Despite the ominous title, Episode Eternal is really just your gateway to the postgame content. You can choose to go back to just before the Progenitor if you want to get the other ending immediately, or you can go back to just before the Lazarus duel, or you can go back to just before the superweapon mission, if you want to pick a different target. (Given how many choices there are, I appreciate that the game lets us see them all without making five playthroughs.) I’m going to go back to before the superweapon.

This also maxes out everyone’s personal trust if it wasn’t there already, thus killing any meaning it had beyond yet another number to increase. Ivoronus has a 250 gift (three max-rank weapon skill boosters; useless) but Alicia does not, for some reason.

The first new thing we can get is a new splice to explore during random missions. The premise is that this is Splice i, an imaginary place based on the crew’s memories that is somehow able to generate real rewards I can take back with me. Uh, sure. The main gimmick here is that the regular enemies are old bosses, who can attack in droves. Of course, as I’ve repeatedly demonstrated, bosses are barely any more dangerous than normal enemies so that’s not a big deal. Colony 503b even retains its crippling weakness to pilot damage! The battle theme here is also the battle theme from the final dungeon of The Reconstruction, which I think is fitting since this is an area based around memories and nostalgia.

You also get unique text fragments here. Unlike the others, they seem to tell a linear story. What does it mean? Your guess is as good as mine. I’m sure it explains the whole plot and I’m a chump for not figuring it out.

Moving on. Our main attraction today is a new bounty hunt.

Mr. Left: “It is time.”
Mr. Right: “Time. Yes. An old nemesis.”
Mr. Left: “Your last assignment. The ultimate challenge.”
Mr. Right: “Taken lightly? You? Never. For you, it is The End.”
Mr. Left: “The End. That is his name. Cunning Unlike any foe you have met before. Be warned.”
Mr. Right: “Warned. So warned, in fact, that there is no cost required to pursue this individual.”

Sounds exciting! I accept.

Mr. Left: “Of course. You could never resist such an opportunity.”
Mr. Right: “Never. Now, end it all.”

The “Shine” music plays here instead of the normal bounty hunt music. Ominous!

I wonder what this thing could be!

Oh boy, I’m getting goosebumps! Could it really be? Could this one be… an actual challenge???

wait what

what

THE END DEFEATED?
Something has gone wrong. Report back to Mr. Left and Right at once.

Somehow I get 1000 credits as a mission reward, which doesn’t make a lot of sense.

When I return, something has changed.

“They have gone rogue, it seems. Having a massed a collection of weapons and technology so great… They have severed all ties, covered all tracks. Even our network of skilled observers cannot locate them. […] With that amount of firepower – which you gave to them – they could be an unstoppable force.”

I love this twist.

I’ve said before how much I love Mr. Right and Mr. Left, because they inject so much personality into a side feature and maintain the perfect balance of being entertaining without overshadowing the main plot – so of course I love that they get their own more involved subplot! I recall at least one other RPG that did this “the sidequest peddler was evil all along!!!” twist – The Tiamat Sacrament – and it fell totally flat to me. Why? Because the sidequest peddler had no personality. There were never any hints to make me think they were anything more than they were, and they never did anything to make me particularly attached to them. Even after the reveal, they had no interesting motives or personality quirks, and died like five minutes later when I fought them. Perhaps on paper the dev thought the character’s lack of development was a good idea because it made the twist more “shocking”, but really all it accomplished was make me fail to care. I had no lasting reaction to their betrayal; in the end they were just another sidequest.

That’s not the case here. I got attached to these lizards, so their betrayal actually grabs my attention. And at the same time, this is so obvious I feel silly for never suspecting it – they acted so incredibly shady the whole time! Of course they were secretly manipulating me for their own gain! Of course The End having no search fee was too good to be true! This makes perfect sense while at the same time being completely unexpected, because you wouldn’t expect a minor gameplay feature to pull this stunt, even one with this much personality. It’s brilliantly structured and executed. Now if only the developer could apply this storytelling talent to stories longer than a few hundred words…

Excitingly, I’m not handed their location, I actually have to figure it out from clues! Well, a clue, but still, we finally get an actual puzzle! Mr. Red points me towards the Hole & Corner, where I can find one of Jazzy’s girls. The rogue agents intimidated them into providing stealth shielding for their base, but this means the girls know where the agents’ address. However, it’s in code: “They just called it ‘sixty-four’ and gave me some kinda weird log screen with some archaic machine language.” In case you can’t figure it out, Mr. Red will explicitly tell you to try translating it into binary. 64 in base 2 is…

About time a null point showed up as one of the special coordinates. Oddly, this won’t lead to the fight until you get the hint from Jazzy’s girl, so you can’t sequence break.

Mr. Right: “Polite. But, your service ends here. We have no more need for you. Our strength is unquantifiable.”
Mr. Left: “You think our secretive actions allude to villainy, do you not? Our needs are our own. Far outside your scope.”
Mr. Right: “Far outside. But… perhaps a test is in order. A trial run. A measure of efficiency against a worthy target.”
Mr. Left: “Perhaps. Yes, it is time. Come, Ouranos. Make the first move. We have waited for this moment.”

I find this node title amusing. Most of the other boss nodes have extremely dramatic names like “Heart of the Heart” or “End of the Line”, but this one is just “Trouble”. Well, it’s accurate!

Mr. Right and Mr. Left are actually kinda sorta theoretically challenging, in that you need a modicum of forethought and strategy to stay ahead in this battle. That shouldn’t really be notable, but this game has set a very low bar. Their main quirk is that, as Mr. Red said, they have all the weapons the previous bosses used. However, this isn’t very impressive in actuality, since most of those weapons are now behind the curve and I don’t think they even use the ones from episode 4. Their attack stats are good enough that they can hit 400-500 damage pretty consistently regardless. But the real reason this fight is tricky is that they’ve also stolen The Collector’s regeneration capabilities. They regenerate about half their health per round, so you have to strike hard and fast if you want to get anywhere, and splitting damage across the two isn’t an option. However, they do have a weakness: their defenses are actually quite poor, and while they have a lot of resistances, they also have quite a few vulnerabilities, and they each seem to have one health type they’re weak on. Once you have them pegged, they go down very fast. I’m rather disappointed they don’t have The Queen’s barrier of The Diamond’s defenses, but that might actually make this battle impossible combined with their regeneration. Maybe if one had the regeneration and one had the shield? Hm.

Mr. Left and Mr. Right are taken to the Inquiry’s quarantine, and I’m rewarded with a crapton of money but nothing else. I guess this is why Lagarto had to be cleared out for episode 4?

Mr. Left: “Bested by the best. Even with all of the powers society has to offer. We should be humble.”
Mr. Right: “Humbled. That is why we have a secret to share. Our true goal. Our true purpose for disappearing.”
Mr. Red: “Agent Ouranos, your tactical abilities are unmatched. But this time, we truly need your help. We came to your craft seeking allies for what is still to come. We have found all we need in you. There is… an entity. Not born of science, or evolution, we believe. A threat? Of course.”
Mr. Left: “Of course.”
Mr. Right: “Of course. But this time, we speak the truth that this is a threat like no other.”
Mr. Red: “The EROS Project drafted us into investigating it. We, in turn, are relying upon you for support. It is an unidentified mass, circling a Surface member of the PLSE project. A lifeform? A threat?” those things aren’t mutually exclusive you know
Mr. Left: “The latter, of course.” no it’s both why are you being dumb
Mr. Right: “Of course. And, since you ruined our means of doing battle, it is you who will fell the creature.”
Mr. Red: “They believe it was disturbed during the automated terraformation process. It is not happy. It shall be you and your primary fleet that engages. There is little time for sub-orbital organization. Should you feel ready, I shall provide the Surface’s location, and you shall depart immediately.”

Oh yes.

That’s a familiar face, and a rather familiar-looking world map in the background. (Though the Violet Sands look a lot bigger and more vertical than I remember. Maybe some continental drift happened between now and The Reconstruction.) The characters proceed to engage in some dialogue that’s almost identical to The Reconstruction’s equivalent of this scene because this sequence is one giant self-indulgent nostalgia trip. It wakes up and says one among the crew “does not belong here” and they must “return the one”. No points for guessing who. Ros tries to ask what it means, but it ignores her and attacks.

Continuing the nostalgia trip, the battle music for this fight is the final boss music from The Reconstruction.

This is an actually for-real difficult battle. Yes, seriously! I actually lost the first time, and as a full party wipe, not due to Ros getting carelessly sniped! In may only be in the very final fight where the game was purposefully pulling out all the stops, but we’ve finally struck difficulty! The reason is, I believe, obvious. If you look closely at that gif, you’ll notice The Tatzylvurm has something no other enemy in the game has: one hundred thousand hit points. Every other boss could be easily overwhelmed in a single onslaught because the defense formula does not work the way the developer intended at all (except Lazarus, who just so happened to also break the max health rule). The health pool is not actually quite as daunting as it first appears: the ‘vurm has terrible defense and multiple vulnerabilities, making it easy to hit near or at the damage cap, and it also has a weird quirk where it effectively only has one health meter; any damage to one health bar will be transferred to the other. This does not apply to its attack costs (which are actually quite substantial), so inequalities may arise, but for the most part you are free to ignore damage type for this battle. This is pretty useful, because it allows you to switch which health type you’re drawing from with your attacks. Normally this does not matter since battles are over in the blink of an eye, but this is a protracted fight so you do actually need to pay attention to your attrition rate.

The health pool alone is responsible for the majority of the engagement and difficulty of this battle. So many of the game mechanics – regeneration, zone of control, critical chain – require time to play out properly, but they’re never given that proper timespan. Other than Lazarus, no battle in this entire playthrough has ever lasted more than 6 rounds. Most normal battles were over in the first or second rounds, and few boss battles lasted longer than 3. That simply isn’t enough time for any of the special mechanics to matter – the zone of control takes an incredible amount of time to shift unless you’re already winning or losing (and unless you have a SOL you can’t speed it up), and you never have reason to care that you’re knocking yourself into critical health with your attacks because if the enemy isn’t dead by that point they will be next round.

This battle lasted 16 rounds.

And that alone forced me to rub two synapses together. I had to constantly swap people between the front line and the healing zone to make sure my team didn’t get worn down to nothing over that time. I had to actually pay attention to how much my attacks were costing and where people’s health was at at the end of the round, because The Tatzylvurm’s attacks hit for half their health and that doesn’t leave a large margin of error. And not only did I have time to advance the zone of control, it actually made a huge difference, because even one stage drastically cuts the ‘vurm’s attack and accuracy and gives me way more breathing room.

The other tricky thing is that this battle is automatically set to the highest difficulty level, where enemies get multiple attacks. The ‘vurm gets 3 attacks per round, and has one attack for each health type. This I like far less, because it leaves the battle far too much up to chance. It usually behaves itself and uses one attack of each health type during the round, but sometimes it will double (or even triple) up on the same health type, which is a death sentence since the multiple attacks will always target the same party member. Always. And each attack hits for ~500 damage, so unless they get super lucky and dodge or have good enough defenses to knock that down to ~450 per hit, that crewmember is screwed and there’s nothing you can do about it. This happened to me the first time I fought for real; the ‘vurm opened with two systems-damaging blasts on Kara and so she went down right out of the gate. Admittedly, it is pretty easy to do something about this; the ‘vurm only ever uses chemical attacks, so if you outfit everyone with chemical resistance they can last a lot longer. That is a bit of a hassle since the way resistances work in this game means you need three defense modules per person, but by this point in the game you should definitely have the resources. And it’s not like you need those weapon slots, since you don’t need good property coverage here. Still, it’s annoying that in a supposedly tactical game, success mostly comes down to praying the roulette picks the right attack and/or that that attack misses. If the ‘vurm was hard-coded to only use one attack per health type per round, this battle would be a lot less hectic.

After my initial party gets slaughtered, I swap out Marie for Cole and Kara for Mahk, because they have the best reaction time of anyone and dodging is really important here. Mahk has terrible defenses but natural chemical resistances in both systems and pilot, so he only needs one shield.

And, as I discovered during the fight, his poor defense actually works to my advantage thanks to the AI’s bloodthirstiness. Because he’s so much weaker than the other party members on paper, the ‘vurm always makes him a priority target, even if he’s way farther away than everyone else. (And yes, even if there is literally no chance of the attack connecting, because it’s quality AI.) The AI also seems to be incapable of noticing resistances for some weird reason, so it’ll even prioritize Mahk over characters who would take twice as much damage from the attack. This, combined with Mahk’s mad dodging skills, actually makes him an ironically effective tank: his poor defense allows him to draw and soak attacks that other characters with high defense can’t take.

However… if you can survive the initial onslaught, this battle is more long than difficult. Though the length of the battle shows the system’s full capabilities, it also shows its limitations, chief among them the lack of non-attack skills. Once you figure out how to switch out the front line and bench, you’ve already won. Once you’ve advanced the zone of control, the RNG can’t even really screw you over because the attacks get so much weaker. You just keep doing exactly what you’ve been doing until you finally cut through that massive sack of HP. There is never a need for any actual variance in your tactics or any fancy tricks, because the game doesn’t give you any fancy tricks. Advance, attack, attack, attack, retreat, wait, advance, attack. That’s all you can ever do. It’s tense because the ‘vurm can easily destroy you if you let your health get too low, but there’s no tactical depth. Even when the battle system works properly, it’s all flash and no substance.

I also dislike the “high health, low defense” approach, at least to this extreme, because it spits in the face of the entire progression system. You’re encouraged to get stronger and stronger weapons throughout the game, because that’s the only thing you can really improve (since the battle system is half-baked and only has attack skills). But stronger weapons won’t help you here; after a ZoC shift or two, you’ll hit the damage cap with even bargain-bin weapons. Stronger weapons may actually be a disadvantage, since they cost more health for no real benefit. What’s the point of finally giving you easy access to level 10 components with Splice i if they’re useless for the only thing left to use them on? I think it would have been a better idea to not throw out the game’s entire structure, poorly executed though it was – like, tone The Tatzylvurm back to maybe 20000 HP but give him Lazarus-level defenses or so so that hitting the cap is possible with high-level weapons but not trivial. That would reward players for engaging with the weapon creation system like they’re supposed to, instead of punishing them.

I get 100000 credits after the battle, so that lizard was loaded, apparently. Well, it is a dragon… I think…

After the battle, the ‘vurm reverts to childish temper tantrum mode, like it did in The Reconstruction. (It says it’s “new to this”, interestingly.) Ros FINALLY voices my frustrations and says she’s sick of this cryptic nonsense and demands actual answers. Unfortunately…

Tatzylvurm: “You know what? Fine! Keep your stupid not-belonging-thing! I’ll get it back eventually anyway! It’s not like it can go any place else! It’ll end up here again before you know it! You’ll see!”

And then it retreats.

Yep, that’s it. After all that effort, we approach one of the mysteries of the first game from a different angle and are rewarded with… absolutely no new information whatsoever. What is this thing? Why is it on this planet? Who or what appointed it to this job? Why does it want Tez? What does it mean by Tez “not belonging”? Are there others? The game knows we’re frustrated by all this ambiguity because it has our mouthpiece ask for answers, but its response is just a cheeky “play the sequel!”. I suppose I can’t really be surprised at this point, but, really? This was the perfect opportunity to tide us over until the sequel by giving us some real hints and answers – I’m not asking for the whole picture, just SOMETHING. Something that built off the knowledge from The Reconstruction and let us make reasonable guesses about the big picture. But after all that dramatic buildup and that tedious battle, we get absolutely nothing. This whole diversion was a waste of time. The only thing we really got is that Tez “doesn’t belong”, which implies he’s the being from the gate and not Blacky… except that #98A2 sounds exactly like him and has the exact same obsession so they have to be related somehow, and I don’t see how that leaves room for Tez to be from another dimension. Unless we’re getting subjected to some parallel universes crap, which given that the dev is a Nine Hours Nine Person Nine Doors fan, we just might be.

Ugh. I don’t even know anymore.

Afterward Mr. Red showers you with max-level items, but he has the good sense to lampshade that it’s pretty meaningless since you already defeated the strongest enemy. And… that’s it. That’s the last of the content the game has to offer. A legitimately clever and funny twist involving the local sidequest peddlers, followed by a disappointing bait-and-switch nostalgia trip that gave us absolutely no new information but did give us a glimpse of how the battle system was intended to work, were the enemies not made of tissue paper.

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