I need more time on Go-Jin Senki, so I decided to spend a day getting the five(!) bad endings in Elie.

The main triggers for these endings involve the “extensions” you can get if you fail to make high-level items by the end of year 4. There is something with the contests as well, as I mentioned in the last post — the ending conditions seem to be based on a combination of items you made and your school ranking.

To get the 1 year extension, make a level 3 item but don’t 4 item, or have a class rank between 200-249.

To get the 5 year extension, you have to not make a level 3 item, or have a class rank lower than 250. Getting either extension locks you out of any of endings above 8.

• Ending 12: Get the 5 year extension, and then do not make a level 4 item by the end of the 5 year extension.
• Ending 11: Refuse the offer of an extension (leave school)
• Ending 10: Get the 5 year extension, and then make a level 4 item.
• Ending 9: Get the 1 year extension, and then make a level 4 item.
• Ending 8: Fulfill the Ending 9 or 10 requirements, and have a popularity of -50 or below, and a reputation of 700 or above.

If you want to get all of these on a file that you’ll actually use for other things, the best thing to do is play normally until you are ready to make a level 4 item — you should be able to do this early enough that you can still lower your class rank by skipping all the tests.

So I started a new file, and played as well as I could for the first year. I wanted this file to be usable later for some of the other endings, so I made sure to do the Marie points correctly, and also I used save states to make sure than any level up Elie gets, she gets at least a point in either STR or DEF.

One thing I was able to do more efficiently in this game is the alchemy level and requests. I didn’t understand the way the “rich people” requests worked at the beginning. They get you a lot of money, and some of them can be completed with fairly easy to acquire ingredients — you can look at the guy’s facial expression to see if you are turning in good items or not. If you turn in basic items you will still get the money, but it may lower your popularity. I am not entirely sure what level of popularity you need to try for — there don’t seem to be any endings that require a specific high level of popularity, but it’s possible that if it gets too low you will miss out on important events. In any case, I don’t find that doing some “bad” requests will affect things too much.

In the first academy contest, I did as well as I could (I got 7th place, which is fine). By the first month of the second year I had learned the recipe for Megacraft, a level 4 item that is pretty easy to make (you just need 4 crafts, the ingredients can be found in the nearby forest).

At this point it is easy to get endings 12 through 9:

• 12: Rest until year 4 8/30. Take the 1 year extension. Rest a year, take the additional 4 years, and rest all 4 of them.
• 11: Rest until year 4 8/30, and quit school.
• 10: Rest until year 4 8/30. Take the 1 year extension. Rest a year, take the additional 4 years, make a megacraft, and then rest the remaining 4 years.
• 9: Rest until year 4 8/30. Take the 1 year extension. Make a megacraft, then rest the remaining year.

Ending 8 takes a bit more effort. It’s easy enough to get your popularity down below -50, just by repeatedly taking jobs and either cancelling them or letting the time limit run out. However, to maintain your 700 reputation, you can’t just rest for years because your reputation will drop. You have to rest for a few months, then take some more jobs (even if you cancel or fail them, your reputation will still go up), and repeat. It’s not particularly hard but it requires some attention. Also make a megacraft. In this ending, Ingrid is very cold to Elie, telling her that she graduated but to immediately leave her office because she’s busy. Elie goes back to her home town, realizing that she’s too unpopular to keep going in Salburg.

Finally, I wanted to see if I could get the cheesecake ending since it’s the last ending I had that didn’t have a movie associated with it. It seemed easy enough, you just have to use Blend Alchemy to make a high ranking cheesecake. I could never get it to work with the recipes I found online, but I finally saw that your alchemy level needs to be high as well. So I reloaded one of my late saves from before, and was able to successfully make the cheesecake. I rested, refused the Maister Rank extension, and Elie opened a cheesecake shop (they should have at least had a picture for this ending.)

I’ve now gotten 8 of the 13 endings. The remaining 5 all have movies and are good endings. I don’t know if I will get all of them, but I’m at least going to get ending 0 (what might be considered the “best” ending). We’ll be back to this at the end of 1998.