Xenosaga - U-TIC Battleship | Part 8
11Here the party switches yet again, introducing us to Jr., the last party member of the game. It'll be a while before he joins the main team however. For now we get a whole dungeon with him, that begins after we do a token fight in his AGWS against some enemies that have no chance of actually hurting him and some cutscenes.
When in control of him for this part, we'll have two guest party members, Mary and Soldier. They both fight inside of their AGWS the entire time and can't leave them. Soldier doesn't even have a model to look at and see his stats, but Mary does so her on-foot stats are actually visible. They just don't matter. There's no way to heal AGWS in this part outside of using items, so keep that in mind before getting into too many fights. I managed to go just far enough the Soldier's AGWS didn't run out of HP by the end of the boss but he was about one hit away from going down lol. You still have access to Shion's inventory so you should have some AGWS healing items available if you do need them.
Jr. - Jr. is balanced like chaos is, but more attack oriented than support. He has high Dex, which means good chances to crit and rarely misses. His Ethers tend to be either buffs or debuffs, with some more gimmicky ones as well. He learns to steal items pretty quickly, but we can't even access his Ether screen for this part to upgrade it, so no theft quite yet. He can also use an AGWS. His AGWS is equipped with two handguns, which have lower damage output than other weapons, but cost less AP. The idea is that you attack with them twice, then use a W-ACT when your AP builds up naturally, so every third turn, you're hitting twice as hard. The Soldier's swords function like that too.
There's a part in this ship where we can find a room next to Margulis's that mentions "T-ELOS". I believe this is the only mention to her in this game, and possibly before Xenosaga III at all, but it's interesting to see how far back she was planned. Xenosaga was originally intended to be 6 games long btw, it's just we only ended up with three.
There's also a bit here where there's like a mini-game about saying "positive" and "negative" things to a captured soldier to get information out of him, but it's entirely pointless. Still, I spent like 5 minutes doing it just for the sake of it. Feel free to skip past that bit.
58:05 - Boss #7: Ambix - This boss isn't much to write home about. Its main gimmick is that it counterattacks often when struck, but the more it's struck, the less it will counterattack. First, put Jr. in his AGWS because he deals pitiful damage on-foot here. All your AGWS units could just guard and build up AP for W-ACTs to suffer the fewest counterattacks possible, or you can just keep mashing attack. He'll almost certainly go down before you do. Failing that, you can just reload and make sure to walk into the fight with full HP.