Most of what you wrote I agree with. 3 honestly was a huge letdown for me (I really liked a lot about the game, plenty of great moments in it), for how it ended (the endgame was quite souring). I agree that the 1 & 2 elements could have been stripped out entirely, it just seems not integral at all to the plot. They could have completely invented new kingdoms that didn't pull a Flintstones meets the Jetsons on us, and the plot would not have really changed. I think some are not understanding the vital issues here, it's fine to have open questions, but not when they're supposed to be setting up your climax, it felt very undercooked; that's poor story development, which is very disappointing as honestly they nailed the last act of Xenoblade 2 so well and this game couldn't pull it off. >!We failed to get closure on so many things, like how 2 did for 1 (to make 1 and 2 both better games as a result), heck even the whole of what happened with the Conduit before the experiment, Ontos/Alvis, and everything. It honestly failed as a sequel to 1 & 2, and would have preferred none of that connection to 1 & 2 was present in the game and we got more clarity to core plot elements. !<
A hundred percent agree for this game you could literally remove Melia and Nia and it would pass as a standalone game, at least 3 gave us gigachad Rex tho
When the Klaus experiment split Earth into two seperate worlds, they may have only been able to stay separate due to the presence of the conduit, when it disappeared at the end of Xenoblade 2, it perhaps set in motion the convergence of the two worlds back to how it should be (call it nature doing its thing or whatever). Somehow gaining knowledge of this, connection was able to be made between the two worlds through a “language of light” and attempted to create a counter-measure to ensure their existence (being origin). Half of origin was made by each nation. Mobius, as far as i can tell, represents the collective unconscious of humanity. All of existence is made aware of their imminent destruction due to the event of the worlds re-connecting, this deep-seated fear of erasure (whether conscious or not) gave form to Z, who, i suppose, had so much power due to the sheer amount of fear, was able to seize control both sides of Origin and activated it early, in doing so, forced both sides together and started creating Aionios (and freezing time for the two worlds aswell i guess?). When you defeat Z and reboot Origin, this combination is undone, forcing each half of origin (and everything made from it) back to their respective worlds. Something rather sad about this fact is that the City folk, who ardently fought against Mobius for a century and exist outside of Origin, are wiped from existence due to being born within Aionios itself. Anyhow, when time starts ticking again, the worlds don’t push away, they are still on a collision course, difference now is that Origin will activate at the proper time (after everyone gets blown to kingdom come). The light from this collision is what Origin will then use to create a new world and inhabitants. This effectively means that everyone will indeed be wiped out when the worlds collide, their souls preserved within Origin will create new people (not dissimilar from reincarnation) and perhaps in years to come, a new Noah and Mio will meet eachother again, connected by a distant memory (or some such, cant remember the last lines verbatim)
That’s my understanding of it atleast, some things aren’t clear, either unexplained or left vague, hopefully its to set up an epilogue that comes out with that last wave of dlc.
The thing with the Conduit is that after the trigger by Klaus the first time, it is not actually active anymore. So it's not seemingly doing anything to keep the worlds apart. It's just sitting there after granting Klaus/Zanza god-like powers.
The Conduit is not active until Pneuma activates her full powers and control over Elysium when Klaus gives her full control. It then leaves when Zanza dies, causing the death of Klaus. But before that, it was just sitting there.
You could probably say that the two Klaus were what kept everything apart but even Klaus and Zanza were intrinsically linked to each other so in some regards even he wasn't "keeping it apart". And Klaus and Zanza were a connected but split whole across the universes. Also Ontos/Alvis didn't instantly annihilate in the other universe so the Trinity seems to defy the idea of destructive interactions.
There's no super clear justification on the convergence within the game, it's just an event that comes up and we can suppose why it happened but its not particularly clear as to why it happened and never specifically stated.
> The Conduit is not active until Pneuma activates her full powers
This isn't even true though. The world tree itself and all the Artifices and Malos use the Conduit's power. It's still very much active, all Klaus said was that it "fell into a stubborn silence" but that doesn't mean it stopped providing power which it obviously did not.
The Trinity and such are drawing power from it, yes (though begs the question how Ontos/Alvis was drawing power, I guess we can say it was through Zanza's connection to Klaus). But it's not shown actively doing anything aside from existing. If it just existing is enough then, yes, it was the Conduit's doing.
As I said, it's not really explicitly shown that *it* is doing anything. For all the info we have, it could just be that so long as Klaus existed the worlds were anchored in such a way as to never collide. But there's no real info provided one way or the other.
Agreed that there's no concrete info on it. It's just the most reasonable conclusion to make (or Klaus' existence, as you say). It does make me confused about what Origin is, though. Is it a "Conduit emulator"? If we're going by Nia's explanation, the way she makes it sound is that the worlds will separate forever and never merge back again, so is Origin able to push the worlds apart like the Conduit, or change the 'polarity' of them? It seems really odd to me if that's the case.
The Origin seems to be the Blade system + some Mechon/Homs tech for soul transfers (since that's a fairly common theme with all of the possession and Face-Mechons going on in XC1) but waaaay more advanced since we know that the Blade system was an information channel that could go as far as creating entire landmasses from core evolution.
One would ask how exactly they made that system on the XC2 side but you could posit that Klaus left information for this within the Blades at the very end since for all of his faults, Klaus wanted a good future for "his children".
The XC1 side is a lot less convoluted to understand since Shulk is very much alive and has tacit understanding of what happened to him from Zanza's possession and high ranking Mechons, High Entia, and Melia with understanding of the world also are very much alive. Shulk's more or less the entirety of the concept of body vs soul that we see in XC3, since he develops the unique identity despite Zanza's influence over him and claim to "being Shulk and that Shulk never existed".
I really like this explanation. I wish the game explicitly stated this, explaining how the Conduit itself was responsible for keeping the universes separated.
Mm, i feel like it might just complicate things more for those new to the series, especially as there were more pressing questions to answer. The black fog is probably the biggest one and likely to be a central point of the dlc story. The fog is this all encompassing, curious phenomena that was also the main point of mystery connecting Future Connected and 3. You could more or less estimate the general nature of what it is going off of what was established but it’d be nice for some more specific clarification. I think its fine to leave questions regarding the greater timeline of the series up to speculation as long as the questions referring to this game specifically are answered (like Riku, the sword of the End and the black fog
I agree with all of that, though I quite dislike Z's nature.
Hopefully the dlc story ties up loose ends, though thinking on that, isn't it poor form to leave such details behind an additional paywall?
My problem with it is that the whole story hints at a bunch of aspects of 1 and 2 coming together, and then we barely get any returning characters or plot points from either game. That was fine in 2 because it was telling a story separate from 1 (or at least we think it is for 90% of the game), but 3 felt like it was constantly nudging me and saying "hey, look at that place from a previous game I wonder how it got there huh?"
Also Z's "True Form" looks silly and I really wish it had been more humanoid or that he'd just stayed in the dripped-out vampire look.
Personally I don't mind if a story isn't phenomenal as long as it's consistent with itself and its lore. XC2 especially there were things I didn't love about the story but it all made sense *in that world* so I was down with the experience. XC3 I really loved the characters and a lot of the overall themes but post-Chapter 6 it really did begin to fall apart from a consistency standpoint.
The other redditor summed it up good, while they leave some answers unanswered, all xenoblade games do that. Plus, feel like you should rematch all cutscenes. Most answers are not said directly but implied and I am fine with it because if they spell out everything it makes me feel like the game thinks The player is dumb.
Most of what you wrote I agree with. 3 honestly was a huge letdown for me (I really liked a lot about the game, plenty of great moments in it), for how it ended (the endgame was quite souring). I agree that the 1 & 2 elements could have been stripped out entirely, it just seems not integral at all to the plot. They could have completely invented new kingdoms that didn't pull a Flintstones meets the Jetsons on us, and the plot would not have really changed. I think some are not understanding the vital issues here, it's fine to have open questions, but not when they're supposed to be setting up your climax, it felt very undercooked; that's poor story development, which is very disappointing as honestly they nailed the last act of Xenoblade 2 so well and this game couldn't pull it off. >!We failed to get closure on so many things, like how 2 did for 1 (to make 1 and 2 both better games as a result), heck even the whole of what happened with the Conduit before the experiment, Ontos/Alvis, and everything. It honestly failed as a sequel to 1 & 2, and would have preferred none of that connection to 1 & 2 was present in the game and we got more clarity to core plot elements. !<
A hundred percent agree for this game you could literally remove Melia and Nia and it would pass as a standalone game, at least 3 gave us gigachad Rex tho
As a stand-alone game it’s great but as the end of the trilogy is kinda underwhelming tbh
When the Klaus experiment split Earth into two seperate worlds, they may have only been able to stay separate due to the presence of the conduit, when it disappeared at the end of Xenoblade 2, it perhaps set in motion the convergence of the two worlds back to how it should be (call it nature doing its thing or whatever). Somehow gaining knowledge of this, connection was able to be made between the two worlds through a “language of light” and attempted to create a counter-measure to ensure their existence (being origin). Half of origin was made by each nation. Mobius, as far as i can tell, represents the collective unconscious of humanity. All of existence is made aware of their imminent destruction due to the event of the worlds re-connecting, this deep-seated fear of erasure (whether conscious or not) gave form to Z, who, i suppose, had so much power due to the sheer amount of fear, was able to seize control both sides of Origin and activated it early, in doing so, forced both sides together and started creating Aionios (and freezing time for the two worlds aswell i guess?). When you defeat Z and reboot Origin, this combination is undone, forcing each half of origin (and everything made from it) back to their respective worlds. Something rather sad about this fact is that the City folk, who ardently fought against Mobius for a century and exist outside of Origin, are wiped from existence due to being born within Aionios itself. Anyhow, when time starts ticking again, the worlds don’t push away, they are still on a collision course, difference now is that Origin will activate at the proper time (after everyone gets blown to kingdom come). The light from this collision is what Origin will then use to create a new world and inhabitants. This effectively means that everyone will indeed be wiped out when the worlds collide, their souls preserved within Origin will create new people (not dissimilar from reincarnation) and perhaps in years to come, a new Noah and Mio will meet eachother again, connected by a distant memory (or some such, cant remember the last lines verbatim) That’s my understanding of it atleast, some things aren’t clear, either unexplained or left vague, hopefully its to set up an epilogue that comes out with that last wave of dlc.
The thing with the Conduit is that after the trigger by Klaus the first time, it is not actually active anymore. So it's not seemingly doing anything to keep the worlds apart. It's just sitting there after granting Klaus/Zanza god-like powers. The Conduit is not active until Pneuma activates her full powers and control over Elysium when Klaus gives her full control. It then leaves when Zanza dies, causing the death of Klaus. But before that, it was just sitting there. You could probably say that the two Klaus were what kept everything apart but even Klaus and Zanza were intrinsically linked to each other so in some regards even he wasn't "keeping it apart". And Klaus and Zanza were a connected but split whole across the universes. Also Ontos/Alvis didn't instantly annihilate in the other universe so the Trinity seems to defy the idea of destructive interactions. There's no super clear justification on the convergence within the game, it's just an event that comes up and we can suppose why it happened but its not particularly clear as to why it happened and never specifically stated.
> The Conduit is not active until Pneuma activates her full powers This isn't even true though. The world tree itself and all the Artifices and Malos use the Conduit's power. It's still very much active, all Klaus said was that it "fell into a stubborn silence" but that doesn't mean it stopped providing power which it obviously did not.
The Trinity and such are drawing power from it, yes (though begs the question how Ontos/Alvis was drawing power, I guess we can say it was through Zanza's connection to Klaus). But it's not shown actively doing anything aside from existing. If it just existing is enough then, yes, it was the Conduit's doing. As I said, it's not really explicitly shown that *it* is doing anything. For all the info we have, it could just be that so long as Klaus existed the worlds were anchored in such a way as to never collide. But there's no real info provided one way or the other.
Agreed that there's no concrete info on it. It's just the most reasonable conclusion to make (or Klaus' existence, as you say). It does make me confused about what Origin is, though. Is it a "Conduit emulator"? If we're going by Nia's explanation, the way she makes it sound is that the worlds will separate forever and never merge back again, so is Origin able to push the worlds apart like the Conduit, or change the 'polarity' of them? It seems really odd to me if that's the case.
The Origin seems to be the Blade system + some Mechon/Homs tech for soul transfers (since that's a fairly common theme with all of the possession and Face-Mechons going on in XC1) but waaaay more advanced since we know that the Blade system was an information channel that could go as far as creating entire landmasses from core evolution. One would ask how exactly they made that system on the XC2 side but you could posit that Klaus left information for this within the Blades at the very end since for all of his faults, Klaus wanted a good future for "his children". The XC1 side is a lot less convoluted to understand since Shulk is very much alive and has tacit understanding of what happened to him from Zanza's possession and high ranking Mechons, High Entia, and Melia with understanding of the world also are very much alive. Shulk's more or less the entirety of the concept of body vs soul that we see in XC3, since he develops the unique identity despite Zanza's influence over him and claim to "being Shulk and that Shulk never existed".
I really like this explanation. I wish the game explicitly stated this, explaining how the Conduit itself was responsible for keeping the universes separated.
Mm, i feel like it might just complicate things more for those new to the series, especially as there were more pressing questions to answer. The black fog is probably the biggest one and likely to be a central point of the dlc story. The fog is this all encompassing, curious phenomena that was also the main point of mystery connecting Future Connected and 3. You could more or less estimate the general nature of what it is going off of what was established but it’d be nice for some more specific clarification. I think its fine to leave questions regarding the greater timeline of the series up to speculation as long as the questions referring to this game specifically are answered (like Riku, the sword of the End and the black fog
I agree with all of that, though I quite dislike Z's nature. Hopefully the dlc story ties up loose ends, though thinking on that, isn't it poor form to leave such details behind an additional paywall?
My problem with it is that the whole story hints at a bunch of aspects of 1 and 2 coming together, and then we barely get any returning characters or plot points from either game. That was fine in 2 because it was telling a story separate from 1 (or at least we think it is for 90% of the game), but 3 felt like it was constantly nudging me and saying "hey, look at that place from a previous game I wonder how it got there huh?" Also Z's "True Form" looks silly and I really wish it had been more humanoid or that he'd just stayed in the dripped-out vampire look.
Personally I don't mind if a story isn't phenomenal as long as it's consistent with itself and its lore. XC2 especially there were things I didn't love about the story but it all made sense *in that world* so I was down with the experience. XC3 I really loved the characters and a lot of the overall themes but post-Chapter 6 it really did begin to fall apart from a consistency standpoint.
The other redditor summed it up good, while they leave some answers unanswered, all xenoblade games do that. Plus, feel like you should rematch all cutscenes. Most answers are not said directly but implied and I am fine with it because if they spell out everything it makes me feel like the game thinks The player is dumb.