Rogue Galaxy Post-Game Session 7

This post-game session is titled "Requesting permission for a fly-by! (spilled coffee)".  Bonus points if you get the reference.

I always preface these things with an expectation of how much time it'll take and how long the post will be, but I've been wrong every single time.  So I'm not going to say that I don't think this will take very long.  Not at all.  I'm also not going to lose motivation two planets in.  No sir.

Basically, this session will be relatively low-interest to read about, much less play.  In it, I'm going around from one planet to the next making absofuckinglutely sure I've gotten all the chests.

When I started, I had a rather genius idea: one of the items you can make in the factory is the Stealth Shield.  According to its description, it "hides your presence from weak enemies".  I don't know what exactly it means by "weak", but I can infer that each enemy has a level associated with it and the shield prevents encounters with enemies that are far enough below your level to be outside a certain threshhold.  The best part: you only need one of this shield equipped for it to affect your entire party.  Using the shield sped up the entire thing by eliminating encounters almost everywhere and severely limiting them everywhere else.

My party of Jaster, Kisala, and Zegram is level 77, 75, and 73, respectively.  From using the Stealth Shield in an environment where there are encounters it can't prevent, I have deduced its function to be as such: When the game decides to generate an encounter, it chooses a specific group of enemies right away.  Then it checks to see if the shield can prevent an encounter with those enemies, and if it does, no encounter happens.  This explains perfectly the sporadic groups of encounters I got with long periods of no encounters in between them.  The alternative function would be for the game to check for the shield right away when generating an encounter, and simply exclude enemies that the shield prevents from showing up, which would result in much more frequent encounters.

While sweeping these areas, I got into a bit of a rhythm, but it still took quite a bit of time, so I ended up splitting up this session into a few mini-sessions.  I was unsure as to the limits of the "see all the chests on the map" ability you gain when you find all the save points on a planet, so there was probably a lot of unnecessary exploration time done.  I'm a fairly thorough explorer in games like these, so I know with high certainty that I got the vast majority of the chests in my actual playthrough.

Session 7a (December 8th): Swept Rosa and Juraika.  Missed chests found: Zero.  Realized how much of a bitch Zerard will be with Rosencaster Prison, the Starship Factory, and both Gladius Towers; kind of lost motivation.
Session 7b (December 30th): Swept Zerard, Vedan, and Alistia.  Missed chests found: Three on Vedan, zero elsewhere.
Session 7c (January 1st): Swept Mariglenn.  Missed chests found: One.
Session 7d (January 9th): Swept Ghost Ship.  Missed chests found: Zero.

I did the sweeping by planet so that if I missed zero chests on a planet, I could reset and not add any game time to my save.  In addition, I kept track of where I found each chest and then after finishing the sweep, I reloaded and grabbed the chests.  This session therefore added very little time to my save file.  Having only missed four chests in a game that's as expansive as Rogue Galaxy is just goes to show how thorough of an explorer I am.