Since I coincidentally published this mere weeks before Future Redeemed was released, I thought it might be fun to revisit some things now offered clearer contexts through its lore-dumps. Doing a video amendment or volume 2 would be more trouble than it's worth, but I've added indented notes to a handful of points on the blog post: mynameismitchell.wordpress.com/2023/04/08/pneuma-the-monado-trinity-as-present-in-xenoblade-2/ Particularly concerning how FR both affirms and redefines my suggested idea of Zanza/Meyneth as substitute Monado, and proposing a scenario for _how_ the Sword of the End arose as a Monado-adjacent phenomena.
I can sense the love and hard work that goes into your xeno videos and blog posts. Learning a lot here. Very interesting seeing the Birth of a Universe cut scene with filter disable. Almost feels like watching it for first time again.
i’m the original creator of the free camera mods. it’s pretty cool to see someone doing cool stuff with it. on a sadder note i’m too busy with college for now… i haven’t even played x3 yet…
I always considered Pneumas sword to be a Monado because even without the symbols, she has the same power to do anything. Just like Shulks Monado, all it took was to think it and you can suddenly do it. Great video! I love all the screenshots you took, they look super cool!
It's a crime this doesn't have more views, this has to one of the best Xenoblade analysis videos on this whole platform. Thank you so much for devoting so much time into this masterpiece!!
25:26 I just realized this is literally the same way Alien X functions in Ben 10. Two personalities, one masculine and selfish, one feminine and compassionate, debating endlessly until they find middle ground. How didn't I realize it used the Animus Anima concept sooner. Awesome video, love listening to people's interpretation of xenoblade
Incredible video! I'm surprised it took the algorithm so long to recommend it to me. The screenshots and general camera work you did was really interesting and breathed so much life to this vid, i'm really impressed you played through all of XC2 and XCX to get those angles, imo those 2 are the least replayable xeno-games. It's cool that someone else recognized that XC2 was narratively disguising itself as fantasy until The Cliffs of Morytha! Also neat to learn about Xenogears 'Kadomony'! I had speculated that Zanza and Meyneth were substitute Pneuma and Logos after finishing XC3FR, but learning that the origin of this Trinity came all the way from Xenogears throws a new spin on it. Man i gotta get around to emulating Xenogears someday.. Not to end this comment on a sour note, but i've got to admit that i find your pronunciation of 'Pneuma' and 'Agniratha' really distracting. I'm pretty sure the 'P' in Pneuma is silent and it's pronounced more like 'Nu-mah'. You're also incorrectly pronouncing 'Agniratha' as 'Aginatha', It is a nitpick, but these two names pops up so much in this vid it's hard not to notice. Are you playing these games with Japanese voices maybe? Edit: Wanted to also praise how you managed to keep my attention without using ANY dialogue from the game (aside from the intro), and how well everything is displayed. The rounded corners on many of the images is really pleasing to the eye and what's on-screen is always relevant to what you're talking about. I think your video has changed my attitude towards XC2 and it's fanbase for the better. You display such a breadth of knowledge about the whole series and managed to make a vid about XC2 that doesn't primarily consist of surface-level observations and comments on surface-level criticisms from outsiders. This video is really, really impressive and entertaining.
What do we think about Noah's blade now that we know the gauntlet houses pneuma's core? The oroboros "sword of the end" form also strikingly similar to Malo's more "scimitar" Monado design as well. That final cutscene in FR really just has my head spinning even weeks after beating it
This video is so good, I can't believe it took me this long to find it. I know in a pinned comment you said its more trouble than its worth but id love if one day you ever made another Xenoblade analysis!
The best part about the Persona, Anima, and Animus section of the video is that Future Redeemed would eventually explain this exact scenario regarding the Trinity Processor. And it wasn't even out when this video was released.
I'm glad to see someone else pick up on the Trinity Core Processor = Kadomony thing. This and your anime reference videos for Xenoblade/Xenogears are excellent as well.
I spent all game thinking about that too haha. It definitely would have been cool since that way the games in the trilogy would follow one of the Trinity Processor cores each (at current Xenoblade 3 kinda seems to care more about being Xenogears 2), and I did feel there was a suspiciously prevalent amount of purple ether in Aionios. The blue, gold and purple ether peppered throughout the game clearly brings to mind Alvis, Mythra and Malos and I don't think Monolith could have done that accidentally. But the purple ether is linked to the villains, whereas Malos had something of a redemption in his closing moments. I'm fairly certain the Logos processor actually shattered in XC2's finale (though his personality hangs around for a little bit to help run Aion so maybe I'm wrong), and Pneuma lost her powers when the Conduit left, so Alvis is probably the only active processor/Monado left standing (in my reading the way he created "a world without gods" was taking the Conduit and vanishing, so he'd still have his full Monado capacity).
@@skapbadoa Malos would 100% be on Noahs side instead of Moebius if he was in the game, so it is a bit unfortunate. even if it wouldn't make much sense. Pneuma may have lost her powers, but Pyra and Mythra still have their core. If Alvis is using the Conduit in the DLC, I see no reason why Pyra and Mythra can't tap back into it. I always thought the conduit itself decided to leave because it was no longer needed, but your theory that Alvis took it to recreate Shulks world and then dipped with that infinite power makes more sense and is way funnier.
AHHHHHHHHHH i love how much sense this makes. I LOVE deep diving into the lore of games that I really like, but I'm not all that great at it. Xenoblade 1 and 2 are probably my two favorite games ever, and so i absolutely loved this. (spoiler for some of the things in the video, in case you haven't watched it yet) I know this is kinda just me agreeing with what you said in the video, but there is a line that Egil says that keeps ringing in my head: "The Monado is Zanza; Zanza is the Monado. They are one and the same." And, again, like you said, that really does imply that Alvis made Zanza and Meyneth to be the "Male" and "Female" parts of the Kadomony... "process"? (I don't fully understand the lore of it all). Not that he created Klaus and (omg I cannot remember Meyneth's original name), but he made them into God's to perform that task of completing the Kadomony "process" (AGAIN, IDK IF THAT'S THE RIGHT TERM, BUT YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN). It's just interesting to think that Klaus and (I'll just call her Meyneth) may not have originally been anything other than simple people in the xenoblade 1 world.
Here: th-cam.com/video/4_LRovuCTY4/w-d-xo.html Unfortunately most of the cutscene is prerendered, so the sepia tone and low res is baked into the video file. Meaning no proper look at Klaus and Galea without the filter (annoyingly this applies to Malos and Amalthus vs the warships too so it's impossible to get a good screenshot of them together). The only particularly interesting tidbit I noticed removing it is the colouration of the Saviorite Colossus being white/blue with blue ether beams. Which becomes weird since Aoidos' Artifice Colossus (seen both in this cutscene and the Orbital Ring area as enemies) are black/red with golden ether beams. The Saviorite Colossus do have zohar-shaped generators (found in an XC2 model/texture dump) but they don't have the halos which indicate a link to the Conduit, hence the blue ether. But it's odd that it almost seems to be a three-way battle, since the black/red Artifice Colossus are shown battling both the Saviorite Colossus and Artifice Siren echelon.
@@skapbadoa Really interesting stuff ! It's crazy to me that they bothered to make a colorswap despite the filter. The blue energy thing reminds me of Sellers' Zohar Emulator which has a blue core : th-cam.com/video/Wr9S9sTQw50/w-d-xo.html I guess the artifices could be powered by a similar emulator which would explain that they have Slave Generator (or they copy-pasted the model without removing it). Sellers is affiliated with the Salvator faction in Xenosaga, which is the japanese name to the Saviorite rebels so that makes this parallel more meaningful. I can"t find the part where a black/red Colossus is battling a Siren though
@@zenobros2808 You're right with that last part actually. Looking it over again there is no clear shot of a black/red Colossus attacking Siren. What we do see is that the Colossus at 1:04 gets blasted by a gold beam. I then simply made a mistake and thought that at around 1:10 the Siren was getting shot at with both blue and gold beams, and putting those together meant the Colossus and Sirens were battling. But looking again the gold beams at 1:10 are actually coming from the Siren, so that shot is just Siren vs the Saviorites. With the way these shots follow on from each other, it might just be that the black/red Colossus destroyed by a Siren beam at 1:04 was meant to be a collateral damage misfire.
I remember Pyra talking about her energy being the excess of energy leaking through the seal of Mythra when she explains exactly what happened with Mythra's awakening. With Torna the Golden Country, it seems safe to assume that Mythra represented the exact same thing for Pneuma. The game claims Mythra is the aegis' true form but she's more the true form of the blade form than the true form itself, which is the form of the trinity processor, aka Pneuma. Adam awakened her as a blade because she could only be controled this way for him. Rex was able to use the actual true form of the aegis though. This makes Mythra nothing more than the true form of the aegis for most people of Alrest as far as they know. There isn't actually a real problem or a real confusion here. You can also call Pneuma either Pyra or Mythra and if Mythra represented a sort of right answer, choosing Pyra would simply be incorrect, which shows that the only true aegis has always been Pneuma. How exactly Malos succeeded to break free from the control of Amalthus stays very vague and lacks practical details though. The major thing is Pneuma seems to suffer from amnesia when Malos had full power and conscience from the start just like Alvis. Of course it has to be in order for the story to work but it would have been welcomed to get a concrete explanation from Klaus about her amnesia compared to Malos.
The concept art of Pneuma and Malos used comes from the "Xenoblade 2: Official Artworks - Alrest Records" XC2 artbook. You can find scans on archive org pretty easily be googling it, or otherwise new physical copies are still available on Amazon JP by searching "ゼノブレイド2 オフィシャルアートワークス アルスト・レコード" (the XC1 and XCX artbooks are in stock too). They're untranslated though, so for this video I just chucked some relevant pages into google translate's image upload function as necessary.
Nowhere in particular. I used freecam to zoom in on the XC1 DE title screen of the Monado in the field, then cut out the other two in photoshop and placed them there to resemble XC3's image of the three red swords together. imgur.com/a/oZp3PNo
It's pronounced this way in the japanese dub and I somehow managed to never hear the english version until just after this was already published. By this point it's too ingrained in me to switch.
"pn" just sounding like "n" is just an English thing since /pn/ is an invalid consonant cluster, so "pneuma", along with many other Greek words with the same start, have a silent p in English. In other languages though, the p should generally be pronounced when possible. I will say that seems to be 2 syllables even in Greek. If the pronunciation used here is how it's said in Japanese, I'm pretty sure that's just a side-effect of Japanese's more limited syllable structure. TLDR: I consider the Greek pronunciation to be the "correct" one, and both the English and Japanese pronunciations are "wrong" in different ways.
Since I coincidentally published this mere weeks before Future Redeemed was released, I thought it might be fun to revisit some things now offered clearer contexts through its lore-dumps. Doing a video amendment or volume 2 would be more trouble than it's worth, but I've added indented notes to a handful of points on the blog post: mynameismitchell.wordpress.com/2023/04/08/pneuma-the-monado-trinity-as-present-in-xenoblade-2/
Particularly concerning how FR both affirms and redefines my suggested idea of Zanza/Meyneth as substitute Monado, and proposing a scenario for _how_ the Sword of the End arose as a Monado-adjacent phenomena.
I can sense the love and hard work that goes into your xeno videos and blog posts. Learning a lot here. Very interesting seeing the Birth of a Universe cut scene with filter disable. Almost feels like watching it for first time again.
Would love to hear your thoughts on the lore reveals from Future redeemed at some point!
i’m the original creator of the free camera mods. it’s pretty cool to see someone doing cool stuff with it.
on a sadder note i’m too busy with college for now… i haven’t even played x3 yet…
I always considered Pneumas sword to be a Monado because even without the symbols, she has the same power to do anything. Just like Shulks Monado, all it took was to think it and you can suddenly do it.
Great video! I love all the screenshots you took, they look super cool!
It's a crime this doesn't have more views, this has to one of the best Xenoblade analysis videos on this whole platform. Thank you so much for devoting so much time into this masterpiece!!
He really do hit diff
25:26 I just realized this is literally the same way Alien X functions in Ben 10. Two personalities, one masculine and selfish, one feminine and compassionate, debating endlessly until they find middle ground. How didn't I realize it used the Animus Anima concept sooner.
Awesome video, love listening to people's interpretation of xenoblade
Well this aged EXTREMELY well
this theory of yours was completely on point for what happened in future redeemed and the overall xenoblade series, you deserve more views.
Incredible video! I'm surprised it took the algorithm so long to recommend it to me.
The screenshots and general camera work you did was really interesting and breathed so much life to this vid, i'm really impressed you played through all of XC2 and XCX to get those angles, imo those 2 are the least replayable xeno-games.
It's cool that someone else recognized that XC2 was narratively disguising itself as fantasy until The Cliffs of Morytha!
Also neat to learn about Xenogears 'Kadomony'! I had speculated that Zanza and Meyneth were substitute Pneuma and Logos after finishing XC3FR, but learning that the origin of this Trinity came all the way from Xenogears throws a new spin on it. Man i gotta get around to emulating Xenogears someday..
Not to end this comment on a sour note, but i've got to admit that i find your pronunciation of 'Pneuma' and 'Agniratha' really distracting.
I'm pretty sure the 'P' in Pneuma is silent and it's pronounced more like 'Nu-mah'.
You're also incorrectly pronouncing 'Agniratha' as 'Aginatha', It is a nitpick, but these two names pops up so much in this vid it's hard not to notice. Are you playing these games with Japanese voices maybe?
Edit: Wanted to also praise how you managed to keep my attention without using ANY dialogue from the game (aside from the intro), and how well everything is displayed. The rounded corners on many of the images is really pleasing to the eye and what's on-screen is always relevant to what you're talking about.
I think your video has changed my attitude towards XC2 and it's fanbase for the better. You display such a breadth of knowledge about the whole series and managed to make a vid about XC2 that doesn't primarily consist of surface-level observations and comments on surface-level criticisms from outsiders. This video is really, really impressive and entertaining.
This was a great watch especially after Future redeemed!
What do we think about Noah's blade now that we know the gauntlet houses pneuma's core? The oroboros "sword of the end" form also strikingly similar to Malo's more "scimitar" Monado design as well. That final cutscene in FR really just has my head spinning even weeks after beating it
This video is so good, I can't believe it took me this long to find it. I know in a pinned comment you said its more trouble than its worth but id love if one day you ever made another Xenoblade analysis!
19:48 Future Redeemed does a massive lore dump on (Spoilers)…
Ontos relating to Origin, and Pneuma relating to the Sword of the End.
Logos is sword of the end and pneuma the fists
Logos is N’s Sword of the End.
Pneuma is Matthew’s Fists and Noah’s Sword of the End.
The best part about the Persona, Anima, and Animus section of the video is that Future Redeemed would eventually explain this exact scenario regarding the Trinity Processor. And it wasn't even out when this video was released.
I'm glad to see someone else pick up on the Trinity Core Processor = Kadomony thing.
This and your anime reference videos for Xenoblade/Xenogears are excellent as well.
As little sense as it would make, wouldn't it be so cool if Noah awakened Malos so all 3 protagonists can have a Monado of the trinity processor?
I spent all game thinking about that too haha. It definitely would have been cool since that way the games in the trilogy would follow one of the Trinity Processor cores each (at current Xenoblade 3 kinda seems to care more about being Xenogears 2), and I did feel there was a suspiciously prevalent amount of purple ether in Aionios. The blue, gold and purple ether peppered throughout the game clearly brings to mind Alvis, Mythra and Malos and I don't think Monolith could have done that accidentally.
But the purple ether is linked to the villains, whereas Malos had something of a redemption in his closing moments. I'm fairly certain the Logos processor actually shattered in XC2's finale (though his personality hangs around for a little bit to help run Aion so maybe I'm wrong), and Pneuma lost her powers when the Conduit left, so Alvis is probably the only active processor/Monado left standing (in my reading the way he created "a world without gods" was taking the Conduit and vanishing, so he'd still have his full Monado capacity).
@@skapbadoa Malos would 100% be on Noahs side instead of Moebius if he was in the game, so it is a bit unfortunate. even if it wouldn't make much sense.
Pneuma may have lost her powers, but Pyra and Mythra still have their core. If Alvis is using the Conduit in the DLC, I see no reason why Pyra and Mythra can't tap back into it.
I always thought the conduit itself decided to leave because it was no longer needed, but your theory that Alvis took it to recreate Shulks world and then dipped with that infinite power makes more sense and is way funnier.
AHHHHHHHHHH i love how much sense this makes. I LOVE deep diving into the lore of games that I really like, but I'm not all that great at it. Xenoblade 1 and 2 are probably my two favorite games ever, and so i absolutely loved this.
(spoiler for some of the things in the video, in case you haven't watched it yet)
I know this is kinda just me agreeing with what you said in the video, but there is a line that Egil says that keeps ringing in my head: "The Monado is Zanza; Zanza is the Monado. They are one and the same." And, again, like you said, that really does imply that Alvis made Zanza and Meyneth to be the "Male" and "Female" parts of the Kadomony... "process"? (I don't fully understand the lore of it all). Not that he created Klaus and (omg I cannot remember Meyneth's original name), but he made them into God's to perform that task of completing the Kadomony "process" (AGAIN, IDK IF THAT'S THE RIGHT TERM, BUT YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN).
It's just interesting to think that Klaus and (I'll just call her Meyneth) may not have originally been anything other than simple people in the xenoblade 1 world.
Id argue that Pyra and Mythra’s sword are also monados
+ Great video overall
- Your pronunciation of "Pneuma" makes me want to pull my hair out. Lol
19:34 normal lucky 7 is Fiora the holder of Meyneth monado/soul
Really cool in-depth theory/analysis. Also, you can remove the sepia filter in the chapter 10 opening cutscene ! I'd love to see an upload of it
Here: th-cam.com/video/4_LRovuCTY4/w-d-xo.html
Unfortunately most of the cutscene is prerendered, so the sepia tone and low res is baked into the video file. Meaning no proper look at Klaus and Galea without the filter (annoyingly this applies to Malos and Amalthus vs the warships too so it's impossible to get a good screenshot of them together). The only particularly interesting tidbit I noticed removing it is the colouration of the Saviorite Colossus being white/blue with blue ether beams. Which becomes weird since Aoidos' Artifice Colossus (seen both in this cutscene and the Orbital Ring area as enemies) are black/red with golden ether beams. The Saviorite Colossus do have zohar-shaped generators (found in an XC2 model/texture dump) but they don't have the halos which indicate a link to the Conduit, hence the blue ether. But it's odd that it almost seems to be a three-way battle, since the black/red Artifice Colossus are shown battling both the Saviorite Colossus and Artifice Siren echelon.
@@skapbadoa Really interesting stuff ! It's crazy to me that they bothered to make a colorswap despite the filter. The blue energy thing reminds me of Sellers' Zohar Emulator which has a blue core : th-cam.com/video/Wr9S9sTQw50/w-d-xo.html
I guess the artifices could be powered by a similar emulator which would explain that they have Slave Generator (or they copy-pasted the model without removing it). Sellers is affiliated with the Salvator faction in Xenosaga, which is the japanese name to the Saviorite rebels so that makes this parallel more meaningful.
I can"t find the part where a black/red Colossus is battling a Siren though
@@zenobros2808 You're right with that last part actually. Looking it over again there is no clear shot of a black/red Colossus attacking Siren. What we do see is that the Colossus at 1:04 gets blasted by a gold beam. I then simply made a mistake and thought that at around 1:10 the Siren was getting shot at with both blue and gold beams, and putting those together meant the Colossus and Sirens were battling.
But looking again the gold beams at 1:10 are actually coming from the Siren, so that shot is just Siren vs the Saviorites. With the way these shots follow on from each other, it might just be that the black/red Colossus destroyed by a Siren beam at 1:04 was meant to be a collateral damage misfire.
If we could just..... *UNLOCC* .....the Monado's Power
I enjoyed the video but GOD DAMN your pronunciation of some of the names is killing me lmao Al’vís and P’neyuma
I remember Pyra talking about her energy being the excess of energy leaking through the seal of Mythra when she explains exactly what happened with Mythra's awakening. With Torna the Golden Country, it seems safe to assume that Mythra represented the exact same thing for Pneuma. The game claims Mythra is the aegis' true form but she's more the true form of the blade form than the true form itself, which is the form of the trinity processor, aka Pneuma. Adam awakened her as a blade because she could only be controled this way for him. Rex was able to use the actual true form of the aegis though. This makes Mythra nothing more than the true form of the aegis for most people of Alrest as far as they know. There isn't actually a real problem or a real confusion here. You can also call Pneuma either Pyra or Mythra and if Mythra represented a sort of right answer, choosing Pyra would simply be incorrect, which shows that the only true aegis has always been Pneuma. How exactly Malos succeeded to break free from the control of Amalthus stays very vague and lacks practical details though. The major thing is Pneuma seems to suffer from amnesia when Malos had full power and conscience from the start just like Alvis. Of course it has to be in order for the story to work but it would have been welcomed to get a concrete explanation from Klaus about her amnesia compared to Malos.
Nice video
The monado is a fucking Dev-tool
Did you make that thumbnail I love the art
Will threre be a part 2 to this video?
Great video, but the way you pronounce “Pneuma” is killing me lol.
I feel like I am being punched in the face every time I hear it
Where is the artwork at 7:51 from?
The concept art of Pneuma and Malos used comes from the "Xenoblade 2: Official Artworks - Alrest Records" XC2 artbook. You can find scans on archive org pretty easily be googling it, or otherwise new physical copies are still available on Amazon JP by searching "ゼノブレイド2 オフィシャルアートワークス アルスト・レコード" (the XC1 and XCX artbooks are in stock too). They're untranslated though, so for this video I just chucked some relevant pages into google translate's image upload function as necessary.
where's the thumbnail from?
Nowhere in particular. I used freecam to zoom in on the XC1 DE title screen of the Monado in the field, then cut out the other two in photoshop and placed them there to resemble XC3's image of the three red swords together.
imgur.com/a/oZp3PNo
Its pronounced Numa, not Pin A Uma.
It's pronounced this way in the japanese dub and I somehow managed to never hear the english version until just after this was already published. By this point it's too ingrained in me to switch.
"pn" just sounding like "n" is just an English thing since /pn/ is an invalid consonant cluster, so "pneuma", along with many other Greek words with the same start, have a silent p in English. In other languages though, the p should generally be pronounced when possible.
I will say that seems to be 2 syllables even in Greek. If the pronunciation used here is how it's said in Japanese, I'm pretty sure that's just a side-effect of Japanese's more limited syllable structure.
TLDR: I consider the Greek pronunciation to be the "correct" one, and both the English and Japanese pronunciations are "wrong" in different ways.
OMG. Why can’t you Pneuma? They say it 100 times in the game. The p is silent.
It’s literally New-ma.
nah bruh puhnehyooma@@SnowCoveredKK
Great video but I hope you realize how irritating it is when you miss-pronounce everyone's name.