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This game ruined Flayn and wasted her potential


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I know I'm extremely late to comment on this game, and because of that I don't know if anyone will even notice this post, but after finally getting a chance to play it I can't help but feel underwhelmed with the treatment they gave Flayn, which feels like a drastic downgrade to her portrayal in Three Houses.

From the start, they show Flayn during the War of Heroes battle, and even give her the very first line of spoken dialogue in the game. From this, you'd think that her backstory or origins would be expanded or given a larger emphasis in the plot, but it's disappointingly never brought up again, and we learn nothing new about her for the entire game (and I have played all three routes). We also see her in the beginning chapters of Scarlet Blaze discussing strategy alongside Rhea and Seteth, setting up an expectation that maybe she will be portrayed as a higher-ranking member of the Church of Seiros who is actually involved in its affairs. That also ends up being nothing, though, as she doesn't appear alongside them at all in story scenes for the remainder of the route, except the penultimate chapter cutscene if you want to count that. In Azure Gleam, the route where you actually do get access to her as a playable unit, you would think she would have more relevance there at least. However, she is again relegated to only appearing in a handful of non-critical story events to offer one or two lines reaffirming what other characters had already said. Her base dialogue also came off as more generic and lacking the same heart as in the original game, at least to me.

Those are only the things that I'm sad they didn't do with Flayn, but when I think about what they did do, it actually starts to get insulting. In the original game, Flayn was very much her own person, with a distinct personality and place in the setting. Here, though, she very much is just a satellite character to Seteth. As mentioned before, she offers no input to the events of the story, and only ever appears to sound off Seteth or sometimes others. Worse still are her protagonist supports, which, for some reason, have been written to revolve around him. To people who might question if it had always been this way, go back to view her Byleth supports and you'll see she doesn't mention Seteth once. And more eye-rolling still is that she brings up Seteth at least three times during the responses to her expedition questions, which again, never happened in Houses with her tea parties. It's like the game writers saw all the low-effort, moronic Seteth memes the fanbase was and continues to make about Flayn, and made that her actual character here. And no, this is not a two-way situation: Seteth barely mentions Flayn in his expedition responses because he still gets to be an individual. Does any other character in this game rely so heavily on the existence of someone else to flesh out their dialogue? Does this show that Flayn really was intended to be nothing more than a joke to the writers all this time?

Well, maybe it's a no for that last question; at least they didn't fully capitulate to fandom madness and have her talk incessantly about fish like many wrongly assume she does. It just makes me sad that, because the prospect of DLC for Hopes seems increasingly unlikely, this is almost certainly the last true characterization we'll get for Flayn (and I wouldn't even call it that). In my opinion, that's definitely more than a bit disappointing.

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Wasted her potential? Yes. Ruined her character? I disagree. Her protagonist support being more focused on Seteth breathing down her neck was fine enough for the dynamic presented with Shez and how untrustworthy they are in comparison to Byleth. If all her supports were Seteth centric then I'd understand the issue but they aren't really.

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It's the church faction overall to be honest. Seteth is completely irrelevant to the story line too (and doesn't even get to use his lance because of the class system), and Rhea, as much fun as is when she does show up, just appears to be a boss once or twice (and then we have Alois who randomly abandons his job to go become a mercenary).

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I kinda think its Seteth that's done a little dirty. The original game seems to imply Seteth can solo a division of the western church in his lonesome. Hubert also names him as the most prominent casualty in a battle that also has the death of veteran warriors such as Alois and Shamir. But in Three Hopes Seteth gets the tar beaten out of him be bandits. 

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