Quote Originally Posted by Lurina View Post
The whole scenario surrounding the Endless just felt cartoonish to me. Why does the game feel the need to remind you that what you're doing is morally okay and that they're not "real" every five minutes? Why doesn't even a single one of them express reservations or objections to being deleted? We're obviously supposed to see them as people from all the heartfelt parental goodbyes and and the fact that Sphene and Cahciua have their own objectives and agency, but they don't act like people, they act like props engineered to deliver the theme. It feels like the game is terrified of making the player feel at all uncomfortable or complicated about what they're doing, and it saps all pathos from the situation. What could have been a painfully bittersweet sequence where we have to do something the game admitted was complicated to save the people we love ended up feeling uncomfortable and emptily sentimental. It was weird.
It's possible that they were actively trying to avoid the current popular discourse around it, but it's also possible that they just didn't think a more nuanced story would so neatly fit into just a zone and a half -- but still felt it was a story they wanted to tell anyway. Probably a little of both, if I were to guess.

I agree that a little more time and space given for this narrative to breathe couldn't have hurt it, but it is what it is in the end. I'm more confused (and this is a tangential response to other posts I've seen, not you, for the record), given that what we got is so heavy-handed, that the discourse is so much about the so-called moral quandary of the central conflict, and not more about its lack of nuance. Not to say that I haven't seen a lot of the latter too, but so much more of the conversation is hung up on arguing whether or not it was a genocide, or simply whether or not it was wrong. And I would never tell someone they're wrong for how a story makes them feel, but the answer to that particular question, dictated by the facts as presented to us by the text (and the subtext, for that matter, as little of it there was room for), is actually very cut and dry.

... But maybe that just proves the writing somehow wasn't heavy-handed enough lol. Certainly not for the most illiterate among us.