make sure to come eat it!
...Hehe. Yeah, Muze. That sounds great.



Ah, um... thanks.



You gotta tell us about yer adventures sometime! How about over our next dinner?
You got it, pops. Hope you're ready for a long one.

We can also have Leif talk to all of his descendants. It's nice to see that connection will continue.



Right, on we go.



It's nice to see Rebecca happy too.



But she sends her regards. I do, as well!

Who'd have thought we'd ever see King Hector IV willingly visit the Ant Kingdom?



You don't need to, it was the right thing to do.
So humble! Please, I hope you'll visit our kingdom now that the dust has settled.

Let's put a pin in this one, too. We'll have to pay a visit to the Wasp Kingdom now that they're at peace.





If we try to talk to General Fuff, Kabbu actually starts the conversation first. Everyone just seems embarrassed...



I'm gonna need a huge painting! From the most talented artist in the Bee Kingdom!
When can you start making it?
Ahahaha! Oh gosh, Vi! Go to your ceremony already!

Something tells me these two are still going to have their frictions.



Vi... you've made me so proud! You've opened new frontiers for all Bees!
A-Ahahaha... Yeah! I really did!
I hope you'll come visit more often, my dear child.

And last up, we have Queen Bianca. At least things definitely seem to be reconciled here!



Right, I think that's everyone! Shall we go into the palace?



The game gives us a warning and asks us to confirm we want to go in, just in case we still had someone left to talk to. We've already covered everyone, though, so we're ready!



(The music stops playing here.)





The camera pans over the whole crowd who have gathered...



as Team Snakemouth files in



and Elizant comes out to meet us.



Many of them are here today, and I can't thank you enough.
But there is so, so much to be joyful for.
The assistance of those who believed in us.
The freedom of the Wasps from their tyrant.
The promise of reconciliation with the Termites.
And the closing of the Everlasting Sapling's chapter.
A new future for Bugaria and the Ant Kingdom!



Everyone cheers.



Even though this was only possible due to the efforts of many...
None can deny the great part you played in this campaign.



...Anyhow, it is my absolute honor and privilege...
To knight the three of you as Royal Blades for the service to our kingdom.
May fame and glory come to you for your brave efforts!



Everyone cheers again!

08 - Getting Stronger!







(The level-up theme does seem fitting to this moment too, as everyone prepares to leave for the feast.)





(Confetti started falling when the music kicked in too, you can see a bit of it here.)





And, with that, we fade out and the credits start playing!

84 - Credits (Recommended listening! Or you can watch the video version below.)

Click me for video!



At long last, it's the credit roll! The accompanying music is a really nice medley of quite a lot of the game's songs, it's well worth a listen. And, possibly in an homage to Paper Mario, we'll get to see a parade of all the characters throughout the game world.

I'm not going to screenshot every last name (you can see the full credits in the video), but I'll call out some highlights.







Here's the core Moonsprout Games team (whose avatars we got to see earlier). You all did some really excellent work; thank you!





Here we have all the backers who contributed bosses!









And more backers, who contributed NPCs!

(Reeves was apparently designed by Blarghalt, who is another LP forum regular! I don't know for sure that it's the same person, but it seems pretty likely.)













And more backers, who contributed medal and item designs. It looks like a few people didn't end up claiming this reward, also?





And the credits wrap up with a special thanks message from Moonsprout Games.





The End!



...Or is it? What happens if we press a button here?

17 - Ant Kingdom



We're back in the plaza again, and the camera pans down to Team Snakemouth...



Don't let the praise get to your head, Vi.
Team... thank you once more.
You've said thanks like a billion times already, stop!
Err, right. Sorry...
You don't have to say sorry either.



What's up?





I would like to... visit my friends.
And to let them know of our triumph.
...Alright. Yeah. We can do that!
Count on it, Kabbu.
Do you two have any requests as well?
Nah. We're fine.
Yeah. You've helped us enough. Let us pay you back.
...Let's go, then!

This is definitely something we can do for Kabbu. Let's help him get some closure. (This conversation is a bit different if you haven't completed Vi's or Leif's requests, in which case they'll bring up wanting to do that now as well.)



The game gives us a prompt to save here.

I am often apprehensive about saving after the final boss in games that offer that option. For just one example, Paper Mario: TTYD lets you do this, and does have a bit of content you can't see until the postgame... but it also offers you no way to refight that boss, and none of its postgame content is actually interesting. In games like that, I tend to prefer keeping my perfect/complete saves in a pre-ending state, because an actually complete file feels useless.

If this is a concern that you have, let me put your mind at ease. Between the fact you can refight any boss whenever you want thanks to B.O.S.S., and the fact there is quite a bit of interesting and challenging postgame content, you don't need to fear saving here. I don't know if this is actually the sort of thing that bothers other people, but I wanted to say it regardless.



We regain control.





Kabbu's Request has been added to our quest log.

We will pick up here next time, and explore what the postgame has to offer.

[Explopyro]

73: Lore World Tour (Part 1)

01 - Bug Fables



Welcome back to Bug Fables! (My apologies, I know it's been a while. I've been struggling with energy and finding time to work on this, updates might continue to be a bit slower but I promise not to abandon this project.)

To start things off, now that we're in the postgame, the title screen has reached its final form. Elizant II has joined everyone in the plaza now as well.



Welcome to the postgame. There are a bunch of things to do, and plenty of content still to see, but of course we don't have a lot of direction right now. Today's agenda is to get our bearings and explore, checking up on the kingdoms now that peace has been restored. There's a bunch of new dialogue to see.

On the subject of lore, I also want to take a quick look at the bestiary entries for the Wasp King, because there's some new information we couldn't see before/during the fight.







This first entry tells us his name was actually Hoaxe, and confirms that he was not a wasp. (He is actually a wasp-mimic fly of the family Conopidae, specifically Leopoldius signatus).

There are some hints at a tragic backstory and apparently he didn't have a very pleasant life (we've seen what the Dead Lands are like), which may explain but of course doesn't excuse anything he did. The official Bug Fables artbook actually includes a ~20 page comic dramatising and illustrating his origin story, though it doesn't go into much detail beyond what we can put together from the game, most of which will be in this update.







The second entry doesn't tell us much, except to point once again at the mystery of why the Sapling's power ran out and we were able to beat him. Maybe we'll be able to learn some more about this today.

03 - Where Adventurers Gather



We're going to start off, though, by going to see Artis.



Artis does have a reward for us! Before that, though, Gen and Eri are back here now, and have new dialogue if we talk to them.

(FYI: General note, while I can't say for sure I haven't missed anyone, generally speaking if I don't show myself taking to a character or checking a banter in this update it's because there isn't new text since the last time we saw them.)



Yeah, Gen. You really saved us, Team Snakemouth!
You helped us be a bit more confident too... We'll do our best!

And there's a new banter too:

I thought I had to be the best explorer, but...
Everything's better if you work together!
Gen and Eri helped a lot in their own way.
Correct! This camaraderie is one of exploring's many joys!

This is cute. Character development is always nice to see.



Right, next stop.



...



Was it too challenging for ya? You deserve a reward! Here, take this!



Come back later when you've bonked some extra hard heads with that medal, will ya?

Heh. Artis is actually lying here, this is the last reward we're going to be getting from him. There are still quite a few challenges ahead of us (including new bosses), but he doesn't give rewards for any of them.

In point of fact, this was actually added in version 1.1, prior to that you didn't get a Hard Mode reward for the final boss either (and only one copy of this medal existed).



A second copy of Miracle Matter is really quite nice, bordering on overkill. I've discussed this medal a bit but haven't shown it off yet; that's still coming, don't you worry. Especially with two of these, though, you can do some really broken things (the strategy is more or less to stack defences to make one of the bugs, usually Kabbu, functionally immortal, then give the other two Miracle Matters and build them as glass cannons; Miracle Matter brings them back on 2 HP, which is well under Last Attack range). Miracle Matter builds are one of the better ways to handle long sequences of fights, which is a thing we'll be interested in very soon.

17 - Ant Kingdom



Right, back to the Plaza. Utter has an alert that there are some new sidequests posted for us; we'll get to that in a moment



First, let's talk to Samira.



Now that we're in the postgame and have heard the final boss and credits themes, we can actually buy all of the songs.



T-thank you! That's all the songs I know...
Y-You supported me all this time! S-So take this. I really appreciate you!



For purchasing all of her songs, Samira gives us another Heart Berry. These are always nice to have, and this is our fifth one! We'll have to decide who to give this to. (As we're in the postgame now and I plan to mess about with our stats at Patton's to show off various things, I'm probably going to stop taking votes for stat-ups.)



We also get an achievement?



The achievement is for purchasing all the songs. Fair enough. As a quick sanity check, let's review how many we're still missing. There are three we can see in this screenshot (#10, #14, #16).



And these two (#01, #02). We have all the others. In total, there are five still to go, and we'll get to them in due time over the course of this postgame.



O-Ok. I'm always here if you want to hear me play.

Now, of course, if we talk to Samira she'll still offer to play songs for us (and will never charge us for anything).



Right, time to check the quest board.











"Confidential" was in the original release, while "Loose Ends", "A New Hope" and "Getting Bored" were added in v1.1 as additional content. These quests are postgame-only and will tie up some loose ends and lead to some of the toughest new content, including the game's true superbosses (in contrast to things like the Bounties). If you're looking for the game to point you in a direction now, these quests are its way of doing that.

We won't be starting them just yet this update, but we'll definitely be tackling these soon.



Also, let's make a quick stop in our house, just to remind us what it looks like. Another fun aspect of this postgame is that there are a bunch of objects that will show up in here as trophies when we complete various challenges. Right now there's only the Card Trophy on the wall, but that will change. (A few more were added in 1.1 to go with the new challenges, also.)

For now, let's go explore and talk to people.



For instance, this guard in the plaza is back to being calm.



Oh dear. The "Seedling Slayer" is still at it. Let's leave her be.



This citizen is grateful for everything we've done.



That's actually it for new dialogue in the above-ground areas. Let's check the tavern?

34 - Dodgy Business



Levi and Celia are still here. Let's check in with them.



...Even so, I've gotten used to this place. I hope she won't mind.

Levi muses on the consequences of the Ladybug Exile ending. They don't seem to have any plans to shut down the tavern.



...She's mellowed out. I hope she can rest easy with the Sapling gone.

Meanwhile, Celia's thinking about the changes in Elizant II.

Now that everything's over, perhaps we should drink some juice with Levi and Celia.
We owe them a round, anyway. Remember when they helped us save Neo?
And they took the hits from Scarlet first!
It's been quite the journey! Heheh... Bea, 5 Berry Juices for us!

There's also this cute banter. Let's kick back and celebrate.



Team Slacker are hanging out here too. We're not going to talk to them right now, because it'll start their quest, but we'll definitely be back. (They won't be here unless you've defeated all the Bounties, that's a prerequisite for this.)



Also, I don't think I've explicitly pointed this out before, but Tristan's here in the background behind Shades' stall.

Anyway, that's all here for now, let's move on to the next destination.



Let's head toward the palace.



Maki is here, but we're going to ignore him for now because talking to him would start the quest. Again, don't worry, we'll get to that in due time.



For the sake of my friend, I'll become an even stronger guard!

This guard has new dialogue.

18 - In the Court of the Ant Queen

Right, the palace. There's a bit to see in here.



Even so, the Queen seems more determined than ever. Under her rule, prosperity awaits the Ant Kingdom!

The Lieutenant seems optimistic about the future.





As a reminder, the War Room is over here on the right side, and this is where Rebecca's waiting for us. We'll be back to talk to her once it's time to do her quest.



Into the throne room.



The guard here has new dialogue again.



Also, looks like they've repaired all of the windows!

Let's talk to Neolith.



It's a shame you couldn't study the Sapling...
I won't say I'm not disappointed... but just proving its existence is a great discovery!
Thanks for everything, Team Snakemouth!

He's taking a positive view of things, even if we weren't able to learn as much as he hoped.



May your explorations always bear fruit!

Zaryant has some praise and well-wishes for us as well.



And, of course, we have to talk to Elizant.



...Yeah. But we dare say you've come close to matching her grace.
...Thank you. I will take those words to heart.
Mother has earned her rest. I pray she will always watch over us.
We hope you'll watch over Bugaria for years to come, too.

This is sweet.

After everything, we feel kind of bad for misjudging the Queen.
It was understandable. You woke up in such a different world!
And she earned your respect anyway, so it's fine!
...We suppose. We'll make up for those doubts with our service.
(Still, Elizant I... We will miss you.)

We can get some further thoughts from our team on this in the banter. This is nice to see.



On to our next stop.



...Which is the mines. There's a bit to see there, and then also of course that can be our hub for checking out the rest of the world.



There's a bit of new dialogue to see here, and then this can be our hub for checking out the rest of the world.



Apparently the mine development is all finished now.



Can't believe Nessa slept through all that ruckus, though. I swear she only works when no one is looking.

A few of the miners have new comments.



I'm so glad we're done working there...

I don't remember if we've seen this one before.





Also, this is worth highlighting. We have the full list of shortcut destinations available from this person as well. It's pretty nice to have an easy route to Patton's, among other things.



Let's head into the back room.



Diana's in here, just stuffing her face with berries.



Awesome! This will make travelling a breeze.
Indeed! It was tiring work, but the Queen seems satisfied.
Oh yeah, thanks for giving me all those berries earlier. I feel a bit bad about asking you for them...
So here, these should help us stay even!



Well, I'm just going to stay here and rest a while. Don't know what the next work is, but gotta be at full power for it!
See you around, folks!
Enjoy your rest, Diana!

The first time we talk to her, she gives us back 100 berries. I'm not sure whether or how this scene changes if you didn't buy all the tunnels (or never paid her at all). That might be something to test on a future playthrough.



A pleasure waking you up...

If we talk to her again, we get this.

Diana's finally done. How bittersweet.
I'll miss finding her across the world!
I'm glad the tunnels are done, though!

And, of course, there's a banter.



Right, let's check out all the familiar locations and see who else has new things to say. First up, the Golden Settlement.

26 - Golden Lands



There's not much new to see in the main part of town, but if we come to this east side, Tanjerin and Cerise are here. Before we talk to them, there's also a new banter.

Ahh... You know, now that everything's over...
We should build a vacation house!
Isn't that a bit much? We're not THAT rich...
We get the hero discount! We should try it out!
Hehehe... I'm so excited!

Right then.





Yay! Cerise found me!
Oh. So that's who "Tanjy" was.
Glad they found each other in the end!
I thought it was obvious.
Why'd you come find me anyway?



Oh! Well, I'm much stronger now, so I can head back. But which way's east again...?
Uhhhh...
Oh no. They're both not too smart. Should we help them? We could see their homeland for ourselves...



Yeah.

I don't even know what to say at this point.

We're very glad that Tanjy's horn healed... and these two reunited safely.
I... I still don't know how that's even possible.
Maybe he just ate a bunch of Tangy Berries.
Okay, but where did he get so many? They're rare and expensive.
Maybe he has a stash of them in his house.
That explains why it's boarded up like that.
But that doesn't explain how he got so many in the first place!

Also, there's a new banter. This is just silly, I don't even know. (I guess it's a good thing his horn... fixed itself... somehow?)



Also, let's just quickly notice that Jayde isn't here any more, she's presumably gone home to the Wasp Kingdom.

While I was here, I also realised we never came back to the Power Plant after beating the Broodmother, so we'll check that right quick.













The bee soldiers here all have a few comments on how the cleanup went and the preparations they're making so nothing like this happens again.

56 - Lands Untamed



Also, at the other end of the tunnel, the ant miners are relieved we're now at peace with the Wasps. (More on that once we get to the Wasp Kingdom, of course.)





Suit yourselves.

Also, if we step outside, Riz is here, and will offer us a shortcut to the Fishing Village if we want to go there. This can be convenient. (He'll technically be here as soon as we've defeated and then reconciled with him, but I don't think I've shown this before.)

I stopped by the Wizard's Tower, too, but he didn't have anything new to say.

63 - Forsaken Lands



There isn't a great segue, but let's check in with Patton next.





And I've got the paperwork to prove it. SEE!? Witness this Bugarian Certificate!
Congratulations, Patton! I am glad to see the Queen repaid your help.
Yeah. What's next for you?
More science, of course!
You're, uh... not gonna move? This isn't part of the Ant Kingdom...
Aha! You would be wrong there, miss!
It's all in the certificate. This plot of land was gifted to the Ant Kingdom by the Termites!
What a gift...



W-Woohoo...
Yay...

Patton's exile has been resolved, if only on a technicality. This always amuses me. (Did the Termites just want to wash their hands of him too?)



Anyway, he'll still be here offering his services whenever we want them.



Next up, Defiant Root and the Bee Kingdom.

37 - Defiant Root



Let's have a look around here.



Maybe I will finally take the time to visit sometime.



But to be honest, things are kinda boring now.

Locke and Dran both have comments on the new state of affairs.



...If you're expecting free drinks, tough luck.

As does the bartender in here.



Let's check down the well too.



Let's see if I can patch this crack...

Will's down here now, and seems to be planning to block off the shortcut into the bandits' hideout.

That's some devotion to this well...
Shall we visit the hideout before the shortcut's fixed?

There's also this banter.

I did actually look around in the hideout, but there's nothing new to see there. I was actually surprised to find the patrolling bandits were still hostile, and Astotheles is nowhere to be found. (I thought we'd be able to talk to him, but I think I was confusing this with his appearance in the epilogue.)



Back to Defiant Root.



Fuzzo has something new to say too, but nobody else in the commercial district does.



Let's head up to the Bee Kingdom next.



40 - High Above, Bee Kingdom



We'll go into the throne room first.





Um, no problem. What a passionate response...

This guard is very enthusiastic now.



While this one's still talking about the Power Plant incident.



Also, Aebees is here now?



I guess this is an improvement over drinking herself insensate in Defiant Root.

I don't remember her ever being so... uh, meek. Meek's the word.
Something quite traumatic must've occurred.
Well, she's still willing to keep going. That's worth respect.

Our party discuss it a bit more in the banter. (I'm not sure why Kabbu treats this as so speculative, we know what happened. She wasn't able to defend the gate and got overwhelmed when the Wasps attacked.) For better or worse, this is the last update we'll get on her story.



Queen Bianca also has something new to say if we talk to her.



Your path may have been unconventional, but I am proud of you.



Aww.



Right, let's have a look around the rest of the hive.



For one thing, Zasp is over here by the clothing stall.



Thank you, Team Snakemouth. I owe this peace to you.
Zasp... You're welcome!

He doesn't have a whole lot to say, but it's still nice to see he's doing okay.

Zasp's a cool dude. He could do better.
Could he? He looks quite content.
I dunno... Mothiva could be nicer to him, or something...
Eh, it's their personal life... Let's leave them be.

There's also a new banter. I've spoken before about the vaguely abusive dynamics they have, and the game doesn't let us get any resolution beyond telling us Zasp is happy this way (which I can't help finding a bit uncomfortable).



Mothiva's hanging out inside the shop instead.



That's what helping defeat the Wasp King does for your brand!
...Good for you.
Uh huh...

She doesn't have a whole lot to say. It's not too surprising that she's milking this for everything it's worth. The banter's a bit more interesting:

Bleh. It feels like everyone learned something... EXCEPT Mothiva! Even Zasp's cool now!
She's probably learned something. She's just too proud to admit it.
She DID help us cross the Giant's Lair...
She did it for the fame! Not to be nice!
Such shallow motives would not have been enough to face those beasts.
You could be right...

I feel like everyone's giving her a bit too much credit here, but maybe it's the best way to keep her from interfering in the future?



I don't think this is actually new dialogue from the shopkeep, but it's funny when Mothiva's literally standing right there.



I'm also not sure if this is new dialogue from this little bee, but if it is, it could be a kind of commentary on how easy it is to forget the past during peacetime.



Also, let's not forget B.O.S.S. is here. We're going to be spending a lot of time on this soon enough.

For now, though' we're done with the Bee Kingdom.



Metal Island is up next.

72 - Summer Holiday at the Metal Island (TM)







This person has new dialogue. I don't think we can actually face her in the tournament, though, as far as I know this is just fluff.



Great, the more money comes in, the better!

This businessperson has new things to say, too, though it's not particularly substantive.



Over here to the west, we can now find Bub and Rob.





I can't wait to visit the Ant Plaza!

They're both excited by the end of the exile.

These two may not be certified explorers, but I feel like they're comrades!
They saw everything, without being able to fight! It's nuts!
We hope they can hang around the Ant Plaza soon...

There's also this banter if we check for either of them. This one's cute.



We've talked to this old salesbug before, but let's do so again.



I don't have anything else to sell, but you lot remind me of this fly lad I met once.
Poor boy went crazy over an old crown I fished out of the lake. Paid me hundreds of berries for that junk.
I wonder what became of him after that... Last I heard he headed north, or something...
Oh, don't mind me. Just going back to my memories! Go on, you lot! Have fun with all that stuff!

Yeah. This is how Hoaxe got hold of his crown. Seems like the salesman didn't know what it was, though.



Nothing else to see here. Our submarine automatically follows us to whatever docks we go to; may as well get in and stop by the pier.



23 - The Sailors' Pier



There are a few people we can talk to here.



(The sea didn't do anything...)



A couple of the sailors in here have new comments to make.



Someday... Someday I'll rebuild my dear ship!

The captain out here is determined to start working on a new ship.

The Wasp King's been toppled, but it won't bring his boat back...
That is the reality of conflict... but he hasn't given up!
If it's his dream, he'll get to sail again!

Also, there's a new banter for him, where our party muse on the fact that defeating the Wasp King hasn't fixed everything. It's nice to see a game acknowledge things like that.





We are always open for business! Come back anytime!

Also, this is weird, the dialogue at the food stall here actually changes! They still offer the same menu, though.

That's all there is to see at the pier.



Next up, the Termite Kingdom.



One of the ant miners has a new line here.

64 - Termite Capitol



Most of the termites don't have anything new to say, but the royals do.



Thank you... for helping us.



Please, do feel at home in our Kingdom!

Neither of them has a whole lot to say, but it's still nice to see they've warmed up to us.



This isn't new, just something I forgot to show earlier... we can actually see a conversation if we check the Mothiva poster.

What's THIS poster doing here!?
Kabbu, you said they were isolationist.
It's, uh, complicated. You can get in, so long as you're not an Ant.
But it's still a long process. Her idol status could've helped?
I don't get politics...

It feels a bit weird to show this scene now when clearly their border policy might be changing, we were obviously meant to see this on an earlier visit.



We can also revisit the Colosseum.



Too bad. I'm sure many want to see you return to the ring!

We can now participate in battles again if we want. There isn't an entry fee or anything. You know what, we may as well, let's see what changes.



I knew I could count on you! Head through the left door once you're ready!





Let's see if they are up for the task!

The Colosseum sequence is broadly similar to last time, a lot of this will look very familiar, but it's been a bit streamlined and there's new dialogue in places.



The cheers are all exactly the same, including the crowd not liking us at first.







Time to let off some steam!

Nothing too spectacular, but our team acknowledge they've done this before.



They shall face fierce beasts from the Forbidden Lands!





Nothing special here.





This is exactly the same enemy group we fought before.





And once again, we get cheers.



You will now face Cross and Poi! The bravest of our border guards!





We've learned from last time. We'll give it our all!
We've grown too. Be ready!

It's cute to see some camaraderie growing here.





Despite what they say, Cross and Poi are no different to fight than last time we saw them.



N-Not again...
Good fight. Let's do it again sometime.



They cheer us again (with the same cheer as our first time here).



My favorite part!







It loves fighting, don't feel sorry for it! Let's go!





This time, there are no interruptions, and we actually get to fight the Primal Weevil again. It hasn't changed since last time.







That was a great show! Do come fight whenever!

That's all there is to it.





Come back again if you want more berries!



So, yeah, we can fight here as many times as we want, and each time we win Bet will give us 50 berries. There are better ways to grind berries, but this isn't bad if you enjoy it considering it's completely free to participate.

This is also the only way to refight Cross and Poi, and the Primal Weevil: for whatever reason, they don't appear in B.O.S.S. (either in single mode or rush mode), so you have to fight them here instead.

Also, I was curious what would happen if we lost here, so I tried again and threw a fight. During the main story it's a game over, but it actually isn't now!



Oh well. There is always next time!

We see this dialogue (I'd guess this is Hector speaking, but I can't be certain).



If you want to retry, just talk to me.

And then Bet just mocks us for losing (retroactively not betting on us), doesn't give us anything, and lets us try again. I wonder how many players have seen this dialogue?

With that, we're done with the Termite Kingdom for now.



Let's head to the Wasp Kingdom next, via the Far Grasslands. That should definitely be interesting.

I'm splitting the update here, as the character limit is fighting me again. Back momentarily.

[Explopyro]

73: Lore World Tour (Part 2)



56 - Lands Untamed



The side entrance has been boarded up, but surely we wouldn't need to use it anyway now.





Also, all the Wasp soldiers are friendly now and will talk to us! This one doesn't have too much to say, though.

A Was- Oh, right.
Old habits just don't leave, huh.
I hope the Kingdoms can leave this past struggle behind and form a bond!

We'll see this banter for most of the soldiers here. I like this one; it's realistic that this could all be a bit awkward still.





As we circle around, there are more people here (including a Roach!) and the main entrance is indeed open.



Before that, though, there's also a soldier on this side.



I-It was nothing, good soldier!
Nonsense! We are free once more! We will never forget it!

She's really enthusiastic about thanking us, which makes sense but definitely feels surprising at first.



Let's head south first before we go inside.



This gate is open now too, and we can talk to the guard here.



...Enjoy your time in the Wasp Kingdom.

She's also weirdly nice.

Even though we're at peace, this border is... not welcoming, to put it in plain words.
You can tell they haven't liked visitors for long. It's like that poster outside my room!
Let's leave it at that.



Right, back here.

After so long, we can freely enter and leave the Wasp Kingdom.
Some are still on edge, but that's pretty normal.
Queen Vanessa's got a lotta stuff to fix...

There's a general banter here too, to start with.



We can talk to this Roach too.

Just like that, Roaches come back into the fold.
Neo was raving to me earlier! There's so much we can learn from them!
Hehe. And they get to learn from us too!

As well as see this banter celebrating cultural exchange. I love everyone's enthusiasm.



Also, this guard will wave us on in.



Let's go!

60 - Wasp Kingdom



The music in here hasn't changed, but somehow I find it hits differently now.

It's bustling around here.
Well, there's lots to do!
It seems we cannot enter their residential area any more.
Given the state it was in, it may need some repair...

Also, there's a new banter. As this hints, some of the areas we explored will no longer be accessible going forward. (Thankfully, this doesn't render anything personally missable, outside of that one Dark Cherry we dug up in the prison cell.)

Let's have a look around!





There's a common theme to what the soldiers have to say.

So, what's Wasp culture like?
Y'know, we're not sure...
Because they've been closed off for so long, I figured they were very violent...
Doesn't seem like it, right?
Hopefully we can learn more about them, now that there's peace.

We can also see this banter. It's a good point; we really don't know anything about what the Wasps were like before the mind control... or, for that matter, how long that control was in place.



We see you've come back to your homeland.
Yup, nothing beats home! ...When it's at peace, anyway.
You gonna keep selling stew? It's super good!
Yup. It really is my passion!
It will be our pleasure to keep eating it!
Hehehe. Help yourselves, my heroes!

Jayde's back home, and it seems like she's making cooking a permanent occupation now. (Guess Queen Vanessa will have to find a new janitor.)



Aw... well, I'll be around. Come by anytime if you want some!

If we talk to her again, she will indeed offer to sell us the stew. Her price is 20 berries apiece now, which is perfectly fair (it's nowhere near as good a deal as the 7 berries she initially charged us, but even so). At this point I usually don't feel the need for them, but if you like them or are feeling nostalgic, here's where you get more.

Hngh, now that everything's over, we should probably tell her...
And lose the discount!? No way!
Kabbu. At this point, we're actual heroes. Is there a point?
It's a matter of principle...!

We can also check the banter and see our team debate whether to tell her we're not the Bug Rangers.





There are a few more soldiers on the right side we can talk to, who'll give us an update on the state of the restoration work.



Back here, we can find Bumble, Rebelle, and Rebelle's partner.







I gotta start thinking of moving, though. Can't be a third wing forever!

Nice to know they're all doing well, I suppose.



Let's head upstairs.



Fuutes is over here. Uh, no comment.

I'm glad peace has come to the Wasp Kingdom. Otherwise, I'd... worry for her.
Hopefully she doesn't get thrown into prison again...

There's also this banter.





We can also talk to these two guards.



Let's head into the throne room.



This room brings back memories, although not very pleasant ones...
It's ok. We can make better ones now!
Ever the optimist... but we agree.

New banter for the area.



Although, truth be told, we're benefitting way more from it...

There's a Roach here too.

We're glad our rulers' words weren't empty. The roaches have found where to settle.
Who WOULDN'T wanna take 'em in!? They're the long lost bugs!
Well, when you put it that way...

Also, this banter got a laugh out of me.





These two guards say the same thing.

I can't get used to them being all nice now...
Eh, give it time. Took us some to get used to you too.

Also, this banter's pretty funny.



That's Roy on the left with the quest marker; we'll leave him alone for now, though we'll be back soon enough. We can check the banter for him, though.

I do not recognize this fellow...
Maybe he was out doing stuff while the King attacked.
What a day to miss out on...

Sure. (We indeed couldn't have seen him before.)



And thank you, Leif. For only freezing me, and not something worse...

General Fuff is surprisingly reasonable when he's not under mind control.

Fuff's a pretty chill guy, huh.
Hopefully we can leave General Ultimax behind, and work together from now on.
He doesn't seem to resent us, thankfully.

That's nice to see.



Let's talk to Queen Vanessa.



Nah. You saved us with the Flame Brooch!
Speaking of... we've come to return it.



You're too kind. I was fully prepared to entrust it to you.
It's the Wasp Kingdom's heirloom. Not something for us to own.
...Thank you. But it could still prove useful in your journey.
Might you protect it just a bit longer? There's no rush.
Queen Vanessa...! Very well. You can count on us.
You've reminded me... This isn't much, but please accept it in the name of our recovering Kingdom.



W-Woah! WOAH!!! T-Thanks!
Good luck with everything, Queen. You've got your work cut out for you.
I'll be alright. And I know I can count on you if anything happens.
Indeed! Don't hesitate to come to us!

This is a nice little scene.



If we talk to her again, this is all she'll have to say.

Queen Vanessa has retaken control of the kingdom.
We may never know how the Wasp King just hypnotized everyone... creepy stuff.
Well, everyone's back to normal, right? It's all that matters!

And here's the banter.



That's all to see in the Wasp Kingdom for now...



For our last stop, let's check up on the Roaches.

78 - The Giant's Lair





We've seen a lot of them out and about, but the Roaches' village is far from abandoned! Plenty of them are still here.



First up, this one's taken over the shop and has all new inventory. Amber was running this last time we were here.



And we can finally explore other lands... I need some savings to travel around.
Your kingdom deals in "berries", right? Help me out here!
If you want to buy something, press (A) near it.

We can also check the banter for her.

Even in such a wasteland, some find a way to be fashionable.
You gotta find SOME joy with all those monsters...
Making the best out of these conditions is commendable! And that goes for all Roaches!

Let's see what she's selling.



Magic Seed (17 berries)
Mystery Berry (23 berries)
Flame Rock (14 berries)

We can now buy as many Mystery Berries or Flame Rocks as we might want, if we have some use in mind for them. That's convenient.



And you speak of fancy chefs? Wonder what that's like...

Some of the roaches here have new things to say, like this one who's fascinated by the idea of high cuisine.



It's not quite an artifact, but maybe it should've been sealed away rather than tossed out...

This is new information! Or at least it confirms some of our speculation, anyway. The Ancient Crown was definitely a product of old roach magic. (Why they threw it into the sea for that merchant to fish up will not be explained.)

I'm going to read into this a bit and assume he knows this because the Roaches retrieved and examined the crown.





When our ancestors took the sapling away, the other Roaches tried to recreate it...
I can only imagine it didn't end well, and I don't pity them. They had it coming.

This Roach apparently knows a bit about the Snakemouth lab, though this is the extent of what he'll say about it.



The Elder's house is empty...



Oh, that explains it. Let's head that way and see what she's up to.



There's still a roach standing guard out here...



Guess they won't be calming down for a while.

This is interesting, and definitely worth keeping in mind.

He still wants to scout after all that!?
It's not like ANOTHER mad king's gonna come through.
Yet he scouts knowing it's still possible! Commendable!

There's a cute banter for him, too.



Indeed, heading west, we'll quickly find there are still enemies here. Although now that we've completed the game, Bug Me Not! will work on them if we choose to use it. (Notably, if we go into the Dead Lands below, it does not work on any of the Dead Landers.)

We'll just run through here. This area is much the same as we left it, though the frantic music no longer plays, just the Giant's Lair theme.



Right, we're back here...





When we're not being interrupted by cutscenes, it's a lot easier to appreciate just how enormous this room is.



Also, here's the Roach Elder, over by the... not the Sapling, whatever tree the Wasp King turned into.





Even though it was supposed to be everlasting... The sapling still wilted.
Were our ancestors wrong, then? Did they not manage to create an eternal plant?
Umm... I mean, it is pretty dark here, and the sapling was stuffed inside that thingy.
Mhm. We suppose the sapling still required sunlight, despite it being undying otherwise.
I see. That would make sense.
It makes me wonder, would the King then have been unstoppable if you fought him in daylight?
He did burn through the sapling's power fast, and that in the end consumed him.
But would he have been truly unstoppable outside?
All in all, we were lucky to have that happen.
If that was indeed a possibility, it's great that we managed to stop him when we could.
Still... did our ancestors really not consider that option?
...Sorry for keeping you around. There's so much to think about...

This is really interesting. I jumped the gun a bit to discuss this during the finale, I forgot this scene was here to explicitly tell us all of this rather than just implying it. Still, it's pretty interesting, and I like that they don't give us all the answers.

Although there is one interesting detail to be found in external sources. According to Mar, what the Wasp King ate was in fact intended to be a seed or nut rather than a leaf. (The sprite's a bit ambiguous and still looks more like a leaf to me, but I can squint and see it as an acorn.) The Sapling might have gone to seed (possibly in response to being cut off from sunlight), and the only known records of the Sapling's effects referred to eating leaves. I'm not sure whether or not I prefer this interpretation, but regardless, I'd be remiss not to mention it.



If we talk to the Elder again, this is all she'll have to say.



We can wander around, but there's nothing else we can interact with.

...The magic that we felt here once is now gone.
So the sapling and the King are truly...
...Come on, let's look around for a bit.

We can also see this banter here, but no matter how much we look, there's nothing to see. Let's get out of here.



Let's finish up our world tour by heading to the Wild Swamplands for Kabbu's request.



The quickest way to get there now is to take the shortcut to the Wasp Kingdom and cut around behind it.

57 - Swamps Where Dreams Drown





And we're right here. Interacting with this will start a cutscene.

15 - The One Left Behind (Leif's Theme)





Even though it's only because of your sacrifice...
...
My new friends cannot replace you. But...



Bit, you would've thought Leif was so cool!
Master, you would've scolded Vi so much!
These meetings that cannot happen... I will keep them in my heart.
...I'll come back to visit. Rest easy, now.





This is a big weight off my chest!
...No problem.
Let's go. Even with that Beast gone, this is no place to lounge around.





It's just a sweet scene, where Kabbu builds a little monument and takes some time to mourn his friends. (It may seem like a weird choice that Leif's theme plays, but the melancholy tone is fitting, and the title "The One Left Behind" could just as easily apply to Kabbu's situation here...)

(Everyone, I hope you'll keep watching over us.)
(...If only I could have saved you. Curses...)
(Are you really proud of me? I can only pray it is true.)
(My friends... I won't ever forget our time together. Rest in peace.)

There's also a new banter here now. I'll let this speak for itself.



For now, we'll head back to a save point and leave things here for today. (Whew, I can already tell this is going to be a long one.) I hope you enjoyed this world tour and status update on all of Bugaria!

Next time... I think I've been putting off the Cave of Trials long enough.

[Explopyro]

74: Trials & Tangy Tribulations (Part 1)

18 - In the Court of the Ant Queen



Last time, we went on a world tour in search of new conversations and lore. Today... today is going to be mostly about combat, because we're going to tackle the Cave of Trials (and also experience quite possibly the most obscure and hilarious secret in the game).

We have a bit of setup to do first, though.



72 - Summer Holiday at the Metal Island (TM)



We need to head to Metal Island and see Skirby.





As a reminder, Skirby sells Tangy Berries for 40 berries each.



I'm going to buy four. Just let me hang this gun on the wall for now, I'll explain it soon enough.

06 - Outskirts



Let's head to the Cave of Trials. I'm going to walk there from the Outskirts to remind everyone where it is, since it's been a while since we found it or thought about it at all.





In the first screen east of the Explorers' Association, we go south and head down these stairs.



The cave entrance is here.



The Cave of Trials! We discussed how it works a bit when we first got access after Chapter 4, but let's do a quick recap. The cave will present us with fifty simulated battles in a row, divided into five waves of 10 with escalating difficulty. We're given two free full heals, but we can only use those after finishing each tenth fight.

So, I think it's time for a whole new build! Let's move some medals around.



A quick note on Hard Mode: if you're only after the rewards here and not interested in the challenge, you can take it off without any penalty. I see a lot of people do this. I won't be, obviously, but I thought it might be good to remind anyone playing along that they have that option. Also, if all you care about is achievements, you can stop after 40 (though again, we won't be doing this).





I still haven't removed any of our HP or TP Pluses. We probably don't need all of the HP, honestly, I could have recovered a few MP here but it's fine to have a safety net.



This should look different!

It's Leif's turn to shine, because his abilities really help us be efficient here. The core idea is to boost his attack as much as possible (including getting him low on HP for Last Attack), and start each battle off with Icefall for major spread damage. A lot of enemies are even weak to ice, which makes this even more convenient. When the tougher enemies start showing up, we can spend a bit more TP and use Ice Rain, or Frozen Drill if they have high defence.



You may notice we're using Victory Buzz, but not Triumph Buzz. Getting HP recovery after fights would make it too hard to keep Leif at 4 HP or fewer, so we don't want that, but recovering 4 TP after each battle is exactly what we want since it effectively makes that first Icefall free. (If you aren't using Last Attack, Triumph Buzz is a good choice here though.)

If battles happen to go longer than two turns, TP Core will help us keep up with any other skills we want to use.

(Kabbu's keeping some tanking ability with Super Block+ and Back Support, and Vi's keeping Heal Plus. Their job will mainly be to stay alive, and relay to Leif if they don't have anything else to do.)



For all that I derided it before because it doesn't affect Frigid Coffin, putting Status Booster on Leif is still a good idea if you're planning to use Icefall. This way, we have a decent chance of freezing anything we don't kill right away, and that can buy us some time to recover more TP (like with the Meditation medals I've put on Kabbu).

Kabbu also gets Strong Start. We could give this to Vi, too; the important thing is that it's no longer on Leif, because we don't want him taking doubled exhaustion penalties as our primary attacker.

Also, Leif gets Hard Charge, to give some control over his HP and make it easier to get him into Last Attack range. (Our Leif has 14 max HP right now, which isn't ideal, but at least means he gets into range with two Hard Charges.)



I'm not sure why I left Status Relay on, it has good utility with Hard Charge but I'm not actually going to be using it. The same goes for ADBP Enhancer, it's a good medal but it doesn't really help us with this setup and I think I just left it out of habit. I'm not going to claim this is fully optimised by any means.

Spy Specs is going to look unusual, considering how diligently we've been spying on enemies. It's here for a very specific reason, which will become apparent in due time. (Let's hang this one on the wall next to the Tangy Berries.)



Also, I went and reduced Leif's HP to 4. We won't be healed automatically at the start, so we can take advantage and go in with Last Attack already active. (This is trivial to do: go into a battle and use Hard Charge twice, then run away.)

Let's take a look at our items too.



First up, we have these four Tangy Berries at the top of our inventory. There is a very well-hidden secret here, which activates under either of two conditions:

(1) We have a Tangy Berry in the 4th slot from the top of our inventory.
(2) We have at least 3 Tangy Berries in our inventory, anywhere.

Just to be safe, I've gotten four berries, which satisfies both conditions. I've seen a lot of slightly different explanations online, but I did some pretty thorough testing.

(What does this do? I'm not telling yet.)

It's a lot more reliable to do this via the 3 berries method. If you're trying to do it with slot 4, it's easy to mess up because of how the inventory works: when you use an item, the one that actually gets consumed is always the closest to the top, no matter which you actually pick from the menu. (So if you're using the slot 4 method, you really need to tie up the slots above it with items of a type you have no intention of using, or you'll mess it up.)

If you've forgotten how to move items around in the inventory, you do it by holding (Y).



I've also made three Berry Smoothies. As a reminder, you can either get these as a random outcome from cooking Mystery Berries, or by combining a Tangy Berry with Dark Cherries.

If we want to make use of Ice Rain (and to a lesser extent Frozen Drill), these really help keep up with the costs. We could probably get by without them or use Crisbee Donuts instead, if we really had to, but they'll be useful.



Right then, preparations are all complete.



Let's do this.

Click me for video!





Holographic enemies flicker into existence. (There's a fun visual effect, if you're watching the video: these simulated enemies' sprites occasionally flicker and glitch out a little.)

04 - FIGHT!
55 - Team, It's Getting Serious!

(Putting both battle themes here, you'll hear them at various points depending on which enemies are in each given encounter.)

Battle 1 of 50, let's go!





From there, we go right into battle. There's not a lot of fluff to this.

The first battle is four Seedlings, two flying and two grounded.



This fight is obviously not a challenge, especially with our setup. I'm just showing this as proof of concept; I'm going to gloss over the vast majority of the combat here and just talk about any highlights. If you're interested in the full battles, it's all in the video (I think I show off some reasonably interesting and clever play in places, and also I made some blunders toward the end that might be entertaining.)



Once we finish the battle, the Roach hologram briefly congratulates us (the ? here is just an amusing coincidence from the deliberately glitchy-looking text, it's normally a !).

Battle 2 of 50, let's go!

Then we're immediately thrown into the next one.



Two Inichas and a Jellyshroom.

Battle 3 of 50, let's go!



Zombiant, Jellyshroom, Inichas.

Battle 4 of 50, let's go!



Three Midges.

Battle 5 of 50, let's go!



An Acornling and two Numbnails.

Battle 6 of 50, let's go!



Midge, Acornling, Weevil.

Battle 7 of 50, let's go!



Weevil, Chomper, Venus' Bud.

One thing that does quickly become apparent is that some of these formations are new. Many of them are unique to the Cave of Trials and combine enemies in ways we haven't seen before.

Battle 8 of 50, let's go!



Seedling, Underling, Flowerling.

This is another new formation, I don't think we've seen this particular combination of the Seedling family before.

Battle 9 of 50, let's go!



Cactiling, Psicorp, Thief.

Battle 10 of 50, let's go!



Burglar, Bandit, Thief.

One other thing pointing out is that the sequences of 10 battles aren't chapter-themed or anything. We started out with Seedlings and other Chapter 1 enemies here, but it very quickly started introducing things from later chapters (Flowerlings don't appear until Chapter 6 but they're still in this opening sequence, for instance). There's a general sense of difficulty progression (both between and within the sets), but that's about the only pattern.



You deserve something for your efforts!
Once you are done, check near the platform, you should find something of interest.

When we complete the tenth battle, we get this message. The prize for clearing this wave is a Tangy Berry, but they don't hand it to us, it appears on the floor and we can pick it up afterward. (I suspect this is because it'd get messy when our inventory gets restored at the end of the trial.)

Incidentally, if you do happen to lose a battle in here, it isn't game over, and you still get to keep any prizes you earned prior to that point. So there really is no reason not to keep pressing forward and see how far you manage to get.



We're also offered the option to heal before continuing. We don't need this right now. (And with a strategy like this, healing is a bit double-edged because we'd have to get Leif back to low HP again.) On we go!

Battle 11 of 50, let's go!



Underling, Arrow Worm, Psicorp.

Battle 12 of 50, let's go!



Bee-Boop, Arrow Worm, Psicorp.

Once again, this is a combination we haven't seen before, the robotic enemies from the Honey Factory are never seen outside that area in the wild.

Battle 13 of 50, let's go!



Two Denmuki.

Battle 14 of 50, let's go!



Two Bee-Boops and a Security Turret.

Battle 15 of 50, let's go!



An Inichas and two Denmuki.

This one's kind of neat, it's combining caterpillar enemies from different parts of the world.

Battle 16 of 50, let's go!



Three Abomihoneys.

Battle 17 of 50, let's go!



Two Thieves and a Bandit.

Battle 18 of 50, let's go!



Two Krawlers and a Warden, all in sand form.

Battle 19 of 50, let's go!



Haunted Cloth, Warden, Krawler (sand form again).

Battle 20 of 50, let's go!



Two Chompers, a Chomper Brute, and a Wild Chomper.

This is another combination we wouldn't have seen, Chomper Brutes aren't found outside the hidden cave, and Wild Chompers only appear in the Far Grasslands.

If you're not ready to deal with the big pools of HP, the Chomper Brutes can be an unpleasant surprise here, and definitely might throw you off your rhythm.



You deserve something for your efforts!
Once you are done, check near the platform, you should find something of interest.

Once again, we're told the reward will be on the ground after we finish. For this wave, we get Dark Cherries.



And again, we're offered the opportunity to heal, though I don't want to. Let's keep going.

Battle 21 of 50, let's go!



Two Mantidflies and a Flowerling.

Battle 22 of 50, let's go!



Two Thieves and a Jumping Spider.

Another new combination, the spiders and bandit enemies never shared a habitat.

Battle 23 of 50, let's go!



Inichas, Denmuki, and two Madesphy.

This one can be nasty if you're unprepared for it; Madesphy have that party-wide attack that inflicts Numb and can easily kill you out of nowhere if you're not careful. (Also, it's another "hey look at all the caterpillars" one.)

Battle 24 of 50, let's go!



Two Leafbug Ninja and a Leafbug Archer.

Battle 25 of 50, let's go!



A Leafbug Clubber and two Flowerlings.

Battle 26 of 50, let's go!



Leafbug Clubber, Leafbug Ninja, Leafbug Archer.

Battle 27 of 50, let's go!



Belostoss and Water Strider.

Battle 28 of 50, let's go!



Ironnail, Plumpling, Flowerling.

Battle 29 of 50, let's go!



A Jumping Spider and two Mimic Spiders.

Here's another new combination. It makes a certain kind of sense since they're all spiders, but these enemies' habitats don't overlap areas normally.

Battle 30 of 50, let's go!



Acornling, Plumpling, Underling, Flowerling.

It's another big Seedling family grouping (though, of course, all the types at once wouldn't fit into a single battle).



Here is something for your efforts.



This time, we're just handed the reward directly. For completing the third wave, we get a Defense Exchange medal (our second copy, finally). If you're leaning toward defence/tanking builds, it might be worth coming here earlier in the game to get this (even if you don't plan to complete the trials in one go).



On we go.

Battle 31 of 50, let's go!



Two Jellyshrooms and a Bloatshroom.

Battle 32 of 50, let's go!



Zombeetle, Zombiant, Zombee.

Battle 33 of 50, let's go!



A Mothfly and two Mothfly Clusters.

Battle 34 of 50, let's go!



Two Wasp Troopers and a Wasp Scout.

Battle 35 of 50, let's go!



Bandit, Burglar, Ruffian, Thief. (The full set!)

Battle 36 of 50, let's go!



Wasp Driller, Wasp Bomber, Wasp Scout.

Battle 37 of 50, let's go!



Diving Spider, Water Strider, Belostoss.

Battle 38 of 50, let's go!



Chomper Brute, Wild Chomper, and two Venus' Buds.

Whenever Chomper Brutes get involved, these fights always get a bit messy, they have just enough HP to get really annoying (and here, there are also enemies that can heal if you let them).

Battle 39 of 50, let's go!



Two Midges and two Leafbug Ninja.

I actually learned something new in this battle! Leif ended up being knocked out by one of the Midges' counterattacks, so I had Kabbu revive him with Pep Talk and found out that this reset his exhaustion penalties. That's pretty handy, although there aren't that many enemies that do counterattacks in the middle of your turn, so applications are pretty limited.

Battle 40 of 50, let's go!



Two Sentry Turrets, a Wild Chomper, and a Wasp Bomber.

This formation's a weird smorgasbord and I don't really know what it's supposed to be.



Here is something for your efforts.



Our reward for clearing 40 fights is a new medal, TP Saver.

This is pretty much exactly what it says on the tin. For 5 MP, the equipped bug's skills will all cost 1 fewer TP (though you can't reduce any costs to zero). This discount also stacks with Life Cast, so it's not uncommon to see them combined (for example, if Leif equipped both of those medals, the cost of Bubble Shield Lite would go from 3 TP to 1 HP).

You can definitely do some neat things with this, although I personally haven't used it much because of where it's located. This is definitely one of those medals I'd love to get early in a randomiser playthrough, though.



On we go. I actually decided to demonstrate the healing this time, I think because I was low on TP; if you're watching along, you'll be able to see that I ended up getting a bit sloppy afterward.

Very well, here is some healing before we continue ahead!



We get a very brief healing animation, then it's right back into the action.

Battle 41 of 50, let's go!



Burglar, Ironnail, Zombeetle.



After we finish that battle, this achievement icon pops up, which is definitely a bit confusing. I don't really understand why it gets delayed to this point, but this is actually for having collected all the Medals: TP Saver was the last one we were missing. I'll show the achievement itself once we're done here.

Battle 42 of 50, let's go!



Wasp Trooper, Bandit, Ruffian, Wasp Scout.

Battle 43 of 50, let's go!



Bloatshroom, Burglar, Belostoss.

(Is there a theme to this one? Maybe it's just that these enemies all have similar proportions?)

Battle 44 of 50, let's go!



Three Abomihoneys and a Wasp Driller.

Battle 45 of 50, let's go!



Haunted Cloth (fire), Warden (fire), Krawler (fire).

Things definitely start stepping up a bit at this point, the endgame enemies start coming out now.

Battle 46 of 50, let's go!



Cactiling, Dead Lander Beta, Inichas.

And now we've got Dead Landers! The final few battles of this really start ramping up the difficulty. (Although this one maybe not so much, the Dead Lander's the only real threat here.)

Battle 47 of 50, let's go!



Dead Lander Gamma and two flying Seedlings.

The Gammas are no joke, though. Any battle with these things can turn against you at a moment's notice.

Battle 48 of 50, let's go!



Two Golden Seedlings!

If you know that Ice Rain can score multiple hits on them, this isn't that scary (though it'll drain a lot of resources); otherwise, it can definitely be pretty daunting! They're still prone to running away, though, so you might get lucky.

Battle 49 of 50, let's go!



Dead Lander Alpha and Dead Lander Beta.

Another one that can be a bit tricky if you aren't prepared to deal with it. It's not that bad if you've managed your resources well, but if you're already struggling it might not go well. (We've seen this formation before, but it's worth remembering that, strictly speaking, you never actually have to fight these things to complete the game.)

Battle 50 of 50, let's go!



And finally, we have two Dead Lander Gammas.

This is never an easy formation to deal with. (Last time we fought these, we had Maki and Elizant there to help!) If you're watching along in the video, I definitely got sloppy here and made a few mistakes, but ended up getting lucky and not dying from them. These things can put out a lot of damage, and most of their attacks cause sleep, so once the battle starts going badly it can very often keep doing so.

(I didn't this time, but it isn't a bad idea to put Resist All and Sleep Resist on someone to make them immune, if you're worried about these.)



It brings me joy that I can reward you with this. Take it!



The reward for clearing all 50 fights is the final ribbon for Chompy! We'll test this out in a bit.



If you want to keep fighting, just talk to me again, and we shall begin the process once more.
I no longer possess any amazing rewards, but you shall still earn berries, so feel free to come back anytime!



We also get this little speech from the Roach hologram on finishing. Clearing the Cave of Trials for the first time unlocks Random Mode, which we'll discuss more shortly. There are no major prizes left, but we can keep fighting for berries (or just because it's fun).

13 - It's Getting Scary!



Wait, what? The hologram just started freaking out and spewing glitchy error messages?



51 - The Watcher



Um.

That looks like...?



Welp. Can't spy on it. (This is why I equipped the Spy Specs medal, so we could see its stats.)



And if we try to see its name by targeting it, it keeps glitching out. Look at the text for long enough and you will see the name TANGYBUG amidst the chaos.

Click me for video!



TANGYBUG is this game's secret boss, and the reason we were futzing about with Tangy Berries in our inventory. If you have a Tangy Berry in the 4th slot, or three Tangy Berries regardless of location (checked when you finish battle 50), you get to fight this weird hologram of Tanjerin. This secret was actually added to the game in v1.1, I think inspired by people memeing about Tanjerin on the official Discord.

And looking at it, this thing is no joke! To start, it has 99 HP and 4 defence; it can take a lot of punishment. And it starts out flying and with two actions per turn. (Interestingly, there are no "normal mode" stats for it either, it'll have these stats regardless of whether you have Hard Mode equipped. This is a superboss. If you trigger the fight, you'd better be up for the challenge.)

(Incidentally, this silhouetted appearance is how any enemies you haven't previously encountered would appear in the Cave of Trials.)

Please excuse some minor continuity errors in HP/TP and some of the items we have in inventory; the fight I'm showing going forward came from a different take than the prior screenshots and the Cave of Trials video.

We'll start out with an Ice Rain.









Probably blew through most of its freeze resistance there for a few extra points of damage, but realistically freezing it isn't going to make or break the fight. (Look at the impact of that defence stat!)

Also, it is weak to ice. Are "fruity bugs" part plant?



Feels like we barely made a dent...

With 11 TP left, I decided to go for another Ice Rain since we could afford it.









That doesn't feel particularly worthwhile, but there are no great solutions here, with this build our best approach is going to be brute force. (If you've been using Vi as the main attacker instead, Needle Pincer is your friend though.)





Kabbu uses a Berry Smoothie.



And then, after another relay, Leif shields himself.



Chompy doesn't get to participate in this battle, unfortunately. There is literally nothing she can do to harm this thing.



The first attack it uses on us is this frost breath, similar to the one used by Haunted Cloths. This deals 4 base damage across the entire party, and also freezes us if we don't fill the bar. (Oops.)



Weirdly, it ended its turn after that. I'm not sure if the breath attack always costs it two actions, or if some kind of bug cut its turn short (maybe because it froze us?); this fight is not very well documented.

Much as I don't want to heal Leif out of Last Attack range, I think I really only have one option here to not lose the fight.







Queen's Dinner! These things are unparallelled in getting you out of a pinch, especially when a lot of the party is afflicted by disabling status. I really can't afford to give up that much action economy this turn.



Right, what to do now?



Let's have Leif use Hard Charge, to at least make a start on reducing his HP again.



And I think it's time for the full-party Bubble Shield. This can be a recovery and setup turn, we'll get back into the swing of things next turn.



This could complicate things. It's taunting Vi. (Taunting also doesn't cost it an action, so it's still going to do two more attacks after this.)



TANGYBUG also has a move that looks like Kabbu's Dash Through, which hits the entire party for 5 base damage.



And another that looks like Heavy Strike, also for 5 base damage. Its moveset is a weird amalgam of moves we've seen elsewhere in the game.



Vi being taunted is going to complicate things, especially since Leif is down an action thanks to shielding last turn. Taunted characters can't use Turn Relay.

Kabbu can, though, so we may as well take this opportunity to do another Ice Rain.









Thanks to Hard Charge, we can still do quite substantial damage even though Last Attack isn't active. This could have been better, but I certainly won't complain.



Unfortunately, we can't really do anything else this turn.



Vi may as well attack since she's forced, but, well, what did you expect to happen?



It's also borrowed the spinning attack from Haunted Cloths, it seems. This deals 4 base damage across the party.



For its second attack, it launches a poison glob. This deals 4 base damage and inflicts poison if not blocked, as you might expect. I think I may have also seen this inflict other status effects before, but I'm not certain.



Then at the end of its turn, it rises back into the air. It will just do this occasionally; it doesn't cost any actions, and I think can come after it does any other move. (Also, like the Everlasting King, if we use flipping attacks on it while it's grounded, we'd send it back into the air.)



We got kind of lucky there, though: Leif took a lot of damage, but survived, meaning Last Attack is back online. So let's keep the Ice Rain coming!









We're making progress, albeit slowly.





Also, we're nearly out of TP again. (Ice Rain is expensive!) Let's fix that.



And then I think it's best to play it safe and shield the party.



We take another poison blob. That's fine.



But then it taunts Leif, which is definitely going to be irritating... it also rises into the air afterward.



Apparently TANGYBUG can also use Dash Through while floating! The effect is the same, though. (Also, this screenshot caught something interesting, while most of the time it's just the grey hologram, there is at least a frame or two of Tanjerin sprites in there.)



This is awkward.



...Or is it? Let's get it out of the air with Vi, even though she won't do any damage.



Leif may be out of actions (and taunted, so we can't relay to him either), but Kabbu can initiate Frozen Drill!



I should probably have been using this more often. Frozen Drill is awesome.



TANGYBUG also has this vine attack, which we've variously seen from characters like Aria and the Wasp King. The first hit deals 5 base damage, and if there's a follow-up, the second does 3.



Also, Leif takes a poison blob and goes down. This was probably inevitable, since last turn's circumstances meant we weren't able to shield him.



This isn't that bad, though.



Kabbu's Pep Talk, conveniently, revives allies on 4 HP, which is perfect for Last Attack. (Sometimes Pep Talk is better than using Magic Seeds!)









Get out of here, Tanjy.



The fight ends normally...



...but when we return to the Cave of Trials, the holographic roach is screaming PUSHROCK at us. Um. Okay then. (This is another Menu Code, we'll talk about it more in a moment.)



Then the trial sequence is done, with no further acknowledgment of it. So that certainly happened.

This boss has a lot more attacks that we didn't see. I can't be certain I've seen everything; this boss is a pain to experiment with, because for every attempt you have to spend nearly an hour slogging through the Trials first, but I did my best to record what I could.



Here's a move that looks like Kabbu's Under Strike. This deals 6 base damage to a single bug.



Of course he has Pebble Toss! This deals 3 base damage.



He also has this other attack, which launches a barrage of pebbles. This deals 1-4 hits across the party, for 4 base damage each, and can inflict poison.



Continuing the trend of borrowing attacks from Haunted Cloth, he has the life drain too. Um. I'm genuinely not sure how much damage this actually does. (In the run I recorded this, Kabbu had 5 defence from Back Support + 2x Defense Exchange + 2x Reflection, but I'd be shocked if this actually does 6 damage per pulse; maybe it does 1 damage but pierces defence? Or it could have a 1 damage minimum unless the character is under Bubble Shield, but that doesn't help determine the actual damage number.)

I think these are all the attacks it has, but I'm not 100% certain.

Anyway, uh, that's TANGYBUG! It's a pretty cool easter egg, though I have no idea how they expect anyone to stumble across it unless they already know how to trigger it. (Maybe that's the point, since it's based on inside jokes?) It's also just a genuinely tough boss fight that's pretty satisfying to work through, even considering it's just made with reused assets. I love this.

Before we get back to the Cave of Trials... let's talk about PUSHROCK.



This is yet another Menu Code which can be entered when creating a file. This was actually in the game well before the 1.1 update, there just wasn't any way to be "taught" it ingame until they added the TANGYBUG fight. So what does this do?



It makes everybody Tanjerin. Everybody. (Or... mostly everybody. Tanjerin himself becomes Kabbu, Cerise is unchanged, and as I understand it, some characters/bosses like the spiders that use 3D models instead of sprites are unaffected.)





Yes, this carries over to the battle screen and the sprites and animations often look very silly.



I think it just creates a mapping between the other characters' sprites and whatever sprites Tanjerin had in the same slot, so you will often see very weird things like bandages appearing and disappearing, etc. It's very strange.

I can't tell you much about where this gets particularly weird, as to be honest I don't really want to actually play the game like this. But if it sounds fun to you, uh, you do you I guess?



Right, back to the Cave of Trials. Here we can see the prizes for the first two waves next to the pedestals: a Tangy Berry for 10, and Dark Cherries for 20.



Here's the achievement we earned earlier.

Back momentarily, I need to split the update for character limit reasons.

[Explopyro]

74: Trials & Tangy Tribulations (Part 2)



Okay, now shall we check out Random Mode?



Very well! Let's load up the Trial program!



Let's do this.

Click me for video!



Immediately we can see the change: we no longer start out with basic enemies, and the formations are different! When I first learned this mode existed, I halfway expected it to just shuffle the previous Cave of Trials formations, but these are almost entirely new (and there are definitely more than fifty possible). I'll show off a few of the more interesting ones I came across, but for the most part, if you're interested in seeing this you can watch the video (or play it yourself!).



Here is something for your efforts.



As mentioned before, the only prize we earn now is berries. After each wave, we'll receive a number of berries equal to the fight number we're on (so, 10, then 20, then 30, etc), and then there's a bigger payout at the end if you complete the entire thing. I don't think there's much reason to care about berries at this point in the game, the main incentive to do this is just that it's fun and challenging, but it's something I guess.





Golden Seedlings show up in a bunch of these formations, alongside all sorts of enemies. They're not that bad if you have a plan to deal with them, but can definitely be an unpleasant surprise if you're not ready.













These Dead Lander formations are just surreal, it's weird seeing them alongside other enemies. Even though they're both endgame enemies, it feels strange fighting them at the same time as the fire constructs, for instance.



Here's one that had both sand and fire forms of Krawlers. This mode ends up mixing and matching all sorts of things.





Also, this was neat. I was able to hit four enemies at once with Icefall in this formation, which I didn't actually know was possible before. I think it's something to do with the sprite/hitbox size of the enemies, and how closely they end up being placed together (you definitely can't rely on being able to do this in normal gameplay, I don't think any formations outside here are closely packed enough).



And this one was just plain weird, which you'll see if you watch the video (it's #38). When I hit some of the other enemies, the Chomper Brute counterattacked by spitting Hard Seeds and ended up killing Leif (showing off the exhaustion reset again). I don't think I knew Chomper Brutes had this counterattack, but even then, I'd have assumed it would be triggered on attacking other Chomper-type enemies (the way Midges only react if you hit other Midges or Broodmother) and there weren't any of those here.





When we finish the entire thing, we get a huge payout of berries. I'm not sure if it's always 318, or if this number varies with some other factors; if so, I don't know what affects it.

Weirdly, I think random mode feels slightly easier to me? I'm not entirely sure why, given a lot of the formations are pretty nasty; maybe it's because the tougher ones tend not to come in a row so you have time to regroup between them? I've also found it tends to feel anticlimactic at the end, if it ends up giving you a trivial formation last.



Sure, maybe I'll come back sometime (though we're done as far as the LP is concerned). This place is fun.



This sign over on the left side keeps track of our stats for the Cave.





And on the right, some of our other gameplay numbers. (I suspect these numbers aren't wholly accurate to the LP if you were to go back and add things up, because I often recorded multiple takes of fights, but please don't waste your time doing that.)



Before we forget, we have one more prize to check out! Mustn't forget the Team Ribbon! (Also, oops, I clearly forgot to use the Heart Berry we got from Samira. I should do that.)



Let's have Chompy put this on.



Well, if nothing else, it's a cute bluish purple colour.



It doesn't give her any new moves...



But it makes her attacks leech 1 TP each, which is pretty nice! Passive TP recovery!

Unfortunately, it's not quite as good as it sounds, because you don't gain the TP unless she actually does damage. If the frontmost enemy has 2 or more defence (like we just saw with TANGYBUG), this ribbon is useless. Unfortunately, this means it can let you down exactly in the tough fights where you'd want its benefit the most. As a result I tend to prefer the Pretty Ribbon overall, but this thing definitely has its uses. It's pretty neat.



One last thing. Let's go to our house and check out the spoils!

Next to the Card Trophy, we now have two icons for beating the Cave of Trials, the top one for normal mode and the bottom for random mode. And the Tangy Berry on the shelf above our bed is for defeating TANGYBUG.

We also have the Wasp King's Ancient Crown, apparently. Um, I should come clean about this. I've been recording the LP on game version 1.1, but there are actually two minor patches that came out since I started the LP (1.1.1, and 1.1.2). I hadn't updated for the sake of keeping the LP consistent, and because I didn't think there had been any content changes, but apparently one of the things those patches did was add more trophies for our house. The crown, as you might expect, is for finishing the main story.

None of these objects appear in the v1.1 save. (And some of the flags are new, I had to replay Random Mode and TANGYBUG again to get the associated trophies to appear.) If there are no objections from the thread, I'll probably just upgrade and record on 1.1.2 going forward so that we can see the rest of this content.

Anyway, let's end today's update there. Next time, we'll take on some of these postgame sidequests.

[Explopyro]

75: Escort Missions and R&R

17 - Ant Kingdom



When we left off last time, we'd just finished with the Cave of Trials, and a very special hidden fight. Now it's time to make a start on the postgame sidequests.





On the agenda today are "Loose Ends" and "A New Hope". I'm taking things a bit out of order here; normally I think of "Confidential" as coming first (partially because it was in the base game, while the rest of these quests were added as the expansion aspect of v1.1), but I think things will flow better for us if I do it this way. If you're playing along, you might want to do that one first because the reward from it will make the others easier.







I'm not changing our build around too much, but I've replaced Victory Buzz with Favorite One, and Spy Specs with Crazy Prepared. Again, this isn't fully optimised by any means, but I've been enjoying it and it's not badly-suited for what's coming, so we'll stick with it for one more update.



And before we forget, let's actually use this thing.



Kabbu can have this one.

18 - In the Court of the Ant Queen





Let's go see Rebecca now. As a reminder, she hangs out in the War Room, just to the right of the throne room.



Rebecca... You'll really go to the Abandoned City? For what purpose?
It may look a bit dreadful... But I have many great memories there.
Won't you come with me? I have a tale or two to share.



A voice interrupts and shouts angrily from offscren.



It's the Lieutenant.



Have you forgotten your age?
...Now, that's not very kind.
These young'uns saved the Kingdom! I have nothing to fear.
...She's right about that. We promise to keep her safe.



....................................
...Only if I go as well. Please, Rebecca.
Hoho, I'd love that! Let's get going, then.





...And they leave.

The "Abandoned City" they're talking about is in the Forsaken Lands; it's the area where we previously fought the False Monarch.



Let's go meet them there.

63 - Forsaken Lands



If we talk to the hooded ant in the Mines, we can shortcut to Patton's hut, but from here we're going to have to walk. Hope you remember the way! We go south from Patton's...



Then east from here.





Fly across the gaps here, then go south.





Use the wind currents here to cross the big gaps, then head west (contrary to the arrow on the ground).





This is the area with the ruined Ant Kingdom vehicles. We get up here (via the bouncy mushroom and some flying), then go west again.



And we're here. We can see Rebecca and the Lieutenant waiting in the distance. It might not be the worst idea to save.

(Before you ask, I don't know if anything about this quest changes if you do it before defeating the False Monarch. Those weird Mothfly NPCs would be here, but I don't know what if anything their presence would change.)





As we get close to them, it triggers a cutscene.



Um, do you really like this place?
...
Um, Miss Rebecca?
Elizant... We shared so many meals here.
You both crossed this place?
Every day I tried just a little harder with my Plumpling Pies...
This place may seem barren, but it was our lovely camp.
That's kinda hard to imagine...
...



13 - It's Getting Scary!



A swarm of Mothflies appear!



Oh dear...
Stay close to us!
Here we go!
I'll assist you as well!



Click me for video!

29 - Team, This One's Stronger! (Miniboss)



This battle's pretty interesting, though a lot of what makes it so isn't apparent at first. (The Lieutenant's fighting alongside us, though! That's neat.)



What is immediately apparent, though, is that all of these enemies come with permanent stat boosts. They all get both Attack Up and Defence Up, which definitely makes them scarier than they would be ordinarily... the damage adds up, and they're not quite as squishy as you'd expect from prior experience.



Freezing them all can buy us some time.









We can take out the one in front, after that.



...What's this? As soon as we've killed it, another enemy comes in from offscreen to replace it!

This is the gimmick of this fight. It's not just four enemies; we fight four at once, but they're going to keep coming until we've killed enough. Every enemy we kill gets immediately replaced. This means that killing enemies is no longer necessarily a way to reduce the number of attacks you face, because the replacements come in fresh and get to attack right away. It'll definitely make you rethink your tactics!



The Lieutenant does help us out, though. She can even jump to hit the airborne ones, so she'll always hit something, though she only has 3 attack (reduced to 2 by these things' boosted defence) so her damage isn't going to turn the tides by itself.



Here's her animation against the grounded ones.

I'm not going to give a full play-by-play of this encounter. It's an interesting one to play through and does present some interesting new challenges, but moment to moment, it's just a marathon of these same enemies. (And if you want to completely trivialise it, you can do so by stacking defence on Kabbu or shielding him and using Taunt. All of these enemies only do single-target attacks, so for all their numbers, you can render them completely harmless with that kind of tactic.)

As far as I can tell, the sequence is always the same. It starts out with three Mothflies and a Mothfly Cluster, then each time we kill one, the next replacement comes in this order: Cluster, Fly, Cluster, Cluster, Cluster, Fly, Cluster. In total, there are 11 enemies (5 small Mothflies and 6 clusters).



One interesting observation: if the last enemy surviving is a Mothfly Cluster, it can use its move to summon two smaller Mothflies, but these summoned ones don't get the stat-ups everything else in the battle did.



Eventually, we prevail.





Huff... Was this risk truly worth it, Rebecca...?
Of course.
Even if you camped here... Rebecca, we should head back.
I didn't get to finish my tale... Won't you hear me out for a little while longer?
Eh, we're already here, so...



Rebecca hesitates and shuffles around for a moment.

61 - Elizant II's Promise





Ellie is a wonderful queen. She really is her mother's daughter.
When I heard she destroyed the Everlasting Sapling...
It took me some days to finally accept it.





Why did you never share these burdens? You always seemed so happy...
Hohoho... I am happy! After all... I'm sure she would be happy.
I'm so proud of Ellie, too...
Do you understand why I needed to return?
...Yes. This is a proper way to pay your respects.



I won't hold you here any longer. I'm very grateful.
...So am I. Team Snakemouth, please take this.



We should, um... go back. You can tell us a lot more stuff at the palace!
Yeah... We'd like that.
I'll lead the way, then!





We're given the option to fast travel back to the Ant Kingdom. We may as well; there's no longer any reason to stay here. (Though I did linger a bit on this screen, because "Elizant II's Promise" continues to play as long as you do.)



As soon as we head back, the quest is complete.

This one's pretty touching, and I do like it, though I have a few questions... for one, why does Rebecca think Elizant II destroyed the Sapling? She decided to, but she didn't actually have to follow through, because Hoaxe got there first and he's the one who actually destroyed it. And, for two... isn't Elizant I in an enchanted sleep? You'd think they might be able to wake her to say goodbye, even if she can no longer be made immortal or have much life expectancy left; I think the implication might be that she was ill or near death when put under and can't actually be woken, but the game never says that outright, so I can't be certain. Instead, everyone just acts like she's dead, which seems a bit odd. Still, I'm probably overthinking this.



Our reward for this quest is the sixth and final Heart Berry.



Vi can have this one, to balance things out. We'll probably be redistributing these a fair bit with Patton relatively soon, but for now I'm going to make the HP numbers that slight bit less irritating.



Unfortunately, despite the dialogue suggesting she'll have more stories for us, Rebecca doesn't actually have anything new to say now.



So let's head to our next destination. We need to meet up with Roy in the Wasp Kingdom throne room.

60 - Wasp Kingdom





We were just here, not too long ago.



Let's talk to him this time.



(Interestingly, it's actually General Fuff who speaks first when we do so.)

I heard you saved my people... Thank you.
And our people, as well. You will always have our gratitude.
I-It was nothing!
Come on, it was really something!
...How can we help?
Our botanists have been working together...



Is it a good idea?
One day, the Dead Lands could be filled with life...
There's no way I'll give up on that dream.
...Count on us!
Yeah! It's gonna work for sure!
With the trials you've faced, I have no doubt you'll be safe.
Shall we go, then? We're headed towards the cold behemoth's entrance.



Once the conversation's finished, Roy starts following us. It's time to head back into the Dead Lands, our destination is just outside the fridge entrance.

There are a bunch of ways to get there, but I was curious to see what the "intended" route is (i.e., what path we could take that wouldn't have Roy disappear from behind us at any point), so I took the long way.



56 - Lands Untamed





Roy can follow behind us on every screen of the Far Grasslands. Although he disappears if we enter the damselflies' Fishing Village; I'd wondered if maybe we were supposed to pick up our submarine there, but apparently not.

36 - Lost Sands





Instead, we walk all the way through the Lost Sands...

06 - Outskirts



Then walk through the Outskirts until we get to the Pier.

23 - The Sailors' Pier





Here, we can get into the sub.

67 - Snug as a Bug in a Sub





75 - Rubber Prison



And sail over to Rubber Prison.



It's a quick shortcut from there to the Giant's Lair entrance.

That was quite a trek! Of course, we didn't have to go that way; it's faster to go straight to the Ant Mines from the Wasp Kingdom, and then take the shortcut right here. But this is the canonical path, so to speak.

78 - The Giants' Lair



The Dead Lands are still as spooky as ever.





Also, the Dead Landers are still here! Including the Omega with all its eye-beams, and yes, it will drop Gammas on us just like before. (And Bug Me Not doesn't work on Dead Lander enemies, so even now we have to either deal with them or run away a lot; running is generally more expedient.)



After a bit of finagling (some of the puzzles reset and need to be solved again), we're back at the fridge. Might not be a bad idea to save here, also.

If you're trying to be efficient (and/or you really don't want to deal with Dead Landers), you could take the shortcut to the Roaches' village and backtrack down through the fridge instead. That does work, but once again, I'm showing the intended path here.





If we come over toward the corner where the plug is, we'll see some plants in pots...





And when we get close enough, we walk into a cutscene.



Don't let us hold you up. We're pretty excited too.
Yeah! And don't forget th-



79 - ???





D-Do they want these seeds...!?
N-Never! Let's beat 'em up!
Good plan.



Click me for video!



Anyone having déjà vu? We fought a very similar group of enemies in this precise location, though of course that time we had Maki and Elizant alongside. (And we're a bit more powerful now.)

This formation should not be underestimated; any fight with Dead Landers can easily turn against you if you're not prepared or don't take them seriously. That said, you can obviate a lot of the difficulty with Ice Rain, as you'll see me do in the video (Ice Rain is kind of broken once you stack enough attack boosts); really, if you can take out at least one enemy on the first turn, you'll probably be in decent shape.



Anyway, we deal with them.





It was wise to test outside of the village...
Will... more come?



Perhaps, as you said, this is a terrible idea...



Roy. Even if it's risky... It's your dream, isn't it?
...
Here goes nothing...!





All we can do now is pray.
I'm sure it'll work!
And if it doesn't, we'll try again!
You can't lose hope, not here.
...Thank you.
The Queen gave me this, but I truly wish to give it to you.



I'll stay here, overseeing their growth.
I promise to run if there's any danger.
You can do it!
Thank you... The future seems much brighter now.



And with that, the quest is complete. I'm not sure how well they'll be able to grow plants inside this house, realistically (it's pretty dark here), but I guess anything is worth a try?

There's a new banter now:

"You can't lose hope, not here." ...How inspiring, Leif!
Shh...
Heheh, you're blushing!
...Just pray for the crops, Vi.

Heh, Leif's embarrassed.



I promise to run if there's any danger.

If we talk to Roy again, this is all he'll have to say.



Here, let's take a closer look at the little garden he's set up. It's cute.



Also, let's use this before we forget.



No choices to be made there, and extra max TP is always nice to have.



Let's use our Compass now to head back to the Ant Kingdom. We've done all we can here, for better or worse.

Next time, we'll finally talk to Maki and see what he wants our help with. (What is this madness, a reasonable length update for once? The next few will probably be on the long side again, though, the remaining quests are a bit more involved than these.) I'll see you then.

[Explopyro]

76: They Grow Up So Fast

17 - Ant Kingdom



Welcome back! Last time, we completed Rebecca's and Roy's escort sidequests, and got a bit of insight into the past and future respectively.



This time, let's finally see what Maki wants our help with.



As a reminder, Maki was waiting here by the Ant Palace bridge. Before we talk to him, there's a banter:

Sir Maki, Kina and Yin!
Yup. Let's see what's up.

Not much to this one, but it exists I guess? Let's go ahead and talk to them. (It doesn't matter which we speak to, either will initiate the same conversation.)



What's up with Yin?
She's become a pupa?
Ugh, yeah. After the ceremony, she just... woke up like this.
She should mature soon, then!
I doubt it. You see, I've been researching Yin...
In the first place, she shouldn't have been a caterpillar for so long.



Yeah. But I've got a theory.
After you enter the Far Grasslands, head west and then keep walking north.
I'll explain everything there.
Gotcha. We'll meet up there!
*Sigh* Don't keep us waiting, okay?



And with that, they walk off.



Well, it looks like we might finally be able to get a bit of insight into Yin's mysteries, at least? They haven't exactly told us much though, have they?

Regardless, we've been to the area Maki was talking about before; it's where we found Engira's lost prosthetic claw. Let's head there and see if we can find out more.



We'll enter the Far Grasslands from the Lost Sands entrance.

56 - Lands Untamed





Head west from this first screen.





Up the makeshift stairway, then north.





Cross the thorns here and smash the boulder.



And we're there.

(It's probably more efficient to get here via the Ant Mines shortcut, and going east from the Far Grasslands "preview area" we reached from the Power Plant. But since Maki gave us directions, I preferred to follow them.)

Sir Maki's here. Let us help Yin out however we can!

If we check the banter, it's only a single line from Kabbu.



And talking to Kina, this is all she has to say.



Maki, meanwhile, is still being cryptic and just asks us if we're ready. What if we say no?

I understand. Come back when you are ready.

Well, that's no help!



Nothing else for it, I guess.







Yin brought me here once. I believe it's where she was born.
She may have been waiting to come back to mature...
Is there any basis for that?
...Well, no. But trust me on this one.
That we will. But why did you require our assistance?





13 - It's Getting Scary!



A bunch of Leafbugs close in and surround us.



Maki, explaining his plans? Please...
Not now, Kina!
They were probably attracted by the energy Yin's giving off.
Don't let them get near Yin! We must protect her until she pupates!
Team, let us stop them!

Click me for video!

29 - Team, This One's Stronger! (Miniboss)





This fight may not look like much at first, but it can get very tricky. This is another sequential battle, much like the Mothflies we had to defend Rebecca from.

Except these are Leafbugs with everything that entails, which means it ends up being a lot nastier. Hit one of them, and you piss off all the others. And then if you kill one, another immediately takes its place. On top of this, Maki is fighting alongside us and will always attack the one in front, meaning even if you don't set them off, he's going to.





Icefall is still a pretty good strategy here, though it has its limits. Freezing enemies both reduces the number of attacks you take, and keeps the frozen ones from gaining charges.





As mentioned, whenever you kill an enemy, another walks in from offscreen to replace it.





Maki moves at the end of the turn, and if he ends up killing an enemy, its replacement will come in before the enemies' turn begins and get to act immediately.



The biggest danger in this fight is the Clubbers' all-party attack, which gets very painful if you let them build up charges.



Eventually, the reinforcements stop coming, and from there it's not too hard to mop things up.

All told, this fight ends up having nine enemies total, three of each variety. Like the previous wave encounter, I'm fairly sure it's always the same sequence, and after the initial formation the following reinforcements come: Ninja, Clubber, Archer, Ninja, Clubber.





Eventually, the final enemy falls, and we are victorious.

I will say, I've always found this encounter interesting. No matter how many times I play it, I never really feel like I've solved it, and always end up coming away feeling like I won through sheer brute force. The gimmicks all interact in a way that feels impossible to counter properly. It's an interesting bit of design and I've always appreciated this encounter for it, even if the experience of playing it tends to leave me feeling vaguely dissatisfied.





The Leafbugs back off and flee.





Yin's cocoon shakes, and begins to open...







She emerges, and looks around a bit.



...Ma...M-Maki...!
Yin, you know my name?



N...Nice to me...meet you!
A-Aww! Nice to meet you too!
Thank you, Team Snakemouth. You helped me keep her safe.



She's got quite potent magic... wonder what'll come of it.
Ma...magic!
...Well... back to the castle with us. Right, brother?
Not yet. First, let me reward you for everything you've done.







(Kabbu reacts about the way I did. This is a hell of a reward!)

About the least I could give you, don't worry.
We'll make good use of them.



Huh? Like... fight you for real?
Yeah. Brother needs some real challengers!
If you're interested... you know where to find us.
Uh, not really. You're always moving around...
...The Ant Palace's bridge.
W-We'll think about it!





After that, they all walk off.



This is enough to get us the quest completion. Of course, we're not actually done, because we have a battle coming. (I think they structured it this way so that sidequest completion isn't dependent on being able to beat the superboss.)

Before we head back, there's a new banter here now.

We'd always felt some magic here, but...
Didn't expect it to be cuz of Yin, right?
Mhm.
I do wonder where Yin's parents went, though...?

This is an interesting question. Of course, we don't actually know how long ago Yin was born (or how long she was stuck in her larval stage, all we know is it's been a while). There's no further information, but if I were going to speculate, I'd wonder if they ran afoul of the Leafbugs given how aggressive they were over Yin herself.





Also, thanks to Maki, we now have these! This is an incredible reward, though honestly they're a bit overkill; combined with the ones we bought from Sun, you can pretty much break the game open with sheer numbers. (It's almost enough to make one wonder if Maki wants to lose this duel.)

These are the final two stat-boosting berries to be found in the game. In total, there are 6 Heart Berries, 4 Bond Berries, 2 Super Peppers and 2 Iron Seeds. (Though you'll see a few more potions than this if you go to Patton, the 3 HP and 2 TP from level-up bonuses will also become potions.)

I'm going to give the Super Pepper to Vi, and the Iron Seed to Kabbu. (For now, anyway.)

17 - Ant Kingdom



If we come back to the bridge, we'll find Maki and the rest of the team, as he said. Let's talk to them.



You've helped us plenty. Let's say we're even.
You mentioned sparring back in the Far Grasslands...
...
One must face worthy opponents, or become rusty.
It'd be an honor to face Team Snakemouth's might.







E-Everyone, this is a friendly sparring match...



There's a lot of tension here! And if we check the banter, there's even a bit more:

Getting to fight Sir Maki is the greatest of honors!
Heheh. Especially after that test of his.
We missed that test. What was it?
Sir Maki took on both Vi and me on his own, without breaking a sweat!
...And then he just said "you pass". Grr!
Hm. It's payback time, then. We'll support you.

Heh. All of these grievances strike me as very petty, but I suppose it's all been simmering for a while.



Make sure to prepare. We're not easy opponents.

Thankfully, the game gives us plenty of warning before starting the fight. We have to talk to him again, and even then he gives us the option to decline. Which we will for now, because we do need to prepare (and also to see the rest of the dialogue and banters first).

I think the "we won't hold back" line is meant to be a hint to the fact that, as a superboss, this fight doesn't have an easier counterpart if you remove the Hard Mode medal. This does mean that this fight is a huge difficulty spike for anyone who played on Normal, though. (TANGYBUG and another fight we'll see next update also have this property, but they were both added in v1.1; in the original release, Team Maki was the only fight that worked like that.)





Heh, Kina never changes.

Seems Kina and Maki finally stopped splitting up.
And she doesn't make the scary faces anymore!
I'm still relieved nothing happened to Maki in the Far Grasslands...
The massive guilt aside, Kina would've... *Gulp*

It's kind of odd the banter's worded this way, when talking to her absolutely has her make the threatening face again.



Meanwhile, Yin is just pleasant.

Yin's such a good girl! ...Must we fight her?
She's gotta learn somewhere!
She radiates magic, too. She won't be a pushover.
Even though she's so young...?

I wonder if Yin being a magical prodigy is supposed to be some kind of payoff to some of those notes we saw in the Snakemouth lab, where one of the Roach scientists noted that moths had a higher potential for magic and were their preferred test subjects. The only moth we've seen using magic before this is Leif, and he doesn't come by his naturally.

Right. Let's prepare for this battle! Time to move some medals around.





To start with, I've removed all the HP Plus medals to free up some MP; we won't be needing a lot of HP with the strategy I have planned, anyway. We will need a decent pool of TP, though, so those can stay.



We're going back to setting up Vi as our primary attacker. (Although I'm leaving the Last Attacks on Leif; I'll admit, this is partially because I don't want Vi to end things too quickly, but also because it will give Leif a way to contribute in a pinch.)



Here's where things are getting different. We're going to put Kabbu in full tank mode. With these two Defense Exchange medals and Back Support, plus the Iron Seed he's eaten, he's starting from 4 defence in the back row; Favorite One will reduce that to 3, but he's still going to be very hard to hurt (and we're not done yet).



He's also getting the full Do Nothing suite. With this, Meditation pays for the cost of Taunt by itself, Reflection adds an additional 2 defence (bringing Kabbu up to 5 defence if he does nothing), and then Prayer lets him regenerate whatever damage does get through.



Rounding things out, we've got Hard Charge and Status Relay on Leif. He can either put himself into Last Attack Range, or pass the boosts off to Vi. Spiky Bod and ADBP Enhancer are both obvious picks for this approach.





Here are Kabbu's and Leif's base stats here, for reference purposes. Yes, Kabbu has zero attack. He doesn't need it. (Leif still has a point of defence from the Iron Seed we gave him, too.)



Right, then. Let's do this!





Click me for video!



35 - Reckless For Glory! (Bonus Boss)



It's our full team against theirs! This shouldn't be a surprise, except maybe that Yin is joining in considering she's just barely an adult. (This does mean we're going to give up a full turn of actions spying, yes.)



Before that, though, let's rearrange our formation. We definitely want Kabbu in the back and Vi in front.



Kina reacts poorly to her brother being hurt, and Yin keeps supporting him... Tough decisions await us!



It's gonna take some practice, but if we're gonna take this beating then we've gotta Super Block!



...We say that, but she's no pushover. Even if Maki gets mad, we must defeat her too.



Let's take a moment here, and just look at those stats! This fight, while there's definitely more going on than just that, is absolutely asking "can you handle it when we make numbers big?". There were a bunch of other hints to how the fight works in those spies, too.



Unfortunately, Chompy's going to be spending this entire fight doing nothing. She can't get through Maki's defences (unless we go out of our way to debuff him), but biting him for 0 damage will still trigger Kina's counters, so having her attack is actively detrimental. Similarly, the Team Ribbon would be a no-go, since it only works if you deal damage.

If you really want Chompy to help out in this battle, you can use either the Venom Ribbon or Shocking Ribbon; Maki has 45% poison resistance and 50% numb resistance, so there's a decent chance of her being able to status him occasionally. I don't think it's worth the TP, but it's definitely a thing you can do.

Well, that was our first turn! Eventful! Let's see what they can do.



Maki starts out with this fairly basic uppercut slash, which deals 8 base damage. It's very, very fast, but for whatever reason that tends to make it feel easier to Super Block.



Kina, meanwhile, chucks darts at us. These deal 2 base damage per hit, and she'll throw 2-4 (each targeting randomly). There are actually multiple versions of this attack, with different colours of needle: white needles like these only cause damage, but there are also green needles that inflict sleep, purple needles for poison, and yellow needles for numb. (It's hard to see in the moment, but you can technically tell them apart.) She doesn't seem to like mixing types of needles, for some reason. If you're not good at blocking, the status effects can definitely become problematic.

(And oops, there goes Vi.)



And Yin likes casting status magic. She can cast Empower or Fortify on either Maki or Kina, with the expected 2 turn durations.



Welp. We're not off to a great start, are we?



First things first, let's get Vi back into the action. (Honestly, the odds of losing someone that first turn were pretty high, this wasn't unexpected.)





Now we'll put our strategy into action. After a relay, Kabbu taunts everyone, then uses Do Nothing to boost his defence and regain the TP. We won't get any damage in this turn, but that's all right.



Maki goes for the sword uppercut again, but it's a lot less effective this time. With all those defences, plus his enhanced Super Block, Kabbu can literally negate the entire attack, and deal Spiky Bod counter damage on top of it. Defence is crazy good if you can stack enough and are decent at blocking.



Kina shows us a new attack this time! This leaping dive kick deals 4 base damage. It's not particularly scary compared to the needle barrages, or the raw damage Maki puts out, but it can be tricky to block until you get used to it; the animation always takes longer than I expect, and she spends a bit of time offscreen.



And Yin casts Fortify on Maki.



Maki has 4 defence now! That could be a pain to get through.



Well, to start with, let's bring back this trick. Leif relays to Vi, and thanks to Status Relay we can combine the two charge-ups from Favorite One. Vi then immediately relays to Kabbu, so he can still take two actions for the Taunt/Do Nothing strategy. (Get used to this pattern, I'll be doing it nearly every turn.)







Well, Maki's defence might be high, but Needle Pincer still ignores it. (This is the reason I like having Vi do the attacking here.)







As we were warned in the Spy text, Kina doesn't like it when we hit Maki. She counters with a charge-up whenever she sees him take damage, just like Zasp and the Leafbugs before her. (You really don't want to let her get off a boosted needle storm if you can avoid it.)





Kabbu does his dance again.



Maki shows us some new moves this time. Sometimes he does this two-hit suplex combo, each hit of which is 5 base damage, instead of one harder hit. (I actually failed to block entirely here, Kabbu just has that much defence.)

The animation through the first hit is very similar, but you can tell which is coming by whether or not his eye gleams before striking (which indicates the single strong hit).



Kina goes for the flying kick again, but even with the boosts, Kabbu can negate it completely.



Weirdly, Yin just skipped her turn entirely. She just does this sometimes. I'm not sure if there are particular conditions for this (or whether it's intended or a glitch, I could see either being the case), but it tends to happen when there are already a few buffs on Maki and/or Kina.



Let's do the relay dance again.



And this time, let's Hurricane Toss Kina. If we take her out first, we don't have to deal with the charge-ups. (Sorry for not making GIFs of Vi's attacks this time, this is a long fight and I'd rather not overload the thread too much.)





Kabbu keeps doing his thing.



Maki strikes Kabbu again. This is just a normal block, so he still takes some damage; I haven't managed to make Kabbu completely impenetrable, just enough so that he can easily recover with Prayer.



Here are those green needles! (Blink and you'll miss it.) I messed up and Kabbu got sent to sleep, which is going to be a problem.



Yin Empowers Maki again. (And just when it'd worn off!)



Kabbu being asleep really does mess up this strategy. (Maybe I should have planned better and made him immune... two Sleep Resistance medals aren't hard to squeeze in.) Still, we should be able to play around it.



Let's do the trick and consolidate the bonuses, then hit Kina again.



Then Vi can pass the turn back to Leif and have him shield everyone.











They can hit us all they want.



Yin's buffs, of course, still work perfectly fine.



I may have miscalculated a bit here. We could shield again if we relay to Leif and wait out the sleep, but that'd leave us nearly empty on TP. And then next turn we'd still be down Leif's action, so we'd probably have to just spend the turn doing nothing except Kabbu's Taunt/Do Nothing, and the turn after that we could use Vi's action to recover some TP. That would have worked just fine, and we wouldn't be in danger of losing the fight, but I'd really rather not take a 4 turn momentum loss.



Moments like this are what Queen's Dinners are for. We need the TP anyway, and we may as well heal the chip damage Vi and Leif took.









Much better. Of course, we're still worse off than we could be here, thanks to being down Leif's action; it would've been better to just have used the Queen's Dinner last turn.



Our best course of action is still to have Kabbu taunt. Even without the defence boost, he should be fine, but there is at least some mild risk here. (It's still much better for Kabbu to be taking the hits than anyone else.)





He's fine. (Although missing the block on the second hit did let some damage through.)



Still fine.



We do see something new out of Yin! Aside from casting buffs, she also has this healing spell, which can restore 5 HP to either Maki or Kina. (Yin doesn't ever cast spells on herself.)



Okay, we've recovered from the setback now. Let's start fighting back again.





Another Hurricane Toss is more than enough to take Kina down.





Then we'll get back to dancing. Leif passes his +2 charge to Vi, then she relays to Kabbu so he can do the Taunt/Do Nothing dance.





Maki's doing more damage to himself than to us with these attacks.



And then Yin heals him.



We do start this turn with +3 charge on Vi, though, which is nice!



Vi starts in on Yin.





And then we'll do the same dance. Pass the charge to Vi, relay to Kabbu, Taunt, Do Nothing.





Maki's doing the combo a lot this time around, isn't he. He does have other attacks, I promise!



Yin boosts his attack again.



Right. On we go!





Bye, Yin. (This feels like a waste of the damage boosts, but we do need to take her down eventually...)



We'll taunt Maki again.





Also, we're getting a bit low on TP, so let's use a Tangy Berry. I'm not that worried about Maki alone, we can risk the lowered defence for one turn... (I did make a minor mistake here, and passed Leif's charge to Kabbu instead of Vi. Oops.)









...You didn't think it was going to be that easy, did you? Of course it isn't.

At the start of the turn after Yin goes down, Maki reacts and gains permanent Attack Up. If Kina is also down when this happens, she'll revive herself with 10 HP and trigger this conversation. Strategically, this might be the worst order to take them out in, but the conversation is funny and I definitely wanted to show it off.

(That said, permanent Attack Up on Maki isn't as big a change as it might sound, considering Yin keeps him buffed most of the time anyway. We've probably taken more blows from him with boosted attack than not.)



After that scene, we move to their turn. This is another new move; Maki has a charge-up, like many enemies we've fought throughout the game. (This isn't tied to the event flags, he can do it prior in the fight if he wants. It might become more likely as he and/or Kina get lower on HP?)







Kina barrages us with sleepy needles again. Thankfully, I managed to actually block them this time.



Right then. We've got a charged attack incoming, and that might hurt.





We'll keep up the Taunt/Do Nothing strategy.





Also, I've had this Plumpling Pie lying around for ages, couldn't hurt to get a further defence boost?

Let's see what happens.

Kina, to me!



It's Maki and Kina's team attack! Maki launches Kabbu into the air, then Kina dive-kicks him into Vi.

I'm not completely sure how the damage for this attack is calculated. The wiki claims Maki's hit is 7 base damage and Kina's is 6, then whoever the falling character lands on takes a hit of base 3 damage. But those numbers don't comport with what I'm seeing here, unless maybe the Attack Up or +1 charge-up isn't being applied? (It's hard to test this comprehensively, but I did try using Cleanse on him to remove the charge-up in another fight, and that didn't seem to affect the damage output. I think those numbers make sense if the charge is ignored but Attack Up isn't.)

If you KO Kina after Maki charges but before they do the attack, he'll do one of his solo moves instead. That move will still benefit from the +1 charge, at least, but it's a lot less impressive a result.



Right. What to do now?







First off, let's hit Maki with a Needle Pincer to take advantage of that +3 charge.



Because Kina's very low on HP, we can just have Vi finish her off afterward.



Kabbu can go a turn of taunting without the extra defence.



This did hurt, but he'll be fine.



We're in the home stretch now.







Let's do another Needle Pincer with +2.





Then one last turn of taunting.





And one more combo attack from Maki.



It's over now.







(Okay, fine, this might be a bit more damage than we needed.)





And we've won!





Bleh... I couldn't impress Maki...



Y-You're strong too, wow!
It was our honor.
I... I feel like we're truly equal explorers now!
That's one way to look at it.
You probably spent a lot of items in that battle... use this to replenish your inventory.



If you ever want to spar again, let us know. We've learned quite a bit.
You got it!



The only reward we get for defeating Team Maki (aside from berries, which barely count) is an achievement.



Here it is. As I believe I said earlier, Team Maki were the only superboss in the game's original release, so this was meant to be something of a capstone achievement. In the version we're playing, there's still one more fight to come.





Also, as of v1.1.2, we now get a replica of Maki's sword to hang on the wall in our house! That's nice.



If we go back and talk to Maki again, he'll offer to spar again. We can repeat this fight as many times as we want. This is convenient for us, because there's a bit more to the fight we haven't seen yet, and I'd like to show off at least one alternate strategy...







Let's boost Leif's attack into the stratosphere for this one. (I went to Patton's offscreen and redistributed the two Super Peppers to him as well, and adjusted everyone's maximum HP. Most notably, Leif is at 9 HP here, perfect for Hard Charge + Last Attack shenanigans.)





Time for round two!

Click me for video!



35 - Reckless For Glory! (Bonus Boss)



First things first, of course we don't have to spy them again. That's convenient.



Leif starts out with Hard Charge.





Vi throws him a Squash Tart, giving him Attack Up and also activating Weak Stomach.









Then we can do absolutely ludicrous damage with Ice Rain.









And then we can cast it again after a relay. Even with exhaustion, this is just crazy damage.



Kina's already down for the count, and Maki's down to 12 HP. That was fast!



We can handle one swing from Maki.



Yin tries to heal him, but I don't think it's going to make much of a difference.



Let's just keep the rain coming.











That was more than enough. Yin hasn't shown any ability to harm us thus far, so what will happen when she's the last one standing?



Yin just flees.



Two turns. That's all it took. Ice Rain is pretty busted.

I tend to think it's more fun to fight them at least somewhat fairly, but if you just want to cheese the fight, this method is very reliable. (I don't think I remembered to in this demonstration, but it's a good idea to put First Plating on Leif if you're doing this, otherwise you're still vulnerable to bad RNG when Maki attacks.)



It will be an honor to let you try again, Sir Maki!
Heh, Kabbu can be savage without noticing...
...Here, this is for all the items you've spent.



If you ever want to spar again, let us know. We've learned quite a bit.
You got it!

The conversation after beating them a second time is a bit different, and once again we get 75 berries for a reward.

For completeness... what happens if we let them defeat us?







Unbelievable...
You can challenge us again... when you feel you're up to par.

We get to see this conversation instead, and they don't give us anything. In the latest patch, v1.1.2, you get back any items you used if you lose the fight (though not if you win), but that wasn't the case in prior versions.

Also, there are a few moves we didn't see. Let's have a look at those now.



Kina has Mite Burgers, which she'll feed to Maki (and only Maki). This heals him for 6 HP and gives him HP regeneration (2 HP a turn for 3 turns).

If you check Maki's bestiary entry, it tells us that Mite Burgers are his new favourite food. It's pretty cute that Kina keeps these on hand for him.



Maki has this leaping slam which hits the entire party for base 6 damage. We got pretty lucky not seeing this one; this is easily his most devastating attack, especially if you're running with low HP strategies and relying on Taunt like I am. Outside of the team-up attack, this is the only attack they have that gets around Taunt to hit the other two bugs.



Yin has a variant on Cleanse, which cures her allies of negative status effects (specifically, Poison/Freeze/Sleep/Numb). She'll only use this if Maki or Kina are suffering from a condition it can remove, and not always then.





And finally, here's a demonstration of Maki using one of his normal attacks when charged, if Kina isn't able to join in the team attack. This is usually less scary than the team attack itself... but the slam with further boosts would really hurt.



And there we have it, that's pretty much everything there is to cover about the fight with Team Maki! It definitely feels like a fair, straightforward challenge, which is pretty fitting for a "friendly" match between rivals and definitely feels different in comparison to our other big fights. It's also the first time the game has given us multiple opponents with this kind of durability; even though the individual characters' movesets are smaller than many other bosses, there's a lot going on taken all together. I quite like this fight, even if it's a bit on the easy side once you understand how to handle it. By the time you reach endgame, you have so many tools available to you that there isn't much you can't trivialise by combining those tools thoughtfully.

Of course... we still have one major fight yet to come. That's for next time. I'll see you then!

[Explopyro]

77: Slack Off, Slack On

17 - Ant Kingdom



Welcome back! Last time, we helped Team Maki usher Yin through her metamorphosis, then fought them in an intense but "friendly" sparring match. Today... we have one sidequest left.



Team Slacker wanted to see us, and heavily implied they're also interested in sparring.

Let's take a quick look at our medals before we meet up with them.











This isn't anything new; I'm going to be fighting them with the same build I used for the first go-round with Maki.

(I did spend some time trying to think of a more clever or novel approach to use, but didn't really land on anything. I do have some new builds to show off next update when we tackle B.O.S.S., but I couldn't think of anything special for this one.)

34 - Dodgy Business



Stratos and Delilah are waiting right where we left them.



We can talk to either of them to start this conversation.



You've come to... "entertain" us?
If Doppel won't mind a broken table or two.
Loser pays the repairs, heheheh...
I-Isn't everyone being a bit too eager for violence...
Hey, it's just banter!
Although I do agree with the loser paying for repairs.
Just holler when you're ready to fight, alright?



Yep, looks like we're in for some more "friendly" sparring.





Just like Maki before them, they give us the "we won't hold back" warning, and allow us to decline the fight. (And, again, this should be taken as a hint that they don't have non-Hard-mode stats. This is another superboss.)

Take your time! A rushed fight's no good.

If we do, Delilah will say this. They're pretty sensible about the whole thing (aside from, you know, deciding to do this in the middle of a crowded pub in the first place).



We're ready. Let's go.



Click me for video!



35 - Reckless For Glory! (Bonus Boss)



Heh, looks like everyone's cleared out, except Tristan's still playing his music in the background.



First things first, let's rearrange our formation. We definitely want Kabbu in the back and Vi in the front for this one. Once that's done, let's get to spying.



Woah, that's a sticky bomb! We can't use items if that hits, they cost a fortune!

This is worded kind of weirdly (I don't know why Vi is talking about the price of anything), but it's an important hint that the rare status effects are going to be in play in this battle. Delilah's got a lot of tricks up her sleeves, which we'll see soon enough.



Stratos can fire shockwaves from sheer strength... it's not even magic. What a guy.

Stratos, meanwhile, is big and strong. He's got his fair share of trickery, too, but he's even bulkier than Maki was.



Here's their combined stats. We're going to have our work cut out for us; even Delilah, as the squishier of the two, has 70 HP and 2 defence.



We still have Kabbu's action, so let's start out by taunting them. He won't be able to use Do Nothing and boost his defences further this turn, so there's some mild risk in this, but it's significantly safer than not doing so.



Chompy will be doing nothing for the entire fight again. That said, this fight is actually a good candidate for the Venom Ribbon; Stratos has extremely low poison resistance, so you can keep him poisoned for the entire fight if you want. I don't think this is an efficient use of TP, but you can totally do it (and I did record an alternate version of the fight to show that off and a few other things, stay tuned for that).



For his first attack, Stratos launches a shockwave. This attack deals 6 base damage and has no other effects; it's probably the least threatening thing he does, and it's not too hard to time blocks for. It looks cool, though.



Delilah, meanwhile, pelts us with darts. These are actually the same sprites as the dart items we can use, she's using Poison Darts here but she also has Numbnail Darts. Each dart deals 3 base damage and can inflict 2 turns of the associated status if not blocked.

When Delilah is below half HP, she'll throw four darts per volley instead of two. Also, note the tell: when her eye gleams before attacking it always means darts are coming.



Right, turn two. Time to start actually fighting back.



We'll use the same Status Relay trick we used last time to consolidate the charge-up bonuses.



Then Vi can hit Delilah with a Hurricane Toss.





Then we'll have her relay to Kabbu so he can both Taunt and Do Nothing.



Kabbu blocks another shockwave from Stratos.



Delilah shows us a new attack, though! Her dive hits for 4 base damage, then she attacks again for 3 base damage and heals equal to the damage done. (I don't think bugs have blood for mosquitoes to suck, but let's just go with it?)



Right, let's keep going. We'll consolidate the boosts again, first off.







This time, we'll hit Stratos with a Needle Pincer instead. Let's be equal-opportunity about this? (Just like with Maki, piercing damage is convenient here.)





Kabbu does his dance again.



Stratos seems to have a one-track mind today. He does have other moves than this!



This is new, though! A lot of Delilah's abilities revolve around items. This Longleg Summoner is exactly the same as the ones we can use, dealing 6 base damage.



Let's keep going.



Delilah's turn to be hit.





And we'll have Kabbu keep doing this. (Leif's definitely playing support this time around; he might be unobtrusive but he's contributing.)



Stratos finally pulls out a new attack! This overhead sword bash deals 7 base damage and inflicts Defence Down. A lot of his attacks inflict debuffs, which can definitely be irritating.



Delilah, meanwhile, powers up and gains a second action for each turn going forward. She'll do this at the start of her first turn below half HP.



Then she pulls out a Berry Jam and uses it on Stratos! This acts like you'd expect from Berry Jam, giving him Attack Up and Defence Up for two turns. She won't use this on herself, only on Stratos; in fact, this will be the case for most of her beneficial items.



She gets to take the second action right away, too, and it's a doozy. She's quite literally hauling out the big guns here. That's a lot of projectiles! And, uh... was one of them a potato?!

Delilah's bazooka attack is easily the most dangerous thing we have to contend with in this fight. She can fire anywhere from 3 to 12 times, the shots come out very rapidly, and the effects vary wildly depending on the type of projectiles that come out (you'll be inflicted with all sorts of status effects if you don't block successfully). Let's break down all the projectile types.



Hard Seed. 5 base damage, no other effect.



Danger Spud. 4 base damage, 2 turns Poison.



Magic Ice. 4 base damage, 2 turns Freeze.



Flame Rock. 5 base damage, 2 turns Burning.



Sticky Bubble. 3 base damage, 2 turns Sticky. (If you don't remember what Sticky does, since we've seen it in exactly one fight prior to this, it renders the affected character unable to use items.)



Ink Blob. 3 base damage, 2 turns Inked. (If you don't remember what Inked does, it makes the affected character unable to use Skills.)

Getting inflicted with Sticky or Inked can seriously mess up some strategies, especially if you aren't prepared to deal with them. (If you're already on the back foot, being unable to heal up with items when you need to can be the thing that makes you lose the fight, for instance.) This attack is seriously nasty. It can be even worse if you're not using Taunt, and she can spread her fire across the entire party.



Right, then. Let's take stock for a moment. Delilah's low on HP, at least; maybe we should just take her down to keep her from doing that again. On the other hand, Kabbu's been inked, which takes Taunt out of play; that could be a problem.



Let's just take Delilah down.



Kabbu can't taunt, so what are we going to do?



He can still use Do Nothing for the recovery, at least.



And Leif can use Bubble Shield.



It feels a bit wasteful when all we end up taking is a shockwave from Stratos, but it's better to play it safe.



One more turn of ink to deal with.





Let's recover a bit of TP, we still have a few of these Tangy Berries left.



And we'll just stall another turn; relaying to Leif lets him use Bubble Shield again.



Come on, Stratos, do something else already!



All right. The ink is gone, so we can get the plan back on track.



Kabbu taunts.







While Vi goes for Needle Pincer again. It'd be a bit safer to have Kabbu do nothing, but I'm less worried about him when he'll only be taking a single attack from Stratos, so I'd rather keep the momentum up a bit.



Stratos bashes Kabbu again.



Okay. We're doing fine. A bit low on TP, though, so we should probably deal with that; we can't afford another Needle Pincer.





Vi uses another Tangy Berry.





Kabbu does nothing and then taunts again. (Also, I had Leif pass his charge-up to Vi even though she didn't use it; she'll be able to attack with +3 next turn.)



Here's a new attack from Stratos! This charging horizontal slash deals 7 base damage, and inflicts Attack Down.



Here we go. Let's do some serious damage.







That's better.





Also, we'll keep doing this.



Like Delilah, once Stratos is below half HP, he powers up and gains an extra action each turn.



He wastes the first on a shockwave.



But the second is something new: he has a charge-up move. He gains +2 charge, and queues up a specific attack for the next turn.



Well, let's prepare for this as best we can!



Out of sheer habit, I have Kabbu taunt. This looks very silly.



Kabbu can still use Do Nothing for the recovery and defence boost. Also, let's pass Leif's charge-up to Vi.







This isn't quite enough damage to finish things, but it's close. Let's see what's in store, then.



The turn after charging, Stratos will use this leaping slam attack that hits the entire party. The base damage is 6, though 2 of that is from the charge-ups; it also inflicts Defence Down for 2 turns. This can also be pretty dangerous, though a bit of the threat is mitigated by the fact he always gives you fair warning it's coming.



After that, he also attacks normally.



Right. Team Slacker fought valiantly, but this is over now.











There we go!

This fight's a lot of fun, and there's definitely a lot going on in it. We didn't see nearly everything they can do that time, though (and in some ways I got a bit lucky there), so let's take a look at the rest of their moves.

Here's an alternate version of the fight, if you want to watch that. In this one, I stalled a bit to give them a chance to show off more. (Also, this one shows off the strategy of having Chompy keep Stratos poisoned.)

Click me for video!



Here's Delilah throwing four darts, as she does whenever she's below half HP.



Stratos also has this 3-hit combo. Each hit deals 3 base damage, but the delay between the first hit and the follow-ups makes the block timing pretty tricky (especially since the animation starts out the same as the bash, so it's easy to mix them up).







This is the big one. Stratos and Delilah each have an unlimited supply of Magic Seeds and Queen's Dinners. (I wasn't able to catch Delilah using a Magic Seed on-camera, but she has them too.) Even if you KO one of them, they're not out of the fight because the other can revive them at any time. (The revived character will take one action immediately after getting up, then go back to taking two actions per turn afterward. I'm not sure if they'll go back to taking one action per turn if they end up healing to more than half, though.)

This is quite a lot of healing potential, and means that if you get unlucky (and/or are running a lower-damage-output setup), this fight can go on for a long time. I've seen people go in without the DPS to keep up with it, and end up losing the fight to sheer attrition.

Their Queen's Dinners don't seem to restore status, though.



That said, Delilah does have Clear Water for that. She doesn't use this very often, though; she'll only use it if Stratos has a bad status, and not always then.



Delilah also has Clear Bombs, which remove all status effects from everyone (both them and us). This is another one it was tricky to get her to use.



Mite Burgers certainly seem to be popular! Delilah has these too; it heals Stratos for 6 HP and grants him regeneration for two turns.

Supposedly, Delilah can also use Hustle Berries to give Stratos extra actions, but I don't think I've ever seen it and I wasn't able to get her to do it when recording for the LP.

(Also, interesting side note. I noticed while recording the alternate fight that using a Queen's Dinner healed us from Ink and Sticky; I think this must have been fixed in 1.1.1 or 1.1.2, as they definitely weren't curable before.)

I really enjoy this fight. It challenges you on a lot of different axes, and they have such varied movesets that you never quite know what to expect. In particular, the Sticky and Inked status effects can really throw you off, which seems fitting for a capstone fight like this, but even aside from those, this fight throws a huge variety of status effects at you and forces you to deal with them. It's also fun seeing them turn so many of our tricks against us; Delilah's moveset is composed almost entirely of items we also have access to, that behave the same as when we use them.

Like most fights, stacking enough defences goes a long way toward trivialising it and it's not particularly hard if you have a cohesive strategy, but as we saw here it can still keep you on your toes by disrupting you with status, and some of these attacks will definitely catch an unprepared player by surprise if they don't know what's coming.



Aww... I was really hoping we'd win, you know...
You're pretty good!
We can go again anytime.
N-Not anytime! Let's rest a bit!
Time to pick up the tab. Oh, you can have this too!



Thanks for the fun time.



The quest complete notification pops up very quickly, but is overtaken by...



the achievement unlocked notification. We actually got several achievements at once here; let's take a look.



That was the final sidequest, so we've now completed all of them.



Also, Stratos and Delilah were the final two entries we needed for the bestiary, so that's complete as well. Which means...



We also get "Our Job's Done!", the 100% completion achievement (in technical terms, you get this for having all of the other achievements). Our job isn't actually quite done, we do have a bit of content left to see still (and I have a few odds and ends I still want to cover before wrapping up the LP), but none of that counts toward this.

That said... what would have happened if we'd lost to them?





Ngh... That's gonna cost us...
What power... No wonder they can afford to slack...





They don't actually take any money from us for the repairs, despite the conceit. Interestingly, you actually get quest completion even if you lose (though not if you run away from the fight, weirdly, you do actually have to let them beat you up), so technically speaking, winning this fight isn't necessary for completion. You can still get the "Our Job's Done!" achievement (as long as you spy on them for the bestiary). This is probably because this fight is technically DLC, it was added in the 1.1 patch and wasn't part of the game when they were designing the achievements.

Unlike Team Maki, Team Slacker don't have any new dialogue if we fight them again, win or lose. It's still fun to fight them again if you want to, but all you'll ever get is 75 berries per win.

17 - Ant Kingdom



Before we finish for today, let's wrap up a few more things.



If we stop in our house, we now also have a replica of Stratos' sword on the wall! (And on the left side of the top shelf, the same crown/trophy we saw for the completion achievement.)



Finally... now that we've completed all the sidequests, let's go talk to Eetl.



Have you noticed anything lately?
Hmm? Well... there ain't any quests coming in, really.
Yup! All us!



It's not proper to boast... but yes. We've helped many.



Yep.



"Ruigee" who?
Artis told me to hand out this "menu code" to the explorers of the month!
That's gotta be you, eh?
T-Thank you! Although... this "menu code"... what could it mean?

Talking to Eetl after completing all the sidequests nets us the final Menu Code. RUIGEE is an interesting one, and a bit tricky to explain, so I'll take an in-depth look at it in a separate post momentarily.

The name is interesting in itself, because it's a reference to the Paper Mario modding community. Specifically "Luigi's Challenge", an optional mode you could enable in Paper Mario: Pro Mode, and then Paper Mario: Master Quest, two prominent ROM hacks (which some of you are no doubt familiar with). In those mods, you could talk to Luigi at the very beginning of a playthrough to enable this mode, which disabled levelling up but allowed Mario to equip a fixed number of badges (64 in Pro Mode, or 16 in Master Quest) regardless of their BP cost.

RUIGEE mode in Bug Fables is very similar to its inspiration. It changes the equip cost of all medals to 1 MP. You start with 4 MP instead of 5, and instead of having a choice, each level-up always gives 1 MP and no other stats. Also, you don't gain EXP naturally; instead, you purchase Rank Ups manually from Eetl for berries (which makes this mode ideal if you want to do some kind of low-level challenge run, too).

You can also combine this with any of the other menu codes, because they're not mutually exclusive. If you want a thoroughly different replay experience without upping the difficulty, for instance, try combining MYSTERY? with RUIGEE to mix up medal locations and costs simultaneously.

Also, now that we've learned the final menu code, let's talk about the "secret" one. While it's not mentioned anywhere ingame, there's actually one more menu code: "TUFFBUGS". This one's strictly for convenience: it's the same as combining HARDEST, RUIGEE, MOREFARM, and FRAMEONE, but you only have to enter a single code. If you want to crank the game's difficulty up as high as you can, try this one out. (You can also combine this with MYSTERY?, of course.)

I know I've said it before, but I really do love the way Bug Fables starts to offer all sorts of variant replay modes as the game wraps up. If you're satisfied with the experience after a single playthrough, that's all well and good, but if you want to keep going it's more than happy to oblige you, and the codes let you keep mixing things up to keep new runs fresh.

Regardless, I'm going to wrap things up here for today! Next time, we'll wrap up the main content of the LP with the boss rush. We won't be quite done after that, I do have some odds and ends left to cover (among other things, let me know if there are any Spy Card decks you want to see), but we're definitely starting to wind things down now. Thank you all for spending all this time with me and our buggy friends.

[Explopyro]

Bonus: A Quick Look at Ruigee (Luigi's Challenge) Mode

01 - Bug Fables



Let's take a quick look at RUIGEE mode. We'll start by creating a new file and entering RUIGEE, after which we enter a file name as normal.



After the intro, we immediately notice our first change after getting the Hard Mode medal from Artis. Our starting pool of MP is 4, not 5. (I'm not sure of the exact reason for this, but I suspect it was to make the MP at max level come out to an even 30.)





Fighting our first Seedling reveals another change - battles always give zero EXP. There's no way to Rank Up naturally. This does also mean that you have to complete Chapter 1 before you can gain levels. It's not a huge difficulty increase relative to vanilla, but it is a change.

Right, let's go speedrun Snakemouth Den so I can show how this process works.





This is interesting - I found a scene I'd never seen before! It turns out that if you skip talking to Levi and Celia and having them explain save crystals, Leif will interject and explain them to us after we meet him.

Is something the matter?



It was used to record where people have walked through.
Since this one is yellow, it will heal our HP and TP too. Try smacking it sometime.
Alright. Now let us depart for real!

It's nothing particularly special, but I still thought it was pretty neat they included that. (Though speedrunners might not appreciate the interruption, I guess at least it's shorter than the original conversation.)



After we find our first few medals, we can see the changes. HP Plus and Poison Defender both now cost 1 MP instead of the 2 we'd expect. All medals in this mode cost 1 MP.

This will definitely change how you evaluate your medal choices. Just looking at these, for instance, HP Plus is a much harder sell when it costs a full level's worth of MP. On the other hand, something like Front Support (which costs 8 MP normally) might actually be worth considering.



Interestingly, Spuder has reduced max HP in this mode. Mar has said in the Discord that they did this for both Ruigee and Hardest, to make sure the fight is still possible. (I don't actually think it's that bad, but maybe he was worried about the fact that you don't have access to Vi's Secret Stash since you can't level up and have to rely on items for healing.)



Once we've finished the chapter and gone through all the cutscenes, let's talk to Eetl.



Uh, what?
How're you still Rank 1!?
Is that... not normal?
It's not! You're not gaining EXP from battles! Maybe some mysterious force is preventing it...
Probably magic. But eh, we're doing fine...
You're doing fine NOW! Without ranking up you won't learn skills or expand your item pouch!
We're missing a bunch of rewards! How do we fix it!?



Uh, can't you do it for free?
Sorry. Keeping the Association running has its own costs. You get it, right?
So don't be cheap! Come to me for ranking up, we'll discuss what happens from then on!



So, yeah. Paper-thin explanations aside, if you want to gain Ranks in this mode, you have to pay Eetl for them.





Alright, with my powers as the Association's Caretaker, I hereby promote you, Team Snakemouth, to Rank 2!
This rank grants you 1 more MP so you can equip more Medals!
Oh, hey! This rank grants you the Secret Stash battle skill!
If you want to rank up again, come talk to me.



And there we go, we have 1 more MP now.

If you decline his offer, Eetl will just say this:

Don't go too long without ranking up!

And if you try to rank up but can't afford it:

S-Sorry, but I can't just submit the forms without berries...

As you may expect, Eetl has a bunch of new dialogue in this mode. I won't be showing any more of it, as most of the rest is just "you got these things for levelling up"; I think he does have a few comments when you reach max rank, but I don't have a convenient way to show it.

One thing worth noting is that you do not get any of the stat bonuses from level-ups that you would get in the vanilla game. Skills and inventory ugprades come at the same times as usual. The stat-up berries (Heart Berry, Bond Berry, Super Pepper, Iron Seed) still exist and work the same, but because the bonuses are gone and you cannot raise them on level-up, the party's maximum potential HP and TP is slightly lower in this mode.

If you combine RUIGEE with MOREFARM, that will increase the amount of berries Eetl asks for (instead of the EXP threshold to Rank Up).

So, that's a quick look at RUIGEE mode! It's a neat way to shake up the game balance and make things feel fresh for another playthrough. It's also ideal if you want to do some kind of low-level challenge, since it gives you complete control over if and when you Rank Up. It's not exactly identical to Luigi's challenge from the Paper Mario mods, but it's definitely close enough that it feels very similar, which is a nice little nod to the community.

If it sounds interesting to you (and you're in the mood to replay Bug Fables), give it a shot!

[Explopyro]

FYI, I should probably warn everyone that I expect the next update to take longer than usual. I've got some travelling to do over the next couple of weeks and don't anticipate having much time to work on the LP, so that's going to set me back a bit and I wouldn't be surprised if I don't post another update until March.

We're definitely in the home stretch now. Here's a rough sketch of what I still plan to cover:

Boss rush (next update is the final "content" update, so to speak)

Spy Card showcase (I want to mess around with a few different decks and show off things people might not normally try, especially if they're trying to complete it earlier in the game. Please suggest decks you might want to see, I've got one or two ideas but could definitely use more.)

Demo differences and the Test Room

April Fool's content and the Aphid Festival minigame

...That might be everything, unless I can think of something else fun to do.

[Explopyro]

This is unfortunately not an update, but I wanted to let you all know I'm still alive.

I'm very sorry, everyone. I thought I'd have found time to work on this by now, but I just haven't been able to muster the energy; work bullshit has been pretty overwhelming, and I've been having some mental health struggles on top of that. If I'm going to be honest, I've been on the edge of a breakdown for the last couple of weeks. Please don't worry about me too much, I'm sure I'll get through it, but I'm not exactly in the best place right now.

This game deserves better than for me to phone in the rest of the LP; If I'm going to do this, I want to do it right, and I don't produce my best work when I'm gritting my teeth and forcing it. I'm not abandoning this project by any means, but I also can't give an honest estimate of when I'll be feeling up to working on it. Thank you for your patience.

For now I'll leave you with a couple of fun articles about bees playing games, I've been meaning to link them at some point since I first saw them and this is as good a time as any:

Ball-Rolling Bumblebees Just Wanna Have Fun (Scientific American)
Do Bumble Bees Play? (Animal Behaviour, via Science Direct)

[Explopyro]

Happy (?) April 1 (?) Please enjoy this video of the latest update from the Bug Fables team.

[Explopyro]

78: B.O.S.S. Me Around

17 - Ant Kingdom



Oof. It's been a while, hasn't it? I'm sorry about that. I don't want to overshare (as this really isn't the place), but I've been struggling with a major depressive episode and it's been difficult to find the energy to work on this. I think I'm finally starting to do a bit better, for whatever that's worth.

Anyway. Back to Bug Fables! I've really missed this game. By most measures, we've already achieved 100% completion, but there's one major bit of content left that we haven't completed. It's boss rush time.



A quick detour first, though. Remember this cloaked ant in the Mines who offers shortcuts? I genuinely can't remember if I've shown this before.



After we've unlocked it, one of the locations she'll take us to is Patton's Hut, and that's very convenient.





It takes us right there!





I won't show the entire process (as it can be a bit tedious), but I want to do a bit of stat redistribution first.

I could clear the boss rush with any of the builds I've shown, but I want to do something a bit different here, and showcase some of the game's truly degenerate builds. I've been holding back for a lot of the game so that all the enemies could show their various behaviours, but these are all fights we know already, so I think it'll be more fun to take the gloves off.



As you can see here, our HP is slightly different. We're still on an all-MP build, I just redistributed the stat-up berries. Here's what each bug got of the discretionary ones:

Vi: +2 HP, +2 Attack
Kabbu: +5 HP, +2 Defence
Leif: +2 HP

Put differently, each bug gets the equivalent of the level-up boost to HP, and 1 Heart Berry each, then Kabbu gets the remaining HP boosts. Vi gets all the attack, Kabbu gets all the defence. We'll be going with this for the first build I want to demonstrate.



We'll stop at home to heal quickly; after shifting the max values around, there tends to be a minor need for healing.

40 - High Above, Bee Kingdom



And then it's straight to the Bee Kingdom. The B.O.S.S. machine is in Doctor HB's lab, in case you've forgotten (it's been a while since update 27!).



Here we are.



Now, let's take a look at our medals.







So far, this should look pretty straightforward. Vi's got all the attack boosts (including Last Attack), Kabbu's got all the defence boosts. (Vi tends to be the better attacker in a vacuum because her basic attack can hit the largest percentage of enemies.)



Also, we're spending 6 MP on resistance medals for Kabbu. This combination gets him 100% resistance to all of the disabling status conditions, which is important because he's the linchpin of this strategy and we don't want him to be unable to act. (He'd probably survive, but we're going to be relying on Taunt, and a chunk of his durability comes from Do Nothing, so he'd be significantly more vulnerable when statused.)



Here's the biggest new thing - Miracle Matter! Leif and Vi each get a copy. There's other ways to do this (which we'll see shortly, too), but this is the most straightforward way, and actually the way I like best. We'll make Kabbu functionally immortal, and the other two can get auto-revive. As an added bonus, Miracle Matter revives with 2 HP, activating Last Attack.



Finally, Kabbu has the full complement of Do Nothing medals, as well as Spiky Bod. We're going to be using Taunt constantly, so Spiky Bod can rack up a lot of passive damage.

This strategy is honestly pretty simple. We stack defence on Kabbu, enough to practically nullify incoming damage (he's at 2x Iron Seed + 2x Defence Exchange + Back Support, then +2 from Reflection when doing nothing, effectively 7 base defence, and that's before factoring in Super Block+ or the fact he'll gain an additional 4 from Last Stand if he somehow gets low on HP). With 2x Prayer he regains 4 HP per turn, mitigating anything that does get through (and there's Block Heal on top of this if my timing is decent). Meanwhile, Vi does the damage whenever she gets an opportunity (TP Core fuels her skills), and Leif is mostly on relaying duty so Kabbu can use both Do Nothing and Taunt each turn.

Basically, when Vi's alive, she does damage. When Leif is alive, he relays to Kabbu to enable Taunt (which mostly keeps the other two alive), or to Vi for extra damage. Kabbu pretty much always uses Do Nothing and Taunt. If the others are dead, Kabbu can just keep using Do Nothing and regenerating until Miracle Matter kicks in. There are some subtle choices you can make from turn to turn if you know what you're doing (e.g. to manipulate your TP), so it's not completely mindless to play, but it'll also work if you just follow the loop.

(The most annoying thing about this build is that we have to swap Vi's and Leif's positions at the start of each fight.)

This strategy isn't 100% foolproof, technically: some piercing attacks do exist, a few attacks do do enough damage to get through if we don't block well, and with Hard Hits equipped (and/or with HARDEST active) more attacks will reach that threshold. But the numbers work out that we can nullify the vast majority of threats and out-regenerate the rest; you shouldn't die as long as you're paying attention.

This is the build we'll be using for our first run at the boss rush.



Let's get started.



Welcome, Vi, Kabbu and Leif! This is the B.O.S.S. terminal!



Let's pick Rush Mode.



We'll tackle the Mini-Bosses first.



There are 11 fights total in this rush. The one oddity is that some of the Chapter 6 minibosses don't appear: The termite soldiers Cross and Poi and the Primal Weevil can be refought in the Termite Colosseum, so I guess the devs figured you didn't need to be able to fight them in multiple places? Otherwise, the gang's all here. Let's get started.

Very well! Please proceed to the Arena to battle!
Let's go, everyone!





The machine whirrs and comes to life...



Click me for video!

If you want to see this strategy in action, I do strongly recommend watching at least some of the video; it'd be tedious to give a detailed play-by-play here, and I genuinely don't know how I'd be able to make that interesting.

29 - Team, This One's Stronger! (Miniboss)



Up first is Acolyte Aria. It's been a very long time since we've seen her! She's not very threatening to us in our endgame state, though it is kind of noteworthy that (as I believe I mentioned last time we refought her here) this isn't a perfect recreation of the original battle circumstances since all three of our team members are here. Some of the fights are slightly changed in B.O.S.S., which I'll point out as we get to them; this is just the first.



After defeating each enemy, the Doctor will tell us how many rounds still remain, and give us the option to heal (which we can do at most 3 times). With this strategy I shouldn't ever need the healing, but it's good to have for some other approaches (especially if you're playing fair).

Alright then, here it comes!



Up second is Ahoneynation. It looks even sillier while transparent, and doesn't put up much of a fight.



Up third, Astotheles. He still has his gimmick of destroying your items before you can use them, so some strategies can get tripped up here (e.g. if you aren't aware when he comes and are somehow low on resources after the first two fights). With this build, he literally can't hurt Kabbu.



Fourth, Dune Scorpion. Perhaps notably, it doesn't come with a Psicorp ally the way the original fight did.



Fifth, Monsieur Scarlet. He's a lot less threatening with the tools we have now, especially considering what a roadblock a lot of players find him to be early on.



Sixth, Kabbu and Kali! This one's definitely different, considering we have a Kabbu fighting for each side! Otherwise, they fight the same way as they did before; NPC Kabbu is the damage-dealer while Kali just plays support for him. The scripting is still in place to end the fight early if Kali dies, so you can ignore enemy!Kabbu and just focus her down.

Also, yes, you can have Kabbu spy on himself, and it's pretty funny:

...I can't believe I did that...

(You can also see this line in the bestiary entry, of course.)



Seventh, Carmina. This fight is unchanged from last time we saw her, just as gimmicky and random as ever.



Awesome work! Seems like you're just breezing through, huh?



Just start another session with the B.O.S.S. after this one is over to try it out!

The first time we complete seven fights in a row, Doctor HB interjects with this and makes "EX Mode" available! This is the final bit of new content the game will offer us; ultimately, it's a "we made all the numbers bigger" option that you can apply to any of the various modes in B.O.S.S., and we'll check it out before we're done here today. Completionists need not apply, there's no meaningful reward for it, it's really just for fun if you still want more to do.



Alright then, here it comes!

On we go.



Next up, battle eight is Riz.



Ninth is Cenn and Pisci. I'm not quite sure how they decided on the order for these fights, because it doesn't really correspond with the order most players tend to encounter them in.

24 - Oh No! WASPS!



Battle ten is General Ultimax, with his two cronies, the same as the battle we fought in the throne room. The Wasp Kingdom battle theme plays for this one.

66 - Mothiva's Grand Stand!



And finally, battle eleven is Team Mothiva, complete with her unique battle theme. This uses their Chapter 6 stats, now that we're past that encounter; they're always the last fight in the sequence no matter when you come here, but it will use their Chapter 2 stats if you haven't fought them for the second time.



Here is something for your trouble!



Our reward for completing the rush is berries.

If you want to try again, just start up the B.O.S.S. once more! Can't wait to see how you will perform next time!





That's the Mini-Boss Rush. 11 fights in a row, largely unchanged aside from a few minor things. It can tax your resources a bit if you aren't using a build with more or less unlimited sustainability (like the one we're using), but most of these fights aren't all that threatening when you go in with all the endgame tools.

Let's take a quick little detour before we dive back into the next one.



If we head back to our house...



It turns out there's another reward. For completing the Mini-Boss Rush, we get a little medal of B.O.S.S.'s smiling face to hang on the wall, just above our Card Trophy.



Right, back in we go!



Welcome, Vi, Kabbu and Leif! This is the B.O.S.S. terminal!



This is new, we can now see the EX Mode options we unlocked. We can choose it for either single battles or rush mode, it's the same fights but with boosted stats. For now, we'll do the standard boss rush.





This one's 16 fights in a row. It includes not just the chapter bosses, but all of the ingame optional bosses, as well as the Bounties. (Perhaps thankfully, the postgame superbosses are excluded. You won't fight Team Maki, Team Slacker, or Tangybug here.)

Very well! Please proceed to the Arena to battle!
Let's go, everyone!







Here we go!

Click me for video!

Once again, if you want to see the strategy in action, I recommend watching the video. I'm going to try to respect the time of everyone involved here and not go into too much detail.

14 - His Friends Call Him Spuder (Don't Call Him Spuder)



Up first is the Spider, or "Spuder" to his friends of course. Wow, that fight was a long time ago! (Another fun perk of the boss rush is that it takes you through a sort of greatest-hits of the music; the boss themes are definitely among my favourites.)



We get the same options between each fight as we did in the previous mode. If you're playing this fair (and not using a surfeit of regeneration medals), you might have to be pretty careful with how you ration these three full heals.

32 - Frenzied Sunflower Dance



Next up is Venus' Guardian. There's not much I can say about this fight; with the kind of damage we can put out now, it's pretty easy to skip entire phases.

(On the other hand, I always enjoy getting to hear this song again. I think it's one of the more underrated boss themes in Bug Fables.)

45 - MECHA BEE DESTROYER BLASTLORD



Battle three is Heavy Drone B-33. When you factor in the tools available at the time you fight it, there's a decent case to be made that this is the hardest main story boss. (At least the music's an absolute banger.)

51 - The Watcher



The Watcher. (Yes, we're taking all the chapter bosses in order for now.)

59 - Cruel Beast, Devourer of Journeys



The Beast. This fight actually is slightly changed from the main story, in that the scripted sequence near the end no longer occurs and you can fight it normally. Other than that, it's the same fight. (And another boss theme I think I appreciate more every time I hear it.)

76 - Battle Against Ultimax, Who Has A Tank



Ultimax Tank. No changes to this fight, even down to the General being ejected from the tank after it goes down and fighting us immediately.

35 - Reckless For Glory!



Mother Chomper. Did you think it was going to be the Wasp King next, after all of the chapter bosses were in order?



Midge Broodmother. Honestly, I tend to forget this boss exists. It's one of the more irritating ones for this kind of strategy, actually, because the spawned Midges' counterattacks can easily knock out Vi (and aren't subject to Taunt since they occur during your turn). This doesn't make it hard, though, just tedious.



And now we're into the Bounties! It's the Seedling King. (I think these bosses might actually be sorted by music, to some degree, because we're going to fight everything that uses the "Reckless for Glory!" theme in a row.)



Tidal Wyrm is next. I found it interesting that when I did the maths, it ends up making sense to attack the tail during the first turn to maximise the damage you can get in before the boss gets any actions (since it only takes two hits to KO the tail). On subsequent turns, I don't think it's worth the bother.



Peacock Spider. The order these fights appear is interesting to me, because Peacock Spider is the last Bounty to become available, but it's third here. I'm not sure if that could reflect a development change, and maybe they originally expected players would fight it earlier?



False Monarch. Another late-game Bounty, it makes sense you'd fight it here though it does surprise me they didn't put it before Peacock Spider.



And to round out the Bounties, the Devourer. With it appearing last, it does make me wonder whether how early you can encounter this fight was an oversight of some kind. (It was the last one I fought in my first playthrough, I'll admit.)

Its maximum HP is low enough that it doesn't present nearly as fearsome a threat as when we first encountered it, but this is still a fight that can end your attempt at the boss rush if you're not ready for it (e.g. if the wrong character gets eaten). With this strategy, we actually have the option of perfect counterplay: as long as Leif and Vi are both low enough on HP that the Head Slam will KO them both, it's no threat, because the Devourer won't eat anyone if there's only one conscious bug after the attack deals its damage.

In earlier playthroughs, before I was aware you could do that, I tended to equip Electric Needles just for this fight, and try to win by disabling it. It's not perfectly reliable, but it helps even the odds in your favour. Of course, you can also just fight through it, it's not nearly as threatening now and between its low HP and our damage output it goes down quickly.

74 - The Other One



After the Bounties are done with, Zommoth is up next. This fight is changed a little, in that the scripting is removed from the opening turns (Leif doesn't start out immobilised, and Zommoth isn't guaranteed to use its charge-up attack on turns two and three).

80 - The Usurper, Grasping For Power



And now we're back to chapter bosses, with the Wasp King. Interestingly Hoaxe's two forms are considered separate bosses for the purpose of this boss rush.

81 - Transcending, Overpowering, Everlasting



Which means that, like the main game, the boss rush ends with the Everlasting King. This fight is still excellent, and marks a satisfying end to this sequence.



Here is something for your trouble!



We get more berries for this than the miniboss rush, though it's still just berries, which are useless to us at this point.

If you want to try again, just start up the B.O.S.S. once more! Can't wait to see how you perform next time!



Right. That's the boss rush done! Before we check out EX Mode, let's once again take a quick detour back home.



For completing the Boss Rush, we get a second medal of B.O.S.S.'s face on our wall next to the first, with an even happier expression!

This is the final object we can collect for our house, which means that wall is finally complete! (If you include the wall trinkets in your definition of 100% completion, rather than just the achievements etc, this would be the true 100% completion point. Of course, that's not going to stop me from showing the rest of the content.)

So. EX Mode. It's the same sequence of fights, but with increased stats across the board. Everything is substantially more durable, and I think possibly might hit harder? (I'm not sure about the damage increase, since I tend to play this with heavy mitigation builds...) Otherwise, though, they're the same fights, just longer.

In the interest of being less monotonous... let's switch to another build! Possibly one even more degenerate than the last!



As you can see, I've redistributed stats again with an off-screen visit to Patton. This time, Leif's gotten the surplus HP bonuses, as well as both points of Defence.



Leif also has all the HP Plus medals on, as you may expect from how high his HP was in the previous screen.







Vi's still got the attack boosts, but this time, Leif's the one who's going to be stacking defences and doing the tanking. More on this in a bit.



Here's the real core of this build. Leif is equipping TP Saver and Life Cast, which together reduce the cost of Bubble Shield Lite to 1 HP. With two HP Core medals equipped, he'll regenerate 4 HP every 2 turns, meaning he can cast the shield four times during that period. Bubble spam is a nearly-perfect defence, and we can sustain this indefinitely. (Leif has the HP Plus medals mostly as a failsafe, but he can still lose HP occasionally due to the timing of recovery intervals, so it's good to have some padding.)



And the other wrinkle: Vi is equipping both Miracle Matters this time. Doubling up on them reduces the respawn time from 2 turns to 1 turn.

So, the plan here is, again, pretty simple. Leif will shield himself every turn, and possibly Vi if Kabbu is around to relay to him. Vi does the damage, funding her skills via TP Core, and whenever she does happen to go down... well, she'll be back soon enough, so it doesn't really matter whether we shield her or not.

The advantages over the previous build is that, because we're relying on Bubble Shield, it really doesn't matter how much damage the enemies do, we can be impervious regardless (with a few exceptions I'll get to), and don't even have to care about blocking. And it's just as sustainable as the previous build, at least in terms of resources.

There are a few disadvantages, though.

For one, I find this sequence of actions feels clunkier to execute (though that may just be because I've spent less time playing with it), but that's a fairly minor thing.

More significantly, without Taunt, we're subject to the RNG determining where the enemy attacks. That means we don't have much control over when Kabbu takes damage, and once he goes down, our damage output tends to decrease since we can no longer shield Vi. Between that and the fact we don't have passive damage from Spiky Bod, fights tend to take longer with this build (especially against enemies who can heal themselves).

Also, because we're relying on a skill, our defences can be shut down by Leif being Taunted or Inked. These status conditions aren't very common, but they're a real threat and can't be prevented, and the main reason we've stacked so much defence on Leif. (I think it's probably better to get the Do Nothing medals onto Leif for these circumstances, rather than e.g. Last Stand and Block Heal, but I wasn't going to go back and record the entire boss rush again.)

(It might also arguably be better to divide the Miracle Matters between Vi and Kabbu, to keep access to relay available in longer fights, but I'm genuinely not sure, and regardless I wanted to show what happens when a character equips both of them.)

Right. Enough talk, let's see this in action.



We've got Leif in the rear this time, which conveniently puts Vi in front and means we won't need to change our formations in battle.





Let's tackle the Miniboss Rush first.

Click me for video!



Immediately, we can see the difference. Aria EX has 39 HP and 1 defence.



Also, the Venus' Bud she summons has 15 HP and 1 defence now! It isn't just the bosses that get powered up, many of their adds do also. That said, this is a bit inconsistent: not every summoned enemy gets a boost, and I haven't noticed any pattern among the ones that do or don't. I've taken screenshots and will make note of the ones I did see, though not every boss that could summon other enemies did during this run so I don't have footage of them all.



Ahoneynation EX has 60 HP and 1 defence.



The summoned mini-Abomihoneys now have 5 HP and 0 defence, as opposed to 3 HP and -1 defence.



Astotheles EX has 75 HP and 1 defence. I really hope whatever build you're using doesn't need items to outlast him!



Dune Scorpion EX has 66 HP and 1 defence.



Monsieur Scarlet EX has 68 HP and 1 defence.



Kali EX has 62 HP and 1 defence, and Kabbu EX has 38 HP and 1 defence.



Carmina EX has 109 HP and 1 defence. This fight actually proved one of the most problematic for this build...



Carmina's roulette can inflict Ink on the entire party, and is completely unblockable. (Other sources of ink, such as Riz's attacks and bombs, and Delilah's cannon, can be blocked to avoid the status, but not this!) Thankfully, Carmina doesn't have the damage output to meaningfully threaten this Leif even without access to his shield, but it does disrupt the strategy (and would be a real threat if we were relying exclusively on Bubble Shield).





Also, as it turns out, Carmina's Dice Bombs go right through Bubble Shields! Ouch. I never knew about this before, and as far as I know, they're the only attack in the game that does. So much for the reliability of this strategy!

Neither of these things makes Carmina actually threatening per se, as long as you're paying attention, but they certainly do make her annoying! It was quite interesting to see, especially since I'm used to thinking of her as more or less a pushover.



Riz EX is up next, with 109 HP and 1 defence. Two fights that can inflict Ink in a row!



Here we have Cenn and Pisci again. Cenn EX has 53 HP and 1 defence; Pisci EX has 42 HP and 2 defence. Weirdly, Pisci didn't get a defence boost, which just goes to show that this isn't a blanket increase across the board; someone appears to have deliberately chosen these numbers, though I don't necessarily have any insight into the reasoning behind them.



General Ultimax and cronies. This one's interesting in a different way: the general himself is completely unchanged, but the minions get a substantial boost.



Finally, we have Zasp and Mothiva. Zasp EX has 53 HP and 1 defence (apparently not getting a defence boost), while Mothiva EX has 45 HP and 1 defence.



Here is something for your trouble!



The berry rewards are substantially increased on EX mode, for whatever that's worth.

If you want to try again, just start up the B.O.S.S. once more! Can't wait to see how you will perform next time!



Right. That's that done. Let's do the proper boss rush on EX mode now.





Let's do this. We'll use the same build once again for this one.

Click me for video!



Spuder EX has 60 HP and 1 defence. (I didn't see whether the adds had boosted stats, since I ended up killing it before it had a chance to spawn them.)



Venus' Guardian EX has 77 HP and 1 defence.



Heavy Drone B-33 EX has 84 HP and 1 defence. (I find it weird that this one doesn't get a defence boost.)



I did see some summons this time around; looks like the Bee-Boops do come with boosted HP.



The Watcher EX has 89 HP and 1 defence.



The Beast EX has 105 HP and 1 defence.



Ultimax Tank EX has 102 HP and 1 defence.



Like before, General Ultimax himself (when he comes out of the tank) has completely unchanged stats.



Mother Chomper EX has 87 HP and 1 defence, and all of the small Chompers in this fight are boosted.



Broodmother EX has 90 HP and 1 defence.



She also summons Midges with a substantial durability boost, which can get annoying pretty quickly!



Seedling King EX has 115 HP and 1 defence.



And the seedlings he summons have pretty substantial boosts, even if ultimately they're still Seedlings.



Tidal Wyrm EX has 132 HP and 1 defence. The tail's HP is also boosted to 15 here, though coincidentally you may not be able to tell from the video here (as I just happened to do exactly 15 damage from hitting it twice with Vi).



The summoned Water Strider's stats are just weird, frankly; its HP is even lower than normal, but the defence is boosted, so I'm not really sure what's going on with it.



Peacock Spider EX has 122 HP and 1 defence.



The spiders it summons are seriously durable - this is a Diving Spider with 20 HP and 1 defence! (This certainly drives home that the best strategy in this fight is just to ignore the summoned spiders and focus on the boss.)



False Monarch EX has 142 HP and 1 defence.



The Mothflies it summons are also significantly stronger, at 7 HP and 2 defence each. This also means they're capable of healing it by larger amounts, since its healing is based on their current HP when they merge into the main body.



Devourer EX has 87 HP and 1 defence, making it trickier to blitz down.



The flytraps also have received some boosts.



Zommoth EX has 141 HP and 1 defence.



I didn't see every enemy it's capable of summoning, but I suspect they'll all be boosted if this Zombiant is.



Wasp King EX has 135 HP and 1 defence.



And finally, Everlasting King EX has 84 HP and 1 defence (and heals more between phases).



The artefacts don't appear to have gotten any boosts, though.



Anyway, that's EX mode! What do we get?

Here is something for your trouble!



An enormous amount of useless berries. I did say this mode is just for fun and doesn't count for anything. I enjoy it, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend playing this unless you've finished everything else in the game and are still feeling desperate for more content.



...I think we'll be okay, Doctor, but thanks.



Right. That's B.O.S.S.! It lets us refight any of the bosses and minibosses we can't encounter again elsewhere, either singly or as a rush.

If nothing else, I hope you enjoyed seeing some of these absurd builds. I've honestly only scratched the surface here, there are a lot of variations on these strategies.

I really do appreciate that this is here, and also that the game is pretty clear about having no intentions that most players will complete it. As something optional to have fun with, for the kind of person who's into it, this is great; if it were mandatory, most people would probably consider it tedious and annoying. If you want to experiment with various builds or do challenges, this offers a way to get quick feedback without having to do an entire new playthrough, which is also a really nice feature for the game to have! Also, fighting old bosses again is one of the best ways to get a sense of how much either the party has grown ingame, or you've grown as a player, or both. (I also appreciate that there is still plenty of gameplay you can engage in even on a 100% completed file.)

While playing through it this time, I actually ended up feeling almost like I was in some kind of zen state and forgetting I was recording.

Before I close out the update, I want to share a few other videos.

Devourer Never Attacks Here's a video I recorded shortly after doing the Devourer update (update 14! that's ages ago) but never really found a place to fit in. Since we focused so much on defensive strategies in the boss rushes, let's contrast it with some all-out offence that literally kills the Devourer (at its most difficult: this is EX Devourer on HARDEST) before it ever gets a turn.

Devourer, No Devouring Here's another video I made shortly after the original Devourer update. This one demonstrates the way it will never eat the last character standing, which I think is particularly useful to know if you want to make reliable strategies for getting past it during the boss rush (as I do think it remains the encounter most likely to derail an otherwise successful run). We did see this behaviour in the boss rush videos I recorded, but this is a shorter demonstration that I hope is more accessible.

Finally, here is a video (not by me) of someone showing off the Bubble Shield Lite/Life Cast/TP Saver strategy in the boss rush more effectively than I did, with a plethora of challenge settings on top of that (TUFFBUGS, Hard Hits, EXP Booster, EX Mode, and not even using Chompy!).

Stay tuned, I'll be back momentarily with a design interlude inspired by this update, also. It's been a while since we've had one of those.

[Explopyro]

Design Interlude: Degenerate Strategies

Let's take a brief interlude to talk about game balance and degenerate strategies.

(Before we start, though, a brief digression about terminology and an exhortation to be careful with your language. We'll be using the word "degenerate" as a term of art in the context of algorithms and game theory, an extrapolation from the concept of degenerate cases in mathematics. Outside this context, this is a word with a lot of negative connotations and is usually an expression of bigotry. If someone says "this strategy is degenerate", they are making a descriptive statement with a specific meaning, not a value judgment on any person employing that strategy. If someone uses the word "degenerate" as a noun, such as "that person is a degenerate", they're probably a Nazi. This has been a public service announcement.)

So what do I mean by a "degenerate strategy"? Broadly speaking, what I mean by this is a pattern of play that is fully generalisable to win in a way that renders the game's mechanics irrelevant (and usually wasn't planned for by the game designer). More succinctly, it is often defined as a course of actions a player can take which will lead to victory irrespective of the game state. This might mean different sorts of things in the context of different games: it may or may not involve optimal/perfect play, it may or may not be the most efficient way to win, it may or may not apply to every challenge in the game, and so on. (There are potential gradations here, and I sometimes find it useful to distinguish between strategies being "partially degenerate" or "fully degenerate" based on how much player input or skill is necessary to execute it, how much of the game content it applies to, how many mechanics it obviates, etc.)

This is related to the concept of a solved game, though I don't often see that term applied to video games, or for that matter to single-player games. They're not precisely the same thing, though: a game can be solved without that solution necessarily being degenerate, for instance.

For a simple (if potentially controversial) example: in many RPGs with experience mechanics, level grinding is a degenerate strategy. Spend long enough fighting the easiest enemies in the game, and your stats will be high enough to beat any enemy without effort, rendering all the combat mechanics irrelevant. (And you'll have enough money to buy anything you want without having to think about trade-offs, obviating another mechanic.) Though, notably, we can see the other side here too: even if it technically works, most players will not bother using this kind of degenerate strategy because it's boring and time-consuming to execute.

Or, perhaps, let's look at an example closer to home. The "Danger Mario" build in Paper Mario: TTYD is a classic one. Reduce Mario's maximum HP to 5, then stack loads of the badges which activate when he's on 5 HP or less (Power Rush for attack power and Close Call for evasion), and you can win most encounters instantly with a multi-hit attack, while also being functionally impossible to hit if an enemy somehow gets a chance to attack you. It takes some tedious work to set it up (e.g. gathering the badges), but once you do, you can win every fight in the game with zero effort. In my experience most players don't use this for long, because the game becomes unsatisfying once the novelty of seeing it work and produce huge numbers wears off, but it certainly works.

(Staying with TTYD for a moment, I also think there's an argument that Superguarding is a degenerate mechanic, in that executed perfectly it invalidates all of the other combat mechanics. The skill threshold to actually do that is so high, though, that it doesn't behave that way in practice. I bring this up because, for all that the concept may seem simple, there are a lot of shades of gray and there can be room for disagreement about what is or is not degenerate.)

It's often considered a game design mistake if degenerate strategies are possible, especially if those strategies are obvious and/or easy to execute. That said, it isn't always: like glitches, sometimes designers intentionally leave them in if they think they're cool or funny.

One interesting and potentially instructive example here is Pokemon. Arguably, a degenerate strategy in those games is "give all the experience to one Pokemon, often your starter, and solo the game by outlevelling your opponents". You can almost completely ignore the type-matchup, switching, and even move-selection mechanics if you overlevel enough. Nearly everyone I know who played Pokemon as a child did something like this in their first playthroughs, and in this case it ends up functioning as a sort of soft difficulty-selection or accessibility option: the game is more fun and interesting when you don't play this way, but this kind of strategy existing makes it possible for young children to succeed and enjoy playing the game (often even if they can't read the game text). Speedrunners will also frequently employ this tactic, but that's a different conversation entirely.

The biggest downside of an obvious degenerate strategy existing is that it turns engaging with the mechanics as intended and playing the game normally into a sort of challenge run. If a player is constantly thinking about having to intentionally play suboptimally or under self-imposed restrictions, e.g. "X move is clearly the best here, but I'll choose not to because the game's better if I don't", or "this equipment combination is too overpowered, let's not use it", it can really ruin their immersion and enjoyment. This is the biggest reason to avoid them: they can often make a game less fun even if the player chooses not to employ them.

So let's bring this conversation back around to Bug Fables, and more specifically its boss rush.

As we've been seeing in the last few updates, once you reach the endgame and have access to all the medals (and, thanks to Patton, access to the largest possible MP pool regardless of your earlier choices), it's possible to put together some degenerate builds, especially in terms of obviating resource systems. I'll go so far as to say that the boss rush and the Cave of Trials even encourage you to think about doing so as a sort of puzzle. You can absolutely finish the boss rush playing "normally" (I have done this), but it'll put a strain on your inventory and resource management. This is even more the case on the bonus difficulty settings.

In particular, it's hard to maintain poison-based blitz strategies, which a lot of players fall naturally into during the course of the main game. And which, incidentally, I'd consider a kind of degenerate strategy in their own right, at least when it comes to winning one fight in a vacuum. But when you need to spend an item to activate poison in each fight, and have 15 item slots for 16 fights, this starts to have issues.

I quite enjoy the texture this gives to the endgame and postgame gameplay. There's an extent to which the question the game starts asking at this point shifts from "can you break the game?" to "which texture of broken gameplay do you enjoy?", or even "which flavour of broken gameplay best suits this particular challenge?", and that's another way to promote creativity. Also, some of these strategies still require you to take different actions situationally or turn-by-turn, so they're not completely mindless to execute. That helps keep them fun to play, at least for a while. I wouldn't want the entire game to be like that, but as a reward for reaching endgame (and for system mastery) I think it works.

(Put differently: a game's core systems being solvable doesn't strike me as a problem if the act of solving them is an interesting and satisfying puzzle. It does become a problem if the puzzle isn't interesting, perhaps because it's too easy, or if the solution becomes widely shared such that players can use it without working through the discovery. It can also be a problem if the act of executing the solution once found ends up not being fun. Mileage is going to vary here.)

This can also create replayability, on a different axis than the menu codes do. If you played through the game without finding any degenerate builds, going back for a new playthrough with that knowledge will make the game feel very different. (As I learned from doing this LP!) And if you did... well, you can go back and do challenge runs, and see how different things feel when you don't exploit the arbitrages.

There are definitely downsides, though. For instance, difficulty scaling stops being particularly meaningful, except in terms of how quickly it pushes you in the direction of using degenerate builds and how much you'll struggle if you don't. (With the builds I've shown, for instance, the EX boss rush isn't any more challenging, it just takes longer.)

I think what I'm trying to say here, ultimately, is that Bug Fables taught me that at least in single-player games, it can sometimes be good design to leave in unbalanced mechanics for players to exploit, even if taken to an extreme that can produce degenerate strategies. Finding and taking advantage of a mechanical arbitrage makes players feel clever. (There's no feeling quite like that eureka moment when you put the pieces together, then test it out and see it actually work.) I think balancing a game too perfectly might be an even worse failure mode: when every option is equally viable, a game's strategic choices can all start feeling false, and there's no real point to engaging in any kind of theorycraft. (Of course this philosophy should go out the window when creating competitive multiplayer games. It's more important to be careful about balance there.) This is not an argument for deliberately taking these kind of imbalances all the way to degeneracy, but I think if you consider the failure modes of each approach, emergent degenerate strategies existing is a better gameplay experience than every choice being equally monotonous.

While they're not exactly pertinent to this discussion of endgame and the boss rush, I do think it's worth addressing a few other cases of possibly-degenerate mechanics in Bug Fables:

There's a case to be made that "pick MP every level" is at least partially degenerate as a strategy. I don't personally mind this one, because ultimately there can still be valid reasons to make other choices (and the game is still enjoyable if you do), and this particular decision being mostly-uninteresting still leaves the player with plenty of other impactful choices to make. Also, I think it's less of an issue because the correct choice also tends to be the most fun. That said, mileage definitely varies here.

Also, the bank interest mechanic is squarely in this space. "Leave the game running overnight to get arbitrarily large amounts of money" is absolutely a degenerate strategy. I would not call it fully degenerate, in part because the game is seemingly designed with the intent that money eventually becomes irrelevant and this just accelerates the timing (and unlimited money only gets you so far), but it definitely qualifies in that it's an unintended play pattern which obviates a core system of the game.

In any event, this is a useful concept to have available in conversations about game systems, and Bug Fables definitely helped me crystallise a lot of my thoughts here.

[Explopyro]

79: Not the De-Bug Room!

01 - Bug Fables



Oh no, what's happened to my save files? A few of them have their location mysteriously showing as TEST ROOM?! (In red text, even!)

Okay, so, clearly we're doing something a bit different today. I've made use of the Bug Fables Save Editor to manually change our location, so we can check out the test/debug room which is still in the game. (As I understand it, there may be ways to glitch in, but I don't know how, and the clip I saw of someone doing so a while back looked like it required frame-perfect menu inputs. That's well beyond my capabilities, so save editor it is. If you want to explore it yourself, set "Current area" to "Bugaria Outskirts" and "Current map" to "Test Room".)

There's some neat stuff here, and most players will never see it because it's completely inaccessible via normal gameplay. Also, I'd never been to this area before recording for this update and only vaguely knew about it, so for once I'm flying blind.

21 - Fry it Up!



Here's what it looks like. It's a big open area with lots of NPCs around. Also, the music that plays here is Fry's theme for some reason.

We can check for a banter, and there actually is one here:

This is the test room. Not much here.
Just some NPCs and props to see if everything is working without needing to walk miles and loading for ages to test properly.
Expect this place to fill with more stuff later.

Even if it is just some placeholder/explanatory text. This is the only banter here; there aren't any for the NPCs or anything, but it's still cool to see they put one.

Let's have a look around.





There's a cuttable plant here with nothing in it.



These black-and-white things seem to be some kind of floor switch we can press down by standing on them. They don't do anything other than make a clicking sound. I don't remember seeing any switches that look like this in the main game, so I think they're probably an early design that was discarded.



There's a moveable rock.





And a dig spot which has a Crunchy Leaf in it.

It's pretty clear this part of the area was used to demonstrate object interactions.



There are also a handful of enemies around! This Jellyshroom is fully mobile and will aggro and chase after us.

04 - FIGHT!



Once we get into combat, though, it turns out it's not actually a Jellyshroom at all, it's three Golden Seedlings!





Incidentally, these still do enough damage to be kind of threatening to max-defence Kabbu, so that build isn't 100% impenetrable to everything. Just everything you're likely to encounter in normal gameplay and/or the boss rush, and he's still durable enough to tank them.



Also, since it happened, here's a demonstration of immortality via Block Heal! Kabbu was on 1 HP before getting hit in this screenshot, and he's still on 1 HP after damage, even though 2 damage should have killed him.



Winning that fight causes a huge pile of items to appear, which always includes 3 Tangy Berries and a Crunchy Leaf.



Right, what's this Devourer hologram thing?



Um. Well. This is... certainly an interesting formation...

Haunted Cloth, Heavy Drone B-33, The Watcher, Warden. Yes, two chapter bosses at once, and yes, their sprites are overlapping, they clearly weren't designed to be on-screen at the same time.

The battle totally still works, though! It looks a bit odd at times, and it's not always easy to tell which enemy you're targeting, but you can fight them just like you would any other enemies. If you want to see it in action, I did record it.

Click me for video!





After beating it, it disappears very briefly and then respawns.



Past there, we're at the edge of the area. This place isn't that big, although there's clearly another region across the bridge to the east. Don't worry, I'll show the whole thing.





There are both kinds of save crystal here, and they function normally. This does mean you can save here if you somehow get here without using the editor (and, thankfully, you won't be trapped, there is an exit back to the normal game world which we'll see eventually).



Before we start talking to the various NPCs, let's check out this conspicuous sign.





















That's a lot of options! (Sorry for not transcribing that, but I think it's more interesting to see how it actually appears in the game.)

That said... I tried pressing the indicated keys, and I couldn't get any of these options to work. I'm not sure if I was doing something wrong, or if the functionality's no longer enabled, they may have worked in a prior version.

Right, let's check out some of these NPCs!





Samira gives us a menu that lets us generate arbitrary items, key items, and medals in our inventory.



Madeleine lets us remove medals.





While Merab lets us get medals in bulk if we want.





M.M. gives us the option to warp to arbitrary locations, but we'll need to know the map IDs.





Levi has a bunch of options, including letting us get whatever temporary followers we want. I didn't mess around with this much (it gives a message that the followers won't show until you reload the map, which is a real pain in this area), but I'm sure you can create some silly looking scenarios if you want. I don't know what "reset regional flags" does.

What's the test string?



It demonstrates a bunch of the text/font effects! I chose not to make GIFs of the text effects because it would've been way too much work, but they do add a lot of charm to the game, so I did one here for once.





It's followed up by a bunch of symbols. Does this remind anyone else of when a print job would get corrupted and the printer started spewing out pages upon pages of random characters? (When I was a kid I loved pretending to decipher the gibberish from these.)

So, yeah, this is clearly meant to test the game's various text effects and make sure they display properly.





Talking to this ant toggles something. I tried to figure out what this does and, from the best I can tell, this might be the flag that's used in the Bandit Hideout to take away Vi's Beemerang; I was still able to use Kabbu's and Leif's field skills regardless.







This Zombiant's pretty interesting! It'll let us input enemy IDs (if we know them) and fight anything we want.



It also insults us if we decline. How rude.



Right, let's do an experiment, shall we?



Let's arbitrarily pick ID 1, that's bound to be something, right?



It immediately asks for another one!



Okay, let's try 2 then.



It keeps going, too. If we did, we'd find it caps out at four enemies (so we can't make a formation arbitrarily large), but for now let's stop here.



Oh, okay, it makes sense that low-numbered IDs would be early-game enemies.



And indeed it puts us in a fight with a Jellyshroom and the Spider.

Presumably, we could use this to build any kind of arbitrary formation we wanted, within the limitations (provided we knew all the enemy IDs, anyway; that information is definitely out there), which is pretty cool!

I will, however, note one caveat: running away is disabled in these encounters, so this could get weird if you end up putting in an unbeatable cutscene boss or something. There might be some possible softlocks here.





Over here is Kali, and the menu just offers us to fight her.



It warps us into the exact Kali fight we saw during her sidequest, complete with Kabbu on the enemy side. I wonder if this being here is an indication that it took them longer to get the scripting working right, or something, that they'd want it easily accessible for testing?





Over here on the far west edge of the area is an interactable telescope, that shows us the same view as the one in the Bee Kingdom.





Talking to the False Monarch here lets us view the chapter intros.



Specifically, it plays the musical sting and shows the screen overlay banner thing.





The area ahead seems dangerous... But if you need to heal, just leave it to me.

The Venus Bud here just has her usual dialogue and healing offer; we've seen this line before, and I think it might just be the one from her normal Bugaria Outskirts location.



Also, there's an exit over here to the west, which is how you can get back to Bugaria proper (without using the Ant Compass, anyway).



It ends up putting us here in the Ant Mines, the same place as the compass would. (Give me a moment to get back to the test room so we can see the rest...)



The diver ant seems to be testing Japanese characters. I don't know what this says.





Artis lets us edit our file name, something we wouldn't otherwise be able to do.





And this Chomper lets us edit Chompy's name. That, we could normally do in the lab.





This termite lets us play the Termacade games.



Talking to Maki just gives this message, but I suspect this fills in the discovery log?





Shay challenges us to a duel.







It's the Spy Cards minigame, of course. But it does use the current area background; in the game proper, we played against Chuck here, but Shay used a different background since he was in Defiant Root.



Patton's here with his usual services.





...And trying to go into Madame Butterfly's shop is apparently a softlock. We get stuck in the entry and literally can't move or put in any other inputs, I had to kill and restart the game. Right, back in a moment.





Celia apparently lets us just arbitrarily edit our stats. I'm not going to mess around with this here, but you can make the numbers absurdly big if you want.





Neolith apparently lets us edit various flags in the save file. I wouldn't know where to begin with this without appropriate documentation.





Venus gives us some options to rearrange the shops. I also didn't mess with this, and I'm not sure what it would even do since we're on a completed file where everything has already been bought...





Talking to Muze has her put "one of each item" into our inventory. She doesn't even ask!



Yes, this breaks the item limit; as you can see here, we're carrying 187 of a maximum 15. This screenshot shows the result if you go to her empty-handed; if you're carrying stuff, you'll still have it, with all of this just coming after. And as you can clearly see, this also includes a whole bunch of key items being dumped into the normal-items inventory. Some of them (like the stat-boosting berries and potions) can be used normally and work fine from that menu; others just don't do anything. You can get rid of them by picking up another item, which will trigger the "inventory is full" menu and let you drop them.







Talking to the Dark Cherry Salesman gives us this menu; he'll let us pick an object from the list and be told its ID number.



Judie lets us get rid of unwanted key items.

(I forgot to screenshot talking to Amber here, but she just has her normal dialogue and lets us access the item storage as normal.)





The TP Plus medal lying around here is real and we can pick it up.



And now we have six! This means the medal list is implemented somewhat dynamically and we could potentially get multiples of anything (including from that earlier NPC who'd give us one of each). I haven't experimented with unintended duplicates of anything, but it could be fun to mess around with at some point.



What's this thing over here?



Hm. Let's have a look.



Meet Mr. Tester. It's some kind of training dummy thing that looks like it's made of rock, and appears nowhere else in the game. I'm pretty sure this is something they mocked up to test the combat system.







It has Spy dialogue in place, though it's clearly just placeholder text, and uses images of Aria instead of its own sprites.

It has 500 HP and 5 defence. (Though it actually has 0 resistance to all status effects.) It can take a lot of punishment, which is helpful if you're going to be practising on it...



And actually, it's even sturdier than just its stats would suggest. This is its only move: every turn, it heals itself by 500 HP and restores 99 TP to us. That's pretty much unbeatable; this thing's clearly designed to be useful for testing, not as a proper enemy.

...But. Are you thinking what I'm thinking?

We've got to find a way to kill it, right? This seems like it has all the pieces to be an interesting challenge. We'd have to prevent it ever getting a turn once we start doing damage... the zero status resistances seem promising, but even that comes with an implicit time limit since they'll increase each time it gets successfully inflicted with something. It might be possible, but it's going to be pretty tricky.

I'll leave you to mull that over for a bit while we explore the rest of this area, but we'll be back.



We still need to check out the eastern half.



There are a bunch of water droplets constantly falling here, for Leif to freeze.



There's a huge row of NPCs here, as well as some signs.



Selecting one from the completed or taken category here will delete it permanently.



This seems to be the quest progress area. Let's not add any quests, though.





The left sign is the quest board.



The flags triggered are the ones only needed for the specific part so any other parts of the game could break as well.

The sign with the (!) above it gives us a pretty dire-sounding warning. Looks like this area lets us manipulate the story progress flags.



Talking to Rizza gives this option. I haven't tried using it, so I'm not exactly sure what it does.



There's a second Leif here?



He gives us various options to set our story progress within Chapter 1.



Here's another one giving us options for the latter portion of Chapter 2. There's a pretty specific granularity here, encompassing most of the progress flags for the main quest.







All of the NPCs here are like this, and they're organised in a vaguely thematic order.





Ending, finally, with the Wasp King and Roach Elder with the endgame areas. This seems pretty neat if you want to replay certain parts of the game (or maybe for challenge runs to access late-game areas with a low-level party?), though I haven't actually tried it so I'm not sure if this all actually works or if some things will break.





Past the "warpers", there's a bit more to see. There are some bandits walking around here, they act like enemies but don't actually trigger encounters if you touch them.



The Wizard doesn't really have anything to say.





Hitting this crystal toggles an icy effect, like the ones in the Sand Castle, but has no other function.



This looks a bit weird, there's a platform embedded in the ground?





Hitting the crystal turns on the elevator.



It's one of the shocking ones, like we saw in the Honey Factory and Rubber Prison. We can ride on it, but it just bobs up and down and doesn't really go anywhere.



There's also a crank here which can be turned with the Beemerang.





This one takes us up pretty high, and gives a nice view of the area (even if there's not all that much to see, really).



Also, there's a Mother Chomper here.



We can talk to it?



This menu's pretty terse, but offers some potentially interesting options! Any one of these we pick will send us into a battle immediately. (Also, because there's so little text, it's very easy to accidentally end up in a fight, if you're in the habit of pressing A to speed up the text. And you can't run from these fights because they're treated like bosses.)

32 - Frenzied Sunflower Dance



The first option puts us in a battle with Mother Chomper. It's exactly the same fight as in the normal game, but it uses the Outskirts area background and plays the Venus' Guardian boss music instead of the Bounty theme.





The second option is the Everlasting King. He starts with all the artefacts in play instead of having to summon them, which does change the fight up a bit, but otherwise it's the same (including the two scripted heals at 10 HP). Once again, the Venus' Guardian music plays.





"10 Leafbugs" is the sequence we fought in the postgame sidequest to help Yin evolve (and unlock the Team Maki battle). And, again, Venus' Guardian battle theme.





The Team Maki option, naturally, throws us into that fight. Aside from the background change, and the music (it's the Venus' Guardian music again), it's the exact same fight.



Finally, we have "all enemies"? That sounds intriguing! Could this be an even harder boss rush? Or maybe all the enemies at once somehow?

81 - Transcending, Overpowering, Everlasting



Unfortunately, whatever you were expecting or hoping for, this one's just an outright lie. It ends up just being a fight against Tidal Wyrm, but with the Everlasting King's battle theme.

Anyway, it's pretty neat that this is here, though I'm not sure why these specific fights are the options (or what the logic is behind the music choices). Maybe these are just fights they needed easy access to for testing purposes?



Let's head back...





Oh, right, this thing was here. (It's respawned because I had to reset after the softlock, otherwise it would have stayed dead.)



I'll take this opportunity to quickly demonstrate that the Bubble Shield strategy works out a lot better against these, and if you use it on Kabbu combined with Taunt and Spiky Bod, you can wear them down with the counter damage at no threat to yourself.



Right. Now that we've seen everything else here, back to Mr. Tester.

I spent a couple hours messing around with this thing, trying various strategies. The core concept is fairly straightforward: inflict a status effect on it every turn, to keep it from getting to take any actions, and use attacks that ignore defence. The devil's in the details, though.

Recall that every time you inflict a status, the enemy's resistance to that status increases. On Hard, the increase is 18% for Freeze, 15% for Numb and 13% for Sleep. Even starting from 0 resistance, an enemy can at most be subject to 6 freezes, 7 numbs and 8 sleeps. So, no matter what approach we use, we're up against a time limit (two, in fact: the hard time limit of full immunity, and the soft limit imposed by the increased vulnerability to RNG).

One of the first things I tried was Frigid Coffin, and quickly ran into some issues. First off, as it turns out, Leif's ice attacks won't freeze enemies unless they do nonzero damage. I don't think I ever realised this before, because with Leif at base attack Frigid Coffin does 4 damage, but this enemy has 5 defence, so he'd need attack boosts to get through. And if we give attack boosts to Leif, then we can't give them to Vi; we need her piercing damage or it's just going to be too slow (and every action we spend fishing for freezes with Leif once resistances start building is one Vi isn't doing damage, and then we can't do damage after freezing or we'll break it). I think this is a dead end.

So, instead, we're going to go with a variant of the strategy often called "rainbow needles" or "needle flash" (which, incidentally, is a strategy I've been wanting to show off but couldn't find a way to fit into the LP before this, so that works out nicely). That said, this was still pretty tricky and required some finagling, I had quite a few unsuccessful attempts before working out the kinks even with the medal setup that ended up getting there.



First off, I redistributed some stats. It ended up being very important for Vi to have 8 or fewer maximum HP, and I also reallocated three levels from MP to TP, as there ended up being a surplus of MP and no further medals that would contribute.



We start off with every copy of TP Plus, we're going to need the TP to keep up with our skills. (Mr. Tester may offer us TP refills, but it will stop doing so once we paralyse it. If it ever refills our TP, we've failed.)



As you may imagine, I'm pulling out all the stops to maximise Vi's attack power. We'll be using the poison boosts on top of everything else.



TP Core will help us keep up with the skill output needed, though we'll definitely be outpacing it. TP Saver is along similar lines (though it's actually what necessitated 8 HP: it reduces the cost of Hard Charge as well, so a Hard Charge at 9 HP wouldn't put Vi into Last Attack range with this).

I experimented a bit with using Life Cast + Life Stealer on Vi as well, but even with this much attack power, it didn't restore enough HP to be fully self-sustaining and ended up being counterproductive (Life Stealer comes with a 1-point attack drop, and I was losing some turns to having to heal Vi when she ran out of steam).

Status Booster on Vi is also very important, for obvious reasons.



Finally, Vi has all three status needle medals, as well as Hard Charge and ADBP Enhancer.

Yes, the status medals stack. Each hit of Needle Pincer has an independent chance to inflict each of these status effects. (In addition to the extra damage, this is why ADBP Enhancer matters, because it gives us an extra hit.) Now, these multiple hits are a bit of a double-edged sword, because while they give us more chances to fish for status effects, if we succeed more than once, we'll build the enemy's resistance faster. That's a risk, but on balance, it's worth it.

Also, if you inflict Sleep on the first hit, the later hits will wake the enemy back up... but it actually doesn't matter, because of the sleep glitch. I think I've mentioned that before: if you hit a sleeping enemy, it wakes up early but still skips its turn. I find this a bit cheesy in normal gameplay, so I don't normally use it, but for better or worse it's the secret sauce that makes this strategy works, and for this particular application, we need it.

And we have Empower+ for Leif, a convenient way to sneak another attack boost in. (In retrospect, I think I might've wanted to also equip Break or Break+, because after Empower, that would've gotten Leif to the breakpoint for freezing with Frigid Coffin from the back lines. That would have been a very useful fallback plan for when the status needles stop working. But I didn't think of it until after the successful attempt, which didn't end up needing it.)

Also, not shown in the screenshots, I have Spy Specs on, and Leif has Strong Start. Neither of these actually mattered, so I could have redistributed another level into TP.



Right, let's go! (Also, seen here, Mr. Tester's dialogue box uses the same glitchy text effect as many of the computers in the main game.)

Click me for video!

Please watch the video if you want to see the full fight; I'm not going to do the full blow-by-blow here because a lot of it gets repetitive.

04 - FIGHT!



This is going to be a lot of HP to chew through. That said, we're not going to start on that just yet. One advantage we do have is that its recovery doesn't matter until we actually start doing damage, so we can take advantage of the free TP recovery to do as much setup as we like.



So we'll spam Empower+ with all of our actions for, uh, several turns, to build up a duration that will last the entire fight. (As I said earlier, I think in retrospect I'd also have incorporated Break or Break+ here, reducing its defence to 4 would let us use Frigid Coffin to freeze it in an emergency.)



This is also why Chompy's got the Venom Ribbon equipped, we'll let her stack some poison turns on the enemy. It might not do much (especially since Vi will be inflicting poison once we start attacking), but I'm taking no chances here, any tiny edge could end up mattering.



Right, that should probably be enough. That said... we're not quite done setting up. We've got to get Vi poisoned and low on HP, after all.



But that's not all, we're going to do another trick too. We'll use a Drowsy Cake to set up our Weak Stomach poison, and also put Vi to sleep for 2 turns.







Then, once she's asleep, the others start force-feeding her Hustle Candies. I have no idea how she eats them while she's sleeping, but this lets us build up extra actions on her beyond the normal limit (since as long as she's asleep or otherwise immobilised, they won't be converted from extra "hustle" actions to actual turns, and we can keep stacking them).



I didn't think it was worth going beyond this, but if we'd used another Drowsy Cake or similar status item, we could have extended the sleep and kept going (Hustle stacks to a maximum of 9).



Right, that's the preparation part done.





Vi starts out with Hard Charge to activate Last Attack. This does build exhaustion, but it's still worth doing, and we couldn't do it earlier because the Drowsy Cake healed Vi. (In retrospect, I think next time I'd have her use Ice Cream instead, for a 2-turn freeze that doesn't heal. Then we could set up Hard Charge first and start this turn without exhaustion. I didn't think of this at the time; you're seeing my first successful attempt.)



Now we finally start using our fully-enhanced Needle Pincer.



Flashy! (This is why people often call combining these effects needle flash or rainbow needles.) And we've definitely inflicted Numb and Poison at least; I think Sleep has been too, just not visibly.

This does burn through a lot of resistance, but it gets the job done. We're off to the races now.





Now we'll spend the rest of our actions spamming Fly Drop for piercing damage! Yes, Fly Drop. Bet you never thought that skill would end up being relevant!

Continuing to use Needle Pincer does put out more damage, but every attempt where I relied on it exclusively ended up failing well before we managed to get the kill (usually with around 150-200 HP still remaining), because it was chewing through the status resistances too quickly. And Hurricane Toss runs afoul of the 5 defence, it's not nearly as effective as I'd like. Fly Drop is the only option for a piercing skill that doesn't inflict status.

On this turn, while we're using all the Hustled actions, it also has the benefit of distributing the exhaustion penalties between Vi and Kabbu; Vi spamming needles for 5 turns straight makes the last few uses less impactful, while Fly Drop (being one hit, and using both characters' attack values) weathers the penalties better.

From here on out, it's just a matter of repeating this process: use Needle Pincer until a status gets inflicted (which might require some relaying), then Fly Drop if actions remain, or sometimes Hustle Candies and/or possibly a Berry Smoothie to stay on top of the TP costs.



Eventually, we manage to wear it down before running out the status resistance timer. (I think the resistance building is actually a blessing in disguise here, to some degree; once it's built up a bit, you're at least less likely to waste multiple inflictions in a single Needle Pincer series.)



And one final Fly Drop ends the fight.





The fight ends normally.



And we're just returned to the Test Room, to find Mr. Tester is still here. Absolutely nothing special happens.

That was very silly, and ultimately pointless, but it was a lot of fun to solve; it presented some unique challenges not seen elsewhere in the game, and it's been a while since I got to work through an encounter I genuinely wasn't sure I'd be able to beat. (As I said, I thought of some ways to improve the strategy afterward, but I thought it'd be more fun to show my actual first successful attempt.)

Of course, you may be thinking that this was even more pointless than I'm admitting, because you can use some of the NPCs here to increase your attack power arbitrarily. Which I will absolutely admit is true. Still, I did this using only the tools we legitimately have access to on a completed file, and that made it a fun challenge. I hope you were able to get some of the same enjoyment out of it that I did.

Anyway, this concludes our jaunt into the Test Room! It's neat that they left it in the game, and there are plenty of things to mess around with if you feel like it. I've barely experimented with a lot of the features here, and I'm sure you can dive in a lot more deeply if you want to. That said, I will absolutely recommend making a backup copy of your save file before messing around here yourself, because a lot of things here feel unstable and can permanently mess up your file.

[Explopyro]

This is just a heads-up, for anyone who might be interested in messing with the save editor, aldelaro apparently updated it a couple of days ago (I think literally the day after I posted the update). The link in the update goes to the github and should now take you to the updated version, but I wanted to mention this in case anyone might've downloaded it when I first posted. There is also now an in-browser version, which is significantly more user-friendly than the old release.

[Explopyro]

I am still alive, and yet for better or worse this is still not an update. (I have not abandoned this! At least not in my head. There are still a few minor extras I want to cover and I do want to do a final thoughts post before submitting this for archival. I have just been very overwhelmed with life things most of this year, and have not had the energy to dedicate to doing it properly. I am still holding out hope I may be able to cobble something together before the end of the year, but right now I can't make any promises.)

That said, why am I breaking my silence now?

I received an email a few days ago alerting me that there's a new run of Bug Fables Makeship plushies going on now, featuring Zasp and Mothiva this time.

Both are fully funded now, there's about 11 days remaining in the campaign (I think it'll be ending on 5 Dec), I thought it'd be worth mentioning here in case anyone wants to get in on it. (Yes, of course I'm getting them, I feel obligated to complete the set.)

Hope everyone's having a good holiday season, and hopefully I'll have something more substantial for you soon.

[Explopyro]

80: What a Long Way We've Come (Exploring the Demo) (Part 1)

We're doing something a bit different this time. I thought it might be interesting to take a jaunt through the free playable demo, and take a look at what's changed since early builds of the game, as well as some content that's exclusive to the demo.

(Please note, I'm putting this together from footage I recorded nearly 9 months ago. Hopefully I'll remember everything I was trying to show when I recorded it... sorry it's been so long.)

01 - Bug Fables



Right away, we notice some differences! The demo has a slightly different title screen.

Demo v0.4.5h is the version available for free download on itch.io. This is the last demo they released before the full game came out, and contains the full Chapter 1 and some extra content. The Chapter 1 content was mostly locked in at this point, though as we'll see there were definitely changes between this and the final release.

This is not the first demo they released, but earlier ones are more or less lost content; at least, I haven't been able to track any of them down. Some documentation of one of the earliest (and most cursed) does survive in this youtube playlist, but I wasn't able to find much else.



Also, there's another minor difference on the file select screen. Selecting a file starts the game immediately, without any option to name the file (or enter menu codes).

02 - The Everlasting Sapling



The intro is mostly the same as in the final game, albeit with some minor edits to the text. (There are a lot of minor textual differences between the demo and the final version. I don't intend to show all the text in the demo, nor all the differences, just where there's something interesting.)





Such as this - apparently the Everlasting Sapling was once going to be named the "Eternal Sapling"! It looks like they'd already decided on the name change before this demo, but missed replacing it in this part of the text crawl.

03 - Where Adventurers Gather



The opening scene in the Explorers' Association is very similar, too. But here's a surprising thing: Team Snakemouth didn't have their names yet in this demo! In the original concept, Vi, Kabbu, and Leif were just going to be Bee, Beetle, and Moth, and this lasted surprisingly long into development.



Even as the characters around them all had personal names! Maki was never called anything like "Mantis". (Although in the earlier demo, the prototype of Levi was just "Ladybug Knight", so this did extend beyond the main trio.)



As we see, Vi was still just "Bee". (I'll still be calling them by their proper names. Using the demo names just feels wrong to me, especially after so long.)



This is an interesting change, where I think the earlier line works better ("at least two explorers" became "a duo of explorers"). Presumably they changed it so that Team Snakemouth having three members would be more explicitly unusual?

04 - FIGHT!





Into the tutorial fight with Maki. It's almost exactly the same fight, but take a look at the interface here, the colours are a bit brighter and the font clearly hasn't been finalised yet. It doesn't look bad, but the release version definitely looks a lot more polished.



Instead of "Great!", we get "Okay!" as the base-level success message for action commands. ("Okay!" does persist in the final game for the first hit of some multi-hit attacks, so it's not completely gone, but it's much less common.)



And here, the action command bar for Vi's basic attack is a bit more crudely drawn, the black outline on the success zone is missing.



Artis still gives the Hard Mode medal.





The menus look pretty close to the final version, albeit missing that same polish. And the medal description text hasn't been finalised yet either. (I'll be using Hard Mode for the demo also, I have to keep it at least somewhat interesting to play.)

Once we gain control, I definitely find myself noticing this demo just feels a bit sluggish compared to the final game. I'm not sure if everything just moves a bit more slowly, or if there are performance issues that would be later fixed with better optimisation. (I don't think it's framerate issues, because this does have the 60 FPS setting.) I do know the walking speed was increased after this demo, so that's probably part of it, but it feels like a more widespread thing than just that.

06 - Outskirts



Here's a line I forgot to show back in the very first update. This ant's still around in the final game, I just somehow missed talking to her.

Time to head toward Snakemouth Den, there aren't any other differences to show in the starting area.



Here, we can see enemy health bars look slightly different after Spying. The defence icon actually wasn't added until v1.1, so this is how it looked for a while (barring some minor font changes).



Also, here's a pretty sizeable mechanical difference: this demo doesn't have Super Blocking! (Maki also didn't mention it in the tutorial conversation.) I don't know when they decided on the concept, but it didn't make it in here.

(Some of the battle sound effects, such as when you get hit or block, also clearly haven't been finalised yet. But you'll have to take my word for that for now; I did record the boss fights, so you may hear the differences later.)



The earlier font just weirds me out on this screen, for some reason. The number scrolling was also sped up significantly in the final game, a definite improvement.

Also, another difference. We'll see it more clearly later, but the level-up thresholds don't change in the demo; it's always 100 EXP (like Paper Mario was).





The scene where we help Chuck cut grass is mostly unchanged. (Though as I believe I noted earlier, here as well as in release versions prior to 1.1, this scene is what unlocks using Kabbu's horn in the overworld. You can't cut grass or first strike enemies until after this scene.)



That said, the reward is different! Instead of 10 berries, Chuck gives us a Honey Drop. (In the release version, there's still a Honey Drop you can find on this screen by cutting grass.)

Ah, honey. Wonderful honey!
Eat it if you're having a rough time. Alright?

The dialogue afterward is also slightly different, of course, teaching us about honey instead of berries.



On reaching Snakemouth, the same conversation plays and we get a discovery, but here we can see an older version of the "logbook updated" icon. Most of the icons were redrawn between this and the final version, and they switched to white text which is a lot easier to read.



The discoveries menu is fully functional, and the description text is largely unchanged. Though we'll note there are only 6 to find in the demo.



This is still here, too. There's no explanatory message on finding the first one, and also these don't do anything yet outside of achievements (yes, the demo has achievements) because Shades' shop doesn't exist.



Into Snakemouth. The dungeon layout is almost identical to the final game, so I'm only going to show the highlights.

12 - Snakemouth Den



I'm pretty sure I mentioned this the first time, but we can't get this mushroom the first time we see it (and couldn't in versions prior to 1.1).



First, we have to see this scene, which unlocks the Beemerang for field use.



Then we can go back and get the mushroom. (It still kind of baffles me that they changed this, and I remain unsure whether or not it was intentional.)







Everything proceeds more or less identically to the final version.



Although Leif introduces himself as "Moth", of course. (The wording of his introduction fits a bit better when he's calling himself something generic, I think.)



Let's take a brief break at this save crystal to see something else.



Here's the file select screen when there's actual data. The demo doesn't have file names or any of the progress indicators for the various chapters, all of that would get added later.

Back into it.



The enemy known as Zombiant in the final game is just called "Zombie Ant" here.



Levelling up for the first time in the demo.





The choices here are the same as in the final game. I'll take MP.



And at Rank 2, Vi still gets Secret Stash. This skill is unchanged here.



This Crystal Berry is in the same location in the final game.



As is this HP Plus medal. (Some of the medal and item locations are different in the demo, so I'm also pointing out the ones that aren't.)



Here's another change that would be made - the colours highlighting equipped medals for each of the bugs is less eye-searingly bright in the final version. Also, the final game has icons for the characters' faces in addition to the colour to show who's wearing the medal; this is definitely an improvement for things like colour-blind accessibility.



This scene plays out the same as it does in the final game. Leif joins as a combatant and Turn Relay becomes available.



Leif's Icefall appears the same as in the final version...





...Except it inflicts a 2-turn freeze. In the final game, only Frigid Coffin did that!



Here's a shot of multiple enemies frozen by it after a single casting. This version of Icefall is absurdly strong, and nerfing it was probably a good idea.



Here's the Turn Relay icon from the demo. It's got little sketches of the characters' heads on it! The final version just uses circular arrows; it's definitely cleaner and easier to read, but this one's cute.





Eventually we level up again.



I take MP again.



This is different, though! At Rank 3, Kabbu learns "Horn Dash". In the release versions, you don't get any skill at Rank 3, and he learns Heavy Strike at Rank 4.







This is Dash Through from the final game. This skill's moved around a lot, hasn't it? From the beginning of the game in the demo, to Chapter 5 in the Wild Swamplands (release versions up to v1.05), then to Chapter 3 at the Lost Sands entrance in v1.1 and later (with the "Horn Dash" name returning once it gets upgraded in Chapter 5 to smash boulders).

It's interesting to think about from a design perspective. Playing through the demo you can get the sense some encounters here are designed with it in mind (e.g. the one in the screenshot with multiple flippable enemies, where you can 1-turn the fight if you get a first strike and use it). But 5 TP is a lot at this point in the game, so it feels reasonably balanced since you probably can't afford to spam it.

On the other hand, it also makes a lot of sense as a thing to have unlock later. Bug Fables is pretty stingy with attacks that hit all enemies, and Dash Through/Horn Dash trivialises a lot of these early encounters with multiple flippable targets. By the time you get Dash Through in the game proper, it feels like another tool in your arsenal rather than a nuke.

On the other other hand, Kabbu's attacks in the early game feel kind of samey, since his normal attack and Heavy Strike use very similar action commands; early Horn Dash does give a nice sense of variety. I don't know if this placement in the demo actually reflects something they were considering, or if it was just to add that variety since the demo is otherwise short.

If I had to commit to an opinion, I think the final placement in Chapter 3 probably is the right one.

Anyway.



This Crystal Berry is also in the same location as the final game.



This is different, though! The final game has Poison Defender here.



I think this placement probably was just for the demo; considering the demo mentions being made by Dr. HB, it would make sense if they'd already done some of that concepting and it was always planned to be gotten from her. That said, this medal works a bit differently in the demo, and doesn't have the secondary function of making Spy actions not cost a turn.



This Magic Seed is still here in the demo, too.





Rank 4!



I'm actually going to take TP for once! (My thinking was that there are only so many medals available in the demo. That said, you can still go MP only if you want; as we'll see, there are some expensive ones later on.)



Leif learns Charge Up. In the final game, this skill requires a medal, which you can't get until after Chapter 3 (it's found on the roof of the house Team Snakemouth can buy). Rank 4 does give you a skill, but it's Kabbu's Heavy Strike.

When you get it for free, this is something you might actually consider using! Especially since this skill is the only source of charge-ups in the demo; I'm not sure if they knew at this point that it would become one of the game's major mechanics. In the final game, it's just not worth the medal slot when there are so many other sources of charge.

There's one major difference with the skill, in that the charge-up icon (green arrow) hasn't been implemented yet, so you don't get a clear visual indication of how many charges a character has.



We also get an achievement? (Our first achievement so far in the demo.)



It's an achievement for reaching rank 4. This isn't the level cap, but it does mark the point at which we don't learn any new skills or get bonuses other than the one we choose; I don't actually know what the level cap in the demo is. (In the final game, this achievement will be repurposed and used as the one for reaching the level cap.)



Here's a good opportunity to take a glance through the menu, and observe there are 12 achievements we can get in the demo.



Also, the demo bestiary has 10 entries.



And the recipe book has 15. (Yes, the demo does have cooking.)



There's still a Poison Resistance medal here.



It's largely unchanged. (I'm showing this so you can see the yellow colour for medals equipped to Vi. It's also brighter than the shade chosen in the final release.)



Onward to the Spider.

13 - It's Getting Scary!



This scene doesn't change much.

14 - His Friends Call Him Spuder (Don't Call Him Spuder)

Click me for video!



Nor does the fight, really. This fight was pretty tightly designed even back when this demo came out; it does a good job of testing all the skills the game's expected you to learn by this point, and gives you ways to use most of your abilities.



That said, there is one reasonably major change! The poison breath attack is just blocked like any other attack, instead of having a mash action command. (It also just deals less damage.) Like super blocks, it seems like they may not have come up with that mechanic yet when they made this demo.



Also, Horn Dash is a pretty elegant way to deal with the minions it summons, so that's another way the fight is potentially slightly easier in the demo.



After defeating the spider, this scene plays out just like in the release version...





But this is different! Instead of the end of chapter message, we get this. I appreciate that they make it explicit the rest of the demo content isn't canon. (That said, as we'll see, in practice a lot of the content here did make it into the final game in some form...)

Instead of finding ourselves in the Outskirts like in the final game, we'll fade in and see everyone gathered in the Ant Kingdom plaza.

17 - Ant Kingdom



Wow! Cool!
...That's not how it went, Bee.
Eh, close enough.
Not really...
But eh, what should we do next?
What SHOULDN'T we do next!? There's lots of treasure to find!
Indeed. Let us depart!



It means a lot to us that you got this far.
If you're still full of energy, try to complete the side quests and Library!

In case we didn't already get the idea, the rest of the demo is pretty sandboxy. There are some side quests available, but otherwise we're just meant to mess around and fill out the various achievements.







Two of which we'll be awarded right away. (Like the final game, there's an additional achievement for beating bosses with Hard Mode equipped. It seems they thought of that pretty early.)



And with this, we're free to explore the plaza. I'm going to skip any of the dialogue that's unchanged in the final version.



The scene when first talking to Samira is unchanged.



As is how she works generally, although the songs are more expensive in the demo (5 berries each!). Also, there's no option to buy them all at once, so it's a bit more tedious to do here. One of the achievements is for buying all the songs (as in the final game as well), we'll get to that eventually.



Instead of Utter, Vivi is manning the quest board. (In the final game, she's in the mines, and gives us a side quest to buy her a hat from the Bee Kingdom.)

That said, the initial conversation with her is identical to the one we'd have with Utter in the release version. She does get a unique banter though.

Vivi helps with the Notice Board.
She makes sure to keep the board in pristine shape, and alert others of new posts.
I hear she sometimes helps out people herself. She is an outstanding citizen.

Let's take a look at the quests.



This one's identical to the final game.



As is this one, although as we'll come to see, the reward is different.



This mentions "on the way to Snakemouth" instead of the cave leading to Golden Settlement. The core concept is the same, but the execution's a bit different.



This quest made it into the final game pretty much unchanged, though it comes along much later and the reward is different.



And this one's probably the most interesting one in the demo; the quest itself made it into the game, but a lot of the dialogue is quite different.



Here we can see a few interesting things. They were already thinking about placing the dirt mounds with buried items, even though there's no way to dig them up yet in the demo.

The gate to the north is locked; they didn't implement the Ant Palace yet.

And the guard here actually has a banter unique to the demo:

I think this is Ant Guard... seven?
Ant Guard number four used to occupy this post, but management must have switched them around.
She probably won't have an issue with us, well behaved as most of us are.
I heard that!

I'm not going to show the Inn Review quest, since it's completely unchanged from the final game. In the course of getting it, though, we can get the rest of the discoveries:



The first four are in Snakemouth Den, then we have the painting in the inn and the statue in the plaza. (I'm not showing the text because there are no noteworthy differences.)



Getting all the discoveries qualifies us for one of the achievements.



I wonder where that place is.

Janet has dialogue unique to the demo; this is hinting toward a way to refight the Spider, since otherwise the Hard Mode achievement would be missable. We'll see what she's talking about fairly soon.



Also here's text you never see in the final game, because this lock brings up a Key Items menu prompt instead.



The Commercial District looks pretty much the same as in the final game. Interestingly, they put a Crystal Berry here where the Underground Bar will eventually be; otherwise, there aren't any scenes here and you can't interact with the lid covering the entrance. I definitely get the sense they were already planning ahead with the design elements (we've got the arrow on the box pointing at the lid, the buried item spot, etc all hint this place is meant to be important), but nothing's implemented yet.



Madame Butterfly's shop has the same inventory as in the final game.



And here's Fry. His dialogue's pretty much the same as in the final game, and he works similarly (you can cook one or two items). You can't speed up his animations, though; in fact, that feature wouldn't be added until v1.1.

We'll be back here later to go through all the recipes that existed in this version, since completing the recipe log is one of the achievements. Some of the items were changed a bit (stats, sprite redraws, etc). For now, I'll prepare a Hearty Breakfast for Chuck, since we still need that.



Merab's shop is here as well.



Though he doesn't offer the option to reshuffle his inventory, I guess they hadn't thought of that option yet. (It also doesn't reshuffle after you make a purchase, you have to leave and reenter the screen. This is how it worked in Paper Mario... but the final version they landed on is definitely a nice improvement.)



Most of the remaining medals in the demo are here (basically, everything that isn't a quest reward). At this point in the recording I didn't have enough berries to buy everything, but I did pick up the ones showing here.

I'll show the full list soon enough, but perhaps most noteworthy is that Poison Attacker and Poison Defender are in his list. That concept definitely seems to have been in the game from very early on.



This area's different. This will become the Residential District in the final game, but in the demo there's some kind of stage here?



This sign is intriguing. This is why I'm fixating on getting all the achievements: once we do, this sign goes away and there will be something to see here.



On our way out of the plaza, I stop to talk to Tod briefly (since his lines are a bit different to reflect where the ball is in the demo).





Instead of in the Residential District, Bug Me Not! can be found here in the Outskirts, by Madeleine's house.



It costs 4 MP here, though (as opposed to 1 in the final release). This is more in line with its Paper Mario counterpart, though I do approve of it being lowered in the final game as a quality-of-life thing. For the most part, you're not going to be making meaningful tradeoffs when equipping this, considering most medals apply mainly in combat and you use this to skip combat.



Artis has a reward for defeating the Spider on Hard Mode.



This is different! This is the first (and actually only) instance of a medal that was completely removed in the transition from this demo to the full game.



Speed Up cost 1 MP and increases overworld movement speed. I can't quantify by exactly how much, but it feels like the speed with it equipped is the same as the walking speed in the final game; moving around without it in the demo feels a bit sluggish.

In essence, they seem to have realised this didn't make a whole lot of sense as a mechanic, as it was essentially "lose 1 MP to not be annoyed" and didn't add anything interesting gameplay-wise. This isn't a medal anyone is going to miss (although the icon is cute).







This bandit's not in the final game, though there's a character with a similar function in the Ant Mines. I won't be using the shortcut, but it's nice that it's here. He does get a banter though:

This guy looks super shady.
It's not like we look any better.
Nonsense. I look trustworthy and approachable!
...
...
H-Hello?

This one's kind of cute. They were putting the charm in these right from the start.



The caravan shop is unchanged.



After picking up Leby for the escort quest, I checked in their house. No Mistake for us to steal here, that must've gotten added later.



For giving Chuck his Hearty Breakfast, we get Berserker instead of Mighty Pebble. That's different! His lines are different to reflect it, too:

That'll make you really angry, but really strong!
Just like me when I don't have food...



The way Berserker works is a bit different, but the concept stays the same. That said, the order of operations is a bit disappointing: to the extent I tested it, it seems to double the base attack value, and bonuses from Attack Up, Poison Attacker, Charge Up, or being in front apply afterward. In practical terms, this is just giving +2 attack, so the version in the final game is actually stronger at +3 (as well as costing fewer MP, it's 6 MP in the final game).



This Crystal Berry behind Chuck's never moved, although in the final game there's a boulder blocking the way to it that isn't here in the demo.





That's the fifth and final Crystal Berry in the demo, so we get the achievement.



Here by Snakemouth Den, we can see the bandit again, so this is where he'd have taken us.



Over this way, we can spot a Numbnail. Getting close to it starts a cutscene.



Do you think it has the kid's ball?
Only one way to find out...



Then we're thrown into battle with two Numbnails. They're very similar to the enemy in the final game, but they have more HP here (11 HP, as opposed to 7).

(These Numbnails don't respawn, but if you forget to spy on them here, there's also one in the play, so the bestiary entry isn't missable.)



Winning the fight immediately gets us Tod's ball.



Onward, as we trek through Snakemouth again (we still need to find Dib), we can be reminded these doors are open now. I still think it's a great bit of subtle design that they use the Leby and Dib sidequest to get you to backtrack here and notice the doors have opened.



This room's different! Of course, in the final game, the entrance to the Lab is through here. (If this room looks like anything, it looks a bit like the Cave of Trials room in the final game.) There's a Zombiant up on the pedestal there.







If we talk to it, it gives us the option to refight the Spider. (This is clearly what Janet was hinting at earlier.) You can fight it as many times as you want, but there's not much to see from our perspective. For the purposes of the demo, it's really nice to have this as a way to play with all the medals and try out different builds.

There's also a banter.

This ant is different from other ants we saw.
How so?
For once, it is not trying to kill us.
Maybe we should talk to it to see what it wants.

Sure, all right then.



Finding Dib isn't any different, but he gives us Mighty Pebble instead of the Lore Book we'd get in the final game. (I'm not sure if they'd decided to have a second major collectible yet at the point they made this.)



Here's one minor difference, though: we're forced to warp back to the Outskirts after completing the quest, instead of being given an option to stay here if we want.



Mighty Pebble hasn't changed.





Returning Tod's ball gets us Break, instead of Sleep Resistance.



The cost to equip this will be reduced from 3 MP to 2 in the final game, and Break costs 3 TP to cast in the demo compared to 2 in the final game, but it's otherwise the same medal we know.

For character limit reasons, I have to split the post here. Back momentarily with the rest of the demo content!

[Explopyro]

80: What a Long Way We've Come (Exploring the Demo) (Part 2)

22 - Fine Arts



Our final quest is in the theatre, and there are some other things to see there too.



First up, despite not being an actor yet, Chubee is still here. Let's talk to her.



Heya, Chubee! Come to see the play?
Yup. Bugaria is just full of talent!
These your friends? They look cool!
Yes.
C-Cool? I mean, yes!
Uh, yeah. We explore and stuff.
Awesome. Let's go grab a bite later, Bee.
Heheh. It's nice to see that Bee has friends.
...Uh, just as expected.

This is a fun little conversation. We of course got some like it in the game proper, but there isn't really any place this particular one would fit. (It does seem that Chubee being friendly/a fan of the party was an early idea.) There's also a banter:

That's Chubee!
She's always traveling and looking for the best foods and shows!
You seem to care for her.
Eh. When you get to know Chubee, you can't help but like her!
You'll have to introduce us, Bee.
I don't know about that...

Seems like Chubee was a bit more of a one-note character at this point; I like that in the game proper she gets to be an actor and have interests other than food.



The drum over here isn't interactable in the demo. (In the game proper there's a Crystal Berry hidden here if you spin it enough, one of the more well-hidden ones in my opinion.)





Fuzzo, of course, is here to sell the Bug Ranger plushie. This conversation's pretty much unchanged in the final game.



And on stage is Mothiva. Before we talk to her, there's a banter:

It's Mothiva! She is super popular!
Even I have heard of her from my homeland, it is such an honor to be here near her in person!
...We do not see how she is that special.
Come on, Moth! Even you must have heard of her, wherever you came from!
...

Heh. Let's talk to her.



Oh, who might you three be?
We saw your listing for help. We are at your service.
(We only wanted to watch...)
Oh, really? Hmm...



That's great! When can you start? We have to rehearse!
No audition?
Shush Moth, don't ruin this.
We can start as soon as you are ready.



Let's begin! Mothiva's training regimen!









Look. People are coming in. Don't ruin this! Just talk to me when you are ready to start the play.



She's "a piece of work", alright.
This is why you shouldn't meet your idols.
Still, let's do our best. This play carries a lot of people's efforts!
And we're actually getting paid. Let's do this!



So, yeah, as you might expect, having to work with Mothiva in the play leads to very different dialogue than when Chubee was the lead actor. This is a lot of fun, though I also quite like the version in the final game.

We get a break here after the scene, we have to talk to Mothiva again to start the play.



Let's do it.



Travelers from all over the world wished to visit. For its clear water and its beautiful ruler.
The princess would greet all who came with smiles and hospitality.
It was so, how an evil prince fell in love...



(Most of the text in the play isn't changed, but IMO the tone feels a bit different when the leads are Mothiva and Zasp, so I'm going to show it all even though it might not, strictly speaking, be new content.)



Oh, how I wished for thee to make this easy.
You have left me no choice!









W-We will stop you!







(Zasp's animations have a bit more personality to them than the Burglar's, which helps here. It's otherwise exactly the same scene.)



You freakish beasts, you dare stand between us and the princess!?
You chose poorly. Prepare yourself!



This enemy formation survived to the final game (although as mentioned earlier, Numbnails' stats got tweaked a bit).

This is the only Acornling in the entire demo. It has 8 HP instead of 7, but otherwise is pretty much identical to the final version (although I think in the game proper, they have two different attack animations and can fake you out; I've only seen one in the demo).





Whatever shall we do now? How will we face the people!?
We will get her back! After them!



The journey was long, and the desert unforgiving...



Do not complain! Our suffering is slim, compared to what the princess faces.



(I think it's pretty clearly implied here that Mothiva is the one griping off-stage. This line's actually nicer in Chubee's version!)



Out of our way, scoundrels. We have no time for thee.
Yeah! Or face my beemerang! I mean, blade!
Nyehehe. You shouldn't have come to the desert...
In such expensive clothes!
Your greed knows no end... prepare yourself!



This fight is also very similar, albeit with adjusted stats. The Bandit here has 7 HP and 2 Defence, instead of 11 HP and 1 Defence in the final game.





The Bandit does provide a decent opportunity to try out Break, though. We can see Leif's full demo moveset here, and Break has the same animation as in the final game.

They have all the moves they do in the final game, though they can't steal items yet, and the Thief's wind attack uses a regular action command instead of button mashing (just like the Spider's poison breath earlier).



Let's get outta here, boss!





It's our lucky day!
Eat quickly, for there is no time to celebrate.
We must reach our liege with haste!



And now, it was time to take back what they had lost...



Even with all my riches, with the grandeur of my land...
You would still reject me!?



Hey! Give the princess back!
You will pay for your crimes!
My knights! You've come to my aid!
Why... why must fate work against me?





Click me for video!

04 - FIGHT!



So, Zasp is actually more or less the final boss of the demo. This is a very different fight from the Burglar.



Here's the stats you see if you spy him.



He has Taunt.



He has his Spicy Berries.



He has his needle salvo.



And he has his martial arts combo. (I think only 1-2 hits, though.)

This is very similar to Zasp's moveset in the final game, though of course it's different fighting him without Mothiva. Despite that, I think he's a bit scarier in the demo, because he can output a lot of damage quickly and you don't have that many mitigation options available.

That said, this fight isn't terribly hard as long as you're paying attention and have some decent items. Also, it definitely seems like they want you to think about the tools the demo's given up to this point: he has defence, so you can use Break; he has enough HP that you might want to mess around with Poison Attacker or Charge Up; he hits hard enough that you might consider stacking defence and using Taunt, etc. It's the most challenging fight the demo has to offer, but ultimately we're still in demo-land here.

I don't think it's interesting enough to give a full play-by-play, but if you want to see the entire fight, the video's there for you to watch.



Also, here's something that was odd. This is Vi's Tornado Toss after 3 Charge-Ups from Leif; I'm not sure why the damage drops from 4 to 2. I don't know whether the damage calculations for Tornado Toss were intentionally changed, or this is some kind of glitch.



I will show you my true power!
No... we are too drained from the fight!
Is this the end for us...?
Hey, I can still fight!







Again, this worked fine in the game proper, but I definitely get the impression it was written with these animations in mind.



Instead of generic cheers, the crowd's all shouting Mothiva's name.



In the name of my mother, the Queen... I grant you the highest honors.
To stay by my side as right hand bugs, as we restore our kingdom.
It was all for you, Princess.





It went way better than okay.
I didn't really like my role... but I managed.
It was super easy. Now, for payment...



(Good thing the audience is happy just seeing me...)
Well, the play succeeded, so fine. Here is your reward.



(This is significantly more lucrative than in the final game! Of course, it serves a different purpose here. This is basically meant to give you as much easy money as you want, since this is pretty much the end of the demo content and you may want to buy everything you haven't gotten already.)



Honestly, a lot of people are asking for an encore.
Feel free to talk to me if you want to go again.







One of the achievements is for completing all the quests.



And another is for filling the bestiary, which we've coincidentally also done.



Of course, we can also afford the Bug Ranger plushie now.





Buying this is also one of the achievements, naturally. Unfortunately, for better or worse, it doesn't serve any other purpose here.

(In case you were wondering... yes, I've tried doing the demo content in a different order so I could give the Bug Ranger Plushie to Tod, and he doesn't have a special reaction. And there aren't any other NPCs you can give a key item to. I don't think they'd come up with that functionality yet... oh well.)



We can get this for buying all of Samira's songs. (This is a bit more tedious than in the actual game, since it has to be done one by one.)



Next up, if we cook all of Fry's recipes, we can get this one.





There are 15 recipes in the demo, and ingredients-wise these all made it into the final game. The only combination that works slightly differently is Spicy Berry + Burly Berry; since there's no Berry Jam, that combination ends up yielding Roasted Berries instead. There's also no Big Mistake yet.

Some of the items' stats got tweaked between this and the final release, though, so let's take a quick look at those:



Leaf Salad recovers 7 HP, instead of 6.



This item is called "Leaf Burrito" in the demo, it would eventually be renamed to Leaf Omelet although everything else about it stayed the same.



Mushroom Skewers got severely nerfed, in the final game it's 6 HP and 3 TP. This would have easily been one of the best healing items for most of the game, otherwise.



Roasted Berries heals the party by 3 HP here; this would be reduced to 2 HP in the final game. This earlier sprite also looks pretty different.



Finally, we'll buy all the medals Merab has left. (This might well necessitate another run through the play, the 150 berries doesn't go quite as far as you might expect.)



We get this for collecting all the medals.







Here's the full list of medals available in the demo. Most of them aren't drastically different from where they end up in the final game (though we've already discussed a few numerical tweaks; in addition to those, notice Poison Attacker costs 4 MP in the demo, and would eventually be reduced to 3 MP).



This is quite different, though. The demo version of TP Plus actually gives 5 TP, making it actually more efficient than putting a level into TP! This definitely makes sense to have rebalanced later.



Once we have all the other achievements, it updates to add this one (it took a few moments for the game to notice).



And once we have the completion achievement, the sign's no longer blocking the stage here!



Tristan, Mar, and Genow are hanging out here. It's an early dev room!



In honor of Marcio, Jose, Tristan, Poppy and Stefan... whose efforts make this kingdom better every day!

This might've been the entire team at this point, I'm not sure.

Anyway, let's talk to them!



I am the Programmer, Artist, Modeller, Animator, etc. I run the crew, so to speak.
Thanks for playing the game. It means a lot to us. I hope you enjoyed yourself.
Please look forward to more stuff coming in the following months.



Gen and I started this project back in 2015 based on a silly comic we made about explorer bugs.
Bee, Beetle and Moth were the characters we used then, and after reaching a point in the comic, we thought:
"Hey, why not make this a game?"
You probably played b1, the first demo with badly made graphics.
I wanted to get all systems coded before I finished it, but the code was such a mess that I decided to start over from scratch.
This also meant making new graphics, so there wouldn't be much trouble and wasted time redrawing the placeholders.
I hope you like this new look.
I am satisfied with what we have in this new version, and I hope you are as well.
We still have a lot of work ahead, but I am sure we can do it!
Thanks for hearing me out. It was a bunch of random stuff, but I felt like saying it.

Mar actually gives a fairly succinct explanation of the early concept and development history here.

That first demo he mentioned was much, much rougher; I haven't been able to find a playable version myself, but there's some footage of it on youtube, as I mentioned near the beginning of this post. Also, here are some screenshots I pulled out, just to give you the idea:



The early demo still used the first working title of "Paper Bugs"!



The leaf animation looks fully hand-drawn, too. (These were animated, though, even back then! The concept was strong from the beginning.)



The Ladybug Knight here would eventually become Levi. Just look at these early designs. The rough spritework is weirdly kind of charming, though I'm glad the actual game doesn't look like this.

(Also, the layout of this area is an early version of what became the Test Room.)



An early battle screen, showing early versions of the Zombiant and Jellyshroom. Also, Vi's battle stance here is wielding needles, the Beemerang concept came along later.



And an early pause menu, with some very goofy sprites.

I think that's more than enough of this; if you really want to see more of it, check out the video footage.





Oh my goodness! I'm sorry!
I've really been trying to fix all of them as I find them...
Just send a message on social media, and I promise to fix it!



It really is, isn't it?
Sometimes, when life gets really hard... you need to appreciate the nice things around you!



I'm a bumblebee! The cutest, right?





Some nice messages there from Genow. (As far as I can tell, he really did make an effort to correct all the typos that were pointed out to him. A few did remain in the full release, at least last I checked, though they might well have been fixed in one of the small patches that came out since I started the LP.)



Finally, we have Tristan.





R-really? Thanks, that *burp* m-means a lot to me!
...



...S-Sorry.



S-sure kiddo, let a pro *burp* show you how it's done.

83 - A Virtuoso's Tribute



Wait, no, that's...
Hold on I g-got this...



What? You finished the demo. You don't need these. I DO.

(This got a chuckle out of me. This gag returned in the final game, Tristan can play this "song" if you find and talk to him during the ending sequence.)



I know what you're thinking. "Cricket musician? That's kind of lazy, isn't it?"
I-I'm a grasshopper, okay? Not a *burp* cricket!





Also, if we try to check a banter for any of them, we'll get this:

I can't grasp the true nature of these bugs...!



That's all the content in the demo! I hope you found at least some of this interesting; it was kind of neat to take a walk down memory lane and see an earlier version of the game.

Honestly, playing this now, I'm pretty impressed by how much of a strong concept they already had in place here; it isn't hard to see how this grew to become the game I love so much. The mechanics feel surprisingly coherent and hold up: combat already feels strategic and interesting (e.g. you can find moments to feel clever for swapping positioning around, taking advantage of ice weaknesses with Leif, using Turn Relay, and so on), and they've already shown some creative medal concepts (such as the start of poison builds, and medals with big drawbacks like Berserker). And the charm and personality are already taking shape. It feels like a lot of what makes Bug Fables great is already here.

I've played a lot of game prototypes/demos that felt more like a proof of concept than an actual satisfying gameplay experience, but this definitely isn't one of them.

[Explopyro]

81: Fool Me Once... Fool Me Too Many Times (April Fools Gags)

Over the years, even before the game released, the Moonsprout Games/Bug Fables team have consistently done yearly April Fools gags. Some of them were fairly minor, but others ended up being fully-playable minigame releases. So that's what we're going to be looking at today.

This wiki page is my primary reference for this material and the chronology. I knew about some but not all of these before doing research for this post.

1. "Actual Bugs" (2017)

The devs made this Tumblr post declaring their intent to change the game from "Paper Bugs" to "Actual Bugs" and that it would delay the release of the game.



It includes this image, which I'm reproducing here for posterity.

2. Demo v0.4.1 (2018)

This Tumblr post announced the release of a new demo, claiming they were changing direction based on feedback from the Indiegogo backers. "This demo has the game’s new prologue, alongside two endings."

"Demo v0.4.1" is still available for download on itch.io, if you want to try it. (For some context here, the naming scheme is very similar to the official demos that were coming out at the time, the v0.4.5 demo that is still publicly available released a few months before this. Though you may notice the numbering for this one is off, I think it's meant to be intentionally suspicious.)

As for what this is, uhh... let's take a look at it?

21 - Fry it Up!



Well, that's certainly a title screen, isn't it? Why is there a human here? Who is this, anyway?

...Yeah. This is an anime-style visual novel thing made in Ren'Py.

main.mp3

(There are a couple of music tracks in this which aren't part of the official OST. I don't know if these were made especially for this, or whether they're stock music or something. And I don't think these were composed by Tristan, per the end credits of this thing. Regardless, this fairly short track loops through most of the early scenes.)



Featuring redesigned human versions of a bunch of the main cast. Here's Bee (Vi), the protagonist of this thing.

This doesn't have much of a plot, and most of the dialogue is intentionally cringeworthy and grating (either poking fun at romance VN cliches, or wink-wink-nudge-nudge isn't it weird we aren't bugs). I'm going to abridge this below and do only minimal commentary, because torturing myself with secondhand embarrassment is not my idea of a good time. If you want to see the whole thing, I did transcribe it, or you can play it yourself since it's fairly short.

That said, the reimagined character designs are kind of fun (in a bizarre sort of way), so let's breeze through this and look at them all.



Here's Chubee. (I continue to be surprised at how prominent a character she appears to have been in these early materials.)



Here's Professor Neolith.



The main thrust of that scene (aside from way too much silly nonsense dialogue) is that Neolith wants us to deliver a letter to Fry. This choice here of where to go looking for him is the one actual choice/gameplay decision in this entire thing; every other dialogue forces us to exhaust all the options before moving on.

03 - Where Adventurers Gather



If we choose the track field, we meet Beetle (Kabbu), and the music changes to the Explorers' Association theme. It does amuse me the way they gave him a big spike of hair to look like a horn.

15 - The One Left Behind (Leif's Theme)



And if we choose the library, we meet Moth (Leif) instead, and hear Leif's theme.

After exhausting the dialogue with whichever of those two we run into, the paths recombine.



A few scenes later, we run into Zasp. (There's a line where he says he has a cold and he's wearing the mask to not get people sick, which is I guess vaguely amusing in retrospect?)



Then Mothiva shows up.

gun.mp3



And pulls out a gun?

Shortly after this, the screen just goes black (though the narration points out the gun never went off, and Bee/Vi was struck in the head with a blunt object).

"TO BE CONTINUED..."

And credits roll, with a bunch of concept sketches.

end.mp3









This one looks to be a version of the theatre proprietor M.M.?



This is Fry and Neolith, I think?



ree.mp3



And the credits end with this charming little animation, set to silly music.



After I finished the first run through this, I saw this alternate version of the title screen. This one features Bee/Vi with plushies of the rest of the main cast; I think the first one was meant to be Mothiva with a bunch of Zasp plushies?

I think that's more than enough of this one.

3. Nintendo 64 port (2019)

The devs made this Tumblr post announcing their intent to make a N64 port of the game and that this would delay the release.



It includes this image of a mocked-up Bug Fables N64 cart, which I'm reproducing here for posterity.

4. Bug Fables: The Everlasting FIGHTERS! (2020)

This one was announced on Twitter, saying the following:
"Bug Fables: The Everlasting Fighters is coming February 30th, 2420!
Get the prequel to know the cast better here!: (link to Bug Fables on Steam)"

The post also included a short teaser trailer (which you can still watch on youtube).







It's got a more or less standard fighting game interface, and Maki fighting Tanjerin.



There's some kind of special move/combo thing with a cut-in of Maki's face.



Then Tanjerin blows up the world.



The trailer just ends with this. Is Tanjy just telling tall tales here?

Honestly, I thought this one was pretty funny.

There's also a wiki article on The Everlasting Fighters, which includes a lot of notes based on dev comments and speculation about what this game could have been. It seems that the team may have actually planned to make this fighting game spinoff at one point, but according to this Twitter thread, eventually abandoned it due to some combination of scope creep and the pandemic. I don't get the impression this ever made it out of the concept stage, but there are some prototype images floating around (e.g. on that thread) in addition to the trailer.

5. Bug Fables: Aphid Festival (2021)

This one was also announced on Twitter, with the claim that "Bug Fables 2 is finally here! And it's... an Aphid Farming Game!?"

This is another fully playable one. "Aphid Festival" is still available for download on itch.io.

Let's take a look at it.

26 - Golden Lands









We get this brief intro to the concept.



And then are immediately dropped into the game. This is basically one of those idle/clicker games, and is played with a mouse.

The berry counter slowly ticks up, and you can get more berries faster by clicking the aphid to pet it (it twitches a little and squeaks each time).

There's also a bunch of menu icons we can click to go to other screens.



The !!! icon in the upper left opens this screen. Nothing to see here yet.



And the book icon in the lower left corner takes us to this saving screen.

27 - Kut it Up!



The stewpot icon brings us to Kut. We can click on any of the three ingredients to have him cook them (for a fee of 20 berries).



Here's the cooking animation. It's similar to the one he has in the actual game, though not identical.



The icon of the cooked dish appears to be a random food item from the game that can be made with that ingredient. Here we picked a mushroom and got a Mushroom Skewer.

Each aphid has a preferred type of food (in this case, mushrooms). If you prepare it the preferred food it recovers 50% HP.





Whereas the other two foods will restore 25% HP instead.

(I didn't see it happen while recording, but as a curiosity, the wiki claims one of the items Kut can end up making here if you choose honey is a Crisbee Donut, which he can't make in the actual game as it's Crisbee's speciality.)

When we're done cooking, clicking the red face icon takes us back to the main screen.

04 - FIGHT!



The Attack icon brings us to the training screen.



Each time we click on Tanjy, the aphid will attack him, gain a level and lose a bunch of HP. (The amount of HP loss varies, I think maybe depending on level? I'm not completely sure, but from full health you tend to get 4 attacks in.)



Once the aphid runs out of HP, you can't attack any more, and you have to go back to Kut to feed it more. (Maybe after a detour to the main screen to pet it and get berries.)



Once the aphid is level 10, this ? icon appears.



Clicking that opens up this screen, where we can choose a mate for our aphid.



And then we're brought back here, but with a new level 1 aphid of a different colour to start the process all over again!



If we check the ancestry screen now, it'll show our previous green aphid as the first generation.

If we keep playing, we can keep raising aphids to level 10, then mating them to produce new generations and fill this out. I haven't played with this that extensively, but as far as I can tell, the colours are at least somewhat random (and don't necessarily correlate with the parent you choose). Each new aphid might have a different preferred food; as far as I can tell that's randomly determined also.

This is a cute little game, but there's not a whole lot of depth to it and it gets old pretty quickly.

Aphid Festival also has its own page on the Bug Fables wiki, although it mostly just describes the game.

6. Vi Simulator (2022)

"Vi Simulator" was announced on Twitter with a short trailer. This is also still available for download on itch.io.



There's a 3D model of Vi, and a cursor moving back and forth over the bar. When we click...



It launches her.



This giant image of Tanjerin appears in the sky.



And eventually she'll crash in some way with exaggerated giant explosions and ragdoll effects.

I was able to get 3 different outcomes here, which I've tried to capture animations of (I couldn't get these to fit under 2MB in a gif, so I had to use webp, hopefully you'll be able to see them). The wiki says there are 4 possible endings, but I've only ever seen these.



First outcome: she doesn't launch high enough to clear this first skyscraper, crashes into it, then bounces and ragdolls around for a while. (This thing is using some kind of physics engine in Unity; the exact outcome of this isn't predetermined, and can often end up looking pretty weird. The only constant is smashing into the building.)



Second outcome: she clears the tall building, the Tanjerin image appears in the sky, and she eventually crash lands on this pile of junk and explodes.



Third outcome: she flies even further, clears the pile of junk...





A button prompt appears (which as far as I can tell is completely futile no matter what you do)



Vi lands in the volcano...



...gets launched into space...





...and explodes after landing on the sun.



Yeah, this is... this sure is a thing that exists.

7. Pay to Vin! (2023)

They released a Youtube video purporting to announce a new update to the game adding a feature called "Pay to Vin!". ("Skip life's hardships with Fungible Termacade Tokens!")

This sketch is short enough I'll just reproduce it here in screenshots.

65 - DineMite Beats









Err... What's 'Vinning', exactly?
Winning. But cooler!
Alright then...









So, yeah, they just bought a credits warp with Termacade tokens.

That's all there was to this one, it's a very obvious parody of modern microtransaction-laden game design. It's a low-hanging fruit at this point but I'll take it, it's not as though the criticism isn't well-deserved.

8: Snails...? (2024)

No new game for 2024, but there appears to have been an announcement from Genow on Discord?



Okay, what's this on his profile?

Code: Select all

68 74 74 70 73 3A 2F 2F 77 77 77 2E 79 6F 75 74 75 62 65 2E 63 6F 6D 2F 77 61 74 63 68 3F 76 3D 52 72 44 74 39 61 30 71 33 50 30

Convert this from hex to ASCII and you get... a youtube link. it's the snail church song



He's been saying a bunch of goofy stuff on Discord, including this. Although as far as I can tell the PUSHROCK thing is also a prank, there isn't a new patch or anything.

9: Future pranks...?

They may well keep going with these, they've done at least something every year thus far.

Anyway, there we have it, the Bug Fables April Fool pranks! A lot of these are pretty amusing, and the earlier ones do provide a little insight into the development history, and maybe some in-jokes between the developers and the backer community.

[Explopyro]

82: Spy Cards Showcase (Part 1)

34 - Dodgy Business



It's been a while, hasn't it? I've been overwhelmed with work these last few months, but I'm not even sure that's really an excuse for the delay, I'm pretty sure I was also procrastinating this update in particular. I didn't want to close the LP without giving Spy Cards another look, but the more I thought about it, the less I could really think of a way to make it interesting enough and I genuinely don't know if I've succeeded. I won't be offended if you skim or skip over parts of this update.



Anyway, since with a completed file we have access to all the cards, I thought I'd build a variety of decks and play a tournament with each to show off some of what's possible.

If you want to delve deeper into the game, or even try playing against other people, there's a neat fan-made website called Spy Cards Online. It has a few articles on the game as well as a fully functional online client you can use to play against other humans. Their strategy article in particular is a really good read and dives much more deeply into the mechanics and metagame than I'm going to, and their how to play article is a solid explanation of the rules if you need a refresher.

I came up with four ideas in the end, which we'll go through in turn. Here's a quick overview:

Deck 1: Venus' Guardian deck
I used this one for a few matches during the game proper; it's noteworthy for being the most synergistic deck you can build with cards you get early in the game, so it's a reasonably popular and reliable choice for completing the sidequest itself.

Deck 2: "Kabbu, Surrounded By Enemies"
This is actually a Leafbugs deck and the main thrust of it is showing off how they play, but I decided to run with The Beast/Kabbu/Kali as a reasonably thematic boss/miniboss group to go along with them, hence the name.

Deck 3: False Monarch and Mothflies
In some ways, this is a similar strategy to Venus' Guardian, but it's just using Empower for straight damage instead of trying to do lifesteal things. This also felt like a good deck to show off Stratos and Delilah, since Team Slacker are thematically tied to the Bounties.

Deck 4: The Everlasting King and his Thugs
It didn't seem right not to show off The Everlasting King at least once. It's the most powerful card in the game and can add some interesting dynamics. We pair this with Astotheles and a lot of "Thug" cards that work well with him; they're one of the more solid straightforward archetypes, and don't require the Boss slot, so it fits decently well.

All right, let's get started.

Deck 1: Venus' Guardian deck



Here's the deck I used way back when, which the game still remembers for me. It worked fine, but we'll be overwriting it here.



The Venus' Guardian deck, naturally, is built around Venus' Guardian. It's a relatively cheap boss card at 4 TP, but on its own it's pretty underwhelming; that said, with a bud or two (or Aria) it can output surprisingly high attack numbers for the TP cost.



Our first miniboss is Aria. She's very swingy due to all the coin flips, and not much good unless you play her with the Guardian, but if you do she can output some serious numbers.



Our second miniboss is Monsieur Scarlet. This is just a solid card, and its healing is on theme with the rest of the deck.



2 copies of Thief (or any 2 TP, 2 attack card).



3 copies of Bandit (or any 3 TP, 3 attack card).



3 copies of Burglar (or any 4 TP, 4 attack card).



4 copies of Venus' Bud.



Here's our final decklist. You can tweak the ratios a bit, but I've found this tends to be pretty reliable. (Which specific attackers you use doesn't really matter, you just want a balanced curve something like this.)

I wanted to show this deck in particular, because it's the first properly synergistic deck you can build and you can get all the cards for it before starting the Spy Cards sidequest. This makes it a good choice for completing the quest early, and if you get a good feel for how it plays it can easily take you all the way. That said, it's not a perfect deck: you do need to play mindfully, games tend to run long which can get a bit tedious, and if you get too unlucky you can fall behind and struggle to recover.

Anyway, let's take it out for a spin.



Here's the bracket for this tournament.



We're up against Carmina first.





Not a bad opening hand, since we at least have something we can play.



We'll play Thief, naturally.



Oh well. This ends up a push, thanks to Carmina winning her coin flip.





Right, what do we have to work with here?



Obvious play is obvious; we could have gone with Scarlet, but I'd rather hold onto him for a later play if I can.



Easy win for us.

These early turns are always a bit of a crap shoot, since we don't have a whole lot of options we can play. An early lead is nice, but not really expected.





We're in a bit of an unfortunate spot here. We definitely want to play a few cards so we can draw more (since we're at maximum hand size), but we don't have many options that are likely to actually win.



I went with this in the end. We'll play two cards so we can draw two more, and still keep the cards with the highest potential in case we draw into a good combo. I'm fully expecting to lose this round, I'm playing the Venus' Bud here to keep it from clogging my hand.



Yeah, that's about what I expected.





This is definitely a bit better.



The most efficient use of our TP is just to play both attackers here, I think. (Although I notice as I write this that I played these in the wrong order. I have a really bad habit of doing this; it's always better to put the weaker card in front in case the opponent plays a Numb card.)



With an underwhelming play from Carmina, we carry this round easily. That said, her play is slightly better than it looks; it's hard to see here, but the miniboss she played is Riz. Riz has only 1 attack, but has "Setup 2", meaning she'll get +2 next turn.





Some interesting options here as well. We could go all in this turn with Scarlet + Bandit, but that leaves us without a clear plan for next turn, and Scarlet + Burglar would be much better if we save it...



Since we've still got a lead (and Carmina has a boost this turn), I think it's better to sandbag a bit and go for the guaranteed heal next turn.



Yeah, this ended badly. (Although thanks to bad screenshot timing it looks like I have 3 attack here, I have 0 because it got numbed.)





Well, we had a plan, let's stick with it. Even if, judging by the card backs, Carmina's drawn her boss and a miniboss also...



Here we go.



Oh, interesting, she's playing Maki. Still, we get our heal and win the round, I'll take it.

(I don't actually know how the opponents' decks are determined, but I've seen enough variety over the course of putting this update together that there's at least some element of randomness in it.)





We're not seeing much of our deck's gimmick this game, but sometimes you just need to win with big numbers.



I decided to go with this. The alternative I considered was Bandit + Burglar + Venus' Bud, but I'm not desperate for the lifesteal, so I'd rather stay at a 5 card hand and take slightly better odds of winning the round.



Carmina's play here has to be unpacked a little; she played Carmina, which turned into Ahoneynation, which summoned an Abomihoney. (I don't know why she's playing Mender, that card literally doesn't do anything.)

Needless to say, we win this one. Although had the coins been a bit more in Carmina's favour, we might not have.





This is a tough one. I don't think the odds favour us, really.



I decided in the end to play just the attackers. Lifesteal isn't going to make a difference since the game ends if we win here, and I didn't think spending Aria for one extra point of attack would be worth it; if we lose, the ceiling on her is much higher if we draw Guardian, and again I'd rather stay at a 5-card hand.



Weirdly, turns out I probably should have played Aria, since that would've turned a push into a win. I think it was correct not to, though.





Still no Guardian. We're probably not going to see it this game.



I opt to go for the 2-card Scarlet combo again. I'm not sure why I threw a bud in here, since it doesn't make any difference either way.



Wow, Carmina had a lot of straight power there. We lose this one, though it's really a wash since we got Scarlet's heal first.





Ah, here we go. This is pretty much the nuts for this deck.



Let's go for it. (One more bud and this would probably be the strongest possible play we could make.)



Luck wasn't with us (all three of Aria's coinflips failed), but we still come out with 9 attack and 2 Lifesteal. It's enough to win this round, as well as the match.



Okay, time for game two.





Our opponent this time is Janet.





Awkward opening hand, but not too surprising with this deck. We normally expect to give up a few early rounds.



I opted to throw away a bud just to keep it from clogging up my hand. As expected, we lose the round.





We've got the good stuff here, but not the TP to take advantage of it. Time to waste another turn.



Again, I opt to throw away a bud, so that I'll get to draw two new cards.



Kind of sad to lose to this, but it is what it is.





Still not quite enough TP to play the good stuff.



But the Burglar is a strong enough play for this phase of the game.



Janet just gave us this one, really.





We could throw out Venus' Guardian here, but I'd rather hold back for a bit longer, I think.



Burglar + Bud is decent enough. There are stronger plays at 5 TP (we'll lose to anyone who uses full-value attackers, for instance), but the odds aren't awful.



We get a bit lucky. I'll take this win, and the lifesteal with it.





Okay, I think it's time now. We could keep sandbagging to try to play our Guardian with higher power, but we don't have a great alternative play and it's unlikely to lose here.



So let's go Guardian + 2 Buds.



This combination is really hard to beat at 6 TP.





We have a pretty solid lead now, though of course we still need to close things out. This isn't too awful.



(Again, I played these in the wrong order. Oops.)



Didn't get punished! (Also I can't tell what miniboss she played here. Needless to say, it didn't make the difference.)





Janet has her boss here, so I'm not sure what our odds are, but let's go for it I guess.



(A bit unfortunate we'll be wasting the Scarlet heal since we're at max HP, but that's a good problem to have?)



Oh. Well, never mind, then. She's playing Venus' Guardian too, but without any of the needed support. It's really not a good card unless you have some buds or Aria to go with it.



Game 2 down. That was much shorter! (Honestly, anomalously so, for this deck. Normally I expect to give up a few rounds here and there, and heal it back later.)





Time for the finals, we're up against Johnny this time.





This is actually a pretty solid opener, since it guarantees we'll have plays for the first two turns.



Turn 1 Thief is the best early play we have in this deck (though not that common, since we're only running 2 copies).



Johnny didn't play anything, so we get this round for free.





Some good stuff here! We already know what we're playing though.



Turn 2 Bandit is also something we always like to see.



We win this one too, although this came down to the coin flip. If he'd won the flip it would have been a push. This is quite the early lead!





Now our hand is awkward, for this phase of the game. We can't use our TP efficiently, and most of our plays are going to be under the curve, so I don't like the odds of winning here.



I elected just to play Thief. There's an argument for also playing a bud to draw an additional card, but I'd rather keep the bud here since we already have Guardian.



As expected, we lose this one.





Still awkward, but I'm more than okay throwing another round away considering what we can do next turn.



We'll just go with Scarlet. (I also considered throwing away Aria instead, but decided against it.)



As expected, we lose this one too.





I think it's time to do the thing. (We don't really have any other plays anyway. If we waited longer, we could make the numbers bigger, but it's better to take wins whenever we can get them.)



So, yeah, we do the thing.



We win handily, and now we'll be back to 5 HP too.





Now that we're firmly ahead, maybe we should press the attack.



(Oops, I still played them in the wrong order. Damn it, past me.)



Easy win here. Ultimax is not a good card on its lonesome. (Most of these NPCs' decks don't have a lot of synergy going on, for better or worse.)





We only have weak cards here (and Johnny has more cards than us), so I don't anticipate winning this round.



I opt to play only 1 Thief, I'm banking on drawing up to 5 to have more options next turn.



Yeah, that's a loss for us. Nothing in our hand would have beaten this, anyway, so I made the right call.





Not ideal, but we have some solid numbers here at least.



So, yeah, let's just go straight numbers. (And I finally remembered to start putting the weaker card in front!)



It's enough. (And hey, Johnny's got lifesteal in his deck too. That could've posed some trouble if he'd pulled it out earlier.)





And there we have it, that's our first tournament won!

So what do I think of the Venus' Guardian deck overall? It's pretty reliable, and I enjoy playing it because it encourages you to think a few turns ahead and not just mindlessly run things out. That said, games can run long, and while we didn't see it here, too long a string of bad luck (or bad planning, or both) can leave you too far behind to recover.

It's far from a perfect deck, but it's pretty good, especially for how early in the game you can put it together. I've used it in several playthroughs, it's more than adequate for completing the quests if that's all you care about.

Right. Now let's do something different.

Deck 2: Kabbu, Surrounded by Enemies



We'll start off with The Beast as our boss. It's not the most amazing boss card, but it's very solid with Kabbu.



Here's Kabbu, of course. In some ways he's the centerpiece of this deck.



And our second miniboss is Kali. She's not much by herself, but play her with Kabbu for a no-questions-asked Heal 3. That can completely turn the game around even if you lose the round you play them (which is likely, because they both have low power).

There's a bit of tension with this deck, because both The Beast and Kali are pretty awful unless played alongside Kabbu, but they're both great with him.



Round things out with 3 Leafbug Ninja...



3 Leafbug Archer...



3 Leafbug Clubber...



And 3 Numbnails. My thinking here was that the Numbnails would help keep us from losing early turns until we could get the Leafbug combos going, or push things over the edge on later turns.

The core of this deck, though, is Leafbugs. They're pretty interesting. As "Effect" cards, they're not affected by Numb, which is one point in their favour. And the Unity mechanic means that, in the right combinations, they can punch well above their weight in TP.



So here's the deck...



...or my first attempt at the deck, anyway. This version just wasn't consistent enough to win a full tournament. I was definitely winning more games than I lost, but didn't manage three in a row after five or six attempts.

So. Back to the drawing board.



The fix ends up being pretty simple. Get rid of the Numbnails, and add one more of each Leafbug. So the final deck is 4x Ninja, 4x Archer, 4x Clubber.

It may not sound like a big change, but it turns out the Numbnails weren't pulling their weight (and the Clubbers offer Numb anyway, it was too big a share of the deck and wasn't contributing to winning hands). And the difference between 3 and 4 of each Leafbug ends up making a huge difference in terms of being able to reliably pull off the right combinations at the right time.

Let's get into it for real this time.



Here's our bracket for this tournament.



Starting off against Carmina again.





One thing we'll quickly notice with this deck is the dearth of early plays, and that even when we have them, they aren't great. (This is one of the reasons I'd thought Numbnails would work out better, they'd help keep from losing these early turns. And they do often do that... they just clog things up too much later.)



In this case we actually have a turn one play.



Better yet, we actually win the round, because our opponent doesn't. Here, though, you can see the downside - played alone, the Leafbugs are very unimpressive.

The way "Unity" works, it basically multiplies the value by the number of different cards of that type present. So Unity(1) with only 1 species of Leafbug present gets us 1 total attack. That's pretty bad.

(Edit: I was wrong about how this works, but I'm going to leave the misconception here because this ability can be confusing; thanks to the comments for clearing it up. How Unity actually seems to work is that it's applied only once for each type of card with it, or each unique Unity value, but the value is multiplied by the number of cards it sees. So, for example, Archer + Archer + Ninja ends up applying Unity 1 (x3) + Unity 2 (x3) for a total value of 9, instead of being 1x2 + 1x2 + 2x2 = 8. Either way, a Leafbug Archer by itself is not a strong play.)

Still, I'll take the win here.





We have a similar problem this turn as well. Leafbugs are not impressive in the early rounds.



Still, we play the hand we're dealt, so to speak.



Ninja's probably the best of the Leafbugs on its own, but it's still under the curve and loses head to head to most similarly-costed cards.





The leafbugs still seem really unimpressive, don't they? We're still a bit too early, it's at 5 TP that they really start being able to do things.



Given this hand, the best play I can make is to cycle out these two Archers. We'll have a solid play next turn, and maybe we can draw into something better.



This ends up being a push, though we barely even deserve that.

Note that we don't get much extra value from Unity for playing multiple copies of the same Leafbug (though each does still calculate its damage independently, each only sees 1 typethe Unity effect only gets applied once for a given type of card), we need different types before it'll start giving us meaningful bonuses.





Okay, now we're cooking.



Archer + Ninja (which costs 5 TP total) is the first combination of Leafbugs that's actually worth something. (And because they're both Effect cards and therefore immune to Numb, the order I play them doesn't matter.)



This pair of cards totals 6 attack. We win this round, although it's closer than I'd have liked (because our opponent won a coin flip, which also tends to punch above the curve).





This is another really awkward hand. Some of these cards combine well, but not at our current TP.



In the end, I decided to play a Clubber alone. This is generally bad; Clubber is just a weak card without support.



So, yeah, we lose this one. Although it's closer than I'd have expected.





We have some decent options here...



I'm struggling to remember why I did this, instead of going Beast + Kabbu. (Clubber + Ninja is underwhelming, but might also have been worth a try.) Maybe I was deliberately throwing this since she has her boss card this turn?



Either way, we lose. (Although again here we see an NPC deck running Venus' Guardian without any way to take advantage of it.)





Still awkward. (You'll notice I say that a lot with this deck...)



That said, it definitely makes sense to go for Beast + Kabbu here, especially since we don't want to fall further behind. (Maybe there's a case for holding on to Kabbu and trying to draw into Kali, but that's also risky.)



That said, Beast + Kabbu is pretty strong, and usually enough to carry the hand. (It's not shown but Kabbu also has Pierce 3, meaning we would ignore 3 points of defence from the opponent.)





Ah, here we go. Now we have the full Leafbug combo, and at 9 TP we can play it. This is the sweet spot for this deck.



Here goes.



One of each Leafbug adds up to 11 attack total, and also activates the Clubber's Numb effect. Again, very tough to beat, but we have to survive long enough to get to this point. And it requires playing three cards per turn, which we can't sustain indefinitely.





We drew it again! This is pretty much the best case scenario for us with this deck.





Boom.



And that's the first match won.





Ritchee is our next opponent this time.





Early hands are very predictable with this deck; either we have a card we can play, or we don't, but either way we're not really expecting to win.



That said, even though the odds aren't great, I'd rather make an early play than not. Our opponents' decks are inconsistent enough that we can often still end up getting a push or even a win sometimes.



Like here, since he played the same card as us. (I doubt any of the NPC decks are running a critical mass of them, though.)





Again, this is awkward, and looks to be awkward next turn too no matter what we play.



I'll opt for playing something over not (especially when considering the maximum hand size, if we play something we'll get to draw two new cards instead of one).



Still a loss though.





As I predicted, this turn's even more awkward.



Even though it means drawing fewer cards, I'd rather throw away one Clubber than Kabbu + Archer, since those will be more useful on future turns.



We get lucky and it's a push rather than a loss.





This is still pretty bad, though we have some potential for next turn now.



Beast without Kabbu is just a bad card, but getting rid of it seems like the best play here. If we fall too far behind, we can play Kali and Kabbu to heal back to max, and no other play this turn has better odds of winning.



We can't win, but our opponent didn't play anything with attack, so this ends up being a push. I'll take it.





Now we have enough Leafbugs to start doing things...



I decided to go with Clubber + Archer since it fully uses our TP. That said, in retrospect Archer + Ninja would have been a better play. I don't think I'd fully realised at this stage how underwhelming Clubber is when you can't activate the Numb.



That said, I'm actually not sure why it's showing 2 attack here, I think it should have been 4? (I suspect it's an issue of bad screenshot timing, since it adds everything up one card at a time.) Regardless, we lose.





We could go Kali + Kabbu here, but we're not quite far enough behind. I'd rather play aggressively for now and hold them for later.



Clubber + Ninja at 7 TP isn't the best combo, but it's acceptable.



Not quite enough to win it for us, though. (For comparison, we've spent 7 TP for the same attack value we can get at 5 TP with Ninja + Archer.)





Enough sandbagging, we need the heals now.



I'll also play the Archer because we can afford to. That said, I still fully expect to lose this. (It doesn't matter that much if we do; unlike Lifesteal, Heal cards apply when you play them and don't care about the round outcome.)



Surprisingly, we end up winning. I'll take it.





We're in good shape health-wise now, and 9 or more TP is the point this deck starts coming online. Unfortunately, we don't have the cards to take advantage of it. (In retrospect, having the Archer here would've helped!)



I dithered a bit before deciding to just go 2x Clubber. It's kind of an awful play, really, but it has a better chance than just one, and I want to get these Clubbers out of our hand.



Surprisingly, it works out for us, though only because our opponent lost a coin flip.





Still not ideal, but at least we can play three cards.



Here's what I went with in the end, though either way the attack value comes out the same.



Or I thought it should have, anyway; I'm not sure how we get 5 attack here. The Unity mechanic is weird. Regardless, we lose. (Edit: the 5 attack makes more sense here with the correct understanding of how Unity is calculated.)





Now we're in a bit of an awkward place. We have a decent 3-card play (though not the best one), but we're also down to a 3-card hand, which means we'll be flying blind on future turns. If we're unlucky with this deck, the lategame can devolve to this.



Still, better to play it than not, it's a strong hand.



It's enough to win, though 8 attack is a lot less impressive than 11.





And now we have a worse 3-card hand. Though it feels less risky when we notice our opponent is also down to 3 cards...



Again, let's just play them all out? (In retrospect, it might've been better to just throw this one and set up a more reliable follow-up, we're far enough ahead for that to work.)



Probably a mistake. (Devourer is a strong play against us, since Leafbugs all count as Bugs.)





This combination has a decent shot, though.



We'll play all three.



It works out in our favour, though if our opponent had won both coin flips for Ahoneynation, we'd have lost.





This is an interesting draw. It's not too likely to win, but we can definitely use the heal...



I decided to hold the Leafbug to set up a better next turn, and just play these two. 2 more attack is unlikely to make or break this play.



Yeah, we weren't going to be beating that. On the other hand, Ritchee is still on 1 HP, and we're nearly full again.





I'd rather have drawn pretty much any other card than The Beast here.



In the end, I decided to go with this. It's not great, but there's at least a chance we could win with it. There's definitely a case for just playing The Beast and throwing the hand, so we could have 4 cards for the next one.



I said we had a chance, I didn't say how much of one. This is also worse, because Ritchee has Lifesteal, so now we'll need to win two hands instead of one to end the round.





Here, we finally have something decent again.





That said, "decent" is not guaranteed to be enough. (This feels worse because it came down to a coin flip.) I feel like I'm on the back foot here.





Definitely still on the back foot... honestly, it's probably best to just do nothing here, and draw some more cards.



Although I think passing was the right call, it turns out we could have won this. Oh well. Hindsight is 20/20.





We're at 5 cards here, but still don't have what I really want to see.



That said, we're at 1 HP now; we can't afford to lose, so let's play all of them.



Critical mass of leafbugs is still critical mass. This is actually a reasonably solid play, and pulls us through.





This isn't great, but this game's down to the wire and both players are on 1 HP. This round will be the last.



As such, we play everything.



And somehow it's just barely enough!



That was a rough match! And it goes some way to show some of the issues with this kind of deck; we have a lot of potentially powerful plays, especially on specific turns, but our plays are often inconsistent if the right cards don't turn up at the right time. The healing from Kali absolutely carried us through this match, and we can definitely see some shortcomings of running The Beast as our boss card.





Anyway, onward to round 3. We'll be facing Kage this time.





We've got nothing we can play turn one.



Looks like he does. Oh well.



Well, for better or worse, we lose this one. (And it's probably for the best we were forced to pass, nothing we could have played would beat that.)





We can at least make a play this turn. Also, it's good to have Kali and Kabbu in reserve this early, that's a great safety net.



We do the only thing we can...



And it's enough. These early hands definitely often come down to luck.





This is awkward, especially looking forward a few turns. But it's not too bad, because we can guarantee we'll survive long enough to play Kali and Kabbu for healing, and then we're much more likely to be in a decent position the other side of that.



That said, for now we can't do much. Clubber's the best card to cycle out here, since if we draw into a Ninja we can play that with the Archer next turn.



I wasn't expecting to win this one, so that's nice. Although Riz is definitely going to make our next turn tougher to win.





Didn't get it. (At 4/11 odds it wasn't exactly likely, but even so.)



Our best play here is to waste The Beast, I think. (The main alternative would have been to waste Kali, and plan to play Kabbu + Beast on 7, but this is a lot safer.)



Especially factoring Riz in, our odds were not good to win this one, and we don't.





We have two options here, and I don't love either. Clubber + Archer is a weak play, but Kali + Kabbu is slightly inefficient, since we'd be wasting a point of healing.



The inefficiency may bug me, but it's still definitely the better play, and should hopefully set us up to do some Leafbug combos in the next few turns.



We get a bit lucky, though, and these two are enough to win the round. (I mistimed the screenshot so it's hard to see exactly what happened here, but Kali's 2 def neutralized the Mothiva card's 2 attack, leaving our 1 attack enough to win through. Numbnail is a blank card against this deck.)





Lots of Leafbugs, but an awkward combination for this TP value.



Let's go with this, and hope we draw into some Ninjas?



With a bit of luck, this ended up being enough to win; I certainly won't complain about that.





Here we go, now we're all set.



We had some options here, but in the end I went with this, saving the full set for next turn when we'd be at 9 TP (the ideal turn to play it).



But we get lucky, and this is enough to win, so it doesn't matter. That's game point.





There's our second tournament down.

So, that's a Leafbugs deck. Not the best showing for it, necessarily, but at least we got to see how swingy it can be! It's pretty fun to play, though, I found myself having plenty to think about from turn to turn (as I tried to highlight as we went through the games), and it feels rewarding when a plan comes together.

It feels a bit unreliable even with this version, and I wonder if maybe it'd be better to tweak the ratios a bit (maybe 5 Ninjas and 3 Clubbers? I'm genuinely not sure). Also, a different Boss card would definitely be more optimal, if you don't want to be thematic. That said, it's definitely a solid strategy and you can do much worse.

Right, on to the next deck. (In the next post, I've hit the character limit.)

[Explopyro]

82: Spy Cards Showcase (Part 2)

Deck 3: False Monarch and Mothflies


This deck is built around False Monarch, so naturally, we'll choose that as our boss.



And for our minibosses, let's try Stratos and Delilah. Stratos is reasonably solid, although he's the weaker card of the two. He punches well above his weight against any cards with defence.



Delilah's just really good all-around. Her attack is a little under the curve, but Lifesteal 2 is an enormous swing, and overall this card's very efficient.

The pair of them together are a solid lategame play, but they're also just both fine on their own.



Now let's play a bunch of Mothflies. The regular Mothfly is okay on its own, but quite strong with False Monarch; we'll play 3 copies.



Mothfly Cluster is a 3 TP, 3 attack card. Let's play 4 of those. (There are only two kinds of mothfly cards, so if we want critical mass, we need to play lots of them.)



In the interest of trying to fill out some more points on the curve, I threw in 2 copies of Haunted Cloth.



And 3 copies of Numbnail.



This feels a bit sloppy, and I'm sure there's a better way to fill this out, but hopefully it'll be good enough.





Right, let's start the tournament. Our opponent is Janet this time.





Looks like I missed the shot of just our hand here, but regardless, we have an obvious play for turn 1. That said, a Mothfly by itself is pretty weak, and we're probably losing this unless our opponent has no play at all.



As expected.





Here, we have a pretty obvious play.



If our opponent plays a numb-able card, we're likely to win with this.



And so we do. (I don't actually recall what card she played.)





Not a lot of options here, but turns like this make me appreciate including a handful of 4-cost cards.



So we'll play one.



It ends up being a push, Janet had a similar idea.





Some decent options here.



Pictured: me making a mistake. One of the bigger advantages of playing a 1-cost attacker like Mothfly is that you can put it in front of a stronger card to block Numb, but that's a lot less effective when you keep forgetting to sequence your cards properly.



And so I get punished. (It's a push, not a loss, but it still smarts when it'd have been a win except for my carelessness.)





We have some options here. Either we play Stratos, or we go Numbnail + Mothfly Cluster.



I opted for Stratos. In retrospect, I think this was probably the worse choice, especially because playing two cards would mean two fresh draws instead of one...



Also because this winds up being a push, whereas Numbnail + Cluster would have beaten this. But again, hindsight.





7 TP is an awkward number for this hand, but if we play things right we can set ourselves up very well for next turn.



I ended up going with just Numbnail and hoping to maybe get a push. (In retrospect, I think maybe both of them would have been a better play, but I'm not sure.)



We'd have lost either way, though, because we can't numb an Effect card. (Screenshot timing makes this look worse than it was, it's still showing the attack value of the card before it got numbed.)





Right, now we're actually set up to do something reasonably big.



Although this would've been a lot better if we could wait one more turn, to add the small Mothfly. Still, we're falling behind, so I don't want to keep giving up turns.



Here we actually see an interesting quirk: Empower applies before Numb, and the Empower bonus doesn't go away even though the numbed card's attack value does. This is also a squeaker of a win, we only won here because our opponent lost a coin flip.





We have some options here.



This seems like the best approach, though.



There we go. Delilah's Lifesteal means we'll be back to 5 HP after this round, too.





And now we just have a pile of Mothflies.



So let's play them all? (And of course I forget to put the weakest in front again.)



We barely win, but I'll take it.





Of course, it leaves us on the back foot a bit, since our opponent has more cards.



That said, we can play all of these, and it should be reasonably strong.



A squeaker of a win, since our opponent also has Stratos, but ultimately a win is still a win.



Round 1 done.





We're up against Serene for round 2.





Oops, nothing we can play turn one. Oh well.



And she has something, so we lose this one.





At least now we definitely have a play?



Obvious play is obvious. (We could technically have played Delilah or Numbnail, but both of those choices would be wasteful here.)



That worked out. I'll take it.





This is a lot more awkward, nothing quite fits.



I opted for playing one Numbnail in the end, but our opponent didn't play anything we could numb, and to make matters worse she has Lifesteal. That's not great.





This could be a bit of an awkward spot because she has her boss card, but it's not too bad.



Cluster + Numbnail seemed like the best play, since it's the most efficient use of our TP and lets us draw two new cards.



Unfortunately, Numbnail does nothing against a Boss, and a Mothfly Cluster is not going to beat Devourer. (Technically, Numbnail isn't completely dead against every Boss card, since some of them summon other cards that are numb-able.)





Let's see if we can do better here. We could go with either Delilah + Cluster, or Haunted Cloth + Numbnail. Both of these seem like solid plays.



I went with this in the end.



It worked out reasonably well.





Again, we have some options, there are a few different combinations we can play here.



I went for this in the end, because we could use the recovery. (And finally I start ordering the cards properly! Hold your applause.)



And that's a win for us. (Astotheles isn't a great card by himself, but we'll see more of him in the next deck I plan to show, he can be pretty good with the right support.)





Looks like it's False Monarch time.



Although again, it's a bit frustrating we can only play one card with it. There's some tension in how many copies of each Mothfly type to include in a deck like this, because the Clusters are a lot better by themselves, but False Monarch is stronger with a bunch of the weaker ones.



That said, this works out pretty well for us here. (At least we didn't get numbed this time.)





We're one round from winning, and we have some decent power here. Hopefully we can push this through.



This seemed like the stronger play to me, even if we could eke out a bit more attack with Mothfly instead of Numbnail.



Regardless, it works out in the end.



And we win the round. One more to go.





This time, we face Carmina in the finals.





No legal play this time. Oh well.



And Carmina has one, so we lose the round. (I've found very few decks where this is never a problem.)





At least we have an obvious play this turn.



This deck is pretty consistent about being on-curve the second turn.



Easy win for us.





And here, again, we probably just want to keep attacking.



(In the right order!)



Again, we win. Carmina seems to be getting unlucky this game.





This isn't too bad. Let's keep using our TP efficiently. (This is one of the reasons I play Numbnails in this deck, because we don't have anything else at 2 cost.)



This always feels reasonably strong on the 5 TP turn, though there are definitely cards it will lose to.



It works out for us.





We have a few decent plays available here, either Stratos, or Delilah + Cluster.



I opted for Stratos in the end. I think I was thinking that he'd be stuck in our hand for a while otherwise, and we can make better use of the others next turn?



It's enough. (This is less a mark in favour of Stratos, than that our opponent didn't bother to play much.)





We're already on the brink of victory, here, so we should probably go for it.



It's not fancy, but it's a strong enough play for this point in the game.



That said, it's not quite enough. (Because she won the coin flip on Plumpling. I don't much care for coin flip cards as a rule, but they do punch well above their weight when they succeed.)





This is very similar to our position last turn; we should go for it again.



I'm not sure why I went for Delilah rather than more attack here. The lifesteal is irrelevant if we end the game, and does nothing if we lose.



It works out in the end, though. (And we finally get to see a weak card in front shielding against Numb.)





That last match was a bit unexciting, but regardless, we've won the tournament.

I'm not sure what to make of this deck overall. False Monarch is in an awkward spot with respect to the TP costs of the cards it works with; we didn't get to really see its full potential, but this performance is pretty typical for it (and weighting the deck in a direction that makes it do better is probably a mistake, because ultimately it still just offers high attack; it's not like Venus' Guardian where you can also get lifesteal on the big turn).

Still, it worked well enough to win a tournament with, and it felt less awkward to play than the Leafbug deck. I'm sure there's a way to optimise it better if you want to.

Deck 4: The Everlasting King and his Thugs



For our final deck, let's take The Everlasting King out for a spin. It's expensive at 9 TP, but this card just guarantees the win. (Well, unless the opponent also plays it, but I don't think any of our opponents can play it.)



Since our boss card doesn't give us a clear deckbuilding direction, why not pick a miniboss that does? Astotheles empowers "Thugs", which is another way of saying the various bandit characters.



I wasn't sure what to do with the second slot, so let's take Riz out for a spin too. You can do some pretty interesting things with him.



And we'll fill out the rest with Thugs, mostly. 3 copies of Thief.



3 copies of Bandit.



2 copies of Burglar.



1 Ruffian. (Honestly, another Burglar might be better. Ruffian is awkward in that it does count as a Thug, but it's too expensive to play with Astotheles. Still, sometimes having a big expensive card can be useful.)



And, finally, 3x Numbnail. I don't know if it's really optimal here, but it usually works out reasonably well for me (and a deck of only attackers is kind of boring, I'd like at least some variety).



Here's the deck list, in any case. Let's take it out for a spin.





We're up against Ritchee for round 1 this time.





Unlucky opener, but as usual, we kind of expect it. We don't have anything we can play.



Interestingly, neither does our opponent, so this round's a push.





Well, we've got the Everlasting King now! With how expensive he is, he'll be clogging up our hand for a while, but the right moment will present itself eventually.



Anyway, let's play something. This is the best we can do here.



Good enough! I'll take it.





Okay, what now? We could either play Burglar, or Thief + Numbnail.



I opted for this, since it cycles out more cards, but either would have been reasonable.



It works out for us.





One downside to this deck, I'm noticing, is that a lot of these hands end up not being terribly interesting.



This is our only option. I'm not terribly optimistic, considering how many cards we're going to be up against.



Honestly, that was closer than I expected it was going to be.





This is kind of an interesting choice, actually. At 6 TP we can either play Ruffian, or Bandit + Riz. In general, big single cards like Ruffian can be risky, because there's always the possibility of running into Numb... but they can also be useful to build back hand size, since you can present a threat without playing multiple cards.



In this case I'd rather play these two; if nothing else, it's more interesting.



Not bad! We actually won this one. Riz is weak enough on the round you play him that I'm usually surprised to see wins, but sometimes the opponent just doesn't have much.





Again, we have some choices. Although I think there's an obvious play here.



Playing two cards (with a weaker one in front) is better than playing one card here, since we can draw back up and we're less vulnerable to Numb. (And this leaves us poised to play Thief + Ruffian next turn, which is even better.)



That said, even with the bonus from Riz, somehow it's not enough! He puts up so much defence (thanks to some won coin flips) that we can't get through.





Change of plans, I think.



This is a bit too tempting. Although in some ways it's riskier than the Thief play would have been, we're more vulnerable to getting numbed ourselves.



Speak of the devil. I think this might be our first time seeing the Tidal Wyrm card, actually? It's a pretty interesting one; it can punch above its weight in the right circumstances, but it also has very low attack, so it's very weak against cards that can't be numbed (which includes all bosses and minibosses, as well as things like Leafbugs). It's pretty strong against this deck, since we're playing mostly normal Attackers (and would have beaten either of our possible plays there).





I think we're pretty much set now, though, that was a great draw. We're at 9 TP, so Everlasting King is an option...



Let's do this first, though.



Astotheles can put out bigger numbers with multiple smaller cards, but this is still pretty strong. And with this...





Now our opponent is at 1 HP, and we had the Everlasting King in reserve, so nothing else we had matters.



The description of the card calls it an automatic win, but in practice it just sets our attack to 99. This makes me wonder what would happen if both players had it, but one played a card that had defence. (My gut says it'd be a push regardless, but I don't know, and I don't think it can happen ingame regardless.)

Needless to say, we win this round.



And with it, the match.





Next up, we're against Bu-Gi.





This isn't a terrible start, though it's a bit unfortunate we're going to have one slot clogged by the boss card for pretty much the entire game.



Always good to make an early play if we have one.



I'll take it. (Generally speaking if you can play a 2TP attacker on turn one, at minimum you won't lose.)





This isn't ideal, but we can work with it.



Let's go for Riz. We're not likely to win this turn, but he'll set us up nicely for the next one, and our other potential plays are suboptimal anyway.



As expected, Riz can't quite cut it on his own.





This actually looks pretty good, especially when we factor in we have Riz's boost. Of course, our opponent has some strong cards available...



Let's see how we do with this.



Well, the Numbnail was useless, but also Zommoth is an Empower boss being played with no support. (We only end up winning this one thanks to Riz, though.)





What to do here? We should definitely play Numbnail with either Riz or the Bandit...



I dithered for a bit before deciding to go with this. I'm not expecting it to do well, but we can set up a more powerful next turn, and we're still doing okay on HP so we can afford a loss here.



Yeah, that wasn't great. But in fairness, it's about what I expected.





We have some options here, again.



In the end I opted for Ruffian, because Astotheles + Thief will be a good play next turn unless we draw something better.



It ends up being an easy win, especially with Riz. Although a Numb would've really hurt here, if he'd had it.





I don't think our draws change the plan here.



Let's do this.



Turns out to be another pretty easy win. Astotheles works out pretty well, though some of that could also just be because the bandits have strong cards at the right points on the curve.





All we have to do is survive here, and we should be set, since next turn we'll be ready to throw out the King.



That said, this is a pretty solid play in its own right...



I'm almost disappointed, honestly. I wanted to use it!



Regardless, a win is still a win.

One more round to go.





This time, we're up against Janet in the finals.





This isn't quite what I want to see in a starting hand, but it could be much worse.



Numbnail isn't capable of winning for us, but it should at least guarantee we don't lose.



Or not. Heh. Oh well.





At least now we should be in decent shape for the next few turns.



Bandit is usually solid on turn 2.



It works out for us, regardless.





What should we do here?



Given our options, I'd rather play two cards than one here so we can improve our chances of drawing into something good.



Also, Numbnail plus any attacker is reasonably strong early on.





This is a bit awkward, most of our options here are inefficient...



I decided to go for this in the end. Let's see how it does.



Unfortunately, our opponent had something better. Not an atypical result with Riz, for better or worse.





Not much of a choice here, really. (Also, we drew the King. That'll come in handy in a few turns.)



Especially since we have Riz available, this seems like the way to go.



That said, this was surprisingly close!

Throughout these playthroughs, I've been really impressed (or, more honestly, annoyed) with how effective these cards that flip coins to gain defence are. When the coin flips end up in their favour, they really punch above their weight. That said, I still wouldn't put them in my deck; they're annoying to play against in the hands of the CPU, but actually playing them would likely be even more frustrating when you lose the flips.





I'm not entirely sure what to do here. We either go with Ruffian, or a bunch of low-cost cards, and both have their downsides.



I decided to go for this in the end. I think because I'd rather draw more cards, and because Ruffian will be more effective if paired with something else.



It works out, at least.





This is a decent position to be in. Like last game, we're guaranteed the win as long as our opponent doesn't manage to heal this turn.



Also, Ruffian + Numbnail isn't too bad, if we don't get numbed our odds to win are pretty good.



Again, I'm weirdly disappointed, I wanted to play the King again. Oh well.



Regardless, that's the match.



And the tournament.

Well, there we have it. That was a bit of a slog in places; I hope you weren't too bored if you stayed with me this long. Hopefully this gives a better idea of the kinds of things that are possible in the Spy Cards minigame. Honestly, it can be pretty fun to play; it doesn't quite have the depth of a proper card game, but when you consider it was created for a sidequest it's quite a lot better than it has any right to be.

I'm not going to claim these decks are optimal in any way, because they're not. If you really want to optimise the strategy, the article on the Spy Cards Online website is a really good place to start (and even has some sample decks). My goal here was more to explore the space and show a variety of decks to give some ideas of strategies you can employ at various points during the game, depending on when you choose to take on the sidequest. I don't know how clearly it came through in this gameplay (I tried to highlight this by explaining my reasoning behind the plays, as best I could), but the decks do often feel quite different to play, and depending on how you build them, you want to be thinking differently about the strategy.

Regardless, it's a neat little card game that has some decent complexity to it, and it was fun to dig into a bit deeper. Have some fun with it.

[Explopyro]

I keep forgetting to show these off, but they finally came a while back. Here's the final set (at least as far as I know!) of Bug Fables plushies, it's Tanjerin and Cerise!



And for good measure, here's a group shot of everyone!



In other things, I now feel comfortable declaring that I'm out of things to cover and this LP is complete. I will be putting together a final thoughts post, once I manage to collect them; I hope to have that done within a week or so, then it should be time to see about finally getting this archived.

Thank you to everyone who's come along with me on this (far too long) journey.

[Explopyro]

Bug Fables: Final Thoughts and Wrap-Up

What do I even say at this point? I've written so much about this game over the last three years that finding something more to say is a real challenge.

It feels like we're in something of a Paper Mario renaissance, these days. There are a lot of indie devs attempting imitators (but Bug Fables definitely got there first); the "Paperverse" is a thing now, and I played a few new releases last year that were reminiscent of Paper Mario (or the broader Mario RPG space) in different ways. On top of this, Nintendo themselves released remakes of Super Mario RPG and even Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, neither of which I would have dreamt were possible before seeing them announced. They even announced a new Mario & Luigi RPG coming later this year, an act of game series necromancy I think literally nobody had on their bingo cards. It's a good time to be a fan of this style of game.

That said, this very renaissance highlights for me the way Bug Fables transcends its inspiration. Bug Fables is perfectly capable of standing on its own, and for all that the inspiration is obvious, at this point I don't feel right putting the emphasis on the comparisons. These days, when I revisit Paper Mario I more often find myself feeling nostalgic for Bug Fables than the reverse.

Bug Fables is not a perfect game, by any means. It could have done with more polish, had it been developed by a AAA studio rather than a small indie team. There are definitely small things I would change here and there if I could (many of which I pointed out over the course of this playthrough), but then I don't know if a single game exists that I wouldn't say that about. Bug Fables has charm, it has heart, and it has solid systems that are rewarding to dive into; even after all this time, I still love it.

One of the core lessons I've taken away from analysing and overthinking this game is that novelty isn't king, or perhaps that a straightforward idea executed well can be its own kind of innovation. Many if not most of the core ideas are derivative in some way or another, from the aesthetic, to the combination of small numbers and action commands, medals, etc, to the general plot structure and use of classic JRPG tropes (e.g. collecting magical artefacts of a lost civilisation), and so on. At the same time, the use of insects is indeed novel, and the way various traits of real insects are used to justify worldbuilding details and plot points is genuinely very clever. And the Turn Relay mechanic (and consistent 3-character party) go a long way to give the gameplay a different texture than that of the Paper Mario series. There is a lot of genuine innovation here, but it's subtle and often shows itself in the smaller details.

On the other hand, one of the things I didn't really touch on over the course of this LP, but would be remiss to ignore entirely, is addition by subtraction. Sometimes I think the best decisions Bug Fables made were to not include certain things that were in Paper Mario, no matter how well-liked or central to the design. Such as, for instance, the "special moves" (and associated resource layer, and TTYD audience mechanics): not to say these mechanics weren't fun or interesting, because they often were, but Bug Fables didn't need them, and its systems feel a lot more tightly designed for it. Or, for that matter, reducing the number of playable characters and changing the structure from "main character + partners" to a group of equals, which ends up allowing Bug Fables to do a lot more character development for the core cast, and also gives the developers more ability to tune the challenge design since the core party capabilities are a known quantity. The inspiration is obvious, but they knew when not to be too loyal to the source material.

Questions like "what makes this game work?" or even "why is this so compelling?" are always difficult to answer, even if you disregard the elephantine amount of subjectivity that has to be part of any conversation about art and taste. It tends to be much easier to pinpoint things that don't work than things that do: things that feel jarring or unpleasant or annoying, etc (even if that noticing frequently stops at symptoms and doesn't progress to diagnosing underlying problems). But when something works well, it can be hard to notice anything more than "this feels good"; the actual things that make that work can be quite subtle and fade into the background (and, one might argue they should). And even then, it's not sufficient to say something like "the game executed its ideas well and did nothing badly"; some flaws aren't fatal and can even be charming.

I'm trying to come up with a conclusive answer as to why I think this game is special, and ultimately, I don't think there's any one good answer. Then again, perhaps there doesn't need to be; perhaps it's even a foolish thing to ask.

For all that I've been covering this game for over three years now (what?!), I still feel like in some ways I've only scratched the surface. There are a lot of builds and strategies I haven't even touched on (including the incredibly bizarre "deathloop" strategy, which involves using Abombination and Miracle Shake to reset exhaustion penalties and play with action economy). I also never covered the bizarre mechanics of Frost Relay, which feature in quite a few advanced strategies; I'll link to this video which explains how weird it can get if that's of interest.

At least for a while, there was a vibrant challenge running and speedrunning scene, as well as an escalating competition to find the highest damage possible to deal in one turn. (I'm not super up to date on the scene but one creator I'd recommend is LyghtBF on youtube. They've done quite a few interesting challenges, including no-damage, no blocking, and speedruns, and they've covered some mods too.)

There's at least a bit of a modding scene too, including rebalancing attempts, custom medals, and even a deliberately bad machine translation mod known as Error Blame: Eternal Fruit. (I don't recommend trying to play Error Blame for yourself, as I'm given to understand it's a bit unstable and prone to crash in places. There are some playthroughs on youtube, though as I haven't personally vetted them I'm not comfortable linking to any particular one. I've seen bits and pieces and it's good silly fun if you're in the right mood.)

There's loads of wonderful fanart and fan animations (here's one of my favourites), and more music remixes than I can count.

So what's next for Bug Fables and Moonsprout Games? The team have been pretty quiet about any new projects. They've made a few comments over the years, but not much:

-They're considering a Bug Fables sequel, but they want to do a different and unrelated project first (to avoid being potentially typecast as a studio).
-Team Snakemouth's story is complete, and they will not be the main player characters in the next Bugaria game (although cameos are likely). The next game is likely to be set in a different part of the world with a mostly-new cast.
-The next Bug Fables game will be an RPG, but will be mechanically different and less like Paper Mario.

Only time will tell, but regardless, I'm looking forward to seeing whatever they eventually come up with.

Wherever you go from here, thank you for spending this time with me and with Bug Fables. I hope I was able to expose this game to a wider audience and show why I think it's deserving of recognition, and I'm flattered this LP garnered as much interest as it did.