RPG Talk: Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse

In which I talk (write) about RPGs from a storytelling perspective...

Platform: 3DS
Release: 2016

I wanted to play Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse on release day (or very close to it) back in September 2016, but there was a slight complication in that Ace Attorney: Spirit of Justice had come out out two weeks before and well, we know who won that battle, since my blog post for Spirit of Justice went up in Feb 2017. Since then, it remained in my backlog, occasionally resurfacing as something I should get back to, but not to the point where I was ready to commit to it, until this past fall when I wanted a shorter RPG and foolishly thought that SMTIV:A was going to be a medium length game.

It might be for some people. But I am a micromanager/compulsive demon collector, so folks, this was not a medium length game for me. It wasn't as bad as Persona 5 or Persona Q2, which I've previously complained about, but it was definitely in the "long" category.

Still, I was glad I finally got to it, because it's really different from the more abstract themes of the mainline games, and yet (or perhaps because of it), it really gets into the weeds on how this whole gods and demons and humanity interaction works. Why do gods want human worshipers? How do humans in turn affect the gods around them? I didn't expect this, especially given that its predecessor, the Shin Megami Tensei IV without a subtitle, focused primarily on the angels versus Lucifer conflict.

Seeing the local Japanese deities angered and dismayed by the interloping foreigners make it clear how absurd it is that the angels and Lucifer are battling for control over humanity in the remains of a country that was never Christian to begin with.

RPG Talk: The Caligula Effect: Overdose

In which I talk (write) about RPGs from a storytelling perspective...

Platform: PS4 (also on Switch and Windows)
Release: 2019

I was interested in the original The Caligula Effect from the day I first heard about it, when it was still a Japan-only title that might never be localized. I liked the idea of characters trying to escape a virtual world that they originally arrived at in order to avoid the pain and trauma in their real lives. And the game had a pedigree, having been written by one of the original Persona writers, from before Persona 3.

However, Caligula Effect was plagued with gameplay and loading issues so I ultimately decided to pass on it.

Then The Caligula Effect: Overdose was announced with additional content, a new game engine to go with the new consoles it would be releasing on, and perhaps the best form of advertising; an anime series. I ended up reviewing the anime at Diabolical Plots and while it was flawed, I really liked the core of it. So when Overdose released, I bought it.

Though the loading issues are gone, The Caligula Effect: Overdose is still a flawed game with a flawed story that I think otherwise had so much potential.

What I liked about the game is that it pulls from a wide range of reasons that a person in pain might withdraw from the world. Every playable character suffers from a personal trauma. Some of the traumas are definitely in the vein of "Yes, that's a problem!" and it's easy to see why someone suffering from bereavement or body dysmorphia could find solace in another reality. But even the more "mundane" issues can still mean a lot to the right person, and I'll get to specifics after I lay out how the story is arranged.

Much like the Persona series, Caligula has your band of high schoolers with issues who come together for a purpose. Only they're not actually high schoolers. The only people in the virtual world of Mobius who are "real" appear as high school kids, but could be any range of ages in the real world.

All of them have realized that Mobius is fake and decided that they want to go back to reality. As with Persona 4 and on, the cast delves into one dungeon after another that focuses on individual characters and gradually more people join the party as we run into more dungeons.

The problem with Caligula Effect and particularly with Overdose is that there are too many damn characters! Our heroes are part of the Go-Home Club, and for every one of them, there is a Musician on the antagonist side, who is fighting to preserve Mobius. Each dungeon beyond the first focuses on a duo, one member of the Go-Home Club and one Musician, who are thematically linked in some fashion. For instance, Mifue has body dysmorphia that makes her starve herself, and she shares a focus dungeon with Sweet-P, who likes to eat but hates being fat.

This gives us a cast of twenty humans plus two virtual idols, μ and Aria, who are the ones responsible for creating Mobius in the first place. With few exceptions, when the plot demands it, there is no time in the main game to do more than touch on the problems these characters are facing, leaving their personal stories for the optional Character Scenarios.

Persona does this as well, but it's much better integrated because Caligula does not have an in-game calendar. Instead, new scenarios are unlocked by dungeon progression, and because there are only so many dungeons in the game (even with the four new characters original to Overdose) this usually means you'll end up doing scenarios back to back.

You also can only do scenarios after having done their dungeon (with the exception of Shogo and Thorn, being the final duo), so with late game characters, this creates an unfortunate logjam where you'll end up doing six or more scenarios in a row because the game is ending and you literally could not start sooner, but the scenarios themselves treat the story as happening over several days, which is frankly baffling.

And this is too bad, because with room to breathe, these characters really could have been something. This cast is broken and it is absolutely no surprise when their secrets come out why they could have been seduced into leading a virtual life where they don't have the problems they have in the real one; whether it is a lack of self worth, grief, or fear. No problem, whether society would consider it big or small, is beneath μ's desire to help.

Suzuna's trauma is referred to as "lunchmate syndrome" where she ate lunch by herself in the bathroom because she didn't want to be seen as having no friends to eat with. It sounds like a nothing problem, high school angst that she'll eventually get over. But it was traumatic for her and that's enough reason for μ to want to give her a better life in Mobius.

And Sweet-P's trauma, if handled with more time and sensitivity could have been amazing (cw: transphobia).

Unsurprisingly, Sweet-P would like a world where she looks like her ideal self, which is physically a far cry from her real world body (not just in terms of gender), and because of that she's one of the Musicians, the game's antagonists. Her character scenarios focus on her dissatisfaction with her real world life, being in middle age and considering gender reassignment surgery, and what it's like being assigned male but liking stereotypically feminine things (especially as an older person with a masculine appearance). In more capable hands her story really could have been good!

So it's terrible that the Go-Home Club, despite being the heroes, frequently says things like "she's actually a man" and outs her status to other characters who otherwise wouldn't know. Worse, the game pulls stupid crap like having everyone pause before the gendered doors in the sauna dungeon so one of the characters can wonder which door she used. Though only the group's meathead thinks Sweet-P would have gone into the men's sauna, showing that most of the characters are aware she thinks of herself as female, they clearly don't agree with her assessment of herself from their behavior elsewhere.

And then the game does things like walk back whether Sweet-P is actually transgender and maybe she's really just a middle-aged man who likes cute things, which could be fine if not for the fact it feels more like the writer got cold feet. I mean, that earlier scene in the sauna where Sweet-P is approached by Ayana felt like serious transgender fear of being attacked for not having the right body type and not the fear of a man being caught in the wrong bath.

My one consolation is that if the player wants to do her character scenarios, they have to be supportive, as expressing disgust or hate towards her gender results in the player being locked out of her stories. So even if the rest of the party behaves poorly, the player is encouraged not to.

Characters aside, Caligula suffers a lot from the same new enemy, new dungeon scenario that Persona 5 does. The Go-Home Club needs to get to μ to force her to let them go home, and μ is working with the Musicians to keep Mobius running, so each dungeon is basically "Hey, we're chasing down another Musician!" culminating in a fight with said Musician, and after a few dungeons the formula starts to get stale. That Overdose actually adds another two dungeons does not help.

What Overdose does add that kind of works is allowing the player to join the Musicians as a covert operative, unlocking the Musician character scenarios, so the characters are not as flat as they were in the original game, and allowing the player character to unlock another ending.

This addition is not all that clean, and in fact results in even more dungeon running as you now revisit dungeons with Musician party members and fight the Go-Home Club, but if you're going to play anyway, it's worth it for the character scenarios. It's not for the added plot.

Ostensibly Thorn is trying to convince the player as the Go-Home Club president to side with the Musicians by seeing the story from their side, but ultimately she ends up brainwashing most of the Musicians to force them to continue fighting for Mobius, and she doesn't do this with the player protagonist. Obviously this is because removing player control would be bad, but this could have been handled with an ultimatum where the player stays or leaves when faced with the brainwashing, so at least Thorn would know that an unbrainwashed player agreed with her. It doesn't seem right that she would have let the player do as they please as a loose cannon.

Thorn as the lead villain is all right. Her ultimate goal is completely insane, destroying the world because her deceased friend no longer exists in it, but that's fine given that this is the game for characters with issues. What I disliked about her was actually added in the Overdose route.

The whole reason the Musicians are fighting the Go-Home club instead of kicking out the people who want to go home anyway, is that denying Mobius's reality as authentic actually causes Mobius to become unstable. The Musicians are trying to preserve the status quo, and for many of them, going back to the real world would be unbearable. Even for someone as unpleasant as Mirei, staying in Mobius means spending time with a loved one who is dying and otherwise confined to a bed. For Kuchinashi, it means living with the family she lost to an arson fire.

But in the Musician route, Thorn oddly threatens the Musicians with sending them back home to keep them in line, which completely contradicts why the Go-Home Club is a problem to begin with. There's no reason to keep this a secret as sending them home would solve everyone's problems and be a win-win for all around. Even if Thorn was keeping this secret on purpose to keep Shogo around for torment, the other Musicians should have said something.

Sadly, this feels par for the course for this game. It's got a lot of interesting ideas, fits and starts of something cool, but it just can't pull it together into the exceptional experience it could have been. I liked the bits I found, and seriously, if the character traumas had been given the proper room to breathe this could have been a highly memorable cast, but this is a case of where the parts are better than the whole.

RPG Talk: Fire Emblem: Three Houses - Blue Lions

In which I talk (write) about RPGs from a storytelling perspective...

Platform: Switch
Release: 2019

Fire Emblem: Three Houses is an ambitious game with three different routes through the first half of the game and four different endings. Honestly, though I'd like to see all of them, a single playthrough is already a very long game, so I don't know that I'll get to all the rest, though at minimum I hope to eventually finish a second route. (Thankfully there is a New Game+ option so a second go-around might not be as time consuming.)

I'm also glad that I finished this before my surgery (and wrote most of this before my surgery) as I'm not sure I would be able to play this in my current state as anything more than a visual novel involves a painful amount of button pressing.

This particular RPG Talk entry will cover both my overall impressions and the Blue Lions route of the game. If I get around to the other routes, they'll have their own entries.

The start of the game introduces the protagonist, Byleth (who can be renamed), and the military academy at the monastery of Garreg Mach. The academy is situated in the middle of the continent of Fódlan, between three nations, who send their best and brightest to be educated there. As it happens, the heirs of the three nations are all in attendance this year and thanks to saving them from some bandits, Byleth and her father are pressed into working for the monastery. Her father, Jeralt, resumes an old position of his as captain of the knights there, and Byleth becomes a teacher.

I'm using female pronouns for Byleth because that's what I used in my playthrough, but the player can choose their gender appearance at the start of the game, and there's a decent case for Byleth being non-binary.

As an instructor, Byleth becomes the head of one of the monastery's three houses, corresponding to each of the three nations. She gets a brief introduction to the students in each of them, and after she makes her selection, the game properly begins.

Though the first half of the game features the same basic storyline for all three houses, many of the scenes will vary owing to having a different cast of characters. It's only after a major event and the five year timeskip that each house spirals out into its own storyline, with the Black Eagles route splitting in two for a total of four possible endings.

When I first heard about the game I was initially going to play the Black Eagles route, but after watching the post-timeskip trailer I ended up falling in love with Dimitri, who I barely recognized from pre-timeskip media. I actually thought he was a major villain at first glance. What could turn such a clean cut teenager into this vengeful man with shaggy hair and an eyepatch yelling to kill them all? There was a story there, and I wanted to see it. So I selected the Blue Lions.

The first half of the game is mostly setup while establishing the weekly routine of life at the monastery, and there is a cadence where each month ends with a battle. Sometimes the battle is narratively something our characters expect well in advance. Other times it's more of a surprise (though to the player it is not since the event is marked on the calendar even though they don't know exactly how it's going to come about).

Things can happen in the middle of the month, but the bulk of the main plot is rendered in the first and last weeks of each month (either setting up or dealing with the result of the month's battle) with the middle likely to be peppered with side quests and optional character development conversations as the students bond with the monastery faculty and each other.

The Blue Lions route focuses mostly on Dimitri, though occasionally other Blue Lion characters will have critical parts to play. As prince of the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus, it's unsurprising that Dimitri's story would take center stage in a game about conflict between the three nations. Whichever house the player chooses to teach is the one Byleth will side with after the timeskip, so playing Blue Lions is really the only way to get Dimitri's story. In contrast, most other students can be recruited into other houses on other playthroughs, allowing their personal side quests to be fulfilled no matter who Byleth sides with.

Dimitri himself starts off as a rather bland character in the fashion of an honorable knight. He's well spoken, kind, and interested in emulating his noble father. But he's had a bad lot for a prince, having both his parents and a good number of his friends violently slain in an event later known as the Tragedy of Duscar. Dimitri himself was the sole survivor.

As the first half of the game passes, it becomes increasingly obvious that despite the appearance of being well adjusted, Dimitri is refusing to let the scars of the tragedy leave him. It's not just a matter of being haunted by the ghosts of his family. He is looking for revenge, and that was his true purpose in joining the academy in the first place. (Though we never learn why he suspected his parents' killer would be in the monastery.)

Dimitri becomes increasingly violent and bloodthirsty when he sees connections between the Tragedy of Duscar and the monastery's enemies until he finally snaps upon confirming that Edelgard of the Black Eagles is in fact the Flame Emperor, one of the main villains of the first half of the game. Despite their history together (they're actually stepsiblings) and Edelgard's insistence she had nothing to do with his parents' death, Dimitri goes off the deep end, and for a good while afterward, can think of nothing but killing her.

And then things get bad.

Edelgard's forces from the Adrestian Empire attack the monastery. During the fighting, Byleth gets knocked out and spends five years in suspended animation, and when she wakes up, she finds out that the entire continent is at war. Edelgard has taken half of the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus, including the capital, thanks to a turncoat noble who framed Dimitri as killing his uncle, the regent. The Leicester Alliance is also troubled by infighting between those who would cave to the Empire and those who wish to fight. And on top of that, Dimitri escaped his execution and has been running around like a madman killing imperial soldiers left and right for the past five years. He is not particularly sane when Byleth runs into him again. In fact he initially mistakes her for another ghost come to torment him for failing them. And this is not a sign of him cracking. He already cracked. He talks to the dead people he's trying to avenge.

It's interesting being put in a position where the leader of the nation is supposed to be a sympathetic character, but the rest of the cast can't trust him to do the right thing. When everyone else reunites after the five year skip, Dimitri is advised to go back to Faerghus, reclaim the capital, and then go to Enbarr, the imperial capital, to take down Edelgard. His advisors want him to be the leader the rest of his country can rally behind, but Dimitri isn't interested in anything except revenge.

This conversation comes up not once, but twice in different circumstances with different characters raising the question. And despite disagreeing with him, the advisors reluctantly stand down and follow his wishes in solidarity with the prince they are honorbound to serve.

I expected a train wreck of a campaign when I picked Dimitri based off his "Kill every last one of them!" line in the trailer, and seeing his obsessive decision making is very much the ride I signed up for. Dimitri himself implies that he no longer cares about the well being of his companions and sees them as tools to be used in pursuit of his agenda.

It almost makes me wonder why some of the characters are still following him, but the thing is, Faerghus has been invaded, half its land stolen, and Edelgard has made it clear that she intends to conquer the entire continent. The rest of the cast might not be happy with Dimitri (Felix in particular makes this known), but they share a common enemy, and it's true that stopping Edelgard should stop the invasion, so he has just enough going for him that people have reason to put up with him.

Following a madman to the bitter end of his quest for revenge is probably a bit too dark for a Fire Emblem game though, so Dimitri does come to his senses, but I'm not entirely sure I like how it happens. He's shown a flagrant disregard for everyone else's safety, so the fact that his father's friend, Lord Rodrigue, dies saving him from an assassin seems an odd choice to snap him out of it.

I suspect the writers wanted Dimitri to reckon with losing another person dear to him, but while that person could still impart some last words that would let him see reason again. The problem is they didn't set it up well enough where we could see why Dimitri would care now when he didn't earlier, and I didn't like that what was written to be mental illness (the voices Dimitri hears are clearly only in his head) is fixed by Dimitri suddenly realizing what an awful person he's been to the living people still around him. He says later that the voices are still there, it's just he's able to avoid listening to them, but his recovery is so clean that if not for that one line of dialogue I would have considered it an inexplicably complete recovery.

Post-timeskip, post-mentally ill Dimitri fits the end to this particular storyline though. He sounds worn and beaten, but determined to do the right thing. He's like his teenage self, but very heavy into atonement and questioning whether he really ought to be king after everything he's done. I suspect that most of his people probably are fine with it, because Dimitri's murder spree over the years has been exclusively at the expense of the Empire. He might have been a mentally ill disaster, but he was their mentally ill disaster, and sticking it to their invaders.

And it's probably best for Fódlan to have a reluctant leader at the end of the day, considering that the Blue Lions storyline eventually results in all of Fódlan coming under Dimitri's rule. The Alliance falls apart from Edelgard's invasion, and the individual lords agree to pledge allegiance to Dimitri, bringing the Alliance back into Faerghus territory (which it originally split off from). Then the Empire falls when Dimitri's army lays siege to it and faces off with Edelgard.

But while I enjoyed the game, the Blue Lions route did not feel fully fleshed out as a story. I understand why we don't get much of Edelgard's motivations, since that will likely be covered in the two Black Eagles routes, but Dimitri's story should have felt complete.

We learn a lot about him, how he cared for his father and stepmother (his own mother dying before he could remember her), and how the Tragedy of Duscar scarred him, but for a backstory defining event, details of the Tragedy are surprisingly light. We know the Duscar people were blamed and had their lands stolen because of it, but we never learn the details about why the Tragedy happened, either the official reason, or the real one.

It's alluded to that Dimitri's stepmother wanted to go back home to the Empire, which was difficult given that she had been chased out of it, and it comes to light that she probably had a hand in the tragedy, which is why her body was never found. That was a great start in building towards a larger conspiracy, but then we never learn anything more. His stepmother is a name without a face, who has no dialogue, and is tied to the traitorous noble who tried handing Faerghus over to the Empire. Characters bring up the fact that it would be extreme for her to murder her current family to go back to her old one, but we never hear her side of the story nor do we know if she ever made it back to the Empire.

This felt like a severe lack of closure since none of this would have happened if not for the Tragedy, and we never learn why Dimitri ties the tragedy to the identity of the Flame Emperor. Though he and Edelgard arguably end the story with no hard feelings towards each other, it doesn't feel earned, especially when we have no idea what happened to the stepmother who wanted to return to her home country and see her biological daughter again. Dimitri doesn't even ask when he has his one chance to see Edelgard on peaceful terms.

I still enjoyed the game, but it was more while the story was playing out than when it finally came to the end and I realized I wasn't going to get the answers I wanted.

RPG Talk: Valkyria Chronicles

In which I talk (write) about RPGs from a storytelling perspective...

Platform: PS3 (also on PS4, Switch, and Windows)
Release: 2008

Valkyria Chronicles won my second Reader's Pick poll for my Ko-Fi supporters, and it's a game I've been meaning to play for years.

Taking place in a pseudo-WWII setting, Valkyria Chronicles follows the story of Lieutenant Welkin Gunther and his squad's exploits during the Second Europan War as they defend their small nation of Gallia against the invading East Europan Imperial Alliance (hereafter called the Empire).

Though the bulk of the war is actually between the Empire and the Federation, the two superpowers on the Europan continent, Gallia is closer to being Switzerland, being politically neutral and opposed to forming alliances with other countries. Similar to Switzerland, Gallia also requires all citizens to receive military training as part of their education, so when Welkin is conscripted, it's not surprising that he's quickly given a command (being university educated) and thrown on the battlefield. He probably needed a refresher, but not the full boot camp.

Unsurprisingly, the Second Europan War is over resources, specifically the MacGuffin known as ragnite. It fuels everything from tanks to medicine. The Empire wants more and invaded the Federation; and later, to get at even more ragnite, it invaded Gallia. This means that Valkyria Chronicles is centered around just one smaller front in a larger war. In fact, the game itself is presented as a book by the narrator Irene Koller called On the Gallian Front. We really don't know much about what's happening in the larger war, whether things are going well or poorly for either side. But we know how Gallia is faring, and for our characters, who are the ones with boots on the ground, that's all they care about.

Welkin is perhaps an unusual protagonist for a war story. He's introduced as an easy going nature lover and a bit of a doodler. Though he's the son of an important general from the First Europan War, he's not interested in following in his father's footsteps. As a recent university graduate, he wants to become a teacher. The only reason he ends up in armed conflict, even after the Empire drives out the people of his hometown, is because he's conscripted.

It takes a lot for Welkin to get upset. In fact, the only scene in the game where he really gets angry is when he confronts Faldio, his best friend and fellow officer, over whether Faldio intentionally shot Alicia, Welkin's sergeant. Even the death of his sister, Isara, doesn't get as much of a reaction out of him (though narratively I think that's because Isara's death was to focus on Rosie's transformation, which I'll get to in a separate post because addressing the game's handling of the Darcsen is going to take up too much space here).

By making someone like Welkin the protagonist, Valkyria Chronicles is able to insert more humanity into a game about modern warfare. Even though yes, our hero and his squad are killing a lot of people as part of their operations, Welkin never loses sight of what needs to come after; the peace and the rebuilding. He's not out to get anybody.

One of the best scenes that captures a glimpse of humanity in the middle of a warzone is when Welkin and Alicia are separated from their squad and take shelter in an abandoned cabin while evading enemies. A mortally wounded imperial soldier stumbles into their cabin, and instead of finishing him off, they choose to comfort the dying man. When he passes away, they bury him.

That's when they're found by General Gregor and his men, who are looking for their missing soldier. On seeing Welkin and Alicia's treatment of their fallen comrade, Gregor is appreciative of the kindness they gave him and leaves them be rather than taking them prisoner.

And the thing is, prior to this Gregor is presented as the most severe personality out of the three enemy generals. After this, the next time we see him, he's presiding over a concentration camp that is close to working the enslaved Darcsen laborers to death. He dies when we free that camp, but the fact he acknowledged a human kindness with a mercy of his own made him a more complex character that he otherwise looks and I was actually disappointed when he died. His capacity for both empathy and racism made him a surprisingly realistic character and I would have liked the game to run with him longer.

In general though, the imperial generals are fairly interesting characters. I wish I could say the same for Maximilian though. He's one of the princes of the empire, but because his mother is of lower birth he's not the heir, which probably explains why he's off invading a small country like Gallia instead of hitting the Federation.

I wanted to like Maximilian, because the guy wants better than he got (due to his low birth), and he's not afraid of doing his own dirty work. Welkin first faces him just before the halfway point in the game and Maximilian is on the front lines in his own tank. (Granted, it's a super tank, but he's definitely not a pampered snot afraid to risk his own neck.)

But the game squashed my only other reason for liking him, and that has to do with Selvaria. Selvaria is the first powered-up Valkyria to appear in the game. She has the power to wipe out multiple enemy squads single-handedly and not even artillery shells can harm her. Her story is unfortunately common for villainous powered women, in which they use all their power to help a man who rescued them and showed them their worth earlier in their lives. But I thought I could tolerate it because Maximilian genuinely seemed to trust her.

Then, after Alicia awakens as a Valkyria and Selvaria loses, Maximilian suddenly decides he no longer has a use for her and has Selvaria sacrifice herself in a rear guard action. Granted, it was a really effective sacrifice, taking out almost the entire Gallian army, but why he would throw away any further use he could get out of her, especially once his enemies have a Valkyria of their own, doesn't make any strategic sense. While he neutered the Gallian military, in exchange, if things went wrong (and of course they did), he would no longer have Selvaria for backup.

Because Valkyria Chronicles follows Welkin throughout the war, it's perhaps not surprising that the story is less about him than the portion of his life he spends in it. The ending isn't Welkin freeing his hometown (that actually happens just after the halfway point). It's Welkin defeating Maximilian, who he does not have any personal grievance against aside from the fact he's the enemy commander.

The heart, the emotional highs in the build-up to the finale, are the principles on which Welkin decides they will win this war.

He first meets Alicia during a visit to his hometown, just before the invasion, and while they start off on the wrong foot, they quickly come together as a team, which is fortunate because when they're conscripted they're placed in the same squad. Though Alicia is not Welkin's only NCO, she's clearly the one he has the most affinity for.

Considering that she's his direct report, Welkin is generally pretty good about keeping any attraction buttoned down. While it's clear that they become close, given the number of scenes they have featuring just the two of them, none of their early to mid-game scenes are overly romantic, and it's possible to read Welkin as being simply too thick to realize that Alicia might actually like him. (This is a guy who compliments his sergeant's uniform because it reminds him of a rhinoceros beetle.) Neither of them flirt. They mostly just talk.

Though Faldio certainly seems to think Welkin loves Alicia, because he wrote as much in his notes, there's nothing to suggest more than a possible crush for most of the game, which I liked given that they're in the same unit and she's his direct report. It wasn't hard to see the potential, but they kept things professional.

Until they don't, but to be fair, it was a good moment, and if you're going to break decorum that was the time to do it, and this is where the emotional climax comes in.

Alicia, having awakened as a Valkyria, sees that the last ditch attempt to stop the land dreadnought from reaching the capital of Gallia has failed and realizes that there's still one thing left she can do. Like Selvaria did, she could sacrifice her life and essentially nuke the enemy into oblivion.

Alicia didn't appreciate the change in her life or the pressure of having become a Valkyria since it set her apart from the rest of the army and she realized other soldiers had begun worshiping her as their salvation. Blowing herself up would save the day and she wouldn't have to deal with the pain anymore.

Welkin is the one who talks her down and makes her realize that there are still people who look at her as one of their own, and he talks about after the war and wanting to spend the rest of his life with her. He gives her a future to look forward to and assures her that winning the war by using her power isn't the right thing to do. (And it doesn't hurt that he makes a temporary engagement ring for her using the flower she put in his uniform the other day.)

So when he and his squad face Maximilian they do so without Alicia turning into a Valkyria (thus preserving game mechanics) and without escalating things to the point that other powers in the war might consider finding Valkyrur of their own. Shortly thereafter, a ceasefire is called and the war ends between Gallia and the Empire.

Perhaps because the characters are a little older, I also appreciated the epilogue which runs over the fates of all the major characters after the war. Welkin and Alicia do return to their hometown where Welkin becomes a teacher like he wanted and Alicia now owns a bakery. Unusually, the epilogue is also far enough forward that the two of them now have a daughter who's old enough to "help" with the baking herself.

RPG Talk: Reader's Pick Poll #2

As a thank you to my Ko-fi supporters, I'm now holding my second poll for the next game to cover in my RPG Talk series. This is a more refined list from the last time, to better focus on games that people have already expressed an interest in seeing me play.

You can vote for more than one game, and whichever wins will be the next RPG I cover on this blog.

Turnaround time will probably be 2-3 months depending on which game eventually wins.

Polling will be open for at least a couple weeks. You can vote HERE.

RPG Talk: Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth

In which I talk (write) about RPGs from a storytelling perspective...

Platform: 3DS
Release: 2019

Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth was going to be the rare RPG I played the day of release. Being built on a hybrid of the Etrian Odyssey dungeon delving mechanics and the Persona fusion system, it's easy enough to play through without requiring much in the way of a walkthrough, which solves my biggest issue with most modern RPGs (needing a walkthrough to make sure you don't miss anything).

Unfortunately my health problems escalated right about when my pre-order arrived so I set it aside and eventually forgot about it, even neglecting to list this on my Reader's Pick poll, which Final Fantasy XV won.

But I came back to it afterwards, and was happy I did.

Since this game is less than a year old, here is your spoiler warning as I'll cover everything up until the end of the game.

Persona Q2 is first and foremost a fan game. It exists as a crossover to allow the casts of all the modern Persona games (3-5) meet each other at the peak of their Persona-fighting abilities. The first Persona Q did much the same thing, only with the casts of 3 and 4.

Unfortunately there appears to be no continuity with the first game as the returning characters behave as if they've never met each other before, but the structure is very similar. For some reason or another, each cast has stumbled into movie worlds connected by a single theater from which the audience cannot leave due to a series of locks placed around the door to the exit. Much like the first game, completing each dungeon (in other words, a movie world) grants a key that removes one of the locks.

Unlike the first game, where players could play from the perspective of the P3 or P4 casts, this one is solidly from the POV of the P5 crew. The player starts with them and Joker is the only one allowed to make dialogue choices. But the flipside of that is that the P3, P3P (yes, the female protagonist is here!), and P4 protagonists all have actual personalities that make them their own people.

The P3P protagonist is especially a ray of sunshine. Though she has her doubts and can be overly cheerful at times, she gets to hang loose in a way that the other female party members don't. She's used to be outspoken and marching to the beat of her own drum, because where she comes from, she's the party leader and she has the confidence to match.

Also, it's about time she got featured in a spin-off game! I understand the male P3 protagonist is canon, but the P3P female protagonist has never been offered in other games, even as DLC when she could be safely included without worrying about whether her existence breaks the laws of reality. She's long been a popular request in the English fan community, and Persona Q2 has finally brought her back in a big way, making her a major player in the storyline. She appears much earlier than any of the other Persona casts, joining the Phantom Thieves as early as the second floor of the first dungeon.

While the story of Persona Q2 isn't her story in particular, her subplot is given a lot of space. She meets the Phantom Thieves while separated from her companions, so one of their early goals aside from trying to figure out their current circumstances is to reunite her with her team. But the second dungeon yields the P4 Investigation Team rather than SEES, and when she finally does meet SEES in the third dungeon, she's distressed to discover that not only do they not recognize her, but they have a different leader who she doesn't recognize.

The male P3 protagonist is pretty accepting about it, concluding that they are essentially alternate universe versions of the same person (which they are), though I wish the two of them had more lines interacting with each other. It would have been funny if they commiserated over the P3 cast's foliables as only people who share the same group of friends could. Sadly, they might as well not exist to each other for the majority of their time together, which makes their mutual farewell, with the understanding that they'll never meet again, ring hollow. This could easily have been fixed with a special screening side quest to unlock a team attack, but oddly the game never tries.

Since Persona Q2 is of debatable canonicity, it's not surprising that its story is ultimately not about the Persona characters or the struggles they're currently in the middle of. Rather, like the first Persona Q, the story is about the new characters specific to this game; Hikari, Nagi, and Doe.

When the Phantom Thieves first arrive, they quickly figure out their new situation. They are trapped inside a movie theater with two other people; the theater curator, Nagi, and a high school girl, Hikari. There is also a mysterious inhuman projectionist called Doe (for John Doe) that doesn't speak or seem to be hostile, but nevertheless runs the movies that the Phantom Thieves can enter by jumping through the movie screen.

Each of the movies revolves around some element of social unfairness. For instance, in the first movie, Kamoshidaman, the superhero runs the city because he's the hero, so of course he's in the right. But he's not actually a nice person and makes objectionable judgement calls. Though people might privately feel disagree, no one is willing to call him out on it because he's the one in charge and to fight him is to lose.

By journeying through the movie, the Persona casts are able to change the endings to those movies by defeating the various bosses and convincing other characters that it's okay to disagree, that it's okay to be yourself, it's okay to have a different opinion.

All these changes have an effect on Hikari, who (though it's not immediately apparent) is suffering from memory loss. Hikari is incredibly shy and introverted, so she understands the various characters who are oppressed in the movie worlds. Standing out and making trouble can actually make it harder for the person who has to endure the scorn of others. But as each movie is changed, Hikari comes to understand that even though putting one's head down is the easy way, it's not really the way she would like to live.

This culminates in Hikari getting kidnapped by Doe and being brought into the fourth movie world, which is a musical that reflects the worst moments in her life. Being berated by her teacher, even though Hikari was following the rules, was what led to the formation of the movie world with the abusive superhero. The other movie worlds are similarly inspired by key moments in Hikari's life that caused her to give up what she believed in.

Since Hikari has grown over the course of the game though, she's now able to challenge Doe on her own terms and recognize him as a distorted fear that her father (who actually loves her a lot) would reject her in the same way that so many other people in her life have. After coming to terms with Doe, she realizes that her father doesn't hate her and regains her sense of purpose. This allows everyone to leave the movie theater.

But, since this is a Persona game where things happen due to the involvement of supernatural entities, that's not the end of everything. Though Hikari is free to leave, and by extension so is everyone else, there's one more dungeon to defeat Enlil, the being that trapped Hikari in the first please. Enlil is fine with Hikari leaving since her theaters are supposed to be a way to placate for people who've given up, but naturally Hikari wants to restore to hope to others who were like her, so the team stays long enough to beat up Enlil.

While Hikari's story isn't bad, it's not as heavy as Rei's storyline from the first Persona Q and lacked the same punch when the truth was revealed. Perhaps being the second game it wasn't surprising that the main thrust of the plot would be around Hikari instead of the established Persona cast, but it also felt that the messaging in the movies was too explicitly geared towards someone with Hikari's personality, making it obvious by the second dungeon that Hikari was the reason we were going through these movies at all.

The rest of the game is pure crossover fun. Shinjiro (known to be a good cook) gets to feed Yusuke (known to be frequently hungry), Akechi and Naoto get to solve a mystery together, and Makoto and Mitsuru get to talk about what it's like being a student council president.

If anything, having the entire roster of the modern Persona games shows what sort of tropes are in play and how the design team has tried to make them all a little different, by mixing and matching character attributes or putting a little spin on their personality. Makoto might be a student council president like Mitsuru, but she's also a knuckle-wielding bruiser in combat like Akihiko. Junpei, Yosuke, and Ryuji might all fill the male protagonists' best friend role, but removed from that they don't feel like the same person copied and pasted into three games.

That said though, I think the next game should avoid student council presidents, detective princes, and wealthy heiresses (all of which were revived in Persona 5). And though I know it's unlikely to happen, it would be nice to see a male navigator character for once as Persona Q2 made it glaringly obvious that every navigator the series ever had has been female. A lot of the party roles, elemental alignments, and weapon types switch across genders. Even the protagonist has had a female option. But the one thing we've never had is a male navigator. We've had males in that role temporarily (like Morgana and Teddie, who are notably both "not human"), but they always leave it once the real navigator shows up.

As far as the ending goes, Persona Q2 ties itself up better than its predecessor, which left the door open for everyone remembering their encounter. (I suppose this means that for the P3 and P4 casts, Persona Q could have happened after Persona Q2 to preserve continuity.) Everyone loses their memory of the movie world when they go home, which naturally makes everyone sad, especially since everyone wanted to see the movie Hikari would make once her love for cinema is rekindled.

The game takes steps towards making this "reunion" happen by featuring the P3, P3P, and P4 casts taking the unusual step of sitting down and seeing a movie together. The P3 protagonist picks up a DVD even though he's not really sure why, and in the P4 time period Nanako mentions that the movie they're going to watch has a dinosaur that looks like Yosuke, which was leading me to believe that Hikari had come from a time period before all three games. Since she never confirms what year she's from, that would have been entirely possible, and I would have found it heartwarming, if she'd turned out to be a director beloved by all three casts.

Unfortunately the P5 cast's epilogue wrecks that but having them attend a high school movie festival (showcasing films are made by high school students), where they watch Hikari's movie and when the director of the film is introduced, the game cuts just as the P5 protagonist recognizes her. So what was even going on with the P3 and P4 casts? Why is there a movie with a dinosaur that looks like Yosuke that has nothing to do with the events of this game?

I don't know.

Though I enjoyed the game, it was just a little too ham-handed, and even the supernatural events felt like rehashes of previous Persona games (Enlil's motivation is a lot like Izanagi's from P4 and Doe's existence is like a cognition from P5). I enjoyed it for the gameplay and the crossover fun, but this isn't one of the better spin-off stories.

RPG Talk: Divinity: Original Sin

In which I talk (write) about RPGs from a storytelling perspective...

Platform: PC (though it's also on PS4 and XB1)
Release: 2014 (classic), 2015 (enhanced edition)

This week was supposed to finish up my series on Final Fantasy XV, but seeing as I'm still struggling with the last of my DLC, I'll resume the series in a couple weeks after the World Fantasy Convention. In the meantime, I realized that I never actually posted my RPG Talk for Divinity: Original Sin, which I had finished earlier this year. So here it is now.

I do play western RPGs, though my article list suggests otherwise. It's just the ones I do are so few and far in between that the last one I played, Dragon Age: Inquisition, was released before I started blogging regularly. For a while, the Dragon Age series alone was enough to scratch my itch, but in the void of waiting for a fourth game I've found I needed to look elsewhere.

There were lots of candidates for that old school computer RPG feel; Pillars of Eternity, Tyranny, Wasteland 2, but I settled on Divinity: Original Sin. I found out about the series through articles on Kotaku, and it sounded like people were having fun, setting their characters up with shenanigans involving status effect spells, terrain effects, and general creativity such as walling off a room from enemies by putting down paintings. You could steal just about everything from everyone and looting was a valid source of income.

(Having primarily grown up with JRPGs, where it's intended that the player can take everything that's not nailed down, I've had difficulty abandoning the habit in western RPGs. If it's there, it's meant to be taken, and I am very sad that the town guards don't see it the same way.)

I decided to start with the first Original Sin game since it was heavily discounted during a summer Steam sale, and played the Enhanced Edition. My first impression of it was not that great though. It took a while for me to settle into the game world and get a feel for its cities, factions, and gods. The lore doesn't pop in the same way that it does for Dragon Age and I suppose that's because when I read a lore book I feel more like I'm reading someone's world building notes rather a treatise that is part of the world itself. But there are some things that the game does extremely well, especially if you're willing to do a little role-playing.

Since Original Sin can be multiplayer, there are two main characters and in multiplayer mode the players each control one. Whenever a questionable conversation comes up, one that the player might want to weigh in on, the two protagonists can choose separate answers. In multiplayer it must be a lot like role-playing in a table-top game when different characters might have different opinions on how to do something. But this option is kept in single player.

And it works really well as a storytelling device if the two protagonists disagree even if they're controlled by the same player. My two agreed perhaps 70-80% of the time, but the 20-30% they didn't was enough to mold them into different personalities working towards the same goal, and it allowed them to snipe at each other in unprompted conversations that felt perfectly in character. It was an experience I'd never had before with player created party members.

Another thing I liked is that early in the game it becomes apparent that there is something special about our two protagonist Source Hunters, and that they may be the reincarnations of previous heroes. At the first whiff of such foreshadowing in an RPG, it's a given to assume that it's true, and I was afraid the game would beat around the bush about confirming it. Though it does take a while for the characters to really consider it (and to be fair, from their perspective it's not obvious), the game gets it out of the way early in Act II, which is pretty good. That's before the halfway point, and allows exploration of their predecessors' doings while knowing these actions were at one point their own.

Much of the lore fun is learning about their pasts, what went wrong all those years ago, and how that ties into the present day. Also the more powerful, inhuman NPCs will acknowledge who the protagonists have been in their past lives, or be amused by the fact they would rather "pretend" to be a mundane Source Hunter when they are clearly demigods.

Divinity: Original Sin also subverts things in unexpected ways. We learn early on that there's a cult, but surprisingly, when we confront their leader, we learn that she doesn't believe in her goddess or any of her religious teachings. Her organization is a cult because it was the most effective way for her to lead a bunch of devoted followers and get what she wants.

The game is also populated with a number of distinct female characters. Half the recruitable party members are female, including an older woman who is on the verge of retirement. Madora gives an air of been there, done that, came back with the t-shirt, and serves as the group's cranky veteran, which is amazing. She's also a front line fighter with a two-handed sword. Since my party was mostly ranged, we were all hiding behind the bulwark that was Madora.

This makes it a shame that the primary villain, Leandra, only seems to have gone bad because she was on the losing end of a love triangle. She began as an otherwise interesting villain (what I mentioned about leading a cult when she doesn't believe in the goddess she preaches about) and I was disappointed when I found out that she and her sister Inara only started to have problems because there was a man they both liked and he chose Inara.

There's more to it than that, but because that's when Leandra leaves her it makes it look like that was the pivotal moment, and a petty one at that. Even when we learn more, we never truly see what happened to cause her fall, which prevents us from properly reframing her transformation into a villain.

I really enjoyed the first act of Original Sin, because it's different from the standard fantasy RPG. It opens with the Source Hunters being dispatched to Cyseal to investigate a murder that was potentially done with Sourcery (the game's punny way of making a Source Hunter a hunter of sorcerers). While there is some of the usual orc and undead bashing around the outskirts of the city, most of the act is spent inside Cyseal itself hunting down clues as to what actually happened the night of the murder.

It's a lot of fun, with red herrings and suspects right under your nose. You get tons of experience running around town and leveling up by doing your investigation, which makes for a brainy way to progress through the game. And due to the layout of the map with the city in the center, going out into the city surroundings felt like side trips, keeping the city the main hub of all activity.

The second act loses a lot of this and comes off much more directionless, even a bit forced. Though the Source Hunters supposedly have the option to call it a day once they find out the reason for the councilman's murder (that he was part of the cult and the person who killed him is trying to stop the cult), the game railroads them into chasing down his murderer and investigating what the cult is really trying to do.

Though stopping the cult is a good idea, the Source Hunters' motivation for doing so feels rather weak, probably because the protagonists are allowed to debate over whether it's part of their organization's business. I think if the game had made it more clearly an extension of their original mission this would have come off better.

Aside from that, Act II just felt too large, with too many quests spread across the map (including a mammoth side area) without a clear grouping or order in which to tackle them. I even had one quest break on me because I happened to have an item in inventory that an NPC wanted to me to get, but I already had (since there are several Blood Stones throughout the game, not just the one he specifically asks to be retrieved).

It didn't help that the Source Hunters' personal story ended up slowing to a crawl, though that will not be everyone's personal experience, which I'll get to shortly.

Fortunately, once the player gets to the Phantom Forest and the third act of the game, the story pulls itself tighter again like it was back in Cyseal. Hunter's Edge has a lot of interconnected quests, so there's a lot to do in a small area that feeds into itself. The Phantom Forest map also sees the resolution of multiple companion subplots and builds itself on the bones of the backstory laid out in previous acts.

By this time the player will have stopped the undead in Cyseal, learned about soul-forging, freed Icara, and learned of Leandra's plans to unleash the Void Dragon that is basically eating all of creation starting from the future going back.

There was just one tiny problem, and it turned out to be a pacing issue that I didn't know existed until I found myself unable to proceed in the game. I'd found a door, but it wouldn't open, and it turns out I wasn't the only person looking up the solution online.

As I mentioned, we gradually find out the stories of our Source Hunters' previous lives as heroes who were eventually elevated to immortals. There's a decent chunk in Act I. Each time the player discovers a Star Stone, a new chamber opens in Homestead, the player's home base at the end of time, and in each room we get a letter, journal, or the like detailing the actions and thoughts of two ancient generals.

We also know that Leandra is corrupting Star Stones into Blood Stones, and the player will find several across their journey, but Blood Stones are not mandatory to use and heal the party to full on top of removing all status effects, so I tended to save them unless required for a side quest. (After all, such things would be better used in a truly difficult boss fight.)

Using up a Blood Stone also counts for purposes of discovering a Star Stone, which means that by saving mine up, I delayed learning the backstory for my heroes, and it's only after the Source Hunters know everything about their past that they can get through the door near the end of the game. This means that I got multiple chamber/backstory unlocks in a row in the second half of Act III rather than being more evenly parceled out over the course of Acts II and III.

I feel like having the backstory unwind naturally through the discovery of stones (Star or Blood), rather than making up any Star Stone deficit by using Blood Stones, would have improved the pacing a lot. I would have learned more backstory while my interest in the game was flagging (I actually took a break of several months in the middle) and then I wouldn't have gotten stuck at a door for the obtuse reason that the game wanted to make sure my protagonists knew everything before proceeding.

What I did like about the Source Hunters' past lives though, is that it turns out that they weren't great people. In a way, they were massive failures. Though they were hailed as heroes for defeating the Void Dragon in the distant past, we can see from their writings that they flamed out spectacularly afterwards, with one becoming a bloodthirsty warmonger and the other withdrawing from the world entirely. When the gods finished sealing the Void Dragon in the Godbox and wanted it guarded by immortal Guardians, the two only volunteered out of guilt. They knew they had messed up, not only after the battle, but during it as well. They only won because a third general had died had rallying them when they were too terrified to fight.

When the Void Dragon eventually escaped, the two Guardians chickened out (not believing they could beat it without their third), and left the goddess Astarte to fight the dragon by herself. Unable to handle their latest failure, they tore themselves out of time so history would no longer remember them and they would no longer remember themselves. And eventually, who knows how many years later, they were reborn as the two protagonist Source Hunters, who are still very much their own people, if you choose to play them that way. And I like that the two Source Hunters can be completely disappointed in their prior selves (though they can also be sympathetic if you want).

The story beats are fairly predictable aside from the Guardians themselves. Once everything is in order, the two protagonists go off to pop the Void Dragon and reseal it, thus redeeming themselves and saving existence. There is a nice moment at the end though where they go report in to headquarters and their boss asks about Councillor Jake, and by that time it's been so long it was a little funny to see how this all started by investigating a councillor's murder.

I think with some pruning and a little more depth to the side characters this could have been a really good story, but instead it falls a bit short.

RPG Talk: Final Fantasy XV - Episode: Ignis

Unlike the other Final Fantasy XV party member DLCs, Episode: Ignis is flawlessly integrated with the main game, so at no point do you feel something was missed or rushed. It takes place at a time when Ignis is naturally away from Noctis, during the attack on Altissia, because all the party members are separated from him. This also means that unlike Gladio and Prompto's episodes, it's harder to see where his story is going or what it's going to cover.

In some respects, that's a good thing. Episode: Ignis's most dramatic moments are ones we had no idea existed, and make perfect sense given that Ignis is not the type of guy to toot his own horn. But on the other, Episode: Ignis is not really a self-contained story. It covers things we didn't see in the battle of Altissia, and heck it even fleshes out Ravus and Ardyn's motivations in ways the original game neglected, but even though Ignis makes for a compelling protagonist, the story told is not about him in the same way it was for Gladio and Prompto.

Rather, Episode: Ignis is a showcase for Ignis's dedication to Noctis.

Imperial forces are still swarming Altissia after Noctis's battle with Leviathan ends, and in the main game we just skip to everything being over and Noctis waking up in a hotel room to discover Lunafreya left the Ring of the Lucii to him and that Ignis has been blinded by an injury. Episode: Ignis covers everything that happened after the moment the battle with Leviathan ended.

Surprisingly, Ignis, Gladio, and Prompto are all together at the start of the DLC, since it was implied that they split up (and Prompto is even flying solo during part of Chapter 9 when he picks up Noctis to try to bring him closer to Leviathan). When the three try to retrieve Noctis following his victory over Leviathan, the fighting with the imperials destroys the bridge they're on and Ignis is separated.

What follows is Ignis desperately battling his way through the city to reach Noctis. He's largely on his own, because the evacuation must continue, and it's a little funny when other people are the ones telling him not to do something stupid since he's usually the party's voice of reason. Combat aside though, the first half of Episode: Ignis is pretty light on story, though we do get to see the return of one of the side characters. If you wanted to see the demise of Caligo (the imperial officer the party fails to kill in the Chapter 6 base infiltration) he finally meets his ignoble end here.

The second half sees Ignis partnering with Ravus so they both can rescue the people they care about most; Noctis for Ignis, and Lunafreya for Ravus. This gives us better insight into Ravus and his nonsensical hatred for Noctis. We still don't entirely understand why he joined the imperial army in the first place, but now it's extremely obvious why he's slated for execution in later chapters. Not only does he call back all the imperial soldiers over the course of the battle, but he ends up attacking Ardyn, the imperial chancellor, after he and Ignis find Noctis and the dying (or possibly already dead) Lunafreya.

Episode: Ignis might not flesh out Ignis's backstory as much as Prompto's did, but it makes it explicitly clear just how devoted Ignis is to his prince. It's not to say the rest of the bros aren't, but we get to see Ignis at his most desperate, knowing that he might not be able to reach the prince before something happens to him. This forces him to cooperate with Ravus, who he has reason to distrust (given that Ravus is a general for the other side), and once the unlikely pair reach Noctis and Lunafreya, they are forced to confront Ardyn, who as usual, appears to hold all the cards in his hand.

This DLC visually shows Ignis's gradual loss of control through his hair and his outfit. So he begins the storyline in his usual Crownsguard uniform, but after the bridge collapses, he's dunked into the canal and loses his jacket. After his boat is blown up by Caligo he's soaked and some of his immaculately coiffed hair comes down. By the time he's apprehended by Ardyn's escort, he's lost his glasses and his hair is completely plastered wet around his head.

When it looks like Ardyn is going to kill Noctis right in front of Ignis, you can feel his despair. We know Ignis isn't capable of fighting Ardyn alone and Ravus has been restrained as well, but there is a tiny light of hope in that the Ring of the Lucii has landed next to Ignis, leading to one of the ballsiest moves in the game.

Ignis puts on the ring, and since he's not of royal blood it starts to burn him from the inside out, but because he's fighting to protect Noctis, the Lucian kings allow him to use it just long enough to go toe-to-toe with Ardyn and drive him off, allow the rest of the gang to eventually catch up. This gave him the injury that permanently blinded him in the main game. It's a really awesome moment, and a powerful sacrifice, but unfortunately it could have been better telegraphed, and even as I was reveling in the moment, I wanted it to be better.

There are two things that bring me up short. The first is that Ignis and Ravus get to be a bit of a break midway through their battle through the city, and it's possible to ask Ravus about his prosthetic arm. At this point I don't remember if it was in secondary media or later in the main game, but Ravus lost it because he tried to put in the Ring of the Lucii, but was declared unworthy. Ravus does not mention this when asked about his arm, so it's possible the player will not know ahead of time what the penalty is if a non-royal puts it on.

The second is that Ignis mentions that if a Glaive can manage wearing the ring in service of the king, he should be able to as well. This is a problem because it's a reference to the Kingsglaive movie (which the player might not have seen) and also because Ignis should not have any knowledge of the events in that movie since he was not in Insomnia when the relevant Glaive made that sacrifice. The only character in the main game who knew about the Glaive putting on the ring was Lunafreya, who Ignis only catches up with when she's already dead/dying.

If Ignis and the player were both on the same page, I think it would have made the event that much more powerful. Because Ignis gives up more than his eyesight.

When he nears Noctis and Lunafreya earlier in the DLC, he meets Pryna, Lunafreya's otherworldly dog, who gifts him a vision of the future. So when Ignis reaches Noctis, he already knows that the prince is destined to sacrifice himself in the future. After the battle, when Noctis is recovering, Ignis visits him and asks if he would reconsider his journey. Noctis refuses, since it would mean throwing away everyone else's sacrifice, including Ignis's, and Ignis does not further try to dissuade him. It feels very much in character for Ignis to not bother telling Noctis how he lost his sight, or what the future has in store for him. Ignis asking Noctis not to continue is a selfish request, and when Noctis is not interested, he backs down.

But for those who would prefer Ignis to have made a different decision, there is an alternate ending!

The alternate ending splits from canon when Ardyn has captured Ignis and Ravus, and jokingly offers a chance for Ignis to come work with him. Canonically Ignis continues fighting (and it's the only option you can take on first playthrough), but the player can choose to play along instead, which leads to Ardyn leaving Noctis and taking Ignis all the way to Gralea.

Though Ignis is supposedly playing along, it narratively doesn't hold up very long before he and Ardyn start fighting again so Ignis can preserve Noctis's future. Ardyn makes it clear that he has nothing personal against Noctis. He's just really bitter about not being selected by the Crystal as the first of the Lucian kings. It's not much revelation into his character, but it's still something and clearer than it was in the main game.

This battle sees Ignis once again use the Ring of the Lucii to make him Ardyn's equal, and from a storytelling standpoint it does something cool. When he puts on the ring he's given the choice of doing so with the understanding he will risk his life for his king, or that he will sacrifice his life for his king. "Sacrifice" makes him the strongest, but puts up a timer after which Ignis will burn out and die, no longer being able to control the ring's power.

But this is the toughest fight in the DLC and you have limited healing items, so more fumbly players (like me) are probably going to want to choose "risk" a couple times before the game forces the "sacrifice" option to extend the duration of the fight without killing Ignis. While I needed the extra time, it just didn't feel quite as heroic, since Ignis is ranting about how he does not want Noctis to die and he will do anything to prevent that.

And it looks like he beats Ardyn well and good, possibly permanently since Ardyn dematerializes and it seems involuntary.

Noctis and friends catch up shortly, since Ravus defected to help them, and Noctis goes into the Crystal voluntarily this time to reach his full power so he can better protect his friends. This leads to an alternate ending where it seems the long night has come, but Noctis does not sacrifice himself to end it. Instead, he gets to rule as king, making for a happier ending.

Episode: Ignis doesn't give itself the time to explain the particulars about how this works though (probably because it's an alternate ending). As the credits roll we see people going about doing things in daylight, but then we also see Ardyn lurking around the empty throne in Insomnia (is he dead or a ghost?). It's nighttime when older Noctis and friends return to the Citadel, but instead of leaving his friends behind to face an army of daemons while Noctis goes up the steps to sacrifice himself, he meets up with older Ravus, who gives him his father's sword, as he'd meant to do in the main game if he'd lived long enough.

And then from there we see daylight and all seems well again.

Ardyn wasn't the root cause of the eternal night, but was tied to the daemons that came with it, so it makes sense that they wouldn't go away with his death. But it's not clear how or why Noctis doesn't need to die this time around, other than somehow Ignis's sacrifice allowed Noctis to forgo his own.

For these reasons I don't find the story in Episode: Ignis quite as put together as Episode: Prompto. It fills in some nice gaps, has some cool scenes, and presents an alternate ending, but it doesn't feel entirely well thought out. This is probably because it's trying so hard to contribute to a larger story that even though Ignis is unquestionably the star, it doesn't feel like the story is about him. There's not even really a plot per se. It's just a chapter we didn't get to see in the main game. In the end, it's still about Noctis and not a personal story that belongs to Ignis himself.

The canon DLC storyline even bookends the story with Noctis as a child taking Ignis's hand, and then Noctis (post-timeskip) doing it again just before they head to Insomnia, in gratitude for everything that Ignis has done for him. And I suppose that was done to give a better sense of conclusion since there is otherwise no character arc for Ignis. He goes in much the same man as he comes out.

I came here expecting I'd like Episode: Ignis the most, since he's been my favorite of the bros and this DLC was well reviewed, but I actually liked Episode: Prompto more.

RPG Talk: Final Fantasy XV - Episode: Prompto

I enjoyed enjoyed this DLC much more than I thought I would, even though I already knew the key details of Prompto's backstory that were skimmed over in Chapter 13 of the main game. It takes place several days after he's been pushed off the train by Noctis in Chapter 11. By this time Noctis and the others have already met with Aranea in Tenebrae, placing Episode: Prompto during Chapter 12.

Following his separation from the rest of the party, Prompto is desperately trying to catch up with everyone and he's trekking through the snow to get to Gralea, where the group had been heading, but he passes out from weakness and the cold and is brought by magitek troopers to a research facility. Why did they capture rather than kill him? Most likely because of Ardyn, who appears in this DLC for no discernable reason other than to offer zippy one-liners and send Prompto on his way with a physical handgun since the one he would normally summon as one of Noctis's retainers doesn't appear (presumably because Ardyn is blocking it).

It's a pretty flimsy setup, but it gets the meat of the story rolling as our poor guy is trying to find his way out of a hostile facility full of magitek soldiers who would love to kill him. Yes, after dragging him there in the first place.

We know from the main game that Prompto is a sort of proto-magitek soldier. Magitek soldiers are created by infecting babies with the plasmodium parasite that turns people into daemons. When the infected babies sublimate as adults they're ultimately turned into the magitek cores that power the mechanical soldiers. But the main game doesn't really go into more than that. Prompto brings it up when he returns to the party, but it's kind of awkward as he goes through the cliff notes version of his backstory in about 30 seconds and then it's over.

Episode: Prompto draws out everything we couldn't see, but was implied to have happened off camera. There are some really nice touches too, as we see Prompto discover research notes and draw his own conclusions about his origin.

The first time he activates a door lock at the facility he uses his barcode by accident, just by bringing his hand up to the door. But the second time he encounters a locked door, it's only after he's discovered the research into daemonifying human infants and learning that one of them was stolen from the facility by a Lucian. He's been in denial that he could be a part of this, despite the mounting evidence (like his barcode matching the established guidelines issued to every infant based on their birth year), and he knows that if he uses his barcode to open that door he's acknowledging this facility as a part of his past.

It's a really good scene.

Prompto is so much better when he's allowed to be more than the goofy comic relief and deal with his own insecurities. Though it's not directly spelled out, the reason he is the comic relief who generally gets picked on by the other guys is because he's terrified of getting kicked out of their social circle. Being the man of least influence is better than not having friends at all.

But once he learns the circumstances of his birth, he begins to question whether there's a place for him within that circle at all. After all, he was created to attack his friends' homeland. Prompto begins to see himself inside the magitek troopers he's fighting, and at one point even hallucinates Noctis trying to kill him just like the prince had killed many of those soldiers in the past.

After he escapes the facility with help from Aranea, he looks at the barcode tattooed on his wrist and contemplates burning it off, but even if he tries (player's choice) it can't be removed. It's irrevocably part of who he is.

Gradually though, with a little tough love from Aranea, he comes to accept that he can't help where or how he was born, but he can choose how he wants to move forward with his life, and that leads to striking back against his researcher father, who is one of the imperial faces early in the main game who inexplicably never returns again (until this DLC).

It's pretty good stuff and we see genuine character growth from the Prompto who started this DLC to the one who ends it, which I really wasn't expecting, and it's too bad we don't get to see this transformation over the course of the main game.

Prompto has his terrible reunion with his dad, who he was cloned from. He takes out a magitek factory. His episode covers how much researchers in the empire knew or didn't know about what they were doing. It makes the cold unpopulated opening to Chapter 13 make sense. Sure, we find out later in the main game why everyone's gone, but if we'd gotten that information chronologically at the same time Prompto did it would have prepared the player in advance.

But at the same time Episode: Prompto is designed to be played after Chapter 13. With a couple tucks I think it could have been made to run concurrent to the main game's Chapter 12. It shouldn't matter whether we find out Prompto's origin from his own mouth in Chapter 13 versus his father's research in Episode: Prompto.

The problem is that the ending of his episode shows Prompto waking up imprisoned in Chapter 13, though we don't know why/how other than Ardyn probably had something to do with it. We see Noctis and company rescue him, and in the post-credits scene Noctis apologizes to Prompto for pushing him off the train and basically saying that it doesn't matter where Prompto came from.

It was nice having Noctis apologize, since he never does it in the main game, but if we cut the credit roll scene and post-credits scene, we wouldn't have any Chapter 13 spoilers and you actually could play Episode: Prompto right after Chapter 11 when he gets booted off the train and it would work seamlessly with what's already in the main game.

And there are ways the main game could have been altered a bit to make Prompto's "by the way" bombshell a little less of a surprise, especially since most players probably ended up going through the main game first, making Prompto's origin reveal all the more awkward. If, for example, the player could discover research notes not just related to humans being turned into magitek soldiers, but that one of the infants had been kidnapped to Lucis that would have helped. Just little tips that would eventually make the player realize before Prompto returns that Prompto was born to turn into a magitek soldier.

That would better set up the fact that the rest of the party tells him it's no big deal that he was born in the Niflheim Empire, because they, and the player, would have already had time to process that information.

One small thing that still sticks with me after the DLC though, is that Prompto used to be chubby as a kid, and that's how he looked when he first met Noctis and was encouraged by Lunafreya to befriend the prince. It seems like becoming the trim person that he is in the present day is likely part of trying to look like a presentable member of the team, one worthy of being a companion to Noctis. So it comes off as cruel now that one of the main game's party banter conversations is Prompto asking if they can check out the Crow's Nest diner for food, and Ignis telling him that's fine if he wants to put on weight.

Ignis is probably not trying to be mean, as that doesn't seem to be in his personality, but considering he already knew Noctis at the time Noctis met Prompto, I find it difficult to believe that he's completely oblivious to the fact Prompto used to be overweight.

The fact that Episode: Prompto has made me think a lot about it following the ending and recontextualize conversations in the main game makes it a solid addition. I can't speak much for the gameplay since I'm not a shooter fan, but for non-shooter fans it's not too difficult to complete even on Normal difficulty thanks to the existence of healing potions.

Next week I'll take a look at Episode: Ignis, finishing off the party member DLCs.