The character is mute in Story sequences because hell if Nintendo is going to pay for 16 tracks of cut scene dialog. And the choices in the Story sequences are there mainly to affect the Player Character's Affinity to Non-Player Characters, I've been lead to believe.
Yeah, sometimes the choices do affect the affinity rating which you can tell by the heart that will appear over another character's head on your choice. But there are others that do not have this affect and are more story based which I doubt affects anything whichever choice you make. As for the voice acting, they may not have to pay 16 people for the entire stories worth but there are plenty of times where just a little bit of dialogue like "yes", "no", "sounds good", "I understand", "please explain more" or "what do you mean" would be quite sufficient and make things a bit more seamless. They already have a few lines done in 16 voices. Would it really by that much trouble for a bit more like that?
So, on to other topics, who is everyone else playing as? After the character creation gauntlet of going through and testing all manner of the different options, I ended up with Veronica.
With Elma and Lin as your early teammates, it's made the game more unique by being so female-centric.
I went through chapters 1-3 today and am in the gap where I could select Chapter 4 and start it but am now just trying out various missions. As such, I've been able to select my division. I was interested in a couple of them. Pathfinders is a pretty tempting choice but with Soren mentioning earlier that he went with that, I wanted to do something different. Curators and even Mediators also sounded a bit intriguing. Intercepters, Harriors, Prospectors and Outfitters just didn't interest me because, like I mentioned in an earlier post of possible Civilization gameplay similarities, I'm more about exploring than battling. So, I'm with the Reclaimers. I'm up for going on treasure hunts and installing different data probes. Seemed like a good fit for me.
Haven't tried out any multiplayer and may not for awhile and maybe not until I get myself a skell. Still have a lot to learn about how to battle first and I want to keep levelling up and get some better gear before joining the great online world.
Now for some story stuff.
I was right that Earth seemed to be prepared. It would seem Elma is an alien considering she wonders if her being on Earth attracted the aliens. I wouldn't have thought she was an alien but it seems there is more to her backstory. That's the way I understood things. I love how convoluted the BLADE acronym is. Why make it an acronym even? I'm not sure what I think of the Prone. They just seemed out of place with the rest of the world so far. Like they would fit in more with Rayman's world or even Star Fox. Same goes with Tatsu looking out of place. The major storyline mission seems to be locating the Lifehold. I'm intrigued to see where that leads. I'm also waiting to understand what the meaning of the giant tower's percentage sign is about. It was at 60% when I arrived at NLA but now it's down to 55% yet no one has mentioned anything about it.There's more I'd like to get into but it is late so I'll leave it at that. However, as I posted on Miiverse, one thing that really impresses me about this game is how with all these Skells around and the sci-fi city and elements, it feels like I'm playing in an anime come to life. I mean, just look at this:
And I can maneuver through it all. When you go to the first page of this thread, there's still a link to the original E3 trailer for this game. The way that trailer started with the player character going to his skell has always made so excited about this game with that Gundam like connection and I'm so glad this game has seemed to fulfill that feeling despite me not even piloting a single skell yet!