This is similar to a post I made a while back where I complained about everything wrong with the story, but this time I’ll go through the story from memory and explain what I’d change. My memory isnt perfect so if anyone has any other ideas, feel free to add them in the replies. (Also, writing this with a bit already typed out, but if I say something like “they need more realistic tones here” and then later say something that seems basic, this is just for overarching ideas on how it could play out, specific dialogues and stuff are not apart of this). Also be warned, I am a certified yapper and come up with a lot of crazy ideas, so this will be a LOT of reading. Hence why I’ll only do bronze sea for this part and make another post for nimbus later.
Disclaimer: While I am mostly adding my ideas, this does go over the general plot of the bronze sea story, so spoiler warning
Dawn Island
Starting off with the opening scene, rather than a look down to your character lying on the beach, I’d start with a black screen and you’ll hear us, Morden, and Tucker escaping from the facility place maybe with brief glimpses here and there on whatever Vetex would like us to see. Then, we’d wake up in a tent rather than face-down on the beach with rain pouring on us. When you eventually walk up to Morden I’d change his dialogue to say something about where he’s going (palo town) and to give him some time to grieve. His overall tone should sound scared but friendly towards you, and angry when talking about the people who experimented on you both (Character lack overall tones in this game which is what makes them feel so bland since everyone is so serious all the time). At this point you could go to palo town and get more dialogue from him, probably talking about how they should split up until they recuperate strength in case the order finds them, since it’d be better for only one of us to get caught rather than both. Though, at Dawn Island he’d still tell you about a town he saw to the east (Redwake) and that it would be a good place to find food and work.
This turns the intro to be much more dramatic, and gives you a reason to get stronger rather than just settling down (since you would want to find out who experimented on you and why, and be able to regroup with Morden once you know both of you can handle yourselves).
Redwake
Not much to change about redwake, but I’d add more pirate spawns and make them a bit stronger since your first combat should not just be “oh yeah these guys are not a challenge at all”, i think it should be similar to early AO since im pretty sure they got nerfed at some point.
Also, this is moreso balancing, but i think fighting styles should get crash at 0 invest and every technique after drops by 30 points, and old weapons get their first skill at 0 invest too (mathematically they should but they don’t for some reason), also relics should have m1s. This evens out the classes early game giving each of them m1s and 1 skill.
Anyway back to the story, pirates would be harder and I’d also add some of their ships docked around the town too just for more immersion. Also could add some part where a Jaw Pirate Captain is seen carrying one of the villagers and is about to take them before you step in. He could have dialogue stating that Jorund is going to be pleased at the unexpected raid (insinuating Jorund did not order this to happen), and if vetex wants to add more mature parts he could give the captain dialogue to imply that they were looking for women to kidnap and traffic to give more reason for the raid and how scummy the pirates are. When you defeat them, a cutscene plays where Estrid walks behind you and is in shock that you managed to beat all of the pirates. She invites you to the tavern rather than just teleporting there and asks you if you’re hungry after that (with dialogue responses). After she gives you food she also offers you a room since its the least she could do after you saved the town. Then you can go sleep. After you sleep you come back and the town is how it should be again (one immersion-breaking thing about the Redwake part is that once you beat the last pirate everyone just teleports to where they should be, so this cutscene should help that). Afterwards it’d be moreover the same with the quests, however the chief will notify you that some of their spies have heard splashes and magic coming from where the hermit is, and suggest that he’s likely the reason behind the water (rather than just saying “Go ask the hermit maybe he knows whats happening!” This should make more sense because the chief should have sent a spy once the first instance of melted fish and ship hulls popped up.
When you go to the hermit, you should see him shooting acid blasts at one of the jaws and the cutscene should definitely show drops of acid falling into the water with a sizzle. You walk up to him and have a dialogue that says “I need to stop you.” (intended to be a poor choice of words). This starts the fight with the hermit, also before the fight you could show he’s slightly worn out from expending his energy from training which could explain why he’s so weak as a boss. Anyway you defeat him, apologize for the accidental fight, and explain why you were really there. Then the rest up to frostmill proceeds as normal.
Frostmill Island
Not much to change about frostmill, but I’d definitely have the Redwake Spy’s boat be present there and then leave once he leaves (and I’d put the mayors boat somewhere there as well since he’d definitely have one, probably a caravel in the middle of the docks). Vibe-wise I would have a somewhat grayish filter be put over frostmill since if I’m not mistaken its meant to be a fairly poor town, and the shops and stuff should sell a lot less and look a bit more run-down/poorly made. Really just needing to drive home the fact that Frostmill is very poor, that way doing the annoying quests like catching 5 fish and food feel more impactful since you’re supporting them (on another note, some quests should actually take the materials you gather, not all quests, but definitely some, and these 2 quests I mentioned would definitely be a part of that). I feel Frostmill is written fairly okay (I haven’t really paid attention to dialogue in my most recent file progression so if anyone has an idea for more to add for any part then just reply with it). I like how iris mistakes us from someone from Ravenna since she’s young and wouldn’t know rather than most other characters having Vetex’s wisdom and knowledge of everything since he wrote them. We need more characters that are actually wrong.
Palo Town (New Part, end of chapter 1)
After Frostmill, you should be directed towards palo town so you can both do some quests there and also so you can see Morden again. Morden would check up on you and listen to your stories of what happened, but rather than him leaving you, you instead leave him after this for two reasons. First, you would invite him to come with you to the stepstones, but he’d decline saying he feels he isn’t strong enough to join you yet. He’d say something about how he’ll go spar with a woman he met at goso jungle (Souvella) and that afterwards he’ll go back to check on Tucker’s grave. Second reason is because, well, you have to attend to your duty of helping Iris find her father. After this, you get the “level 40 required” and can go to stepstones or level up as normal. This part of the story also gives better reasoning as to how iris was able to climb the stepstones so quickly.
Stepstones, Cirrus Island, Skycliff Island, The Myriad, and Djin Ruins (end of chapter 2)
Figured I’d group these all together. Stepstones story stays the same as its only dialogue with warren. First thing I’d change is when you get tipped off about the suspicious people going to Skycliff Island, Iris would join you on your sky ship (after all, she came up here to look for answers herself, why would you do all of the work from this point on?). You head to Skycliff with your overall plan to be sneaky so they don’t find you. You get into the cave at the bottom and jump through the hole, then a cutscene plays of iris making a ton of noise by using her flare magic to jump through the hole after you. After this, you hear a scream from outside the cave so you and iris run out and see a man laying on the floor with no apparent injuries. You ask him what’s wrong and then suddenly you get ambushed by the other 2 order members and he explains that his trap worked perfectly. One of the order members knocks out Iris but you react in time to the other one and are able to throw them over your shoulder. He insults you by asking if you really thought they wouldn’t see your Skyship on the horizon, nor all of the noise you made inside the cave, then combat initiates. You then have to fight all 3 of the order members at once rather than them being spaced out. When you defeat all 3, a cutscene then plays of you incapacitating one of them, and the other 2 get scared since they know they can’t beat you and know if they fail the order will kill them (the first time the order is mentioned). This leads both of them to jumping off the sky island. You turn the incapacitated man over and see the symbol on his cloak, and take the cloak yourself to show to ren later. Then you carry iris back to the skyship where she regains consciousness as you fly back to Cirrus. This would give Iris more character development as she realizes she can’t be so careless especially with such a dangerous mission. As you walk back to the stepstones, you would ask Neviro if the cloak belonged to the men he saw, and he would say yes, then you would ask if he knows what the order they were apart of was, and he’d say no. He would ask how many they were and you’d say you defeated 1, and the other 2 jumped off. He’d make some comment about the foolishness of what they got themselves into, and also say that he saw 10 of them and that one of them was wearing golden armor, likely their leader. After this, you head back down to Ren and tell him everything. Story continues from there where he takes you to the Myriad, The cutscene of Randall only plays when you face his body at the base of the tree, and it would also be updated to show a tree branch handing you the book. When you go back up to ren with it the same dialogue plays and then instead of Ren just saying “oh its the Order of Aesir” you can instead flip through the book with him and see other ancient symbols for more lore drops. When you both find the page with the Order of Aesir, you can read about their group and their goal in the page rather than it being dropped in dialogue with Ren. After this, you tell him you’re going to look for the remaining 7 members since they’re too dangerous to be left alone, and he agrees. You would head back to Cirrus to talk to Iris and Neviro and just overall prepare yourself for the remaining members and their leader. Neviro opts not to join you since he says he’d just get in the way, but Iris, wanting to prove herself, offers to join you again. You and Iris head to the pumpkin farm and see nobodies there, so you head to the last island, Djin ruins. As you approach, another cutscene plays of the order members seeing your ship and firing at it, the ship gets damaged and you and Iris are forced to jump off as it collides with the island, killing one of the order members instantly. You get up and fight the other members with Iris. After you defeat 3, another cutscene plays where Iris gets shot in the shoulder, you rush in to help her but she yells at you to stand back and that she has to prove herself, then she rips the arrow out and uses her flare magic to cauterize the wound, before fighting again. You and Iris defeat the other 3, but she’s worn out from adrenaline and overexertion, so she stays back while you go into the ruins. Elius fight proceeds as normal, and in the dialogue after you beat him, Iris finds out hes a noble from ravenna, and asks him about her father. Elius obviously has no idea who her father is but says if he mysteriously vanished, the king probably put him in the mines for treason and covered it up. After you choose to spare or kill him, a cutscene plays showing blue flames shaped as a person watching you from above without you (the character, not the player) knowing. The blue flames says something like “You did well” and then flies off. If this is the first time the player has played the game, they’d likely think this is another order member rather than Warren and could just be a cool scene I think. You and Iris take the order member’s ship (since yours got destroyed) and head back to Cirrus, where she says she’s going to ask around more about this order, and will go to the navy base since they oversee most activities happening in the bronze sea. She tells you to go to Sailor’s lodge to see if any mercenaries have info too.
Sailor’s Lodge and Fort Talos (end of chapter 3)
You head there, and it proceeds as normal but with a few dialogue changes as this should be the third time you and Morden have seen each other. Morden says he finally feels like he can hold his own in battle after honing his shadow magic and learning boxing from Souvella. You tell him more about your journeys and he offers to finally join you. You ask around the bar and get the same info, though maybe with more people since I’d really like to get more dialogue with that wizard guy. Morden would follow you with his sailboat rather than just teleporting there, and then you head in as normal. Morden would actually helping in the fight with the first guard before you two go different ways to cover more ground. This is where you eavesdrop on the two guards and find out that Elius was wrong, and that Iris’ father was actually executed. Then you lap back to meet up with Morden and all of this including the note stays generally the same. Another change I’d do here is make every guard in the following halls already be passed out or if Vetex really wants you to fight there, you could have passed out guards and other guards standing around them having came in afterwards and seeing them. Everything else for the rest of Talos remains pretty much the same.
Ravenna (end of chapter 4)
One part I’d like to change is having blue arrows tracing the path after defeating Carina (I think every part before that is fine) where you go rather than just a marker, that way it doesn’t say “Head to the Ravenna Castello” and then just have the marker on a random spot, because vetex does this twice so in the future if we ever see a marker not where its meant to be we already know we’re going to be ambushed. The story quest, rather than saying go to the Castello, would instead just say “Follow the path”. This way, you can’t just skip the story progression point, head to the Castello, then say “hey im at the castello why story no worky”.
Anyway you continue through, get put in the mines, everythings the same basically the entire time, but rather than sleeping through the break-out scene, you get woken up by explosions and see guards running out of the mines. You would get up and try to find out whats going on. You head to the main mine area and see some of the prisoners fighting back, and you see the warden of the prison about to kill the old man you talked to. You tackle into him and then get into a fight with the Warden. During this fight you would have halved base health, energy, and stamina, and only be able to use m1 and the first skill of your magic and fighting style (So blast and crash), and they wouldn’t have reduced damage if you dont have magic or strength investment. The warden could have like idk 1000 health or something and attack like Revon, except just stronger. After you beat him, you could begin pummeling his face for everything he put you through (Silas needs more moments where he just lets out his rage, afterall hes a descendant of Zeus). The old man pulls you off of the warden and tells you to calm down, and that you need to help the other prisoners. From here, you see some of your items in a crate and rush over to collect them, after which you are back to normal except for a story injury of starvation and exhaustion where your movement speed, energy recovery rate, and healing rate are all decreased, but no damage to your health. You then fight off the rest of the guards to save the prisoners, and then thats when Iris and the others, having been alerted to all of the noise of the fighting, find you. You and your group escort the prisoners out and the remaining cutscene stays the same except the prisoners stay with Iris and she promises to get them freed. (Some of the prisoners can die if Vetex wants them to, could have some die to the guards before youre able to save them, and others die after trying to escape before your friends arrive, I just felt that presumably having all of the prisoners die was a bit too overkill). Rest of Ravenna arc stays the same except calvus fight would be a bit harder because of the story injury of starvation. If it gets too hard, another idea I had was having phase 2 of calvus be a cutscene where he lands one of his pillar explosions on you and fries you to a crisp, and as he gloats about landing a supposedly final blow, you could tap into your legacy powers and heal yourself with spirit energy and then blast him across the throne room into his throne, destroying it. Could make it even more dramatic by having the character unconsciously create a thunderstorm with spirit energy outside for the rest of the fight. Calvus would be surprised and a bit scared, but also angry that he was overpowered by that. That’s when he starts to fight serious by utilizing his curse inheritance, could add dialogue where he says he has to stop you before you awaken more of your power. Then the phase 2 would play out like the nimbus sea bosses phase 2s where it just counts as a second boss, then his phase 2 becomes the mirage afterwards. You defeat him and story plays out as normal except for a few dialogue points about the thunderstorm (Neviro was unconscious so he doesn’t know you did it). Then you get to run through Ravenna while its storming hard which would just make it way more cinematic. Revon fight would proceed as normal but for the sailboat, there should be an actual barricade of ship and then a sailboat would be part of it on the way to Windrow. Rather than having to sink the ship normally, you just ram right through it with a cutscene (even if you have a ketch), destroying it and pushing it out of the way. Cutscene could also have some ravenna soldiers jumping out of the way or some latching onto your ship determined to stop you, and have them fighting your crew. If vetex wants an actual challenge when getting to windrow, heres another idea I have that could be cool:
After you sink the sailboat, a brig begins chasing you and firing mortar shells. You’d be able to see the where the shells would land and have to avoid them while sailing. After about 30 seconds of avoiding the shells (you can only get hit about 3-5 times before your ship sinks and you have to replay the “fight”, the brig heads in to ram your ship with a cutscene. Thats when you see the same blue-flamed figure from djin ruins fly overhead and drop a potion into the water, creating a whirlpool that traps the brig, allowing you to escape.
Windrow Island, Awakening, Mount Othrys (end of chapter 5, and thus, end of bronze sea)
You head to windrow island, carry neviro while iris carries morden to the middle of the valley and set up camp. Then you get the same dialogue and bandits attacks, etc etc. When you hear the flames again and the cutscene plays where you pan up towards the sky, you should see the blue figure again flying. You investigate and see that its Warren, the character still wouldnt of known that he was spying on you at cirrus or that he was the one that dropped the potion, but the player should know from the flames around. I’d add dialogue about Warren saying he saw great potential in you after you defeated Elius and that he couldn’t let your story end there, the player character would ask how he knew that they defeated Elius, which he would shrug off, and they would also ask if he’s the one that dropped the potion, to which he’d say he was. He makes a comment on your strange energy, then asks if you’ve awakened yet. You wouldn’t know what that is and then thats where he explains yada yada. You go to the awakening spots and the first spot shows you flashbacks of the brig chase, revon, calvus, the mines, and carina. Second spot shows you flashbacks of Argos, Elius, Iris pulling out the arrow, getting knocked out at skycliff, and where you fought her at frostmill, and the final spot would show you flashbacks of Shura, the jaw pirates captain, morden at shell, and then it would slow down and fade to black, with maniacal laughs fading in, then would unveil some of the experiments you went through involving blood, potions, and other stuff whatever vetex thinks would be appropriate to show. The images would speed up as the laughing grows and it’d end with a face you wouldn’t recognize telling you to seek further truth at Mount Othrys. You sail across the sea and see trails of energy leading you towards the entrance to the caverns. You enter and (rather than it being pitch black) the cave is completely lit up with blue spirit energy, and a wisp made of spirit energy leads you through to the surface and then to the temple before merging with Poseidon’s statue. Poseidon’s dialogue would give you the same information but also a bit more involving who you are, telling you that you are descended from zeus, and that he (poseidon) is sort of like your uncle. He tells you that you’re destined for great things and knows that you’ll be the one to restore the world to how it was before the fracture. Then the wisp you saw earlier (which you learn afterwards is his soul) detaches from the statue, flies around and causes the water to go crazy, then fuses into your body. You get your awakening and then head back to windrow where you tell Warren what happened (though omitting a few details, of which you could probably guess which ones you’d omit). From there the story plays out normally to nimbus, and thats the end of this post.
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