I’ve made some very specific predictions about the events of Sen III, now I figure I should put down some more general ones. Should pre-release information render some of these impossible, I reserve the right to be a ninja and alter them at any time prior to release.

• Testa-Rossa is going to be cleansed of its curse and Alfin Cedric will become its next Awakener. [Modified 7/25/17 based on pre-release information]
• Nord is going to be attacked and people will die. Gaius will witness this and the trauma will cause his Stigma to awaken. Thomas will help him cope with this and at the end of the game he will travel to Arteria and take his place as one of the Dominion.
• The protagonists will temporarily work with Ouroboros for the purpose of dealing with the wild card that is Osborne. Both sides will understand that all bets are off as soon as he’s out of the picture and it will be everyone for themself in the scramble for the Sept-Terrion. And if Ein and Campanella both get involved, you can sure they’ll try to out-cheat each other to come out on top.
• The remaining Divine Knights will all be found and receive new Awakeners if appropriate. This includes Ordine, though if Rean manages to resurrect Crow (a thought that must be going through his head) then it won’t need a new Awakener. If not, Vita may be the one to operate it.
• The middle initial of the Arseid family will be confirmed as short for Sandlot. Falcom will finally confirm that yes, Arianrhod is Lianne Sandlot. After dancing around the issue for three whole games…
• The remaining Stahlritter will show up to help get Phantasmal Blaze back on track, as will Campanella.
• We’ll learn what the historical basis for Erebonia’s vampire legends is. Arianrhod may be involved (per Guan’s theory that I quite like).
• We will learn that the cycle of Divine Knights awakening and coming into conflict with one another was caused in some way by Erebonia’s two Sept-Terrion having destroyed each other in a conflict. Some lingering drive within them or an incompatibility in their power is essentially drawing them to fight one another whether they or their Awakeners want to or not.
• Due to an unfortunate lab accident, the attempt to resurrect Rutger Claussell will fail and instead they’ll get Rutger Hauer who will explain that the door behind which Divine Knights are sealed is properly known as a Tannhauser Gate.

7/25/2017 Update:

I modified one of the above predictions but left the rest untouched, though some have been or appear likely to be confirmed now. Gonna wait to see where everything goes before being too proud of myself for being clever. And I’ve got two more predictions of a semi-audacious nature, because that’s where I’ve been recently.

• The ‘Erebonian Empire 1206’ artbook reveals that among other things, there’s a new red-colored puppet that appears to be related to Millium and Altina’s. Without getting too geeky about names, I’m going to predict that this one comes from the same body of legends and will be named either Nuada or Dagda. The former because he’s the guy for whom Airgetlam is an epithet and Claiomh Solais is sometimes associated with him (in Japanese sources at least) and the latter because he’s indirectly associated with Nuada and hence the previous two names and has aspects that fit both its color scheme and the way it’s shaped.
• More audacious prediction, since we’ve all but had it confirmed that Arianrhod is an Awakener by now, I’m going to go nuts with the crack and predict that hers will be named Longinus the Silver Knight (白銀の機神ロンギヌス). That she’ll have a lance for her Knight almost goes without saying, it’s symbolically fitting and we’ve gone seven games without that name cropping up in the series yet so we’re about due. As for the color, well, the Knight we see behind Arianrhod in the teaser commercial looks silver, it matches the description of her armor and it was either that or ‘Steel Knight’ but that’s not a color so it doesn’t fit the pattern established by the other four Knights and it would be just a bit on the nose, even for Falcom.

9/25/17 Update:

The game is almost upon us, so it’s time for one last flurry of predictions that were too small to get their own topic, based on the most recent information. As with the earlier update I haven’t changed my existing predictions, though I should add that I’m now suspicious of the machine seen with Arianrhod, as the footage we’ve seen since makes it look larger than any Knight. But I still think she’s got one and I like the naming symbolism so the prediction stands in general.

• The locaton of the Hexen village will be along the southwest coast of Erebonia. Why there? It’s a safe assumption that it’s not in the east or we’d have seen it already. It’s safe to assume it’s fairly remote or the attention would be problematic, which means it’s probably not located along the main railway lines. This removes from consideration most of the locations seen on the new map. Alster would make sense but it can’t be Emma’s hometown or we’d have learned it in the drama cd (and Ring of Judgment would probably have dropped hints) and I can’t imagine that it’s Aragon Mining Town because it’s industrial nature makes it too prominent for other reasons. Assuming it’s marked on the map at all, that suggests that the Hexen are located somewhere along the western coast where there are a number of unnamed locations indicated. We also have clear road (but not rail) networks in the southwest where the map was covered by text from the magazine it came in which are promising, but I’m not certain there will be anything significant there ingame much like parts of southern Liberl. So, west coast it is.
• Given the hint in Famitsu that ‘a man affiliated with Ouroboros’ is making a reappearance, I just can’t let that pass without some crack speculation. Our list of candidates is naturally short. It can’t be Weissmann because that’s the entire point of a Salt Bolt. I don’t think Loewe’s getting a resurrection, short of Falcom making a second Alternative Saga. Walter’s such a shoe-in for Calvard that it makes little sense to use him before then. So… Gilbert! And because that’s not nearly crack-y enough, I will add two more predictions. First, that my theory about his becoming Enforcer VII will either be borne out by his CS3 appearance or he’ll be clearly set on that path. Second, that if it’s already happened, he’s the one controlling the blue mystery machine we’ve seen in screenshots.
• One of the remaining Divine Knights will be a two-seater and it will eventually be piloted by Juna and Kurt as a late-game replacement for their Soldats.
• One of the running questions in the arc which CS3 is set to resolve is why the Emperor trusts Osborne so implicitly. Obviously he Gets Things Done for the Empire so we can safely assume that’s how he keeps his job, but on its own that doesn’t seem like enough for the man’s initial rise to power, getting the most important job in the imperial administration and (even if it was only an empty gesture) raising him to the highest level of nobility outside the four great houses.  Given talk of Erebonia’s ‘dark past’, Agate’s secondary mission in Erebonia to investigate Hamel and Vita’s mention that Osborne was in some way involved in the aftermath of the massacre as part of why he’s a dangerous man, I think they’re setting up a connection. Perhaps Osborne learned something after the war and he’s been blackmailing Eugent with it…
• On a similar tack, this is somewhere between observation and theory but… Olivier and his parallels with Dreichels. The Black Records couldn’t have made the similarities more clear if Rean had commented on them after reading the fourth volume. Both were out of the line of succession due to having a common-born mother, both took to wandering outside the Empire and demonstrated a carefree attitude until circumstances forced them to act, both have a ‘knightly’ companion who they’ve known since childhood, both gathered a force from unexpected quarters, both care about helping Erebonia’s suffering population more than the intrigues of power… So, where could this go? Well, given Erebonia’s cyclical history, if Olivier is indeed meant to repeat Dreichels’ story then he should eventually come out on top and assume the throne. If we take my Osborne blackmail idea as having some basis in fact, that would make the chancellor the political equivalent of Orthros (minus the Testa-Rossa connection, but he might have that indirectly via manipulating Cedric) and we already know that he and Olivier are destined to have a final showdown. We could even say that Olivier has his own Lianne Sandlot in Scherazard, should she appear in the games. But if there’s something to the cycle idea, I fear for Mueller as his equivalent in Dreichels’ time didn’t survive the war. Last thought, what if Eugent knows about the Divine Knight cycle and either knew or suspected it was about to repeat and and so deliberately set about making a new Dreichels by fathering a son with a commoner, in the hopes of influencing the direction of the upcoming cycle?
• I’ve seen a lot of discussion of possible character death flags so I’m just going to toss out that I don’t think Vita will die. Primarily I must admit, it’s because I like her and would prefer not to see it happen but I also think that if we’re getting an Anguis death in CS3, it’s going to be either Arianrhod (see my later-posted theory on Wagnerian parallels) or the still unrevealed ‘Sinner’.
• On that note, a reminder of my theory that Barkhorn is totally the Fifth Anguis. The way Falcom has been extremely coy about his inclusion in the story isn’t helping the suspicion any.
• One last thing that’s extremely suspicious is the vocal songs for this game. We’ve seen two of them so far, Ikitsuku Saki and the currently unnamed song in the trailer (and the fact that it’s nameless is itself suspicious). All precedent is for a vocal trailer song to be the OP music, going back to SC. I’d say ‘the very beginning’ but FC is the one exception because that game doesn’t have a vocal OP. This can also be seen in Tokyo Xanadu’s trailer. Yet it appears that the main trailer’s song is not the opening song, which begs the question: What is it then? While it’s possible that the song is a fast-paced ending a la I Miss You, neither the rhythm nor the lyrics really fit that idea. It sounds too action-y to feel right as an ending song and the lyrics are anticipatory like you would expect an opening song to be, rather than reflectory like I Miss You or I’ll Remember You have been. There’s also something else suspicious, which is the lack of a digital single for the game. Falcom has been releasing those since CS1, so we’ve had access to the full song prior to release for both previous games (and again, Tokyo Xanadu) but for some reason they haven’t done that with the far more significant game that is Sen III. It feels like they’re deliberately hiding something from us with all the secrecy. I think they’re going to pull a fast one on us and the game is going to have a second movie after the story hits its tipping point, and that is when the trailer song will play. And we’ll be struggling to pick our jaws up off the floor when it does.
• And one last entry in the ‘so crack it’s actually insane’ category a la my Rutger prediction: According to scans and assuming there aren’t any others we haven’t seen yet, the in-game novel for the game is ‘The Biography of Tomatonio’ and its protagonist is, ummm, a tomato. Okay then, wasn’t expecting that. Now, we know that novels in Kiseki are Serious Business, so there must be some kernel of truth to this rather unusual CS3 novel. Therefore, I predict that the novel will verify once and for all that Tomartians are, indeed, Canadian.