Culdcept Saga -- Part 10: With a Grain of Sand

Hey, look! (Listen?!) It's Beau Billingslea! ...there are actually quite the number of high-profile voice actors in on this project. If only the sound mixing was better, we could hear more of them! There's not even an option to make the voices a little louder or the music a little quieter for occasions such as this... (A Cepter has the right to dream!) Honestly, Wongen seems to be the most... er... "normal" opponent we've run across in quite some time. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I feel like there's a bunch of weirdness we're just given to accept without question or even a token explanation. Is it better or clumsier worldbuilding to treat such as an unremarkably commonplace occurrence? (I honestly don't care. Give me more Beau Billingslea!) Oh, what? Another interloper! (I bet nobody could've seen this coming after Ticomun crashed the party last time!) And this one seems to be the guy we've heard spreading rumors about the state of the Empire. Honestly, it seems a bit weird, the way he's decided to reveal himself... it wasn't exactly in a position of power or in a fashion that would secure aid in his task by Wongen, so all he really did was get himself embroiled in an unnecessary conflict. As we've seen plenty of evidence for already, matches between more than two participants are WAY longer and far riskier to every player involved. (The risk of being targeted by additional sources of hostile action alone goes way up and becomes far harder to predict!) --- Fun side note here... although I hadn't wanted to use it at all, as I keep avoiding the option at the end of a match, part of this session is only possible by use of the Save Replay feature the menus won't stop pestering me about! You see, I was interrupted partway through... and as annoying as that tends to be on its own, necessitating some extra video editing magic just to recover from... ... ...I... kinda forgot to resume capture when I got back to things until the thing was basically already over. Given how INTENSE this game gets near the end, I definitely didn't want to lose it, but I also had to figure out how I'd manage to make things work out... (Even if I played this match all over again, there was no guarantee it'd be anywhere near as interesting an outcome!) As a result, I decided to save the replay and also overwrite the old game save data with this new progress, and I hedged my bets on whether or not I'd be able to make it work. Honestly, it works out way better than I'd feared, even if it was massively annoying to assemble at all. What I did was let the match play out as initially captured until the point where I'd stopped... then I slipped in the replay footage from that point forward until the very conclusion, and switched back to where I had remembered in much irritation that I'd not been recording. (It's a good thing I did that at all, because I had figured that the whole thing would be a wash and I'd just messed up royally.) You SHOULD be able to notice where the initial swap happens, because the background music obviously wouldn't be synced on both ends of the seam (the effect is still surprisingly minor considering how it could've been, though!), and all boardside banter by the AI players suddenly ceases. Honestly, it just spares you some more of the same senseless posturing by Drachma and prevents Wongen from ascribing the game's events to the wind... again... and again... (Oh, and there's huge, unremovable text at the bottom making sure you KNOW it's a replay. Just in case you were confused!) Overall, I'd say that Drachma's strategy of pissing everyone off works about as well in gameplay as it does in pre-battle diplomacy... but the really surprising thing is that Wongen could've wrapped this thing up much more tidily if he'd been more liberal about his use of Quicksand. I have no idea what he was saving it for, because it's easily the most powerful card in his deck, especially once he'd gotten that hugely powerful Land set up near the Castle. I love the single copy I have for my own Book's use. It's pricey, but once you're ready to play one, it can make it way more than pay for itself. Just make sure you don't cast it when a passing player has a combination of creatures and items that can let them wipe out your defender! --- For the first time in the game, I really like Wongen's perspective on things... I wouldn't trust the Empire either, but I'd say that Jo and Faustina have probably earned some respect for a change. Hopefully no behind-the-curtains machinations manage to overturn this hopeful note of a successfully-forged alliance... I'm sure there won't be any regrets or underhanded malarkey! Game ended, nice job, you guys!