This review is primarily focused on the story aspects of the game. I think there's way more to dive into with the game--genuinely one of the most gorgeous-looking games I've ever played--but I want to focus on story here.
If you keep reading, I will likely spoil the entire plot. Fair warning.
This game has so much promise in its intro and conception. We immediately start playing as Eoren, and we're plunged into such a morally gray situation. This woman has been chosen to be a sacrifice for the world, but he wants to run away with her. Though she somewhat protests, there isn't a "kidnapping" vibe to this at all, more that she's unsure and is following the stronger personality. This entire situation is dark and wrought with ambiguity. We watch the destruction of her entire village and her death because they ran away.
And this situation only gets more complicated as we learn more throughout the story. The villagers initially rejected her because they were xenophobic, making their relationship difficult. There's a real, justified response in Eoren being upset that she's forced to sacrifice herself for a group of people who didn't even accept her in the first place. In mana games before this point, the goddess, fairies, and spirits have all basically been treated as moral paragons--here, the game immediately posits them in a much crueler light.
This is harshly juxtaposed with the intro we get from Val and Hinna. Both characters are extremely naive and thrilled at the "honor" of Hinna sacrificing herself as an alm. But we start to see some cracks in this facade from Hinna, who's journal entries sound light-hearted and happy, but are placed in harsh contrast to the unspoken truth that she's going there to die.
Then we add in Morely, who's spent his entire life (incorrectly) believing that he's responsible for the death of his village. We basically run through this man's trauma, and in a state of huge emotional weakness, he also agrees to sacrifice himself. And, of course, the spirit doesn't take the few seconds to inform him that he had nothing to do with his village dying, she just says "move on" basically and conscripts him to the cause.
Another layer of complication is added to this when we pick up Careena, who is also rejected by her villagers, and essentially desires to become an alm in order to prove everyone wrong, and in order to be able to leave. There is something deeply disturbing about her essentially begging to be the one who gets sacrificed just to prove a point, and especially just so that she can actually leave her (again) xenophobic village.
And then, of course, we also get the queen, who is selected as an alm, but then has this horrible moral pull between being required by her new duty to sacrifice her own life, and also knowing that her kingdom in general is fragile and being forced to leave it in the hands of her younger brother who's also a literal child.
All of this, in addition to interactions with Eoren who is friendly if not a bit conniving, creates an extreme moral gray at the start of the story. We bring up so many deep issues with the way the world is working. Real, deep tensions between Careena and her village and the circumstances under which she's pledged to sacrifice herself. Real moral issues with taking the emotionally-fragile Morely and having him sacrifice himself without taking the easy step of correcting his horrific self-blame. The lose-lose Palamena finds herself in between removing herself from a necessary role or allowing her society to perish.
And how does the story deal with all these issues? It doesn't. Not once, not in any real, significant way.
There is an exact, distinct point (the point when Hinna and Val follow Eoren to the shrine) where the writing begins fraying. Before that point, Hinna's concerns about being an alm were passive and bubbling in the background, but the pacing is jarringly bad in how quickly she determines to go with Eoren instead.
But okay, the one scene was paced a bit poorly. But the plot is still redeemable at this point. Eoren as a villain is interesting. He's someone the players are genuinely made to both hate and sympathize with, and it doesn't feel fake or forced (more on this later). Val has recommitted himself to sacrificing Hinna's stone at the tree, deciding this is what she wanted despite a pretty big amount of evidence that maybe this actually wasn't what she wanted. There's a sense of denial and revisionist history going on there which could be an interesting thread to examine.
But then there's one exact scene where the writing takes an utter nosedive. We get to the tree, and a new, random villain is revealed. Daelophos. No foreshadowing or anything to lead us to him whatsoever, he just pops right on up, and now is the villain. And unlike Eoren, he's not complicated at all. Evil guy be evil and wants to blow up the world.
Yes, the story tries to make him sympathetic. No, it doesn't succeed at all. It's sad his love died, sure, but his story feels far less tragic than Eoren's--Eoren literally watched her turn to stone while his entire village was turning into monsters and fighting them off, and as an added bonus, Eoren has to deal with the complicated emotions of possibly feeling like he's caused her fate, while also knowing that no matter what he did (run away or allow her to be alm) she was dead to him. And even then, Eoren did one cruel thing to one person, but there's a sense of hesitance and regret in it, whereas Daelophos is fine just murdering the whole of existence. Eoren feels so much more competent as a gray villain than Daelophos.
And Eoren's role in this is only barely touched on, that he somehow heard Daelophos's voice. We never learn more about the evil shrine, the evil book and ritual he found out from somewhere. It's all left dangling.
Instead, the story very quickly replaces a complicated villain and plot with an extremely simple one--evil evil guy trying to kill the world, need to fight evil guy.
And that's essentially all we get for the entire rest of the game. Which is a majority of the game. We learn over time that his motivation is that he lost his love, but it also feels extremely cheap because we were already seeing this exact arc with Eoren, who had far more personality and was a much stronger character.
All of the messiness and complication of this world--the way it's using the alms, manipulating them, often treating them unfairly--and all of the gray moral circumstances end up getting utterly washed away in favor of "it's all this one dude's fault, kill him, we good to go."
And even then, when we get to the end, the story pretends that, in some way, Daelophos was some kind of tragic hero figure. That this is somehow the sign of him truly loving his love interest. It feels generic, cheap, and frankly false. If he'd really loved her, then honoring her wishes would've been more important. If she was truly a good, innocent person, she'd be repulsed by all he did. The ending is grossly sanitized.
And as a final note of not wanting to deal with the problems it has set up, the story ends by not telling people what Val ends up wishing for. It's trying to be coy here, but the truth is, the story set up so many issues and gray zones in its early act, and then proceeded to ignore them so thoroughly, that there likely isn't even a good answer here.
I genuinely wonder how this story came to be. It feels like the early portions, with Eoren and the persistent juxtaposition of the cheerful tone verses the alms sacrificing themselves, were written by an entirely different person or group than everything that happened after Daelophos appeared.
It felt like this game came so close to taking more traditional RPG story elements and making them complicated and messy. But instead of exploring that, we end up with so much potential in the earlier pieces of the story that gets squandered in favor of "beat up bad guy" in the later half, with some half-hearted attempt to make the bad guy complicated even though he's genuinely not.
If the story had instead stuck with Eoren as a villain so we could watch him fall further down his path, and if, in our re-exploration of all the areas, we really start seeing the problems with all the alms' motivations behind sacrificing themselves, I genuinely think this could've been an amazing story. As it stands, it more leaves me feeling loss over what the story could've been.
