It’s 60xx and phone receivers still look like that? Is Mace a hipster?

Jog jog jog, fight fight fight, booze booze booze. God, it’s like 2003 all over again. At one point, Jailbait has to run down a ramp, only for a house-sized mech (with a pointy bayonet on his space rifle) to chase him all the way down, just like those soldiers that played grab-ass with Shion on the Hoglinde. I have discovered time travel. Jailbait’s back-alley route to point 2089–the one they’re taking to avoid civilians, remember–leads him back up to street level and right through a group of civilians, who are in fairness already injured or at least faking it for melodrama.

Oh get up, you drama queen.

Up some more goddamn stairs, a U-GEE helicopter gets the drop on Jailbait and throws down some kind of barrier behind him that looks like a chain-link fence made of lasers. In a completely unnecessary cutscene, some U-GEE troops that look even more like Stormtroopers than normal drop out of the chopper, ambushing our heroes in a fight that might take one whole more round than normal. Annoyingly, the four Stormtroopers look basically identical but are actually two different models of, uh, human, with two different break combos. That is some bullshit. Out of the battle, Jailbait must navigate between the light fences (which split into multiple, roving light fences, why not) by ducking into alcoves and talking to more frightened, injured, and/or bitchy Second Miltians. I of course get him all the way through this toddler-level obstacle course only to be caught by the light fence at the last moment, leading to a battle with more Stormtroopers and the helicopter itself. I’m not sure why this is. Did it trap them in a light net? The helicopter proves to be a horrendous pain in the ass that makes NOT fucking up the obstacle course even more obviously essential–not only can it only be hit at all by Jailbait (MOMO can hit it too, because she is now an archer for no reason, but she’s not in the party right now), but every couple of turns that it remains upright, it can vomit out a couple more Stormtroopers. I hate myself right now.

Okay, it’s more like if a Stormtrooper mated with a Tusken Raider.

Thankfully, the obstacle course is immediately followed by a save point, which I take to mean this silly chase is almost over. After making sure everybody has the skills I arbitrarily decide might be useful right away, Jailbait rides the elevator behind the save point up to the rooftops. The roof is covered with crates full of random helpful items, and at the center of the area is a big yellow crane. Just as Jailbait approaches, the pallet of crates next to the crane explodes as a winged mech shaped like a uterus bursts through them from inside the building. How it even got in there is beyond me, but there’s no time to wonder about it. Probably another glass-walled mall atrium somewhere.

Oh. Toto is a human, with a mother who is horrible enough to name her son ‘Toto.’ Carry on.

The fight against the 0-88 Libro, or 0-Uterus, starts out crazy boring–its break combo is AA, but none of the boys’ attacks will actually hit the A zone until they do enough damage to its monitors or something. So they stock, and attack for piddly shit nothing, and slowly build that boost gauge, and keep Jailbait healed since it seems he’s made of glass now. In the meantime, I realize CHAOS!!! keeps saying something when he uses ethers that sounds like, “Unleash your dragon with the right power.” I am both terrified and excited that he might be about to unleash his dragon. Where the fuck has that thing been? I would feel so much better if I knew its whereabouts.

0-Uterus only takes a couple rounds of fully stocked and boosted ass-beating combos to go down, but in between unleashing the first big combo and stocking for the second, motherfucker decides to start boosting every two seconds. I am probably doing something to cause this, but the battle ends before I figure out what, and now I don’t care. After the battle, Jailbait shoots the crane in the control box until its arm falls over and creates a bridge to the next building. At least the crane ended up being for something. I was vaguely disappointed when I didn’t get to give 0-Uterus mechanical brain damage with it.

Did I say that last save point was possibly a signal of the end of this chase? Ha. No. Jailbait and Co. have a good 20 more minutes of running, shooting at robots, climbing stairs, and me falling into a temporary coma before they reach point 2089. But get there they do. There’s a helicopter landing pad on this particular roof, and Jailbait and the others start running toward that, I guess to wait for their extraction by Mace. But the mechs get there first. Mech #1 spirals toward them with panache. The man inside says, in an impossibly whiny male voice, “Long time no see! You’re looking well. You remember me, right?” Unless it’s Corey in that thing, no. No, I do not. He goes on, “My name is Richard! Let that name burn in your mind as you die!” Meaning the other guy is Hermann (he will never identify himself because he doesn’t talk much). But that “Remember me?” shit? I don’t know. I looked it up, since I hate myself and loathe having free time, and they have some tacked-on backstory entirely contained within the Xenosaga I & II remake for the DS. Which I normally wouldn’t even get into here–fuck that semi-canon alt-universe garbage–but just for posterity, Richard is a psychotic toff with flowing blond hair straight out of a high-end shampoo commercial, and Hermann is his mostly mute butler. Hermann even served under Captain Matthews in the Navy! With sexy results, I don’t doubt. But even my half-assed Google search doesn’t tell me what history Richard would have with any of these four. So whatever, Dick.

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I hope you haven’t forgotten, given how exciting this all has been so far, that Richard and Hermann are the ones Wonderbra assigned to capture MOMO. I know that was probably obvious, but sometimes I fall into step with the writers of this series and lose faith in my audience. Anyway, these two dudes we never even see out of their mechs, and yet who will be recurring villains, have a schtick: Richard talks a lot, and Hermann barely talks at all. They also have a schtick in battle: even though Hermann (in an A.M.W.S. named Scrotum Scutum Scrotum) has the ability to heal, it’s fine to wail on him first because he will only use it to heal his precious master Richard (whose A.M.W.S. is called Pilum, which is much less suited to childish nicknames).

Surprisingly, though this will become the new normal, the star of this boss battle is MOMO. The two A.M.W.S. have no break point, so raw damage is the only real factor, and MOMO and her new recurve bow do a fucking massive amount of damage to both of them, but Scrotum in particular. (Yes, I just pictured MOMO going all Mockingjay on a giant pair of metal balls. It’s way more interesting than the actual boss fight.) At the end of the battle, MOMO announces, “I feel more like a combat model these days.” She ain’t fucking lying. I do miss the mahou shoujo aesthetic of the old MOMO and her Cutie Moon Rod bullshit, as well as her old non-weird voice, but this MOMO is mostly a huge improvement.

Pilum and Scrotum are still looming large over the party after the battle, as if they didn’t just get knocked the eff out by a little girl in thigh-high socks. But out of nowhere–and Richard and Hermann seem as surprised as Jailbait and the others–some weird music starts playing. No, not the Song of Nephilim. I mean, maybe they fired the Song too and there’s a new scab Song in its place. But the lowercase song announces the arrival of a new mech. It’s a very Blanche from Golden Girls hue of rose pink from head to toe. In one hand it’s holding a 30-foot-long spear. In the other…well, nothing, but the hand itself is as big as the entire rest of the mech. It looks like the Hamburger Helper Man’s custom pleasure bot.

Good thing Shion’s not here, or she’d be ordering Miyuki to draw up KOS-MOS’s newest attachment, R-FINGERBANG.

Inside of the Handjob 5000, Wonderbra waves a hand at Richard and Hermann (which I wonder if they can even see) and says, “Stand down, you two! I’ll take care of the rest.” Richard and Hermann get the fuck out without a word. So this is the aforementioned E.S. Issachar. I can see why Wonderbra was concerned this relic might be too old and busted to work–that color is so very ‘80s. Issachar’s giant hand detaches–it might never have been attached, I don’t know–and breaks apart into five pointy projectiles that bombard the platform the party is standing on with lasers. Oops, you hit MOMO with a laser blast and she’s dead. Too bad!

Just kidding, but this doesn’t strike me as the smartest way to go about kidnapping a single person. Then again, Wonderbra’s barely even done demanding they turn over the 100-Series when Issachar’s pointy fingers are blown out of the sky by the savior they’ve ostensibly been waiting for. SURPRISE–it’s Canaan in E.S. Asher. Jailbait recognizes the craft and the dude piloting it, and Canaan commands “Rubedo” to get his ass down. I’m not really sure what being a few feet closer to the ground will do in this situation, but whatever. Asher and Issachar brawl in midair, with a lot of sparks flying between phallic bayonet and phallic spear. Wonderbra thinks she has the upper hand when suddenly a glowy item appears on the screen (it looks very vaguely like a Golden Penis Plate) and Asher and Issachar are frozen in place and begin to emit a golden glow themselves. I’m guessing this tiny chub version of the GPP is an Anima Relic. Nobody present seems to know what the fuck is going on, and Wonderbra is given no choice but to crudely extract Issachar from Asher’s embrace and follow Richard and Hermann out of there. Here’s hoping this game won’t just be 50 hours of MOMO abduction attempts, though I’m not hopeful. I’ve had enough of those.

Jailbait, who has clearly spent a little too much time with Shion lately, complains that Canaan “could have shown up a bit sooner.” If I’m being honest, I’m a bit surprised he didn’t myself, given how fast these E.S. craft have been shown to move. But maybe he got confused and landed in the wrong shopping mall district. Canaan replies, “I’m surprised to hear you whine so much.” Telling you, it’s Shion. Canaan and CHAOS!!! share a brief moment where they stare at each other and CHAOS!!! looks like he wants to run laughing into his muscular arms, but Canaan rather anticlimactically lets them know things should be fine now and leaves them there on the rooftop. Again, that thing only carries two people so I don’t know what else he was going to do, but still. “See you around, Rubedo,” Canaan says as he leaves, just so Jailbait can complain that he doesn’t go by that name anymore. “I already told you! I’m Gaignun Jr. now!” Canaan chooses not to reply, “Yeah, nothing creepy about pretending to be your clone brother’s son.” Because it is, right? It’s creepy.

MOMO asks Jailbait if she knows that guy, as if that exchange didn’t make that abundantly clear. But I’ll give MOMO a pass because it’s probably easy to miss little nuances when someone is trying to kidnap you all the time. Jailbait calls him an “old acquaintance,” which I will happily read as “ex-boyfriend” until it’s proven they are current boyfriends. An Extreme Close-Up of Jailbait’s eye segues into a flashback to the night of their first meeting. (The Miltian Conflict. Their first clothes-on meeting.) I will be charitable and read this as an expository necessity along the lines of Shion’s massive info dump earlier, and not as a deeply insulting rehash of events we have basically seen already. Anyway: former, actually 12-year-old Jailbait/Rubedo is staggering through the rain, holding an unconscious Gaignun/Nigredo in his arms and wailing for help. (Albedo, thank God, is nowhere to be found.) Sobbing and red-eyed, Rubedo lets us know by shouting it into the rain that “Nigredo won’t stop bleeding!” Though no actual blood is visible. Thanks, censors!

‘My eyes won’t stop leaking this warm clear fluid! ERROR, ERROR, ERROR’

Nigredo is in the middle of telling Rubedo to just let him die already when they are suddenly bathed in a bright white spotlight from the flashlight attachment of their saviors, Canaan and CHAOS!!!. Canaan identifies the boys as “Two U.R.T.V. variants” in case we forgot what they are, but CHAOS!!! goes for something a bit more literary. And by “literary” I mean “E.S. Asher deploys its Bible Mallet,” obviously. “The red horse carries war, and the black horse, famine,” he says to no one. But the red horse is currently carrying the black horse! What do you say to that, Castrati Jesus? “Upon those tiny backs,” he goes on, ignoring me, “bear they great calamity.” Canaan is basically like, “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that. I did, but it was stupid.” Moments later Canaan is lifting Nigredo into his arms and CHAOS!!! is helping Jailbait climb onto his back. This is messing with my shipping. And I still don’t know where the hell these two are going to fit inside Asher. “It’s…all my fault,” Jailbait moans to CHAOS!!!. “I’m the leader…but then I cut the link. And now Albedo’s…” Don’t worry: if you really want to learn more about what Rubedo’s saying, and the last reference wasn’t enough for you, we will soooooo be getting into it in detail. Patience, grasshoppers. Canaan’s like, “Oh fuck, is there another one of you Children of the Corn around here?” But Rubedo just whines, from CHAOS!!!’s back, “He’s a piece of me. The beating in my right chest.” Do people really say “right chest”? Because that makes me picture Jailbait with two complete, separate chests, one of which has Albedo’s pulsating face. Pretty mad at my imagination right now.

Canaan consults his dossier or whatever and tells CHAOS!!!, “Albedo is the name of unit number 667. The records show that he and unit number 666 were conjoined twins. Apparently, it happens on rare occasions, even with artificially created children.” CHAOS!!! somehow doesn’t reply, “Cool, this is totally the time to be discussing this.” He does wonder if “the rider of the white horse” (DO YOU GET IT YET?!?!?!?!) was infected by UUUUUUUUUUUUU-DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, which, duh. “May your bodies and souls find peace,” CHAOS!!! says of all the dead designer boys. “Even if…it is but a short one.” Like the short peace I enjoyed between recapping these two games. Fleeting, but sweet.

Back to the Jailbait of the present, who lamely finishes story time with, “I guess I…I owe them my life.” MOMO replies, “So you’ve known [CHAOS!!!] for a long time, too?” She really needs to pay better attention during these stories. “Um… Can I also call you Rubedo, too?” she asks. “It’s a very pretty name.” It is, isn’t it? That said, she’s known about that name for at least a couple of days, since Albedo wouldn’t stop using it. Perhaps for that reason, Jailbait gets all weird and stutters and stares at his feet until MOMO drops it. Well, the chemistry between these two has completely evaporated. It’s like a 50 Shades of Grey sex scene up in here. MOMO realizes that both Jailbait and Ziggy prefer not to use their real names, providing Jailbait an opportunity to deflect away from his own sad-ass life: “Names tend to link themselves to memories, both good and bad. I have a feeling that old man over there has a lot of baggage, himself.” Does anyone around here not? This game may as well be called Xenosaga II: Jenseits von Gut und Baggage. The scene ends as Jailbait laughs about Ziggy being a dog’s name. Yup, we still get it, guys.

After a black screen, the “action” switches over to Shion, KOS-MOS, and Corey, but I think I will end it here just so I can say the first two recaps of this game were mostly Shion-free. Because the forecast from here on out is calling for some severe wankstorms. See you in part 3!