It should be known that one of the central sidequests in this game is the reconstruction of Colony 6, restoring it to its former glory from the decimated pile of rubble it's been left as when we find it. This spans the course of the entire playthrough, restoring facilities with materials and collectibles from progressively later in the game and allowing us to invite NPCs across the world to move in and give us access to fresh quests and rewards. Restoring everything to level 1 does not require anything that cannot be found in the areas you have unlocked when it becomes available, and doing so rewards you with a key item called the Ultra Small Reactor.

The Ultra Small Reactor is required for another quest all the way back in Colony 9 at the start of the game: the one that permanently unlocks your access to gem crafting from anywhere, rather than having to run all the way back home every time you want to refine your crystals and clear out some space. As you can probably expect, this would already be priority number 1 even if there was not a chunk of this challenge where I literally cannot come here.

This all becomes accessible by the end of Satorl, but I customarily tend to wait a little longer until I have access to Melia at the very least, because one of the items necessary for level 1 is a drop from a monster that has a nasty habit of self-destructing if you don't kill it fast enough and you typically cannot do so without her. I unfortunately find I have to trek out even further than expected to grab everything, because I am short one collectible in Tephra Cave, but I've got the reactor in about an hour. I decide to take a break because I have already done several laps up and down the Bionis' Leg today and my thumbs are getting tired. I've determined that getting from Colony 6 to Colony 9 takes like 15 minutes in real time.

And so I introduce the process that will define the remainder of the run, and start actively planning my route so I can minimize the ungodly traveling time that might kill me in real life if I continue as usual.

This first trip down is relatively simple: I head back down to the mine to round up the four Colony 6 quests that have objectives there (and take a fifth death on the way as an enemy slaps me twenty feet into the air off a cliff), I make my way to Colony 9 to grab the portable furnace, and I do as many new quests as I physically can while I'm here. In the process, I work on getting Shulk and Reyn the rest of the way to max affinity, and once they're there I can spend like an hour turning all of my crystals into gems and selling the ones that suck. (Or the ones that are armor-only, shedding a tear once again for the perfectly good Quick Step gems that will never see the light of day.)

As it turns out, I am just the right level now to take on the monsters out on Colony 9's Agora Shore, and I will need to because one quest involves going to recover an item that is sitting in a cave behind a very big level 40 guy named Gentle Rodriguez. He is not gentle. There's a way to sneak past him using gems to lower his detection radius, but I'm gonna take out as many of the uniques as I can anyway, so I figure I might as well take him on while he's relevant. He's a difficulty tier above me, but I'm getting to the point where I can work around his advantage by playing smartly with my tools.

Anyway, then he instantly kills Sharla with his first attack.

We retreat before his carnage can continue, which is great because there are no landmarks down here and I would have to manually swim all the way out again if I died, and strategize. Lesson learned: he starts off the fight with a big physical AoE. We try again, this time starting off the fight by using Monado Speed on Sharla to guarantee that'll miss her. From there, Dunban draws all the aggro, and we fall into a rhythm of the two of us keeping him alive with Speed and support arts while I'm free to go about my usual positional arts rotation. And we win this time!

It's at this point that I realize the true nature of the challenge I have beset upon myself. Because of the way HP and agility scaling works, even here I am not at the projected point where a single attack landing will wipe out my entire health bar, big huge-damage arts notwithstanding; those exist because there is explicitly a system for preventing those. This does not, in fact, have to be a run where I comically overlevel myself so I never get hit. Everything I could usually take on is just as doable as always—I just have to really know what I'm doing and play around my increased vulnerability, make the best use of the maximum three gem slots I get. It makes surviving a difficult fight all the more satisfying, gives me that Dark Souls "oh my god I just beat an insane boss with my own two hands I'm so good at this game" rush. I have functionally just... created this game's hard mode.

I wrap up this batch of uniques, unlock myself a new skill branch for Shulk, and have myself a new list of errands out in the world that I'll be back to turn in the next time I've got to come here. I make a mental note to myself to go fight Clifftop Bayern over on Bionis' Leg on my way back up to Makna. And I close out day 4 musing that, on top of my "hard mode" realization, the meticulous planning aspect of the challenge has transformed this game even moreso; I am now treating it like a survival game where my own time is a resource to be managed, and the tedium of traveling has become a punishment for a poorly optimized route.

Today was a shift. Today is where it has gotten interesting. It is a challenge that I would not wish on anyone who does not know this game like the back of their hand the way I do, but god damn if it isn't incredibly cool.

Day 5 begins and I set out to run for like a full half hour probably into Riki's loving arms. I think I get a little sidetracked along the way, but not enough for me to have commented on it. We get our favorite little guy, we're sent to go retrieve some armor for him that immediately goes in the trash, and we do whatever quests we currently can in Frontier Village because the next boss is a tedious nightmare and I do not want to be near equal level with it. I expect things to be rougher than it actually goes, because this town has a burnout-inducing number of quests, but the amount I can access this early is actually perfectly reasonable. I start keeping a written list of things I need to do on my next trip back down to Colony 9.

Out in the woods I come across a godsend when I happen upon a group of enemies I can use to grind out the worst material requirement in this game: a Hyle Hode paired with an Orluga, which when defeated are guaranteed to drop a silver chest with a rare material, which means I do not in fact have to spend an hour trying to find eight Hode Planks for various important things later and can in fact just repeatedly save and reload to keep respawning them. It's a much-needed blessing.

With all that out of the way, I decide to take on the Leone Telethia, who is just as bad as always even if I am comically overleveled for it. Its favorite trick is a little aura called Soul Read, wherein it will simply decide you cannot hit it for like a full two minutes, and its other favorite trick is an awesome move called Talent Drain, which slorps the juice back out of your talent art so you cannot use it. Did you know the best way to cancel Soul Read is to use Shulk's talent art to purge it? And that you build your talent gauge by hitting the enemy? And that this boss can decide to also give itself health regen? Pretty cool!

I decide to call it after that nightmare and am left with a pretty uneventful day. They couldn't all be big progress days! But this fight unlocks the next batch of quests, and so day 6 starts off with me going through all of those ASAP. The trip to the next area is one-way, after all; I don't unlock a way back until after a whole extra few areas, so I've got to make my time here count now, especially having realized that the next major boss has also had a history of being a problem. (Spoilers: it's another Telethia, and also an enemy that Shulk physically cannot hurt.)

While I'm out here, I figure I might as well go to the handful of areas I've been avoiding in Makna, on account of there's a unique monster down in that region that I'll need to take care of for a quest anyway. And so I follow the rapids of the river down to Seahorse Islet, swim out to grab the collectibles beyond it, and find that the currents here are so ungodly strong that it will take me several minutes of swimming to get back to that dumb little island thirty feet away, so I simply let myself get swept away by the waterfall and respawn on dry land. 6 deaths. It was not worth it to come out here, but by god, I did it anyway.

But I'm still on the dumb little island on the edge of this river, so it's time to swim upstream for like another ten minutes. I go all the way up to Makna Falls at the opposite end and pick up a quest item there that I'll need later, and then loop back around to the nameless island where a guy called Unreliable Rezno will hang out eventually, finding nothing of value there even though it's a good spawn for rare items. I dread my upcoming trip to Eryth Sea. But at least Eryth Sea doesn't have a goddamn current.

Having dragged myself sopping and miserable back onto the mainland, I hunt mostly fruitlessly for a handful of very rare collectibles I still need before realizing I can just trade for those things. (As I wrap up the last few quests in Frontier Village I slip between the guardrails a couple times and bump the death counter up to 8.) I debate whether I want to make another trip back to Colony 9 yet, but elect to leave it for later because I will continue unlocking more stuff to do there and the last thing I need is more trips back and forth. And so it's time to move on to Eryth.

Eryth Sea and its associated areas are another straight shot by necessity: throughout all of these fantasy politics Melia is notably very absent from the party, so I want to minimize the side content I do while she's away to offset any potential EXP she might lose out on. At one point I buy an artbook for her and find that I can in fact have her learn it despite the fact that she is not present, implying the game is still treating her like she's here and giving her the experience I fear she's not getting, but I'd rather play it safe. Doing everything possible in Frontier Village, as it turns out, does in fact overlevel you quite a bit. We'll be fine.

As such, the High Entia Tomb is no problem, I can functionally one-shot the enemies there during Melia's brief solo endeavor, and its associated boss, while still a big wall of HP to slowly burn through, poses no problem. It's fine, we're good, and we can move onto the next crisis and get her back into the party permanently this time. It took about three hours to get through it all, which has been primarily cutscenes. And then it's time for Prison Island!

But first, it's time to do all of the quests in Alcamoth. These are also all very extremely missable, so I've gotta do them all before our steadily-approaching cutoff point and now's as good a time as ever. I am usually burnt out of talking to random nameless NPCs at this point, but I do so more often this run and find a weird amount of them really want to tell me about game mechanics even though this is four towns in and the others have been mostly worldbuilding? Go figure. I've done a good bulk of it by the end of the day, and close it off there with a hefty chunk of progress.

Day 7 marks one week since I began this questionable endeavor, and it is fittingly time now to embark on a mission I have been dreading from the start: filling out the map for Eryth Sea.

You see, each map autocompletes when you've found every location and landmark therein; the majority of Eryth's are floating islands connected by teleporters, so it's not particularly daunting to reach them all and complete the map. Or at least, it wouldn't be if there were not also locations at sea level. My terrible completionist brain leaves me no choice but to plunge into the depths below, swim manually for literal miles of empty map as I visit each one, and finally swim all the way back to shore. There's a handful of things I need to do down here, anyway, so it's not like I had a choice to never come here.

After visiting a couple of more accessible locations and taking out uniques there, I start The Big One™ by diving down to the Hode Lair to hit up Funeral Gozra, who I need for a quest. From here I swing out under Prison Island and visit Bionis' Occipital, and then I swim for a very very long time to a little cave at the very southwest edge, aptly named "Faras Cave", because it is in fact far-ass. I begin the next leg of my journey to Sleeping Dragon Isle right near the middle of the map, and as I make it here I decide I am done with this swimming nonsense and let a very strong fish kill me to send me back to civilization. (Deaths: 9.)

I wake up in Faras Cave. I have made a mistake.

I decide to use the game's timestamps on saves to measure how long it takes to get from here to Latael Shore, the closest place that will actually let me get back on the hovering reefs. It is at the clear opposite end of the sea. It takes nearly ten minutes of uninterrupted swimming. I am somehow still not done, and my soul drains from my body with every stroke.

I am dying on the inside and out and it is now midnight in real life, but there is only one more location to hit and it's not too much of a hassle, so off I go. I make my way over to Reef 5 and drop into the atoll below, taking out a quest monster who is immaculately named Flabbergasted Jerome, and then it's comparatively not far at all to Kromar Coast. The guys who live here are like level 90 and I let them kick me out of their house, because I do not want to be here. (Deaths: 10.) The map is complete and I am but an empty shell. I'm barely even opening the goddamn maps in this run. I need to do anything other than be awake right now.

I start up day 8 bright and early and can finally continue on to Prison Island, where some Very Important Plot Things happen, which will be relevant later. But for now: I can finally go back to the rest of Bionis! Hooray! Finishing up the story here permanently unlocks a guy who will now stand next to a transport pod that was already there the whole time, and talking to him will take you down to a new area of Makna. I will be talking to him I think more times than anyone ever did in their life.

This new spot leads up to Valak Mountain, which I will visit in just a minute, but my first order of business here is to go the exact opposite direction and start up and then instantly complete a quest to restore a broken bridge from here back to the rest of Makna. (This is one half of what I needed all of those Hode Planks for, and will make my life about a billion times easier going forward.)

Shortly after venturing into Valak, I finally achieve Inner Peace, which I am so glad is something this game allows me to say. This dumb skill that I have been working towards for most of the game is finally mine, I share it with as many party members as I currently can (poor Riki still needs to wait until I can bump his affinity with Dunban up to level 4), and then I can finally switch Dunban's focus to the skill branch I USUALLY start him with and begin working towards another important skill called Critical Drain. This will come back later.

Not long after this, I have also collected two Ice Cabbages, which are one of the "notoriously rare" collectibles needed for Colony 6 even though I have literally never had an issue with them. And that means I officially have everything I will need to upgrade it as high as it can go before the cutoff, so it's finally time to start heading back and doing the next major batch of quests.

I loop back around through Makna, pass through Satorl and finally go fight Reckless Godwin (who is still a stinker even when you're comically overleveled), and we've made it back to Colony 6 in short time, if you consider 40 minutes "short time". I make up for the length of this trip by pumping a billion resources into this little place at breakneck speed, and it stays level 2 for all of ten seconds before I push it right on up to level 3. (This is what the other half of the Hode Planks were for.)

This is great! But it doesn't do me a whole lot of good when there is still nobody here, so it is now my mission to set out into the world and invite everyone who's willing to come here at this level. My first stop is, of course, Colony 9, where there are a couple guys I can get, one of whom is hanging out in the very first area you start in and makes me wonder how long it took people to find him when this game first came out. It's finally time to start going down my ever-growing checklist of things to do on my next trip over. (Technically, I started going down that list back in Satorl when I rescued an NPC whose quest had taken them there, but I digress.)

As I clear out the quests I have to turn in, I realize that I will in fact need to make at least one trip back here, because there's one thing I still have to do here that involves going and grabbing an item from Satorl; as such, I actually decide not to check off one quest on my list until the very end because I know it'll bump my affinity with this place back down by a little, and I don't need any trouble finally getting up to 5 stars to unlock one other, final quest. That's all well and good, because there is yet another quest where I have to get the affinity between two female party members up to at least level 4, and I have been feverishly checking to see if Sharla and Melia are there yet like a bored kid in a car.

I head back to Colony 6 and start a thing for the guy who was hanging out in the beginner babyzone, go and grab the item in Satorl, and after another gem crafting session I'm finally prepared to go to Colony 9 for the last time until the endgame. I'm starting to approach burnout on all of these quests and my planning is starting to get sloppy. I'm reaching the point where it's difficult to keep track of where the hell my pathing was taking me based on what I wrote down. It's overleveling me something fierce which does make the part of me that loved the challenge a little disappointed, but the end is coming into sight.

I begin day 9 with some more planning ahead about what I'll be doing in Valak. These notes were temporarily enough to confuse the present-day me, writing this now, into thinking I had somehow gone back there despite leaving off the day before in Colony 6, and had simply attributed it to the savage cold robbing us of reason and leaving us as animals, or something. But then I remembered that I did not in fact do that, and there was a reason my trip there had left a mysterious void in my mind, which was because it never happened. I'd jotted down a list of materials I'll need from Bionis for the areas past the point of no return, which turns out to only consist of one item, and then I had a momentary crisis as I realized the only path down to Valak's lower level is a one-way trip before remembering about The Geyser That Launches You 3000 Feet In The Air. Crisis averted. It's fine and really safe, actually.

When I'm done with that and decide to actually play the video game, I set out to finally wrap up Colony 9, and I can officially say that I am completely done with a major area until endgame. It's great! It's rejuvenating in my time of need when I am getting Extremely Tired of doing quests!

But there's still more to be done. I march on.

My next stop brings me back to Frontier Village, which will not be the last time I visit here before moving on. Along the way I finally knock out Makna Forest's single Challenge quest to take on a particularly infamous monster called Shimmering Forte, who only spawns during hot days, the rarest weather here. I feel a comical horror when I realize that the Wii version's indicator for this weather, a telltale distortion effect over the world, is something the 3DS cannot do. It joins the bloom and shadow effects in being one of the very few visual limitations preventing this port from being completely 1:1 with the original. If you do not have the 3D effect turned on to see the vague overlay they replaced it with, you just do not have any indicator to go look for this guy. It's hilarious in a way that I can only say as someone who knows exactly how to bruteforce him into spawning.

Anyway, I manage to get the Rock Smasher achievement for dealing 30,000+ damage in one attack with a regular, no-chain-multiplier Back Slash because I've brought Shulk out to deal with this guy's counter spike, realizing he has become absurdly powerful while I've been off playing as Dunban and Melia this whole time. It's almost like our guy Zanza at Prison Island upgraded the Monado or something. Crazy. Shulk goes back onto the bench anyway, because I want to keep playing Dunban.

I take out the next batch of quests at Frontier Village, including the much-beloved red pollen orb questline which I forgot briefly makes me run to Satorl to interrogate Zazadan, until everything left to do here involves heading back to Alcamoth or Valak Mountain. Critically, there's only a couple quests left in Alcamoth which both ALSO involve going to Valak, so I start those up on the way. (This is of course save for wrapping up the pollen orb quests there and needing to take a detour back into the tomb for a couple enemy drops about it.) There's nothing else for me to do but venture into the inhospitable cold and face the funniest ice physics any game ever did.

Valak Mountain itself does not have many quests, but it does have a few that I knock out while I'm here, including one that tasks me to go stand places and compare the views. One of these locations is Kana Peak, which is accessed by traveling along a very thin pathway running up a mountain. I make the mistake of approaching this from the bottom, so my companions keep falling off and respawning on the nearest solid ground, which usually happens to be directly where I'm standing, so their collision inevitably pushes me off to my death. ...Twice. The counter goes up to 12. I decide to come back to this one later.

(Admittedly, this might have happened on an earlier trip here, but this portion of the run turned my brain into a slaw and I do not remember the specifics of where I went when at all. What you're reading is my best approximation of a blurry polaroid and a diary missing pages at a time.)

I move on a little with the plot in order to recover a key item I need to melt a few walls of ice. I realize I have reached a level of brainrot where I am no longer phased by the characters' extremely British asses pronouncing geyser as "geezer" and can finally pay attention to new things in the scene where they introduce this, such as the fact that its pacing feels super breakneck for no particular reason even though it's just people standing around talking. It's like the story is self-aware of the fact that this is an unfittingly video gamey errand and is trying to expedite it as much as possible to get back to the actual narrative. I feel like certain games could take notes.

On the way to said scene, though, the death counter is bumped up to 13 due to an ice physics incident in the Hollow Bone. Now, dear reader. If you have not played this game, I need you to understand that when I say this I am not talking about a normal video game "oh whoops the platform was too slippery and I slid off!" sort of thing. That's child's play. No, this game's ice physics are stupid: you build up momentum ridiculously fast and then keep literally all of it when you jump so that you rocket forward at mach speed. It's the kind of behavior that was definitely not intended by the devs, but when they noticed they did NOT fix it and instead took the noble and correct path of designing setpieces around it so you have to experience it, actually. The Hollow Bone is a big tube of ice that you have to time jumps in so you can fly over gaps, and if you mistime it you can die of fall damage because of how long you spent airborne. This is how I died.

Anyway, now with Magma Rock in hand, I am finally able to unlock a ridiculous Sonic the Hedgehog ice ramp up to Three Sage Summit and rescue a couple guys from Alcamoth who are very about to die, and then once I get myself back down I swing around to Bafalgar Pedestal to grab some extremely specific ice that is different from all of the other ice because reasons. I find that sitting here with no pants and the air conditioning blasting is a truly immersive experience. And then, though I am not quite done here, it's time to head back to the city to turn those stray quests in.

And with that, Alcamoth is now also complete. I've used the ice to cure one lady's racism with the power of friendship. It's great and everyone claps. That's two areas down, and I call it a day.

Day 10 is scattered. There's not a whole lot left; this is looking like the end of this stupid, giant marathon around Bionis. I start the night before by making a list of materials to go collect in Valak for the last few things I need to do, and then I proceed to ignore it in the morning and go do more stuff in Frontier Village for a while. I finally reach the point where the only stuff left to do there is gated behind those materials and admit that I should go get those.

From there, I swing back down to Colony 6 to knock out more stuff there (and dip into Bionis' Leg one last time to do one that consists of realizing we've made a very big mistake that we will never speak of again), and then head back up to Frontier Village again to wrap up the last few quests there. The very last one I do here pops the achievement for completing 300 quests, and I'm half sure it boosts me up like two entire levels, which is absolutely insane at this point in the game.

There's now just a few more to do now back in Colony 6, so it's back down I go again. I eventually reach the point where only two remain, but they require the area to be at four-star affinity and despite it all I am still sitting at a lowly three. I start to chip away at this by talking to NPCs at various times of day to form links between them, but I soon decide this is the opposite of fun and I would rather be doing anything else. One of those quests involves getting swarmed by level 62 monsters anyway, and I am not confident at all that I can take them right now. I decide that this is where I will call myself done. I can finally move on. I am horribly, disgustingly overleveled, and it took me 57 hours to get here.

Following this closure, day 11 is the first actual progress day in what feels like a very long time. Shulk is back in the lead, we completely eviscerate the boss waiting for us at the end of Valak, and it is finally time to set foot on Mechonis.

Sword Valley's enemies are strong enough that the combat starts to show its teeth again, which is refreshing considering I was concerned I would turn too much of the game into a cakewalk by doing Every Quest Ever. It turns out the hundred-foot Fortress Mechon are, in fact, extremely intimidating regardless of your level. This area finally introduces Anti-Mechon weapons so that other party members can actually damage them without having to rely on Shulk's Monado Enchant; with excellent timing Melia earns a skill called Unadorned Beauty which gives her a 20% buff in four different stats if she's not wearing any gems, which is great considering these weapons only come with one slot anyway.

Shulk, however, stays up front, because we are reaching the point where counter spikes are much more prominent on unique monsters than they have been up to now; we're halfway through the game and things are gonna start getting nastier. I've mentioned these briefly before, but if you're not familiar: they're passive effects on enemies that automatically hurt you back for a set amount of damage whenever you hit them, and they can melt you if you're not careful. A spike can temporarily be removed by inflicting Topple, but most party members do not have a way to cancel these outright save for Shulk, who can use Monado Purge to put an end to them for a short time. Spike Defense gems are armor-only, so he's our only real option.

We work our way through Sword Valley and Galahad Fortress, only getting a little lost on the nightmare labyrinth that is the hilt, and then stop right before our point of no return to round up the last few things we've missed. Most of the uniques have gone down, but there's one more guy on the sword that I've been dreading, and I've gotta take him on now because there is no coming back here once I go down that elevator. That guy is Mischievious Naberius, and he is one of those absolutely towering Fortress Mechon I mentioned.

I grind a little bit to get myself another level and bump him down a difficulty tier as a safety precaution. That agility boost is going to be very necessary: Fortresses have an infamous art called Titan Stamp, which hits everyone in its huge range and does MASSIVE amounts of damage even when you do have armor. I am not remotely confident that this will work. But we go ahead and give it a shot anyway, and while there is much sprinting around this guy's gargantuan hitbox to revive each other and a lot of panic heals, we manage to pull through without a team wipe! Hooray! I am once again proven right in my theory that Sharla will be basically mandatory for the rest of this game!

With renewed confidence in my capabilities, we close out the day here with only one thing left to do—there's one more collectible to find here and then we're done for real. Tomorrow we enter the point of no return.