Part 13: The Queen of Spanish Harlem

Now where were we…? Ah right… Freefalling through a pocket dimension while confronting the Babel’s Queen. Not that anyone actually names it “Queen” outside of the datalogs and the music track…


New Music: Queen



Aya has leapt into the body of… Roland Vorbeck? Alright, who snuck their DnD character name into the random name generator…? You and Roch Baranov get the hell out of here. Terrance Wedekind can stay, since I typed that one into Google and got two Facebook hits. You’d think I would stop getting sidetracked by these NPC names but it just keeps getting ridiculous!



Anyway! While freefalling through this bizarre pocket dimension within the Babel, Aya’s abilities are rather limited. We cannot actually move Aya around the field. She can only swivel in air and aim her gun in place. Liberation is also out of the picture for no particular reason. Crossfire and other NPC support is also out. Despite the generous amount of Overdive candidates, everyone caught in the Babel Zone is in some kind of comatose state until Aya leaps into their body to begin firing wildly at the Queen.





Speaking of other NPCs in the area, the Queen isn’t particularly proactive in fighting off Aya initially. Its only concern seems to be launching volleys of orbs at humans in the area to convert them into energy for the Queen to consume.







Now, the Queen will eventually take notice of Aya if she fires on the monster and can do the same energy snack routine to our heroine. If Aya’s host body gets caught in the energy conversion field, she has about two seconds to jump away to another unfortunate soul trapped in the Babel. Otherwise, Aya gets disintegrated and that is, surprisingly enough, an automatic Game Over.



The Queen cannot constantly fire off its energy shots. There is a lengthy cooldown period and once it targets a human on the field, it’s committed to consuming that body. Aya is in the clear as long as she doesn’t accidentally leap into said future battery charge. There’s nothing that can be done for the poor bastard being zapped into oblivion. But it’s fine. The game doesn’t hold it against Aya for the ranking score. They were basically dead anyway!





But, while the energy attack might be occupied elsewhere, the Queen isn’t a complete idiot and will turn to see what prick has woken up and started dumping rounds into its backside. In such case, Queen Twisted will turn its err… well there’s a mouth, so let’s call it a “face” towards Aya’s position. The mouth, when opened, is a weak point on the Queen. Chucking a grenade into it is a great way to cause some damage and possibly stun the big nasty.







The problem is there’s about ten seconds between the Queen facing Aya with a very cross look on its writing tentacle carapace and it just outright eating her whole. Which also, funnily enough, is an instant Game Over. Indeed, the Queen only has one-shot kill attacks. But, we’ve already seen two-thirds of them.





Shooting the Queen in the mouth and lobbing grenades isn’t the most effective method of dealing with the episode mid-boss. Instead, it’s best to look around the field and see who is equipped with unique weapons. As people are consumed by the Queen, new folks, presumably being absorbed by the Babel since… I guess that’s a thing it does… will wink into existence to replace them. Of particular note are guys equipped with grenade launchers and sniper rifles.





Sniper rifles will work in a pinch if the Queen is busy eating someone else and Aya can unload every two-shot magazine on the person. Maybe it will be able to pull off a stun. It’s risky/hard to do with the terribly slow aiming, but Aya can possibly snipe the Queen in the mouth for some serious damage.



But really, the grenade launcher is what we want here. Any direct hit in the head/vaguely where the mouth is or two-three grenades anywhere on the Queen’s body will cause a stun and allow Aya to perform an Overdive attack. Overdive is essentially the only way to deal any real damage to the Queen and explosives are the only real efficient way to get it to the point where Overdive kills are possible.



But, the random chance of a grenade launcher floating alongside a soon to be dead SWAT Team member’s body isn’t the only way we can cause serious damage to the Queen to get in a Stun/Overdive Kill. It seems the Babel has also managed to absorb several vehicles (and pieces of buildings too if you watch the background carefully.)





As it turns out, vehicles floating in the Twisted Zone have become ridiculously flammable and will explode in a fiery mess after only a few shots from any of Aya’s weaponry. Exploding cars do have to be floating near the Queen to do damage. Their explosive radius is fairly large, but there’s no way to get the Queen’s positioning to cooperate and actually seeing/targeting vehicles is up to Aya’s position and hoping the auto lock-on cooperates (it often doesn’t if the stars don’t align properly.)







In addition to trashed cars falling through the void, subway cars and oil tanker trucks will also lazily float by the Queen battle zone. These too are ridiculously volatile and are almost guaranteed to stun the Queen and undoubtedly murder a dozen people trapped in this nightmare zone in the process.



That’s about all there is to the battle against the Queen. Hit it with explosives. Target vehicles when they present themselves. Overdive any chance we can. Try not to get Aya disintegrated or eaten.



The third Feat of Chapter 2-2 is to “Escape from the Babel Quickly”. What this actually means is to avoid the second phase of the Queen battle. Which isn’t hard to do with the tactics described. But, should Aya take more than four minutes to slay the Queen Twisted, the battle will move to its second phase.







A cutscene occurs where the Queen floats far below to the rather ominous looking portal at the far end of the pocket dimension. Said portal explodes in a flash of light and turns into a swirling doom vortex. In case you cannot guess, that ain’t good!



From here, the battle shifts to the Queen just hanging out in the portal and sucking Aya, as well as everyone else trapped in the Babel Zone, down towards the Queen’s open maw. Given the Queen opening up to devour everything above, its weak point is exposed and very easy to damage.



However, now Aya and everyone are constantly being sucked downwards to the vortex. There is still a trickle of fresh bodies spawning in higher up from the Queen for Aya to Overdive into and gain some ground... But they’re not infinite. The supply will eventually dry up and if Aya still hasn’t managed to end the fight, well…





Getting sucked into an oblivion hole connected to a pan-dimensional monster devouring everything within is also an instant Game Over. But again, it’s pretty hard to make it to this point. The Queen can easily be beaten in two and half or three minutes. It takes four plus minutes to initiate the vortex phase of the fight. And a good six minutes total for the game to get fed up with the player dicking around and kill off Aya from lack of Overdive bodies.





But back in the proper timeline where Aya didn’t run off into the Babel by herself and get horribly torn apart at an atomic level, the Queen was beaten with little issue.

That fight has an alright idea and the surreal setting is visually neat. It's just not any sort of fun in practice. Plus having a "Use Minimal Overdiving" Feat in a boss fight where you get one-shot if you do not Overdive is a wee bit of a dick move.





[The Babel!]
[It's sinking!]



Hey, is that-?
The Babel's...
Did we do it?





Aya manages to Overdive out of the Babel as it collapses and into another unsuspecting SWAT officer just kind of hanging out by his lonesome. As you do on coordinated special task team missions while assaulting an alien stronghold.



Agent Brea also managed to jump into a lone police officer that just happened to be hanging out in the same alley as Cray ended up in, also by himself. Unarmed. And still wearing the same outfit as his desk job from the first timeline…




New Music: Crossing Time, Crossing Mind



Huh?



Umm… Right? It’s hard to tell under all the tactical gear and uhh… you being an Asian man.
Yes, it’s me.
Phew. That’s a relief. That would have been hard to explain to some random SWAT boy. You really gotta start using some kind of signal when doing this thing.



Let me tell you something someone taught me once. No matter how you leave a battle, anything's better than death.
*gasps and frowns*
Everyone has someone waiting for them.
So Aya, what are you doing here? I don’t remember you being part of this mission.
*rubs neck* I’m here for you. You may have… umm… died.
…Oh. Jesus.
…Yeah.



Alright, we’ve successfully rescued Cray from… whatever it was that killed him in this timeline. It was probably a Bean. Those guys are the worst.



Aya attempts to radio command the success of her mission and to presumably get unplugged from the past. I’m not entirely clear if Aya can bail out of the machine on her own or if she needs assistance.

The sound of a microphone getting jostled on a desk is heard over the radio and then silence…



…
Uhh… aah… Sir, please respond!
…



[We lost Monsigny's signal.]
Where did we lose her?
[I'll show you.]



Welp. We’ve rescued Cray and now lost Gabrielle. Tune in next time when we spend some quality time with Boss Owen, where he provides quality support to his employee and certainly doesn’t pull some tremendously stupid bullshit. No sir!






Video: Queen Boss Battle and Chapter 2-2 Conclusion





Queen – It’s like a giant squid got fused with a rotten eggplant while in the middle of fucking a Mass Production Evangelion.