Life kind of got in the way of my play-time this week. But, despite that, I still managed to hit a couple milestones. As always, let’s start with some numbers. My total time spent playing is now 28 and a half hours, I’ve completed chapter 6 of the story, and my main character is currently level 25. There will be some spoilers ahead, but they’re pretty minor this week.

Chapter 6 opens with a cutscene depicting Ganglion soldiers attempting to recover a skell, which are the giant robots in this game. However, they’re stopped by monsters that are referred to as “tainted”. We’re not exactly sure why the Ganglion want the skell, but they say they need to get it before the humans can.

That’s where we come in. Blade has noticed the Ganglion activity, and so our team is being sent in to try to recover the skell. It’s a little funny that an army of soldiers that are supposed to be such a threat to humanity couldn’t accomplish this, but Blade’s only sending in four of their own. But, whatever. Video games, right?

The mission itself is pretty straight forward. Follow the icon on your map, find the skell, do a boss fight. The fight itself was pretty tough though. But with a little patience and some upgrading of skills, I was able to get through it just fine.

After completing chapter 6, you unlock eight missions that lead to you being able to pilot a skell of your own. Two of the missions were already finished when I received them. I believe one was for having a specific probe in place and I’m not sure on the other. None of the missions are two hard, but they are time consuming. One of them is one of those gathering quests I was complaining about last week. You had to gather three different types of materials. One of them I already had all that I needed, one I only needed one more and managed to get that one while working on a different mission, and one I had none of. That last one took me about an hour of running around the same lake just hoping for the right thing to drop, and if it wasn’t for GameFAQs.com, I wouldn’t have known that I was even in the right spot. I hate gathering quests.

Once all eight missions are complete, you are rewarded with a skell. I haven’t had much time to mess around with it yet, but it seems pretty cool. I went to the shop and bought a bunch of weapons for it and then took it out to Primordia to give it a go. The basic combat while in your skell is still the same as on foot, but your arts are now based entirely on what weapons you equipped rather than your class your customized loadout. It’s going to take a little to get used to.

And that’s basically my experiences for the week. Sorry this is a bit of a short post, but I only managed to squeeze in about half the amount of play-time compared to the last couple weeks. With my skell unlocked, I feel like the game just became a lot bigger, with previously inaccessible areas suddenly available. Here’s hoping that I’ll have much more time to play in the near future.