Autumn Wright Asks What Does It Mean To Redeem The Future Anyways | Winter Spectacular 2023
This year, being 25, for me, was defined by thinking a lot about death, but not much about life. I survived panic attacks, depression, ideation, covid, poison ivy, capitalism, and being trans in America. I felt at the bottom of my writing career thus far. I tried, and failed, to think of what to do next. I also read Berserk in its entirety; that probably didn’t help.
I started playing Xenoblade in my last semester of university, the first summer of pandemic lockdown and glimmers of nascent revolution. And when I graduated, moved back home, fell into the depression I knew was waiting for me, eventually followed my friends to New York, and got laid off from the only full-time job I’ve ever had, Xenoblade was there again. Wallowing in my Brooklyn apartment last summer, reluctantly trying to find my feet as a freelancer again, I got to review Xenoblade Chronicles 3 and pour myself into Aionios for a month.
When Future Redeemed came out earlier this year, I felt like I had still not advanced from that point in my life, but I was finally getting help. Figuring my shit out has been very nonlinear. Things got much worse still after I played Future Redeemed in April, but today they’re better than they have been in some time. Xenoblade as we know it has come to an end, and I feel like I am moving somewhere past where I was when I first played these games.
Future Redeemed is about realizing the necessity of the future. All of Xenoblade’s greatest antagonists are anxious to maintain their present, to hold a moment for eternity. Na’el, however, is driven by a hatred of the present. Reflexively, she desires a past she never really knew, that could never really be recreated. We find her at games end in a place so ancient it was forgotten a world ago. But we know the outcome of that past is the division she lives today.
Still, to go forward, we must undo. As Matthew, her brother and antithesis, says: “Turning around, going back…Looking for a new way forward. Doing that time and again, that’s how you build a future.”
So, here’s what I got. The reasons you should play Xenoblade:
So you can watch the sunset from the Bionis’ knee.
So you can climb the Mechonis’ skeletal finger at dawn.
So you can one day return to Colony 9.
Because there are emotions best said silently, between shared sunrises and the waxing moon.
Because all its villains ever wanted was to hold on tighter to the world they already knew.
Because we need heroes that will let go.
Because what was once one became two; The world fractured into pieces. Giant nations war endlessly, all consumed in an ancient cycle of violence. And in this world of strife, the very ground itself begins to erode. For eventually, this cycle too will end. The journey of each cast — our actors, agents, and heroes — is to eventually discover the ontology of their world. And it is the world as they know it that eventually ends, revealing the possibility of another, an epiphany that lifts the world from stagnation. Beyond revenge, hate, and separation — there is a better ending.
Put another way: What was two will become one.
