everdistant | Tales of Xillia 2 liveblog!

Current Mood: pleased

Entry tags:

Tales of Xillia 2 liveblog!

SO /b-brushes the dust off this

I got ambitious and determined to do a live blog of Tales of Xillia 2 ~~even though my Japanese skills are very sad~~! This is it.

Naturally, spoilers for the game will be in these posts, and for the first Xillia as well. These will be unmarked in my comments, so if you're steering clear of them until the localization comes next year, stay out of these posts YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED

Those of you who don't care, come on in-- I will be posting a somewhat short summary of the first game, partly because no one has played it and knows what's happened or the characters involved, and because Xillia 2 gives players digest movies of the first's plot to review, so it's part of the game too.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

They defeat Nachtigal, the king of La' Schugall trying produce Gin for power; butt heads on ideals with Gaius, king of A' Jule and actually a good guy just extreme; meet Musee, Milla's unknown sister and Greater Spirit who basically opens rifts through space, makes black holes, seems disturbingly mellow but is actually batshit; and work to stop the plans of the group Arkunoa/Arc Noah(Exodus in the local) who want to return to their advanced world of Elenpios, where Alvin is from, and take Rieze Maxia's mana energy with them, since there are no Spirits, mana or anything to sustain the world there after their over-usage of Gin has drained it all. However, Rieze Maxia is isolated from everything else by the Shell, a separation of space that has been kept secret or tried to be, and is tied to Maxwell's existence... which means they naturally try to kill Milla to get back home. They get demolished instead, but Milla gives up her life regardless to save all her important people from getting killed by Musee, even knowing that it will open the way for more like Arc Noah to come over and try the same, but believes Jude and Gaius can take care of it.

Except the Shell doesn't fall at all, because Milla wasn't the real Maxwell even though she honestly thought she was. Jude and co. figure this out, start looking for the real big guy in order to get explanations, and find out that 2000 years ago the true Maxwell got sick of the people of Elenpios killing Spirits, so he created Rieze Maxia and people could use mana as artes so they wouldn't resort to stuff like Gin, migrated all the remaining Spirits over and sealed it off. When Arc Noah unintentionally broke through and got stuck there 20 years ago, Maxwell knew they would come for him, and created Musee to protect the Shell from one side of space, then Milla to be an expendable decoy Maxwell and had the Greater Spirits follow her so humans would believe she was the real deal, and permanently holed up in his realm where he keeps the world ticking along.

The party calls him out on abandoning Elenpios to die, Milla is reborn as a Spirit and calls him out on it, and after getting kicked across the screen the old man finally agrees that maybe he should dissolve the Shell and use the mana left over from that and when he dies to help Elenpios out. Except Musee, who has been killing everybody who knows about the Shell because it's her MISSION to keep it safe and secret, freaks and calls Maxwell out on essentially throwing her away-- if there's no Shell, she has no MISSION, and no reason to exist. Gaius is also less than impressed with all of Maxwell's actions and decides he can do it better, putting him at immediate odds with Milla, who believes a normal human doesn't have what it takes. Musee decides everything before any fighting can break out though, by literally pulling the Spear of Kresnik out of thin space and incapacitating Maxwell with it, then hurling the party over to Elenpios to get rid of them.

That turns out to be the best thing to happen, however, as they discover there that mana in the people of Rieze Maxia can be concentrated in the fossils of Spirits left on Elenpios, allowing a new form of the former Spirit to be created from it; a process called Origin, after the Prime Spirit of the same name. With new Spirits and a new sustainable supply of mana, Gin can be abandoned and everyone can get along, but Gaius refuses to believe that it will work out and Musee is just crazy, so they fight to end as the final bosses... and lose, but survive. Jude earns Gaius' respect and grudging willingness to at least try the new technology, and Milla wins Musee over by being kind since the poor girl just wants to be loved. But as the Shell dissolves to nothing, so does Maxwell, leaving nothing to hold up the system of Spirits, worlds and mana. So Milla decides to take his place, being born and bred for role even though it was a lie at first, while Musee sticks around with her and the party and Gaius return to Rieze Maxia to start working on preparations for the changes that will be coming.