November Eve

Oh man, remember these? It feels like it's been day five for ages.

I wish I could come up with any sort of meaning with these day names.

Day six should open up with some celebration. The slime monster is destroyed, and Steve has been defeated. Crisis over.

And at first glance, it seems to be that way. Gem Hunter is a little patronizing here to Kim who is absolutely a strong and capable character in the Gem Hunter games. In this game Gem Hunter, killed a doctor and shot Hercules. The latter probably wasn't all that dangerous of a situation since I'm certain everyone else in that room was heavily armed.

With how frequently female characters in ZZT games of this era feel like they have the personality of cardboard, Kim remains a genuinely likable and strong character. Gem Hunter is a lot more boring.

But there's still one thing that hasn't been dealt with, and that's Masamune. This whole xamboxumbadria scenario was caused by his plan to kill off various powerful Hoodians (and humans) in order to conquer Da Hood. Just because Steve's been defeated doesn't mean that Masamune's going to just give up.

Plus the fear that Masamune taking over would result in a ban on rap music is pretty funny.

While Parasite Eve doesn't end with a fight against some dude in a helicopter, it does feature the equivalent of NE's Tyrone jumping out of a helicopter to throw some fancy ultimate-being-killing bullets to the protagonists, which is pretty incredible. Are we out of Interactive Fantasies members who could jump to their deaths for such a purpose?

Masamune's got a cute little animated helicopter that doesn't look like it's capable of taking down a cruiser, but it's capable of finishing off then-Interactive Fantasies member Knightt.

So the real final battle is with Masamune.

Unfortunately, it's no different than the Steve fight. The mounted machine guns that took out Knightt do move around on the bottom of the helicopter and fire zig-zag patterns of bullets, but again there's just a big gap in the middle. It's even more bizarre here because there's no reason the guns couldn't move an extra step from side to side and close the gap.

This also means that Masamune has an attack that just automatically hits Kim, to prevent the fight from being completely free, but it does less damage than what Steve was capable of.

The auto-hitting attack is supposed to be Masamune launching a missile, which also has a physical component to it. Here one gun will stand in place and fire several shots downward which nobody will ever be hit by.

The only danger here is that because of Steve's own auto-hit attack, Kim is probably going to be pretty low on health by the time she gets to Masamune so healing becomes a priority at first.

Yet another aircraft crashes.

There is a big non-animated explosion, and I can't decide if I like how it looks or not. I think I'm actually onboard with the very chaotic shading it has, but that red blob in the center just makes things look like some weird fried red egg.

Ugh I felt like this was a reference to something having this sort of explanation of physics and just realized I was thinking of Bee Movie.

There's one final rendezvous at the station before the game closes.

With the planet saved, it's time for everyone to get out of town before they're overrun with media asking questions.

Steve is still out there, but there's a casual line about how he can no longer create an ultimate being, so everything's wrapped up nicely then.

Roll credits.

The credits are not as lengthy as I thought seeing as there were so many ZZTers included in this game. Lots of folks thanked here don't make an appearance in the main game.