IIRC even if you do everything perfectly there's always one guilty, I could be wrong on that though. Also good call on waiting for Lucca to bail you out, I probably would have totally forgotten about that. I did remember the Lode Sword being in that dungeon though so I didn't buy it.

Nah you can have everyone find you not guilty; he probably got it from the cross examination when asked who bumped into who. That is the most common one, I think.

I'll have to double check, I thought you had to answer "I started it" or something along those lines, otherwise if you deny it he says that you bumped into her on purpose. It's been forever since I would have ever looked into it though, especially since it kinda doesn't matter much either way beyond getting more mid-tonics in your care package which in a normal playthrough is irrelevant.

Taking Hyde's advice I cleared the prison with minimal issues except for the boss who in typical fashion I just barely beat, and that included using all ~15 or so of my mid-tonics and several regular tonics. In the first ruins in 2300 I found that Marle's Provoke is a lifesaver; it seems to always work and lasts a long time (forever?) so it's great for stopping the jester-looking enemies from doing the group heal all the time while you deal with everyone else, etc. Lucca's Hypnowave seems pretty hit or miss on working so I stopped bothering with trying that.

I did just get my first game over in the Sewers; I don't normally bother in a regular playthrough because it's not necessary, but for some reason I could have sworn that you could make it through the enemies in there okay at this point in the game. So my thought was run in there and get some stuff since IIRC there's a Lightning Sword and maybe one or two other things in there, but you can't avoid either encounter from the entrance and the enemies were doing like twice the HP of any of my characters per hit. Not sure if I'm remembering wrong, if he buffed this zone specifically to avoid what I was trying to do, or maybe if I'm remembering right but I was just running away from battles to avoid the deaths and get to chests.

So in any case that was a no-go, was hoping to get that sword and whatever else in there before fighting the boss in the food stores so we'll see what happens.

It's been several years since I played it, but I'm pretty sure if you tell him that Marle started things, he presses and asks something like "come on, tell the truth, it was you wasn't it?" and then you're all "NOPE" and he leaves it at that.

Spekkio is God Tier now.

Also the game is too clever to let me get better gear early on; I went to pre-historic times first but they won't let you trade for items yet, and there's a good armor at the Dactyl Nest but you have to fight at least one battle that's impossible at this point (and you can't run away).

Leaving a note here. It's been almost a month and grad school has been kicking it up a notch but I want to devote some serious time to this in October. Updates soon I hope!