Time for yet more cracktastic predictions as time begins to run out…

Disclaimer

Because I kind of like the idea of having more surprises than we did going into Kuro II where there was a ton of info in the lead-up to release, I stopped tracking updates at the start of September and have studiously avoided looking at things that have leaked, so this is not a post made with full information and I’m fine with that.

Old Matters

To start things off, a few references to previous theories which remain up in the air and which this game may resolve:

I refer everyone to my Shizuna crack theory which has not been disproven by Kuro II but Kondo’s responses in the Visual Collection interview seems to support that there’s Something There. I’m pretty sure my theory’s still happening and this might be the time to confirm it.

Likewise my time loop theory from back when Kuro was releasing (though it’s something I’ve suspected even before then, and mentioned again for the following game) also is looking pretty damned good given various things that have come up in the first two games of the arc plus the motifs of Kai’s OP theme.

I also refer everyone to my Kuro II theories with regard to the identity of the Holy Beast; nothing that game did has dissuaded me from the belief that Mare is an avatar of the one who watches over this arc’s Sept-Terrion, especially given that game featured more Distorted Text when she tries talking about herself. More on this later.

Project Startaker

Might as well start with what the promotional material really wants us to focus on, and that’s Gramheart’s plan which the first two games have been building up to. Given the whole ‘end of everything’ implication in what the Grandmaster told us was coming and what we’ve seen in promo material plus Gramheart’s evident degree of knowledge, it’s a safe bet that the plan he’s got isn’t to try and get people off of Zemuria. One launch can’t do that and we’re right down to the wire for the Big Cosmic Deadline so even if this were intended as a proof of concept, there’s no reasonable way to scale it up to that kind of degree even if the first attempt goes off perfectly. So if he’s not trying to create some sort of space ark maybe he’s trying to… buy time? And by that I mean, he’s either hoping to stall whatever is coming long enough for the real solution to arrive, he thinks that he’ll find the Sept-Terrion in orbit, or both. The fact that Mare goes all Distorted Text on us when talking about what she senses in the Ishgal mountains (which we know is near the launch site) seems to point towards a causal link to the Sept-Terrion. I wouldn’t be surprised if the thing is in fact in orbit (as a convenient way to get rid of it) and that it’s also the very threat that the Grandmaster warns us about because it’s continuing to reset Zemuria and there can be no true progress until it gets the ‘answer’ it seeks, a la the previous treasures.

The Silver Grendel

It’s Agnes, full stop. Given the link between the transformations we’ve already seen and the first and eighth Geneses, it’s pretty likely that she bears this new nightmare because it’s in some way necessary to channel the combined power of the Oct-Genesis for whatever hidden purpose Epstein intended the things for. We know they’re necessary, we know that what happened in the last game wasn’t it so that must be something for Kai to resolve.

Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the Sussest of them all?

No, it’s actually not Nina but Marduk, since we still don’t know what their goals are and they don’t have Church affiliation to explain things. Plus, as other people have spotted their headquarters has, if you look closely, the same branching lines that key visuals for the first game and the Time Leap screen in the second have. I’m sticking with my previous theory that they represent the Kinship of Time, which is why they’ve got such advanced technology while not (so far as we have any indication) being associated with the Thirteen Factories. It would also explain why they’re backing Gramheart if his plan means getting their Sept-Terrion back from whatever happened to it twelve hundred years ago or otherwise fixing whatever they believe they screwed up the first time. And now that she’s been mentioned…

The Saint of the End

Okay, Nina’s still super-sus but as of the end of the previous game we at least have some context for it. And then one of the screenshots in Grim Garten’s promo material threw a new curveball at us because we got a flashback shot of her and Rufina of all people. And she was speaking ‘a language that wasn’t Zemuria’s’ at that time. I suspect that she, like McBurn, originates from the Outside and part of her wicked identity issues stem from the fact that she’s ended up in another world where she didn’t originally belong. In fact, if the circumstances of her arrival are similar to McBurn’s, it’s possible that ‘Nina’ is a composite of a Zemurian girl and someone from the outside and the transition left her with both a similar case of amnesia and a badly scrambled identity since she’s not sure who she really is. And on that note, that whatever is threatening Zemuria is associated with the Outside which is why she’s the Saint of the End and instrumental in what’s to come.

Risette

Kondo has told us that she’s extremely important to the story of the game and we know she works for Sus Incorporated, so there’s probably something supremely crack-y at work here. Especially with the screenshot of her seemingly confronting something about herself and denying that it’s true. We know from the first two games and especially the second that she has reasons to doubt all of her memories So in for a penny, in for a pound: Just as Mare is the Holy Beast of this arc manifesting as Van’s Holo AI, Risette is the original body of that Holy Beast, which Marduk has experimented on and the reason that she doubts her memories is because almost all of them really are false, a la Rachel from the film Blade Runner. I think that Marduk tried separating Mare’s mind from her body as part of whatever plan they’re working towards (or possibly it was an accident and they rolled with it) and the two halves need to reunite at some point. It’s particularly interesting that the screenshot from Kai of Risette echoes what Mare said in Chapter 5 of Kuro. “違う…違う…こんなのは…” for the former versus “ちがう…こんなのちがう” for the latter. Mare follows her line up with a repeated ‘This isn’t me!’ and I would not be surprised in the least if Risette’s line in Kai is followed up by words to the same effect, because they’re two halves of the same coin even though they don’t realize it yet.

Barkhorn Bergard

…is going to get a Stigma again. For all the Fuckery that we’ve seen with how Gaius got his and the evidence that it really did get transferred in defiance of everything we’re told about how the process works, it would make a whole lot more sense if he somehow transposed one that Gaius already had but which was unawakened with his own. And then part of the reason he spent the entirety of the second game offscreen is because he had to go pick up an appropriate Artifact to absorb it and awaken his new Stigma, which he’ll unveil at a dramatically appropriate moment. And speaking of the Church…

Mission of the Mythos

It was implied in Kuro II and confirmed by Kondo in the Visual Collection that the Khurga and the Nord are two branches of the same culture, with the latter diverging about a thousand years ago. We know from pre-release material that the ‘mission’ of the Khurga is important to this game and Kondo’s comment about the split emphasizes that the highlanders were influential in shaping Erebonia’s history in a way that aligns with this mission. Now for some real crack:

Both groups are extremely devout and we know that the Church has taken an active interest in one of them already in the present day via Barkhorn mentoring Gaius. What if some of the weirdness to do with Barkhorn is because the Church has been Bene Gesserit-ing the fuck out of things and had a role in the common ancestor of the Khurga/Nord and the eventual split? In other words, they know something about what’s coming because of their secret records (which we know can contain information isolated from being reset) and they came up with a plan to put some people in place by inspiring a culture with this ‘mission’ to be played out when the time comes. And Barkhorn’s interest in Gaius was because he was checking on the offshoot culture to make sure things were going According To Plan. Whatever part the Khurga have to play is going to be something the Church has been setting up and Feri, Kasim or both are going to wind up being the fulfillment of their plans.

Unstuck in Time

And now, what might be my crackiest prediction: Agnes ends up time-traveling via her Grendel form and the Geneses, moving backwards through history and resolving several plot threads in doing so. One thing I can’t help but noting is that Agnes’ age as of this game matches that of the protagonist of Sunshine Agnes, who up and vanishes at the end of the story and who at one point seems to see an incident that has yet to happen. Almost like she’s got some sort of time-manipulation ability. She also tells Edwin that they’ll meet again if the latter doesn’t become a reporter, like she has some knowledge of what the future holds. Maybe because to her, it’s actually the past.

And then we have Sheena Dirke, student turned revolutionary who helped found Aramis Academy on top of the place where she and her friends once hid from the royalist forces. And who was ‘about twenty’ when she stepped onto the stage of history. Remember back in the first game how Aaron and Feri think the statue of her in the park reminds them of someone? Right before that, Agnes got called away so she couldn’t be there. Perhaps because they’d make the connection if she was right there with them and we couldn’t have that. As for why Van doesn’t make the same connection, it helps that Feri and Aaron (to a lesser extent as he was raised in the Eastern Quarter) are outsiders and may never have seen a depiction of her before, while Van’s grown up with it. He’s likely so used to seeing her appearance that he doesn’t make the connection.

We know from the previous game that there’s more to the story of the revolution than the history books recorded and that Auguste’s plan is related to this. Perhaps a certain time-traveler helped nudge things along and Auguste got the idea of using the Genesis to ‘fix’ history was because he had either seen them used for that purpose or knew about them because he knew something of ‘Sheena’s’ circumstances.

And yes, if this theory is true then by default that means that Agnes has to end up separated from the rest of the cast, dying in the past as history records Sheena doing. Well, she is crying in the OP and having to make a sacrifice to ensure that the world that she knows comes into existence would certainly fit with that.

Now let’s throw yet more crack into the picture, because if Agnes ends up in the past then there’s every chance that she could run into her great-grandfather. And inspire him to create the very devices that sent her into the past in the first place. Epstein knows about the looming calamity in 1209 because Agnes tells him about it, so he invents the Oct-Genesis and writes a warning in his notebook for Agnes to find, so that she gathers the things to travel back in time to tell him to create them… we have the Sept-Terrion of Time in play, we might as well go full Doctor Who with it.

Minor Predictions

• Going with the fact that we’re likely dealing with time loops, I expect the cloaked figures to either be Genesis-created copies of the cast (several of them are blatantly carrying weapons based on the party’s, Aaron most obviously) or they’re actually their past selves from prior loops, called into this loop via Time Fuckery. I like the latter, especially since it would fit with why the OST Mini preview shows one of them accompanying the track Farewell, My Dear… Said figure appears female and is carrying a sword, almost certainly some version of Elaine.
• I find it interesting that the quotation that opens The 3rd is from the same text that’s linked to Van’s Diabolic Core and in general the Seventy-Seven Devils, the Book of Ezer. I would not be surprised if the beginning of it (“That brief hesitation was all it took to spawn a great evil.”) turns out to be foreshadowing how the Devils came to exist and it’s something we’ll learn in this game.
• Again, I’m pretty sure Trion Tower is going to turn out to be hugely important. We aaaaalmost got it in the second game since the entrance to the final dungeon is in front of the place, but the tower itself has still defied being relevant even as that game reminded us that Epstein designed it and planned it for uses that couldn’t be done until after his own lifetime. And it’s once again prominent in promo material in the background of a bunch of shots, and I don’t think it’s just because it’s such a landmark that it’s hard to find a spot in Edith where it’s not visible.
• I’m fairly certain that something significant in this game is going to be named Zarathustra, after the title character of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra where the concept of eternal recurrence is explored at length. While he didn’t create the concept he was extremely influential in bringing it back to the public consciousness so a nod to him would make sense, perhaps as the name of the final dungeon, or boss, or Marduk’s predictive AI or… a whole lot of things. But it’ll be there somewhere.
• The statue unearthed near Creil in the past and confiscated by the Church is going to finally become relevant and will be the biggest setup-to-payoff we’ve had yet, since this was first mentioned by Kevin back in SC. And it’s probably going to be the new Assault Frame having ended up stuck in the past, then fossilized over time, with the reveal of this happening at the point when the plot starts to really kick into high gear.
• Like I mentioned in my Kuro II predictions, I think that the Shards and Holos are channeling energy from outside Zemuria and that almost all of the latter being named for literal demons is entirely intentional. For bonus crack, Pater Mater’s resurrection as a Holo could even be a remnant of the dummied-out prototype version of Star Door 14 where the dead are described as passing to the Outside/Beyond.
• On that note, since we’ve got a new Assault Frame, the Tyrfings and whatever Novartis has cooked up seen in the OP, Pater Mater getting a proper body to go along with its resurrected mind isn’t terribly unlikely.
• Echoing my Kuro II prediction, we still haven’t seen the abilities that Celis and Rion pulled (offscreen) to help break the barrier around Genesis Tower in the first game, though we did see the one that Kasim used. I think it’s time we get those. While what we saw were cool, the pair of them have pretty underwhelming S-Crafts compared to the other Dominion. But if they were holding back on us in the previous game…
• And lastly, surprise appearance by Anelace later in the game, please. I need it Falcom.