Part 6

When we left off, Red had quit his job in order to focus full-time on superheroing. But he simply can't do that without grabbing some sidekicks first!

Now that we aren't with the Cygnus anymore, we have to take the junky region ships now and then. It doesn't look very safe.

Over in Shingrow we encounter Doll and her 80's hairdo.

She wants to go into the ruins here in Shingrow, but we'll save that for later. For now, she'll join us.

She's good at pretty much anything. I prefer to give her swords.

Next we go back to Koorong, where we encounter a lady of the night Annie. Her main role is in Emelia's story, but she helps out here too.

We negociate the price for the goods.

She knows where Shuzer's base is, but first we have to buy her dinner. Geez, women...

I think Roufas is pretending to be a waiter up there.

We follow her through the sewers to the hidden entrance of the base.

The bridge (which you can vaguely see there) is the special entrance.

Red trips on his way over and cops a feel.

There's the base, but going in there right now would get our asses kicked. We just did this so Annie would join us.

And we got Annie to join for this:

She's hiding under the table.

Roufas runs a little squad of his own, which is why he and Fuse were familiar with each other. We'll learn more about them in Emelia's quest, but for now, we get the choice of recruiting either Roufas or Liza, the purple haired girl.

This is a very easy choice because:

1. Liza is awesome.
2. We can actually get Roufas another way if we skip him here, whereas there's no other way to recruit Liza.

Here's Annie. She's a decent swordswoman, but that's about it.

Liza is probably the best character at Fighting techniques in the whole game. And seeing as how the DSC (supposedly short for Dream Super Combo), the game's most powerful single attack, is a fighting technique, you can see why taking Liza along is very much recommended. She learns it faster than anyone.

Next we head over to Luminous. It's all magicky.

We take him anyway. Rouge is Blue's brother, and probably the best magic user you can recruit.

Finally, we head back to Kyo and find this lil' Robot hanging around in a garden. His name is Rabbit and he's looking for the local BlackX base.

We take him along too.

Alright. Red has a sizeable posse now, and it's time to decide who we'll be using in the main team. Since this is the first quest we've done, I'm going to go ahead and make a few of the decisions: Doll, Liza, and Rouge will be on the team. This is because:

1. Doll can only be recruited in Red's quest. If we don't use her now, we won't ever see much of her. I plan to try and give every character at least some screentime over these seven quests, so I'll have to use Doll here.

2. Liza and Rouge are awesome, and some of the later BlackX areas are pretty tough.

In later quests I'll try and let y'all make more of the decisions. But for now, there is one choice: we've got two decent mecs in BJ&K and Rabbit. Which one do you want to see on the main team? Rabbit's probably a stronger fighter, but BJ&K has some nifty healing abilities.

Tomorrow we'll probably take on one or two of the BlackX bases (four convenient locations: Koorong, Kyo, Manhattan, and Shingrow!), and I'll be using the rest of today to power these guys up a bit. Also, I'm going to fiddle around and see if I can teach myself how to take video clips of the game, so I can show off some of the boss battles. Assuming all that goes well, I might toss in a quick bonus update tonight with some battle videos or updates on Red and co.'s training. Otherwise, expect things to continue tomorrow.