- Joined
- Dec 17, 2019
It truly was the worst campaign the game ever had, and coming off the heels of Witch Queen with a mostly solid year of seasonal storylines to boot (aside from the filler season that was Plunder), it only made it look all the worse. Somehow they managed to take the idea of "the architect of the Collapse has finally made it to Sol and it looks like he's gonna fucking win" and made it into a lame filler side quest that only served to delay the actual ending for a year. Seriously, you can cut the entirety of the Lightfall campaign from the Witness's arrival to when he opens the portal into the Traveler and you would lose nothing.
Not only that, but it also completely wasted Calus, a character that had been around since the start of D2 and was one of the more entertaining additions to the series. He finally makes a real appearance after years of being a voice in the shadows, only to be offed unceremoniously as the campaign's final boss. All that buildup for nothing. And there isn't even any real resolution with Caiatl, because of...
Nimbus. Fucking Nimbus. That stupid surfer enby faggot with his stupid voice and stupid face and stupid dialogue and stupid everything. Whenever anyone complains about Lightfall, the number one reason why is Nimbus. The worst character ever added to the series and it's not even close. (I mean, I say that, but then I remember Micah-10's existence, and ugh, that stupid tranny VA that can't act for shit. At least he doesn't appear in TFS's campaign at all, but his stupid voice made me mute dialogue audio for the first time in the game's history just because I couldn't stand listening to it while I was in the Pale Heart. Sorry, digression.) The absolute cringe bomb he dropped at the end of the campaign was just godawful. I skipped as many of the cutscenes as I could when going through on my other characters.
It's funny, though, how much you could improve the story by making one small change: switch who dies. Assuming that you're still going with this story and setting and characters, of course, this is an exercise in improvement and not just tossing it all out and starting over (which they should have done). But consider that the Cloud Striders have a very short lifespan once they've been augmented, ten years if I remember correctly. There are only two at a time, a master and an apprentice, with the master teaching the apprentice the ins and outs of the job before they pass on and the cycle repeats. When Lightfall happens, Rohan is reaching the end of his tenure, but Nimbus is still a cocky and arrogant apprentice, sure of himself but not yet up to the job. Suddenly, Neomuna is under assault by a massive force unlike any they've ever seen, and with these new "Guardians" to help, they start to fight back against them.
And then it comes down to the wire, and Nimbus is the only one that can save the day, but in the process, Nimbus fucking dies. (And there was much rejoicing.) Okay, maybe rewrite Nimbus to be somewhat less annoying so that the audience actually feels bad about it, but still.
There's a lot that you could explore with this sort of scenario in the aftermath of the campaign. Rohan now has to cope with the grief of losing his apprentice and wonders if he's failed as a Cloud Strider. Not only that, but with his own death fast approaching, he is now faced with the tough decision to either try and train a new apprentice in the limited time he has left, or let the line of Cloud Striders die with him. You could write a more relatable story of grief and resolve with Rohan as your Neomuna character, especially compared to the utter nothing we got with Nimbus, where he's back to his stupid faggot dialogue by the next mission and seemingly couldn't care less that his mentor's dead. (Plus Rohan just has a better design too.)
Really makes me wonder just what that original version of Lightfall was that we never got. Pretty much anything would've been better.
