Scott and Professor Hobo stare at each other for what feels like an hour, with Lionel Richie’s “Hello” playing in their heads, before Professor Hobo mutters something about Jailbait being a meddlesome little shit and tells Scott to get his ass to his work station like nothing happened, adding, “We have a big, once-in-a-lifetime job to do!!” And Scott, for his part, replies, “Yes, sir! Roger that, Professor!!” The old man finally at least admits that he’s glad Scott is back, but there is no mention of him changing his drinking habits or ceasing to be a cranky dickhead. It just took one uncomfortable look into each other’s eyes for all those problems to melt away. Not that I care if, five minutes from now, Professor Hobo chugs a bottle of Mad Dog and backhands Scott across the room. They can be as dysfunctional as they want as long as I get my robot.
Our reunited lovers start pounding away at their consoles to begin robot assembly. Professor Hobo stares longingly across the room at Scott, thinking to himself that Scott is a fine young man who will competently run his Robot Academy for him when he auto-asphyxiates in the corner suite of OUR TREASURE within a year. Scott thinks to himself that Professor Hobo is “the greatest” and that he’s at his best when he’s making robots. It’s true–the specific moment of robot creation is the only time he isn’t hopping in place, yelling incoherently, or drinking out of a jug with “XXX” stenciled on the side. Amazingly, the robot comes together even with its creators making fuck-me eyes at each other instead of looking at their work. The robot rises from its birthplace, a technological masterpiece, assuming that technological masterpieces can be made out of primary color Legos and look more or less exactly like Voltron. The robot, named Erde Kaiser (that’s German for “absurdly overpowered”), has pointless wings, broad ’80s shoulder pads, and a dragon’s head sticking out of its chest.
White pants after Labor Day? Gasp!
“Behold!!” Professor Hobo cries in ecstasy. “Love, courage, justice, victory, friendship, effort… The symbol of all such things, united and invincible, absolutely just, the ‘Erde Kaiser’!!” Yeah, I’m really thinking of all of those things every time I gaze at this majestic children’s toy. Can’t it just be a kick-ass robot, and not a symbol of Professor Hobo railing Scott?
So, the good news is that I don’t have to talk to Professor Hobo anymore and I have this amazing robot that unfailingly does 9999 damage once per battle. The bad news is, not only do I have to use Shion to access this auto-win button, but it takes up every one of Shion’s ether slots, meaning Shion will be even more useless than she normally is once Erde Kaiser’s been used, and that’s saying something.
Now that the party has been equipped with the latest and greatest weaponry, it’s time to tackle some more optional content. Clearly I’m doing this because I love this game and will do anything to forestall its ending, and not because I think I may have said five years ago that I would recap this stuff and don’t want anyone getting snippy with me about breaking my word. The first stop on the Prolonging My Suffering tour is Sector 26 and the second floor of the IRON MAN. You’ll recall that this area is the home of Mintia, a Two Face RealDoll who appears when MOMO is the lead character. When MOMO sashays into the room, she stares around stupidly until Mintia floats down from her roosting place on the ceiling, looking for all the world like Lewis Carroll and Tim Burton teamed up to create Batgirl. Mintia stares her down for a moment, muttering “Hmm…” to herself a couple of times, before pulling a baton out of an unnamed body cavity and politely challenging MOMO to a fight.
Other than her affinity for MOMO and her disturbing appearance, the critical thing to know about Mintia is that she holds an irrational hatred of two things: penises and robots. I don’t even know how she has managed to exist in this universe for this long without killing herself. While she will tolerate the presence of men as long as they don’t attack her, the use of any “big mechanical beast thing” is disabled. That sounds like really bad news, but strangely, her hatred of machines only extends to A.G.W.S. and doesn’t apply to Erde Kaiser. And because Mintia only has 7777 health, the only actual challenge of this fight is getting MOMO to successfully steal from Mintia before destroying her with my Steel Champion of Friendship and Buttsex. This is no small task–the boss regularly uses an attack called Dark Star, in which she pushes one of my ladies-only party to the back row. I’ve gone over the frustrating time limitations of MOMO’s Magic Caster ability, and more than one attempt was wasted because MOMO was pushed backward and could not return to the front row in time to cast her silly fishing pole. Yes, I could have put KOS-MOS behind MOMO to prevent this, but…look over there! That Gnosis is riding a unicycle!
Once MOMO manages to steal the rare Craft Apron–because women be craftin’! In the kitchen!–Shion stops bobbleheading long enough to summon Erde Kaiser. “Reveal thy ancient power to me,” she chants, like this thing wasn’t created in a lab five goddamn minutes ago. Also, given that this is Shion, I’m going to assume “ancient power” means either “penis” or “bank account.” But in fact, there is a true ancient power within those robotic appendages: the power of unnecessarily long attack animations.
Out of hyperspace, the individual pieces of the robot fly in one at a time, reminding me of what the other summons look like. So the entire purpose of the Kelbim Dragon from earlier was to provide a physical representation of the body for this cutscene. I’m glad we cleared that up. The pieces fuse together exactly like Voltron always did, except there aren’t people in jumpsuits riding inside each piece. Green light and high-pitched squealing emanate from the assembled Erde Kaiser, but we’re not done there. Oh, heavens no.
Who the hell are you?
From Erde Kaiser we transition to a woman with long black hair in a pale red kimono, hands clasped before a full moon. No, I did not accidentally fast forward to a completely different part of the game. The camera pulls away from the Mystery Asian Lady as kanji fill the screen. Though I could look them up, the game UI is obscuring a few of them, and I also don’t feel like it, so we’ll pretend they say “Love, courage, justice, victory, friendship, effort, robots, penises, purple monkey dishwasher.” A few of the kanji flash in succession on the screen as Erde Kaiser reappears, now brandishing his two-handed sword. Of course he is. And just when I thought I maybe had a handle on what’s happening again, because I at least understand robots and phallic objects, the sword gives off the faintest sparkle of stardust–no, really–hailing the return of the Mystery Asian Lady. She prays like Michele Bachmann at a gay pride parade until a series of criss-crossing lines appear under Mintia, and then the man in the moon, or Jesus, or fucking CHAOS!!! for all I know, uses more stardust to shatter the lines like glass and deliver Mintia death by 9999 tiny cuts.
Am I high? Is this real life?
Mintia seems as surprised as anyone at what just happened, but rather than dropping dead like most bosses would after getting overkilled by a couple thousand HP, Mintia drops to the ground ass-first, then throws a temper tantrum, during which little stars explode from her tiny doll fists. Shion takes all this in and adds, “Great, I’ve collected some good data.” I am unsure what kind of data could be collected from a giant robot summoning the ghost of an Asian lady and harnessing her moon powers to kill a talking doll.
Loading ...Mintia disappears, but says to MOMO from whatever dark corner she’s hiding in, “I-I hate to admit it, but I lost. All right, I’ll give you this!” And thus MOMO receives the Dark Scepter tech, which Mintia tells her to use against Gnosis. Again, this turns Gnosis corpses into items, a not terrible ability. The Craft Apron MOMO stole, for the record, increases acquisition of skill points by 25 percent–I’m sure if I had three of these for every character, I’d come close to getting the amount of skill points the strategy guide expects. Alas, I put the apron I have on Ziggy, just to make a point to no one in particular about gender stratification.
With that out of the way, I reorganize the party, swap MOMO for Jailbait, and fix their techs et al again in preparation for another optional boss, this one on the Durandick. In fact, this one is, I shit you not, hiding in the closet in Corey’s hot tub room. Maybe he was partying with Corey and the young beefcakes from the IRON MAN during the Gnosis invasion and passed out?
Anyway, this man trapped in Corey’s closet is named Great Joe. He basically looks like the Xenosaga version of Freddy Krueger–he has the fedora, the Wolverine claws, and the shit-eating grin, but instead of a striped sweater, he’s wearing a gruesome skull-shaped codpiece and a fancy red-trimmed cloak that looks like it was made for Spiderman. He is supposedly a gunman like Jailbait, but I can’t figure out how he could fire a gun with those scissorhands. Great Joe leers creepily at Jailbait and murmurs, “A boy gunman? You know what awaits you if you are defeated in a gunfight, boy?” Well, it can’t be death, because it’s not like anyone in this game would die to something as mundane as a bullet wound. The worst consequence I can think of is sitting through another Albedo cutscene, and I’m sure Jailbait would agree. Joe asks Jailbait if, knowing this, he would still like to engage in combat. “Bring it on,” Jailbait responds, which is just such a Jailbait thing to say.
The worst thing about this outfit is that it reminds me of Ghost Rider.
Like Mintia, Great Joe is not fond of machines and outlaws them from the proceedings, but again, that doesn’t include Erde Kaiser, so I get to cheat my way through another fight. Shion is also, just this once, wearing her ghastly swimsuit. Great Joe drops a dump truck of tech points on the party, and this way I can minimize my exposure to her ass later. It’s probably a wash.
I won’t pretend this fight lasted all that long. Great Joe has 9999 HP–more than Mintia, but not so much that he can’t be killed in one narcotics-laced blow from Erde Kaiser. But since Shion is slow and shitty, Jailbait and KOS-MOS do get the opportunity to attack. When Joe is smacked in the face with KOS-MOS’s tiny heeled boot, he lets out an “Ohhhh!” so reminiscent of Big Gay Beedle that I’m convinced they must be related.
Upon his embarrassing defeat, Big Gay Joe hands over a swimsuit that he probably found in Corey’s closet. “I lost…” he understates. “I let my guard down, but still, that was some gunmanship. You’re a man worthy of calling a friend.” To seal that friendship with Suddenly Super Manly Jailbait, he teaches his new pal the Soul Rhapsody tech and, again not kidding, the Magnum Joe ether. Fortunately, this attack simply summons Big Gay Joe to battle, and does not involve Jailbait flashing his tiny wiener at the Gnosis, causing them to die of laughter.
With all of that pesky optional crap out of the way, Jailbait can ask Captain Matthews to transport him and the rest of our idiotic heroes to Proto Merkabah. As they take off, Jailbait says to Shion, “Sorry…I didn’t mean for you to get pulled into my personal issues…” First, how did the destruction of a planet become a personal issue for Jailbait, even if his creepy rapist brother is responsible? Second, why does he think Shion deserves a goddamn apology? Maybe Jailbait is looking past Shion, through the fourth wall, and apologizing to me personally. I sure feel like I deserve one. If he is, Shion doesn’t get it, because she replies, throwing up her hands in a conciliatory gesture, “Don’t worry about it. After all, my homeland is in peril.” And as if this makes any difference, she adds, “And we’ve received company approval.” She’s done loads of stuff without company approval so far. Would she not assist with this if Vector didn’t give the green light? And Vector’s headquarters are on Second Miltia–of course the company approves. Jesus, woman.
‘Yes, but what do Busty’s tits think?’
Shion even brings Corey into the conversation, asking him to confirm that it’s okay for them to help, like she has ever cared about his opinion. Corey, though, seems to have finally snapped. In the most over-the-top sarcastic tone he can muster, he snarls, “…Oh, sure, why would I want to miss out on the fun?” As Shion folds her arms under her boobs like a Wheel of Time character, he adds under his breath, “Besides, it’s not like you ever listen to me…” On one hand, I’m relieved that Corey finally might be growing a pair. On the other hand, I can think of much better scenarios in which to take a stand than “Should we help save a planet from being blown up?” Shion snottily asks him to speak up if he has something to say to her, but he doesn’t blurt out, “Fine! You’re a bitch! That loud enough for you?” because I didn’t write this game. Instead, his newborn testicles retreat back into his body and he meekly responds, “Ah, no! Nothing! I’d accompany you to the very depths of hell!” Even MOMO has this look on her face like, “Dude, I almost respected you for five whole seconds.”