I came back to Xenoblade after a hiatus and finally did the Mechonis.
Hooooly shit. That went to hell VERY suddenly and epically. And especially the Egil fight where one of the vision tags is to stop him from just obliterating the entire Bionis in-engine.
So I finished Xenoblade. The conclusion is suitably ridiculous. I have to admit I suspected Dickson ever since he showed up in the Machina village and acted all cagey about how he knew it was there. If anything, the surprise was that Alvis wasn't evil. Also, losing Alcamoth and about a quarter of your NPC chart was a shock. Poor Ricoth T_T
The last fight was surprisingly difficult. I really liked having to QTE to get vision tags. It's such a simple change that requires no tutorial or anything, but ends up meaning so much in context. Much as I dislike QTE in general it TOTALLY worked here.
Nearly all your healing comes from QTEs, and the "dedicated" healing options outside of that amount to a whopping 8% max HP to one person on a 30+ second cooldown with significant special gauge cost. On the one hand, it means you don't have to bring Sharla to literally every nontrivial battle. On the other, it means strategy comes down to half brute force, and half choosing class and teammates that will just chain the shit out of each other's soul voices.
The affinity missions are nice and a good expansion of heart to heart, but being unable to continue the story at the same time is a bit annoying -- especially as the first affinity mission I took decided to gate itself with timed drops from a mining node and random world collectibles from the next region over (which the story hadn't even entered yet). And there's a WAY bigger collectible pool in this game, so getting 4 of a specific kind is a lot more onerous than it sounds.
Non-combat, most of it is a clear improvement. I miss the gratuitous Britishness, but as far as "how Japanese people think the US works" it's a decent and even-handed take, and the characters are likable enough. Sprinting and better jumping was direly needed and appreciated given the sheer holy shit scale of everything, and I look forward to Skell flight.
I know it got mixed reactions, but I kind of like how the game just throws high-level predators all over the place right out of the gate -- it forces you to approach new areas and even navigate old ones with strategy and awareness. Putting high-level nonaggressive enemies in the middle of targets would've worked a lot better if ally AI was more careful about AOE though. You can usually expect to aggro everything around your battle whether or not it was originally hostile, and I've had Lin just run the fuck off to chain aggro her way across entire map segments. It really needed tighter (or at least more conservative) team AI, but it usually doesn't break anything.
The only thing I can really say about this game that's god-awful is the town BGM, which really sucks because it's what you hear most often. The music outside of that is decent-to-good, but nowhere near as gorgeous and memorable as the first game. I haven't heard anything yet that matches the Colony 9 overworld theme, which is literally one of the first things you hear in that game -- though Primordia comes close.
I dunno. Overall the game is coming off as "I don't regret playing this" but it could be so much better.
given that Ys Seven had a Chinese PC port but then XSEED worked on the western PC version, I was expecting XSEED to pick up Memories of Celceta as well, merely out of analogy (albeit with no understanding of any more relevant details)
I finished Lady Layton. The twist is apparently that people are just kind of dumb.
Also there was a surprise tie-in to Layton Brothers in the postgame. Mind you, this game is a lighthearted romp with a talking dog, lovestruck boy, and sassy detective who go around showing that most crimes are really either accidents or self-inflicted coverups. And the other game was about a gruesome serial killer, corrupt cops, and an investigator who developed split personality after witnessing brutal murder and getting shot in the chest. So I'm not sure how to feel about the canonical recognizance.
Also Sherl's entire plotline was abandoned for the entire game mere minutes after the prologue cutscene.
Xenoblade X has one of the most fundamentally useless methods of categorizing quest difficulty I've ever seen. It's ranked 1 to 10 stars like Monster Hunter, but the stars don't actually correspond to any reasonable measure of difficulty or scaling. You'll get 4-5 star quests to kill stuff anywhere from level 20-45, then a 6-star quest to knock out a handful of level 11 bugs in the starter zone, then a 3-star quest to kill a level 49 giant elite. What the fuck even is this.
The affinity missions have explicit level cutoffs but even they're wonky as shit. HB's mission requires level 32, but involves taking down five guys 35-40 who start off by chain nuking your teammates to instant death. And of course, once you start an affinity mission you can't back out of it or attempt another affinity or story mission concurrently. I was lucky I was a bit overleveled and carting around a beefy ass skell.
I figured I should go ahead and finish the FFV postgame before the Fiesta starts next month. Omega Mk II was a wuss. Enuo was fun, a good extension on Neo Exdeath. But dear God, Neo Shinryu is the most idiotically tedious thing I've seen in years.
His gimmick is supposed to be that he has two invisible, invincible targets to eat random attacks like berserkers, Meteor, and most notably Rapid Fire. This is how it worked on the GBA. But on the Steam version, someone fucked the hell up and they eat basically everything except black magic -- and instead of eating a third of said attacks, it's more like 90%, including AOE-targeted stuff. This gets rather worse, because at the end of the fight he puts up Mute so you have no magical way of attacking him at all, which means you're down to just spamming Aim + Flare Spellblade and hope it actually lands a couple times before you die.
To any aspiring game developers, DO NOT DO THIS. If you want to pad out the boss's HP, just fucking give him more HP. Don't make him random, especially if he already attacks absurdly fast and can use unresistable AOE Maelstrom.
So some folks are making a mod for Breath of the Wild to make Zelda playable. It looks good, great progress. And then after like the first milestone they publicized it through like every major game news site ever, so expect a C&D by the end of the week *facepalm*
Why are people who make good fan content always idiots with no concept of what early exposure does? The company is legally obligated to take you down as soon as you become visible.
Because the people who make this kind of content either give up entirely afterwards, or go on to make something completely original that they can make actual money off of? So every single one of these projects is made by first-timers?
Also, maybe there are fan gamemakers who've learned from past C&D incidents. And because they're avoiding early exposure, we won't hear about them until their games are actually done—assuming they get that far.
I've finally taken down all of the 4* magicite battles in FF Record Keeper. Some of them were fun, but Siren can just fuck right off. She uses an AOE silence, and you can't afford to equip silence resist because her holy damage is so goddamn ridiculous you have to accessorize for that instead. So if your healer or even off-healer is silenced it's just an instant reset. Also she spams haste and 9999-tick regen on herself throughout the fight, and in the last phase will counter-cure herself for 9999 every time you hit her.
You have overstrike limit breaks that can go up to 99999, multi-hits that cap individually at 9999 but only trigger one counter, and all limit breaks and summons are uncounterable (though we don't have any good dark summons). Also some characters have ways of putting up damage reflect, which as a counter is also uncounterable. There are tools, it just drags out the fight when she's already going berserk and shitting out an absurd amount of spiky damage.
FF3 Bahamut Torment had the 9999 counter-cure gimmick a long time ago, and it was much worse because back then things were much less powerful and we had less uses on the more powerful abilities (also he had a FUCKTON of HP, far beyond anything else that would be in the game for a solid year since). Power creep has made the regen and counter-cure significant but nothing too horrible as long as you can keep up pressure.
There's also a more amusing strategy floating around to have Cloud put up Retaliate, then dump a bunch of gauge into him to put up two limits: one from the Kingdom Hearts event that empowers him with darkness (Siren's weakness), and another that lets all hits break into 5 digits and is rather notorious for breaking the game. Then the party attacks Cloud with 4-hit abilities, and he counterattacks the boss for obscene damage that doesn't trigger the counter-cure.
It's funny and I'd totally do it if I could, but reliant on having specific tools -- one from a gimmick banner that was otherwise kind of garbage and not worth pulling on. Even the darkness BSB is pretty much worthless in all other situations. It changes the element of his regular attack and boosts the crappy burst commands that come with it, but Cloud doesn't have access to any stronger abilities that could leverage it. It only really exists for Kingdom Hearts fanservice and so you can take Cloud into a small handful of fights that would be better killed by the villains.
for all the issues with skyrim's civil war questline i feel like, for me at least, i reacted to it in a way that lined up pretty well with my political views at the time
that is:
stormcloaks looked hateful and misguided, but had been wronged
imperials were mostly in the right but were wrong to use violence against the nords and their status as colonizers left them without moral high ground
thalmor were the real villains in the conflict but the game wouldn't let you take them on aside from the odd inconsequential skirmish
i was discussing this with my brother and we came to the conclusion that it would have been pretty awesome if, instead of just kind of petering out where it did, the end of the civil war questline had triggered the start of a vs. thalmor questline, where the thalmor invaded (taking advantage of the empire's weakened state after the war). the death of the emperor in hail sithis could be an extra requirement, or else just have additional ramifications for the questline
an alternative option for altmer to join up with the thalmor could also have been cool
also the dark brotherhood were underutilized as a villain faction; there was that one wedding in bound until death which ostensibly could have brought peace had the bride not been murdered by the dragonborn on behalf of the db. but if you refuse to join the db, the wedding never happens; it could have been cool if destroy the dark brotherhood had been a more elaborate thing, with the wedding taking place and the db attempting to sabotage it
also it's nothing to do with the civil war but: the blades questline could have been great, but they made it suck because ~moral ambiguities~
can't let the player have fun and feel good now can we
my brother pointed out that skyrim itself had not been colonized: the empire was originally skyrim-based, not cyrodillic, which frankly makes the stormcloaks just come off as ukippers
The new Switch Pokemon is basically just Yellow, but with Go capture where you just chuck balls and hope for the best. Because EVERYONE loved that. Goddammit. At least the battling looks intact.
They also have a weird cube-stylized Mystery Dungeon looking thing, which looks like it might have been fun...if it weren't a mobile game with half-automated battles. So enjoy watching your entire party of cubist Pokemon AIs attack the wrong targets, blunder into attacks, and aggro the whole dungeon with no way to stop them. Goddammit.
for all the issues with skyrim's civil war questline i feel like, for me at least, i reacted to it in a way that lined up pretty well with my political views at the time
that is:
stormcloaks looked hateful and misguided, but had been wronged
imperials were mostly in the right but were wrong to use violence against the nords and their status as colonizers left them without moral high ground
thalmor were the real villains in the conflict but the game wouldn't let you take them on aside from the odd inconsequential skirmish
i was discussing this with my brother and we came to the conclusion that it would have been pretty awesome if, instead of just kind of petering out where it did, the end of the civil war questline had triggered the start of a vs. thalmor questline, where the thalmor invaded (taking advantage of the empire's weakened state after the war). the death of the emperor in hail sithis could be an extra requirement, or else just have additional ramifications for the questline
an alternative option for altmer to join up with the thalmor could also have been cool
also the dark brotherhood were underutilized as a villain faction; there was that one wedding in bound until death which ostensibly could have brought peace had the bride not been murdered by the dragonborn on behalf of the db. but if you refuse to join the db, the wedding never happens; it could have been cool if destroy the dark brotherhood had been a more elaborate thing, with the wedding taking place and the db attempting to sabotage it
also it's nothing to do with the civil war but: the blades questline could have been great, but they made it suck because ~moral ambiguities~
can't let the player have fun and feel good now can we
I think having it just peter out was a powerful decision; I felt incredibly emotional when I swatted the last breath out of Ulfric and realized that there was nothing left to do and very little was going to improve and if it did, I'd never see the results. It ties into my odd reading of TES as a series about powerlessness against massive sociopolitical forces.
Also The Blades wanting you to kill Alduin seemed like a valid choice to me? It sucked and made me unhappy but Skyrim is a bitter, unhappy game as is.
my brother pointed out that skyrim itself had not been colonized: the empire was originally skyrim-based, not cyrodillic, which frankly makes the stormcloaks just come off as ukippers
That's totally what they are; Bethesda's big mistake was making Skyrim genuinely economically downtrodden (kinda?) and making Ulfric genuinely charismatic and not a raging ineloquent chode who people project positive qualities onto.
The new Switch Pokemon is basically just Yellow, but with Go capture where you just chuck balls and hope for the best. Because EVERYONE loved that. Goddammit.
I mean
chuck balls and hope for the best has been Pokemon's MO for a hot minute and well before GO
The majority of my pokemon catching experience, yours may be different, is chucking balls at a sleeping pokemon that has 1 HP. I don't see "walk up and throw a ball" as much of a change if it's in its most basic form possible. And it's not a known quantity if it is the exact same thing; there's a lot of interesting things you could do.
i mean if the stormcloaks hadn't had some semblance of valid grievances, and Ulfric had been a bigger dick than he was, then they'd have been much more straightforwardly villainous and the war would have been less interesting
i don't agree that letting it peter out was a powerful decision (maybe because we just reacted differently? you said you felt emotional, but i felt nothing much), from my perspective it wasn't powerful it was, oh what, this is boring and i would have expected killing Tullius/Ulfric to have *some* consequences
if they wanted to tell a story about complicated sociopolitical forces against which you are powerless, maybe don't have the most visible social problems in the setting be the fault of a group of sneering murderous elves without any redeeming characteristics? just found it very unsatisfying, because these are not, on the face of it, some complex insoluble social problem that can't be solved by hitting it with a sword. at the very least i should have liked the opportunity to try.
the blades wanting to kill paarthurnax was valid i guess, but it wasn't fun from a player perspective and again, it felt avoidable. i kind of wished they'd gone with a more mass effect route there: that game presents you with some tough decisions, but your crew are loyal to you and there's never a point where they will try to murder you for not using the genophage or whatever. in skyrim you are the leader of the blades, but you can't reason with them on this one, you can't be all look the reformed dragon who is helping to save the world is not on our hitlist alright
i mean if the stormcloaks hadn't had some semblance of valid grievances, and Ulfric had been a bigger dick than he was, then they'd have been much more straightforwardly villainous and the war would have been less interesting
Thing is tho
IRL racists don't have valid reasons to be racist. Economic anxiety is a lie. Depicting racists as ignorant, malicious, aggressive pricks is just kind of the honest way of depicting them.
this is boring and i would have expected killing Tullius/Ulfric to have *some* consequences
if they wanted to tell a story about complicated sociopolitical forces against which you are powerless, maybe don't have the most visible social problems in the setting be the fault of a group of sneering murderous elves without any redeeming characteristics? just found it very unsatisfying, because these are not, on the face of it, some complex insoluble social problem that can't be solved by hitting it with a sword. at the very least i should have liked the opportunity to try.
Killing Tullius/Ulfric does have effects;the game just doesn't take place on such a timeframe where any of the major repercussions would ever come to pass. You see cities change in leadership but life goes on about the same as always. Which feels very real to me.
Also a shocking amount of complex sociopolitical forces spin out from a handful of sneering spiteful rich white dudes, so having the crux of the setting's problem rest on the shoulders of purely evil sociopaths feels to me like a very valid choice.
Also I'd be... very bothered if the game tried sending the explicit message that you can totally cut through complex issues with a literal sword, which would essentially make it a might makes right story.
the blades wanting to kill paarthurnax was valid i guess, but it wasn't fun from a player perspective and again, it felt avoidable. i kind of wished they'd gone with a more mass effect route there: that game presents you with some tough decisions, but your crew are loyal to you and there's never a point where they will try to murder you for not using the genophage or whatever. in skyrim you are the leader of the blades, but you can't reason with them on this one, you can't be all look the reformed dragon who is helping to save the world is not on our hitlist alright
I mean just as an aside I would heavily dispute that Mass Effect has a great many actually difficult decisions. I would say each game has, of dozens of choices, something like 1 to 5 choices that give me any pause beyond "take the upper-right option to do the good thing," and past that each game has... maybe two choice moments where I would ever consider breaking from that pattern, and past that zero choice moments where the game doesn't completely eliminate any moral ambiguity through the (what boils down to a) good/evil meter mechanic combined with framing that consistently makes "evil" actions be performed as aggressively and maliciously as possible and "good" options be performed as altruistically as possible.*
Mass Effect 3 kinda works it for me because it seems less like the game is encouraging you to forge your own path while providing no coherent protagonist psychology behind anything other than a pure paragon or a pure renegade run (like the first two games. And even then the paragon route feels significantly more coherent psychologically as an all around good guy than does renegade route, for which the MO seems to be "I disagree with literally everybody."), and more like it's constantly reminding you what you're sacrificing in order to be good and how much you are on the razor's edge of going bad because of the power and influence you wield.
And to bring it back to Skyrim... no, you can't reason with them, because, idk, sometimes people just be like that. I think the fact that they want to kill the good guy dragon just because he's a dragon and the player feels an actual pull to do so because the Blades will get mad at you if you don't is a choice with some actual emotional heft to it where the edge would be completely sanded off if the player could just... not make the choice at all.
I'm pretty unfamiliar with Skyrim and thus am not invested in the part of this discussion about that specific narrative, but do wanna say I am at least enjoying this.
*For example. The final choice of the first game lets you essentially pick who, among two choices, will hold a prominent and incredibly symbolically important political role. Your two choices are your good pal the military general and a career politicians. Now, Mass Effect 1 generally has, at best, vague suggestions in the direction of "distinguishable character traits" so what I think the game intended to be a choice between Goodguy McStraightlaced and Evil McConniving felt a lot more like a choice between "put your buddy in power because he's your buddy" and "put a guy who knows what he's doing in power because he knows what he's doing." So my natural inclination, enemy of nepotism that I am, was to choose Evil McConniving. But I didn't do that cause I read up on the actual consequences of doing so, which is that he turns out to be evil and racist. And the player character is framed as picking him for that very reason, and not any number of the other sympathetic reasons why one would make that call.
i mean if the stormcloaks hadn't had some semblance of valid grievances, and Ulfric had been a bigger dick than he was, then they'd have been much more straightforwardly villainous and the war would have been less interesting
Thing is tho
IRL racists don't have valid reasons to be racist. Economic anxiety is a lie. Depicting racists as ignorant, malicious, aggressive pricks is just kind of the honest way of depicting them.
oh no, economic anxiety is definitely real. though i would never say there was such a thing as a 'valid reason to be racist', there's not.
i get what you're saying about 'might makes right' but i'd say that games in that genre typically *are* a power fantasy of sorts, and i don't think skyrim really does much to challenge the idea that hacking and slashing your way through most enemies is the most profitable approach, it just doesn't give you the option when it comes to the big plot significant events (apart from Alduin)
idk i just didn't find it very satisfying, personally, and i would have rather it had been. you're free to feel differently on this.
agreed on paragon vs. renegade. and mostly i think the moral choice in mass effect is pretty clear, yes, though sometimes (e.g. redirecting that one missile) it boils down to a trolley problem of sorts
the blades decision had some emotional heft to it, i guess, providing you were that invested in the blades that you actually did feel a pull to go along with the plan to kill paarthurnax. idk it just felt like a let down to me, because like, *obviously* i wasn't going to let them kill that dragon, so like, oh, that's it for that questline then, sucks
seems to me like when you have a tricky sociopolitical situation your best hope of influencing events is joining a movement (stormcloaks, imperials) or starting your own (blades). skyrim presents only pessimistic outcomes to these.
(Not the thread for this conversation but like. Personal economic insecurity as a motivation for racial resentment just, like, is absolutely not a thing that happens. The working class statistically is more inclined to hold progressive views and the rich significantly more inclined to hold racist views. Dunno if I was clearly talking about *personal* economic anxiety specifically in the context of "people voted Exit/Trump because of economic anxiety" when I said economic anxiety is a lie, but that is what I meant.)
But I would say that Skyrim, as a direct result of not having any all around good options for anything in its most major decisions, *is* subverting power fantasy stuff in a way. The large amounts of time where might makes right in that game ultimately carry less weight to me than the few big times where it isn't the case. Granted, I say this with the admission that TES as a series having combat consistently be not just the only solution to problems but the inevitable outcome of basically everything is a huge series wide flaw.
To me, Skyrim's little bits of power fantasy, that end up making the bulk of raw playtime serve as something of a symbol of small personal victories that one has to treasure in the face of fundamental powerlessness in the face of historical forces. That's my read and I've never really seen anyone else read the game remotely like that, but I do stand by it.
that's a *very* inaccurate and simplistic summary of the leave vote in the UK, and not borne out by statistics, and if you're at all interested in UK politics i would encourage you to read up on the subject some more, but you're right, this is not the thread
i don't really have anything to add about skyrim, i can understand your interpretation, it's just not really how i felt while playing it, and i was just posting some ideas for things that could have been added which would have made the experience more meaningful and satisfying for me, personally.
My take on the Skyrim civil war thing is: I could never stomach joining the imperials because if they win at Whiterun they throw Heimskr in prison and that's just fucked up.
Like this isn't me claiming the stormcloaks are good actually, just that like it bothers me that every time Skyrim civil war discourse pops up it ends up being "imperials rule stormcloaks drool" as if both sides aren't awful. And honestly it is really hard to twist my mind to the place where the "let's just let the Thalmor wander around committing whatever atrocities they feel like" side is meaningfully a lesser evil.
(Ulfric himself is a fucking piece of shit, obviously, and I think the main reason I still find myself inclined to sympathize with the stormcloaks is due to kind of assuming that most of the ones that aren't from Windhelm basically agree with that and just consider him better than the alternative. Which, I admit, is based on like one piece of dialogue in the whole game.)
The whole thing is just deeply unsatisfying. I want to punch both Ulfric and Tullius in the face and there's no reason that I can't except the game says so. I think they were going for "powerlessness against massive sociopolitical forces" to some degree, but once you're simultaneously leader of the Blades, Companions, Dark Brotherhood, College of Winterhold, and Thieves' Guild while also being publicly known as the hero who saved the world, that powerlessness doesn't actually feel realistic anymore. It's really more plausible than not that you could get away with, say, just up and declaring yourself High Queen, if you wanted to.
Like, I don't know whether that would have actually made it a better game, but it's pretty arbitrary to say that crosses some line wrt power fantasy bullshit when you spend the rest of it being Just Better than everyone and becoming leader of every organization you join within five minutes.
It's something basically any sympathetic Imperial character will outright tell you. Tullius outright *hates* the Thalmor to an extent he barely attempts to hide.
so another instance of the powerlessness in the face of whatever thing
on the whole i guess it was just a very pessimistic game, and while i don't mind that a little bit (it did feel like it had more depth than oblivion), it was a bit much for my tastes
also part of my issue with the civil war stuff wasn't just the pessimism, but how short it felt, which i felt to be an issue with most of the questlines
the mage's college was over way too quickly for my liking, in particular, it was like, go into a couple dungeons, kill this elf, congrats you're the arch-mage now. i didn't feel i'd earned that title.
the companions, the dark brotherhood and the thieves' guild were better, but still could have been a bit more substantial, given how quickly you rise through the ranks
I mean, not to escalate things but this is the easiest possible comparison: northerners and southerners in the American Civil War were both largely racist, but only one side was fighting to preserve slavery.
sure, and there's definitely an analogy there, but there's not really an equivalent to slavery in this scenario
instead you have on the one hand the stormcloaks who will drive out the elves and the imperials, and on the other hand the thalmor who are brutalizing the nords
even if you don't fault the imperials for that, there's not really a happy outcome either way
Comments
a more proper name might be "Archaeozoic Crevice" though.
it's a brass horse that shits bombs
Do you have multi-hit attacks that can deal more than 9999 in one turn before she can counter?
Or is the damage cap >9999?
Also The Blades wanting you to kill Alduin seemed like a valid choice to me? It sucked and made me unhappy but Skyrim is a bitter, unhappy game as is. That's totally what they are; Bethesda's big mistake was making Skyrim genuinely economically downtrodden (kinda?) and making Ulfric genuinely charismatic and not a raging ineloquent chode who people project positive qualities onto. I mean
chuck balls and hope for the best has been Pokemon's MO for a hot minute and well before GO
IRL racists don't have valid reasons to be racist. Economic anxiety is a lie. Depicting racists as ignorant, malicious, aggressive pricks is just kind of the honest way of depicting them. Killing Tullius/Ulfric does have effects;the game just doesn't take place on such a timeframe where any of the major repercussions would ever come to pass. You see cities change in leadership but life goes on about the same as always. Which feels very real to me.
Also a shocking amount of complex sociopolitical forces spin out from a handful of sneering spiteful rich white dudes, so having the crux of the setting's problem rest on the shoulders of purely evil sociopaths feels to me like a very valid choice.
Also I'd be... very bothered if the game tried sending the explicit message that you can totally cut through complex issues with a literal sword, which would essentially make it a might makes right story.
I mean just as an aside I would heavily dispute that Mass Effect has a great many actually difficult decisions. I would say each game has, of dozens of choices, something like 1 to 5 choices that give me any pause beyond "take the upper-right option to do the good thing," and past that each game has... maybe two choice moments where I would ever consider breaking from that pattern, and past that zero choice moments where the game doesn't completely eliminate any moral ambiguity through the (what boils down to a) good/evil meter mechanic combined with framing that consistently makes "evil" actions be performed as aggressively and maliciously as possible and "good" options be performed as altruistically as possible.*
Mass Effect 3 kinda works it for me because it seems less like the game is encouraging you to forge your own path while providing no coherent protagonist psychology behind anything other than a pure paragon or a pure renegade run (like the first two games. And even then the paragon route feels significantly more coherent psychologically as an all around good guy than does renegade route, for which the MO seems to be "I disagree with literally everybody."), and more like it's constantly reminding you what you're sacrificing in order to be good and how much you are on the razor's edge of going bad because of the power and influence you wield.
And to bring it back to Skyrim... no, you can't reason with them, because, idk, sometimes people just be like that. I think the fact that they want to kill the good guy dragon just because he's a dragon and the player feels an actual pull to do so because the Blades will get mad at you if you don't is a choice with some actual emotional heft to it where the edge would be completely sanded off if the player could just... not make the choice at all.
But I would say that Skyrim, as a direct result of not having any all around good options for anything in its most major decisions, *is* subverting power fantasy stuff in a way. The large amounts of time where might makes right in that game ultimately carry less weight to me than the few big times where it isn't the case. Granted, I say this with the admission that TES as a series having combat consistently be not just the only solution to problems but the inevitable outcome of basically everything is a huge series wide flaw.
To me, Skyrim's little bits of power fantasy, that end up making the bulk of raw playtime serve as something of a symbol of small personal victories that one has to treasure in the face of fundamental powerlessness in the face of historical forces. That's my read and I've never really seen anyone else read the game remotely like that, but I do stand by it.
actually it was most satisfying to just steal their sweet rolls