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my thoughts on FFXIII-2
-which I finished the other day, yays. Cut for spoilerishness.
It did improve towards the end, and by 'improve' I mean 'spent more time diving down into nightmareville'; I couldn't help but love the level about the last three people on Pulse throwing a birthday party while one of them is trying to persuade one of the others to kill him. ALMOST PINTER. My levels of cast indifference shifted as it went on, too; Serah was never all that interesting but Noel, much as I continue to dislke him, did eventually attain FFXIII-worthy heights of stereotype parody by having his dream-self demonstrate that indulging in manpain is what makes him truly happy. Noel is all manpain. He is an entire map of manpain where it always snows diamonds.
My worry is that it's unintentional. FFXIII was permanent trollmode but here Noel's showing off his absurdist manpain and Yeul's riding the Rei Ayanami infinitely-disposable-girldoll trope straight off a cliff and I have zero faith that the writers have done it on purpose because the rest of the game is so shallow in comparison with FFXIII.
But, Alyssa.
ALYSSA.
She is a hotpants-wearing cyberpunk mad scientist with some genuine, fascinating existential plotfuckery. She's fighting for herself and just for herself and that is what makes her so much more compelling than anyone else in this game. I am so, so in crush.
Most of the paradox side endings are better than the real one; Caius is still a sucky villain because he's unrelatable and his motivations are nonsensical but he has stage presence. I did like the way the cutscene spun out, though; fake us out with all the cutesy cutesy love love and then drop the apocalypse on us. Yes.
I think I've got this one figured.
The Archlyte Steppe is one of those areas that quotes its timestamp as '???'; unlike the others, there is no plot reason for this. It's only doing it for the sake of the ambiguous. You've got a Pulse-dwelling hunter-gatherer culture hanging out together and no indication as to what part of Pulse's history they're occupying. The women are dressed much like Vanille, and, well, the men's wrap-around tops belted at the waist are...kind of reminiscent of Fang. They also wear multi-layered necklaces made of teeth, although I think theirs have three layers rather than Fang's two. Most people of both genders have tattoos shaped like Fang's.
It's slow to explain when it is. The (delicious) implication in FFXIII was that human life on Pulse had become extinct due to the creation of too pointlessly fucking many l'Cie, although FFXIII-2 tells us that the Paddrans survived as nomads. But there's two NPC comments that make it pretty clear;
-there's a villager who says that the group originated on Cocoon and prefer life on Pulse because human technology is better than Fal'Cie,
-the chocobo keeper says 'And think, I remember when they were only kept as pets!'
I can't now remember where (it's not in the datalog or in a fragment entry, sadly), but something, somewhere in this game stated that since Cocoon had abandoned Fal'Cie-worship after the Fall, some people had taken to worshipping Fang and Vanille instead. CAN YOU BLAME THEM.
What this suggests is the people of the Archlyte Steppe are a breakaway group of post-Fall Cocoonians who are practising a reconstruction culture based entirely on Fang and Vanille.
Things I Want Fic Of:
-most of the paradox endings. The Future Is Hope is crying out for DLC, never mind fic. I love the Shadow Of The Colossus ending and grimdark of it would be great. But omg, Test Subjects. It's a brilliant excuse for MGS riffs and I want an entire fic of Noel and Serah falling in with the Resistance (which needless to say is led by Rygdea's duplicate - I am amazed he made it out of Eden alive, omg love) and gradually trying to piece their heads back together, failing, finding the one mental anchor they can place is Alyssa's evil clone army (I am picturing hundreds of rampaging Alyssas here) and that the only way they can win the war is by deleting the lot of them, probably with idk nukes. No, shut up, I am not going to write this.
-ALYSSA ALYSSA ALYSSA. There is not one fic about her on AO3. What. I just want her existential dread and her bereavement trauma and her handshakes with Serah and her sat in a dark room backing up her brain and having long masturbatory conversations with her duplicate. I want her faking her way through a relationship with Hope just for the sake of seeing Serah again. I want her swinging from obsessing over Serah because Serah saved her by establishing her reality to obsessing over Serah and desperately needing her dead. I want the moment she figured out how completely, utterly fucked she was and deciding how many people she would be willing to kill to fix it. I want her meeting with Caius - seriously, how did that happen? I want Serah on the back of the Shivabike regretting everything.
-I want fic about the Yeul who grew up.
So obviously there will be a FFXIII-3. I am hoping like hell that Fang is its main character but I think it's tragically more likely to be Hope. :/
It did improve towards the end, and by 'improve' I mean 'spent more time diving down into nightmareville'; I couldn't help but love the level about the last three people on Pulse throwing a birthday party while one of them is trying to persuade one of the others to kill him. ALMOST PINTER. My levels of cast indifference shifted as it went on, too; Serah was never all that interesting but Noel, much as I continue to dislke him, did eventually attain FFXIII-worthy heights of stereotype parody by having his dream-self demonstrate that indulging in manpain is what makes him truly happy. Noel is all manpain. He is an entire map of manpain where it always snows diamonds.
My worry is that it's unintentional. FFXIII was permanent trollmode but here Noel's showing off his absurdist manpain and Yeul's riding the Rei Ayanami infinitely-disposable-girldoll trope straight off a cliff and I have zero faith that the writers have done it on purpose because the rest of the game is so shallow in comparison with FFXIII.
But, Alyssa.
ALYSSA.
She is a hotpants-wearing cyberpunk mad scientist with some genuine, fascinating existential plotfuckery. She's fighting for herself and just for herself and that is what makes her so much more compelling than anyone else in this game. I am so, so in crush.
Most of the paradox side endings are better than the real one; Caius is still a sucky villain because he's unrelatable and his motivations are nonsensical but he has stage presence. I did like the way the cutscene spun out, though; fake us out with all the cutesy cutesy love love and then drop the apocalypse on us. Yes.
I think I've got this one figured.
The Archlyte Steppe is one of those areas that quotes its timestamp as '???'; unlike the others, there is no plot reason for this. It's only doing it for the sake of the ambiguous. You've got a Pulse-dwelling hunter-gatherer culture hanging out together and no indication as to what part of Pulse's history they're occupying. The women are dressed much like Vanille, and, well, the men's wrap-around tops belted at the waist are...kind of reminiscent of Fang. They also wear multi-layered necklaces made of teeth, although I think theirs have three layers rather than Fang's two. Most people of both genders have tattoos shaped like Fang's.
It's slow to explain when it is. The (delicious) implication in FFXIII was that human life on Pulse had become extinct due to the creation of too pointlessly fucking many l'Cie, although FFXIII-2 tells us that the Paddrans survived as nomads. But there's two NPC comments that make it pretty clear;
-there's a villager who says that the group originated on Cocoon and prefer life on Pulse because human technology is better than Fal'Cie,
-the chocobo keeper says 'And think, I remember when they were only kept as pets!'
I can't now remember where (it's not in the datalog or in a fragment entry, sadly), but something, somewhere in this game stated that since Cocoon had abandoned Fal'Cie-worship after the Fall, some people had taken to worshipping Fang and Vanille instead. CAN YOU BLAME THEM.
What this suggests is the people of the Archlyte Steppe are a breakaway group of post-Fall Cocoonians who are practising a reconstruction culture based entirely on Fang and Vanille.
Things I Want Fic Of:
-most of the paradox endings. The Future Is Hope is crying out for DLC, never mind fic. I love the Shadow Of The Colossus ending and grimdark of it would be great. But omg, Test Subjects. It's a brilliant excuse for MGS riffs and I want an entire fic of Noel and Serah falling in with the Resistance (which needless to say is led by Rygdea's duplicate - I am amazed he made it out of Eden alive, omg love) and gradually trying to piece their heads back together, failing, finding the one mental anchor they can place is Alyssa's evil clone army (I am picturing hundreds of rampaging Alyssas here) and that the only way they can win the war is by deleting the lot of them, probably with idk nukes. No, shut up, I am not going to write this.
-ALYSSA ALYSSA ALYSSA. There is not one fic about her on AO3. What. I just want her existential dread and her bereavement trauma and her handshakes with Serah and her sat in a dark room backing up her brain and having long masturbatory conversations with her duplicate. I want her faking her way through a relationship with Hope just for the sake of seeing Serah again. I want her swinging from obsessing over Serah because Serah saved her by establishing her reality to obsessing over Serah and desperately needing her dead. I want the moment she figured out how completely, utterly fucked she was and deciding how many people she would be willing to kill to fix it. I want her meeting with Caius - seriously, how did that happen? I want Serah on the back of the Shivabike regretting everything.
-I want fic about the Yeul who grew up.
So obviously there will be a FFXIII-3. I am hoping like hell that Fang is its main character but I think it's tragically more likely to be Hope. :/