Part 121: Bonus: Unraveling The Puzzle

Bonus: Unraveling The Puzzle

We’ve got a few things I want to show/explain before ending this for good. Namely, I want to explain some stuff about “loops” and how they interact with the characters in more detail, but we’ll cover all the postgame unlocks.



The first thing we’ll show is Destruction, where… we got a D in the final battle. I’m not doing it again, I promise, I just want to remind you all how bad I did. There isn’t even a real reward for doing better, as there are no Files locked behind it.



Slightly more relevant is that there is a whole postgame of many, many bonus waves to do! We also will not be participating in that!



No, we’re here for the Mystery Files, because we’ve unlocked several dozen by completing the game.

Goddamn Ida. I know it’s not “our” Ida, but this fuckin’ guy, I swear. I just want to punch him in the throat whenever I look at him.






So, this is actually one of the more interesting little details revealed in the postgame Mystery Files: the reason Juro’s grandma was never home. She got deleted by Universal Control when the android Tamao came to Sector 4. This isn’t even important, they could have easily just not told us this because it affects basically nothing, but it’s pretty funny.






Literally every single side character has now had their file updated to note that they are an AI managed by Universal Control. I’ll skip over the rest of them, though.

Also, Miwako deserves to be a full person!




I’m sorry, I still can’t get over Shadow 426’s ass.




Fuck you, Ida.




At least 300 loops before this latest one, huh? Keep that in mind going forward.



I’m of two minds on the whole “all the probes are repeating this infinitely with different permutations” ending. On the one hand, I find it both funny and charming. It’s silly and sweet and I enjoy it. At the same time, though, my critical brain is noting how existentially horrifying all this is, considering how many untold generations of children got turned into slurry and flushed by a dumb computer, and now that’s gonna happen everywhere else too. Best not to think too hard about it!











All the sectors have the same new updated text too.



The facility housing the pods is reaching its breaking point, eh? Why could that be? Well, it says here that it was built to last for about 5,000 years, which explains… basically everything. It’s why Sector 0 won’t carry on past the final loop, and why this is the final loop to begin with. Remember what I told you to remember earlier, about there having been at least 300 loops before this one? Well, each loop lasts ~16 years. 300×16=4800, so we’re already almost at 5000 years just from the 300 loops that have happened so far, meaning the facility would need to be recreated and this stage of Project Ark started over. That’s why this was the final loop; because the facility would be destroyed and recreated.










In case you needed confirmation of who was born in which sector, here you go.





Time for The Truth.



Before the patch, this used to not be sealed behind a 0 Mystery Point lock, which allowed the player to convert their Mystery Points into Meta-Chips before the endgame. You can’t do that post-patch, which is extremely annoying.



And that’s all the Mystery Files, not counting the ones I skipped because they were just Sentinel armaments or whatever.

A few more things before I sign off, though. First, we should note one more thing about loops: see, two loops ago, Juro Izumi and Chihiro Morimura were uploaded to Sector 0 and sent to Sumire Bridge in 2189 one loop ago. In that loop, Izumi becomes a wanted terrorist who is killed by Morimura, who also dies, but not before sending Tetsuya Ida to Sumire Bridge in 2189 in the current loop, where Morimura is waiting… but Izumi is no longer there. What gives, here?

Well, at some point Izumi must have updated his data in Sector 0, overwriting his younger self, while leaving Morimura and Ida to meet up in the current loop. Morimura, who did not update her data, did not replace her younger self at Sumire Bridge. That’s probably the most complicated thing to figure out in the game. The rest you should generally have the pieces to figure out, especially if you have actually played it and can thus use the Event Archive to put everything in the correct order.

But… that’s 13 Sentinels! Your reward for reading this far is this sick remix album I never linked because the fucking cover is a massive spoiler! Also, here’s a gif I made of the corkboard’s progress over the course of this LP:



Thanks for reading.