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As I recall, Nuvius was 'just' an authoritarian. He wanted to rule the galaxy, led an evil empire, and was generally a horrible person, but I don't recall his empire being built on racial superiority or the like - he was perfectly happy to unite everyone under his brutal rule. The resources of the planets he conquered would flow back to Lachiem, but that was colonialism and imperialism, not fascism.
The fact that it's so easy to confuse the two villains does point to Nuvius' limited presence in the game - and a lot of people confuse the two characters for obvious reasons.
That said, that indicates another reason why Nuvius sort of had to have limited presence - a huge part of the game takes place in the past, a thousand years before he was born.
Vol Terrilis actually does get a lot of development. Even if we only meet him once (and that's optional), he and his ideology had a huge impact on every single character in the past, and a lot of the logs there are about him to one extent or another.
I think that if there was going to be more development for Nuvius, it would probably be similar - by having more characters in the present and showing how Nuvius' rule, behavior, and ideology has affected them. Though, we do get some of this from the future logs.
I was hoping that Nuvius was a more sympathetic character, and I was hoping to see more of a dynamic between Nuvius and Lunais because we learn that he is her father. A good part of me was hoping that Lunais helped her father find some redemption or atone for what he had done, sort of like Richter Belmont in Symphony of the Night.
The "dinner date" memory implies that a strong motivation for him to hunt down the Winderians was because he wanted his daughter, whom his lover had kept secret from him for so long. It felt strange to me that there didn't seem to be much word of Nuvius hunting her down after she went through the timespinner.
It felt like he was painted to be a little more sympathetic prior to his ascension as Emperor, especially with his conversation about "self-improvement" with Selen in one of her memories, and how she hoped to see it again in the dinner date rather than the authoritarian he (always?) was.
I felt like there was potential that something happened to Nuvius prior to his ascension. That he was aware of all the pain the Empire was inflicting, but he wanted to be different. Yet, something at some point twisted his beliefs.
Since we were seeing the memories thorugh Lunais' eyes, and she learns about other aspects in Lachiemi such as its war with Vilete in the past, the presence of demons, and the Bleakness, it felt like they were opening a door for her to think "Something happened to him before all this..."
She never knew her father, but her mother saw something in him in the past, and it was gone in the present. Maybe something happened that caused this change...and maybe she can "help" him like she did with Queen Aelana in the past.
That said...
I can just as easily see Nuvius just being flat out uncaring because of his characterization in the recent memories and just killing Selen in cold blood. Just thinking akin to "Hmph. This was the consequence of your choice, Selen." and leaving it at that.
I didn't see anything odd about him not being persuadable, although the discussion of revenge earlier on did make me think there might be some choice there that didn't precisely materialize (perhaps sort of in an in-universe sense in that, if you choose to use the Timespinner for the true ending, Lunais is choosing not to get revenge on him in the present in favor of trying to fix the problem at its root instead... although in one of those she gets revenge on him in the past, I guess? But that feels sort of like getting past "kill him for revenge" and into "fix the problem", with him just incidentally being one manifestation of the problem.)
I was more surprised at how fast Queen Aelana was redeemed... on the other hand, she was obviously a decent person before she became queen and started to crack under the weight of the horrible things that were done to her and her people, combined with the horrible and often no-win decisions she was faced with.
Personally I do picture Nuvius as having believed he would make the empire better when he killed his father. He legitimately thought he loved Selen, he ordered his chief scientist to try and find a way to stop using demons, and so on. But he also refused to see things from anyone else's perspective and insisted on brute-forcing situations when things didn't go the way he wanted.
Makes one wonder if Lunais actually managed to break the cycle after taking his place. Even though the ending implied she does, I'd be inclined to see it as ambiguous on account of that generally being the "worst" ending - Lunais trusting her own power and will over working with her friends to create a better future in the past seems perilously close to repeating Nuvius' mistakes.
There's no good faith when you're talking to a blank faced NPC.
But hey, at least your memory isn't long enough for your feelings to stay hurt, ya goldfish.
But I also think that that might have partially been intentional. The fact that Lunais dismisses the fact that he's her father as unimportant, and that Selen considered him a one-night stand, doesn't tell us very much about him (and means that we can't really learn much about him), but it does tell us a lot about Lunais and Selen and how they view the world - it establishes Lunais as the sort of person who isn't affected by that sort of thing.
Yeah not really liking it
Which is a real shame, because my first impression of him was that he was a decent person but misguided, much like Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader in Star Wars. It would have been so much better if they gave him an act of redeemption like Vader, but that would not fit the kind of narrative that they were pushing.
It was really unfortunate that they had to go in that direction. Nuvius was such a waste of a character. He could have been so much more than the one-dimensional villain we ended up with.
My thoughts exactly. He was basically akin to Vol Terrilis; not delving further than initial portrayal.
I was maybe thinking part of Lunais' logic or personality would maybe come from him being related and all, and he might surprise us. But still, nah.
This is almost exactly my thoughts about Nuvius. I was hoping he'd be like an Anakin/Darth Vader archetype to Lunais' Luke Skywalker. The way the story was presented, it really felt like they wanted Nuvius to be sympathetic and that you could "redeem" him in some way.
However, I can just as easily understand if the later memories were meant to paint him more as a 'He was deceiving Selen the entire time and was just trying to woo her', which, in a way, is a counterpart to Selen using him as a glorified sperm donor.
Lunais' actions make sense though. At the cost of a more sympathetic characterization of Nuvius, it absolutely is not unwarranted for her to see him as "just another man". She has no emotional attachment to him as a father, and she has displayed little to no interest of ever knowing who he was. All she needs to know is that he killed her mother and slew her clan. That perspective is easily portrayed to us as the player, so we know her motivation.
Admittedly, a short-sighted one, but understandable.
Also, I personally believe she'd end up as a tyrant like her father as Empress. She comes across as equally stubborn and self-righteous.