COMMODOREGROOVY'S PROFILE

author=Solitayre
I am actually going to post a minor diatribe regarding the Stoic backstory that has been percolating in my mind pretty much since I played Arc 5 but that I've never really had an opportunity to discuss until now.

Spoilers, etc.

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I actually felt like the Stoic backstory reveal made him feel a lot LESS badass. There are a few reasons for this! The first is that because he has lived for a such a long time, there is an expectation that he's been in the hero and adventure business for centuries. In the early arcs, this was the focal point of his character. There were no specific references to places he'd been or things he'd done, he was just wise and knowledgeable about dungeons, because he's been doing it forever. He understands how to solve the puzzles and knows the enemies' weaknesses. His catch phrase says it all. "I know all." You get the sense that he's earned the right to say something like that over the years.

He starts the game at level one, but this is a perfectly acceptable break from his established level of expertise- he makes up for it with his knowledge, and due to the fact that one of his primary functions in dungeon crawling is as a battering-ram, there's no reason to doubt this guy's badassery.

So then arc 5 comes along and most of this arc is devoted to exploring Stoic's past. The problem I have with this is it doesn't do justice to his thousand year lifespan. Fun little anecdotes like "this was one of Stoic's cool adventures before he met you guys" would have been a great way to flavor his character. Instead, everything he's ever done is explored in detail. It spoils the mystique, so to speak. You're no longer wondering "man what kind of cool stuff did Stoic do in the past," because you now know everything.

There's also the fact that Stoic doesn't seem to experience much, if any, personal growth over his life. His personality when he was alive is pretty identical to what he looks like a thousand years later. I never got the sense that he has been shaped by 1,000 years of events. It felt more like he was shaped by one or two events that happened 1,000 years ago. His early game comments that reference his past expertise as an adventurer no longer feel justified or even plausible, since there doesn't seen to be any point in his backstory when he was off doing any of that. It even reaches the point where we learn he just spends 400 years sitting in a cave sulking. Decidedly non-badass.

Basically, I liked the early game Stoic who just seems like a cool seasoned adventurer much more than the late game Stoic with the dramatic backstory. Less is more sometimes!