Spectrobes: Origins (Part 2)

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4

We’re continuing this quest in the Kaio planetary system!

Doldogo

Call it a hunch, but the river being turned into
Purple Drank isn't a great sign.

Eeyep, these Krawl are plants. Jeena, bring the flamethrower!

Rallen and Jeena land their ship near a village, only to see that the river going through it has run purple and poisonous. Upon meeting Gretta, the village's chief, we learn that her daughter has gone missing after going up to the Tree of Life, through the forest from the Verdant Village. The NPP officers head towards the Tree to investigate. They find Gretta’s daughter Salia, near the tree, attacked by plant-property Krawl. These aliens do adapt to the environments they invade! The monsters are defeated, and the girl is taken back to her village safe and sound.

These battles introduce status effects to battle, like poison,
or later, freeze, stunned, and so on. These are really annoying
because they impact your ability to fight, and there is
NO WAY to heal yourself from them, you can only wait for
them to pass. Poison will cause your character to stumble at
every couple seconds and lose HP as well. Augh!

Flying Spectrobes are only useful like this twice. Also, good
thing one species like it is so common on this planet! Or
else we would get stuck pretty badly!

However, the water remains nasty. Heading deeper into the woods, the heroes find large Krawl polluting the waters and harming the Tree of Life. The first two are dealt with, but the road to the third goes by a chasm they cannot cross. Jeena gets the idea of sending a flying child Spectrobe to the rocks above the cliff to break them and create a bridge. Using the C button, you can control child Spectrobes outside of battle in specific situations, to explore or solve puzzles like this one. Most Spectrobes are on the ground, but some are capable of flight. Later in this chapter, we control a walking child form through smaller holes in walls to activate mechanisms to open doors to new areas. The flying Spectrobe creates the bridge, and the officers carry through.

Little Komainu goes on a journey. Come back,
but only after you've opened the path!

I have no idea what that monster is supposed to be. I just
know its horns look like freaking drills.

The third Krawl is defeated, and so the waters are cleaned. The Tree of Life regains its strength. This rescue of Doldogo’s ecosystem reveals a temple under the tree, which opens. We walk through several rooms, some of which contain traps, all the way to a room with a Krawl boss, which we defeat. Past that room is a mural and symbols revealing a large dragon Spectrobe and a legend indicating that the mighty creature awakens in time of crisis. The heroes find a glowing fossil, which they learn is a piece of that creature; they need the other pieces to reawaken that beast. The fossil is beeping, as though it is aware of the Krawl threat. They even receive a vision of the past Spectrobe Master of the system explaining the legend to a younger Gretta. Our protagonists will have to look for the other Shards across the Kaio system.

Well, from the shard. Duh.

All fine and good, but Kamtoga, the man they had come to Doldogo for, wasn’t here. Gretta says that he might be on Kogoeria, the system’s ice planet. Before leaving Doldogo, the protagonists contact their headquarters again, and speak to an agent who drops a strange truth: They’re not the first officers to go missing and land in the Kaio system. Thirty years prior, another one did. Specifically, their commander, Grant.

A quick stop by Wyterra, then it’s off to Kogoeria.

Kogoeria

In my experience, the sword remained the best weapon; the
axe is mandatory for enemies who defend themselves, but is
slow and thus dangerous to use against quick enemies, like
bosses; the blasters do ridiculously small amounts of damage,
and I thought the lances just straight-up sucked.

We land by a snowy campground. Nobody’s home; Kamtoga and his team must be on an expedition. The officers go through a snowfield and explore an ice cavern, where they encounter a powerful Krawl with a shield for a head, sparring all of their attacks. They’re saved by Kamtoga himself, who tosses a new weapon at them to use: An axe, which is heavy to wield and slow to swing, but can pierce through the defenses of enemies protecting themselves. Thanks to it, the Krawl is defeated, and Kamtoga’s team escorts the NPP officers back to camp, with the old hero laying it on thick that the two, especially Rallen, acted on impulse instead of playing smart.

After the plains and the forest, the ice land. Just wait,
there's a desert, a big tower, a volcano, and a classic final
flesh dungeon coming up!

Back at camp, the heroes tell the Spectrobe Master’s partner that they are looking for a Shard and that it may be in nearby ice ruins, but the man refuses to help them, claiming they aren’t properly prepared for it. This attitude angers Rallen who makes the rash decision to go look for it himself (with Jeena). Much good that does them; the ice breaks and they end up rescued from a crevasse by Kamtoga’s team. Not for nothing, though; in there, they find a second glowing fossil, which grants them a vision of the Kaio system’s Spectrobe Master having to rescue his partner, a younger Kamtoga, after he got hurt in a moment of impulsive heroism.

The two are taken back to camp, where Kamtoga comments on what the two saw. Puts a lot of his actions in perspective. With that, he agrees to help the Spectrobe masters, but only if they gear up first. The old guy gives a blaster weapon to the younger heroes, then asks them to come back with a full set of creatures – six fighters and three searchers. Only after this does he give the two his Cosmokey. Ah, good ol' padding.

Good thing we only have two and a half planets to revisit
to get all the weapons we missed.

Remember the pedestals found behind property barriers? This key opens them, and they contain legendary weapons. Every weapon found that way has a design similar to a Spectrobe species in Kaio, and bears its property. This gives you weapons of all five properties! Our quest can only continue after we return with at least one such weapon; then, Kamtoga tells us about a passageway that leads to the ice temple.

Nothing groundbreaking, puzzles-wise, but at least it's
something. Compared to the completely linear dungeons
after Menahat, this one is almost straight out of LoZ!

Rallen and Jeena get there, and the temple contains a handful of puzzles that aren’t too difficult. Just remember to send your searcher to explore small openings. You can also ask it to stay put on a pressure pad. We get to the end, where a giant dragon-like Krawl guards the final door. Three heads, each with its own property, and a weak spot above ground. This was the toughest battle yet, as I didn’t even know how to harm that monster significantly and my team was under-leveled. I eventually won by cheesing the battle and staying under its belly, where I had access to its feet and to its chest, where its weak point was. The intention may have been to use flying Spectrobes to hit the weak point, but the few I could access had weak attacks and could barely get there due to the Krawl’s three breath weapons, ground stomps, and tail swipes.

This damn thing could also freeze you or zap (stun) you.
All great stuff you don't want to deal with in a boss fight.

That's Grant on the left, and the past Spectrobe Master on
the right. He has the same hair color as Rallen. He just looks
a lot like an older Rallen. I wonder if...

Past that beast there’s a large room, with a second glowing shard. We bring this back to Kamtoga, who explains that the glow means the fossil can transmit visions of the past. He hands it to the heroes, who see a memory of young Kamtoga and the Spectrobe Master rescuing someone from a crashed ship. The guy they saved looks like a young Commander Grant. Kamtoga confirms Grant’s presence in the Kaio system, and how though they had to part ways, he’s glad they kept fighting the Krawl across the galaxy. Contacting headquarters before they depart from Kogoeria, Rallen and Jeena learn that Grant took a ship and left the HQ.

Menahat

Usual stop by Wyterra to show the Shard to Radese and get the next coordinates, then it’s off to Menahat, a desert planet, on which they’re instructed to look for an explorer named Neal. The NPP officers receive a transmission of someone in pain and needing help.

So blatantly asshole-coded it hurts.

They land in an empty field and make their way to a mining village. A company is hard at work excavating Antigravity Stone, an important material in this system. After asking around, the officers learn that the explorer has left for ruins in the Great Desert. To be given the a-OK to search the desert, the two first talk with the company’s CEO, Dyrus, who is… well, he’s a dick, but he still allows them through. Within the Great Desert, Rallen and Jeena find broken ruins and hear Neal in there, still in agony. We find a way to enter the ruins using a searcher Spectrobe to unearth an elevator. Past an encounter with some Krawl, we find Neal… who’s completely fine!

Even these ruins feels like we're stepping into some
advanced spaceship.

What, did he find a first aid kit while we were away? He sounded like he was at Death’s door this whole time! Geez, so much for us working our asses off to find him.

At least, in Pokémon, everyone has their own creatures.
Here, only a select few can raise Spectrobes - kinda cuts
out possibilities for people when these creatures end up
necessary to traverse the world.

He was exploring the ruins but couldn’t move past the current room, as its entrance is barricaded by a system that requires a Spectrobe Master and their searcher to step on two pressure pads. This opens another room with a button, which when pressed, causes the ruins to sprout from the ground. Neal confirms that there are six more ruins to look for and unearth, so we search around the mostly empty desert. The handymen from the mining company are also looking for those ruins, and even inadvertently help the heroes by revealing spots they know are hiding other elevators.

On a scale of yes to 10, how screwed are we?

A desert that's not as empty as it looks - there's a lot going
on under all that sand.

After the third ruins, the desert rumbles. Earlier, we saw the main villain, Krux, awakening a giant coelacanth Krawl in the desert – this isn’t an average boss, this is the creature that transformed Menahat from a lush green world to the desert it currently is, millenia ago. The fish-shaped alien monster has announced its presence and shown itself. Now certain that unearthing them all will provide answers (and maybe a solution), Rallen, Jeena and Neal look for the remaining ruins. Somehow, Neal keeps finding them before the heroes. (And getting comically hurt. It gets to a point where Rallen can tell apart Neal’s screams of pain from his screams of panic.) Dyrus was informed of what’s going on, and first sent his guys to find the ruins so they could turn a profit off them, because he’s that kind of asshole, but the Krawl coming out to play made him drop that idea fast.

Loved that little part in the last dungeon. It needed some
spatial awareness and actually 

The officers find the remaining ruins; their puzzles are never too difficult, but do get tricky by the end. The six pillars revealed form a circle in the desert, with just one left; the seventh doesn’t contain a puzzle, but it does have a glowing Kaio shard, and it features a new Spectrobe, Pegatinum, a horse/dragon creature the heroes can ride on. The ruins themselves were used to stop the reawakened Krawl in the past, and the officers use them again to defeat this thing – but they have no margin for error, as the building has only one charge available. They lure the Krawl amidst the ruins, trap it in place, and tear the monster apart.

Well, good thing we don't have to battle the whole damn
fish. The big-ass core is more than enough!

However, the core of the giant alien is still alive, so we still get a classic boss battle between Rallen or Jeena and that thing. Once this battle is over, we report to the mining company that the threat has been eliminated. We also get a glowing fossil out of it, seeing another vision of the past: The young Grant doing experiments with a strange liquid he found. He pours it on a creature, and it turns into a Krawl, which he kills with his blaster. Kaio’s Spectrobe master comes by, worried about the shot he heard. Unbeknownst to Grant, the master has seen everything.

(Of note, glowing fossils and glowing shards are two different things; just needed to point that out, it's confusing.)

The end of this chapter opens new possibilities: Thanks to one worker, you can connect to the previous game, released on Nintendo DS. This can grant you two metallic versions of Spectrobes available on Kaio.

The only fast travel you're gonna get.

Pegatinum has been added to your “searchers” menu. You can now select this creature and use it as a steed. This Spectrobe, which does not have a property and cannot be used in battle, has a special ability allowing it to cross bridges of light in a few specific areas, with one on every planet (but only one that is plot-relevant, on Wyterra).

With this code and constellation, we're getting
this secret big guy.

Neal found blueprints in the ruins for a card reader, which Jeena builds on the ship. Each copy of Spectrobes: Origins came with a pack of cards. Each card includes a 9-digit code and either a circuit board pattern (for items) or a constellation of stars to link together (for Spectrobes). These cards can allow you to unlock creatures that you can already find as fossils in the wild, but it’s also the only way to get five legendary, evolved Spectrobes. The official wiki lists all the codes and constellations, so you don’t need to own the cards – good, because I wasn’t lucky with mine.

A worrisome report comes in from Commander Grant before we leave for our usual stop by Radese’s home; something BIG is coming towards the Kaio system. Something controlled by the Krawl, and as big as a planetoid. In other words: “That’s no moon”. Nope, that’s a Krawlosphere. Uh oh.

Well, that’s enough for now, how about continuing in Part 3?