No. See. This is silly. I am saying that, Square can not have their cake and eat it too, you say above they can't get items again because that'd be a cheap duping method so they made the design choice to do away with it, ok, but also some quests remain finished as well, mostly. I can go to New Bodhum 700 AF or whatever the last time is and get the Ark artifact over and over and over again, in Acedemia 4XX AF I can had over 5 Graviton cores over and over and over, all with no change in my inventory because that's what the teams on those places did, or those specific areas of those locations but in Academia 400 AF I can not do the Miss Horizon quests again despite this seemingly being our heroes first time, or them re-living it for the first time. Square's intent and execution do not match up which breaks both. Their canon explanation makes no sense nor does the item duping one make sense because they fail on both accounts. If the problem was item duping they could just solve that by being asses and making whatever item you get, like the Ark Artifact, just replace the Ark Artifact you already have. Bam, no duping. And if they did that you(wait, they did!) you could do all the quests again, despite already having the rewards and it wouldn't be AS obvious that there was a logical inconsistency since 99% of the time the reward is a fragment with the only exception I can recall being the fragment weapons you can get in exchange for Chaos crystals. Even then, if someone did get one of each by just replaying that particular event is that a big deal considering that whichever you don't pick you can buy in the store? And it's not "just" fragments that you can not acquire more than one of, you can't buy more than one of each Monster Adornment from Chocolina either. whether one thinks that's player friendly or not is one thing but the game did already have a way of addressing the item gathering abuse issue.
But, since they did make the decision to not let you re-acquire items and did lock most quests that you have completed what they say and what you visually see and experience is 100% different. The disconnect is huge. You can tell me day and night that me going back and sealing a gate is me "re-living" that event but what I see and experience in the game tells me otherwise. I can not allow that to slide as a player. If I allow Square to tell me one thing while doing another then everything's broken. If Square saying the player characters are reliving those events and that has to be canon because Square says so despite them programming it differently Square might as well just tell everyone that they are playing as Lightening, despite us obviously not playing as Lightning, and make that canon to shut up the fan base.
Nope. Not buying it nor allowing it to happen. This is a problem only because of Square's incompetence.
On a philisophical note, re-living an event for the first time without any of your prior knowledge of the said event is a waste of time. You may indeed make different choices but you don't know that you did. That means when Caius says they have seen all the possible endings that surely, they actually have not. Either the player is indeed above time and does have the power to retain information from different timelines and lives within a single timeline or not, but you can't say that they can get to all these Paradox endings and have seen them all but then turn around and say that every time they seal a gate they lose their own knowledge of those events and live it for the first time. It again can not work both ways. If I accept that the player characters really are living those events for the first time than the player characters can not see all the paradox endings because they could only see and remember the last ending they got.
The only way this explanation works in any capacity is if Square Enix is really breaking the 4th wall and Cauis is actually addressing the player themselves, not the player characters, meaning he is meant to know that there's someone playing Serah and Noel sitting in front of a TV that retains that information while Serah and Noel do not which for story purposes may or may not actually be a 20 something video game nerd and is perhaps some other unknown and as of yet unintroduced character or entity in the Final Fantasy universe. So maybe we're not controlling Serah and Noel but controlling a character that is manipulating Serah and Noel's journey through time?
I'd actually find that hilarious.
This is all an inconsistency brought about by Square's writing incompetence. I'm no Sci-fi writer, I'm sure you can tell from my writing style that I'm no professional writer in any capacity actually, but even I could not write something this broken.
Right, I know and agree here.
I mean to say they need to make it to where all the moments of FF XIII-2 are but a mere flicker in Serah's mind and she experienced them because of her ability as a seeress as a vision from the future not physically and they should start the next game where FF XIII left off and just have Serah mention her visions as the ONLY tie to FF XIII-2 that will ever exist anywhere.
That Nier gets their guys canned and yet FF XIII gets another bat pisses me off.
