The missing mood in the existential horror of the last zone of the game (spoilers)

[Sivante]

The current method is stated to be unsustainable because she will eventually run out of souls. That's just what logic dictates-- that she will reflection hop until no one is left. […]

I am beginning to see the source of our conflict here: Yes that is what Sphene plans. My issue isn’t with stopping Sphene. My issue is core to those servers, the terminals. Just because Sphene thought feeding souls to them was the only way doesn’t mean she was correct: but we didn’t investigate another route. We had experts on hand for this sort of thing but didn’t even try. Sphene became but her people were not, we just… decided it was convenient to wipe them out first and equivocated a why.

Sphene has already begun the process of dimensional fusion, […]

I do think more time and better pacing as you suggest would have given the writers time to correct or route the story in a fashion that brought more nuance to the story as well.

However, that’s not what we have. We agree, but that’s not what the story is.

You cannot relegate the ‘endless’ to the ‘slightly more okay to genocide’ bucket without also relegating Alpha, all of Ultima Thule, and similar expressions in the game to that same bucket: but the story strongly implies no one would be okay with that. Indeed, I doubt the players would be.

If this story was intended to be a ‘it’s sad but must be done’ I’m okay with that, but there are ways to express that story. Those ways do not include side-quests of a man who has been looking forward to marrying the love of his life before you wipe him out, humanizing what you have plainly stated is inhuman, and following the sadness and hesitance of it all with a jaunty guitar feel-good scene while people eat tacos. I just killed a man about to marry the love of his life, but there’s a taco.

I am deeply uncomfortable in a way I do not think Square Enix intended, playing a WoL who committed a genocide (again, my perspective) and then had a happy-go-lucky montage of tacos and a happy ending. There is a word for that behavior: psychopathy. I’d be delighted to play a WoL that is canonically a psychopath, but again I doubt this is intended.

We do not agree that it is unrealistic to expect consistency: there are methods of doing this even across multiple writers, but I understand the spirit of your statement enough to be happy to disagree and not argue it further. Where you’re coming from isn’t invalid: consistency is hard in stories this long. I just had higher expectations I suppose, and this will teach me to adjust them.

[SongOfTheWind]

I am deeply uncomfortable in a way I do not think Square Enix intended, playing a WoL who committed a genocide (again, my perspective) and then had a happy-go-lucky montage of tacos and a happy ending. There is a word for that behavior: psychopathy. I’d be delighted to play a WoL that is canonically a psychopath, but again I doubt this is intended.

I came to the same word when was thinking how it all reads. I am curious how it was possible to achieve as I also think it was not intentional. It almost feels like different people were writing different bits without any agreement between themselves and then it all came together in this weird abomination of a plot.
Maybe I am missing something, but I think jp players have many similar complaints to en players, but Endless fate issue doesn’t seem to come up in conversation. I really wonder how they feel about it.

[Sivante]

I came to the same word when was thinking how it all reads. I am curious how it was possible to achieve as I also think it was not intentional. It almost feels like different people were writing different bits without any agreement between themselves and then it all came together in this weird abomination of a plot.
Maybe I am missing something, but I think jp players have many similar complaints to en players, but Endless fate issue doesn’t seem to come up in conversation. I really wonder how they feel about it.

I'm curious as well. I lack the original cultural implications from Japanese as well as the language implications the original script would give, and I'm hesitant to think it was really written this sloppily. It cannot be intentional, I imagine, but here we are looking at it. It does very much feel like multiple different writers butting up against each other doesn't it?

Hearing from a JP player on it would be a super interesting endeavor. Sadly I know none that can tolerate my brand of insanity.