Undone: The DQXIS article

7 September 2026

If you want to destroy my ~~sweater~~ story, Pull this (plot) thread as I walk away. -- ~~Weezer~~ Me

When the credits roll, DQXIS is wrapped up in a nice bow. Its story of hope in the dark is best shown in the transition between acts one and two, where we're getting the band back together.

Sylvando shows us the power of optimism when we're at our lowest, things may be bad, but that doesn't mean we can't make it the best possible. His hope lifts up the community in doing so. Erik commits everything for the promise of fighting another day. He may lose his memories, but if he's alive he can make more. His hope allows him to persevere. Jade fights for others because it's right and she's okay with the possibility of failure because others will take up the fight. Her hope inspires others to fight with her.

Rab declines a false paradise in order to make sure his body is ready for the next opportunity. He's given the option to check out to an ideal world, Dundrasil still standing, his family together, celebrating a birthday. Surely if anyone is worthy of laying down their burdens it's Rab, but he declines. To accept paradise while others suffer would be tragic. Instead, he trains relentlessly to prepare for the next shot at fixing the world. Even though it's bad, he remains hopeful that it will get better and he's ready to seize that chance.

Serena is the best example here. She loses her twin sister but bravely holds herself together because she knows Veronica's sacrifice wasn't so she could be sad about Veronica, it was so she could finish the job. She not only picks herself back up, but becomes the most powerful mage in the party, carrying her sister's power within her. Serena goes from the most boring, empty character to one of the most compelling as she battles through her grief to become stronger for everyone around her.

We've had our big emotional moments, the catharsis of beating the villain, and possibilities for the future. So what do you do when you decide you want to tell more stories?

You have to pull at the bow.

When the hero chooses his own personal New Game+, he unravels everything that happened before.

Going back to our best examples, the hero chooses that paradise and leaves his friends and family behind to pursue it. I don't want to get too timey wimey/multiversal about it, but he literally leaves them behind over their protestations. It is a selfish act as he explicitly takes the out Rab refused.

And why does he do this? So Veronica can come back. Ostensibly noble, textually insane. Veronica made the sacrifice to allow her friends the slim chance to fix everything for her, because she believed in them. Her belief was paid off in spades. Choosing to undo the Doctor Strange 1 out of however many million for the chance of "but what if it was better" is the height of hubris. I guess the hero read the script.

We undo most of the cast's growth, except for Serena whose hair grows back as the rest of her growth is undone. She returns, meekly, to her much more flamboyant and bombastic sister's shadow and dutifully gives up her new powers as she does so. Her grief is gone and so too is anything interesting about her.

Then we try to redo the growth, Sylvando, Hendrik, Erik, all get similar but different beats. This is where Lucas would say "it's like poetry, it rhymes" which makes us ask why even do this? All of the sacrifice, the beats are cheapened by this. It's seeing the funhouse mirror version of what we did already, grotesque and distorted.

The story descends into nonsense as a result. The character can't speak and tell the other characters what's happening, so we all blithely follow the possessed king of Heliodor to a party that must obviously be a trap. The hero can't even tell Serena that he liked her hair better short and must make a wish to make it happen (which is also weird from an agency perspective).

There's so much effort here in making something half new that I wonder what they could have done had they just...continued the story with the post game and showed our heroes tackling the challenges of building a new world post ruin, rebuilding Dundrasil perhaps, a more policy oriented Sylvando parade of happiness.

So as I faced down the Crystalotl and got absolutely demolished, I found I had a choice. I could grind it out, come back, and fight this beast to plow deeper into this warped reality of what I had liked, or I could pull the ripcord and take the credits as my exit. Yes, I'd miss the Calasmos fight and the resolution of the story, but really the story I wanted had resolved fifteen hours earlier. No use throwing good money after bad.

That's the ending of my game, and it was really rewarding and cathartic. I wish I hadn't sunk another chunk of time into figuring out that I should have taken that off ramp, but it's an ending I can be okay with. All that stuff happened and I don't think it's good, but I think DQXIS is good and worth playing despite that. I don't want to let the devs off the hook, but it's a way for me to be sane here, opting out of the parts tacked on that didn't work.

I suppose at the end, I'm going to take the paradise while everyone else suffers in the real ending.