Fallout 2: Finished. I'll say this for the endgame: they may throw power armor and nightmarishly strong weapons at you like candy in the last few hours, but you absolutely need them if you're going to tackle the Enclave cowboy style. Clearing that place was brutal. The detention area wasn't a problem, but the armory? Oh god. I was going to leave that area alone, until I realized I'd have to come back that way after triggering the reactor meltdown. Had to cheese it out and abuse the exit grid to take healing breaks and tackle the goons in waves. When you've got four or five enemies wielding gauss rifles, someone's going to die fast, and they all seemed to go out of their way to target the MC.
Ending montage had a couple of headdesk-inducing moments. Not because of quality concerns, but because the events described were things I went out of my way to prevent during the game and they wound up happening anyway. Vault City enslaves the ghouls? Fuck. It did always seem like there was something I'd left unfinished there--Gordon's plan to sell power to Vault City really sounded like a sidequest, but nothing ever came of it. The second thing that gets me...is something I have no freaking clue why it was even there. The ending narration claimed that I wiped out the deathclaws at Vault 13. ...The FUCK? I saved them from starvation, and the Enclave killed them all afterwards. It's just insulting to say I'm responsible. Was there actually some way to prevent that from happening that I overlooked? [NOTE: I just went back and checked my list of kills. I wasted four deathclaws in the whole game. The boss fight at the military base accounts for all of these.]
Were the credits supposed to be silent or was that another feature bug? Also...Jeffrey Jones was President Richardson? Totally didn't call that.
Anyway, the ending lacks anything with the punch of getting chucked out of the vault in Fallout 1, but the game as a whole is much better. It is incredibly immersive, moreso than the vast majority of games I've played, with a very wide variety of quests that always have several possible solutions, all of this backed up by quality writing. The Enclave is kind of funny. They're a sad bunch of has-beens...or would be, if they weren't poised to wipe out humanity. I have to appreciate the fact that the ghoul settlement is pretty much the sanest bunch of people you find in the wasteland.
Combat is mechanically unchanged and still quite slow-paced (d'oh), but on the whole much improved by better balance and allies actually being useful. (Of course, it helps that I scaled up to the brokenness this time. I'd guess that you can get power armor right after leaving the first town, but you'd have to know exactly where it is. Flying in the dark, only following the chain of NPC gossip, Navarro is one of the last places you're going to hear about.) This is important for me since I really don't dig solo action in RPGs. Even if operating a full team isn't always the best idea in Fallout 2, it's at least a workable option this time (one I usually took because working as a group is more personally appealing to me).
Some interface issues linger, though. Item management is just the ick, man. Talk to someone every time you need to access their inventory, talk to someone every time you want to remove them from the party/add them to it/change their AI...for the love of god, can you just give me a menu? How hard is that? Minor maintenance took up far more time that it had to and this remains my main beef with the game. Whether it (and the multitude of bugs) hold the game back from 10/10, I haven't decided, but it's certainly the only thing that could.
~
Various final MC data!
Starting stats: 5 ST/6 PE/5 EN/10 CH/8 IN/10 AG/4 LU.
Ending stats: 9 ST/8 PE/5 EN/10 CH//9 IN/10 AG/3 LU.
-Strength boost is solely from power armor bonus, perception boost is from BoS surgery + a perk, intelligence boosts is from BoS surgery...and I'm not sure what caused my luck to drop. I'm guessing it was allowing the NCR Hubologist to perform a zeta-scan on me, as it was around that part of the game that I noticed the loss.
Initial traits: Gifted and Small Frame, because anything that boosts base stats is excellent to start with, I think.
Perks: Bonus Rate of Fire, Gain Perception, Kama Sutra Master, Mysterious Stranger, Presence, Sharpshooter, Speaker, Stonewall, Tag (small arms)
-Mixed bag. Ones that upped my effectiveness with guns were quite valuable for combat-heavy quests. KSM was there for laughs. Presence was there because your selection sucks at level 3. MS was picked for novelty and was mostly useless (though the guest does at least get better weapons as the game progresses, I noticed; still mostly irrelevant since random encounters are such a minor part of Fallout). Stonewall was a late-game pickup that I nabbed just because I'd grown tired of folks knocking me down and stealing my AP--the MC has the best damage output, I don't want her missing attacks in a tough fight. Gain Perception...well, I hit level 27 immediately before the last fight (such as it is--the turrets do most of the work), so it hardly mattered what I took. I went with GP just because I knew there was still a Giant Mook to kill, and since shooting people in the eyes had been my best bet for shutting down Enclave troopers fast, I figured anything that could boost accuracy was better than most of the other options.
Karma: 1450 (Savior of the Damned)
-Yeah, I'm a goody-two-shoes. Well, in some regards. The ones that matter for karma, at least.
Titles collected:
Champion
Married
Prizefighter
Porn Star
Gravedigger
Gigolo
Sexpert
Made Man (Wright)
-Gravedigger...came about because some random New Reno sidequest led me to believe that I was supposed to look for something in a grave at Golgotha, so I just started digging there willy-nilly. Started finding money, weapons and armor, and figured I'd just clear the whole yard since it was turning out to be pretty lucrative. >.> Only time in the game I actually did dig up graves, but it was clearly more than enough. Pretty sure the other titles speak for themselves or should have obvious causes discernible from my previous posts on the game.
Interesting career I had there. Pugilist, "actress", mafia hitman, law enforcement officer. Yeah, I was a cop too! Admittedly only within the jurisdiction of Redding, but if you screw up on my turf, you will feel the backhand of porn star justice.
~
Various combat/NPC notes! As much as I wanted to avoid combat and diplomify my way through the game, I was also trying to do every sidequest I could find and fighting is just unavoidable in some of them. Also, some people just need to fucking die (slavers/raiders in general. Lynette too, though I never did kill her because I would've had to take on the entirety of Vault City afterward).
Nina (MC), AKA The Chosen One, AAKA "Ripper", AAAKA "Lisa Lix," AAAAKA "Ice Queen" (I love this game's pseudonyms): Used the sharpened spear for the longest damn time on account of both lingering pacifism and my lacking money to get a decent weapon. Went straight to the .223 when I finally found one and had managed to bring my gun skills to a respectable level. Final weapon = motherfucking gauss rifle. That is one badass gun. 10 AP + Bonus Rate of Fire = I can get two aimed shots a round. Two hits to the eyes gives me a very good chance of either getting a horrific crit or blinding the enemy. Sniping is good times.
Sulik: Was pretty useless once enemies acquired decent armor and thus became too durable to be threatened by common melee weapons, and is just terribly unreliable with an SMG (well, unless you're relying on him to gib your whole party with burst fire). And he couldn't equip the mega power fist, which was disappointing. ...Then I gave him the super sledge I found at Navarro and he turned into an unholy terror, a crit-happy kamikaze who attacked three or four times a round and more often than not hurled enemies halfway across the screen when doing so. Nerfed somewhat by having to face power armor at the Enclave, but still did pretty well just for the sheer number of attacks and the frequency with which he'd ignore defense.
Cassidy: Generally solid. I had him using shotguns for most of the game. Which I'm sure is suboptimal, but it was quite a while before I got a decent rifle. Actually, he wound up with the pulse pistol in the end. Generally a good gun and he can get off two shots a round with it (I wanted to give him a spare gauss pistol, but didn't because the ammo was so rare and I wanted to hoard it for the MC. Little did I know that I'd find hundreds upon hundreds of bullets at the oil rig). Idly, Cassidy's oft-repeated line about being named after a comic book character has me wondering who that was. The only one that springs to mind is Black Tom Cassidy, but a very minor X-Men villain seems an odd choice for a reference. Does fulfill the requirement of bastardry, though.
Marcus: Solid at first, then awesome once I found a plasma rifle. Inability to equip armor is eventually crippling, though. Enclave troopers could rip him to shreds in no time. Also, he's so damn slow that he was often lagging far behind whenever the MC and the rest of the crew stumbled across enemies in an unfamiliar dungeon.
Goris: See Marcus, subtract plasma rifle. Okay, he does have a lot of AP, so he can move far and get in a lot of attacks, but he struggles to deal with high-quality armor. So in practice, he was a worse Sulik. Again, lack of armor is a horrific weakness if you're trying to take the Enclave through brute force. Idly, it still amuses me that Vault City makes you kick Marcus out of your party before letting you in, but they're just fine with admitting the reptilian killing machine. (Hey, he's wearing a cloak and everything, he must be okay!)
K-9: Probably would be good if you had for much more of the game, yes. He did manage to get one level-up while in my party (Navarro/military base/San Fran/Enclave = truckload of XP getting dumped on you), but I think that's it. 16 AP is pretty awesome, but his damage just wasn't that great even when he got the full five attacks a turn. Best I could usually hope for was that he'd get a lucky crit or knock someone over. Being non-human, lack of armor is of course also a problem. Not LVP though, because of...
Miria: Screams in terror and runs, mostly. It was rare that she tried to shoot anything, and she almost never connected when she did. Again, I'm sure the designers expected your spouse to stick around for all of five minutes (it can't even level), but I am a stubborn fool.
I never recruited Lenny, Dogmeat, or SkyNet. Vic got left in Vault 13 around halfway through the game. Trader Vic's is a pretty cool thing to name a character after, though (even though I have never been to the restaraunt and only know of it because it was mentioned in that one Warren Zevon song).
...Ah yes, I almost forgot Myron. Little snot forced his way into the party when I went to talk him into abandoning the New Reno crime families. He was almost immediately gibbed in the shootout at Salvatore's place and I decided that I didn't care. World's a better place without him.
~
Guess I should finish up Crisis Core now.
