SRW OG Master Overview Part 2.5

SRW OG MASTER OVERVIEW, PART 2.5
Part 1: https://pastebin.com/5Kv0wqGv
Part 1.5: https://pastebin.com/72bHvSBn
Part 2: https://pastebin.com/MJUk3wKa

In this segment, we'll be discussing a game that doesn't get much exposure in the English-speaking SRW world, Super Robot Wars Original Generation Gaiden.

The name Gaiden implies "side story", but this game is a direct continuation of the OG storyline that takes place after OG2 and features events that lead directly into OG II. (After releasing OGs, they decided to call the next main game OG II. Yes, it's silly.) They number the game 2.5 in the intro FMV, so that's what we're going with here. If you haven't read Part 2 of my overview, the OG2 summary, I suggest brushing up before starting this, because I'm not going to do a separate character guide this time.

Before we go into the game proper, let's take a moment to discuss the year NCE 188 in the timeline. It's an eventful year in OG continuity. So eventful, it lasts through the endgame of OG2, OGG, OG II, and well into Moon Dwellers. Everything that happens from this point forward in the overview will take place in the year 188. Why?

Because of the Alpha series.

No, really. Alpha uses the same NCE for their era name, and their events take place roughly in parallel. Instead of Meteor-3, the Macross lands on Earth. Instead of the Hiryu encountering the Aerogators in 179, the Exelion encounters the Aerogators in 180. Bian establishes the DC in 183 as a benign organization, because in the Alpha continuity the government takes his warnings to heart and acts on them. The events of Alpha 1, later called the Balmar Campaign, play out over 186-187. In 188, the Preventers overthrow the Titans at Dakar during Alpha Gaiden, which is also a deceptively named direct part of continuity that follows a1 and precedes a2, and Project Aegis is carried out as a plan to build a network of barrier-generating satellites to shield the Earth Sphere from the shockwave of an ultragravitational collapse triggered during the Balmar Campaign as part of Gunbuster plot. Alpha 2's Sealing War takes place from 188 to 189, and Alpha 3's Galactic War breaks out in 189 before concluding in 191.

So if you want to blame anything for the lack of time progression over the course of four whole games, blame Alpha.

With that, away we go!

Super Robot Wars Original Generation 2.5: Unified Wisdom

NCE 188
PROJECT AEGIS DOUBLES DOWN
	The Earth Federation Government is now a full-blown dictatorship following the events of OG2. President Graien Grassman has an ironclad grip on power both politically and militarily. Now that the Einst and the Inspectors are gone, the Federation's first order of business is shoring up their forces further before even more aliens attack. As part of this new push, the Federation has commissioned every major mobile weapon manufacturer to submit a candidate for a new mainline mass produced unit to succeed the mass production Hückebein Mk. II. These mainline unit candidates will be competing at a trial being run by Brigadier General Mauro Gatt.

THE SKULLHEAD
	The Skullhead is a production facility housed in an asteroid somewhere in orbit around the Earth. It was built at the behest of the EOT Council back before the DC War, and it was originally intended to be a peace offering to the Guests. Its final orbital location was kept an absolute secret and few believed it really existed, but the Inspectors knew exactly where to find it and occupied it immediately upon launching their invasion of Earth. It sat abandoned after the Inspectors' defeat until the EFM located it.

SHADY FORESHADOWING ROUNDUP
	Isurugi Industries and their new subsidiary, Wong Heavy Industries, are in charge of doing the repair work on the Skullhead. Last week, they conducted a scheduled duration test for a large-sized stealth shade that could cover the whole asteroid. The test was supposed to wrap up three days ago, but there's still zero sign of the Skullhead.

	What's more, sensors around the moon picked up a major ES wave reading right around the same time as the end of the Inspector Incident. ES wave readings are typically associated with warps, and no matter how stealthy a group might be, nobody can completely conceal or erase those waves. There's no sign of whatever warped in, but somehow Gilliam doubts this is some mass sensor malfunction.

	Back on the ground, candidates for the new mass produced mainline unit trials are dropping out left and right at the last minute. Unit shipments that were supposed to reach Aviano for the trials are being attacked by Neo DC remnants. And that's out of the handful that made it past selection—many were just rejected out of hand on the basis of rival candidate specs being higher on paper, which is incredibly backwards to anyone who takes two seconds to think about it. Kai was planning to show up to the Aviano trial in a customized Gespenst Mk. II to make a point, but he gets reassigned elsewhere while the rest of the Aggressors remain at Aviano.

THE TRIALS
	The only candidate to make it to the trial is the prototype VTX-000 Mironga, produced by Wong Heavy Industries. The Aggressors are concerned that they only got the Mironga's specs a matter of hours in advance and had barely any opportunity to review it. What they can make out is that the Mironga's specs are indeed high on paper, capable of tremendous bursts of speed and rapid maneuvers, but that there is basically no regard paid for the pilot in the machine—No insulation against G-forces, barely any armor. It's concerning, doubly so if this is meant to be the main workhorse of the Federation moving forward.

	At the trial, it's the Aggressors plus Kusuha, Bullet, and Ibis, pitted up against a squad of Mirongas to gauge their performance. Things start out normally enough, but then the Mirongas activate some kind of special system, and suddenly their performance shoots through the roof. They're outmaneuvering the Aggressors left and right and predicting their every move. The Aggressors adapt and start pulling out new maneuvers they've never done before to compensate, and they just barely scrape out a win. Questions remain about the condition of the pilots who were in those Mirongas during the trial, and the Aggressors aren't allowed to see them. Rick Wong, the head of Wong Heavy Industries, is satisfied with the data obtained during the trial, and he's ready to transition immediately to the debut of the mass production model. Wait, what??

OUTBREAK OF THE BARTOLL INCIDENT
	If things weren't already shady enough, it gets worse. The debut takes place in a matter of days, and it's being held at a huge stadium in Japan in front of a massive audience of civilians. In light of all the Neo DC attacks going on, shouldn't they be more discreet about these things? General Mauro Gatt says nah. As it turns out, he's on the take with Isurugi and in league with Wong, but Mitsuko Isurugi is actually being left out of the loop on this one, and she is none too pleased about it. She is well aware of events quickly escalating beyond her control, so she calls Gatt up and warns him that there will be consequences if he crosses her, a warning he summarily ignores.

	The debut event is the first public unveiling of the VTX-001 Bartoll, and in a shocking twist, it is a huge disaster.

	The Bartolls blow up all the other robots present and start firing gas on the crowds, a numbing gas that immobilizes people for capture. The Bartolls then load the people up into crates and fly off, escaping to the Skullhead, their new base of operations. Among the people they abduct are the entire Aggressors team, minus Kai. Kusuha also gets kidnapped, for the second time so far in OG.

	During all of this, Rick Wong is shot by his own staff and fed into the ODE System driving the Bartolls, and when Gilliam shows up to question Mauro Gatt, he finds Gatt already dead, assassinated in his office.

	Shoko also gets kidnapped by Folka, and Kota tries to pursue them, but the Bartolls interfere and keep him too occupied to catch up with Folka.

	*record scratch* Wait, who? That was a whole bunch of new names.

	Let's take a step back and talk about some of these groups so that we can neatly unpack everything that follows from here.

THE AZUMA FAMILY
	During all of this lead-up, there are other things going on in Asakusa, Tokyo. Kota Azuma lives there with his little sister Shoko Azuma and his grandfather Dr. Kisaburo Azuma, a retired inventor living off the proceeds of some of his patent sales. Kota often scraps with local punks, and in lieu of having some fancy fighting style, he calls his the Asakusa School of Hard Knocks. He and his grandfather are both hopeless with money, so Shoko does all the budgeting and penny-pinching for the whole family. Kisaburo is the local neighborhood committee chairman, a kindly and quirky old inventor who looks out for others, like their new neighbors Garnet and Giada.

	What the kids don't know is that Kisaburo Azuma has done more than just invent things. He is a former EOTI robotics expert and old friend of Bian's who once stumbled across the crashed wreckage of a giant robot called Compatible Kaiser, a robot from another dimension. He was able to communicate with Fighter Roar, a fallen warrior whose spirit remained with the machine after falling in battle, and he agreed to give Roar shelter. He built a massive hangar and transit complex underneath the streets of Asakusa, the BF Base, where he housed Compatible Kaiser and slowly fixed it up over many long years. This is the actual reason the family's budget is so limited—Kisaburo spent most of his sizeable savings on this, his true life's work, so that one day Compatible Kaiser could rise again to fight its nemesis, Dark Brain, a menace to all worlds.

	Long story short, Kisaburo's got a giant robot lying dormant under Asakusa. When unidentified enemy drones attack the city, Fighter Roar's spirit speaks to Kota and urges him to say the words: "Burn! Ready! Battle!" Kota bonds with Roar and summons the Roar Armor, thus taking on the identity of Fighter Roar. This allows him to merge into Compatible Kaiser, but there's a problem—That robot name is too clunky for Kota's liking. So he dubs it Compatikaiser, even though Roar points out that's only one syllable shaved off.

	This robot's appearance piques the interest of a heretofore unknown entity named Dyminas.

DYMINAS AND THE TECHNITI-PAIDES
	There is an extradimensional being that calls itself Dyminas. We will be referring to it as "she" for ease of reference. She wants to meet her creator, Dark Brain, so that she can understand the purpose of her existence. This is the same being that manifested before Raul and Fiona back in the SM-verse and triggered resonance with their Timeflow Engines that jumped them to this dimension. It did the same for her, as it happens. She is presently in league with Dr. Wilhelm von Jürgen, the leader of the unnamed faction responsible for the Mironga and the Bartolls, which I will be calling Team ODE for ease of reference.

	She has created three Techniti-Paides (Greek for artificial children) from her own flesh and blood, homunculi designed to go out in the world and serve her needs. These children are named Tis, Lalia, and Despoinis. Tis and Despoinis do the lion's share of the legwork, while Lalia sticks to a support role most of the time.

	Right now, her primary interest is in assembling the factors necessary to perform another dimensional jump, factors that she calls Keys. Why does she need these when she already performed at least two documented independent jumps? Because she's broken. Physically and mentally, on a fundamental level. She makes a number of counterintuitive decisions for this reason over the course of the game, and it's explicitly spelled out toward the end. Regardless, she's fixated on gathering two specific Keys: The Excellence's Timeflow Engine, and the Compatikaiser's Overgate Engine. These are keys to opening the gate to reach her creator, a gate opened through sufficiently focused human will and thought. (Gilliam's use of System XN to escape the Einst dimension in OG2 worked on this same principle.)

	Keys can be taken easily enough. But what about that human thought? How do you get it focused on such an enormous scale? That's where Dr. Jürgen comes in.

THE ODE SYSTEM
	Short for Omni-Dendro-Encephalo System, the ODE System is Dr. Jürgen's pet project going back to the DC days, an effort to create a system for real-time information sharing on the battlefield. When Dr. Adler Koch pushed it into live testing before it was properly fine-tuned, the twelve pilots using it all suffered a mass rejection reaction, in which the knowledge they were flooding into each other's brains was too much for them to bear, so they all went berserk and killed each other. The DC killed the project, and with it, Dr. Jürgen's dream of a perfected system controlling unmanned drones that could protect the Earth Sphere perfectly and adapt to all new alien threats in real time while not endangering any human lives.

	When the Aerogators launched their massive attacks on civilian population centers in OG1, Dr. Jürgen's wife and son were among the casualties. Dr. Jürgen was so utterly consumed with the notion that his system could have prevented all of this, something inside him snapped. He reassembled his old team and got them on board with his mad plan, then he struck up an arrangement with Wong Heavy Industries to produce a unit optimized to work with his ODE System. The products of this effort were the Mironga prototype and the Bartoll mass production unit.

	The ODE System itself incorporates the collective knowledge of every single person connected to it. Essentially, the most effective way to improve it is to feed it people en masse, which gives it a larger knowledge base and pool of controllable pilots, which enables it to go out and harvest more people, ad infinitum. All of this is run from a master core housed safely in the confines of the Skullhead, which Dr. Jürgen and Dyminas have taken over as their base of operations during its "stealth shade deployment test". Only now it's been renamed the Hellgate, because Skullhead wasn't edgy enough already.

KYLE BEAN HATES MAP WEAPONS
	The Bartolls have kidnapped thousands of people, including members of the Steel Dragons, and all of these people have been taken to the Hellgate to be hooked into the system. When the Bartolls go live, everybody working for Dr. Jürgen works in tandem to remove liabilities like Rick Wong and feed them into the ODE woodchipper, then the Team ODE members all voluntarily submit themselves to the system, surrendering their will and sense of self to the greater good that they believe in. The only exception is pilot Kyle Bean, who still has some work to do as a thinking individual before he can finally join his brethren.

	He reaches out to his ex-girlfriend Celsia Ferm, a former technician on the ODE System project who never rejoined it. He sweet-talks Celsia into infiltrating the Tesla Reich Institute under an alias so that she can sabotage one of the three greatest threats to the ODE System's deployment: The Valsione's Psycho Blaster. As far as Celsia knows, he wants to capture everybody there alive and needs that MAP weapon offline to do so. It quickly becomes apparent that Kyle was lying. When he attacks, he talks about wanting the "brilliant minds" of the Tesla Lab, and Celsia realizes to her horror that he's going to doom these people to a fate worse than death. While a pitched battle is going on outside, she hastily writes a countervirus to shut down the virus she planted in the Valsione's computer systems and manages to restore it to full functionality.

	Cybaster eventually shows up to help. Why? Because Shu tipped Masaki off that he predicted there would be an attack here, and Masaki grudgingly followed up on the tip. Kyle shifts his attention immediately to Cybaster, another of the top three threats to the ODE System due to its Cyflash MAP weapon. No points for guessing the third major threat, the Granzon.

	After Kyle retreats, Celsia offers to surrender herself to Federation custody, but the scientists of the Tesla Lab ask her to defer it and assist them in sorting this mess out instead. She never goes to jail.

	The Steel Dragons end up confronting Kyle Bean for the last time at the Wong Heavy Industries head office and main production plant in Dalian, China. Shu shows up right on cue to assist the Steel Dragons. Why? Because Shu knows what this system is, being a DC alumnus himself, and he has his own reasons for wanting it gone—namely, he doesn't like its backers. Remember, if there's anything Shu hates, it's aliens. And really, Trusty Dr. Shu Shirakawa has been nothing but helpful since OG2, where he consistently showed up to save the day whenever the good guys were in a jam. Masaki doesn't buy all this goodwill in the least, but as usual in these exchanges, Shu points out that fighting him is far less pressing than whenever the crisis du jour is.

	Shu makes a curious assertion: That Team ODE made a critical blunder right out the gate, and consequently, Dr. Jürgen's plan is doomed to be undone by an irregular beyond the ODE System's ability to control.

THE HELLGATE ASSAULT
	The Steel Dragons want to mount a rescue op to save the people trapped inside the Hellgate, but time is of the essence. The longer they go without destroying the master core, the more the ODE System will learn and adapt. The Earth Federation Military is determined to avoid the worst-case scenario, the one where the system escalates to the point of being completely unstoppable. So the EFM gives the Steel Dragons a job with a strict time limit. They have twelve hours to reach the Hellgate in space and destroy the master core inside of it. If it's not destroyed in twelve hours' time, the EFM is unleashing nuclear missile armageddon on that asteroid and blowing it to kingdom come no matter who's in it at the time.

	At the same time that the Steel Dragons are approaching the Hellgate, Kota is doing the same with his Compatikaiser. He's pretty sure Shoko was taken somewhere around here, and the Hellgate's by far the most likely place for it. So he forms a temporary alliance with the Steel Dragons, one that turns into a more lasting bond as the story progresses.

	They encounter resistance at the maw of the Hellgate in the form of hordes upon hordes of unmanned Bartolls, plus four manned ones containing the unconscious bodies of Latune, Arado, Seolla, and Kusuha. The Steel Dragons manage to rescue the four pilots, but the resistance they encounter from the unmanned units is unusually fierce. The reason why suddenly clicks—They're using Lamia's perfectly precise, nearly mechanical movement patterns. Lamia's definitely been integrated into the system.

	The four rescued pilots barely remember any of what happened, but they're pretty sure Lamia put them out there in a place where they could be rescued. That's close to the truth, but not quite there. What actually happened was that when Lamia was integrated, the interference and noise she caused in the system was so bad that the system itself deemed that adding any more irregulars like her would be a bad idea. So it rejected the four pilots, inadvertently saving their lives in the process. This is the critical error Shu spoke of—By introducing Lamia's mind into the system, the system has become permanently flawed despite all of Jürgen's attempts to re-homogenize it.

	Lamia herself has been reduced to a mouthpiece for Dr. Jürgen, who in turn has been reduced to a host body for the ODE System's collective will. Whatever Dr. Jürgen's will is, it's no longer dominant or even really relevant. Kyosuke is shaken more deeply than anyone by this turn of events, because he was the one to promise Lamia a place to belong, and it sure as hell wasn't supposed to be this. He takes it upon himself to rescue her come hell or high water, and while he manages to free her body of the system, she passes away in his arms.

	A huge battle with Dr. Jürgen's Valsion CF ensues, but it gets rudely interrupted by Dyminas showing up with the Techniti-Paides in tow. She summarily destroys the Valsion CF, putting an end to her partnership of convenience. This is the last thing she needs to do in order to gain complete possession of the ODE System; She's already absorbed the data of the people that Dr. Jürgen gathered, and their mental energy provided her with enough sustenance that she can finally move on her own for the first time since coming to this world.

	The operation's a bust. The Steel Dragons get ordered to retreat, and exhausted as they are in the face of this new resistance, with no prospects left of rescuing the rest of the hapless abductees now that they've been brain-drained, they flee the Hellgate. They make it out just in time to see a rain of nuclear missiles fly past them toward the Hellgate, but the missiles inexplicably all shut down before reaching it.

THE SWORDIAN
	Dyminas's actual partners finally reveal themselves. A giant, elongated narrow structure with a hilt-like encirclement on one end appears in space near the Hellgate, and it is the field given off by this structure that shuts down all machinery that comes anywhere near it, including the nuclear missiles. The Federation assigns a codename to this structure: The Swordian.

	This is the actual location that Folka took Shoko to, a colony-sized fortress currently serving as the base of operations for the Shura.

	The Bartoll Incident has now been more or less resolved with the writeoff of the abductees and the passing of Dr. Jürgen and all key personnel on Team ODE. But it leads directly into the second half of OG Gaiden, the conflict later referred to as the Shura Crisis (what Moon Dwellers calls "Shura no Ran").

THE SHURA
	First, let's talk about Folka Alberk and the Shura. The Shura are humans from another world whose centuries of nonstop internal warfare ravaged their planet to the point that it was actually destroyed. They unearthed ancient robots in their world which they call Shurashin. These Shurashin are separated into various classes based on how powerful they are—The most powerful among them is the one-of-a-kind Ten class, followed by Cho, Go, and Retsu at the very bottom. The Shura have next to no grasp of the Shurashin's underlying technology, so they cannot replicate it other than the knockoff Retsu grunt units, and every high-ranking Shurashin is irreplaceable. They run on what the Shura call haki, meaning they sap the lifeforce of the pilot or anyone in their general vicinity. You might think this makes repairing them a problem, and you'd be right. They have minor self-regeneration to compensate for this.

	The Shura believe firmly in the law of the jungle, where the strong eat the weak and might makes right. They have codified these beliefs into a rigid set of rules called the Laws of the Shura that everyone is expected to abide by. The Shura society is governed by the Shura Lord, Alkaid Nasch, who has his own tactician and generals that enforce his rule. One of these generals is Altis the Lightflash. His adoptive brother, Folka Alberk, is one of the central focuses of OGG's story.

	Folka and his adoptive brother Fernando are two warriors raised and trained together under Altis, who taught them the Kishinken style. One day, they were made to duel each other in the presence of the Shura Lord. Folka defeated Fernando in honorable combat, and the Law of the Shura dictates that the weak must die, so it was expected of Folka that he would execute his fallen foe. However, Folka refused. He didn't have the heart to kill his best friend over the outcome of one stupid fight. His refusal meant that he broke the Law of the Shura in the Shura Lord's very presence and brought the deepest dishonor upon Fernando, a disgrace that Fernando never forgave him for. Folka continues to serve loyally among Altis's forces, but deep down, he's begun harboring serious doubts about the entire Shura way of life.

	Anyway, planet destroyed. Yeah, the Shura Realm was completely destroyed, a disaster of the Shura's own making. But the leadership located a place that they could take shelter in, a massive sword-like structure they called the Tenkumajo, later referred to by the Federation as the Swordian. Its real name is neither of these things—It's called the Radi es Radius 4, and it's one of five arks built by other people in other worlds to escape Dark Brain's menace. This unit is one of only two still in existence. The other is in Scramble Commander, and the less said about that game, the better. The Shura used it to make the jump to this world, and they plan on taking over the Earth and turning it into a second Shura Realm.

	However, the Shura don't have scientists, technicians, or engineers. They don't understand how the Swordian works, and they are incapable of making full use of its technologies. The Swordian has teleport platforms capable of sending entire strike teams to Earth at once, but they have maybe a 40% chance at best of reaching their intended destination. Combine this with the fact that most of the Shura grunts are dumb jocks and brawlers with no mind for tactics or order, and the result is pure chaos on Earth. If the Shura can't predict where they'll hit next, the Federation sure as hell won't be able to either.

	This is why they're in league with Dyminas—She has reliable teleportation in comparison to theirs, and she can facilitate a lot in their invasions. In return, she expects certain favors from them. One of the favors that she asks is for them to bring her Shoko Azuma. Shoko and Kota both have resonance with a Key that Dyminas is looking for, but Folka doesn't know any of that. All he knows is that he's under instructions from his superiors to bring Shoko in, so he does so while the Bartoll Incident is unfolding.

OUTBREAK OF THE SHURA CRISIS
	The Shura start striking random places all over Earth. Some are surgical strikes that hit key Federation facilities, while others just randomly fly off the mark, leading to things like a tactically questionable military occupation of the Japanese city of Hakodate. The Federation is struggling to cope due to the completely and utterly unpredictable nature of these attacks. It can't be everywhere at once, and it can't approach the Swordian due to that field around it.

	One of the more surgical early strikes is led by Tis, who takes a team of Shura grunts to go hit Pillbox 1, the main Earth base of operations for the Tsentr Project.

	What's the Tsentr Project up to these days? Let's go over it one scientist at a time.

THE TSENTR PROJECT
	Dr. Mitar Zapad: The chief administrator of the Tsentr Project and the developer of Razmnonium, which is (stop me if you've heard this before) metal cells capable of self-regeneration, self-propagation, and self-evolution. His general focus is on developing marketable bioweapons that are maintenance-free. He's injected Razmnonium into the Einst Regisseur specimen he captured. This allowed it to escape the demise of its fellow Einst brethren, and it has evolved into a new species that Mitar has labelled Jetzt (pronounced "yetst", the present-tense version of the word Einst). He also had a whole separate Flatfish Plan that involved injecting Razmnonium and Jetzt cells into captive human specimens, but the fruits of that project fell into Dyminas's hands a short time ago, much to his bosses' displeasure.

	Erde Mitte: A leading figure in artificial intelligence development. She's been touting her new AI0, a learning and adaptive AI, as the solution to finicky man-machine interfaces. She loaded AI0 onto the three remaining Wendigo units after an earlier incident with their developer stealing one (long story and ultimately never brought up again so it's not covered here), and it's now the default control mechanism for the Tsentr Project's ground forces that aren't the Crywolves. She has zero issue with any of Mitar's insane experiments as long as she can use project resources to cultivate her precious AI baby.

	Dr. Eric Wang: An upstanding robotics engineer distinctly at odds with the other project personnel—While Mitar and Erde are straight-up mad scientists, Eric is just a kindly old man who likes to play up being quirky and senile when it suits him. He is strongly vocal in his disagreement with Mitar's ideas, and he is of the opinion that the Einst are fundamentally uncontrollable creatures that Mitar will never be able to weaponize the way he wants. For Eric's part, he's here because he wants Mitar's help to develop a mobile weapon capable of destroying the Granzon. He's convinced that it's only a matter of time before "ol' Shuster" inevitably betrays everybody, and since he was one of the people to develop the Granzon, he knows all too well how powerful it is. This is why he tried to get his hands on the Zweizergain during the Inspector Incident. Right now, he's fixing up the Soulgain and overseeing the care of its comatose pilot, Axel Almer.

	In addition to these goings-on, Mitar had project personnel sift through the Earth Cradle's wreckage with a fine-toothed comb. They unearthed someone there, and even though it's been a long time since the Cradle was destroyed, Mitar's going to try restoring them with Razmnonium. There's also allusions made to another comatose man they're keeping around in addition to Axel. This never gets brought up in OGG again, so it's probably not important. Don't worry about it.

	The relevant part for us is that Axel finally wakes up. Eric briefs him on everything that he's missed while he was unconscious, and Axel is decidedly unimpressed with the Shura. The war that Shadow Mirror wanted was an orderly, managed chaos. The Shura's war, in comparison, is pure mayhem. Eric has no illusions of Axel sticking around to help out, and he wouldn't really want that anyway, considering how shady the whole Tsentr Project operation is. He tells Axel that he can take the Soulgain and go, if Axel will just do him one teensy-weensy favor first. What favor? Just dispose of the Jetzt real quick.

THE JETZT
	Around the same time as the Shura attack Pillbox 1, the Jetzt Regisseur breaks out of its containment glass and goes out of control. What starts as a simple containment op for the Crywolves quickly grows more chaotic when Axel emerges from the hangar in the Soulgain. If that wasn't confusing enough, the Red Ogre suddenly pops out of the Soulgain. Yeah, Red Ogre, as in the Federation's codename for Alchemie's boss robot from OG2, the Persönlichkeit. What the hell?

	Here's how Alchemie explains it. She was on the verge of fading away, and Axel was on the verge of dying. But his strong emotions in his dying moments drew her to him, and she used the power they held, plus some mass from the Soulgain, to reconstruct the Persönlichkeit. With the Persönlichkeit rebuilt after the Einst's point of mass decay, her life support system was effectively back online and able to regenerate what was left of her body along with Axel's, similar to what the Einst previously did to bring Excellen back from the dead. She lives on past the end point of the Einst because the power of feelings has evolved her into something new... just like the Jetzt, in a sense.

	The Jetzt has begun spawning Bones, Grasses, and Armors from its regenerating tissue. Worse, the Shura are now showing up on the scene to attack pretty much anything and everything, followed by Tis, who wants to bring the Jetzt specimen back to Dyminas for weaponization. As if THAT wasn't enough? The Granzon shows up.

	Eric is delighted to see his old pal Shuster dropping by to say hi. He puts in a chipper request for Shu to help destroy the Jetzt as a favor to an old friend, and he'll even fix up the Granzon for free afterward. Shu, oddly nonchalant about this scientist who knows all of the Granzon's secrets and is actively out to destroy it, says sure.

	Unfortunately, the Jetzt is able to escape despite the best efforts of this team-up of very unlikely partners. Alchemie makes it her personal mission to pursue the escaped Jetzt and put it to rest for good, and Axel decides to tag along with her for the ride. Mitar tasks the Crywolves with pursuing and eliminating the Jetzt as well, and he gives Albero another freezing HCC bullet to immobilize it, plus a special RBE shot that he claims will inhibit the Razmnonium in its body, enabling it to be destroyed for good.

	In a shocking twist, when the Crywolves finally catch up to the Jetzt and fire the RBE bullet into it, it has the opposite effect. The Jetzt grows wildly out of control and rampages, destroying the Gespenst belonging to Albero's son Foglia. It also totals Hugo's Gespenst. Albero's ready to make a last stand when Axel and Alchemie show up. Axel tells Albero to retreat, and Albero grudgingly evacuates, carrying Hugo's cockpit block with his mangled body inside. Foglia doesn't make it back alive, and Hugo's more dead than alive at this point, but don't worry. Trusty Mitar Zapad will fix Hugo right up next game with Razmnonium cybernetic parts. Sure, those parts risk causing a fatal rejection in Hugo's body, but as long as Hugo keeps taking a regimen of immunosuppressant drugs that only Mitar can produce, he'll be just fine. What could go wrong?

	One way or another, the Jetzt is destroyed, a huge setback for the Tsentr Project but ultimately not a game-ending one. That's it for those guys in this game, though.

FOLKA ALBERK'S TIPPING POINT
	Folka has been following orders loyally despite his misgivings. However, his tipping point comes when it's finally time to transfer Shoko from the Swordian to the Hellgate. You see, while Shoko's been kidnapped, she's been treated as a guest in Altis's wing of the Swordian, and Folka has been visiting regularly with her. He is fascinated by the foreign ideas Shoko speaks of as an ordinary teenage girl, things like friends going out for karaoke, or schoolkids having future dreams and aspirations apart from fighting. For the first time in his life, he grasps the concept of peacetime, and much like Lamia before him, he arrives at the conclusion that his people have no place in this world.

	When the order comes down to deliver Shoko to the Hellgate, Folka knows what he must do. He takes Shoko with him in the Ialdabaoth and uses the Swordian's systems to make the jump to Earth. Unfortunately, he can't keep Shoko in the cockpit with him while others pursue him. If you didn't skip the blob of text about the Shurashin (it's okay, I don't blame you), one of the things mentioned there is that they run off of haki, absorbing the lifeforce of anybody in or near them. Staying in the Ialdabaoth during active combat would kill an untrained civilian like Shoko, so Folka is forced to deposit her on the ground while he fights. This means she promptly gets swiped up by his pursuit, and she ends up getting delivered to the Hellgate anyway.

	The Steel Dragons show up during his fight, and after it's over, Folka throws himself on their mercy. He's deeply upset about causing so much misfortune for Shoko. Kota's plenty cross with him too, but he grudgingly agrees to work with Folka when Folka offers his full cooperation in providing intel and combat assistance against the Shura.

THE DAGGERS
	Folka provides some very useful intel about the Shura's teleportation methods. In order to compensate for their jumps being so wildly inaccurate, the Shura carry objects that they call Shunten Blades (codenamed Daggers by the EFM). These are beacons that enable reliable jumps to be made from the Swordian to the location of the Daggers. The Steel Dragons quickly piece together that this could potentially work both ways. If they can capture enough Daggers to transport their ships, then they can bypass the Swordian's electronic-nullification field entirely. In effect, Folka has just handed them the keys to the castle.

DYMINAS'S MACHINATIONS
	Dyminas is far from inactive during this time. She's reconstructed Lamia with some reprogramming, she's got Shoko drugged and brainwashed, and in addition, she's arranged for the abduction of the Timeflow Engine's main technicians, Raj Montoya and Mizuho Saiki. If she can't have the Excellence's Timeflow Engine, she'll just have them build her a new one. Raj agrees pretty much instantly despite Mizuho's loud protests, no brainwashing needed. Raj insists that he'll do whatever it takes to save his own life, and if that means making a superscience doodad for a giant meat balloon, so be it.

	Lamia's been reprogrammed into a loyal servant, and she takes a Valsion CF and leads a squadron of Bartolls out to destroy the Steel Dragons. The plan is for her to fight them long enough to get in a perfect position to activate Code ATA and self-destruct, blowing the entire Steel Dragons Squadron away in one fell swoop. But the Steel Dragons note that something about this methodology doesn't add up. Why challenge them to a fight at all? Wouldn't it be far more efficient and reliable to just send Lamia in on foot to infiltrate their ships and self-destruct before anyone is the wiser? For some reason, the idea never even crosses Dyminas's mind, which reinforces the idea that her thought processes are fundamentally broken.

	The one to save Lamia from self-destructing turns out to be Axel. He overrides Code ATA by invoking Code DTD (Dust to Dust) in Lamia. Code DTD sends W-Series units into a kind of overdrive mode that improves their performance but also causes them to overheat drastically. In Lamia's case, it also triggers a system purge that erases Dyminas's programming. She's still a complete mess afterward, but she's alive, and the Tesla Lab scientists are ready to rebuild her and make her whole again. Lamia's back for good now.

	During that fight, Fiona comes back. Turns out she just got jumped months into the future from where Raul got sent during their accident at the start of OG2. Now there's two Excellences instead of one.

	For Shoko's part, she's been set up with some gear that Dyminas was mysteriously gifted at some point by an unseen entity (Dark Brain), the Emi Armor and G-Thundergate. She gets sent out against Compatikaiser as Fighter Emi in hopes of triggering a resonance reaction, and one does happen, but it backfires on Dyminas and the kids when Shoko gets freed of her brainwashing and the G-Thundergate combines with Compatible Kaiser to form the G Compatible Kaiser. Kota's ready to pat Shoko on the back and send her home after that to recuperate, but Shoko insists on sticking around to finish this fight, now that she's caught up in it.

THE PUSH ON THE SWORDIAN
	Once all of these loose ends are settled and the Steel Dragons get their Daggers, it's time to make a push into the inner halls of the Swordian. Their goal is to reach the Swordian's control core, a sealed-off room that the Shura call the Inner Palace. The whole Shura army is standing between them and their goal, including Folka's brothers Fernando and Altis, and the Shura Lord himself, Alkaid Nasch. In their battles against the Shura, Folka has pushed his Shurashin, the Ialdabaoth, to a superpowered state the Shura call Ascension. At this point, with the Steel Dragons backing him, he's effectively more powerful than the Shura Lord and all of his generals. When Alkaid finally falls, he recognizes Folka as his successor, making Folka the new Shura Lord and ruler of all Shura.

	During this final push, Trusty Shu generously shows up in the Granzon to offer his assistance. After the usual song and dance with Masaki, he joins the team.

	Dyminas shows up upon the Shura Lord's defeat. She says it's time to finish this once and for all, which means it's time to recall the Techniti-Paides into herself. Tis and Lalia are in tears at the thought that they will cease to be, but they were made to be obedient, and they dutifully rejoin with Dyminas. The third member of the group, Despoinis, is reluctant. She doesn't want to die. She's also sickened by the things she's been doing over the course of the story, especially with regards to Lamia and the other prisoners. Fine, whatever. Dyminas can still just activate her new Timeflow Engine to open the gate. Except that the new Timeflow Engine Raj built her turns out to be a bomb in disguise, one that cripples her from within.

	But then a gate opens anyway, and Dark Brain emerges from it. He's disappointed with Dynamis-3, his broken creation. Yes, that's right. Her mind was so broken that she couldn't even remember how to spell her own name. Dark Brain disposes of her himself. He tries to do the same to Despoinis to remove both defects, but Raul covers her and protects her from harm, since she's holding Raj and Mizuho with her. Dark Brain finally turns his attention to the Steel Dragons and describes himself as a dark accumulation of wisdom, a hivemind of beings that feeds on the negative emotion of all human life and abhors positive emotions. This, then, is the other reason besides the Bartolls for the game's title, Unified Wisdom.

	Dark Brain claims to be seeking to unify the twelve keys so that he can reach the Empyrean, whatever that is... just like Gilliam once tried to do, according to him. Axel wants to know what the hell is up with this world attracting so many jumpers like Shadow Mirror, Raul's crew, the Shura, and now Dynamis-3 and Dark Brain. Dark Brain's best guess is that maybe it's a place with a confluence of factors. Don't worry about it until next game.

	Regardless, 1.3 million HP later, Dark Brain goes down just like any other boss, much to his shock and disbelief. With Dark Brain's demise, the massive thought assembly within it is freed all at once, which somehow causes an incomplete gate to open up, one that blurs the boundary between dimensions. This leaves the Steel Dragons trapped in a weird subspace pocket. Roar figures that they'll go back to reality naturally once the boundary's had some time to stabilize, but someone else has other ideas.

TRUSTY SHU'S SURPRISE BETRAYAL
	In a shocking twist, Shu takes his Granzon and betrays the team. He invokes a special code in his secret Kabbalah Program to transfigure his Granzon into a newer, beefier form, the Neo Granzon. He calmly informs the Steel Dragons that he's going to use this opportunity to destroy them, and once every last obstacle is removed, nothing can stop him from finally destroying the Earth and sacrificing it to his god Volkruss. He gloats about how he was never on their side, much like Ingram Plissken before him. The Steel Dragons are forced to admit Masaki was right all along, but the deliberate way Shu namedropped Ingram gives Viletta pause. The implication isn't exactly subtle.

	Sure enough, when the group defeats the Neo Granzon, Shu is finally liberated from his own shackles, and he dies a free man. Masaki openly weeps and calls him a damn fool.

AFTERMATH: THE GAIA SAVIORS
	Let's go over each loose end here, one at a time.

	Dynamis-3 and two of the three Techniti-Paides are gone. The remaining one, Despoinis, is still alive. Raul and Fiona are going into business for themselves as the L&E Corporation (Lightning and Eternal, named after their Excellence frames), and they offer Despoinis a spot in their new company. Since the Timeflow Engines can apparently be used by bad guys to open dimensional gates, they've decided to remove the Timeflow Engines from their machines and scrap them entirely, as well as scrubbing all data pertaining to them. This means they won't ever have a shot at getting home again, but they're okay with starting over in this world. They'll start by developing a rescue unit with a new engine, one that doesn't run on chronoparticles. The Excellence Rescue will go on to be the rising star of OG II before they finally think better of this plan and go back to using the Timeflow Engines in Moon Dwellers.

	Axel and Alchemie decide to keep roaming the land together, since they've taken a shine to one another. They'll go off and get into some other adventures in Endless Frontier Exceed later.

	Folka is the official ruler of the Shura. Many generals are dead, including his brother Altis, but those that remain accept him as their leader. He's ready to lead the Shura in a new direction and give peace a chance, but he feels that the Shura have already burned their bridges in this world beyond any hope of mending. So he makes the decision to jump the Swordian to worlds unknown and seek out a proper place to turn into a new Shura Realm.

	Good riddance, in the eyes of President Graien Grassman. He's fed up with hazardous objects orbiting the Earth and looming dangerously over everybody's heads. He's also of a mind to do away with the Hellgate entirely, but Mitsuko insists that its Aegis Shield will play a critical role moving forward. Graien is skeptical, considering that they're still fighting aliens with teleportation tech. He's also skeptical of Mitsuko's role in this, but Mitsuko washes her hands of the whole Bartoll affair and claims complete innocence, which is more or less the truth. Graien is more than welcome to question anybody involved, except oh wait, they're all dead.

	Graien's aide Nibhal is of the opinion that this is a prime time to push forward with his proposal to form a special forces unit capable of rivalling the collective might of the Steel Dragons, one that reports directly to the president. This is why he's been funding the Tsentr Project and demanding deliverables—The Tsentr Project is going to play a central role in the formation of this new special forces unit.

	It will be called the Gaia Saviors.

	That wraps up OG Gaiden. See you next time in SRW OG II: The Gaia Savior.