Astlibra Revision, Lore Analysis 9 - Part of Her Plan
0We go over the events of the game and explore the connection between Astraea's plans for the time loop, as well as the connection to the Great Sage.
This one got quite a bit long because there's so many tying and connecting events. One big one I completely forgot about until replaying the game is how at the end of Chapter 2, Bridion, Astraea acknowledges that Project Astlibra has begun when Polin first sends the Hero back in time.
We can see a lot of this as well with the Great Sage. The Great Sage, Karon, as well as Ranker Krishna, seem to both be major allies of Astraea. I speculate that Krishna only becomes an acolyte of Astraea after being sent to track down the Hero at Astraea, but its not exactly clear. I think she is a human, though, like the Great Sage.
The Great Sage is clearly immune to memory changes. When we go to the future he is fully aware when we come back. He also acknowledges he doesn't fully understand the best solution, but that there are many possible solutions.
My theory here is that Astraea has accounted for many different possibilities. The time loop, Project Astlibra, is designed around the idea of simply making a Hero strong enough to destroy Geas. However, the time loop also affects related characters--Gau, Shiro, Kuro, Polin, Karon, Kai, Lisa, Anulis and ANUBIS, and even the Four Heroes, among others, actually get stronger through consecutive loops.
While the characters openly acknowledge the Hero himself is ridiculously strong, some of their powers get incredibly insane as well. And the Four Heroes are ludicrously powerful when fought in Postscript despite the Hero also being incredibly strong, so while he is the strongest, I do think they also are getting stronger in loops. Lisa probably had strong healing powers all along, but never to the extent she does now.
This is also intended to be emotional baggage for the Hero as well. To keep him going, Astraea had to account for his own desires for friends and companionship. He presumably also may have a noble bloodline back to the Atoma as well, given he's clearly Lezartus' long lost brother.
Another one heavily hinted at to get really strong is the Baker's Daughter, as she's constantly showing up in the background. She's the protagonist of Astlibra Gaiden, so we'll probably see more about her then.
I'm assuming that Astraea intended on getting captured in order to convince the Future World to actually even attempt the ANUBIS Project. She allowed herself to get captured because ANUBIS was the best chance they had at creating a distraction for Geas.
The Hero's love for Anulis made sure he would go after her. This allowed Hero to bring Kai back to the past and to stop ANUBIS without destroying it completely. Kai was not originally accounted for, but in the end Astraea incorporated Kai into her plan by having him be able to bring them down to the surface, and the Great Sage granted them a warp point to let them travel down to the planet more easily.
All of the tests and training laid out were for the purpose of enabling the Hero to be strong enough to break the cycle. Its also interesting, though, how Astraea also allowed the cruel Meldine to be killed off, as Meldine had already long gone mad.
After finishing the main game, I went ahead and replayed the entire game on Hell Difficulty to get a few things we missed, explore alternate dialogue paths, delve into lore details I missed the first time around, as well as challenge all bosses on a higher difficulty level. I'll be releasing these bonus episodes sporadically, but I'll try and make them as sequential as possible.
Please note that these episodes may mix-and-match things during out replay sessions of the game. As such, we might do a lore analysis surrounding a boss battle, but the boss battle is cut out. The boss battles will be in its own separate series to primarily focus on the boss battles themselves, though some are kinda hard to include without replaying the events nearby.
The three series I have here are:
Variations - This shows the events that happen depending on choices made during the game. This is only restricted to the Main Game rather than Postscript as in the Postscript there's barely any variations.
Hell Bosses - Facing off against boss battles on Hell Difficulty. I opted to restrict this only to the more interesting bosses as honestly, they weren't that different on Hell Difficulty for the most part.
Lore Analysis - This is only during Postscript. Here I just replay the story and analyze elements of the story I was interested in and wanted to highlight things I missed.
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I am not associated with Nintendo, KEIZO, Whisper Games, Vanillaware or any other video game companies either, I just like games.