-a huge battle that obliterates the Flying Ziggurat of the Broken Emperor, but the occultic fallout zaps peoples' brains transforming them into hordes of Velveteen Executioners. A gauntlet of overwhelming foes feeds the player into a final dialogue with Agent Feldsparr, who reveals that the Broken Emperor is already dead. We see that the Emperor's attending physician was corrupted by Feldsparr, and used an obscenely long drill to put out His Worship's eyes. Quite graphic and protracted. Agent Feldsparr further reveals that he has absorbed the power of the Crawling Chaos at the heart of the world and afflicts the player with yet another gauntlet of infernal demon children who spam nonstop combat vomit that is both sticky and corrosive. Allegedly, the demon children were just supposed to be placeholders for the true enemies, since the demon children are the same assets from the substitute teacher minigame from earlier, but the leak made everyone think that the penultimate battle involved slaughtering scores of little kids. Both the phony outrage types and the phony edgelords fired up the hot takes for and against, and Obligate Interactive was 'pressured' to issue a statement that the leaked ending was a 'work in progress and did not necessarily reflect the final form in-game content would take.' Of course, the conspiracy clowns said this was all a staged controversy designed to gin up sales. There was also consternation that Agent Feldsparr-the beloved protagonist of three previous Excellent Blazer installments-was revealed as both a traitor and the final boss. Analysis of a leaked build further frustrated the fans as it seemed that much of Agent Feldsparr's heel turn happened offscreen. Clues were spread throughout, but these were considered too subtle, bending the reliable Excellent Blazer action roleplaying formula towards an unwieldy mix of postmodern science fantasy swashbuckler and hair-pullingly granular police procedural. In an interview with Noncritical, lead developer William D. Tucker said, "So, our overall vision was that Agent Feldsparr was overdue for promotion from protagonist to questgiver, which we thought would present us with so many opportunities to evolve the paradigm of in-game emergent storytelling beyond anything in the previous games and also give us the synergistic leg-up within the 21st century context." Anomymous sources revealed that Tucker was absent for much of the production, and only swooped in at the end when half the creative sub-leads ended up in ICU from toxic overwork and cluster-nervous breakdowns. Tucker allegedly had no interest in sword and sorcery and would often give the surviving staff long, winding, utterly impenetrable discourses about the 'deep metaphysical paralellisms of crime and heroism in This, our post-9/11 Context.' He would then proceed to host screenings of perilously obtuse re-edits of popular television shows such as Miami Vice, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Cop Rock, and an apparently limitless number of animatics he had devised for a mecha-themed wholly unauthorized reboot of The McLaughlin Group. An anonymous source said, "William was a lot of fun. But he was out of his depth. Most of the cycle he was gone, attending acrostics themed orgies at various undisclosed locations deep within the suburbs of Illinois, Minnesota, and Atlanta. And he seemed to have an interest in infusing that sort of content into the already convoluted braided questline 'tangle structures' that the previous lead developer-H.H. Brill-had gone thoroughly insane engineering from scratch. None of us wanted to cross the boss, y'know, I mean Brill was a genius but also an utter tyrant. I never had any problems with Brill, since I was one of his favorites, but the guy was a monster. Brill was actually the one who put most of the team in hospital. And so along comes William, also insane, but in a benign way, and now we're losing productivity, we're behind on our benchmarks, looks like the money people are gonna shut us down-and that's when William just bought the whole opearation out from under everybody, which was a shock. I guess those acrostics orgies were raking it in-who would've guessed? And from that point onwards William declared a new phase of development. Oh, what did he call it-it was something like,uh, something like 'The Reinstatement of Timelessness Initiative,' or words to that effect. In effect this was what we now call Permacrunch, so in a sense, you could call William a pioneer, right? And pioneers, if they don't die horrible deaths, then they tend to survive but with a lot of trauma, an abundance of recurrent agonies, and not much joy in living-but the breakthroughs are killer. So, y'know, I'm mostly positive on William. If I were still capable of leaving my secure compound without screaming uncontrollably in irrational panic, I'd love to work on another project with the guy. Like, in an instant. But, well, y'know, I'm not really up for that these days. So . . ."
-October 2021-July 2022
