So! Part of the reason I find Ardyn in Zegnautus irritating is because they've done a very good job at voice and characterization. I find this guy insufferable! =D Great job on the character!
But I also find him irritating (in an actually frustrated way, rather than gleeful) because he's a clumsy tool of the narrative, especially here. Did the test groups have high attrition numbers through the keep? Is that why you need to have the villain just constantly on the overhead announcement, reminding you to be mad enough to continue? If testers were ditching the game, could it have actually been the fact that we've had a couple of massive tone shifts and the gameplay is wildly different for the penultimate dungeon?
(It could be worse, they could've put Pitioss in the main plotline.)
And then there is what he says. There is something to be said for a game bringing up the implications of combat. Goodness knows Lara Croft and that Uncharted guy never realize how many people they've killed in a particular area (at some point I feel like the Bad Guys are justified in attempting to kill the singular person who is murdering *all* of them)
But they're trying to bring this up in a game where I--as Noct--apparently haven't managed to defeat to death *any* of the human combatants. So, if this is an attempt at massively re-framing that MTs are not soulless robots, that I should feel guilty about blowing them up with a lightning flask when they all jump out of a dropship and stay in a convenient huddle, that could be an interesting goal.
Except.
I can see the racks of inactive and already non-functional MTs. There has been nothing given to show that they eat, sleep, or have any functions outside of combat activation. They are less sentient than the wildlife we've been fighting with minimal moral concern. Sure, they have been scourged since they were 'too young to suffer ego death' but then they were incubated and unconscious until they could be canned in their armor.
Luna, our healer of the scourge, does not get to deactivate MTs by healing them.
They have already been killed in every way that mattered. If anyone has been out murdering infants, it is the empire who created them, and trying to put that guilt on me was always going to fall flat.
This feels related to every time a villain attempts to blame the hero for not saving a person from the villain's plot, when the villain's plot is the mechanism of death. And to quote Speed, "You're not the Asshole, he is."
I'm not the asshole here. If someone should be feeling guilty, perhaps it should be the guy on the PA, who helped invent the Mass Produced Orphan Powered Soldiers.
It is made worse by the fact that Noct doesn't actually seem to be taking in any of this. He has minimal reaction and could just as easily be seen to be ignoring Ardyn. That Prompto has to reiterate that he was supposed to be an MT means that we are repeating the point a lot.
So who is Ardyn talking to? If it's to Noct, i don't think he's listening, which at least spares me from having to argue with Noct for trusting the villain here. If it's to me, I recognize that Ardyn is full of shit.
And then, as soon as we reassure Prompto that he's one of us--which he is; he got to live and grow, and all that in Insomnia--it will never come up again. There will be no moral dilemma about continuing to fight MTs.
There will be no discussion about whether or not MTs or daemons could be healed, or if the dawn will heal or fully kill them. It will not come up again.
