LogFAQs > #957848509

OK, so now I get to explore Ymir for a bit before heading out to talk to my robot again. Taking a look at the party, it looks like Toval is an actual member now, since I'm able to mess with his orbments and equipment. The only thing it doesn't let me do is unequip his only accessory, which cuts casting time in half. I guess they figured it'd be too OP on Rean right now? Not sure but it is a bit weird.

Either way we head out to hang out with Valimar, and after some dialogue he reveals that he can sense the waveforms of all of the classmates that were with me when we awakened him! Very convenient power, very cool. It will certainly help narrow down our search points to find everyone, so thanks for that, ancient robot programmers. He determines all vital signs are normal for these people hundreds of miles away, which is some very powerful radar. Still a bit unfortunate that they haven't killed Millium offscreen yet, but sadly that's not how things work. Also, he refers to my classmates as "secondary contractors" to his awakening, which reads a bit awkward for me...probably some quirk of localization. Mzero, do you remember what term he used to refer to everyone?

Also, when he's doing all this, he says something like, "Classmates? Do you mean the lifeforms with you at the time?" or some weird crap like that, and I was just dumbfounded that he doesn't know what "classmates" means. That's a pretty general word. You have to assume that the concept of schooling existed when these ancient engineers were designing powerful robots with advanced AI. You'd think that would be the last word he wouldn't know, but then 3 seconds later, he proceeds to list the modern names of various geographic areas where Rean's classmates are. Yeah, god forbid an area gets a new name in 1000 years but 'classmates' is too advanced. Okay Falcom.

Tangent aside, at this point the cat casually introduces in-universe fast travel as a concept. Okay, now I'm starting to get a little worried about the plot devices piling on top of each other. You'd think that, in-universe, if what amounts to teleportation was a thing that was possible, it'd be a much bigger deal. This continent has had so much drama about the orbal revolution and how it revolutionzed transportation, so many segments where they discuss the airships and how they impacted society, and the railroads, orbal cars, all of this is brought up over and over again. But apparently there's some hidden art of teleportation that a special few are aware of? I mean if it was some ancient shit that NOBODY knew about, that Valimar had to teach us about, that's one thing. But the cat just brought it up like it was a well known fact to his group, so at that point you'd think that Emma could let it slip, or you'd think they would have taken advantage of this at some point.

They do go on to say that only faithful believers of Shinto - sorry, Animism are knowledgeable on it and allowed to use it. Okay, if that's the case and this ancient religion had teleportation powers, I'm really curious how they let themselves get outmatched and driven out by the Church. I mean we know they have some crazy powers too, but you'd think with everything that the Animists got going on they'd put up more of a fight and wouldn't have been reduced to whatever state they are in now. That would be an interesting thing, if the game goes into detail about how animism died out on the continent. Hopefully we get there at some point. But in this era of rapid commercialization and industrialization that is destroying traditional values, it does make sense that only a noble few, which may or may not include our entire party, are capable of taking advantage.

Okay, tangent over. We get a glowy, hyperspace cutscene where Rean tries Icy-Hot for the first time, and we end up back in the Lunaria Nature Reserve. We get to revisit the first real dungeon in the original, nice touch! And it is nice to see how coming back here has more meaning after what we just learned, since your first time here you are wondering what all those stone monuments lining the walls are about and if we'll ever learn anything on that. You kind of forget about it since it happens so early on, but now there's some payoff to it in the next game. That's a nice use of worldbuilding if I've ever seen it.

Actually getting through the nature park was a little challenging actually. With only me and Toval in the party, you're not able to output too much damage. They did slow the enemies down a bit, if you're able to get your triple advantage hits off then you should be getting 2-3 turns before they act which helps a lot, but if you ever miss one then the fights can get pretty rough. Especially against those baboon monsters, I had to use quite a few S crafts to make my way through the forest, and actually had to do a retry on the very last fight before the boss, looking at the orbment charging station in the distance. Rough life.

Past that fight though, we do encounter a boss which - much like the nature park we are in - is a reused asset, the original boss of the area in the first game. It's poetic that it took our entire team to take him down last time, but this time I'm doing it with only Rean and Toval. They go on to introduce a brand new, never before seen mechanic - Overdrive. I do have to wonder why they introduced it in Azure but didn't implement it in CS1. That's the only thing I can really think of that the series took away from a sequel, so seeing it come back is nice. Not that I ever really used it outside of boss fights and I doubt it'll be any different here, but still. We'll see how it goes.

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