Foreign Invasion

[Cleretic]

The WoL sees into the past based on stimuli and aetheric traces, as far as we can tell. They wouldn't have been privvy to a 'Meanwhile' going on in Garlemald, featuring characters they either haven't seen in ages or haven't even met in the first place.

It would also twist and reshape the story in a way that doesn't necessarily help at all. 'Meanwhile' scenes are a way to keep us the player up to date on what's happening while our character is busy doing something else, to let us know that things we aren't there for aren't just in stasis. It also helps to give pretense and context to big characters the WoL hasn't met yet, so that they don't come out of nowhere when we do meet them; Emet, Fantastic Dan, Zero, and Golbez are all characters that got and used that little head-start, and the scenes are almost all at the end of a patch specifically to work with that load; it's a cliffhanger that we as players know but our character doesn't, and so can't do anything about, making for a natural stopping point.

Making them Echo flashes would change that primarily by making the WoL aware of and capable of acting on them. Could you make a good story out of that? Absolutely, and other stories have worked well off similar ideas. But it doesn't really work for the game we are playing, because it immediately turns the 'Meanwhile' scenes into actionable evidence. They can't be a floating unresolved cliffhanger while the WoL and their friends do something else; instead they're now actionable evidence that they have to act on, and as a result kinda have to be moved to the start of the a content load rather than the end, because then reasonably speaking the next step is 'do something abut the fact there's an Ascian with Varis'.

And then to take the repercussions further, the fact that you've taken away the main approach to cliffhangers and are now being more reactive to these flashes means the story has to be much more episodic in structure. We also need to make the flashes less accurate; if they're the impetus for the immediate story, we can no longer build on them iteratively to make something unique, so to avoid them being too predictable we have to be sure they're missing vital context.

And finally, in following all the necessary readjustments to the story we need to make the 'Meanwhile' scenes an observable event, we have somehow reinvented That's So Raven.