Revelations from Patch 5.3

[Fenral]

YoRHa: Dark 10chars

Some stuff holds up in 2P's characterization (if it can be called that). I was forced to replay the Copied Factory the other day, and she does actually sound concerned that the machine lifeforms are being controlled. But she wasn't that interesting. Basically Mide with even vaguer motivations. Surprised she didn't have a scar under that mask...

But why bomb the dwarfs? And why show up in black at all? Sure, it's dramatic, and not totally unprecedented for 24-man characters to undergo personality replacement surgery between patches, but come on. It's momentary shock value at best, but now that we have that precedent, further speculation feels almost meaningless. Why bother laying out a rug that's just going to get pulled? Wait, what if the P-units are actually purple?

I mentioned before that part of the fun of twists is being able to guess them, at least in part. I suppose I haven't lost all my emotional investment, but I'm getting there. Knowing Yoko Taro's reputation for "oh it's just so sad" endings isn't really helping. I also have no prior attachment to 2B or her panties, so her arrival is just another reminder that "this wasn't made for me."

But honestly, I've carried a bit of prejudice against the NieR series ever since I found out Replicant was a thing and someone had made the call that we westerners would only want Gestalt. (I'll take a pretty-boy lead over a hypermasculine escapist avatar any day.) Anyway...

[Cilia]

YoRHa: Dark 10chars

Some stuff holds up in 2P's characterization (if it can be called that). I was forced to replay the Copied Factory the other day, and she does actually sound concerned that the machine lifeforms are being controlled. But she wasn't that interesting. Basically Mide with even vaguer motivations. Surprised she didn't have a scar under that mask...

But why bomb the dwarfs? And why show up in black at all? Sure, it's dramatic, and not totally unprecedented for 24-man characters to undergo personality replacement surgery between patches, but come on. It's momentary shock value at best, but now that we have that precedent, further speculation feels almost meaningless. Why bother laying out a rug that's just going to get pulled? Wait, what if the P-units are actually purple?

I mentioned before that part of the fun of twists is being able to guess them, at least in part. I suppose I haven't lost all my emotional investment, but I'm getting there. Knowing Yoko Taro's reputation for "oh it's just so sad" endings isn't really helping. I also have no prior attachment to 2B or her panties, so her arrival is just another reminder that "this wasn't made for me."

But honestly, I've carried a bit of prejudice against the NieR series ever since I found out Replicant was a thing and someone had made the call that we westerners would only want Gestalt. (I'll take a pretty-boy lead over a hypermasculine escapist avatar any day.) Anyway...

Ultimately, my problem with it is...

With Shadowbringers presenting a lot of old things in new and interesting ways, I was expecting the Automata raid to do the same. To this end I expected 2P to be a fresh take on a familiar face; 2B in a way, but adapted to fit the world of XIV. What she ended up actually being is an evil knockoff of 2B that exists for the sole purpose of "giving birth" as Adam did in Automata. (And the "real" 2B is also here. For some reason. Somehow.)

Super disappointing.

Meanwhile we still have no context for what the Automata stuff is doing in Norvrandt. With the driving mystery keeping me invested in the series answered and so disappointingly, I have no real reason to care anymore.

While I don't like Ivalice and the Return to Ivalice series did rely on egregious infodumps to make sense, at least it did. We had reasons to care about the Lexentales themselves, if not their quest to find Ivalice and clear their family name. We have no real reason to care about Anogg and Konogg, who have treated us as little more than their gofer from square one, and none of the Automata characters have interacted with us all that much (other than 9S trying very hard to kill us at the end of Copied Factory).

I'll wait and see what happens in the final chapter but what we have doesn't hold my attention (grotesque imagery stopped being shocking after all that Dead Space I played). So, whatever.