London Life Pauly, and the living’s easy

Have I gone into any long musings yet about London Life, the so-called mini-RPG bonus loaded with over 100 hours of gaming included with Professor Layton and the Last Specter? ::scans Grinding Down‘s archives:: Hmm…looks like a resounding no. For shame! I’ve lost a lot of Happiness.

First, let’s take a look at London Life Pauly in all his snazziness:

Pretty impressive, right? That snazzy top hat just melts your eyes. Normally, I like dressing in fairly bland clothing, the day-to-day stuff like a single-colored polo shirt or something flannel, but that 60 Formality really helps me get inside some of the fancier places in Little London, such as the casino. And you kind of want to get inside everywhere, as it opens up more quests, jobs, and people to mingle with. Let me set this all up a little better.

In London Life, you create an avatar and spend the majority of your days and nights talking with citizens, doing fetch quests for them, buying clothing, decorating your room, fishing, and earning money by completing a number of miscellaneous jobs. If it sounds a lot like Animal Crossing: Wild World, it’s because it is, with a few differences, some better and some worse: you don’t have a mortgage to pay off because you live in a tiny, small apartment studio; citizens in Little London do not really live lives, staying in their respective spots during the day and night times, speaking the same lines of dialogue over and over; and you have to be aware of your avatar’s Happiness, which I guess is a way to keep them alive. I’ve not yet run out of Happiness–though I’ve come dangerously close after some bad spouts of fishing–so I don’t really know what happens when the meter hits zero, but I don’t want to find out. A happy avatar lives better, they say. And there’s plenty to be happy about…

For starters, the writing in London Life is fantastic. And most has to do with the small observations or the flavor text for items, fish, flowers, furniture, and so on. There’s humor to be found in everything. Your avatar can basically examine anything he or she sees, and is rewarded with some text for it. Not just “It’s a desk.” This same level of attention to minutiae is prominently in Professor Layton and the Last Specter, found when tapping around the screen, and it’s greatly welcomed here. The music’s bubbly and bouncy, appropriate for each place you go into. And the graphics…my god, the spritework! It’s just heavenly, and it’s also amazing how well defined different items of clothing can be with just some simple sprites.

Okay, let’s take a look at my cramped living quarters, too:

Used to have a roommate, but he wasn’t down with my toy and stuffed animal collection, so he left. Toodles to him. Little London Pauly collects what he wants, when he wants. Not sure what the benefits of a roommate are, and I guess we share a bed Scott Pilgrim/Wallace Wells style, but whatever. With him gone, it just means I have more space to put stuff down. Such as a stack of books I recently bought. Yay!

I don’t know if there’s actually 100 hours of gaming in London Life, and I don’t really know how many I’ve already spent so far–maybe around six or seven–but there’s definitely a lot of things to do, and it’s just so dang charming that I’m going to keep on doing them until the charm wears off, which will most likely be after I stop getting newspapers full of quests every morning. Will try to check back in again, especially if I’m able to move into a larger pad or if I figure out how to open up that mysterious LOST-like hatch. Since the game is still so new and relatively obscure, there’s not a lot of info out there, which is actually kind of cool. It’s been some time since I’ve had to really figure something out for myself…

All must bow before the Master of the Fighters Guild

Well, of the remaining quests to complete to the Fighters Guild, three more involved going into a cave and killing [plural noun]. The final ones actually broke form, but even with that said, they weren’t that exciting, despite being concerned with taking down the Blackwood Company and destroying a crazy drug-producing tree. It was still go here, kill these people, report back what happens, accept next quest. Very disconnected and disappointing, but I’m glad to have to at least fully completed a guild questline–other than the easy-peasy Arena one–so here, look at my shiny rewards:

Champion, Fighters Guild (10G): Reached Champion rank in the Fighters Guild

Master, Fighters Guild (50G): Completed the Fighters Guild Questline

The final quest involves you taking down the Blackwood Company, a group of no-gooders that have popped up a few other times during your growing career in the Fighters Guild. Instead of going to a cave to murder them all, you go to their base of operations in Leyawiin…and murder them all. Molly summoned a lot of skeletons to distract them and then plucked them down systematically with her bow and arrows. Nothing terribly hard. In the basement, she found a tree surrounded by cogs and wheels and other crazy-looking mechanisms. Every time you click on it, nothing happens. You are tasked with destroying the pumps powering the chaotic thing; I loosed some arrows and fire spells into it, but nothing seemed to be working. Then I noticed some boards on the ground, which fit perfectly in the spinning wheels, breaking them fast and setting the whole place on fire. Upon returning to mean ol’ Vilena Donton and telling her all about Molly’s good deeds, she bestowed upon her the grandest of grand titles, the Master of the Fighters Guild. After that…um, nothing. There’s no confetti or party in the basement, no roasted rat meat and seasoned cheese wedges, no cheering and clapping, no anything. Hollow from beginning to end.

For this marathon run, I stayed focused. I picked up very little loot, unless it was lightweight or simply gold or more arrows for my enchanted bow of numbing, and that was a little hard for me at first. I am, by nature, a lootwhore. I like taking everything, whether I plan to use it or not. I mean, in my mind, there’s always the possibility that X might come in handy or that I could always just sell Y at a later point, but this then leads to spending a lot of time on inventory management. My goal was to see every quest completed, and so there was little time for fidgeting. Bad enough all the loading from fast traveling to and from constantly, from cave to city, city to city, city to cave.

And that’s mostly that for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. From what I’ve gathered, the most exciting guild questline in the game is that of the Dark Brotherhood’s, but I chose poorly, going with Fighters Guild and am now out of time. Tonight, I am going to be devouring The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim in big-eyed fashion, and while there’s no Fighters Guild in this new snowy realm, there is another guild similar to them. The Warriors? I dunno. I think though for my first playthrough I’m going to work on getting into the Thieves guild and going from there.

Molly the Master, out!