Jailbait again insists that he continue on alone, and everyone else again insists that he’s being a dipshit. But Catatonic!MOMO walks over to him like a lost puppy. “You…wanna come with me?” he asks her, and she nods. Oh, I see, it’s too dangerous for the battle robot, the cyborg, and the guy that melts Gnosis face with his penis, but if the girl that just got raped wants to tag along, she should feel free. Jailbait is so stupid. Speaking of stupid, Shion also insists on accompanying him. “Don’t you remember what you told me?” she asks, like she of all people has any right to tell people that they should remember stuff better. “This [Phallus]…it’s responsible for destroying Miltia and bringing the Gnosis into this world… If this has anything to do with that place that I know of, then…this involves me as well…” So let me see if I have this right. Shion was in a hospital room once and saw something that looked like the top of the Phallus of Nephilim. She has convinced herself that this moment of happenstance gives her insider information on what they are dealing with, even though she needed to have everything about their current situation explained to her. And she also thinks that this means she’s “involved.” I mean, yes, she is involved, as we’ll find out way later, and it’s hilarious, but not because she looked out of a fucking window. While we’re at it, why doesn’t she just shout “I HEARD THE SONG, TOO, YOU GUYS, I’M MAGICAL!” in Jailbait’s face?
‘Here, take this,’ he added, unzipping his pants.
For now, Jailbait is tired of arguing and the group moves on together. Jailbait returns to the Elsa with MOMO in tow, but apparently removing her physically from the Phallus of Nephilim no longer constitutes a successful rescue mission–now they have to go beat Albedo and destroy this place before Matthews will fly this jalopy home. Remember how Chesty said the Durandick could blow this place up, if only MOMO weren’t inside? Yeah, well, these guys don’t. Jailbait, of course, would stay anyway, as he thinks that killing Albedo will magically erase MOMO’s trauma and fix her. Social commentary!
When Jailbait enters the Phallus proper, we can see that the structure has its own weather, namely lightning, for that mad scientist ambience. Wait, Joachim Mizrahi was a mad scientist? I didn’t realize. Three large drum towers surround a central structure, but none of them are currently connected. I’m sure it will be relatively straightforward to move between them. Jailbait enters the closest tower, creatively named Tower 1.
It becomes immediately obvious upon entering Tower 1 that straightforward dungeon progression was the last thing the game designers had in mind for this place. The entire central area of Tower 1 is dominated by an elevator shaft. But the lift itself doesn’t simply move up and down on command. Oh no, that would be too easy. Instead, there are several piles of boxes all over the elevator’s floor. These must be destroyed in denominations of three to reach each floor. So to move up three floors, Jailbait must blow up nine boxes. None of the floors have stairs, and the elevator only travels up. So the only way to move between floors is to rise to one level, drop down the “exit” hatch (in a sane universe, this would be called a laundry chute) and blow up a different number of boxes to reach a different level. Imagine you work here–and yes, this was supposedly a building with a function, and not just some Ganondorf-funded puzzle dungeon that could afford to be convoluted for the fuck of it. You work on the seventh floor. To get to work in the morning, you have to blow up 18 boxes to make the elevator work, so thank God these are Wizard Boxes that regenerate whenever anyone leaves the elevator. And let’s just ignore, for our own sanity, the fact that Shion’s Boom Stick is supposedly a Vector prototype and would not have existed when Mizrahi built this place, so I guess everyone who worked here had to light the boxes on fire. So if you have a crush on the cute young thing working on the second floor, you can’t just take the elevator down to ask your crush out for a drink–you have to jump in the laundry chute and fall down seven floors, which would probably kill you, before taking the elevator. How did anyone get anything done here?
Loading ...Despite my complaints about the gross stupidity of Tower 1’s architecture, it doesn’t present any real challenges beyond attempting to fanwank a reason for the building operating this way. The enemies in here, and throughout the Phallus of Nephilim, are a mix of robots and Realians. I wouldn’t be surprised if this whole time our heroes have been killing Joachim Mizrahi’s Roombas. Ziggy, now in the lead, finds a console on a third floor balcony that creates a bridge between Towers 1 and 2. The bridge, naturally, is on the sixth floor. The sane building design continues. When the bridge appears, the rounded tip of Tower 1 starts to glow green, making it look even more like a penis within a penis. After getting a Med Kit DX, another Segment Address decoder, and the pretentious Neo Armor Alpha (for Jailbait or CHAOS!!!), the party heads for Tower 2.
The area at the top of Tower 2 features a donut-shaped catwalk with a console and save point at the center. For the record, this is the only save point in the Phallus of Nephilim, not counting the two save points on board the Elsa outside. Put another way: there are more save points on the Elsa than in one of the game’s biggest dungeons. The strategy guide warns me not to hit the button on the nearby console yet, because doing so will send the whole donut structure down to the bottom of the tower, which is a one-way trip. So Tower 1’s elevator only goes up, and Tower 2’s elevator only goes down. And what happens if I do hit the button? Am I just stuck down at the bottom with no way to complete the dungeon? God, this place is a shit show.
Leaving the area from the northeast exit leads to a dead end room. I put MOMO in the lead so she can find something sparkly embedded in the wall. “?? Oh?!” she cries, fondling her new shiny. “This is combat armor exclusively for the 100-Series Observational Units!! I’d heard of it, but I never thought it actually existed!!” Only it’s not armor–it’s a new transformation for Cardcaptor Sakura!MOMO. More importantly: yes, MOMO says all of that. Further, she’s been using her little emotes in all the battles so far. So for story purposes, MOMO is catatonic, but the game designers didn’t bother consistently transferring that silence to anything that isn’t a cutscene. This will get even dumber later, but it’s already pretty stupid now.
Shion fondles some balls.
Shion takes the lead, because I guess I stopped giving a fuck around this time, and takes the exit on the north side. In this area, and for most of Tower 2, the party has to fight a series of Roombas and deranged Realians, the latter of which enjoy using an all-enemies flamethrower attack. Over and over and over again. If you guessed that the strategy guide says I should have the the fire resist skill or fire resist accessories on all party members, but buries this in the middle of a giant paragraph instead of pointing out this necessity in the “Essentials for the [Phallus]” section at the beginning of the dungeon walkthrough, you win a Golden Penis Plate puffy sticker. For the record, all that section says is to grab Med Kits and weapon and armor upgrades, which any fucking idiot would do without being told. Heaven forbid the guide point out items or skills that I wouldn’t think of on my own to prepare. Really, this is my fault, for not relocating to the alternate dimension the guide’s writers inhabit where skill points fall out of the fucking sky. The result of all this is that Shion, by virtue of her healing spells, gets to be the only party member that doesn’t get third-degree burns in every random battle. It pains me that it has to be this way.
Now I understand why Virgil hated Realians.
It should go without saying that Tower 2 is a singularly agonizing experience for the battles alone. After the first battle, KOS-MOS (look, I started giving a fuck again!) grabs the anviltastic Cross accessory, which goes on the Wang, not only because he’s Jesus or something, but because it reduces damage by 10 percent and it almost makes up for me not being psychic and extracting fire resist for him. The chest with the Cross is at a dead end, so by process of elimination, it’s time to head through the northwest exit. The area through this door is a confusing sea of ladders. I’m not really complaining–it’s not like I am forced to watch Shion shaking her ass in my face while climbing them, and at least they’re not one-way ladders that require me to first solve a logic puzzle. Down one ladder there’s some flamethrower rape, up another for a Soldier’s Honor accessory, down another for a couple more rounds of flamethrower rape.
This should be airbrushed onto a T-shirt or a van.
KOS-MOS finds another door at the top of yet another ladder. This door leads to a balcony, uh, elsewhere in Tower 2 (translation: I don’t know where the fuck I am) with some explodable metal containers. The second and third ones contain, respectively, the Defibrillator Vest accessory and Neo Armor Beta, specifically for Shion or MOMO. I barely have time to reflect that it’s sexist that the alpha armor is for boys and the beta armor is for girls, because the fourth container has a boss in it. No, really.
This boss, a gangly, hunched purple fellow with swords for hands, is the Athra 26 Series, a name that leads me to believe this is some horrible Realian experiment gone wrong. Keep in mind that the little girl with visible panties is the experiment gone right. Now, I was actually prepared for this fight, because I really have learned the lesson of reading ahead to the boss sections. Unfortunately, rather than putting “THERE’S A BOSS IN THIS CRATE, HOLD ON THERE, TURBO” in 72-point red font, this information is again buried in the walkthrough, so I’m not exactly ready for Athra 26 here to jump out of the debris of the container like a grotesque jack in the box. Nonetheless, despite the guide figuratively falling all over itself to tell me how hard this fight is, it’s not that bad–in fact, it takes me two turns to even realize it’s a boss. You know, given that it was hiding in a box like a pussy. And once I realize what’s happened, I pointedly ignore what the guide says and have Shion and CHAOS!!! hop in their A.G.W.S., leaving KOS-MOS alone to face the boss’s wrath. The trick to this boss, other than realizing beforehand that it’s going to pop out of a random box, is not relying too heavily on special attacks, because Athra 26 auto-boosts after every non-physical attack and tailors its defenses to whatever was just used. But between the A.G.W.S. just using their giant phallic guns and KOS-MOS repeatedly smacking him in the butt with R-HAMMER, it’s not really an issue. All things considered, this fight is easier on my fragile sanity than the flamethrower rape-a-thon that preceded it. Oh, and I get to do that again too, since it’s time to backtrack into the ladder room. Yay!
Before leaving, KOS-MOS roots around under Athra 26’s corpse and finds another Segment Address decoder that I’m sure will lead to more stupid robot parts. The fifth and final container in the row thankfully does not have any more surprise bosses crammed inside; it’s empty, actually, but it is in front of a Segment Adddress door that contains a hammer for MOMO. I bet she would have liked to have that earlier.
Somehow–I’m a woman and I’m bad at directions, sue me–KOS-MOS ends up at the bottom of Tower 2, far underneath the donut catwalk. Pressing a button on a console here lowers the donut (but not the donut hole with the save point) to the bottom. I hope there’s a bathroom on every floor, because it would be all kinds of annoying to have to navigate the Room o’ Ladders and raise or lower the goddamn catwalk every time you had to pee. From here, you’d think it would be a matter of hopping over the knee-high divide between the console and the catwalk, but since the group isn’t in a fucking hurry or anything, they instead have to backtrack to the Room o’ Ladders and eat flamethrower a couple more times. Only then can they enter from another side, step onto the catwalk, blow up a canister on the right side, backtrack, eat more flamethrower, and destroy a canister on the left side. I swear, if these guys could learn to hop over tiny bannisters, this would have taken a quarter of the time. Once both canisters are blown up, a piece of the floor between them lowers, which causes a boss that looks like a crackbaby butterfly to descend from the top of the tower. Was that thing up there the whole time? Why didn’t it attack earlier? For the record, this boss, Rianon Se, is the first and only Gnosis living in this dungeon, which makes me wonder how the hell it got here and why none of its brainless Gnosis buddies decided to join the party with it. I’m going to go with the theory that it used to be Albedo’s Yorkshire terrier.
This boss fight has a few gimmicks to it, but it’s easy enough once you know what they are. I’m not complaining, since “have these three skills and this item on every character, surprise” is not one of those gimmicks. Notably, using A.G.W.S. in this fight is a death trap–the boss drains health, and while that sounds like a good reason to be in giant mechs with huge health pools, it drains a shitload more from the mechs than it does from our heroes’ fleshy little bodies. This makes no sense from a biological standpoint, but what fucking does in this game? Rhiannon Se (sorry, I’m listening to Fleetwood Mac to keep my blood pressure down) also afflicts the party with an ailment that keeps them from boosting, which is total hairy bullshit, but if CHAOS!!! casts his new Supreme Judgment ether on it, it will get pissy and overreact, cleansing itself and the party members along with it. Oh, and it also knocks party members into the back row–this prevents CCS!MOMO from being able to use Magic Caster on it, so she morphs back into normal!MOMO without having done anything. The guide is very emphatic about how important it is to steal the rare item from this boss, and I haven’t saved in an upsettingly long time. But my boyfriend Jailbait manages to steal the rare with Psycho Pocket, so I don’t have to slit my wrists. Between dealing with the status ailments, periodically having to waste a turn moving characters back to the front row, and the fact that no attacks really do that much damage to this thing, this battle stretches out for an excruciating 20 minutes. Yes, even when it’s part of 11 hours of play, 20 minutes can still be excruciating.
And we’ve still got one tower to go! Wonderful. Past Rhiannon Se’s corpse, Jailbait finds a door to another balcony and another bridge-operating console, this one connecting Towers 2 and 3 and lighting up the tip of Tower 2 in bright red. He also finds a magical sparkly elevator that returns him to the top, offering a shortcut to the new bridge and to the save point, thank God.