Hours Played/Hours Total - 6-1/2 hrs / 24-1/2 hrs
Starting Point - Nautilus - Nautilus Station.
Current Goal - Explore Nautilus with Sazh and Vanille. Hopefully get them involved in the actual story rather than they just constantly run away. Make it back around to the rest of the crew. Complete their Focus I guess.
What Happened -Oh boy my pace is just slowing to a crawl anymore. No excuses can be made though, but I really need to kick in more time to beating this. Worst case scenario, I'm going to force myself to finish by the end of July. You might wonder how...I figure I'll just take off a few days in a row and force XIII out the door! Until then, we're going to nickel and dime it in my own time. Onwards...to Final Fantasy Fun!
Where I left off, I had just made it to the giant theme park town called Nautilus. Being responsible adults, both Sazh and Vanille ran away from their troubles and straight into a big theme park to "hide". We don't get too far into the park when a large news announcement takes place. It's talking about the recent l'Cie attack in Palumpolum, and we even see images of the other group fighting with PSICOM soldiers. Vanille spots Fang in the video and is all like "le gasp!". After the news report ends, the two overhear all the people nearby commenting on the report. Basically, it's something like "blah blah just kill those people" or "they're all infected by Pulse now". Overall, it's pretty negative.
Vanille seems to get pretty worked up about all of this, so Sazh distracts her from it and suggests they go see some big parade in town. We head over to this "parade" and turns out it's more of a play than a parade. Anyways, it's another very pretty cutscene. It's all these fancy holograms of both red and blue people that are re-enacting/commemorating a battle between Pulse and Cocoon. The hologram people are dancing around and then an "Evil l'Cie" appears! It's an evil Pulse l'Cie, and he starts attacking people. While doing so, he yells out "MWAHAHA! I AM FROM PULSE! I AM GOING TO KILL PEOPLE AND FULFILL MY FOCUS!" Unfortunately for him, a "Good l'Cie" from Cocoon shows up and exclaims his own battle cry. "I shall protect Cocoon and defeat you!" Then they have a big scene of the two l'Cie fighting, and then they randomly change into monsters somehow. They charge at each other and explode in a big flash of pretty. This display seems to bother Vanille though...and then the cutscene is over.
After that big show, they figure it's time to explore the park a bit more. They're worried about the other group...Then they decide to look around and enjoy themselves instead. Yay for irresponsibility! We walk, walk, walk right into another scene. Suddenly, Vanille decides to ask about Nautilus. Sazh explains that the place is one giant amusement park created by Sanctum for the people. (The whole "pet idea" from waay back there is starting to fit in place...) Sazh also mentions that he had planned to bring Dajh here someday and now just hopes he can tell his son about it. Vanille assures him that he'll get a chance. He does know where his son is...and so we head off from here.
The next area we enter is filled with Chocobos. Vanille seems a bit happier here because she feels more at home in this natural place. There are piles of chocobos and also some kinda sheep. We enter the farm area, and Sazh's baby chocobo starts flying around. I get to play a game of "chase the baby Chocobo", and it's not fun at all. I'm rewarded with a random accessory after running about, but it still felt like a stupid pointlessness.We follow the baby chocobo around a bit more, and it's getting all friendly and such with its full-sized brothers. Then we go into another scene with Sazh and Vanille talking.
Biggest reveal here is that Sazh says he's going to turn himself in. He knows that execution is inevitable, but he figures he will at least get a last request to talk with Dajh. He wants to tell him about the chocobos and other stuff in the park. Vanille pleads with him to not do it. She almost convinces him when she reveals she knows who caused the Euride Gorge incident. (The place where she and Fang tried to attack.) The person from Pulse is....INTERRUPTED! Chocobos start running about, and we are being fired upon from above. Soldiers stop dropping down on us, and it's time for us to run and fight our way out. Of course, it's less about running at this point and more about fighting. (Sazh mentioned earlier that he was tired of running.) We fought through a number of troops as we make our way to...somewhere. No idea where we're trying to get.
Of course, I can't get through this area without a bigger challenge of BOSS BATTLE TIME! It's a large 4-legged cannon robot! This was yet another long and annoying battle to go through. I must have done something wrong here and/or not fought it the right way. The battle was just a large string of changing from buffing and debuffing, attacking, and offensive with healing. It's pretty boring with just two people because you don't have a lot of tactical options here. Honestly, I felt like the boss bot had too much health for just two of us. If it had less HP, the battle would have been shorter and way more interesting. Nothing really special to say beyond that...and we win of course.
With the battle done, it's time to continue on into a big ol' scene! The robot is destroyed and then Dajh appears out of nowhere! He's quite happy to see his father, and likewise with Sazh. Then...he turns into a crystal. (Oh noes!) Then the lady who helped Sazh with all of this shows up along with PSICOM soldiers. (She was briefly shown earlier but not named then. It's Nabaat.) She's starts talking and tells us how Dajh was of great help to them, and it turns out that his Focus was to find Pulse stuff.
On top of this, she shows off something a bit more interesting...footage from the Euride Gorge attack! LE GASP! It reveals information to Dajh that I have known for quite some time already! Vanille and Fang were responsible for the attack, and thus Dajh was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Thus, he was branded a l'Cie by the Cocoon fal'Cie that felt threatened at the time. If you do the usual "who to blame" scenario, it quite clearly falls upon Vanille and Fang. Mostly Vanille because she's actually present right now. Sazh takes this new information pretty hard, and Vanille is feeling even worse of course. She runs off, and Sazh chases after her. Nabaat and her group follow them to watch and see what Sazh decides to do.
I get to walk a short distance and right into another scene. Vanille is distraught with guilt and just feels awful. She figures that the best course of action now is for her to die for what she has done. She sees a weird vision of Sazh shooting her right there, but that passes...and then the real Sazh shows up! He pulls his guns out and is ready to shoot Vanille on the spot, but he ends up not doing it though. Sazh realizes that no matter if she lives or dies, nothing will change what has happened. Of course, now neither one of them know what they should do. Sazh is all emotion-ed up now, and his l'Cie brand starts to glow. A giant ball of fire shoots up and changes into a giant fire robot, so we've got another Eidolon on our hands.
BOSS BATTLE TIME! EIDOLON EDITION! We're fighting a giant fire robot called Brynhildr, and this battle is basically like all of those before it. He casts Doom on my party member (Sazh), and I'm forced to beat him under a set time limit while following specific conditions. How do you impress a giant fire robot? With chain bonuses of course! Unfortunately, just like Odin, this one is a huge jerk. He does a huge amount of hits and damage in a small period of time. I ended up healing more than focusing on attacks, and this was a recipe for failure. I couldn't get anywhere, was almost out of time, and then I died. This game is all about letting you reset every battle though, so I did just that. I might have failed the first time, but I shot through him on the second time. How? A simple solution really. I equipped Ember Rings (reduces fire damage) to both character, and that solved my only real problem with the battle. On top of that, I used a dual-Ravagers Paradigm to chain like crazy. The second attempt was basically wam, bam, and done.
WIth its defeat, the giant fire robot changes into a...race car. These Eidolon's Gestalt forms are stupid. Sazh boards it and drive sit a bit to show it off. Now that the battle is done, it looks like Sazh is going to turn on Vanille regardless. Then he doesn't shoot her because she's just a kid, so he turns the gun on himself and...blank screen with shot sound! OH NOES! (I'm skeptical, but we shall see.) This is followed up by a cutscene of Nabaat and her crew carrying Sazh in a coffin-like container and Vanille being escorted as a prisoner. Aaand Nabaat is going to be a bitch about it too. Time to switch back over to our other group!
Another cutscene! There's a massive airship (and I do mean MASSIVE, bigger than the rest so far I'd say) that is identified as the Palamecia. It's the ship where Sazh and Vanille are currently being held. Then the view switches over to the Lindblum. The group is hearing on the news about the l'Cie being captured and are going to be executed. Snow is all "what the hell damn guy!?", and Cid begins to explain. There's a big of a lengthy and boring explanation that follows, so I pretty much just skipped past it.
Basically, it's going to be a public execution to quell the common folk about the whole "Pulse l'Cie" problem. Of course, before the execution, the Primarch, leader of Sanctum, is going to judge them guilty and execute them...rather than just immediately execute them. Cid points out that the Primarch is coming in person though, so this will be a great opportunity to get the man directly. Fang thinks it's most likely just bait to lure them out though. Regardless of this, the group all agrees that they're going to do it anyways. They want to rescue their friends/fellow l'Cie. Time to prepare! Preparing is what I'd do if I had money or anything which would allow me to upgrade or whatnot, but I've got nothing. So it's straight on to the Palamecia! Also, it's Chapter 9 now.
We jump aboard a Cavalry vessel and are transported to the Palamecia. CUTSCENE! It's pretty, pretty airships and pretty sky. They're flying about, and that's really all there is to say for the short cutscene. It's followed by a regular scene. We get a glimpse at the Primarch who is on the Palamecia, and he's talking with Nabaat. Nothing super important though, so I skip past that and back to our group outside. They get clearance and dock on the giant airship, Palamecia. Now that we're inside...It's a Code Red alert! So despite us just now getting on the ship, they already know we are here. (Or so it seems that way...) No time to talk so we're just going to FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT!
The next couple hours of the game was just fighting enemies on the ship. Honestly, it's probably only an hour-ish or so long part, but I kept pausing to take notes and do other things. So...this part was expanded by quite a bit. There's really not much to say for all this bit, but I'll go ahead and detail it as I have taken notes for. Without further ado, this is basically what happened on the ship...
FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT. We somehow start running along the outer part of the ship with magical-somehow walkways to walk on the outside of a flying ship. There's quite a few enemies out here as well. It's just an assortment of robots and PSICOM soldiers with jetpacks. We work our way around the ship and back inside. GROUP JUMP! It's Sazh and Vanille here. Just like I thought he isn't dead, and the game shows us why. He pulled the trigger but moved the gun right before it shot. He couldn't kill himself, and he couldn't kill her. He's struggling with what he should do, but Nabaat comes up to inform him of what shall happen next. She informs him that his son is technically a hero, and his crystal will be put on display as a memorial for all to see. She then knocks Sazh out, and the game comes back to the now.
The two of them start talking briefly, and Sazh realizes that Vanille had awaken form a crystal stasis. Thus...Dajh can too! He asks Vanille about what the experience was like, but she doesn't directly say. Just talks about being made into a l'Cie to fight Cocoon, and we flash back to Day One. It's at the Bodhum fal'Cie spot. Vanille is currently a crystal, but then she changes from crystal to alive again. Fang awakens right next to her, and it seems that Fang can't remember her Focus. Vanille admits that although Fang had forgotten, she had not. She lied to Fang about not knowing and simply played dumb. /end flashback
Also, it switches back over to the other group. They're all running about, and the alarm just keeps going on the ship. Another announcement goes out, and the Code Red has changed into a Code Green. These colors mean nothing to me, so I'm going to ignore them and continue onwards. For this next bit, it's a big ol' pile of FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT! (Once again) That's followed up by FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT! On the side of all this fight is a simple fight fight fight. I'm being slightly critical, but that's honestly all that happens. It's a long pathway full of a lot of fighting. We do finally hit a stopping point, but that's just so it can change back over to Sazh and Vanille for break out time!
The Code Green is still going here. A couple of PSICOM soldiers along with a robot come to escort the two to a different cell. However, it seems that a plan has been prepared. Sazh lets loose with his secret attack, "Baby Chocobo Strike". This distracts one guard long enough for Sazh to tackle him into the other guard and knock them both out. Vanille grabs one of their dropped guns and destroys the robot that came in with them. So...they just magically escaped with very little trouble.
Now that they're free, they set out to escape this place. However, Vanille is questioning if she deserves to live after all she has done. Sazh tells her he can't figure a reason out for himself either, but that's why he has to push harder to live now. Apparently, her story of changing from crystal status has given him hope that Sazh will change back someday. So yeah! Off to fight fight fight some random monster robots! We fight off quite a few and come to a scene of CODE PURPLE! OH DEAR LORD, NOT CODE PURPLE! Sazh figures that there are other l'Cie onboard who are making trouble. Vanille is determined that it is Fang. Sazh says they should go get rescued now, but Vanille is all "NO! We are doing the rescuing this time!" All righty then...CHANGE PLACES!
The other group is suddenly wondering what is up with all the codes and colors. Fang believes that it just means they are succeeding. Nothing more to add there though, we move right along then. We fight some enemies. (Okay, we fought a lot of enemies.) As I make it through one area and into the next, I get a little scene of "elsewhere..." Nabaat is on the bridge with the Primarch, and she's pretty much freaking out over this scenario. She's also proving that their color-coded alert system is stupid because she can't even remember which color means what. Then there is an announcement about how the engines are losing power. The Primarch comments about needing to get things done himself and announces a CODE WHITE.
The game jumps over to the engine room, and Vanille and Sazh seem to have made their way over here. I get to fight my way through a single but very large room. There's even a group of enemies that I couldn't handle here. It's hard to explain without going into full detail, but the bottom line goes something like this. Two people can NOT handle a group of four enemies with three super fast ones and one big guy who takes little damage and does big blast attacks. I fight every monster that I can and continue towards the exit in this room. Unfortunately, the door is locked and the two get cornered by some monsters. However, they're a small group and easily defeated. Then we get the ol' switcheroo back to Team Lightning.
Team Lightning is currently on the outside of the ship (AGAIN). They suddenly notice that the wind isn't blowing nearly as hard now, and the ship seems to be decelerating. Snow thinks it's just good luck for them, but then there are robot monsters here. Fight fight fight! There's an awful lot of monsters on the top of this airship...FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT! We're running along the top of the airship that's currently falling, and we don't seem to be affected at all whatsoever. Anyways, things are going well enough, but then suddenly, RAWR! Giant lightning dragon monster! BOSS BATTLE TIME!
...Or so I thought. It was more of a tough enemy than anything resembling a boss. I quickly stagger the big beast and kill it during the first instance of stagger. It's dead body falls to the ground and then falls off the ship. A second dragon swoops down at the team, but it's just teasing us at this time. Then there's an explosion on the side of the ship! But it's just Sazh and Vanille. The group almost gets to have a touching reunion, but then that second dragon flies back around for BOSS BATTLE TIME!...possibly. The second lightning dragon wasn't really any harder than the first one. Admittedly, it did put up a bit more of a fight, but I would argue that there wasn't really anything noteworthy to bring up here. It's just a big lightning dragon with big lightning attacks. That's about it. Boss fight is over and off into another scene!
The group has a quick tearful reunion, mostly Vanille and Fang. Fang looks at Vanille's l'Cie brand and sees that Vanille still has time. With that out of the way, Sazh asks the group what their next plan of action is.
They announce that our next target is to take down Sanctum. This surprises Sazh, who is all like "REALLY!?!" They want to take down Sanctum to return Cocoon to the people. Also "Screw the fal'Cie and their ruling!" Just as they are discussing this, more dragons appear to fight us, but it seems Vanille and Fang have other plans for them! Vanille uses her weird multi-whip horn thing and captures one of them. Fang pins it down with her spear, and I guess we're going to ride it out of here. The group runs towards it, and then the game zooms out to show an ominous white robot owl watching us. Now it's cutscene time!
The group is flying away on a magical lightning dragon flight! They fly around the large ship and straight at the front of it. We're going STRAIGHT for the Primarch! Somehow, Fang gets the dragon to shoot off lighting and blast a hole into the ship. The group then leaps off their captured dragon and into the ship. Time to go and take out the big guy! This is all followed up by the most AMAZING thing unlocked!
I CAN ACTUALLY SELECT MY TEAM NOW! Amazing! New! Astounding! Yaaaaaaay... /end sarcasm to the max. Despite this new ability at hand, I keep with my current team of Lightning, Hope, and Fang. It's working for me, and there's really not much of an advantage to switching around right now. The area we jumped down into is annoying as crap to traverse. It's just random platforms that are separated, and you have to go from one to another by activating bridges here and there. That doesn't sound bad, but it's just a lot of long distance running from one spot to another. That...and I wanted to get all of the treasure around. Most of the platforms had enemies as well, so this entire area was just a big long walk of annoying.
The enemies here weren't very hard, but they weren't complete pushovers either. I took waaay too long here because I wanted all of the items though. With all of the items collected, I head for the bridge of the ship and CUTSCENE! Nabaat (whose first name is Jihl apparently) confronts us and asks the Primarch to run while she holds us off. He simply goes "nope" and says she's going to leave instead...but not in a good way. He blasts her with magic and then proceeds to kill everybody else. The group and I are thinking that he's a l'Cie! He tells us that Cocoon is a factory built by the fal'Cie to create their thralls...HUMANS! He talks down about all of the people who are afraid of just a few l'Cie running around. Lightning tells him that they might be curious to know that a l'Cie runs everything! He laughs at that though and reveals he isn't just a plain l'Cie...He's actually a fal'Cie!!! (DUN DUN DUUUUUUUN!)
The Primarch is the ruler over all of Cocoon and the Sanctum fal'Cie, Barthandelus! He changes into his true form and it looks...kinda stupid if you ask me. It's hard to describe it, but I'll do my best here. It's like the upper half of the body of a giant. However, the head is much larger than the rest of the body, and it's adorned with a fancy headdress of sorts. That headdress is filled with four upside-down heads that stare at you. So...that's about what he looks like, and did I mention BOSS BATTLE TIME?
Barthandelus is another lovely multi-step boss to defeat. You can't just directly attack him because that's slow, ineffective, and you will die. Instead, you have to focus on the outer headdress heads before you can get to the large main head. Each head is capable of casting a specific element of spells, and that head is also resistant to that element. Basically, this battle goes a lot like that airship from before. You have to destroy the four smaller heads before you can tackle the main head. Otherwise, he's got a sort of armor that negates a large portion of the damage aimed at him. It took quite some time to defeat each head, and I didn't realize the element thing until I was down the last two heads.
For those curious, this wasn't that exciting of a battle for me. I mostly just kept switching between three of the Paradigms for this whole battle. It was either all-out attack (Relentless Assault = two Ravagers and a Commando), all-out heal+defend (Solidarity = Commando, Sentinel, and Medic), or some sort of mixture of the two (Diversity = Commando, Ravager, and Medic). If I haven't been clear about some of the Paradigm roles, Commando is straight up attacking, Ravagers use magic to attack and combo up for Stagger, Sentinels are full-on defense, and Medics should be self-explanatory. Anyways, I mostly shifted a lot between those three and spent more time than I'd like healing. Either I was behind or he was super ahead in the damage factor. I did have everybody fairly maxed out at this point, so yeah...
Once you get down to just fighting his main head, it's still a long battle ahead because unlike the airship, destroying all of the headdress doesn't take HP from the main part. It simply allows me to actually damage him now. He has some fairly powerful attacks at his disposal, so I spent a lot of time healing up between those. It's not too bad if you keep up with healing though, as to prevent dying and wasting time on that. The worst attack in the bunch seemed to be one called "Destrudo". He will sit there and begin to charge up. Attacking him causes him to twitch a bit and eventually flench. It doesn't stop him from charging, but it causes some sorta flash (persay). I just assume that weakens the overall attack. In the end, I took like eighteen minutes to do this battle, and the ranking screen claimed I could have done it in NINE! I don't know how I could have done it that quickly, but I was apparently doing something quite wrong here.
Anyways, the fal'Cie is defeated now, and it's time to follow up with a nice scene. Of course, by "defeated", I should have just said that we temporarily disabled him somewhat but not really. He's not going to go down that easily, and he reveals that we aren't the ones to destroy the fal'Cie here. Only Ragnarok is capable of doing that. Fang inquires as to what that is, and he gives us all the answers here. (Suspiciously I might add.) Ragnarok is something that one of us will have to become if we want to defeat Orphan and destroy Cocoon. That just brings up the next question of "Who is Orphan?" And Barthandelus just gives us the answer again. Orphan is the source of Eden's power, and in turn, Eden uses that power to sustain all the other fal'Cie and the people. If we destroy Orphan, Cocoon is pretty much done for as well.
Snow doesn't like the sound of that though, and he throws out that he promised Serah that he'd save Cocoon. It was her Focus and all that! Barthandelus laughs at this and clarifies what her Focus actually was. Unfortunately for Snow, her Focus was simply to bring them all together so that they could destroy Cocoon instead. Events proceed pretty fast from here, and things just jump to it. The fal'Cie blows the roof off of the bridge and then... Remember that white robot owl from like...6ish paragraphs ago? Yeah, it flies into the room and turns into an airship now. Since the Palamecia is crashing now, this is our only way out of here. The group jumps on board and flies off into a cutscene!
I don't know why we are trusting that guy we just tried to kill, but they all seem okay with it. Also, it's just a big pile of suspiciousness that he gave us ALL of the answers. The group does go over this here in a bit, but I'll get to it when I do. Just...felt like saying it out loud now I guess. Sazh, being a pilot, is trying to control the ship but isn't having any luck. Then everything gets a bit worse when an enemy airship appears in front of us. It's Rosch! He's still alive somehow and is trying to shoot us down. However, our ship starts magically flying and dodging by itself. On top of that, it has super magical shields to block all of his shots that DO hit. It's a big fancy ship flying cutscene with fighting. Yay for fun and pretty!
Hard to say if things are going well or not, but then we found ourselves in front of a large flying city. It doesn't directly identify it, but I believe this is Eden (also the name of the big fal'Cie). The group somehow manages to gain access and fly right through the city's shield. Rosch on the other hand isn't allowed in... Going to assume it's a little more help from our airship friend here. They almost run into a building while flying around, but then they are teleported into a random large tunnel.
As the group disembarks, Vanille identifies the area as a piece of Pulse. So...why is a big hunk of Pulse this close to Eden? Everybody's discussing all these new things, but Snow is sulking off to the side. He's all heartbroken now that he's learned what Serah's Focus was and how fulfilling their own Focus kinda screws up his promise to her. Finally, they're bringing up that something isn't right about this scenario. The Cocoon fal'Cie, whose "human" name is Dysley, told them basically everything they needed to know and even gave them a free ride. Something is up here, and they discuss ideas of what could be going down.
Why would a Cocoon fal'Cie be so determined to destroy Cocoon? Hope goes with the easy answer here. It's some bigger, grand design between the fal'Cie that they, being humans, couldn't possibly understand. Nobody else really has anything to input right here though, so that's really all we got to go on right now. The group tries to get Snow involved here, but he's still all sulky business, like I stated before. The conversation ends, I get to explore this tunnel, and it's now Chapter 10! However, I've decided I've got more than enough post here for Day 88, so time to wrap it on up.
Dear lord, I'm certainly stretching this game's length out. I should be a LOT further by now, but I'm really not. I'm only a small ways into July, and yet I've really made very little progress. I've got to push harder, or my goal of finishing by this month's end is going to be shot. Worst case scenario, I'm going to plan for an extra day off and just shoot through the game. I'll probably end up cutting off some of the extra side quests, but I can't see myself being very interested in those anyways. So! That's more than enough rambling for the end. Thanks for reading as usual, and be sure to tune in for Day 89 coming soon I hope.
Side Note - For those who care to know, I've got another album review coming up in the mix, a side post random RPG review, gotta start working on Chapter 3 of my story, and Day 89 somewhere in there. Before Chapter 3 but probably after one of the other two.
Ending Point - The Fifth Ark - Upper Traverse.
Current Party -
- Lightning - Commando Lvl 3, Ravager Lvl 3, Medic Lvl 2
Next Goals - Figure out what's really going on here. Destroy Cocoon maybe?
~May the Crystals Guide Me~
No comments:
Post a Comment