The objective was always for him and Phi to be born as Sigma/Diana sons in a life-or-death situation to guarantee they would have powers.
They could have used other opportunities and maybe not scare their parent for life, but it would risk them not having powers and not returning to the past. I guess by the time the terrorist would set in motion humanity extinction, they would be just children.
You misunderstood me : I get the reasons the game gives for his actions, I'm just saying that they were unnecessary.
How different would the story have been if Delta was actually a random old guy with mindhacking powers that was born in the early 20th century?
Sigma and Diana would still have been left stranded in an alternate history, they would still have had a child, they would still have sent her back in time to avoid starvation. (By the way, the fact that Phi was sent to 1904 first
and then to 2008 also seems pointless. 1904 Phi has no influence or importance to the story, she should as well have been cut.)
The whole "parents in danger = children with power" also feels like an ass pull. At no point in the series was it established as a necessity. The cast is full of people with powers developed without influence from their parents. Hell, Carlos's sister is one of the numerous humans to develop powers in anticipation to the Radical-6 outbreak out of the blue. No genetic manipulation necessary.
Absolutely nothing would have changed if Delta wasn't their child. Everything would have happened the same way. These informations are completely superfluous and do not inform his character in any way.
No power is explained too much. Delta's power is just read anyone minds and control them for a few moments.
As I said before, in my opinion they should have distinguished better all the powers. He can't shift so the he can't escape death like shifters can. It means that quite a couple version of him died and he saw that.
He even mentions in the end, he's not the same Zero that made them pass through those horrible situations. He just made them flip a coin and that's it. He just knows what happened because he read their minds.
In the other sense, everyone that jumped is the same "entity" that went through everything. But the Zero that made that is dead. And the Zero that meets them is different.
But they are. Junpei and Akane could access the morphogenic field to respectively send and receive information. Sigma and Phi could shift timelines by sending their entire consciousness in the morphogenic field and "downloading" it in another version of themselves.
Delta can read people's mind by...? And can momentarily control them by...?
We could start conjecturing and tentatively explain them by saying that he can force people to broadcast their thoughts to the morphogenic field and then receive them in full, and that he can force people to receive "instructions". But that's a bit bullshit. We shouldn't have to start theorizing how the powers of the main antagonist of the series actually work.
And like I said, his actions would barely be different if he actually was a shifter. The whole point of stating that he can't actually shift is to throw a curveball at the very end of the game, with him claiming "I didn't do anything wrong, I'm not guilty.
It was another me." Which is completely bullshit, because
he's the leader of a fucking terrorist organization. He's responsible for the death of Alice's father and the nonary games before 999.
It's a very weak payoff for what amounts to breaking the rules of how espers work and creating an entirely new set of powers.
I agree with you in that they should have segregated the different kinds of esper powers better, but in the case of Delta, they should have also spent more time exploring them and their potential.
In ZTD, what did his powers actually did? He forced some people's decisions (despite being dead in some of these timelines)?
Sigma was already experiencing this kind of things in VLR, acting against his own common sense. Didn't need no mind controlling fake tetraplegic at the time.
Once again, that's just the excuse for a weak twist. You were not actually controlling the three team leaders. You were controlling
Zero controlling them. Except when you weren't. Or something.
This is left open because it can be anything really. It's possible that even Delta doesn't know exactly how it happened.
I guess the quantum computer is limited to see realities where it exists. It's possible that the timelines he can see aren't of any use to stop humanity decay.
Honestly, the very definition of quantum computer in this game was news to me. I don't know if there's actually a cientific side to it that would, theoretically, access all states in one time.
Quantum computing is entirely theoretical so far, so any application in science fiction is very much a case of "magic science" doing whatever the writer needs it to.
In the case of ZTD, IIRC Sean is explicitly said to be able to access any possible state of reality. You
could argue that he would need to access a universe where he already exists, but that shouldn't be an issue in the case of the fanatical bomber.
In any way, the whole "I released Radical-6 to prevent human extinction" feels like a ridiculous asspull because they needed Zero to be somewhat benevolent. Which is bullshit because, like I said earlier, he's the leader of a terrorist organization that wants to "cleanse the world".
So, three possibilities. Either Delta was :
- A mastermind playing an incredibly long con, spanning over a century of manipulation, parallel world fuckery, murder, genetic manipulation, fanatical indoctrination and genocide to achieve a "good end" (by way of power of friendship or something).
- The most inept illuminati that ever lived, being unable to stop a single man despite, I reiterate, having access to mind reading powers, future reading powers, quantum computing, and the support of one of the world's biggest terrorist organization, with members within a wealthy elite (nonary games).
- A poorly written character.
And I want to be clear : until the Delta reveal, I was thoroughly enjoying the game. I still like it. It's just that everything after that point turned really sour for me.
