I think this has been the longest section so far. Felt like it at least.
Luna Sanctuary was reveal fest. The curse stuff has never really been a strong point of the plot and that doesn't change here. Black Alberich being an entity that possessed Alisa's dad is kinda eh and I'm actually more interested that Franz was part of the Thirteen Factories before all that happened. Osborne being Driechels's reincarnation is also kinda "okay sure." So instead of going through all that and picking it apart I'm going to instead probably completely over-analyze a different part here - the Holy Beasts. I'll start with Argres, the Holy Beast of Earth. And here I want to focus on the obscuring of the name. We've seen this earlier with Rean but while there I thought it was kind of a style thing to represent the curse causing him to forget everything... with Argres a slew of different questions are raised for me. It also has its name distorted. And like Rean you could say this is curse related. However simultaneously Roselia says it is a name lost to oblivion but also Class VII clearly hears it unimpeded to make the connection that it sounds similar to Arianrhod's Divine Knight. ...So what's up with the distortion in both name and sound? The only one it's apparently affecting is the player which makes me think back to Campanella seemingly breaking the fourth wall in Star Door 14. Like... is there a greater meaning here that only the player is apparently being affected by this? As for the Holy Beast of Fire... what happened to the original? The current Roselia is her familiar but where'd the original go? If she died... how? Holy Beasts are apparently quite hard to kill. The Gnomes went to all the trouble of making Millium and Altina just to get a weapon capable of killing one.
Anyway, questing about was fun. Vivi: "*gasp* Are you trying to leave Alisa and flag the Vivi ending? Bold move, sir!" IS THIS AN OPTION? lowkey i actually think they have pretty good chemistry going all the way back to cs1. Anyway, we eventually go invade the Gargantua because apparently you can just move dimensional spaces around. Gargantua theme was pretty great though. Sharon redemption I buy. George redemption no no no nope. lol Schmidt just shitting on Alberich and to a lesser extent George.
Anyway, this behind us we go to the Draco Sanctuary finally and unsurprisingly Fie is the star of this segment, and consequently 3-1. Fie's Zephyr plot has been one of the best character stories in Cold Steel and the conclusion to it is excellent. Her confrontations with Xeno, Leo, and Rutger are all great at showing how far she's come from the first day at Thors. Her farewell with Rutger was touching too (even if I wish we could have recruited him too.)
Anyway, onwards to 3-2. Haven't really done anything here yet except buy some new equipment and witness the Pom Party difficulty spike that is Gaius. My thoughts above feel a bit scattered and unsatisfying to me but I am actively trying to keep from going on multi-post thoughts on my own!
---
xp1337: Don't you wish there was a spell-checker that told you when you a word out?