Finished Radiata Stories: Non-human path this time.
I had always kind of enjoyed Radiata Stories and thought that due to the splitpath anything that wasn't really answered on the Human side would be answered on the NH-side, especially since it's the supposed "Good Ending". How wrong I was. The Human Path ends up making -more- sense on its own...
It's not so much the completely unintelligible "Cosmic Order/Balance ruled over Dragons" plot points that bother me so much as the completely wasted potential of the political plot points that were brought up at the beginning of the game and then completely thrown to the wayside towards the end of the game. If they wanted to have a bunch of unintelligible destiny-controls-everything crap for a story, then that's fine, at least it would have been cohesive (as cohesive as this kind of self-recursive story can be). But instead they chose to go through the trouble of setting up two sides who supposedly have generally-good intentions and they begin explore what each side's motive is...
And then they change the story entirely, now it's just a "it's destiny, can't-be-helped" war. Oh, by the way, Jack has no importance what-so-ever and is pretty much just watching things happen. Except at the end, where he kills god because he has a hard-on for Ridley.
Characters don't follow any sort of logical thinking processes from one scene to the next. Larks, the leader of the Radiata Knights on the human side, is shown many times to be a level-headed, race-sympathetic character. However, he ends up giving commands to negotiate with the dwarves to -Cross-, who blatantly flaunts his hatred of all nonhumans and is repeatedly unabashedly insubordinate.
Jack witnesses the horrible slaughter of the dwarves AND the Earth dragon and then continues to fight on the humans' side, happily killing dragons. You can choose to have him join the non-humans instead, but he does this for Ridley, not because of anything he saw of human cruelty.
The game is constantly -preaching- about how humans and nonhumans should be able to live together, but no one ever makes any effort for this happen.
After this point, any semblance of a coherent political plot is gone. Humans and non-humans fight because that's what they do. It's destiny. Oh, and there's a cosmic cycle of dragon-y death coming to kill all humans. Because it's destiny. Ridley somehow figures into all of this. Who knows why? It's destiny...
I'm not going to even go into why Aphelion manages to fail it up... Although, I will say that I thought he had some potential for being an interesting 'villain' on the Human path... which was just wasted as hell when I got the 'good ending'.
Actually, the whole game's story just reeks of the same storytelling style as Eternal Sonata (not nearly as bad, but same style) and that pisses me off to no end. A crappy story I'm okay with... hell, FE7 was a crappy story, but it made some level of sense and there weren't a ton of plotholes. Eternal Sonata and Radiata Stories both start off with some cool story ideas and then just throw them away for some pseudo-emotional bullshit. I'm not saying emotional bullshit can't be part of a story, but when you've set up a physical plot, don't expect a metaphysical ending to suffice.
The Non-human ending is especially infuriatingly vague, too.
Despite all the hate for the poorly-executed story... Jack himself was amusing enough and really the only reason anyone should care about the story.
