- Joined
- May 25, 2020
Some of the side-content, if I remember, hints at why they're assholes - unable to use magic, the other races essentially dominated them. So they started digging into technology and became crazy assholes as a result - but crazy assholes whose interest seemed primarily in absolute order and getting rid of the planet's intermittent "lemme just destroy everything" actors.
Whoever wrote SB apparently missed the memo from both the base-game and HW that there's an undercurrent of "everyone is kind of an asshole." The base game makes a point of suggesting the whole reason that the world's chimp-people keep summoning deities of destruction is that the various nations keep trying to take their shit. When the ability of more humanoid races to summon primals to slap shit is introduced, it suggests that the subjugation of the beast-things by the expansionary policies of every single nation is in effect not much different from open war and hostilities. HW's main story hook is that the elf pope was covering up the fact that the "good guys" were actively covering up the fact that the elves were some greedy fuckers - and that the big dumb angry dragon had a good reason for wanting some knife-ear genocide.
Then when they hand the creative direction to whatever teenager wandered into the office on bring-your-kid-to-work day, I guess everyone was too polite to point out how the saturday morning cartoon vibe of SB threw all of that into a meat grinder. There is an argument that "the new emperor is some crazy motherfucker, and he's taking the faction on a totally different course from what it used to be" - would be interesting if the story took that turn. Yet there's nothing really within SB to suggest it; everyone seems mostly fine to just go along with bleeding the occupied territories completely dry and doing everything they can to make the native populations despise them. And they don't even think of trying to insert plants into either rebellion, as if a first draft with a completely linear progression was shat out and put into production.
As pointed out above, Lyse and Hien are both objectively awful leaders who mostly do nothing and then take the spotlight - the game takes a throwaway line of dialogue to ask "isn't that kindof shitty that you abandoned absolutely everyone?" which is rebutted by the people going "well you saved us once from something that was very convenient for the plot, so we completely forgive you." You could've played around with the fact that Conrad was an overly-sentimental idiot who had long-since lost any faith in the revolution, or that Yugiri and Gosetsu's bushido nonsense was misguided to place faith in an absent head of state -- but not enough time, too difficult for a teenager to come up with.
Then when they hand the creative direction to whatever teenager wandered into the office on bring-your-kid-to-work day, I guess everyone was too polite to point out how the saturday morning cartoon vibe of SB threw all of that into a meat grinder. There is an argument that "the new emperor is some crazy motherfucker, and he's taking the faction on a totally different course from what it used to be" - would be interesting if the story took that turn. Yet there's nothing really within SB to suggest it; everyone seems mostly fine to just go along with bleeding the occupied territories completely dry and doing everything they can to make the native populations despise them. And they don't even think of trying to insert plants into either rebellion, as if a first draft with a completely linear progression was shat out and put into production.
As pointed out above, Lyse and Hien are both objectively awful leaders who mostly do nothing and then take the spotlight - the game takes a throwaway line of dialogue to ask "isn't that kindof shitty that you abandoned absolutely everyone?" which is rebutted by the people going "well you saved us once from something that was very convenient for the plot, so we completely forgive you." You could've played around with the fact that Conrad was an overly-sentimental idiot who had long-since lost any faith in the revolution, or that Yugiri and Gosetsu's bushido nonsense was misguided to place faith in an absent head of state -- but not enough time, too difficult for a teenager to come up with.
