CHAOS!!! feels like they haven’t discussed the need for action enough, so he adds, “In any case, we have to hurry up and get everyone onboard. If we don’t do something, the Gnosis are going to take over the entire Metropolis.” They’ve probably already done that in the time you assholes have stood around talking about what to do. Christ. Most of the normal gang volunteers to assist with the evacuation, so it’s finally time to head to town and actually help people. That is, after Shion and KOS-MOS stare at each other some more, and Shion for no reason recalls the vision of KOS-MOS throwing down with UUUUUU-DOOOOOOO. After this, she sloooowly walks over to KOS-MOS, sloooowly puts her hand on her boob shoulder, and says, “KOS-MOS… We’re counting on you.” Beyond the fact that they’re wasting time, this is stupid anyway, since both Shion and KOS-MOS are heading down there, and have plenty of time to fondle each other and make small talk.

‘I’ll do whatever…my lady…desires… *sob*’

As soon as I exit Cutscene Purgatory, the first thing I do is make Jailbait the lead character again and remove Shion’s waggling behind from my sight. The second thing I do is refamiliarize myself with, and reassign to my liking, every character’s equipment, ethers, techs, and skills. This probably takes me 20 minutes. Hey, I didn’t say these were 11 quality hours of gameplay. If you take out cutscenes, loading screens, reading fucking emails, running around in circles because I don’t know what I’m doing, and futzing around with skills in the menu, there’s maybe an hour here.

Over at the Foundation, Gaignun’s faithful citizenry are lined up by the shuttle launch pads, patiently waiting to be ferried away from the Gnosis that are all over the damn place. Gaignun must fill up this giant space bong with pot smoke, because everyone is really fucking relaxed. Jailbait heads up the stairs and across the city to Sectors 26 and 27. On the street running through Sector 26, Jailbait finds the Mayor–the Kukai Foundation needs a mayor?–waiting for someone who’s not him to rescue the citizens still in the buildings. He tells Jailbait how many citizens are still unaccounted for–at this moment, 13–and also sells a small selection of items. Jailbait stocks up on Ether Packs and Med Kits before running off to be the hero.

The first thing to note about this rescue mission is that the Gnosis rampaging around the two neighborhoods respawn every time Jailbait leaves the screen and returns. This is not new to this game, but it’s worth noting here because saving all these people requires a lot of backtracking. Even better, most of the Gnosis in the streets are bugbears, and thanks to their stupid heal-all ability every battle takes 10 goddamn minutes.

The first citizen Jailbait finds just so happens to be Pauly D. He is “hiding” from the Gnosis by pretending to be the fifth Beatle fourth member of the Iron 3 buttsex squad. This kind of silly trick really should not work on Gnosis, but it does. I’m not complaining–making a comic book team of gay steel workers into a Chekhov’s Gun is kind of awesome. Once he’s sure that moving from his spot behind his favorite cardboard cutouts won’t result in a chalky death, Pauly D makes for the Durandick and Corey’s hot tub.

Delightful.

Next, Jailbait heads over to OUR TREASURE, where the innkeeper-slash-bickering husband is dying noisily on the floor. “M-my treasure’s inside the safe…” he gurgles at Jailbait, “the code is… Photo…birth…day…” I’m not sure why he would, with his last breath, give Jailbait a puzzle to solve instead of just telling him the damn combination, if he wants his treasure rescued so much. After all, I doubt the Gnosis standing over there in front of the safe is going to hear the numbers and think, “Oho! Now I can crack this baby!” It’s a fucking Gnosis–I doubt it thinks about much of anything. Trying not to roll his eyes at this poor dead innkeeper, Jailbait runs upstairs, where he finds a weirdly backlit picture on the wall of the man, his henpecking wife, and their daughter. Under the photo, a caption reads, “October 28th: In celebration of the birth of our little angel.” At least it doesn’t say “the birth of OUR TREASURE” for that extra smack in the face with an anvil. While he’s up in the attic, Jailbait loots some of the OUR TREASURE Family’s valuables and heads next door to raise the IRON MAN’s service elevator. Back downstairs, Jailbait opens the safe and finds the man’s “treasure,” which is obviously his daughter. She knows without being told that the Gnosis killed her dad, even though they must have done it after he locked her in that safe. She runs out sobbing, leaving Jailbait with 11 more people to find. This is just riveting, isn’t it?

After grabbing a swimsuit–no, really–from a chest behind the inn’s counter, Jailbait returns to the IRON MAN. Now that the elevator has moved out of the way, he can get behind it and blow up a bunch of storage containers. Why would there be storage containers stowed behind an elevator that is only operable from the second floor? The owner must have been too busy posing with his Iron 3 cutouts so he was just like, “Yeah, put that shit wherever.” When the boxes are cleared, Jailbait finds a man cowering in the debris. And how in the fuck did this guy get here? Everyone who lives in the Kukai Foundation must be a wizard.

We’ll let Shion be the judge of that.

It’s probably becoming obvious that I was winging it for most of this area, because Jailbait goes back to OUR TREASURE and revisits the attic, but this time he leaves via a door and ends up on the rooftops of Sector 26. Even though there’s a freaking door out to this area, the roofs are too steep to walk on, and Jailbait ends up half-running, half-falling over to some catwalks, and then running across the IRON MAN’s awnings to another door. I pull out the strategy guide and it informs me that, if I make MOMO the lead here, I will have the honor and privilege of fighting a very challenging optional boss, the reward for which is some new weapon for MOMO that turns Gnosis into rare items. While that sounds dandy, I have no intention whatsoever of doing this right now. But just to refresh myself on what I’d be missing, I flip to the guide’s appendix. First off, this boss, named Mintia, is a creepy doll with a face like Harvey Dent. Yeah, I’ll pass. Second, the appendix plainly states that the party probably is not strong enough to defeat her at this point in the game, while the walkthrough heartily recommends taking her on. Did anyone edit this document? Anyone? Bueller?

Also, I’d just like to point out that the subheader for this section of the guide’s appendix is called “Easter A.G.W.S.” The person who wrote that needs to step forward so I can punch them in their balls or ovaries.

Jailbait’s money shot. Hee hee.

Well, that was a colossal waste of time. Back to the rooftops, where Jailbait first clambers over to a catwalk leading to Sector 27 and a chest with another Segment Address decoder in it. On the way back, he endeavors to fall into a different spot so he can discover a Segment Address door, behind which he finds the head of his long-desired robot that only Shion gets to use. Finally, he runs/falls all the way to the left side of the sector, so he can land inside a dumpster. Of course, there’s a man either inside or behind the dumpster, wearing goggles on his head like a Digimon male lead; he’s no doubt waiting for a sexy rendezvous with Pauly D that never happened. He lies that he was hiding from the Gnosis in here, but we all know what’s up. Goggle Boy runs off to join the party in Corey’s hot tub, leaving Jailbait to rescue nine more people.

Before I go any further, I should return to that swimsuit I mentioned earlier. Any of the non-machine-parts characters (i.e., not Ziggy or KOS-MOS) can wear the swimsuit, which increases acquisition of tech points. This annoys me, because Ziggy is the one that really needs them. I hate to actually admit this, because my God, is the Bradygames guide a piece of shit, but given that I’m picking up this game after a long hiatus, I’m following the guide’s party composition recommendations. Problem is, its recommendations never include Ziggy. Like, fucking ever. And yet, reading ahead a little bit, I see the guide basically assuming that Ziggy should soon not only have his (badass) Executioner tech, but have it leveled up to use every turn. For some perspective, it will be approximately six hours before Ziggy gets Executioner at all. I assume this is because I’m not running back into completed dungeons via Encephalon and leveling up like a fucking junkie, or because, horror, I’m following the recommendations of a book I should have burned in a garbage can years ago.

What I’m getting at here is that I put the swimsuit on Jailbait–not because he needs the tech points, but because I want to watch him shoot his little pistols with his shirt off. I am a bad person.

Hooray for damnation!

That should be everybody in Sector 26, so it’s time to move down the street to Sector 27. At this point I realize that I’d better stop heeding the idiotic guide and start using Ziggy, no matter how much he sucks against these particular Gnosis. Thus, he gets grouped with the Gnosis Wrecking Crew Duo of KOS-MOS and the Wang. Immediately inside Sector 27, KOS-MOS, my new lead, finds a Gnosis type called a basilisk–since you asked, it looks like a scorpion ate a shuriken–hissing at someone sitting on top of a statue. KOS-MOS, ever the pragmatic girl, chooses to blow up the statue to get the man down. “I was about to get turned into a bronze statue, too,” he tells her. No, you were going to be turned into a salt statue. Or into nothing, if you’re Shion. Sigh.

From there, KOS-MOS runs past BAKERY PACMAN and into the dry cleaner’s. There are a few people to rescue here, but more important are the Gnosis haunting the building, called larva dolls. I don’t want to blow my wad on items killing these, so Shion jiggles back into the rotation. I’m not thrilled about this, but the larva dolls are healed by attacks and damaged by heals, I haven’t taught Shion’s Medica ability to anyone else, and MOMO’s Life Shot doesn’t do enough to make a difference. The silver lining to being forced to use Shion is that, if their deaths are lined up with the points bonus, these dolls provide a shitload of tech points, and the faster KOS-MOS doesn’t have to wait two turns to use X-CLITORIS, the happier I will be.

The lady near the entrance to the cleaner’s, who I am pretty sure owns the place, refuses to be rescued until her runaway son is found, so KOS-MOS is like “Whatever, meatsack” and heads upstairs and outside. Of course, the party I used for the larva dolls is spectacularly shitty against the gel fish Gnosis on the second floor patio, so I have to change it up again. Wait, gel fish? Is that supposed to be like gefilte fish? Are these the Gnosis made out of Jewish people? And before I get any shit for pulling this semi-religious reference out of my ass, let’s remember KOS-MOS up on the cross, the 12 apostle Golden Penis Plates, and the Federation Capital of Fifth Jerusalem. I’m probably right about this.

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Past the gefilte fish, Jailbait–back in the party, as I’m probably spending two minutes rearranging my party between battles for every minute I spend doing anything–cuts across to the second floor of BAKERY PACMAN to rescue the baker. This involves going back outside to raise a bridge on the catwalk and lower a ladder, both of which I’m sure were included to make this rescue mission have some kind of puzzle element to it, except there is no reason at any point not to press the buttons to respectively raise and lower them. So as puzzles go, it’s…non-puzzling.

Michael Jackson’s favorite bakery.

Inside King’s auto body shop, Jailbait discovers a couple that seemed to be making out on top of Grimace when the Gnosis attacked. The man, Johnny, shoved his lady friend into a box, like he was afraid the Gnosis would make fun of his beard. They run off, leaving five more people to rescue. In his zeal to find items in the back of the room, Jailbait accidentally blows up Grimace, but at least this means Shion won’t get any more emails featuring Corey’s disembodied head.

Upstairs, Jailbait finds King himself, who demands that his kitten be saved as well, but isn’t about to stand around waiting for Jailbait to accomplish this task. He flounces out of his shop, mesmerizing Jailbait with his assless chaps and purple bodysuit. The corridor leading out of King’s shop connects to the back room of the dry cleaner’s (no, I have no idea, either), where the group finds a woman cowering at the foot of the stairs. “Wait! Why am I being targeted?!” she demands, like the Gnosis give a fuck who they’re sucking the soul out of. “I’m not even an important character! I’m just a part-timer!!” Oh, how deftly meta, writers. I am undone by your witty dialogue.

Right. ‘Her.’

Backtracking to King’s shop because I am clearly not paying attention to what I’m doing, Jailbait finds a door with an electronic lock. This door leads to King’s poshly furnished fuck dungeon panic room, and then up some stairs and down another corridor, where King’s cat somehow ran all this way only to get harassed by a larva doll. Once the cat has been saved, she prances down the hallway, tail straight up and butt exposed, which Shion of course recognizes as the universal “I’m in heat” walk. This leaves two more people to be rescued. Yes, the cat counted as a person, even when the dying guy from OUR TREASURE did not. That, or the cat is taking the dead man’s place on the rescue roster.