Quote Originally Posted by Bright-Flower View Post
It bothered me too. Especially with Shinryu, the ending of HW made such a big deal of Shinryu, having Popolymo sacrifice himself to stall it and us resorting to unleashing Omega rather than fighting it. Then we just fight it like any other primal.

You can try and say 'it was weakened' but the story doesn't really confirm that.

There really is no explanation beyond 'we leveled up.' Now if this was say ARR, maybe it wouldn't bug me. We start off as a new adventurer and work our way up to a grand hero standing against godlike monsters.

But by the start of SB we've been doing this a while, and nothing we go through in SB is really out of the ordinary for what we did in ARR and HW. It's not like we were being pushed to new extremes to become more powerful. We just keep doing what we normally do and arbitrarily get 'stronger' in that vague shoenen sense. Compared to say Fordola who we beat, then she gets empowered and beats us, and then we capture her by using a device to use her artifical echo against her and weaken her. With Zenos we just kind of stroll up and fight him.

And there aren't even any real stakes to losing to him either. A couple npcs get wounded I guess. One unnamed npc dies at RR but if I recall it was Fordola that killed him anyway. The resistance doesn't have to abandon its headquarters, and in Doma there are no negative consequences for our failed assassination attempt. In fact, it plays into our hands because Grynwhat's attack on the Steppe coming after us helps to rally the Xaela against them after we win the thing.

Zenos has the potential to become interesting for me in 5.0 with his current path of reclaiming 'what's his' in the empire but for now I find him unengaging both as a character and as a menacing foe to face due to the lack of consequence when he wins.
Keep in mind that we got strong enough to also fight and win against Omega, which in turn was more powerful than Shinryu. So, it makes sense that at that point we could defeat the primal. If you think about it, Omega itself kinda "tells" us (well, he doesn't, as that's the part that it can't understand) why we can keep getting stronger and stronger, which in turn makes sense after everything that happens during SB. For instance, being the first time that we get our ass handed back to us would certainly sparkle something inside the WoL to go beyond their current limits (why does this remind me of that Cloud VS Sephiroth talk during Advent Children in regards to strength?). A bit of inner reflection and self-discovery goes a long way in order to make people learn and improve, especially someone with such a huge potential like the WoL. We never truly had to do that before, despite several people/dragons telling us to do it. And as Kalise said, we weren't sitting on our hands during all that time, either. The most important parts being our additional training with our job's master, or fighting with and alongside a true warrior race like the Xaela. If you add everything up, it truly makes more sense.

I agree on the lack of consequence part, tho. Yes, some minor characters died when we lost, but that's all. I mean, for our characters maybe even losing these people was a significant hit, but it's hard for us as players to actually feel anything like when a certain someone with pointy ears died (and then it felt so rewarding to beat Thordan and company).