Greatest moment?

[Earnest]

(07-02-2009 07:38 AM)Jaxartes Wrote:  Exactly.

Beatrix wasn't ordered to kill them (as Brahne also sees the party as little threat, especially as securing the crystal will almost certainly lead to their deaths anyway).

Beatrix doesn't kill people for fun; she doesn't really derive fun from anything really. Her existence revolves around following orders.

She copes with this mundane existence by accepting the royalty's authority over her, trusting in their superior blood, wisdom, morality etc, whilst also doing everything she can to prove to herself that she is better and stronger than all other people.

By doing that, she can tell herself that she has a life worth living. Therefore she continually tries to usurp authority from Steiner and embarass him and the Knights of Pluto (although she dislikes it when people call attention to what she is doing).

She was willing to simply outwit the party by stealing the jewel from under their noses. But when they suggested she was running because she was frightened, thought she might lose to them etc, her pride demanded that she put them in their place.

RPGs are full of relationships that go nowhere or interesting connections between characters that are never revisited or developed. Usually, it's just a symptom of the 'mid game slump' that pretty much all RPGs suffer from (when the focus switches from character to world ending apocalypse plot stuff).

So I think that Fratley's storyline becomes one of these casualties. I also think they don't put him on screen with Beatrix and show the similarity of their personal quests, because they don't want to cross wires and confuse people when they put Beatrix and Steiner together later.

You could say the same thing incidentally for Amarant and Freya. They start building on something with their confronation at the Alexandrian docks, develop them during the trip to Treno and in the Fire Temple.

But after that... nothing. Freya ends up with Fratley, who we haven't seen since the start of Disc 2 and Amarant gets an ultimate last minute sequence with Lani (who again, we've barely seen).

But that's just how it goes. If games had more development time and particularly if unbiased, critically able parties were allowed to playtest through drafts of the game, a lot of kinks could be ironed out.

Then we'd have consistent character progression throughout, not just at the start. Great, well used locations throughout, not just at the start. No characters fading away into the background.

Ive never disagreed with this. So many characters just fizzle out of the game. Amarant, who I think is one of the most under appreciated characters in the series, is victimn to this fizzleage as well. I dont blame people for not appreciating him, when his screentime is so minimal.

Fratley virtually comes and goes. Freya's entire BG story is based on him, and yet we only see a glimpse of him once. The glimpse we see is such a good glimpse too. He takes out the 3 blackmages and saves the party, proving he's highly skilled, and then disappears. Its a shame.