pathetic

First, don't get me wrong--I'm a Trailblazer fan as much as anyone, and I fully understand that in a gacha game that encourages self-insertion, of course the MC is going to end up being the main hero. I never expected Trailblazer to be anything less than 1000% essential to saving Amphoreus.

But being essential to saving a world does not always mean taking the literal, highly dramatized role of the "Savior" (capital S). We do not always need to become the quintessential White Knight in order to win. Consider the Xianzhou, where Dan Heng and Jing Yuan still got their chance to shine. Consider Penacony, where Acheron's "saving" Penacony from Aventurine was a more open moment of heroism than Trailblazer versus Sunday, where the events that occurred in the theater were literally suppressed to avoid terrorizing the public, so Trailblazer's actual heroism goes largely understated.

This is very much in line with what the game has told us about the essence of Trailblazing--those on the path of the Trailblaze are "Nameless" because their (usually) brief visits can spark colossal change in the worlds they visit, but their individual identities are less important than the spirit they carry with them and the hope they collectively represent. The Trailblazer as a stand-in for the sheer concept of Heroism does make perfect sense--but the Trailblazer actively usurping the role of the "Savior" from one of the planet's "natives" does not. It runs contrary to what we saw in Belobog (where Bronya remained the hero of her people), Xianzhou (where Jing Yuan was held accountable and stepped up to fix his own mistake), and Penacony (where the real "showdown" was between the IPC and the native Penaconians). We are always "a hero" in the worlds we visit, but rarely--at least for the natives of that world--"THE Hero" (capital H).

There is, in the concept of Trailblazing that the game has set up so far, what we can call a soft "narrative promise."

In storytelling, narrative promises are the premises suggested by the genre and the author, throughout the course of the story, that convince readers to expect certain outcomes.

Genres exist entirely because stories set up "narrative promises" at their beginnings and carry them through to their endings. For example, if you're watching a Disney princess movie, you know you've already been promised a "happily ever after." If you're reading a mystery novel, then you've already been promised the mystery will be resolved by the end. If you're watching a horror movie, you already know someone is going to die.

But outside of genre, authors can make all sorts of individual narrative promises to their readers. If an author builds up two characters, gives them insane chemistry, and hints at the possibility of romance for them throughout the course of the whole story, then of course, your expectation will be for those two characters to get together by the end, right? If an author hints that a character has done something unforgivable, readers will expect that character's karma to catch up with them and anticipate seeing them get what they deserve by the end. There's even the concept of Chekhov's Gun, the rule that an item or plot point mentioned early on the story must always have its use or payoff by the end.

The role of the Trailblazer and the concept of Trailblazing in general in HSR comes with a sort of tacit promise to the player: "Your character will travel the universe and touch many lives. You will change the course of entire worlds and bring hope to those who have long lost it--but then, heedless of reward or fame, you will depart again on your next journey, each world just a fleeting moment in your long story." The Trailblaze oath, "May this journey lead us starward" captures clearly the idea that the Trailblazer is, in essence, the "wandering legend," the one who appears when the hour is most dire but whose identity is ultimately fated to fade from memory, because though we may touch a thousand-thousand other lives across the course of our adventure, our destination is always somewhere up ahead--we do not belong in any of the places that we stop, and our character is always destined for something beyond.

Amphoreus was already toeing the line of this concept, teasing the possibility that the Trailblazer had become too intertwined with the fate of the planet to be able to leave again, to continue on their Trailblazing journey unimpeded.

But even while saying this on the surface, we as players know this is absolute nonsense. Leaks for the next world are already starting to come out. We already know the main plot of the story will require us to pack up and move along from Amphoreus in three or four more patches at best.

The narrative promise of the Trailblaze itself is telling us players that our character will never become so attached to a world that we can't disengage from it and move along, so everything pointing to the Trailblazer becoming inextricably bound to Amphoreus, of only us being capable of being the world's true hero...

All of it feels like little more than blustering, weakly attempting to persuade the player to buy into stakes that don't actually exist.

"The one who will be recorded in Amphoreus's history is you, Trailblazer!"

Cool, awesome, that is not at all what Trailblazing is about. This idea that the Trailblazer will become the true hero of all time in Amphoreus and usurp that role from a "native" of the world isn't consistent with what we've been "promised" about Trailblazing as a concept.

Simultaneously, the idea of the Trailblazer taking over as the "real Deliverer" from Phainon is also breaking another massive narrative promise established by the story: From 3.0 to nearly the tail end of 3.4, we are told time and time and time again that Phainon is the Deliverer.

We're told this visually: Phainon's entire design is built around sun symbology, from the sun on his neck to the emblems on his coat, to his glowing golden blood.

We're told literally, as every one of the other Chrysos Heirs reinforces Phainon's status as "THE Deliverer":

And, more importantly, we're told this thematically, as the first three patches of Amphoreus revolve, at least to a certain extent, around watching Phainon trace the exact steps of the hero's journey. We learn of his call to action with the destruction of Aedes Elysiae, his rising to the call by choosing to join the Flame-Chase Journey with Aglaea... We see his early trials as he grows in strength and wavers over his ability to rise to the hero's role--

and then we see that rise itself, with Phainon moving away from his originally self-centered focus on revenge against the Flame Reaver to stepping into the genuine leadership role by the time 3.3 rolls around:

We watch this rise in the crafting of the blade literally called "Dawnmaker," in Phainon stepping up in 3.3 to pull an actual god out of the sky... And then, of course, in 3.4, when Phainon shoulders a burden like none seen before, bearing the weight of 33,550,336 cycles and 400 million coreflames to ensure that Amphoreus will not be able to birth a new Lord Ravager and become the destruction of their galaxy and more.

We watch him give everything, descend into agony and madness, kill those he loves most dearly again and again and again all so that he can fulfill his duty...

Only to be told he's just "one of" the heroes. Not THE hero.

Not the dawn.

"I am the blazing sun, destined to rise."

"Did you see? Amphoreus has ushered in the dawn."

(What was this for? What was all of this even for?)

The "Nameless Faces" trailer launched in January. It's July. For half a real year, the game's patches and promotional materials have all been making us a narrative promise: Phainon is the Deliverer. He will become the hero who saves Amphoreus.

And 3.4 broke that promise.

If you take 3.4's ending at face value, Phainon isn't going to become the dawn. He's not the Deliverer. He is--word-for-word from the game itself--just "fuel" for the fire that the Trailblazer is supposed to carry into the new world to become the real savior.

Six months of build up for a "just kidding" conclusion.

Now, hang on. I can hear some people who liked this twist already jumping to defend it. Yes, it is possible and sometimes even incredibly good storytelling for authors to break their narrative promises. Sometimes the shock effect and the surprise ending are the best routes to take. Sometimes ironic revelations can be the most powerful writing in the world. There's a post about this on Reddit that suggests a famous example: In the legend of Orpheus, our assumption is that Orpheus will be rewarded for his loyalty to Eurydice and be able to rescue her from the Underworld. But that narrative promise is ultimately broken--Orpheus fails his mission by looking back--and the message of the story becomes that broken promise. The story is a deeper and more meaningful meditation on love because it did not have the happy ending that its set up seemed to suggest it should have.

Sometimes it is possible that "subverting expectations" produces a better story.

But... does that really seem like the case here? After building him up for six months, then giving us four dedicated hours of torture porn as we RP walked him into abject despair, does it really seem like shifting the story's focus, taking away Phainon's role as "THE Hero," will really improve the quality or message of this story?

Even the Trailblazer doesn't seem to think so, resulting in wishy-washy messaging: We players are given the option to try to undo what the game itself is doing, though of course we know our dialogue choices have no real effect.

A broken narrative promise can be powerful. It can be justified and good and meaningful.

But it has to be earned.

Did 3.4 earn the right to subvert Phainon's role as the Deliverer? Did it properly lead us players to the conclusion that Amphoreus would be better off with a different hero, that Phainon didn't deserve to be the Deliverer, or that anyone else could do it better? Did the game manage to convince us that Phainon's story would have a more meaningful conclusion if he wasn't THE hero? Did it manage to convince us that all of Phainon's character build up and importance in the plot so far were better off being utilized in a different role?

I think the answer here is a resounding no.

And the crazy thing is, I don't think this was impossible! They could have earned this broken promise! They could have convinced us that Phainon's story wasn't meant to go where we hoped it would. With proper build-up, 3.4 could have been a very meaningful deconstruction of the Hero's Journey, with a message about the consequences of bearing too much responsibility for any one person, of breaking down in the face of insurmountable expectations, and of no one being capable of shouldering the literal weight of the world all alone.

It wouldn't even have been especially hard to do this. If the story had just been slightly tweaked, it would have worked more effectively:

Show Khaslana doubting himself as he begins the cycles. "Can I do this? What if I just mess it up?"

Show Khaslana starting to doubt that his decisions mean anything at all. "Even if I consume an infinite number of coreflames, what then? How will I get out of the system?"

Show Khaslana stumbling--a cycle where he nearly fails, or where he's forced to leave that iteration before collecting all the coreflames, thus opening up the question of "What if mistakes keep happening; what if things slip by me and Lygus wins?"

They also needed to let Khaslana actually grapple with the warnings his comrades were giving him. The game did do a good job of hinting that Khaslana's choice to infinitely loop Amphoreus was probably not a good idea, such as Anaxa saying early on:

But this, and many other similar statements about Khaslana becoming callous and cold-hearted, is effectively thrown away by the story because there is no reflection on it. The story tells us that Phainon can't stop collecting coreflames and regressing the world, so he doesn't. We don't actually get to see him grapple at all with Anaxa's question here, of whether he's made the right choice and whether the iterations are actually going to help anything. He just says "I never had a choice" and moves on. Even we, the player, are put in the sort of back-and-forth state of "Yes, Khaslana is killing his comrades and that's bad, but he's doing it because if he stops, literally millions of real people will die."

It's difficult to be persuaded that there's enough of a genuine moral quandary here to justify saying "Khaslana isn't a hero anymore" when the choice is between a simulated universe that restarts with the push of a button and the fate of actual reality. He may not be a hero to the Chrysos Heirs he has to kill in each cycle, but we're not led to believe that his heroism towards the actual universe ever wavered even the slightest.

We needed to see scenes of "the Hero Within" wavering, starting to fade out, where Khaslana's grasp on the concept of heroism itself started to fade away.

And ultimately, what we needed to see was Khaslana actually burning himself out. It needed to get to the point that the burden was so heavy it couldn't be carried by a single person.

We needed to see a scene where Khaslana met again with the barely there vestiges of the Hero Within and broke down, where he whispered in a cracked, broken voice: "I can't do this alone anymore."

If the story trajectory had led us organically to the message that "The weight of the world is a burden no one can bear by themselves; the collective will of all those who wish for a better future is required in order to bear the burden of deliverance," then it would have made absolute and perfect sense for the Trailblazer to appear, to prop the fallen Khaslana up on their shoulder and say "You're not alone, Phainon. That long night is over. If your steps waver just before the sunrise, then let me be the one to carry you those last few moments into the dawn." Then it would have made perfect narrative sense for the Trailblazer to step in as "the concept of Heroism itself," as part of "the Deliverer," as one hero helping another to achieve the greater goal.

I fully believe they could have done "Khaslana passes the torch on to the Trailblazer to finish the final moments of the mission" well.

They just... didn't.

Even worse, because there's never any real reflection on the way heroism can become a toxic burden to those who seek it, we're left with not only a weirdly unexamined theme in 3.4 but also a deep despair for Phainon as a character.

It feels like we, the player, are betraying him by going along with where the end of 3.4 dragged us. Did you really want to say "I will become Amphoreus's dawn" after watching Phainon struggle 33 million times to usher in that dawn?

In fact, this patch also went so far out of its way to give us insight into Phainon's actual dreams that it hurts all the worse:

Every point leads back to the same conclusion: Phainon wants to be the kind of person who helps others, who achieves people's wishes, who carries their hopes with him, who protects and guards what he cares for, who can be counted on--also someone who is strong enough to tussle with warriors, who is respected enough to be part of victorious homecoming parades, who is the role model for children...

In other words: Phainon's wish is to be a hero.

And, without our consent, 3.4 forces the player to take that role from him.

Phainon wants to fulfill everyone else's wishes--but we're not given the option to truly fulfill his.

Does anything from 3.0 to 3.4 convince us players that Phainon will be truly happy being nothing but a burning ball of hatred to throw at Nanook? Does watching his own inner hero fade out to become the Trailblazer feel like a fitting end for the internal heroism of someone who has given so much? Does he sound fulfilled when he says that he'll throw himself on the pyre once again?

All of 3.4 is what Phainon must do, and none of it is what he wants.

The narrative promise being broken by 3.4 isn't just about who will usher in Amphoreus's dawn. It's also about playing a game that insists on the beauty of life, of not giving into nihilism and despair, about a 100+-hour-playtime promise that chasing your dreams is the most worthwhile pursuit of all--only to watch the guy previously situated as this patch cycle's "main character" be treated in the exact opposite manner of the game's own central message.

The story leads us over and over to the same conclusion, makes the same promise over and over--the inner hero Phainon possessed all along will become his true self, a true hero who can shine the light for those he loves--only to revoke it in a twelve-line-long dialogue option at the very tail end of the patch without so much as a prerendered cutscene to give it more weight.

It's not that Trailblazer becoming the Deliverer is the worst thing ever--it's that the writing of the story did not properly build up in a way that would make that a satisfying conclusion.

It doesn't suit the Trailblaze, it doesn't suit what the first three and a half patches of Amphoreus set us players up for, and it doesn't suit a beloved character like Phainon who humbly dreamed of just getting the chance to protect his home and friends and see their wishes fulfilled. Even Shaoji himself says it: Hatred as a primum mobile doesn't suit Phainon, whose true root is the desire simply to love and be loved by others.

If heroes are those who fulfill the wishes of others, what kind of hero are we, the Trailblazer, if we can't even help Phainon become the person he truly wants to be?

"But Phainon doesn't care about himself, his wish is only to help others and he doesn't pay attention to his own desires."

Yes, and the game itself tells us this is a bad thing.

The game itself tells us that Phainon's complete destruction of the self in order to bear the burdens of others is a horrible decision, and that he should have thought about himself, that he was entitled to his own happiness--and then 3.4 ends without giving him the slightest option to achieve that.

It's both intellectually and emotionally bad, contradicting its own message.

...Which is why I don't think things will stay this way.

Maybe I'm just too hopeful, but to me, it seems that if there's something in the writing that really isn't adding up, that's really contradicting the game's core message in and of itself...

Maybe that thing isn't supposed to feel right.

Maybe we're supposed to feel off about this choice for the Trailblazer to "become the Deliverer" because maybe things aren't as straightforward as they seem on the surface.

So, my (probably) hopium-induced conclusion from all this is that there's a bigger plot afoot than what we currently know.

The scene where the original Phainon and Cyrene confront Lygus seems to suggest that the plan is just to endlessly cycle as a way of stalling for time until Fuli gazes at Amphoreus. But does the gaze of Fuli actually achieve anything in and of itself?

Now that they know their world is nothing but data, could Phainon and Cyrene actually be happy with just forestalling Destruction?

Would they not want more for their world than to remain an experiment?

My guess is that the real plan all along was to utilize the power of the Scepter, combined with the power of Remembrance (and possibly also Erudition for good measure) to actualize Amphoreus as a real planet, making all its inhabitants into "real" people and allowing them to escape the experimental nature of their existence, while also neutralizing the threat of the Lord Ravager.

Thus, Phainon's "I'm going to go burn myself out attacking the Destruction" is actually not a "I don't have any better ideas, so hopefully punching god helps" but a deliberate part of the longer ploy to penetrate the Scepter, get "on the inside" of Irontomb, and seize the power of the Destruction for Amphoreus.

The entire bait-and-switch "who is the actual Deliverer" plot might even, then, be an intentional ploy to divert attention away from Phainon's actions, giving him time to assume control of the Scepter's systems while the Trailblazer and Cyrene work to achieve their end of the plan.

If this ends up being the case, then Phainon's role as the "hero" won't be ending here, and the role of "delivering" Amphoreus--while also tied closely to the Trailblazer--will nevertheless stay with Phainon too.

Personally, I can only hope this is the direction they intend to take the rest of Phainon's role in Amphoreus, because if it turns out that this was genuinely supposed to be his end and the remainder of his contribution to the story, I think it will probably go down as one of the biggest fumbles in character writing that we've had in all of HSR.