Ok time for more 13 sperging
So In my prior post I established who the major deity's are. Now lets clear up what exactly the L'cie's deal is.
Basically they are slaves.
They get excess to magic, summons and possible immortality but the price is they have to do whatever the gods and their Fal'cie angels want them to do. Otherwise they get turned into mindless zombie monsters. And even if they do everything right, their reward is to get frozen in crystal carbonite for a long ass time (potentially thousands of years) until they wake or get woken up.
In theory the system is supposed to be mutually beneficial. The L'cie finishes the job like a hitman, gets put in a crystal dream sleep then gets pulled out whenever needed to do the next job. This way they get a technical kind of immortality as nothing short of a summon can break the crystal. Perhaps even rejuvenation depending on what happens exactly to their body's. (Etro and Bhunivelze gave a lot of perks to lightening.)
In practice they are puppets to be called upon forgotten and disposed of as needed.
The mechanics are different between Type O and 13 but I can break it down simply enough.
Type O is a controlled environment (a sort of science experiment) that has indirect observation from all three gods. 13 is a neglected dominion controlled by Fal'cie (angels) that went insane.
The overall goal here for both worlds is to somehow manifest and open Etro's gate (the afterlife) via a controlled culling/empowering of human souls. In Type O the process was done a couple million times with no success and eventually they figure out they cant get it open and cut their losses in the good ending. In 13 somebody screwed up. There's supposed to be a balanced war going on between the People on the planet of pulse and the people in the sky city of cocoon. But almost everybody on the planet is dead (it's not known how or why, although the planet is something of a 40k death world). So there's no way to keep the meat grinder going. It's either too early for a check up or the planet has been completely abandoned by the gods. With nobody around to flip the kill switch. Society grows fat and happy while the Fal'cie stew and try to figure out how to do something they were not designed for.
Left: Cocoon/ Lindzei. Right: pulse
So in the universe of 13 when you get branded by either side of the Fal'cie team you get access to magic, which nobody else can use, (until later in the franchise for some reason) summons if you can tame them, some physical buffs and free will to use the power as you see fit. The problem is your on a timer to fulfill your focus and if it ticks down without being achieved you get turned into a cyber zombie. I suspect the Fal'cie enjoy fucking with people or they simply cant convey very well what they want to do. In any case it's a rather rough life to live. cocoon L'cie at least have the benefit of being honored as champions by the city and having easier focuses to fulfill. (I dont believe the cocoon Fal'cie are even capable of making a focus for their branded to blow up the city.)
If your unlucky enough to get branded by pulse you're hunted down like an animal and shot. Nobody's going to be lucky enough to fulfil a focus unless they were born a couple thousand years in the past. Otherwise the only thing they can do is blow up cacoon and or die before becoming a zombie. The only reason our hero's manage to get branded in the first place is becouse the caccoon fal'ce let one of the pulse ones onto the city and just let it lie around until some someone stumbles into it.
In Type O Magic is a common thing, but to compensate the L'cie are walking WMD's of immense destructive power. The price is they barely have souls as a result. After they are granted power by their respective nation's crystal (the Fal'ce have a more hands off, observatory approach and are not nearly as numerous) they gradually lose all emotion and self initiative . They are little more then chess pieces on a board for all their destructive power. The one benifit is as long as they remain loyal to their nations they dont have to worry about turning into monsters. Turning into crystal is doable but not encouraged as the end goal, as it feels more like a failsafe if they die.
When you get right down to it it's a rigged game of chicken where nobody wins. Unless you hook up with Etro.
Etro has all the benefits and seemingly none of the drawbacks. To the point where she's the only one who is able and willing to freeze and get rid of the markings entirely. (Yeah it wasn't power of friendship that made everything better at the end of 13 it was Etro saving everybody's ass.) Etro actually tries to give a shit about humanity... Emphasis on try.
Unfortunately instead of simply enchasing people in crystal, the end result of using her powers is usually death when the lifeforce is drained. Her attempts at kindness also tend to have a nasty way of backfiring. When she gives her power to a kid who wants to predict the future and save people it ends up ruining her life and trapping her in an endless loop of death and reincarnation. Giving immortality to Caius to watch over her, likewise drives him to the brink of insanity. Finally she screws herself and the timeline over by using her power to save the main characters in 13. Etro for all her good intentions cant see past her hand and doesn't truly understand people.
So yeah, when you get past the terminology and mechanics, its actually pretty interesting in how intentionally screwed up it is. Shame we didn't get to see how messed up Etro would have been in versus.
So that leaves us with one last little mystery. What the hell is sora from Kingdom hearts doing in crystal?
This was from the secret final fight in the KH3 DLC. Unless you can fight dark souls blindfolded you're not going to beat a noctis looking mofo on the first try. When sora gets his ass kicked he turns into a popsicle which implies quite a bit....
I for one am excited to see the death god overlords in a disney game.
