Random Thoughts.....What Are You Thinking?

also: lol

I guess the "first" layer of story is super boring and weak. Its the old object-centric plot, where everything revolves around a single item. Soon you start getting annoyed hearing "Monado" this, "Monado" that. "The power of Monado" ***. Together with the object-centric plot, there is the old and old revenge-centric plot, where the team start walking around the world for the single purpose of revenge. Later on the revenge-centric plot is placed is swapped to save-the-world plot what is nothing new. So, the game revolves around a mix of three old cliches that really dont bring anything exciting to old players like me who saw many stories already.

THEN, after the shallow part of the story, I guess I need to give proper congratulation that the background story is very actual and interesting, while probably hard to catch to kids, that probably will be more focused on the hero.

That background story indeed gave me some very good insights about what really matters to me, the discussion about existence and reality.

First and foremost, the idea of scale is something astonishing. People like in a world like the real one, but that world is nothing more than a big giant body. What represent the homs reality is nothing more than the skin of that giant. The parallel is very true if you try to see the reality to the eyes of a insect, bacteria, fungus or virus. The reality of those microscopic life forms is no different to homs and the host of those is ourselves. And if you do the reverse deduction, if humans are host to virus, the same could be said about the Earth being host to humans. Its undeniable the conclusion about human being virus, bacterias, fungus or insects is just a matter of scale.

After that second layer of subplot, there is the conflict of human and machines, two races who cohexited but at some point it could result in a total war between both sides. This subplot isnt any new, its not that old like the "main" plots and it sounds less likely imo. I dont think the humanity will live long enough to create machines that will try to erradicate its creators.

Then the third layer is the religion. This one topic as much controversial as it is, its somehow subtle. The "last boss" or evil foe is no other than God itself, so the last goal in game would be the conflict between creator and creation, humans against god, supposely to achieve "freedom". In the Bible, God gave the human the oportunity to stay in paradise living under his rule, or to leave the Eden to forge its own concept of valor. And thats where I disagree with the message passed by the game. To the game, humans were given knowledge but not freedom. In Bible, to humans were given freedom to obtain knowledge. So, I think its false the idea of human fighting God for a supposed freedom that was already be given to them. The human is not free by any means, but the thing is, the human is slave to the human itself. The slavery comes from a lower level of knowledge that is the real reason why people cant achieve true freedom.

The games conclusion was that the human defeated God but didnt accept to become a new God, thus, to the game PoV, achieving freedom where all living being could cohexist and walk together to the future they forge by themselves. Kinda utopic tbf but anyway, worth just for the discussion involved.

All in all, it was a good story more because of the subplots than the main plot. The open world allowed lots of freedom to grind levels and gear. The Megabosses gave nice objectives to gameplay.

The downside were the unnecessary extras like affinities, a lot more quests than necessary, NPCs showing or hiding depending on time, the missable stuffs, the unnecessary large maps that took several hours just to explore it all, the restriction of weapon gems to only three.

The DM in our biweekly campaign told us we've achieved the next level. I'm multiclassing into artificer, and at 5th level I suddenly gain access to 23 new spells, now giving me 41 in total. Unfortunately, I can still only choose 7 among them every day.

Normally, that's fine. I like meaningful choice. My favourite thing in games, especially tabletop RPGs, is sitting there for hours trying to optimize my performance. The problem is that not all spells are created equal. They each fill one of those 7 slots no matter what, and they cost the same in every other spent resource as well. If I may only make 17% of my spells active each day, the most important spells to have are the ones that are useful for a multitude of reasons.

So unless I stole my DM's notes to learn that we're going to be facing an adversary veiled in invisibility, why would I choose the spell that lets me see through invisibility? Why would I choose a spell that would give an ally a slight chance to resist being poisoned? Especially when it costs the same spell slot to include a spell that lets me remove any status ailment, including poison?

All of that choice goes away because D&D doesn't properly attribute weight to spells. If one spell is useful in hundreds of situations while another is only useful in one, the one with broader application should cost more somehow. It would be like a Final Fantasy game if every spell cost exactly the same amount of MP.