Originally Posted by
TehCubey
There's also a difference between "it wasn't going to be easy" and "your actions are meaningless and don't matter". It's a serious problem of agency and disempowerment. I know it's hard to have player agency in a game like PSO2, with a linear story - but you can at least have character agency. Which is to say, are the actions of the player character impactful and do they make a difference?
Even as early as ep 1, there was player character agency. One of the very first things you do is take a detour to find Matoi, and I don't have to say how impactful in the long run that was. But in episode 6? All your actions were meaningless so far. If instead of participating the Guardian decided to stay home and take a nap, events would have unfolded in exactly the same way. Your presence doesn't matter, you're a passive observer. Sega tries to mask that fact by having the PC fight during cutscenes, but those fights are meaningless. You're fighting not to win but to hold the enemy off, yet the NPCs don't have any issues doing that by themselves. When Varuna retreats, it's not because of anything you did either. You fail to make a difference by getting to Sara in time - she has already failed to defend Kashina, but that also was meaningless because Xiao gets brought back anyway.
A good storytelling practice is to remove all elements that serve no purpose. When that element is the protagonist, you know your plot has problems.
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