This is a continuation to last post. Spoilers for chapter 13 act 3 below.

What if in Spy Kids 3 Elijah Woods' The Guy didn't die comically and instead solved every issue from then on

Getting back to Void first of all. I was indeed missing something and what I was missing was that apparently they retconned the Ganglion's origins. Like... If you really want to argue about it I guess you can say they were still technically made by Samaar, but in my opinion Void was already Void by then so it's safe to say he wasn't made by Samaar Samaar. I think this retcon makes things worse, having the Ganglion turn evil due to possible mistreatment by Samaar is way more interesting than just them being born evil from the get go.

And of course, the one to exposition that information to us was none other than Al. Nevermind that we were literally looking into Samaarinan databases in the spears and that would be the perfect place to put Void's origins, Al has to suck out all the joy out of getting answers.

A quick break to talk about something I did like: exploring Volitaris was moderately fun! I like that the minimap didn't work so you had to really explore, I did find myself using the minimap a bit too much at times during the main game. I liked that two of the towers had mini objectives to unlock, and the gimmick of having some of them underground was fun too. Granted, there's not that much else of interest to explore, but the scavenger hunt for the party members was nice.

Except for L who was just in the fucking ship. I didn't know they were allowed to be in the ship, I had no use for the ship since I was already properly greared up, and L did not activate his emergency beacon since he was in fact not in an emergency.

That's another point: I was overleveled for this and that diminished my enjoyment by a lot. Nothing aggroed on me except tyrants and a few enemy skells, and the tyrants weren't difficult at all to fight. The final fight kind of mitigates this by putting you in the Ares Prime through the power of friendship, but its art palette isn't that impressive and they made the strange decision of having it have no appendages — I get we got rid of the cores right before but come on, targetting appendages was the whole point of this chapter!

The alien containers having such huge rewards was like, interesting at first but since I was already overleveled and convinced they we were never going back to Mira at that point it didn't do anything for me.

And yeah, we didn't go back to Mira. Loading the game after you beat the chapter brings you back to before you started 13. We're stuck on a whole different planet, you could say. And it sucks! They never did anything with the idea that extinct civilizations flocked to Mira, the Qlu involvement from Neilnail's affinity mission was just tossed straight in the garbage. I think I do agree with "the whole fandom" on Tumblr now, I would very much like to pretend this chapter isn't canon.

I still haven't looked into it properly but I'm still very curious to know who the writers for this were. I did learn that Al was derived from the original concept for the guy that talks to Lao on the Death Stranding beach and that the Hraesvelg was supposed to be his skell instead of Liesel's. I can't say for certain whatever they had in mind back then was going to be any better than this (could be the same writers), but I'd still be curious to find out what they were cooking back then.

In conclusion: