Jail Time

Now we have come to the worst part of Disc 1. Dudes from Kislev (the other country at war) have found Fei and thrown him into prison city. No joke. This entire city looks, sounds, smells and feels like one big prison. The worst part is we can't leave until we finish all our vegetables. Bleh.

Mr. Banderas

Right away the character of Rico is introduced and I really don't like him. I mean, sure I like him, but not in a large way. I feel like Rico represents something. Like Bart, this is his one time to shine and for most of it, he just serves as contrast to Fei. He has a huge amount of power and defense but is slow as an ox and we have to get his deathblows up from nothing in the middle of the first big difficulty jump that comes up in game. This is the chapter where we get a whole new area full of new baddies to explore, but the game also introduces status ailments. Which suck. S-U-C-K. 

Never Enough Tools

I hate status ailments. No matter the game I hate them. I never really use status attacks as part of my go-to strategy so I find it annoying when some random encounter hits me with confusion or poison or worst of all "sadness". What is the point of that!? It's not even in XG. It's from Chrono Cross or maybe FF7 but basically it just means you get depressed and can't do quite as much, quite as fast. Sure I get that the dev's have to make combat multi-faceted in order to keep us on our toes but having to carry around 20 different items to "cure" different status ailments is like trying to be prepared in real life. IT NEVER WORKS. You might think "ah, I can be prepared by carrying a first aid kit" but when you need tweezers and there are none in there, you add tweezers to the kit for next time. And this continues until you are travelling with your entire house in your bag. Whatever happened to just rolling with it? If you get poisoned, okay. You could use antidote or you could just wait until it wears off. Am I right? Why don't stat-ails just wear off? A random number of steps and you either fall down dead or your liver has done it's job. NOT "you are poisoned forever until you can find that one item". 

Besides which, stat-ails are mean-spirited. Bad enough you wanna punch me until I die, now you gotta send me to sleep while you do it? And if I try the same thing on you it never succeeds! Most bosses have immunity to stat-ails and about 60% of randoms do too. For the other 40%, the attack can miss and you're left looking like the cheese-head who wasted a turn. BAH!

Needless to say, I do very badly in the "Sewer Horror" chapter. The guys (Citan's here too) muck about in the sewers of the prison city looking for a murder monster and pick up an amazing number of pathogens from the baddies. On top of that, Fei is fighting in this Giant Robot Contest, where all the rules are totally different, and he has to win in order to continue. Tedious! That's what this section is. 

We had a good thing going in Aveh. We were on our way to make Bart the king again. We had goals, and a direction to shoot for. Now all of that has been put on the back burner. All the things we thought we were about to do have been snatched away from us. I feel like the whole Kislev section could have been so much more interesting if we hadn't had the whole build-up of liberating Aveh right in front of it. Working through the dungeons and being locked into to this area feels terrible because we know (well, I know) that there is something left unfinished. If we could just get back and wrap that up real quick... but no. Spoiler alert, we won't do that until Disc 2. The game developers have more of the world to show off before they'll let us go back.

On one hand, I applaud them for this storytelling direction. Being shuttled around based on scripted circumstance leaves me wanting more from each area so I want to keep going. Knowing that I haven't explored every cranny of the game yet makes me want to find every cranny and bust it open. On the other hand, experience has taught me that there is no end to the cranny making the game devs can do. Later on, they will add areas to the world map which were never previously there. A few dungeons are one-play-only with no sign of them on the map after or before. Apparently, this world is being continuously edited by the cosmic forces.

When the sewer is clean (relatively) and the gear fights are won, you might think we can focus on leaving this dump and getting back to what we were doing. But no. Turns out that Elly's boss decided to blow up Prison City with a kamikaze strike on an old nuclear plant so we've gotta stop that from happening. WHAT FUN!