Dawntrail's Final Zones destroy everything the story has built.

[MikkoAkure]

On the topic of us deleting them being a "mercy", that simply wasn't our choice to make. We asked like three people out of potentially thousands or more. Outside of one potential dialog option that gets glossed over, no one even really questions it.

If an Endless really doesn’t want to go and they have a strong attachment to continuing to stick around, they just don’t. We see that after the terminals are turned off. Even among those, half of them willingly fade away after their unfinished business is taken care of. Before that, you can talk to random Endless NPCs and one doesn’t care whether or not Sphene’s world fusion works and another expresses disgust at the idea that souls from other worlds are being taken to promote their continued existence.

Those remaining will fade away in time without a source of upkeep though which I think is the key difference between them and Ultima Thule beings. In Ultima Thule, they seem to be self-sustaining and need to grow food to continue to survive and the Endless require the terminals and eat pure aether pretending to be food.

I still don’t agree in Ultima Thule’s residents being brought back to life but they’re not parasiting multiple worlds and their lifestreams were hijacked by Meteion anyway so they lost their ability to reincarnate on their own worlds normally. Should they do anything to influence the universe outside their dynamics bubble far away I think we’d better call the ghostbusters though.

The most confusing issue with Alexandria is not the memories, but souls.

We see that they have technology to capture souls.

What happens then when person with regulator "dies"?

Was under the impression that you need either the handheld device the soldiers used on Tuliyollan citizens during the invasion (and then probably eventually on their own during that attack), or the machine Namiika was taken to when she was dying that was around her when we met back up with her.

Otherwise, having backup souls in the regulator would make no sense.

Souls seem to be prioritized for the living too since only 1/10 of the Endless population is actually embodied at any one moment and the rest sit in storage.

[Aulainn]

While I agree with your position, I do want to play devil's advocate a little and question if it was indeed them not wanting to let go

Given what we knew about Namika prior to her death, I didn't get the impression that she willingly decided to become an endless, and that Sphere made that decision on their behalf as part of her coding to protect and serve all her people, who she considered Namika to be one of.

So I also started to view this as. a mercy. How many of the endless lived full, happy lives, and made peace with their end that were afterwards forced to continue to live for eternity?

Sphene was perfectly fine and accepting of people who did not want to wear the regulator, there is no indication Namikka was against wearing it and everyone was aware of what it did and was doing.

[BabaM]

They're not people. They're a system. Literally not people. People are Souls+Memory, they are just PNGs saved on a harddrive. If anything, I'm annoyed that I even had to go through the whole waste of time to get to know them. They are as much as people as the recreations in Amaurot, which is to say that "getting to know them" is a waste of time.

[Arzalis]

In gameplay terms, it's simply not feasible to ask every single person, even among the, at most, hundred or so that were active in Living Memory. In story terms, we still had to deal with Sphene trying to initiate interdimensional fusion, so we didn't have time. (Yes, I know, the game's time scale moves as fast as we complete quests, not on any actual visible timer outside of instanced duties. Story-wise, though, we still had that timer, it just wasn't visible to us as players.)



No, my point has been the same either way; There was no other choice. If they're alive, they're complicit, because it's made clear they all knew they were consuming souls; if they're not alive, it doesn't matter. Trying to reframe my arguments doesn't actually change them.



The difference is that the peoples in Ultima Thule aren't consuming other dimensions to sustain their existence. That's kind of a big deal.

Yes, the original Omicrons did conquer and assimilate other worlds, and they're all dead now. We could argue whether the recreated ones in UT deserved a second chance, but that seems like a separate discussion.



Again: If they're alive, they're complicit, and if they're not, they're parts of a genocidal machine. There was no shift.

You didn't really answer my question. How can something that's not alive be genocidal? A machine doesn't have any concept of such a thing. I think you really need to pick one argument and stick to it because your arguments aren't compatible.

Also, calling them all complicit is odd. No matter what country you live in IRL, it has undoubtedly been responsible for some manner of atrocity in it's history. Are you complicit in that because you directly or indirectly benefit from being a citizen of that country?

It's generally accepted that citizens under a nation, state, sovereign, whatever aren't intrinsically complicit with any acts the ruling body or system they live under commit, doubly so in situations where they seemingly don't have much of a choice in the matter. The Endless we see in the final zone weren't going around killing people and taking their souls, so I'd say your argument falls flat here as well.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

Well, as soon as G'raha decides to kill entire realities of other people to steal their souls to sustain his existance, I'll take him out as well.

I thought you were being serious given G'raha created a divergent timeline not knowing if he'd wipe out the people of the other timeline just to save us. Then I realized you assumed that wasn't a thing he's attempted to do before. That was awkward.

They're not people. They're a system. Literally not people. People are Souls+Memory, they are just PNGs saved on a hard drive. If anything, I'm annoyed that I even had to go through the whole waste of time to get to know them. They are as much as people as the recreations in Amaurot, which is to say that "getting to know them" is a waste of time.

Except that we watch the memory aether extracted and sent to Living Memory. When we delete them the look like dissolving memory aether. The aether they are made out of is soul aether. Therefore, they are memory+soul. By your own definition of personhood they meet the standard. For me, I'd ask can they think, desire, make decisions, have feelings, opinions, beliefs, the answer for all those is yes. They are feeling, thinking beings. To argue otherwise means you believe that the AI was puppeteering Cachiua into insisting on her own non-personhood and destruction. The characters also think these beings can think and feel because we put on a play to give the children happy memories before deleting them. They were thinking, feeling aether beings that we dissipated in hopes that it'd give us a tactical advantage. What we did was no different than wiping out the entire Garlean race so Varis has no reason to conquer people.

[Connor]

I To argue otherwise means you believe that the AI was puppeteering Cachiua into insisting on her own non-personhood and destruction..

Isn’t that literally the exact thing that happened though? The Cahcuia we meet is an AI recreation and not the ‘real deal’. The reason she was able to subvert her programming and ‘go off script’ as it were was likely due to her strong desire for discovery and adventure. It couldn’t reconcile the ‘Cahcuia’ data telling her to set off into the world with the ‘Endless’ data telling her to stay there and follow her programmed route. Leading to her realising that she can’t be ‘the genuine Cahcuia’; not like that.

It’s not even so much that she insists on her own ‘destruction’. She simply wants her soul to be able to return to the aetherial sea to be born again, seeking new discoveries in another life etc. If she remained as an Endless she’d be trapped in Living Memory for the rest of eternity, feeding off repurposed dead souls to sustain herself. Which would probably be even more torturous than going back to the natural cycle.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

The most confusing issue with Alexandria is not the memories, but souls.

We see that they have technology to capture souls.

What happens then when person with regulator "dies"?

Does:

1. The original soul goes back to aetherial sea? If so, they would run out of souls quickly and after the ending, leaving Solution 9 in current state with people still using regulators makes this very questionable morally.

2. Original soul is captured by regulator. But then, why fresh soul is needed? Why not use original soul and memories and put them back into the old body?

Why the process of separating soul from memories is done at all? To move "legally dead" to Endless area and use purified souls as spares?

Why not use original souls for Endless without memory purification?

If Endless don't need souls then the whole premise of the story is bogus, as this would result in surplus of souls.

From my understanding the used soul is sent to Origenics for cleaning and repackaging while a new soul is activated. Just holding the same soul in might not work as this seems like a rebirth type of thing. The act of getting a new soul might be how they are bringing themselves back from death, so just finding away to hold in the original soul wouldn't work. They also use multiple souls at once for powerups. Without the Endless, they shouldn't run out of souls given they recycle them. The issue they were running into with the Endless was that they were attempting to maintain every person that ever existed for thousands of years, from their medieval age to their cybertech age, that's why some people are dressed like Ye Olden Days while others are dressed cyberpunkish. Not letting a single person on your planet go back into the aetherial sea for thousands of years meant they were constantly pulling from a system without ever putting anything back into it which is how they tapped the well dry on living energy for their shard and was going to move on to other shards.

What doesn't make sense though is Sphene's unwillingness to let us help her. There was likely a way to sustain their memories without the use of soul aether and there was no pressing need to drain the Source RIGHT NOW as the memories could live in the cloud for centuries without fading. She could have always agreed to let us research the matter and get back to attempting to murder the lot of us if and when we couldn't find a solution. Knowing it made no sense that a person with her personality would agree to cooperation first, they threw in another handwave of "oh, the program is controlling her mind and making her act like that." She gave Zoraal's dumb plan 30 years, we can't get three weeks? And why is that program not controlling Cachiua's mind as she stands there and behaves counter to it's every imperative?

Isn’t that literally the exact thing that happened though? The Cahcuia we meet is an AI recreation and not the ‘real deal’. The reason she was able to subvert her programming and ‘go off script’ as it were was likely due to her strong desire for discovery and adventure. It couldn’t reconcile the ‘Cahcuia’ data telling her to set off into the world with the ‘Endless’ data telling her to stay there and follow her programmed route. Leading to her realising that she can’t be ‘the genuine Cahcuia’; not like that.

It’s not even so much that she insists on her own ‘destruction’. She simply wants her soul to be able to return to the aetherial sea to be born again, seeking new discoveries in another life etc. If she remained as an Endless she’d be trapped in Living Memory for the rest of eternity, feeding off repurposed dead souls to sustain herself. Which would probably be even more torturous than going back to the natural cycle.

No, that's not what happened. The Cahcuia we meet is made up of the Cahcuia memory aether that came from Cahcuia's body and was separated from Cahcuia's soul and grafted onto someone else's soul. The one and only time we hear about any AI is when we're handwaving away Sphene's sudden and ridiculous personality change because it's time for the final dungeon and don't nobody got time for politics anymore. The AI is never mentioned again and we don't see any program doing anything or controlling anything. Also, if these people are data and not memory aether, the absolute need for soul aether makes no sense. We could just run the entire lot of them inside VR and be done. It's only because they are made of memory aether does the need for soul aether make any sense.

[DontReadThis]

I think a major issue is that Sphene was introduced way too late into the story. She was really only present for 2 areas of the game, excluding that one brief appearance during the first invasion. And with the slow pacing of the MSQ it was never really established whether she tried looking for alternative methods to power Living Memory or if she was so beholden to her programming that it was impossible for her to even consider exploring alternate solutions to power the system.

I'll admit I was expecting her to try getting additional soul aether straight from the aetherial sea and tunnel directly into it. It seemed to be a much easier and simpler solution if the guys at Sharlayan were able to do it without a mysterious reflection-merging artifact like her key, and the presence of Minfilia and Emet-Selch's souls show that it's connected to every reflection. Not sure how invading other worlds with an army of robots to suck out peoples' souls is easier than secretly siphoning souls from the afterlife and feeding them into her system. Would have made the final area more interesting since she could have been trying to preserve the memories of all of the dead in every reflection, or it would have been an interesting conversation about her condemning the unwilling souls of the actual dead to power her simulations.

It almost felt like the entire plot contrived itself around that key just to introduce an easy method of inter-reflection travel in the future. It's like the latter part of the MSQ was made to suffer just so the writers could introduce a convenient artifact that would make it easier to write in more plots about us visiting other reflections.

[MarianneviBrittania]

All this stuff seems rather simple to me. One way or another, we wiped out an entire people. Or their remnants, anyway. So essentially as far as I'm concerned all those here in this thread arguing over 'having no choice' but to end the Endless are merely coming up with further and further desperate justifications for a slaughter. A fictional one, lest you accuse me of insinuating anything untowards about people's actual morals or some such thing. But a slaughter nonetheless. I dunno about any of y'all but I'll always be rendered uncomfortable with needing to kill off an entire people no matter the reasons, all the moreso when the game insists it had to be done.

There is always a choice. Always. All else is mere justification and excuses. Merely the individual who did indeed make their choice retroactively self-justifying to assuage their own guilty conscience.

[MikkoAkure]

Merely the individual who did indeed make their choice retroactively self-justifying to assuage their own guilty conscience.

Like I said before, I couldn't shut them off fast enough and I would've done it if given the opportunity even if I wasn't asked to.

The game spends hours ahead of time talking about how wrong it is what the Alexandrians were doing and we have an entire setup of walking, talking, thinking dead and I thought the whole entire thing was gross.


These people already died before. They have living descendants. They are made out of their memories artificially stitched to someone else's soul and they "live" in an environment that is falling apart and covered in fiends that have gone rampant. It can't even handle the whole population so 90% of them just exist as memories locked in a terminal and the system rotates them out every now and then. They can't even "die" here and if "killed" by a fiend, they just wind up in the terminal again. Time doesn't even exist for them there and they just slip in and out of reality as the system chooses and they don't even need to travel anywhere because they can just teleport. One of the kids mentions having seen the play 70 times and there's only so much you can get out of that area after centuries. This isn't living at all.

The whole thing goes against the natural order of life, death, and rebirth by denying an entire society the ability to reincarnate and return to the world's cycle by holding on too tight and babying their citizens, removing all memories of the deceased from the living and then putting them into a theme park to be "preserved".

I think people are being way overly sensitive about this.