Part 132: Labyrinth of Memories

Today, it's time for the bonus dungeon.




To unlock this dungeon, you need to have gone to Phaeroh's Crag right before Zaude and do the scenes in fake Yormgen. If you don't, well, no bonus dungeon for you on that playthrough. The developers probably realized that this was a huge dick move after release (or maybe just got some negative feedback), so in the PS3 version, this dungeon is no longer missable. I'm not 100% sure, but I believe you head to present-day Yormgen after beating Duke if you haven't done the "normal" way to unlock it, or maybe the scene we'll see in Dahngrest in a bit just triggers without the prerequisites. I should probably check this more thoroughly.

Anyway, we're going back to fake Yormgen.



Somehow, it is now filled with all the NPCs that we saw way back during the Yormgen illusion after we passed out in the desert.



Our objective is talking to the Sage.



Haven't we already met?
It looks like he's forgotten.
He didn't forget... It's more like...we're back in the past now.
Yes. The town's bustling with people now, too.
What are you whispering about over there? Ah, perhaps you would like to hear an interesting story?
I don't have the time to listen to any epic sagas, gramps.
No, it'll be quite short, I assure you.
All right, then. Lay it on us.



And then, out from the stacks of books...

...



...I cannot believe this... He's been talking for two hours now...
Err...perhaps you could get to the point of the story?
What do you mean? This part is very important, and interesting, too!
Come on, get ta the good stuff!
Oh, all right. So, ultimately, I found a certain book in the stacks. And in this book, the following was written:



When the maiden of beauty sets out on a journey, she will come down to the fourth dimension, keeping watch over a fiery youth. Receiving the love of heaven, she will descend into a human body, and will revolt against the heavens. Eh? Pretty interesting, don't you think?
Is it?
What mysterious proclamations... It's very interesting, indeed.
Would you like to read more? I can give it to you, if you'd like.
You don't mind?
No, not at all. I've already memorized the whole book anyway.



Thank you very much!
You sure do like books, Estelle.


We can talk to him again for this line that I'd love to actually hear the story of, but otherwise we're done here.




Next stop is Dahngrest for a short scene.




(Imagine some screen shaking here.)



Other NPC: I think it came from the west.
That...seemed a little different from an earthquake.
Yes, it felt like there may have been a landslide.
That'd be one doozy of a landslide.
Let's go have a look.


Roughly west of Dahngrest are the Truffdae Mountains. If we went here before the scene in Dahngrest, we would have seen this:





However, now, they have changed to this:





Approaching the changed area triggers a scene.




Yes... Wasn't this area supposed to be a mountain range?
It seems that the rumble we heard back in Dahngrest came from here.
...Ya sayin' an entire mountain collapsed here? That's a pretty big cave in.
Deep beneath a steep and winding mountain range, on the sixth continent of Yurzorea, slumbers a man who transcends time...
Huh? Wasn't that what was written in that book you got back in Yormgen...?
Yes.
Hmmm... It might have something to do with this. Let's go down and have a look.


And down here, we can find this... dimensional rift or whatever it's supposed to be.





We can enter it like any other town or dungeon, so let's do just that, after I restock items and rest up.








Gives ya the heebie-jeebies, doesn't it?
Come out and show yourself!
Sounds like someone gets off on threatening people. Time for a beat-down!
But it doesn't seem like there's anyone here at all...
Wh-what do you mean, Estelle? I-I'm s-sure he's just really good at hiding... Yeah! That's it!



There might be something to be said for listening to a warning, though.



S-so-so, I guess we should s-stop, right? I mean, there's nothing here anyway...right, guys?
Yes, let's get going.
Let's look around a little more.
Urgh...


As soon as this scene is done the game throws this message at you:




Once you proceed, you cannot go back! Have you made up your mind?



Picking no just returns you to the world map. If you say yes, your on-screen character gives a short quip. You only ever see one of them, so here's the full list:

Yeah, I've made up my mind. Let me pass.
Of course I have! I'm going in.
I-I've made up my mind...!
Argh! I've had enough of your scare tactics! You'd better be ready for ME, punk!
Yes, of course. Let me pass, please.
Yeah, yeah, I've made up my mind. Ya got me curious not ta wanna see what yer hidin' in there.

Then pass. You're about to enter an infinite and merciless labyrinth from which you can never return, where hopeless confusion awaits you!

Sounds good to me! Bring it on!
...Here I go...
...L-labyrinth...?! Oh man, I hope I don't get lost...
Who's afraid of a little labyrinth?! Not me...
Hehe, sounds like this could be fun.
Eek, scary...Maybe I should've brought a change of diapers...


And we're inside... for the lack of a better word. Welcome to the Labyrinth of Memories.




Huh...? Don't I know this place?
This is Zaphias... Why...?
Ha ha...
I don't know how they're doing this, but I get the idea.
What idea...?
This is some sort of illusion, yeah? Let's have as much fun here as possible.
Can we have fun in a place like this...?



Oh, that's very useful to know! Thank you. You're very thoughtful!
We don't need you to tell us to be careful. Let's go.


I'm almost certain the design document for this dungeon included both "make this as long as possible with the least amount of effort" and "make the player not actually want to do this place". It sucks. But first things first.





You may notice this brown filter over the area. You will see this filter the entire dungeon, so get used to it. This also goes for this music, as well as



this great motion blur whenever anything on-screen is moving.





Every area of this place has one or more of these dimensional rifts that leads further into the dungeon. This area has two. Both of these will lead to a different area, as well as trigger the same scene:






That makes one!

What's with this coin?
It's not Gald...



Wh-where is that voice coming from...? N-not like I'm scared or anything...
Hey...you wanna go back?
I don't think we can.

If you wish to return to the land of the living, then it would be wise to gather up coins.

Looks like savin' up those coins is 'bout all we can do.
That is, unless we want to stay here for the rest of our lives!
C-cut out the jokes!
Oh, all right. ...Let's keep going.


Big Reason #1 why this place sucks: Fake Gald. To actually finish this place, we need to collect a total of fifteen Fake Gald. Apart from the first one here, getting Fake Gald is completely random. You may get one after beating a boss, and you may get one from treasure chests. I believe the drop rate increases in later areas of the dungeon, but that could be complete coincidence.

So hey, there we a chest right next to us in that cutscene, wasn't there? Let's open that!



Welp.

Big Reason #2 why this place sucks: All treasure chests are locked until you have defeated all enemies in the area. The contents of these chests is random, and may contain anything from Gald (pretty common) to usable items to accessories to Fake Gald (super rare). It feels like later areas in the dungeon give you better stuff than earlier areas.

So you'd think, okay, sure, if the treasure only gives you random pointless stuff but requires you to fight all enemies, and later areas of the dungeons with bosses give you better chance of Fake Gald, might as well just ignore the early random enemy fights and rush through to the end, right?

Nope. Reason #3: The dimensional rifts to the next area don't spawn until you have defeated all enemies in the area! Which means that the lock on treasure chests is entirely pointless and just means you have to backtrack through the area once all enemies are dead. Game design!







The enemies around here aren't very exciting. They're always one of three groups: Enemies that would normally be in the area, enemies that would be in the final dungeon, and like three enemies that are actually exclusive to this place.








Enemies are dead, which means we can advance and open the chest(s). I'll skip over most of this after the first room.



Entering the only warp in this area goes to:




You may have noticed that all of these areas are areas we've been in before. This leads into reason #4: the layout. Since they're just using stitched together areas from before, you will have no clue how any of these are actually connected unless you have a map or diagram.

GameFAQs is to the rescue:



(http://www.gamefaqs.com/xbox360/945...eria/faqs/54060)

This looks a bit confusing, but is actually not too bad. We start at the bottom and all paths are one-way.

Thanks to how the middle section of this place is laid out, it will take you a total of at least five visits of this dungeon to see every area once, but only four visits are required to meet and scan every enemy for the monster book. Unfortunately, this is not an issue.





And they didn't even bother to properly section the areas off for the revisit here, I am running up against an invisible wall in that screenshot above.




Here's some or maybe all of the memory dungeon exclusive enemies.






Some of the chests are jokes, thanks RNG.

Imagine more rooms like these here, there really isn't even a point to show them off, they're all places we've already seen but with a brown filter.

Eventually, we will get to a boss:






The bosses count as different scans and actually have different stats than originally, and also remove all the in-battle events and dialogue and whatever, but are otherwise identical as far as I can tell. Same movesets, same AI.





After defeating either Yeager or Schwann for the first time, a scene triggers:




Wh-what...?

...The last battle caused a rift to open up in space...!

...! Maybe we can go outside from here!

Y-you cannot go outside! Th-the only way out is to make it all the way to the end, of course!

The mysterious voice sounds a bit more flustered than usual.
Looks like we can get out of here after all.
Surely you're not suggesting that we go back after coming this far?
Sometimes the best strategy is to run. It might be a good idea to go back to recover our energy.

If you leave now, you'll have to start from the beginning the next time you enter! Do you still aspire to such folly...?!

If you decide to leave:

We're going to step out for a bit.

W-wait...

So, are we leaving or not? Come on!

Alas, they got away...

If you stay:

We're going to keep going.
H-huh...? You want to keep going?
Do you really want to have to start all over again from the very beginning?
I don't really see why we need to ever come here again...
But if we don't find out who the voice is, Rita will be too scared to sleep at night.
W-what are you talking about?!
Are you saying you could just chalk it up to ghosts and forget about it?
Th-there's no such thing as ghosts!
Ah, good. Then we can get moving.

Hee hee hee... I admire your courage...


I actually do take a short trip outside to trigger the skit (since all audio in the memory dungeon gets an echo effect which is pretty annoying), which forces me to start over from the beginning. Getting out here isn't too terrible, only makes you redo four or five rooms, so let's ignore that and jump straight back to where we were:



Skipping past most of these rooms...




This one is interesting because in the actual game it's only used for a cutscene, way back when we first met Barbos and Ioder. Here we can actually run around on it. Strange priorities, although I suppose they might have already created the non-cutscene map before they realized they only needed it for a scene.




Two.




You sometimes get to fight battles like Estelle or Schwann with them being in your party as well, which is kinda neat and silly.




These black warps have some requirement to go through them, in this case you need to have finished the Giganto sidequest.




Like I said before, assuming I didn't get extreme RNG, later areas have better items than earlier ones, so it would be much more efficient to just run back here instead of fighting a million random enemies.




Three.




Four. This is also a cutscene-exclusive room, I believe.




And back here is the end-of-dungeon locked warp, which needs the 15 Fake Gald:





End of run 1: Four Fake Gald. This is actually pretty good, on average you only seem to get around two per run.


Fake Gald (thank fucking god) carries over between trips to this dungeon, but everything else resets, including chests. A single run through this dungeon usually takes somewhere around an hour, I guess.


Let's just speed through this until we get to interesting stuff again. Second run:



Here's another of these cutscene-only areas, this time the scene in Baction with the Schwann reveal.




Five.




And end of run two, only one Fake Gald.


Third run:



Sometimes you actually get nice stuff from the random chests!



This area is weird because, for some reason, you can't open the menu here. No idea why. I believe it's fixed in the PS3 version.







Fourth run:








Fifth run:






Yay, we're finally done here! Of course, the game proceeds to troll me hard:





Running total: 18 Fake Gald in 5 runs, which is insanely good actually.


So what actually is behind this locked warp?








...Then...can we get out of the labyrinth from here?
Or maybe it leads to the land of the dead?

That is your own choice.

Our choice...?



Aaack!
Is this... Is this the one the book was referring to...?



Death will be more than happy to take you into her cold embrace. Hee hee hee...

We eat guys like that for breakfast! Come on, it's go time!


Watch the battle! / Baldurdash





It's Kratos! In case you don't know, he's one of the main characters in Tales of Symphonia.







He fights a lot like he did back in Symphonia, and overall this is a pretty fun fight.






























He's also got his Mystic Arte, which as far as I remember was exclusive to the PS2 port of Symphonia.



























But yeah, fun fight, not too hard but not a cakewalk either. It's too bad this is part of such a terrible dungeon, really!




L-look at that! Your trickery doesn't work on us anymore! Now show yourself!!

...I said, show yourself...





..."Don't think this is the end?" What's this all about?
I'm not sure, but it sounds ta me like he's gotta bad case of sour grapes. I guess this means we're not through with him?
But isn't that an exit right up ahead...?
I'm not sure... Let's go and see...



And with this, we have everything we need to do everything in the Coliseum!



Oh, and in case you wonder, the chests here are randomized crap, just like the rest of the dungeon. Thanks game.









Let's get out of here.




Phew... Thank goodness.
Aww, I wanted to play a little more.
Should we come back again? We can try a different route next time!
You're not funny! Stop it!



Hmmm... No idea on that one.
A ghost, probably.
I told you! There's no such thing as ghosts!! I'm sure it was just some lame old mage who gets a kick from making illusions for people to get lost in!
All right, let's leave it at that, then.
Good idea. Otherwise Rita'll be in a rotten mood all week.
But whaddaya think would make anyone wanna do that?
Our money, maybe?
No way...
It's nice to see the world is still full of mysteries.
Yes, I agree.



I second that. We should go before we get yanked into another labyrinth.
Okay, okay.




Achievement/Trophy:

Ahhh, Memories


Apparently there's another scene if you're insane enough to actually go back in again, but I couldn't get it to trigger.

Wait wait! Are you GOING BACK INSIDE?!
Yeah. Do you mind? You mind, don't you?
...Yes.
We don't need to be here anymore, do we?
It's just an illusion made by some mage, right? What's there to be afraid of?
N-nothing, but even so...

Rita shares my sentiments.


A short note on the PS3 version of this dungeon, since I kinda ignored that. It's mostly the same with a few minor changes:
- The Tison/Nan battle adds Clint into the fight.
- A room with The Don is added between Zagi and Duke.
- A room with Seifer is added between Estelle and Gigalarva.
- A room with Green Menace is added between Chimera and Pterobronc.
- A room with Bloody Beak is added between Medusa and Duke.

It also feels like you get less Fake Gald in the PS3 version, but that could be completely random chance screwing me. Or maybe they increased the drop rate for the European 360 version or something. Who knows. (The PS3 version is clearly based off the JP/US 360 version.)


Going through the dungeon a couple times got me a couple skits:

Skit: Around the World, Thanks to Karol / Baldurdash
It feels like we've been all over the entire world.
I'd read about some of the places in books, but we've gone to lots of places I'd never heard of!
Ah, ya gotta admire the youthfulness...the sweet naivete!
What? Are you too old and withered to appreciate anything anymore?
Oh! You're terrible! I am as innocent an' pure as a newborn babe...
Judy, you've been around the world on Ba'ul, right? Did you know most of the places we went?
No, not at all.
There were a lot of places I'd never seen before.
See? Wasn't it a good idea to join Brave Vesperia? Look how far we've come!
I feel like I really have a sense of how big the world is now. It wasn't that way in the castle.
You see?
Don't be getting all cocky, Karol. It's not like you had anything to do with it.
Now ya know how I feel, kid! Come ta ol' Raven's arms.
Misery loves company!


Skit: The Strongest Guild





I don't care how many enemies we've beaten, you guys are just too full of yourselves!
But I don't think any enemy could stand up to us at this point!
See, even cute li'l Judith says so! ♥
But doesn't this make you a little uneasy? Getting this strong...
What do you mean?
What if everyone is afraid of us, or no one wants to be anywhere near us...?
Or maybe they'll capture us, and put us in a cage for everyone to see!
I-I see... I hadn't thought about that...
Come on, that would never happen!
Hey, a life of luxury in a cage, people attendin' ta my every need!
Doesn't sound bad ta me!
...No matter how strong they get, some people never change...
...Heh heh... You're one to talk, Yuri.


Skit: Check It Out!
Look, look! I filled up the Monster Book!
Oooh! Let me see!
We sure have fought a lot of different kinds of monsters.
But it looks like there are still a few blank pages left...
I'm sorry... I don't know if I'll ever be able to finish it...
You're not the only one working on it, though.
Huh...?
Right. That book is the product of all our battles together.
That's right, Karol. You can't give up!




We can now also do this scene since we've discovered all towns and dungeons:








Yes. I was just thinking about all the different places we've traveled to.
Oh, I'm so jealous!



Well, we stay away from towns and strange places, so...
Oh, really?
Yes... A carriage operating an inn would look pretty out of place in a city, don't you think?
Perhaps...
Yes...and we stay away from dark forests, deep gorges, and the like... Such destinations are far too dangerous.
Ah...
...Could you maybe tell a little about the different places you've been to?
The places I've been to? Ummm...
Yes, please. I'd love to hear.
Well, then... First off, there's the capital...

...



...Wow. You've had quite a trip!
Well, we still have a good ways left to go... Ah, it's getting late...
Oh! I'm sorry! I completely lost track of time!
No, it's okay!



Yes, of course. I'll come again.
Hee hee, I can't wait to hear what happens next! ♪


Filling the whole world map also gets us an achievement -- though this is technically related to map fill rate, not town/dungeon discovery, but hey, close enough.

Achievement/Trophy:

Map Nerd

And that's it for today! Next time: The Coliseum!