Oh my God, why did I decide this was a good idea?

Alright.  So, just to let those who haven't played DW7 yet, which is probably most of you, there is a mode called Conquest Mode.

Conquest mode is basically where they take China, divide it up into little coins to represent different battles and cities.  You've got a mish-mash of Legendary Battles, battles for weapons, "Free" battles, etc. etc.  It's good fun, honestly, and obviously beating a level unlocks the ones around it, if any.  There's a reward for unlocking the whole map, of course, which as you can see might be a little time-consuming.

But that's not what I'm interested in.  You see, they've implemented a few wandering figures into the map; depending on your bond with officers, they'll start wondering between cities and you can visit them to pal around a bit, as well as there being the existence of traveling merchants and Scholars (who appear all the time when you unlock all of the cities.)  The scholars, which is a neat touch I must say, ask you questions about the era in fives, and if you manage to get at least four out of five correct in a series, you get a monetary reward.  Which, now that I'm trying to buy up the big bad weapons, is necessary.  (Black Dragon Halberd alone is something like 65,000 gold(!))

Now, I might come off as a semi-expert of the time, but I'm not that good, as, for instance, I didn't really know the name of the officer whose older sister married Yue Ying's father.  Or whose death made Zhuge Liang so distraught that he cried so hard he coughed up blood.  I mean, it's multiple choice, so there's always the chance you'll get lucky, but we want maximum profit here, as there's a trophy and a weapon in it for answering every single question the Scholar's ask.  Which in turn opens a path for another trophy (getting all the weapons), and likely another (acquiring a hefty sum of accumulated gold over the course of the game) and etc.  So it's not like this is a one-and-done thing, it's a vital cog in the machine of getting shit.

Here's all the questions.

I'm going to assume you opened that, noticed how small the scroll bar got, went, "Holy Shit" and closed it.  Or perhaps you read a little and wondered if there was a rhyme or reason to any of that.  The answer is no.  No there is not; the questions appear in random order, which means the order they're in in that document is so disheveled, it might as well be like looking at a Rorschach.  So I went to myself, "There needs to be some order here."

I don't know if it's completely logical, but I always sort of default to Alphabetizing things.  It just seems to be the simplest method of organization.  So, knowing that the questions were ordered in the random order -of- a random order, I decided the best thing to do was have them alphabetical.

....I'm sure you can see where this is going.

You see.....for some reason, I thought it was a bright idea to copy those things, section by section, into a blank document in OpenOffice, open another, and transfer the questions over after ordering them properly.  The easy questions weren't so bad!  Formatted as they are, double-spaced between questions, it took up about eight and a half pages in 10 point font.  Not too bad.  It went by rather quickly, all things considered.

Then I went on to Normal.

This, uh.....this was not wise.  I looked for a picture to properly convey how bad a mistake this was.  I could not find one.

Just to give you an idea of how big a mistake this was;  The normal questions took up 20 pages of an OO document.

Re-read that.  Here.  I will help.

The normal questions took up 20 pages of an OO document.

The normal questions took up 20 pages of an OO document.

The normal questions took up 20 pages of an OO document.


This would be the point in time where I came here and posted the placeholder post that was here a bit ago.  And is gone now.  Now, you may ask, "Why didn't you simply give up?"

And to that, I answer, "I have no fucking clue."  Maybe it's just that my brain was all

or something.

But the fact of the matter is that I did it.  I did it.  Powered through the Normal and finished up Hard and Chaos (which, by the way, combined?  Weren't even 20 pages.) and then sat back, taking in my victory.  When suddenly, a thought came to mind.

"Well, I did it.  But now what?"  It's not like I can submit it anywhere; it's honestly copy-paste work from the original guy's guide (which, to be fair, is word-for-word transcribed from the game), and as a pure text document, it's worthless to me, since, well, you can't read text documents on a PSP (which is what I was using to check the questions in real-time while answering.).  So I did the only sensible thing one could do at this point:  I emailed the FAQ writer and said, "Hey, I, uh, restructured your guide to be easier to read.  Do you want it?" in the hopes that he will say "Why, yes, of course" and take it and incorporate it over the current layout and possibly give me a bit of credit for apparently having some sort of awful OCD.

He hasn't gotten back to me yet, which is understandable, given it's 3 AM and I sent the email off literally before I started this post.  But I will update this with the response.  I'm sure you're all dying to learn what happens next.