Reasons Why I'm Single: #397

I'm a dork. I know it, you know it, every chick I've ever dated knows it, and a few of the animals in the more accessible cages at the San Diego Zoo know it. Those animals also know I'm a sexual deviant, but it is up to the government to make that case so I won't go into it here. As a testament to my dorkiness (and because people don't really like me, but computer games can't ignore me), I've usually got a computer game of some sort going. However, my computer is a laptop and it's getting a little long in the tooth so it can't really handle a lot of the games being made today. Also, many of today's computer games are these online "massively multiplayer" games which require interaction and cooperation with other people, which sort of defeats the purpose of me playing a computer game. So lately, I haven't had anything going and I got a little desperate. I own an Xbox 360, and I ventured on down to Fry's Electronics to see what games they had there on deep discount. After digging through the bargain bin, I came home with a little title called Blue Dragon.

Now, Blue Dragon is a role-playing game but it is a Japanese role-playing game, which seems to be its own subcategory of these games. The game is in English and all, but I guess it has what you might call a Japanese "sensibility" to it. Which is another way of saying I don't know what the fuck is going on in the game. Apparently the Nippon are really into this sort of shit, and I might need to start hanging out with them so I can begin to understand this game. Here's what I know so far:

There are these three kids (two boys, Shu and Jiro, and one girl, Kluke). They have gigantic heads (like Josh Brolin) and eyes and they look like they're about 11 years old but the manual says they are 16 or 17. As you can see from the picture, Shu has kick-ass Japanese videogame hair. These kids live in a village in the desert. By village, I mean a small area with about 4 buildings. The three kids, their families, and maybe 2 other people seem to live in this village, for a total of about 10 people. So the village they live in is a lot like Blythe. There is no discernible economy in this village, very much like the U.S. right now in that regard. Every year for the past 10 years, purple clouds form and a "land shark" swims through the sand under the village and destroys the village with its metal fin, which sticks up above the surface of the sand. When this happens, the people of the village climb up onto a platform they've built above the desert floor. When the land shark is finished, they go back down and rebuild the village. It hasn't occured to anyone to move the village, or to rebuild the village on the platform.

Before the latest land shark attack, the three kids were exploring the Ancient Ruins near the village and they constructed a large metal net from metals they found in the Ruins and use that net to capture the land shark by snaring its metal fin. However, the land shark broke the net and the three kids fell with the land shark down a hole into the Ancient Ruins. There they meet a purple dude on a hovering chair who has a little sidekick who repeats everything the purple dude says. He reminds me a lot of the little creature who was Jabba the Hutt's sidekick in Return of the Jedi. The purple dude threatens to kill the children, and they run away into the Ruins chased by robots. Then they find a drilling machine, but none of them knows how to drive the drilling machine so they can't escape. A voice tells them to swallow the globes of light that just sort of appear out of nowhere and they can use the magic of the globes to drive the drilling machine. So THAT'S how you get kids to swallow your "globes of light" - Lord knows promises of Jolly Rancher candies isn't working any more. Anyway, the kids swallow the globes, and this gives the kids blue shadows which fight for them and cast spells and stuff. Then the kids run into a whiny half-cat child called Marumaro who is always screaming about nothing in particular but who also has swallowed a globe of light and whose shadow kicks the most ass of any of them in combat. Turns out the cat's village has been made sick and so it has been looking for the cure in the Ancient Ruins. The four of them find the cure and go back to the cat's village in the drilling machine (which they can now drive since they swallowed the globes of light) but the cure doesn't work. Turns out it is a false cure, but one of the children's parents is a doctor and she remembers her parent curing a similar illness with a particular flower, which can only be found in the Forest of the Dead. So they go there, fighting poo snakes along the way. In case you were wondering, poo snakes are snakes made out of pink feces. After the cure is obtained and the cat's village is cured, the cat people all get together and do a dance of appreciation, and then the three kids and the one cat set off for the Valley of the Mural Monsters. But they can only enter the Valley if the cat people do another dance in front of the stones at the Valley's entrance.

So, so far so good. But I've got a few questions:

1. What am I supposed to do with Mystery Part Alpha?

2. Does that fucking cat EVER stop talking? If I hear "Woweee!!! Shu, those Robots are kicking your ass!!!" or some other such crap one more time I'm putting my hand through my TV.

3. What am I supposed to do with Ancient Phonograph? Use it to "spin" house music at the cat village town hall? I still haven't found any Ancient LP's...

4. I've also got Broken Part of Eternal Engine. Who's going to pay to fix it? Was Eternal Engine under warranty? How did an Eternal Engine break in the first place? I mean, isn't it eternal? IT SAYS SO RIGHT IN THE NAME!!
5. Is the Pirate Queen (see above) a 9 or a 10? (The manual says she's 20 years old so this is a totally legit question.)