Really good game, really emotional, every actor fucking crushed it. Weirdly...WEIRDLY similar to Shadowbringers in a way that can't have been overlooked by the people making it who made Shadowbringers. More below the read more I guess, spoilers!

Okay so I really have to throw out here that this is a story about a world beset on all sides by an aetheric deluge which has been orchestrated by the last member of a precursor race who had fled their dying world to create a new world to be sacrificed to recreate their own, much worthier paradisial home. Baffled by humanities accidental, largely, developmeny of free will and motivation they set into motion to create a vessel but that vessel defies them and they invite him to meet them for a final showdown in a remaining ruin of the ancients society. And then the victor remains to turn to stone.

I...this has to be intentional right like...this is...like, a legendary retelling of Shadowbringers? Like this goes beyond the similarities of all final fantasy stories that tie those tales together thematically.

Boy, Jill got fucked straight out of the story huh. Like, wow. Just uh, Thanos snapped out of relevance by Clives dick.

The racial politics of this game and elements of it in media before the game came out still confuse me. This game has people of colour in it but it specifically doesn't have black people, which was specifically handled by Yoshida in interviews leading up to the games release as badly as it could be? I think if I had to guess the decision to...limit the world's scope racially was a writers room attempt to specifically not have a black person portrayed as a bearer or put them in a world alongside the depiction of bearers so avoid inviting historic parallels but also it does the like...thing where it is a world that clearly has race, but it's just....strange. badly handled, awkward. Not malicious, just...a big question mark they themselves created. Smarter and more well honed people than me probably talked about this.