Part 43: The Ultimate Bikini

You know what, I think we should be brave and reload our game again! Let's do it with our friends Escher and Musiea!



Incidentally, here you can see how long it took to play through the game, even when you know exactly what you're doing!



So we are dropped back into the Ark Arena. I think we should talk to Piu-Piu, it has been a while, we should check what he has to say!



Wait, what, what kind of challenge do you mean?









A Super Bikini, hm? You know what, I don't care about his bikinis. Let's say NO to this.







Wait, his first arena battle? Is he talking... about wanting to fight us himself?

You acted as if you were interested in and you let me down so easily...
You treat me like I'm so little!?
Like, a little girl who is naive, do we need her in this world? No need? That's what you were thinking!
You have taken away a lot of things that were valuable to me!
You think you are allowed to do anything as long as you have money!?
I curse you!
You will be fed up with hearing me say "No" I will keep on cursing you! You enjoy it!!

Ugh. By the way, I have on purpose transcribed the above lines with keeping in all of the spelling and grammar errors present in the original, because it certainly seems the translators were a bit drunk when doing this part! Sentences running into each other, missing words, you name it--it's there.

In any case, it's probably better to say yes...



...so let's do that!







So what does this...



Yes, folks. If we want the Super Bikini, we're going to have to fight Piu-Piu.



If you thought that this is a joke fight, I assure you that it's most definitely not! Piu-Piu is in fact the strongest enemy/boss in the game! He is on level 100 and has about 200,000 HP. And a particularly nasty trick up his sleeve that I will show in a moment. Escher and Musiea are both level 79 as we saw.



So our first attack is not too bad. If it were not critical it would be less, probably between 10,000-12,000 HP or so, but still OK.



He hits hard (also attacks twice per turn), but nothing we can't deal with really.



But the biggest surprise comes at the end of the turn! He has a permanent regen that gives him back 10,250 HP at the end of EVERY turn! Sooo.....

Unless you go and level up your characters like crazy, ordinary attacks are NOT going to work as you really need to outdamage his healing by a decent margin if you don't want this to last the whole day! (Especially since you will have to spend some turns on healing, etc. which will allow him to completely catch up back to full health if you don't have a sufficiently large margin!) Luckily we have just such a thing in our arsenal:



Basically, pick any of these physical attack skills--this one guarantees a critical hit (at the expense of going last in a turn, but that's fine).



When the morale gauge is on our side, this gives us quite a nice attack figure.

And so after a while of this, with strategic healing etc., we get to see this:



You can watch the video of this whole fight below! There is probably no need to watch the whole thing, but I do recommend at least skimming through it because Piu-Piu's voice is pretty funny (this is the only part of the game where he is actually voiced).

VIDEO: Escher and Musiea in the quest for super bikini! (make sure to switch it to 720px HD for much better quality!)





He gives quite a lot of money and EXP as a result.





In fact enough for both of our characters to gain several levels even at this point in the game.



More importantly, we get what we came here for: the super bikini!



This is an accessory we can equip on a character for a large boost of all stats. Here you can see what happens if Escher puts it on--yes, both characters can equip it, but we only get one item, so we have to choose who we will give it to.

Actually, the game is finished, why would you even want this? Well, there is the matter of New Game+ in a few different variations, so this may be helpful. Personally, I don't feel this game has a big replay potential, so I am not going to bother, but there it is if you want it.

In any case, Piu-Piu has a few comments about this turn of events:





















And just one more final thing...





You can actually fight Piu-Piu with each of the four couples and as a result, get one bikini for each couple that you can then use in NG+.

And with this, you have really done basically everything there is to do in this game and obtained the maximum possible completion percentage (I will show you in a moment what that is).

As another "reward", once you defeat Piu-Piu with all four couples, the game's title screen changes to this (not sure if it's a good thing or not, though):



(this is the complete version of picture previously seen on the "The End" screen!)


Which finally, finally, brings us to... the scenario screen. This screen shows you the percentage and the details of which parts of the game you have completed so far. This is what it looks like for the fully completed game; when you have only started, all the boxes are completely blank and only fill in when you complete an area/fight. Unfortunately it does spoil the fact that there are four chapters and not only two, but what can you do (it also seems to indicate the correct order of chapters to play them in!).

Additionaly, the Piu-Piu bits at the bottom only get added if you finish everything else, including all optional content--so you have to get the 100% completion first, and then you can fight him for 2% per couple, yielding the final maximum of 108% that you can see below! So here is the screen as it looks at the end of the game:






So now then. You might have noticed that there are some loose ends/unexplained references in this game. Worry not, that's why there is "Chaos Rings Ω", the prequel to this game, which tries to give you a bit more insight/explanation about some of the events that preceded the ones shown here. Whether you will LIKE the explanations or not, is another story, but it is there if you want it.

What that means for us, is that after a few days break, we'll continue right here in this same thread, straight into Chaos Righs Ω, to complete the story. That game is not very long, somewhere between 1-1.5 lengths of a chapter from this one. Once that is done, I will give a few thoughts about what I think about both of these games in general.

So, don't go anywhere and "please look forward to it"!