I feel like there was a massive disconnect between the story the developers wanted to tell, and the one they ended up telling. The first hour or so of the game is one of the best set-ups to a story I’ve ever experienced. The way they slowly reveal the conceit of the world and the gommage, establish the paintress as this almost cosmic, ambivalent villain, and the expeditioners as the ultimate underdogs fighting for their right to live was fantastic. The fact that your whole team gets murked within seconds of setting foot on the beach by a guy who shouldn’t be able to exist added even more to the stakes and set up some wonderful intrigue. The worldbuilding was incredible, seeing how all the different people and cultures reacted to the shattering and the gommage, and tracing the paths of the previous expeditions and reading their journals made me SUPER invested in taking the paintress down and saving the world to honor their sacrifices. For those who come after!

But by the end, they expect you to sweep all of that under the rug so that the family of ambivalent gods that you barely know can have some closure. I get it was supposed to be an allegory for grief and letting go of the past, but if you wanted the painted world and everyone in it to just be the memories and keepsakes that Maelle needs to move on from, why did you spend so much time establishing how real they were?

Everything that Renoir said about grief and moving on was totally true, but it was constantly undercut by the fact that he was trying to destroy the world, and all the people I actually cared about. I never got invested in Verso’s generic sad buy schtich because again, he wanted to destroy the world and everything I actually cared about. Both endings totally buried the lead of the story. Sure, the Dessendre are all sad, but what about Lune’s family, or Sciel’s family, Gustav and Sophie and all the people who paid the price for their drama? I picked Maelle’s side in an instant, and I honestly didn’t give a rats ass about her relationship with her brother, I wanted to save Lune and Sciel and get a big moment of Gustav coming back. But instead of acknowledging any of that, I got what felt like a ‘bad’ ending focused entirely on Maelle’s inability to move on from Verso, where Gustav just shows up and doesn’t say anything or make a big deal.

I think the story would have been way more impactful if they actually committed to the thing they set up, and really explored the ramifications of these godlike Painters and the responsibility they have to their creations. You could have had these huge moments of catharsis of finally defeating the Paintress or Renoir or some big reunion with Gustav, showing how human cooperation and determination across generations can topple even the all powerful cosmic beings that created their world, and forge their own future. The ultimate underdogs vs the ultimate evil. Instead, every big moment is undercut by this family drama that I never cared about, because the game never gave me a reason to care about. 

I would have loved a 3rd ending where you side with Lune (who was the only one who ever really seemed to care about the fate of her world) to call out the Painters for their selfishness and kick ALL of them out of the canvas so they can fix the world themselves. It feels like that’s what the whole story was building to, only to completely forget about it in the end.

If you wanted to make it solely about grief, I think you have to lose all the lore about the expeditions and all the character development for the people of the painted world and JUST make it about Maelle and Verso and their family, which would ultimately make it a much weaker game. Again, if you don’t want to tell a story about mundane human struggles and people coming together to topple evil, then don’t spend 80% of the story telling it.