Fossil Fighters (Part 4)

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 – Part 5

Well, it's a good thing this alien tech is very easy to
use, even by humans!

Duna, who’s actually an anthropomorphic alien dinosaur, and another guy from her species, broke into the lab and stole the tacky idols, and turned Rosie into an animal. Richmond and Diggins have watched the encounter on security cameras, though, and are discussing it as the hero, Nicolas, and Rosie show up. She attacked the male Dinaurian and stole a pendant from him. Diggins presses the button on the pendant while Nicolas is nearby, and the two get transported onto the alien ship.

Thankfully, by a crazy twist of circumstance, the Dinaurian guards we encounter all think we’re just Dinaurians who forgot to turn off their holographic human disguises. The two heroes were near the teleportation field, so they quickly go back to Earth. If we want to sneak aboard, we’ll need an actual disguise… and because this is a land of weirdness, a mere mask will apparently do the trick. No fake tail, no body paint, naw… Just a mask. Dr. Diggins suggests we ask Saurhead, the other Master Fighter, for two of his many dinosaur head masks. However, as you can guess, he’s not gonna hand them over without a fight.

Could you imagine fighting the same champion 5 times in a
row in any ither game?

A fight? Five fights, to be exact! One team for each Vivosaur element. He’s difficult, but not impossible. As a reward, he takes off his own mask, revealing what’s beneath: …Another mask. Oh, he Kakashi’d us! And he does it again to give us a second mask, revealing that he wears many, many masks at the same time. I may rage at many plot elements, but a lot of character-based jokes and twists can be pretty funny, I’ll give this game credit where it's deserved.

Yup, he made it huge and clunky. And stationary.

We run back to Diggins, who in the span of five vivosaur battles has had enough time not only to reverse-engineer the technology of the teleportation pendant, but also to build an entire machine larger than him in order to teleport himself and the hero onto the Dinaurian ship. I'd call bullcrap, but hey, sometimes we need that convenience. So the two put on the masks, step on the teleporter, and lo and behold, IT WORKS! Their poor costumes actually fool the aliens! They venture into the ship and Diggins finds three things of interest: One, this ship is just like the one found crashed on a secret island located near Vivosaur Island. Two, some Dinaurians have put themselves in "stone sleep", a form of petrification or cryogenics, to be awoken once the “mission” is complete. Three, the Dinaurians’ plan basically involves exterminating humanity by de-evolving it back to amoebas so that they can claim our planet.

Look, that’s a perfectly devilish plan, but I have bad memories of a villain’s plan involving de-evolution…

AAAAAAAAH! NO! KILL IT WITH FIRE! I don’t want to remember this thing from that movie!

A serious discussion is going on between aliens.
And we're totally not subtle in the corner over there.

We get to the main room and see the four idols attached to a bigger idol. We hide in time to see Duna walking into the room with her leader, King Dynal. He states his plan – because villains sure love to reminisce on the steps to their plans just before executing them. He then asks Duna to activate the machine. She refuses, having seen the good side of humanity, and when Dynal menaces to have her imprisoned as a traitor to her own kind, the hero pops up from hiding and battles the King’s team of robot dinosaurs. You read that right, the game had to go a step beyond, and we now have robot dinosaurs. Dynal is defeated, but he still activates the machine, but it doesn’t work as Diggins had time to remove one of the idols. However, somehow this causes a weird time effect that sends him back to the dinosaur age with the idol he took off. Guess the Dinaurians’ evil plans are put on the backburner for now, until we can find Diggins… Might as well never find him! Let’s say he took one for the team. He’s probably dead anyway.

Keep your mask on, you're gonna need it where you're going!

Flashback time!

Nicolas the hero flees with Duna back to Earth, and Duna explains her species’ plan to Richmond. Their original planet was destroyed long ago by a galactic monster, so they set out to re-create it somewhere else in the universe. Earth was perfect for the task. They thus planted the seeds of reptilian life, which led to the creation of the dinosaurs. However, as we all know, they were then wiped out and a new species evolved and grew to become dominant: Humans. That put a dent in the Dinaurians’ plans, especially since they had been waiting for this new planet for hundreds of millions of years. The idols were supposed to keep track of their plan’s progress and keep undesired species unevolved, but then that ship crashed and the idols (which they call “sub-idolcomps”) were lost on Earth. Hence why they hired some humans, the BB Bandits, to look for them.

Glad to see that plot-relevant fossils
are in red. Useful color-coding.

Duna also says that Raptin’s de-evolution ray was weak, so Rosie should have been turned back to normal. And that’s the case! Yay. Now in the secret lab, we look for the missing idol… and find that it’s been split in five pieces all over the island. Somehow. And we need to find all five pieces. Oh, fantastic! More padding! Lord knows we haven’t had enough in this game so far! Also, it means that for a time, there was twice the same idol lying around, except one copy was in multiple pieces. And somehow those were never picked up by any radar?

We get the five pieces, one in each of the main dig sites, but once we’re back we learn from Duna that one is still missing. That last piece will be found on the Secret Island, which only a select few have had access to. It’s where the Dinaurian ship crashed, long ago, causing the idols to be lost around the island in the first place. As it also turns out, most of the fossil revival technology was created from tech found in said ship. We head there with Duna and inspect the place. This is where we properly hear about what destroyed the Dinaurians’ original planet.

"We're talking about a monster so large, your little imaginary
Kaiju would run away in fear like a vegan flees from a steak."

Imagine, if you will, if Galactus had a pet that looks like an eel, and it loved munching on planets just as much as its owner. "Sit, puppy 'nash! Sit! No! Don't eat that sphere-shaped moon-sized vessel, it's poison!" Now imagine if the pet was larger and actually ate Galactus so it could freely go and eat anything it wanted to, without any way to be reasoned with. Doesn’t sound so funny now, does it? That’s the monster known as Guhnash. There’s no way that thing will ever pop up in the story, that would be too crazy.

Quick read, and the ending is too easy to guess. 1/10.

You can dig for all-new fossils within the crashed ship, but let’s instead move on with the story. We find a slab on which English text was written, a slab which somehow was never discovered by the people who found that place before. Even though it’s in plain sight, and Richmond and Diggins should have come across those stones if they thoroughly explored the place. I think Guhnash munched a couple plot holes into the story. The words mention taking six months to reach the island, losing sandals. Hey, didn’t we unearth fossilized sandals earlier… Oh ho ho! I see what they’re doing! Clever!

Sure, we severely weakened the opponent dinosaur,
but they severely weakened us too. 77%? To accuracy?

The two enter the main control room and find an adult human-sized, human-shaped rock in one of the Dinaurians’ stone sleep parts of the ship. You get three guesses as to what this is. The missing idol piece is inside that rock, too. Unfortunately, before we can make like a tree and get outta there, we encounter Raptin, who engages the hero in a vivosaur battle.

Our hero wins, of course, but Raptin refuses to listen to anything Duna has to say about preserving mankind. Yeah, we’re intelligent lifeforms too! Less advanced maybe, but intelligent still! We are bringing back the dinosaurs as fucking awesome combat machines, aren’t you impressed?

No, you think? Gee, I would have never guessed by this point!

After Raptin leaves, we bring back the human-shaped rock to the center and clean it, revealing the Diggins-shaped rock inside. Duna uses her alien tools, and revives him. Sincerely, I love the foreshadowing with the fossilized sandals from earlier. Diggins spent the last millions of years in the Dinaurians’ stone sleep, and it worked! Sure, he’s taken to dressing like a Flintstone, but he’s alive and well.

He gives us the last idol piece, and we bring it back to the lab under Richmond’s building. Richmond is acting weird, though. Once we assemble the idol, the real Richmond shows up and it turns out we had been talking to King Dynal in a holographic disguise. Dynal flees with the idol and teleports to his ship, and we follow him through the teleporter in the Fossil Center.

Thanks, descriptive text, for telling me
why Dynal is badass. I sure needed that...

Onto the Dinaurian ship, we avoid the guards and reach the control room, in which we encounter King Dynal. A fossil fight ensues, of course. Battle of the fates: A King who wants a new planet for his species to live on, against a human who wishes to keep his kind alive! They cannot go more epic, this has to be the final boss! Dynal’s vivosaur form, among other things, can remove 77% off every of your Attack Zone vivosaur’s stats if it ends up in a Support Zone. That includes accuracy. In other words, if you let Dynal be in a Support Zone, you might get screwed pretty badly. Thankfully, if you also use stat reductions against his Dinomatons (the robot dinosaurs), things become easier. Once defeated, Dynal admits that he is impressed by humanity’s determination, and actually starts seeing things like Duna; that, perhaps, mankind should be allowed to live.

Dynal seems to resign himself to seeking another planet on which to live, until the hero suggests Dinaurians could just stay on Earth. Hey, why not? That might take some getting used to, on both sides, but an alliance with an alien species would be fantastic! See, that’s the thing they glossed over in Pixels. Aliens don’t have to be depicted as an all-evil kind. They are varied in personality, like humans, and cohabitation is possible. Or, at least, in my stupidly idealistic mind, it would be.

"The worlds could be one together, cosmos without hatred,
Stars like diamonds in your eyes..."
Oh crap, I just remembered what that song was really about.
Oops.

If we're primitive beasts, you're an advanced moronic bigot,
Raptin.

Unfortunately, that’s when Raptin shows up, angry at what he has just heard, and decides to activate the sub-idolcomp machine. However, after all this, the idols refuse to comply, their AI stating that they were created to prevent the wrong evolutionary path to happen to the species seeds planted by the Dinaurians on Earth. By which they mean, the dinosaurs. However, humans really are the original species of Earth, not actually the result of their machinations – life found a way, the proper life that was meant to grow from Planet Earth. Aww, an AI is defending mankind. That’s sweet. The machines say they will not fire the beam. Kinda ironic, though, how the Dinaurians’ plan failed long, long ago, and it took them 600 million years to find out. After everything that happened, the King seems to take it all in stride, though.

Sadly, it’s not over – the main idolcomp has still decided to destroy humanity, but it has only one way to do so; Send signals into space… where they were received by Guhnash. Holy damn, THAT’S the final boss? That planet-sized monster? On the one hand, that’s epic. On the other, what the Hell?

Just in case you don't think it looks that impressive...
Remember, its head is bigger than Planet Earth.

Three giant brains and it still doesn't have enough cells to rub
together to figure out that what it's ding is wrong.
Let's teach it some manners.

Yup, the planet eater is coming, which should lead to a crazy final battle. Aware of their responsibility in this crisis, the Dinaurians are willing to help humans against the beast. There’s no way to make all of humanity escape in time. However, Diggins shows up with an idea to defeat the monster: Destroy its three brains! Somehow, while he was studying Dinaurian data way back in the past, he studied the monster’s biology and figured out the location of said brains, in a place big enough to allow a fossil battle, and he also figured that, hey, a monster can’t do much without its brains, no matter how big it is. Um, remind the Marvel Universe to try that on Galactus someday. That might work.

Rosie and Duna rise, however, and offer themselves as helpers in this final battle. However, the hero can bring only one ally in with him through the teleporter, so he has to pick between them. The ending will differ slightly depending on who you choose. Man, it’s like solving the love triangle! Will you go for the human or the alien?

Hm, which one will be the least bothersome to bring along...
What a no-brainer, it's Duna.

A surprising number of people would pick the alien.

Oh, and there’s no hurry. The plot says there’s a hurry, but you have all the time in the world to prepare. Go dig out more fossils if you want. Take a nap. Gather all the fossilized droppings and bring them to Nick Nack. Find new areas, complete your Vivosaur-Dex!

They are the literal brains behind the
operation. Gotta kill them all.
And then add them to our Dex!

King Dynal approaches the girl you pick, and gives her a communication device (And, in Rosie's case, a second special item). She then steps on the teleporter with the hero, and they are sent into the giant monster. They are in the monster’s mouth, because that’s where the brains are. That makes complete sense. And the monsters appear, like three separate creatures.

If you overtrained your team all the way to Level 12, something that is perfectly possible through the Story Mode, this battle with the brains is a breeze. They’re only Level 8. If you have vivosaurs that greatly change stats, like Compso, then it’s even easier. Their most annoying move is them randomly shifting around the positions of vivosaurs on your side, which is awful if they set your weak Support vivosaur in the Attack zone and shove another one in the Escape Zone, preventing you from switching out your weak vivosaur.

With the brains dead, Guhnash is somehow going to explode, because that also makes sense. Plus, somehow the cosmic energy blocks the teleporter, so they need to use the special device in order to go into stone sleep, to be retrieved by the Dinaurians, wherever the Hell they are in space. The hero and the chosen girl hold hands and the device is activated, and they are blasted in space by the explosion.

I could go for some psychedelic space rock right now!

If you picked Rosie: The Hero soon wakes from stone sleep, alone, with Rosie nowhere to be found. Or rather, she was revived, but… there was a glitch and she lost her memories. Visiting her confirms that, yes, she’s got amnesia. However, and this is the game ending either on another awesome Chekov’s Gun or the silliest thing ever, the Digadig Chief shows up, and the hero cures her with the mighty Digadig hip shake. Makes complete sense! AND IT WORKS! She retrieves her memories!

What is it, Rosie? This isn't a battle for your affections, it's
 a decision towards the saving of humanity from a giant
monster!

If you picked Duna, well, first Rosie is jealous. Second, the escape from Guhnash goes the same way, with the hero waking from stone sleep. This time, however, the Fossil Center was unable to revive Duna, and she’s still stuck as a stone, with the Dinaurians planning to leave the planet in order to find a cure for her. We go see her in the park, and once again, the Digadig Chief shows up, and says that the Digadig hip shake can free her from stone sleep. And you know how it goes: IT WORKS! And so the Dinaurians stay on Earth, in both endings.

So twerking can save lives. Who knew? I expected Dynal's jaw to drop to the ground in surprised shock, but apparently the game with magic twerking that does anything and poop collectors has more class than that. Really, I expected something along those lines:

Before you go and say I took that art, no, I actually got it during a
free raffle art stream from artist ZachSeligson.
You can view his art here, and also here, and also here.

And so the game ends on this note, credits rolling. We get funny scenes from the various characters, among others Diggins who now prefers to keep his Stone Age suit instead of going back to a lab coat. And of course, after the credits, the hero hooks up with the girl who joined him into the final battle.

In Part 5, I’ll discuss the various post-gameside-quests, and give my final verdict of the game.

Kinda glad the story’s over. There was so much to talk about.