Hi Niara nice to chat with you again. It's been a little while.
I find it interesting that you don't consider N as the main antagonist, but since you put it the way that you did I guess I can kind of see why.
To me, they are the main antagonist because they are the individual pulling all the strings and causing all the problems. The individual you are referring to as the main antagonist, to me, is more like the motive for the main antagonist. I did not really view that person as the main antagonist. But I suppose you could.
Regardless, the moment N told me their story, I pretty much got the gist of the entire situation. When things started happening in My Kingdom, I said to myself, I know who's behind this and they actually told me where to find them. Let's get an army together and go hunt them down and take them out. But that wasn't an option. I had to pretend like I didn't know who was behind it and slowly and painstakingly allow my kingdom to go through all sorts of terrible stuff as if I had no idea what was happening or who was behind it.
That's the part, to me, that I really didn't like about the story. Especially in act 3 when so many things were going wrong, I was kind of frustrated and felt like a loser leader because here all my people are suffering and nobody seems to know what is going on. I felt like I wish that they had given me the ability to somehow prevent more tragedies from occurring because I knew who was behind it, knew where to find them, and even guessed the source of said issues in act 3. My point is just that they made it a bit too obvious every step of the way.
In bg3, I feel like I have had to really work hard just to try to figure out what I have, and I'm not even confident that what I suspect is the case is actually the case, especially after talking with other people who have different theories. The story keeps you guessing, and you may even have to do several playthroughs to fully understand everything. I don't feel like I'm sitting there thinking that we should do this, that, or the other thing in order to stop the bad guys. I'm relatively clueless as to how we're going to get out of our predicament.
You know, the more I think about it though the more I realize that it isn't much different from Shadowheart. I feel like in bg3 it is pretty dang obvious that Shadowheart is a Sharon, but I'm supposed to pretend like I'm surprised when I find out she is. So, I guess in that regard they are similar.
