So every conflict established in the title card and introduction to
chapter two has been resolved, but...chapter two is still going on. This
is what I was talking about before, the pacing between the second and
third chapters is a little strange.
Completing the storyline-mandated request from Yuuko opens up two new quests on the whiteboard. The red magnet is required to progress the storyline, the yellow magnet is a sidequest we'll be doing first.
Our client is a game company employee in Shinjuku. He created an application that's just encountered a sudden error right at the time of release. Choosing to take on the request automatically sends us to Shinjuku.
We catch him just as he's getting off the phone with his boss. The developer is pretty peeved at us for being late, and he's panicking over potentially losing his job.
To address the problem, we do a Connect Jump into the game application's digital space. The
dumb thing about these digital space dungeons is that we can't revisit most of them later, or recreate them with the Mirror Dungeon feature, so we have
to pick up everything here on the first run.
We got a Memory Up from Growmon; using it increases the party memory by 5, making room for more Digimon on the team.
This area introduces the new Child-level Digimon Terriermon, Lopmon and Tentomon. Terriermon is part of the Nyaromon line, while Lopmon evolves from Pagumon as she did in
Digimon Story.
Piyomon degenerates and then evolves up to Palmon, while Growmon degenerates and evolves to Waspmon.
At the end of the first digital space dungeon we find Poyomon, who just lost to a boss in the game. It turns out the error is being caused by Poyomon playing the game from the inside. He doesn't want to leave though, and challenges us to a fight.
This uh, doesn't go well for him.
Afterwards Poyomon agrees to leave, but he wants to meet the game's developer to thank him. Poyomon enjoyed playing this app a lot.
The employee is mad at us for taking too long up until the very point that the error goes away. He starts saying that
we'll be the ones unemployed at this rate! But the error vanishes with Poyomon, and his tune changes quickly.
Talking to him one more time before leaving, it turns out one of the "children" that played the game left him a thank-you message!
When we come back, I pick up a Nyokimon medal from the machine. Unfortunately, she's only a one-star medal.
Grandpa buys all of our current medals for 950 yen. Thus far we've spent 900 yen and gotten 1120 yen out of it--a net profit of 220 yen.
Something is up with the vent near the machine, though. A blue static is dropping down, and when we approach we get this image of a girl.
No sooner do we check the vent, that Kyouko contacts us with another quest!
Before taking on another quest, I make sure to sell off the majority of my HP Capsule Cs. These mostly come from random drops, but if I don't periodically dump them for yen at the Broadway shop I'll end up with too many of them and not be able to pick up more.
Completing the game quest gives us 1000 yen, 300 CSP and a bank expansion drive. I
think this increases the number of Digimon that can be held in the Digi-bank, I still need to verify it.
Kyouko gives us a job well done every time we finish a quest. Certain ones have specific dialogue, including all of the Mirei quests.
Next up, we accept a quest from Mikagura Mirei. There's a bad hacker in the digital world that she wants us to "punish."
We need to meet with Mirei after accepting the quest. She had a feeling we'd want to take on her request. The target is a hacker in Cron Lv. 2.
I take this time to hatch another Digimon, this one a Data-Earth type.
Meet Lopmon! She's going to sit in the back of the party for a while to build up her level. She's born with the Water attribute skill Blazing Ice and the passive ability Animal Colosseum, which causes same-attribute damage to get a 15% bonus.
The hacker thinks we're crazy for telling him not to use a hacking program for hacking. There's no bad use of bad power; so naturally, the only way we're going to convince him is through force.
Black Garurumon and Waspmon both oneshot his Pico Devimon. Turbo Stinger is my favorite part of Waspmon; it's a single target attack with multiple hits that deals greater overall damage through a number of small hits rather than try to go in for one big blow.
After we've convinced the hacker to stop using Digimon, Mirei thanks us back at the lab. It just so happens that this is only the first of
thirty hackers on her blacklist. We don't have to deal with the other twenty-nine just yet, but we will eventually. For completing her request we receive 1000 yen, 100 CSP and an HP Capsule B.
This
also unlocks the first DLC quest. Since it's the last one-star request on the board, we'll tackle it now. Once again, the client is Mirei.
For this quest, we'll be taking on another
blacklisted hacker, an Irregular within EDEN. This one's actually a
group of three camped out in Cron Lv. 1; but as with all hacker teams, it's in danger of expanding to four, five and eventually an unstoppable number of members. Mirei wants this one nipped in the bud.
It's around this time that I elect to
rename my Digimon. You can do this through the Setting feature of the
Digimon submenu, by selecting to set the name at the top instead of the
skills or items further down. For Black Garurumon, I settle on Burai.
Since he's Black Gabumon's twin, for Waspmon I make the nickname Bur
ei. As for Palmon, Miss Mad makes her return. She did a lot of work for me in
Digimon Story, so I have her on the track to evolve to Rosemon.
The first member of the three siblings' hacking group is Takeshi, who used Digimon to steal item data in a social game. He uses a Pico Devimon and Botamon that are really far outdated compared to our Adult-level Digimon.
Next up is Takeshi's elder brother Mamoru, who used Digimon to hack a health goods website and take them for himself.
Mamoru uses Pagumon and Gazimon, two Digimon of the same line that are likewise no challenge for our party.
Finally we face the big emmer (
Oneniichan) and strongest of the three siblings. Suguru used their Digimon to hack their Avatar parts, mixing and matching male and female parts to make an androgynous identity that no one can tell the true sex of. Apparently, they didn't just stop at their own Avatar, but used the same technique on others to cause mayhem.
(Note: Suguru is voiced by a woman in battle, but speaks with the gender neutral pronoun
Watashi unlike the masculine
Boku and
Ore used by their siblings.)
Suguru's main Digimon is Keramon, flanked by two Tsumemon. As long as Keramon gets taken out, the other two fall quickly.
Mirei thanks us for defeating the three siblings. For this quest we're rewarded with 3000 yen, 300 CSP, Developer's Knowledge (開発者の開発), a Mega HP Generator and Mega SP Generator. The Developer's Knowledge opens up item development on the Farm Island, which lets us craft randomly generated items with our Digimon by setting one as the Digi-farm leader and investing yen in it. (Development takes real-world time though.)
Those last 300 CSP are enough to bump us up to the next Cyber Sleuth rank! This makes us a Beginner Cyber Detective. These ranks are equivalent to the Tamer ranks from
Digimon Story and
Sunburst/Moonlight.
Our next whiteboard quest comes from the Nakano Broadway management association, and concerns the "time capsule snow woman" (タイムカプセル電女) that's been appearing recently. Kyouko hasn't any idea who she is, but she's pretty cute.
The problem seems to go back to the K-Café on the fourth floor, where there's an access point to the Broadway's central conditioning computer system. There have been temperature problems ever since the snowgirl started showing up.
Kyouko's been doing her homework on the snowgirl. She
was the breakout idol Yuuki Fuyume, but that was a long time ago.
(Yuuki Fuyume is a visual pun; Fuyume is written with the kanji
冬女 "winter woman." The game ascribes no kanji to her surname, but
Yuuki can be written as 幽鬼 "ghost." "Snowgirl" Yuki-onna 雪女 is a famous winter demon in Japanese folklore, said to be very beautiful while also ruthlessly killing her victims by freezing them solid. One potentially less cumbersome translation is "snowgrel" by fusing snow, ogre and girl, but the English pun is only immediately obvious through a dub.)
One of these boys is scared of the snowgirl, worried that she has some kind of curse on the place. The other boy is just concerned about the severe cold today.
Kyouko accompanies us on our investigation of the café. The plan is to Connect Jump into the café's digital space, and investigate the cause of her appearance.
As we do so, we get another image of Yuuki Fuyume.
The café space is a pretty short dungeon. The only new encounter is Keramon, the same Digimon that Suguru used before.
Yuuki Fuyume: "--ank--ou--..for comin..."
"--ank--ou...plea...s--...he--l--"
No sooner do we find the girl that she's replaced by a Wanyamon!
Yukidarumon: More...! Freeze more! I'll freeze everyone into icicles!
We don't even get to talk to that Digimon though, because the real cause of the cooling crisis shows up!
Yukidarumon is slightly more threatening than Growmon, but only just. He's a Vaccine-Water, which means he deals 2.5x damage versus Burai, but takes 2.5x damage from Miss Mad. He can restore about ~170 HP with the Aura skill, but it uses up his turn and versus Mad it's just stalling.
Having any Data attribute Digimon would help make the fight a cakewalk, but being Grass attribute on top of that is just icing on the cake.
After Yukidarumon is defeated, the Wanyamon returns to normal. He doesn't know anything about cyber detectives or requests, but thanks us anyway for whatever we did. It seems Yukidarumon came along and was causing an error in the system.
"Eh? Who am I? Umm...I'm me."
We sort this out back at the office. Wanyamon stumbled across a time capsule containing a video of Yuuki Fuyume while accessing the Broadway intranet, and Yukidarumon was responsible for the error causing Wanyamon to appear on monitors as Yuuki Fuyume. Meanwhile Yukidarumon himself was the one trying to freeze the whole place through the Broadway's conditioning system. For completing this quest we get 100 yen, 500 CSP and a Farm Expansion Plug-in.
We actually unlocked another quest by completing this one, and I really want to wrap this up, but I'll do it anyway. This quest is Incandescent Broadway.
This time instead of getting too cold, it's getting way too hot! Once again, the problem goes back to the central conditioning system.
This time Blue Meramon is waiting for us, or "Meramon #2" as he's called. He's pissed we're trying to get him to turn it down, and won't stand for that.
Blue Meramon is a Virus-Fire type that has an 2.5x advantage over Palmon but is treated neutrally by the rest of the party. He can deal strong single target damage with Gold Flame, but is basically as unremarkable as his predecessor and doesn't even have a healing skill from what I saw.
That and Freeze Fang is a Water-attribute skill, so it makes short work of him.
The Broadway manager doesn't really understand about the "dejimon" inside of the "digital space," but...job well done! For finishing this request we get 500 yen, 300 CSP and a Speed Attache E. The Attache items are stat-boosting equipment, and Speed Attaches get priority over most others because the stat is so essential to determining turn order.
I want the entire internet to know that Growmon sent me the
exact same Digiline text twice, five minutes apart.
The final quest of the chapter (and the one we need to complete to finish it) is to trace a "phantom digital area." (
怪人デジ面積) It's a personal request from Kyouko, but she's not familiar with this term, nor with any associated "Shinjuku police patrol" (新宿マタギ刑事) or "classified police data" (警察の機密.) Police detective Matayoshi is already on this case, so we'll be assisting him. We get the keyword phantom digital area for this case.
Our first clue is in Cron Lv. 2, where using the keyword on this hacker uncovers its meaning. Lately, phantom space has been a hot topic for Cron's hackers. Apparently, the term originated with a
police hacker, our next keyword.
Detective Matayoshi is surprised to see us here, but helps clarify what's going on a bit and drops us a clue; the trail of this case is in Shinjuku.
During all this I evolve Miss Mad up into Togemon. Her support skill changes to Poisonous Thorns (
猛毒のトゲ Moudoku no Toge) which gives her a 10% chance to inflict poison when she attacks, and she learns the unique ability Chikuchiku Bang Bang, a 10 SP skill with a base power of 40 and a 5% chance for paralysis.
Lopmon also evolves into Galgomon. It's counterintuitive, I know. His support skill becomes Freikugel, which increases hit rate by 15%. Dum-Dum Upper is his unique skill, a base 90 skill with a 10% chance to stun.
It would seem that this guy's our "police hacker." He's a pretty shady guy with a strange laugh, but he's a legitimate policeman. He recommends we check out the area near the access point by the Shinjuku entrance.
We meet this guy there. Immediately he starts questioning who we are, asking if we're with this police, if this is some kind of setup, then immediately accusing us of a human rights violation and--
Disappears through the Access Point! We Connect Jump after him.
"I hate, hate, hate the police!"
We find him at the end of Cron Lv. 1, partnered up with this Veggiemon.
Veggiemon: "The police are the enemy! The police are the enemy! You...are you police pawns? Dogs! K-9s!"
Veggiemon is the dominant part of this duo.
It's one Adult-level Digimon versus
three.
With Veggiemon's influence negated, the man comes to his senses. It seems that like with Mr. Mephisto before, this guy's actions were being controlled by a Digimon. He doesn't know anything about a phantom digital space, let alone police data. In the first place, he isn't a hacker. But he did meet another person with a strange aura.
Back in the real world, Detective Matayoshi owes Kyou-chan one for our help. With the policeman's cooperation they've been able to wrap this one up.
Since Veggiemon was the one behind the crime, the phantom space data is secure now. As far as we're concerned, this whole phantom space affair is unimportant compared to what it's achieved. With the police secrets safe, detective Matayoshi will be in a good position as well. With him as our shadow, we can get support from the inside during our own investigations.
For completing this quest, we get 150 yen, 500 CSP and two SP Casule Cs.
