Problematic notion about Zone 5 & 6 story bits.

[Lyth]

I really didn't feel emotionally invested in this part of the story. With Emet and Amaurot, you could feel his investment in the conflict even when you were at odds with his beliefs. With Sphene, it just felt disconnected. I thought that her moment with Robot Otis in S9 was compelling, because she had just reconnected with someone precious to her briefly only to lose him again permanently, his machine model being an early precursor of the Endless. The execution felt slightly off, but I felt that Hiroi was on to something there.

But then we encounter Otis again in LM and Sphene has no involvement with his story. These are all her 'precious subjects', yet there's no reaction as Lamaty'i and company run around freeing up disk space on LM's cloud storage. I wasn't left with the feeling that Sphene knew who any of these people actually were, or that she even recognized that she was losing them. Her complete absence throughout the zone makes her feel indifferent to the whole thing.

I understand what they were doing on a conceptual level, and they could have easily made this area heart-wrenching if we saw Sphene's connection to the zones that we were shutting down. But the execution was just so insipid that I just couldn't feel any stake in the matter. We just followed around and watched as the lights went out in an abandoned theme park.

[Kirutsuki]

I really didn't feel emotionally invested in this part of the story. With Emet and Amaurot, you could feel his investment in the conflict even when you were at odds with his beliefs. With Sphene, it just felt disconnected. I thought that her moment with Robot Otis in S9 was compelling, because she had just reconnected with someone precious to her briefly only to lose him again permanently, his machine model being an early precursor of the Endless. The execution felt slightly off, but I felt that Hiroi was on to something there.

But then we encounter Otis again in LM and Sphene has no involvement with his story. These are all her 'precious subjects', yet there's no reaction as Lamaty'i and company run around freeing up disk space on LM's cloud storage. I wasn't left with the feeling that Sphene knew who any of these people actually were, or that she even recognized that she was losing them. Her complete absence throughout the zone makes her feel indifferent to the whole thing.

I understand what they were doing on a conceptual level, and they could have easily made this area heart-wrenching if we saw Sphene's connection to the zones that we were shutting down. But the execution was just so insipid that I just couldn't feel any stake in the matter. We just followed around and watched as the lights went out in an abandoned theme park.

This I agree with, and it has to do with all these characters being relatively new to us, yet we somehow make really deep connections with them for no apparent reason.
Like us calling Wuk Lamat; "lamatyi'i" or whatever felt a bit off, but atleast there we had gone to an actual journey with her alone and seen her growth. But with Sphene, Otis and many others in the 2nd portion we spend so little time to actually grow a connection to any of them, to have some form of emotional response when we need to shut them down.

And ofcourse Sphene's complete disconnection from the arc in the story felt odd.

But that's not really the point in this topic, more about the philosophical and ethical issue the game presents to us. The moral quandrary regardless of if you knew these people or not.