I did not like the story or characters at all.
The story is paced way too fast and nothing ever has time to breathe. The characters' motivations were all paper thin and end up dissolving by the end of the game because of it, so everyone just melts into this collective puddle of friendship.
For a game that seems to be basing itself on the uprising of the downtrodden against unjustices in the world, they do a really bad job of showing you what those even are. You get a few minutes of Alphen complaining about being a slave while sinister slavery shit happens in the background, but then we immediately jump to Patrick Seitz unleashing the plot device who falls into Alphen's lap and inadvertently gives him some bullshit ability to break free from his shackles and free his people, which he does five minutes later. Then all of the evil people just leave while Alphen sleeps for a week.
The next place isn't much better. Patrick Seitz lets himself be captured for no real reason and we're not allowed to help because people might get hurt, which is never a concern at any other point in the game. We're told everyone is too scared to help or do anything, but the majority of our interactions are with the resistance, who seem to be really excited about doing something. They're also led by the most conspicuous man possible. Then we kill that guy. Oppression over, all the other bad people left. Also they forgave whoever helped spy on people because forgiveness is important.
Then they visit the most perfect paradise in the world where everyone gets along, but surprise there's actually a heinous plot perpetrated by someone that NOBODY ELSE NOTICED and it's up to Alphen to solve it with the help of a very calm man who drank too much capri sun. The evil plot is revealed and ends up triggering horrifying memories that were never explained to us in order to give an excuse for a boss fight. The culprit is apprehended, but not really because you should just forgive criminals that killed a lot of people instead of punishing them I guess. Everyone realizes racism still exists and moves on.
The fourth realm has already been "liberated", but oh no! It turns out hateful, bad people can exist on OUR side as well. This somehow solidifies everyone's bonds before a backstory for Rinwell is puked up at our feet, and she's then told in what I assume was intended to be a heartfelt scene that she shouldn't kill a really terrible person just because. Like, I guess rising up is okay but don't do it too hard or someone's feelings might get hurt. You know, the people who have been fucking over your planet for hundreds of years. She dies anyway because Sephiroth showed up to progress the plot. Also the hateful people didn't end up mattering because they all exploded.
Then, we find out as 100% fact that Alphen is actually from hundreds of years in the past based on pure speculation over extremely vague details that one person barely remembers. This upsets him greatly and removes his desire to rise up like a gamer...because he killed a bunch of people. Except this is very poorly portrayed. He sees blood on his hands in the middle of a burning city, and this is supposed to convince us that he committed such horrible atrocities that he would falter in his desire to liberate the world. How? We didn't see him gutting people on the street or ripping buildings in half. We didn't see him do anything! Instead he tells us he did and he feels really bad and we're just supposed to accept that as his excuse. Well it doesn't even matter because after being complained at by everyone who is now 100% friends with each other and has given up on all their racism, he goes right back to his original mission.
The weirdest possible scene plays out in watertown, where people chant in boats and then evaporate...somehow. And just by watching that happen, everyone is able to deduce that they're being mind-controlled and forced into this against their will by the evil wet man. Why couldn't we have been introduced to this by exploring the city and encountering people acting like this first, instead of having it thrown at us randomly? Sephiroth dies or whatever and some weird person floats up and steals all our chaos emeralds. A weird person that has apparently been present at the side of every lord so far, but conveniently nobody remembers. This could have been foreshadowed just a teeeeny tiny bit and actually add an element of mystery to the plot, but instead it's just dropped on us out of nowhere.
And with that, the world is freed from evil and nothing bad will ever happen again. The entire first "half" of the story revolves around the horrible things these psychopathic people are doing around the continent, but nobody was really in that much danger outside of Calaglia. Cyslodia got on just fine outside of its weird spotlight slavery, but since we never see any of that actually occur we just have to believe everyone telling us it's really bad. Elde Menancia was fine outside of the convenient people-melting fruit that nobody ever noticed. In Mahag Saar we never got a taste of whatever horrible things its people were forced to do, and it just made the Dahnans look bad instead since their immediate pains were mostly self-inflicted. Ganath Haros was just nonsensical to the extreme and I don't understand what it was supposed to convey to us beyond the fact that Vholran himself was nothing but nonsense. Not to mention all attempts to describe the crown contest, the dumb event behind all of the problems in the first half, just leave you with more and more questions and things become less and less clear.
A big laser happens for no reason and then we visit the land of the racists and find out they're not doing too hot :(. Their funny leader man hasn't been telling them what to do, and they can barely function without having orders beamed into their eyeballs. There's also a disgusting attempt to humanize the lords that really isn't necessary. Nothing could ever redeem the absurd goonishness of their evil and they could never say enough to convince us they had any real character. They're just bad people and bad villains.
Of course, none of this matters after a conveniently placed spaceman dumps all the lore on us and it turns out, racism was completely fabricated by the will of a planet and it was actually aliens that caused everyone's problems. And our solution is to put the planet's soul in a box, or blow it up if that's not an option. Like...what? Where does this tie in to rising up against oppression? Is it because the planet was oppressing the aliens and indirectly caused us our problems? But we're also kinda sympathetic to it now? They really could have used more development of the idea that astral energy can form a will of its own, beyond the very brief introduction we get to it before this is revealed. By this point everyone's motivations are irrelevant except for Alphen and Shionne because they both tryna live out here. And despite Sephiroth's best attempts at being a memorable character they manage to achieve that with little real effort on anyone's part and get to enjoy their happy ending.
It all felt very shallow, and a lot of it very unnecessary. There was far too much telling, where they'd tell us all about how crappy life is and how they want to be free, with very little showing of any of the before, during or after bits of staging a revolution. We'd be rushed along through each area to get to the lord to kill them all while being stopped every few feet so they could wax poetic about what it means to be a slave, except we only ever saw a few minutes of Alphen's life as a slave. Everyone spends all their time talking about their one quirky trait to endear themselves to the audience but none of it feels authentic when we never actually experience any of anyone's strife outside of their introductions(or a bit later in Rinwell's case because they needed to give us a reason to hate the wind lord).
We get told a bit about everyone's pasts/childhoods which is all well and good, but there's very little out in the world to corroborate or add to it. We never see anyone's homes(unless you count the guard/master's quarters in the palace?), there are very few NPCs who have past connections to the party and actually bother to talk about them. We don't even know where Alphen grew up, even though we've walked around the entire planet. The "history" of Dahna was supposedly erased after the invasion and that apparently removes any sort of interesting tidbits about the world they could have given us. And the "artifacts" we find are just references to other random games instead of potential links to the older civilizations. Almost nobody in the party feels like they even belong in this world.
Shionne's whole character makes no sense. Why did the thorns(and maiden ablities?) only manifest in her? If they're so hellbent on keeping her alive and reject other people because they're scary why did they allow any of the experimentation that was done to her? How did she even get onto the planet in the first place and steal a whole master core? And who chained her up and put her in a cargo train? Where was it even coming from? How did the resistance find out all of that detailed information about it? So many questions, no answers. Her spending large portions of the game worrying about some vague horrifying apocalypse she's somehow aware of is also not compelling when it's just her telling us that a few times.
As mentioned before, the antagonists were very underwhelming. A bit of flash here and there in the few scenes they're in, then bam they're gone. Never mattered. You're just mopping up the messes they left(except not really since you leave immediately most of the time, turns out there's good enough infrastructure among the various resistances to keep a realm running despite their lack of 'culture' or chances to flourish as slaves we're told so much about).
The bonus dungeon characters were also pretty disappointing. You're telling me you pulled areas from six different games and you have one and half world's worth of characters to show for it? Lame.
Game did look very pretty though.
