I took my sweet time, beat it last week with 190 hours & being lvl 210. Absolutely my favorite game of all time, the open world is absolutely amazing & was in my thoughts when not playing the game, "oh whats up around that lake i saw?" "How do i gain access to this wizard school" etc etc.
I noticed, in hindsight, i play a lot of games & enjoy them, have a blast, but they don't stick with me & persist the way E.R did. Hell, right now all I want to do is cleanup any spots I missed and then either tackle NG+ or do an entire new build. I did Strength w no magic, no bows, used spirit ashes. I'm taking a break though, let the game digest as well as get to some things I put off the last couple weeks.
I finally beat the game after 113 hours, and in the end I felt like I was rushing just because I finally wanted to say I cleared the thing. There is so much more exploration to be done, so much lore to find. This is exactly the level of depth I was expecting from Miyazaki, but the sheer size is incredible.
And even the side-quests/stories feel like actual major plot lines of their own. I will give you guys my favorite example:
So when if you meet Sellen and pursue her sorcerers quest line (ofc I did), she talks about wanting to restore the primeval current of sorcery. I had no fucking clue what this meant but I’m like, sure I’m game lol.
So she sends you to this hidden cave where you find the corpse of a legendary sorcerer named Lusat, and a primeval sorcery that he discovered. It’s a powerful sorcery but I still don’t understand what any of this means.
Then later on you come across the corpse of Azur who is another legendary sorcerer, where you find the infamous comet azur spell. Okay, nothing mind-blowing yet.
So then you find out that Sellen, Lusat, and Azur were all banned from Raya Lucaria for the same reason: that pursuit of primeval sorceries was heavily discouraged by the sorcerers there. Still not mind-blown.
Then something dawns upon me as I collect more sorceries. Any time I use an “Academy approved” spell so to say, there is a magic emblem that pops up just before I cast the spell. The primeval sorceries do not conjure emblems, only the spells themselves.
Then I discover on YouTube that the emblems emitted by academy approved spells are emblems that reference the alliances that the Carians and Raya Lucaria have made over the ages (for example with the Crystalians and such). So it’s like, sorcery itself became political, and all of the primeval sorcerers are just purists trying to return sorcery to its roots and remove the political aspects of it.
But then…well I won’t spoil Sellen’s questline, but let’s just say that the primeval sorcerers have also suffered greatly in the pursuit of the primeval current, so it’s like…are primeval sorcerers purists trying to return the practice of sorcery to its purest form? Or are they mad-men destroying themselves, and is the Academy actually correct for banning them and for trying to control sorcery more strictly?
This is exactly the type of depth and nuance I wanted from this game, and this literally isn’t even the main quest, this is like, a minor aspect of a side quest that feels like it’s had more thought put into it then the plot of most fiction these days lol.
