What all can be done to the echo.

[Anonymoose]

I have always figured that the reason we don't get Echo flashbacks like 1.0's is because they were really confusing;

The 100-page thread where we finally realized that every opening story included a large number of 10-year Echo jumps marked only by a subtle (and sometimes glitchy) "whoosh" sound was arguably the catalyst for the creation of the lore forum so we could be safely relocated out of the localization forum after we started using it as a de facto World Setting Quality Assurance campfire <nervous sweatdrop>

It was a really cool storytelling device and a really cool way to introduce the Echo ... except for the fact that it was not only subtle enough to appear as though the events were happening in one time in linear succession until the epiphany, it was so subtle that the epiphany itself was undermined by the inability to recognize / remember which scenes should be reinterpreted, and we had no way to re-experience them. There was no NG+, there was no Unending Journey, the EXP grind was prohibitive, and the barriers to recording quality video of the game were pretty high at the time.

I expected that as long as they didn't try to make it ambiguous when you were in an Echo again, and/or at least marked the "in-Echo state" more clearly, everything would be fine, so it also felt (to me) like an over-correction and net loss - a(n admittedly mild) disappointment - that we went straight from there to sepia-toned, zero-exploration, zero-interaction flashbacks forever after. I probably would have just slapped a subtle, shifting, dreamlike, iridescent filter over the edges of the screen and called it a day, lol.