What are your final thoughts on Aether? How do they compare

>>31890964
Is that a motherfucking JoJo reference?

Faba is shit. Wicke does nothing memorable. Lusamine is just a crazy woman.

Team Skull > every other group.

Aether Employees have unclear motives and therefore pointless aggression towards the player. If they agreed with and fought for their bosses' plans for alien invasion, thus an act of biological warfare, how are none of them reprimanded for their actions? They come off as seriously sinister and foreboding, with the intent to make the player "disappear" [???], but then walk it off the second Lusamine gets dealt with. Very poorly handled grunts.

Wicke isn't very interesting. She had the potential to be, with her involvement as a spy in the later parts in the game, but this just boils down to her spewing words of exposition at the player's demand. She doesn't actually do anything the entire game. Her design is banging, though. The cock do.

Faba is the most pointless part of the Aether Foundation. His role could have been swapped out with a random Aether Researcher and his character would be exactly the same. He doesn't have enough of a personality outside repeating the same two-dimensional element of contempt in his character in every single little thing he says. Very surprised to see he made it as a rematch for the Champion Title of all things when I'm fairly certain battles were never ever his strong-suit.

cont;

>>31890964
trash
no plot development or any motives
its just
>go to af
>oh everyone hates me now
>beat lusamine
>oh jk anon we didnt like what she was doing anyway
what a fucking mess of disappointing wasted potential

>>31891003
Lusamine is a victim of the pandering the entire game does not to the protagonist, but to Lillie. She is Lillie's enemy, not the players. Lusamine does not to a single thing towards the player outside give them stronger Pokémon to catch later, and is given the role of a villain the player must overcome as their enemy. What it boils down to, however, is Lillie using the player as her "Pokémon" to fight a battle she is incapable of doing.
Furthermore, she's once again, another two-dimensional character which falls back on the tired excuse of "I'm crazy!" far too often to be anything other than just another battle and cutscene in the game to breeze through and move on past.
A lot of her character would be resolved if there was a single option anywhere in the game for the player to tell her where her husband is, but this option was apparently out of the question. Unreal.

Overall, if the very first thing you see in the game and the Aether Foundation's connection to the cast tells us anything, it's that they're fine antagonists for the main character. The main character isn't the player, however. It's Lillie and her brother. As enemies for the player, they're terrible; the only times you can feel emotionally invested towards their actions as an individual is when they start messing with Pokémon as part of their experiment, which is much too sparce to warrant their actions as a whole.

Really fucking good fight themes, though.

I like how it was an honest organization to the people working there and they fight you just to follow orders. You could say bw1 plasma is similar, but in that one, it was a fanatics cult, so even ignoring the fact that the higher ups are villains, you had to be fucked up to join.

As for the individual characters, lusamine is great, fava is weird, he acts like he was evil but he really didnt do shit. Wicke was pointless. To be fair though, they shared the game with skull.

>>31891016
Literally perfect response. And the reason the late game fell flat for me. I was in Ultra Space when it dawned on me that nothing I was doing was related to me or a character or my growth or my motivations, but was all about other people and me being a silent passerby.

>>31890964
Lusamine was bad because she's shown as completely unhinged, and unlike Cyrus, who was shown as a messed up kid but still messed up, after the game ends, we battle Lusamine and at LITERALLY the very last second we find out she wasnt really evil, with zero indication before and no explanation why, and then the game ends. Pushing the reasons for her descent to postgame was a terrible idea.

Like others have said, it is entirely unclear where the Aether Employees stand. They talk about the company having a dark side so they arent just ignorant grunts like Galactic Grunts, and there doesnt seem to be two sides with the good ones actively working against the other like Plasma, because all the "good" guys never mention the bad stuff, yet when the game ends all of Aether is good with no explanation.

They seem good for most of the game, which was pointless because the very beginning showed them as evil anyways.

Bad.

They're pretty lame. I've already forgotten what their motives were. Lusamine was a pretty horrible villain.

I like how rather than making them entirely "suddenly evil because fuck you", that it was mostly the higher ups that were shady, while normal employees were just told to stop the player. I wish they'd played up that aspect more honestly.

Like many things in the game, it feels like they ran out of time and had to rush the game out. Other anons already mentioned it, Aether had no development or anything. You are introduced to it, then nothing, then "lol you have to go raid it because reasons." It fits but there was just no depth to it.

>>31890964
The girl grunt is cute

>>31890964
Wasted potential. You can't either agree or disagree with them because their motives are so ethereal and forgettable... like Aether... now I get it. Genius!

bunch of dumbasses and enablers employed by a selfish lunatic

the only good member of that bloodline is gladion. bless that boy and his null

As villains there is absoltely no meaningful buildup, the motives of the grunts are unclear with some stuff implying they were just following orders and others implying Lusamine purposely hired shady fuckers and more issues, and Lusamine is the worst kind of insane villain, so they're pretty fucking shit.

Cool uniforms though and the raid itself is great for Hau/Gladion interaction.

They'd be a lot worse if Skull didn't carry the game.

Lusamine is good though.