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EFWQ XIII: Fat Lady Strikes Back

After losing every penny earned on EFWQ XII's massive success to Hanna-Barbera and Turner Entertainment in a quick and not even remotely close copyright infringement claim, Phonics was forced to merge with CubeSoft in order to remain in business as a viable production house (their original joint venture, EFWQ Tactics, having created the relationship initially). The resulting entity, Cube-phonics, produced the final four EFWQ games and most of the spin-offs, starting with EFWQ XIII: Fat Lady Strikes Back.

The approach with EFWQ XIII was simple: make a game, set in Battal, and please for the love of God do not infringe on anyone's copyrights this time.

This left the writers more than a little confused. In a carefully-worded memo, they asked if they could at least copy from past games in the series. The terse response from the Cube-phonics legal department was (accidentally?) faxed to every major video game magazine and website in the world, and so is reproduced here.

After receiving this memo, the project leader publicly released a statement that the next EFWQ game was going to be "A creative reimagining of EFWQ I, with the rich plot development of EFWQ IV, the deep character development of EFWQ VII, and the girl-power appeal of EFWQ X II.

When the game was released as a GameCube "exclusive," it rapidly became the most popular RPG on the system. It was released for the PS2 an astonishing 3 months later (with the necessarily reduced graphical content offset by the sixteen additional side quests as well as one main quest that had been cut from the GameCube version, rendering the plot virtually incoherent).

Story

A monstrous Black Dragon Dralock has been ravaging the Mandleclangian countryside. Princess Winnie has been kidnapped. The Unique Orb of Excellence is missing. Only a descendant of Rothgar can recover the orb, rescue the princess, and convince the Princess to use the orb to slay the dragon.

The game opens with young Alphonse, a Fire Elemenstor, standing before the village elders, accused of arson. However, Alphonse is the son of the mayor, so the village elders are largely helpless to do anything about Alphonse's crimes. After some inaudible consultation, one of the elders "notices" that Alphonse has a very distinctive birthmark: he is the heir of Rothgar! He will have to leave town to save the kingdom and very likely the world!

And so Alphonse heads off to find his destiny, and the town is saved. Alphonse's travels take him all over the world, gathering friends and plot-twists alike; he first encounters Lawrence, whose Shushelcraft gets them to Ch'th'lm, where they meet a young girl who bears a startling resemblance to the missing Princess Winnie--but she says her name is Nolanna and that she is looking for Rothgar's heir. Others join the quest, including (most importantly) James Ninesword, who spoiler alert turns out to be the true heir (the quest where this is revealed is omitted from the GameCube version), though Alphonse never figures it out, and bravely more spoilers alert sacrifices his life to get orb into Nolanna's hands. Nolanna yet more spoilers is really Princess Winnie in disguise, and she joins hands with James and the two of them obliterate Dralock.

Needless to say, Alphonse's parents mourn him and the village elders slap high-fives behind the mayor's back.

Gameplay

As with the original EFWQ, each character has a fixed class. However, the large cast of characters allows for custom party-building for most of the game. Three characters plus one "backup character" are usually in the party. The "backup character" does not normally appear during battles, but when a character has low health, their attacks will be supplemented by the backup character's "backup move." The execution of this idea fell well short of its possibilities, but remains one of the endearing quirks of this installment.

Without a doubt, the most helpful addition to the game's interface was the sidequest journal. EFWQ XIII contains somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 sidequests (in the GameCube version).

Characters

Party Members

Alphonse the Whiny: A Fire Elemenstor (or, arguably, a Pyromancer) with a knack for arson.

Dolorous of Mount Slowless: A Magical Fighter, she claims to be a Knight of some kind. Dolorous has a mysterious past and has some connection to Princess Winnie.

Fenn the Stool: A Free Furniliar looking for his place in the world.

Ginger the Cookie: A Warrior Chef from Farnvania who wishes to become a Culimancer. Ginger is an optional character. She will only join the party if the player can complete the "Get a First Edition Copy of Mother Nancy's Fancy Cookbook for Ginger!" sidequest.

James Ninesword: A Warrior who impressively manages to wield up to three-fourths of Swordblade (one of the famous 100 Swords of Sepathok) at a time. The true heir of Rothgar.

Lawrence the Imagineer: EFWQ XIII is one of the few EFWQ games in which Lawrence is a playable character. Specifically, he is the pilot of the Shushelcraft that transports the characters over waterways and later is converted into a dirigible.

Lithely Sway: Inaptly named Particularly Unwomenly Women Folk Samurai who joins the party in Blee that was.

Mardrangion: The Wizard of such notoriety. Weak in battle, but with a spectacular "backup move"--a deadly shot of Magniloquent palavercation. The real "voice of reason" throughout the game, he tends to leave the party at inopportune times and rejoin once the danger has been effectively handled by the weaker characters.

Mayumi: Another optional character, deeply hidden and with no spoken lines or role in the plot of the game. In other words, her inclusion was pure, 100% unadulterated fan service. Although her class is listed as Mysterious Stranger, her stats make her an obvious tank. Basically, the only way to get Mayumi short of hacking your save file is to complete every side quest, then conquer the optional and punishingly difficult Chasm of Eternal Sorrow dungeon. At the bottom of the dungeon, the semi-cryptic line "Hmmm, looks like MooMaa isn't here..." is displayed. If the player lingers for ten minutes, a portal will open up and Mayumi will step out. The message "A Mysterious Stranger has joined your party!" will be displayed, and the boxcutter-wielding psychopath from Earth will be selectable. She is basically a game-breaking character in terms of strength, but since getting her is several times harder than beating the final boss, it doesn't make much difference.

Princess Winnie: A Life Elemenstor whose unique relationship with The Unique Orb of Excellence makes her vital in driving the Black Dragon Dralock out of Mandleclang. She escaped from Dralock on her own, then searched for the heir and the orb as Nolanna the Thief. It is not clear what she is Princess of, though Alphonse calls her the "Princess of Battal" on several occasions.

Silky: Zobrane's Elf-Witch Schoolmarm. Her role in the game was frankly all too memorable to be summarized here.

Zobrane: A K'thian schoolboy and fledgling Ice Elemenstor who tags along with the group after they save him from being eaten by Dralock's minions like the rest of his thirty classmates.

Others

Dralock: The Black Dragon who is terrorizing the countryside. Naturally, the final boss.

Trivia

The one recurring theme from the rest of EFWQ that does not appear in EFWQ XIII is the Harpy enemy. Hackers digging into the game's codebase have discovered that the enemy was originally included, but its only graphic is a portly woman in severe business dress, and its stats have been replaced with the words: "harpy = smart-mouthed lawyer." This is also the only fat lady in the entire game--and she's not, strictly speaking, in the game.

If you watch the credits to the end, then wait for sixteen minutes at the final "the end" screen, there is a brief cinematic, sloppily subtitled "six weeks later," in which Alphonse's home village is completely destroyed by wildfires started in a thunderstorm. One of the village elders is heard crying, "if only someone knew the secrets of Fire, they could have saved our village..."