Hmm.

Y'shtola.

Why?

Well, she's in her 30s and in denial. She sasses city-state and world leaders, despite having little to no leadership experience herself. It's easy to take the moral high ground when you stand to lose nothing, and never have to make the same decisions as a leader, or anyone else, for that matter. She's not a good tactician, her first thought to collapse a tunnel, when she could have easily used Stone 1 to weigh down her assailants, giving her, Thancred, Minfilia, and the WoL all time to escape together.

She's less a character and more a fighting F-Toy, who has powerful forbidden spells on demand that only take a toll when the scriptwriter says so, and then the same scriptwriter is inconsistent with said demands. She's evidenced to be physically blind after her "ordeal" but regularly showcases that she is not physically blind. Literally goes from, "Urianger, describes the stars to me~" to, "The cave paintings on these walls tell quite the story!" She literally couldn't tell the WoL was the WoL, due to seeing via aether and only seeing things aetherically, despite being less than 10 yalms away, but she can see cave paintings? All I'm asking for is consistency with her malady.

Obviously there's the fact that she's escaped lethal damage/situations three times now, and who knows, maybe it's 4. I wasn't around to see if she flirted with death so casually in 1.0 or not. I assume not, but a Legacy member will have to weigh in.

She's a mixed bag of feelings for me. I used to like her, in spite of her being a cat girl, as she was my starting Scion. I liked her sass at first, and occasionally still do, "Yes, mother." - "Don't make me take you across my knee!" But repeated playthroughs actually have me feeling quite antagonized by her narrow view and moral grandstanding.

Everyone cheers for her when she spurns Magnai, and it was a hilarious scene. However, in that same Azim Steppe sequence, she was visibly vexed by Hien taking in the Steppe and wanting to chat a little. They could have dug a lot more out of that, and shown us that she was frustrated because she could not actually see the Steppe itself. Instead it just came across as her being rather snide, impatient, wanting to be done with everything there as if she despised being there. I would have much loved to see real interplay between a woman who is supposedly very intelligent and clever and Hien, a man whose dry wit really does go unappreciated by the majority of the playerbase. A lot of people call Hien a himbo, but he's rather Machiavellian. He's actually the closest personification I can find to how I perceive my WoL. Fully aware of his circumstances, and would much rather do something else, only he feels responsible and is bound by honor and duty. Anywho, talking about why I dislike Y'shtola.


But they don't want to give us real substance with Y'shtola. They want to feed fan service with a snarky, hot cat girl that can blow up your enemies and heal your wounds. The last time she had real character development was in Heavensward, as she was largely absent from 4.0 due to wounds, and then they repeated her 2.55 stunt in 5.0, as we all know. They clearly don't know what they want to do with her, and while I do appreciate that she's apparently going to publicly smack talk Fourchenault, I don't think she honestly deserves to be nor should be the character doing that. But she's a one trick cat girl.