Our son - never named as far as I know - is supportive.
Taloon's wife Neta hasn't gotten much screen time so far this LP, and that's a real shame. Consider the chapter from her perspective: her husband comes to her and says, "Hey honey, I know my income is the only thing supporting you and our son, but I'd like to spend our savings on a mediocre plant-based weapon and go whip monsters. I'll send a message when we're rich, ok?"
And to that, Neta says, "Good luck, dear! Try not to die!" Then she hands him a Lunch and waves him goodbye.
That's not even considering the time a dog dragged his mangled corpse to the town healer. I'd have a hard time with that, myself.
But Taloon has persevered and sent for his family (though he probably hasn't explained all the drowning-related details behind his new fortune):
Hm. Back in Chapter 1, I interpreted 'Smack!' as, well, a smack, such as one might see in a 50s sitcom. It gave an interestingly unsettling edge to the memory-restoration scene, but it's clear now that I misread it; what's-her-name in Burland restored her husband's memory with a kiss. D'awww.
Anyway, even though the chapter is titled 'Taloon the Arms Merchant', the shop is in fact a team effort between Taloon and Neta. Taloon's job is to go out and find bits of merchandise (which need not be weapons), and it's Neta's job to sell them.
You can certainly sell the items you find after battle, but that's risky and takes a long time. Simpler is to just go across the street and buy as many high-ticket items as you can carry, as I've done with the Abacus of Virtue (1.6k a pop!) here.
We then give the Abaci to Neta to resell...
...at a
50% markup.
On its face that seems pretty ridiculous; you can buy the same item at a
fair price if you're willing to walk like 10 more steps. But when we check in the next morning...
...we find that she has, somehow, sold every Abacus
and the Lunch we gave her.
Archon-level psychic powers? Devastating sex appeal? Outright theft? Neta's nigh-miraculous ability to sell above market is never expanded upon, but it does at least explain why she wasn't worried about her own future without Taloon. She clearly loves the guy (and who wouldn't?), but it's equally clear that she doesn't
need him to be successful.
By plowing the first day's profits into more Abaci, we earn ourselves even
more cash in Abacus sales the following day.
After four iterations, we've quintrupled our starting stake to 35k. Four
more iterations would take us to 175 thousand. Another four iterations...yeah. Unbounded exponential growth is
niceBasically, we have infinite money for the rest of the chapter. We could, I believe, go pay off the old man and wrap things up right now, but while we're here we might as well see the way you're
supposed to raise that 60k.
And no, you can't sell the Iron Safe.
You may recall that the King had hinted at having a post-shop mission for us:
: I want you to collect weapons and armor for my soldiers and deliver them to the people downstairs.
: My order is 7 Broad Swords and 7 suits of Half Plate Armor!
Now, complaining about one's equipment is a fine old military pastime, but given the recent near-miss with Bonmalmo and the ongoing civil unrest in Santeem, it's understandable that the king might want to upgrade his defenses. And our reward?
What an amazing coincidence!
Half Plate Armor is available at the armor shop in Endor, but for Broad Swords we'll need to go to Bonmalmo. At shop prices the whole order is worth 22,400gp, so the premium for a rush job is substantial.
Though, both items drop from end-of-chapter enemies, so as it happens I'm carting around a few of each. In business it's good to anticipate the customer's needs, so let's hand them over right away:
: I've made a record of the delivery.
: The rest of the order is...
: 6 Broad Swords!
: 5 suits of Half Plate Armor!
: Keep bringing them.
To make inventory space I sell off everything except the Sword of Malice and the Iron Safe, so we can pick up the whole Bonmalmo order in one trip.
Early on in this process, Laurent's contract expires. If you need more Laurent in your life you can find him on the second floor of the inn again, but we're good.
Back in Bonmalmo, we catch up on the local gossip:
Tom's son was a thief, and that's bad, but he was such a petty thief that no one cares enough to look for him, and that's...good? I guess?
6 Broad Swords later, we head back to Endor. After we've dropped them off we hit the Endorian armor shop for the requisite Half Plate Armor, and soon enough:
Success!
: By the way, have you heard of the Zenithian Sword?
: It can even break rocks, so they say.
: I wish I could get it...
A sword that can break rocks, eh? If we'd had that, we could have fought that giant rolling rock monster from the cave with the Iron Safe. And also we heard that rumor about how the Chosen One is going to need it to save the world.
Taloon's arms-merchant dream is pretty much in the bag at this point. We have a shop, we have a wife with freaky mind-control powers who can get people to accept enormous overheads, and we're based in an area where the wildlife more or less rains weaponry. Once we've glutted the market in Endor and Bonmalmo we can expand toward Santeem; if the civil war's still going they'll certainly need weapons there. Taloon's path is set, mission accomplished.
But.
There is, to be blunt, the end of the world thing. Monsters increasing everywhere, ominous portents, mysterious civil wars. The whole reason people need arms merchants, basically.
It's not sound business sense to deliberately reduce the demand for your own products.
But it
would be pretty great advertising. "Come buy the weapons that saved the world!" Neta's doing crazy things already, what could she do with a marketing campaign like that? Thousand-gold-piece clubs, probably. Not to mention whatever absurdly powerful weapons one might find on an epic quest. One-of-a-kind, some of them, probably.
You know what?
Let's do this.
Step one: get off of this continent somehow. The one ship we've seen was stuck underground - and ethically dubious to boot - so we really do have to buy into this old man's crazy scheme. 60k is pocket change nowadays, but still.
It'll be a while before anything happens here - massive underground construction projects do take time - so let's go visit the casino:
Well, that's what I planned to do, but as you can see from this screenshot it's more or less deserted. The only guy around is Ragnar.
: But it's over and the Casino also seems to be closed for a while.
: ...and so rather than search for the this person in other places, you opted to just chill in the empty casino?
: Yeah, what of it?
Ragnar was all kinds of badass in Burland, but Burland is, let's face it, the Hazzard County of DW4. He's in the big city now, and it doesn't look like he's adjusting well.
By checking in on the mining operation, we trigger the Casino for real.
But I'm feeling contrary; now that we're
supposed to go to the Casino I don't want to anymore. Plus it's kind of a downer seeing Ragnar waste his life instead of being the two-fisted mystery-solving badass we all know he can be. So instead, let's abuse our shop some more:
OH FINE
(Past this point, you can no longer abuse your shop to get vast quantities of gold. Gold doesn't carry over between chapters and there's nothing left to buy, so it's not a huge loss)
So, ok, fine, the Casino. We touched on it a little in chapter 2, but now that we have money to burn we might as well dig in:
First, buy Casino coins to gamble with. 200 gp buys 1 coin (the ratio was 10:1 in chapter 2, but Taloon's gold-grinding abilities are considerably more than 20 times more efficient so it works out).
Once you've gambled up a bunch of coins, you can trade them for the prizes shown here. The Magic Potion and Wizard's Ring restore MP (the only two items in the game to do so), the Meteorite Armband doubles your agility (ensuring that you'll act first), and the Metal Babble Shield is the strongest shield in the game. At the current exchange rate it costs 10 million gp to buy directly, and it's worth every penny.
(The Staff of Jubilation is a decent-ish weapon for healer types, and the Mirror of Ra does one rather unhelpful thing to one monster at one point in the game).
Honestly, without savestates or a lot of patience, direct purchase is probably the best way to go. Like a real casino, the odds are slanted sharply against the player.
For example, here we are playing the slots. The first column has a '7' in it, so we could win a thousand coins!
But we won't. Ever.
: Pick the winning monster, and you'll rake in the coins!
Here's a better choice. The Fight Ring.
The odds seem to more or less correlate to each monster's hp, or some similar fragility metric; the Sizarmage is one of the more dangerous monsters on the ticket thanks to its Icebolt spell, but it can't really take hits.
The battle begins!
Fight Ring battles are mostly a matter of luck. The monsters attack each other randomly, and if two of them happen to gang up on the third, it can easily be killed.
But if your chosen monster is one of the gangers instead of the gangee, and it betrays its partner at just the right moment...
...it can win you a bunch of coins.
Normally, you're restricted to betting a maximum of 50 per fight. But if you win, you're allowed to bet all of your winnings on the next match, no matter how big a purse you've won. Once again, exponential growth FTW.
Lilypas are low-level and wimpy, compared to the other monsters on the list, but the game's algorithm doesn't seem to realize that it can cast Upper on itself, doubling its defense power and putting itself out of reach of monsters of this level. There's no such thing as a safe bet, but...
...it worked out.
Taloon picks the winner a few more times, and before long:
Also like a real casino, they make you stop if you've won too much.
Unlike a real casino, you can just wander over to the next table and play some more.
Unlike DW4 slots and DW4 blood sports, DW4 poker doesn't resemble its real-world antecedents very closely. You're dealt five cards, and may choose to send some of them back to be replaced...
...and if you can form a poker hand with those new cards, you win something. Note that with two pair you "win" x1 your original bet.
Once you've won a hand, the party begins. Double-or-nothing is a very simple game: you're dealt one card face up and four cards face down. You pick one of the face-down cards, and if it's higher value than the face-up card, you double your bet.
Save states make things a little unfair.
But why bother? Didn't I say back in chapter 2 that I wasn't going to abuse the Casino for crazy high-level items that would make the game a snap?
I did say that. But let's face facts: Taloon the character may be awesome, but Taloon the collection of game mechanics kind of sucks. In Chapter 5 he's going to have to stand up to direct comparisons to other, better, characters, and his tendency to not do what he's told only exacerbates things.
So I thought it'd be nice to give Taloon something distinguishing, that would make a fighter at least comparable to Ragnar or Alena. There's just one catch:
I had forgotten - or simply never knew - but the Metal Babble Shield is special.
Only spellcasters can equip it. Brey can use one of these, but Taloon/Ragnar/Jessica/whoever cannot.
Oh well. Into storage it goes.
Now that we've wasted some time gambling:
: I didn't understand what it meant....
: Are you leaving on a journey again?
: You don't have to lie to me....
: I've heard about the Zenithian Sword too. You want to search for it, right?
: You're always chasing dreams....
: But that's what I love about you.
: Why don't you go? I'll be waiting for your return.
Neta, ladies and gentlemen. Give her a big hand; she deserves it.
And so, followed only by his faithful canine companion Tov, Taloon set forth on a new journey.
Don't worry, old man; we absolutely will.
I think this guy is trying to throw us off the scent. If there's sword-related info to the East, why's he heading west?
Recurring theme #20 or so: treasure hunters are duplicitous.
Recurring theme #21:
Fjords is an asshole for bagging on things, as they help people unlock their dreams.
We emerge...
...and that's that.
We'll see Taloon again early in chapter 5, right at the point where you're having to make decisions about who to cut from the Core Four.
Next time, on Let's Play Dragon Warrior 4:
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