most of the time it doesn't really change any motivations or goals.
Off the top of my head, none of Xenoblade 1 would have happened if Metal Face lost the first fight against him, none of the entire Golden Sun series would have happened if Isaac and Garet beat Saturos and Menardi in that first fight, the first fight against Yggdrasil in Tales of Symphonia is unavoidable from a story perspective and would have made the whole game a lot shorter if you won then... It was even critical to Xenoblade 3's story and themes (most notably, Noah's development into a protagonist that could actually win), though that's not nearly as obvious at face value because very little of Xenoblade 3's story and themes are obvious at face value and you were too upset about the game to bother digging further into understanding it. There are certainly many cases where it's just a lazy way to write a transition into the obligatory JRPG jail scene, but it's still ridiculous to suggest that antagonist victories aren't significant to the plot, especially because even those lazy examples usually end up being an opportunity to explore more about the villain's motivations and/or the nature of the world you're trying to save.
YoukaiSlayer posted...
About the xenoblade 2 stuff, I'm aware the need for a sacrifice CAN come up unexpectedly, but it doesn't NEED to and the plot would have been totally fine if that just didn't happen. If they just escape the space station thats already blowing up anyway.
Most of any given story doesn't NEED to happen. Heck, the game didn't NEED to be made in the first place, if we want to talk about genuine necessity. That was, however, the story they wanted to tell, and within that story, the World Tree collapsing after the Conduit stopped powering the station and that presenting an apocalyptic threat to the world below was entirely consistent and reasonably foreshadowed.
YoukaiSlayer posted...
You also wouldn't necessarily need as many different scenes as possible. The way optional characters are typically handled is their lines are written and just not said if they aren't there. You only really need variance if something would produce a different result, like in this case, but even then you can probably use all of the characters interchangeably. Even the default wind blade could probably chuck you across the gap for that matter.
You might not actually need 2e46 (39!) copies of each scene, but that's still a significant amount of variability to put in. Given how much easier it is to just write a story that doesn't need to acknowledge any other rare blades than to put that kind of variability in, I'm not remotely surprised they went with the former.
And again, it's entirely a moot point. Pneuma wasn't going to change her mind either way, so the only thing that would change about the scene is that Rex got talked down on her side instead of with the rest of the party. Even then, I don't think even that would have happened, because as I mentioned before, he *did* try to cross: He tried his grappling hook, he asked Poppi, and it stands to reason that he would have tried other blades if he hadn't been talked down following Poppi's refusal. What you're proposing is that he should have ignored every person in the party telling him to listen to Pneuma and thrown a tantrum of trying every blade he could until he made it across (to, again, accomplish nothing), which is... just a bad idea. Forget talking about plot consistency or whether that's fitting for the character, that'd just be a terrible scene.
YoukaiSlayer posted...
Not to mention it's a game, I already won, why aren't you giving me the happy ending I earned?
Because that's not how stories work. Not every story ends with "and they all lived happily ever after the end," nor should you expect them to because restricting yourself to that is just lazy writing.
YoukaiSlayer posted...
And that theme of accepting not saving doesn't make any sense at all. You said he accepted he couldn't save her, and then...went to save her.
It's accepting that he could fail to save her without compromising his identity. His identity up to that point was pretty thoroughly just a generic unflappable shounen protagonist: He helped everyone he met and everyone's life was better for it. When he completely failed Pyra like that and couldn't see a way forward, he just wanted to dissociate from the whole situation because he couldn't handle facing such a failure. He moved past that after everyone punched him in the face and found the motivation to go find Pneuma's sword, and that development subsequently got showcased by him accepting that the last moments of the game were an instance where he couldn't save Pneuma (and, in doing so, demonstrating that he was strong enough to carry Alrest into the future without being discouraged by the inevitable failures along the way).
In chapter 7, it wasn't a matter of accepting that he couldn't save her, it was a matter of finding the motivation to try again after failing. He found it(/had it knocked into him), then he saved her. Then when Pneuma sacrificed herself at the end, he was able to draw on that growth to find the motivation to build a world without her instead of sinking into despair.
YoukaiSlayer posted...
Pneuma just activates a 5 minute self destruct. Could have just left after initiating that.
I expect Aion can only run with one of the two Aegises inside, hence Malos stayed in it for the final fight instead of just setting it loose to nuke everything while he chilled in Elysium.
YoukaiSlayer posted...
And why would a space station designed to be automated and work by itself for thousands of years not be designed with a way to deal with the world tree falling on the planet? For that matter, why would it just collapse without power in the first place? It should just remain dormant.
I'm pretty comfortable accepting that the original designers didn't plan for all of humanity to be wiped out in a genesis event that forced Earth into a parallel dimension, leaving the Beanstalk to run autonomously for tens of thousands of years before eventually the omnipotent power source keeping it all going vanished into another dimension. That's a little beyond what most building codes expect engineers to consider,. I'm also pretty comfortable accepting that the station relied on some active stabilization to keep it orbiting in the correct position, which would have relied on the Conduit's power and therefore failed catastrophically when the it vanished. From there, it makes sense that it would escape orbit if the "trunk" were severed (and this is explicitly mentioned in a side conversation), and in turn that it would fall if the "trunk" were pulling on it.
YoukaiSlayer posted... A person who merely sees the gameplay as busywork for the static story is just never going to see eye to eye with me.
That was your logic, not mine. I see plenty of value in gameplay. I just don't get upset and ignore all of that value when a cutscene exists that doesn't tell me I'm doing a good job. The melting health bars do enough of that to satisfy my ego.
---
This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.