What do you get when you cross an amnesiac nonbinary manager with a clock and set them travelling from district to district of a dystopic megacity braving the horrors of living in a society with only a dozen blessed psychopaths with squishy bones to protect them? You get a fun time had by all! Settle in and enjoy my journey back through the best and worst of Limbus Company.
1: No spoilers for any Project Moon content. Not even under spoiler tags. Not of later Limbus stuff, not of Ruina, not of LobCorp. I've seen how that shit gets out of control immediately and I'm shutting it down now. This game is written so as to introduce anything important naturally from the perspective of the characters. If something must be elaborated on, I will do it myself.
2: Talking about the characters' literary inspirations is very much allowed, in fact encouraged. I would like to analyse the source texts myself but unfortunately my brain is very small and many of them are quite dense, intimidating, and Not In English.
3: Dante is nonbinary. If you forget to use they/them pronouns I will shoot you with the funny DING DING DING moth guns.
We begin in darkness.
Lion: "Ah~ If we're being technical, what our master has planned apparently isn't one of the City's taboos. It's just the kind of thing that... no one has ever dared to consider, you catch my drift?"
And already, intrigue. A small peek into the true self of our mysterious protagonist, hunted by three assassins in the midst of an important task - Wolf, Lion and Panther, as their dialogue tags them. The mysterious protagonist does something in the dark that mildly surprises Lion, and...
Swaps heads.
An ever-burning clock is a pretty sweet choice for a prosthetic head as far as your options go. Unfortunately a new wrinkle presents itself with this new fashion choice.
No one can understand them any more.
Wolf demonstrates this by wounding the protagonist in some way, causing them to howl in agony. From the faster ticking, Wolf determines that they can still feel pain.
Which... okay fair, with a prosthetic head and little room for the brain there's not necessarily anywhere for pain signals to go, might as well check.
The protagonist is only growing more confused and disoriented by the second, wondering why they're even being attacked in the first place. They're vaguely cognisant of something being done too quickly, a process that's redacted with white boxes, and that their memories are fast dissolving. Wolf, bored now that the ticking has ceased, moves to finish them off. Lion questions why she's in a hurry when they're in the middle of nowhere - Wolf retorts that they must "follow her teachings" rather than drag things out. Lion still opines that this is "the moment of a lifetime", lamenting that they won't get a second chance to "kill someone of this calibre". Panther admonishes her for being so emotional on the job.
Curiouser and curiouser, for our protagonist to be of such a station that killing them is a rare honour to be savoured. Panther gets back on task, confirming that the protagonist won't or can't tell them where their "star" is.
'Me' realises, to their consternation, that they can't even remember where this mystery "star" is supposed to be. Reminded that this prosthetic head has no mouth, and thus 'Me' couldn't tell the trio where the "star" is even if they wanted to, Panther surmises that their prey is now useless to them.
But right as Panther is telling Wolf to have at it, a noise interrupts them. A deep, rumbling, striking noise. A wild animal? A great beast? No.
BUS
Panther wonders how a bus got into the middle of the woods and Lion wonders if it took a wrong turn. It's possible she meant it as a joke, however...
THWACK
... her plan to deal with an oncoming bus was to walk in front of it and she was flabbergasted it got her run over, so maybe she's not playing with a full deck.
Wolf: "It bested Lion's strength?"
Yeah dude a fucking bus hit her.
Regardless, the partybus pulls up and parks in the clearing, and a mysterious woman is first to disembark.
Faust: "You've lost your way in a dark forest." 'Me': <I'm... sorry, what?> Faust: "Yet you were not overcome with fear. Why was that?" 'Me': <That's...>
Faust: "That's right. Now, repeat with the heart what I tell you aloud as you remind yourself of that image."
They repeat after Faust, and with a thump in their head and a pain in their heart...
... the pact is forged. 12 rattling, shattering impacts follow as the 12 occupants of the bus are tethered to the protagonist's clock head. Faust reassures them that their heart is still functioning, and the pact is now sealed - her nametag becoming dull pink, the header changing to Sinner #2. Master and servant, bond established. From this day forth, "bound to [their] time".
Faust: "I hope you'll make a fine leader." 'Me': <"Our"...?>
At which point the rest of the partybus begins to disembark, their names already revealed and tagged just like Faust's.
Ishmael: "... This guy's still not making any sense."
Dante awakens, at last ready to make proper introductions with the rest of the crew.
Man With Red Eyes: "It's not morning, but I could guess it's refreshing. How do you feel, Dante?" Dante: <What the hell do you mean by 'you could guess it's refreshing'.> Man With Red Eyes: "Tick-tocking like a clock... Sigh, some language barrier this is." Dante: <But you replied to me when I said you came too late to->
Dante nods. Satisfied that the manager has their wits about them, Vergilius gives Charon the go-ahead to set off. Charon, her tone flat and disaffected as it has been and will always be, announces departure with a 'cheery' "Vroom-vroom." The bus rumbles to life, at which point Dante realises they are on a bus, reflecting that they can't even be sure if they've ridden one before in their pre-clock life.
Vergilius keeps this practical. Does Dante remember who they are? Dante shakes their head. Dante probably wants their memory back, right? Dante nods.
He's so sassy
At this point Faust enters the conversation with a small exchange I honestly struggle to parse.
Vergilius: "Any words of yours, Ms. Faust?" Faust: "Faust will kindly turn down the offer. I doubt we'll have that much freedom over our own bodies most of the time."
Like I assume Vergilius is pulling her into the conversation via a sarcastic offer for her to communicate via gestures now too and Faust is replying that that would be logistically difficult but the way it's phrased makes it rather opaque in a way that PM games usually aren't. It's pretty minor in the grand scheme of things all the same.
Getting back on track, Dante once more questions the fact that Vergilius and Faust are referring to them as 'Dante' - or 'Dantehhh', as is the case with Vergilius' disaffected drawl. Faust remarks that the amnesia must be affecting them rather severely, reassuring them that they'll get used to it with time, which only causes Dante to question how she can understand them when the three assassins and Vergilius have all claimed to hear nothing but mechanical ticking.
Except that one time when Vergilius appeared to directly reply to Dante - let's all keep our eyes peeled for times when it seems like Vergilius is either pretending he can't understand Dante just fine or making the wildest crits on his Insight checks.
Then again perhaps not if Dante's saying shit like "Vergie" within earshot.
Faust: "Faust can hear what you intend to speak." Dante: <You really can...? But how? I don't even have a real mouth.> Faust: "Outdated ideas must be one of the side effects that came with your head replacement. It's anachronistic to think that vocal organs such as the cords or tongue are necessary to participate in conversation."
Faust got jokes, honestly. <How can I speak without a mouth?> "Skill issue." She even says that Dante can limit their words to a single person or make them audible to all, which is either an overstatement or a retcon because I'm pretty sure Dante has been overheard while having a private conversation with one Sinner before as of this writing.
Faust does clarify the limitations of Dante's particular gift of conversation - only Sinners can hear and understand them. The Sinners, of course, are the twelve contracted to Dante's time, who were healed from their gruesome deaths once Dante turned the clock. This at last makes Dante aware of the other 11 people in the bus sitting scattershot behind them, followed by some untagged interjections by the recently deceased.
??? (Sinner #3, The Saint Of Silly): "What hooo!!! So thou art the final piece that completes our journey's cast! How I have yearned for this moment!" ??? (Gregor): "Say, pal, where'd you sell your old cranium off?" ??? (Ishmael): "So it was you. Thanks for putting my spine back into one piece. Were you a surgeon or something in the Nest?"
Vergilius immediately tells them all to shut the fuck up and go one at a time, because he was assigned the role of teacher on this particular field trip and he sounds like he wants to kill everyone on the bus and then himself any time he has to act accordingly. Gregor is the first target of his ire for the crime of sitting closest to the front of the bus, much to his consternation.
We'll find out what Greg means with this aside quite soon, never you fear
Gregor: "Heard you were gonna be our boss, or... yeah, our manager." Dante: <Manager?> Gregor: "Yep, which is why I was real curious to meet you, and... Uhm... Hmm, tsk. Forming the right sentences is tough work. Dunno what you did with your old head, but I guess everyone has their story."
CV: Choi Han
Source Material: The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. The story of a man named Gregor Samsa who wakes one morning to find himself transformed into a massive cockroach, or Ungeziefer (literally meaning 'monstrous vermin'), hence the cursive above his name, and the tattoo on his human arm.
Greg is one of the most chill Sinners, but not by choice. His cockroach arm is a real handful, causing him to suppress his emotions as much as he can for fear of setting it off, and we'll see in short order just how much strife that thing has caused him throughout his life. One of the few Sinners whose info has accidentally been revealed without redaction, letting it slip that he's canonically 35. Still somehow the most babygirl of the bunch, not helped by being a 5'6 pocket prince, and one of only two smokers on the bus.
Gregor: " 'Greg'...?" Dante: <Rich? What's that about?>
Refusing to elaborate, Rodion assaults them with her title card.
CV: Yoon A-young
Source Material: Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The story of a man named Rodion Raskolnikov (РАСКО́Л being the first half of that surname, meaning 'split' or 'division' on its own, and inscribed on this Rodion's axe) who murders and robs a pawnbroker in the hopes of at last changing his fortunes.
Rodion is another of the more chill Sinners, though where Greg is laid-back and nonconfrontational she's quick to lighten the mood. The Backstreets as a concept will be revisited in relatively short order as the bus makes its way to its first destination, but suffice it to say that for Rodion to hail from there means that she comes from extreme poverty. Honestly she's likely the poorest and lowest-class of the entire bus, and it shows every time the gang start debating a social issue. She's also 6ft tall and a Skilled Gambler, making her iconic and beyond reproach.
She also either has a very loose grasp of what the company's goals are with this expedition, or is doing a silly to break the tension, because she's quick to claim that since Dante used to be such a big deal back in the Nest (more on Nests as a concept will follow) clearly once their memories come back everybody's gonna be in the money easy-peasy.
Then she kicks it to Sinclair because the boy must suffer.
Source Material: Demian - The Story of Boyhood by Hermann Hesse. The story of a young boy named Emil Sinclair struggling between two worlds, one of illusion and one of reality, in the process of becoming a man. 'Vogel', meaning bird, taken together with his icon of a cracked egg, alludes to the idea of a bird fighting to free itself from its shell in order to be born. VOGEL is also inscribed on his halberd.
Out of all the other info in this title card I am immediately locking on to the fact that Sinclair canonically has resting bitchface, because that makes him so much like me fr fr. Any time I would have a photo taken for some kind of ID I would look like a future serial killer. He's also very trans coded and dude same- The second-shortest Sinner of the bunch at 5'5 and highly unlikely to be any older than 20, he speaks in a timid and high-pitched voice that further emphasises his relative youth and immaturity among the Sinners. Made a brief early cameo in the resurrection CG, having been offscreened to smithereens by the Furries.
Even Dante can tell that Sinclair looks viscerally uncomfortable to be here, referring to him as a 'boy' and wondering if he joined the company by choice. Personally, Dante, I think when everyone's called 'Sinners' and bound to you via some kind of profane pact I'd sooner assume nobody here has a happy story.
Rodion: "Well, you'll learn the ropes in the coming days. 'Kay then, how about you next, nerdy pal!"
CV: Min Seung-woo
Source Material: Unique among the Sinners in that he is not himself from a work of fiction. Instead his namesake is the penname of one Kim Hae-gyong, a poet and writer who lived during Japan's occupation of Korea. The hangul text, Ha Yung, is another alias he used - rarely visible ingame not on his knife, but the book he carries beside it. Most influential in his role in Limbus Company are his poetry anthology Crow's Eye View, notorious for being so difficult to understand that only 15 of the 30 poems were ultimately published, and The Wings, the source of the evocative phrase "Have you ever seen a taxidermied genius?" used in Yi Sang's character promo.
I could gush about Yi Sang for paragraphs, but the textual equivalent of that one gif of a cat getting vigorously patted by like a dozen guys will have to wait until his time comes. Until then, I'm deeply amused by the fact that his official company blurb stops just shy of saying "look he has autism just try to be understanding".
Case in point. Dante even waits a little while longer, expecting him to be fucking with them like Faust already has, only for Yi Sang to immediately disengage and stare out the window. Sigma researcher grindset.
Ever the one to position herself as the voice of reason, Ishmael steps in to take her turn with a trademark exasperated sigh.
CV: Jang Ye-na
Source Material: Moby Dick by Herman Melville, the story of one man's Luciferan ego and self-destructive obsession with vengeance upon nature itself, of which Ishmael is the only survivor to tell the tale. Ishmael's subtitle, Hearse, seen printed on her shield is likely a twofold reference - the 'two hearses' Ahab is prophecised to see before he dies, one being Moby Dick itself and the other his very own ship, and Queequeg's coffin, which goes unused by the man himself but ultimately saves Ishmael's life when the Pequod goes down with all hands.
Her company primer is as relatively straightforward as she is herself - she's the closest to Normal of the bunch and she generally knows what she's doing, but taking her for granted will fast-track you towards a problem. She is also oomfie and I would sacrifice many of my material possessions to her.
Ishmael thanks Dante for the save with their clock-turning, the first to properly acknowledge that that was their doing. Hilariously, she even bows to Dante before sitting back down. In an interesting parting observation Dante is socially conscious enough to notice that while Ishmael was unfailingly polite and appropriate in her introduction, they didn't get a vibe of genuine friendliness from her the same way they did Rodion.
Heathcliff takes his turn next without prompting, though hardly out of a sense of decorum like Ishmael did.
CV: Hong Seung-hyo
Source Material: Wuthering Heights by Charlotte Bronte. A tale of toxic love, obsession, the inhumanity of class division, and the howling vortex of suffering paid upon suffering that is generational trauma. His subtitle is kind of a no-brainer, seeing as Wuthering Heights revolves around Heathcliff's Count of Monte Cristo-esque twelve-step plan to wreak catastrophic vengeance upon the family that raised him only to deny him happiness.
I would sacrifice life and liberty for Heathcliff, but that's for much further down the line. To focus on the company blurb, it says little that you wouldn't be able to surmise from just meeting Heathcliff, or indeed the one line he had in the previous update before getting Snapped out of reality - he's a straightforward bruiser and he doesn't like to stop and think things through.
Heathcliff: "Not under anyone's orders, mind you. I only did it to buggers that got on my nerves."
Heathcliff: "I'm deathly allergic to cocky gaffers who think they can boss me around."
Dante, with a faintly nervous air, narrates that they don't think they've done anything to give him that impression yet.
And then
La Creatura cometh
CV: Kim Yea-lim
Source Material: Don Quixote, a novel by Miguel de Cervantes depicting a delusional chivalryboo who LARPs as a knight-errant and travels the country with his 'squire' Sancho to generally be a fucking nuisance to everybody. However her subtitle, 'SUEÑO IMPOSIBLE' or IMPOSSIBLE DREAM, visible engraved on her lance is a reference to the 1965 musical Man of La Mancha (itself inspired by an earlier non-musical play I, Don Quixote) where the story of Don Quixote is a play performed by Miguel de Cervantes himself while in captivity by the Spanish Inquisition - The Impossible Dream is the musical's headliner song, its very own Defying Gravity if you will, sung in full and then partially three times more over the course of the play. The musical connection is even more apparent due to the word choice of "exaggerated mannerisms akin to those of an actor" in her company writeup.
Man this bus has everything - we got chronic depression, manic depression, OCD (listed on Ishmael's anger management issues, autism and ADHD. Don's enthusiasm for the job is as boundless as her delusion about what a Fixer really is. We'll be meeting some normal Fixers very soon, so we'll save any deeper discussion about how insane her beliefs that they're defenders of justice are for later. Instead we'll talk about how Don is very small but very powerful, boasting some incredible pipes on her notorious for jumpscaring players who leave their game idle on the top menu too long. MANAGER-ESQUIIIIIIIIIIIIIIRE, WHERE DID YOU GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.
Dante: <A Fixer...? That definitely feels like a term I used to know...>
Don, seeing a chance to ramble about her hyperfixation, gets stars in her eyes.
No, literally.
Don stops herself just short, however - to realise that Dante probably doesn't know about the City either. She revs up to start eleven breathless paragraphs of exposition before mercifully being cut short by Vergilius with a reminder that this is meant to be for short introductions. Don badly misses an opportunity to say that all introductions are short coming from her because she is 5'4 and could fit in your inside jacket pocket to give you strength for the many trials ahead.
:O
Next up is the Notorious Hongler, Project Moon's favourite princess and the most interesting boy in the world.
CV: Kim Sin-woo
Source Material: Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin. I have little to say about it as Dream of the Red Chamber is, according to my research, a Big Fucking Deal to the point that it makes for a very intimidating approach. My understanding is that it's the story of a magical piece of jade being incarnated as a human by the goddess Nüwa in order to learn more about the world, with Hong Lu being unique in that he doesn't share a name with that incarnated character (Jia Baoyu), but one derived from the jade itself. His icon too refers to his heavenly origins, being a jade-coloured eye (the same as his own left eye) encircled by clouds. His subtitle translates to 'unreal' or 'illusory'. This is one of the ones where I invite any more knowledgeable readers to please share what they know in the thread.
And here we have the inverse of Rodion, the richest Sinner coming from a place of truly absurd affluence. A fusion of Greg and Don in terms of being both chill and silly, he's something of a cipher even as of writing, though there have been tantalising hints as to just what may be cooking under the surface scattered about here and there. Amusingly his company primer amounts to "look he's so rich he thinks a banana costs 10 Ahn just try to ignore him". Made a brief cameo in the resurrection CG, stretching and smiling through it all despite having been reduced to paste by the Furries.
Hong Lu: "Wow, and look at you! Isn't that a fascinating head there? A popular model these days, I suppose?" Dante: <No, this isn't that kind of...> Hong Lu: "It's not of my interest, though."
Heathcliff understandably is ready to decapitate Hong Lu for that weird-ass conversation, only for a death-glare from Vergilius to put his ass back in its seat where it belongs. Ryoshu takes her turn next.
CV: Lee Sae-ah
Source Material: Hell Screen by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, the story of the greatest artist in the world making manifest a vision of Hell for a lord's commission - and in the process, losing all that he cares for. Ryoshu is named after an alternate reading of the characters used for the protagonist Yoshihide's name. Her subtitle, printed on the scabbard of her odachi, means... 'Frantic, Screaming, Incoherent'. A foreboding thing to carry with her at all times but I don't know what you can expect from the artist who painted Hell.
Ryoshu is a fucked-up cycle path and the company primer makes no bones about it. The caution tag about her 'background' is no fucking joke either. You see those shapes behind her in her character art? Let's get a better look at them from a different promo piece.
A colossal grasping hand looming from the void behind her as she stands in an ocean of blood. Those fingers are each styled after an immensely powerful criminal syndicate known as, well, the Fingers - I especially love the Thumb's lil hat, it looks so silly. We'll be learning more about the Fingers as we advance through the Inferno so I won't bog this down any further, but suffice it to say the implications of this art are staggering. It's like one woman getting literally every mob family pissed at her at once, as well as the Yakuza and the Triads and the Cartels. Insane behaviour. She also had an early cameo in the resurrection CG, looking entirely too excited about watching the gore reverse itself.
And she follows it up with a shitty pun, then proceeds to snort at her own shitty pun.
I forgot about this moment and I'm glad I get to revisit it because that's insane coming from Ryoshu of all people.
Next up, Meursault.
CV: Kwon Sung-hyuk
Source Material: l'Etranger by Albert Camus, alternately known as The Stranger or The Outsider. The story of a man named Meursault who appears to feel nothing and so becomes slowly estranged from society, culminating in being cast as an inhuman monster when put on trial for shooting a man dead under dubious circumstances. His subtitle, Soleil (or Sun) is likely a reference to the same blinding sunlight that gave Meursault heatstroke and impaired his judgement before he was confronted on the beach, and caused the blade of the knife in the man's hand to gleam prominently before Meursault shot him - the literal cause of his downfall, and a metaphor for the burning, torturous glare he's endured from others.
I was going to just post 'Meursault (Meursault)' for a funny gag at first but no, best to hold to the pattern. He's a real cipher of a man, and the words that follow only reinforce that.
Dante is floored by the neurodivergence on display, but is unable to pinpoint exactly what is wrong with Meursault, and so decides to leave it be. Instead they turn to Outis to answers with a long, long note of silence. Dante is so overwhelmed by the pressure of her evaluating gaze that they start to bow to her, only for her to mercifully stop them.
Canto I: The Outcast (Part 1) - Through The Cracks
Welcome back boys girls and others, today we lift the curtain on our first Canto! I would say 'first proper canto' but... well, that's not exactly accurate.
Time constraints are practically a principle of nature, and that seems to go double with live service games where the chunk of content prepared at launch is straining beneath the weight of introducing everything that'll be the foundation for the next squillion years of service while also offering enough content to feel satisfying to chew through during the honeymoon period. Let's not mince words; Cantos I, II and III are a completely different beast to IV, V and VI.
Now, does that mean the first three are bad? Not necessarily. I'm going to relish the excuse to properly experience them all again like this so I can fully solidify what I think about them - because everybody likes a big payoff, but catharsis requires contrast, and I think that Project Moon did something particularly smart with the release-day Cantos that showed awareness of their limitations.
Though I'm not gonna blow smoke up your ass either, it does the classic early gacha 'an important conversation is spread over three map nodes because waves of enemies zerg rush the characters between sentences' thing which I am simply going to skip over for the most part 'cause that's what an LP is for.
A first look at our map screen for the day. Every Canto and Intervallo has its own cool map screen that visually charts the group's progress through the story, the connecting thread between each map node turning bright gold as you go - unfortunately they're very much formatted for scrolling around on a phone, and as such it'd tank my image economy to try and stitch them together, so I'll just show what's most crucial. Map nodes turn yellow when cleared, bright green on EX clear - typically that's just clearing a node under 10 turns, 15 in select cases, not usually a problem at all. Lunacy is the gacha currency, which we will talk about as little as possible.
Map nodes generally require enkephalin to enter - enkephalin being that empty gauge in the bottom left there, the standard mobile game stamina system. Book nodes are purely story sequences, and free to enter. Sword-and-book nodes are fights with story sequences before, after, or both - by clicking on the node I can simply replay the story sequences directly for the purposes of this LP without having to waste enkephalin entering, not that it'd really be a problem either because backing out of a fight refunds what you spent to enter minus a piddly 1 point surcharge and the 5 minutes it takes me to screenshot everything regenerates that single lost point no problem. For certain nodes I will have to fully replay them because important story beats happen during battle or even after battle but before the victory screen, but we'll get to that later. For the most part it's just story nodes like this that directly use enkephalin - and while it offers the ability to turn gacha currency into stamina like most other gacha games it's actually an insanely good exchange rate in Limbus for reasons none of you could or should possibly care about - so this LP will honestly be no strain on my resources whatsoever. And thank god for that.
Anyhoo, last update you may remember I said we'd be encountering the Backstreets up close soon. Say hello to the Backstreets - a grey, run-down shithole of a place. That is to say that the Backstreets aren't a singular, defined 'district' of The City. In Library of Ruina Roland describes them more accurately as a kind of network of veins threated through the entire city. The places where the lost, the dispossessed, the downtrodden and the straight-up unlucky congregate. Every 'bad side of town', every 'wrong side of the tracks', every place in your city where the money dried up and the infrastructure decayed and everyone in power stopped caring about the people who they're supposed to protect. Those places are everywhere in the City because that's just how it is in the City, and as we'll soon see, few people aboard the bus have any greater level of empathy for the misbegotten wretches who live here. After all, they have their own stuff to deal with. That's that and this is this.
Dante, previously dozing to pass the long bus trip, awakens to the sound of Charon asking Vergilius for "permission to vroom-vroom". Vergilius gives it, and Charon dispassionately warns of "bumpity-bumps".
Narration: The clumps stuck to the window gently dissolve, letting light through. Many different sets of eyes are lethargically facing forward. It felt like a pretty gruesome scene, but based on the others' reactions, maybe this kind of violence is common in the City.
Not a single person on the bus even feels the need to comment as Charon ploughs through who knows how many unfortunates are too slow to get out of Mephistopheles' way. Dante, clearly feeling the need to change the unspoken subject straight away now that they're awake, turns to Gregor (who as we know sits pretty close to the front of the bus near Dante) to ask after their destination.
And instantly beefs it.
Gregor: "... you almost called me 'bug guy', didn't you?" Gregor: "Once again, my name is Gregor. The same way you're called Dante and not clockface."
Wisely deciding not to dig themself any deeper Dante simply nods. Greg, willing to let it slide, turns and asks about the destination on their behalf.
Gregor: "Say, Bus Girlie. Where are we headed?" Charon: "Once again, my name is Charon. The same way you're called Gregor and not bug guy."
Dante: <She's got you there, Gregor.>
The conciliatory move seems to get Greg back into Charon's good graces, not that she's too enthusiastic about anything. She replies that she heard from Vergilius that they're going to District 4 - to the immediate and loud enthusiasm of Don Quixote. She begins rattling off a story about someone called the Grass Maiden, but her hyperfixated ranting rouses Heathcliff's ire. He snarls at her to shut the fuck up and let everybody ride in peace. Don, clueless, defends herself by saying she'd been quiet. Heathcliff, predictably, is not in the mood for pedantry and just tells her to shut the fuck up again, louder.
At which point Ishmael makes it so much worse by putting her foot in it to say "you're being louder."
Heathcliff: "... even if you can't die, you sure as hell can suffer, no? So say that again." Ishmael: "I say the right thing and your first response is violence? Shows how refined you are."
I'm kind of cringing just recounting it because god has there ever been a better demonstration of how saying things that are technically true can escalate a situation. Let alone that she strikes a more sensitive nerve than she realises, Heathcliff's loud bluster growing cold at the mention of his refinement.
Dante thankfully, belatedly, realises that this is something an Executive Manager should intervene in.
Ishmael: "Kuh-"
Unfortunately someone else on the bus has Strong Opinions about the volume of chatter, and far less hesitance to act on it than Heathcliff.
Ryoshu: "To right against noisy crying hogs entrails scragging."
She didn't draw her sword at any point, by the way. The scabbard is covered in blood. She fucking decapitated Heathcliff and Ishmael in one swing with a sheathed sword.
But at least that's the end of it and it can't get any w-
Monkey SEES Villainy: Neuron Activation
Rodion tuts that all the teamkilling got blood on her coat while Dante laments that they must be fucking insane.
Vergilius: "You four. Cleaning duty for the next month." Don: "Such unfairness! I merely sought the hand of justice!" Rodion: "Oh, also! Tell them to do my laundry, too. Blood doesn't wash off as easily as wine stains. Sheesh, dry cleaning's costly..."
Can you even imagine what being Vergilius has been like in the time between this bus setting off and now. It's been This Shit day in and day out. No wonder he's short-tempered.
Vergilius prompts Dante to turn the clock again. Unfortunately that first time was kind of a fluke, and Dante doesn't understand what he means. With a heavy sigh, Vergilius immediately pivots and calls in Faust for another round of translation. Funnily even Faust is kind of irritated to have to explain it again, sighing before she heads over to the two at the front of the bus and reexplains that it's just a matter of Dante closing their eyes and following their star. Once more Dante listens.
In fact, the door is everywhere.
However, only you can see it. For the stars never set in your sky.
Dante senses a change around them, a thread of light, and 'opens their eyes' anew.
Hell.
What, you thought they were gonna fuck around?
Narration: It wasn't a pleasant sight. Suffocating heat and agonised cries seep through the gap. Hearing the endless laments and wailing for even a split second makes me feel faint. However, I'm approaching the door, grasping at its handles as if it's what I was born to do.
Yeah no it's just Hell, the Sinners die and go to Hell and then Dante has to drag them back out.
Narration: I grope about in the door. Thousands upon thousands of last wails lay within. And reaching inside, I grab a few unknown hands. I can feel the histories of different sins bearing their brands crawl up my hand and onto my arm.
Art thou prepared to share the pain?
Narration: Could that have been a question? Or rather, pressure to comply? I pulled forth the Sinners grasping my hand with all my strength.
The gates of Hell have a particularly 'Door to the Truth' from Fullmetal Alchemist vibe that could have all sorts of implications, let alone the fact that hell is fucking real and people have to go there when they die instead of getting to finally escape this miserable shithole of a City. But if that weren't bad enough, this time Dante is well and truly conscious of the fact that by hauling the Sinners back from their terrible fates, they must share them.
Narration: A terrible pain spreads through my neck and head. It's so crushingly severe, it makes me wish I were dead. The indescribable sensation of bone and muscle twisting, entangling with each other, goes on for what feels like an eternity. My legs weren't prepared to endure all this agony; I fell to kneel atop the pool of blood in helplessness.
Narration: Trembles in the bloody pools, gradually growing into waves and bubbles rising from the floor. Soon, that blood soaking the ground coalesced into three masses. Narration: Then the agony that seemed to last forever vanished just like that.
There's a brief, tender moment as Heathcliff and Ishmael mutually cope with their fresh resurrections, clearly still shaking off the effects of their wounds.
Ryoshu, conversely, is a freak about it.
Heathcliff advances on Ryoshu the second his senses clear, eager to exact his revenge. Dante frantically reminds him that he just came back to life - unfortunately Heathcliff's blood is up and he won't countenance anything less than getting to repay the harm done to him.
Sinclair: "P-please, wait! Dante looks like they're in a lot of pain, so we really should sh-"
Anything.
Heathcliff: "Next time, Clockface, you're crushed. Are we clear?" Ishmael: "You really are as coarse as you look." Heathcliff: "... was dying once not enough for you?"
Heathcliff tightens his grip on his bat. Ishmael readies her mace and shield. Dante wonders if they're really supposed to manage people who won't even let literal death change their ways.
Then the boiling tensions suddenly freeze over as the Sinners remember they're not alone in the bus.
Vergilius: "Do not let me hear weapons clashing inside the bus. If any of you break this rule as of now..." Vergilius: "You're going to be begging for me to let you die. I'm sure you know I'm capable of that and more, right?"
After Vergilius' interjection, the only sound left in the bus is Sinclair's writhing, dying gurgles. Despite everything, Vergilius isn't ignorant of how much Dante suffers to turn the clock, and apologises while asking them to rewind once more. Unfortunately a 'sorry' isn't enough for Dante right now, after that hellish vision and equally hellish experience.
Narration: I'd rather die than have to bear that harrowing pain once more. I waggled my head in dejection. Narration: The faint hint of a smile on Vergilius' face vanishes as his expression shifts. Vergilius: "... You'd better open up while I'm still feeling generous enough to ask and offer apologies, Manager Dante." Vergilius: "Oh, in case you're refusing simply because you don't want more pain, I can gladly help you with that. This degree of pain will feel like nothing by the time I'm done. Surely you'll be a tougher person afterward, right?"
Dante may be 'manager', but that hardly comes with any real power. What little benevolence Vergilius has in him vanishes the instant they display any hesitance, any willingness to cut and run, and whether that cruelty comes from malice or desperation there's nothing Dante can do in the face of it. But then...
a POWERFUL rat by the name of Charles Entertainment Cheese
Vergilius: "You... this is not the time to step in." Outis: "I was informed when I joined the company that the Executive Manager would be my superior, not you. I would say that the manager has made themself clear with a shake of the head." Vergilius: "I see, so their aide has decided to step in, is that it? Then it's my turn to make clear what I mean."
Vergilius' eyes glow even brighter, even redder, and Dante panics. They don't know what they're supposed to do, if they're even qualified, but fear of an even bigger mess should they allow Vergilius' wrath to be roused to its greatest extent is enough to spur them on. "Reviving one should hurt less than reviving twelve at once", they reason to themself as they frantically motion Outis to stand down. She reluctantly obeys.
Narration: The red door greeted me again, along with the twisting sensation. I've given up trying to describe the throes I go through. Words can't express it in full, anyway.
Upon revival, Sinclair shakily thanks Dante for the assist and waddles back to his seat. The bus, presumably, has that classic broken-glass-for-air atmosphere of the dining table right after the dividing line between 'argument' and 'domestic incident' gets crossed. It's unclear how long that silence lasts, save that the first to break it again is Don. She wants to know that if rule #1 was 'no fighting on the bus', what's #2? Greg winces, wondering what possessed her to ask about that.
Vergilius: "Rule number two..." Vergilius: "Don't litter the bus floor with cigarettes. They leave burn marks."
Ryoshu chuckles, and the bus knows peace once more.
So yeah that scene is memorable enough that multiple people I've spoken to, including myself, assumed it actually happened in the prologue instead of Canto I. Because man talk about another striking introduction to this busful of blessed psychopaths. Ishmael and Heathcliff start as they mean to go on, Ryoshu proving herself to be the biggest freak on the bus, Don having a No Thoughts Head Empty Only Justice momento, Outis being willing to throw herself in front of an oncoming train yes executive manager i will block its wheels with my flesh and bone anything for glorious limbus company... it's a lot.
I think what stands out for me, from the standpoint of rereading all this, is some of the smaller subtleties of how it plays out. I fully forgot that Ryoshu instigated the fight, doubtless using the minor annoyance of an argument as pretext to once again see and experience Dante's miraculous time-rewinding healing. That Ishmael honestly might have picked that fight, because she's not an idiot and that was some quite specific word choice, twice, to get Heathcliff that upset with her. That Heathcliff, aggressive and verbally abusive for sure, didn't actually upgrade from threats to violence until... well, getting decapitated. That Outis is willing to put her money where her mouth is despite being Evil Advisor coded, defying Vergilius with all the brazen courage of a piece of untoasted WonderWhite bread standing its ground against a hydraulic press. And that Vergilius honestly seems to be trying, in an inexpert and/or halfhearted way, to not just be a cudgel. Because there's clearly more to Vergilius' relationship with the company than meets the eye even now, the greater history behind the brief conversations he has with Charon and Faust, the attempts (albeit failed) to coax Dante into their role without threats. I suppose I can't blame myself, it is pretty memorable when he starts laying down the law.
Anyway the bus stops because it needs fuel and Dante has a minor existential crisis trying to picture Vergilius at a petrol station.
Vergilius suggests Charon flash the headlights on and off, "like stage lights". Charon placidly agrees that "it's dance timey".
Ishmael: "Wait, if we do that, we're effectively asking to be attacked." Meursault: "That appears to be the intent." Ishmael: "... Sorry?"
Rats congregate outside the bus, slamming their weapons against the windows and demanding the passengers run their pockets.
Ishmael: "Sigh, why am I surrounded by dullards left and right." Heathcliff: "... what'd you just say?"
HOLY SHIT ISHMAEL LEAVE IT ALONE
Meanwhile the fact Vergilius drew the Rats on purpose is deflected by Don's smooth, completely frictionless brain and she declares that any cowardly enough to ambush them must be villains. There's another quick battle with absolutely nothing noteworthy about it so we skip to the next cutscene and learn why Vergilius wanted the bus attacked - and why he orders the Sinners to leave their foes near death, not dead.
Narration: A number of human shapes littered the ground before its maw. Some were still conscious, while others weren't exactly in one piece. Then, the bus began devouring those served to it in the most literal sense. Gluttonously, voraciously.
Oh, you thought the bus ran on gasoline? That lacks the requisite immediacy of the human suffering inherent in fuelling up a car!
In the face of this insanity, Sinclair has no one to confide in but Dante.
Dante: <Just to make sure... None of you were forced to join, right?>
The well-intentioned question unfortunately lands in the worst possible way. Taking it as a reminder that he chose this, however technically, Sinclair's face falls and he mutters a learned platitude that he'll get used to all this eventually.
Don, of course, doesn't give a shit because she's built perpendicular.
After a second fight, Rodion laments that Mephistopheles eats better than she does.
Faust: "Do mind that all meals are provided with appropriately determined quantities." Rodion: "It's not nearly enough to get me going!" Heathcliff, off in the distance grabbing another body: "YOU THINK I'M DOING THIS ON A FULL STOMACH?!"
Funny motherfuckers. Plus another small hint about the Sinners' accomodations, something that as far as I can recall doesn't really get much elaboration until we're past Canto III. For the moment, though, the discussion about Mephi's fuel segues into a little more worldbuilding for us to chat about.
Dante: <Does this bus run on stuff like blood or protein?> Faust: "It's Enkephalin, an energy source Lobotomy Corporation treated." Ishmael: "You mean the previous L Corp. I heard it produced energy using its Singularity, though all that remains of the company now is rubble."
It's time for a little of that lesson on the City that Don might've given us if not for Vergilius' annoyance; the City is a colossal and diverse megacity separated into 26 Districts. These Districts are assigned corresponding letters of the alphabet, and each letter of the alphabet has a megacorporation, or Wing. Each Wing has a Singularity, but we'll learn more about that sort of thing in due time - what's important is that once upon a time Lobotomy Corp was an energy company and enkephalin was its stock and trade, but with its fall after the first game and subsequent reincorporation as Limbus Company, Mephi might as well be running on liquid gold - gold which is extracted from the brain and spinal nerves of a human being. The extraction is of course more efficient from living subjects. The flesh and blood are a supplementary fuel source, effectively what Mephistopheles consumes on cruise control while enkephalin handles ignition and acceleration.
At which point Yi Sang chimes in to call it a hybrid and it's just so beautifully insane that looking at the screenshot again stunlocked me.
Dante: <... well, that's complicated. I got that it's tough work, at least.> Faust: "Don't mention it. Faust knows no struggle."
It's really lucky Dante has no face or I can only imagine the Looks they'd be shooting at the Sinners sometimes. In any case there's a third fight that passes without any variance in enemy type or behaviour (it's just more homeless men like we fought out in the woods), but after this one Vergilius commands for the killing and bus-feeding to stop.
Again, such a beautifully insane little mental image. I'm just imagining Vergilius fully sticking head and shoulders out through the window like a disapproving Muppet, glaring at the Sinners, then retreating bodily back into the darkness.
Dante asks what's going on, and Faust explains - as it's going to be their first time into a dungeon (no seriously she calls it a dungeon), she determined that they'll need a guide.
Yuri: "Looks like it..."
Meet Yuri, the fandom's first favourite princess and the only normal person we know.
Narration: The bus had just about finished its meal, crunching on the last remaining bone chips. Yuri watched it indifferently before introducing herself.
Normal by the standards of the city, in that she has long since been conditioned to accept The Horrors.
Yuri climbs aboard the bus and mentions that she was formerly employed by the previous L Corp too - though she's working with us freelance at the moment, see her 'Grade 8 Fixer' tag. Faust confirms that this is no coincidence, and that the bus' target is the long-abandoned branch offices of the fallen Wing scattered all across the City. Responses are varied.
Ishmael: "If I were you, I wouldn't have taken part in this. Being a fallen Wing and everything, I doubt your employment ended on pleasant terms." Rodion: "What're you on about? Any point in your life can be pleasant as long as you've got money to spend." Gregor: "Hm, I heard those places are still teeming with monsters to this day..."
Faust quickly corrects Gregor that they're Abnormalities, not 'monsters'. For once she's not actually being pedantic. You see, Lobotomy Corporation was a management sim, and what you were managing was Abnormalities - think SCP Foundation, but the entities in containment are generally somewhere in the upper middle of the spectrum between Big Scary Monster That Is Evil And Will Kill You By Eating Your Liver Through Your Toes Oh And Also You Can't Kill It Fuck You and Pig That Bleeds Pepsi, being entities in some way derived from the fears, fixations and anxieties of the collective unconsciousness. Enkephalin was extracted through worker interaction with the contained Abnormalities, and a recurring part of the game was getting sent new Abnormalities to house and work on over the course of the 50-day span. Well, now we know where all those other Abnormalities came from, and when the Wing fell they didn't just up and vanish.
Within these lost branch offices now lie new prizes, "neoplastic plantlike growths holding the essence of L Corp's technology" - the Golden Boughs, one of which was on display quite prominently in the opening movie you saw at the end of last update. Vergilius reminds Dante that their supposed goal is to "engrave your Aspect", and reassures them that with those Golden Boughs it'll be a cinch.
The thought of their old self gives Dante a headache, but Faust urges them not to worry about it so much. It'll all come back in due time. Instead Dante looks on the bright side and surmises that if they're going to old L Corp installations they might find spare enkephalin lying around too.
Look at this little nerd, thinks we shouldn't feed the homeless into the Organ-Masher. Typical bleeding-heart liberal.
Ishmael, on the other hand, is all business - she wonders if they'll be able to grab some EGO while they're down there too. What is EGO, you may ask? I'm surprised that Ishmael even knows, but then again she might've read some company primers on the subject, and someone in her position would doubtless be interested in getting their hands on such a rare find.
EGO can mean multiple things and I'm not sure of the finer details, but broadly there's two kinds - human EGO and abnormality EGO. Abnormality EGO in Lobotomy Corporation was when the company worked on a given Abnormality well enough that they were able to extract some measure of its essence in the form of powerful, supernaturally-imbued equipment, themed suits and weapons for your best workers to wear and improve their odds when beating the shit out of escapees, that sort of thing. There are also the 'big supermove' kind of Abnormality EGO that rose to prominence with the shift to Library of Ruina and now Limbus Company, where the wearer borrows a small piece of the Abnormality's power for one big super attack like a Noble Phantasm or the like.
The Sinners' base EGOs are not human EGO, barely even close, but they're close enough for the purposes of this discussion. Their EGOs represent who they are at their deepest core, in some small way. But these shards are tiny and feeble, drawn out only momentarily through the expenditure of sin, their own self-conceptualisations so frail that they can only conjure up coloured voids instead of the full-blown soulscapes that Abnormalities are capable of generating. How exactly are the Sinners using these EGO if they're too weak of heart to manifest them truly? I'm honestly not sure if there's a canon answer, so I have to assume it's somehow a function of their pacts with Dante, considering the shared themes of prisoner jumpsuits and cells bound by barbed wire.
The bus team plus Grade 8 Fixers descend into the dark.
What awaits them is not a pleasant sight.
Sinclair: "Urk... the smell... it's awful..." Yi Sang: "Mmm... I can feel the waste collecting in my lungs. The odor is so intense, it winds back to refreshing."
Yi Sang what.
Anyway, Faust reminds the gang that if they die down here Dante won't be able to resurrect them as easily as usual. I don't understand why exactly, like obviously in gameplay terms dead Sinners stay dead until you reach the next rest zone in a dungeon but it's unclear why that applies in-universe. Hopkins wonders what the hell Faust meant by that, but Aya decides it's a weird meme going around the City and Dante decides if Faust won't correct them they won't either (perhaps momentarily forgetting they can't say shit to normal people anyway). Instead Dante takes another look at the corpses visible lying around in the background CG.
Dante: <Looks like they probably died a while ago.> Outis: "An astute observation, Manager. The corpses have reached the stage of active decay." Rodion: "Bleh, looks like the bugs are having a feast over there." Gregor: "... let's just hurry along." Rodion: "Huh... Something up, Gregor babe? Are you scared of bugs?"
Rodion: "Boo!!!" Gregor: "But just in case one of y- GAH! Put it away! What's so funny about this?!"
Choi Han's delivery here is hysterical, I love Gregor. Rodion has herself a good laugh at Greg's expense, astonished that he of all people would be afraid of some bugs... only for the laughter to die as she realises Gregor's taking it much harder than she anticipated. Gregor brushes it off, and Outis admonishes Rodion for fucking around. Meanwhile Faust and Yi Sang are examining the bodies - here they realise that some of the bodies are still warm, indicating a much more recent attack. Yuri's initially darkened expression clears at this.
Not as far out from her time at L Corp than she thought, it seems
Ishmael: "I heard these buried facilities are considered pure goldmines now, attracting all sorts looking for riches. Phrases like the 'Lobotomy Dream' or the 'Enkephalin Rush' are apparently starting to catch on among Fixers and Syndicates." Ryoshu: "LD. E-Rush... Got a nice ring to it..." Ishmael: "Sigh, that's what you have to say after keeping quiet for so long...?"
An already funny exchange made hilarious by remembering that Ryoshu randomly decapitated Ishmael like an hour ago and nobody's allowed to talk about that. Interestingly, Yi Sang interjects.
Yi Sang: "Is such a frivolous use of English not prone to blurring the original meaning?" Ishmael: "That's what I'm sayi-" Ishmael: "Huh, you seem to be talking a lot more than usual, Yi Sang?" Yi Sang: "Does that reflect strangely?" Faust: "He was never really the quiet sort. He only had a... shift recently."
It's interesting to see this seeded here, so early on. There are multitudes conained within Faust's one line there, but sadly I'll have to wait until all the way in Canto IV to elaborate. Suffice it to say, Faust isn't kidding.
Outis: "It's not a bad thing to have more lackeys with keen eyes. I'd like you to keep that up. Let us march." Yi Sang: "You make yourself look like the captain here. I dare say that role belongs to the manager."
At which point Yi Sang calls Outis on deciding she's General Limbus sight unseen so she whips around and bows to Dante while begging forgiveness for her insolence like Ichiban dolphin-diving over the counter at a shareholder's meeting in LAD 7 god she's the best. Dante awkwardly brushes her off so they can all head down to the next level, where another bloody rusted corridor full of corpses awaits - because what Silent Hill considers a hellish otherworld is just weekend overtime in The City.
Narration: Most of the corpses' body parts were morphed in bizarre ways. One had pairs of wings protruding through their intestines, and another had horribly twisted antennae hanging down.
Ishmael: "You mean those bug-headed people?" Outis: "Quiet. I'm seeing Uniform Tangos ahead."
Outis cautions the party at the sight of some figures up ahead and this time all obey, albeit with a whispered conversation between Rodion and Gregor where he explains Outis is using military alphabet to refer to Unidentified Targets. I also realise that I really need to turn off notifications when I take screenshots for this LP because the exchange is broken up by Steam telling me all about how Omi is getting back into Baldur's Gate 3.
In any case, Dante frets about the possibility that the figures are some of those 'Abnormalities' Faust mentioned earlier, and Outis notes with a sense of grim resignation that the narrow confines of the facility offer them no other option besides forcing their way through. The group moves forward and are hailed, not by Abnormalities, but by humans. This, Dante's narration notes, does not make it the better option.
Vulgar Veteran: "Did they slip past our team at the entrance? Those scavengers keep coming one after the other." Heathcliff: "Oi, bug buggers! You friends with the bodies back there?" Dante: <heathcliff there had to be a better way to say that.> Vulgar Veteran: "Bodies?! You bastards didn't..." Crooked Veteran: "Wait. I don't know where you scum're from, but hear me out a sec. You're here for the Enkephalin, aren't ya? If you go just one floor down, there's a treasure trove just waiting to be nabbed. Whatever's on that floor is yours. We'll just take what we can here and be on our..."
The Crooked Veteran trails off and the Vulgar Veteran steps in to finish his sentence with a dry, mirthless chuckle as he recognises that oh so famous face. For "the moment the soldier's eyes landed on Gregor's face, their thin veil of kindness was torn down".
Vulgar Veteran: "... way. Ha- Haha." Gregor: "Tsk. So you recognised me, huh." Crooked Veteran: "Traitorous pissant..." Gregor: "Ahh, you must've been dispatched to the front lines too. I look better in real life than on those flyers, right?" Crooked Veteran: "Cut the cheeky crap! I'm disgusted that I once saluted to your face." Gregor: "Whoah, easy there, it's not like you had to salute me in person." Vulgar Veteran: "While you posed as a normal member of society thanks to your dumbass privilege freeing you from the side effects... we never even got a chance, you fraternizer. We were thrown away right after the war was lost." Gregor: "... I was tossed out all the same, you know. Isn't that how it is for all the soldiers? So this is the lifestyle you chose? Rifling through the trash like actual bugs?" Outis: "Halt! No good can come out of taunting your foe!" Gregor: "You served the military too. Y'know where this is going. We're not getting outta this without a fight." Crooked Veteran: "... we were planning to let you through, we really were." Vulgar Veteran: "But now, I'll mince you and your traitor friend into mutt meat."
Sinclair: "W-wait, were they?" Heathcliff: "They've fallen to rock bottom and below, an' I swear down they don't care a whit for honour, eh? Well-off or broke, people turn on each other as long as there's something. You're way too naive to think otherwise."
The scene ends somewhat awkwardly without actually transitioning straight into another fight, because it's time to check out our new surroundings - a dungeon!
Here we are, floor one of our very first dungeon. As you can see we've got a simplified map overlaid on top of a cropped version of the background CG from earlier, denoting various rooms and their purposes with lines of passage through. You move one map square at a time, dealing with whatever encounter is on that square, so on and so forth. What makes it more unique is that we have access to all twelve Sinners, with their health and SP values retained between battles - if a Sinner were to drop dead they would remain dead even after the battle as Faust warned, allowing us to sub in another for them until we reach a rest stop. Generally speaking it's just easier to reset if you lose someone though, seeing as having to build SP back up from 0 is almost always a horrid time. Upside, sin resources are retained all the way through a dungeon, allowing you to use EGO much more freely than you would in normal map node combat.
Anyhoo, to maintain continuity all three paths available to us from the start of the dungeon lead to the same thing, a normal battle (see the single sword map icon) with some G Corp Veterans. These battles aren't noteworthy save the fact they have a stronger Augmented Body passive than their starving above-ground fellows, healing 2hp at turn start if below half health. Being level 4 enemies with total hp pools below 50, this is both more than it sounds and nowhere near enough. Even if I weren't grotesquely overlevelled for this, they'd be dispatched with ease.
Regardless, with the veterans dispatched another scene plays - Gregor lighting up a cigarette and taking a deep drag as the Sinners discuss the precarious position of these G Corp remnants.
Ishmael: "They'd have fared better than this if they got a job at a security company or something..." Outis: "They spent their entire lives as soldiers. The changes required for them to start a new life must have been overwhelming." Gregor: "You have no idea how stubbornly the stigma of a fallen Wing's remnants will haunt you. If anyone's generous enough to take you in, licking their boots is the least you can do..." Yuri: "..."
Yuri: "No, it's fine. I'm sure things were rough with G Corp's fall too.... the breaking of a Wing is a turbulent affair for many people."
Next up we're funnelled into a battle with Abnormalities, as denoted by the lil horned monster icon on the map up above. Specifically these are a brand new subcategory of Abnormality introduced in Limbus Company called the Peccatula
Specifically, Peccatulum Gulae. Fittingly they are very strong against Gluttony attacks and exclusively fire back with Gluttony attacks, but more importantly they're our first introduction to the proper mode of combat in Limbus company and alternative to the Brown's-Cows-brawls of normal battles - focused encounters. In a focused encounter the chain previously dragged across the skill deck vanishes and you are given full control over what exactly each Sinner targets with their skills. This is also where speed comes most into play because once you can target freely, the rules for clashing become much more important.
See here, for example - Faust has rolled a 3 for her speed this turn. The four Peccatula have rolled 3s and 1s, and if she were to target one of the 3-speed Peccatula she would launch a one-sided or upposed attack on that Peccatula either before or after it executed its own attack (I believe in cases of speed ties it's a simple 50/50 who acts first). If she instead, say, targeted that 1-speed Peccatulum on the top left who wants some of Yi Sang's ass, she would force it to switch targets and clash with her instead in what we could interchangably call an interception or redirection.
Now, let's think about this a little deeper. Let's say Yi Sang also aimed an attack at the 1-speed Peccatulum. In fact let's say the entire team decided Fuck This Peccatulum In Particular and all aimed their attacks at it. Then let's have Faust aim her attack at it last, causing her targeting arrow to touch tips with the Peccatulum's. This would mean that upon combat start, the Peccatulum takes four unopposed attacks to the fucking dome before it even had a chance to try and overcome Faust's chosen skill, doubtless either staggering or (more likely given even my base ID sinners are overlevelled) dying outright. The Codex ESGOO names this maneuver 'redirecting downwards' and it's one of many benefits to winning on speed rolls, or better yet inflicting Bind on the enemy, but we'll get to status effects later.
Also it bears mentioning that with a speed range of 5-8 base Ishmael is genuinely the fastest base ID (rivalled only by Yi Sang's 4-8) and is still currently in the highest tier of ID speeds. The sailor lady took the concept of 'sealegs' as a challenge and decided to become Fast As Fuck on land.
Anyhoo, another thing with abnormalities is that they come with an Observation Level. The more times you defeat a given Abnormality the more you fill out its observation level, and the higher your observation level - from 0 to V - the greater the global damage bonus applies to that target. This is only a 3% boost per level to a max of 15%, which is... there, I suppose? As far as player experience it honestly feels like a placebo, but I can hardly complain about free damage. The real meat of Observation Level is that it correspondingly unlocks portions of the Observation Log, reports relevant to the target offering snippets of lore or insight. Naturally I already have most abnos at max observation due to being a launch day account so I'll just throw up their info as they appear.
Observation Log (cont'd): -missing sustenance. Continously shoving things into the mouth, despite being unable to absorb any of it... What an odd creature that was.
A strange and cryptic little story. I'm unsure of what it could mean, as the idea of a 'jungle' existing anywhere remotely near the City feels wrong to me (considering the climate just beyond the city limits appears to be Midgar-esque if I recall the relevant CGs correctly), but then again there was a whole-ass forest in D Corp's district that we started in so maybe there's a fucking jungle somewhere too.
Also, when you click on human enemies it spits out their revealed damage affinities automatically. For the Peccatulum I would have to click on the Body part first, because Abnos can have multiple destructible body parts - but we'll have an opportunity to talk about that more indepth very soon.
After the four Peccatulum are pasted, Yuri remarks aloud that she's never seen such things before in her life.
Narration: Hopkins' face quickly turned into a cold frown. It was in such stark contrast to the face he showed before Vergilius I shuddered in fright. Yuri: "No, I... well..." Hopkins: "Don't you know why we bothered to let a fallen Wing's feather into our Office?" Yuri: "T-to deal with requests taking place in L Corp branches more safely..." Hopkins: "Exactly. I didn't even expect much from a low-rank agent. Just two simple jobs: lead the way, and tell us how to deal with those Abnormaladies or whatever. Now look... what do you expect us to do with just 'Oh nooo, I've never seen those before!' Huh?"
Aya is significantly more chilled out than Hopkins, and I have to assume co-owner of the Office with him because based on the low-grade Fixer offices seen in Library of Ruina their entire company is probably just These Three Right Here. Even so it's not much comfort to Yuri, at least not until Faust steps in.
Faust: "If they are in fact new to Ms. Yuri, then these might be another type of entity derived from Abnormalities... perhaps a new species.
Yi Sang: "Yuri, there is no reason to lambaste yourself for neglecting to remember what you were never taught." Hopkins: "Ahem..." Yuri: "... Thank you, sir." Heathcliff: "What's there to argue about? All that matters is we beat 'em to death, right?" Meursault: "Give the word, and we'll do it."
Next choice of two map nodes is yet another pair of Peccatulum battles, this time mixing the Gluttoy lads with Pigritiae (Sloth) or Irae (Wrath) boys. I elect to battle the Sloth ones, but it's really much of a muchness - these are the weakest kind of Peccatula and as such have very little in the way of riders or passives to keep track of. Gulae self-heal a little on hit, Irae inflict Burn, and Pigritiae inflict Bind.
Observation Log (cont'd): And the same could be said of me.
A particularly noteworthy distinction to be made is that these analyses of the low-ranked peccatula are done from this... strange, personal-yet-removed viewpoint with an unclear identity to the narrator. Observation logs are usually not tagged with whoever is commenting, leaving that to be inferred by their choice of wording, but there are clearer senses of 'who where when what why' than is provided here. Curious.
Ryoshu: "... What'd you say?" Aya: "Oh boy, there goes Hopkins again, being clumsy with his tongue... I'll apologise in his stead~ Heheheh."
Little does Hopkins know that Aya is the only reason his ass is still breathing. And speaking of his ass-
Aya: "What's taking you so long though, Hopkins? Haemorrhoids acting up again?" Hopkins: "W-what- no I'm not! Dunno what you mean..."
Hopkins stands up and his pockets are so clearly stuffed full of salvage that even Dante notices, but they decide not to cause a fuss about it.
Instead we come to the first rest stop of the dungeon, the Employee Lounge. Faust schmoves in front of Dante the moment they open the door - a likely story, considering her ass' horrid 1-4 speed range. She tells Dante to close their eyes and seek their star again.
Dante: <This star... This one won't hurt, right?> Faust: "It shouldn't cause you any pain since you're simply locating it." Narration: Something about the way Faust put that bothered me, but I decided to trust her and block my sight.
Dante: <That's... beautiful. That light... is it only visible to me?> Faust: "Not quite. Through you, now all of us can see it. Even though we're inside a dungeon, we can now reap the benefits of your ability through the star."
Fun fact: the game randomly selects a CG to display every time you hit a loading screen, based on whatever mainplot scene or Uptie 3 story you viewed last. This specific CG of Dante looking up at the star is the one you always see while loading in from the title screen (which itself changes depending on the season or active event). Unfortunately the Sinners do not share in the magic and wonder of this moment.
Ishmael: "Can you please hurry up with the clock, then? I think I dislocated my shoulder." Yuri: "The clock? It wasn't just for show?" Gregor: "That's not all it does. They have a really neat power. You should come and take a look, Yuri." Dante: <... will no one recognise the pain I endure?>
Being Dantehhh is suffering and it shall continue to be so until further notice.
Rodion: "Ah~ That felt real good."
Case in point.
Aya: "What an amazing clock you've got~ I haven't seen that technology anywhere." Hopkins: "That has to be on the level of a S-Singularity... What Wing could be responsible..."
See? At least these two appropriately recognise Dante's contributions!
Narration: Hopkins greedily stared at my head. I really tried to ignore it, but looking at his stuffed pockets again... Rodion: "Dante? Why are you clutching your head like that?" Dante: <I-it's nothing.>
Okay nevermind. Yi Sang even asks whether Dante can resurrect their guides the same way they can the Sinners, perhaps having noticed the intensity between Hopkins and Dante, only for Faust to bluntly state that -quite obviously- the clock will only work for Sinners.
Aya: "Aw gee~ I s'pose that's for the better. Imagine you're dragged right back to life with a gaping hole in your stomach. Wouldn't that suck? Nah, y'know what, you're lucky if a hole is punched in your gut. You'd be a goner in seconds-"
You see the more you fuck around, the more you're gonna find out.
Outis commands the Sinners to form up and prepare for battle, wary against another tentacle attack from the walls.
Aya: "... What'd I tell you? I've always... been a... lucky girl..." Yuri: "AYA!!" Yi Sang: "Her life has departed." Gregor: "Come, now... You'll have to keep it together, especially in times like these, yeah?" Yuri: "B-but..."
Faust quickly surmises that such an unconventional attack must have come from an Abnormality. Outis prompts Dante for commands. Yuri is still in tears at Aya's death, looking between the Sinners and the corpse and back again, and pity distracts Dante momentarily. The knowledge that their guides are the few Dante can't revive spurs them on, and they order the Sinners to meet the Abnormality in combat to prevent more permanent deaths.
Every time she makes this face she's a 10/10 character
Hopkins asks how Outis can make sense of the ticking, only to receive a glare so fiery Outis was honestly probably going to tell him to kill himself before she remembered that she's got a job to do. She once again shouts for the "lackeys" to form up and target the foe ahead of them.
Our first ever proper Abnormality battle, let's go!
As you can see the sin resources we've accumulated naturally by killing our way here in the first place have been retained, allowing us to have access to certain EGO and passives right off the bat if we wish. Also don't look at Yi Sang, he got an alternative ZAYIN class EGO this season that I forgor to strip off him with all the rest when I assembled this 'story' team. This is as good a time as any to mention that while physical affinities are set according to the Sinner's equipped ID, their sin affinities are set via which EGO they used last, and their equipped ZAYIN-class EGO determines what affinities they show up with in the first place. So Yi Sang's resistances are a lil different for now but it won't matter.
Next, body parts! Abnormalities have multiple body parts, each with their own damage affinities, speed ranges, and health pools. The Abnormality itself has a master health pool known as 'core' health which is depleted every time a body part is damaged, which has the unique effect of making AoE EGO particularly effective against them owing to effectively dealing double or more damage for the price of one activation. This is why Abnormalities tend to have parts with higher Slot Weight, such that something like Representation Emitter would target the Roots 'twice' and then another random part once. These targetable body parts also have their own independent Stagger thresholds, and when their health is fully depleted there can be a range of effects up to and including breaking the part entirely, whether temporarily (tagged 'Destructible') or permanently (tagged 'Severable'). A severed body part obviously can no longer be targeted, but also can no longer use any attacks, while destroyed body parts will cause the core to take greatly increased damage until they have a chance to regrow.
Next, status effects. Ebony Queen's Apple is quite the nasty wakeup call of a fight if you're a truly fresh account, because she rolls up with a serious problem in the form of combining partywide Bind with Attack Power Up. Let's do a sidebar on some 'generic' status effects now while they're relevant;
Attack Power Up/Down: Increases or decreases the base value of an attack skill by the corresponding amount. This means that Ebony Queen's Apple's rather nasty Pride attack Root Spike, which naturally rolls 4+5 for a ceiling of 11, is actually rolling 8+5 for a ceiling of 15, a very tall order for an on-level team of mostly base IDs starting at 0 SP. Note that only her Roots body part has this 4 ATK Power Up, which you can see by clicking on the Abnormality and then on the Roots body part.
Offence Level Up/Down: Increases or decreases the target's Offence Level by the corresponding amount. This modifies clash power and final damage dealt, though the former of course only truly kicks in so long as the modified amount is another 3 points higher or lower than who they're clashing with - eg Ebony Queen's Apple is level 6 with an Offence Level modifier of +1, so her Offence Level is 7 which a level 5 ID with a -1 Offence Level modifier would have -1 Clash Power against (isn't it sad Greg) because their final Offence Level of 4 is 3 lower than the Queen's. But if Faust whacked the Queen with her s2 it would be reduced to 4 next turn, causing Greg to clash equally with her.
Bind: Reduces the sufferer's Speed by 1 this round, to a minimum of 1. A sufficiently slow target is an almost helpless target, as having full control over who clashes with it when is incredibly powerful for the reasons I outlined earlier with the Gulae. However Ebony Queen's Apple has woeful speed ranges of 1-2 or 1-3 on all its parts, meaning that because I accidentally brought some of the fastest base IDs only meaning to represent the major players of the Canto it's just not even a problem in this situation.
Fragile: Causes the target to take 10% more final damage for a turn. This is a powerful and honestly kind of depreciated status, as most modern IDs inflict much more specific kinds of fragility to encourage certain synergies, but it's particularly applicable here thanks to the Queen's passives.
The Roots will use Root Spike every turn, utterly overwhelming anything but EGO - and even then probably most base EGOs coming from a fresh at-level party - as she picks apart the team. In order to restore their speed the Sinners must break the roots, but how are they to break the roots if they're so powerful? Well, they have a few options. One is to go Gorilla Mode and beat on the roots as much as possible, sacrificing whoever they target to the whims of whatever defensive skill they have active, as the roots do have two Stagger thresholds placed decently apart to take advantage of. They can also focus on the arms, which have much weaker and more easily clashed attacks, to build up SP and finally sever them for good in order to depower the roots. There's also the Fruit, which does nothing but guard every turn - should you give in to curiosity and attack it anyway seeking to destroy it, good news! On destruction it applies 2 next-turn Fragile to all body parts, greatly boosting your chances of staggering/severing a part before it can do serious damage.
I could just unga it down, as my level advantage gives me the sheer Offence Level to clash with the Roots anyway, but in the interests of playing along I mainly go for the head and arms to dismantle the Queen piece by piece.
Pictured: Greg using his s3, obscured by the swooshy effects. Most attacks use a horizontal vignette effect, and even resolve multiple attacks/clashes simultaneously in normal encounters where speed ranges and order of operations allow. Focused encounters like this show all clashes one at a time, but both kinds of encounters halt all the action and zoom in real close when a Sinner uses their s3. This particular angled vignette effect is unique to the use of a skill 3, and Greg's art cut-in up there is happening because he flipped heads on his second coin. Generally speaking blows will land with a particularly meaty, satisfying impact on heads hit compared to tails (or vice versa with a reverse coin skill) and some IDs even have different combat barks depending on a skill coin's result. All this to say woo gregor go babygirl give us that hot 17 damage sorry babe I know she's pierce-resist but it's fine.
In any case we deal enough damage that round to push the Queen's Apple to trigger another new mechanic - skillcheck events!
Narration: Yet, someone has to pull up these thorny roots, as there is no wound that can remain unearthed. The Sinners gave each other looks. Being coiled in piercing, sharp pain was something to avoid even in one's dreams.
Skill checks offer advantage (a lower DC) to certain sin affinities, but can be attempted by any Sinner in the active team. I genuinely have no idea how it picks which skill to use for a skill check, I've seen skill 2s and 3s used with no particular rhyme or reason, but generally speaking you wanna set yourself up to win these because they see a lot of use and they usually have some pretty good rewards for passing. I ultimately chose Faust to do the deed, as with a base power of 6 her s3 was able to beat the DC even if she hadn't flipped all heads.
Narration: Faust walked with shaky steps. With bare hands, they dug up the roots. In their hands were the doubts of others. The Sinner realised... That while the injury may heal, distrust might take deep root in their heart.
With this the effects of Entangling Roots are removed with the Roots body part only Staggered at half-health rather than destroyed entirely. I elect to finish the job entirely with the help of Ryoshu's s2, which deals bonus damage on both coins so long as the target already took damage that turn. This damage boost is enough to push her over the line to breaking the Roots entirely, and with a piddling 65 core health left I send in the clowns to finish the job.
Pictured: base Ishmael's s3, Shield Bash. It has a unique animation flourish where after winnng a clash the target will perform another generic attack animation, which Ishmael blocks with her shield before shattering all their bones. This also inflicts same-turn Blunt Fragility (remember what I said about specific types of fragility?) but this team both isn't set up to take advantage nor in need of the extra 10% damage.
The Ebony Queen's Stem falls in a spray of blood - not as a corpse, but as this egg made of twisted bleached roots, set with the Abnormality's amethyst broach. We'll be talking about what that means exactly in just a moment!
With the fight over, Heathcliff has only one question.
Yeah no kidding dude that shit was risk level WAW that's literally the penultimate threat level not 'gets shit pushed in by level 5 losers'.
Ishmael: "I heard Abnormalities were supposed to be so powerful that even suppressing them is a dangerous task..." Faust: "It's the Qliphoth Deterrance in action. Heathcliff: "Huh? Coffee pots?"
The way Hong Seung-hyo says "huh? co-pe-pot?" is hilarious, even not understanding Korean I love the vocal performances in this game a whole awful lot.
Faust: "... a force that weakens Abnormalities. Its original purpose is to safely supervise them in containment. As we continue our assignment in collecting more Golden Boughs, the deterrence will weaken as well. Although this was a simple battle..." Ishmael: "... later on, one of them might take our lives more than a hundredfold to handle it."
No kidding, Dante.
Dante: <... Where'd its corpse go, anyway? I'm pretty sure that attack did it in...> Outis: "It was felled without a doubt. All thanks to your exceptional command, Manager." Dante: <It couldn't have disappeared into the sky...>
I'm gonna shit my pants, "yes manager of course it only makes sense to consider whether it flew into fucking orbit", love you Outis
Gregor: "... is the tough-looking ceiling above us not a thing to you two?"
Yuri, hardly in the mood to partake in japery and tomfoolery at present, points over at the fallen egg of the Ebony Queen's Stem. Faust identifies it as the Abnormality's core, reduced to a condensed 'ovate' form when 'suppressed via appropriate measures' (read: beat it with sticks until it falls over) - and Yuri clarifies that once enough time has passed, it'll hatch.
Faust: "Abnormalities simply cannot die. It's one of the factors that contributed to L corp's massive energy production."
So you're probably thinking at this point 'hey wait a second what about the Peccatula?' And you would be right to think that, as Peccatula are not reduced to eggs when defeated, and instead are turned to paste like most anything that gets killed in this game. That's because Faust wasn't blowing smoke up Yuri's ass when she said that Peccatula could be a new breed of entity. What are they, exactly? What are the implications of their existence? Don't worry about it!
Anyway, Limbus Company isn't unprepared for this, what with the job description being delving into fallen L Corp branch offices and all. The company has a larger and more extensive organisational structure than just a dirty dozen assholes on a bus committing vehicular manslaughter across the City; Dante is the Executive of LCB (presumably 'Limbus Company - Bus'), but there's also the Before Team (LCCB) and the After Team (I forgor their acronym). Yuri is already faintly aware of the After Team, having heard them mentioned in orientation, and it's this After Team who will sweep through after the Sinners are done to collect any Abnormality eggs left lying around so they can be contained properly (and presumably harvested for Enkephalin again, as the fall of Lobcorp hasn't stopped them from doing shit with the funny green juice).
Rodion: "What's stopping you from calling them now?" Faust: "The transmission device... is on Mephistopheles." Gregor: "Figures."
Womp womp
Quickly before the jump, let's do some cleanup of the Ebony Queen's Stem battle courtesy of the wiki (limbuscompany.wiki.gg not that Fandom cancer). Firstly, there's a second event that triggers after the Fruit has been broken once and subsequently reduced to 50% health after regenerating.
Narration: The Sinners peered at its face. They gazed upon the weathered memories within... Down to the holes left by pests. An apple does not culminate when it ripens to a glossy red. When the apple browns, cracks, shrivels, and attracts lowly creatures... That is when is when it has met its golden bliss. The Sinners knew now was the time to bring the apple to earth.
[Pride Advantage check]
Narration: [Sinner] brought the apple to the ground. The fall left a dull thud. The fruit was emptied of its lifeblood long ago; only futility remained. This attack allowed the Sinners a brief moment of respite.
The reward for this one is practically an 'I Win' button, as it instantly breaks the Fruit part while Staggering every part of Ebony Queen's Stem at once.
I wonder why the very first Abnormality we face in this dungeon, in this Canto, has so much emphasis placed on the idea of a rotting apple? Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...
Next, let's take a look at the full Observation Logs.
Observation Log (First Clear): Recording the information gained from an encounter with the entity. <Company Rules> Article 11, Paragraph 2 states that I am to categorize it as an Abnormality. When first faced with the Sinners, the Abnormality showed no signs of hostility. Instead, it initiated direct communication through the psyche. Out of all the languages I knew, the Abnormality appeared to use my most commonly spoken one. I did not see any sound-producing organs such as the mouth or vocal cords in motion. "Bring Snow White." This is what the Abnormality said. A report on the former L Corp. I analyzed after disengagement suggests that it has a connection with F-04-42. In addition, I discovered a corpse that seemed to belong to the staff that arrived here before us for preliminary investigation. Their ID confirmed that they were from the Operations Planning department, so we retrieved the remains and left the scene before a battle could break out. Concluding the report.
First I'm hearing about this psychic communication shit, Faust! The writer of the report most likely being Faust based on the 'out of all the languages I knew' comment and the generally formal, clinical wording of the report. I wonder if this psychic message reached Dante too, just offscreen, or they were excluded.
Observation Log (Level 1): Recording the information gained from encountering the entity in battle. <Company Rules> Article 11, Paragraph 3 states that I am to designate its risk level as WAW. This is based on the managerial procedures retrieved from the branch facility. I will describe its behavior during combat. It attacks using growths of vines. It wraps its vines around itself as well, forming a shape that resembles a dress; it is possible that it believes itself to be a "noble". Its vines are used in a variety of ways, such as persistently stabbing one Sinner and rising from the floor to injure multiple Sinners. In addition, its sturdy exterior made it difficult to damage. In one battle where many Sinners were lost, we managed to remove one of its arms. (As I could most aptly describe.) I found then that it could no longer perform the attack that targeted every Sinner. I will record any additional discoveries I observe in future encounters. Concluding the report.
In fact this is as good a time as any to talk about Risk Level, as it's a thing introduced in LobCorp which kind of skipped a game in terms of relevance but is now back in full force with Limbus Company. The five risk levels are ZAYIN, TETH, HE, WAW and ALEPH in that order. These are based on the letters of the Hebrew alphabet (zayin, tet, he, waw/vav and alef natch), as the series has kind of a Thing with Jewish mysticism - in case the phrase 'Qliphot Deterrance' didn't clue you in - and has a particular fondness for the Sefirot. That part is of lesser prominence in Limbus compared to Lobcorp and Ruina, but we'll see it here and there eventually.
Observation Log (Level 2): Recording an additional significant discovery. We were able to remove its head during an encounter. While we did not initially consider the head a target as its height was considerably higher than the Sinners' reach, Heathcliff's unstoppable advance provided a helpful clue. We were able to successfully destroy the head. Although Heathcliff's head was destroyed as well, it should be a negligible loss as it is a renewable asset. It continued to move and attack despite the lack of a head, but we found that its exterior significantly softened. Removing its "limbs" became a much more manageable task. Even though the head grew back after a period of time, the removal of its arms and legs in the meantime freed us from the threat of powerful attacks for the rest of the operation. Concluding the report.
Fucking lmao at Heathcliff catching a random stray in the reports one last time.
Narration: I see an overcast sky. Cries and screems twist and ring out at a distance. And in that sky, gunfire and artillery create a cacophany.
Heathcliff: "So why the hell are we in a bloody battlefield?! Is this a trap or something?" Faust: "No. We're on the right track. The essence of the technology we're looking for is not far from here." Ishmael: "You mean the Golden Bough?" Faust: "Correct. Do you recognise when this was?" Outis: "Anyone with functioning eyes should know at a glance."
Sure enough, anyone who's played Library of Ruina can probably tell what this is just by comparing the hellish tableux unfolding before us with some of the flashback CGs seen there.
Except Outis forgot about Dante. Who doesn't know what this is. Because of the amnesia.
Ishmael: "Was that the best excuse you have..."
Flawless, beyond reproach, we love an insincere rat-woman.
Given the chance to clear her throat and recover from showing her ass like that, Outis yet again displays that her military mannerisms are no mere bluster. Based on the number and designs of the flags she spies, she determines that they're at least 70 days into the Smoke War. What is the Smoke War? It's a terrible inter-Wing war that was waged 10 years ago between, among other factions, the old G Corp and the old (as in pre Lobotomy Corporation) L Corp. The titular Smoke was in fact Old L Corp's energy source, the conflict waged - as so many ultimately are - over the precious resource. The circumstances surrounding the war and its aftermath are foundational to both Lobotmy Corp (the game) and Library of Ruina, so I will leave anything further at that in case any interested readers would like to play those games themselves.
???: "The outpost next to ours turned into a nursing home - they can't even walk without sticks!" Heathcliff: "Who the hell are you and why do you act like you know us-"
The man snaps to attention with a salute the moment he sees Gregor.
Gregor: "... you." Tomah (Reminisced Soldier): "You wouldn't recognise me, sir. I'm Tomah from Biomimetics Maintenance! I thought you were part of the front unit; I didn't expect to find you here at the back. Are you on your way to the front? I could help you get there since the augmentation on my legs allows me to jump-" Rodion: "Bweh, that sounds gross."
This nets Rodion a suspicious look from Tomah. After all, if they're here in this place, in this time, they're loyal soldiers of G Corp... right? Gregor scrambles to cover for her, stumbling over his words in his haste to distract Tomah.
Gregor: "H-hey, Tomah! So you're an assistant manager - or regular staff?" Tomah: "Sir, yes, sir! I'm an assistant private, sir!" Gregor: "Err, you see, s-she's a new hire who had her procedure not too long ago, so... Still getting over the confusion, y'know. I'll give her a good talking to." Tomah: "Ah, I get it... Our corporation must be getting desperate, sending unprepared employees into battle." Gregor: "Yeah, we're- sorry for the trouble. I've got to take her somewhere real quick..."
Gregor yanks Rodion out of the conversation and hurries over to Faust.
Gregor: "Just what's going on, Faust? These are..." Gregor: "... my memories."
Faust does not deny it. She claims the group have entered the "fathoms of [Gregor's] ego", "an open path in [his] psyche".
So much for a simple retrieval job.
The defeat of Doomsday Calendar yields another EGO gift, this one offering a whopping 1 Burn to the entire enemy team... for the first turn of the next 5 battles? Jesus that's pitiful, you fucking suck Doomsday Calendar. Abyss fiction abnormality tbh, there was a reason I forgot his ass.
EDIT: Upon reviewing the footage, this is just an incredibly poorly worded tooltip. This EGO Gift inflicts 1x5 Burn on the first turn of the encounter, meaning '5 times' is referring to the 5 Count it inflicts. Still not exactly good, but hey it beats a hole in the head if you have Burn IDs.
Behold, the true depths of the dungeon, and Gregor's fathoms of EGO. The dungeon 'floor' may still be divided into 'rooms' but we are travelling now as much through time as we are through space, hitting certain strategic points in the Smoke War with times listed in military 24-hour time. The stripe of Golden Bough iconography at the top emphasises the unreality of the space we're now lost inside, making quite plain just what is causing this dive into Gregor's heart. But why would it conjure up the Smoke War for him? Why would it resonate with him, where no other Sinner could hear its whispers? Questions for another time. The group moves forward, towards the event node seen on the southern path.
Shortly down the path, however, the world shifts and ripples nauseatingly.
Yuri: "Guh... I think I'm gonna throw up." Faust: "It would appear the psychogenic pressure is rising." Faust: "But you should be... fine..."
Narration (Gregor): Maybe I'm still in one, even now.
Narration (Gregor): The blue covering every wall, and the dangling dot of red.
Narration (Gregor): All I had to do was stretch out my arm and cut the hanging apple. Narration (Gregor): The people in blue coats seemed to think I failed to understand that.
Narration (Gregor): Unfortunately for them, that wasn't the part I struggled to understand.
Narration (Gregor): I don't remember what drove me to do it. Maybe I was exhausted mentally. Or maybe I thought to resign myself to it. Narration (Gregor): In either case, what I do remember is my desire to break free from the nightmare.
And then there is a woman's voice, echoing from memory.
???: "You finally did it. I knew you could. The surgery was successful, after all." ???: "You just have to keep it up. Chop up the apples in front of you. Simple, isn't it?" ???: "Oh, right. Happy fifteenth birthday!" Gregor: "... Okay." Narration (Gregor): A nightmare I escaped through renunciation and resignation.
Narration (Gregor): Some were hard, some crumbly, some were soft, some sappy.
Narration (Gregor): At some point, I realised something: I thought I woke up from the dream.
It's left unclear if any of the group, even Gregor, were able to truly perceive that flashback as we did. We stumble instead into a battle with more G Corp soldiers - not withered shadows of their former selves as we've been facing before, but twisted, infested nightmares conjured by Gregor's vivid memories of the war.
Are they maggots? Tendrils of the Ebony Queen's Stem? Some stranger, more alien infestation corrupting their bodies to match how Gregor sees them? It's impossible to say. We kill our way through to Defensive Line 23-7 at 1300 Hours.
Gregor: "Still in a battlefield..." Yuri: "... it's the same place as before. Though, something about it is different."
Tomah: "The Nest next to ours turned into a nursing home - they can't even walk without sticks!" Rodion: "Hold on, isn't he the same guy we just..."
Tomah: "He doesn't suffer side effects like the rest of us, and he can regenerate his arm, too! He was operated on by none other than Hermann, our most skilled director." Gregor: "..." Tomah: "A hero shouldn't be on the rearguard. I'll give you a ride!" Rodion: "Wh-what the hell? Get away from me!"
Rodion recoils in disgust as four insect wings erupt from Tomah's back, clicking and twitching.
Tomah: "Why are you running? You should raise G Corp's banner and take the lead on the frontlines!" Gregor: "I..." Gregor: "I never wanted any of this... Not the procedure, nor the war..."
Jesus Christ how horrifying
Rodion: "Yeek... we gotta fight them again? My stomach is gonna turn..." Outis: "What is that display of weakness? Do you wish to be punished for insurbordination?" Dante: <... I think we should run here?> Outis: "An excellent plan, Manager. You know when to strike and when to withdraw." Heathcliff: "The hell is her deal?"
I can always count on Outis to be hysterical, it helps distract me from the Unending Horrors.
Ishmael asks, more pertinently, why the G Corp soldiers are so grotesque. She knows that everyone under the corp got modified, but it couldn't have been this bad. Faust dispassionately explains that what they see now is far from objective reality, a path opened by Gregor's feelings far more than his memories.
Yuri: "... This is how he felt in his heart about his own allies." Yuri: "Did all the employees in your Wing... receive the augmentation procedure?" Gregor: "... Most did." Yuri: "Was it done with their consent? That's so..." Gregor: "Did the people in L Corp consent to offering themselves up to Abnormalities?" Yuri: "That's... I heard that was written on the contract. We were never properly informed, though... They said such routine procedures should be skipped for efficient management..." Yuri: "That we should face the fear." Yuri: "In the end... anyone who joined the corporation agreed to it, knowingly or not." Gregor: "... Can guess how it went for us, then."
With that, the cutscene leads us into the event node we were aiming for.
A G Corp soldier, faintly calling for help. We choose to follow the source of the voice, perhaps hoping to help him.
Ryoshu aces the check, and the man thanks her with his last breath.
Narration: The soldier's life was delivered a coup de grace by the knife. The human rhythm that rose through the blade soon ceased, and the soldier was eased into eternal rest.
Another EGO Gift, this one improving the party's survivability. I know for sure that I never got half these EGO gifts my first time through, so chalk that up as another way this LP is enriching my own experience with the game I guess.
What is The Metamorphosis about? It's about a man who turns into a cockroach.
Except it's not a cockroach, it's an unspecified ungeheueres Ungeziefer.
Except it's not really about that, the same way monster movies aren't really about monsters. Horror is about anxieties - of the era or of the author or maybe both, endlessly repackaged and reprocessed with each new iteration, into something just far enough removed for plausible deniability. The vampire is a distant, inhuman aristocrat who makes livestock of the lower class. The vampire is a charming predator who hides behind a human face, the threat you don't see for what it is until you've already let it into your home and let yourself believe it loves you. The werewolf is the monster in human skin that isn't so controlled, can't be controlled, leaving even the body it inhabits a frightened victim, powerless to prevent the harm it causes by existing. Sometimes when monsters menace and kidnap our women, it's because there's a certain kind of human that the author is really worried about.
The Metamorphosis is about Franz Kafka waking up one morning and realising that without his ability to provide for his family he would be lower than the lowest vermin in the eyes of society, reviled by even his own flesh and blood, and in that state find nothing more comforting than the idea of quietly expiring in the dead of night, never to trouble them again.
It is not always best practice to use a work of art to psychoanalyse the artist, not even generally, but when there is published evidence of Kafka's relationship with his father being so strained that literary critics have no problem believing that the Mr. Samsa of the novella who ultimately condemns Gregor to death by hurling rotten garbage at him in a fit of rage is a stand-in for Hermann Kafka, you have to talk about the elephant in the room. It's not exclusionary, either. Even in an experience so unique and personal I find something so deeply resonant in the way Kafka's Letter To His Father opens "you asked me recently why I claim to be afraid of you. I did not know how to answer, partly for the very reason I am afraid of you, partly because an explanation of my fear would require more details than I could even begin to make coherent in speech." He writes about his father's uncaring and unkind words, in front of him and others, about every comfort and opportunity that he had been given by the sweat of Hermann's brow and yet offered no sign of gratitude or sympathy. The disdain and judgement one feels for the crime of not correctly capitalising on privilege, of squandering the hard work of those around you on which you build your luxurous life. I read those words and I am acutely aware of every way in which Franz Kafka has felt the same things I have felt, grappled with the same fears and insecurities and fragile sense of self I have. Even the most personal of experiences can resonate across time, across countries and cultural boundaries, to the point that in 2011 Sui ishida published a manga half the world away in which the protagonist directly namedrops Kafka's work - and subsequently becomes a creature that is less than human through no particular sin of his own, parasitic and monstrous, worthy of death in the eyes of society, forever grappling with the question of whether he and those like him even deserve to exist.
Canto I of Limbus Company is the story of Gregor, a man who is the son of one of the most powerful women in the world. A man who was used as a quite literal propaganda piece, upholding a shining vision that proved to be a lie for anyone who wasn't born with the same privileges as him. A man who escaped hell by the skin of his teeth, blessed to have escaped grotesque disfigurement and outright shunning from society, to find a second chance at a new job with a new company. A man who, when asked if it's really a sin to live on where others died, where others suffered and failed to reach the same low rung of the ladder you clung to, replies "Yeah. You just can't let it get to you." Nevermind what he suffered at Hermann's hands, nevermind what he suffered in the Smoke War, nevermind how he suffers again and again working for Limbus Company's goals past the point of death. He's internalised all that. He's depersonalised himself to the point that everything he's suffered feels like a bad dream. He can only accept that the way things are is the way they're always going to be, and move forward along the track.
Gregor's base EGO is Suddenly, One Day. It's relatively unique among base EGO in that his base ID can't fuel it at all, and that neither of the sin resources used to fuel it match the sin affinity of the EGO itself. Lust and Gloom make Sloth, helpless dejection in the face of his circumstances. In the art, his prison is twofold - the striped prison jumpsuits that all Sinners share is wrapped around his arm and nothing else - he himself wears his old Smoke War uniform, the nightmare playing out in the world beyond the bars forever. Bound by barbed wire, menaced by shadowy hands and bloodstains, his arm a warped and distended monstrosity chained and sealed by symbols of the Sefirot, his posture hunched yet slack - defeated and accepting. Suddenly, one day, this happened to him, and it's going to keep happening forever.
Touching on the Sefirot briefly - the seals on his arm correspond with the iconography previously used in the series for Malkuth, Gebura, Chesed, Binah and Hokma. To be excessively reductive these represent the earth, strength, mercy, knowledge/understanding and divine wisdom. What these mean specifically for Gregor remains to be seen, but given the series' historical fondness for the Sefirot it's a topic we're sure to revisit down the road.
Let's return to the Smoke War illusion for a moment - in that I was lucky enough to get The Outcast pack in Mirror Dungeon so I could some non-spoiler opponents for an EGO showcase. Specifically, a rematch with our good friend the G Corp Head Manager.
I truly can't tell you whether I somehow bypassed fighting him again in Canto I's story dungeon third floor or didn't and steamrolled so badly I straight-up forgot, but he's here now and boosted enough in power to last more than a couple of rounds. This time he boasts a particularly dangerous skill called Mind Wave, where he releases some kind of psychic blast that inflicts a whopping -15 SP on up to two Sinners on heads hit.
Let's give Gregor the win on at least one small part of his past, shall we?
Suddenly One Day is not a good EGO. Among a selection of actually pretty good base EGO, it stands out as impressively mediocre. Gregor is bad at fuelling it, and the only IDs of his that can don't want to. Its ceiling of 28 is impressive but its floor of 14 is not, even less so when it boasts an unimpressive -1 Offence Level and the truly useless effects of spinning a roulette wheel to decide what status effect it inflicts. Its passive helps keep him alive, with 2 Protection and 15hp restored every turn he starts below 25%, but even 'unleashed' it only serves to horrify, inflicting SP Loss Efficiency on both an ally and an enemy.
And really, isn't that just a perfect marriage of story and gameplay? This arm is something that was forced on him. Gregor doesn't need it, doesn't want it, gains nothing from it besides ostracisation. And yet he can never be free of it - in this world, even severing it completely barely slows it down. In every other world, something happens to his right arm regardless. Every new EGO he gains, the Abnormality's power takes root first in his arm.
In fact let's go ahead and look at his alternative ZAYIN-class EGO, Legerdemain, offered as a free battlepass reward in the very first season of the game. This one he does fuel with his base ID, quite perfectly actually! Its power ceiling is lower but its floor is far higher, and with a whopping 4 Paralyse on 3 ATK Weight it's even desirable for him to use if he happens to get lucky with a speed roll.
Let's demonstrate on Steam Machine, the absolute fucking bastard, whose first appearance in Railway 2 is no longer playable and good riddance.
Here we can see both Golden Apple's domain unbound by Qliphoth Deterrance, and the utility of a high Attack Weight EGO in action - a mere 41 damage doubles just because Steam Machine is a 2-part Abnormality. Thanks to a heads hit, Gregor inflicts a massive 4 Paralyse on his target. What does Paralyse do? Well I'm glad you asked, because it's so powerful that the game has just stopped allowing you to inflict it in such large quantities ever since launch - it fixes the power of the next X coins the target flips to 0, effectively meaning that heads hits are meaningless.
The funny part about it, of course, is that reverse coin skills that lose power on heads are actually buffed by Paralyse, because instead of adding 0 to a low amount of base power you are now subtracting 0 from a high amount of base power.
The extremely funny part is that because Steam Machine also inflicted Paralyse on Gregor in the process of him landing that Legerdemain, despite rolling heads 3 times on the Corrosion next turn he nonetheless clashes and then unleashes it at full power. What's Corrosion? Well I'm glad you asked.
Note the purple light shining behind the cracked screen.
And the caution markers at the corners of the screen where the Awakening had plain green labels.
Remember how I said that when Sinners hit -45 SP they can panic or Corrode? Well, here's the downside to EGO derived from Abnormalities: while their own base EGOs will perform reliably every time (and indeed consumed no SP on launch), extracted EGO has a chance to Corrode on use the lower their SP when firing them, and if they hit -45 they will uncontrollably transform into a mutant hybrid of the Abnormality and their own body, which will proceed to attack indiscriminately next turn before finally letting them snap back to 0 SP. A post-launch update added the ability to Overclock, expending extra sin resources and SP in order to utilise the power and unique effects of an EGO's Corrosion (as opposed to its standard or Awakening version) without risking harm to the team - or just Sending It without enough sin resources to pay the surcharge, Corroding the unit on purpose.
Corroded Golden Apple trades the Tremor and Tremor Burst for guaranteed Paralyse on hit, some Bleed application, and the unique status Maggots which inflicts a little Gluttony damage at turn end before raising the target's Bleed Count by 1. Its passive, here meaning the effect that becomes active the turn after using either form of an EGO for the rest of a battle, gives him a chance to inflict more Maggots on every hit scaling with Gluttony A-Res.
And isn't it just insult to injury that the objectively superior option to the manifestation of his own soul is to mantle the rotten power of the thing that killed Yuri? That it's the more natural fit for him across so many possibilities? And that a rotten apple is what spelled his literary namesake's doom, left lodged in his back where he was powerless to reach it on his own. Rotting, moldering, something that could have been treated if only his loved ones could stomach him long enough to help, until at last a combination of infection and starvation claimed him. But I'm sure our Gregor's gonna be fine, right?
Speaking of Canto I Abnormalities, Outis has the honour of mantling Ebony Queen's Stem, and all respect to my beloved rat woman but this isn't her canto so I'm not screenshotting every inch of her Awakening and Corrosion animations. Of note mainly is her Awakening activation quote, "If this is to seize victory..." and the name of its passive, Stem of Distrust. The quote doubtless alludes to Outis and her namesake's willingness to do whatever it takes to win their wars and return home to their families. Stem of Distrust is a little more cryptic, as Ebony Queen's Stem has more regal and imperious themes than anything duplicitous or treacherous. But you know who is duplicitous and treacherous, at least in aesthetics, and whose namesake is a king? This gal.
I doubt it's a coincidence either that the Trojan War began in myth thanks to Eris' Apple of Discord.
Next is Impending Day, the EGO infamous for being the only thing Sinclair could Corrode into for months and months and months until he finally got Faelantern.
Do not talk about Soup.
Impending Day is in rare company among EGOs in that even its Awakening is a reverse coin skill, punishing him for using it at high sanity and rewarding him for risking using it at low sanity and edging his mental illness like he's trying to open up to his therapist without being committed to the psych ward. It has a particular niche use in being intended to finish off already weakened enemies, offering not only a power boost and team healing for killing, but showering Sinclair in bonus sin resources for killing with its passive active. Funny how it incentivises the boy to murder so much!
Sinclair's time in the spotlight is fast approaching so I won't delve any deeper into the possible symbolism of giving him this EGO, but suffice it to say I think he's well acquainted with the fear of a forever-looming day of reckoning.
Now, let's get back into Identities. I elided much of what's going on with them in the process of hitting the ground running with the story, but as was previously explained in the prologue an Identity is a shard of possibility extracted from another world and used as a kind of 'skin' around the relevant Sinner - granting them the powers, equipment and skill of their other self, while preserving their ego against contamination by the reflection. An Identity's strength is determined by both its level (scaling health, offence and defence level) and its Uptie rank (unlocking combat passive at U2, support passive and skill 3 and U3, and a slew of balance changes trying to save piss-poor launch IDs at U4). Level cap rises by 5 with each new Canto (i.e. with the release of Canto 6 the previous level cap of 40 was raised to 45), and upon completion of Cantos I and II the base IDs are all automatically Uptied to 2 and 3 respectively. There is no way to reverse Uptie rank and I thought it would suit the story better for you to see all base IDs in combat screenshots so I just decided to let it lie - it won't be long until Canto III when the gap closes anyhow. What's important is that once you uptie an extracted ID to 3, Dante gets to take an insightful peek through the crack in the mirror and into the other self's life.
Let's take our first example of a 'story' ID, one explicitly patterned off a character that appears in the relevant Canto's main plot. G Corp Manager Corporal Gregor is a reimagining of Gregor as just another of the rank and file in G Corp's army, one of the boots on the ground rather than the literal posterchild. Doesn't he look all bright and shiny and proud?
With those scraggly antennae on his cheek and bandage over his left eye, he's a dead ringer for Tomah isn't he?
Narrator: "He could've been hacking away. Or perhaps he was stabbing. A medal emblematizing his rank rested at the corner of his chest, as if to acknowledge the troubles he went through. The child's eyes, ones which once shone with a vigorous gleam, have now been drained of any colour." Narrator: "Was there any meaning to that war? The conflicts of interests between multiple Wings? Perhaps, but were the interests of the many children who fought the war part of them? It certainly would be nice if they were..." Narrator: "Because, for this child, there's no desire or wish of any kind on his face as he skewers the hearts of one enemy after another. The child used to salute with pure passion in his eyes only a short time ago, but that span wasn't so short in his memory." Narrator: "And, his tired and battered mind... eventually settled on the conclusion that stifling his emotions amidst bloodshed was the right away to be, or so it would seem." Narrator: "Alright. If that is for your sake... then, in its own way, it's the right thing to do."
What an odd thing to say, mysterious narrator who uses a completely different narrative voice than Dante. You seem to have your own opinions about how Gregor does or does not process his emotions in this state. Care to elaborate?
No? Okay, let's move on then.
Next is Outis, taking the role of our nameless G Corp Head Manager. It's only natural that she would end up in the world of G Corp - after all, didn't you see the silhouette of a horse back in the previous update...?
Outis: "... F Corp, and E Corp." Military Court: "... Any others?" Narrator: "The child was vexed by the question, especially so, as she knew that having the expected answer come out of her mouth would put her standing in jeopardy." Outis: "... The old L Corp." Military Court: "What you've just testified would signify that you fought alongside the instigator of the war. Do you admit this?" Outis: "I was only following G Corp's orders as an employee-!" Military Court: "Manager Outis, please." Narrator: "Annoyed by the child speaking out of turn, the judge lifted a hand to stop her from further interruption." Military Court: "... Manager Outis. Listen, the war has ended. Furthermore, it was your side that won. G Corp acquired what it sought: decades worth of energy from byproducts of the smoke. This court is not being held to find you responsible or punish you. Do you understand?" Narrator: " 'As if' the child thought to herself. The victory of G Corp's alliance does not mean that its influence extends to the whole City. Rather, it comes with a problem: as the war involved the inextricably intertwined interests of several Wings, the victor will need its justifications. For those sorts of matters... the obvious move for a company would be to appear as innocent as possible in the public eye by reprimanding an easy target..." Narrator: " 'And that's why I'll be thrown to the wolves', she concluded." Outis: "... I understand, your honour."
Yet more tantalising hints and tidbits! Is this an alternate universe in which G Corp 'won' the Smoke War, or was the bounty of the old L Corp's fall simply not enough to keep it afloat in any world? Interesting too that the fallen L Corp was apparently the instigator of the war, and that Outis colluded with the as yet unknown F Corp and E Corp. What was her angle? If one 'side' can be painted as analogous to the Achaeans in the proverbial Trojan War, then what does it mean that she fought for so many sides in this world? Did she mastermind the war's end, as implied by her namesake? What brilliant, terrible thing could one woman have done to end such a terrible war - something worth casting her as the scapegoat in a war crimes tribunal, even by the victors?
Outis' time in the spotlight is a long time out yet, and tidbits are still all we have. But it's nice to take stock of the relevant information as it arises all the same.
And last but certainly not least we have Faust, taking the role of Yuri as Lobotomy Corp Remnant Faust.
Narrator: "Her lost right eye, her lost colleagues, her lost workplace, her lost trust. Countless other lost things flashed together in her mind." Faust: "The job's done. I'll be heading back." Narrator: "After that short report, the child shoved the transmitted into her pocket. The world within her single-lens view... A dead person, separated into two halves, succumbed on the cold floor of the Backstreets; illuminated by an ill-maintained blue, blinking and flickering." Faust: "Do you know?" Narrator: "The child asked a question to someone who couldn't reply. The child, expecting nothing as an answer, goes on." Faust: "When will Faust's work be recognised?" Narrator: "No one, not even a common insect, is there to lend an ear to her withered lament." Faust: "When will I be free of the stigma that binds me to a fallen Wing?" Narrator: "If there is one thing she hasn't lost, it would be a fact, tying her to the old L Corp... Yes, the fact that she once worked for the company where my children resided." Faust: "Is there any reason why I had come out alive from that living hell? Is there any place that needs me? Did anybody else survive that sudden burial? What was the meaning of those shining nights and sunless days?" Narrator: "The child let out a small sigh..." Faust: "There is nothing that Faust can know." Narrator: "Her tiny breath scattered away before it could fill that small corner of the alley."
Wait hold on back up what was that part?
Mx Narrator? What was that bit you said about L Corp?
The bit about the company where your children resided?
You gonna elaborate on that?
Hello? Person-Who-Isn't-Dante?
NEXT STOP - CANTO II: THE UNLOVING
(I jest, of course - I know exactly who the narrator of the Uptie stories is, but we won't be talking about their identity for some time yet. Please look forward to it~)
Canto II: The Unloving (Part 1) - No Plan Survives Contact With The Enemy
Welcome back, Sinners, to the next stop on our Magic Hellbus ride - Canto II: The Unloving! A little longer, a little harder, and a little more story-dense than the last. It's unclear just how long it takes the bus to head to its next destination, but it's certainly not long enough for the heightened emotions of LCB's failure at District 4 to fade.
Narration: The bus wasn't all that lively. I could hear Rodya's occasional quips, or Heathcliff starting pointless quarrels with someone - probably Don Quixote or Sinclair. And Ryoshu demanding a source of heat to light her cigarette, having run out of lighter fluid. Amidst the gripes and disorder, Gregor was pretty much the only Sinner I could rely on to willingly turn the mood around...
Narration: But now, he was one of the quietest. He was just staring out through the window, seemingly lost in deep thought.
Man. How fucked it must feel for Dante that All Of That Shit happened to the one guy out of the bus crew that they built a rapid rapport with. You just know things have been extra strained between them over the <Cut it now, Gregor!> incident right before Hermann and the Gang showed up too - clearly only Gregor saw those cutaway flashbacks down in the branch facility so it's not like Dante knew but it all must've been so much fresher in his mind because of it.
Iced out of talking to Gregor, Dante instead turns their attention and ire to Vergilius. The road to the Golden Boughs has already been treacherous enough, putting them all on the brink of death (and past it, repeatedly, much to their chagrin) and yet their 'guide' offers them no sympathy. As far as Dante is concerned, the fault lies with Vergilius for so thoroughly harshing the vibes.
Not that they can really say that to him, because he won't admit he can can't understand them, and Faust wouldn't translate that, and Vergilius would tell Dante to put the fries in the bag even if they did. But eventually Ishmael does get tired of the silent treatment and pipes up to ask if he won't at least tell us the next stop.
This smug fuck things he got jokes.
Rodion: "Pah, you're hurting me with your cold shoulder. Don't you know that kids falling behind need more love?" Vergilius: "And let me plead you not to embarrass me this time. I sure don't want to look like a teacher taking a bunch of gradeschoolers out for a picnic."
He is quick with it, though, you gotta give him that.
Vergilius: "I have high hopes for you in particular, Rodion. You might just make a good guide for this tour."
Uh-oh.
Rodion: "Huh? I know I'm a big deal, but I don't think I can be a guide for a place I don't know..." Vergilius: "No worries. We're heading to a location you should be more than familiar with. A Nest of hedonism where you can drown in money or be drained of everything you have." Vergilius: "J Corp's."
Now it's her turn to freeze up and go quiet, much to Dante's chagrin. Perhaps the previous discussion in the Backstreets of District 4, Vergilius hustling Gregor out to meet the old soldiers, is already replaying in her mind. But what ghosts and regrets could a social butterfly like Rodion have left behind?
Heathcliff, who you'll remember is seated multiple rows behind Rodion and so probably can't see her reaction so we'll forgive him an oblivious momento, decides that winning it big at the craps table on top of grabbing the Golden Bough sounds peak before announcing his intent to nap the rest of the way. But there shall be no napping, no snoozing, no honk shoo nor mimimimi. The bus won't be able to take them straight to the branch building this time, whatever that means, and so Vergilius tells Charon to park.
Charon asks what parking is.
No, really.
Vergilius: "It means stop." Charon: "Stops are red. Red tastes bad to Charon."
Canto I was about Project Moon punching you in the face with how dark it's willing to go. Canto II is about sinking the next one into your gut while your hands are still up so you laugh until you piss yourself.
Vergilius, who of course was the only one who did not ragdoll like he tried to climb a 12-degree incline in a Rockstar game, tells everyone to get the fuck off the bus-
Hong Lu: "Hmm... The destination still seemed rather far... Ah! Will you call a taxi for us?" Vergilius: "... as Ms Faust will explain in detail, this mission is going to be quite different from our last, Dante."
-after fully sandbagging another oblivious comment from Hong Lu, because the next part's going to take some legwork. Why?
We're robbing a casino, baby!
The Sinners are initially more preoccupied about the fact the target destination is still inhabited at all, clearly having hoped it'd be dungeon crawls in the ass-end of nowhere every time. If District 4's was the exception, then this whole trip just got a lot more complicated.
Vergilius: "See, it's times like this that remind me our team doesn't necessarily lack critical thinkers... It really does make me wonder how you managed to blunder your previous mission even more." Ishmael: "..."
Oh you know her ass was ready to go with a quick 'kill yourself' before she remembered it's The Red Gaze she's talking to.
Vergilius does elaborate that the Golden Boughs are potent energy sources, such that the rewards for tapping into their potential would be astronomical, and it only stands to reason that such a thing would attract wealth and people. The further afield they go, the more competing interests and aspects of the City's seedy, selfish underbelly they'll have to contend with. Robbing a casino's only going to be the beginning.
Bro got the whole squad laughing.
The Sinners catching a fresh stray, at least, leads to a cute scene of Dante commiserating about Vergilius' horrid vibes with Gregor and Rodion. For one, it serves to answer my unspoken question as to the state of LCB before the incident in Selva Oscura - the Sinners haven't known him much longer than Dante has.
Rodion: "What'd he say again? Something like, 'Welcome to Limbus Company. I'm your guide, Vergilius' and all that..."
Yoon A-young's gruff Vergilius voice is pretty funny, but it's missing the trademark 'Danteeeeh...'
Gregor: "You got his authoritative tone down to a tee, I'll give you that. I had to hold myself back from asking if I could resign right after joining." Dante: <I get the feeling the rest of you thought the same.>
Don Quixote getting hired by Limbus Company be like "bait used to be believab- HOLY SHIT IS THAT THE RED GAZE!?"
Gregor remarks that Vergilius has a fan after all, he and Rodion sharing a chuckle. It's a sweet moment - as @Squirtodyle pointed out Rodion was fairly active back in Canto I, calling Gregor 'babe' and trying to cheer him up with bantz even if she was clearly stuck at 0 SP the way her coins kept coming up tails. His hardships are over for now, hers seem to just be beginning if Vergilius' pointed comments are any indication, and this moment almost serves as a passing of the narrative torch as much as an affirming of their bond over Being Normal.
Vergilius: "That's more talking than necessary. I really do not wish for there to be impetus behind a third rule for this bus ride." Rodion: "C'mon, give the employees some room to badmouth their boss. You're being totally petty." Vergilius: "Next time, do it out of earshot."
God, no I still love Vergilius. He plays the field of being a hater as a switch-hitter. He doesn't even care that they're doing it he just wants them to do it behind his back, so this Mads Mikkelsen motherfucker deadpan drawls "but i'm just a little guy, danteeeh. a little small guy. it is also my birthday, dantehh."
Vergilius: "Right, time to get up and at it. I sure hope you come back with a Golden Bough in your hands this time." Heathcliff: "And if we bugger it twice?" Vergilius: "Who knows? Charon might suddenly forget what button to press to open the door for you."
Cursed to vividly imagine Vergilius sitting up the front in his seat, reading a magazine (potentially with Old Man Reading Glasses on) and studiously ignoring literally a dozen people frantically banging on the door to the bus. Heathcliff is incensed by the sardonic threat because of course he is, but Ryoshu instead reiterates that "UITGAAN".
Narration: Heathcliff glared at Ryoshu, insults welling up in his throat, only to then expel a loud sigh. He resigned uncharacteristically, as if he came to the realisation that killing her wouldn't solve anything.
I don't know what I love more, Ryoshu's subtle shit-eating grin when providing the translation or Heathcliff being so completely fed up with her already that he truly cannot even stay angry about it. The gang debarks and makes its way into the cramped and shadowy backstreets (that may or may not be the Backstreets) of District 10, where Faust provides more details.
Faust: "According to the information we've acquired, the casino has three entrances. One for ordinary visitors, one reserved for VIPs, and lastly a backdoor used by employees. We'll split into three groups of four Sinners to cover each entrance... Four of us will disguise as croupiers, four will pose as guests, and four will play the role of VIPs."
Outis and Yi Sang both approve of the plan to split their unwieldy dirty dozen up into smaller groups - that is to say, Yi Sang's wording of "it is wiser to divide rather than unite" seems kinda sus but nobody wants to get into that right now so instead Faust passes out envelopes containing everyone's assignment briefings. On top of that, the Sinners botched it so disastrously in Canto I that the higher echelons of Limbus Company have started getting cold feet, and to ensure the success of this sophmore outing they're sending LCCB personnel to work with the Sinners directly. Ishmael correctly points out that the party is already big enough at 12 combatants plus Dante.
Hong Lu instead starts looking around like he's waiting for an LCCB operative to pop out of a bin. Babygirl.
There's a completely throwaway battle with some more Rats here (so it is the capital-B Backstreets, in fact it's safe to assume this whole Canto takes place outside of the Nest itself for reasons we'll get into much later) as the gang make their way towards their rendezvous point, a particular pawnbroker's shop.
Pawnbroker: "Y'all prefer your luck of the draw from trumps or mahjong?"
The moment they step inside they are accosted by the proprieter asking them if they want to play mahjong, which is of course authorises the use of deadly force, quick Heathcliff kill him now-!
I kid, it's something much worse. You see, Vergilius handed out a pamphlet about J Corp (offscreen, in the gravitational abyss between Ishmael asking where they were going but before everyone got off the bus, due to this joke not quite panning out with the timeline) and being a Homework Girlie only Ishmael read it. They're big into fortunes here at J Corp, you see. How big? If you come here to sell your grandfather's prized pocketwatch to cover rent for the month and the cards decide you have bad vibes you'll get scammed on top of your scam and get paid a pitiful fraction of its worth.
Hong Lu promptly makes it all about him by reminiscing that his family employed dedicated fortunetellers, who drew a "greater boon" for him shortly before he left home.
Hong Lu:L "That must've been a sign that I would join all of you wonderful people on our journey."
And on that day the vibes aligned, for there was someone they could both bully.
Hong Lu: "You might be right. I didn't like to get along with my younger sibling in childhood. Always trying to cheat and grouch if things didn't go as desired."
Hysterical, doubly so when we recall just how chummy Heathcliff was with a certain Hindley Earnshaw in his source material.
Meanwhile the pawnbroker, clearly sensing he's losing the room, again prompts the Sinners to either draw and prove their luck or else prove they have any damn thing worth selling on them. He scans the Sinners in turn, diagnosing them with Broke one by one until his eyes at last alight on Dante. The pawnbroker observes that their clockhead might fetch a good sum, and Rodion asks how much.
It's important to me you know that in this moment Dante reveals a new sound they can make - a fucking cash register noise.
Faust makes an effort to redirect the conversation back toward the plans already made with Limbus company, but she's 1-4 speed and can't redirect for shit so it's time for the unherded cats to scatter and make mischief.
Pawnbroker: "Oho... A dragon embroidered on silk. That's some meticulous needlework, which might net... let's see, seven million... Ahn?" Heathcliff: "A crummy piece of cloth is worth that much? Have your eyes rotted out, old geezer?!" Pawnbroker: "Wha? You don't recognise the value of this quality - Beh, now I see. You're wearing a shabby ring like it's true treasure... Tsk-tsk." Heathcliff: "... What did you just say." Rodion: "Geez, cut it out! Dante~ Please shut them up~"
This seems on the surface to be no more than another epic 'Heathcliff becomes murderous over nothing' prank, but like Ishmael's use of 'refinement' back in Canto I he's actually getting triggered by something quite specific here. Remember the ring he wears (on his right index finger, hidden by perspective in his talksprite but sometimes visible in combat or on other IDs), it's a surprise tool that'll help us later.
Faust: "Certainly not. There was little I could do to alter the driver of the bus."
Faust seems to know these two personally - take note not just of how the first announced herself to Faust by name, but how Faust is using her smiling sprite as she greets them.
Grumpy Dante.
Dante's words of course fall on deaf ears where non-Sinners are concerned.
??? (Man on the Right): "Oh, so it was you? You guys are the team that botched the Golden Bough retrieval last time? Folks had high expectations for your team, what with some of the smartest people in the City being on it." ??? (Woman on the Left): "No wonder... Ms Faust wasn't looking very pleased."
Faust said, lying like a rug.
Heathcliff: "Eym what're you standing around for? Go on now. This fellow here is also the brainy sort. Don't brush him off." Yi Sang: "I shall not, as that would be a hollow vaunt." Heathcliff: "But you were a lot more talkative down in that basement? Who are you and what did you do with Yi Sang?" Yi Sang: "I am and have always been whom I match in the mirror."
I fucking lost it at this long-forgotten exchange while taking the screenshots. Heathcliff was honestly trying to be nice and gas Yi Sang up, only to get sandbagged hardcore by the man himself. Who knew Heathcliff wasn't as much of an unremitting asshole in Cantos I-III as I remembered?
Anyway Faust follows up with "our first mission was designed with failure in mind" because they "needed an opportunity to see what potential our Sinners held", a statement so staggering that Gregor and Outis start hammering X to Doubt instantly. It seems even the two newcomers aren't buying it, as the one on the l- you know what fuck it, from left to right that's Saude and Effie, they're about to introduce themselves anyway.
Anyway Saude asks where Vergilius is because she signed up for this mainly to meet him and Effie (correctly) assumes he was too fucking embarrassed to be seen with these losers.
Mood, Ishmael.
Saude and Effie at last introduce themselves properly, announcing that they're the LCCB contacts the group were waiting for. Heathcliff, still smarting over Effie's comment about Vergilius being embarrassed to be seen with them, asks if the two are waiting for a round of applause. Hong Lu nearly provides one, presumably stopped by Dante before Heathcliff stopped it for him by hitting a home run with his occipital lobe.
Saude: "Check the documents in this envelope, and do exactly, preciiiiiiisely as the papers say."
Effie may be active-aggressive but Saude is being passive-aggressive to the point of using 'preschool educational program host voice' and it's so obvious even Dante can tell. Gregor observes that this is less a 'joint operation' and more of a 'Saude and Effie tell us what to do' operation, to which Ishmael insists they put their foot down and-
Heathcliff reading over Ishmael's shoulder with a distressed grimace is giving me life, did these two traumabond last Canto.
Ishmael: "Look at this. It has routes drawn out and everything. It's been ages since I saw a plan this clear and meticulous." Outis: "Mhm, surely. This is certainly indicative of their knowledge in writing up proper plans of operation." Outis: "Ah, this isn't to say that it holds a candle to the level of forethought you display, Manager." Dante: <Outis I'll be honest I just hit Win Rate.>
Outis: "And in doing so you ensure we perform what is most mathematically optimal at all times, excellent strategy Executive Manager."
Dante opens their own copy of the instructions and takes a gander at the briefing. To put it briefly, the goal is to make it to the top floor of the casino. There they'll find a private elevator straight down into the buried L Corp branch facility where the Golden Bough lies. To reach this goal on any other day would be a tall order, but today a high-stakes game of poker will be taking place on that very top floor, held between the four major Syndicates (here meaning any kind of defined organised crime outfit operating in the Backstreets) who hold stake in the casino for the right to take the Golden Bough. Of those four the Sinners will infiltrate in the guise of the Tingtang Gang.
Dante: <Tingtang Gang?> Faust: "A name doesn't necessarily reflect the nature of an organisation. That's a shallow prejudice." Yi Sang: "It is unideal for one to choose to see things through the tinted lens that is bias." Dante: <... Right.>
This of course elides the question of how they're supposed to guarantee a win once they make it to the table, but Saude and Effie brush past that with more talk about just how good their croupier disguises are, I suppose implying that one of them intends to replace the real dealer at the high-stakes game and ensure the Sinners win. Effie even mutters an acerbic comment about the Sinners only needing a pair of functioning eyes to take the pot. The Tingtang boss, too, will be disposed of by Effie and Saude via sedatives in his food.
Why does Yi Sang seem so troubled at the idea of drugging someone's food? Don't worry about it!
Effie and Saude take control of the pawnbroker's with nary a whisper of resistance, having already made arrangements with him to provide the necessary pieces for the Sinners' disguises. The pawnbroker switches from snide to simping in a heartbeat, eagerly showing everyone around.
Hong Lu: "Oh my! This is a Guppcha Designer Brooch, isn't it?" Pawnbroker: "Hyah~ What discerning eyes you have there, sir. This beaut is the mainstay of our shop's catalogue. Only 10 of those were ever made, so its worth is positively un-" Hong Lu: "My dog used to have one of these on its collar whenever we took it out for walkies. It's so nice to see something that brings back pleasant memories!" Pawnbroker: "..."
The Sinners, having the collective target prioritisation ability of a hyperactive cat, naturally get sidetracked. Rodion tries to select some fine cowhide gloves for her 'disguise' before getting passive-aggressively slapped down by Saude, Don Quixote seems genuinely pressed to be stuck with the role of 'Janitor' for the infiltration, and Gregor asks how the LCCB duo plan to afford all these bits and bobs from a Backstreets bilker. Effie retorts to the latter that they are no mere low-rank hirelings, and everything comes out of the company Black Card.
Pictured: Rodion genuinely about to start going lumberjack mode on some skulls because the A5 Wagyu she's been long-denied was within reach all along.
Unfortunately, Mr. 'Sets Prices Based On Luck' is about to run out of his very shortly.
Canto II: The Unloving (Part 2) - Dance Like You Wanna Win!
The Sinners burst into the casino, ready to mount their daring heist.
The security guards recognise the gang's Tingtang getup on sight and simply give them nods of acknowledgement while Saude and Effie, still dressed as croupiers, swiftly escort Rodion to the casino cage - presumably to pick up the chips she'll need for the buy-in at the top floor. Dante is amazed watching the two of them work, everything from their expressions to their body language seeming to fit their disguises to a T. For the moment the Sinners are left to mill about in the lobby and wait.
Sadly there are not new talksprites for the gang to reflect their Tingtang getup.
Gregor: "Try not to go saucer-eyed at everything like a fascinated kid, Don Quixote. You'll seem fishy..." Ishmael: "The guests here look dead inside with their dim eyes, and they smell worse than the Tingtang schmucks we faced. Do they even wash..." Gregor: "I don't think they'd be too happy about you holding your nose right before their faces, Ishmael..." Ishmael: "But, this is the kind of bilgy stench I'd only ever caught from deckhands..."
Ishmael might consider herself well-travelled but she ain't travelled far enough if she doesn't know just how bad gambling addictions can get, let alone here in the Backstreets where even the remotest restriction or safeguard on siphoning the money and wishes from the pockets of the unfortunate has doubtless been removed long ago. Especially down here on the ground floor, where clearly the primary attraction is slot machines going by the background CG - truly not even the barest veneer of skill or ability to assess probability, you just sit down in front of the addiction box and pull the lever until your brain has been warped forever.
Oh hi gacha mechanics-
Don and tiktok brainrot stimulation, name a more volatile duo.
Don Quixote: "What must I do to hear the jolly bells as the other patrons are?" Dante: <I don't think I've been to one of these places before, so I wouldn't know...>
Hey wait a second how does Don not know what a slot machine is. Like she's smol but she objected in what seemed to be legitimate frustration when Rodya implied she's young, and she's the only Sinner besides Ishmael to have the Fixer Identification Number on her ID card filled in.
Narration: Looking at all the flashy symbols and numbers spinning had slowly eroded my resolve to act the part of a stern manager. Dante: <I, I guess a little peek is fine?>
Could Don really have just not encountered gambling before in her travels across the City? Maybe if we assume that J Corp is like, The One Gambling District, but even if there's a high concentration of it there that doesn't mean the 'culture' and tech of J Corp hasn't spread all over the City. Wing products proliferate everywhere, that's capitalism baby! And no way in hell a place like this regulates gambling to the point only the Backstreets has it.
Don Quixote: "It says here to press the button! Is pressing it what one ought to do?"
Maybe if she consciously spurned it as amoral, a vice that would distract her from her righteous duties, but she clearly has a completely surface-level, naive fascination with all the flashing colours and lights and spinny-
Uh-oh.
Narration: The hand I'd swiftly outstretched to stop Don Quixote from touching the machine unexpectedly fumbled and landed smack on the button- Dante: <Yikes!> Narration: -and in an unpredictable series of coincidences, someone had left a token in it, enough for one game.
Meanwhile, literally just across the room, leaving Dante and the Sinners unattended for all of two minutes;
Effie: "That manager? It was the only favour we asked of them, they'd better be doing a good job." Rodion: "You can count on Dante, dear duo~ They're one of the few sensible pals who gets what's up." Saude: "That's good to hear. With so many sheets attached, they should be able to win any game with ease. We just need to be careful not to draw attention here."
Narration: Waves of casino chips plunged from the machine, so many that I wouldn't dare try to gather them up.
Big lmao that Dante made sure to grab a red hawaiian shirt so their disguise still fit their aesthetic. If they swapped shirts with Don they'd be in Christmas colours.
Narration: I came here determined to do something right, and it fell apart all so soon.
Being Durante Is Suffering.
Other patrons of the casino begin rubbernecking, jolted from their addiction-fuelled reveries at the realisation that waltzing into a casino and hitting the jackpot on your first game is some freak shit. Unfortunately, security comes to much the same realisation, and approach to administer an ID check.
Yes, even though they make more money than God they get really upset with you and kick you out if you're too good at the games where human skill is a factor, because scam merchants always feel deeply entitled to your money.
Faust: "Chance in this place doesn't work the way we think it usually does. You could accumulate your luck for a big payout or trickle in small amounts to break even, but winning the jackpot on your first try should be a literal impossibility here."
Faust explains that, of course, to make it slightly more unfair than even real life casinos, control over the 'lesser singularity' of J Corp means that this casino is fixed so that you engage with the push and pull of the wishpower economy or you get fucked.
Don Quixote: "Chips are raining down like shooting stars!"
Don, presumably, is eating casino chips like chocolate coins.
Ishmael: "I'm disappointed. You're none other than our manager, and I expected you to show your capability and clear the disgrace of failure from us." Narration: Ishmael's barrage of scathing whispers was something to marvel at, as Gregor muttered in awe. On top of that, her piercing gaze I had never felt before... it made me want to weasel away under a rock, if there was one. For once, I thanked my clock for lacking eyes to meet her glare.
Executive Manager Dante rolls Worst-Timed Poker Jackpot, asked to Kill Themself Immediately.
Of course it may not just be Dante's fault the Sinners are suddenly getting far too much scrutiny, as Gregor hurriedly points out. For when Dante turns to look and see what he sees...
Regrettably a joke that doesn't land as hard without a custom talksprite or a CG of her out of disguise.
Ryoshu, still in her LCB fit, because she just didn't put on a gangster outfit and walked in at the back of the pack and nobody noticed.
Gregor: "Gah... Manager Bud, today isn't our day, huh..." Dante: <Yup... looks like we're screwed. Royally...> Effie: "This can't be... All the work we did to put this plan in motion... Faust, what were you thinking volunteering to bring these fools along for your missions? You're supposed to have near-unparalelled brilliance, right? Then use it!" Faust: "Even though I haven't worked with them for long, I was able to realise something: I ought to become a Faust that believes in uncertainty."
Faust: "That is what my 'plan' entails."
Effie: "I have GOT to kill myself."
Dante: <Alright... It's time for our usual gig...>
That's the spirit, Dante! Go girl, give us pessimism.
A brief fight with casino security ensues, but I'll skip over it for now in favour of moving to the next map node, which has a slightly more notable one.
In fact, Ryoshu is just as bored with the trash mob battles as me if not moreso, her eyes inexplicably glowing bright red not unlike Vergilius' - she can just Do That.
This is honestly the most pressed we have ever seen Ryoshu, she's more pissed about having to fight security guards than she is about getting her skull cored out by Don's lance.
This is definately payback for the decapitation in Canto I.
Ryoshu, surprisingly, only shakes her head with a look of complete confidence.
Ryoshu: "... This is art. Poetaster, gimme the knife." Yi Sang: "You may forever take it from my hands. The blade will be better off parting ways to wander about the air for however long."
Blursed image.
Narration: Ryoshu held his dagger and threw it straight into the air. It struck an anchorage on the ceiling that kept the chandelier still, causing it to sway precariously. Narration: Indeed... Ryoshu may be weakened from what she once was because she became a Sinner, but nevertheless... She was still the best swordswoman we had, able to cut through steel like a proverbial hot knife. Narration: Sure, she treats my words with less respect than she would a wad of gum, but that wasn't a problem. Narration: Everyone's eyes turned to the swinging chandelier... and eventually, flustered by all the gazes falling upon it... Yi Sang: "Thus, in a haze, it succumbs."
Narration: The chandelier crashed to the floor in full force, making a tremendous noise.
Narration: Nothing else happened.
Dante: <So, uh, what was that for? Ryoshu?> Ryoshu: "... a performance." Gregor: "You just made that up, didn't you?"
Ryoshu has been getting some fantastic character moments and she still has a couple more in the works, it's quite remarkable.
Here we see the lobby battleground, complete with fallen chandelier in the background courtesy of Ryoshu. There are three kinds of Casino Security - Collected, Confident and Rigid. This lot have +2 Offence level, making them deceptively dangerous to clash against for the baby Sinners (we'll revisit that in a jiffy, don't think I missed that offhanded line while Ryoshu was beclowning herself), but more than that the brown-coated Casino Security have some utterly heinous coin effects that will effectively cripple a Sinner if they land - the blackjack-wielding Confident ones have Hold It Right There which inflicts two stacks of next-turn Power Down, a somewhat depreciated status that drops the Base Power of all skills the entity uses by the Count, and the baton-wielding Rigid ones have Freeze! which inflicts a whopping 4 Plus Coin Drop next turn. Plus Coin Drop is arguably the strongest status debuff in the game, as the vast majority of enemies flip positive coins and the benefits of reducing coin power are only magnified against multi-coin skills, the most dangerous kind. To put it into perspective there's a 2* ID we'll probably talk about after next Canto who is a sleeper powerhouse support unit if nothing else because of his ability to inflict 2 Plus Coin Drop next turn with his skill 2.
Then there's the Casino Security Chief, the one in the grey coat kind of concealed under the right side of the turn counter there. He has the third form of surprisingly nasty negative status effect he throws around with wanton abandon - a whole lotta next turn Paralyse! As I explained in the Canto I postscript paralyse fixes the power of X coins the entity flips that turn to 0, which is absolutely crippling for the base IDs who wager so much total skill power on their coins and have so few to throw around.
Another reason normal battles can be kind of frustrating is that the autotarget AI has almost no conception of what clashes are possible in your party's given speed ranges, so you end up taking completely needless one-sided attacks in the process. It's fine for our purposes, as it gives me another opportunity to illustrate a small detail - Don's flinching sprite is an interesting character choice for something that flies by so quickly. Rather than looking obliviously silly, or genuinely pressured, she leans into the oncoming blow with an expression of something like annoyance.
The battle ends in another victory, and the casino security guards slip away with their lives upon defeat instead of exploding into giblets.
Saude: "You all know that our goal is to win the game being held on the top floor, not reduce the ground floor of the casino to rubble, right?"
Dante and I agree that some of the Sinners definitely don't know or care.
Saude: "Not only must we reach the top, we also have to win the game as our objective states... Thus, we need the wishpower to make it happen."
PainPeko.jpg
Outis asks where best the group can procure more wishpower from their immediate environs, and Saude points out the roulette table near to the entrance - people tend to pop into the casino daily to test their luck there, so it will have naturally accumulated a steady trickle of wishpower.
Dante: <Think you can pull that off?> Outis: I have carried out countless operations much greater in scale." Outis: "Your preposterous blunder amounts to nothing in the grander scheme of things, Manager. It has to have been the fault of the drudging dredges who obfuscated your ability to make sensible decisions! Don't let their words deter you!" Dante: <Preposterous... I see... Wait!>
God, fuck. Even Outis can't fully brush aside that dipshit move with the slot machine, she's just spinning it as 'listening to the other Sinners (derogatory) temporarily rendered you A Fucking Imbecile, executive manager, you can't be blamed for such psychohazards'.
Meanwhile, Heathcliff is already making a mad dash for the entrance.
Narration: Were we too focused on the conversation, or did we collectively lose our minds?
Dante calls after Heathcliff to ask what the fuck he's doing, but Heathcliff shoots back urging the group to stop chattering and get a move on heading upstairs already. Then, making his inexplicable behaviour yet more mad-seeming, he turns and heckles the casino security within an inch of their lives.
Heathcliff: "That blondie over there is a rookie who's as unfledged as he gets. And that mate there we call our manager has a bad case of lost memories and can't wield a weapon to save themself. This is what you're struggling against? What a joke..."
Dante and Sinclair mutually wail and sob and cry and throw up to have been subjected to such bitter invectives.
Heathcliff: "And last thing, that club you're holding deserves a better owner."
The security chief rushes forward in a rage, swinging for Heathcliff's skull...
Hey you have a Counter not an Evade, I call foul.
Saude is genuinely edging her aneurysm like it's 11pm on the 30th of November and she's ready to pop if the wind blows the wrong way.
Narration: Spouts of what I assume was once wishpower until moments ago poured through the poor remains of the roulette. As if in death throes, Saude let out an agonised scream before clapping her hands over her mouth... I couldn't help but turn away from the tragic sight. Narration: "When I grow up, I wanna be a wish sticker, giving hope to everybody!" I could almost hear the unfilfilled dreams of those lost wishes in my imagination.
The even funnier thing is that this wasn't an accident. Oh no. Heathcliff has a plan.
Heathcliff: "Oi, listen up, you thickos. Do you want to admit to your boss 'bout breaking this thing while fighting us and get lambasted for it? Or do you want to make it our fault and let us through?" Rigid Security: "T-this was... a month's worth of luck..." Security Chief: "... it won't be any safer for you upstairs..." Heathcliff: "Eh, never been too close to safety anyway. 'Preciate the advice."
Heathcliff may have destroyed our backup source of wishpower, but he did so in service to a genuine Soul-Read of the security chief that secured the party an exit to the next floor of the casino rather than subjecting us to grinding through every security guard in the building. Heathcliff truly out here illustrating the difference between Intelligence and Wisdom, even if he doesn't get credit for it.
Heathcliff returns and expectantly asks Dante to heal his shoulder, dislocated by a mere graze from the security chief's baton. Dante can only stare at him blankly, perhaps looping back around to Numbed By The Horrors.
Faust: "Took you long enough to realise." Effie: "Faust... This is one of those times when it's better to keep your mouth shut."
Narration: Trying our best not to step on the crushed remains of the Tieqiu Crew's boss - Sinclair barely managing to hold back the urge to gag - we reached the elevator. Rodya was the first to complain about dead insects during our last expedition, but here, she got to the lift and pressed the basement button without a grumble.
The gang is full of questions about the high-stakes game and Rodion's performance therein, and she answers their questions with ease as they all wait for the lift; first and foremost, Rodion knew that the Tieqiu Crew boss would be keeping an eye on the Tingtang Gang's rep to cheat with wishpower because everyone knows that the Tingtang Gang have a wishpower extraction device, no need to read any tells to figure that out. She just had to make it to the final round, act like she was slipping a wishpower sticker, and call his bluff in the head-to-head so the inevitable reveal would cost him more than he had to wager. One can assume that she had this plan ready for the Mariachi or [hitherto unknown fourth syndicate] as well, the Tieqiu Crew boss was simply the one who jumped into the trap headfirst because his poor position made him desperate enough.
She's not wrong, technically, but this is another line I'll be putting a pin in for later.
Rodion: "I mean, look. Even you guys thought I'd popped the wish stickers, right?" Rodion: "If I'm being real, wish stickers and all that stuff are just hopes and desires given important-sounding labels in the end." Rodion: "To someone with unshakeable faith in themselves, it's nothing more than a weird piece of paper."
Saude objects because like... this is fact. Wishpower is a real, extractable thing using J corp's tech. People trade on it like currency. Rodion remarks airily that it sure is an unparalelled confidence-booster in this day and age.
Literal "Nah, I'd win" behaviour.
Rodion: "I've always believed in myself." Yi Sang: "... to have faith means that the mind may avoid crashing into the depths." Yi Sang: "Pray tell, how does one go about acquiring that faith?"
Driving me feral that Yi Sang would be asking this but I'm not allowed to elaborate on the matter. Rodion promises to let him in on the secret, getting Sinclair to lean in expectantly as well.
Homie is straight up 🤏 this close to going postal.
Yi Sang: "... Perhaps I shouldn't have asked at all." Dante: <Rodya... Don't tell me that's how you've been treating my words...?>
Fortunately the lift comes to a halt before Sinclair can kill everyone in the lift and then himself. Unfortunately, we've just found out what happened to those missing people the windscreen messages at the Car Pagoda were alluding to. Slave labour, first digging the tunnels used to reach the buried LobCorp branch facility, and then excavating extra space to install vaults for the casino.
Rodion blurts out in annoyance that there was no point in them winning the game then if they've still gotta push past hired guns. She calms down at the sight of the vauls though, with a trademark lackadasical comment about how she'd like to make a mountain of cash like that her tomb when it's time for her to go.
Greg, more pertinently, asks who Sonya is.
Rodion: "Greg, love, reunions are always uncomfortable. Didn't you feel the tension that time you ran into your former comrades?" Gregor: "... can't argue with that."
It's another nice little moment of Rodion and Gregor being one of the closer pairs on the bus. You could say Rodion's just deflecting again, but it's a more honest kind of deflection - the difference between answering "fine yeah" and "bad, I need a minute" when a friend asks you how your day's been. Also, calling Sonya a friend unprompted sure is a far cry from the Ishmael-esque frigid hostility she showed him at every stage of their prior conversation - clearly things are pretty complicated between them.
Then Hongler asks if the fucking Peccatula in cages he sees down below are pets the casino are raising.
Ishmael visibly wants to kill him with hammers, maybe she and Heathcliff really do operate on the same wavelength.
Dante wonders aloud if they really thought they could tame Abnormalities.
Sinclair: "Oh, Yuri..."
Curiously, Faust actually does interject that she believes taming the Peccatula - or perhaps a certain subset of Abnormalities in general - is theoretically possible, provided that they possess the requisite intelligence and a proven method of managing their aggression exists. Ishmael begrudgingly admits that they'd make pretty good guard dogs if that were the case.
Hong Lu: "Oh? I'm taking a closer look and these people have fingers or other parts of their bodies bitten off." Narration: Thankfully he didn't add 'is this in fashion?' or other obnoxious remarks this time. Hong Lu: "Is this in fashion?" Dante: <...> Narration: Almost. Almost didn't.
Dante's only been here two cantos and they're already getting sassy. Even amnesia can't act as a buffer against the insanity of the bus for too long.
Here is the Canto 2 dungeon. I believe this dungeon is solely responsible for people dumpstering it in the polls as their least-favourite canto, because despite all the story stuff in the map nodes leading up to it being peak, this dungeon is jam-packed with some incredibly boring fights. But we'll talk about those later.
At the start of the very first node (a mandatory fight with Peccatulum Irae) we open on a cutscene of Gregor making note of security guards and Peccatula in their path. Rodion comes in close to ask him for his expert opinion on how they should proceed, being a frontline veteran and all. Then gives him a firm shove out of their collective hiding spot to force his hand.
This moment had me in hysterics because of how perfectly Choi Han captured the flustered agitation of getting bodychecked mid-sentence.
He goes stumbling, not into the line of fire, but into one of the withered, gaunt slaves seen in every corner of the mines down here.
Gregor nervously claims that they can just let bygones be bygones since he and his friends aren't here to rob the vaults ("I mean, wouldn't say no if we were offered it" you cringe loser Greg), but his attempt at fast-talk falls on completely deaf ears.
Captive Debtor: "F... four..." Captive Debtor: "Forty-seven million, nine hundred and twenty thousand..." Captive Debtor: "Forty-seven million, nine hundred and ten thousand... Forty-seven million, nine hundred thousand..."
Ryoshu has had ZERO fucking chill this canto and that's saying a lot when she decapitated two teammates in the previous one.
Sinclair helpfully chimes in to say that she probably said "Break All Remaining Fingers".
Dante: <At this point I'm more scared of how quickly you got that.>
But to return to the subject of the slave, well... what do you think that number is? It's his total debt. He can't return to see his family until he's paid back every last red cent of it, and his captors say they'll wipe 1 Ahn from the debt every time he swings his pickaxe. A completely ridiculous return he doesn't have a chance in hell of repaying in his lifetime, assuming the Syndicate even choose to honour the arrangement rather than saying "nuh-uh lol" and doubling the debt for 'interest rates', but desperate enough people will take even the barest shred of a chance to dig themselves out of a pit if it's the only option they have. The slave panics at having his train of thought derailed, frantically returning to his work and trying to pick up the count where he left off, and Gregor is instead discovered by another casino security guard.
So, thinking quickly, he turns to Marxism.
Gregor: "This is... outrageous... tyranny! To tie people up and force them to dig! Let us all... rise up... and fight our oppressors..! Go, onwaaaaard!!" Dante: <...> Captive Debtor: "..." Rigid Security: "..."
Meursault: "Propaganda. His effort has regrettably ended in failure." Rodion: "Greg, sweetie... Here's the thing about those people... They ended up here by living their whole lives as scum - exploiters and exploitees."
What do you mean by that, Rodya. Why are you averting your eyes like that. Methinks the lady doth protest too much.
Outis: "... before you attempt an instigation operation next time, be sure to train your acting skills to at least an intermediate level." Rodion: "Oh Greg... have you never tried acting in your whole life?"
Fun fact; 'scheibenkleister' literally means 'window pane putty', but it shares its first syllable with 'sheisse', meaning shit. So Gregor, a thirty-five-year-old man, just said 'aw fffffudge'. Babygirl.
Because of Gregor's terrible acting and no other reason, the casino security bust open the Abnormality cages, and we've got some fights on our hands.
There's nothing noteworthy about the enemies down here - the security guards are mixed in with slaves who, obviously, are hardly powerhouses of combat. The only particularly noteworthy combat node on this floor is one where you fight three Casino Security Chiefs at once - I thought that guy was a unique miniboss but I guess security here is run by a team of triplets. Meanwhile the slaves themselves have abysmal -4 Offence Levels, are Slash fatal (meaning this team almost exclusively fields attacks that will tear their bodies in half) and are mono-Sloth so they might not even break even on damage affinity calculations. They're basically just filler.
Although...
Captive Debtor: "... forty-seven million, nine hundred..."
To the surprise of all, the debtors do suddenly turn on their captors, mindlessly swinging their picks against the guards in a sudden assault that creates enough confusion for the Sinners to slip by unscathed.
Gregor: "So we did get help from the debtors after all." Rodion: "Just a coincidence." Narration: Rodya replied with an apathetic look.
Rodion does not have a sunny outlook on the collective power of the proletariat! But enough about theory, we've got the second floor to c heck out.
Yes, the dungeon really is going by that fast. Nor was there a boss fight on the previous floor, as there's going to be two on this one instead. We head into Production Line 2, facing off against not only a Peccatulum Irae, but a brand new abnormality-type enemy.
Meursault: "The prevalence of peculiar materials suggests that this is not a simple manufacturing facility."
The moment he finishes speaking, the strange plastic container activates with a cheery tune. Sinclair observes nervously that there aren't any security guards around any more, but before Dante can get one word in edgewise a new arrival stomps out of the depths of the machinery.
You Want To Get Beat? Hurtily?: "Highly excited!!! Ahh~ Thoroughly amusing!!! Da GAME of DEATH!" Faust: "..." Dante: <jesus christ how horrifying> You Want To Get Beat? Hurtily?: "ATH. ATH!! ATH!!!!! ATH!!!!! ATH!!!!!" Faust: "Hmm... It appears they redoubled excavation efforts from this point onward. I can't think of any other reason to augment humans on a conveyor belt..." Dante: <Yeah yeah I get it now let's move! They're pointed right at us singing that spooky song!>
So! Lots to unpack here, but fuck these guys so let's throw away the whole suitcase-
But seriously, technically none of these are Abnormalities. The Abnormality itself is... well, the factory. You see there's this concept first introduced in the sadly delisted webcominc Wonderlab called 'Aberrations', which are basically like regional variants on the Abnormalities seen in Lobcorp proper. In Lobcorp there was an Abnormality named You Must Be Happy, a kind of autodoc that could alternately buff or debuff your agents through surgeries depending on your timing in stopping the procedure. Have You Become Strong is deliberately evocative of that name (though the EGO derived from it instead lists the name of its source as You Want To Get Beat? Hurtily? itself), and its ability to cybernetically augment random people is a clear allusion to its parent Abnormality from Lobcorp. What we fight are technically only its subordinates, thus we can actually kill them permanently - but put a pin in that. For now, in place of showing the initial skirmishes with the augmented debt slaves let's take a gander at the logs.
Observation Report (First Clear): A bunch of creeps walked out of that container box. Wearing tin cans on their heads, torsos made up of some sort of plastic... It's hard to explain. It was like someone arbitrarily put together pieces of random toys. On top of unmatching colors, some straight up lacked frames to cover up the mechanisms. They weren't all machines, either. Between the parts, I saw bits of flesh and dried blood... Just what is going on inside that box?
→ Umm... Maybe it's a type of automated prosthetic procedure device? A company my father considered buying was… N-Never mind. Forget I said anything.
→ Abnormalities are not real devices. I recommend against trying to make ties with existing things.
It's unclear who wrote the initial report (maybe Ishmael? She lacks any obvious markers for her perspective, but that alone might be indication enough), but the first annotation is definitely Sinclair - both for his speech patterns and the mention of prosthetic procedures. But we'll get to that part later. Second is probably Faust, as it matches her clinical tone and greater knowledge base.
Observation Report (Level 1): They're tough. These things are way tougher than they look. I thought they'd be as easy to deal with as children's toys, but I way misjudged... I thought I'd seen my share of extraordinary things throughout my career of unpleasant jobs, but it looks like I still have much to see and learn. There has to be a human inside… but they acted like broken killing machines. Their upper body rotates all the way round, and their arms moved weirdly, too. And most of all… It's like they're incapable of feeling pain. I heard some alleys in the Backstreets provide a surgery that fries pain receptors. Could this be similar?
→ As I repeatedly assert, Abnormalities are entities of their own category. You shouldn't construe them with the City's standards, Ishmael.
→ And yet Abnormalities physically exist in this realm. If the properties of a thing aren't determined by the laws of the space it exists in, can it truly be said to exist?
→ The hell are you yapping on about?
→ I don't believe it's necessary for you to understand, Heathcliff.
→ Huh? Is my name written here somewhere? How'd you know it was me?
→ …Funny. [A cigarette burn is left on the paper.]
Oh okay it's Ishmael. One, because Faust names her directly in the first annotation. But two, and most importantly, she immediately gets sidetracked snapping at Heathcliff in the comments. Final comment is probably Ryoshu and not Gregor since he probably wouldn't comment like that, especially so briefly, which begs the question why Ryoshu felt the need to comment at-
oh she might be reminiscing about the teamkilling incident. Yeah nevermind that makes sense. We'll leave it there for a second and move on because the level 2 log is most applicable once we've faced the boss battle itself.
Taking the southern paths through the floor, we find an event node directly before the boss battle with You Must Become Strong('s henchmen). It's a very simple event, not even requiring skill checks - you see a vending machine, and you can press one of the three buttons seen in the illustration, all three, or turn away. Press one of the buttons and you get a free EGO Gift with no downside - Toy Fist for +10% damage, Toy Foot for +1 Speed, or Toy Screw for +10% max HP. Turn away, you get nothing. Press all three and-
You get all three, for an absolutely heinous price. Make no mistake, if I weren't grossly overlevelled this decision probably would've killed me. I could've reset to the checkpoint since I don't think doing so wipes acquired EGO gifts, or at the very least backtracked and taken the alternative path in order to farm SP off the battles I skipped, but I decided to just push through.
You Want To Get Beat? Hurtily? is the 'boss' of the encounter, but all three cyborgs present a particularly perplexing snag. Mono-pierce, mono-slash and mono-blunt (the spear, sword and Big Fist models respectively) and more importantly mono-Pride, yet inexplicably weak to Pride as well as Wrath while resisting Lust and Envy. The cyborgs boast a suite of both positive and reverse-coin skill, and being Abnormalities they face none of the drawbacks of reverse coins yet all of the advantages (i.e. reverse coin skills become more difficult to win clashes against the more coins they lose). They also each have a skill which trades a relatively large 10hp demerit for the sake of adding 1-2 Base Power, making those attacks deceptively powerful, with absolutely zero downside because of the fight's main gimmick - they can't die. Attacks will only reduce them to 1hp, and after breaking their sole Stagger Threshold the cyborgs will never stagger again. Instead at turn start they regenerate to full hp and gain another stack of Surgery (that mini-SD card looking icon under their health bars). Surgery reduces their max health by 20% per count in exchange for 20% damage dealt, and give them 1 stack of permanent Haste per Surgery. The Haste in particular will very quickly spiral out of control, as while Hurtily only has a pitiful 1-2 speed range the lesser cyborgs have a base speed range of 2-5, meaning they pretty rapidly hit Ishmael-tier speed, and an enemy with 8 Speed is an enemy you do not get to pick advantageous clashes for that turn.
Oh yeah and Hurtily may be slow as molasses but it also has insanely fucking dangerous attacks, most of all being PUNISH⭐MENT which takes its already ruinous 3+(6x2) power and adds +2 base power on top of that by draining 10 hitpoints which as discussed prior Don't Fucking Matter. PUNISH ⭐ MENT, even more than Get to Work! (a reverse-coin with a hideous ceiling of 13 for this stage of the game), will just stagger or outright kill any Sinner who has the misfortune of touching it without holding an EGO out at arm's length.
Case in point, Ryoshu tried to get a little fresh and fruity with her raw levels advantage and got her spine shattered for good measure. Again, coming into this fight at -25 SP would be a genuine death sentence if not for the level advantage, but also fuck this fight I hate it and so does everyone else who had to put up with fighting these assholes in Thread Luxcavation. Unfortunately the abno who eventually replaced them was worse, but we won't get into that until Canto 4.
Anyway, after witnessing two revivals via the Surgery buff, an event triggers between rounds - the Sinners discuss the possible sources for the cyborgs' seeming immortality, before taking notice of renewed noises coming from the factory behind the cyborgs. You're given the choice here to either investigate the factory or simply keep fighting. Investigating the factory is the 'correct' choice, which prompts you to 'pin down' the biggest cyborg (Do You Want To Get Beat? Hurtily?) to buy time for the Sinners to do so.
This is easier said than done because Hurtily decides to spam Punishment twice on a turn he has 4 Speed and half my damn team also has 4 Speed, making redirection basically impossible.
I respond with Castle Doctrine, i.e. loading my .44 Smith & Wesson and shooting him three times with base EGO. Fortunately this means I have footage of Snagharpoon, Branch of Knowledge and What Is Cast all to use later. It's kind of overkill, but fuck this guy.
And then there's this shit-ass abno event. You get a Yes button and a No button. If you press Yes, it says it's continuing augmentation. If you say No, it warns you that pressing No three times will successfully shut down the factory. If perhaps you get confused by this 300 IQ play and press Yes too many times, at 5 total inputs the factory will just fucking blow up and deal 20hp damage to all Sinners. If you successfully press No three times, the factory shuts down without damaging the party. Either way, the passive which has been giving the cyborgs Surgery stacks this whole time is wiped out, causing them all to become killable at the start of next turn. They use all their remaining skill slots to panic-spam the skill E-MER-GEN-CY!!!, pitiful 1+(1x3) skills that cause them to take 3 fixed damage on each hit even if they do win a clash/go unopposed, and the next rest stop is literally right nextdoor so it's basically unlosable now.
The problem is that this fight is just very... very... slow. It's slow not even in the sense of having extremely durable enemies, it's slow in the sense of taking a very mandatory amount of turns no matter how powerful your units or how much you overwhelm the opposition. Then, after one or two turns of hacking away at slabs of meat, you get an event where you choose whether you want to just brute force it or do it the 'right' way. You may have noticed the stacking max hp demerit and wondered "hey what happens when the stacks reach 5 and the cyborgs should have -100% max hp?'. If you did, good job, because it means they explode. Since they start with 1 stack of Surgery already that means you just have to kill each cyborg 4 times to finish the job, which is kind of a pain in the ass. Here, let's bring up the last part of Ishmael's report on the subject, since it directly references the resolution of this fight.
Observation Report (Level 2): I think I have an idea now. When I approached the fainted tin men, I heard mechanical noises. It sounded like things were being fixed within. If I had to guess… They seem to be equipped with devices that automatically repair their bodies. But, the device didn't seem capable of carrying out more than five repairs. Only trouble is that they grow stronger each time they're fixed up… We should find a way to deal with them and stop this repair mechanism from getting to work. Until then, we'll have to bear with their five lives… Oh, by the way: How do you think the 'human' parts inside are being repaired?
→ Do not question the physics of Abnormalities.
Faust really said "IT'S JUST FUCKING MAGIC OKAY" and we love that for her.
Anyway, the problem is that the event menu to do it the 'right' way is also very slow and tedious, with unresponsive menuing to just hit the same button three times and then spam 'proceed' a few more times, plus a mandatory 'filler' turn just to stagger/kill Hurtily again to proceed to the second half of the event.
They're an uninteresting fight and everyone rightfully got super fucking sick of them because you had to fight them three times every week for thread and I know I personally just started paying the module surcharge to skip the fight until they were finally rendered outdated by the release of the next tier.
Thread lux is the grinding node you use for Uptie materials, it's not really important for our purposes beyond being a way to refight old abnos on command.
At least we get this EGO gift out of it, which acts as a one-time death-save that gives the affected Sinner Giga-Steroids before making them die of heart failure at the end of the triggering battle. Useless for my purposes, and sadly also deeply useless for the battle in this dungeon that gave me so much trouble on launch.
The Gambler's Fallacy is the erroneous belief that the more a certain outcome occurs as a result of random chance, the more likely that makes the alternative. It's distinct from (but certainly comorbid with) the sunk cost fallacy, where the more you lose on a certain pursuit the more you feel compelled to pursue it further rather than admit defeat and 'waste' all that was spent. You'd be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn't fall victim to this fallacy, even if they intellectually know of its existence, because it speaks to a kind of fundamental human experience. We always want to believe that next time is the time. We always want to believe that eventually the failures will be worth it, and each time we fall will make the eventual win all the sweeter. It's a kind of low-level universal Main Character Syndrome, passively believing that probability and statistics will simply give in when faced with sufficient confidence and determination.
You don't have to look far to see how this applies to Rodion. You don't even have to read a word of Crime & Punishment, just know a thing about its author - Dostoevsky was himself a notorious gambling addict, to the point that he would release a novella about gambling addiction named The Gambler... because he had lost all his money gambling in the middle of releasing Crime & Punishment, and promised his editor a brand new work inside two months to dig himself out of the hole he'd put himself in. This addiction cost Dostoevsky so much, so many times, that he would certainly have been left destitute were it not for the assistance of friends and family to pull him up after the particularly close calls, and yet Rodion is portrayed as the proverbial Skilled Gambler who's made a resurgence in contemporary meme culture as a completely absurd archetype. You can't be 'good' at gambling', these memes implicitly say, and to pretend that one can engage in the inherent paradox of reliably winning while gambling is ridiculous enough to be a punchline in and of itself. So then, why does Rodion always win? And why is her support passive literally named Gambler such a reliable boon to the party while her own combat passive, Split Evil, is an unmodified 50-50 shot?
"I've never lost once in anything where money was involved."
Enter wishpower. The technology of the City makes the gambler's fallacy a very real thing, yet another tool to manipulate the odds in games where the house always wins, but it's more than just the literal fixing of games. We have that already, it's not that hard. Wishpower is something far more important to Rodion's canto, in spite of and indeed because of the fact she spurns it and wins the high-stakes game without it. Wishpower is a literalisation of one of the precious few intangible things a human being can possess that is nearly impossible to take away from them - hope. The believe that one day things will be better, their number is about to come up any minute now, if they just hold on they'll hit the jackpot. It's not entirely unrelated to the phenomenon of the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire", where people of middle or lower class labour under a passive assumption that taxing a 200 million dollar inheritance is a policy that could one day affect them. Everyone loves to imagine their own meteoric rise. Everyone loves to imagine being the main character of life and all the amazing things they could do if only they had their day in the sun.
What Is Cast is a delightful base EGO as far as symbolism. The name itself, a certain Reddit post about Canto II claiming to be from a Russian fan, refers to a Russian idiom that "what is cast/thrown cannot be returned", with the verb being a play on the act of rolling or 'throwing' dice. Taking posts on Reddit with a grain of salt we can support that reading with our own sources - there's a reason that Caesar was famously quoted as saying 'the die is cast' or a similar phrase when he crossed the Rubicon. For this EGO in particular, consider the very coin that Rodion flips at the start of the animation that never comes down, is seen still flipping in the full art. In a playful meta sense we can take that coin to be the EGO's literal skill coin, and it comes up heads or tails on the UI to determine the power of the skill. Its passive permanently causes her to gain more SP when gaining SP and lose less SP when losing SP, stacking the effect even further for a turn if threadspun to tier 4, allowing her to play the odds even more effectively. But it doesn't come down because, heads or tails, that coin has been flipped. She cannot return to the time before the coin had been flipped and the outcome decided. She cannot regain ever what she lost on that coin toss.
We talked before about how Gregor is terrible at fuelling his base EGO. He supplies the 1 Gloom it needs, sure, but it's only 1/4th of the total sins required for it, and you'll need the rest of the team to make up the difference of 3 Lust which is a lot to ask. Rodion flips that dynamic around, relatively easily fuelling the 3 Pride requirement herself - but that measly 1 Gloom is nowhere to be seen. She's almost there, infinitely closer than Gregor will ever be, but the Gloom to finally draw out that fragment of herself has to come from someone else. What does she have instead? Wrath and Gluttony - wrath for quite obvious reasons, and gluttony for the armour of free-spirited hedonism she's built around herself.
In the Story Theatre tab of the game, you can either rewatch story cutscenes of ID uptie stories. If you want the latter you get this screen: all 12 Sinners, photographed presumably at the moment they were officially hired by Limbus Company. Doesn't Rodion really stand out in her getup? She's all dressed up like a wealthy debutant - or perhaps, more accurately, a high-roller. We know she hails from District 25, where her great sin took place, but it's District 10 that the bus travels to for the Golden Bough which resonates with her. Why? I'd hazard a guess that after the Middle's purge she fled as far from District 25 as her means allowed her to, eventually making her way to District 10 specifically for its gambling scene in order to immerse herself in vice. Remember what the Mariachi said about how gambling is something to be done for fun? That's not entirely unfounded. Psychologically speaking the healthiest way to engage with gambling is to consider anything spent on it lost from the start, more like paying admission to an attraction than honestly believing you're about to strike it rich.
Rodion claims that she has no need for wishpower because she has self-confidence to spare. I think it's that she doesn't care, which I suppose is its own kind of confidence. That after she lost her greatest gamble, that day after which she felt as if nothing she held or possessed was ever truly hers again, it brought a particular kind of mindset that allowed her to succeed again and again without ever truly going anywhere. Wanting nothing, believing in nothing, hoping for nothing, because she already lost everything that mattered and now money and good food are just things she consumes voraciously trying to fill the yawning emptiness its absence leaves.
Rodion's major Season 1 EGO, if not equalling Gregor's Legerdemain in significance, at least comes pretty close. He gets the power of the Abnormality that killed Yuri and rubbed his nose in the horrors of all that he's experienced, she gets the power of the Abnormality that represents everything Rodion literally and proverbially ran away from in Canto II. This doubles down on the irony of Rodion requiring Gloom to fuel her EGOs while having zero Gloom in her base ID, with a secondary focus on Envy which is going to get a lot funnier a ways down the road when the Middle get reincorporated. Hell, both What Is Cast and Rime Shank have the exact same 'target above 50% hp' conditional to make the connection even more overt.
And wouldn't you know it, the Awakening line has a pretty direct link to her admission that she wants to stay in the cold a while longer.
Now, to help us demonstrate the Corrosion, we have Glupo.
Everyone say hi to Glupo before I shatter all his bones.
Damn, would you look at that, another allusion to Rodion staying in the cold as a way to cope with the pain of her past.
Say goodbye to your bones you fucking frog.
Rime Shank is an insanely strong EGO of Rodion's which effectively guarantees her a place on Sinking teams because of the colossal amounts of Sinking Potency and Count it can apply (Awakening applying Count in AoE while Corrosion applies more while single-target, T4 gives both Potency and makes the Corrosion AoE as well). Thanks to its passive Coldness, she'll subsequently continue to sap her foes' ability to fight by inflicting Bind and Attack Power Down on hit if they have sufficient Sinking Potency, further weaponising the icy cold of the Golden Bough's vision.
Now, I'm not going to blow smoke up your ass. I tried to give Crime & Punishment a read the same way I did The Metamorphosis to give my analysis some extra grounding, but a novel that already has some very dense and at times confusing prose which is even harder to chew through when working with plain bricks of HTML text so vast that you could build a house out of them. I didn't personally read through the correct chunks of Part 1 (the instalment most relevant to Canto II) to provide evidence that the Rasolnikov of the novel is every bit the wannabe Ubermensch utterly convinced of his own unique quality that Limbus!Sonya accuses our Rodya of being. I did however read through enough of Raskolnikov's half-delirious back-and-forth arguments with himself assembling half a dozen different, conflicting justifications for committing the murder he did that I found something resonant with our Rodya's feral mutterings about devouring the very brains out of the tax collector's skull if it meant feeding her starving neighbours. And while Raskolnikov is hardly a former communist soldier he is a failed law student, an impoverished dropout who harbours some particularly cynical and just plain nasty thoughts about the dregs of mankind who surround him, yet is taken by urges to charity and goodness to them almost as much as he is lured to his final crime of passion. And it is a kind of passion that ultimately motivates him, that pushes his obsessive planning of the pawnbroker's death from a kind of coping mechanism, an intellectual exercise in his own superiority and heightened scholarly mind, into action. Rodya sees her neighbours starving in the street and brings her axe down on her ideal of evil to feed them. Raskolnikov is told in a letter from his mother that his sister is soon to be wed under circumstances which hauntingly remind him of the worthless drunkard he chanced to meet at the tavern the previous day, exploiting his own daughter Sonia's prostitution to enable his excess, and he is overcome with helplessness to spare Dunya from what he is sure will be the same fate - unless of course he slays the pawnbroker and erases his family's woes with her ill-gotten gains.
There's a very particular phrase in Crime & Punishment that stood out to me immediately. Raskolnikov is in the worst throes of his pre-crime delirium, seeing patterns and signs in every little coincidence, when he happens to sit next to a student and an officer at the local tavern as he tries to come to grips with this monomania. The student and the officer, in a conversation so on the nose there are good odds they're merely externalisations of Raskolnikov's own thought processes, begin to debate the morality of allowing Alyona (the pawnbroker) to live against the inherent sin of actually killing her. The student asks the officer "would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds?".
The very first Abnormality you get in Lobcorp, the one you will always get, is named One Sin and Hundreds of Good Deeds. While the world of Project Moon quite consciously removes cultural markers of religion, race and gender from the mixture of its inspirations in order to focus on more universal themes, this Abnormality has a fairly overt Christian theme to it, being a skull fused with a partial crucifix wrapped in a crown of thorns. One Sin and Hundreds of Good Deeds is the rare Abnormality which is of practically no danger to anyone, refusing to even breach containment, offering exclusively benefits to its presence in both obvious and non-obvious ways. Which really stands out, doesn't it? Knowing what we know about the City, what we know about Abnormalities as personifications of the collective unconsciousness, what was established about it in the lore even as far back as Lobcorp to motivate the plot of that particular game. A bastion of goodness, freely offering benediction and absolution?
The thing is that you have to admit it. You have to go before the Abnormality and confess honestly. The notes on the Abnormality even mention that sometimes agents disqualify themselves from the benefits of confession to One Sin because they don't truly confess - they don't lie, but they distort the truth in their own minds, subconsciously excusing themselves in much the same way Raskolnikov bends over backwards to give himself a hundred different reasons why killing Alyona is a net moral good. If you want to be better, first you must be honest about how bad things have gotten, and that's a step our Rodya isn't ready to take. She's not ready to truly admit she might have made a mistake, she's not ready for the same confession to Sonya that freed Raskolnikov's soul of the guilt that physically sickened and haunted him for so much of Crime & Punishment. She stands in the depths of her own mind and her guilt, surrounded by ice and snow and the frost-rimed bodies of debtors forced into hard labour which can only be an allusion to Raskolnikov being sentenced to years of hard labour in Siberia as penance for his crime, and she backs out. The Sinners are far too early on their paths to grapple with the ramifications of who they are and who they could still be.
Sonya tried to coax her to the 'finish line', and whichever side of the line your own assessment of his trustworthiness falls, Rodya did not trust him so he failed, even with every advantage. What might have been different, had Dante even thought to try for themself?
Let's take a look at the other EGO covered this Canto, shall we?
Ishmael and Hong Lu simultaneously get variants on the same Abnormality, a move that's certainly uncommon but not too rare. More interesting is their choice of Sinners to use them. I can certainly see the vision with Hong Lu, as he seems to express interest in the idea of being subjected to Pink Shoes' enchantment in the observation reports, and 'canonically' suffers it in Sinclair's stead only to casually say it was actually pretty fun. The way he's bound and suspended like a dancing marionette, his mouth securely bound by layers and layers of ribbon (which curiously is only reflected in the Corrosion animation), I don't think it's hard to see how the symbolism here might apply to how he feels about his family and the amount of freedom he's had growing up. I couldn't possibly tell you why his variant gives him prominent clawed gauntlets though. Nor am I sure why they went all-in on Defence Power and Defence Level decreases and an underwhelming Lust Fragility passive, making his variant pretty easy to swap out for alternatives if you aren't frantic to gain Lust resistance for a certain battle.
Conversely Ishmael's variant has some insanely good effects, that 7 Offense Level Down and 3 Paralyse synergising with her base ID's extremely high speed to let her really fuck up someone's day for the crime of thinking they could win clashes. It's unique among EGOs in that not only is it a reverse-coin skill on Awakening like Impending Day, but it's also positive-coin on Corrosion like it was Opposite Day when they designed it. This means that even with a rather steep cost of 30 SP for Overclocking, it's prrrobably better to use the Corrosion rather than put up with inevitably hitting heads with the Awakening for a floor of 16. It also has a far more appealing passive in the form of Pink Ribbons, which means that every time she wins a clash she inflicts the status of the same name on the target - every time they flip a coin that turn the count increases, and then they gain the same amount of Bind the following turn. This further enhances her incredible clash control via speed and debuffs, and synergises with Snagharpoon's passive giving her a flat +2 Clash Power in forecasts that are at least Favourable (and -2 in Neutral or worse, but you really don't wanna Send It on odds that low in the first place).
What does it mean for Ishmael to have a Roseate Desire EGO? I've got a couple ideas based on future content that I'll keep mum about, but the fact this EGO spontaneously manifests an anchor for her to swing around is certainly more explicable than Hong Lu's gauntlets. We'll likely have the chance to get into it more in future, but as far as Limbus Company's conception of the Seven Deadly Sins it chose, Lust is very rarely used in allusion to sexual desire. I find it synonymous more with obsession and delusion, at times mania - themes which certainly apply to Ishmael, though we'll be waiting to explore those in more depth later.
Next, Screwloose Wallop. Unique among EGO in that both its Awakening and Corrosion are positive coin skills (something far more useful post-Overclock update than when you were always at -45 SP while using the Corrosion). Also unique in that the derived Abnormality listed on the info card just above its official title is not You Must Become Strong but the subordinate entity You Want To Get Beat? Hurtily? as I mentioned in the previous update. There's a certain irony to this choice of EGO that I'll have the chance to get into soon, but not quite now, and the choice to give it to Meursault doubtless also alludes to various accusations in l'Etranger that he is an unfeeling monster, less than human, due to his far-from-conventional methods of expressing emotion. This lets him harness the power of Surgery for himself, gaining stacks after casting whether by Awakening or Corrosion, with some helpful defensive buffs in the form of Protection or reducing his Stagger Thresholds respectively. Its passive is particularly niche among EGO passives in that it's not a buff so much as a conditional effect - if the EGO is cast while he's at less than 25% hp, it'll give him a bunch of buffs every turn, then he'll fucking explode at the end of his third buffed turn. Depending on yoru opponent and setup, this might even be desirable! Sadly this TETH EGO has fallen very much by the wayside in favour of a certain Other Option of his which has become particularly infamous, though I won't get into it now.
On to the IDs! First and most bizarrely is Tingtang Gang Gangleader Hong Lu, an ID as seemingly unfitting as it was a godsend to use on launch for its incredible raw power.
A Bleed ID in the most technical of senses, he completely eschews the wishpower tattoos of his inspiration (doubtless because of how insane that effect would be with multiple action slots and access to EGO) in favour of some sweet tribals that are probably just a different kind of augment. A Bleed ID in the most technical of senses (converted into a kind of Bleed Assassin at Uptie 4, gaining vastly boosted damage and evasion power vs bleeding targets), his versions of Shank and Mutilate are so much stronger than the original's versions that he was the absolute king of boss-killing at the time of his release. His version of Mutilate hits for 30 Final Power on heads, +7 fixed damage, and if he gets heads again with the on-kill recycle it deals Double Fucking Damage. The only thing holding him back was the SP bug on launch where someone forgot to carry the 1 and SP only had half the intended effects on heads/tails probability they were intended to, to the tune of max SP only granting a 72-73% chance to flip heads as opposed to the 95% rate we have now.
But why the hell would le funni naive rich boy ever become the leader of the Tingtang Gang? Let's take a gander at his uptie story and see what there is to see.
Hong Lu: "Okay, one at a time, one at a time~" Narrator: "The child's hands and feet were too quick for the eyes to follow." Hong Lu: "Ah~ You there, slacker~ I'll carve out your skull if you keep half-assing your swing~" Disciplined Lackey: "Yessir! Sorry sir!" Narrator: "The child makes sure to check on his subordinates even as his hands are occupied." Hong Lu: "Alright, alright. So, what are you here for again?" Narrator: "The child questioned the trespassers on his turf. His hands didn't neglect to cut down approaching foes as he spoke." Wincing Intruder: "Urgh... The- The car pagoda..." Hong Lu: "The pagodas? What about them?" Wincing Intruder: "The rumours... about J Corp..." Hong Lu: "... Umm~ Anyone know what this guy's talking about?" Narrator: "The child apathetically asked his men for an explanation. One of them was quick to fill him in." Disciplined Lackey: "I-I'd guess it's about... the, err, wheel of fortune thing, boss." Hong Lu: "The wheel of fortune...? Like, the one in those tarot cards?" Narrator: "The child turned to the invaders, his biggest question still unanswered." Hong Lu: "Why would you look for it in our turf?" Wincing Intruder: "... the wheels." Hong Lu: "Eh?" Wincing Intruder: "... Cars... have... lots of them." Narrator: "The child's eyes narrowed, and soon crumpled into an annoyed frown. Then..." Hong Lu: "That's rather anticlimactic... How about you all just die?" Narrator: "He declared with an icy voice while gripping his dagger."
Okay that was not at all what I expected or remembered. Not even a shred of explanation as to how he ended up heading the Tingtang Gang, with the central conflict of the uptie story being something so bizarre I'm not entirely sure what to make of it. What I can say, based on all the other Hongler uptie stories I've read, is that he Does Not Act Like This. Bro is chilled out to the point of needing medical intervention in every other world (to the point if he has a Thing it's having easy access to SP heals), it boggles my mind to see him display a flash of actual anger and/or bloodlust here.
And then we have Mariachi Sinclair.
Fuck Mariachi Sinclair. Moving on-
No, seriously, this ID is so ass it's discovering new and unusual ways to fart. It's unique among IDs patterned after a boss that appeared in an Canto for making sure that it's significantly worse in every single way that it resembles Aida (her cool 4-hit glow-in-the-dark finishing combo is a damn one-coin coming from him), almost to the point you could believe PM were making a joke out of the 'potential' the Mariachis claimed they saw in him while trying to hire him, if not for the fact there's loads of other 00 IDs in the same release window which are obscenely trash like he is. He can't clash, he can't deal damage, he's so hideously slow with that Base Meursault tier 2-3 speed range that he can't intercept a goddamn thing making him worthless for tanking, this whole mans is just a life support system for an evade that's Kind Of Okay. Then Uptie 4 came, which was effectively a balance patch that salvaged a vast swathe of IDs with confused and underpowered kits... and made him double down on Sinking to the point he needs one limbillion sinking on a target before any of his skills roll acceptably. Bro is the runt of the litter because his big brother ID who came a little later got to eat all the cheese and crack.
Anyway, on to the uptie story;
Mariachi Novato: "You want me to do that...?" Narrator: "The child's eyes quivered. His skin went pale, and his well-furbished mustache wriggled like a caterpillar." Mariachi Alegre: "El jefe... he's feeling uneasy. It's all up to you to cheer him up, aye, novato?" Narrator: "Another child softly comforted him. All the other children had their eyes fixed on the one they called 'jefe' or 'boss', who was holding maracas in trembling hands." Mariachi Vivaz: "You see, novato... this is like a rite of passage." Mariachi Alegre: "Sip, that's right. It's... something all true purveyors of joy oughta experience to be un verdadero mariachi." Narrator: "But... I've heard the stories. If I say that to our jefe, Sinclair..." Mariachi Alegre: "Sip, your head will go pop." Mariachi Vivaz: "For sure, un cráneo explosivo." Narrator: " 'What did I just say!' the child angrily argues, but the other children shake their heads and say the same thing:" Mariachi Alegre: "... We all went through it once." Narrator: "The child let out a long sigh after that. Then... he realised that there was no way out of it. The child carefully opened his mouth and spoke to the boss..." Mariachi Novato: "Um, B-Boss... P-Prepare the pañata party pl-" Narrator: "Before that sentence could finish..." Narrator: "Shaka."
Narrator: "A wee spout of blood gushed out of the head of the child who mentioned 'pañata'." Mariachi Alegre: "Mhm. Bien hecho, novato." Mariachi Vivaz: "Sip, the boss... has entered boss mode." Narrator: "The rest of the children scratched themselves on the backs of their respective heads as they watched the fainted child with proud eyes. From the looks of things... it seems to have reminded them of their own experiences."
And see, this is what adds insult to injury about how shit Mariachi Sinclair is - he's the beginning a trend that you soon see in Sinclair IDs where he's the Potential Man of the bus, just waiting for the right circumstances in the right mirror world to get him to Lock In and commit various acts of stylish ultraviolence. As presented in this short story Sinclair is meant to be such an absolute beast in combat on such a hair trigger that the wrong phrase will make him move like the flash and fracture your skull with his funny maracas, commanding the kind of fear and awe from his subordinates that would make sense coming from Tingtang Hong Lu, but not him.
And yet, torturously, as a mono-blunt ID Mariachi Sinclair was perfectly positioned to offer certain desperate gamers a ray of hope when they inevitably collided with Canto III.
Don't worry though, his next ID is far less of a letdown.
Hermann: "Impressive, Yurodivy. Not only did you manage to clear out the legion of foes... you also burned all that cash."
Hermann: "I will admit, you are not like most idealists who are all theory and no action. You would have earned my praise had you secured the Golden Bough on top oif everything." Sonya: "... I showed Rodya that world. The ideal reality that fascinated me." Sonya: "Alas..."
Sonya: "It seems the method you suggested was wrong after all, Hermann." Sonya: "She wasn't the kind of person to let a few words change her mind." Hermann: "So, do you find this... regrettable?" Sonya: "Well..." Sonya: "Part of me might've wished that she'd follow me like in the past." Sonya: "But no, I think I'm actually releived to find that she's the same as before." Sonya: "Rodya wasn't wishing for a perfect world with no flaws whatsoever. Rather, she might have felt..."
Sonya: "That's the impression I got." Hermann: "I thought her to be a woman of virtue, principles unshakeable... But hearing this, she was a dreamer just like you, wasn't she?" Sonya: "She still has a long way to go, I'm sure." Sonya: "... she won't want to admit it, though." Hermann: "I got your point. I'll keep it in mind for future considerations on our course of action." Sonya: "You won't scold me for this? I was unable to complete the job you gave me." Hermann: "Reprimands won't make the Bough appear at our feet, will they?" Hermann: "It's fine. Wherever the Boughs may be right now..."
