Just as episode 0 was a more effective prologue, episode 1 is a more effective first arc than The Reconstruction’s chapter 1. We’re thrown into action early on, sidequests are meaningful instead of busywork, and multiple long-term plot hooks are set up instead of only one.
Marie is the one to wake Ros up again.

Ros: “No use in asking what’s going on, is there?”
Marie: “We finished the new Hab. We’re almost within Relay range. It’s gonna be a big moment for all of us.”

And she’s is providing necessary information when prompted, like an actual person! I hope this continues.

I’m immediately taken to the assembly hall, but Sorenson’s explanation is essentially identical: they built a house, and everyone’s very excited. When he tries to make contact, though, he discovers it’s being attacked by Lessers, so I’m shoved out the door to deal with the problem. Yes! This is how you build tension and excitement, not by having farmers tell me to squash bugs.

Something about this amuses me. Most games are so polite about their save prompts, but this one is just like “You WILL save your progress now, OR ELSE.”

Here you can see this mission’s gimmick. It is basically impossible for the Lessers to actually destroy the hab unless you do nothing for the entire mission, and there are three nodes that repair the integrity if you really need them. The mission basically creates the illusion of tension and danger without actually making you stress over it, which I think is good for an early level. You do get a bonus if you keep the integrity high, which is a nice incentive.

The characters flip out over how the Lessers shouldn’t be capable of this kind of coordination blah blah racism. I get the impression this was foreshadowing for something that got cut. There’s an awful lot of stuff about how the whole “working together” thing is weird and new, especially in the early segments, and while it does sort of come to a head eventually, there’s no proper conclusion or explanation for what triggered the change. My best guess is that an important Lesser character we’ll meet later was originally intended to be a superintelligent ringleader capable of rallying all the Lessers behind a single goal, and when his plot role was changed this whole thread got dropped.

Easy game is easy. I send the Lessers packing without much trouble. (And yes, there’s an achievement system. Most of them are really annoying to get, so I won’t be going for all of them.)

After the mission, I get a new party member, who also gives the crew some racial diversity. I’m not an expert on race stuff, but he seems like a much better portrayal than Marie — though his dialogue is very informal and vernacular, his main trait is his skill in computer science, which I don’t believe is a black stereotype.

Gameplay-wise, he’s a specialist on defense and a generalist on offense, which is a bad combination. I’m particularly confused as to why the IT guy has the worst systems defense ever; shouldn’t that be his specialty? His other defenses are great, but that Achilles’ heel makes me too nervous to use him in normal combat, since it’s almost impossible to predict what weapons you’ll be up against beforehand.

And while I’m looking at character bios, I notice that everyone’s gotten a big personal trust boost. I wasn’t expecting that. I’ll have to keep checking to see if this is a consistent thing across episodes. I guess it makes a degree of sense that the characters would warm up to Ros over time, but it’s a little odd that that passive increase is so much more significant than what you get from taking the time to talk to them personally.

We then get some exposition.

Rami: “I see they put up some more plasmatic bars. What’s with the rooms on the sides, though?”
Neff: “Lesser traps! Quarantine for if one of those ugly bastards gets inside.”
Tezkhra: “Sensors detect the distinct chemical they give off, triggering the trap. The side areas are holding cells. Once captured, we can decide what to do with them. Most major facilities have this system in place.”
Rami: “O-oh yeah. I knew that.”

Some very awkward exposition. We do need to know this for a later scene, but having the doctor, of all people, act as the Watson for this is just cringe-worthy. This would have worked a lot better if Ros was the one asking the question. Actually, you could probably relegate it to optional NPC chatter; the main characters have opportunity to explain everything in the later scene where it becomes important.

As for the plot, Sorenson doesn’t tell me much, just that my next assignment is waiting for me. I spend the next several minutes exploring the space station and talking to everyone.

Inhabitant: “There’s about 100 of us in and out of here from time to time, but the whole thing should hold at least a thousand.”

Uh… just how populous is humanity right now? ‘Cause even with a huge death toll from the Shine, I imagine they’re still in the billions. A thousand should be a drop in the bucket. I guess the idea is that there are supposed to be a lot of these things.

You know, why are they so obsessed with building space stations when there are plenty of perfectly good planets out there? There’s supposed to be some handwave about people not liking to live on planets anymore, which seems really weird, and also it’s never elaborated on. I can understand if the developer wanted to portray a future where humanity was utterly divorced from all nature (or if he didn’t want to design organic tilesets, which I suspect may have been a factor), but that’s such a leap from our current behavior that you really have to sell it. And even then, a big emphasis is placed on how the best the Inquiry can do is jury-rigged junk made with limited resources, so they should grit their teeth and make planet bases anyway. Emitters mean people don’t even need to breathe, so hostile environments aren’t even an issue.

Inhabitant: “They use those magnetic charges to keep our feet on the ground here, instead of rotation like my last Hab.”

Wait, so there’s no artificial gravity? How is that possible? Humans get really horrible deformations and ailments when they spend a lot of time away from gravity; it’s one of the biggest concerns astronauts face. Artificial gravity should be a requirement for any long-term living space, unless the emitters take care of that too? Oh, and plus, I’d imagine magnetic floors would interact really badly with cyborgs.

Crewman: “These distillation chambers are apparently a necessity now. We razed many moons to find enough water for the whole thing.”

Wait, a necessity for what? Cooling systems? The emitters are magic and remove the need for food and water too, so it can’t be for the inhabitants.

Tezkhra: “Order must persist. Despite what some say, I know it to be the natural progression of all things.”

shhh no one tell him about entropy

Interesting. Typelog is shaping up to be pretty sinister. Although, once again, how do you know that Ros you’re supposed to be an amnesiac remember?

And finally, there’s a little sidequest I can do here. This is Soran. He likes collecting “carboderm”, which is some kind of self-repairing nanotechnology. It is also a vendor trash item I can find while spacefaring. If I turn a bunch over to him at once, he’ll give me special items. Unfortunately, I don’t think this sidequest was well-balanced. I think you’re supposed to be able to advance one step per episode, but his quotas become bigger and bigger while your rate of carboderm acquisition stays flat. If you’re extremely lucky and get carboderm from every single treasure box you come across, you might be able to finish this by the end, but otherwise you’ll have a lot of grinding to do. Right now I can fulfill his initial request of 10 carboderm (getting me a minor defense boost for extension shells; useless) but I’m nowhere near his next quota of 25, and I doubt I will be for a while.

I also get a new batch of articles. One is pretentious musing about Habitation Zero, one is more hysterical flailing about how weird it is that the Lessers are doing stuff, and one is this, the message that Sorenson is being so cagey about. As is trendy these days, it makes a halfhearted jab about standard player behavior looking sociopathic from an internal perspective without actually committing to it. After seeing Undertale actually walk the walk, this kind of posturing just doesn’t impress me anymore. Also, kind of anticlimactic to have it appear as a normal article, and pretty weird, too, since this is supposed to be a public forum. It would have made more sense for Sorenson to display the message in the next briefing.

Speaking of which, my next mission is a fetch quest. I have to replace the materials lost in the attack. This is actually handled quite well, because the location I’m exploring has story significance that ties into another subplot. It’s not the empty filler it seems at first.

Neff: “Tri-Barium… Siliderm… Chorded Alloy? Where are we gonna find that kinda stuff?”

the capitalization burnsss usssss

Sorenson also explains about the message, but we already read it so eh. The only new information is that Sorenson hasn’t noticed any suspicious movements, so Lagarto appears to be biding his time. With the hab damaged, Sorenson fears Lagarto will swoop in and seize the opportunity, so fixing it is top priority.

This mission is pretty unremarkable, but does serve as a springboard for the multiple fleet mechanic now that we have Neff. The Reconstruction tried really hard to convince you to split the party, and I Miss the Sunrise tries really hard to convince you to use your whole roster. It works a lot better since there’s no actual downside to using multiple fleets, but I still usually found myself using one main fleet to do the important stuff and using the rest for cleanup. This is mainly because it’s enough of a pain outfitting one fleet with weapons; trying to do it for everyone is maddening. Once you start upgrading weapons you can give them hand-me-downs, I guess, but still…effort. The real advantage is that additional fleets give you more movement points. I presume this was done to encourage you to use the mechanic, since moving multiple fleets naturally means spending more movement points, but there’s nothing stopping you from abusing it by giving all the extra movement to a single fleet, which is what I usually do.

There’s a walkable area here for picking up the stuff, but there are no puzzles, which disappoints me.

Afterwards, I can do a sidequest. Chac was an officer for the destroyed ship you can see in the mission map, and the only survivor after the Shine destroyed it. He lost his legs in an explosion or something, and now he’s really depressed and full of survivor guilt. This is a real fetch quest; I have to jump through a bunch of hoops to get him to like me, then I have to cough up some vendortrash to make him mechanical legs. The legs aren’t cybernetic, which raises the question of how he can use them. I’m pretty sure his hip was destroyed, so he shouldn’t have the requisite muscles. (There is also the question of why no one tried this before if normal prosthetics are possible, but I guess you could handwave that as the society being too dependent on cybernetics for it to occur to them.)

Ros: “Chac, I finished a battle as the only active pilot. Does that count as being a ‘lone survivor’?”
Chac: “…and how did it feel? To see your friends, your… everyone, burning to death around you?”
Ros: “It wasn’t anything quite that serious. Plus, we still won.”
Chac: “…I know. Still, your readiness to admit such failings is most appreciated.”

This is one of the requirements, and I find this dialogue pretty forced and silly. It seems like Ros is trying to connect with him, but the situations are incomparable, and trying to compare them only trivializes what Chac went through. Yet Chac’s only response is to be super melodramatic followed by congratulating her on something completely unrelated. Thinking about it, a better way this could have worked might be to emphasize the “we still won” part. Chac’s big thing is that he’s given up on life, so having someone show him that it’s worth it to keep trying because you can always pull through should be what resonates with him. Instead the message he takes away from it is that everyone’s a failure but at least Ros is willing to admit it, which sounds like it’s really just making him worse.

After I get him everything, he starts spilling his heart out.

“…but, something happened. I became filled with… something. A feeling. Emotion. All I wanted to do was get away. I should have stayed I should have tried to help. But my mind and body would not allow it. I had to run. The flames consumed my legs as I crawled into the lone surviving evac chamber. Then… I was free. the craft, the crew… all a total loss. I was their Officer. And I was powerless against myself.”

I like this. Throughout the story we get passing references to the suppression and the way people are coping with a new influx of emotion, but it’s all portrayed very casually for something that should be world-shaking to everyone. This is one of the few times we get a good example of what this was like for people. I find it quite poignant; when you get down to it, it is really scary how emotions can sometimes run so high that they make you do things you would never do rationally, and it makes sense that people would be even worse at dealing with them after spending so long sweeping the problem under the rug. There’s something almost childlike about how everyone is figuring out how to navigate all that nuance and irrationality all over again, which is fitting for a post-apocalyptic narrative. It’s a regression, but also a rebirth, an opportunity to reinvent oneself. The citizens are a microcosm of their society as a whole, as it should be.

Everyone gives Chac the legs and a pep talk, which lift his spirits enough to convince him to fight for me. He’s a generalist in both offense and defense, and his stat total is really high. His specialty is regeneration, but since battles rarely last more than two rounds that’s not very important. I usually have him replace Tezkhra or Mahk at this point, but with a LAC Ros I need my ranged attackers, and enemies are pretty weak for now so I can keep Mahk on the field a little longer.

Let’s end this update here, on a good note. Next time, we meet the game’s Lovable Sexual Harasser. Brace yourselves.

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