As Mace mutters mostly to himself about Yuriev’s designer sons and how they sure are a thing this guy made, possibly with his penis, Yuri is concerned about their welfare. God, we get it, she used to be a really caring person and mommyyyyyyy! Message fucking received. “I don’t want to hurt these children, even for Sakura’s sake,” she adds. I guess that only extends to the special ones with pretty hair, since other U.R.T.V.s have already been hurt. And Mace adds, on the subject of their welfare, “I’d heard they were young, but I didn’t expect them to be this young…” What age, exactly, was he prepared to accept? Like, more in the high school range? Does he need Nigredo to be making a sad attempt at a mustache? Yuriev calls Mace “pretty sentimental for a soldier.” Yeah, what a delicate flower, wanting his cannon fodder to be at least able to drive a car! Mace snits back, “I believe a soldier’s duty is to protect human life.” This statement is so brazenly untrue and hypocritical to everyone in the room that they all, appropriately, let it hang there in the air like a fart. Yuri finally breaks the silence, telling the boys over the intercom, “This time, Sakura will be with you, too.” Oh cool, I’m sure she’ll be super helpful. I mean, at least she’s got those water-resistant Crocs on, but it’s not like anybody’s allowed to get their feet wet around here.

Yuriev is this close to gesturing at his crotch and saying, ‘Fear not, there’s more where they came from.’

And just like that, the boys, followed by Team Future Stalkers, are back at the beachside gas station, except it is now winter, and snow is blanketing everything. I hope KOS-MOS brought her warmest invisible parka! Rubedo reiterates to his brothers that their target is once again the beach, and they run off. Oh boy! This dungeon was so interesting the first time, too!

Of Sakura there is no sign, so I guess she is waiting at the beach. Not for nothing, it seems profoundly shitty to do the dry run of this mission (which is, and I am fanwanking here, what the last Encephalon dive must have been) at the beach in the peak of summer, and the real version (with Sakura in on it) during the winter. I mean, I think the way this works, Sakura is more or less controlling what it looks like since it’s her broken little brain, but it still makes me feel like she’s been robbed of splashing around in the surf with her new boyfriend, while his brother sits under an umbrella and scribbles angrily in a journal.

KOS-MOS blows up all the applicable objects at the gas station looking for loot, getting nothing but one shitty med kit for her trouble. It’s worth noting that she can no longer blow the door off the outhouse, even though the only difference is there’s a drift of snow in front of it. It’s a fucking laser beam! Pretty sure it can handle frozen water! But hopefully everybody went to the bathroom before they were shunted into another dive-within-a-dive.

I’m going to try my best to keep this tight because describing the same fucking trek again, but through snow, is going to be unavoidably boring. On the Gnosis scene is Catharsis–a renamed version of Necessity, the one with the hulking shoulders and tiny head–and it looks like it’s injecting itself in the bicep on turns when it powers up, which is really going to get it into trouble with the Gnosis Competition Committee. And my favorite Gnosis ever, Expression, is back, and in basically every battle as before, but it’s now called Glare. There are no other changes, not even a palette swap. This is great, because I sure didn’t have any notes on that perfect gameplay experience!

Okay, so there’s no needle, just two tiny arms on one side and one beefy one on the other. Maybe it actually needs the steroid treatment!

I have already failed in my mission. I am very sorry. Anyway, the team gets very deep into this simulation before noticing anything different about the place at all. This could be because I entirely forgo checking out the situation with that shack and “forbidden device” Ziggy discovered last time, on the safe assumption that I won’t care what the deal with it is, and neither will you. Across the first extremely dangerous stream (which is not frozen over despite being like four inches deep), the party encounters yet another motherfucking Glare, accompanied by a couple infected U.R.T.V.s. But…but. Why are they still here? Do these unlucky boys just live in Sakura’s head now? Or did they do this second dive with the triplets, but as soon as they came in they were grandfathered into being infected random battle fodder for these other people they can’t see? Am I in an Encephalon dive? Do I have a neurological U-DO disorder too? Has the past year been a coma fantasy? Please say yes. Just lie to me, it’s fine.

Meanwhile, Sakura may have permanently coded these poor redshirt U.R.T.V.s as mindless monsters, but she did very considerately restock all the treasure chests! Thanks, Sakura!

As before, a save penis plate lies on the other side of the second treacherous river, which I seize upon like I’m stranded on a desert island and it’s a bottle of Gatorade washed up on the shore. I only note this because while recording, I took this opportunity to take a break, and therefore got a loading screen with more story summary text when I began recording again. On this episode of “The Story So Far,” the game claims, “U-DO’s waves infected the standard U.R.T.V.s and turned them into monsters. The three fought and cured them, but Albedo, in a rage, continued to beat a helpless U.R.T.V.” Yeah, no. Not only did those three not fight shit–unless I am to believe Team Future Stalkers is body-snatching them for all these battles–but they definitely didn’t cure shit, since the sad boy monsters are still wandering around in here like children abandoned by their parents at the mall who go feral and claim Zumiez is their home now.

But I am bothered by this first point more than I would like to admit, given that the gap between this game’s release and now is almost as long as the gap between this flashback and the game’s present day. And also, who cares about this game at all? No sane person. But why fight how I feel? So: even if I take at face value that the mechanics of this Encephalon dive make a hair of sense–and friends, I DO NOT–it is a curious gameplay choice to remove our heroes from this much of the ongoing narrative, in that they are, and by extension I am, simply watching the story happen. What’s that, game? I haven’t accomplished a solitary thing? That was all Rubedo, 14 years before I ever meet him, and it was in a fucking simulation? Cool, thanks for letting me know!

Oh, but to cheer me up, the gang finds a Segment Address door set into a snowy ridge that was not there on the summertime trek! The door just pops more against the white, you know? Not that they can actually open it right now, but that way I just get to extend my bliss into the future, when I get to come back here–to this imaginary place within an imaginary place–with the proper decoder! This game gets me.

I SAID, THIS GAME GETS ME

Other than this very suspicious door that was not here before, the first sign of any difference between these two versions of the beach hike is on the next screen. Last time, this was the portion of the trek where the kids and the digital ghosts wandered through a pastoral hilly valley full of wind turbines. This time, though, some kind of imagination earthquake has transformed the valley into a series of rifts and fissures covered with deep drifts of snow. I was about to say my sad attempt to fanwank this is undone by the total lack of wind turbines anywhere in the area, but just as Jailbait is turning his back to the camera like a little diva after a battle, there’s what looks to be a toppled turbine-looking structure looming behind him! Well, shit. And I had some jokes about climate change deniers ready to go, too! Sucks for you guys, they were SO CHOICE.

The only reason for this cataclysmic change to Sakura’s mindscape is that the game designers wanted to make me do more than walk in a straight line this time, and I guess that’s fine–at least there are more treasure chests as a result. At the end of this path, another cutscene begins, in which Rubedo notes to Sakura–who’s apparently been with them the entire time–that there’s nothing here this time to impede their progress to the beach. But Sakura doesn’t want to run fancy-free through feet of snow to a cold-ass beach. “Why not?” Rubedo asks. “Let’s go! First, we’ll cure your illness, then we’ll go to a real beach.” That is some beautiful child-brain logic. Then they’ll get ice cream! And then a slumber party, which will be really awkward for everyone! And nobody will want to go home, but secretly everyone will!

As Rubedo is talking, Sakura is staring at his feet, where his shadow is, Peter Pan-style, going into business for itself. Eventually, it takes the shape of a demon with outstretched arms, though as Rubedo turns around to look at it at Sakura’s insistence, it looks more like an inflatable dancing tube man attached to him by the feet. And alone among everyone there, Albedo finds this hilarious. “What do you know, Rubedo?” he gets out between dark chuckles. “You’re just like me, aren’t you?” I don’t know–if Rubedo blasts his own shadow off, will it just reappear? Turning away from Rubedo’s shadow problem, Rubedo and Nigredo look at Albedo, who is glowing purple. “Rubedo’s a monster, too!” he cackles gleefully. “It all makes perfect sense. Once, the two of us were one. So, if I’m a monster, that means you’re a monster, too!” Hey, is everybody following this? I know it’s really complicated and we haven’t gotten enough of a thematic foothold in the material to understand it fully. Hopefully someone will take the time to explain again how conjoined twins Rubedo and Albedo Aren’t So Different, because wow, man. I’m drowning.

Even though his brother looks like he’s about to turn into a Sailor Moon monster of the week because someone stole his pure heart, Rubedo is more concerned with everyone insisting that this thing on the ground is his shadow. No, you’re right, it must be your economic anxiety. Sakura, who is of course reduced to the quaking peacemaker here, clasps her hands and begs him, “Rubedo, calm down. Please don’t get angry.” I fully expect Nigredo to just lose it out of nowhere at this exact moment and wail on Sakura for stealing his bit, but that would be pretty fucking dark even for this series. Telling Rubedo not to get angry naturally just makes him angrier, as he yells mostly at Albedo that he’s not a monster. Which in turn makes Albedo laugh more. These kids are caught in some kind of perpetual sibling drama motion machine. Eventually, I’m left with panning shots of everyone, including our heroes, staring at Albedo as he laughs himself to the cusp of vomiting. As the shot comes in close on her, vegetable MOMO is the first to realize that Albedo’s adult voice is on an overlay with the baby version, just guffawing away. He’s in stereo now. I do not need this.

“Can you still feel the beating in your chest, Rubedo?” the adult Albedo voice asks, through child Albedo’s mouth. It is every bit as disturbing as it sounds. “Can you still feel my heart, buried in the right side?” Somehow, Shion doesn’t interrupt to ask KOS-MOS what they’re talking about. The camera zooms in on Rubedo’s face, and then one eyeball, for a tediously long time. It feels like we’re all standing here waiting for it to glow red and for Rubedo to erupt in flames, but before that can happen, Sakura and MOMO also have a stereo moment, yelling to Rubedo together through Sakura’s body, “Rubedo, it’s a trap!” Oh my god, stop, it’s always a fucking trap. That Albedo, always one step ahead, seeding himself into his own past body to…what? Yell at Rubedo? Yeah, he’s historically had a really hard time managing that!

Is it possible to fail the Bechdel test with yourself?

And Sakura/MOMO alerting Rubedo to this extremely obvious, while also baffling, situation does not prevent him from waltzing right into it, as he subsequently erupts into the aforementioned fireball. Present-day Jailbait–not just in Encephalon but in the real world, with his little VR goggles on–starts screaming and glowing red as well. But don’t worry, folks, Encephalon Emcee Corey Feldman is ON IT: “Chief! The Encephalon field structure has started to rapidly collapse! It’s not a problem with the system… It was probably another trap inside MOMO.” Can he stop putting stuff inside her? Please? I would consider it a personal favor. Shion backs away from Jailbait, who is going critical in front of the group while they all stare and do nothing. “We should have known,” she says. Ha! Haha. “Albedo anticipated the likelihood of an Encephalon dive.” Indeed! Albedo is playing 4D chess while his opponents are eating checkers pieces and making their mommies drive them to the ER for a stomach pump. Traps within traps! But at least everyone knew going in who they were dealing with, and, as Shion actually correctly notes here, they should have maybe thought of Albedo’s history of taking pleasure in fucking with his brother. “Did you say Albedo?” Ziggy asks.

ZIGGY!

ZIGGY.

JAN. MY DUDE.

I am dead, and my ghost is finishing this recap. “If he was an acquaintance of Sakura Mizrahi as well,” Ziggy goes on, not caring that he has triggered several embolisms in my brain, “then it may have been part of his plan to bring [Jailbait] here.” ZIGGURAT 8, ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING MY GHOST RIGHT NOW. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU. Meanwhile, Jailbait is staggering unimpeded toward Albedo, since all of his friends are still mastering core concepts like what a trap is, who Albedo is, and how the sun got all the way up there in the sky. Corey comes over the top of Ziggy, who should maybe shut up for eternity, and labels this “A bypass-intrusion into the Encephalon?” On cue–practically like he was waiting for someone to say the words–adult Albedo emerges from a fucking wormhole to put Jailbait in a headlock. And to bury his face in Jailbait’s hair, natch. “Such a sweet smell, Rubedo–The smell of rage evaporating off your body. Sure you don’t suffer from excessive norepinephrine?” Not to take away from this incredibly erotic moment, but fun fact: that’s basically adrenaline! Thanks, Dr. Wikipedia.