Having some optional heroes sit in on a strategy meeting and drop some optional lines that don't alter the scene as a whole would be a good compromise between not being able to involve optional heroes in main story and not showing them at all, yeah.
Crys... Crys Crys Crys. I love the IDEA behind Crys and Noah facing off like that but it's so unceremoniously rushed through and then never mentioned again that it really does a disservice to their relationship. At minimum they could have like... brought it up in the cutscenes with N in Origin or something, considering that Crys mentoring Noah as an offseer was one of the key pieces that made Noah not turn out like that? Or at least that's what the framing during the mist vision scenes suggested to me...
That being said, I think freeing people from the term service while still in Aionios would have been a misstep. It would have taken out so much of the urgency in having to free them from Aionios, because while the annihilation effect will eventually eat all of the world that's... not going to happen anytime soon and having that strict time limit (made a little less strict by Mio not having her mark anymore) propel the plot forward is a good thing in my book. (They just should have propelled it with more care, lol.)
Also, my understanding is that Mio effectively doesn't have Moebius powers anymore after the eclipse because Z turned it off. I think she says something to that effect while they go to the Cloudkeep.
They should have made X and Y personally involve themselves in the war at this point, I think. It would have been an escalation (we know they're Z's right hand people, we know they're special in some way so it presents a ramp up from fighting "just" regular moebius) and it would have given them the opportunity to add more meat to the two, plus expand on Z a little more. Bring Isurd back into the story (I think closely involving him right after chapter 3 would have been difficult, because while dragging sidequest characters around in ways that don't make sense is something I can overlook*, him immediately abandoning his colony to go search for the city with Ouroboros would have been weird). Valdi and Bolearis, as discussed. The aforementioned strategy meeting could have been here as well. Then I think Crys could have presented another ramp up in personal tension for Noah when he makes himself known, and defeating him could have served as a sort of reversal in this "war intermission" before they go on to defeat X and/or Y, removing one of the final obstacles presenting the colonies from focusing their attention on storming Origin. Something like that.
I have a strong feeling they had to make cuts due to dev constraints, honestly. Finding the origin metal for the ship feels INCREDIBLY uninspired for a game that largely avoided mindless fetchquesting with no story bits attached, and you absolutely can not tell me they intended to have X and Y go out without so much as a cutscene. I really do think they had things planned that they couldn't follow through on, and that is so very disappointing, to think about what they could have made of this all if they'd just had more time and budget.
As for some Moebius being older, I think K (you know, the grunt in colony 4) is from the City for sure. Reasoning being that I think real world swears are actually City slang, as evidenced by Matthew using them fairly liberally and Noah only ever saying shit after coming into contact with them; and K also says that Taion's vaunted intuition is full of shit. Don't know what to make of Triton though, when he moves to the City I had the impression he's not from there...
Re: (Lmao, god. A whole second essay)
Having some optional heroes sit in on a strategy meeting and drop some optional lines that don't alter the scene as a whole would be a good compromise between not being able to involve optional heroes in main story and not showing them at all, yeah.
Crys... Crys Crys Crys. I love the IDEA behind Crys and Noah facing off like that but it's so unceremoniously rushed through and then never mentioned again that it really does a disservice to their relationship. At minimum they could have like... brought it up in the cutscenes with N in Origin or something, considering that Crys mentoring Noah as an offseer was one of the key pieces that made Noah not turn out like that? Or at least that's what the framing during the mist vision scenes suggested to me...
That being said, I think freeing people from the term service while still in Aionios would have been a misstep. It would have taken out so much of the urgency in having to free them from Aionios, because while the annihilation effect will eventually eat all of the world that's... not going to happen anytime soon and having that strict time limit (made a little less strict by Mio not having her mark anymore) propel the plot forward is a good thing in my book. (They just should have propelled it with more care, lol.)
Also, my understanding is that Mio effectively doesn't have Moebius powers anymore after the eclipse because Z turned it off. I think she says something to that effect while they go to the Cloudkeep.
They should have made X and Y personally involve themselves in the war at this point, I think. It would have been an escalation (we know they're Z's right hand people, we know they're special in some way so it presents a ramp up from fighting "just" regular moebius) and it would have given them the opportunity to add more meat to the two, plus expand on Z a little more. Bring Isurd back into the story (I think closely involving him right after chapter 3 would have been difficult, because while dragging sidequest characters around in ways that don't make sense is something I can overlook*, him immediately abandoning his colony to go search for the city with Ouroboros would have been weird). Valdi and Bolearis, as discussed. The aforementioned strategy meeting could have been here as well. Then I think Crys could have presented another ramp up in personal tension for Noah when he makes himself known, and defeating him could have served as a sort of reversal in this "war intermission" before they go on to defeat X and/or Y, removing one of the final obstacles presenting the colonies from focusing their attention on storming Origin. Something like that.
I have a strong feeling they had to make cuts due to dev constraints, honestly. Finding the origin metal for the ship feels INCREDIBLY uninspired for a game that largely avoided mindless fetchquesting with no story bits attached, and you absolutely can not tell me they intended to have X and Y go out without so much as a cutscene. I really do think they had things planned that they couldn't follow through on, and that is so very disappointing, to think about what they could have made of this all if they'd just had more time and budget.
As for some Moebius being older, I think K (you know, the grunt in colony 4) is from the City for sure. Reasoning being that I think real world swears are actually City slang, as evidenced by Matthew using them fairly liberally and Noah only ever saying shit after coming into contact with them; and K also says that Taion's vaunted intuition is full of shit. Don't know what to make of Triton though, when he moves to the City I had the impression he's not from there...
*(Yes, I did drag Isurd into jail with me.)