I haven't gone through this entire thread, but after finishing it, am I missing something or is the entire story hot garbage that makes no sense? The universe itself 'cares' that all matter wasn't canceled out by antimatter (which if it was, just means the universe would be filled with massless radiation anyway, not fail to exist entirely), so it gives literal sentience to extinction events like the global freezing, meteors, and plant algae that have destroyed ~70-85% of life in the past.
...Except if the universe's 'motivation' has to do with the presence of physical matter, why the hell does 550 billion tonnes of biomass on our little blue marble of a planet mean jack shit when that accounts for less that one percent, of one percent, of one percent, of one percent, of one percent of the mass of the Earth itself (550 billion tonnes / 5.9 sextillion tonnes = 9.2e-11 percent), which itself is further dwarfed compared to most other planets, stars, or just about every other cosmic body.
Like okay, Koji wants to make a story about the human experience, connection, togetherness, etc. so why not steal more thematic elements from Interstellar than try to shoehorn in some pop-sci buzzword laden nonsense about sentient extinctions? At this point I'm more interested in the story of the Sephiroth dinosaur who summoned Meteor to end the Cretaceous, dude's probably got a wild story to tell. Also what was the sentient algae thinking when it sucked the oxygen out of the ocean over a few thousand years to kill the trilobites, were they playing a weird slow motion version of Plants v Zombies?
Everything involving the characters is also just dumb luck? A 20 yr old (obviously before she was president) got chosen to be the god of death because she had an NDE? And then she kind of does, but kind of doesn't, but still kind of does want to tear off the bandaid that is life on Earth but also still likes people and wants to connect them, but will still do it anyway, but wants baby Sam to stop her because she chooses to do it, blah blah blah.
And the characters are all exposition robots who act like automatons poorly mimicking humans. Supposedly loving father and devoted husband Cliff risks life and limb to save his child...who he permanently refers to as BB (bridge baby, a thing). Like what loving parent refers to their child by their social security number or as some other categoric identifier? ("I love you Homosapien #6138, listen to me sing you lullabies. Let me risk my life to save you from this laboratory hell, Homosapien #6138! No you bastards, you can't keep my little Homosapien #6138 locked up here, I love it!")
Like I really came to enjoy the gameplay. Getting in the swing of planning routes, methodically navigating the the beautifully haunting landscapes, building structures that other players interact with in their own splintered parallel universes, etc. all turned out to be more fun than I had imagined. The "cities" sucked ass (FF12 had infinitely more lifelike settlements on the PS2, come on). I was initially in the boat with people who wanted combat, but in the end I kind of wished they removed combat entirely, or at least the bosses (grenade big health bar thing until health bar goes to zero is a shitty boss design, making them puzzles or something Shadow of the Colossus-lite that used your navigation and balancing mechanics would have been infinitely more interesting).
But god, that half baked, poorly researched, buzzword filled (I'm Higgs, the God Particle! Jesus Christ), contradictory nonsense story with shittily written robot people...it wound up being so aggressively stupid that it killed whatever small but poignant message about human connectivity was buried in there somewhere.
/rant
