I did not expect the chapter to be longer than the previous two combined.
Frontier Village is the source of a whopping 22 of the 62 quests I’ve marked as required. That’s more than a third! While a good chunk of them are not available right off the bat, a lot are, and I need four stars of affinity with the village so I need to do a lot of not strictly required quests as well. Since we’re getting further into the game, quests are more involved, and the fact that Makna east of the village completely lacks for landmarks isn’t helping matters. Not only that, but we get two new party members here as well, so I have to spend significant time getting everything set up for them and I have more Nopon Grand Prix to do.
Colony 6 has a few components to it that add up to the requisite 4.5 stars being even more of a hassle than for Colony 9 and Central Bionis. Not everyone in the region is available from the start: you need to invite them there. And to invite them, you need to have certain levels of reconstruction done. On top of that, there is no visual indicator that the character can be invited, and you just have to talk to them. Reyn’s skill branch there can be unlocked pretty soon, but Sharla’s is so far out that I probably will ignore it until I’m basically at the end of the game. I want to spread out the load if I can (by doing things as early as possible), but there’s only so much you can do when reconstruction requires items not yet available.