Shion and her cyberbunny, ignoring Snake Charmer II’s demand for an immediate reply, laboriously rehash this turn of events in such a maddening fashion that I can’t even recount it, and that’s after I just spent six paragraphs on Shion reading her email. God, how I hate myself. Once they’re done flapping their jaws at each other, I send off the “Durandick” response and get the fuck out of Shion’s inbox.
To reward myself for getting through that email without murdering anyone, once I get control of Jailbait again I have him run around in the surf and get all wet. Hey, in a game like this you need to make your own fun. After about ten minutes of this (hee hee hee), the party heads for the exit, only to run into Ziggy, who, damn his shiny hide, immediately senses that something is wrong with Shion. He echoes Corey’s sentiments that she not push herself too hard and teeters on the edge of being fucking dead to me.
With that, the group leaves the beach and steps out onto the city map, which is uncomfortably reminiscent of the horribly designed city maps from Xenogears. This game has almost nothing in common with its supposed predecessor, but this is one of the traits Monolith Soft chose to carry over? Thanks, assholes.
Jailbait’s first stop on the map is the “A.G.W.S. Parts Shop & Foundation Robot Academy.” Robot Academy? This has to be as good a reason as any to keep Jailbait away from the Kukai Foundation’s company credit card. Just look at what he spends money on. Like any twelve-year-old boy, I’m sure he has gone through at least one “robots are awesome” phase.
Shion can probably help you with that problem.
Inside the building, Jailbait finds three things of note: the academy, a vendor for A.G.W.S. crap, and a “super-fun” quiz game that doles out electroshocks for incorrect answers. At least only Jailbait gets shocked, and I’m not taking volts through the Dualshock. Though that would be a lawsuit waiting to happen, and I would love to forsake my degree, quit my job and live off of a fat Namco settlement for the rest of my life. Alas. So, since I still have no money for expensive Voltron appendages and I have no desire to spend any time playing horrible mini-games, I guess it’s time to go downstairs and visit the Robot Academy, with the realization that my sweet Jailbait is probably a Transformers nerd. On the bright side, this should help to curb my inappropriate thoughts toward him. It should, but it doesn’t.
As Jailbait reaches the foot of the stairs, we are told that the following scenes are “Chapter 1” of a no-doubt thrilling side story here at the Robot Academy. Please kill me. Jailbait wonders aloud where this place came from, obviously forgetting all about his sugar-high-induced demands for its construction. You’re not fooling anyone, kid. An old man runs up to him and shrieks, in the midst of a foot-stamping tantrum, “What’s going on?! This is no place for the likes of you. No siiir!” Rather than telling the old man that he is Gaignun Fucking Kukai Junior and that he can buy and sell his senile ass, Jailbait asks what goes on in this establishment. The old man responds, “This is the amazing, stupendous, absolutely fantabulous, Foundation Robot Academy!!” Oh, so it’s kind of cool, then. But the old man can’t be bothered with further explanations, because he’s busy. Only he communicates this with a lot of punctuation. Jailbait, continuing to feign ignorance of this ill-conceived pet project of his, says that it doesn’t really look like an A.G.W.S. factory. The old man is insulted! These are robots, not A.G.W.S.! Huge difference. I should probably mention that this guy is wearing a long, dingy yellow scarf even though he is inside a climate-controlled building, and his space-age unitard looks to be three or four sizes too large. All he’s really missing are some half-starved stray cats and a shopping cart to complete the image. He even accuses Jailbait of spying on him and his robot creations, so let’s add “tinfoil hat” to the list as well.
So the old man, finally convinced that Jailbait is not stealing his thoughts using a magic microwave, admits that he is building “an invincible giant robot!” Jailbait’s all, “Giant robot?!” and the old man, scoffing at Jailbait’s lack of nuance, clarifies: “IN-VIN-CIBLE giant robot!” Christ. This couldn’t be more annoying if it was being conveyed through Shion’s email.
The old man also has a secret to convey to Jailbait, a wondrous, magical secret. Hopefully he will not say that the secret is only safely uttered in the back of his van, where he also has a stash of candy. Jailbait doesn’t even care about the secret, because he’s too cool for that kind of baby nonsense, but the old man is going to tell him anyway. Surprise. “The hopes and dreams mankind lost have been scattered across the universe!” the old man wails, limbs flailing. “Likewise, there are giant robot parts that we have forgotten in the past floating around aimlessly in the universe!!” If I may cut to the chase, that means I need to bring the various robot parts I find in dungeon chests to this guy, and he will make a robot out of them. Now, knowing that I have not given him anything, his proclamation that he “is building” a giant robot is a bit of a reach. It’s more like he wants to build one and is suckering Jailbait into fronting the hardware. I’m also not sure why I need this guy to get the robot constructed. If I find a head, a body, and four limbs, are you telling me not one of my intrepid heroes could wire that shit together and make it work? Isn’t that what Shion and Corey get paid to do? I know Shion probably gets paid to do other things, but still.
Jailbait takes his leave of the old man–who claims that his name is Professor with the same air that a crazy homeless woman would claim she is Queen Elizabeth–and leaves the Robot Academy…only to walk right back downstairs and start another cutscene, this one Chapter 2, with Professor Hobo. I need to go back in time and ask my past self why she’s so mad at me.
Jailbait announces to Professor Hobo that he’s got some robot parts to contribute, which is much faster than the old man thought he would get any, like Jailbait didn’t specifically get prodded down here just to hand off the parts. Jailbait demands compensation for supplying the parts, like it was really demanding work to open a chest and take them out. After some haggling, Professor Hobo admits that he can work out a deal with Jailbait, but only after he helps clean up the laboratory, which is a mess because Professor Hobo invited all his hobo friends here for a party last night and now there are broken jugs of moonshine everywhere. This simply involves Jailbait wandering around and blowing up the jugs (and dead bodies that resulted from the customary knife fights) with the Boomstick. Simple enough, and one of the few bits of enjoyment I get from this game, so why not?
If that man is a giant dork, maybe.
Once Jailbait’s done, Professor Hobo agrees to turn the robot parts into some sort of fun toy. We see the parts–some robot arms–held up by some cartoonish machinery, and then plunged downward and off-camera to be transformed. The resulting product looks like…well, kind of like a gummi ship, only if I designed it, because the few times I have ever tried to make a custom gummi ship, it ends up looking like something that is completely incapable of flight or even movement. More to the point, it looks like a Beyblade made of Legos. Professor Hobo explains that this thing–Throni Blade, now called Throbbing Blade–will go into Shion’s Ether menu as something she can summon in battle. Yes, only Shion can summon Professor Hobo’s unholy robotic creations. And since I avoid using Shion whenever possible, we probably won’t have much occasion to talk about them. Hooray!
Finally, Jailbait leaves the Robot Academy for real and heads to an area labeled on the map as Sectors 26 and 27. Sector 27, you’ll recall, is where Shion wanted to find a hotel room and get a male prostitute. For now, she will have to settle for being out of my sight as Jailbait blows up debris on the streets and talks to NPCs, though the first one he runs into gives him fairly clear directions toward the local hotel, nauseatingly named OUR TREASURE.
The first building Jailbait finds is a bar with a sign reading “IRON MAN” hanging above the door. The sign also has a picture of a burly naked guy on it. Jailbait thinks of himself as pretty studly, and figures this might be the kind of place he’ll fit right in. Further piquing his interest, a woman outside tells him, “Hey, I heard that the bartender is actually a member of Director Gaignun’s fan club. I wonder if his tastes run along those lines?” So men who are sexually attracted to Gaignun hang out here? This is definitely the place for Jailbait, then.
The bar is honestly pretty boring, low-light, normal pub material…until you get to the far right side of the room. The NPCs throughout the bar are chattering about some famous comic and how either awesome or lame they think it is. The comic in question is called The Iron 3, and seems to be what the bar is named after. (The alternate explanation is that the bartender thinks Gaignun is an Iron Man.) So what is this comic? Well, on the right side of the room, a young man is preening and flexing his sad lack of guns in front of a promotional cardboard cutout of the heroes of The Iron 3, who, as far as I can tell, are superhero gay steel workers. They’ve all got on tight jeans and hardhats and are showing off their bare chests to the room at large. Fabulous! The guy admiring the cardboard display says, “I am who I am today thanks to that comic!” I’m glad that, in this universe, there is a comic series out there that encourages youths to be open and honest about their sexuality, like this young man. Maybe if Squall had had The Iron 3 as a child, we wouldn’t have had to deal with all that Rinoa beard nonsense. But he didn’t–all the Balamb Garden library had on hand was fare like Superman Totally Loves Lois Lane and Is NOT Gay for Jimmy Olsen! and The Adventures of Captain Leviticus.
Jailbait is intrigued.
As much as I don’t think that a comic about gay steel workers can be topped, I do have the rest of the area to explore. Next stop is OUR TREASURE, a hotel which has apparently fallen on hard times due to the fancy high rise in a newer, nicer area of the city we can’t even visit. Jailbait only goes to the slums when he visits the Kukai Foundation. OUR TREASURE is run by a father and daughter who constantly fight, according to every NPC in the city, but they seem pretty mild mannered. The dad insists that his item shop within the hotel has “nothing worthwhile” of Jailbait’s money–wow, check out those sales pitch skills!–but other than that, I have no idea what all these glassy-eyed NPCs are talking about. The daughter arranges a room for Little Master, but it is Shion we see in the ensuing cutscene, all rested and ready to go back to the Elsa to work on KOS-MOS. I hope she washed off all that cheap male cologne afterward, because I bet KOS-MOS would totally smell it on her a mile away.
But Shion will have to wait a little bit, because we have only so far explored Sector 27. Sector 26 is through a tunnel to the left of the hotel, next to an NPC youngster who has heard that Jailbait is really Gaignun’s cyborg love child. That is so hilarious on so many levels.
In Sector 26, Jailbait first pays a visit to the bakery, which is called BAKERY SMILE. Is there some law that states all the retail establishments in this game have to have Engrish, all-caps names? Pacman is on the bakery’s sign, and I don’t know, of all places, why Namco would want a Pacman reference here when they could have just sent Shion an email regarding the latest monstrous, 3D “update” to the classic game people actually liked. But it’s there. Or maybe it’s a wheel of cheddar. I don’t know. There’s also a cute girl working at BAKERY SMILE, whose lovely curves are attracting local boys like moths to a flame. Really, they’re all visiting because the cinnamon rolls rock, and after eating one they all head over to IRON MAN to pose like gay steel workers.
Upstairs from the bakery is a dry cleaner’s, Lavare’s, and yes, that too is in all-caps, but unlike the others it doesn’t look like it belongs on a Japanese girl’s T-shirt. This shop, like the hotel, seems to be run by a dysfunctional, arguing family, which, again, we only know because people say it’s the case. But there’s not too much going on here for the moment–the most interesting thing is that some customer apparently sends in a vast amount of leopard print to be dry cleaned, because it’s hanging up everywhere.
Jailbait’s final stop is the chop shop owned by a man named King. The “joke” here is that this King fellow is respected and feared throughout the Kukai Foundation, because he’s a rough biker type, but he’s actually a completely flaming gay man who baby-talks to cats. As if this weren’t enough, he has a pageboy haircut and wears a codpiece over a lavender-and-white bodysuit. He is truly a specimen of masculinity, this Mr. King. Upon observing that this man is harmless, Jailbait blows up all the crates in his shop, and in one of them finds something that looks like Grimace. Grimace here has TALK TO ME written on his ample belly, and is very pleased when Jailbait TALKS TO HIM instead of blowing him up with the contents of all the other crates. Grimace goes on and on about someone named Tom, like there’s anyone with that normal of a name in this stupid game. It’s probably short for St. Thomasinus Apocalypto Nietzche or something. Grimace is so happy that he’s made a new friend that he wants to tell Jailbait a story, the quality of which Jailbait can choose. Upon choosing “good story” he hears about a hidden Segment Address door on his very own Durandick, like he doesn’t know his space penis like…well, his real penis. Grimace even takes a picture of himself with Jailbait to commemorate this happy day, before asking Jailbait to say hi to Thomasinus for him. The Tom Grimace keeps referring to is actually back on Mos Eisley, working at the store TALK TO ME. And that name is printed on him! Amazing how that works. Looking back at that recap, I’m pretty sure Grimace’s twin in that shop never came up because I was still seething over Shion’s whining about being the fattest fat to ever fat. And now I’m mad about it all over again.