Aside from the obvious associations, “forever and ever” is a Biblical phrase, usually referring to God and the salvation he offers. I think this title would have been far more fitting for episode 5. You’ll see why when we get there.
Marie is the only one to wake Ros from the tank this time. She says it’s been a while – presumably longer than the previous episode gaps, because she’s worried Ros has gone loopy from being in the tank for so long. Now why would that be? We’re told the tank serves the same purpose as stasis chambers for Ros; it’s supposed to preserve her mind, not degrade it. Is this why every outsider so far has been disturbed by Ros’ treatment? Did the Inquiry crew lie to her about its true purpose? Ros completely ignores these implications and just says she’s fine.
Ros: “It feels good to be out of that tube again.”
But what would she have to compare it to? She’s unconscious while she’s in there.
Marie acts a little awkward and tells Ros to come to the briefing room, but also warns her to keep her head down. She leaves, and Ros wonders where Sorenson is.
“They must be harder to catch than he thought. Alive, anyway.”
On the way there, I pick up some nicely ominous NPC chatter. The last one seems out of place, though – why would Sorenson put Ros here if he thinks she’s still in the tank? For that matter, why would he bother placing her in a normal cell when the tank is so much more effective? This sounds creepy but it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
And… wait, what happened to Lagarto?! If you don’t deal with him by this point they kill him? I wasn’t given any warning that this would happen and now I’m permanently locked out of the choice?! That is such crap!
Ugh, whatever. I revert to my end-of-episode-3 save and release him. I said back in episode 2 that there was a reason I wanted to release him now, and that’s because, as you can probably tell, any piracy he could commit now is a drop in the bucket compared to the baseline danger of the war. He has bigger problems now and so do we. It would be kinder to release him at the war’s end instead of its beginning, but, well, you make do with what you can.
Incidentally, this choice finally maxes out Ros’ flexibility score, making her a RULEBREAKER. I’m a bit surprised that things turned out this way, since I’m normally such a goody two-shoes. I guess that outlook changes quick when the authorities are all evil and/or stupid.
Annnd I just now notice that the trust boost you get from this applies to the whole crew, not just Marie! Woah, broken much? This is definitely way better than the paltry money reward.
You can also poke Sorenson, which results in this cringe-worthy narration. Their reunion obviously has to be saved for a suitably dramatic cutscene, but it’s absurd to have him ignore her when she’s trying to get his attention. It would make a lot more sense if the text here was something like “Marie told you to keep your head down, so maybe you shouldn’t bug Sorenson yet.”
The storage room has also been cleared out, which is a nice touch. Guess they need all the resources they can get. I suppose it’s just as well, because treasure chests are somehow STILL giving me worthless junk.
But on to the plot.
Those lawlessness points are really destroying her ability to speak properly, I see. The crew informs her that things have gotten pretty bad: the war is tearing civilization apart, and the Inquiry has joined in as a third superpower.
Marie: “Sorenson’s… preoccupied with his new duties. Our project has been put on permanent hiatus, it seems.”
And that means… what, exactly? If the Inquiry has declared itself an independent superpower, what is it fighting for if not its original objective? Unless they’ve completely gone over to the dark side and are now just grabbing resources for the heck of it like everyone else, this seems like it is still, technically, an extension of the original peacekeeping project. The real reason the crew isn’t personally involved is because Marie pulled strings to prevent them from getting drafted, so I don’t know why the game doesn’t lead with that instead. And wow, that’s pretty selfish – sure, throw the faceless masses into the meat grinder, but my friends get special treatment! The scientists have presumably been doing something productive, but what have Daszk and Mahk been doing to justify others dying in their place? This would work a lot better if they were all supporting the war effort, and the string-pulling was just to get them together for this. For a story that’s supposedly about scope, it’s really heinous for “my friends get special exemption from war” to be a handwavey footnote.
They also say that Ros no longer works for the Inquiry. Uh, why? What does Sorenson have to gain by throwing away his trump card? We’ve spent three episodes of him being super buddy-buddy with her, but suddenly when he needs her the most he’s willing to cut off his nose to spite his face? Maybe this gets explained later and I just have a massive hole in my memory, but this seems contrived purely to create unnecessary tension between Ros and Sorenson.
Kara then recaps the situation in case you were asleep through the end of the last episode:
Kara: “Typelog Corporation and the EROS Project… are at war. The issue with Ral and the Mind-Machine Interface Project got out of hand, and now…”
[pause]
Kara: “I told him! I told Jameson that this was a mistake! Now we all have to pay the price!”
Wait, what? This sounds like she was involved with the sabotage, but in episode 3 she was just as shocked by the revelation as everyone else. Are we universe hopping again?
Tezkhra: “He was trying to save a life. He assumed the flaw would be caught and the project would be aborted.”
I am going to savor your death so much, Tez.
He’s seriously defending Willis on this? Seriously? How does he even know Willis had these oh-so-noble intentions? He outright said he was only doing it to preserve the integrity of their own tech last episode. Even if we’ve hopped to an AU where this is true, if he was that embedded in the project he could have TOLD THEM HOW TO DO IT RIGHT instead of patronizingly slapping them whenever they did something wrong. No matter how noble his supposed motives are, he purposefully took the most selfish route to accomplish them. How on Earth does the game still expect us to see him as a good guy?
You know, why haven’t they arrested Tez at this point? If he’s taking EROS’ side not just on their general crimes against humanity but the inciting incident of the war, he’s clearly in love with them and is going to defect at the first opportunity. I would be seriously questioning his loyalties right now. But because the other characters are equally terrible, they let his obvious favoritism pass without comment.
Anyway blah blah Marie saved them from getting drafted and they’re all so glad they’re not in the meat grinder but now they’re doing something. Marie says that with Sorenson occupied, she’s going to be ordering missions from now on. Yay, the female second-in-command gets to do some actual commanding instead of being scenery for once.
Ros: “Fine, I guess. So what did you wake me up for this time?”
Jesus, Ros, who ran over your dog? She sounds like Marie did at the beginning. I guess this is a consequence of her dialogue only being determined by the left and right sides of the personality spectrum in general, even though there should be nuances. Right now she’s actually pretty chill on the passive/aggressive spectrum, so it makes no sense for her to be acting like a spoiled brat. Like, seriously, I thought she said she liked being up and about? She shouldn’t be treating this like a huge imposition.
Marie says she received a distress call from a rogue nest, and they’re going to answer it. She refuses to give any details because as the new commander she has absorbed Sorenson’s inability to explain anything. But because she’s not Sorenson, people actually push her on it, giving us hints to work off of instead of endless crypticisms! Amazing. Tezkhra asks why this nest specifically and if they’ll get anything from it, which makes her flip out and say they’re not capturing it.
Marie: “It’s… I need to find out for myself. But I need your help. Especially you, Ros…”
Uh woah slow down there Marie, I like you as a friend and all but I think we need to establish some boundaries!
Oh hey, I always thought these were pure gameplay abstractions. It’s cool that the game is willing to play around with expectations like this. I think Marie should be a bit more competent at this if she’s supposed to be an officer, though. And the “should you choose to accept it” joke is painfully forced.
Portrait! It’s probably obvious what’s going on now. Just in case it isn’t, Marie proceeds to have a long silence before getting flustered and saying they’re going to protect the nest no matter what. The rogue is still angry and insists she can handle it, but Marie pushes forward anyway. We’re also told these are EROS robots specifically, which I’m mentioning because it’s important for something later.
This is a pretty straightforward “defeat all enemies” mission. There’s no time limit either, so you can investigate every node!
And this capsule, which almost certainly belongs to the rogues. Ah, brazen theft, the most important part of being a hero.
The fights are unremarkable as usual, but you’ll notice enemies finally get multiple weapons now! I’m pretty sure damage type is still fixed, at least for these ones, but hey, it’s something! The names are pretty boring, though. Previous MODs had fanciful names, but these are just a bunch of numbers. I presume the E stands for EROS, but beyond that I don’t see any pattern.
When I reach the “?” enemy, there’s a sudden electrical burst. Ros asks what happened in a comically reserved fashion, but everyone else immediately flips out. This is the “jamming pulse” that lizard NPC was talking about: engagement failsafes have been disabled, so now if HP reaches 0, the craft is destroyed and the pilot dies (translation: game over). While a cool way to up the ante, I feel the execution is sort of bungled here because the game never really emphasized or explained the failsafe thing before now. There was that one mission in episode 2, but if you zoned out during that it’s easy to forget that the blocky explosions aren’t what’s actually happening. Given that the evac routines are supposed to support the themes in a big way by showing how safe and insulated from death these people are, they really should have been explained in more detail, and more consistently. I would have expected the crew to cover it in the tutorial mission, or at least provide a Typelog article on it.
This also raises the question of why they can’t just retreat manually when they’re low on health. After they’re hit by the pulse everyone says they need to run away, so this isn’t like a tractor beam, you should still be able to escape. I could see this being a danger in a hectic warzone, but honestly the regular evac routines shouldn’t do you much good there either. In order for this to work as a real threat, it has to be some sort of trap that cuts off all forms of retreat. Kind of like The Cryocarrier’s freezing cloud thing – that could be cool foreshadowing if it was based on that! Of course, if the pulse fried the engines too, it would raise the question of how ships could still move in battle, but… eh, I’m sure you can handwave something.
Regeneration also gets disabled, but eh, not like that ever matters anyway. This fight is particularly easy – there are only two opponents. If you had to face a full fleet here that could have been an actually challenging miniboss and a memorable introduction to this mechanic, but nope.
The special effects are pretty cool, though. The screen flashes red and you get warning messages everywhere, plus downed ships get a more realistically-rendered explosion on top of the stylized one… somehow. I guess Neff made a sloppy patch to deal with it, but it just makes the decision to use stylized explosions in the first place look even sillier.
People also get 500 extra health to represent the fact they’re going all-out (except for Ros, who gets 2000 extra health for some reason). I’m preeety sure I’ve inflicted plenty more than 1500 damage at a lot of points, which is pretty easy if you score a critical on a weakened enemy. It might have made more sense to up the buffer to 1000, to really emphasize how big these guys are on safety.
And uh… are these more robots, or did I just kill people? The game is usually pretty consistent about including “MOD” in the name if they’re robots. Marie acts like there are only MODs attacking the base both before and after this so that’s what I always assumed, but we encounter these enemy types later in circumstances that imply they are manned. Yikes. None of the characters ask this question but do grandstand about how terrible it is to use a jamming pulse against civilians, because they’re horrible.
Mahk: “What madness is EROS cooking up this time?”
Kara: “I make no apologies upon their behalf for this. It is madness. I intend to find out more.”
And Kara reaffirms that she is solidly against EROS as a whole, not just Willis. Remember this.
Marie requests that she be let in to check on the inhabitants, and the commander agrees.
This is Alicia Sarazon, Marie’s little sister. That’s right, a personal subplot actually ends up being relevant to the main story! Shocking, I know. Rami somehow understands the significance of this, which is weird because he’s definitely post-breach. I suppose his generation could still have had family structures depending on how stable things were, but there’s been a big focus on the idea that they don’t remember. Rami couldn’t tell Deirdre was a child, so why does he understand what a sibling is?
Unfortunately, things don’t go as planned. I think this scene is actually quite well-written, and I want to include the whole thing for nuances:
Marie: “I came here to see you! We’re getting you out of this place. I have to take you somewhere safe. Now.”
Alicia: “Just… leave us alone. You don’t belong here.”
Marie: “No. Do you have any idea what I went through to get here? How long I’ve been looking for you? I had to defy orders and go out from under my Commander! I had to put my crew in danger! Now, you’re coming with us whether you like it or not! I’m not losing you again!”
Alicia: “Things are different, Marisol. I’m not your little sister any more. I don’t need your protection.”
Marie: “Yes, you do! You’ve been stuck in a Hab all this time! You have no idea what it’s like out there! And now with Typelog and EROS goin’ at it, they’re gonna beat down your door eventually too!”
Alicia: “I don’t know? Really? Seems to me these people have been my family way longer than you ever were.”
Marie: “I…”
[pause]
Marie: “I won’t… I won’t lose you again! Not now, not ever!”
[Ros says something dumb here, skipping it]
Alicia: “And who are all these people? Your new friends?”
Marie: “We’re what’s left of the Inquiry Project. These are all of the remaining officers.”
Alicia: “You brought the whole army just to intimidate me, huh?”
Marie: “They are my allies, just as you have yours! I was hoping if you saw that, then maybe…”
I talked before about how one of the most interesting parts of the setting is how people grapple with their newfound emotions. In earlier episodes they were totally focused on how their own emotions affected them personally. Here, I think, is a moment where that gives way to a more mature handling of emotions, which of course comes with new challenges as well. Marie has her own demons worked out, but now she’s struggling with familial attachment, which requires trying to reach out to someone else and deal with their emotions too. That’s a vastly more complicated situation, and I don’t think she’s at all prepared for it. Her behavior is just as irrational, selfish, and childlike as it was at the very beginning when she was threatening to murder Ros over slights – but this time we can see what’s motivating it and what purpose it’s working towards, and that makes far more meaningful and relatable. Alicia doesn’t know how to handle it either, of course, which escalates things when they probably could have worked things out if they had just been able to communicate better.
Come to think of it, this reminds me a bit of the gems in Steven Universe – they try so hard, but it’s so obvious that they’re terrible at understanding one another because they all have such different ways of thinking and communicating. You would probably get something similar in people who completely forgot about emotions and then suddenly got them back. To us, it’s obvious that Marie cares so much about Alicia – but she can’t express that in a way Alicia understands, so she just ends up digging herself deeper. People spend too much energy just understanding their own emotional responses that they can’t look outward and realize other people work differently than them.
This also works very well just from a dramatic standpoint. We expect family reunions to be sappy heartwarming things that we can get over with quickly, but that’s not terribly realistic – popular media often places way too much value on familial love, but obviously family relationships aren’t all sunshine and roses. That would be especially true here, where family has become a meaningless concept and people have no reason to honor it. This isn’t the end of Marie’s journey – she’s finally found what she thought she wanted, but it’s created more conflict that she has to navigate. Plot threads are being opened up and explored more thoroughly rather than hastily closed off and forgotten about. The topic should have been more prominent in the main plot prior to this if it was going to be important – in particular, I’d like to see how Marie jumped from “I dunno if I should even bother with this” the last time she talked about it to “THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING EVER”. It’s poignant for her to come to that realization, but I would like to see her affirm it before this.
But hey, I’m in a good mood, let’s judge this on its own merits. Overall, I think this is very effective in humanizing both characters. Familial attachment is the obvious endgame for any discussion about emotion, since it’s such a powerful one and so fundamental to our way of life. Marie is still letting her emotions get the better of her, but unlike in episode 0, it comes from the best of intentions, making her a lot more sympathetic and understandable. Meanwhile Alicia just doesn’t want to deal with this and is shutting her out instead of trying to understand – which shows that she’s got some growing to do too, and that she promises to be her own person instead of a meek extension of Marie’s will. I really feel motivated to see these guys come to an understanding and get a happy ending.
Alicia finally decides that fine, they can take her, but she grandstands that she’s going to suck the Inquiry’s coffers dry – “Who cares? As long as Marisol gets what she wants, right?” Unfortunately this appears to be an empty bluff, because you still keep all your money after this and it’s never brought up again.
Marie then proceeds to ruin everything by adding her to my roster. Everyone immediately does a spittake at Marie shoving her into combat after that speech about protecting her. Marie proceeds to completely ignore the objection and just says she’ll make sure Alicia is “deployment-ready in no time.” Ah, and it was all going so well. I have no idea why this game loves pointing out its gaping plot holes only to completely ignore them. To my knowledge she never explains why she’s doing this, which is particularly glaring when we just learned that fights can be lethal now. What is she gonna do if Alicia gets trapped in a jamming pulse? Forcing her into a fighter fleet is far more dangerous than leaving her in the middle of nowhere. Maybe the point is that she’s just being selfish and cares more about keeping Alicia close to her, but she could still accomplish that just by keeping Alicia on the Inquiry. Placing her in the fleet confers no real benefit to Marie, and might make Alicia hate her even more.
Also,
Alicia: “So, you gonna drag me away in chains too?”
Ros: “Why, you in to that?”
I hate informal Ros. How would she even have a concept of this given that she has no memory of life before the Shine? How hard is it to stay consistent to your protagonist’s sole character trait, game?
Well Marie’s defining motivation just got disemboweled to make Alicia a playable character so let’s look at that shall we. She’s terrible: bad AP, bad defenses, and only average offense – plus her personal weapon isn’t even the same type as her specialty, what gives! She’s got a maxed-out personality stat and her weapon (electrical/ballistic, honestly one of the more reasonable ones) is unique, but those are the only really notable things about her. Also, there is something very worrying going on with her left eye. It disturbs me the more I look at it.
After the mission we get articles, as is standard. This seems to imply the Inquiry only militarized recently, which is odd – this would make more sense if we got it at the start of the episode. Why would anyone think they’re the cause of the war, though? Maybe some conspiracy nuts think they sabotaged Ral just so they could be heroes and deflect suspicion, but that’s a stretch. As I said last episode, the Inquiry has been disappointingly milquetoast in terms of its actual actions. It’s hard to believe anyone would see them as anything but the obvious patsies they are – but the game has to insist on making the heroes look important even if they aren’t, so here we are.
We get an article on jamming pulses, too. The second paragraph is awfully written; the English teacher in me wants to scrawl “repetition” over the whole thing. Originating with rogues is an interesting detail, though. On my first playthrough I somehow assumed Typelog came up with it, since that’s the only thing that would even come close to justifying the insistence they’re exactly as evil as EROS, but a display at the research station implies it was EROS. Now we’re being told it was just some random criminal who started it? What EROS just commenting on or observing it instead of making it themselves?
Speaking of which: Before this mission, this computer discussed something that was, in hindsight, obviously a prototype for the jamming pulse. Now the records have been purged, for… some reason. EROS doesn’t want people to know they’re responsible for this, maybe? It’s really weird that this only happens after this mission; it would make a lot more sense for it to happen as soon as episode 4 began. Perhaps that was supposed to be the plan and the game just didn’t initialize the “this is episode 4” flags until now.
Now that I’m writing these in Word, I’m noticing how horribly long they are, so I’m cutting it here despite only covering 1 mission. The next bit really deserves its own section, anyway.