Yeah you do specific combos enough to unlock them as special combos that deal a lot more damage and then you can use those deathblows in the mech battles as well. It’s a stupid system that does not work terribly well but is the base for all combat.
They are critical to making the mech battles not a slog and after the first two-ish dungeons you get stuck in mechs for the next 3 with no opportunity to grind for deathblows.
i’m in the cave under the desert atm, and so far all the mech fights have just kinda been like “i feel like i’m going to lose thi- oop, no never mind he died. huh.” which is honestly kinda good and feels in keeping with how Fei has responded to the mechs in general.
The dungeons and random battle are sloggy. I really can’t tell if that is because I have no patience for JRPGs anymore or these are mediocre.
I think I am due for 45 minutes of cutscenes tonight.
I sure am in the middle of an hour of cutscene.
I love this stupid ship captain.
always good to be with a man of the sea
lol died after 20 minutes of cutscenes I gotta watch again idiot.
Oh this is where this horrible “joke” format that To The Moon guy uses comes from.
The game is better when it is earnest or has an inexplicable dolphin man. These Anime Jokes are like sand in my mouth. It is like valuable for to witness, but boyhowdy.
Tonight I finally broke up a notebook to start writing down unexplained proper nouns. I know it is probably unneeded because the game is definitely gearing up to turn to camera and explain the plot to me.
This card minigame on The Thames goes from “alright” to “wait what the fuck” when after all the explaination they tell you the controls.
Okay. So a colony ship got attack by something X years ago and crashed on a planet that birthed some form of Elly something something.
Now thousands of years later (or whatever) People on land are digging up robots and weapons to kill each other while also heaven (it is a spaceship) is running guns and robots to the middle east to fuel a puppet state in it’s war against Midgar over ???
On top of that the disposed prince of The Middle East is cosy with the Russian Orthodox Church’s Mother Supreme who is a 13 year old girl with a living stuffed animal she got from Heaven (it is a spaceship.) the stuffed animal wants to fuck our main character.
Fei is our main character he may be the embodiment of the apocalypse and his robot has a bumper sticker that says “This Machine Kills God.” He’s killed anyone he has ever loved except the Middle East Prince and everyone involved with him because plot armor.
Accompanying Fei is Twitter Shitposter Citan Uzuki. Who the game has already told me is actually a double agent for Space Emperor. I do not know what side the Space Emperor is on. Spacey-E did have a conversation with a multi-sentience TV Cube about how they have to drop a nuke on Midgar to try and kill Fei because he may be “him”. Citan Uzuki is also know as Hyuu by every character we fucking meet because they all went to InterDimensional Space College but fell out with Ramus’s Extreme Ideas.
Ramus is like head of Heaven (it is a spaceship)'s Middle East Operations and is really whiny about losing to Fei in a robot battle. He’s flanked by HyperCompetentWoman (name unremembered) who is also talking to Grawf who wants to kill God. I don’t know if she wants to kill God but she owes Grawf a favor. Are you confused yet?
See Grawf keeps showing up and telling Fei to Kill God and Fei goes “what no” then goes crazy and kills everyone he’s ever loved.
Flanking Middle East Prince In Exile is Sigurd who went to college with Uzuki and Ramus but was a double agent the whole time and came back to Earth to work for ??? But now is helping this Prince.
In Midgar Fei met The Baron of Midgar who had an illegitimate son that is basically Blanka called Rico. Rico was charged with trying to murder The Baron but we helped him escape. His actual objective was ??? But now he is in our party and thus no longer has motivations or personality.
Meanwhile I mentioned Elly. She is the girl to Fei’s boy in this boy and girl try to cause the end of the universe story. Elly has a rich-powerful daddy (unknown) who helped her move up the ranks in Heaven (it is a spaceship) Special Forces. At some point she freaked out and blew up the heads of everyone around her in a beautiful anime cutscene. That was before the game began. Her fellow pilots in Special Forces have a grudge against her telekinetic murder powers and that she is a fail-daughter. She meets Fei a few times finds out Heaven was lying that everyone on Earth only exists to be murdered by Heaven and has joined our side.
Except just recently HyperCompetentWoman used Mind Control powers to make Elly a sleepe agent to try and blow up The Prince’s Submarine. It got shut down in time and repaired by A Man Of The Sea. He’s cool and probably unimportant.
What is important is after the submarine got damaged we got attacked by Ramus and Fei got pretty fucked up. So we had to go to The Vatican if the Vatican was actually Nerve HQ to get him healed up because a priest named Billy decided to do us a solid.
The Vatican is definitely doing horrible experiments to create bioweapons.
Billy’s “father” Auron (to be reused in FFX) was also at Space College. He probably became disenfranchised with Heaven (it is a spaceship) AND THEN The Vatican when he found out they do fucked up stuff. I guess he was also in charge of murdered Bioweapons released from Babel (of more likely from The Vatican). Now Billy is supposed to kill “Reapers” and he did us a solid so we are gonna Uber him in our submarine while Fei is still recovering to do what is likely a very boring dungeon.
Is that everything? NO. The TV Cube said “this” has “happened” 500 years ago. The TV and Spacey-E do not want this to happen again. Fei has visions of him being totally jokerfied as a kid.
Also there is Wiseman who wears a mask and said cryptic shit to Fei a couple of times before Fei said “I have amnesia you asshole.” And he went “For Real? So that’s why nothing I said made sense.” Wiseman trained with Fei’s Dad on a UFO Country (that is not heaven.) i guess Fei is from there, I guess. Anyways one day Grawf showed up and killed Fei’s dad (maybe) and Wiseman took Fei and him in a mountain village while trying to chase down Grawf. As Grawf has timestopping teleportation powers and a magic robot probably pretty hard. Also we kicked Grawf off our plane President Harrison Ford Style before that same plane got shot by a Missile from The Prince. So maybe Grawf is really just some guy.
Fei woke up in the village was raised there then an experimental robot designed to kill god and made for Fei shows up he kills everyone he has ever loved and Citan Uzuki says wow Fei you should keep getting in that robot (wink.) Don’t pay attention when I ask very direct questions about your every action and thought. I am just your doctor and “friend”. I will never “betray” “you.”
Oh yeah I guess everyone in your party possesses “The Animus” which is some bullshit.
Elly and Fei bonded over how they have never had a home and don’t know what they are doing except Fei murdered his whole village in a Robot Rage and Elly is taking a break from her bullshit job and bullshit Dad.
So there are two world religions (at least) two possible God Killers (at least) two double agents (at least), two spaceships that are countries (i guess I don’t fucking know.) is God Real? It took me an hour to type this out.
damn, what a game
on reflection, i think part of why i wasn’t as shocked as most with how Chrono Cross turned out is due to Xenogears. Trigger definitely hints (sometimes more overtly, sometimes not) at a sort of darkness, and at a world with a lot of hidden history, but Xenogears is the attempt to make that The Point.
so when we get to the part where (Chrono Cross spoilers) Miguel explains that Fate traveled between dimensions to kill the heroes of Chrono Trigger, i was just sort of like “oh, that makes sense.”
I’ll restate the point I intended to make elsewhere is that some one explained that after FF7 every Square fan voraciously bought the new Square PS1 RPG so thinking of all of these as continous iteration and somewhat expecting everyone to have played the previous one.
No I have not bothered to draw out a release timeline but going to say this idea ended with Kingdom Hearts.
you forgot about lucca from chrono trigger living in fei’s village, and I guess canonically being murdered by him
I didn’t even meet her because my rule with JRPG 1st Towns is they are probably gonna blow up anyways so go through the story as straight as possible otherwise I can wander around later.
‘Ethos, The’ - The japanese word says ‘The Church’.
Wow that helps a lot!
What a bunch of dorks. I think they forced themselves to learn Japanese to understand the holy text so good job.
Trying to make sense of this fucking game. They keep adding and discarding characters at a rapid pace and we keep being bailed out by Auron from FFX because he is clearly the coolest character. By game clock time 30 hours in and I guess going to try and dethrone Heaven (It Is a Spaceship.)
Watching the plot playout has the emotional impact of playing a boring JRPG dungeon for an hour then reading a wikipedia summary. The Cast of characters is so incredibly long at this point. Watching the budget, the story, the game, and the translation fall apart in real time.
Seriously had a huge revelation happen in overlay text. Going to be so cool when Disc 2 is just reading.
I got another party member and my reaction was “Fucking Really?”
Wished I could just take 3 Billy Lee Blacks
I don’t even remember if that’s actually his name, that’s just his cool ass cowboy name in my head
The game had denied me being able to buy ammo for him for two dungeons.
the party members are such a weakness of the game, yeah. outside of elly and citan, none of them are relevant at any point after their initial arc, and they’re forgettable enough that I don’t remember half of them.