Once a Stranger

I just love the depth that all the main characters have. Nobody’s just an archetype/trope; they are really well layered and thought out psychologically speaking (and also very appealing!!!). There’s also a lot of random cool minor characters like Chocolate and Kate and Linart and so on, which are very well realised as characters. Obviously the villains (at least the big ones, the Desian Cardinals are pretty threadthin) are also extremely well characterised and multi-layered. I do love how much the antagonists spend their time plotting & scheming against one  in the background while the protagonists do their stuff XD (there were several moments where I was like: “should I draw a diagram or relationship map of the Desian&Cruxis&Renegate politicking?”) And how much the story overall had twists & betrayals & double agenting. Bet on rewatch there’s a lot of hilarious moments of “you know that I know that you know and meanwhile we’re pretending for everyone else”.

Thematically, I love a lot of the subtleties and nuances although I think they are also weakened by the flaws of world building (I don’t think the discrimination of Half-Elves is well established as part of the setting on Sylvarant; and you keep butting on the weirdness of the discrimination against Half Elves being THE thing while there’s barely any Elves around so you wonder where they come from…) but from the very beginning with the situation in Isolia and the Human Ranch they set up things as pretty complicated and nuanced as well as completely appalling. And they typically don’t take the easy way out in term of calling out any characters on the mistakes or over simplification they may do, I like that.

Idk, does that answer your questions and do you want answers to something else? I definitly don’t mind talking about ToS right now ^^