When Jailbait enters, he finds a massive room dominated by four pillars of glass channeling blue electricity, presumably from the crawlspace upstairs. In the center of the room kneels a lone woman who I noted earlier looks like she could be Pellegri’s twin, save for her preference of a ponytail that must be giving her an extreme headache. “Welcome to this holy confessional,” Iggy Azalea says, as the camera keeps tight focus on her boobs and I wonder why her skin looks like a skin-colored turtleneck under her dress. Then I remember they spent all their money on Shion’s new hair sticks and printing a bunch of anti-union literature for the Monolith Soft breakroom. She adds, “Come in, you filth.” I don’t know how she could know that–I’m the one who’s had to Encephalon dive into half their brains and find out how nasty they all are. Jailbait, hilariously, starts at this, and very briefly looks down at himself, like he’s worried he’s got skidmarks on his jeans. Iggy ignores this. “No matter what you do, there is no escape from this place,” she says. “Now, confess your sins. I will listen to anything, even from the mouths of foul beasts like you.” I have a feeling this self-styled Inquisitor is maybe not interested in absolution. And even if she were: while I know this collection of dirty boys and girls has plenty to confess, but I do think it’s a missed opportunity to not have Matthews down here, sobbing into this lady’s leather dom gown about what he did to all those robots when he was in the bag on two liters of the shittiest bloody marys ever served on an aircraft.
Loading ...“You damn bitch!” Jailbait says. Whoa there, buddy. You don’t get a pass on that word when you’ve never correctly used it on the lady standing right behind you. Iggy doesn’t seem especially concerned about Jailbait’s spicy attitude, and certainly doesn’t suggest he pray on his language or maybe get a swear jar. Instead, she gets to her feet and calmly says she is about to “rip [them] apart.” I’m supposed to be focused on her eyes suddenly glowing green and her dual-wielded laser saber and old-fashioned sword, but I’m now noticing her hair is not in a ponytail, but in an upside-down braid where the tail is flopping down over the top of her head. A tight, headache-inducing braid and your hair is still in your face? Seems useful.
She looks like a Barbie whose head has been pulled off one too many times by a child sociopath.
So what is this lady’s deal, other than having dumb hair and almost certainly some problematic opinions about homosexuality? Glad you asked, so I can google her and pass that info along. First off, though I’m not sure this is ever communicated in the text of the game, she’s apparently a cyborg, so I guess that explains her melted neck. Maybe if Ziggy took off that full bodysuit he’d have a fucked-up chewed-on-Ken-doll situation too. She also, more relevant to the task at hand, has a split personality, denoted by her eye (and lightsaber) color. This is some real “I wrote extensive fanfic about my KOTOR character” energy. Iggy’s name in Blue Eyes White Dragon mode is Manes, which is not doing it for me on a Mary Sue level, but maybe I just don’t understand Art. She seems to turn into Manes after she’s taken a bunch of damage, which I could figure as a defense mechanism on Iggy’s part, except her main difference in Blue Eyes White Dragon mode is that she sacrifices her health to do extra (read: fuck you amounts of) damage. I say this as though it did not work as exactly that, as she does enough to kill the party before they can kill her. This is, somehow, Shion’s fault.
In my Shion’s defense, this is kind of a hard boss battle, especially when you run with Jailbait and either Shion or MOMO, who are all three of them about as stout as wet toilet paper. But I was doing this mostly because Jailbait and Shion were the ones I’d trained Psycho Pocket on, and you also need two people to team up and cast that with Analyze in order to steal an item called Awakening II, which you can only get from her, and only while she’s Blue Eyes White Hellbitch. So, we’re back to this being on Shion, really. Miraculously (and if this were the first game there’s no way this would be true), I have enough spare skill points lying around to train up MOMO and CHAOS!!!, so I’m not fucking boned if someone dies. And if you’re wondering what Awakening II does and why it’s so important, I am thrilled to report that it teaches Shion and KOS-MOS a double attack called Gravity Bomb. I don’t remember what this looks like but I’m going to assume it involves Shion bouncing her ass on KOS-MOS’s face. I mean, I’m probably close.
I think her lightsaber might also be a gun. Some kind of…blade…gun.
Outside of CHAOS!!! and MOMO successfully netting me the Shion/KOS-MOS Motorboard Jamboree, trying this again, unfortunately, doesn’t go a whole lot better. This is mostly because Blue Eyes White Hellbitch’s powered-up attacks can do more than MOMO’s max HP, and also it’s hard to push her back to Green Eyes of Destiny mode when MOMO and CHAOS!!!, even when they survive, are constantly healing each other. She also keeps boosting (overriding my fucking boosts) in the middle of the combo chains Ziggy is painstakingly setting up because he has to do fucking everything around here. But by the time Manes has shrieked, “Damn you, Sellers!” three or so times (which she does every time she goes back to Slytherin mode, and no, I don’t know why or care to find out), I manage to squeeze in one last attack chain and fucking Shion puts her in the ground right before all her EP runs out. Iggy falls forward on her tits and face and her body disappears. In my immersive research session on her, I noted the wiki would only go so far as to say Iggy is presumed dead because there’s no body. Which I would respect on general principle, but given what’s about to happen to this place, I don’t think her going invisible is going to help her survival odds.
Left to his own devices, with no guidance from the dying/dead Iggy, CHAOS!!! must guess what the fuck to do in here, and figures messing with those electrical pillars is the best idea he’s got. Destroying one of the pillars magically evaporates them all, and it turns out the pillars were actually the cables holding up the vestigial junior diamond, which now plummets into the pool of water. After some bobbing up and down, its door comes perfectly level with the water’s surface. A bridge even materializes to connect it to the walkway with the save point, so I guess this is yet another built-in feature of this place that only appears when another feature is irreversibly destroyed. I have a feeling U-GEE goes through a shocking number of civil engineers. I can’t imagine the mental toll of being tasked with building Rube Goldberg devices that can only be set up once but need to be used repeatedly. I’m a broken husk at this point and I only have to talk about it.
I almost never do this, but: if anyone out there is, for some unknowable and stupefying reason, playing along with these recaps, SAVE. SAVE RIGHT NOW. Jin, back in the saddle, enters the smaller diamond.
Despite my party choices, in a cutscene, Jailbait, Shion, and Ziggy are staring at what they find inside this chamber, which is a whole lot of candles. They seem to be wired together, and therefore look more like strings of Christmas tree lights arrayed in a geometric pattern across the floor. But they’re all poking upward, so: candles. Or penises! Very romantic, either way. “This looks like the center of the stronghold,” Shion says, which is an odd thing to say about a room that was literally inaccessible until just now, and also looks like it might have been the place where Iggy and her “lightsaber” indulged in a little personal time off Jesus’s time clock. “And luckily,” Ziggy adds, “it comes with a self-destruct device.” I don’t know who could look at what they’re looking at and jump to that conclusion, but it is nonetheless correct. Jailbait is very excited to “blow this thing to hell,” and I have to agree with him, but it’s not as simple as turning the thing on. It is, of course, one more puzzle to stuff down my exhausted gullet, even as I weep and plead for mercy.
EXTREMELY concerned there is a swastika hidden somewhere in there.
If I can manage to be generous enough to judge this puzzle based on how simple it is in practice for me, the gamer, versus how simple it is compared to any device that could have done this same job without making a fucking Broadway production out of it, this one isn’t so bad. There are four strings of the novelty penis pergola lights, which can be lit all at once via the console. If the fuses all reach the center at once, the device is activated. The strings are all, of course, knotted up in ways that make tracing their paths, and therefore rewiring them accordingly, difficult to suss out. Naturally, of course: this is, after all, a puzzle, not some kind of…fuse box. What did you think we were doing here?!
As is almost always the case with puzzles of this type, the trick is to make as few changes as possible. Jin uses his katana (a perfectly sane and reasonable way to do this) to flip three of the breakers to different light strings and stands back to watch them blow up. When all four fuses in the center spark with perfect synchronicity, which even I have to admit is satisfying to watch, Jin calmly says, “Okay, this place is going up in 30 minutes. Let’s get out of here and go back to the Elsa!” And a timer starts. A timer that persists through the menu screen, and through battles with the entire respawned force of the stronghold. And though I haven’t set aside any time yet in this recap to bitch about it, remember that a typical battle in this game against some U-GEE redshirt, or a Realian with paring knives for arms, or Kommo-O the Scaly Pokémon, takes at least five minutes. (This is almost exactly what the very first one, in the tube area, takes.) Also consider that, thanks to the narrow walkways that comprise almost the entire bottom half of this structure, running away is impossible because the enemies all have collision detection and block the way.
What I’m saying is, Jin’s going to have to cut some slits in that kimono, maybe ditch the sandals, and run a little fucking faster.
If there is a silver lining to be found here, it’s that all of the puzzles remain solved, and I don’t have to waste time pushing blocks around or trying to remember how one particular elevator purports to “work.” The only real drain on time is the battles, but holy shit is it a drain. I know for an absolute fact that this collection of mega-geniuses and Shion get out of here successfully, but I have messed this up before, and that memory is still making me keep a nervous eye on the remaining time ticking away, complete with a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. This is not fun!
With under ten minutes to go (and this is, in my experience, pretty good), the team reaches the E.S. dock and leaves the airlock. The good news is, this is where the timer stops. The bad news is, that’s because somebody just showed up to avenge her cyborg sister. Hovering above the first and least annoying elevator shaft in this place, in her E.S. Handjob (né Issachar), Pellegri observes the emerging robots with consternation. “Really! Neither my subordinates nor the Patriarch’s toys are of any use.” Would love to hear more about the Patriarch’s toys. I bet he’s got some real freak shit, and it’s all gold and encrusted with rubies, and he has a special display room. Does he have one of those big incense burners that’s a big egg on a chain? But it also has another use?!
Pellegri hears none of my questions, and it’s just as well because she seems like she is resolutely against ever even appearing to be cool or fun. “The Inquisition will not allow you to escape,” she announces down to our heroes, before zooming to the bottom of the elevator shaft, her giant hand and polearm swirling around her dizzyingly. She demands they surrender their weapons, but this teppanyaki knife-and-spatula show isn’t what I would call a convincing plea for pacifism.
You may be wondering why Pope Exposition would dispatch Issachar for this, when we saw it get locked up with simpatico soul power or whatever the hell with Asher before. Or, at least, why Pellegri’s mission wouldn’t be instead to crush the Elsa in her mech’s giant fist and ensure that the E.S. have no ride out of here. You may also be wondering if this boss battle (the third of this mid-game dungeon!) is going to end with a similar Anima Relic malfunction. And I totally have a valid theory as to why this isn’t the case, and wasn’t the case when the Hall of Doom attacked E.S. Moonbeam, either. It’s, uh, in the car. I’ll just go get it.
What, you’re still here? But you’ve forgotten entirely what your question was? Bummer. So Issachar is a much harder boss than ol’ Richard and Hermann were, even with Richard’s ability to blow up the entire space station with no self-destruct button necessary. Or, if not harder, longer (hee hee)–bitch has like 30,000 HP and I think Asher tops out at doing maybe 1500 damage a hit with the incredibly dirty-sounding Shot Buster. And Zebulun has to keep both bots topped up for when Issachar eventually uses the also very dirty-sounding D Field (it probably looks like the room full of penile Christmas lights). D Field concentrates Issachar’s magic powers and lets it start using stuff like Genesis (sigh), which creates a Final Fantasy X summoning circle and hits both my mechs with lightning bolts for around 4000 damage (double sigh). Kind of wondering why none of my giant robots powered with the souls of the ancient tribes of Israel are the super-cool, high-powered ones that can do more than shoot a piddly shit laser crossbow. Despite this, Pellegri’s still outnumbered and apparently incapable of healing herself, and after about 12 minutes of nickel and diming her to death, it’s over. And yeah, if you feel like doing a little math, where does that leave our self-destruct timer? Fuck all of us, that’s where.
Okay, maybe it’s for the best I don’t have the golden shower ether field.
As the E.S. all face each other post-battle, one of them not at all looking like it has been beat to absolute shit and back, the game does try to make a little more hay of the imminent destruction of the stronghold. Though again, time very much has slowed down here. The walls are shaking and there’s some debris. The place is not the fireball it obviously should be by now. Pellegri decides now is the time to talk shit–correctly, given how she canonically looks like she just came to a tie in a handicap match–announcing she won’t “allow” them to escape. “This fortress has already begun to disintegrate,” she exposits for the people who initiated that process. “It’s only a matter of time before it’s swallowed by the Abyss. It’ll be a fitting memorial to you.” I’m not sure being swallowed is a fitting memorial to anybody here. But Pellegri is probably ad-libbing this since she had no way of knowing they’d blow up the joint. I won’t assume, as I always do otherwise, that she’s been practicing this speech in front of a mirror. As she lifts off, she finishes, “I suggest you spend your final moments praying for a peaceful slumber.” This lady believes hell is real, right? And that she’s rightly punishing the wicked? Seems like a mean thing to say when you have white-hot zealous certainty in your soul that they will get no such thing. Not that it matters, because she launches into the void, without making any attempt to keep them from doing the same. “Shion,” KOS-MOS says before Issachar’s even out of earshot, “I recommend a swift retreat. This structure will not hold much longer.” Reminder that KOS-MOS is the one piloting this thing and could just, like, do that. “I know,” Shion replies. “Let’s hurry on back to the Elsa.” You know, the thing Jin announced they were doing well over 30 minutes ago! These people really do deserve to die here.
A black screen after the E.S. begin sloooooowly making their way to the elevator, Shion slooooowly jogs through the doors to the Elsa’s bridge, demanding, “Hurry, Captain!” You first? Matthews, after a LONG overdue, “Shut up, I know!” to Shion re: their imminent demise, confers with Tony and Hammer on how fixed the Elsa got in the party’s absence. Which is, not very! The logical drive and therefore the engine’s thrust are still damaged (do not look at me, unless it is for some conspiratorial snickering), which of course leads to some “comic” relief about who exactly fucked up the ship so badly in the first place. I point at Shion, but they don’t see me.
Tony must be really stressed, as he does not follow this with, ‘And that’s NOT normally a problem FOR ME!’
Another Black Screen of Nobody Fixing Jack Shit advances the destruction of the stronghold, with lesser laser-firing buttplug drones getting pulled into one black hole or another, as the Elsa crew hangs onto handrails and makes grunting sex noises at each little jolt. Corey is crouched, cowering, in the dead center of the bridge, holding onto nothing, which is a bad character note, because that dude would find every restraint belt on the entire ship and mummy-wrap himself in a storage locker. But at last, after one particularly close kaboom, and Matthews wondering with a sigh if this is finally it for this crew that’s cheated death a ludicrous number of times, two green beams connect with the Elsa’s stern, pulling it upward like a prize in a crane game. These dummies somehow don’t realize what’s happening until Shion’s all, “Captain, look!” and everybody looks, uh, up (the display windows on the bridge are actually facing away from their saviors, but never mind) and sees the glorious Durandick plucking them from certain doom. Given that Chesty or Busty absolutely could have pinged them well before they were in range to give them a tow, I am taking this as them wanting to let Little Master twist in the wind and maybe hoping he’d cry a little.
Not only has Jailbait not broken down in tears, he doesn’t even give them a thank you (though Tony and Hammer are literally doing a little jig in the background of his call to the Durandick). “What the heck are you guys doing here, anyway?” he asks, snottily. Chesty’s like, “Rescuing you, dickhead.” Jailbait replies, “Yeah, and I’m grateful for that… But don’t you think your timing was a little too perfect?” Beating me to it, Busty says Gaignun told them to come: “He said if we let the Little Master handle everything, he was bound to do something reckless.” Also, don’t they have some mind-meld shit where Gaignun would have known he was in trouble anyway? Or do we only remember that when there’s a direct plot point that requires it?
This name-drop of Gaignun provides us with the real point of the scene, which is to share the news that he is not on the Durandick or even back at the Kukai Foundation, but on Fifth Jerusalem, the Federation capital. The secondary point is for Jailbait to talk a bunch of shit–whining that Gaignun treats him “like a kid,” calling him a “big shot” with a lot of scorn and not a shred of self-awareness, opining that he’s not here at this important moment when Jailbait just got finished being mad that the Durandick is here at all–so we know he’ll feel really fucking bad later when he finds out what’s been going on with his clone brother. But for now, Chesty announces they’re taking the Durandick back to the Foundation, instead of, oh I don’t know, CONTINUING ON TO MILTIA WHICH WAS THE ENTIRE POINT OF ALL OF THIS ARGH ARGH ARGH WHAT THE FUCK. Ormus Stronghold, its entire curvy shaft riddled with explosions, falls into a black hole behind it. The twin black holes then disappear, which is not a thing black holes just do.
But Gaignun, and this goddamn cul-de-sac back at Second Miltia, will have to wait. I am prompted here to save my game, which is all the escape hatch I need to not think about any of these assholes for a while. Next time–and despite what Chesty just said, this time I’m really not fucking kidding about it–OLD MILTIA. I swear to God, it’s happening. Probably after a bunch of sidequests where Shion wins a ski race to save the rec center. Until part nine!