Part 98: The Real(?) Ending (Yours Truly Returns!)

Welcome back! At this point, there is literally just one thing left to do in the game. And here it is.



You might find yourself confused here a little bit. The recommended level is only 100, but the description says something like "for someone who's managed to get this far". But the quests that we did last time were on levels 150-200 or something like that. The easy explanation for this is that when originally released, this game didn't have quite as many quests as it has now (I think it had about half as many) so this USED to be the last quest that you could do after you've done all the others. Maximum level for characters was also 100 if I am not mistaken.

But then what happened is that a couple of updates were published which raised the max level to 200 and added a whole bunch of side quests. But this one was kept where it is, and now you can do it basically when you're halfway through all the others. It's kind of worthwhile as you get a really good accessory that you can use in the hard fights, but this quest is also interesting in that unlike others, you can do it as many times as you like (but you don't get multiple rewards). So we'll be doing it here with our Lv. 200 characters, although in real life I did it at level 100 to get the reward, so I could use it for other quests. But it's not really super hard either way.

This time we'll do it with Darwin and Marie, but if you are doing it with lower level characters you might want to bring somebody sturdier, such as Araki.

Anyway, let's get going.

















So I guess, the idea is that if we beat up Piu-Piu it might help him to regain his lost memory. You might recall from the game that he did have occasional flashes of recollection from the Ark Arena events, which would theoretically indicate that this is happening after, but with these games' mess of timelines and parallel universes, who the heck knows.





As mentioned, because of levelling this will probably be a lot easier than it normally would have been.



As you can see, he does not have a huge amount of HP.





His attacks do look funny.



Of course this is hard to defend from, really. In fact I probably could have used again pair Sacrifice to basically one-shot him... but I like to do it properly.



Like all enemies, sometimes he will skip a turn.



Poke!









But Marie finishes him off eventually.

If you'd like to see his attacks in action, you can use the link below to view this fight as video!

VIDEO: Yours Truly Returns! (make sure to switch it to 720px HD for much better quality!)



Like in the first game, the reward is the Super Bikini which, when worn, gives you a hefty boost in all stats. Unfortunately, even if you redo the quest, you can only get one of these.





So... what happens now?



















(I think it's gotten worse. A lot worse.)
(Can I even heal this?)
(Maybe he's waiting for someone to step in and smack him upside the head.)
(So do it. I can't bring myself to.)
(Barehanded hurts. Can I shoot him?)
(Stop him before we catch whatever he has!)
(How odd. I can hear everyone's thoughts.)













(Why can't I stop crying?)
(There are no words.)
(Guess I was one of the lucky ones.)
(Some things... just can't be bought.)
(So this must be what he was like before he lost his memory.)



Again, the whole place starts shaking.



























What's going on.































Nice explosion there.













His cardboard cutouts burned out during atmospheric re-entry, I guess.

















And apparently somehow everybody hid in his safe while all this was going on and are now being "spat" out.









































One last time, the credits. These, too, show us how everyone ended up in this version of the story. Music on these credits is quite funky: it's a medley of chiptune versions of several themes from this and previous games in the series. I highly recommend listening to it (use the link below please)!











And so...



That's it then. This is the fourth and final possible ending in this game. Obviously it is meant as a joke and not part of the canon--the real ending is the one we saw previously. But at this point, there is quite literally nothing else to do in this game. Unfortunately, I don't think there's really any kind of New Game+, so this is basically it, as far as that goes.


 *  *  *


Here we are finally, at the end of this (long) saga! It was fun to me to show a few games that people may have overlooked, and hopefully for you too (with apologies for sometimes a bit longer breaks between updates, of course)!

Overall, I think these games have turned out quite well. They have decent storylines, fun gameplay (CR2 especially so) and in my opinion provide good value for money (even though they are often criticised for being expensive compared to some other mobile games). They actually do go on sale from time to time at a substantially discounted prices, so if you are interested to play them yourself, probably you should wait for that.

The first game is perhaps hampered a little bit by the slowness of the story to develop--the real story doesn't in effect start until the second two chapters, so it's possible to lose interest a bit during Eluca/Zhamo chapter as it brings nothing new compared to Escher/Musiea, but if you get through that, you are in for a good time.

The other nice thing is that Chaos Rings 2 really took everything that made the first two games good, and still improved on it. It looks/sounds better, but more importantly the gameplay was vastly improved, especially through little tweaks to the battle system that make it much more fun. What I particularly had fun with there were the high level side quests, which I think they did a good job of making them slightly challenging, but not generally frustrating to do.

One more highlight for me for all three games were the beautiful character portraits--I mentioned several times, they are by Yuusuke Naora, a veteran art director/character designer of many Square JRPGs all the way from Final Fantasy VI onwards. And while I'm mentioning some team members by name, might as well praise Noriyasu Agematsu, the games' music composer, who I also thought did an excellent job!

In case anybody is interested in technical details, I played this on an iPad (there are also versions for iPhone, Android devices and (of all things) PS Vita!); gameplay was recorded via AirPlay mirroring to this application and everything else followed from there.

So I will say goodbye for now, and we'll see what will come next. Maybe Chaos Rings 3, maybe something else, not sure yet. We'll see.