#and is the exact foil to Clive

[ninadove]

18 for MLB and 25 for Professor Layton !!! 💙💙💙

18. It's absolutely criminal that the fandom has been sleeping on... [ Miraculous 🐞🐈‍⬛ ]

The parallels between Ladybug and Felix/Argos in Strikeback and Emotion. Seriously. They even have a sun/moon dichotomy going on. We love some platonic character foils in this house

25. Common fandom complaint that you're sick of hearing [ Professor Layton 🎩 ]

Two come to mind:

"hErShEl HaS nO pErSoNaLiTy" oh I’m sorry do you mean the child who was forced to assume his brother’s identity from the age of five-ish? The teenager who felt compelled to bury his own dreams and aspirations to pursue a career and interests he used to hate, because he was so plagued by guilt over his friend not being able to live this exact life?? The young man desperately trying to keep his dead almost-fiancée’s memory alive by reducing himself to the parts of him she invented for him??? That guy????? HMMM I WONDER WHY HE MIGHT BE LIKE THAT!!!!!!!!!!

“Ew why do you still like Clive it’s cringe you’re not 14 anymore ew ew ew” NEWSFLASH ASSHOLE Clive is like the one thing I don’t regret about being 14 so try again

Thanks for the ask @dragongutsixofficial! 💖

The original can be found here!

[semi-imaginary-place]

finishing ffxvi

endgame lore dump time! ultima+fallen discovered magic and created an advanced civilization. the use of magic caused blight so they abandoned their physical bodies and went to a new land (a new world??? why else bother with becoming beings of spirit) and that was Valisthea. but they also brought the blight with them to valisthea, so part 3 of their plan is to make a 3rd land/new world free of blight. the mothercrystals were collecting aether to power the creation spell. ultima created humans to farm out a vessel capable of holding the power.

if they wanted to go the whole pilisophical debate on how free will is a burden, they should have developed that more through out the game. the weight of choice and the weight of consequence by. because clive doesn't make all that many weighty choices in the game, save the ship of sinking orphans or save the tower of burning orphans but you can only choose 1. that type of stuff. like maybe have clive go interact with the mothercrystal cities and see how their destruction has directly ruined these people's lives. Like i think half of valisthea is dead since the start of the game, could have framed that through the lens of choice. or they should have made a Dragon Age branching paths game although that makes it incredibly hard to make sequels as games like Three Houses or Origins can attest.

well everyone in twinside is dead.

oooooh after clive sucks a dominant. if they try to prime they go berserk. ooooh yeah that explains why he didn't have shiva and what happened with titan because that was never explained well. im surprised dion is willing to risk going berserk given that that exact thing happened just a short time ago and led to the destruction of his beloved empire.

i've given up on jill as a character, im fine with her being a side character, this game is the joshua clive show, but if they were going to sideline her they should have done so from the start instead of building her up as a main character only to drop her story line off a cliff. and get rid of the romance, the romance adds nothing to the game and actively makes it worse, its just a distraction from the rest of the story. having Jill be a side character is fine, reducing her role in the story to that of Clive's girlfriend isn't ok.

sidequest time: sabine might be sheltered but i do agree with her. why is a rosarian secret organization headquartered in dhalmek?

the reason i didn't understand why jill couldn't prime after clive absorbed shiva's aether was that at the very beginning of the game its established that the phoenix shares its blessing with its shields. Its established as normal that eikons can share their powers and that clive can use the phoenix's power. its only later that the game brings up the plot point that if clive drains someone, priming will kill them or berserk them which isn't explained at all with titan.

the tomes and dion quest may be my favorite. the flower lore continues. the national flower of sanbreque is the same one used for the poisonous tattoo ink used on bearers. our roots do not define us. where the emperor gifted the domesticated flower to dion to shackle him and make him obedient, tomes his other father figure gives him a wild flower to set dion free. for all the things each tell clive, tomes his guilt for not better mentoring dion and dion his crushing guilt of failing not only sanbreque but also tomes, they say very little of that to each other.

they're even going to Origin without Jill, she got sidelined SO HARD, dropped off the edge of the world. Joshua and Dion are both going and they're going to die if they prime. AND THEY DON'T EVEN GO ON AN AIRSHIP there was that whole subplot about Mid designing an airship. a great way to foil Ultima's plan is to keep Joshua at the hiddeway since Ultima needs both brothers.

really boss fight immediately??? where's my final dungeon so long i want to cry and give up.

huh. ultima's kindred/the fallen turned their bodies into the crystal/the mothercrystals (from which all crystal originates). what what happened to that whole dragon corpse thing. unless you're saying they're a hivemind dragon? those made into crystal were meant to be abandoned in valisthea but by destroying the mothercrystals clive has freed them. ok you lost me. presumably 8? 9? eikon statues each with an ultima in front of it and there was also an ultima sealed in joshua. each mothercrystal was actually an ultima, but there were only 5 mothercrystals. im confused.

Ifrit doesn't get a new design new design now that phoenix and ifrit have fully combined? robbed. ROBBED. After seeing the mural the entire game I was hoping to be able to play as the true eikon of fire. they never did explain what was special about the element of fire, i mean why wasn't leviathan or garuda the vessel?

oh clive absorbed ultima. why'd you'd that

clive, didn't we have this whole arc about not sacrificing yourself and going it alone.

so joshua his body falling apart gives the past of his power to clive before dying. clive beats up ultima and absorbs him. clive then restores the damage on joshua's body/tries to pour phoenix back into him before deciding to kamikaze black the entirety of origin. He's then implied to have died of the curse from using too much power on the shore and jill's reaction later. joshua is implied to have survived and written the story in the epilogue. hey clive maybe if you just sliced the crystal like you did the others you might not have died.

or apparently the lyrics hint that clive wrote the story in joshua's name and clive was looking at the moon. who knows i dont care anymore.

the joshua and clive scenes in this last part were good and the rest of it was bad

this story is wack. one of the least coherent stories I have seen in some time, the further on it goes the worse it gets. and it started so strongly too or perhaphs because of the prologue format. it brings up plot threads only to drop them character arcs go no where, it thematically backtracks and double crosses itself. it tries to do 17 themes without tying them together.

FFXVI feels like some mix of got, dragon age, final fantasy, but worse than all of them.

ambiguous and concrete endings are equal, it is about what purpose each serves. what does an ambiguous ending add to the themes, to the atmosphere, to the storytelling? what does a concrete ending add to the themes, to the atmosphere, to the storytelling? on a personal level i enjoy the mastery needed to craft a subtle and good ambiguous ending. however the ambiguous ending here doesn't help any part of ffxiv