Xenogears - The Plan Is Set!

 

Citan gives a rundown of the current military situation. As expected, Bart's men are heavily outnumbered by the Avehian army. The latter have divided themselves into three groups, one supervising the path to Nisan, one guarding the capital, and one guarding the border with their rival nation, Kislev. Naturally, the latter two contain the bulk of their soldiers, with the Nisan group being merely a skeletal force.

He begins laying out his plan. The first step is to stage an attack on their Nisanian force with Kislev gears. Makes sense, it's the weakest force, and causing a diversion there would pull troops away from the other more important forces, especially the one guarding the capital.

Of course, the moral aspects of this move draws more than a few concerns, but Citan reassures them that he doesn't want Nisan to draw Aveh's ire, it's just that with their military situation being so bad, he needs to take some risks.

On to the next part of the plan. Citan mentions that the force at the Kislev border is the largest and strongest one, featuring an old yet mightily armed ship. This causes Bart to worry, but Citan reassures him that, despite everything he just said, dealing with it wouldn't be too hard - its commander, Vanderkaum, was demoted to the post because of his recent incompetence. He's apparently too old fashioned and too stubborn to adapt modern tactics, especially those involving gears. Not only that, his force also had its count of gears reduced.

Of course, it would not be wise to underestimate the force, despite all of that. So Citan suggests making Fei assault that force to keep them occupied. And here's where I start having objections. Why not have Fei leading the charge at the most important location, the capital? Why send him off to fight the border forces? What Citan is suggesting is essentially diluting the strength of Bart's force to fight a very uneven war.

Fei thinks this plan better than me, as he unhesitatingly agrees. Bart and Sigurd show concern, but he reassures them. Citan then urges them to conduct this plan as soon as possible, and Bart, in agreement, chooses the very next day.

He also utters these overtly enthusiastic words which, um, don't really inspire much confidence in me. Nor does the ominous music which announces the dawn of the next day.

But hey! At least Margie is here to mildly poke fun at Bart. That's good.

At the harbor, they go over the plan once more, before Margie and Bart tease each other over the latter soon becoming a king. The relationship between the two is genuinely very funny, and it's a little unfortunate that we won't be seeing much of Margie for a long while.

Once the party is gone, Agnes starts pushing the idea of the cousins marrying and fucking each other. Ugh, gross. Margie doesn't care much for the idea, but Agnes, ignoring her protests, keeps talking about how she's quickly maturing into a "beautiful woman" and how Bart won't be able to "ignore" her for much longer. Weird.

On the ship, Fei and his squad prepare to take off for their mission. But before Fei can leave, Bart stops him to express his concerns for him and also to get him to promise to take care of Margie if he dies. Uhh, you're really not helping the mood here, Bart.

There's a really brief CGI scene of Weltall being launched out of the ship, and then we cut to Citan visiting Maison in the middle of the night. Maison muses about how he may have burdened Bart too much in his childhood, and how it's sad that he barely got to know his home city.

Citan, after briefly consoling Maison, heads up to the deck, where he catches Bart and Sigurd having a heartfelt chat in the moonlight. It turns out Bart feels he isn't worthy to be king, but Sigurd insists that it doesn't matter - he's not loyal to him because he's the "rightful ruler", rather he fights for him because he likes him for who he is, and believes he should be restored to his rightful house.

Bart, reinvigorated by Sigurd's chat, vows to fight Shakhan with all his resolve. Sigurd takes this opportunity to mock Bart's poor hygiene, while Citan silently admires his talking skills from afar. This game really loves running through the entire gamut of emotions.

The very next scene is Ramsus suffering through a nightmare of the mysterious red man destroying his forces. We see Grahf silently observing everything in the distance, as the red man enters a red gear and begins destroying Ramsus' soldiers with even more ferocity, before descending on and killing Ramsus himself!

Ramsus, naturally disturbed by his nightmare, wakes up panting. Miang tries to reassure him, but he just walks away. She then senses Grahf's presence in the room, and calls him out amusingly.

Grahf veiledly threatens her to not plot against him, but she's clearly quite nonplussed. She lightly comments on how he seems to know about everything, and casually promises to not "steal" Fei and to cooperate with him. Damn shadowy people and their shadowy plans!

As if to deepen the engima, the next scene has the operator of Bart's ship comment on a mysterious presence underneath the sand. Before we learn much about it, news about the Avehian armies getting distracted and being sent away from the capital floods in, much to the delight of Bart. Maison, like me, feels uneasy, but Bart was never one to take things cautiously, and simply dismisses him. Welp.

We cut to Gebler's barracks, where the Gebler goons prove themselves very charming by mocking Elly, who's their commander, for being a woman. Great. The writers surely didn't spend any expense in making them sympathetic whatsoever.

Random mook sexism aside, this scene does have a purpose: it introduces a new gear that can apparently only be operated by people with strong psychic powers. Odds are, we'll be fighting it quite soon....

And with one final cut, we're thrust back into gameplay, with us getting control of Fei amongst his squad. Yeah, errr, the game is extremely heavy on its story, and since I did take a fairly long hiatus, I figured I'd get an extra long update out and get all of the setup out of the way, before seeing the payoff, aka the outcome of the plan itself. That shall be next time. See y'all then!