#still kills me how when asked about how shulk and rex are there it the response is basically ''i don't know either'' | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mozillavulpix · 1 year

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a bunch of Future Redeemed thoughts before I call it a day. Currently on Chapter 3 where you have a quest to help make a certain Nopon’s workshop

my hand hurts i think i played it in an uncomfortable position

In no specific order:

these games are addictively fun because checking things off a list is fun. Rewarding you with % completion even when you discover a treasure chest makes things even more rewarding than usual

Matthew’s voice actor in Japanese (although I’m playing this in English) also voices Yuji Itadori from Jujutsu Kaisen and honestly Matthew is basically just Yuji. Casual, surprisingly empathetic bro who settles things with a good punch.

speaking of VAs, sad Al Weaver didn’t reprise Rex, and I’m not exactly sure why Skye Bennet didn’t come on for Glimmer, given it’s the same voice in Japanese there, but actually I think I like that. Just cause it’s their kid and looks like them doesn’t mean they need to be voiced by the same person. I love Dragon Ball Z (Japanese) but you don’t always have to do that

Holy shit the Xenoblade Chronicles (1) battle theme plays in the Gaur Plains area I was not expecting that. I think it took me a while because it also sounds like...Kingdom Hearts music. Did Yoko Shimomura do this track?

it’s like some of Future Redeemed here is a bit of an apology for having so much of the plot revolve around Rex’s children and their lineage that we’re going to do some more direct XB1 callbacks this time

the first big plain area definitely has elements of Gormott in the music though. Was Gormott never in Aionios before? That makes it three times they’ve remixed that track lol

I was weirded out when Rex started off all hostile to Glimmer, but they did explain it. Chad Rex isn’t just great because he big and buff, it’s cause he’s a giant himbo. It’s so fun to see him being written by someone who wrote him in XB2, some of his lines come so naturally out of his mouth

Also interesting how people who played game 1 and 2 they’ve basically confirmed Nicol and Glimmer are Shulk and Rex’s kids but it’s probably still vague enough that new players wouldn’t immediately figure it out

we now have a third time they have played The Weight of Life thankyou monolith

like I was a little disappointed the returning tracks from XB3 still have the flute in them because the flute isn’t a motif in this prequel, the off-seeing didn’t exist yet but oh well

instead of more flutes we get clapping. the claps are the new flutes. i wonder if that’s like, a symbolic choice, representing community or something

we had better get na’el playing piano on-screen at some point. maybe she sings the sad song in-character. maybe i’m going to cry a lot

btw I have a depressing theory about how Nicol and Glimmer get out of the 10-year cycle. my theory is Shulk and Rex give up their lives for their lifespans somehow. it’d explain where they went to. and why it probably can’t be repeated by anyone else. only people who originated from outside Aionios can do it maybe

good on Zeke and Pandoria for having a kid

Glimmer’s design is not too fanservicey, but it is very easy to do an upskirt shot if you move the camera. luckily she has shorts underneath her short skirt. she also has jiggle physics i think but again it’s very subtle. She *will* get a lot of doujin. But I like her. even if she feels maybe a bit too Mythra

i’m sure people will dislike glimmer for being the antagonistic one in the heroes but i say let her girlboss. she just wanted to die for a cause and is scared and confused.

oh yeah lore stuff, it’s confirmed Ghondor is N and M’s kid, which while adding to the “Noah is bad at naming” gag, also makes me ask what took Z so long to decide to revive him as Moebius. For the amusement? even then you’d think it’d hit harder if he had to either do it directly after his death when he knew people there or many centuries later when there were more of his descendants to kill rather than, like, 3. maybe he just wanted the sweet spot where ghondor was still alive but there were more of his kids to kill

that’s all i can think of for now

#xenoblade chronicles 3 #xb3 #future redeemed #spoilers

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chemicalbrew · 1 year

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choose violence ask game 6 bc we both know where this is headed (cough all of them cough)

YEAH YEAH YEAH YIPPEE [immediately turns reblogs off]

6. which ship fans are the most annoying? [interpreting as romantic ship]

so. let's start with what we both know

Katana ZERO

As I said in DMs earlier, I think the only worthwhile KZ ship is Zero x the receptionist (preferably one-sided, but I think someone really smart could make it mutual. I certainly wouldn't be mad if it was confirmed mutual in canon, but I seriously doubt it - one-sided is way funnier, anyway.). I also kind of sort of in theory respect the hustle of people trying to write V and Snow (rarepairs... been there), but I think I could never see it that way; what we have in game of them is barely good enough for anything, which is what makes it hilarious. That said, the most annoying shit here is, as we know...

150 150 150 150 150 !!!!!!

Even their stupid ship name cracks me up. Like, I understand, you can't have a good portmanteau or anything when your ship has numbers, but half the ship is literally Zero (hehe another reason Zerocep[tionist] wins), however... the way you read it is not even conducive to a shipping read. One fifty? One hundred and fifty? Even the number doesn't want them together <3

There was a post somewhere in my KZ tag that actually puts my feelings better than I myself can, but I'll try anyway. Due to the way this game's plot\timeline is framed, all their past interaction is basically implied. They don't really get to exchange any words, no matter how awkward (compare this to the receptionist having the tiniest of character arcs, but still an arc, between the hotel and bunker stages) - Fifteen just shows up, confirms he's the real Dragon, kills the shit out of V, and leaves, and that right there is the closest we get to an interaction (surely you won't say Zero walking in on a conversation later counts?).

How the fuck can you wrangle a ship out of that?

'But muh implications' that's all they are, implications. Not a very fertile ground to build upon. And even then, what they imply is far more like camaraderie than anything, which, while a solid and even necessary (in real life, at least) foundation for a relationship, doesn't MEAN it has to be romantic!! Give me traumatized war buddies that aren't making out with each other, pleeeeeeease...

'But you're reblogging art with them together' YEAH BECAUSE THEY LOOK HANDSOME TOGETHER AND THEIR DESIGNS ARE PERFECTLY COMPLEMENTARY. THAT'S THE ONLY REASON. I'M LITERALLY OBSESSED WITH HOW WELL THEY MATCH IN THIS ASPECT. This is why they should just be fighting together and nothing else <3

Xenoblade (gonna try and be a bit more rapid-fire about the rest of this post, unless the wrathful mood strikes me again)

Shulk and Fiora do not make sense romantically at all to me. They're family, ffs. Same for Shulk and Reyn, if not doubly same. But the fans keep insisting otherwise and often. (Libra, if you're reading this, this doesn't apply to you or other friends of mine that like Shiora. You're the only ones I trust with these two, I just want no part of it myself)

Shulk and Alvis are amazing, but need to be viewed through a lens more complex than typical shipping to be fully appreciated (something I'm still somewhat guilty of and recovering from. Jesus, wider XB1 fandom can be the worst sometimes).

Shulk and Melia as a ship by itself does not offend me, but the fans that weep about how Melia never had any good shit happen to her, and say Shulk not returning her feelings makes it worse... can die in a fire :)

I don't understand how people can take Reyn and Sharla seriously together tbh... but I guess it's more acceptable than the stuff above?

Rex and Nia (on their own, without Aegis in picture) never needed to be anything more than friends. The way Nia gets over being ''''friendzoned''' (hate that word) canonically is better than anything fans have come up with regarding this matter.

Lora and Jin have barely been interpreted by anyone in the wider fandom correctly (that I know of - key word 'barely'). Just stop at this point <3

...I won't be talking about XB3 ships because I heavily dislike XB3 and haven't read anything shippy for it, not even for NoahMio.

PS. Morag and Zeke should get more attention (personally I'm still guilty of somewhat ignoring this as a ship, but if I ever replay\rewatch, I'll be sure to analyze their interactions more, especially bc they're fun no matter how you look)

misc.

I have seen people interpret Ares and Dela (Brandish series) as a romantic ship, and I'd like to see just how much their brain has rotted.

Olivier and Mueller (Trails in the Sky) are very fun as a ship! I'd just like to see people view their relationship through a more neutral lens sometimes. However, the fact that Estelle x Kevin fics exist is the real mind-bender here. HOW? It's called being playful and keeping up a front!! (Also, Estelle x Anelace is slept on the same way as Zerocep and Moragzeke <333)

Frog x Magus and Lucca x Magus (Chrono Trigger) make equally little sense, and yet seem to be popular. Ew. Not even mentioning my personal beef with Frog x Lucca. Don't.

Midna x Link and Malon x Link (Zelda series) were actually my first NOTPs, largely because of annoying fans. I see now I was in the wrong and am largely 'thog dont caaare' about it, but still, important.

Ace Attorney series... tbh its fandom is weird about ships as a whole, but I'm guilty of falling into the Blackmadhi trap, so I can't speak. Almost everything other than Blackmadhi, though, is a tough sell largely bc of fandom.

Any ship involving Stocke from Radiant Historia has to be included in here. I am by and large respectful of most popular stuff with him (especially Stocke x Rosch and the Stocke x Sonja x Rosch OT3), I just think it's more fun to have him not into any of it. Very similar situation to Zero KZ, honestly.

#zero.txt #yippeeee

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irandrura · 4 years

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More detailed, spoiler-full thoughts on Xenoblade Chronicles 2:

One of the things that always fascinates me, when I compare JRPGs and WRPGs, is the sorts of conflicts they’re interested in, or the sorts of questions they ask. XC2 is yet another example of a JRPG that asks a question that simply never seems to arise in Western games. That question is: is there an ethical basis for the world’s existence? Is there a justification for the world continuing to be? Is existence, being, even a good thing at all?

XC2 is fascinated by this question, and even by the more narrow questions of “is it a good thing for humans to exist?” or “is it a good thing for people in general to exist?” It takes these questions very seriously, to the extent that characters who firmly conclude “no” are treated as sympathetic antagonists, rather than madmen.

Western games only rarely raise similar questions. Every now and then you get a madman in Fallout who thinks humanity is a scourge and should be replaced by some other race, or the likes of Archaon in Warhammer, who seeks to destroy the world because the gods demand it – but these characters are generally not treated sympathetically, and very little time is spent refuting them. Of course you stop the guy who wants to destroy the human race. What, you need a reason? Here’s one: you’re human, so are people you care about, end of story. There’s not much to engage with there. In the likes of Skyrim, when Arngeir suggests that maybe the right thing to do is to allow the world to be destroyed, the player’s response is incredibly perfunctory. “I like the world. All my stuff is here.” What more could you possibly need?

But justifying existence seems like a more central question to JRPGs. Not only XC2, but if I think back to, say, Final Fantasy X, or Final Fantasy VII, or Final Fantasy VI, or, well, half the games in that entire series, a frankly bizarre amount of time is spent arguing with nihilists who believe that the world and/or the human race should be destroyed, because... um, suffering exists, or the world is meaningless, or people are awful, take your pick.

My usual approach is to just attribute these differences to religion. The West is deeply influenced by the Abrahamic tradition, in which God creates the world and pronounces it good. There can be no real question of whether existence is good or not. To even ask the question is blasphemy. This instinct now seems so deeply-rooted that even atheists, who outwardly reject all religion, just take it as read that existence is a good thing. By contrast, Japan still has a historical Buddhist influence, and Buddhism is much more skeptical of the value of being. If you could destroy samsara... would you? Is the goal of the spiritual life to escape, to obtain release from the shackles of the world? The Buddhist tradition contains significantly greater ambivalence towards the world.

In XC2’s case, I think it’s a little more complicated, because XC2, like XC1, is heavily influenced by Gnosticism. I am far from the first person to suggest a similarity between Christian Gnosticism and Buddhism, of course, but here I think the Christian imagery comes to the fore. Klaus is a demiourgos, the Architect of this world, standing in the place of God despite not being truly divine himself. This flawed creator goes on to let loose his own trinity – Ontos, Logos, and Pneuma; Being, Word, and Spirit – but nonetheless is full of regret, unsure as to the value of the world he has tried to build. God himself is not visible; only this broken man trying to fill in for God. Even he is not convinced of the world’s goodness!

(And while we’re on the topic of Christian imagery, yes, I know, Pyra and Mythra’s core crystal is cross-shaped, and Pyra is symbolically crucified like four times in the plot, it’s not subtle.)

But to step away from religion for a moment and look back at specific characters...

What drives most of the central characters of XC2 is, initially at least, the desire to cease. Amalthus believes that the world is nothing but a vale of tears, and regards the world with little but hate and disgust. Malos is corrupted by Amalthus’ hate and believes that justice requires the world be destroyed. Jin is driven mad by the cruelty of the world, comes to hate the Architect and seek to destroy him. Even Pyra, our ostensible heroine, wants to reach Elysium in order to beg the Architect for permission to commit suicide and cease to be.

As such, the heart of the story of XC2 is responding to all this with, “No! Life is worth living!”

It seems like such a banal message. If anything, it’s doubly so because the game’s protagonist, Rex, is the most relentlessly optimistic and upbeat person in the world. Rex is the sort of person who’ll respond to all the above with an innocent, “Well, that’s how life is, you know? You’ve gotta take the good with the bad.” He has no darkness in him at all. Even Shulk, who was a total sweetie-pie, was willing to go on a quest to flat-out kill someone for revenge. Rex is truly a beautiful cinnamon roll, too good for this world, too pure. Heck, one of his lines in battle is a completely unironic “We’ll beat them with the power of friendship!”

That’s one of the odd things, for me. Rex himself does not struggle with inner darkness, or with anything I’d recognise as suicidal tendencies or depression. He searches for an answer to justify the world to Malos, but ultimately doesn’t come up with anything more coherent than, “There are wonderful, valuable things in this world, and I believe people can change, and I know that you once believed that too!” This isn’t a story where Rex finds a substantive answer to the question, or one that would satisfy a philosopher. Rather, he ‘solves’ the puzzle through sheer force of will. He ends up convincing the Architect that the world has merit not through anything he says, but through what he does – through his selfless optimism and belief in other people.

Just as Amalthus and Jin concluded the world needs to die not because of philosophy, but because of traumatic personal experience, Rex concludes the world needs to live because of positive, uplifting personal experience. The answer to the dark impulse that would destroy the world is to point to positive relationships within it, even in the lives of the people trying to destroy it: Mikhail and Patroka, or even Jin and Malos, have genuine friendships. (The moment where Malos stops to hug Jin, even as he heads off to destroy the world, is surprisingly touching.)

On one level this really works. It fits surprisingly well with the overall Christian themes: the answer to “why should the world exist?” is “loving relationships”. Pyra’s answer, in fact, is “I love this world because you’re in it.”

On another level, it feels a touch disappointing, if only because it means the climax of the game is just a reiteration of what the player’s been hearing for the past fifty hours: yes, love and friendship and bonds are good things!

Where Xenoblade 2 works, I think for me, is where the specifics of the relationships feel powerful enough to make those clichés feel fresh. The game’s world sets up a number of reasons to despair (the world is slowly dying, the titans are dying, people are warring over the declining and limited resources, etc.) and then sets up a lot of obstacles to relationship (the Blades, immortal, but having their memories wiped every time their closest friends die, feel quite tragic), and then shows love and friendship perpetually overcoming them. The game’s strongest moments are those where, at a point of despair, somehow love saves the day again. Chapter seven stands out here: both the moment where Nia reveals her true identity, and where Rex practically raises Pyra from the dead by standing over her body and talking about how much he believes in her. Naturally, then, the game ends on the emotional high of the entire playable cast flying off into the sunset, looking fond of each other, Pyra and Mythra’s miraculous return, and the closing line: And thus, boy met girl. Like any good love story, it works only if you buy into the characters’ emotions.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2, summarised: “Should you commit suicide? No, because love.”

Now that said, two other random observations:

In the first Xenoblade, I really disliked the Klaus twist at the end. It felt like it came out of nowhere, required a large exposition dump, and didn’t add much to the plot. For me, the first Xenoblade felt pretty much entirely downhill after the defeat of Metal Face. Xenoblade 2 still has more-or-less the same backstory with Klaus, but here I thought it was contextualised much better and was more effective. The revelation that the Architect is the torn remains of an ancient scientist, trying to rebuild the world from scraps but now half-given up on the whole project as a waste, feels like it fits much better with the world that we explored.

Xenoblade 2’s world always felt somewhat artificial, and from the very start of the game it was evident that there was a previous world before this one. There’s something beneath the Cloud Sea, and whatever it might be, it was evidently once technologically advanced. Making Rex a salvager was a good move to emphasise that, and the way that so much of the world’s economy depends on salvaging the ruins beneath the sea reinforces the sense of the world as being in decay. The Architect is mentioned at the start of the game, so you know that the world was made or at least modified by someone for an unclear purpose, and the World Tree is mysterious enough. So when later in the game you do go below the Cloud Sea and discover the remains of ancient cities, and then find that within the World Tree is an advanced scientific installation, it doesn’t feel like it came out of nowhere. Indeed, the final revelation – that ages ago a scientist accidentally destroyed the world in an experiment, and this is his imperfect attempt to fix it – feels both like a genuine discovery, but also something that, well, makes sense. Of course it was that. Of course! That explains so much about why Alrest is the way it is.

The second observation is... okay, so, XC1 and XC2 are in continuity, that’s all good. How does XCX fit in, if it does at all? I was a bit disappointed when Klaus’ flashback mentioned ‘Saviorites’ attacking the experimental station. Who are they? I wanted to assume that Klaus’ experiment was some sort of cutting-edge secret research immediately before the Ganglion attacked at the start of XCX. That way the aliens attack and start to destroy the Earth, in a panic Klaus tries to accelerate his experiment, hoping he can use the power of the Conduit to save the world, he screws up and ends up splitting the Earth off into two parallel dimensions, creating the worlds of XC1 and XC2, and meanwhile the survivors of Earth in the home dimension escape on their Ark Ships and go and do XCX. That would fit all three games together pretty elegantly, and Conduit-related weirdness might also help explain what the heck is up with Mira in XCX.

But there doesn’t seem to have been any room left for that, so I guess XCX is a completely different continuity? That just... also contains Nopon, who for some reason have heard of Shulk and the Monado? Who knows?

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xsparklingravenx · 6 years

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I want to talk a little bit about Alvis, Klaus and Meyneth.

(I’m gonna talk about Xenoblade 2 too, so, MASSIVE SPOILERS FOR XENOBLADE 1 AND 2 AHEAD. DON’T READ AHEAD IF YOU HAVEN’T FINISHED BOTH. Seriously. Don’t.)

So, at the end of Chapter 10 of X2, we get to see the ending scene of X1 again in shiny HD and with a new point of view. In the original, it was fairly clear cut as Alvis shows Shulk what caused the creation of his world with the Bionis and the Mechonis; Klaus is deluded scientist with a god complex, and Meyneth is an innocent bystander who tries to convince him not to go ahead with it. It’s a short scene, thirty seconds at best, painting a very brief picture of who Klaus and Meyneth were before the events of the game in a way that lines up with what we know of them as Gods. Klaus is egotistical, Meyneth is practical, and things go terribly wrong when he refuses to listen to her.

There’s a lot crammed into that short scene, and it’s the physicality I want to comment on quickly. We see Klaus making big, dramatic gestures. Meyneth is panicked as she rushes over to him. She grabs his arm, and he callously throws her to the floor before going back to his controls with a manic desperation. He, in this scene, does not look like a man in control to me. He looks like someone who is deluded and caught up in his own madness. There is no good reason for him to press that button; he’s doing it for his own whims, to be a God.

This looks to be in direct contrast to X2’s depiction of the scene, which expands on what we, and ultimately Shulk, were shown in X1.

Klaus, in X2’s version, is a lot more composed. The space station is under attack, he has locked everyone else out of using the Conduit that might save them, and yet when Meyneth/Galea confronts him, he simply turns to her with a relaxed smile and tells her that they’re about to witness the birth of a universe. Look at him. He’s leaning back on the controls. He’s not frantic, he’s not manic. He’s calm.

She calls him “Professor”, indicating a higher rank than just a scientist, and he’s not making mad declarations, either. He’s explaining his ideals to Galea, who can’t even comprehend what he’s thinking. She knows the danger, but I’d say he does too. He’s just not willing to think about it. They’re under attack, they can’t hold up against the enemy forces, and he’s got the opportunity to take advantage of it.

“What’s the alternative?” he asks. “Do you just want to surrender this place to them?”

Galea knows he’s a fool for even thinking about it. She grabs him, and it’s not violent. For a moment, ever so brief, it’s intimate.

Klaus admits this. He sees the hubris of humanity and yet his own desire to be more is what drives him. He throws her back as he did in the original depiction of the scene, and despite Galea’s cries, he presses the button nonetheless. The Conduit is activated, and the rest of the scene plays out identically to how it was shown in X1.

So, here’s the question: why didn’t Alvis show the full series of events to Shulk? The obvious answer is that Monolith Soft hadn’t come up with this backstory at the time of X1, but I think that there can be something made of this regardless. The first idea that struck me was that perhaps Klaus remembered the scene differently to Alvis, seeing himself as being less manic and more content with his own decisions. It’s worth noting that we meet his ‘good’ half in X2, so that may be influencing the way we perceive him in this flashback. He’s not a narcissistic God hell bent on destroying life as the Architect. He’s kinder, repentant, the kind of man who regrets what he did. His words as Rex and co. leave represent this in the most heartbreaking way possible, as he hopes that he may be able to face Galea again, unknowing that Zanza would have killed her in X1’s reality.

However, the second idea that came to mind was a little bit more sinister. Is it possible that Alvis manipulated the scene to make Klaus out to be a worse person than he was to Shulk, perhaps to help him make his decision to have a world with no Gods? Any of Klaus’s redeeming factors in the X2 scene are absent in the X1 version, and the war raging outside is left out entirely. Misguided as he was, the X2 version paints Klaus as pressing that button in a moment where there was no other way out, where the Beanstalk is being ravaged and they won’t last much longer. Though he did lock the others out of using the Conduit and kept it to himself, it’s still worth noting that he only did that in what seemed to be their final hour. Alvis erases the context from the scene, and in doing so, changes its meaning.

But then, there was one third idea I had about the scene, and that is that, as a computer and the third Aegis Ontos, maybe Alvis simply didn’t understand the emotional context behind Klaus’s actions and what occurred between him and Galea in that moment. I’ve always thought that X1 presented Alvis as an utterly neutral kind of being, only working on the base programming of ‘creating’ and only going against Zanza because he was ‘destroying’. The idea of him altering a memory to change Shulk’s perception of Klaus didn’t ring entirely true for me. Instead, the idea that he simply showed Shulk the bare bones of the situation as he understood it – Klaus had a desire to be God. He pressed the button. He destroyed the world. That was all that Shulk needed to know. The rest of the fluff may have been unnecessary in his eyes. It didn’t matter that he and Galea may have had a mutual understanding or even a close relationship. It didn’t matter that they were under attack. Alvis showed only what mattered, and that was that Klaus became Zanza.

Whatever the case (meaning I’ve probably read far to into it), I do wonder what Shulk may have thought had he known the entire story.

#xenoblade 2 spoilers #Xenoblade #Klaus #Alvis #Meyneth #i'm serious do not look at this if you haven't finished either game #i am still losing my shit over all this #spoilers

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