(Hey! This is the part where those unavoidable spoilers start coming into play! You have been warned!)

Day 12 is when we take the plunge, but first: I want to fill out my Collectopaedia, and Sword Valley has one rare little flower that still evades me. It is called the Delerium Foxglove, which I assume is a British spelling of delirium, but Wiktionary tells me it is actually just spelled wrong. I could trade for it if I waited a little longer but in my hubris I have decided I want to see it filled in while I can still access the area it's from.

I pull up the wonderful resource FrontierNav, fittingly named after Xenoblade X's mapping system, which tells me there is a very small chance to find this item at a great number of collectible points across the map. This chance never reaches higher than 12% and the places where it is this high are scattered with no particular concentration. There's not much I can do here but just wander around to these locations and hope I can get lucky, especially considering that saving and reloading does not work to respawn these points.

I do this for I think three hours.

I fall into a pattern of making it to one end of the map, leaving to enter the next area, and then saving and hard-resetting the game from there; this is because, as far as I can tell, the collectible respawns seem to be on a global timer that your current session respects but only affects the current area between sessions. It's probably for the best that I do this anyway because the 3DS port has a notable version-exclusive bug that can softlock you and appears to be tied to some form of memory leak, so it's a bit of extra assurance.

I finally find it on I think my third or fourth visit to the Monado Wound, which is a big hole in the ground that is oddly-named because we are on a sword and not actually anywhere near the body of either titan. I have collected 76 Purple Lamps and I never want to see one again.

I can finally leave. There's nothing else to do here but one more boss fight, which goes just fine, and we are separated from our group as we drop down to the Fallen Arm. We can officially no longer return to Bionis until nearly the end of the game. The timer for reaching our cutoff point sits at 65 hours.

But more importantly: Fiora's here! The girl who got so, so murdered at the beginning of the game!

Fiora has always been my favorite out of the main party, because she is an undead cyborg who dual-wields giant combat knives and says things like "okie-dokie!", and also because I am very good at ignoring that she is canonically written with a crippling inability to pass the Bechdel test. With her, we're finally up to seven and (once everybody's reunited) we have the full party for the remainder of the game.

She does not join the no-pants club, because she is not wearing anything in the first place, so removing her armor just keeps her in her default design. This is perfectly fine by me because the ironically more revealing Speed set that I usually have her equipped with looks ridiculous, and by playing on real hardware instead of an emulator I cannot use my beloved Fashion Disaster texture pack to make it bearable to look at, so not being able to use it is a blessing in disguise.

On this note, however, we come to a critical point about how this will affect her: Fiora's whole gimmick is her adaptability specifically as defined by her armor. Rather than wearing the same armor everyone else does, Fiora gets dedicated sets that each give her a notable boost to one of her core stats, which frequently come inset with gems stronger than ones you can find for their effects out in the wild. In her foot armor slot is instead a type of equipment called Drones, each of which comes with its own talent art and lets you choose between something like Cannon Drones, a single multi-target hit in a straight line, or Sword Drones, which focuses a bunch of physical damage onto a single target, and upgrade to stronger versions as you progress. Using this system you can mold her into just about any party role you could ask for aside from pure support.

We will not be doing any of that. She will be stuck with plain old Cannon Drones I and no special stat buffs. I am severely handicapping this poor girl.

Anyway, I proceed to play as her almost exclusively for the rest of the game.

This whole bit takes a couple of hours before we actually permanently have everyone in the party for good, on top of the big dumb flower hunt from earlier taking forever, so I'm content calling the day here. But first I do take time to step into the next area, Mechonis Field; we're not moving on until we've knocked out the quests in the Hidden Village here on the Fallen Arm, but crossing this line will allow us to access all but one of those quests. ...That one will be relevant later.

Day 13 is dedicated to our Hidden Village laundry list. There are currently only 25 out of the 30 quests here that I can access, and of the remaining five, four of those are locked behind the endgame; for our current purposes these won't count when we say "everything".

This is also the day where I realize that all of the defense skills I have been using have been completely useless this entire time, because this is the first time I actually process that they calculate your bonuses based on a percentage of your defense stat rather than adding a flat number to it. This means that your 30% buff to a base defense of 0 is... still 0. I feel justified in my decision to ignore Fiora's defense-boosting aura in favor of her Haste aura, Speed Shift, which makes her attack very very fast and is addicting to use even though it lowers her defense instead. Except you can't go lower than 0, so there is no downside, actually. Also, all the affinity coins I was using on sharing defense skills can be better spent elsewhere now. Win/win!

The 20-some quests I can do right away shouldn't take too long, though they are stretched out across a few hours by the amount of back-and-forth I need to do across a map that is relatively big even for this game, along with venturing further into Mechonis Field for a handful of things. Of note, however, are two quests that each reward something special: The first gives us Monado Armour, which is allowed to keep its British spelling here on account of being a proper noun, and the second gives us Fiora's fourth skill branch, Rashness.

Armour is going to be vital for the back half of the game, even moreso now than it usually is, because it is a flat damage resistance buff for as long as it is active; for a bit I misinterpret it as yet another useless modifier to our defense stats, but it is not and it is in fact directly reducing all damage taken by a huge percentage that only increases the further I upgrade it. As we are finally starting to approach "bosses can just decide to instantly kill you" territory, we will be needing that.

Rashness, on the other hand, is going to be equally important for all of the time I am going to spend not playing as Shulk, and this is where that other skill we started working Dunban towards comes in. Critical Drain, as you could probably infer from the name, has the effect of restoring a little bit of your health every time you land a critical hit; we have him share this with Fiora alongside Inner Peace, which takes no extra work, because they start at level 3 affinity on account of the whole "being siblings" thing. Rashness features two skills, Ultimate Counter and Critical Combo, that turn every counterattack and double attack—variations of your standard auto-attack that can happen at random—into guaranteed critical hits. Take this, combined with the fact that you can use gems to increase your double attack rate, and the Haste aura I mentioned earlier, and Fiora will functionally become a self-sustaining blender of death. She can now heal herself faster than most enemies can damage her. It's completely busted. It rules.

Also, while I am doing all of my running around, the game apparently decides to apologize about the foxglove by magically seeing a wishful thinking almost-joke I'd made to a friend earlier about organically finding Rainbow Slugs, the MOST infamous of the rare collectibles needed for Colony 6, and actually just giving me them somehow. Even the extra I need for the Collectopaedia. These things have a similarly tiny spawn rate, but also only at night and when it's raining, and I found three of them without trying. I feel like I'm going insane. Like. What? Okay??? Thanks???

On day 14 I spend much of the day enraptured by a playthrough of Ratatouille for the GameCube. I do not make any progress because I want to actually watch the cutscenes and I respect Mechonis Field's music too much to play with it muted, so I just spend several hours today gem crafting in the village.

Fiora's introduction to the party makes this process infinitely easier to optimize, but also makes it drag out to be a million times longer. The way this system works, see, is that each crystal represents a few percentages each associated with an attribute: you choose two or more crystals and stick 'em in the furnace to make those numbers go up, and if one goes over 100, it spits out an equipment gem for that attribute whose quality depends on how much higher it went. If it hits 200, you enter a "heat" state that bumps the gem up a level, but if it doesn't make it to 100, you instead get the choice to refine it into a cylinder that goes back into the crystal pool with the improved percentage all by itself. If you stick two high-percentage cylinders for the same attribute into the furnace, you guarantee yourself a good gem with that effect.

Fiora starts with 3 cylinder slots to choose from at the end as opposed to everyone else's 1, so if you were to pair her up with someone she's got low affinity with and choose gems with a collective three low percentages, they won't have enough turns to get them up to 100 and you can slowly refine all three to 70, 80, 90%. You easily set yourself up with a mountain of really, really good gems, and it's easy money when you can sell all the weaker ones you won't need anymore. (And, in my case, the armor-only ones.) It's also the kind of thing that makes me wish it DIDN'T work as well as it did, because it makes my ADHD possess me to do nothing but this for hours at a time.

Also, while I am shuffling through the characters and seeing their listed affinities in this menu, I notice Shulk and Dunban are at level 4 even though they were up to 5 earlier. I realize this is because, while grabbing an achievement for giving Reyn a Mechonis Field collectible he loves, I took the time to also get the inverse achievement by giving Dunban—you guessed it—an Ether Plum. It turns out I have used Shulk so sparingly in this run that they'd only just made it over the edge of level 5 affinity and no higher, and this was enough to bump their level back down. The prophecy came true. I still can't believe it.

Having had our "break", day 15 is going to be a Big Progress day, because I am nearly to the top of Mechonis Field already and Central Factory has exactly one very small cutscene happen in it, so it's not going to take very long at all. Throughout my ventures into Mechonis Field over these past few days, however, I should note that my death counter has gone up two more times to hit 15:

The first was an incident on the Great Battle Scar, which is a very steep slope that inexplicably has ice physics because the devs were geniuses and visionaries, and therefore you can jump directly up it like a freakish goat. I, on the other hand, made the mistake of jumping at all on the way down, which resulted in me hurtling into some awkward corner of the wall at terminal velocity.

The second was when I dove down to an obscure little place called the Spent Fuel Tank, which is a little bucket of safely swimmable fluid in this area that is otherwise surrounded by stuff that will very much kill you if you spend too long in there. There is a guy here named Commander Oracion; I quickly discover that he has a horrendous spike and swap out to Shulk, and mourn that enemies with these things allow for so little variation in strategy, because just auto-attacking to build up my talent gauge and use Purge again right when the old one wears off is incredibly boring. He goes down easy enough, but now I am presented with a new problem, which is that I am still in a tiny oasis in the middle of The Stuff That Kills You. The only way back is to swim through it to a platform nearby; I can't make it any safer, because Terrain Defense gems are armor-only, and so I am simply unable to make it there in time.

Those aside, it's time to actually do the boss fight here, and I am once again fairly overleveled, which is great because this guy hits HARD. And then it's time to do The Trek between these stupid bulkheads. You normally only have to do this once. I will not be so lucky.

This room of the map, you see, is the Mechonis' hip, or, more accurately, it is the big metal bar connecting its leg to its torso. It is a very long straight line with nothing but some short walls in it, because it is first and foremost a boss arena; this fight does something very interesting with the fact that your opponent is a sniper and introduces cover shooter mechanics in this JRPG as you slowly work your way towards him at the other end. But then after you beat him you get put back at the start of this room and have to run all the way back to the end again, for some reason, which takes... a while.

From the big elevator at the end of the room, we move onto Central Factory, which is the least eventful area in this game until way later. It's pure videogames: just go deeper into the map and fight enemies and at one point you find a vent you have to blow up, so you go get parts from still more enemies to go construct a bomb with at a place we found earlier in the level. (Technically, we could say there are two cutscenes on this trip here if you count the three-second cutaway of the vent exploding.)

As we explore here, we make backtracking far more painless, because we unlock elevators that travel straight down the center of the map and that we can just take directly from the end back to the beginning in like a minute or two. One of those elevators, however, also has no guardrails, and there is a section of the map that you can only access by stepping off the side while it is moving. I am on a Discord call talking with a friend at the time, so my attention is split here and I step off too early, plummeting to my death; I try again, but this time I overcompensate and step off too late. The death counter ticks up to 17. I get it right on the third try.

After we get through everything here (barring a unique monster who is Very Strong and who we'll be leaving as the very last thing we do in this part of the game), we take the transporter up to Agniratha, the final area of Mechonis.

And then we turn around.

Do you remember how there was one more quest in the Hidden Village that we couldn't access yet? It's available now. It is also missable.

See, there is this NPC called Zilex. You probably recognize his name from the fact that this section of the article is named after him, explicitly because of this one stupid quest that he gives you. Zilex is looking for memory chips scattered around the Mechonis, which is no longer safe for his people to venture into on account of all the Mechon, so he tasks you with finding them in his stead. First, he asks you to find four in Mechonis Field, which is simple enough, and then when you reach Agniratha, he has a new quest to find a final one there.

This is fine when you can just go back to the Fallen Arm whenever the hell you want. But in our case, this means we will have to run all the way between these two places... four separate times. Once to take the quest from him, once to get back to Agniratha to find the chip, once to go return it to him, and then one more time to actually go continue the goddamn story of the video game. We cannot wait until we return to the Fallen Arm naturally to turn this in, because when that happens Agniratha will be inaccessible and the quest will have expired.

And so we begin the first lap, and head down those very nice Central Factory elevators that feel like a mercy designed for me specifically, and then it is time to run all the way across the giant empty boss room for the second time out of the five I will have to do this. In the absence of literally anything else to do, I measure the time and find that it takes almost a complete loop of the music here to make it to the other end and reach the 1st Zebrai Bulkhead, which will probably be the only thing keeping me sane because Mechonis Field has maybe my favorite song in a soundtrack where that is a staggeringly high bar to clear. I then ride down the tallest elevator in the universe, which takes like another full minute. The fun don't stop.

As I make my way back down Mechonis Field's many many floors, I get into a fight with a unique monster who has respawned. In the process Riki is knocked off and, surprisingly enough, survives to pick a fight with some other guy on the lower level. Once we take out the unique the encounter has not actually ended, so I decide to just fall off on purpose to follow him and only shatter my ankles a little bit. The drop between these two levels is in fact survivable. I have discovered a shortcut.

The rest of the trip down is uneventful. We talk to Zilex and get his silly little quest, and also turn in another one for a guy who wanted something from Central Factory. Nothing magically appears to make riding the very tall elevator and crossing the boss room interesting on the way back up.

Agniratha is the final major area with any substantial amount of non-story quests, and we have to do all of them to reach the secret area here, so that is what we do. I am reminded that much of this area's encounter design is built around sticking you in the middle of a giant mob of enemies, which seems to be because the devs were extremely conscious of how good Mechonis' battle theme Mechanical Rhythm is and wanted to give you many opportunities to listen to it for as long as possible. I get through them with no problem and feel awesome about how good I am at this game. I am, above all else, assured that Fiora can be built into a powerhouse no matter what she's equipped with and I can free myself from the shackles of that stupid Speed armor.

Agniratha takes many hours. I ace the fight against the infamous Wise Gremory, a unique with a spike who is needed for one of the quests here, and eventually it's just down to finding a few Grape Springs, which are a weirdly rare collectible for the game to ask you to find six of. But it is done, and then the only things left on Mechonis are to turn in Zilex's quest, take out the one unique in Central Factory, and find one last Grape Spring for my Collectopaedia.

Tomorrow we finish Mechonis. Tomorrow we enter the final act.