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Alfric2011-12-14 19:16:16

Good job on taking out Ishtar so quickly again. Her and Yurius running around would probably just be a nightmare for me and my "no one dies" thing.

Poor Alvis. Despite all the awful crap he did, I can't help but feel sorry for him. I am not sure how they managed to make the guy who backstabbed and massacred Sigurd and co sympathetic, but it doesn't seem as forced as with Trabant. But that could be just me.

Ishtar was a lot less luck this time, since I actually have people who could put up a fight, namely Sety.

I get what you mean with Alvis. He's a bastard who was able to taunt Sigurd with his brainwashed wife, slaughter Sigurd's entire army, of which included his own brother and likely at least a few of his friends, all for the sake of taking the throne and avoiding being persecuted for his blood. His goal though was noble, attempting to end persecution due to being a prime target for it himself, having Lopt blood and all, and if not for his monster of a son allowing the Lopt sect to rise to power, due to Alvis's own goal of ending persecution, he wouldn't have been a half-bad ruler, judging from his personality at least.

To be completely honest though, a good 90% of the crap that went on throughout the game, including basically the entire second generation and the war and such, were due to Manfloy and his little group. He blackmailed Alvis, kidnapped and mind wiped Dierdre, talked Verdane into attacking Grandbell, led the rise of the Lopt Empire back into power, kidnapped Julia, and used Julius to subvert basically all of Alvis's power, leading to the tyranny of the second generation.

Yeah, Manfroy and his group are more or less behind everything that happened. I guess that does make Manfroy seem impressive as a villain, as despite Sigurd and later Celice fighting off every step of his plan, he more or less succeeds. Loptous is revived through Yurius, and the Grandbell Empire is on it's way to become a second incarnation of the Lopto Empire.

However, unlike Alvis and to a lesser extent Trabant, Manfroy isn't sympathetic at all. One could make a case that the other Lopto Sect guys followed him due to how they have been persecuted and they wanted revenge, but Manfroy seems to want Loptous revived and the world sent to hell...for the hell of it. They aren't even going with the angle that he wrongly views Loptous as a savior like the others are implied to in the Yied Shrine scene; he seems to know that Loptous is pure evil and he wants to revive him anyway.

So yeah, while I like Alvis in both his bastardy and his sympathetic nature despite that, I am conflicted on Manfroy: On one hand, he's been pulling all the strings, has adjusted his plans to deal with Sigurd and Celice's actions and more or less wins (or at least comes extremely close)...yet his character is almost completely flat and one note and he has no clear motivation aside from doing it For The Evulz.

But I've rambled for long enough, sorry.

Otherarrow, it's said between the lines that Manfroy's motivation for reviving the Loputo Empire is as revenge for over a century of persecution and suffering from the world as a whole, having their members executed publicly and exiled to a dillapidated fortress/shrine in the middle of a harsh desert. As the story expands, we quickly learn how justified this is, with witch hunts, Maira being exiled to Verdane even after he saved Jugdral, and people being burned at the stake simply for being descended from the bloodline of an evil god, regardless of the kind of people they are. You really think The Dog Bites Back isn't a justification?