02G: Bound in Darkness

02G: Bound in Darkness

A shared vision of the Focus

We are back with the team - and they are waking up in a new area.  Where we are is at Lake Bresha in the Cocoon Lowlands - a crystalline environment that is below the place where the construct was.  This may be what is left of the lake that Snow and Serah were at in the flashback?

As they start to piece together what has happened, a L'Cie monster appears and they battle it, quickly putting it down.  Snow thinks that Serah must have rescued them - and Lightning still wants to geld Snow because she blames him for Serah being converted to a L'Cie in the first place.

As they fight they all realize that they have been converted into L'Cie - and now the Paradigm Tutorial loads - you should probably go ahead and do this unless you are already familiar with the process.

To review, using Paradigm you can configure your party to maximize strategy for a given fight.  You assign specific roles for each party member, which allows you to control what skills and spells they use.   Configuring offensive and defensive decks lets you change to a defensive posture and then back to offensive once you are healed much quicker than if you try to manage healing in the party yourself.  Presently you are using the Relentless Assault Paradigm - you can shift to a different one like it says, but this is the best one for dealing with the current situation, so maybe not.

Hope is understandably freaked out, and shares his feelings as only a teenager can - but Val kneels down to calm him and we fade-to-black.  You should now unlock the 'Instrument of Tragedy' Achievement/Trophy.  You will get a bunch of new entries for your journal - may as well take a look at those before you continue playing as they include entries on the Paradigm Deck, Paradigms under the Battle Information Section, info on Lake Bresha, and some extra information on the Cocoon Society.

You will also notice that there is a new selection in the journal - Paradigms - which is where you go to customize, generate, and delete your decks as well as build your Battle Teams.

Head down the slope until you trigger a CS in which you all discuss what your Focus (mission) might be - and it turns out that you all had a similar vision - what the party is called a dream - and that may be the Focus that you have been assigned.  Part of the purpose of the discussion in the CS is to fill you in on the back story without actually making it feel like that is what they are doing. 

Snow concludes that the meaning of the Focus is connected to what Serah told them before she was transformed into a crystal - that they are to save Cocoon.  They refer to Cocoon in the feminine, which I suppose makes sense considering the cultural point of view in Japan...  Now that he has made up his mind about the Focus, Snow heads off and we get a mini-tutorial about the side-effects of being turned into L'Cie, which include unlocking the ability to level up (Yay us!).

You should do this tutorial if you have not already learned how to interact with the CP system, since it is kind of important, right? 

Crystarium Tutorial

As you can see, a new entry has been added to the journal menu below the Paradigms selection for the Crystarium - the interface that we will use to spend the CP we have acquired in battles in order to improve upon and add new abilities, magic power, and HP. 

The individual interfaces have a lot of information on them - starting with the jobs that we know (and can develop) and our current levels for each of these - which include Ability, HP, Strength, and Magic.  If you look at Lightnings Commando job and then compare it to her Ravager job you will see that Commando is much more developed - which makes sense as that is what she was from the start of play.

Selecting Commando shows you the different known abilities, which are represented by being lit, and the as yet unlearned abilities, which are represented by unlit crystals.  You can select the jobs that you want to advance in for each of the five and use what CP they have to advance them, following the logical paths now.

That pretty much covers leveling up - now you need to go out and grind CP to get your party to the point where they are more of a danger to the enemy than to themselves!

- End Crystarium Tutorial -

An interesting point - the vision that they each had included the Summoned being Ragnarok - a summons that Val will eventually be given the Focus for according to the canon.

Before you continue on from here load your journal and take a look at the Battle Primers - new sections have been added for all five jobs, and it would be an idea to read these prior to committing your CP so that you have a better notion of what they are, and by extrapolation, who is best suited to follow what upgrade path for leveling.