Random Post #73 - Ending Questline

Okay, so here’s the big update on the ending questline I promised before. Just so you know… There might be spoilers for the quest context below. So… if you’re not interested, feel free to skip it.












With that out of the way, let me do some explaining on what is going on.
So, how will this “ending” play out? There will be three dungeons spread through the game, each containing a an elemental spirit who is currently being hunted down by the Spirit of Hatred. These dungeon locations will be a “secret” that will only be told to the player through backhanded descriptions, and through an endgame quest coming from Bum-Bum, where she will tell the player exactly where the dungeon is. (It’s not supposed to be THAT hidden, so hopefully they will usually be found by the player before the end of the game. The water one is very much "go to the beach at night")
I plan on making it so these dungeons will scale with the player’s level, as they can be completed in any order and at any time. But… I’m unsure how I’ll do that. I think I have a way, but I never tested it, so we’ll see.
And as for rewards, the current idea is to give the player a different “class” upon completion! Each Spirit will reward the player with a different class that will fit him in one of type of “class”. I don’t think I ever really mentioned it here, but I do keep track of what I consider “Damage Dealer”, “Tank” and “Support” characters, with some overlapping on two of them. The Player’s class is called “Hero” and it is a jack of all trades, but is mostly just a tanky fighter with some utility. It kinda dumbs down a bit the options for party compositions. SO! With this, we’ll have the option to have a fully supportive protagonist, a defensive protagonist, and a damaging protagonist!

Now, for the quest itself. Each dungeon will have a self-contained (hopefully funny) quest, going on the Spirit of Hatred’s attempt to capture the last few elemental spirits, with the player being swept along.
One thing of note, though. I’m having some difficulty with these dungeon quests. I have already rewritten a good chunk of them at least two times by now. The first time the quest(the Tide one in specific) just ballooned out of control and became too big. And the second time I thought it was… boring. Tide felt too similar to other “cute girl” type characters, so I had to do some tweaking to make her feel more unique, and that led to a decision… As of right now, the only member of the elemental Spirits we have in-game is Bum-Bum, the Spirit of the Farm(she’s the earth spirit), and she is absolutely unhinged! So, I made the unfortunate decision of making them all unhinged in their own way. Tide will continue being cute, but she is also a huge prankster, and… she has almost no empathy for human woes. She might prank a sailor, watch them fall in the water, and drown while giggling about the prank, while being unbothered by the death itself.

Let me just paraphrase here. This questline as a whole is silly side content to unlock the game’s finale. That being, pregnancy and the character endings. It WILL be considered a main quest, and it works as a parallel to the Goddess’s questline. It IS optional content throughout the game, but at the very end, it's obligatory to reach the finale.