2/2

More of these inconsistencies can be found as you look into the last third of the game where the Alexandria arc takes place. Zoraal Ja is hamstrug by conflicting motivations switching between wanting to achieve peace by making people sick of war to being power-hungry and mad, only to find he's motivated by issues we barely get inklings about. Sphene, being forced entirely into the last third of the act, serves as a dark mirror to Wuk Lumat as opposed to her brother being a foil, but outside of the most basic characterization of 'is nice' and 'will do anything for her people,' has nothing really compelling going on about her.

Furthermore, the entire plot point of the Endless seems to contradict what we know about souls and aether, and is contradicted by both pre-existing material and its own characters. Being able to make perfect clones of people, memories and all, was something that was achieved by Allag thousands of years before Sphene's time, and they seem to have a similar technology base to Alexandria. These clones don't need souls to sustain themselves - why do Sphene's Endless need them? And lest we forget, there are no other Mamool Ja in Alexandria that we know of - so how did Zoraal Ja have a son that's the spitting image of him down to the otherwise unique blue scales, if not for cloning?

Even disbarring that, we have the existence of Otis, a soul placed into a machine, memories and all, that functions perfectly fine for hundreds of years. There's hordes of Alexandrian soldier bots that Sphene herself can project herself onto; why couldn't the memory data of the Endless just be installed in the Alexanderian robots and keep Living Memory as simply backup storage? No souls seem to be needed for the animation of these robots, or the storage of digital memories.

All of that is to say, Sphene and her motivations feel incredibly contrived to the point of straining credulity. Even if she is essentially an AI falling into the paperclip maximizer loop, there are too many more efficient ways for her to choose a path of co-existence that would have guaranteed the preservation of her people, a capability she demonstrated when she opted to work with Zoraal Ja. This makes the last zone and dungeon, obvious callbacks to Amaurot, Ultima Thule and The Dead Ends, feel hollow, and the final trial just existing as something we have to defeat rather than any meaningful triumph.

I was worried about the direction the writing would go as the 6.x storyline went on, and knew that it would take time to course correct. I am sad to see my fears proven right, especially when two thirds of the expansion itself resonated so well with me and had it stuck to that storyline, it would have been one of the more enjoyable expansions I've experienced. As of now though, I am genuinely concerned about where our next journey will take us.