It also wouldn't gut the vast majority of these stories that would still function just fine if that section of the game was straight up removed, much less altered.
Most stories would be pretty significantly altered if an instance where the antagonist won was removed.
YoukaiSlayer posted...
If you want the boss to feel threatening, make it threatening in the gameplay.
They do, unless you deliberately break the game such that they aren't.
YoukaiSlayer posted...
And again, getting captured and not killed by the boss already makes them far less threatening. Any story with high stakes doesn't allow for a loss.
Sure it does. Being captured is usually a lazy cop-out, I agree, but last-minute escapes or saves allow for losses despite the boss being a genuine, high-stakes threat, especially if getting away and being unable to stop them causes them to destroy whatever you failed to protect.
YoukaiSlayer posted...
You talk as if you know all of the people that like to be overpowered in these games, but I don't think you do. I'm pretty sure more of them are like me than you suspect.
Obviously I don't know all of the people of any given subpopulation, by virtue of there being a lot of people in the world, but the vast majority I've observed are happy to shrug inconsistencies like this off as a minor annoyance, not feel as if the entire game has been ripped out from under them because one time a cutscene told them they weren't omnipotent.
YoukaiSlayer posted...
Ah, more of "90% of the game is non canon IN the game". It's such a stupid argument. It's not even ludonarrative dissonance at that point, it's just straight up narrative dissonance.
it's kind of inevitable with how Xenoblade 2 was designed. To have a different version of each cutscene for every possible combination of those 39 randomized rare blades, you'd need more cutscenes than there are stars in the universe (squared). Does that mean the game's core gameplay design was a mistake? Arguably, but given that this one instance of "he could have used one of their powers to jump over there and not actually change anything about the situation except needing to jump back in a minute or two" is the only point where it actually caused a "problem," completely overhauling the core gameplay design to fix that "problem" would be pretty silly.
YoukaiSlayer posted...
It was blowing up anyway.
It was collapsing. The debris from a space elevator/station hitting the ground would have been apocalyptic (which is why every other Gundam series does some variant of it >.>), hence the need to annihilate as much of the column as possible to allow the station to drift free.
YoukaiSlayer posted...
She wasn't even the only person to stay behind to do it.
She used Aion to do it. In the entirety of Alrest, there were exactly two individuals that could operate Aion, and the party had just finished killing one of them. I'm not even sure who you're trying to suggest could have done it, because this is just straight up false.
YoukaiSlayer posted... "And honestly, yeah, if they really had to be sacrificed, it would have been better if they'd gone out together instead of completely trampling the main characters will."
Absolutely nothing about Pyra or Mythra's characters as presented prior to that moment suggests that they would have been okay with Rex throwing his life away for no reason, nor would any of the other party members.
YoukaiSlayer posted... "The bigger issue though is why make it require a sacrifice to begin with? That wasn't inherent in the problem. They didn't go up there on a suicide mission expecting to sacrifice someone."
You can end up having to sacrifice someone without the characters planning to do so. In this case, the station's collapse was foreshadowed by a couple of side conversations (one of which I believe requires KOS-MOS, so it's not exactly the most accessible), plus simple physics.
YoukaiSlayer posted... "The themes of the game aren't about sacrifice and moving on or anything like that."
The only piece of actual character development Rex gets is learning to accept that he can fail to help somebody without losing his entire identity (specifically, in chapter 7 after Pyra is taken and he gets all mopey but eventually everyone talks him into trying again). Being willing to let Pneuma sacrifice herself instead of putting the entire world at risk trying to come up with a solution that makes him feel less like a failure is 100% consistent with that growth. This also sets him up as a foil to Jin, whose inability to move on from Lora's death pushed him to the point of seeking absolute oblivion by ending the world, and in turn establishes a parallel between Pneuma's and Malos' characters (Pneuma wanted to save the world because Rex loved it, Malos wanted to destroy it because Jin hated it). Amalthus' entire motivation as a villain also boiled down to being unable to accept that bad things were happening in the world, so again, Rex being able to accept losing Pneuma sets him up as a foil to Amalthus as well.
2 had themes other than that, certainly, but characters' response to loss and hardship was a major one, shaping most of the main character and especially villain arcs. With that in mind, Rex losing Pneuma (to a semi-voluntary sacrifice or otherwise) and still being willing to move forward is 100% consistent with one of the game's major themes. Heck, I might even go so far as to suggest that Pneuma sacrificing herself without telling Rex that she would be reborn a few minutes later could have been part of the Architect's plan, as a final test to ensure that Alrest would be safe in the hands of Rex and his friends because they wouldn't fall to the same nihilistic despair that defined Amalthus, but that's reading pretty deeply between the lines.
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