As that scene fades out–wow, we learned a name! That was worth my time!–I get control of Jailbait, who is standing next to a blessed, miraculous save point. After using it three separate times–I don’t like to take chances with this game–Jailbait runs through the wreckage on Miltia’s streets, blasting cannisters and trying to avoid the helicopters’ searchlights, which bring down the wrath of random battles upon our heroes’ heads. These random battles are, however, a fun opportunity to use Jailbait’s new ability, Storm Waltz. This ability involves Jailbait throwing a bunch of coins in the air and ricocheting bullets off of them. As is anything involving Jailbait, it is improbably and disturbingly hot. (Does the name Storm Waltz make sense, given the nature of the attack? No. Do I care? Again, no.)
After a few minutes of running and battles, Jailbait, Ziggy and MOMO come to another screen, where Jailbait’s doppelgangers are shooting machine guns with reckless abandon, in the shadow of the same phallic building Shion cowered before earlier. “Every single one of them’s infected…” Jailbait says of the Jailbait-alikes. Infected how, we don’t know yet, but they do seem to be taking great satisfaction in firing their guns. Hey, just like our Jailbait! One of them, though, is shot down by another Jailbait clone, this one with black hair. We know this is Gaignun. Cute Boy!Gaignun is calling out for someone named Rubedo. Gee, I wonder who that could be.
The scene shifts, and now Jailbait is standing on a girdered platform, the same location from his dream. Cute Boy!Gaignun is limping along the platform, using his gun as a cane, while another Jailbait-alike, this one with white hair (another mystery character, assuming you’ve been drinking paint thinner and have lost all memory of the game up to this point), looks on from above. White Hair blasts Cute Boy!Gaignun with a wave of something or other and then floats down to his level, glowing with Evil Boy Power.
Jailbait is running for the two of them, calling out for Gaignun, when he comes back to himself, still standing with Ziggy and MOMO. MOMO, besotted as she is, is beside herself with concern for her new boyfriend, but Jailbait snaps “I said I’m fine!” at her protests. Then, realizing how much he sounds like Shion, he apologizes. As he and the others try to figure out why they’re stuck in Jailbait’s flashback, we return to the characters I don’t like, stuck in Shion’s much less interesting flashback.
Red and Shion, sitting on the swings, converse as to the nature of this place. Red, with many more words than are necessary, explains that KOS-MOS pulled memories out of Shion’s head and made them into a virtual place. “This world…it is also KOS-MOS’ memory as well.” Shion starts to protest that that is some bullshit, but Red cuts her off with, “Memories do not belong solely to one person.” Well, no, but they tend to not belong to people who could not have experienced them. If she pulled this place out of Shion’s head, then it is Shion’s memory. What more do we need than that? I am already accepting this ridiculous premise beyond my normal suspension of disbelief, so can we just move on?
And Shion has another problem beyond this one: she stutters about the original KOS-MOS, and in a wackily-lighted flashback, we see Shion, pointing a gun at Homicidal KOS-MOS Mark I. Red completes the thought: “…Destroyed, during that incident, two years ago…” Shion, I have to say, had good aim, and blew KOS-MOS’s head off with a single bullet. And we’re treated to another flashback, of Homicidal KOS-MOS Mark I sticking her metal fist through Kevin’s torso. Nice.
Kevin has R-DRILL tested on him.
Shion isn’t too happy about having these horrible memories dragged out of the darkest corners of her empty brain, but Red wants her, and all of them, to learn to deal with their traumatic pasts and “accept the entirety of [their] memories.” Shion, staring blankly ahead, mutters, “Accept…our memories…” AUUUUUUUUUUUUGH.
Red also needs Shion to get over her fear of Miltia, because she wants them to return there to fulfill some great cosmic purpose. At that thought, Shion flashes back to a hospital room, where her mother and father are both dead. Suffice it to say it’s not on Shion’s Top Ten Vacation Destinations list. Red says only KOS-MOS knows why they must go to Miltia, and instructs Shion to go find her, somewhere “out there” in this mish-mash of flashbacks and technicolor skies. After Shion and Corey are already walking off and out of earshot, Red asks CHAOS!!!, “Are you sure this is what you want? There is no turning back.” CHAOS!!! answers, “I know…but…Shion…is vital to her.” Sigh. Red wonders what CHAOS!!! will do, since he and his schlong seem intricately tied into this whole mess. Yes, it is big enough that he can tie it into things. Think balloon animals.
Once I’m back in control, I first spend five minutes trying to decide which character I want to stare at less: CHAOS!!! or Shion. The balloon animal imagery I conjured up in a fit of masochism causes me, for the first time, to think of Shion as the better option. So Shion runs through the ruined catwalks and streets of this not-quite-fake Miltia, shaking her ass antagonistically at me. On one catwalk there are a variety of cartoonish animal statues that wouldn’t look out of place at a zoo, and among them, pretending to be a really fucked-up looking cartoon moose, is a Gnosis. It is, for the record, called a bugbear, for reasons I will probably never figure out. These bugbears, which are abundant in this area, both hit really hard and heal themselves. Awesome. It would have been really nice of KOS-MOS to, well, pretend these Gnosis weren’t here for the purposes of constructing this reality, so the party could just walk in, get the stuff, and walk out. It’s not like this game has an alarming shortage of four-hour dungeons–we could cut one.
Ding dong, the rabbit’s dead!
In addition to that, all these Gnosis are really laying waste to Shion, and when I’m working with a two-person party, Shion dying is no longer a cause for celebration, but one for chucking my controller at the wall. I blame Shion for sucking. For both connotations of sucking.
After fighting through way more Gnosis than necessary, taking several wrong turns, and finding another red Segment Address door–wonderful, now we have keys for doors inside of KOS-MOS’s imagination–CHAOS!!! and Shion descend into the virtual Miltian sewers. Because, as you all know, there’s nothing I love more than a good ol’ sewer dungeon. Especially when it’s just like every other sewer dungeon in every RPG ever made! Sweet, sweet constancy.
*snicker*
This sewer dungeon, for what it’s worth, abandons the typical mutant fish monsters, and instead I get to fight Gnosis that resemble electric blue centipedes and creepy doll Gnosis that can only be damaged by healing ethers. At the very least, it gives Shion something to do, as her attacks up to this point could be compared to slapping the Gnosis with a wet paper towel.
As Shion and CHAOS!!! (and useless Corey) venture deeper into the sewers, to encounter even more acid trip-inspired bug monsters, we return to Jailbait and company, possibly to reward me for not having turned the game off by now. Their meanderings lead them to a ruined subway station, where trains and pieces of the ceiling have fallen just so, forcing Jailbait to navigate a precise maze populated by U-GEE soldiers and A.G.W.S. Naturally, Jailbait cannot blast any of this stuff out of the way…except for the wreckage that’s hiding treasure chests. The rest of it was made impervious by wizard magic, apparently. Deeper into the subway system, the group starts encountering the same Gnosis that Shion and CHAOS!!! have been fighting, but thankfully this group doesn’t suck balls and deals with them fine.
Eventually the subway path leads down into the same sewers Shion and CHAOS!!! were just in, but this group follows a lower path, unconnected with Shion’s. Which means Jailbait gets to fight all the Gnosis that Shion got to skip. Lord knows I should have to scour the entire dungeon clean of all other lifeforms before getting to move on. And yes, I am complaining about this because it is the only thing of note I have seen in the last twenty minutes of gameplay. I feel like I’m stuck in some random battle version of Groundhog Day. If I have to hear MOMO shout “Meteor Storm!” one more time I might have to jump off a bridge.
Climbing a ladder out of the sewers, Jailbait, Ziggy and MOMO end up above ground again, the rainbow druggie sky blazing around them. Spotting something ahead of them, Jailbait’s all, “You’ve gotta be kidding…” The sight before them turns out to be the phallic building, and Jailbait clues us in on its identity: “The [U-GEE] Organization’s central tower…Labyrinthos.” Looking up its impressive length again, I note that the building has spikes coming out of its sides, like Prince Albert piercings. It also looks nothing like a labyrinth.
Atop the tower, a crazy man is acting crazy. “Hallelujah!” he screams at the sky, while our heroes look up at him. “And the sea gave up the dead which were in it…and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them…and they were judged every man according to their works!” Okay, he’s middle-aged, standing on top of a U-GEE building, and shouting quotes from Revelations in a feverish, fanatic tone of voice. This can only be Joachim Mizrahi. MOMO figures this out pretty quickly herself. As we get a shot of Mizrahi orating further about things we can’t hear, but are no doubt crazy, MOMO screams “Daddy!!” and is only held back from running toward the building by her new daddy, Ziggy. With MOMO still struggling in Ziggy’s grasp, Jailbait and Ziggy bandy back and forth with the information we not only have deduced on our own, but have been flat-out told already: this is indeed Joachim Mizrahi. No, really, Ziggy, it is. You don’t have to keep saying it. Meanwhile, Mizrahi has moved on to the the lake of fire and the Book of Life and a number of other things you’ve heard before if you either know your Bible or watch a lot of History Channel. His recitations complete, Joachim Mizrahi does something totally sane and rational: he lights himself on fire and throws himself off the building. This guy’s getting a bad rap, I’m telling you. My dad lights himself on fire all the time!
MOMO screams and runs toward Mizrahi’s falling body, but it vanishes into nothing just as it would have brained her dropped into her arms. While MOMO cries and Jailbait stares at her with pity, Ziggy decides what we all need is a little dose of stating the obvious. “All this before me…is this really Miltia from fourteen years ago…?” YES, IT REALLY IS, ZIGGY. JESUS CHRIST. But just as Ziggy is, at Shion-like pacing, coming to terms with where they’ve been for the past couple of hours, the ground, the building, and everything else dissolves into the rainbow haze, and our heroes fall into it. As they’re falling, a seal, or gateway, or something, materializes near MOMO, and the light emanating from it sucks them out of the void.
And now we’re back to Shion. Joy of joys. Where Jailbait’s run through the sewers took him back into the maze of ruined buildings in urban Miltia, Shion has somehow come out of those same sewers into a dark forest. The scorpion-like Gnosis here enjoy casting a poisonous attack of poisonously poisonous poison, but here it will not be CHAOS!!! and Shion’s undoing, because the strategy guide, for once, warned me of something important in advance and I therefore knew to reset their skills to protect them from the poison.
It is also at this point in their trek where CHAOS!!! finally, finally learns his magnum opus of attacks, Angel Blow. As far as I can figure, this involves CHAOS!!! sprouting angel wings, flying up high, and blowing his load all over the screen. Only it’s all sparkly and blue–magical sperm from a magical wang. Happily, it turns out that CHAOS!!!’s bodily fluids are just as harmful to Gnosis as his hands are.
Get down on your knees for some Angel Blow.
Deeper in the forest, Shion comes across a small hill set back from the road, with what appear to be several metal, carrot-shaped barrels lined up along its crest. From behind one of the carrots hops Shion’s imaginary friend Bunnie. Bunnie proceeds to, easy as you please, blow up one of the carrots and, from its remains, pull out a large soda can. (The can actually contains carrot juice, which doesn’t really make this any less weird.) It notices Shion watching this act of plunder, squeaks, and hops off out of sight. Shion watches it go and says, “That’s the mascot that was on the ground at the park.” It’s also the guardian of your overworked email inbox, you dingbat. C’mon, girl, it’s not like you’ve never seen it before. Also, although I just described it to you in detail, I have no idea what just happened there.
As Jailbait did in the subway tunnels, Shion wiggles and blasts her way through a precise maze of caves, waterways and upturned trees as she makes her way through the forest. Several times, because I apparently have neither a sense of direction nor any skill at videogames, she ends up back where she started, after at least five minutes of walking. I probably should not be allowed to make fun of Shion’s stupidity, given this, but I’m going to do it anyway. I do so enjoy it.
Shion finds Bunnie a screen later, sitting in a clearing at a tree stump table (with smaller stumps for chairs, isn’t that cute), celebrating its carrot juice prize and hopping up and down in delight. After a moment, though, it grabs the can from the stump and hops backward into a small burrow in the hill. A burrow which has an electronic door, and no roof, but I don’t know another word for it. I guess I could call it Bunnie’s rabbit hole, but then we would be talking about CHAOS!!! plunging into the rabbit hole, and I’m sure you guys don’t need to hear about that.