It’s almost as if Gloria going around poking the King is a stupendously bad idea for the ages, except if he pokes too hard there won’t be ages for it to be a stupendously bad idea in.
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I’m sure the King’s chains are still strong…
I’m also sure every geopolitical actor surrounding Crete will act with the patience and calmness needed to solve this diplomatically, instead of threatening to cause a famine, forcing Crete to attack a NATO member, and starting the largest war since WW2.
Because that would be dumb for the about 3 minutes everyone would get afterwards.
So it won’t happen.
Right? 
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Indeed. After all, if there’s one thing we can rely upon, it’s political actors to not be complete and utter morons.
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Just giving me more reasons/excuses to take Lat with me and tell everyone to fuck off once the whole thing is over. Y’all can handle your problems once the war is over but I’m done being a stooge lol
Not you Aki, I’d never say fuck off to you. You’re more than welcome to come visit.
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As much as I agree with ya, I think being in the League is the only thing keeping ya from being hunted down by the government.
Skipping the country might be kinda easy with powers but ya’d think by now that there’d be laws against that stuff.
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I got a feeling that after Japan (looking at ya, berserk Forlorn) some people might start thinking the same as Stratton did and there’s still a chance that he could come back to the White House since one of the laws concerning the health of the president, the VP steps in temporarily if the president is mentally or physically unable to do so.
If that happens, Lat and I be fucking gone.
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Not gonna lie, at this point I have bigger objections to Gloria than Stratton as president. It’s true that Stratton would PROBABLY knowingly and willingly endanger innocents for good press, but Gloria DEFINITELY did, and definitely trumps probably.
I say we let them both be deemed unfit and take our chances with whoever is the Speaker of the House (that’s the next one in line, right?).
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When Gloria was introduced as a famous soldier, that was a big red flag for me. Most of the military types from I’ve noticed tends to take on the warmonger mentality in the movies and such.
Which is why I mentioned earlier that when everything is done, I’m outta here so I wouldn’t have to be used as a pawn for someone again. What are they gonna do when they know that I helped out with whatever will happen in the future? You’d have to be a dick to push something else onto them when they’re retired and out of sight.
And yes, the Speaker of the House is next in line after the President and VP. After the Speaker is the Senate leader then the Secretary of State if I remember that right.
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Which I personally think is a big flaw in writing. Not that I believe soldiers can’t be in favor of war, but I’ve always thought that was a pretty weak way to tackle the ‘different mentality’ that comes from being in an active military situation.
Like, a soldier is probably going to think his armed forces are beyond what other places have, for example, but that doesn’t mean he would think every situation is an Iraq that needs a Desert Storm.
None of this is to say Gloria isn’t planning on a war with Crete, but if he was, (and I’m not saying he is), you’d be well-served listening to what @JBento expressed before, Crete’s neighbors slowly being turned against Crete because of the situations that keep happening.
Remember, Crete has the finest navy in the Mediterranean. There are only two entryways into the Mediterranean. The Suez Canal is owned by an undisputed Cretan ally who had Crete get them out scotfree after getting savaged in the Six-Day War, and the other entry point is Gibraltar, which is guarded by… what? One British regiment and a few patrol boats?
Going to war with Crete risks the whole of the Mediterranean being closed up, and Lord knows how many economies imploding from that alone, nevermind the losses that places like France/Spain/Italy/etc would suffer if Crete was forced to stop trading with them.
Right now, if Gloria declared war on Crete, he’d cause a worldwide economic crisis, and basically half the nations in NATO would pull what they all did to Ukraine after 2014, namely going “gee, we’d love to help, but uh, money and stuff”.
Going to war with Crete is very foolish.
Choking it out slowly, leaving it bereft of allies, and then kickstarting the Arsenal of Democracy? Barring the King, that’s not a bad plan at all.
Two things.
One, extremely optimistic belief that whatever is coming isn’t coming for you specifically.
Two, I am so glad you brought up the order of precedence for the US presidency.
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It’s some silly energy alien dispute isn’t it?
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It’s a hell of a lot of coincidences building up to the earth-shaking crescendo that things are today.
The “big” events behind it are the Cataclysm of 966, the Unification 400 years ago, and a certain Death Charge.
… No, I’m not explaining the last two. Wait until Chapter 9 and 10.
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But my impatience! What will I do!? 
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If they interrupt me eating pizza out of a 5 star restaurant that I bothered Ignis to tell me about, I’m going to be very upset
I just wanna eat good food on my new superhero salary man.
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Unification. Death Charge. Now those are some choice words.
My intuition is to place the Unyielding Valkyria in the timeframe of the Unification, and to place the Death Charge very recently, within the past decade, as what brought Valkyria Regiment to an end. With the Varangian hypothesis, they can be connected to the Aegean Cataclysm too, though that remains shrouded in mystery.
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The idea of the Valkyria itself predates the Unification slightly, but the Regiment itself was founded during it.
The Death Charge was approximately 11 years ago. My timeline is a little screwy there (I’m bad at math), but it’s either 11 or 10 years.
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Somebody’s (oooh, can it be me?) gonna work their way up that chain, aren’t they? Shattering link by link?
That’s because time is a big ball of… wibbly-wobbly… timey-wimey… stuff.
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Frogive me if am wrong but only one male ro?
Two: Nova and Mars
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Any story or character details people have missed that you wish more people have picked up?
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I try to sprinkle a lot of hints on scenes, so there’s a lot of stuff that I don’t think people pick up. That’s fine, mostly, since the goal is to have it all make sense on a second run, when the story is finished. I think I’ve mentioned it somewhere else, but I’ll be legitimately surprised if I don’t get at least one person going “Good God, man. Is there any page without foreshadowing?” once they know everything.
That said, there’s a few things that I expected more people to take note of. Some of them are from the rewrites, other are not. Here’s a list:
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Crete seems… like a great place, on paper. It’s socially liberal, rich, hasn’t committed atrocities despite its long history, and all that. But as the Codex states, it also has the third highest military budget in the planet, despite being of minuscule size compared to the USA and China, the only two countries to outspend them, and also engages in what you could argue is ‘soft imperialism’, as it has basically taken over the economies of Greece, Egypt and Cyprus.
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Near the end of Chapter 1, Seeker leaves on a trip. Ignis doesn’t like this, and refuses to have breakfast with the team when this happens. It’s meant to be a bit of a whiplash from the whole ‘haha, i’m charming and on your side!’ stuff she was showing earlier. She doesn’t like being separated from Seeker.
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Unlike every other RO, every choice about getting with Latooni has her taking the initiative, since she’s already into you (see Chapter 2. She’s the only one to ask the MC to dance).
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In Chapter… 3, I think, Nova calls Seeker ‘Seek’, as a nickname. Seeker immediately tells him to never call him that again. When Ignis uses that same nickname in Chapter 4, he doesn’t seem to mind at all, despite specifically telling Lat ‘I don’t like people calling me that’ later in the chapter.
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In the Codex entry for Crete, there’s a parenthesis where it says “God, how I wish.” Remember that Nova writes these entries for you. It’s a reference about him being from Latin America, which is basically the US’ playground. He’d like his country to be more like Crete, a strong, fully independent island that doesn’t have to fear the US collapsing them every time a leftist runs for president.
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This one isn’t as obvious, but Aki uses ‘Heavens’ instead of ‘God’. This is partly because of that whole different religion, but it’s a bit deeper than that. Aki’s the most religious member of the cast.
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In Chapter 4, if you tell Gloria that being a hero is ‘just a job’, his dialogue changes slightly depending on if you’re romancing Ignis or not. If you aren’t, he simply goes “hey, you don’t know if those rumours about Ignis and Seeker are true, do you?”, which seems like a bit of an innocent question. If you are romancing Ignis, though, he specifically calls Ignis and Seeker ‘lovebirds’ to the MC’s face.
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Continuing on with Ignis, near the end of Chapter 4, you get picked up for dinner. If you’re romancing Ignis, Forlorn comes pick you up, claiming that ‘Ignis is busy’. If you aren’t romancing anyone, though, you see she actually isn’t busy, because she picks you up herself. This is because she’s already feeling conflicted about romancing the MC, and so is trying to avoid confronting the matter (and being alone with the MC), at least for now.
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This one isn’t as obvious, I think, since Stratton is an ass in general, but while most of the team just thinks he’s a buffoon, Ignis actually despises him. When he’s brought up in the Prologue, her demeanor immediately changes and she insults him. When he has that speech in Chapter 1, she is the only one to curse at him, and she does it twice. The only other person to be this vitriolic about Stratton is the Broken King, and that’s only after someone does a terrorist attack in his name and mocks his dead wife.
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This is more on the articles than the game itself, and I’ve kind of said it a few times, but the Blitz Queen is surprisingly vain. She was poor growing up, so she has a chip against Byzantine nobles. 50% of the reason she creates the Cretan Army is because someone told her ‘people will think you’re cooler’. (Part of) her final words are her implying that she wants more than just to be Queen of Crete, her true interest was seeing the world with the King.
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At the start of Chapter 5, despite being in the middle of a terrorist attack, all the German Chancellor cares about is throwing barbs, making fun of Spain and France’s colonization of the Dominican Republic, and poking fun at your conversation with Gloria.
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Gloria calls Seeker ‘Mister’. He’s the only team member to get the honorific, and the only one that Gloria specifically avoids antagonizing. This is because he doesn’t like Seeker.
There’s other stuff (I was legitimately expecting questions regarding Sayaka, a figure of Seeker’s past), but those are a bit smaller, and I’ve been writing this post for like an hour anyway.
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