I just played through Season 3 all in a row, and it gave me some different perspectives than I had just following them as they came out.
Braham
First off, Braham storming off didn’t seem quite as sudden when I didn’t have downtime between his appearances. What interested me though, is it felt like he was hiding something. I don’t know how to explain it, but some of his dialogue came off as someone who is really, really frustrated about something else. The death of his mother is obvious, but it felt like there was something else, and something he might not even realize himself and is projecting it onto everyone else. It might sound baseless at the moment, but it makes me feel like there might be a future reveal for him.
Something that bothered me this time around, was the exact way the Commander responded to him. Braham was being a jerk about the whole guild thing, but I really feel like the player character was overly harsh about his plan. At the time, all you have is an idea from Taimi that she might be able to come up with a plan to pit the dragons against each other. It’s not for two episodes until she even intends to start experiments. Nevertheless, your character treats Braham’s plan, which he ultimately proves to be viable, as an offensive waste of time.
This is one of those places where it feels like the characters know where the story is going, because while Taimi’s plan is certainly preferable, it was not anywhere near solid enough at the time to start dismissing viable alternatives. The logical thing to do would have been to let Braham keep researching his plan in case Taimi’s thing didn’t pan out, not to tell him off, even if he wasn’t in a bad mood.
Anise
It’s no secret that I’ve been suspicious of the portrayal of both Jennah and Anise for a long time. After seeing Season 3 in this new light, my perspective on it has shifted a bit. I’m a little less suspicious of Jennah now. While I’m still not fond of how she handled the events of Episode 4, in the greater context of the season, they feel more like a situation in which the heroes and villains are black and white so the heroes can get away with more, if you know what I mean. I also think the situation was influenced by the culmination of that arc being known for a long time.
Anise, however, set off even more flags for me. While her being much older or not who she seems has been offset by Livia’s role, that doesn’t rule her out entirely as having some dark secret, it just offsets the two instances of her age coming into question (in the Personal Story and Season 2, the former of which I guess can now be explained as information Livia gave her).
In Episode 4, there’s quite a few things. The Commander gets upset about her sending Canach ahead without informing everyone, and even Demmi calls this out. Those fears turn out to be fairly justified, as well, since Canach’s squad was taken out and he was being tortured. Anise also infamously gets pretty violent on multiple occasions and the other characters have to talk her down, culminating in her attitude toward Valette.
Then there’s the Shining Blade stuff in Episode 6. Livia lets all this information out about the Shining Blade, and Anise is not happy about it when she finds out that Livia told us. The thing that I found odd, is that Anise is initially angry that Livia told us about the whole oath thing, but then suddenly brings up the idea of us taking it. It’s this weird moment that feels like she didn’t want things going that way, but then suddenly realizes that she can use that as part of her plan after all.
When Anise vouches for you, she talks about how much she’s watched everything you’ve done, and the Commander gets upset about that little revelation. This reminds me of back in Season 2 when Anise told Canach to spy on the Pact, which still seems like a suspiciously unnecessary thing to do when she’s friends with important people in it already.
On top of that, despite this whole story about getting inducted so the Shining Blade can share secrets with you, one of the other Shining Blade members talks about how Anise keeps secrets even from the rest of the Shining Blade.
Maybe Anise is just supposed to be a somewhat amusingly secret-obsessed but otherwise heroic character, but I feel like this Season laid it on a bit thick when it came to her darker side.
Canach
Canach is my favorite character by this point. I feel he not only gets the best dialogue, but he knows the right way to deliver it. I’ve critiqued the sarcasm in many characters, but I’m okay when he does it for two reasons: first, he tends to direct his sarcasm to the topics that are actually deserving it, and second because he delivers that sarcasm with an appropriate frustration rather than the arrogance that many others do.
I want to see him again as his own person, and if I’m right about Anise, it would be awesome to have him along for that (as long as it didn’t turn into a Demmi situation, because that was unfortunate enough as it was).
(edited by Jokubas.4265)