Attractive people love Mac's playthrough videos ~ Reliable Internet Personality

I didn't really have much choice, so I grabbed Windy and decided to uncover as much of the map as I could. This meant sailing over mostly bare ocean with nothing in sight, so I brought balms with me to calm storms but still shipwrecked a couple of times because I wasn't quick enough. It's a good thing I save often in this game. Eventually I ran into some small islands in the Pacific and Atlantic that I was missing, uncovering a few ports in the meantime as well as finding a couple of villages. I think I'm still missing one or two treasures, but eh, I won't need them, because after checking back in at Amsterdam with my cartographer friend, he concluded that I've "finished" the map (as much as I could, anyway), paid me 45k and when I checked my adventure fame, it had jumped from 26000 to 50000, which I believe is the max.

Entering a pub initiated a convo with Enrico, who reminds me of the promise I made to take him to Zipangu, so I set sail for Japan right away and dropped him off in Nagasaki. Not much of an emotional goodbye, but eh.

And now I'm not sure what to do, but I figure I'll sail back to Lisbon and see what happens.

I dropped Windy off and picked up my fleet--Bantamanam, The Everend and The Neverend--and stocked up on crew before slowly making my way over to South America. I had to stop a lot to refill on my supplies, because with a lot of men on each ship and not a lot of cargo space, you can't travel very far before running out of food. Once in South America I really didn't know what to do, as every port I landed in had the same dialogue of Rocco and Joao talking about, well, how they don't know what to do and should just look around. I started to wonder if I had to get my pirate fame up to initiate the next moment, because I remembered that this storyline "ends" with a big sea battle in South America, but there were no other ships in sight.

Eventually, and I don't know if anything triggered it or if it was random, Rocco notes some commotion by the bar and we find Lucia, the missing bargirl from Lisbon, being held captive by some pirates. I dueled the one guy and kicked his ass--with the sword that I had, the Rune Blade, pretty much any strike attack is going to land and do damage, so I only had to worry about defense. Lucia explains that she overheard a plot by the evil Marquis Martinez of Portugal (the leader of the conservatives) to build a pirate fortress in South America and amass a great pirate army with which to take over the world--the pirate fortress being called Neo-Atlantis. Catalina shows up and offers to help if we can get the Spanish Fleet off of her tail, which we do just by telling them what's up, and they offer to help you fight against Martinez and his pirate navy.

This is actually a much easier fight than the one outside of Massawa, as you only have to fight one sea battle as opposed to two (and I know I mentioned that I fought three battles then but, uh, it turns out that third battle was just me attacking a random Turkish fleet that happened to be passing by...whoops...although that does explain why my "friendship" status with Turkey plummeted to 15% or so). I got one game-over by losing the sword fight because my opponent had wicked defense, but on retry I fought a different captain and beat him with no worries.

Martinez and his fort are destroyed by the Spanish fleet and I sail home to Lisbon where my father recommends to the King that I be made Prime Minister of Portugal in his place. Sweeeeet.

The ending is done in a diary-style recall of the major events of the plot, like meeting Catalina, defending Massawa, dropping Enrico off, and all of these events are accompanied by flashbacks of the moments as they were in-game. I always liked the music during the endings and didn't realize that I've been listening to an orchestral version of them for years from the Orchestral Game Concert albums, which has a piece that covers most of the port music as well as the ending:

It's a gorgeous piece, give it a listen. And then I get this ending crawl, alongside a pic of Joao looking off a ship's railing into the horizon (or New Horizons, get it?!):

Well don't that make me feel special.

I had considered starting a new game as Otto, as he is the only character that hasn't appeared in Joao's story (unless he's the "old man" that Lucia talks about breaking out of the pirate prison with) and because I felt I didn't do near enough ship combat in this playthrough, but I figure I've spent enough time on this game for now and that it's time to move on. Plus, this game has just been eating my time over the last few days. Basically whenever I wasn't at work I was playing New Horizons--it was like 1998 all over again.

I fell right in love with this game again. Its stories aren't very deep and its characters are caricatures at worst and forgettable at best, but this is one of the rare cases where I actually enjoy the freedom a game offers. I usually get turned right off of games with too little direction, like the Elder Scrolls series or World of Warcraft. I tend to like a more linear experience to a big open-world thing because when you give me too many options I usually don't like any of them, but this game somehow wins me over. Maybe it's because it's a world I know--I mean, hell, I learned most of my world geography from this game when I was younger, and there's nothing that I terribly don't recognize when I'm sailing about. Also, the idea of building a fleet, being able to name my own ships, fight pirates, get rich in any way I want, and explore the world...it all appeals to me here, when it doesn't for fictional fantasy worlds.

Or maybe it appeals to my OCD-like management obsession. I like having to keep track of trade, or supplying my ships, or keeping my seamen happy (don't laugh), or uncovering as much of the map as I can and finding villages full of treasures and whatnot. There's only ever so few things that you absolutely have to do to beat a campaign, but it's all the stuff that you don't have to do that rocks. Want to make your adventurer a pirate king? GO FOR IT. Want to defect to England and leave your home nation behind? I don't know what happens if you do, but I know that you CAN do that. Hell, there's so much to this game that I either didn't even cover or don't even understand. It's huge, people. Huge.

It may not be everyone's bag, but it certainly is mine, and taking so long to get back to it just made me appreciate it that much more. Maybe after I finish my last game I'll play through another one of the stories here. Maybe.
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Mac plays the games he thought he knew (Current: Uncharted Waters 2: New Horizons - SNES):
http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/548-zsb/61122424