Blade fans (Most of which also happen to be gears fans. Well, fans of half of gears anyways) don't come here because of the obnoxious saga elitism. You know, the kind that drove sorayasaga to attempt suicide?
Xenoblade X is coming soon, and you guys might just get a resurgence, if you don't crap in your hands and throw it all over the place to scare them away. So I will give it a try.
A huge problem is, for some reason, saga fans just cant seem to comprehend that many of us have actually played all the games, and really dont think Xenosaga, the franchise that fired half of monolithsoft for not being publisher yes men is really all that great. In fact, we think it kind of sucks. Including the story, and the design was a massive step down from gears, and may have well been a pre rendered background game a la Squeenix's typical psx fare, instead of an actual designed and interacted with game world like gears. Actually, they were able to do just that with incredible ease with the ds games. Sagas world design was worthless and completely inconsequential, the exact opposite of gears, which had the player rotating the camera and platforming across every nook and cranny for chests and other goods. Saga was a series of a decent, horrible, and allright games attached to cutscenes, and its enduring legacy consists of an endless flow of buttfloss figurines and disturbing body pillows merchandise. Those KOSMOS pillows are simply so that they can remember how the story was Soooooo deep I am sure.
Xenoblades lore and world is not nearly as shallow as constantly stated here, like any other xeno game, it only appears that way when you don't know what it is founded on, we find it baffling saga fans can be so proud of their literary allusions in saga, yet be so completely ignorant of them in blade, which incorporated them all the way down to the gameplay mechanics and power up systems (A game where characterization is actually a power up, only from Takahashi). Maybe its because blade is subtle and doesn't hit you over the head with an obvious hammer by naming itself after the philosophers works?
Did anyone even think of googling a Monad, Monade or Monado? Ever? No, it seems like they just pretty much instantly assumed Xenoblade was about a boy with a magic sword. Because taking Xeno games at face value is a thing people want to do I guess.
This is the first Manuscript page of Gottfreid Leibniz's most famous philosophical work, 'The Monadology', written in the early 1700's. Like Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was to Xenosaga, Gottfreid Leibniz's philosophical works are the basis of Xenoblades story and world lore... And frankly, he was vastly more interesting. Unlike Saga, his philosophy, and other incarnations of the concept of the monad, are also integrated into the gameplay mechanics. I am not going to go in depth with this one, as its better to read about it, and then rewatch what happens and what dialog is said in Xenoblades 'surface' story.
Other important uses of the concept of Monads in the story, are ancient greek philosophy, particularly the pythagoreans, of the Monad being the one supreme being, who could make other gods. Their religion was also involved in their mathematics.
The pythogoreans believed the one supreme being, the beginning of all, was the Monad, the monad begat the dyad (getting it yet? the one, made the two?) Which begat the numbers, which begat the points (a spot in space occupied by an element. Ringing any bells NOW? Seriously, this part is actually explained in a game cutscene by the Monad itself.)
It also uses the gnostic version of the Monad, and the fact the pythagoreans condemned gnosticism with the way the gnostics treated the monad. Should be getting an idea now about which One is gnostic, and which One is pythagorean now.
And the last important basis of the Game is on functional programming, particularly on structures in functional programming called Monads.
a monad is a structure that represents computations defined as sequences of steps: a type with a monad structure defines what it means to chain operations, or nest functions of that type together. This allows the programmer to build pipelines that process data in steps, in which each action is decorated with additional processing rules provided by the monad.
This basically explains shulk throughout the entire game.
Shulk doesnt have a sword, he has physical manifestation of a user i/o device that has access to communicate to the Monad.
Shulk doesnt cut things, he edits them in two.
Shulk doesnt see the future, he can see the points in space time where ether exists (1) and where there is no ether (0) by seeing where that ether has been, and what it is doing, he can predict where the ether will then be with the certainty of watching code run in a debugger, and modify it. He has a reality debugger.
Shulk cant actually fight. His combat skill is nothing, and he doesnt physically do any of the cool things he does in the game. He programs them into existence.
Zanza gave shulks corpse borrowed life and the monado, and root access to use the i/o interface as part of his plan to recover, escape and defeat the pythogoreans, er mechonis.
Zanza's mistake was that he didnt count on, or care about shulk growing up to be a scientist and beginning to comprehend computer logic and functional programming with his exposure to the monado, the very things the world Klaus accidentally created was based on, and the concepts the monado ran on.
And now Im going to leave before someone begins 'sagasplaining' how this is all just a coincidence and it doesnt 'count' because Takahashi didnt actually think about any of this when he was making Monad
o: Beginning of the world' and how modern Takahashi is just too stupid to purposefully link these philosophies and themes together, and its just a coincidence.... Again.
The upcoming Xenoblade Chronicles X is very obviously another reboot to make a chapter of the Xeno story.
Hopefully people can let saga go like we let gears go... Because it would be a shame to be stuck in the past the moment Takahashi finally realizes a chapter of his vision, unfettered, unshackled, and uncompromised. If its not constantly raining crap from a screeching fanbase, people may actually start discussing things Xeno again.
Last edited by Gottfried on Fri Feb 06, 2015 7:26 pm; edited 4 times in total (Reason for editing : sp corrections)
, take a break and rest 
re making Xenoblade seem soulless compared to the other games. Especially when youâ€
