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There's a limit on how many words I can write in my lifetime, so rather than document each of my attempts to assassinate this noble while dressed as a nun let’s just lay out what the game instructs you versus what I’ve painfully gleaned.<\/p>\n
You'll see your target surrounded by bodyguards. Approach him carefully.<\/b><\/p>\n
You won't see your target. Your target is on the other side of quite a large map. If you and he both move towards each other at full speed, you'll meet in a few minutes; if you move in any other direction, you'll probably fail the mission.<\/p>\n
Your target is paranoid, but he trusts nuns. Dressing as one will let you get close to him and his bodyguards.<\/b><\/p>\n
The target jogs gamely through the city. Since fitness is all about consistent habits, he sticks to his jogging route regardless of who is trying to kill him or with what. His bodyguards have a bitter hatred of nuns and will happily abandon their charge to run you down and kick the shit out of you. Upon rolling your corpse over and discovering you weren't a nun, but an assassin in disguise, they'll feel a bit guilty about not giving you a chance.<\/p>\n
<\/div>Your best bet is a pistol shot through his forehead.<\/b><\/p>\n
I know you've probably got your own arsenal, but this awesome “dress as a nun” plan means you can only hide one pistol. No, not your <\/em>pistol; this pistol right here. We think it belonged to a gentleman of some kind; the shipwreck we pulled it out of looked really fancy.<\/i><\/p>\n Also, don't miss that wildly inaccurate shot! By the time you can reload it your target will have run out of its range, and you <\/i>will have run all over the pavement, because you've been standing around eyeballing coarse grains while the bodyguards go all John Henry on you.<\/p>\n Once you take your shot, you're going to have to run.<\/b><\/p>\n Considering that all you've got is your pistol, and you can't move quickly while reloading it, and as a matter of fact you can't move very quickly at all, and that man's vengeful bodyguards are all faster than you, and that the city guard have each of the exits covered, and that they<\/i> have polearms, the most practical escape route is through that tunnel into the really bright light. While you're drifting along it, watching the guards play lacrosse with your skull, come up with a really good excuse to give Saint Peter about the whole nun thing.<\/p>\n So, a recap: you’ve got to put on a disguise that doesn’t work and shoot a moving target with your first shot from a bad pistol after his bodyguards have already spotted and charged you. If you hit your target, you get to feel a warm sense of satisfaction before you’re dogpiled and murdered. Otherwise, you are dogpiled and murdered.<\/p>\n Mount and Blade<\/i> fans might expect that dying would trigger a message like “By the time your companions wake you up later, your target is long gone” and kick you back to the tavern with your health slashed and your quest marked “failed.” Nope! Much worse than that. Dying here carries exactly the same obnoxious consequencesMore on that later, but suffice it to say it's far worse than dying in Mount and Blade<\/i> really ever is<\/span> as dying anywhere else in the game. I have a feeling that the players who picked “Ironman” didn't get a lot further than this quest before quitting Caribbean!<\/i>, and possibly videogames, entirely.<\/p>\n But I can save and load whenever I want. And by that, I mean, “I can save six loading screens before the mission and I can load a minute or so after each failure.” Point is, if I’m willing to endure a lot of grim repetition…<\/p>\n …I've got endless attempts to break this goddamn mission in my favor.<\/p>\n That's the one thing I like about sloppily put together games. See, I don’t get a lot<\/em> out of hedge mazes. Your basic hedge maze is simple and extremely polished; you can only engage with it the way the designer intended. You walk along a path. Try to walk off the path, well, they thought of that–there’s a big hedge in the way.<\/p>\n But sometimes, deadlines or plant diseases or zoning issues come up. Designers can’t get the thing together the way they want, and so some corners get cut–they build security robots to block people from getting through a hole that leads straight to the exit, they give you a plank to get over a trench that’s not supposed to be there, they lay down land mines across a patch where the walls all come in sparsely. Maybe this maze doesn’t sound like fun to you. I understand. So you go back to the other one, and if you need me, I’ll be here with my plank, digging up land mines and throwing them at robots.<\/p>\n Behold this veranda. From here on out it’s Fort Rutskarn.<\/p>\n The moron conga is about to come towards me on the right side, out from behind the covered porch. I've still only got one good shot at the target–but the bodyguards have to run all the way around and up the stairs to get to a place where they can hit me. Which will matter, as long as I manage not to miss.<\/p>\n They come along. And…shucks. I missed.<\/p>\n That’s fine. I’ll get it next attempt. In the meantime, let’s test out stage two and hop over here<\/em> to Castle<\/em> Rutskarn.<\/p>\n Few facts about this spot. It doesn’t have a clear shot on the idiot parade, so I didn’t discover it immediately, but it nonetheless has a few characteristics I find highly attractive. For one, I can just <\/i>hop high enough to get up there, there's plenty of room to move around, and absolutely none of the AI knows what to do with it. They’re all afflicted with NPC degenerative disease and can’t hop, and none are packing, so they're limited to grinding fitfully around the edge.<\/p>\n So I’m not going to win, because my target’s out of range and he’s going to reach the gate in a minute. But I might as well play catch-up on some of that gruesome revenge I’ve been planning. Come on down to Mama Rutskarn’s Take-Away Window, serving up hot clamshells of bullets to the head<\/em>. Bring your friends! Bring your family! Bring the city guard! Plenty for everyone!<\/p>\n Around the point that every law enforcer in the city is a bloody poppet at my feet, I get a popup informing me that my target escaped, and that now I've got to escape as well. That’s when it occurs to me that I should have left one of these assholes alive.<\/p>\n Because I can't load my save until this mission is over, and since nobody’s around to mercy-kill me the only way for it to end is for me to huff and puff my way over to the exit. It'd be slightly quicker–if only slightly, thanks to the tedious loading screen length–to quit from task manager and reboot from desktop.<\/p>\n You know what? Let's just go take a swim in the harbor. I plod over to the docks and let myself sink into the brine.<\/p>\n Sorry, that's not quite right. “Plummet.” I plummet through <\/i>the brine, straight down to the bottom, where I eat a little falling damage and then straighten up casually. I’m making no attempt to swim, probably because I’m meeting no water resistance whatsoever. Did I miss a part of my backstory where I ate a devil's fruit?<\/p>\n I wait a few seconds, hoping I'll start to drown. Or just instantly die, which is sort of what I expected. Unfortunately, I continue breathing comfortably.<\/p>\n There's, uh…there's no way back up, is there.<\/p>\n Okay, I'm not saying they should have put in swimming animations. I'm not demanding some kind of keelhauling minigame. But is it too much to ask that they put some kind of invisible wall around the giant body of game-breaking water? Could they have done absolutely anything to hide this inescapable pit of, uh…<\/p>\n Of…<\/p>\n
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