Past Posts
***** SPOILERS THROUGHOUT POST *****
Noah, Mio, N, and M
I left the last post on a cliff hanger so going to start this one with some plot to explain where the game went. The party was defeated and captured. Mio is dead. Moebius N was swinging his sword down on Noah’s neck.
Noah wakes up in a fog filled void. There is a hooded child that talks to him. The child shows him memories of his past lives. In every life he meets Mio and falls in love. They ally with the City against Moebius. Then tragedy strikes. One time they challenged the Moebius leader, Z, and were curbstomped. Other times Mio met the end of her 10-year lifespan before Noah.
In one lifespan they had a child together. We see a heartwarming scene of Noah and Mio with their child. It turns to heartbreak after a time skip where we see Noah and their child say goodbye to a dying Mio. More heartbreak later when Noah leaves some parting words before dying himself, leaving their child an orphan.
Z brought past-Noah to his lair and showed him all this. Z promised past-Noah an “endless now” where he could eternally be with Mio. Past-Noah took the deal and both he and Mio became Moebius: N and M. It’s not clear how the present Noah and Mio came to be; the best guess ventured is that the regrets of N and M materialized and formed the Noah and Mio we know.
The hooded child asks Noah if he will go down the same path as his other. Noah admits he doesn’t know for sure but resolves to change things. He talks about all the death he’s seen and wanting to build a better world for people. The child extends a hand, revealing Mio’s hand, and asks Noah to walk together.
Reversal
Back in the present, N’s blade comes down on Noah but is blocked by a force field from M. M walks over to Noah. Instead of gloating, M talks familiarly with Noah, apologizing that her hair is now long. Noah and N begin to make the connection. A month ago, when the group fought M, she used her body switching powers. This included on Mio. Except Mio and M never actually switched back. M stayed in Mio’s body and is the one who died. Mio is now in M’s body with no time limit.
After the despair that was the end of Chapter 5 this scene was an awesome reversal. Noah sheds tears of joy that Mio is alive. The rest of the party is flabbergasted but recover. They fight off their captors and Sena and Taion have a brief happy reunion with Mio.
N, on the other hand, is devastated when he learns his Mio is the one who died. I’m not a voice acting expert but I think Noah’s VA (who is the same as N) nailed it between the end of Chapter 5 and now this scene. You can see and hear N going mad. N declares he’ll have to start everything all over for him and Mio; that means killing Noah, Mio, and himself. He also points to N and says, “You have stolen her away from me,” which gave me strong Vader-in-Episode-3 vibes. On that note, Mio says that M never wanted to become Moebius and felt trapped by the decisions N made for her. That’s why M was okay with dying.
A beatdown ensues. Noah and Mio are able to Interlink even though X and her sealing staff are still present. They break the staff and the rest of the party joins the fray. They then fight N (gameplay wise pretty much the same as end of Chapter 5) and this time seriously wound him. X sics the false Agnian Queen on the party who gets in a huge Ferronis. The party takes it down too.
However, X reveals that Agnus Castle has an Annihilator just as Keves did. And Shania the traitor gave the location of the City to them. It’s already charged and nothing can stop it. It destroys the City and takes a chunk out of the Mechonis’s Sword. Just when hope returned despair replaces it. And then…
It may be corny but I loved Ghondor’s triumphant return. Mio, as M, had warned Monica and Ghondor during the past month. They were able to evacuate the City. Turns out the City is a huge mobile Ferronis itself. X takes N and flees. With all their commanders gone Agnus Castle puts up little resistance and is taken by the Lost Numbers.
Ghondor confronts Shania. Shania was already going mad and planned to kill herself anyway. She summons her Blade, a pistol, points it at her head, and pulls the trigger…
***** Gameplay/Sidequest Section *****
The Cycle of Rebirth
Now that the party knows about the cycle of rebirth many sidequests deal with finding previously dead characters who have been reborn. They liberate a whole colony filled with aged-up reborn characters that were being used by a Moebius. This colony includes Miyabi, Mio’s friend, Ethel, and Cammuravi.
Another sidequest reveals the Lost Colony, a colony whose Flame Clock stopped working on its own and thus they already were freed from the forever war. Taion’s first Commander, Nimue, was originally from there. She longed to see the outside world and met Isurd when he was wounded and found his way there. In the sidequest, Isurd feels regret that he pulled Nimue from her peaceful life but finds out Nimue has been reborn there. He begs Taion to save the colony, which is being targeted by Moebius, but keep Nimue there.
New Classes
Attackers – Some powerful new stuff here. Ghondor’s Martial Artist has a sky high crit rate and just does a ton of damage without a lot of bells and whistles. Cammuravi’s Seraph is like Final Fantasy’s Dark Knight: sacrifice HP for its powerful attacks. Thankfully it uses a percentage of current HP instead of max which makes the sacrifice less annoying. Machine Assassin is a class that gets a lot of flak because it focuses on debuffs and a lot of later bosses are immune. I still had fun with it though.
Healers – Miyabi’s Troubadour includes Ring o’ Roses, a circle set on the group and anyone inside gets a boost to their Arts recharge speed. That’s bonkers on its own and really speeds up the team’s pain train. Arts not only do more damage on their own but they charge both the Chain Attack and Ouroboros gauges so you’re getting those quicker too.
Defenders – None! Defenders go back to getting the shaft.
Lucky Seven – Noah can now draw Lucky Seven in any class. To do so you need to charge his Unlimited Sword art but it’s well worth it. He gets Lucky Seven for 90 seconds. During this time he’s invincible and his Arts change based on his current role. I mostly used it as an Attacker. Every one of his Arts now do crazy high damage, some can put a random buff on the party while doing high damage, and Tachyon Slash does a bunch of hits that all do a bunch of damage. And it can be used in Chain Attacks. Once again, the game keeps throwing power at you.
Ascension Quests
When you get a class it’s capped at Class Level 10. To raise the cap to 20 you need to do an Ascension Quest for the class’s character. These quests add extra story for that character too. Many of them deal with the liberated Commanders ongoing efforts to make do without Castle support and build alliances with the other liberated colonies.
Zeon’s quest has become a meme in the fanbase because he obsesses over potatoes. It makes some sense in context because he needs a food source for his colony. But the quest drags on and on as he tries to grow potatoes and then raves about them after being successful.
Eunie’s quest reveals the truth of gold rank: when a colony would reach gold a Moebius would come by and wipe them out. This was because a gold rank colony had the best life force for them to harvest. This is why Moebius D killed Eunie in a past life.
Gray turns out to be a denizen of the City. His quest involves intrigue and backstabbing in the City. There are factions that want to overthrow Monica and Gray is tasked with rooting them out. His wife is seemingly a part of this faction. But at the end she turns against the traitors. Gray always knew she was planted to root them out and the two of them make a cunning and formidable team. Nevertheless, after seeing the City held up to such a high standard compared to the rest of the world it’s interesting to see they have problems too. It’s a reminder that our heroes aren’t fighting to make the world perfect; their world is just so terrible that converting to what we would consider a more normal world is still a huge improvement.
***** PLOT SECTION *****
Now with the key to the Cloudkeep the team travels to the upper Aetia region, above where they started the game. Inside they find a grand stasis pod with the true Queen Nia, queen of Agnus and a character from XC2. However, she’s shot by Moebius D, who followed the group to the Cloudkeep. D is joined by J (Joran).
Joran reveals why he became Moebius. He was shown his past deaths. In each past life Joran was unsuited for the battlefield and met an undignified end; one time he was even run over by a Levnis on his own side not even in combat. He wanted to see what it was like being one of the powerful for a change.
Noah, Lanz, and Eunie talk with him. They insist that this isn’t how Joran really is, that he’s actually kind. They point out that by sacrificing himself to save Lanz he already proved how powerful he is. The words start to resonate with Joran.
D is having none of this. He forces Joran into an Interlink and fights Ouroboros. However, Joran decided to sacrifice himself once again. D can’t cancel the Interlink without Joran’s cooperation. Joran absorbs too much energy so that it speeds up the Annhilation timer. He then forces their Interlink form off the Cloudkeep so they explode safely away from the heroes. As he does so, Noah, Lanz, and Eunie see a vision of Joran as he once was, promising to see them again some day.
The Truth of Aionios
Queen Nia survived being shot. She tells the team about the nature of Aionios. In XC1 we learned that world came from our own (Earth) due to a mad scientist’s (Klaus, who then became the antagonist Zanza) experiment. In XC2 that world came from the same experiment. The two worlds separated from the same source… and they were being drawn back together.
However, the two worlds were negatives of the other. If they merged they would annihilate each other. Melia of XC1 and Nia of XC2 became aware of this and learned to communicate with each other. They enacted a plan to save their worlds: Origin. Made of the strongest metal known to either world it stored data on their entire worlds and its people. The two universes would merge, the worlds would be annihilated, but Origin would survive. Then Origin would “reboot” the worlds with its data, restoring them and their people back to their pre-merge state.
Way back at the beginning of the game we see a young Noah, Lanz, Eunie, and Joran running around a city. Alcamoth, a castle from XC1, can be seen. As the clock struck midnight all time seemed to stop except for Noah. He looked around at everything frozen. Then he looked in the sky and saw another world about to collide with his.
Origin didn’t activate as it should have. Instead, it was hijacked by Moebius. Z took over Origin and captured the Kevesi queen, Melia. He used Origin to create Aionios: a fusion of the two worlds frozen in time. It’s sustained by the life force released in the forever war.
Thus, in order to end the forever war the group needs to take back Melia and Origin from Moebius. The path the heroes have taken so far has made a circle. Origin is in rough, impassable seas. The team thinks of an engineer they had talked of who was working on a ship that could navigate the sea.
The decisive battle draws near. The party prepares for an assault on Origin.
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