Well, here we go. The war plot just got wrapped up in the shoddiest and quickest way possible, so the stage is now finally clear to resolve this Lazarus thing.
Immediately after getting chewed out, Ros runs to the external communications room. For some reason no one notices this despite Sorenson saying she’s under surveillance. He picked a bad time to look the other way, because…
Ros is really getting around today. For some baffling reason she’s decided she wants to duke it out one-on-one, so she tells him her crew is mobilizing and if they want to duel, they have to do it now.
The game lets you choose your reason for doing this, which comes off pretty bizarrely when you’re not given the choice of whether or not to do this in the first place. This is a really weird combination of railroading and interactivity; you’re not allowed to direct your avatar’s actions, but you are allowed to ad-hoc a reason for why they’re on the railroad? That’s hard to answer if you don’t like the protagonist’s actions and don’t think there’s any good reason for them – and that’s the boat I’m in. Ros is choosing to subvert an already-irate authority yet again and to place herself in extreme danger just so she can… what? Win a macho contest?
This is playing precisely into Lazarus’ hand. As I keep saying over and over, he is not actually that special: he’s just one guy. Ros’ biggest advantage over him is the backing of the Inquiry Project. If she engaged him with full support, he wouldn’t stand a chance. And Lazarus probably knows this: notice that, despite saying his only goal is to kill Ros, he hasn’t made a move yet. He can’t attack while she’s protected by the Inquiry – his only hope is to hit her while she’s cut off, similar to what Lagarto did earlier. And she’s just handed him that victory on a silver platter.
What makes this particularly jarring, though, is that we just had a scene where the crew poured their hearts out over how Ros is such a great person and they trust her utterly. Yet here she is, going around their backs to win some dumb bet, and potentially endangering all of them if she fails. The crew should be pivotal to this confrontation. She connected with them when Lazarus couldn’t, and that is precisely why Lazarus is so weak now, impotent and alone. They are both the reason she’s better than Lazarus and her greatest weapon against him. But Ros doesn’t see that. Here she shows she was undeserving of that outpouring of support we just witnessed: when it really matters, she keeps them in the dark and jeopardizes their mission just so she can play holier-than-thou.
There is no good, logical reason for doing this, but since the game isn’t giving me a choice, I’ll pick the one option that at least approaches something sensible.
Lazarus: “True… anyone who gets between you and I will likely die quickly and horribly…”
NO THEY WON’T. HE IS NOT A ONE MAN ARMY. SHUT UP ABOUT THIS ALREADY.
This seems like a major conflation of fantasy and sci-fi. Fantasy is all about singular individuals and the clashes between them, but it is able to back it up by giving them superhuman powers that ensure that yes, the hero demonstrably is the only one who’s on the same level as the villain. But that’s a stupid, romantic notion that has no place in reality. In a realistic genre like this one, numbers trump individual strength. There is no reason why Lazarus would be any more dangerous than the normal enemies the crew faces all the time. Absolutely none. His time suspension parlor trick doesn’t mean jack if he doesn’t have the guns to back it up.
Bah. Let’s just assume my theory is right and he’s bluffing to manipulate Ros.
Lazarus mentions the “old man” again and Ros demands to know more. Annoyingly, he brushes it off yet again, just saying “Surely he’s reached out to you by now!” While that’s enough information for us to piece together a little on our own, it still grates that we’ve dodged a reveal twice in a row now. This is the eleventh hour; the time for buildup has run out. We need proper explanations and we need them now. Sadly, Ros goes along with this and moves on to the main topic, telling him not to use any tricks or traps for their duel.
Lazarus: “Tricks? Tricks?! I am deeply offended, dear sister! Why would I need tricks to beat you?”
Probably because I get three times as many attacks as you.
Lazarus places the arena: he wants to fight at the very edge of the galaxy. Word of the ceasefire hasn’t reached there yet, so there’s still fighting and they’ll blend in.
Ros: “Mister! You got yourself a duel.”
WHY ARE YOU BEING CHUMMY WITH THE MEGALOMANIAC WHO WANTS TO KILL YOU
With that, Lazarus taps out. Somehow no one noticed this despite Ros supposedly being under surveillance and communication signals apparently being really obvious, if Neff was to be believed. Let’s fanwank it as Sorenson not expecting her to do something so soon after his threat.
Ros will be going the next battle alone, so she needs to get outfitted. I haven’t bothered to update her equipment much since the rest of the crew normally destroys everything before she can move, so let’s fix that by putting Sorenson’s gift to good use:
Oh yes. This thing has a base damage of 700 and a maxed out ballistics disabling effect. I also use a gift I got from Daszk to pump her contact skill through the roof.
The dispatcher says she’s on lockdown, but Ros pretends this is one of the random exploration missions because of course you can still do those at this point. Sorenson is evidently an idiot who doesn’t monitor her movements at all, because Ros manages to slip her leash without a hitch.
There are lots of lag-tastic explosions in the background. Somehow they don’t have to worry about getting hit by errant lasers.
Lazarus: “Beautiful, isn’t it? Your brain has probably memorized the movement of every single craft in the subspace.”
Okay so, I just had a thought: What if, in keeping with the idea these are random mutations, each of the Ouranos siblings actually had different abilities? Ros has demonstrated no preternatural sharpness of this kind, but what if Lazarus really is the superior Ouranos and got superintelligence on top of the time dilation? That could go some ways toward explaining his superior attitude and the constant claims that he’s the Chosen One.
Lazarus: “Let us waste no time! The old man is watching, you know. He’s always watching…”
I dunno, his scouts are super fragile. I doubt any of them could get close. Anyway, he activates a jamming pulse and the battle begins. It has a special BGM, “Ouranos”. I’m not as thrilled with it as I am with the rest of the soundtrack – it’s suitably dramatic and the fast pace is a good contrast to the normal boss music, but it feels a bit too casual and upbeat, especially the opening. The standard boss music, and “Abandoned”, feel significantly darker, which is odd when this is supposed to be the climax of the super-dark storyline where the game’s taken the gloves off.
Lazarus is the closest this game gets to actual difficulty. For one, his defense and dodge rates are extremely high, meaning he takes about as much damage as he dishes out. His defenses are actually a bit worse than the previous bosses’, but he has 3000 health thanks to the jamming pulse, so you can’t just vaporize him with one onslaught.
His other trick is that, as you can see, his weapons inflict status effects, making this also the closest the game ever gets to making battles more than damage races. Since Ros is alone and the game encourages you to specialize, disabling her weapons can potentially leave her a sitting duck. I prepared for this by giving her high-level ballistic weapons as well – which, weirdly, seem to do more damage than my shiny new Starcore Impaler. I gave them damage booster effects, so those are gamebreaking, I guess? I tried to give Lazarus a taste of his own medicine by outfitting my weapon with B-block, but I never got it to trigger. I suspect player status effects may be bugged; I don’t think I’ve ever seen them activate. Or maybe bosses are immune, I dunno.
His third trick is that he is a cheating cheater who cheats. Craft aren’t supposed to regenerate in jamming pulses, but his does! By pretty significant amounts, too, considering how slowly I have to chip away and the fact that this is the only drawn-out battle in the game. His weapons also cost next to nothing, while mine cost nearly half the damage I’m inflicting to him – this is one place where health costs can really screw you over if you’re not careful, especially if you whiff a lot of shots.
Oh, and also he totally does pull in backup because he’s a liar and also a wuss. Looks like he does need tricks to beat me after all!
But at the end of the day… he puts on a good show, but he’s still a total pushover. It doesn’t matter how good his defenses are or what flunkies he summons, when I’m getting four attacks (I put the AP from those level ups to good use!) to his one, it’s a foregone conclusion. I actually bump up the difficulty to a level that lets enemies use multiple attacks just to give him a fighting chance, but it’s still not enough to make him a challenge. Like everything else, this battle is just a damage race, and it’s one you’re rigged to win.
(Also, why couldn’t the developer have centered Ros’ position for this battle? Seriously? The asymmetry bugs me so much.)
Lazarus: “Why wouldn’t they respect me? Why did they see me for the monster I am? Why not you too?”
But he does have one ace up his sleeve: banter! He says something new at the start of every round, up to round 10 where he just starts frothing about how much he hates Ros. Keeping him alive long enough to see all his dialogue is the only thing that ever makes me lose this fight – well played, Lazarus. The banter itself tries a bit too late to make him sympathetic; at first it’s confident taunting, but once it turns to the topic of the crew he totally loses it and has a breakdown over how they love Ros more than him. Eh, kinda comes out of nowhere, and it’s hard to feel sorry for him when by all accounts he has no one but himself to blame. It would have more poignancy if the weird hostility at the beginning of the game was explained better instead of forgotten about; if it was explained that he faced the exact same unreasonable aggression Ros did, that would draw a better parallel between them while also raising the question of if he was always like this or if he could have been a good person if they hadn’t overdone it.
Hm, you know what might have been really clever for this fight? If it was a throwback to the battle with The Black One in episode 2. Ros shows up for her duel only to discover that Lazarus is not a stupid as she thought and has, in fact, laid a trap for her. He engages with a full fleet of high-level units (and being able to recruit disparate groups of fighters would lend credence to the claim he could be a major player in the war) that are hard-coded to get multiple attacks – Ros stands no chance. And then the cavalry arrive: the rest of the crew noticed what she was doing and have caught up to rescue her, cue the real boss battle. That would be perfect on so many levels! The game sets you up to expect a romantic duel between two demigods only for reality to ensue and reveal that Ros is nothing on her own, because this isn’t a fantasy story, sucker. And in her darkest hour, her friends put their money where their mouth is and follow the moral support they gave her last scene with real aid, giving her her own army to combat Lazarus’. That is what prompts Lazarus’ breakdown: because as his own allies crumble around him, he’s forced to see that Ros really is the superior being, that she got the love and respect he never could. In the end he suffers the same lesson he tried to teach Ros: he is alone, and alone he is nothing. Nothing but an angry manchild screaming into the dark.
Admit it, that would be a thousand times better than this stupid dick-waving contest. And so much more consistent with the themes, too – we started out trying to rebuild society, so doesn’t it make sense for the solution to come from the civilized ideals of cooperation and community rather than bullheaded cavemen duels?
Seems Lazarus wasn’t carrying much cash on him, but the doubleplus AP booster is pretty sweet – I’m pretty sure it’s unique, actually.
After the battle Ros is very sad she had to kill the evil murderer because she’s terrible. The Inquiry then catches up to her and Sorenson hacks her ship to force her to return. Back onboard, Sorenson abandons her to the wolves and tells Thomas she can go back in suspension. Because this is a game I still need to have a period of free roam, so Thomas fortuitously reveals he doesn’t have the proper holding facilities on his ship and it’ll take a while to build them. Why didn’t he do this in advance, especially given that Ros’ trip to the duel location was explicitly mentioned to take a long time? Why doesn’t he just take the Inquiry’s suspension lab? It is a mystery.
Sorenson also does not simply shove Ros in the jar until Thomas is done even though he hates her because [not found]. Instead he’s going to force Marie to chaperone Ros at all times to prevent this from happening again, which he really should have done from the start. Ros ends with a passive-aggressive “you’re welcome for me cleaning up your mess” which no one responds to because why have the characters explain and justify their nonsensical actions when they can be hollow props for the hero to be nobly indignant at.
Because consequences are for losers, nothing actually changes and I’m still free to do whatever I want. Flavor text gets updated: everyone’s very sad and wants to keep Ros around because she’s so awesome and wonderful. Sorenson still has the same “ignoring you” description he’s had all episode, which disappoints me. To continue the plot I have to talk to Thomas, who places Ros in suspension while he waits for the holding facility to be built. Let’s just pretend that actually happened immediately after the previous scene and the free walkaround section was just a gameplay abstraction.
Ros’ final quip is just a juvenile “you can’t hold me forever!!!” Thomas chooses to shut this down by contradicting his previous rant that he would, in fact, lock her up forever by saying no actually he totally plans to use her again if he needs an ace in the hole.
Thomas: “Some were born to lead. Some to serve. You are a tool. A conduit to empower those above you.”
And he now happens to possess this conduit. So yeah, all his speeches about responsibility and Ros being too dangerous to ever use were total crap and he’s going to use her to take over the galaxy. Nice job breaking it, Sorenson!
Thomas: “When you awaken again, society may be something completely unrecognizable to you. Perhaps, by then, they will have a way to put you to proper use. But, your place is not here.”
Man, wouldn’t that have been interesting. Ros spending the game getting tossed around between various owners and organizations over massive timeskips showing different iterations of society would have been totally trippy and awesome, and would have actually done a much better job of displaying the story’s ostensible central themes. Unfortunately this is an empty bluff, as is probably obvious from the fact there’s only one episode left.
Sorenson doesn’t stick around for a cliffhanger monologue this time. Instead, I get messages from the scout MODs overlayed on a black screen.
“…con-gratulations. You are the superior life form. We shall be meeting very soon, indeed. You have a universe to save, after all… …the next step is very important. You need not panic at what happens. I have faith that you can survive anything, including this…
…immortal…
…all-knowing…
…omnipresent…”
And end scene.
So no, we are not even getting a meaningful conclusion to the central plot thread of this episode. The old man’s motives and plans for the Ouranos siblings are still a mystery wrapped in an enigma; this speech could mean practically anything. Some information in the abandoned databanks will actually help us connect some of the dots, but it’s poor design to force players to scour optional content just to understand the basic plot.
And yes, that’s it. That’s the end of the last full arc; episode 5 is comparable to The Reconstruction’s chapter 6 in length, so abandon hope of everything getting wrapped up tidily. The answer to the question of if this episode could adequately address everything episode 3 left hanging is a resounding no – even worse, it actually spent its precious time introducing even more plot threads, which it also failed to properly develop.
I talked about this in the superweapon mission, but this episode was all over the place. It reads like four or five different writers were all jockeying to cram their subplot in. First Sorenson is out of the picture and the crew is doing everything on its own, okay… Then no wait actually Sorenson does want to micromanage you again and also he’s turned evil, actually nevermind that’s irrelevant because we’re pulling a new character out of nowhere to start a completely new plot, wait crap we still have to wrap up the original plot quick have Ros do that and crap crap we’re out of time okay just wrap it up with a flashy battle and hope no one notices. It’s just a mess. Nothing follows logically from anything else, and none of the intrigue ends up mattering because Lazarus kindly drops the solution into Ros’ lap. The plot is totally incoherent and doesn’t use its time well at all.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy there is plot, finally, but it’s the same problem we saw in The Reconstruction: the game tries to cram all its plot into a tiny space that inevitably ends up collapsing under its own weight. The episode tries to do too many things at once – things that are, individually, good ideas, but just end up feeling rushed and disconnected here. I think the opening is very good: a personal, small-scale operation that gets us acquainted with the horrors of the new status quo and reminds us of the emotional stakes we’re fighting for. That’s a great starting point, but the game proceeds to sequester that thread in the optional conversations while the main plot veers off in crazy directions. In my Reconstruction review I said I really wanted the final arc to be a chaotic world war to show the consequences of everything that came before, and so I was excited to reach this point, since I knew that’s exactly what happened in I Miss the Sunrise… on paper. In reality, the plot of this episode is a bait-and-switch. We spend the opening building up the terror of the war and asking what everyone’s going to do about it, then suddenly it becomes window dressing for a completely new subplot that wasn’t foreshadowed at all. I feel incredibly cheated; for once, it looked like we were getting a truly meaningful plot that was going to address the issues that have been building the whole game, then PSYCHE we’re just pulling a new self-contained plot out of nowhere yet again. We were led to believe that this would build off of all the events that had come before, but instead the main conflict and major players are pulled out of thin air, with the war being reduced to a minor background prop we’re not allowed to interact with.
Dumping Ros’ past on us NOW and pretending this was the big thing the whole game was building to is simply laughable – the last time it was brought up was two episodes ago! You can’t completely ignore a plot element for most of the story and still expect us to care when you bring it up at the last minute. The joy of slow-burning mysteries is in engaging with them continuously throughout the story and figuring them out over time, but that’s not what happened here. We get absolutely nothing the whole game except “welp, I guess that wasn’t it either”, none of the characters care, then suddenly it’s the most important thing ever and is getting crammed down our throats? That’s totally backwards. If this was going to end up being the plot that really mattered, it should have started much earlier – which even makes more sense with the characters’ motivations! Why did it take Thomas so long to figure out who stole his goods? And if he’s such an unstable trigger-happy monster, why didn’t Lazarus show up to challenge Ros earlier? In order for this to work, the topic of Ros’ past had to be built up and advanced every episode so that this doesn’t come out of nowhere and we can be invested in it. The mystery messages definitely should have showed up a lot earlier.
This whole thing kinda reads like it was written as an independent story and awkwardly fitted in. It has a pretty self-contained plot thanks to the new characters and conflict all coming and going within its runtime. There’s continuity with previous episodes, but it’s so irrelevant that the game doesn’t really bother to explain any of it even though it’s had all game to do so. You could probably get a pretty decent complete story if you expanded just this episode into a full plotline – you’ve got personal emotional stakes with Marie and Alicia, you’ve got a terrifying war to deal with, you have a protagonist who thinks they’re no one but who ends up having an important destiny and a dark past they have to settle. That’s great stuff! It’s all there! But great stuff needs to have the proper time and care dedicated to it. A war isn’t something you can just push into the background and ignore, and if Thomas and Lazarus are meant to be serious players we need more time to develop their motives and have them act in ways that aren’t idiotic. Honestly, it probably would have worked a lot better if the Ouranos stuff was relegated to episode 5; that would give us a more substantial final arc while freeing up this one to address the matters at hand.
Worst of all, the fact that this is a self-contained story means it doesn’t even try to address all the dangling plot threads from last episode. The Black One doesn’t even appear at all! Sorenson’s personality change is also completely out of left field – the whole game he was warming up to you and last episode he and Ros parted on very amicable terms, now suddenly he hates her? Why? You need to show your work with these things; tension and strife isn’t believable if the conflict is totally artificial.
Overall, this episode rather ironically came down to a failure of scope. The writer needed to think more about how this arc fit into the whole plot, and he needed to realize that certain stories need a certain amount of space to be told properly.