LogFAQs > #976423391

Another couple hours down, so here we go!

We start off at this heavy artillery thing - the kind that could probably go KEWL KEWL BANG BANG if you wanted it to - and Light (as she wants to be called now) starts talking about how she wants to blow up Eden, the Fallacy in which Sanctum is housed, the capital of Cocoon. Sazh asks and she's 100% serious. She has a goal now, a target like she was always taught to have as a soldier. She doesn't care who it is, just so she has a mission in life. Sazh and Vanille think she's crazy, and that she might have to fight Snow. Hearing this, Hope offers his aid, and then struggles catching up to Miss No Patience. Sazh questions her Focus, and Light doesn't care - she's either gonna die a Cieth or get turned to crystal, and it makes no difference which flavor of DOOM she gets to suffer. Light just leaves without anyone knowing how emotionally conflicted she is. She's going through a lot of reflection right about now but is good at disguising it. I appreciate this characterization of her a lot, honestly, but it would be nice if we got to see her internal thoughts a bit more. She IS the protagonist even if Vanille's the one narrating things. It would be nice to show her losing it a bit more, given her archetype.

She barges ahead with Hope hobbling along and KABOOM, some PSICOM goons cause a smoldering separation from Sazh and Vanille. The goons are weak despite this, and only serve as a plot device to get the party to split AGAIN. Seriously starting to get a bit tired of that. For some reason, the party can never be together as a whole for very long and 4/13 chapters into the game feels like the time you should start having some choice. Literally everything here is linear in ways that I don't particularly like. Hope asks Lightning to help him get stronger and she's not exactly enthused about this. Him going home doesn't help his resolve either, since he won't be welcomed there as a l'Cie. He shows his worth by hotwiring a Pulse Armament like the Dreadnaught from before and barging through a bunch of security robots. Man that was fun! Kicking one toward the stars and watching it blow up in the distance was gorgeous. Whacking the robo-arms to wipe them out was just great. I hope we get more sequences like that, since Hope crashed this one and didn't land gracefully enough for Light. After he trips and falls, she abruptly goes off on him for being a liability and
<img src="https://media.tenor.com/uKxZgrT0xb4AAAAC/persona-persona4.gif">

Yup, of all times for Light to awaken to her Persona, it was NOW!

First things first, I gotta fight Odin in order to claim him, and this does not go well. Since I kept picking up Spark Rings I at least had the foresight to give one to Light immediately before since I smelled a boss fight ahead, figuring it would be an electric-type, and that didn't help much. Hope didn't have one so he kept getting owned, so I decided to use an extra (I have three) for Hope, level up Light's (three extra levels only got 6% more, ouch) then spend some of these extra Phoenix down the PSICOM thugs dropped. I can see why they drop them commonly now - this fight probably had a lot of people struggling in beta so they added that. I conquer the Norse God-king and he turns into a Horse, becoming Light's Persona to command at will. I get a tutorial where he gets to whoop some robot asses (wait, do they have asses?) and it's awesome. I'm trying to recall everything they went over in there about the gestalt gauge and the summon gauge. I gotta let the gestalt gauge fill up before pressing Square to ride the Persona, but also gotta do it before the summon meter expires. This way deals a lot of damage, and it's great.

After the fight, Light apologizes (!!!) to Hope for being cruel and then makes him a promise:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVcLIfSC4OE

Okay, that aside, Sazh and Vanille trek through some sort of factory. Vanille is just fun and carefree - Sazh has a lot of trouble keeping up with her youthful energy. With all this attention to her being a kid, plus that spoiler-tagged thing above, I'm starting to think she's not an actual kid, or maybe she is and was already crystalized as a l'Cie once, already having had that tattoo under her skirt. Sazh doesn't mind being "Dad" for right now, he's used to it, though I do wish we got more story about him. I encounter something that looks like a D20, but it's actually just a bomb that blows itself up. One pair killed me for reasons unknown. Don't know why the target changed on me. Also don't know why I can't stagger the Pulsework Soldiers half the time even though Vanille has used her Saboteur spells (and Sazh his Synergy ones) to ensure that it's possible. Don't know why that doesn't always work because it makes fights needlessly tough even when I do things correctly.

We then get to some busywork with pushing four buttons at four power terminals to activate glyphs to open the path. This is stupid. I swear, I miss actual PUZZLES in JRPGs, things that actually made me think a little, instead of this Skyward Sword "you can't go into the dungeon" crap. After clearing another rough battle, Sazh and Vanille opt to make camp for the night. Vanille finds a mat rolled up in a pile of rubbish and uses it as a bed, then draws a line telling Sazh not to cross it. He is woken up in the middle of the night by Vanille's warm body pushing against him... so she crossed it, LOL!

Next, we finally get to check in on Snow, and the woman he's with. She now has a name btw: Fang, which I've heard 'round here before but I was never properly introduced. Don't know why that was. You'd think we'd have been shown her introducing herself since she seems to be a pretty major character. Hell, after we get through the cool sci-fi city shit to something called Landblum, we get this bad guy-seeming dude introducing himself as Raines, this game's Cid. Yes, he seems like a bad guy, but I can't tell if he is or not just yet. He says things like "the Sanctum" and makes these implications that despite Snow's accusations, he's not fully their stool pigeon. He talks about executions placating the public so they can sleep at night, about how negative press covfefe keeps the fear alive, and about all this dystopian stuff that amounts to a futuristic version of "ppl r dum" so the powers that be exploit them. But I can't tell if this is his agenda or if he's simply reporting what Sanctum intends to do. He may not be fully on board with that - Fang sure doesn't seem to be that way. She's trying to get Snow to not say or do anything that will get him shot on the spot, even as Serah gets taken ahead. This is why I don't know if Cid isn't actually a villain or just somebody I'll get to kill later.

We then get yet another flashback to before the Purge. These are honestly starting to grate on me a little, because most of these don't really add much meat to the forward story - pretty much everything is being told backwards. The forward plot is just too light and while this backstory helps me care more, it feels like we should've been shown some of this at the start of the game instead of just being dropped face-first into it. In this one, Serah breaks up with Snow, revealing that it's because she's a l'Cie, and thus his enemy. After talking to Lebreau at the bar, he finds Serah watching the sunset on the pier and tells her they'll face it together. He's certainly a keeper! Not gonna let anything dissuade his feelings for her. While they certainly behave like a couple here, I gotta wonder how many times Troy Baker and Laura Bailey have recorded a romantic scene like this by now - this was probably the first of several. (Also: How many times did Troy Baker have to record "SERAH!" in various forms?)

That's enough for now.