Oblarg

Fates Warning - Face the Fear Rediscovering my love for mid-period Fates Warning. I used to write this stuff off as too commercial and boring, but really it's quite brilliant now that I'm revisiting it. And I'm now convinced Mark Zonder is not a human.

Makes me glad I kept Kaiden alive, though I'm really not sure if I'm actually going to buy this, it's looking like it'll be pretty bad.

Christ, what was Drew thinking? "Oh hey, Chris Avellone added a lot of depth to Revan in KotOR2 through Kreia's dialogue. Instead of exploiting that, I'll just retcon it away - I can only work with one-dimensional, boring characters!" You honestly get the feeling from reading this stuff that he didn't actually play KotOR2.

Just got done with an exceptionally beautiful bit of Fourier analysis. Went from an ugly triple-integral to the exact single integral expression I wanted in ~5 lines, by means of an integrating factor, integration by parts, *and* a delta function.

I believe (and I could be wrong) that those Sith Assassins are supposed to be hard to kill with force-powers, it ties into the lore of them being trained to kill force-sensitives. They are, however, horribly weak in melee combat, so just whack them with your lightsaber.

Budgie rule.

Dog romance, but no cat romance? I DEMAND EQUALITY, BIOWARE!

Uh, third-person shooter?

The only game Hale was any good at all in was Eternal Darkness.

Wait, what the ****? "The exile is a normal Jedi who was cut off from the Force" completely misses the point of the entire character and is directly contradictory to the primary plot point of KotOR2 (that the Exile was not cut off from the force, that she willingly and completely gave it up in response to the horror of Malachor V - this is why she was the sole Jedi that could walk away from Malachor without being broken by the echoes that come from such a tragedy). There is so much that could have been done with this character if it were handled by a diligent author. Also, what the **** is with Bastila sending the Exile after Revan? Kreia already did that, and Bastila did not know where Revan had gone, anyway. Also, no mention of Kreia is, I suppose, better than a bastardization of her character, though grouping her together with the other "Sith lords" is rather stupid, as she fell past being either a Sith or a Jedi, and pretty much saved the galaxy by luring out the remaining Sith so that they could be destroyed... I mean, this really just begs the question, did Drew really play KotOR2? Or did he simply read a ****ty plot synopsis? You know, if he was going to retcon like this, why couldn't he have done something cool and like make the "Kreia is Arren Kae" theory canon?

Riot are truly back. ****ing incredible.

Best post I've read all month. Thanks for the laughs.

Consciously making your posts read like they were typed like a five year old does nothing to change the fact that they do, in fact, read like they were typed like a five year old. You may want to consider that if you want to be in a position where you can call someone out for poor rhetoric. And if you honestly think that there's absolutely no self-contradiction in that post, you're truly hopeless. Here's a hint: if public opinion is not determinate on the issue of Kreia's motivations, it's not determinate on whether or not those motivations were made clear, either. Especially when, as you've noted, the most straightforward explanation of them is an optional line of dialogue. Regardless, I'm through with this discussion. Judging from your unwillingness to actually discuss any of the plot points I bring up rather than simply repeating the same three things (to which I have responded, multiple times) in every post, you're clearly not interested in reasonable discourse so much as verbally ****ting all over the thread until the other side gives up. In that respect, you've won. Congratulations.

One of the funniest self-contradictions I've ever seen, but that aside, I'm done arguing with you - you've made it quite clear that you'd rather simply repeat the same thing rather than reading any of my responses. Also, I'm quite aware of the meaning of "irony," and it's even more ironic that you, of all people, would attempt to criticize someone over literacy.

I love the irony here - first you call me out for claiming that my interpretation follows "obviously" from the dialogue (which it does, mind you, unless you just want to selectively ignore those lines which point towards it), and then claim that anything that isn't your interpretation is "misreading" the game. "Good fun!" indeed. I have not precluded the possibility of Kreia having multiple goals, I have only pointed out that most of those goals wouldn't need to be accomplished were she to accomplish what you claim is her main goal. If you assume that Kreia is actually plotting to destroy the force for most of the game, then most of the plot is completely nonsensical.

I'd say your interpretation gives far less credit to Kreia's character than mine - not only does it require to you simply accept pretty much every action she takes at the end of the game (and most of what she does for the majority of the game) to be completely absurd as it doesn't help her accomplish her supposed end goal, but it also requires you to accept that she ultimately compromises on her beliefs by being "redeemed" at the end by the Exile. It literally makes no sense at all in the context of her character, and even less in the context of the plot of the game. If she really wanted to kill the force, she could have done it as soon as the force bond developed between her and the Exile; why would she need to draw out the Jedi and the Sith to destroy them if she truly thought she could remove the one thing that made them a threat to the galaxy in the first place?

No, I think you're just close-minded and not really reading anything I'm posting. The "big reveal" is of the nature of why the Exile lost his connection to the force, and of Kreia's true motivations (to destroy both the Jedi and the Sith). The cool twist to this is that it ultimately doesn't end up being that much of a twist at all: "Perhaps you were expecting some surprise, for me to reveal a secret that had eluded you, something that would change your perspective of events, shatter you to your core. There is no great secret. There is only you."

Actually, she didn't go through much at all - most of her actions throughout the game were focused on eliminating the remaining Jedi and Sith, which had much more to do with the future of the galaxy than with allowing the death of the force - in fact, most of your actions during the game have absolutely nothing to do with the "death of the force" at all.

It's not just one line, though. I've given repeated examples of how numerous other major plot points in the game don't make sense in other interpretations, and how there's a lot of build-up that points towards Malachor being the main unresolved horror in the Exile's past, and how confronting that and resolving it is the main point of the game.

Trooper, really? If I were to play it at all, I'd have to be a smuggler. Han Solo is my hero.

I haven't ignored "most of the game's content." Maybe you'd see that if you yourself weren't busy ignoring the content of my posts.

Alpha Protocol has easily the most impressive branching narrative of any modern RPG. I played it five times, and got distinctly different things happening each time, none of which seemed tacked-on or half-baked. That, and the lack of those obnoxious "PICK ENDING BRANCH HERE" moments that games like Mass Effect are so fond of made it a really enjoyable experience for the narrative alone. Yes, the combat was clunky and the AI lame, but those were minor issues for me. I do think, however, that the Alpha Protocol concept could have been quite a bit better had there been more reactivity to character skills in dialogue - the shunning of a "dialogue skill" is nice, but I feel that it wasn't adequately replaced by other reactivity, and thus your character build ultimately had very little impact on how the game ultimately played out, minus the few points of reactivity to how you'd go about a mission. The few times technical aptitude opened up additional dialogue choices were nice, but why wasn't that done with every skill? It'd be great, for example, if you could only disarm Surkov when he pulls a gun on you if you have sufficient martial arts skill. I think one thing that could take a game like Alpha Protocol from merely "good" to "classic" status would be large-scale reactivity to *every* skill tree in dialogue. This would probably necessitate a fundamentally different skill-tree design (trying to work in reactivity to skills in each of the four individual weapon classes would be goofy and unworkable), but given that Alpha Protocol is such a narrative-driven RPG it's disappointing when the RPG mechanics (read: character building) don't have that much effect on the narrative. Still, calling AP one of the "worst games ever" is ****ing stupid, but I expect no different from Volo.

When she says she sees in the exile the ability to "see the force die," she does not literally mean the ability to destroy the force. She means the ability of one to willingly sever all ties with the force, and ultimately become stronger for it. This is why she chooses the Exile. This is her motivation for the entire game - to preserve the truth she sees in this one not-quite-a-Jedi. Kreia's behavior for the "vast majority of the game" is nothing more than training the Exile, and using him to defeat those she sees as blind. It is only at very end, once those who betrayed her have been destroyed, that Kreia draws the Exile to Malachor, as the final piece of his training. She repeatedly mentions that for the Exile's training to be complete he must confront his past, and after he confronts Atris, Malachor is the one shadow in the Exile's history, the driving force behind pretty much all of the plot, that must finally be confronted and resolved. The echoes must be stopped - Kreia directly tells you this. Why do you think so much of the dialogue in the game refers to these "echoes?" The entire point of the climax is not that you're stopping the evil villain from killing the force, it's that you're finally directly confronting this horror in the main character's past, which has been the source of pretty much all conflict in the game (Sion and Nihilus are direct products of that tragedy). This is Kreia's "final test."

You don't have to ignore any buildup - Kreia hates the force, and she sees in the exile truth in that one can turn away from the force and become stronger for it. Her motivations for the entire game are to preserve this, and rid the galaxy of those who are blind to it (the Jedi, the Sith). Nothing more, nothing less. "I would have killed the galaxy to save you" and whatnot. If Kreia had actually intended to kill the force, her actions at the end make no sense - she would have done it as soon as she could, not wait for the Exile to come and stop her.

The "you have already failed me" is dependent on the "if so," not a separate declaration. The latter would directly contradict other lines in the same discourse, which is full of nothing but praise for the Exile and his choices up to that point. None of what I have said "flies in the face of her character for the rest of the game." Quite the opposite - it is much more in character than a straightforward betrayal and villainous plot would be. Kreia is not a villain, not truly.