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: The truck is a point of no return, but we should be fine. I should mention that if you do not have all of the Red Nova stellars, you definitely want to get all of them before you go in here.
: “Hmm, the facility is much bigger than ol’ Frank expected. Searching for Professor Gilbert’s whereabouts will take some time.”
: “What’re you talking about? At times like this, all you gotta do is grab the guy in charge and make him talk.”
: “A little violent, but sounds like the fastest way. Anyway, let’s get moving and find the head of the base.”
: It’s hard to see, but right behind the truck, on that ramp, is a chest.
: Raise Up is the basic revival spell. Hopefully, we’ll never need it.
: “Huh? Umm.. yeah, right. We’re the new kids.”
: I’m having flashbacks to Eternal Punishment, and I don’t like it.
: “Wow… sounds pretty nice.”
: Actually, wait a second. Isn’t this that guy that Kandori shoved into the DEVA machine in Persona 1?
: “Hmm… well, now I know how great Mr. Morrison is…”
: …This really is the lab dungeon from Eternal Punishment, isn’t it.
: If we talk to Morrison again, we can ask him about himself.
: This looks so much like a Perfect Dark cutscene. Frank would main the Farsight and have the most kills without even knowing how the Farsight works.
: I hope someone remakes Perfect Dark.
: Meet Hilda. She has a very annoying gameplay gimmick that we’ll get to after Roswell.
: Hilda looks like someone threw a copy of Manga Time Kirara Carat into a nuclear reactor and an unholy fusion of Machikado Mazoku and Hidamari Sketch came to life as a result.
: You might ask if Hilda’s eyes being fucked up like that is an emulator bug, and the answer is no - that’s how it’s supposed to look.
: I feel like this probably could be a chapter of Machikado Mazoku. Hidamari Sketch not so much, unless Yuno got her head stuck in a bucket or something.
: Natan gets screwed out of his party spot yet again. Don’t get me wrong, Hilda is great - if you’re willing to grind a ton. You’ll understand what I mean when we use her in combat.
: “OK, I’m Johnny. Nice to meet you. And how about… uh… this weird creature here?”
: This is a running joke that’s been going on since Koudelka. Let’s just hit Start and see what happens.
: I made a save state before hitting Start to see if he had alternate dialog for putting in “Roger Bacon”, but there isn’t any.
: Roger is here to remind us all of the moral of the first three games: don’t fucking go to Wales! I mean, there’s also the whole bit about not trying to resurrect the dead, but really it was about Wales.
: “…Hmmm.”
: I don’t think Johnny even knows that Wales exists, so we’re okay on that front.
: “…'Cause I don’t really care that much. Well, let’s get a move on. If we get found in here, things could get difficult.”
: Roswell is a lot like a PS1-era Persona dungeon, in that the developer kind of intended you to run into walls and backtrack a bit. We’ll be taking a more straightforward approach.
: Our first stop is this room, to the right of where Hilda and Roger were. The chest has a Daphne Fruit in it.
: “Huh? Umm. no, no, you got it all wrong. We’re just the new assistants.”
: “So you believe me, right? Thank you very much!”
: “Thank you!”
: “… I feel kinda bad.”
: There’s another person in here we have to talk to.
: You see, there’s a three-part password we have no way of knowing about - the game kind of assumes you’re going to go through the door behind Zett and find that out first, then backtrack.
: Instead, we want to grab this Hit Area Expand, which I’ll probably use on Hilda, even though she can only have three attacks per Ring. Let me show you why.
: That second hit area is absolutely anemic. It’s pretty clear that they actually expect you to use all of the Hit Area Expands, compared to Covenant where they weren’t really that important.
: On the way back to where we met Hilda, we hit a random encounter. We need two Snaps of each enemy here. None of them are particularly threatening, especially compared to Alcatraz.
: Betelgeuse here has around 100 HP and attacks for damage. That’s about all it does.
: Acteon has around 80 HP and will usually spend its first turn buffing itself. It’s kind of a mystery to me why the enemies here are so much easier than they were in Alcatraz.
: Oh, right. It’s time to talk about Hilda. Hilda’s gimmick is that she has three forms, which are changed by using a move we haven’t actually gotten yet.
: Which form she’s in is governed by a meter we can’t see yet that ranges from -100 to 100. Right now, she’s in “Curvy” form, which is anywhere from 11 to 99 on the meter.
: Curvy Hilda has higher physical stats and higher HP, but lower MP and magic stats. In this form, most of her skills are geared towards healing rather than damage.
: Our next destination is on the other side of the room where we met Hilda.
: This is why we had to go right first.
: “…Who are you?”
: “Freeze! Stop right THERE!”
: “What are you doing here?”
: “…Jonin? Orders?”
: “He he he… as a matter of fact, Britney’s a ninja, just like ol’ Frank. The Jonin is the head of our clan.”
: Not canon, Frank is definitely the hokage.
: I never bothered to read this, because I know where it is we have to go.
: “WHAT?! What is this?”
: “Hmm… and the secret location is written on this memo?”
: “Hey Frank… aren’t you kinda being used?”
: Before we leave this room, there’s two items we need to pick up - one of which we probably shouldn’t know is here.
: First up is another stat-raising item. I should probably start using these.
: This is what we came here for. We need this last keycard in order to complete Frank’s secret mission. We should, however, go into the room just behind Johnny before we do that.
: That’s two parts of the password.
: We’ve got everything in here. Our next destination is the hallway immediately before the room where we met Hilda.
: If we head to the left (the right side is where we entered the lab), there’s a level 3 door. We definitely need to go in here.. because this is how we get Frank’s new skill.
: Yes, unfortunately, instead of befriending UMAs, Frank’s abilities are all gained through sidequests like this one. See these three barrels? We need to check the blue one.
: Oh, it’s just a nuke. This is just an average day for Frank.
: “Whoa.. that looks really dangerous.”
: Please god let Frank make a Nuke Saber.
: “…Britney?”
: Fuck that! Let Frank have his nuke! How are we going to defeat Wales if we don’t have a nuke?
: This is stolen valor! That’s Frank’s nuke!
: “It’s like she’s taking all the credit…”
: “The Jonin.. He is watching ol’ Frank’s work! How THRILLING!”
: “Uh.. I think he probably always has to keep an eye on you…”
: Hmm.. this is the third part of the password. In order, we’ve got.. “GRAY MEN LITTLE?” Whatever that means.
: Slow isn’t terrible if we manage to hit with it, so I put it on Hilda.
: On the way back to the right side, we run into the final enemy in Roswell - Sirius, which has around 45 HP and is pretty much a joke. Everyone except Johnny can kill these in one turn.
: I also remember we have a shitload of Soul Energy, and use it to power up Tatan’ka. This was a mistake, because as it turns out, you can’t use Red Nova as part of a D-Combo.
: Either one of the two side rooms where we got passwords will lead you to the next area - I chose to go the long route just to make sure everyone was full on Stock.
: Gerard and Buigen are here. Now, if you’re the kind of person that grinds, you probably want to equip everyone with a Pocket Watch, which Hilda starts with. Pocket Watches block Ring abnormalities. You probably also want four Bodhi Bracelets to prevent paralysis.
: Of course, if you were one of.. those people.. you’d also probably remove Frank from the party because the upcoming boss is immune to physical attacks. I am not one of those people.
: Instead, we’re going to do this boss Frank style, by simply ignoring game mechanics and nuking the fuck out of it. It’s the American way.
: “Ah, yes. Please tell us!”
: “Looks like you believe me. Thanks so much!”
: “Wow, those eyes really work for you..”
: I should mention that the password “puzzle” is also able to be bypassed if you already know what the answer is. I was only running around to make sure everyone got Stock and to see if I could grind enough Cash for a second Pocket Watch (I couldn’t).
: There’s a lot of NPC dialog in this room. I’m going to skip some of it.
: I’m willing to bet money that’s not the original line, but at least it’s a Discworld reference and not some dated meme like a lot of translations did back in the day.
: There’s an extra Heal down here, which you should equip to anyone who has a Pocket Watch on (Hilda has one she starts with).
: We can use the computer in the middle to input the password.
: Now we can get into the elevator, which is right across from where we entered the main control room.
: “Excuse me, but we’re not aliens, really!”
: You might be asking “Isn’t this that thing that was on the snap card you traded for last update?” and the answer is yes. The boss is immune to Snap.
: Given how Shadow Hearts usually goes, I would not be surprised if that thing is powered by liquefied orphans.
: Yeah, we should probably get to killing this thing that looks like it’s a rejected Killing Floor monster.
: Game can’t resist the pantyshots, apparently.
: Bah gawd, it’s the stunner!
: Meet Slim Hilda. She’s a pure caster who has lower HP, higher MP, lower physical stats and higher magical ones than Curvy Hilda. Slim Hilda kicks in when her meter is between -11 and -99.
: I should mention that I think Hilda is the first of her siblings to actually suck someone’s blood - Keith had a special attack in Shadow Hearts 1 that drained HP, and I think Joachim did as well, but none of them did it in a cutscene.
: And now it’s nuking time. We could use Hard Hit or Red Nova on Procyon here to nuke its stock, or..
: Just have Hilda nuke it. Procyon has 960 HP and is Wind-element, effectively making it the perfect target for Hilda.
: Frank uses a couple of spells, and Shania fuses into Thunderbird to hit the boss with Omega Cluster, a hard-hitting Dark spell. Honestly, the hardest part of this fight is keeping your D-Combo up.
: The boss occupies the High and Mid hitzones, and a lot of our best spells are launchers, which remove the Mid hitzone.
: Johnny follows up with Combo Magic - by sheer luck, I picked the right one on the first try, no Handy Tools necessary.
: We have effectively deleted the boss in a single D-Combo. All that’s left now is to clean up.
: Of course, the boss hits like a goddamn truck, and if you get unlucky with its multi-target skill…
: Yeah. Even worse..
: The boss paralyzes Thunderbird. This is one of the two annoying things it can do - it can also do some Ring fuckery, but we don’t really care about that.
: Ultimately, due to the sheer power of Hilda and Combo Magic, we annihilate the boss before it really gets anywhere. The developers balanced this surprisingly well, given that Frank, Natan, and Mao’s skills don’t work on it.
: I recorded the post-boss cutscene solely because of Frank. You can view it here: https://youtu.be/AxJMVzCvzSw
: Several seconds of Hilda curbstomping the director ensue.
: We must be on Persona time, where “the other day” means “six months ago”.
: Looks like we’re heading to South America next update.
: If I was doing the writing, I’d have had Johnny go “Chet-chin..Pizza?” followed by Frank interrogating the director to find out where he can get pizza.
: If you know anything about geography, you’d know that what Natan is saying makes no sense if you’re in Roswell, due to the fact that you’d hit the Gulf of Mexico and would not need to cross the Caribbean.
: Of course, this is Shadow Hearts, and I would not be surprised if the Welsh somehow cursed the Gulf of Mexico so that the only viable sea route to Mexico is down the East Coast.
: Yes, Frank is moonwalking. This is why I recorded the cutscene. I wasn’t going to, and then I saw this and went “No, I have to fucking record this immediately”. Here it is again, just in case you missed it.
: Roger is clearly trying to figure out whether Natan somehow knows more than he does about the status of the Gulf of Mexico in regards to its being cursed by the Welsh.
: Roger needs her to verify that the Gulf is still there, and if not, he’s gonna need Frank to use that nuke before somebody builds a giant floating fortress or summons a demon there.
: Natan is probably going “Thank god the vampire didn’t want to come, she’d probably dive facefirst into the extremely cursed Gulf of Mexico.”
: Next time, we drive all the way back to New York to take a boat from New York to Mexico. Shadow Hearts!
: Oh right, I almost forgot: have a picture from Salty Vanilla of Frank and Bigfoot being friends.
