I do think this could’ve been different if it was somebody with more ruling experience, more of a spine, and less directly emotionally involved. I View Leon as a genuinely good human being but a pretty bad king and that’s mostly because of how I view the events surrounding this.
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On another note( i say that way too much i swear im sorry) one of the hings that springs to my mind is how badly Ante played herself. If she didnt keep the Mage from casting the disentchantment, if she actually believed they were loyal none of this wouldve happened. And why did she play herself this way? She delivered Tahlia the Mage on a silver platter. She gave one of the biggest Enemies of Param one of the mightiest Archmages basically as a freebie. Sure some Mages wont be swayed to Arcadias side but think about it. She still, if all of the pyre etc didnt happen wouldve probably approached the Mage and tried to convince them but ot def wouldve been way way harder that way even with Eli as a lure. So infact Ante’s distrust of the Mage made her fears come true. For the most part she made the Mage the enemy she wanted them to be because she was so gdm distrustfull of them. Well done Ante. Well done. ( One can see I do not like her. At all. ) Back to Lurkdom again!
Edit: I know its in her Occupation as a Spymaster but still after all the Mage did in the war her heavy distrust was still very very much unreasonable.
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Occupational hazard, I’d think.
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Ante’s had it out for us since the start, I wonder if we’ll get more insight into what her problem is in the future.
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I agree, but we have to bear in mind that Param doesn’t have a modern judicial system or a modern society. At the time the story is set (Kinda like late middle ages), justice was much more punitive than investigative, much much different from how it is today. Especially in cases that seemed as clear as this one, except to those who knew the MC personally. And yes, I agree that they should have waited for the journal, but nobody knew how long it would take, whether it would even be possible to read it, or if it would contain the exact evidence needed to either exonerate or definitively condemn the MC.
Also, Leon probably has no idea how to be a good king, considering how some of his formative years went and the fact that he spent several years fighting a war rather than ruling. The situation was just a gigaenormous mess with no easy outcomes.
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You’re a glorified nobody who just randomly appears and is friends with the royal Brothers, who clearly is hiding a bunch of stuff, who, it turns out, is acquainted with a certain crazy psycho, who, for all she knows, is probably still hiding stuff. And her job is literally to look out for the royal family and to find threats, you’re basically a walking red flag
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I don’t agree that alone is enough to warrant her behavior, there’s a fine line between healthy suspicion and what appears to be a desire to make the mage out to be a threat.
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The other way I see the reunion going down is us crashing that little festival they have in honor of the mage. So many nobles and other leading figures in one place would prove too tempting a target. Also it would give us a chance to get rid of that damn statue.
Self fulfilling prophecy. If she’s still the spymaster after this big of a screw up then my mage’s reunion with the old crew is gonna go south real fast the second she learns that.
I’ve always suspected that she’s part of the order of broken flame, or whatever they’re called. The ones hellbent on the eradication of the Arcadian people. Would explain much. After a certain point during the war her suspicions of the mage should’ve died down. At least when sister died she should’ve cooled off a bit. The only way her constant distrust of us makes sense to me is the reason I’ve given above.
Also if you remember what was going in Param in the old demo, all that happened on her watch. It really paints her as either being inept, or she allowed that stuff to go on.
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She strikes me as someone who has exactly one guiding principle, protecting the royal family and that’s basically it. She legitimately does not care about anyone or anything beyond that, and that single minded to termination explains a shit ton
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I think in the end Ante was obsessed. It was very much extreme to which length she went to just prove the Mage guilty of something. Im excited for whatever part she will play in the story since i may hate her but she is a good character for the story. And yeah self fulfilling prophecy indeed. Ah i love this Series.
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That was badly stated on my part. Not the flashback itself, but the events in it. Given that Mirage says she apprenticed under Thalia for something like 15 years, clearly Thalia is much older than she looks. It likely has something to do with her phantasma, of course.
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Ok yeah haha that I can see. We still dont who or what Tahlia is tbh. I have some crackhead theories that will stay in my closet for now. But yeah we dont even know what happened that Param and Salantir even went to war with Arcadia. Its still horrible but i think there is a big big conspiracy in all and i dont think Tahlia is quite Innocent.
Just my thoughts thou.
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Do we know how Aunt Bess’ son was named? I think it could be a cute callback reference to use it as a fake name in book 2.
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We weren’t told onscreen but that doesn’t necessarily mean the mage doesn’t know.
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I ah, didn’t know where to put this since idk if the Book 1 thread was ever reopened but I did find a slight typo. “Clumps”.
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I guess for my mc it will depend on whether or not he really ends up falling for the red-haired cute and funny pretty boy now. Even if that happens however my now mercenary mc will still try to get maximum rewards and, if necessary, make it clear he is only there to support Yu, beyond the mandatory year and doesn’t care much about anything beyond that.
I admittedly don’t remember much of the old demo so I can’t comment on the differences, but I really enjoyed the read! I miss the old crew terribly (I was ready to BOLT back to Param at first lol) but I’m begrudgingly (on my Mage’s behalf, I had no problems liking them lol) becoming more and more attached to our new teammates, and the trickle of information about the culture in Thulrum and the memories of Lucerre really sold me. Trusting Tahlia is a whole other ordeal of course, she’s an intriguing character
Some typos/errors/bugs I found:
In the codex, it seems that the Prestige refers to use as a member of the White Fangs, and in the Relationships section the Associate Information of Ilya, Saine and Leon also look like they would belong in early game Book I
^ I was able to cast all of these even though the descriptions said they require a lot of proficiency/expertise (my lowest magic stats is 40)
(sorry, they’re probably not in order since I switched playing on computer and mobile)
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It’s kinda funny that the hardest decision I’ve had to make in this game is whether to bail Yurui out of that situation with the refugee girl. On the one hand, I feel like they’d like to extricate themselves from that situation, on the other, I feel really sorry for that girl. That was my stopping point last night. Still don’t know what to do.
One odd thing I noticed from the responses to the new demo is that some people seem to think that Arcadia is now too squeaky clean and Thalia doesn’t seem as evil as before. I find that really odd because they still very much have the vibe of well intentioned activists for their people who resort to extreme measures. They just don’t seem racist about it this time around. We see F melt a man’s SKIN off. I can hardly blame them but then again I couldn’t the first time around either.
The idea that the Diocese seems too clean compared to what Arcadia looked like before is also odd because what we saw before of Arcadia was nothing. We barely saw anything of the people who actually lived in the city. I was under the impression there was only a handful of residents there and it was mainly a central institution of the Ishavak Church with political autonomy like the Vatican. The reason it seems way less sinister now is because our time is actually being spent among the people living there and not just the secret remnants of the old government running black ops across the continent. The people of Param didn’t all seem sinister either. They were normal people. This is like complaining that Param seems less morally ambiguous because those orphans we saved weren’t ominous enough. They don’t seem sinister because they’re regular citizens uninvolved with any of the political machinations of various factions. This is why I keep saying wanting to burn the whole country down is kinda unhinged.
As for Thalia, it’s been said before but she doesn’t seem less sinister at all. She just doesn’t immediately tell us her true goal. It’s possible she either has better intentions this time around or was simply always meant to have them and the old demo didn’t nail the execution, but we DID also see her in flashbacks and POV scenes in the first game where she like, orchestrated Sister’s start of darkness and encouraged her plan. She’s not NAMED there but she’s a blond woman with red eyes who effortlessly dispels magic collar spells and other forms of magic. And the way she talks to us is rather evasive but she also kinda admits to having a hand in the whole thing. She just doesn’t go full double-barrel and start talking about how she wants to conquer the continent and kill the Royal Family right away. That’s just her being smarter. She wants us radicalized first.
I do have ONE issue that’s kinda bugging me. When you’re hearing about Param recovering, you can either be happy for the whole country, blame the whole country, or focus on how your death is being treated in the press, among one or two more murky options I can’t remember but aren’t relevant here. The focus on your death seems to put the blame for it being swept under the rug on ALL of your old companions, and the other two options are to be happy for everyone or resent everyone. And that’s kinda a trend I don’t really like when we express our feelings on the whole ordeal. We can either resent everyone or forgive everyone. At no point that I’ve played thus far has there been an option to separate the different parties involved. I don’t blame all of Param for my death, I blame LEON. He’s the one who had me executed. I certainly don’t blame Illya or Saine, they tried to rescue me. I have a reason to hate Leon, but the others tried to bust me out. I wrote a love letter to Illya.
This was an issue briefly in the last game too, where if you try to be angry at Leon for ordering your death, your character says that they should have left ALL THREE of them to die in the Forrest. It feels like the game is trying to brow beat me into taking a forgiving path by forcing me to have collateral damage if I want some retribution against like, two people. Like, it can’t come up with a way to make me feel bad for targeting Leon so it just neuters the ability to shape my character’s desires so it can hold the people I actually like hostage. Stop lumping him together with these other two. They are not the same.
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To your point of it all bei g to squeaky clean and seeming so i stand by that point because i think u maybe misunderstood me maybe not others but maybe my point. I didnt mean it as in oh my Arcadia is so cool now but rather in a its in way too good of a spot rn with resources happiness etc rn. Its suspicious as heck. Thats what at least i meant with my squeaky clean. I think i stated that too in my comment but then again english is not my first language so eh. And the rest is just your opinion which is valid. I have no string feelings about the rest or anything to add anymore. But yeah Arcadia is basically suspiciously good looking and i cant waot for the facade to crack.
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