Imprisoned, Fei has little to talk about. So he sleeps, and gets this weird dream of Grahf, a mustachioed man and some red haired guy readying themselves for a face off!
The dream stirs Fei out of sleep, and Citan enquires whether he rested well. Then, he begins to apologize for getting him into this condition, as Weltall was a top secret Gear that would naturally attract the interest of both armies. I still feel like he has some underhanded motives for Weltall that he isn't revealing, but eh.
Citan notices Fei being rather moody, and changes tack, asking him if he was pondering Grahf's words about his dad. Fei replies that he's more worried about how Grahf had claimed to trick him into destroying his own village. Which, well, perfectly understandable.
Citan reassures Fei by telling him to not worry too much about it, but privately, he wonders if Fei is the Chosen One. We then cut to a conversation in his past, where an Emperor told him of a prophecy of humans returning to God's paradise and living eternally.
That prophecy was soon to come true, and so, he and his group, the Gazel, had to find God's resting place and resurrect him. This was their only hope of averting an upcoming apocalypse. Hmm. Ominous.
We then abruptly cut to a rather enthusiastic voyeur spying on the couple's detention vehicle. They seem quite interested in the Gear up top. Must be a very fancy machine to draw all of this attention, lol.
The observer turns out to be a yellow haired pirate captain, who immediately orders his ship to attack them!
His butler and his companion try to get him to desist, but he pays them little heed! His ship surfaces and fires upon the vehicle.
Predictably, the vehicle does not take the hits well. It starts keeling over and...sinking? Into the sand? Lol. Whatever, let's buy into it for the drama.
Anyway, Fei and Citan make their way through the sinking vehicle, closing some bulkheads, fighting some desperate soldiers, and getting blown away by random explosions in the engine room. One nice touch to this area is that you can actually see the place fall apart as the vehicle keeps sinking and the engine keeps sputtering out of control, with more craters forming and more tiles coming off.
Eventually, they reach the outside, where Citan urges Fei to walk across a spindly crane arm to retrieve Weltall before it is lost to the sands. Hmm. Very odd behavior for someone arguing for its repairs to move it away from Lahan not too long ago.
This leads to a bizarre but short minigame where Fei has to maintain his balance while running across. Thankfully, it is not possible to lose via cheap falls, as Fei will quickly pick himself back up. There is a timer, though, and once it runs out the game resets the entire segment. Kinda annoying.
The Gear activates, and flies the two to safety. Fei reveals that it acted on its own, almost like it had a mind of its own!
But before they can figure out anything more about Weltall, the pirate captain from earlier challenges Fei to a fight in his own Gear! He proves to be a rather easy opponent, however. Maybe Weltall is really that good, lol.
Unfortunately, both of them get so caught up in fighting, they end up getting sucked in by the sand. Heh, rather anticlimactic. Well, let's hope someone fishes them out soon, else this is going to be a very short game!
Or they could end up in some caves right below the quicksand. Sure.
Anyway, the pirate captain lets up after seeing Fei leave the precious high tech Gear, and introduces himself. He's Bart, a pirate captain operating within the desert. Fei briefly explains his situation to him, and Bart, relieved to not be dealing with an adversary, proposes a "truce" with him until they get out, with a fair bit of smugness on his face.
Elsewhere, we see that Citan was safely rescued, and that the pirates are a decent bit more magnanimous than their first impressions would suggest - they willingly rescued all soldiers and personnel that had survived the attack on the vehicle. Also, they do have a search party looking for Bart. Good, nice to see they're well organized pirates. Lol.
Also, the pirate's companion gets a name - Sigurd. Apparently he knew Citan in his past, and is quite disapproving of Bart's attitude. Lol. Also, Citan changed his name from Hyuga. Citan doesn't say much, besides vaguely talking about destiny making them meet again. And scene!
We then join back with Fei and Bart, who tackle the game's first Gear dungeon. They're essentially like "normal" dungeons, only they have Gears running and jumping through them. The main gameplay concern here is lacking access to any direct healing, meaning that conserving HP and fuel by carefully picking fights becomes paramount to surviving them.
The player can get their characters out of Gears in these dungeons if they wish, but often there isn't any real reason to, outside of accessing small passageways and doors.
Most enemies in Gear dungeons are Gear-sized, and as such, they deal considerably more damage to characters than to Gears. Adorably, these dungeons also feature human-sized enemies every so often, letting us observe just how frail humans are against them, lol.
The enemy in focus here is a Tin Robot, a rickety gear clearly built more for mining than for fighting. It doesn't do a lot of damage, and it tends to stumble and fall, dealing damage to itself! The humans are raiders, and are, as mentioned before, easily dispatched. As an aside, each Gear has separate animations for attacking human sized enemies, and they're all quite goofy, lol.
Bart's sensors detect a way out of the cave! There's a rock on their path, and Fei gets Bart to push it along with him, despite his great reluctance.
The rock is pushed aside, but Bart immediately begins whining about how his Gear's leg is starting to give away, and how it would suck if it broke down in this cave. Fei asks him about whether his crew isn't looking for him, and whether Citan is safe. He lies to Fei about the former and reassures him about the latter.
Fei then pointedly informs him that they got into this situation because of his brashness - if only he'd have bothered listening to him instead of fighting him, they could've easily avoided all of this. Bart, taken aback, decides to turn the blame on Fei, while blatantly lying about "going easy" on him and threatening to fight him again when Fei calls him out! Jeez. Yeah, he's a bit of a brat, lol.
Thankfully, Fei steps away and makes him see reason, pointing out that he had made a truce because they needed to help each other to escape the cave. Bart resignedly accepts this, and drops the argument for now.
Ahead, they run into a random excavating Gear. It tells them about a gate that was activated to stop excess sand from flowing in, as this was an excavation site. Until the flow is stopped, it advises them to wait in a shelter ahead.
The two are surprised to run into someone in the shelter, especially one looking this old. He comments on how they seemed to be riding good Gears, with one of them having leg problems. He could make out all of this just by hearing them, he's just that good! Also, he's straight up called Balthazar. Yep. Just a casual wise man in this here cave.
Bart, somewhat crudely, enquires him about his choice of habitat. Balthazar, unfazed, informs them that he has been collecting fossils from the excavation site, and then shows them his collection of bones. He asks them to see if they can identify anything. Bart, casual as ever, dismisses it as "just" a "pile of bones", but Fei is able to recognize that human bones only begin to show up after a certain point on the shelf.
Balthazar then explains what this means - human beings only started showing up on this planet 10,000 years ago, and showed up with their skeletal structure already in place. This meant that they were not native to this planet, but were transported here by something. Hmm. Perhaps the colony ship in the intro had more survivors than just the one lady?
Also, Bart brings up that Ethos teaches people that humanity evolved from other animals, and Balthazar brings up that the concept of humanity evolving might very well be a lie. That's an interesting contrast to our reality, lol.
Balthazar then starts straight up quoting the Genesis' story of humanity's expulsion of paradise, with the added twist of humanity making giants to fight God. God destroyed them and most of humanity with his wrath, but was wounded in turn. He then retreated into his paradise to rest, and hid it under the ocean, where it has been lying since. He also created another batch of people to replace his last rebellious batch, lol. These people are supposedly the ancestors of all humans on this planet.
Alternate Genesis tales might be interesting, but the two have bigger concerns right now. Like getting out of this cave. Balthazar decides to point out exactly how to open the sand gate, as he doesn't like being barred by it either. They need to turn off two sensors, and then he'll operate the gate's controls to open it. Simple, right?
He also serves as our first Gear store! Gear stores are capable of repairing Gears, as well as selling upgrades for them. Since Gears get no experience, this is basically their only progression system. Gear upgrades are pricey as fuck, but extremely impactful, and so should be obtained as soon as possible. Especially since some Gear-like enemies start ramping up their defenses significantly.
There's honestly not a lot to talk about this dungeon. It's mostly a rather bland and boring affair, with very dull looking rooms and rather uninteresting foes, despite some charming gimmicks. There isn't even any background music for most of it! What a drag!
Also Bart is our first weapon user. Both Fei and Citan don't use any weapons, as they are fist fighters. Bart swings whips, in a rather curious choice of weaponry. Perhaps he likes seeing them flail about? Not sure really.
Anyway, they get the sensors shut, and Balthazar keeps his end of the bargain, opening the way forward. But, before doing so, they decide to stop at his shelter for a short rest. Bart queries him about an ancient Gear that was so powerful, it was dubbed the "God Gear". Balthazar thinks about the legend, but ultimately dismisses it as make believe, and then leaves to check on their Gears.
Bart mulls about how he wishes for such a powerful Gear, and how the Gears extracted recently are nowhere as powerful, being only a few hundred years old. They talk about their history, and it turns out, there aren't any solid historical records for either relatively recent Gears, or ancient Gears. The Ethos controls all of the available information, and so it's hard to find out much about them.
Balthazar returns, very curious about Fei's Gear. It turns out, Weltall is, per his words, a host for a god slayer. Hmmm. Fei, getting curious himself, tries asking him for a clarification, but he abruptly blows the two off, telling them to leave as soon as possible! Well okay then.
Past the gate, things get a bit more interesting. This freaky mantis robot hybrid looks cool, even if its moves are mechanically rather bland, outside of its defense lowering breath.
There's a gondola ride with a tiny, human sized gondola. It's almost adorable how tiny it is from the pov of a giant combat robot.
There's also this dug up area which was clearly dug up using much smaller, human proportioned vehicles. Lol.
And with that, we're nearly done with this dungeon!
But not before a fight with our "first" boss, Mr. Chonky Gear. Chonkbot is, as far as I can tell, a huge physical attacker. So it's not really into tricks, and Bart's little accuracy debuff actually helps a lot here. Aside from that, the fight is pretty simple - pummel it with everything we've got! It's got a fair bit of defense, but as long as both Gears are upgraded, it's not too hard to wear it down with constant offense.
Chonky Gear tries pulling a fast one on Bart after defeat, but Fei, startled by the situation, quickly rushes to stop him, unleashing some dark punches! This leads to an awkward situation afterwards, where Bart constantly prods Fei over his cool new technique, which he pulled from his angry spirit in a fit of desperation, and so knows nothing about. Lol.
And NOW, we're finally out. Phew! What a dull, tiresome dungeon that was. Bart casually drops some tidbits about his origin, mentioning that he's from the capital of Aveh itself, Bledavik. He points Fei to a rendezvous point with his ship, the Yggdrasil.
At the ship, Fei is at last reunited with Citan. Bart gets some hilarious admonishments from Sigurd, Fei mulls over his god slayer vessel, annd we finally get out of the desert and into a brand new "town".
But what shall happen next? Will Fei and Citan fully support these pirates? Will these pirates take them on a daring new adventure? What exactly is Bart's deal? Or Sigurd's, for that matter? Find out all this and more next time!
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