Time to save Midori, and I don’t think she can actually die; if you keep stalling her rescue mission like I have you’ll eventually be railroaded into it at 12:00, an hour after the time mentioned in the Laplace Mail. Then again, it was already off on Beldr yesterday, so I guess those problems with its garbled text are already more than skin-deep. She’s at the Ikebukuro concourse entrance, cornered by three (technically nine) angry people who refuse to listen to any of her protests, saying that a witch like her deserves what’s coming to her. Time for us to step in and save her.
Mission 19
- All civilians must be driven away
- The whole party cannot die
- Midori and no civilian can die
So, how do we drive the civilians away without killing them you may ask? By going up to one of them and cherrytapping them with weak physicals. Once the civilians see that we’re demon tamers too they’ll panic and try fleeing towards a series of escape panels, so just let them go. Midori, meanwhile, will try to make for the underground concourse, the very site where she’s supposed to be killed. Thankfully she doesn’t seem to be too dedicated to reaching it, only moving one panel at a time if she even moves at all, because she starts out standing right next to it almost. We have to get someone over to her to convince her to make for a new escape panel off to he side.
After topping off Midori’s HP things are going swimmingly...until Keisuke arrives on the scene. He’s jumped straight to the Knight Templar end of the Law Hero spectrum, declaring that if there is no law or order within the lockdown then he’ll take it upon himself to judge people. As soon as he makes this declaration a voice asks him if he truly desires justice. Keisuke declares that he does, and just like with Kaido yesterday a new demon appears on the field in response to his desire: the king of the underworld, the judge Yama. He sets Yama on the civilians, saying that perhaps it was a good thing he was caught in the lockdown, for some people just don’t deserve to live. Atsuro implores him to think about what he’s doing, but his friend’s resolute: he says that he’s always felt that some people harm society just by existing, and that power is necessary to uphold order. So yeah, full Knight Templar.
Anyway, so now we have to defend the civilians from Keisuke and Yama as they try to double back and make for yet another set of escape panels on the opposite side of the map. Yeesh.
Keisuke (Lv. 29)
HP/MP
- 212/133
- Resists Fire and Elec
- Ice Dance - Deals several random hits of Ice damage to multiple targets.
- Mabufu - Deals Ice damage to entire enemy party.
- Media - Restores HP to all party members.
- Mana Surge - MP raised by 30%.
- Anti-Fire - Grants resistance to Fire attacks.
- Anti-Elec - Grants resistance to Elec attacks.
- Hustle - Increases team’s chances of landing and evading Physical attacks.
- Power, Bai Ze
Yama (Lv. 45)
HP/MP
- 442/122
- Resists Fire and Elec
- Maragi - Deals Fire damage to entire enemy party.
- Pierce - Physical attacks bypass Physical resistance, nullification, and absorption.
- Beast Eye - Allows two actions per turn during battle.
- Awakening - Sacrifices some MP to raise magical damage by 50% for one turn.
Yama is too strong for us to be able to reasonably defeat at the moment with the resources we have, but that’s okay. He’s very slow and can be safely ignored. Keisuke, on the other hand, is a much more manageable foe, and that’s a good thing because he is a much greater threat to the civilians’ safety. Though he will summon two Loas to the field near their escape panels at one point, and they’ll spam Bind so that the civilians either can’t escape or we can’t help them before they attack. So before you get that far we really need to heal them up if they’re hurting from Keisuke’s attacks. That’s why I brought along Ishtar, so I could have Affection ready when it was needed.
Once Keisuke’s defeated he says that he wished we of all people could understand what he’s trying to do and leaves, taking Yama with him. All that’s left is to take out the Loas and the mission is complete.
Completing the mission earns us 670 EXP and 410 macca.
The crew’s upset over the path Keisuke’s chosen when Midori comes back to offer a subdued thanks for rescuing her. Yuzu asks if she understands now that some people won’t thank her for doing good deeds and says that she has to be more discrete and lay low from now on. Only for Midori to say that no, she’s still not going to abandon people and that she’ll keep pursuing justice in her own way. Well, she leaves with her death clock still saying zero, and the others worry about the further degradation of relations between demon tamers and normal people.
A new Midori scene has yet to pop up, but the game does allow us to start working on the Aya plotline via a series of timeless scenes starting at Omotesando where a woman says that she once saw her with an important Shomonkai member. Heading to Shinagawa has a Shomonkai member irritably telling us that she has nothing to say about “Lady Aya”, but after some back-and-forth with Roppongi we learn that Aya is/was Azuma’s “guest” and the Shomonkai lady gets fed up and says that if we really want to see Azuma that badly, he’ll be at the Roppongi Hills in two days at 12:00. Thank you~ That was surprisingly painless on our part.
So with that accomplished, time to speak with Gin back in Omotesando. He thanks us for the legwork and says he’ll be at the designated spot. And his death clock drops a digit...
At this point a second Midori scene pops up in Omotesando and you’ll eventually be railroaded into watching this one too. The crew finds her hiding from another mob, but thankfully there’s no fighting this time. They have another talk with her about how it’s a bad thing to force your ideals on others and why people are afraid of her. She seems to finally get the message, but doesn’t want to give up on being a hero because her father apparently taught her to never look away from people, so she asks if she can join our group. Since I’m a nice guy I let her in (I think even if you turn her down Atsuro and Yuzu object), her death clock rises to 2 like ours, and we officially have a full party of four again, whoo!
Midori joins us at Lv. 27 and her stats are similar to Yuzu’s, if a tad weaker and slower. The good thing is that unlike Yuzu she has the standard movement range of four panels rather than three. Like Keisuke though we have to outfit her with skills and demons ourselves. Maybe the COMP deletes its old stock when the user joins up with another network?
Once we’re done patting ourselves on the back it’s time to head to Shibuya for an important Atsuro scene. It begins with him and Akira discussing where Naoya built and designed the server and come to the conclusion that, well, since the Shomonkai contracted him he probably did it under their supervision. Atsuro wonders if he left behind something like a memo or source code that they could use to find the server and we can bring up what Azuma said earlier about them cleaning out his work station tomorrow. Atsuro realizes that hey, we’re his cousin, and if we asked for his things there should be no problem. After watching a short scene with Gin where we learn that he has a COMP too an event with Azuma will open up at Shinagawa. Here we ask if we can have Naoya’s things and the man seems to have an idea of our motives because he says that our cousin didn’t leave anything like a set of blueprints or a memo behind. But we insist, so we’re told to come back tomorrow once everything’s gathered. This is definitely something that needs to be put on a to-do list, because if you forget then we’re locked out of one ending, maybe two.
It’s about three o’clock now and the only other character scene available at the moment is one with Haru, where she continues her backstory talk from yesterday. It’s a bit more uplifting than before, as she explains how after she left her neglectful family she met Aya and became a singer thanks to her. Gin’s definitely been keeping her in the dark about Aya’s disappearance. She says that we should buy one of Aya’s CDs if we ever get a chance and leaves. Despite her more upbeat demeanor today, her death clock still reads zero...
Next up is Shinjuku where we witness a group of thugs trying to shake a guy down, thinking he’s rich. Midori won’t stand for this, and the mustache-twirling yakuza reveal that they have a plan consisting of robbing people then breaking out of the lockdown once their demons get strong enough, so that’s another reason to take them down.
Mission 20
- A demon tamers must be defeated
- The whole party cannot die
- The civilian cannot die
A single civilian surrounded by like six hostiles may seem like something of a sticky situation, but fortunately our starting point is close enough so that we can quickly reach him and draw the thugs’ attention. They don’t use any new demons so most of the thugs aren’t difficult to take down.
Their two bosses, however, are a slightly different story. They’re equipped with an Auto Skill called Battle Aura, which nullifies any attack that inflicts less than fifty points of damage, so you likely won’t be able to hurt them until you take out their demons. While that’s going on they also have the Race-O passive, which lets them do heavy damage to enemies of the same race, in this case our team leaders. Going in heavy is pretty much the only option in dealing with them. They’ll start to flee once most of their henchmen get defeated, but chasing them down before they escape is a simple matter given the map’s guardrails.
Completing the mission earns us 720 EXP and 470 macca.
Turns out the guy who was being shaken down was someone Midori had already saved once the other day so he doesn’t run screaming from us like other people have. Instead he thanks us, saying that he’s glad there are some demon tamers like us around. Well, that was a nice change of pace from usual.
Buuut on the other side of the coin, the next mission, outside of Tokyo Dome, involves Kaido and Honda attacking people with their demons. We gotta step in here...
Mission 21
- Kaido and Honda must be defeated
- The whole party cannot die
- No civilian can die
There are actually two ways that we can choose to go about this mission. We can either defend the civilians as they make for the escape panels, or we can straight-up fight Kaido and Honda. As you can imagine I’m going with the latter, both because I don’t want to have to constantly baby the civilians as the two attack, and because I’m not going to pass up on EXP and the chance to indulge in my fetish for detailed boss entries. The two claim that they were attacked first, so they’re trying to put the people in their places. We’ll see about that.
Kaido (Lv. 29)
HP/MP
- 660/101
- None
- Weak Kill - Deals Physical damage to one target, heavy if they’re suffering from an ailment.
- Brutal Hit - Deals Physical damage to one target that depends on the user’s HP.
- Recarm - Revives one ally at 50% HP.
- Life Surge - HP raised by 30%.
- Retaliate - Moderate chance of countering Physical attacks.
- + Paralyze - Physical attacks may paralyze enemies.
- Blitzkrieg - Increases team’s attack power by 25%.
- Pazuzu, Nisroc
Honda (Lv. 28)
HP/MP
- 384/152
- None
- Media - Restores HP to entire party.
- Maragi - Deals Fire damage to entire enemy party.
- Mabufu - Deals Ice damage to entire enemy party.
- Mana Surge - MP raised by 30%.
- + Mute - Physical attacks may silence enemies.
- Battle Aura - The entire party is protected from attacks that inflict less than 50 damage.
- Silky, Cait Sith
Pazuzu’s Chaos Wave makes Kaido pretty slow, but as he’s bursting with power and has a three-panel attack range he needs to be made the first priority. He’s got a lot of HP, but thankfully both of his demons have weaknesses to Ice, so I had no problems getting extra turns with Ice dance. Honda still doesn’t have that great a team for battle, though his use of Battle Aura again ensures that you probably won’t be able to damage him until his demons are eliminated.
Both of them retreat when defeated, Kaido grumbling that this isn’t fun anymore like a sore loser while Honda just says that he can’t die here.
Completing the mission earns us 780 EXP and 520 macca.
For some reason the crew decides to give Kaido the benefit of the doubt and choose to believe that he just lost his cool. But as it stands relations between normal people and demon tamers continue to widen, and when Yuzu brings up that Kaido’s gotten stronger (eh, I’m not sure we’ve had a good measure of that, really) they raise the possibility that he’s got some kind of Chaos Hero goal in mind.
Let’s close out this update with another Shoji scene. We run into her again in Kanda and she says that since we last met she’s learned that we’re demon tamers, but it’s okay to admit to her. She’s willing to share some more information with us, namely that the true forces behind the lockdown are angels. It’s the truth, she says, she saw them with her own eyes directing the SDF. At their behest, the government locked down downtown Tokyo in order to contain the COMPs and Shomonkai, as they were holding a conference the other day that was attended by their highest-ranking members.
At this point Yuzu asks what makes her so sure angels are behind this, so Shoji asks her a question: does she believe in God? Taken aback, Yuzu stammers that she’s never been very religious and Shoji that if that’s the case, why did her question upset her? She challenges the belief that God always has to be on “our” side and then asks if we’ve learned anything about the supposed calamity that’s coming. Upon telling her about the special forces in the Akasaka Tunnel she eagerly goes off to investigating, leaving the crew to comment on how unbelievable things are getting. Yuzu responds by saying that things have always been unbelievable inside the lockdown, they’re just getting used to it.
Compendium
- Mahakala
◊
- A figure in Buddhism who is considered to be one of the gods of luck in Japan, though elsewhere he is a more violent figure. His name in Hinduism can refer to either Shiva himself or one of his attendants.
- Ishtar◊
- The Babylonian goddess of fertility, love, and sometimes war. One myth states that the seasons came about because every six months Ishtar is consigned to the underworld thanks to a curse laid by her sister, the underworld goddess Ereshkigal.
- Yama◊
- The judge of Hell in Buddhist and Vedic lore. Yama's role was to judge the sinners and determine what punishment they would serve before being reincarnated. Westerners are probably most familiar with his depiction as a Beleaguered Bureaucrat in Dragon Ball Z.
- Ubelluris◊
- The God who held up the western sky in Hittite mythology.
- Ym (NSFW)◊
- A dragon that rules the ocean and seas in Semitic tradition. The floods he causes makes him mortal enemies with Baal, the god of agriculture and fertility.
- Lorelei◊
- The name of a water spirit that's associated with the Lorelei rock that sits on the shore of the Rhine river. It's said to be a malicious spirit that tries to make sailors crash their boats upon the rock.
Soundtrack
- Rival Battle
- The map theme for when we're up against human bosses.
Comments
- This being the only problem he has with Gin.
- However, that doesn't mean he won't listen to what Kaido has to say while letting the thug think what he will. He has picked up a few things from Naoya... And if our hero's can't be everywhere at once a Pawn may be useful.
