So, this is going well! But you will notice there is one character who is not being browbeaten with his own shortcomings, or in Alex’s case, the flaws of another person entirely because he barely has a personality: as the five teens stand together in the darkness, presumably still off in their own individual nightmares, Squeak appears, his terrible child voice penetrating the void. “Mia! Kyle! Nash! Jessica! And Alex,” Squeak says. “You mustn’t allow yourselves to bend to the despair whispered from the darkness. Remember what you have learned thus far!” Are you sitting here, as I am, ruminating on what they have learned? Like, beyond the bafflingly long-held secrets of the Four Heroes, I guess they’ve learned to be slightly less shitty people? While I’m still thinking, Squeak continues, blowing my mind apart, “Dragonmaster Dyne risked his life knowing that if you follow your heart with pure intent, the way will always open before you! You must overcome this despair, and prove this true once more!” Squeak, Dyne faked his own death and turned his girlfriend into a baby with an angelic backup choir, and these two events paved the road to the Category 5 shitstorm you are all currently in. He can follow his heart with pure intent directly up his own ass.

I am given a choice here, between “You’re right…they’re just illusions!” or “I don’t have the power to fight…” I’m sure this is a real choice. When the group, as one, has their mandatory epiphany, their duplicates appear opposite them, so they can be told off one by one. “My dad has never forced me to do anything, not once…” Jess tells hers. “And I’ve never had to hide who I am from him! When I’m outside, I run wild and free…and when I’m inside, I behave as a lady should.” Jessica de Alkirk is a housecat. She figures this sensibility comes from having a pirate dad and a “noble woman” mom, and thus, “I have inherited the blood of both my beloved parents!” Well…yes. That is how it tends to work. “My father understands this…and so do my friends!” Jess finishes. “No one has ever held me back from being myself!” As I suspected, Jessiclone’s read of Jessica’s Brain Room was entirely wrong, and Jessiclone vanishes in a whoosh of flawlessly genetically balanced logic.

Kyle’s turn! I’m sure I won’t hate this! He first admits up front, like anyone needs this clarified, that he is a partying fuckboy. “But this adventure has taught me that there are times when I have to get serious… And there’s nothing more serious than what’s going on here right now!” This is of course an outgrowth of the problem that no partying will be possible if they’re all dead, which, fair. He finishes, “I have to fight so that future generations are free to freeload!” Well, that was a lot less circuitous than Jess’s little emotional journey, but I guess that’s what happens when the dilemma he was presented with was little more than “This sucks and I don’t want to do it, but I have to.” Like, I don’t think any of his friends want to be doing this. Nonetheless, Copykyle disappears.

OMG if he also says he loves Coldplay and White Claw I am so swiping right

“All my life, I’ve allowed my fear to control me,” Mia says, frowning, to her double. “I was always afraid that my mother would consider me a failure… Always afraid that I wasn’t good enough or strong enough to lead the Magic Guild.” Imagine if literally any real person with Mia’s relative position of nepotism-granted leadership actually reflected on or even had any of these thoughts. What a world that might be! Too bad this one is fake, and on the moon. She continues, “But I realized that my fear wasn’t only affecting myself. If I couldn’t face my fear, other people would be hurt… So I’ve resolved to be strong. Not just for myself, but for the people I care about…and for those that care about me…” Well, that’s a takeaway! If you have crippling anxiety, just stop having it! I see Mia’s been talking to Marianne Williamson. Like cancer cells in a body that believes in love and miracles hard enough, Mialike withers away.

Nash starts, “We can’t… We can’t value…” and then begs for a do-over because the thing he’s about to say is so hard to utter out loud. Dude, who are you even talking to? It’s not clear Alex can even hear this, and everyone else got pulled back to the real world already. “We can’t value people only for their power or wealth.” WHEW. It’s like a ten-ton weight has been lifted from Nash’s bony chest–now everyone knows his secret shame! Jesus. “We have to value people for all they have to offer… And when we work together, we can achieve anything.” He’s still not all the way to the finish line of “People don’t have to OFFER me anything to be worthy of respect and kindness,” but he did about three-quarters of the run in a couple of sentences, so I should give him a break. “Together,” he finishes, now the brimming-with-confidence Nash we all hate but I love, leave me alone, “my friends and I shall defeat Ghaleon absolutely!” Nashalogue doesn’t even get to wail, “BUT WHAT ABOUT GHALEON-SENPAI,” before he too is gone.

Alex is now alone with what passes for his id, but unlike his friends who all stepped forward to tell their darkest doubts to fuck off, Alex takes a step back, and the screen goes white. Maybe this is because all his darkest doubts were about Gams and not himself, and he realized that means he is a tabula rasa and has now disappeared into existential catatonia like an EVA pilot.

Back in the real world, Xeboobia is congratulating all the other heroes on overcoming her Therapy Thunderdome. “All of you except for the Dragonmaster, that is…ha!” I mean, that is pretty wild. Who knew there was enough in there to fuck him up this bad? But if I’m concerned about Alex’s mindset at the moment, his friends don’t seem to be. They all basically insist Alex, “the strongest one among us,” per Nash, will be just fine, and he’ll never stop fucking that chicken until Gams has been rescued. Man, even his friends are drawing a bead on that particular motivator. It’s almost like the Doppelmaster is making some good points in there.

On that note, we return to Alex’s green room, where Gams has now joined the party. The Doppelmaster watches from the sidelines as Alex calls out to her, the two of them on opposite ends of a dirt road that’s suddenly in here. As the Doppelmaster repeats to his charge that this shit is not going to work and that he and Gams are basically acting out the lyrics to “Don’t You Want Me,” Gams screams back, “Don’t you dare stand in my way, Alex!” and throws a bolt of red magic at him. It takes me at least ten seconds to realize I actually have control of Alex here and should be moving his little stumpy sprite legs toward Gams. He screams at her, oddly, “[Gams]! Run away! It’s not important anymore! [Gams]!” What exactly isn’t important anymore? And if he really believes she’s still in there, but also thinks she could just run away, why wouldn’t she have done that ages ago? Alex ignores me and his double and keeps moving, finally telling off the Doppelmaster when he’s within arm’s reach of Gams, “I won’t run away until I save her! No matter what it takes, no matter how far! I WILL save her!” Great! I still don’t think that’s a personality!

This outburst, or reaching Gams in his own mind, or whatever the fuck, snaps Alex out of his mind-prison, and after another flash of white he’s reunited with his friends. Given that the game made a point of Alex having a harder time with this than the others, wouldn’t it have been interesting if the other four had had to fight Xeboobia without him for like five rounds until he got his shit together? I know I rail about unwinnable fights, but all that happened here is Xeboobia was temporarily successful in snaring her most dangerous adversary, and instead of exploiting that advantage, she stood around with her thumb up her ass. It was for literally nothing instead of almost literally nothing. The other teens all congratulate Alex on his unsurprising determination, and now Xeboobia wants to fight. Of course she does. But Alex has some words for her as well: “We all know [Gams] as a human being, [Xeboobia]…” Uh, Kyle doesn’t! No matter. “Not the creature that Ghaleon is trying to turn her into! I will give up my life to save her from him… I know that [Gams] still lives inside the body of the Goddess… Just as the Goddess lived inside of her. They are one and the same…” Oh, but that “one and the same” is a “creature,” huh? I hope nobody is recording this shit or Gams is going to let him have it later.

Okay, that was a looooong fucking preamble to the second of three boss fights in this dungeon. Do you guys not give a shit about this, either? Her boss model isn’t even as crazy as Royce’s, she’s not very hard, and we still have a long way to go, here. She does intermittently cause some characters to be stoned, so if that is still a think that makes you giggle, I have put it out here for you, next to some Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.

Honestly I’m disappointed. Miss Universe contestants regularly go crazier than this.

Cool, so Xeboobia is dying. Naturally, she chooses this moment to question all she’s learned from Ghaleon, namely that “humans were ugly and…weak… It’s impossible…Ghaleon could never be wrong…” It would take up too much time to point out all the ways that’s laughable, so let’s not, and anyway Xeboobia disappears with one last apology to her non-boyfriend who can’t even hear her and wouldn’t care if he could. Mia is still troubled by her whole deal. “Did you hear the way she spoke Ghaleon’s name?” she asks. “It almost sounded as though she was…in love with him. What a pitiful woman…” Women who are in love with Nash should not be throwing stones. No one else comments on Xeboobia’s fucking sad romantic life, or on anything else about her, because she’s dead and that’s definitely the worse predicament for her.

Once the party is all healed up and properly re-equipped and I’ve saved a few times out of paranoia, they proceed through the doors and up one last staircase through open space, this one resembling a red-and-gold double helix. The design of this fortress is all over the goddamn place, and I have to assume that Althena kept adding floors out of boredom over the millennia, with no coherent design throughline. Maybe she added a new top section every time a Dragonmaster dumped her. But at the top of this mess, they emerge on a platform of blue crystal, to the telltale “Hmph” of their quarry being unsurprised but disappointed at their arrival. “At last, the hour is at hand to correct the error of ALTHENA from FIFTEEN YEARS AGO,” Ghaleon says, as always the emphasis mine on his insane pitching to the back row. As the camera pans toward him and Gamsthena in their matching Fantasy Burning Man getups, I am unsure if he’s saying this to her or to Alex. Gams, nonetheless, replies, “I shall do everything within my power to assist you, my lord.” This is very monotone from her, but that could be for intentional or unintentional reasons. Fun when I can’t tell the difference!

Ghaleon switches back to dialogue boxes so I will stop making fun of him. “You were never meant to exist in the realm of mortals, Althena,” he says. “Your soul is destined to live for eternity…not suffocate within a rotting sack of flesh.” What I did not expect here was for Ghaleon to slag Gams’s hot bod. Well, I did, but not for this reason. “You are a goddess, Althena…” Magic Emperor Genius adds, “and to refute your absolute power is to deny your true destiny.” I’m really struggling with the idea of an all-powerful creator god having a destiny that she is fighting against. Unless Althena is just divine middle management, this seems like it should be a paradox. But this is just Ghaleon’s preamble for telling her to climb the stairs at the back of the tower and “show that power to the children whose world and whose lives you created!” She’s all, “Neat,” and sashays away. I’m unsure if this brainwashed, flat agreeability with everything Ghaleon says is evidence for or against Alex’s assertion that Gams is still in there somewhere, but you know and I know what the endgame is here, and there’s little point in trying to spot organic development of it.

Alex could have spoken up at any point in that little exchange, but chooses to hold his tongue until Gamsthena’s blue beach waves are bouncing up to the top of the tower. Polite, even at a time like this. Ghaleon calls him “dragonboy” some more, calls Gams “the object of your desire,” which is wrong in more ways than I care to enumerate, and hits the major bullet points of his Free Will Is Only for the Elite manifesto for anybody who just got here. “Humans are helpless creatures, dragonboy. Pitiful, helpless creatures that need to be strictly controlled. Fifteen years ago, the Goddess ignored this basic truth…and chose to be reborn as one of her own children. She believed they would be able to care for themselves. It was a foolish belief acted on in a moment of weakness.” Really, this is what we all get for having a godDESS, am I right? What if she had gotten her period when she made sunsets?! The upshot, of course, is that Ghaleon’s grand do-over will put him at the wheel instead, since “Althena and Dyne willfully cast aside their responsibilities” and Ghaleon was obviously second in the line of succession for godhood.

Men are too emotional to be Magic Emperor.

Now, I thought what that meant for Gamsthena was pretty obvious, but apparently not, as Ghaleon’s about to way overexplain it. As Alex and Friends watch helplessly, more seizure-inducing concentric circles of magic start making their way faster and faster for the goddess, until she lets out a very Gams-like shriek and is encased in a pillar of blue light, just as she was before she turned into the World’s Most Special Baby. Let me paraphrase Ghaleon, for my own having-to-transcribe-him sanity: Althena sent her magic out into the world, and for that error to be made right, Her Holy Gift can’t be out in fucking Iluk helping one of her children “disrupt” masturbation by “inventing” porno mags. Gamsthena needs that shit back, and so here she is, sucking all the magic in the world back into herself (no, no, I’m not going to say it). And once she’s got it all slurped up in her holy vessel, she’ll hand it over to Ghaleon, because he’s a man and way smarter and more rational than her, tee hee!

“What?! That’s why you kidnapped [Gams]?!” Alex says. I…I mean… Girl, stay with Ghaleon. I take all that shit back.

There’s more, of course, mostly about Ghaleon’s new, 1984-tastic “structured reality” and how these whiny children before him will all get used to it eventually, like he isn’t planning on killing them all right now anyway. But though Ghaleon is now surrounded by a troubling aura of dark magic courtesy of Gamsthena, it is on this specific point where the non-Alex delegates feel they must step in, because it’s one thing to kidnap Alex’s sister, but it is quite another to tell them they have to pay magic taxes. Kyle calls him a “nutbar,” which seems insufficient, and says for what feels like the hundredth time in this recap, “Human beings don’t need to be controlled to be happy!” Jessica jumps off this point to add that Althena trusted them “with her powers” and that they’re not about to give that up. Okay, but humans definitely were able to use magic before fifteen years ago. Mia’s mom and all her ancestors used it and everything! Ghaleon used it! I guess what I’m saying is that I have no idea what the stakes of Althena’s fateful decision actually were, and our heroes don’t know either, and that all of this is very good and I have certainly not ruined this game for myself for thinking for five minutes about anything in it.

Nash makes this all about himself and his epiphany as of RIGHT THIS MOMENT that “now I realize just how wrong you are!” so let’s just skip over him, shall we? Mia, unsurprisingly, raises the most salient point: “You’re a human being, Ghaleon. You’re like all of us. You make mistakes…and you are flawed. What makes you think you are worthy of wielding the power of the Goddess…and taking away the freedom she gave to all of us?” I am on board with “Okay, sure, but WHY YOU, SPECIFICALLY” as the main takeaway of this whole saga, and I’m sure there are no real–world reasons this angle is working for me. But since these little speeches are always just a couple of lines for each character, with Alex last, and Ghaleon only responding to Alex, Ghaleon gets to totally ignore this direct indictment of his own fitness. Perfect. To his credit, Alex uses his allotted time to make a pretty decent point too, asking, “Don’t you understand, Ghaleon? Don’t you understand that the only person who wants the world as it was is you?” That might be because nobody else even knows it changed, but yes! Tell that fucking Boomer what’s up!

Ghaleon merely sighs that the world is fucked if it has no god–again, it currently already has one, but he also thinks it needs a different one, with a penis–and that he’s gotta step up and save those yokels in Meryod from their dumb selves. “The only thing this world needs to be saved from is you,” Alex shouts in defiance, “and we’re here to do just that!” This is as good a line from which to get down to fucking business as any, so we’re finally off to the goddamn final boss fight!