Some of it would be travel time, Schera mentions travelling to Bose would take a full day, so travelling to other places and running around doing side quests could add up. The school was I think two weeks but definitely no longer than a month. Other than that, it’s hard to say.
Yeah I was thinking about the travel time but at the same time the game makes it clear when they stop to sleep, they never seem to camp in the countryside for instance. As such I would expect that every leg of every journey would take one day at most. You also have things like stopping at Manoria for bentos, implying that the travel from the mountain pass took about half a day (since they slept at the summit and left in the morning). That would mean that the journey from Bose to Ruan took two days.
I suppose that if your consider that every time you leave town for a quest or side quest one full day passes, it would add up to several months down the line.
That’s why I prefer Final Fantasy style minimaps over the “highway” system used by this game (and many others). It makes the scale of the game more intuitive.
Oh, it was the controls for the drawbridge. That explains why it opened when the mayor tried to flee. Odd that the only path to his private marina was through a hidden door and down a ladder, now that I think about it.
week 28 impressions
The bad guys got away but at least we know Agate is ok. That is, physically. That man is definitely not ok, emotionally. Even mysterious black-clad mercenaries can see it!
I did read ティータ’s explanation and it boiled down to something like: If the quartz inside the orbment isn’t connected properly, the orbment won’t work. A machine that isn’t connected to a power source doesn’t work, truly high-level technical stuff. Possibly she was saying it in an unnecessarily confusing way, so I won’t fault Estelle too hard for that one. I’m guessing we’re going to see her do a lot of suffering over machines in this chapter :’)
Seconding that the new party member’s aoe attacks could be very useful. Starting out, her only basic craft is quite a large aoe that you can aim at the ground. There’s potential for some good stuff with her, even if you have to push her all the way to the back of formation because of that low HP!
Love the new town. All the town music has been upbeat but this jazzy flavor is my favorite so far. Explored every floor of the research lab to get a bitter tomato and some book reading. Exploring the town, there’s another smaller workshop that I think may be relevant in some way later just because it’s big and set apart from the other buildings. There’s a stuffed bunny upstairs to indicate kids so I’m gonna guess, ティータ’s house?
Also I appreciate the cafe cook commenting that he has no idea why his soup gives you a buff, because it’s just normal food. Video game food works in mysterious ways.
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I took a picture of it because Estelle’s hapless “s-stop!” is very funny to me:
I noticed that. The guy in the bitter tomato room says that his colleague is working on food that fights drowsiness but is not tasty (presumably the bitter tomato is an example of that). Given his comments on the side-effect of food, I expected that the cook might play a role in this by managing to cook the tomato into a good dish that would also keep the status effect.
But maybe it’s just a random comment and I read too much into it.
By the way I’ve already encountered a similar character (an android speaking in an overly technical style) in a different game and the way you can tell is that they use a ton of onyomi jukugo words where more common kun vocab exists.
Note how she says 内部 instead of 中, 接続する instead of 付ける or 繋ぐ, 生成する instead of 造る, 当初 instead of 始め etc… Apparently that sounds like technical jargon to Japanese speakers.
Week 29 is up. This is a very important week, because 猫語日常会話入門 exists.
I actually explored the limestone cave before going to Zeiss, because it was really good XP, and I figured I can use that on hard mode. Also, there was a goodie hidden there! (it was a better weapon for Tita)
Did you notice that lower leveled characters get double xp in battle? Handy to catch them up to the other party members, love it. This can be annoying in other games.
So I got to try Tita in battle for a while, and I think she’s borderline OP, haha. Her craft is a huge radius huge damage AoE.
(actually I just remembered it was basically the same for Olivier)
Definitely a cool and handy moveset to have in the party.
I know at least some of us really enjoyed using Tita, yeah! I’m impressed you’re hanging in with hard mode, given how mean the game occasionally felt even on normal, haha.
Often haven’t had too much to add since I’m looking back from the future like this, but I’ve enjoyed reading your updates and appreciate that you’re leaving them in all the threads like this!
Thanks, in true JRPG fashion I’m also glad of everyone’s support 
it’s fun to read all your thoughts after every segment.
If I could choose again, I would probably choose normal mode, haha. Just to focus on the story. Hard mode is fun though, the combat is a nice challenge. But from how the game works I can imagine it’s also often not easy on normal.
For SC I’ll definitely choose Normal as well as I’ve heard it’s extremely hard outside of normal.
That’s not how it works in the original game at least, instead it seems that every region is designed for you to reach a specific level, if you’re a lot below that level you get a ton of XP, if you’re near that level you get a little XP and if you’re above that level you barely get anything at all.
Hmm, maybe it is as you say or maybe they changed something on Evo, I specifically tried to test this and this effect stopped working exactly when the character reached the same level as the others. Might randomly be that level for the area.
I definitely feel like there are points where enemies started giving us basically no experience at all, so I want to say Evo is still how @simias is describing.
It’s not that a region is designed for a certain level but that each enemy has a level and amount of experience. If you’re the same level, you get that much exp. If you’re above or below, it’s adjusted based on how many levels above or below you are.
In the original it’s *0.5 for being overlevelled and *1.25 for being underlevelled. So like, if you’re one level above the enemy, you get half exp but if you’re two levels above you get a quarter.
Right that’s what I had in mind when I said “designed for a certain level”, it’s pretty clear the the devs want to make sure that you’re always at a fairly specific level range for any given region and they don’t reward grinding for levels.
Which is decent game design in my opinion.
Week 28
Those two soldiers being pursued were seriously bailed out by their masked commander. Maybe this is the chapter where we finally get some background on him?
Princess theory 100% confirmed. You don’t have your personal 中尉 otherwise.
Cool shot but please no child characters 
Nothing takes me out from a story faster than some 8-year-old wunderkind not just dying in the first battle. We are supposed to be in dangerous situations completely unfit for a child to be around…
The escalator is painfully slow, but I guess that’s realistic. Zeiss otherwise feels like a very relaxed town, once again… but I’m seriously not going to speak to everyone in that factory each time time advances.
The style of dress is more oriental here, I guess.
Can you not run up and down it?
Only if you’re a monster. During my recent trip to Japan it was very clear that one ought not to even walk in an escalator, never mind run. 
(I did end up running them up and down because it’s so slow. Actually, in the end I used fast-travel to the factory whenever I had business there.)
I rarely ever thought about it like that in games. There are 8 year old musicians and chess players who are better than adult masters, performing on the battlefield (stage / tournament).
She’s also a ranged character, so we can assume the melee fighters cover for her and she’s relatively unbothered in the back.
But yeah, if you take everything about fighting and the logic in a game world seriously and at face value, you will always arrive at contradictions. Personally, I separate fighting and the story and don’t take all the combat aspects literally, because it’s impossible to make sense completely.
Btw I love how Zaiss looks in 3D in that one screenshot 