September 12, 2024 (Originally posted on Neocities)
Why #20? Because the previous several entries were posted over on Cohost, but since that site’s going away, and I plan to backport all those posts to here like I previously did for the Tumblr and Blogger posts, we’re starting with this number. That’s also provided I’ve counted right and I’ll fix the number later if I did miscount, but I’ve checked a few times. However if someone reads this later they’ll see all the previous ones integrated into the mix before now so it’ll all look fine anyway. So for the record this was the first post specifically for the review blog on my site.
Where I left off last time, I had finished the last of the large sidequest chains, the one with the space pirates. Now I’ve looked into potential sidequests and ended up continuing the main quest finally after putting that off forever. Therefore this post has minor spoilers for the later parts of roughly the first half of the main quest, at least about where I think it is.
My first sidequest came up during looking for crafting material in my own quest to get OP weapons. Some guy in the Well in New Atlantis had to get rid of a pair of cursed boots and told me to dump them in a crate in the Den, the space station not run by pirates that’s glad to accept contraband. So I did that, even though some guy there offered me a minute amount of 500 credits to my millionaire ass and I turned him down so he wouldn’t get sent out of the airlock accidentally. Now just wondering if there’s a way for the space station to wear the shoes technically so it’d end up imploding or whatever.
The next was on the path to try to find another sidequest I’d heard about and was idle in my “random things to do” list in-game, but my ship can’t quite reach that far at the moment, which generally means lots of grinding ahead to get all the required perks set up. It’s also not quite obvious what systems are where and how far from each other given the starmap is technically 3D but can’t really be looked at in all angles. However on the way there I ended up on a planet with a “resort” that was more of some alternative prison, complete with some kinda commentary on usual prison systems. Those usual systems may work for the player character, who just time skips to having spent time or money after a moment, but then there’s the whole ethical thing and so on. Long story short I mainly had to figure out who kidnapped a random guy and then get them to leave the place alone. Fortunately I was able to do it with words, in addition to fancy clothes and drugs because that’s how this game works.
I did a bit more grinding, mainly surveying random barely-populated planets and moons, but came to the conclusion that I should just grab whatever EXP I can from the main quests so it’s not just totally boring. I finally asked the rich investor guy at the Lodge to do his artifact-buying thing. Naturally that meant going to Neon and acting as if I hadn’t been there before. It started off by suddenly having to pay off a 10000 credit bounty, which if not some weird bug may have been a result of a previous quest where the king of the city or whoever framed me for a random murder, but no big deal.
Then onto the actual quest, I had to meet the seller in a nightclub there, which I’d previously hacked the door of so I could dramatically close it during negotiations. There was less of a negotiation when some guard from the guy the seller stole the artifact from so I blasted his ass, but it turned out we couldn’t leave and had to visit the boss in his building. It ended up being a stealth escape through vents and stuff, until stealth broke again due to teleporting companions, so I just blasted through every single guard and such I found on that floor and made it to the last part, where I ended up having to decide what to do with the seller from earlier. I asked him why he stole the plot device from the boss, and he had very good reason to, mainly as revenge from being fired from a crappy job. I was also swiping whatever credits were sitting out in the floor I blasted through with my particle beam shotgun so all’s fair. Therefore I let him go and the boss was also just fine with that and also let me leave.
After leaving the planet, we encountered this weird ship that said to stop finding the artifacts or else be destroyed. I just decided to leave immediately instead of attempting to blow up the ship or giving up the plot device like a dorkus. The Lodge had all kinds of theories about the nature of the ship, whether it was aliens or God or some kinda alien god.
After that main quest adventure, I had enough levels to unlock war crime shotgun mods that I’d heard about. So I went and added those to my current particle beam shotgun that was already pretty powerful to somehow add a spreading damage effect to an already fairly large spread, as well as a standard double-barreled one, the type I normally don’t use because the “clip” size is so tiny, but when the mod for that effectively turns it into a rain of bombs, it’s worth it, just needing to maximize the range on it to avoid exploding myself. It also proved helpful in clearing enemies and native wildlife that was just in the way of finishing the next part of the main quest, which was mainly just two artifact retrieval things without much else, except now that these Starborn enemies spawn in front of them, but with my weapons I can also obliterate them quickly, which is important because they actually also have an OP gun. This also applies to the followup missions about getting the powers from the artifacts from the space castles, where after being teleported outside, another Starborn labeled as a guardian shows up either right in front or some distance away, ready to get hammered with firepower that’s only considered excessive against anything else.