TLDR: SSE Please Hire A Writer, And Stop Treating Your Characters Like Stereotypes. Stop Treating Alex

I’m not good at putting my feelings into text, nor am I a writer, or good at literature analysis, but I do have thoughts.

I never liked SSO’s writing to begin with. The writing of SL was okay for a game of that scope. I loved the mystery of a seaside town and strange powers that be. But SSO’s writing is confusing to me.

Dialogues almost always try to be funny, relatable, and it comes across as shallow or boring. I try to read all the dialogue because I am invested in the universe by now and I want to know everything about the events of the world and it’s characters. But lord is it hard sometimes to not skip the repetitive, shallow dialogue.

The characters lack debth and it is hard for me to like any of them. It feels like the Soul riders are just written as stereotypes. Don’t know something? Talk to Linda, she knows everything and loves doing research! She’s a nerd! Alex is the hurr durr let’s do shit without thinking anything over. Haha, Lightning goes zap zap!! Elizabeth is our teacher. A druid. And? Fripp? What even is Fripp? “Mysterious” leader who I don’t know anything about or don’t spend any time with. Who comes across as emotionless and disinterested in his charges. Avalon? Recluse who barely shows up and when he does, he always disagrees with everything.

I like that SSE has been trying to focus on the characters more. Elizabeth’s death didn’t make me feel anything because I just didn’t know her, didn’t have any attachments to her. If anything I laughed during that scene because of the way she ass slammed Darko like that Ground Slam Ash of War from Elden Ring, then got turned into Annie from Attack on Titan, and then blew herself up. That scene should have been an emotional story beat that should have gripped me and made me sad. Red Dead Redemption does that so well. I cried a lot during that game. I wish SSE took the characters seriously tho. It’s like every quest is an episode of The Simpsons where shit happens, it never gets acknowledged after, the characters don’t change. Every episode is a new start. I really like that they commited to the darker and real events, such as Lisa losing her mother, Alex having a dysfunctional low income family, and Anne getting over the real trauma of Concordes death, her kidnapping, and isolation. BUT THEY DON’T GO ANYWHERE WITH IT.

I want to love these characters and I want them to feel like real people, but it’s hard when they get treated as a joke, or the real and traumatic things that happened to them never get acknowleged and have no impact on them or the story. What about Linda and the betrayal of the Baroness? What about Meteor being lost. She didn’t even mention Meteor until the spymaster sent MC to tell her where Meteor was. And I am still waiting for the new Fort Maria quest to see the dynamic between the druids and the Soul Riders after the events of Justin’s rescue.

And the story…. Sometimes it just feels too whacky to me. I don’t know if the witches and golden apples are some folklore from Sweden, but I did not expect that when I first played through, and I did not like it. It felt like the game was spreading itself too thin? It felt out of place to me.

And sometimes, the quests feel like they have no impact. We need to do a difficult thing. Ha let’s do it this way. Go there. Click the ground. Done, we did it, yay!! It just feels very childish, lacking weight. I’m not sure how to put this into words, and I think there are people out there who are much better at this then I am.

I disliked the new Alex quest and felt unsatisfied. The whole questline had me anxious because the job of an event planner is so hard for me as a person with zero organisation skills and confidence. I am sure it is a very important and difficult job, and I was waiting for how SSE handled it. The entire time I felt like MC and Alex were not making any actual tuall progress. Then the whole thing got derailed to “let’s record a narrated tour of the CIty”. And when the quest ended, I was like “that’s it?”

The cinematic for Alex shows a resourceful, hard working and strong individual who got delt a bad hand, but found hope in Elizabeth. But the game keeps treating her like a stupid comic relief character who can only do one thing, and that is use her lightning power no matter the occasion. Even the Freeing Anne quest felt off to me. Why would Alex chose to go back and face Darko alone, when they keep rehashing the theme of “we’re stronger together”. Her power can be fueled by anger, but her main thing is to protect her loved ones. They got Anne, her priority should have been to get Anne out of there, not come back alone for Darko. It just felt like the writers did that because they needed Elizabeth to die, and MC getting stranded in Pandoria so that Lisa could use her singing power. And how would getting blown off a cliff into a bottomless space get rid of a powerful individual who can easily teleport himself and other people?

I really wish SSO would hire actual writers do deal with their story, the structure of the story, and the characters. Helena did such a good job making the main cast feel real, and structuring the story.

TLDR: SSE please hire a writer, and stop treating your characters like stereotypes. Stop treating Alex like a stupid person who goes zap