LogFAQs > #942684985

Black-haired boy is now riding a train, navelgazing on how he's traveling to his new school where he'll be for the next two years. The game is super oblique, with the writers trying not to make their infodumping obvious, but they're pretty obviously infodumping and I wish they'd just rip off the band-aid and tell me what I'm supposed to know rather than being coy about it.

Rean -- who I'm absolutely done with calling black-haired boy, btw -- stared around the train, wondering why of all the passengers, everyone else is wearing a green uniform while he's wearing a red one. This clearly must be the train to Hogwart's, because only students are on the train and Rean talks like the students couldn't possibly be arriving by any other means.

Finally, we arrive at our stop, Trista, and Rean gets out to gawk at how beautiful the city is. The devs must have been super proud of themselves for constructing a fully 3-D town, because we're treated to a two-minute virtual tour as the game shows us what every street and building looks like. As Rean is standing in the middle of the path, taking in the sights, Pigtails emerges from the train station, also gawping as she walks, and plows right into Rean. She falls, he does not, and he offers her a hand up like a gentleman. Then he apologizes for standing still, and she says oh no, it's my fault, I should have watched where I was going. They play the getting-to-know-you dance without actually exchanging names, and she runs off to the school to not be late for the admission ceremony. Clearly, I should hurry to do the same.

Clearly, this is an RPG and I should explore the town. Not that I didn't already see what it looked like in Visio. Almost all the buildings are closed anyway, so the best I can do is talk to NPCs. I find a "third dormitory" before advancing to the next part of town, where I find the first and second dormitories, and then finally I'm at the school. Two upperclassmen greet us, take our weapons, and tell us to shuffle off. Along the way, I meet two other characters wearing red -- a nobleman who literally pulls up in a limo and tells his chauffeur to piss off so he doesn't stand out from the other students, and the blue-haired girl who parts ways with her butler.

The ceremony, which we fade in on near the end, has 50 generic NPCs mixed in with a few of the red-shirts. The nobles, all sitting in the front row, are part of classes I and II, while the commoners are in III, IV, and V. Now please go to your designated location, indicated by your...oh, oops. We don't have one. Rean banters with the redshirt beside him, a short boy named Craig. Wait, no, that's his last name, but for some reason Craig is what sticks with me. Then another member of the faculty emerges from the other direction while literally only the redshirts are still here, standing stock still rather than asking questions about where they should go, and asks, "So I bet you've all got questions about where you should go, huh?" The writers know they're committing a faux pas and just lampshade the hell out of it, which seems to be a running theme in this game.

Instructor Sara, who is surprisingly laidback and borderline unprofessional, tells us to all follow her into some creepy old haunted (school)house. She says, hey, you're part of Class VII, and someone goes "wait, aren't there only five classes?" to which she says there were, but now there's six -- 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and...7. Remind me not to let her throw my holy hand grenade of Antioch. Before explaining anything else she's going to put the kids on an orienteering exercise, and I think, shouldn't that be orientation, which one of the kids helpfully asks for me eventually, but no, it's orienteering, which is a word I'm completely unfamiliar with. Obviously it means we're about to be Shanghaied.

Sara pulls a switch, the floor gives way, and six of the students tumble in. Pigtails is trying to hold onto the tilted floor. Rean's is a better position to hang on, but he jumps from his spot to shield her and they both tumble down. The ninth chick says uh, nope, and hits the rafters with a grappling hook. Sara clearly knows her and says you have to play nice, and tosses a knife at the rope. The girl gives the camera an exasperated sigh as gravity pulls her down.

Speaking of gravity, Rean's getting a nice face full of sweater meat right now. In the basement below, Pigtails has landed on his chest and fainted, and he's studiously keeping his hands where everyone can see them rather than getting up. The other kids lament how they got here, Pigtails comes around and gets SUPER angry at Rean for no reason, and then two of the boys get into a pissing match. Or rather, they continue their pissing match, which started before the trapdoor incident. Jusis, the high noble, puts Machias, the commoner with glasses who is raging about the existence of the class system and how horrible nobles are, in his place by pointing out that he's the capital governor's son. Machias says, well noOOoo, I'm not a hypocrite 'cause my daddy worked for his position. Whatever.

Sara calls us on our cell phones, which we didn't even know were cell phones, but I guess the kids can be forgiven that because they weren't around to remember the days when everyone used flip phones. We get our first quartz for our ARCUS, and I'm like, hey, I guess I'm going to tie a link of arcus now, huh.

The group is supposed to fight our way through a dungeon, set up just for us. Oh, yeah, I forgot the cutscene as we're walking into the haunted house, where four people who are seemingly upperclassmen, watch us from a ridge and engage in context-less exposition about what's in store for our class. It's so oblique that I almost wanted to just mash the A button and skip it. That kind of scene might work in an actual program, but in a game, it's just a distraction.

Also a distraction is Justis and Machias, who get into it again, and both storm off to navigate the dungeon on their own. The girl with the grappling hook also leaves. Blue-haired girl -- Laura -- takes charge and says hey girls, come with me. You fellows might want to stick together, too, by the way. We watch the ladies leave, chat up a bit, and then enter our first dungeon.

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