Well lots of people DO like Estelle, but I think the vast majority of English-speaking players haven't played Zero/Azure quite yet, so Lloyd isn't even an option for them (like myself). But nearly everyone I know who HAS played it for sure, seem to favor him from what I've noticed anyway.
I've written about this before on discord (and have a theory published on the website), but I like spread crack seeds around so I'll bring it up here. The main theme of each arc can be derived from the name of country it's set in (I'm not going to argue this here because I've already written about it my Calvard predictions theory). Listing all the countries we know about,
Liberl - Liberalism, Freedom
Crossbell - Cross implies blocking in JP (theme is perseverance)
Erebonia - Darkness (theme is hope)
Calvard - Latin root is to lie (per Gu4n)
Remiferia - Latin root is remedy
Ored - probably just order
Northumbria - It's a real world place
Leman - mistress or lover in outdated English
Arteria - major heart valve
Longlai - The Dragon to come? I don't know enough about Chinese so I'm guessing fate.
This should be all the names of countries we know about. My guess is that the three remaining arcs are going to be Calvard, Longlai, and Leman/Arteria.
Given the context of when 龍來 was mentioned and the usage of furigana which seems to denote the Chinese pronunciation (correct me, if I'm wrong, Yotaka), my guess is that Longlai isn't a country but a town. A famous green tea which has 龍 in its name reminds me of the Longjing(龍井) green tea from Zhejiang Province China. The name of the tea is the same as the village where it was originally cultivated.
My guess is that just like Steinrose is an Ulster product, the green tea Rean and Count Egret are nerding about is a trademark from a little Eastern town called Longlai, probably even carrying the same name.
@wuolong77 It's mentioned again in Sen IV and the context gives the impression it's a country or region in the East not a town.
SpoilerCrossbell/Cold Steel... Unofficially it would be pretty easy to imagine the first instance is related to KeA's powers since she'd have a vested interest in preventing an attack on Crossbell and she already mucked around with causality beforehand (while the actual railway cannon attack happens after she fully comes into her power, at which point the Aions could do all the work) but the latter is a sticking point since by 1206 KeA no longer has those same powers. Unless Hajimari does something definitive it's likely to remain a grey area.
O ye of little faith. I've only played up until CS2, but Crossbell really
Basically anytime anything particularly convenient happens in any future game, or has ever happened in any previous game. Anything in the series, really, if you squint your eyes and stare cross-eyed enough at it? KeA Did It is the new A Wizard Did It.
Joshua almost, but doesn't quite, kill Cassius Bright? KeA needed an Enforcer to save the Scooby Gang. Renne shows up in Phantasma only after the characters capable of talking her down? Ditto. Rean doesn't take Lloyd and Rixia into custody and/or kill them during CS2's Divertissement? Out of the goodness of his heart, right. Who has total control over his entire life, to mold his personality to suit her every whim if she so chooses?
Don't even get me started on the Ao endgame, which I found an implausible parade of inexplicable decisions on the part of the bad guys. I could just loop my father in on the real plan, but instead I think I'm going to stab him in the back, then make sure to monologue to him about it like I'm a god damned Bond villain. Then I'm going to literally stab my other co-conspirator in the back. No, that makes too much sense, I meant to say pretend to stab him in the back. Speaking of the lawyer, he's pretty hardcore. He's been involved since, I think, before D:G's large-scale operations were shut down (requiring him to be hardened enough to knowingly permit Paradise, and many other places like it, to operate if it furthers the plan). Yet Lloyd manages to not just talk him down but make him realize I've been full of crap this whole time just by talking for a few minutes.
I think KeA has to have intimately choreographed the whole Ao endgame. It's too preposterous otherwise. My (crack?) theory is she wanted all the bad guys to realize Wait a minute, I'm one of the bad guys except without the part where the other bad guys then proceed to kill them. As for Crossbell itself, Rean conquers it so there's no war, no civilians are hurt, not even when Shirley deliberately tries to kill a few just to rile up Rixia, and Rean himself is the Boy Scoutiest Boy who ever Scouted a merit badge.
I even suspect she messed with Lloyd, who at the end of Zero knew some unknown mastermind orchestrated Joachim's downfall (he even mocks Joachim for not noticing), in a way that implies this mastermind knows everything about the cult. What he knew should also have been enough to implicate Dieter Crois as this mastermind, even if he didn't have any proof. Who benefits from the craziness at the end of Zero? Dieter Crois wins, everyone else seems to lose. That stinks to high heaven, and Lloyd absolutely should have picked up on it. It's his job and I'm sure he would have been specifically taught that technique at the academy.
But if Lloyd follows up on that, either he winds up dead, or the whole thing unravels. We can't have that, now.
So if KeA can do all of that, who's to say she can't have used Time & Fate to control, well, the entire story? The Grandmaster, the whole of the Septian Church, everybody who's a real player in this struggle for control of the Sept-Terrion. Everything. In Ao, the Dominions say 'we can't promise to leave KeA alone, her powers are too vast' and then they proceed to do exactly that, because her powers are "gone".
Basically the biggest argument against this (other than, um, the fact I haven't played CS3/4 yet and either may explicitly debunk this) is that
Leman - mistress or lover in outdated English
It's also another name for Lake Geneva, dating back to Roman times when they called it Lacus Lemanus. Given that Leman feels like Zemurian Switzerland, I suspect that's what Falcom was going for. All the locations we see in SC are real places in Switzerland, except that Balsthal got rendered as Balstar.
My guess is that the three remaining arcs are going to be Calvard, Longlai, and Leman/Arteria.
Agreed in principle, though as we don't know much about the makeup of the east I'm hesitant to say that Longlai (assuming it is a country, which its mention in CS4 makes it sound like) would be the setting or the only setting, if it's visited. But yeah, my prediction since Kondo confirmed three future arcs is that after Hajimari comes Calvard, that will be our springboard to parts further east and then we'll finish the series off with Leman and Arteria.
I must have completely missed this. What is Longlai and where does it come up?
It's first mentioned in CS3 when you meet Musse's grandfather, who recognizes that Rean's style of swordsmanship is from the East and asks if Rean would have preferred 'tea from Longlai'. It's mentioned again in CS4 as the location Yun Ka-fai sent a letter through. The CS3 context could be talking about a place within a country famous for tea in the same sense that Darjeeling is a city within India, but the talk of routing a letter via Longlai makes it sound more like it's a country.
Random aside, the characters are apparently how a South Korean poet wrote their given name using Chinese characters. I assume this is just an interesting coincidence because it wouldn't be pronounced in accordance with the furigana that Falcom provided. The mention of it made me want to look up if there was an obvious reference in the name and that was the only one that turned up on Wikipedia Japan. I'd have to use translation software and hope for its accuracy to work out whether any of the Chinese uses are significant. One thing I could figure out without help from a quick perusal is that apparently there's a mobile mahjong app that uses it for its name (龍來麻將).
@yotaka Yea, I've had this argument with Gu4n before. Falcom probably did get the name from Lake Geneva, but I also can't see Falcom not using it's English meaning to set the theme for the arc considering that all three arcs so far have done so. It would also just...make sense. Each arc theme has revolved around a single human virtue (almost as if the Sept-Terrion were meant to test humanity lol). It would make sense to the end the series with the most powerful of them all--love.
Hey, Yotaka, or anyone else who understands Japanese, any plans on getting Zero/Ao Kai? I'm mainly interested in hearing about the character additions in Ao, even though it's probably nothing major. But hey, who knows - maybe Towa will be the one to save the day this time, while taking over Osborne's role in the conference and wrangling Olivier. She has no limits!
Yeah, I ordered both.
SpoilerCS4I'm curious, is it ever made clear whether or not Osborne was aware if the trio in the Courageous would be ok? I guess what I mean is, if he was willing to let them die for the sake of the plan. The man seemed to be such a 4D chessmaster it wouldn't surprise me if he knew they'd be (relatively) fine.
Short answer: Yes.
Just Starting Azure, and I've been wondering this for awhile now, and the start of random npc dialogue kicked my own thoughts in...
question spoils 3rd and Zero and answer spoils beyond if answered:
Does Do the Hayworths ever know what happens to Renne for Real? Do they ever meet? Effing hell, I don't think there's a single scene of that girl late 3rd and later that doesn't make me tear up. She's like the principle of bittersweet made flesh. I know this game rarely kills characters, but I almost expect they'll make her do a REAL heroic sacrifice (real as in dies for real) at some point just because she consistently tears my heart. I know she doesn't... yet.. but... later?[/spoiler]
I can't edit posts... or I don't know how?
Anyway meant to edit last post's spoiler section.
Oh god, it just occurred to me she probably will meet the hayworths, and they will learn her story, very late, and THEN she'll do the heroic sacrifice shortly after for them and perhaps others too
