[SPOILER] i really want to like this game but...

[yxbxi]

Ive written in my review that i think there arent enough points where the author foreshadowed plot twists/devices, i really want to just be plain wrong and am willing to read what yall think about this.
(reading the review isnt necessary to add to the discussion)

[NewMoonShadow]

There's actually a bunch of foreshadowing, it's just easy to miss on a single playthrough.

A handful of examples (SPOILERS, if you didn't beat it)

Polca looks like a human, which is easy to dismiss as just the designer wanting her to be sexy until you realize that OBVIOUSLY the reason she's human is because she's fused with SOMEONE. This is set up right in the beginning (or at least the moment Mebius introduces the player to the concept of Fusing) but it's pretty easy to overlook.

Lily Killer's "Crystallize" ability is easy to overlook since it's so utterly useless in battle, but it's the very power she uses in the final cutscene to trap herself and polca in crystal for healing.

Almost all of Lily Killer's dialogue takes on an entirely different context on a second playthrough, once you're aware of the full extent of her true nature. Seriously, we're talking "Sixth Sense" level ♥♥♥♥. It all points to her true nature, you just don't know it yet.

Diana and the Aubade in general are foreshadowed by the presence of the random-ass rusted car just sitting in the middle of the Bohelos marketplace looking as out-of-place as it possibly could without actually glowing.

A lot of the foreshadowing is in battles or in the environment itself, rather than spoken.

[yxbxi]

Originally posted by NewMoonShadow:

There's actually a bunch of foreshadowing, it's just easy to miss on a single playthrough.

A handful of examples (SPOILERS, if you didn't beat it)

Polca looks like a human, which is easy to dismiss as just the designer wanting her to be sexy until you realize that OBVIOUSLY the reason she's human is because she's fused with SOMEONE. This is set up right in the beginning (or at least the moment Mebius introduces the player to the concept of Fusing) but it's pretty easy to overlook.

Lily Killer's "Crystallize" ability is easy to overlook since it's so utterly useless in battle, but it's the very power she uses in the final cutscene to trap herself and polca in crystal for healing.

Almost all of Lily Killer's dialogue takes on an entirely different context on a second playthrough, once you're aware of the full extent of her true nature. Seriously, we're talking "Sixth Sense" level ♥♥♥♥. It all points to her true nature, you just don't know it yet.

Diana and the Aubade in general are foreshadowed by the presence of the random-ass rusted car just sitting in the middle of the Bohelos marketplace looking as out-of-place as it possibly could without actually glowing.

A lot of the foreshadowing is in battles or in the environment itself, rather than spoken.

I did notice the crystallize one, the others kind of.

I was vague in my post but the main "twists" that, imo, need explanations on how they are foreshawed are: the berserk potion, which i havent noticed any mention of prior, and sarasa's action of preserving part of claura, which i can excuse but i feel like a single cutscene without dialogue of sarasa fidgeting with clauras corpse would have been enough.

[NewMoonShadow]

Originally posted by Supol:

Originally posted by NewMoonShadow:

There's actually a bunch of foreshadowing, it's just easy to miss on a single playthrough.

A handful of examples (SPOILERS, if you didn't beat it)

Polca looks like a human, which is easy to dismiss as just the designer wanting her to be sexy until you realize that OBVIOUSLY the reason she's human is because she's fused with SOMEONE. This is set up right in the beginning (or at least the moment Mebius introduces the player to the concept of Fusing) but it's pretty easy to overlook.

Lily Killer's "Crystallize" ability is easy to overlook since it's so utterly useless in battle, but it's the very power she uses in the final cutscene to trap herself and polca in crystal for healing.

Almost all of Lily Killer's dialogue takes on an entirely different context on a second playthrough, once you're aware of the full extent of her true nature. Seriously, we're talking "Sixth Sense" level ♥♥♥♥. It all points to her true nature, you just don't know it yet.

Diana and the Aubade in general are foreshadowed by the presence of the random-ass rusted car just sitting in the middle of the Bohelos marketplace looking as out-of-place as it possibly could without actually glowing.

A lot of the foreshadowing is in battles or in the environment itself, rather than spoken.

I did notice the crystallize one, the others kind of.

I was vague in my post but the main "twists" that, imo, need explanations on how they are foreshawed are: the berserk potion, which i havent noticed any mention of prior, and sarasa's action of preserving part of claura, which i can excuse but i feel like a single cutscene without dialogue of sarasa fidgeting with clauras corpse would have been enough.

I mean-

1: Why does EVERYTHING need to be foreshadowed? Foreshadowing is neat and all, but having literally everything that happens be mentioned previously would just needlessly bloat the game and clog down the pacing. And could very well necessitate some very boring and/or contrived dialogue situations.

2: They didn't mention the potion specifically, but I'm pretty sure Sarasa and/or the King of Books mentioned that the demons would rampage across the continent, they just didn't mention why it would happen (whether they knew why or not is a bit up in the air, but I'm pretty sure they didn't). Also the potion was something that the assassins were specifically keeping hidden until it was used, and none of the demon generals had any reason to mention it up until then because they believed the secrets of its creation had been lost to time. You can mumble about wanting more narrative tropes all you want, but it's 100% logical and in-character that nobody would mention it before then.

3: There comes a point where you just have to accept that people continue to move around and do things offscreen. And anyway, from what I remember Sarasa didn't even use Claura's corpse for the revival, she used one of the many mini-Claura's that she carved off of herself to cook before she was mutated. That ones that Claura spent half the game eagerly handing out to anyone within earshot, and had already been demonstrated as being capable of moving and running around on their own, but just didn't have the capacity to think, reason, and regenerate the way the main body did. Sarasa gave one of those mini-Claura's the ability to fully regenerate the main body, rather than using the main body itself.

[yxbxi]

Originally posted by NewMoonShadow:

Originally posted by Supol:

I did notice the crystallize one, the others kind of.

I was vague in my post but the main "twists" that, imo, need explanations on how they are foreshawed are: the berserk potion, which i havent noticed any mention of prior, and sarasa's action of preserving part of claura, which i can excuse but i feel like a single cutscene without dialogue of sarasa fidgeting with clauras corpse would have been enough.

I mean-

1: Why does EVERYTHING need to be foreshadowed? Foreshadowing is neat and all, but having literally everything that happens be mentioned previously would just needlessly bloat the game and clog down the pacing. And could very well necessitate some very boring and/or contrived dialogue situations.

2: They didn't mention the potion specifically, but I'm pretty sure Sarasa and/or the King of Books mentioned that the demons would rampage across the continent, they just didn't mention why it would happen (whether they knew why or not is a bit up in the air, but I'm pretty sure they didn't). Also the potion was something that the assassins were specifically keeping hidden until it was used, and none of the demon generals had any reason to mention it up until then because they believed the secrets of its creation had been lost to time. You can mumble about wanting more narrative tropes all you want, but it's 100% logical and in-character that nobody would mention it before then.

3: There comes a point where you just have to accept that people continue to move around and do things offscreen. And anyway, from what I remember Sarasa didn't even use Claura's corpse for the revival, she used one of the many mini-Claura's that she carved off of herself to cook before she was mutated. That ones that Claura spent half the game eagerly handing out to anyone within earshot, and had already been demonstrated as being capable of moving and running around on their own, but just didn't have the capacity to think, reason, and regenerate the way the main body did. Sarasa gave one of those mini-Claura's the ability to fully regenerate the main body, rather than using the main body itself.

My bad i forgot to answer:

1) because if something big happens out of nowhere then thatll feel like an asspull

2) fair point

3) yeah, thats what happened(i was wrong in that reply), i still think pulling that out of a magic hat in the literal last minute of gameplay seems an asspull, sure its in sarasas character to do so but how can i accept that when i just spent 40hrs building an empire, seeing it burn down cause the actions Polca did basically had 0 weight to them and then sill have a somewhat happy ending where sort of everyone is happy.

[NewMoonShadow]

Originally posted by Supol:

1) because if something big happens out of nowhere then thatll feel like an asspull

I recommend turning off cynical YouTube comedy shows like "Cinema Sins" and "Pitch Meeting". You'll enjoy media a lot more.

3) yeah, thats what happened(i was wrong in that reply), i still think pulling that out of a magic hat in the literal last minute of gameplay seems an asspull,

In the sense that literally anything any character does without announcing it first is an "asspull", I suppose.

sure its in sarasas character to do so but how can i accept that when i just spent 40hrs building an empire, seeing it burn down cause the actions Polca did basically had 0 weight to them.

What do you mean Polca's actions have 0 weight to them? She is literally the only reason that the demon village in the future exists. It was her years of fighting alongside her human companions that inspired them to save the demons from complete annihilation. She saved her race from extinction by inspiring change in those around her to forgive them for what happened a thousand years ago.

Just because she didn't PERSONALLY drag the demons out from underground doesn't mean she wasn't the reason for their survival. She very much was. She changed the world on a fundamental level, it just took time for that change to... well... take root, for lack of a better phrase. Which is a far more appropriate and realistic ending than defeating BlessCurse leading to an immediate and unquestioned end to animosity between humans and demons, which is where a lot of stories would have taken it.

[Deathpinca]

Originally posted by Supol:

1) because if something big happens out of nowhere then thatll feel like an asspull

I just wanna push back on this a bit by saying that is not necessarily true. There are definitely situations where big things could feel like an asspull if they're not contextualized in the correct way, but what is important isn't just the stuff before that situation but the circumstances surrounding it as a whole.

To take an example from the game, (Endgame Spoilers) when Nazjetza travels to the past to save Diana after we had already played through the scene in the timeline that she died in, nothing within the game foreshadows that ability or outcome, and yet it is contextualized well enough before and after the event for players to make sense of it despite having likely not taking much notice on the details that make it possible. (Endgame Spoilers) Ever since we met Fuh, this idea of an Ultra Spirit Stone is emphasized as this powerful object that Fuh can use to do incredible things, in his case wanting to find a mate. And while we're getting to know Nazjetza, we learn about the broach he always keeps on him as a special memento from his mother. These two facts are never connected, and there is no foreshadowing for Najetza travelling through time, with everyone assuming he just got lost or distracted. But when Najetza travels through time with the power of an Ultra Spirit Stone, we already have enough prior context that when the game explicitly makes that connection, it retains the surprise without giving hints on what is coming up.

Foreshadowing is just a tool to contextualize the future. There are plenty of other ways to go about it without drawing them towards a specific planned conclusion.

[manoelnsn]

The game does have several foreshadowing structures. In fact, the way the game builds its turning points is one of its strongest points.

The ideal would be to play the game twice and notice these moments (there is foreshadowing even in +18 scenes), but since this would take a long time, there are channels on YouTube where you can watch complete gameplay. It might be a good idea to take a look at some of the main events in the story and see if you can notice things you wouldn't have noticed before.