In parallel to replaying Dragon Knight Saga, I'm currently also replaying the UbiSoft game Hype The Time Quest. Another game from my childhood with a suprisingly deep story, and a game which I sometimes think maybe inspired some of the decisions in the design of Divinity 2. Given that Larian and UbiSoft collaborated on some earlier games of the Divinity series, maybe that isn't too far fetched.
Anyways, it's just now that I started paying attention to the "themes" of the stories of those games. Hype The Time Quest is all about the main character being humble whereas the antagonists are being corrupted by their power. The narrator even asks at the end if there is a moral to the story, and if there is, it would be about humility.
Well, that got me thinking about the moral of the story of Ego Draconis specifically. I don't know if Flames of Vengeance was planned from the beginning, but if it wasn't...
...well, then the moral is kind of that you weren't ideologically blinded enough? And that maintaining your closed dragonslayer world view of dragon knights being the evil ones would have been the right thing to do?
Lucian says the reason you were susceptible to Talana's / Ygerna's manipulation is because your mind was still vulnerable after the initiation. You can clearly see how no other dragonslayer even has the patience to listen to your story (well, except for Kenneth, but being a prisoner of Sentinel Island and at your mercy, he doesn't really have a choice). Throughout your transformation process into a dragon knight, this ideological blindness of the dragonslayers is framed a a bad thing - but ultimately, at least a far as Ego Draconis is concerned, they were right:
Had you just killed "Talana" like you originally intended, Broken Valley wouldn't have been destroyed, Aleroth wouldn't have been overrun by undead, Ygerna wouldn't have been revived. Every other dragonslayer would have been shielded against Ygerna's temptation by their own ideological blindness and zealotry.
Even in Flames of Vengeance, you merely get to rectify your mistake from the main game.
I'm not saying this is the message the developers were intending to send. In fact, the twist at the ending of the game seems to me like an early case of the infamous "subversion of expectations" (Star Wars VIII, Game of Thrones Season 8): A plot twist for plot twist's sake - and maybe even one that runs against the intended theme of the story, causing the plot twist to fail. It only causes frustration for viewers / players, for no apparent reason because it doesn't enhance the message of the story.
