I Have Finished My Draft

[ebonwinged_nova]

Clocks in at about 45k words right now with one scene missing; the content itself should mostly be fine and only require some details editing. That took way too long, but sometimes that's just how things are. It's a postcanon xenoblade 3 fic with a twist, namely:

Click for ending spoilers

The worlds still separated, but instead of everything resetting to pre-Intersection, Origin dumped everyone into the corresponding world as they were at the end; also N is there because I wanted him to be.

I wrote the first draft before Future Redeemed so it's not compliant with that, but even if I hadn't I wouldn't have made it compliant, given my extremely mixed feelings about the entire DLC.

I'll be letting it rest for some time and draft something else before going back to it. In practice that'll be either the "I hurt N a lot" fic or the "Z hosts cutthroat kitchen" one. Languagefic, despite being much older than either of those ideas, apparently still needs time in the mental oven before I can knuckle down and actually write it (why do I keep insisting on writing slice of life, why do I do this to myself, I know I'm not good at it) and the FR rewrite... may or may not happen but I don't think I'm in the mood for that right now.

I'm leaning towards the cutthroat kitchen one. Despite being a more complex story (yes, there's a story to it) with a larger cast I have a clearer idea for how it'll go down.

Comments

Re: (Lmao, god. A whole second essay)

[yvannairie]

Honestly the fact that the game just forgets about Isurd is kind of the most egregious part of the general sloppiness of the ending. They literally give us a character who is singled out as the finest strategist of a generation and the gang doesn't even think to fucking consult him on the whole "storming the stronghold of the final enemy." I definitely think him and Bolearis at the minimum should have been more involved with the ending, especially with how Colony 30 can be set to assist either of them, since Valdi is already working with both of them if you do the sidequests.

My ideal would be that all the Heroes you've done the Ascension quests for before completing the Origin metal scavenger hunt get to sit in on that meeting where Monica, Bolearis and Isurd hash out the plan of attack -- maybe something like the City acting as a spearhead, with ground forces (led by Bolearis and Colony 4) tying up any enemies Mobius send out after artillery (led by Isurd and Colony Lambda) knock them out of the sky. Ideally, all the heroes would be there, but if that's too ambitious, let's narrow it down to Zeon and Juniper (if you've finished "Crusading for Taters") and Teach and Ashera (if you've finished "Festival of War"), to signify that the back-of-the-line support and the front-line operations of the kingdoms have effectively been unified for this one big operation. It doesn't even have to change anything about the ending, I don't mean this to be like Galactic Readiness in ME3 because that's not the point of the Aionios Colony Mutual Aid Network, it would just be a nice symbolic addition.

... I, uh. I may have thought about this quite a lot. Can you tell I've thought about this quite a lot? |'DDD The ending we got just feels like the ending we would have got if we did none of the coalition-building mutual aid stuff, and I can't help imagining what it would be like if the Heroes were allowed to band together the way the main six did, getting over their mutual apprehension to see the humanity of their former enemies.

Also, I think you're right that nobody really gets favoured by the ending, and Noah being suddenly so strongly in the focus doesn't really make his arc... any more satisfying or coherent. For example, I think Crys is one of the most mishandled elements of his story, something that could have potentially been plot-defining for Noah, but it's kind of just dealt with as a consequence of getting to deal with the Keves Castle still not being freed, and needing to get that out of the way so the heroes don't have to fight a two-front war. Mio's new powers never being showcased in any way has the same effect (I still firmly believe that the plan was at some point to make Noah capable of breaking Flame Clocks, and Mio capable of freeing people from the term system). There feels like there's just content missing, and we're getting a weird truncated summary of "all the things that went on" while they were doing the preparations for the final attack, rather than seeing the preparations themselves.

The Moebius themselves seemingly not feeling threatened at all and not feeling any motivation to defend themselves also speaks to this, you're dead-on about that. Like, I straight-up don't know what to make of the fact that some Moebius are significantly older than others, clearly, is the idea there that they're Citizens like Shania? Do Moebius age? Why is the triumvirate of X, Y and Z so completely disinterested in the people they have managing the war for them suddenly dropping off? It's... not well-written, it just drops a lot of elements that are introduced early on in a way that speaks to them getting a mandate to wrap that shit up, either because they didn't want to make any more map to explore or because they didn't want there to be any significant plot points that required backtracking, maybe to commit more of the unique locations in the game for sidequests.

Re: (Lmao, god. A whole second essay)

[ebonwinged_nova]

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.)

Re: (Lmao, god. A whole second essay)

[yvannairie]

(lmao. I decided to deal with the mental dissonance byelecting to think that if they're not required for a mission, they weren't there. IIRC I also had him along for the batshit chain attack skill he has, but the plot would simply be too much of a mess if any of the heroes besides Riku and Manana went missing for an entire month like that)

You might be right about the plot losing in a sense of urgency if the term limit was removed, but a) that could have been easily addressed by making X and Y way more active, and starting an all-out war with the Moebius firing off Annihilators and accelerating the production of soldiers a la Miyabi, Cammuravi, in an attempt to reset the playing field b/c if they just kill everyone sufficiently uppity,things will calm back down and b) I... Already kinda felt like the tension regarding the term limit ran out after chapter six >>); Even if we assume Mio was _the oldest amongst all the characters, by the time the eclipse was over, a bunch of them were also tent-term and would have logically been a few weeks at most away from Homecoming.

Honestly, what I really would have wanted was a Xeno 1 style hard line of no return that completely locks you out of doing the Affinity quests for Heroes who died during the time the gang was in prison, like how you could miss out on a bunch of quests in Alcamoth b/c the quest givers get Telethia'd, with a secondary way (perhaps Z's lab in Camp Omega) to raise the level cap for their classes?

Would it be sadistic? Yes. Am I probably gonna incorporate it into a fic for funsies regardless? hehehehehehe

Re: (Lmao, god. A whole second essay)

[ebonwinged_nova]

Hmm, I think we may just have to agree to disagree on the term limit removal idea. XD Personally I don't think X and Y getting involved would provide enough tension to replace it, but YMMV.

As iffy as time limited quests can be in video games, for fic material that's a goldmine ahahaha.