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Originally recorded: October 24, 2024
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While I prepared myself for the worst with this session, the funny thing is... I had to contend with completely different issues than what I was warned about this time around. Either way, I still managed to get exactly where I wanted to by the end of this session, so things worked out in the end.

KI warned me well in advance that the boss fight with the Mermaid was the game's most infamous segment. For starters, given the fact that she essentially bungees down from the ceiling to attack means that Brown is completely useless in this fight -- to the point where he legitimately got knocked out on my successful attempt. That being said, this fight ended up being more tedious than difficult... though I did end up burning through pretty much all of the small healing items I had on me in the process. To make matters worse, I didn't find the save point on my first attempt, so I basically had to replay the entire chapter again from the start after dying to the boss. Fortunately, it's a fairly short chapter.

The Gingerbread House was even shorter -- to the extent where calling it a chapter feels like a bit of a misnomer. In many respects, it was more akin to the game's very first chapter... though it was also significantly more straightforward. That being said, the events of the June chapter have caused me to double-down on my "this is basically just Silent Hill" theory for Rule of Rose. The fact that Wendy actually showed up in the chapter directly after this one only strengthens my suspicion that Jennifer is being attacked by her supressed childhood memories. That being said, I'm still wondering about the relevance of the little boy who seems to be the ringleader of this whole operation to torture the weakest 19-year-old in all of human history.

However, it was during October -- the last chapter that I planned on clearing for the night -- that the true threat finally emerged. The game crashed not once, not thrice, but twice! Fortunately, I didn't lose that much progress either time: the first crash happened near the start of the chapter and by the time the second one happened, I'd already been saving every chance I got out of sheer paranoia. Of course, I was really worried that maybe the section that crashed the game in the first place was bugged... but fortunately, it seems like the game just decided to start crashing after running for a set amount of time instead. KI informs me that sixth-gen games had a tendency to crash in general, but I'm wondering if these hiccups stemmed from the game itself or the system I'm running it on. Hopefully, I won't run into any more issues during the final stretch.

From the looks of things, November's going to be the last major chapter of the game. As of right now, my plan is to showcase both of the game's endings -- likely starting with the good ending and then reloading my save to show off the bad one. Of course, that'll depend on just how long the rest of the game takes me. But at this rate, the Halloween stream may not involve any of my Hallow-stream games at all. I've got mixed feelings about that one. On the one hand, I've been falling behind all year, so being ahead of schedule by any metric would be nice. On the other hand, I'm sorry to say that the most Halloween-themed of my remaining games isn't the next one in line... though, I definitely could've done a lot worse. But as usual, I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's just see how things shake out on Sunday.