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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:
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.
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.
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Date: 2023-07-15 08:27 pm (UTC)From:God I gave the main game so much grace, thinking that the DLC would to the Torna thing and really build up the tension of the past that our heroes end up having to struggle against and INSTEAD IT JUST DID THE SAME THING AS THE MAIN GAME'S ENDING, BUT WORSE!!!!
AAAAAAAAAAAAUuugh *sigh* every time I think about it, I get so annoyed.
Anyway. TBH, Xeno 3 but the capricious god dresses up his plan for the emotional heat death of the universe in the colours of a comedy shonen does actually sound like a banger. I think that would deal with a lot of the incoherence of the stakes a lot better, the overwhelmingly serious framing of the rules of the world ends up distracting from the story they were apparently trying to tell. If there was no war, at least then I wouldn't be hung up on how the war is just fucking forgotten about by the writers.
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Date: 2023-07-15 08:39 pm (UTC)From:I was hoping the founders dlc would build up on the past in that way exactly until they showed us that Shulk and Rex would be playable, after that I predicted correctly all the ways in which the DLC would fall short for me lol. I wish we'd gotten another Torna level DLC, man.
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Date: 2023-07-15 08:44 pm (UTC)From:Thing is, I also fucking hated the plot of Torna, but at least it was well-established in the lore of the world and also slotted in nicely as a play-between for chapters 6 and 7. It did my favourite characters no favours, but I can accept being Jossed in my interpretation. At least it was coherent.
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Date: 2023-07-15 08:47 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2023-07-15 08:59 pm (UTC)From:In Xenoblade 2 or Xenoblade 3? :'DDD
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Date: 2023-07-15 09:10 pm (UTC)From:I'm just happy to have someone to talk to about xenoblade, almost none of my friends have played it lol(This is gonna be a wholeass essay lmao)
Date: 2023-07-15 09:58 pm (UTC)From:I'll guess I'll do all of them, on the obligation that you tell me yours also :'DD but man, I'm gonna try to get the absolutely most depressing "look at how they massacred my boy" out of the way first, and get to the ones I think were done good and need less rewriting.
The absolute pits of it -- my favourite characters in Xenoblade 2 were Mytra and Malos TvT) Malos, at least, honestly just suffered from being the Designated Villain, but to this day I think it's fucking stupid that Rex' powers of friendship didn't work on him, and that Aeon was supposed to be Pyra's and Mythra's Artifice entirely when it's so clearly coded to be Pneuma's and Logos' Artifice, being white and green and black and magenta, to be used jointly by the two Aegises rendering judgement on the world. His death is to this day the writing decision I think was most stupid, and the way both Torna and even Future Redeemed went on to spit on him really just shows to me that Monosoft never saw him as the same character he reads to me like. I love how impulsive, emotional and distraught he is, I love the mask of arrogance and obsession with power born of him getting the worst deal of all time in a Driver, and if the story just gave him more grace about it he'd be one of my favourite characters of all time. And the worst part is that literally all that needs changing about Xenoblade 2's ending is just... not killing him, and then letting the consequences of that roll through the ending. It even fixes the problem of
Pyra and MythraPneuma popping back into existence -- Logos deciding he doesn't want his beloved sister to suffer the consequences of his foolishness, and sacrificing himself like the thematic Jesus he is.Speaking of Mythra!! God she got fucked over by how Monosoft thinks it's evil for women to be choleric and un-wifely. The biggest reason I resent Torna is that the plot is obsessed with punishing Mythra for being obsessed with victory and strength because those are the traits she inherited from Addam and he's too much of a chickenshit loser to embrace his own hunger for power. It fucking sucks. It sucks that Mythra is not allowed to exist as a no-nonsense all-business warrior who both delights in her strenght and fears the consequences of existing as a weapon. I also famously hate the choice to separate Pyra and Mythra out into individuals in the ending, but I think Mythra is done worse by it -- the whole point of Pyra is that she's all the tenderness and care Mythra couldn't bring herself to show to the world because she needed to be a weapon, and that the two of them uniting into their true self is a satisfying narrative arc both for Pyra, who was always deeply uncomfortable with her powers, and Mythra, who didn't want to exist as a person because it conflicted with her duties. She was loved whole by Rex. That was the entire point, and somehow Monosoft missed the point of the character arc they wrote
AAaaaaaaaaugh.
Anyway! Onto less disappointing things! Eunie and Taion are my favourite Ouroboros, and I think they're also straight-up the best-written characters in the game -- largely because they get least screwed by the second half of the story. Taion is only slightly less screwed than Sena in the sidestory department, but that doesn't take away from the fact that his interactions with the rest of the team are some of the strongest ones. I also just... fucking love people where the relationship status is effectively "dying by the bit". I love them and need them to kiss forever. I want nothing as much as them to have the chance to bicker with their soulmate until the end of time. Words cannot describe how much my ideal Xenoblade 3 fic is just the two of them arguing for the sake of arguing while holding hands about it.
HOWEVER! My favourite character in Xenoblade 3 by a comically large margin is Isurd. Truly, I cannot describe how much of my fannish headspace is just me obsessing over this One Guy, and it's entirely because they sneak some of the most Batshit Implications for the war part of this war story into his backstory and what little plot content we get for him outside of the mandatory main story stuff. And I love the main plot stuff, don't get me wrong -- the game's existence is justified to me entirely for that moment after the Lambda battle where Taion lies to Isurd's face about what happened and he just looks at Taion like ":/", clearly immediately clocking that it's bullshit. But, like, I am obsessed entirely because the more I thought about him, the more I realised that his affinity quest is literally the most normal he ever acts about anything, and he is delightfully weird in that one, also. He is the most understatedly strange person in the whole cast, and I have and I will write whole entire essays on just him.
For Xenoblade 1, I do still feel very fondly for Alvis, although that is also now caveated by all of FR being the way that it is -- but my true fave will probably forever be Reyn. He is the quintessential Warlike Puppydog, every other warlike puppydog I like is forever living up to him. And, like, everything I like about Reyn, they did more and better with Frye in Xenoblade X, so while playing that game I was like welp, lmao. Frye Christoph is the reason I joke about Xenoblade giving me a thing for blondes, I have never been so fucking socked in the jaw by the realisation that I have a type :'D
Re: (This is gonna be a wholeass essay lmao)
Date: 2023-07-16 12:03 am (UTC)From:(Malos is also my xb2 favourite along with Akhos, whose terrible little shit-ness I enjoy way too much and who also got shafted by the narrative.)
(Honestly, basegame muffling around as to what Torna the org actually wants as whole kind of shafts them all a bit, in my opinion...)
In XB3 my favourite is by faa a aaaaaaar N, followed pretty closely by Noah. Eunie is my second favourite party member, although I really like all six of them... The game still isn't perfect about it, but in my opinion it's definitely the best written party out of all three games.
Isurd IS delightfully weird, aha. I like him a lot.
(It might interest you that he stars in the languagefic, along with protagonist Taion! Whenever I get around to actually writing that.)
In XB1, Melia was weakly my favourite and after XB3 she's now strongly my favourite, ha.
I don't think I have any xbx favourites... The writing in X generally didn't make a big impression on me, but maybe I can say Mira as a whole is my favourite character, because I sure loved exploring every inch of it. XD
Re: (This is gonna be a wholeass essay lmao)
Date: 2023-07-16 12:10 pm (UTC)From:Yeah, like, the worst I can say about Malos in Torna is that he's just a flat villain with zero fresh development. Which. Fine, it's better than making him actively worse I guess >_>) I do feel you, I thought Torna org had a lot of potential and I really liked the potential dimension of all of them being so emotionally damaged that they couldn't even bring themselves to embrace being a weird misshapen family unit (especially not with "affection is poison" Malos at the helm, despite him being the one who fucking collected them like orphaned kittens), but writing them as flawed but sympathetic would have required the plot be willing to let things be Rex' fault, sometimes. I thought Akhos and Patroka had potential, and I really wanted more development of their apparently fraught relationship with Nia, but alas.
I'd honestly be curious to hear about why you liked N so much. I can't make up my mind about him, but I haven't really heard a lot of people saying positive things about him, y'know? I'll also say I was already interested in languagefic b/c I love Tower of Babel set-ups and I rarely see them done in fanfic -- a lot of fannish content with Isurd doesn't really live up to my
admittedly. quite highstandards, he tends to be written a little too comedic for my preferences, b/c the thing I like about him the best is that it's very hard to tell if he's sincerely weird or if he's bullshitting people for the strategic advantage. I like it when his intentions are... ambiguous c:Re: (This is gonna be a wholeass essay lmao)
Date: 2023-07-16 03:27 pm (UTC)From:I was hugely bummed out by that because the game never really shows blades as existing as people independent of their drivers outside of Torna. Even with Vess, when they're not fighters, she still exists in conjunction with her driver. And I don't think this was the implication they intended, but it did leave me wondering: are blades socially allowed to do their own thing? The game never really gets too into theology but there was some blabla about the architect sending blades to serve humankind or something, wasn't there? So slotting a storyline about the pressure on blades to Behave As Blades, in other words work with whatever their driver does, would have worked really well to flesh out Torna and give them an actually coherent goal as a group.
(Malos says they all wanted oblivion but that's clearly just him projecting, it makes no sense otherwise lol)
With regards to Akhos, Patroka and Nia, I just think the game should have given us more on the status of flesh eaters in the world. I got the impression people see them as a bad thing, but it's all so frustratingly vague and all three of them suffer for it as characters.
As for N... WHERE DO I EVEN START, lol. The simple and easy answer is that my favourite character type is best summed up as "mental health issues", which, I mean. just look at him. Do I need to say anything further. But that's also the lazy answer, because if it was just that I don't think I'd be quite as obsessed with him as I am. Where it really comes from is the interplay of N and Noah, two characters who seem to be entirely different on a surface level; I mean, one is a cruel and callous maniac, the other a kind and compassionate heroic figure etc. etc. BUT when you dig a little bit deeper there's a wealth of characteristics they share, they just express them in entirely different ways. More to the point, the traits that led to N becoming Moebius are exactly the same traits that enabled Noah to take the final step and end Aionios. They both mirror and contrast each other in that way, and Noah getting N to move forwards again not (just) with the usual defeat means friendship but by accepting that he's capable of doing the same in the wrong circumstances and meeting N with compassion is, on a meta level, a potent statement on acknowledging your own flaws and still working to better yourself.
And I fucking love that. I eat that shit up like it's candy. I'm obsessed with them a normal amount.
*clears throat*
I may ask to pick your brain about Isurd at some point, if you're amenable! I don't think I have a firm grasp on writing him just yet.
Re: (This is gonna be a wholeass essay lmao)
Date: 2023-07-16 03:37 pm (UTC)From:Lmaoooo considering I've been working on a fic focused on him for almost ten months now it's safe to say I also don't have a firm grasp on how to write him, but I'm game :D I do love talking about my faves, and I have some bullshit up on Tumblr where I'm just holding my brain upside down and shaking it to get the feelings out. Who doesn't love a chance to Provide Propaganda, y'know?
Also, yeah man, the parallels between Noah and N, the way you can see all of Noah's traits in N once you start looking at his actual decision-making, was one of my favourite parts of how both of them were written. N has clearly gone through one of the worst cases of empathy burnout, it's so interesting to see the compassion and sensitivity to other people's feelings that make Noah such a good leader and strong ally turned on their head in the form of N who just... doesn't have the strength to care anymore, who's letting himself get eated up from the inside because he just wants things to stop happening so much. I definitely felt FR went overboard with his arrogant posturing, it felt really strange suddenly not being able to see the echo of Noah in him, and see him act all callous and self-assured was genuinely pretty strange. Like, say what you want about N/Noah but he's not a tsundere "it's not like I care or anything" type. In fact, he's the opposite. He is horribly capable of killing himself and everyone around him by caring.
Noah was just, like, a really really strong character that I felt was let down by the fact that he got elevated into Special Boy status, which diminished the necessity of him having a strong support network of people in the form of the rest of the ensemble to keep him on-rails and on-task, y'know?
Re: (This is gonna be a wholeass essay lmao)
Date: 2023-07-16 08:12 pm (UTC)From:Oh YES N was absolutely pushed past his breaking point by his own compassion. "just wants things to stop happening so much" is an EXCELLENT way of putting it. Looking back, in that one flashback where child Noah reveals he could actually summon his blade, he says he's scared of what this war will do them and ohhhhh, ohhhhh, this is what it does. It's such good foreshadowing because at first it's just something reasonable he might say, but in hindsight it makes you go OOOOOOOOOOO that's what that meant!! hahaha.
My personal take on his personality shift is that he puts on a persona the moment Z asks him to kill the city people—pretending to be someone who can do that without shattering. It also explains why he talks normally before becoming Moebius and then starts being pompous after (it's also why any modern AU ideas I have with him in it inevitably end with him as an actor lol).
Hmm, personally I didn't have the feeling that he got elevated to Special Boy? I thought the ending sequence made pretty clear that he only got this far because of all the support he had.
Re: (This is gonna be a wholeass essay lmao)
Date: 2023-07-16 08:36 pm (UTC)From:Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't mean... like, he's not like Rex, who becomes an absolute black hole of narrative agency, both doing nothing and causing everything to happen -- I think both Noah and Mio are given decent amount of narrative agency during Chapter 6 and 7, but the way Noah and Mio are suddenly the only characters whose presence truly matters to the plot in such an ensemble-driven game really left a sour taste in my mouth =__=)
I didn't mean it in a "disliking Noah" sense, I meant it in a "disliking how everyone else got shelved in favour of Noah", because no matter how interesting the ending would have been, it was let down by the characters I cared the most about having almost entirely passive roles. Eunie and Taion don't even get it the worst, tbh -- in fact, I think Sena is probably the worst done by how her presence literally stops mattering the moment she and Lanz try to sacrifice themselves to save everyone from N. If they had died there, it would change nothing about the ending, and that's pretty criminal in a game that is trying to be an ensemble piece.
Both Xeno 2 and 3 having literally nothing for the extended cast to do by the end, compared to Xenoblade 1 where Shulk's lack of specialness was critical to the finale working out the way it did, is honestly just a sign of market-research led writing. I'm sure the first drafts of both these stories came back with "no, no! The hero needs to be More Heroic!" or something, because something something it's not a power fantasy if our hero is hindered by anything in his way. My name for the tendency for the protagonist to eventually dominate an ensemble Special Boy syndrome even outside of Xenoblade. I didn't mean to imply it hurts Noah's character as much as everyone else's character is hurt at the expense of him (and Mio, to a lesser degree, although Noah being the Monado Wielder of this game does ultimately make him the most narratively important character for the ending)
I do like that interpretation of N. Our Noah is so painfully earnest and bad at lying, it's funny to imagine that he suddenly gets much better at literally performing the role required of him once he's out of Morality Juice to tell him it's bad to deceive people XD
Re: (This is gonna be a wholeass essay lmao)
Date: 2023-07-16 08:49 pm (UTC)From:(Maybe combined with giving X and Y more Things because you can not tell me that was what they originally planned to do with them in the end lol)
> Rex, who becomes an absolute black hole of narrative agency, both doing nothing and causing everything to happen
Epic description, lmao. Somehow he really does nothing while still making the whole plot revolve around himself.
Don't get me started on this though or I'll unpack the "Nia should have been the protagonist and aegis driver" agendaThe funny thing is I think N also kind of sucks at it? XD He definitely sells it but also it's... super, super easy to tell that he's just broken rather than actually 100% believing in it even without Riku spelling it out with his "eyes of N were sad" or whatever the actual phrasing is. Although that's also just having the meta knowledge that he's a video game character, I guess.
On that note, I also love how he just projects all of his own experiences on Noah in that jail scene. "That is the hubris of fools who cling blindly to their hopes" and he really just talks about himself, ahah. It's great.
(Lmao, god. A whole second essay)
Date: 2023-07-17 06:18 am (UTC)From:Yeah, like, Lanz' and Sena's lack of a presence in the plot has less to do with them not physically being there or not having lines -- it's about the way neither of them, I feel, gets a truly satisfying character arc for themselves. This is especially egregious for Sena, who gets basically no development in the main plot, and her attempt to sacrifice herself (which is entirely consistent with her flaws! Don't get me wrong, it was definitely a choice both she and Lanz would make in that situation) is dealt with by Mio going "don't ever do that again!!!". It just felt like the writers got bored with having such a big main cast. Taion and Eunie are less worse off because their arcs individually are quite strong, but they're out of the way early and are more solidly written to be supporting cast.
I have lots of bad things to say about Xenoblade 2, but I found the finale of Indol going to war with everyone a very satisfying raising-of-stakes. Xenoblade 3 was kind of the opposite. After the castles are liberated, the kingdoms stop mattering to the plot. Many mandatory characters, like Valdi, Juniper and Isurd, are literally never mentioned again. They do a really good job developing the main six' collective motivations, first from survival to learning the truth and finally to stopping Moebius and ending the war, it's just extremely graceless about the way everything else you put investment in in the game is completely irrelevant to the ending, which is all about the Lost Numbers, N and M, and Origin. The people of the kingdoms feel weirdly disposable to the plot after entering the City the first time, which stands out when the majority of the sidequest content is so focused on building a mutual aid network and liberating the colonies from the Moebius. A lot of the actual things we do in the game end up feeling incredibly incidental to the plot. The stuff about N and M comes in at the very end of the plot and completely dominates it from that point on, and once they're dealt with, the plot is over.
IDK. I feel like Xenoblade 3 could have used at least two more chapters of main plot that are focused on getting everyone the gang frees ready to help them fight Moebius together, since "learning to work together" is the majority of what actually happens in the game. The ending essentially rendering everything that happens in the game null and void doesn't bother me, but it does bother me that it leaves so many threads hanging, and considers the resolution of Noah's and N's character arcs a suitable culmination for a plot that isn't about any one individual, it's about the collective effort to move forward unto the unknown future even when it scares you. Chapter 6 felt like the midpoint of the journey, narratively, the way the battle at the end of chapter 5 was written was clearly meant to demonstrate our heroes were nowhere near capable of taking Z on yet... and then they solve it essentially by going "no, they were, Noah just didn't have his shit together sufficiently", which was really unsatisfying when the story had been about so much more than just Noah. By the time we got Mio back, with her sudden insight into the way Moebius operate, her new powers, I really thought we were gonna go back and finally free everyone from the term system, and build an army large enough to topple Z's castle in the sky and take back fate for ourselves.
And I admit that's getting into the "how I would fix XC3 narratively", but Noah beating N solves less problems than the game seems to think. Even if we ignore FR and assume that N was the first Consul, the only thing that is really special about him compared to other consuls is that he has the Sword of Origin like Noah. The free colonies are still not capable of fighting Moebius on their own, and everything that has been built up with them, every attempt the people of the kingdoms make towards bettering their own situation and getting out of a survival mindset is rendered irrelevant. It's almost like saving anyone doesn't matter, Z never feels threatened by any of the effort the gang puts in and does nothing to reassert control. We could have just as well left all the Kevesi and Agnians to kill each other to death, for all it mattered, which is a very grim conclusion when "I'm tired of other people's suffering" is what breaks Noah out of the false dichotomy of the kingdoms in the first place.
Re: (Lmao, god. A whole second essay)
Date: 2023-07-17 07:40 am (UTC)From:That being said, I don't think Noah and Mio are immune to this problem, because we don't get to see them process what this all means for them either! I think this is why it never came across to me as "the game priviledges these characters more than it should" and more as "this part of the game is unfortunately sloppy in many different ways". Do agree that defeating N to doesn't demonstrate that they're now capable of fighting the colonies, but I don't know if that was the intention? I guess it might be, what do I know, but it felt more like the culmination of Noah's personal arc, and the "let's build what we need to take Z down once and for all" is just absent. XD
But I think we are in broad agreement of the actual flaws of that part of the game, we just have slightly different views on it. Unfortunately, this has now led to me wanting to rewrite the post-eclipse part of the game, as if I don't have enough writing projects lined up. |D
Hmmn, in terms of which colonies should get the focus... It'd have to be ones with a commander you're forced to recruit throughout the story. The obvious choice on the Kevesi side is Colony 4 because it's already so prominent, but Ethel's situation makes that a little bit complicated, maybe? I'm not sure if she'd be better off having her post-resurrection stuff in the main story or not. Or I guess take Bolearis as a stand-in for her... Valdi doesn't do much in the actual main story after teaching you how to climb, but he's a fun character so I wouldn't mind taking him.
On the Agnus side, I think Isurd would be the best choice, personally. Juniper is also main story, but more nominally than anything. Isurd definitely has the stronger presence, I feel. Cammuravi post-colony omega is an option, but given that he's all about big epic solo duels in his approach I don't know that he'd be a good choice for a story arc about coalition building and mutual support. XD Plus, I don't think his colony is actually still around anymore, or if it is I'd have to make it up wholesale and that doesn't seem worth the effort.
Re: (Lmao, god. A whole second essay)
Date: 2023-07-17 08:23 am (UTC)From: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)
Date: 2023-07-17 09:15 am (UTC)From: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)
Date: 2023-07-17 04:40 pm (UTC)From:(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)
Date: 2023-07-18 09:39 am (UTC)From:As iffy as time limited quests can be in video games, for fic material that's a goldmine ahahaha.
Re: (This is gonna be a wholeass essay lmao)
Date: 2023-07-16 04:08 pm (UTC)From:Also, I wanted to split talking about Torna Org and Blade's rights to a different comment because oh boy I have a lot of feelings about Blade Personhood and I think Xenoblade 3 making all Agnians part Blade was... well, on the one hand it was pretty much the only way to deal with how the lore around Blades was set up, and I'm glad they didn't just completely abandon the streak of considering Blade personhood a thing, but at the same time... in the lore... Blades are literally self-aware computer programs, and I don't think Monosoft realised that they wrote a story about AI rights, because Blades are also supposed to be an angel allegory, making flesh eaters a fallen angel allegory.
Like... going full geth and granting every Blade a full ability to self-determine? Probably the best way to address the fact that even in-game it's not clear whether or not and to what degree any individual Blade is capable of self-determination. The fact that their personalities do not stay consistent between when various Drivers use them points to Blades like Jin, Brighid, Pandoria and the Torna flesh eaters who are fully self-aware being in the minority, especially since we don't know if forcing a Blade to become a flesh eater forcibly causes them to become self-aware, also. It makes sense for older, more unique Blades, to have developed stronger personalities, but how that relates to them developing self-awareness rather than following their programming to gather, refine and reproduce data is very unclear, and further obscured by the Blades most fervently discussing their right to self-determine being, like... the elite of the elite.
It's just all really messy, the most charitable interpretation is that since every Blade has the potential to grow into a Jin or a Nia, they all should be granted the individual rights to foster the ability to grow. This would also be consistent with the themes of... I guess mentorship? I don't want to say parenthood because I don't think the majority of Blade-Driver relationship make sense interpreted through that lens, but the implication clearly is that Blades grow into the versions of themselves through continued influence from their Drivers over the various, and by extension not all Blades are or want to exist independent of Drivers. Because, y'know. They're angels. They're servants of God meant to guide and assist humanity and also be the armies that God does battle with.
All in all I want to say I also think Torna Org was wasted, everything around them was incoherent, their plans seemed to pivot on a whim and they also seemed to have no respect for the personhood of their fellow Blades... while at the same time making perfect sense in their initial professed goals which weren't followed up on because Monosoft couldn't stand our heroes actually being wrong about anything ever >_>)
Re: (This is gonna be a wholeass essay lmao)
Date: 2023-07-16 08:58 pm (UTC)From:Honestly I think a subplot like that was what the game earnestly needed. It gives a much needed character arc to Rex; hook into Vandham owning him in Uraya because he was reckless with Pyra's power and the whole "you gotta learn to be a responsible driver" and make him ACTUALLY learn something by digging into the way society expects blades to be, including Pyra even though she's definitely one of the self aware ones. It gives a coherent goal to Torna. It fleshes out what Amalthus was doing; I interpreted his cleansing thing as being the cause for "generic" blades and preventing them from developing into unique selves, which slots nicely into this. It lets you dig deeper into the nature of blades being influenced by their drivers, something that comes up and then never gets resolved or addressed arrrrghh why is this game like this it's so frustrating.
(I like xenoblade 2, I should say... I just wish it was BETTER. XD)