3 - The 7th Stand User
(Originally posted March 9, 2024)
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Thank you all for voting! After all that prologue business that was basically just the first chapter of the manga, we have now entered The Fanfic Zone, that dreamlike dimension where we build our JoJo OC; our JoJOC, if you will. And the first thing we see in this dream is...
->Yes
->No
If you were playing this without a guide, this is where you'd do a whole Buzzfeed personality test that ends with you being assigned a Stand. Some people have put together whole formulas and shit for getting Maximum Stats, but I'm not going to bother. We're just going to beeline straight to the one we want.
You all voted for a Special-type Stand, and each of the three sort of edges into a different class. The short-range Special edges into Control, the middle into Support, and long here into Power. Power was the runner-up, so...
Our Stand is a Mega Buster by way of s-CRY-ed (which I've never seen). Let's go.
In proper JoJo fashion, Quicksilver is not named after the X-men villain but after the rock band Quicksilver Messenger Service. They are perhaps best known for the Happy Trails album which contains a 25 minute long rendition of Who Do You Love?.
(Aside: In retrospect, perhaps doing a JoJo LP when I know next to nothing about music was a poor decision.)
I've always felt like these sorts of personality tests - Myers-Brigg, enneagram, horoscopes, the four humours, etc. - are basically cold reading; you're going to latch onto the parts that seem like they fit and ignore the bits that don't. More specifically, this is referred to as the Barnum-Forer effect, where people perceive broad statements on personality as specific to them. Who hasn't let their emotions carry them away from time to time?
That said, I believe this does actually affect the 7th Stand User's dialogue.
Only a few people gave suggestions (my thanks to all those who did), but there were enough that I could toss them all into a proverbial hopper and press the "random" button. If we put everything together...
(Art by the incredible RoseNonsense, send her some commissions)
Our newly possessed player character awakes with a start.
Cascada: The power to cause any CEO on Earth to instantaneously explode?
I feel like my reaction to suddenly having a Mega Buster would be more along the lines of "fuck yeah".
This line makes a bit more sense when your Stand isn't the one that's an arm cannon, I think. Perhaps we'll see that one day.
The game will elaborate somewhat later (much later) but this is some primo fanfic OC bullshit right here. The New Girl is part of the plot now, because... she just is. The player was just given context for who Dio is and why he's hunting down the Joestars, but Cascada here is just some teen with no skin in the game.
It's so blatant it loops back around to being kind of acceptable. The whole thing about this game is that you get to be the cool and special 7th Stand User. No need to make any bones about it.
He just said that he's dead! His life was already on the line and got scratched out! Pay attention!
With that... we can finally play the game! Holy shit!
You've probably played JRPGs, and this is one of them. We're on a grid, we can rest in our bed to restore HP/SP, we can look at our stats and skills in the menu, et cetera. The bookshelf has a manual with the basic controls and a volume of Pink Dark Boy, an in-universe manga by Part 4's Kishibe Rohan.
Pink Dark Boy goes on to explain other Stand basics. Generally, only Stands can defeat Stands, unless they manifest in an explicitly physical way like possessing an object. Also, a Stand's strength is usually inversely proportional to their range, with the exception of Automatic Stands with simplistic behavior.
The treasure chest in the room contains a Handkerchief, which gives a +1 to all stats and resistance to Poison and Darkness (Blind) status effects.
I definitely didn't have to look up what PC-98 games came out in 1988 because my original joke was about a game that came out in 1990. No ma'am.
If you've read Part 3, we have some long-term foreshadowing here in the form of an impossible minigame.
I have never once succeeded at doing this; if you're going fast enough to reach the goal in 20 seconds, then you're going fast enough that you simply cannot avoid any obstacles in time. Here's how it usually plays out:
It would actually be quite advantageous for me to grind out some wins on Hard mode (you can accumulate up to three Badges of Honor) but fuck that. I can use Cheat Engine later.
That's everything in our room. When we go to leave...
Due to what I can only assume are technical backend reasons (most likely due to how party members work), Steel is basically our equip menu. You cannot choose equipment from the pause menu: you have to call up Steel, ask him to change your equipment, and then he'll cycle through each piece one by one and ask you if you want to equip it. This is fine right now and incredibly tedious once you've accumulated more than three pieces of armor.
If we ask Steel for some guidance...
Also notable is the Tactics menu, which is a sort of soft equip slot that lets us tweak our stats and status resistances a bit. There's Normal, which has no plus or minus, but we also have:
Initiative: Attack +5, Speed +5, Defense -10
Charge: Attack +10, Speed +10, Defense -20
Desperation: Attack +20, Defense -20
Keep Distant: Attack -10, Speed -5, Defense +5
Flee: Attack -10, Speed +10, Long-range Defense +10
Guard: Attack -10, Speed -10, Defense +20
I pick "Flee" for now, correctly assuming Quicksilver's attacks are mostly magical rather than physical. This bites me in the ass for a solid 45 minutes because the basic attack is always physical.
Cascada lives in a nice suburban home with her parents and little sister who have absolutely no personality traits whatsoever. At least she isn't an obligatory anime orphan, I guess. The doors to their rooms are locked, but we can check the loft.
...aka, the New Game Plus room. Any souvenirs in your inventory from previous playthroughs populate this room; otherwise, it's empty.
I do nominally appreciate the "wow, you're up early" calls as a justification for why we can futz around the map indefinitely before progressing the plot. Even if we can still sleep in the bed as many times as we want.
The chest in the kitchen has an F.F. Sports Drink (10%+2 HP/SP), the fridge has an inexplicably unlimited stash of Bottled Water (5 uses, 2%+1 HP/SP) and we can take three Ointments (50 HP and cure Bleeding) from the first aid kit.
...I actually forgot the water was unlimited when I recorded this, so I did a lot of running back home to rest. Cascada is gonna get hydrated when I load my save.
We finally step outside. Cascada's house is in the northwest (upper left) corner of the Japan map. Our objective, the school, is a big fenced-off area in the center. When our heroine simple tries to cross the street...
Goddammit!!
Delinquents are basically the slimes or goblins of the Japan map. There's a bunch of 'em and they aren't really dangerous at all... but we are only at level 1.
Remember that the Flee tactic is lowering Cascada's Attack... but that doesn't affect Quicksilver's Sunbeam. 22 damage is enough to outright OHKO every single mob enemy in this area; having a Mega Buster fucks.
The problem is that it's expensive, at 8 SP. Our total at Lv1 is 35. If my math is right, that's four shots before Cascada has to jog back home and take a nap. Or chug an entire bottle of water.
Immediately south of Cascada's home is the konbini, which sells some basic healing items and basic equipment. Nothing we really need quite yet, and we can't afford it anyway. Dad is stingy with the allowance.
Right after getting back on the road...
Steel wasn't kidding. The instant Cascada got Stand powers, Dio's squad of assassins started mobilizing like it was the end of John Wick 2 or some shit.
Muderdolls (named after... uh, Murderdolls) are a persistent encounter throughout the game, if the "Lv1" didn't give it away. They're a bit more dangerous than Delinquents but mostly by virtue of always appearing in threes; they'll still drop to a Sunbeam like anything else.
You definitely want to prioritize killing any that start to get up in your face though, because...
They will blow themselves up for about 10 damage; nothing to sneeze at when Cascada's max HP is around 50-60. To make things worse, this does mean you lose out on the EXP and money for that Murderdoll.
Another block or so southwards are a couple of locked buildings.
Cascada goes to say hi to a fellow student, but...
The third and final mob encounter on the Japan map is a pair of Lv2 Murderdolls, who have a bit more HP and a somewhat more annoying attack pattern.
They like to trip you, which has a chance of causing the Dizzy status and causing you to lose your turn. The chance is low enough that you're probably not going to get stunlocked or anything, but it's definitely annoying. And being annoying to the player is the most heinous crime any video game character can commit.
Now we're cooking. Heat Ray costs a whopping 15 SP - by the end of this update, we can barely cast it three times - but...
Encounters in Japan top off at 20 HP. The first boss has 170.
Remember how in Final Fantasy IV, Tellah had all the big Tier-3 nuke spells but each one cost a whole third of his MP pool? This reminds me of that, but we're only going to improve. The Machine cannot be stopped.
East of the 7-11 is this building.
As far as I recall, most maps don't even have one of these. It's more for culling your inevitably bloated inventory in NG+, I think.
Even so, we poke around, and on one of the bookshelves in the corner...
Nice. There's a random pool of items that can show up for sale, but we couldn't afford the Good Potions anyway. This is the same skill Jotaro had in the prologue; it's free to cast and heals Confusion, Sleep, and Fear statuses. Getting it for cheap is a nice bonus.
We run back home for another nap and then head due east along the top edge of the map.
Guess Jotaro's taking the long way to school this morning. He wouldn't dare hop a chest-high fence.
How could an explosion not leave even a corpse? Creepy. Good thing this isn't related to us at all. (It actually isn't)
He's across from a side gate in the fence around the campus. This is just a bit of flavor; it doesn't matter how you enter the school, as far as I know.
Further east, at the upper right corner of the map:
Oh hell yeah. Time to get some Super Hang-On in.
Unfortunately this is the shittiest arcade ever. If I walked into a place where it looks like a gang brawl happened ten minutes ago, I'd probably walk right out. But I guess I don't have a Heat Ray.
God, looks like the bathroom is leaking too. I currently have 5-foot-square holes in my wall and ceiling and a completely unusable bathroom due to a leak, so just seeing that puddle fills me with dread.
The games give your stock beeps and boops, and one of the Delinquents will attack you if you bother him. Around here is where I switch my Tactics back to Normal, which allows Cascada's basic attack to do around 10-14 damage instead of 4-6.
One of Dio's assassins wouldn't be doing something this conspicuous, right?
Google Translate tells me this is basically her saying "I'll find someone with supernatural powers and kill them". Seems on the up-and-up.
In the next enemy encounter:
That fortune-teller hit us with a status effect! That charlatan! Fortunately all it does is help us finish this encounter quicker before wearing off. We start heading down the right-hand side of the map.
Part 4 enjoyers might recognize this goon; the sack makes a cat meow sound. Guess Cascada ain't worth scamming, because this is all he says.
A bit further down we get to a hospital. I'm pretty sure we'd respawn here if we were knocked out, but I guess I'm just too good at this game to know for sure. More likely it's just a Game Over screen.
For the whole stay? Damn. It costs me $400 to even go to the emergency room; who knows how much treatment would cost. When I got my appendix (that the surgeon described to me as, and I quote, "gangrene all the way up") removed, it was something like $1600 with insurance - and this was still when I had my parents' Good Insurance. Without, it would have been something along the lines of $25,000.
...I made myself depressed.
The bottom edge of the map has this forest maze, but the entrance is further west. We pass by a few more buildings on the way.
Hey, it's that cafe. Looks like that one waiter did quit after The Polaroid Incident. Can't blame him, really.
Restaurants are going to be our most economical source of healing once we're in the game proper, because they affect the whole party at once. A single potion that heals 20 SP runs for about 50G.
Meanwhile, cameos spotted.
My understanding is that the stock "kids hate their veggies!" food in Japan is green bell peppers, due to their bitterness. The reason I hated veggies as a kid was because my mom always cooked them from frozen in the microwave and they ended up soggy and mushy. You gotta burn the shit out of that brassica, it can take it.
This also reminds me of the wacky ingredient intros on the original Iron Chef.
Wise words, Chairman.
If we hook south from the cafe, we can start navigating the forest maze.
It leads to... another locked building.
Damn. Out of literally any fictional restaurant I've ever seen, this is the one I want to eat at the most. That spaghetti would definitely fix me, right?
And with that, we've explored all of the Japan map besides the school, our plot-mandated destination. There definitely isn't anything else to check out. Not a bit.
.......fine.
Stand Notes
It seems that whoever used to live here was gathering info about different Stands.
Dan Penn: My own Stand. Remote-controlled. Takes the form of countless levitating hands. Can turn memory fragments into physical records.
Murderdolls: Allows dolls and mannequins to be controlled from a distance by attaching a strand of hair. Does not transmit damage to the user.
Alhirt: An automatic Stand that takes the form of many large, insect-like entities called Green Hornets.
Diary
It's a scrapbook-style diary. Half of the contents are burnt to ash... There's a photo of a young woman and a much older man. Are they father and daughter? They seem very happy.
...It's that bow and arrow... That's the cause of this whole catastrophe... It has the power to awaken latent Stand powers... I'd tested it many times to no ill effect, but that day was different... an unbelievable thing occurred. The arrow broke apart, scattering pieces of it everywhere. I don't remember how it happened... It was almost like it shattered on its own.
...That was when it all started. Bizarre accidents began occurring around town once after another. Things that seemed like they couldn't possibly have been the work of human beings. Then, today, I received a visitor. He, too, was a Stand user. The man introduced himself, then, in a detached tone of voice, began to say...
"I apologize, but you know too much about my powers. I came here to dispose of you."
That man is my murderer... Using my Stand, Dan Penn, I was able to transcibe my final thoughts into this diary. That arrow has caused many new Stand users to appear, and so has sparked many disasters... This is my penance for my irresponsible deeds... Watch yourself from now on... Watch out for 'Stand Users'...
If you're brushed up on your JoJo, you probably have an idea of who blew up this building and killed Steel. Weirdly enough, it's not actually important to the plot of 7SU. Like, at all.
Next time, Cascada actually goes to school like everyone told her to.
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