Here we go, part 2 of the XCM playthrough! As promised I turned off all multipliers for a more legit stat growth. I'm actually at around the same level I was when I reached Epsilon on my vanilla save.

I was gonna do the entire second half of the game on this part, but I want to get the extra armors before heading off to HQ and the deployment BS requires me to literally waste time to see the results... so I'll do that part off-screen. I'll start recording the last part as soon as I get the key I need.

On my previous run of this game, I got the Ultimate Armor and Absolute Zero Hyper Modes before fighting Epsilon, so this was my first time fighting him without either of those things. Quite good fight, but I hate that move that leaves me with 1HP.

As a side note... man, chapters 8 and 9 kinda drag on huh? The annoying forced fights on the Grave Ruins and the constant up-and-down and silly Botos stuff on the Melda Ore Plants is not great. Not only that but the encounter rate shot up to the stratosphere in this second half for some reason. I was really tempted to turn on a cheat to disable them since I don't need to level up much more, but I didn't want to interrupt the playthrough.