This led to a fairly strong early impression of the story: when we first meet Ava, we get the tiresome 'main character and this girl know each other from high school' trope, and it looked likely to me that she was going to be played as First Girl Wins and I'd be constantly forced into choices revolving around how to go about sexually harassing the officer I have authority over with zero self-awareness of how utterly skeevy that is. This makes her the only character I straightforwardly like in the game.

She's largely played as a no-nonsense soldier who does not put up with 'wackiness' from other characters and always has a practical suggestion ready on hand. With comparatively little to say, this is going to be a series of three posts that each cover three characters, starting with.Īva is your first officer, acting as the face of the Sunrider, ie your capital ship. (In no small part because the story it's telling is fairly aimless and uninteresting) And then it spends a distressing amount of time trying to cram them into the story it's trying to tell, with natural interactions tending to be off to the side: conversations you don't have to see, or sequences that are technically mandatory but are deliberately patterned after filler. This is probably the biggest sin the game commits in regards to its plot while I complain about the 'harem comedy shenanigans', generally the writing is far stronger when it's focused on the characters interacting naturally than when it's trying to fit them into the story it's telling. I feel there's stuff worth discussing here, but Sunrider's characters tend to be a bit narrow in their qualities and not experience much development or even explore what they are very thoroughly. While I had an abundance of things to say about the units as gameplay pieces -the gameplay is surprisingly deep, it's genuinely worth checking out- I overall have less to say about the characters.

This is perhaps for the best, as while the characters could be better, they're much more a strength of the game than the story is.

These posts are going to be talking about the characters of Mask of Arcadius with limited elements of touching on the plot because when it gets down to it Mask of Arcadius is much more focused on having a colorful cast than it is on having a coherent plot.

Sunrider liberation day tropes