The battle with Clamps and its lieutenant nurse robots marks the first time since receiving it that Erde Kaiser alone won’t kill a boss. Not only does it have 12,000 HP, but unless the nursebots are eliminated first, it will keep up a shield that blocks all damage, while regularly smacking its vagina-tongs into our heroes for 600 health a pop. Irritating. But you know what’s even more irritating? Because this boss does a lot of damage, and because all the healing must be relegated to CHAOS!!!, I did my best to outfit the party with items that would increase their defense or decrease their damage taken, like the Cross. In the process, I removed the Angel Ring from Shion, which halves EP cost. And guess what! Without it, Shion cannot summon Erde Kaiser! And since Shion is basically a paperweight without her robot pal, my party is caught with its figurative pants down and a papery, too-short dressing gown on. And guess what else! It’s time to start over from the save point! YAY!
Loading ...Jesus. This is bad enough without me tripping over myself.
So on take two, I stop being an idiot long enough to equip Shion properly and everything goes off without a hitch. Clamps heals itself as it gets to very low health, so it’s important to whittle the boss down to the kill zone before summoning Erde Kaiser instead of the reverse. If cheating my way past the hard part instead of the easy part sounds like an obvious and unnecessary thing to point out, well, it is, but more on that later. The party loots another Segment Address decoder from Clamps’s body, so at least we can say we’ve witnessed the miracle of a decoder and a door being not only in the same building, but kind of close to each other.
After I’ve rearranged the party a bit, Jailbait runs across the satellite dish and onto a dented catwalk, which leads to a tiny ladder up to another, entirely isolated catwalk. This room is staggering in its inefficient use of space. One robot fight later, the party is in another research area, this one with a holographic model of the galaxy floating in the center of the room.
KOS-MOS announces for our benefit that “all observable space” can be viewed in this room. “All observable space…?” Shion Shions. As the focus shifts to the hologram itself, she goes on, “I wonder what that black area is? It doesn’t look like a black hole.” Jailbait, since he doesn’t actually know anything but doesn’t want to be left out of the conversation, says that it must not be all observable space after all. Good thing Jailbait was here to point that out.
Because the last hour of the game is totally the time to pile on exposition, CHAOS!!! murmurs, “Lost Jerusalem…” Shion’s all “What?” because CHAOS!!! said something inscrutable, but for once he actually explains himself. “Lost Jerusalem was once our homeland in the distant past, but no one can go near it now,” he exposits. “Actually, nobody knows its location anymore. It could be that pitch black part there.” Jailbait adds, “I’ve heard that the government has been working on a project to find Lost Jerusalem for quite some time. …It looks like the radius of that black region is at least several hundred million light years.” Yeah, that’s just something you can eyeball. Shion wanks some more about finding their “homeland,” a place she found out about literally seconds ago, but suddenly has replaced Second Miltia as her sentimental whoring ground. Whatever.
Jailbait unlocks a door that leads back to the room on the 44th floor, ensuring easy save point access, before the party fights its way through a couple more Demons to reach the ladder behind the hologram display. Directly underneath the hologram is a donut-shaped area and, behind a crate, the final Segment Address door. I expect the chest to contain an item called “Another Robot Part! Ha ha!” But instead Jailbait finds a Trauma Plate, which protects its wearer against critical hits. Obviously this item and its extractable ability must be useful in forthcoming battles or it wouldn’t have been here, and the guide says to begin extracting from the Trauma Plate immediately. That said, reading ahead to the final encounters, not only is the need for protecting against crits never mentioned again, but the “Final Boss Preparation” section specifically says to use skills to guard against three other ailments. So either this section of the guide–maybe the most important in the entire book given how difficult these fights can be–is grossly misleading, or the final equippable item obtained in the game is useless. I’m not sure which possibility annoys me more.
The back door from the hologram room leads to another split-level room with another, probably malfunctioning elevator. It also is host to a new Gnosis type, the Armaros. This reminds me too much of Armhos in the Zelda games to not rename them, mostly because I keep typing “Armhos” by accident anyway. They look nothing like hopping animated statues, but since when do Gnosis ever really resemble their names? Exactly. The Armhos are an exercise in phallic imagery: a long sword in each hand, long penisy arms, and long penisy appendages protruding from each arm. If Shion were actually responsible for developing any of KOS-MOS’s Freudian nightmare accessories, she’d be getting all kinds of ideas right now. The Armhos also like to boost their speed, with the help of magic phallic clock hands–y’know, for performance.
Ribbed for her pleasure.
Above the elevator, Jailbait finds another door, this one leading to a round room with more holographic displays of nubile little Realian girls and angelic light beaming from the floor. If those things weren’t enough of a clue, MOMO simply says, “This…is the room where I was born.” True to form, Shion responds, “What? This is where you were…?” Born, yes. If you’d stop tapping every word with your finger, Shion, you’d be able to keep up with everyone else in the script.
We switch to a cutscene as Shion murmurs, “MOMO…” and the camera sloooowly pans up MOMO’s body, once more for old time’s sake. After the last recap I can’t even get worked up about MOMO-ploitation. MOMO suggestively strokes the bannister as she reminisces about her time in Proto Merkabah’s womb. “Mommy never told me what this facility actually was responsible for during the Miltian Conflict…” she says sadly. “But…I think I know.” She flashes back to, I believe, her rainbow-haze-filled experience inside Enchapalon. MOMO is staring into a portal in the technicolor haze, which cuts to Gnosis coming out of the same portal. “When I was born, Daddy died…” she goes on. “If that vision was true, then what happened afterwards was…” So Joachim Mizrahi started quoting the Bible, and then the sky went rainbow-colored and monsters came out? It’s like what happens when praying the gay away goes wrong.
This scene was directed by Albedo.
“It’s just like Mommy said. This is an abominable machine,” MOMO says as her theme music swells morosely in the background. “If a lot of people died because of my birth, does that mean I’m an abomination as well, just like Daddy?” Ugh. Jailbait–let’s remember, the guy whose big mouth is the primary reason MOMO now has a complex about her dad’s reputation–just looks sad and goes “MOMO…” like that will help, but Shion decides to be more forceful. “No! No parent could ever say that,” she yells in MOMO’s face. MOMO, to my undying disgust, gives Shion a look like she wishes Shion were her mom, and Shion takes that as encouragement to keep talking. “Even though you’re a Realian, you’re still their child, right?” Actually, no, she’s not really their child. She’s a robot copy of their child that Dr. Yuri resents for existing. That’s kind of the whole goddamn point. “No parent would ever think of their own child as abominations,” she Engrishes, and then says more to herself, “Surely… There can’t be any…” Foreshadowing!
Thank God that’s over. Shion was this close to stuffing MOMO into her uterus for protection. Moving on to the elevator, it delightfully manages to go both up and down, and does not lead to four more pointlessly elevator-less floors. Even better, there’s another save point here. TWO save points in a Xenosaga dungeon! I feel so spoiled. Alas, this is the final save point before the end of the game. Which is not to say that Albedo and whatever pretentious Gnosis mutation bullshit he’s cocked up are just around the corner. That would be treating me too well.
Down the hallway from the save point is another elevator, though this one is more of an open industrial-style elevator. To make up for the last elevator not being stupid, riding this one down triggers a Gnosis gauntlet of sorts–the Gnosis materialize on the platform as it descends. You’d think KOS-MOS or MOMO could use the Hilbert Effect to keep them from doing this, but I should know by now there’s nothing to be gained from applying story logic to gameplay or vice versa except a migraine.
The Gnosis are mostly Armhos, occasionally accompanied by a Baraqijal, which vaguely resembles a Skip-It and inexplicably heals my party members or itself; or an Azazel, which is basically a fatter, flying Armhos that changes the Baraqijal’s considerate heals into damage. Despite that last wrinkle, it’s a pretty easy trip to the bottom–the only weird part is watching Jailbait sit down on the floor in between battles, as if to say, “I’m a free spirit and sit down on elevators. Do something about it.”
To the right of the elevator shaft, the party finds an ominous-looking steel door with only blackness beyond. They step through and finally arrive at…oh, another hallway. With more Armhos and Pals. I get the distinct feeling that this hallway full of Gnosis exists solely to make sure I don’t run out of monsters to kill if I want to do some last-minute leveling, as if it’s impossible to ride the two elevators back up for some more Armhos action. Even better, this area respawns, so thankfully I don’t have to worry myself sick over missing out on fighting my way through it again after clearing it and returning to the save point one last time. Whew!
As our heroes run across the bridge to the reactor, we switch to a cutscene just in time to see them…running across the bridge to the reactor. Glad we got multiple camera angles of everybody’s arms swinging and asses jiggling there, or I don’t know what I would have done. They run through the door to the central chamber, and as Jailbait looks around stupidly, a pretentious, overrated voice shouts from above, “You’re late!” Jailbait looks up at this outburst, with this look on his face like he honest to God didn’t expect anyone to be there. Again, it’s a good thing he’s got that ass.
That ass.
Speaking of asses, Albedo is standing high above them on the reactor, looking like he’s about to launch into “Be Prepared” with his hyena backup singers. “I was about to give up on you, Rubedo,” he taunts, like he hasn’t been monitoring their progress through this exposition factory for hours. “Take a look. This thing has a full belly already.” Nobody has anything to say to that, because it’s a stupid thing to say, so Attention Whore Albedo flourishes his cape and jumps down to their level. “Well then,” he says, “what shall we do now?” Oh, I don’t know, fire Proto Merkabah at Second Miltia? Ha! Like he’s actually going to do that. Obviously, he just wanted to lure in Jailbait and MOMO so he could fondle the latter while making the former watch. Confirming this, Albedo adds, “Shall we continue where we left off?”