Back down on the main floor, Shion nabs the item she got from her wild, violent impulses: Secret Key 7. This is for a skill called Junk Beam, which is a bit on the nose. Next, she tries the door she just accessed. Surprisingly, the room is being patrolled by more sentries even though it was literally blocked by a fucking U-Haul until 45 seconds ago. It’s possible some jerk double-parked and Shion didn’t do anything a parking attendant robot wouldn’t have done anyway.
The first thing Shion does in this room is blast the support column out from under a catwalk, a really reasonable thing to do when you’re sneaking around at work late at night. With no other action from her, the left side of the catwalk comes free and crashes to the floor, creating a ramp to the right side. I’m concerned about how well the welding on the right will hold if the left just unmoored like that. But if Shion ends up shattering her tibias when this thing collapses, I’m not going to call that a complete tragedy.
Through the door at the top of the catwalk, Shion finds herself in a room stacked high with crates. As always it is my instinct to blow up every crate in the room, thanks to it being one of the only fun elements of this entire godforsaken series. Doing this here yields me Segment Door No. 1, which I don’t yet have the key for, since there’s apparently some kind of fucking galactic law that says I will never have the key at the time I find the door, so I am forced to use Encephalon for every goddamn dungeon in the game at least once. There is probably some Encephalon service charge that Shion is racking up on the Vector company card. But once I’ve got that uncovered, I have Shion leave the room to reset the crates, because now there must be a method to the crate-destroying madness, which is just no fun at all. Blowing up the correct crates creates a bridge between the catwalks on the left and right sides of the room, allowing Shion to access the left side of the last room and the second level of the facility at large. Things I say in every Xenosaga recap alert: that seems like an inefficient way to get around. Constructing the box bridge is, thankfully, pretty straightforward now that I have the indiscriminate destruction out of my system, and before I know it Shion is standing on the floor above where she came in, looking out over the warehouse area. Unlike everything else she’s exploded, the orange truck is still gone, so at least she and Corey aren’t trapped up here if Shion decides to bail on this insane mission, or if, at least, Corey decides to bail on her. I can dream.
A large, unsecured computer console is waiting for Shion on this level. With a few taps she accesses information on the vessel she’s looking for, a pale violet phallic spacecraft. Only the best for her robot girl. “All right…” Corey says, “but how are we gonna get onboard? The security here isn’t exactly easy to override.” Has he been staring at his phone this whole time? Just letting Shion guide him through here while he watches himself get swiped left on over and over again? Shion responds with hilarious seriousness, “Brute force.” Even though this is literally what’s gotten them this far, Corey now has cold feet about it, and asks again if she’s sure about this. “If we go any further,” he adds, “getting fired will be the least of our problems.” Somehow Shion Uzuki’s largest problem never exceeds getting fired, and she also never gets fired. It must be awesome being special. “Oh, be a man already!” Shion says to this. I know I’ve been dancing around making that same point this whole time, but WOW WHAT A BITCH. Be a man already and go along with this plan that will get you thrown in the space gulag based on the word of an impulsive weirdo who has provided no explanation for why she’s doing any of this! The biggest possible indictment of Corey is that this negging actually works, and he doesn’t just flip her the bird and go back to his room to jack off in peace. He just moans to himself that this is “nuts,” which, yes, and trails after her.
‘Ooh, I bet that has so many different vibrate functions!’
One last piece of business on this floor: Shion taps at another console near the door to “activate the elevator.” And sure enough, a panel from the floor below floats upward to come flush with the edge Shion is standing on. An elevator that can only be controlled from one level! Shion being a bitch to Corey! Phallic accessories for KOS-MOS! This place is like a Xenosaga greatest hits album. Shion uses the elevator–which now that I did the work, makes this place much less of a nightmare–to hit the nearby save point before moving on.
A hum of machine activity lets me know before I even see it that I’m going to dislike this room. The hum turns out to be coming from a mass of conveyor belts, trundling crates of presumably classified weaponry and tech off for storage or shipping. This mostly means that they ride on the belts until they drop off and fall into a series of rooms below this one. Seems legit! I’m sure the nuke boxes are padded really well, and always end up where they are supposed to be. And guess what! To get to the hangar containing KOS-MOS’s beautiful lavender dildo ship, Shion will have to ride on these conveyor belts like she’s a bitchy little Amazon box! Corey is getting an up-close look at how his body pillow got prepared for shipping.
Someone, somewhere, thought this would be fun.
The drop-off points for the various conveyor belts are labeled numerically, though the signs are posted such that it’s not always clear which number is for which belt. To be fair, this is one of the least dumb elements of this setup, since it’s not like the boxes need to look for the correct off-ramp. I don’t know exactly how boxes would get to the correct one, of course, because Shion has to do this using her feet, and boxes tend not to have those? I don’t know how every box wouldn’t just end up going down the central belt and landing in a massive, dented pile. Let’s say…microchips. The wizards of the tech world!
From the central belt, Shion blasts a couple boxes off some side belts, sending some kids’ Christmas gifts of Vector Rockets for Kids!! into the abyss, and then she drops off the end into a corridor below. Each room off the corridor corresponds to a numbered conveyor belt dropping stuff in from above, though just to make it extra-infuriating for no reason at all, the doors are labeled with letters and the belt number is only marked on the inside back wall of each storage room. There must be some bitter misanthrope Vector paper pusher who spends two hours every week crafting a nakedly angry memo about this labeling system that no one reads. But back to this super-great system! One would think the rooms would be stacked high and deep with boxes, one big one maybe containing the Ark of the Covenant or some shit. Not so! The rooms have a crate or two but are pretty empty considering there’s an automated system trucking packages into each one around the damn clock. I guess what I’m trying to convey here is how much sense this all definitely makes and how I have zero questions.
In the room labeled A, which corresponds to conveyor belt 16 (god dammit, can’t A at least correspond to 1?!), Shion finds Segment Address No. 7. Does she have the corresponding key? I think we’ve established she does not.
One of the doors in this very sensibly labeled hallway is locked from the inside, which means the only way into it is to drop directly down from the correct conveyor belt. Thankfully, a staircase leads back up to the main warehouse floor and the elevator, allowing Shion as many tries at this as she needs (as it happens, four, because I’m good at videogames) as long as I don’t mind fighting the same sentry bot by the elevator every single time. I actually do, but it also doesn’t matter what I think. When Shion finally manages to get herself on conveyor belt 04 and drop down to its storage room, she finds herself behind the locked door, next to a staircase leading down. I know I’m belaboring the point here, but the only way to reach this entire wing of the facility is to ride a conveyor belt, drop into a closet, and descend stairs inside the closet. Even if the locked door were open, it’s still a staircase in a storage closet! Imagine being the custodian or maintenance employee who has to come down here for work every day. I mean, being real, it’s actually kind of great–in their position I would absolutely pretend I was a secret agent in Get Smart.
Making this even more confusing is the fact that Shion goes down these stairs only to immediately go up several more steep flights of stairs. Based on where that storage room was in the larger facility, there’s no way this stairwell could be here–it would be tunnel right up into the center of the warehouse. There’s some kind of wormhole at work here, which I guess would be appropriate for the storage of any of KOS-MOS’s accessories. And at the top of these stairs, Shion finds herself in an atrium overlooking the craft’s hangar, which looks like a different vehicle from every angle. (Right now it looks vaguely like a helicopter.) HMMMM.
Shion has been destructive enough at this point, and is clearly sufficiently on security’s radar already, that I don’t know why she doesn’t just break the glass in this corridor and jump directly down to her goal. Maybe this is, like, Boomstick-proof glass. Yeah, that’s the ticket. So she toddles down the stairs leading away from the thing she wants, but presumably eventually toward the thing she wants. I mean, she just got here by virtue of dropping in off a factory conveyor belt into a locked closet, so who’s to say there’s even a door to this thing and she won’t have to crawl through an HVAC duct? Who among us doesn’t design their multibillion-Nietzsche-dollars weapons storage facility as a rat maze?
I know, I’m beating a dead horse, and it’s just regrowing its appendages and hyena-laughing. I’ll move on. Shion hears the sound of water coming from the next room, a large chamber that does in fact have a door leading north, but it seems to be locked, judging by the pulsing red NO BUENO sign on it. Nothing I’ve seen has dissuaded me from the belief that Shion could theoretically hack this door open, other than the fact that I don’t believe in Shion’s ability to do anything other than carry a tray of curry and eat out her robot girlfriend. But whatever I think, the door is not opening.
It gets worse. The sloshing sound is coming from a large pool taking up most of the space in the room–you know, for when the custodians need a little R&R but they don’t know how to get the fuck out of here and go home–but it’s topped by a single sheet of glass sitting on several blocks on either side of the pool. Despite the makeshift suspension of this piece of glass–it looks like it was set here temporarily by some robot arm until it could be installed as the Dämmerhung’s new windshield–the steps leading up to it are built solidly into the floor. Sure, why the fuck not. Shion destroys all but one of the blocks on her side and ascends the steps. Then, its supports gone on one side, Shion walks over to an unsupported corner, and the considerable bulk of her 90 pounds of bitchiness and hair chopsticks weighs down this glass pane (which must weigh a ton, it’s the size of a basketball court) and sends the opposite corner upward. Shion can then quickly walk to that corner and use it as a ramp to access a door, without the glass crashing back down the second she starts moving in that direction, as it absolutely would in a space where physics has any authority and her weight were enough to move it in the first place.
This door is, to my bafflement, the way forward, so before Shion makes use of it she takes the time to “solve” the rest of this “puzzle” by making sure to stand extra hard and bounce on her heels a bit to make the glass fall again. It comes down hard enough to actually break the block supporting this corner, which contains a chest. This is all dumb enough and we need no more, but if there’s one way in which this game is not half-assed, it’s in how dumb it is. The chest pops out of the block, and rather than get pinned beneath the sheet of glass, it shoots across the swimming pool, as if equipped with a jet pack, and comes to rest on the ramp leading out of the pool at the opposite corner. The speedboat chest, of course, contains a key for Segment Address door No. 15. A chest ensconced entirely within a support column for a giant windshield suspended above a swimming pool seems as good a place as any to keep the key to a door that resides inside MOMO’s imagination.
Oh no her diet 🙁 🙁 🙁
The room, uh, above? To the west of? The room adjoining the Fuck Off Physics Puzzle Pool does mercifully look like it leads in the right direction, and comes with a welcome save point to boot. But this is because it has what looks like certain death at the end: this room is a wind tunnel, and past a couple patrolling robots, a massive fan is spinning very near the door Shion presumably must take. I wouldn’t trust this bitch to be around a Dyson bladeless fan without harming herself somehow, and then blaming it on Corey or Jin, so this is terrifying.