#“doing the dragon transformation robs you of your soul forever and you will never return”

[ganondoodle]

even if i didnt love botw as much as i do, totk drives me nuts bc, similarly to pokemon, this series is so SO SO full of potential, they have so many games they can pull from, theres so many themes, characters and worldbuilding thats just left to rot, you dont need to connect anything with a chain to old titles, you dont need to bring back any things that already had their ending, but PLEASE harness at least a fraction of all this!!!! and they just refuse to do it beyond shallow references

totk jsut drives it all home to me, bc this isnt just the next game in the franchise, but a DIRECT SEQUEL no 10 years apart from botw, yet they cant even, they REFUSE to even keep the continuity with its OWN lore it established in botw together, and that, i think, is what truly makes me so insane (derogatory) about totk

it PROVES they do not care, they dont care to build on anything of the lore of old titles beyond references in form of amiibos or whatever, they dont even care to make a sequel to their most successful game in the franchise coherent with its own lore

botw established a captivating detailed world full of potential, while lacking in active storytelling, it had environmental storytelling, characters and ideas that were the perfect ground to build on-

and then they do away with it bc idk .. they want you to build mechs and make videos of it that go viral and thats all they care about or something

shiekah tech? forget that existed character being the character you know? act as if you are seeing them for the first time just like they are lame story? dont think about that just be distracted by the epic presentation of it lore the previous title established? forget that, all that matters is what is here and now beloved character from old games beign brought back? hes a new guy and has no background and no lore and just sits waiting for you at the end to have a flashy fight with references from old titles and their lore? just here for nostalgie bait, dont you remember? you LOVE this series, now give me 70 bucks for a glorified DLC that ruins what you loved about the series and makes you realize that nothign matters and nothing is interesting anymore

you are supposed to take it all at face value, to not think about anything, to see a character say something and just go with it, and forget it the second its over, be distracted by good music and pretty visuals, but dont think about, dont think about anything but what is directly said to you like you have no critical thinking skills, forget there was a game before this one, only the one you play matters, empty your skull and dont let yourself feel anything but what the game tells you to feel

if they dont even care to make the sequel to their most successful game actually build on the previous title, dont even care to keep their continuity of two games supposedly directly happening one after the other in tact- maybe they never cared, and all the meaning we thought we saw them build into their games was all accidental and meaningless

and that is absolutely soul crushing for fans like me to discover

its a game. its not a story, its not a world, its not themes, its not characters, its not lore. its a product made to make you pay money, not to make you think about anything.

[rametarin]

Watched a playthrough of FF6 recently.

I guess between all the bouts of grinding and level exploring I never realized just how melancholy that game is in tone when you focus on the main story from A to Z.

It’s not depressing, but goodness gracious. Most of the character development is tragic.

Like, Terra. What is she? She’s introduced as the captive mind-slave and personality robbed war machine for an actual evil empire. She’s the bi-racial spawn of fairies and humans (Fight me on that term. I dare you. I dare you, fucker. Fight me on my classification of her father’s race as fey.) that was an unwitting attack dog. Upon heading to a neutral arctic country, she meets a frozen fey-dragon entombed in ice. Trying to interface with her causes her machine to explode and brings her into the care of a man in town that opposes the empire. He frees her mind. Now this poor little half-fairy faun has to cope with the existential terror of suddenly being a person instead of a CPU for war machine.

So she makes friends with a world traveling treasure hunter, meets a dashing young engineer and prince of a techno-kingdom, his brother the weightlifting kung-fu dude, and joins an anti-empire resistance movement, knowing just the weight of what’d happen if that empire gained control of all the fairy-magic.

Well not too long after she defends Narshe from another Imperial attack and attempt to seize the entombed fairy-dragon. Again, she interfaces with the fairy-dragon. This time, the fairy-dragon awakens the other half of her heritage.

Terra sees her own transformed body and flies into a complete dysphoric tantrum where she flies off trying to escape from her own body, burning through the sky and screaming like a pink furred, yellow eyed demon. She burns parts of entire towns just buzzing them gibbering for human contact and help and all anybody sees with her whizzing by is a screaming monster before their houses and shops catch fire or are blown apart.

The party locate her in the top room of the tallest building in a city full of liars, thieves and degenerates, but she’s bedridden. Any time she wakes up she freaks out and knocks herself out or passes out at the reality of her own transformed state. They don’t know exactly how to help her. Then another fey person appears and lays it down; she’s not human. She’s not just some garden variety experiment from the Empire to endow human beings with magic. She’s full on, real deal, offspring of a Fair Folk and a human woman that strayed too close to the Other Side. The man reveals he escaped from the Empire’s torturous mechanical fortress where they suck the magic right out of the fairy-people and reduce them to immobile, pathetic lumps of the creatures they used to be. And also that they turn into magic crystals when they pass away. Where he proceeds to just.. let himself die for the party’s benefit. They receive their first Summons and ways to learn magic from the crystals.

His only request is they find their way to the Empire’s magitek facility, free the fairy-folk, and shut the abominable site down.

Well, after a detour to get an airship, they do so. They find a whole bunch of fey-folk in glass tubes being drained of life. Among them, Terra’s father. Maduin.  But it’s too late. The Fey-Folk explain that their lives have been drained too much- there’s nothing left to save. They gift their remains to the party to help stop the Empire and become magicite/materia.

Only when you bring back  the still psychoactive remains of Terra’s father, let him interface with Terra, let him show her her origins from HIS perspective, how he met her mother, how they formed a relationship in the fey-world, show him how the Emperor and the Empire invaded the magic realm, does Terra stop seeing her existence as monstrous and relax back into her human state. Now able to transform.

After you confront the Empire and fail, causing the world to go through a reshaping apocalypse as the bad guy co-opts the god statues, your party is scattered throughout the remade world.

Terra has taken up residence in a town that was devestated by Kefka’s godlike Light of Judgement- basically a laser beam that sundered the world. Where most of the adults perished protecting the children from horrible monsters and fiends unleashed from the broken world. They call he mama, now. She’s taking care of dozens of orphans in a town ravaged by destruction.

But by the time you find her again, she’s lost her will to fight. In trying to defend the town from an ancient monster, Phunbaba. She gets beaten near to death. So, the party rescues her. It looks like Terra is never going to rejoin your party and help save the world. She has to mother hen these lost orphans.

You come back later and fight Phunbaba again. Terra emerges and goes Super Fairy Saiyan and joins your party to fight him. After defeating him, she stands there in the town, monster-up. The children approach her and recognize her as Terra- whom they just call, ‘mama.’

She explains that she loves them, but has to leave them to join the party and help save the world from monsters like that. But she’d be back for them. Rather than be afraid of the Burning Pink Monster, they praise her and wish her well on her adventure and hope she returns home before the 17-18 year old couple have their first baby.

Moving on, they finally meet Kefka in his tower. Which he has dubbed, his monument to non-existence. Kefka doesn’t want to do anything but end life itself or make it suffer. That’s his whole bag. He finds amusement and joy in the suffering and oblivion of other people.  Final fight ensues. They win.

But the tower starts falling apart. They have to escape. While fleeing, the fey-crystals start disappearing- without the goddess statues and Kefka grounding the two different worlds, the feywild and the material world, the two are separating again. Maduin contacts his daughter again and tells her she is of two worlds; there’s a risk that she may be drawn into the fey-world with them, or simply ripped apart from the genes out. Unless she has a strong attachment to this world and the people in it, then she might... MIGHT..... have a chance to survive and live in that world. If she believes hard enough.

Terra transforms again into her flying pink furry monster mode and guides the airship out of the collapsing heap of a tower/castle as it comes down, as magic starts to fade from the world. Like a big monstrous Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.

She starts to fade out. Losing her magic. She reverts, and the airship catches up, where she lands on the deck in a heap. Checking to make sure she’s still alive, she’s just barely. But she’s alive. Her Fey-side forever shut off, however.

She went from personality robbed, shell of a person, to confused purposeless soul screaming into the ether not knowing where she came from or what her purpose was, to understanding who she was and where she came from, to making contact with humanity around her, to eventually saving it and attaching herself to the planet and its people strong enough to escape death and save her friends.

There’s no saving the people that died when the world went to shit, there’s only rebuilding and moving on. But, she did it.

Terra’s story is probably the longest in the game, but they’re all basically similar.

The biggest problem is if someone tried to make this game into a movie, probably the whiplash of the major plot points would just be a cryfest.