Am I a Phainon fan? Not really. Did I enjoy the Flame Reaver twist? Also, not really. But by For The Sun Is Set To Die I lowkey got attached to Phainon's role. Everything that has happened up to this point was for the sole objective of letting Phainon create a new world.
Hell, even just looking at the last words of each character. Personally, I clowned over the "Bring the dawn, Deliverer" cheesy line, but that's the common thread of most lines. Mydei and Anaxa are, iirc, the only two who say it directly but most conversations imply that the characters are wishing to reunite in the new wolrd [that Phainon will bring]. Maybe Cipher is a bit off, but considering she legitimately died to buy time for Phainon, she's with everyone else in spirit.
And anyone there's no doubt that everyone truly believed Phainon would deliver them to the new world.
The twist of Amphoreous being a simulation to the benefit of the Black Tide and Era Nova being a lie were great - but of course, that means we can just scrape everything that we built up to this point with Phainon right?
That part really bothers me. It might make sense technically but meta-wise? The writers wrote the whole lore of Amphoreous in that same patch. If they didn't want Phainon to disappear, they could have easily wrote the pseudo-scientific mambo jumbo differently.
I don't want to hate on Cyrene, because it would bother me of any other character swooped in and got the leading role in Phainon's place. But even if it was just TB, it still feels that anything in the last 2 (soon to be 3) patches feels so disjointed. We had a good recurring theme with Phainon and the sun, bring a literal and metaphorical "tomorrow" to Amphoreous, that was essentially what everyone struggled towards. Frankly, this connecting thread comes apart ever since the Hysilens/Cerydra and now it just feels lile TB, the geniuses, March and DH, and Cyrene saving the world - not just from the amount of screentime they got, but from the way everything the Flamechasers didn't matter at a practical level at all, except from having a token scene where everyone chimes in and says their lines - and they are so out of their depth that they'll probably won't ever be able to matter. And even, if by some miracle, they do matter the core issue with me, that the "original" we saw was reset without leaving any mark at all, still stands. What we saw and did for 4 patches only had relevance in that it introduced us to characters and lore, but the actions really didn't matter in the overall story. And the main example of this is how the first half of the story all lead to Phainon achieving everyone's dream, just to scrap him, everyone and their dreams too.
I was happy when I learned Amphoreous would last a whole version but it seems the story fell a bit off halfway through. At least as far as coherence is concerned. At this point, I would have probably been happier with a shorter story
