Why Star Ocean 4 Is A Terrible Game Part 3

 This part follows up from Part 2 to explain some things that make the writing bad in more detail.

All warnings since Part 1 still apply

1. The Muah being plot relevant at all is lore breaking

The mere fact a lot of key plot twists hinge on the Muah is a massive canon breaker in and of itself. The Muah were part of the big series reveal in SO1 and SO2 that humanity, via their common ancestors the Muah, inadvertently seeded many of the races they would later encounter.

Further, the fact anymore more than scattered records of their existence were available in SO4 is canon-breaking. The whole point to them being a "lost civilization" is that their continent Mu (an archaic term for Atlantis) and the Muah themselves were essentially yeeted across time and space, leaving nothing but apocryphal records of themselves behind, which matches how Atlantis is portrayed IRL, which is what they were based on.

However, in blatant defiance of canon backed up by SO1 and SO2 and even SO3, SO4 decides to ignore their established canon and claims not only were ruins of theirs discovered, humanity also discovered symbology without knowing it from said ruins.

Given this all takes place 300 years before humanity should have had the first reasonable inkling symbology was a thing (this is a key plot point of SO1), this really defies series canon.

To be fair, just their mention alone is not canon breaking. When the Cardinaon leader brings them up, it's not inconceivable they were filled in on the basics due to their contact with the Grigori, and this alone would be a nice call-forward to Star Ocean 1.

Anything beyond this is where they step over the line and break prior canon to crowbar them into a story that is only harmed by their inclusion.

Unfortunately, a huge portion of SO4 hinges on breaking this canon from the prior games.

2. Symbology is somewhat less lore-breaking, but still a pretty bad breach of canon.

Simply put, symbology SHOULD NOT EXIST in this game, at least not under that name.

For one thing, it's Star Ocean's version of magic, and canonically, the Pangalactic Federation only really became aware of it in Star Ocean 1. The fact it existed prior to that is not unrealistic, though it wasn't until post-Star Ocean 1 that the Pangalactic Federation integrated it into their tech and made it an official discipline.

The problem with it in Star Ocean 4 is that they, first of all, used the name "symbology" for it, and second, made it a key backstory element like the Muah. These both break canon so badly it's not funny and makes the discovery of both in Star Ocean 1 look idiotic because it was supposed to be a big deal when both were discovered in Star Ocean 1. SO4 didn't care to keep either vague in the slightest for the sake of plausible deniability to avoid too severe a canon break, they just make it a commonplace element no one really questions despite the fact it's three hundred years too early for humanity to be well acquainted with it.

Sure, you can have it exist in some form, but tying it to both the main characters via the Muah (another canon breaking piece of writing) and making both explicit plot elements that break later canon is just pushing it too far. Star Ocean 1 made it so only one human character got ahold of it, and then they had to learn it the hard way. Star Ocean 4 drops in on your main male character for no real reason except to crowbar it into the game. Sure, they gave symbology to the previous protagonist in some form, but that had a perfectly logical reason for it that didn't defy prior established canon.

3. The Grigori will soon make no sense

The Grigori are initially introduced as a force of evolution gone horribly wrong, granting great power and knowledge, but with the price of mutating the minds and bodies of those they uplift. This made decent sense, and early on, this motive suffices to both give a good prequel reason for why the Pangalactic Federation would later develop the Underdeveloped Planet Presevation Pact (UP3) for later games and provided a good foil to the heroes, who quickly realize handing out advanced knowledge to lesser races like candy is unwise.

Problem is, the writers will quickly add on what amounts to a self-destructive sci-fi take on a death cult motive to the Grigori and will soon write themselves into a corner where they have to invent some way to stop them since they lack a clear "leader" to stop to end their threat.

I'll belay more for further parts, but honesty, they were a pretty decent villain concept that was horrifically derailed into something stupid.

Part 4 will cover more information about the plot so I can detail some more canon breakage and generally asinine writing.

Why Star Ocean 4 Is A Terrible Game Part 2

 The first part of this review of the plot of Star Ocean 4 covered general issues with the story and the characters and their story compatibility with the plot itself.

This post will cover the plot in more detail up to the end of the Alternate Earth arc. All notices applied to the prior post still apply, including this including spoilers. This will not be a line-by-line breakdown of the plot, but more an overview and pointing out the flaws where applicable.

1. The Backstory

As a prequel to the rest of the series, Star Ocean 4 is set in SD 10, quite early on. It's set a few decades after a nearly apocalyptic World War 3, after which humanity not only realized they needed to lay down their arms lest they destroy themselves, they looked to expansion to the stars as a means of saving themselves.

That said, it's worth mentioning Star Ocean 4 is a bit inconsistent. Early games mentioned Earth was somewhat dirty but livable, and Star Ocean 3, set at the end of the known timeline, is a few hundred years after reconstructing Earth and what we did see didn't look too bad off, and given the amount of time that had elapsed, it can be reasonably inferred most of Earth had recovered to a decent looking state prior to the events of SO3 that devastated its surface and population.

Star Ocean 4 wobbles between Earth being nigh uninhabitable, to the point everyone has to live underground, while still showing scenes where humanity is above ground in some areas. Radiation is noted as a common threat, similar to the Fallout series. All further information we get on the state of Earth throughout the rest of SO4 continues to either have Earth be a total wreck or gravely scarred yet still able to support life to some degree.

Another thing that is worth noting is that this game makes heavy retcons to the early history of warp drive and space exploration as mentioned in prior titles, with events of the game providing a justification for why many of these official retcons are not on the "official" record.

Finally, there is a reason the game is subtitled "The Last Hope". A very minor hint is dropped early on with a reference to 'Seeds of Hope" at the beginning of the game, then the plot ignores this until it gets brought up A LOT later, and even then they just give a partial explanation at best and expect the player the be both a Star Ocean lore nerd and willing to accept getting a partial story while the rest is drip fed through painstaking combing of the ingame encyclopedia

More of that when we get there though.

2. Aeos Arc

This arc starts with a recap of the above delivered by Edge on the SRF-003 Calnus, who decided to nope out of the boring induction of the USTA (Universal Science and Technology Administration) given by Deputy Director Shimada, prudent given the man is an unlikable slug of a human being.

We get introduced to Edge's childhood friend Reimi, get a battle sim tutorial, meet Stephen "Lightspeed" Kenny and find out Shimada is a condescending douche to a man with a legit hero's reputation and does more than his smug, bloated superior. After some introductions to Welch Vineyard (recurring character since SO3) and Captain Grafton, not to mention a brief meet with Crowe F. Almedio, Edge's rival/surrogate older brother alongside Reimi for the latter, the Calnus and the other SRF ships launch on their maiden voyage.

It is here the first stupid story decision takes place.

We are shown what "subspace warp" looks like, and a meteor of some sort passes through the subspace field and makes it all go horribly wrong. The reason this scene is stupid is that we find out later human warp tech was reverse-engineered from alien tech yet somehow when we get said alien tech ourselves, this issue never happens, despite the fact the plot says our own warp engines are pretty much a straight up clone of said alien tech in general application.

Basically, the fact the warp drive goes horribly wrong is just a setup for cheap drama.

Despite this, we managed to make it to the planet Aeos, albeit the Calnus crash-landed. It's confirmed other SRF ships, the Balena (SRF-002), Dantedelion (SRF-004), and Eremia (SRF-005) all landed too, in varying states of being smashed up, the Calnus thus far suffered damage that should be repairable after awhile. The SRF-001 Aquila (Crowe's ship) is MIA.

After a brief recon to scout the area after recovering from the landing, Edge and the other SRF troops are attacked by a bunch of insect-like beings, and here is the next bit of stupid.

The bugs are apparently immune to what look like miniature railguns (also called coilguns), and the latter explanation given is the insects generate a field that neutralizes the electromagnetic charge that provides propulsion to the ammo of the gun. This said, Star Ocean needs this scene to establish why futuristic weapons have to be downgraded to fantasy-style weapons, so I can generally roll with this. However, IRL, railguns still fire solid ammo, the railgun is merely using electromagnetism to provide the propulsive effect for the kinetic energy.

So even if we buy that the kinetic force is being greatly reduced by the anti-electromagnetic field, I find it a bit hard to believe the ammo never hits at all, just that it was greatly decelerated, meaning it should hit, but at such low velocity as to do negligible damage, though ingame the ammo never seems to get anywhere near them at all.

But, whatever, they needed an excuse for Edge to grab a nearby metal cutting blade and go old-school sword swinger.

After this, Captain Grafton can't contact the Eremia and it's apparent that they need help, so he rings up Shimada to ask for some reasonable assistance. Shimada is a prick, as expected, but promises to contact "them", and Captain Grafton in the meantime tells Edge to do a recon to learn more from where the projected Eremia crash site is. Reimi winds up coming along, and since she's got a bow (thanks to her backstory helpfully having her learn to use one growing up), she can fight old school too.

After some exploration, they find the Eremia wreckage along with a dying crewmember. Guy admits he had to destroy the ship to kill some monster assaulting the surviving crew and croaks. An alien craft called a Sol shows up, piloted by a guy named Faize, an Eldarian, the Star Ocean version of the Vulcans.

No, seriously, they are literally lawyer-friendly Vulcans in nigh every way, this will become important later.

Faize introduces himself, and confirms he's part of the help Captain Grafton was promised, and that's when a monster shows up out of the wreckage, forcing you three into your first boss battle.

After the Armaros is dead, it leaves behind a strange rock from its yeeted corpse, which Edge reasonably picks up with field tweezers and sticks in a sealed container for later study. After this, you three have to hike back to the Calnus.

Once you get there, you find an entire base facility set up, with the Calnus in its dock. Turns out the Eldarians showed up, helped with repairs, and now this deployed forward base is the Aeos operations center for the Earth and Eldar personnel on-site.

You meet Captain Grafton and Elder Supreme Commander Gahgan, and after handing over that weird rock for study (this never happens, so this plot line goes nowhere), Edge gets handed a surprise promotion to Calnus captain since Grafton needs to help supervise at the new base. You also find out the Calnus got overhauled by the Eldarians, and you, Reimi, and Faize are the new crew of what is now Captain Edge's vessel.

Before we go on to the Lemuris arc, let's cover a few things that get introduced that are poorly explained later.

First, the Eldarian upgrades effectively amount to warp engines that are basically identical to what you had, but no freak meteor can show up and ruin your day. They still a find to screw you over during attempted warp travel once more during the story, but for different reasons later. Second, Gahgan drops a vague hint Faize has many talents and he hopes they will prove useful to you.

The writers got lazy here. The only way you'd know squat about his comments is by poring through the in-game encyclopedia, which is easy to forget even exists. This reveals Faize was heavily genetically modified and a host of other information that the main game never sees fit to cover, so many later scenes have little context. And trust me, this really makes some later scenes make little sense later.

3. Lemuris Arc

The Lemuris arc is when the game attempts to get the main plot off the ground. It is also supposed to show what happened prior to the Pangalactic Federation having their version of the Prime Directive and why they, in part, came up with it.

We start with the team landing not too far from a town called Triom, and when they get out to say hi to the locals, they are very disturbed to have the locals treat them like gods, which they issued appropriately unnerved denials.

Soon after, we meet the village elder Ghimdo and his adopted daughter Lymle. After finding out he has a disease called Bacculus (which is slowly turning him to stone, hence his being in a chair when we meet him), we also find out Lymle wants to visit a nearby place called Alanire Citadel to find a symbological cure. Faize is surprised to see symbology off his world, even the fact it's called such here as well, but Edge agrees to escort her because that's standard hero thing to do, given she looks like six year old despite being far older for reasons the game lazily crammed into the in-game encyclopedia.

Before we continue, let's break down some more stupid.

First off, Lymle had a lot of her backstory crammed into the game encyclopedia, but her summonable hellhound Cerberus (they don't mention the species explicitly, but it's obvious what he references) is implied to come from the Demon Realm of Star Ocean 1, and Lymle's growth was stunted by the same experience, a fact that is generally not relevant to the plot. What is relevant is that since day one, her and Faize are like oil and water for some inexplicable reason.

Also, you might notice the people of Lemuris and Eldar look fairly similar. There is a reason for this.

Also, Bacculus is NOT the Stone Sickness of Star Ocean 1. It's roughly similar, but where Stone Sickness at least tried to obey basic biology to some degree and the first game invested it with enough of a plausible science that curing it would be more a matter of technology than magic, Bacculus is nothing like it, especially since Bacculus turns people to literal stone on the outside, while Stone Sickness essentially calcified the body from the inside until the victim is forced in a comatic state after they freeze up like a statue. If anything Bacculus will turn out to be an incurable plot device pulled out of the butt of the writers to give you a reason to run around Lemuris.

In fact, the actual Stone Sickness will crop up later, but we'll get to that eventually.

Anyway, you have to go to a cliche tower-like dungeon, solve some basic puzzles, and kill off a Dragon Newt, which winds up killing the person there who could help you figure out the symbological cure. Thankfully, you are informed of a Plan B at another town, but not before the game starts a mildly cringey gag where Edge gets assumed a pervert for no good reason.

Once you arrive in the town of Woodsley, a symbologist named Lutea points you in the right direction and wants you to get a copy of the disease on what amounts to a magical photocopier (symbol stone) so a cure can be made. You also get told the route back will be obscured for some reason and you need to find some planet named a Faerie Orchid to get back to Triom. They don't really explain why, this is just to make you take a long way back apparently.

Once you get back to Triom, Ghimdo is still in pain, but he tells you that you aren't the only aliens who had a ship land. Apparently, those lizard people you assumed to be random monsters are connected. After getting what is called a Fire Ring to get past an ice floe blocking the path to it, you find a ship that is not Earth in origin.

Inside, they have you make more use of that Fire Ring and some Plastic Explosives to open blocked doors, with a hard-to-notice warning on them to back off after using the Fire Ring on their detonators before the blast takes off a chunk of party HP. You wind up fighting through a ton of lizard monsters and have to take the long way around more than once due to ice, and after exploring a huge ship (which, if you have the Treasure Sense ability, you can skip 40% of for being empty space), you find out the crew was a lizard-like species called the Cardinaon who apparently crashed and got mutated into those lizard monsters. Worse, the Cardinaon are apparently hostile aliens who intended to invade the planet they landed on.

Soon after, you reach the ship core, where a crystalline entity that is the apparent source of the lizard monsters and Bacculus is hanging. The symbol stone breaks when you try to use it, and instead, the crystal transforms into a huge monster with an angel-like name called Barachiel.

This first boss fight is a difficulty spike out of nowhere where only Edge can do anything resembling damage and fire is the only effective means of doing damage. After its defeat, the lizards across the planet turn to stone and Faize is all "well, we seem to have no more options".

Upon returning to Triom, Ghimdo and a bunch of other people are now stone statues, as the death of the crystal not only killed the lizards, it caused the Bacculus to go into overdrive before the crystal shattered. Basically, you did all that for nothing, save the consolation prize the Bacculus and lizard monsters are gone for good.

Back aboard the Calnus, Faize goes over the data for the Cardinaon and manages to locate their home world, and you prepare to find out more about them.

4. Cardinaon Mothership Arc

This arc is mostly a very long, tedious dungeon crawl, and I'll not bore the reader with too many details except to say the place has tons of cramped hallways, lots of blank, unused rooms, and suffers from being so long the player risks falling asleep.

It starts with a weird discovery. Instead of what should be the home planet of the lizard people, you instead find a giant mothership in its place, and before you can figure out why your vessel is dragged into the lizard people's mothership via tractor beam.

You all get out of the ship on an eerily quiet dock and try to find some of the crew to talk to, but they try to kill you, so you have to beat them up. As you do this, some mysterious woman in a skimpy outfit is watching from somewhere nearby. Some time later, Faize does his terminal hacking magic and discovers this giant mothership has another freaky crystal-like on Lemuris, apparently called an "Epiphanies of Guidance". With this knowledge in hand, your crew attempts to go find it.

Or that was the plan. You instead get caught, put in a holding cell, and a Cardinaon commander quizzes you for some info, confuses Edge by noting he's a descendent of the Muah (in Star Ocean, the common ancestor of modern man and many other races), and then tries to get Edge to tell some 'steel giant" who has been raising Cain to quit running around and causing trouble.

Given the lizard commander is a total lunatic who worships those crystals that jacked up Lemuris and think the knowledge it got from it makes his people gods (despite the fact it also made them feral and insane), Edge instead tells the the "steel giant" to keep breaking stuff and offing these cold-blooded madmen. The lizard commander is dumbfounded at this, plans to keep you in the holding cell until they hunt down the other intruder, at which point he'll decide your fate.

You don't have much time to mope, though, as the 'steel giant' busts in and through the walls of your cell like the Kool-Aid Man. He introduces himself as a cyborg named Bacchus D-79.

Bacchus then infodumps what will be the main plot. He's from the Morphus, a people who are watching out for threats to the universe, and the one both you and he are worried about is what his people call the Grigori. After describing them as a force of malevolent evolution, he also explains that Crowe and the SRF-001 Aquila and Bacchus ran into each other sometime before your crew showed up, and he helped Crowe escape while offering to remain behind to buy the guy some time. You also find out the Cardinaon were a bunch of barely sentient lizards just 200 years ago before the Grigori got to them, and they got turned into a feral invading army in exchange for having their natural evolution fast-forwarded by a few millennia.

In short, the Grigori are the real threat here, and while the game initially bills them as a deranged force of evolution that gives great knowledge but also great insanity along with their gifts Faustian pact style, they get another contradictory motive stapled across the first later that makes a hash of this, but more when we get to that point.

Anyway, Bacchus and your team share enemies, so you decide to team up. You eventually come across another weird crystal thing and Bacchus decides to blow it up as violently as possible. This works, but makes the Cardinaon commander show up in an incoherent rage that you caused what his people consider what made them "gods" go nova, and that's when the pieces reform around the lizard man and turn him ton another Grigori monster, this one called Sahariel.

Edge gets all emo at this point for some weird reason, despite the fact this had to be done because the Cardinaon has become feral madmen, but he doesn't have too much time to mope as the ship is going to self destruct and the lizard commander seriously wound Bacchus with a kamikaze strike. With that, your team bodily lugs the cyborg out through the hallway and attempts to escape.

This starts the typical "escape before the ship explodes" cutscene, only more like "warps to some bizarre corner of space forever", and at one point it looks like you fail. The skimpy-looking chick shows up again to bail you out, but apparently doesn't stick around long enough for you to thank her, and besides, you guys are more concerned with beating the clock. That said, the woman with little clothing notes you "aren't the red-haired man" before hauling tail.

Thankfully, you manage to get off the mothership in the Calnus just as it warps off into parts unknown.

It's then the game recommends you head for Bacchus' home, a place called EN II, where you can find out more about your next move.

This goes horribly wrong somehow, as you somehow, despite having sensors that are sharp enough to detect gravitational disturbances, run into a BLACK HOLE, of all things. As this stupid writing tries valiantly to make you believe it, Edge and company try to warp away from its event horizon before it pulls you in.

A fade-out occurs as the game enters the next plot arc, which is chock full of stupid.

5. Alternate Earth Arc

Be advised, the writing of this arc is head-to-desk agonizingly bad. So if bad writing makes you rage out, be warned, this will give you PLENTY to get mad about.

It starts with the crew waking up to find themselves on a very familiar planet. And not just that, two of them call it home.

That's right, it's EARTH.

However, despite the mass confusion why this Earth is not a radioactive nightmare of poisoned land and toxic skies, Edge and everyone save Lymle and Reimi stick with the ship and the rest do a recon.

First off, while they don't name where you are, it's not hard to guess the location, so I'll just come out and say it. It's Roswell, New Mexico.

After all, what's a game like this without leaning hard on sci-fi cliches, amirite?

Upon entering an old gas station, you find a copy of CHIME (trademark-friendly version of TIME) that is three years old. Given the magazine states the date of production was 1954, you are on a 1957 version of Earth, meaning this Earth is likely either from the actual past or a different timeline altogether. Bacchus also catches a radio broadcast with a clear reference to Sputnik, just make sure we got the year right.

First off, while this scene isn't entirely stupid, the CHIME copy has what looks like Truman on the cover, not Eisenhower. Truman left office in 1952, and this version of Earth is apparently nigh identical to the IRL version and the past of Edge's Earth. However, theories about the weirdness have to wait, as you exit the gas station to find the Calnus surrounded by what are obviously US soldiers. Just as the team is all "now what do we do", the plot drops a helpful person in your lap named Klaus Bachtein in your lap who obviously realizes you are not from this Earth and offers to explain things at his place nearby.

Edge decides to trust Klaus because Klaus basically turns his back to strangers without worrying he'll get shot for the trouble, and once you make it to Kalus' house (where you find Lymle), Klaus gives an infodump.

First off, the Calnus and Reimi are now in the custody of the US military. Also, they should now be in a base located near this world's equivalent to the Barringer Crater (which IRL is in Arizona, not New Mexico). Klaus further explains the base is a black ops place for experimenting on aliens and researching alien tech, and he's not a fan of it.

He was a former member of said base, but quit because of reasons of conscience and not liking the idea of leapfrogging his knowledge instead of figuring stuff out on his own. After a bit more rambling, he makes clear he still sticks around because he hasn't gotten his conscience clean enough yet and wants to liberate the lines that are held captive there as well because they do Mengele-level things to them that don't let him sleep at night. He also utters the classic canards about he doesn't think the people of Earth are mature enough to handle technology beyond their own natural limits, hence why after he helps you get the base captives free, he wants you to take all your alien stuff with you and haul it out ASAP.

Honestly, this is pretty cliche so far but not too bad, but the writing will get retarded fast.

He then leads you out to what looks like a telephone booth and Bacchus turns out his optic camo to hold onto your gear because you don't want to wind up defenseless later, Bacchus will be going in incognito via optic camo with your equipment so the base troops suspect nothing. Sure enough, Klaus gets their attention, a secret entrance rises out of the ground, and some obvious American GIs roughly manhandle your crew into the base while congratulating Klaus on his haul. Meanwhile, as we cut to the next scene, we still have no idea who Klaus refers to as Milla on the phone or his connection to her.

Nothing too overly bad about this scene, the uniform fatigues are reasonably accurate, but the weapons they hold are nothing like you'd expect for the 1950s, looking like a weird chimera of an SMG, light machine gun, and assault rifle.

We cut to a prison cell, and Bacchus hands us our gear after a decloak and Klaus trips all the locks off so we can escape. This rather brief dungeon has some enemy fights against the escape test subjects, all of which are cliches. Stuff like Bigfoot stand-ins, little gray aliens, and even Night of the Living Dead-esque zombies.

Note we also get a scene shortly after the locks deactivate of Klaus getting the crap beaten out of him as a traitor. He pulls out an ocarina which will be important later.

Halfway through we find Meracle, a Lesser Fellpool catgirl about to be killed by a literal chimera. After you save her and make it to the other side of the dungeon, Quelle surprise, you are surrounded by a wall of soldiers.

The soldiers are led by Milla Bachtein, who turns out to be the ex-wife of Klaus, and bizarrely, wears the uniform of a 4-star general in the 1950s. Despite being a woman, mind you.

Milla tries to win you over, even though she does admit to all the Mengele-level horrors you had to fight being her fault. She then spins a very insipid sob story about Earth having an energy crisis and how nuclear is dirty as sin and how all she wants to do is find a clean energy source to fix things.

Before we continue, let's break down how idiotic this is:

1. Earlier, we got confirmation this 1950s is more or less identical to the IRL one, complete with a SPACE RACE. If their energy crisis was that bad, they would not be spending energy on space programs.

2. All you have to go on is her word. The same word you'd be taking from someone who is obviously capable of unethical actions and cruelty so bad her husband and she divorced because her actions sickened him.

3. The IRL world did not have any serious energy concerns in the US until the Oil Crisis of the 1970s.

4. Edge should have enough working knowledge of history, as the SO verse is largely identical to ours for all the above essentials until their WW3 begins, to realize all this.

What Edge does instead of declining to provide anything and insisting on taking his ball and going home is just beyond stupid.

He falls for her story hook, line and sinker, and has an ANTIMATTER Core removed from his ship to give to her in the hopes he can change his own future, despite the fact the last arc smashed us across the face with why handing primitive civilizations tech too advanced for them was dangerous, despite the fact Milla is very unethical as a person at best, the fact she's commanding a black site devoted to alien exploitation, despite Klaus' admonitions getting involved would be suicide, and despite the fact no matter how Edge might think he's acting in good faith, even the rest of the part, albeit halfheartedly, tells him this would be a really bad idea.

Sure enough, it all goes horribly wrong. Edge's unbelievable stupidity is rewarded with being recaptured, Milla reveals she's basically mentally ill, and to the horror of your team is planning to reenact the Half-Life 1 resonance cascade incident by plugging that antimatter core into a spit and pencil generator.

Worse, it's obvious to the team all she's going to do is cause the Earth to go nova because she has no idea what she's doing, and she makes a point to tell you she doesn't care what you think. You do get Reimi back around this point, but considering you've all been locked back up and Milla plans to get everyone killed cause she's crazy means that's not much consolation. Worse, and part of this you need to find out via the in-game encyclopedia, the reason she's insane is that her two-year-old son Kevin died due to radiation poisoning while she and her husband were poking around an alien crash site, she lost her mind, they divorced, and now she's calling her jury-rigged reactor "Kevin" after said deceased son.

It's also worth noting none of the soldiers are remotely nearby because they all basically disappear so the game can let this crazy woman kill the world without restraint.

However, since this would end the game, Klaus manages to have survived being beaten up to bail you out again and while you all run for the Calnus, Klaus accepts the world is going to end and just embraces his absolutely crazy wife to be with her in death because at this point, not much else to do.

Meanwhile, aboard the Calnus, you find Edge idiotically gave Milla your ONLY exalithium crystal with the Antimatter Core, meaning the engine is dead. Thankfully, the plot drops a shameless Deus Ex Machina in your lap as Meracle was apparently carrying one on her this whole time and miraculously, it's a perfect fit for your engine. Cue the Calnus barely getting off Earth before it blows up.

We end with a brief fade-out that apparently sends us through a dimensional warp back to the regular SO universe.

And that's all for this part, I'll cover more later.

Part 3 will cover some more detail about the stupid writing in Part 2 and why it's abysmal before Part 4 will cover more of the game plot.

Why Star Ocean 4 Is A Terrible Game Part 1

 This will be the first in a series of posts why Star Ocean 4 is not only a terrible Star Ocean game, but also a terrible RPG. It WILL contain spoilers. Also, I shall refrain from any profanity whatsoever unless I'm citing any direct quotes or pertinent material that includes that to describe plot points.

This post is going to cover the more general aspects of why it's not a very competent game, later posting will go into further specifics. This post was made based on the Steam port.

1. The voiceacting in the English version is pretty bad

The voice acting in this game, compared to all the other games, is pretty terrible. The English script is overall pretty stilted in delivery, and the game does a horrible job of syncing the dialogue to the dramatic times of most scenes, so even some of the more competent voice acting comes off sounding weird.

Worst of all is Edge Maverick, your main character. He is voiced by Matthew Mercer, and this was a role much earlier in Mercer's career. Mercer is now regarded very highly as a voice actor, but his voice work for Edge is definitely far from his best work. Edge has a halting and slightly nasal tone in many critical scenes, which does little to make him seem like an assertive character, and especially in early scenes, he delivers lines very awkwardly, which does not help. To be fair, some of the more minor dialogue is competent enough, and despite the poor script he manages to invest some scenes with actual dramatic gravitas, but taken as a whole, this was not one of Mercer's better roles and I'm glad he improved drastically. He gets slightly less cringe later on in the script, and even approaches good at times, but more often than not this was far from Matthew Mercer's best role.

Some of the other more known voice actors are pretty good, admittedly. Laura Bailey and Travis Willingham voice some of the better-acted characters and fight tooth and nail against the bad script of the game, managing to sound likable or at least competent at worst. Kyle Herbert voices Arumat P. Thanatos, and despite the fact he's got a VERY tryhard Grim Reaper aesthetic, Herbert manages to pull it off without making one cringe too hard. Everyone else ranges from unremarkable at best to rather overdramatic and corny more often than not.

The Japanese dub is still hobbled by the same basic script, but it's certainly far easier on the ears given most of the Japanese voice work has a wide range of inflection and syncs far better with many scenes. Given some of the English voices are awkwardly pitched, the Japanese dub sounds a lot better due to what appears to have better voice work direction overall.

2. Star Ocean 4 is just not very faithful to its own lore

Star Ocean 4 is, according to its script, the earliest in the series timeline, being set a few decades after humanity took to the stars via warp drive technology. Almost immediately, the script runs into serious continuity issues.

First off, the initial portrayal of the warp drive is horribly botched. For some insane reason, they describe their early subspace warp technique as using wormholes, and that is idiotic, as wormholes and subspace (or hyperspace as it's called in some works of science fiction) are two different things with different laws governing each in science fiction and current prevailing scientific theory upon which both concepts derive from. Also, it becomes clear the first scene where their warping goes horribly wrong that sets up the rest of the plot was obviously staged that way to basically set up cheap drama. Later your ship gets an "improved" warp engine and this sort of thing never happens again save one scene that was obviously set up for cheap drama again to send the characters to the next story arc.

Given Star Ocean takes pointed inspiration from Star Trek, which attempts to keep matters of technical specs within some framework of plausibility within its own narrative, Star Ocean 4 manages to get very basic facts like this wrong more than once, despite having three games of established lore to refer to keep it consistent.

A later scene with a black hole is also poorly portrayed, with the characters somehow running into it out of the blue even though such phenomena are, by their nature, easily detectable from a long way off, and your vessel is portrayed as advanced enough to pick up on gravitation disturbances. And, given black holes are super-dense areas of gravitational force that leave conspicuous differences in surrounding space detectable from a long way off, and it seems absurd you could just run into one without warning, which the plot insists you do, and the attempt to escape its event horizon serves to force the player into going to the next plot arc.

In short, Star Ocean 4 gets a lot of basic sci-fi conceits and tropes wrong, with the above just being some of the larger examples of this bizarre incompetence.

More importantly, Star Ocean 4 badly wanted to do a prequel to the rest of series timeline while not violating established canon, and on those grounds, they did a pretty poor job as well.

Two arcs, in particular, are BAD at this, the Roak arc (aka SO1 Nostalgia Arc) and the EN II arc (SO2 Nostalgia Arc)

The Roak arc (which I shall cover in more detail in a later posting) exists more or less so the writers can coast off Star Ocean 1 nostalgia. Literally, the very events that make it possible to shoehorn you into said arc without good reason, and all the events that transpire are literally by writer fiat. They find a way to advance the actual plot somewhat afterward, but it's still pretty forced.

That said, it's pretty obvious this arc was set up to explain a lot of things that did NOT need explaining anyway. Things like "why didn't Asmodeus from SO1 become a threat sooner" and the stone sickness plot of SO1 are both revisited in a very obvious manner and considering how both amount to a fat load of nothing in their resolutions, it makes the entire arc even more of a blatant walk through SO1 nostalgia.

They also use this arc to cram in the obligatory side content you'd expect to find in the previous three Star Ocean games, but that's minor and forgivable compared to the amount of continuity twisting retcons this arc does to SO1. In fact, without going into exhaustive detail, this arc tries to explain a few things from SO1 that were either adequately explained prior or didn't need explaining to begin with while introducing some new elements that never get referenced again.

The EN II arc (the place is obviously a short way of saying Energy Nede II) is literally SO2 Nostalgia, only even more pointless to the series lore, as despite their considerable story impact on SO4, they effectively disappear from the series canon after it's events, which is really bizarre given you'd think during the events of SO2 with the original Energy Nede they'd have shown up. In fact, SO4 implies they were going to show up later in the series canon, but they obviously don't, at least not the Nede descendants from EN II.

As for the overall plot, it's basically a giant justification for the Underdeveloped Planet Preservation Pact (UP3) that later chronological games would reference. The problem is, the game has a pretty hamfisted way of justifying it, with the Roak arc especially essentially making hypocrisy of this effort (mostly because it would have been possible to have never explored Roak for plot reasons but the writers forced you to anyway despite the characters wanting to keep their potential cultural contamination to an absolute minimum), and the villains of the game are a further effort at delivering this prequel justification that basically has sledgehammer subtlety on top of bad writing giving them plot relevance at times.

In short, while I'll cover the problems with the various plot arcs later in detail, it's safe to say this game was poorly constructed for narrative reasons and makes a poor prequel to the rest of the series, to the point even Star Ocean 6 makes a grand total of two possible references to SO4, with one being a possible coincidence and the other even has the game effectively admit the connection is apocryphal.

3. The Characters and How Well They Fit (or Don't)

A. Crowe F. Almedio: Crowe is a character that is the quintessential Hero of Another Story. That said, that's not a bad thing in and of itself, as his being absent from view most of the plot does help the narrative surrounding the character of Bacchus and Myuria considerably. What is annoying about an otherwise competently written character is how the writers were obviously shilling him to the moon when even the character himself and what we do see of his onscreen actions show him as certainly capable as a warrior and as a ship captain, but still doing no more than is within the natural limits of his own skill and circumstances.

He also falls victim to the problem of how the writers so badly wanted to tie the events of SO4 to SO1, by including an unlockable stinger scene more or less stating Roddick Farrence from SO1 was Crowe's descendant, thus establishing a character who was a canon Fellpool had human ancestry. While this is entirely unnecessary, it's also to explain how Roddick got his hands on what amounts to a Star Ocean lightsaber, which SO4 establishes were Crowe's.

The thing is, this is entirely gratuitous shilling, especially given how the whole Roak arc is literally forced on the player by writer fiat.

Still, Kyle Herbert (who voices Arumat, and teams up briefly with Crowe) makes a good showing of his role and makes Crowe sound distinct from Arumat. The only thing working against him is all the shoehorned writer shilling for a character who even in-universe remains humble and reasonably self-aware of his own limitations.

Further, given the events of SO4 and SO1's Past Roak story take place within a few decades of each other, Crowe would likely still be alive during the events of SO1 and it seems absurd to think he would have not gotten involved in any way, shape or form, with those events.

B. Shimada: Shimada is that annoying, incompetent Deputy Director of the SRF (the exploration fleet by Earth to find new planets to colonize, which the Eldarian civilization knew about and supported) that is the game's Asshole Victim. True to the character archetype, he exists mainly for someone on the player's side to hate till the story deems the villains need to kill him off, so when he gets killed he will not be missed because was a total douche when he was alive.

In a better-written story, that would be a good thing, but the problem is, Shimada has a tertiary connection to the plot at absolute best, and with some very minor changes, his entire character could be minimized to an entire offscreen role, or even written out entirely, as he's shorthand for all the higher ups on Earth who are useless glory hound bureaucrats more concerned with their own skins and reputations than anything else. The only times he has any plot importance are two times. The first, when Captain Grafton calls for help, could be given to some offscreen voice or even omitted entirely, as the only thing he does is call in the Eldarians for help, which need not be done by Shimada, any higher up in the Earth military (which has oversight over the SRF) could have sent back a response to Grafton about the Eldarians being called, given the information on their existence was a closely held secret for political reasons.

The second time is when Shimada wants to burn all records of the SRF to keep the Eldarians from assuming Earth leveled their homeworld and blew up their sun later in the plot. This fails to make sense for multiple reasons.

One, the Eldarians were in contact with Earth for the longest time and have a reasonably good idea of Earthling capabilities and intentions, the invaders who were responsible are clearly not even human and their facsimile imitations of Earth tech are clearly that. Worse, in many key areas, Earth is patently inferior to the Eldarians, as is clearly mentioned earlier. How Earth could even be guilty of the act Shimada wants to cover up beggars' belief, especially when there are living Eldar who know Earth had nothing to do with it, thanks to both Crowe (who saved a LOT of witnesses to prove Earth's innocence as is clearly stated) and Eldar commander Gahgan. The story even realizes how frail their excuses are later and the Eldarians and Earth team up to help in the final arc because it's obvious whoever hosed over their homeworld was not Earth.

Now, even assuming the Eldarians were stupid enough to believe Earth would stab them in the back anyway, the message he has Stephen Kenny relay about destroying all SRF ships to Edge need not come from Shimada, he could be replaced by offscreen, unnamed Earth military higherups and the plot would proceed the same way.

Basically, Shimada only exists so the writers can kill him off later, his actual plot roles being so minor he could be written out with little to no change in the plot.

C. Edge Maverick: Edge as the protagonist has a promising start but the story fails to use him well. Established as the guy who feels inferior to the character of Crowe (who the writers shilled a bit too hard as better than he was) and clearly the "hero" of the main story, the writers fail to do well with him outside the initial Aeos arc.

To the credit of the writers, they do have Edge point out that his sudden promotion to captain of the Calnus basically fell into his lap instead of being earned, and he shows adequate competence in realizing he's in over his head with no help and duly leans on said help early on.

Unfortunately, the horrible scriptwriting makes him come off as horribly indecisive and a poor example of someone trusted with command. Later arcs immediately after reveal that while he still has some admirable heroic traits, he's also in horribly over his head and by the time of the alternate-Earth arc, where everyone's IQ took a nosedive, he's forced to act very stupidly and curses himself some time after for an event where he was basically required by the writers to be an absolute moron and cause a tragedy due to imposed ignorance.

For most of the Roak arc (itself another case of badly forced writer fiat), he's effectively useless in command, forcing Reimi to take over briefly until she's laid out of action with stone sickness, which is the first of a series of events to jolt him back into his former self.

By the end of the Roak arc, he's basically back to normal and the game effectively pretends his moments of obscene stupidity earlier didn't really happen or if they did, he has a much more subdued reaction to them. Events, one must remember, that resulted in him being a proxy to the destruction of an entire planet through naive stupidity.

Other things that work against is the writers forcing him to be the role model of Faize, despite Faize initially showing much more competence and ability to make informed decisions, and it's the later incapacity of Edge that only partially results in the events that lead Faize to be absent from the part after a certain point. Most of that is due to issues I'll cover when covering Faize.

Otherwise, Edge is the typical cliche hero archetype and cleaves to the same mold as many of the characters before him, just written less well. Like Fayt from SO3, he also has a power he was unaware of but this is very poorly explained, with key aspects of its plot importance buried in the ingame encyclopedia. Like Claude from SO2, he's forced to make some painful judgment calls, some of which result in a horrible tragedy, but unlike Claude who made his decisions of his own free will, Edge's moments of bad decision-making were forced on him by the writers. Finally, Edge is something of a prototype of Ronyx from SO1, but where Ronyx was an experienced man making judgment calls to bend or even break rules based on a far greater good, Edge is forced to make many of the same calls but with far less competence, self-assurance, or anything else going for him except what the writers mandated. His writing thus suffers from him often being their hero not because he grows into the mantle, it's more like the writers forced it on him.

D. Myuria Tionysus

Myuria is the resident Ms. Fanservice Lady of Black Magic (the sci-fi equivalent at least for the latter).

Unfortunately, the former is somewhat forced on her by the writers.

Her backstory is notedly marked by a husband she remains very devoted to even after she was left a widow by his being killed by the villains. Further, the game shows her personality is rather serious and acerbic most of the time. She does seem to derive some stress relief from some mild teasing and flirting, but it comes off more as a cope over being a widow than anything else, it never goes anywhere. The game even gives Edge a big relationship boost with her if he goes out of his way to pay respect to her husband Lucien's grave, which is a bit ironic given, canonically, the game ends with him ending up with Reimi by default and nothing happens romantically if he gets Myuria's custom ending.

Further, her fanservicey outfit comes off as a shoehorn to the basic tropes mentioned above as opposed to being a logical idea. Not only does it render many of her scenes mildly comical because she was given constant Jiggle Physics for her cleavage, she comes off far more as the big sister archetype, even mildly telling Edge off should he try to seriously return the mild teasing with what seems more a mild put down than anything else.

That aside, her role in the story is fine for what it is, even though it's established she doesn't need symbology tattoos to use it (though she could just have them for decorative reasons) and both her and Bacchus suffer from the fact their faction effectively disappears from canon after SO4 despite their SO2 referencing.

E. Bacchus D-79

Bacchus is actually one of the better characters, mainly by virtue of Travis Willingham moving heaven and earth in his English VA work to make him sound good despite the otherwise poor script. He also benefits from being the infodump character due to his being a scientist and a cyborg.

Aside from the same issue as Myuria regarding their faction, he's actually one of the better-written characters.

E. Faize Sheifa Beleth

Faize, conceptually, is actually not a bad character. He's intended to be the first alien to join your team and provide an important role in the story. Unfortunately, he's hobbled out the gate by several things the writers are responsible for.

The most serious problem is that the writers were lazy. Many pieces of plot-critical information about him were tucked away in the ingame encyclopedia, and without reading it, many scenes make far less sense about him than they should. Most critically, the entire Roak arc makes him look like he snapped like a twig after falling for some random girl and it ends in tragedy, but reading all that information the writers could not be bothered to make relevant in the actual script reveals he was having a slow-going emotional breakdown long before and that was just one of the last in a long line of events to make him come unglued. This is also what made him later vulnerable to being brainwashed by the Grigori, which otherwise, while somewhat foreshadowed, makes little sense.

Another problem is how the writers forced him to look up to Edge, of all people, as a role model, despite Faize showing much more initial competence. Worse, even after Edge's intense stupidity in the alternate-Earth arc, this remains largely intact until the writers needed it to be otherwise. Again, all the info tucked in the game encyclopedia makes it clear Faize has emotion-suppressing issues and he was subliminally trying to imprint on Edge to be an emotional anchor for him, and when Edge turned into a mopey shell of himself Faize's internal cope with his issues started falling apart hard.

Again, due to bad writing, the game is very poor at showing or explaining this in the actual depicted script.

His turn into a brainwashed minion of the Grigori threat is also a way to provide a resolution for the plot, which I'll describe in more detail when I cover the Grigori. The thing is, while Faize in this role isn't a bad choice given how the story plays out, the writer's laziness rears its ugly head here, as the way the writers wrote the plot Faize got brainwashed into a villainy role so the writers could write an ending for the Grigori, who otherwise wouldn't have a good way to tie off their plotline.

Basically, Faize makes a lot of conceptual sense, he's just cursed by lazy writing for key aspects of his own character and is used as a plot device for other writing laziness in other areas.

F. Reimi Saionji

Reimi is actually one of the better characters conceptually and is further helped by Laura Bailey doing a good job voicing her and powering past the bad script to make her likable.

Her issues are actually, again, due to the writers doing some bad shoehorning and poor elaboration of some plot.

Her big hangup is being imprinted with symbology that gives her a nigh immunity to almost any disease, which resulted in a terrible childhood where she proved practically immune to radiation poisoning that killed everyone else and got her cursed for surviving while other kids died.

This isn't a bad backstory given this plot twist, but it only becomes relevant during the Roak arc, which was a writer-mandated excuse to flog Star Ocean 1 foreshadowing. During this, she even gets Stone Sickness from SO1, albeit in a less dangerous form than it would be in SO1 (with the implication it mutated into something far worse after). Her backstory is generally relevant to this arc only, after which it kinda drops off the map in terms of story relevance.

Some key plot details were, like Faize, left in the ingame encyclopedia, but to a much less severe degree. Thankfully, the above issues aside, she makes a good first officer for Edge, and the relationship system in the game makes them a very obvious preferred canon couple in the end, which actually is logical given their backstory.

However, one arc towards the end pulls something out of nowhere to make Reimi important despite the fact the lore does not support it, namely her fending off a psychic attack by one of the villains when even the lore behind her immunity only covers most diseases and mutagens, but nothing concerning mental attacks.

G. Lymle Lemuri Phi

I don't have too many bad things to say about Lymle, to be honest, except mostly to criticize how, again, a lot of key story details about her have to be inferred or gleaned from the ingame encyclopedia.

Her voice actress made her sound emotionally stunted, which she is for the most part, but she recovers by the post-game, but it would only make sense if you bothered to hunt down the lore for it, otherwise, she comes off as a slightly slow child. Aside from a bit of writer laziness, she's not all that badly written given her plot relevance.

H. Arumat P. Thanatos

I don't have much bad to say about his writing, mostly because most of his screen time comes long after the cringiest story writing is over with, so by that he generally escapes an overly cringe treatment by the game script. Helps Kyle Hebert did a decent job in English with him.

I. Meracle Chamlotte

Meracle is not a bad character in concept, basically being this game's version of Pericci from Star Ocean 1, and both share about the same level of plot relevance. She is unfortunately brought into the party during the absolutely horrible alternate Earth arc, but her actual character isn't too bad.

That said, she suffers mainly from the writer's doing some cringe shoehorning and poorly explaining it, especially during the Roak arc.

The writer intended her character to be a less disturbing variant of the same plot twist used in the Futurama movie where Phillip Fry unknowingly sleeps with his own grandmother in a warp to the past and becomes his own grandfather upon having returned to the future timeline. Meracle uses a similar time travel twist, except she's from the future where she ends up later and unknowingly recreates the events of that future due to her own unwitting foreknowledge of it.

This is what is called a Predestination Paradox.

The problem is that the writers wrote it a bit poorly, not making clear how far along Meracle was in her own timeline before winding up in the alternate Earth timeline, aside from a tie-in with the character of Eleyna Farrance in the Roak arc.

That is unless you started hunting down all the lore in the ingame encyclopedia, though to be fair, this is kinda something the writers likely intended to be more than laziness, they were probably hoping to keep it oblique on purpose due to the fact the game has multiple endings due to the character relationship system allowing for certain character endings.

J. Sarah Jerand

Sarah Jerand is a character from the Roak arc whose biggest reason to exist is due to the events of that arc and the blatant foreshadowing of the characters Ioshua Jerand and Erys Jerand from Star Ocean 1.

Specifically, she's their paternal aunt. Information yet again gleaned from hunting for the lore in the ingame manual on top of the obvious foreshadowing given her name.

Otherwise, that's her sole reason to stick around.

To be fair, she's not a bad character conceptually, though her helium-style voicework by her English actress is certainly hard on the ear. They do get a fair amount of use out of her well-meaning ditziness for humor, which seems to be a big source of her character interactions, but her story role is pretty minimal overall.

K. The Grigori

The Grigori have to be one of the worst-written villains in the entire Star Ocean franchise, mostly because the writers could not settle on what they were all about.

In fact, the Grigori are absurd because they have two motivations they express, both incompatible with the other, but they try to do both despite them being an inherent paradox.

The first motivation is a sci-fi take on the Christian heresy of Gnosticism, specifically their take that God is actually evil and wants all humanity as perpetual thralls. The Grigori are a sci-fi extension of this concept, as they consider themselves divine beings and want all lesser lifeforms to submit to their hive-mind gestalt. Of course, this is by no means a good thing, as in exchange for uplifting those they control with great knowledge they also essentially mutate them and eventually drive them insane as well.

The Grigori are named after a similar set of beings mentioned in some Jewish and Christian writings, specifically the ones associated with the angels who mated with the children of Men and created the Nephilim in the Book of Genesis. While for the most part they just have a vague angel-like appearance and some angel-style names (like Tamiel and Barachiel), they are other described as a bunch of beings from another dimension, like something out of the works of H.P. Lovecraft.

Unfortunately, this initially decent villain idea is ruined when they introduce another motive to the Grigori, which is effectively to destroy the universe and build a new one on top of it after killing all life.

Needless to say, this does not mesh with their first concept well at all and just makes the Grigori look schizophrenic.

Another problem is that the Grigori does not fit well if you know the series lore. In Star Ocean 3, the villain of that was the alleged creator of the Star Ocean universe, who basically wanted to format our universe like a hard drive and start over after he deemed us to have exceeded our limits and gone against his intentions for our universe (and that was his last resort after a more localized culling of what he deemed the problem did not work). The Grigori are introduced nearly 600 years prior to SO3 and obviously, their plans would not only make the rest of the series unable to happen, but it would also be not kosher with the SO3 villain, who had every intention of maintaining our universe and its inhabitants, he just wanted to cut down the weeds of anyone who got too close to figuring out their universe was effectively a massive MMORPG created by the SO3 villain.

Ergo, the Grigori are not something that makes any logical sense and would be considered a destructive virus that would be outside the control of the SO3 villain, who according to series lore has been stage-managing the events of the universe since day one.

In short, the Grigori are a terrible fit for the Star Ocean franchise due to their inconsistent motivations and blatant conflict with other series canon.

Study Guide For Bible Students Wishing to Cross-Reference Secular Historical Information

 This guide has been written for two reasons. First, it was originally to help my own mother, who has commenced a study of ancient cultures as an adjunct to her Bible study, in order to get a more well-rounded historical picture of the cultures mentioned in the Old and New Testaments. Second, believing this could be useful for other history students, I have edited this into a study guide for others interested in doing research in this vein, for both secular and religious study of the Bible. It is my hope this proves valuable in that regard.

Aside from public domain documents, this guide will recommend no particular secular historical books. Most general world history texts and many secular studies of particular geographic areas mentioned below will be more than adequate for this purpose. I do not wish to prejudice anyone into believing only certain texts are ideal. I have outlined certain topics to do more in-depth study on for clarification of certain topics only touched on in the canonical scriptures accepted by most Christian denominations, should anyone wish to do even more deep study in any particular area.

Beyond this, I only recommend students of the Bible go into cross-referencing secular historical accounts with an open mind, taking into account the Bible was written from a very narrow POV focusing mainly on the Israelite experience, and that viewpoint is further narrowed by viewing all history through the lens of religious purity as demanded by the God of the Israelites and who later would include the Gentiles in a redemptive covenant. Secular histories may fill in more blanks on topics the Bible merely touches on but will obviously not have this moral bias coloring the focus, and may even suggest information that may appear to be a discrepancy with the Biblical account. I urge any serious history student, devout Christian or not, to keep this in mind, and weigh the secular accounts against the Bible. As a devout non-denominational Christian, my faith in the essential proof of the Bible has not been shaken by doing this, and for the sake of avoiding ignorance, even if you disagree with some of the conclusions of secular historians and their viewpoint, you should be willing to learn about them regardless, if only to hone your own arguments, especially should you wish to do more than merely study and enter into a serious career involving academic discussion or teaching of history and/or theology.

IMPORTANT INFORMATION

The Bible, during the Old Testament, covers periods variously dated depending on the concept of either a "young" or "old" earth, according to some theologians. Secular historians typically discard this out of hand and place history along the commonly accepted BCE dating with a history dating back much further than either theory, bear this in mind if you are an adherent of either theory. Further, also bear in mind many secular historians believe the Biblical account contains numerous discrepancies with a more "objective" view of history, using archaeology and other sciences to attempt to falsify the record (as historians will do to suss out actual history from fabrications or distortions of the same), and they also believe the records presented by the Bible contain their own biases, which is admittedly true, given its narrow focus. If you are a Biblical literalist, do not take this personally. Finally, many historians believe, with varying degrees of justification, certain religious practices of non-Jewish or non-Christian origin had a profound impact on the development, direction, and character of the religious thought and doctrine espoused in the Bible. Again, this is nothing to take personally, and such is even mentioned as a common influence the Israelites were warned to be wary of in the Bible itself, so if the thought of this is religiously offensive, bear in mind even the Bible mentions this did occur to some degree even during the time in question.

Finally, please note I recommend the study of other pagan faiths and their practices relative to the cultures mentioned only for academic and intellectual purposes only. If one is to better understand why they were repulsive to the viewpoint of the Bible, anyone interested in the actual historical reasons why should be reasonably armed with an intellectual knowledge of their cross purposes with the faith espoused by the Biblical canon. My recommendation to study these pagan practices is merely for the purposes of being less ignorant of their history, origins, and context in regards to their conflict with the faith mentioned by the Bible, and is thus not to be taken as endorsement or promotion of their beliefs.

IMPORTANT INFORMATION

I. Mesopotamia Studies

Mesopotamia should be the first place historically a Bible student should look into to gather the context of the origins of Biblical history. It is the region of this culture that what is acknowledged as the origin of many civilizations took place between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. It is from the city of Ur that the patriarch Abraham of all Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) all claim the common heritage, and many of its more well-known historical documents have an interesting parallel to later mentions in the Bible of practices relating to law and certain degrees of religious crossover in regards to certain events.

In general, the study of the civilizations of Sumer, Akkad, and ancient Babylon is integral to understanding the origins of recorded history in Western civilization, as well as provides vital context to understanding later studies of many Middle Eastern cultures, all of which have some basic heritage stemming from this one. 

Two particularly interesting documents worthy of comparison to the Bible are "The Epic of Gilgamesh", which contains many mentions of the Great Flood mentioned in Genesis, and "The Code of Hammurabi", one of the earliest known recorded legal codes that have a high degree of overlap with the later law of Moses, recorded in the first five Books of the Bible, commonly called "The Books of the Law".

Both documents are in the public domain and easily be found in English translation for free on many sites.

II. Egyptian Studies

The society of the Egyptian culture descends in many ways from the Mesopotamian culture and knowledge of its latter Middle Kingdom period and the New Kingdom period is highly recommended for the understanding of Biblical events mentioned in Exodus to the end of the Books of Kings. Knowledge of the earlier history of Egypt (The Old Kingdom) is also vital for those wanting to understand many things, such as the concepts that formed the Egyptian religion and the impact the ten plagues of Egypt had on their civilization in terms of religion. A detailed study of their religion is helpful for greater context to its conflict with God as mentioned in Exodus.

Some historical comparison is drawn in particular to the Pharaoh Amenhotep IV (also called Akneaten) and his unusual espousal of the form of monolatrism/monotheism that ran at cross purposes with his own people's polytheistic faith. Some scholars have drawn parallels between his beliefs and certain beliefs and concepts of the Israelites, though whether there is a direct connection is up for debate.

Generally, most historical dating of the people who became the Israelites dates back to the late Middle Kingdom era in the Book of Genesis, resumes in the New Kingdom era by the Book of Exodus, generally after the 200 or so year interregnum of the Hyskos people's invasion of Egypt between the Middle and New Kingdom periods.

III. Canaanite/Sea People Studies

The period from the latter parts of the Books of the Law, the Books of Joshua, and later, up until the end of the Books of Kings is heavily dependent on knowledge of this region, known as the history of the Sea Peoples, or those who established cultures due to migratory patterns to places along the Mediterranean Sea.

The various peoples of Canaan, the Edomites, Amalekites, the Philistines, the Assyrians, and others mentioned between the books of Exodus to the ends of the Book of Kings played a prominent role during this period. The study of the Hittite and Phoenecian peoples is also important to gathering proper context regarding this period of history in regards to their interactions with the Israelite culture.

Religious studies of this period should involve looking into the polytheistic worship of the Ba'als, Asherah, Dagon, and other Semitic cultural deities common during that time, and their interactions in terms of religious conflict and intermixture with the Israelites and their generally monotheistic practices.

IV. Neo-Chaldean (Babylon)/Persian Studies

The period after the ends of the Books of Kings, ranging from the period beginning with the Book of Daniel and continuing on through Ezra and Nehemiah, covers the period during the Babylonian captivity, the immediate overthrow of the Babylonians in exchange for the rule of the Medes and Persian cultures, and related further books about this period such as the Book of Esther concern this period of history.

The Babylonians are mentioned in the Books of Kings first and gain increasing prominence historically, especially during the Book of Jeremiah, written during the final days of the Kingdom of Judah, which had increasingly become a vassal state of Babylonians that was eventually utterly conquered and destroyed as mentioned in Kings. Other minor prophets who prophesied during the Books of Kings are also worth looking into, as their books historically took place during the Books of Kings and some into this period as well.

The Books of Chronicles are also worth reading and cross-referencing for further context on certain Israelite kings, mentioning further context omitted by the Books of Kings, though both cover generally the same periods.

While not directly covered by the Bible itself, research into the Babylonian and Persian religions may be helpful. Certain loanwords common in a modern religious discussion such as "sin" and "evil" were prominent in the Babylonian faith with different connotations. The Persian belief of Zoroaster and it's associated faith is also worth studying, given it has many concepts some historians believed influenced the Israelites' own beliefs, given both have a rather similar monotheistic outlook and other similarities.

V. Greco-Roman Studies

A several hundred years interregna take place after the Old Testament period, and the Bible resumes around 0 AD, otherwise known as the birth of Christ. The four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) concern the period from 0-33 AD. The Book of Acts and all books stemming from that, such as the letters Paul wrote to the various Christian churches, this takes place from AD 34-60 AD. Further is not covered by the canonical Bible in terms of history.

Direct study of the Greek and Roman religions is helpful in understanding some of the religious conflicts (such as was mentioned the city of Ephesus in the Book of Acts) and the animosity of the Romans towards the Jews and any beliefs deriving from their culture.

It is worth noting that after the Old Testament period the Israelites had become known as the Jews, after Judea, the name the Romans gave the province that consisted of the biblical Kingdoms of Israel and Judah, a name they and their descendants would bear since. Later reading of Roman and Greek history (as the Romans had assimilated the Greeks and thus to study one is to study both) is essential to gathering knowledge of the formalization of the Christian faith into the organized form that succeeded the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD.

If one is Catholic, this is generally where they would include many of the letters, historical documents, and other canon generally accepted by the Catholic and similar traditions as canon. Even if the reader is not Catholic, it would be prudent to research many of these documents for important information beyond the scope of the period covered in the Bible. The Catholic faith and several other Christian traditions also consider the Apocrypha canon to the Bible. This "deuterocanon" is a series of books that are left out of some Biblical translations by some denominations due to doubt of their canonical status but are still worth researching regardless.

Any further records past the fall of the Western Roman Empire would proceed strictly from non-Biblical sources and other secular records and are totally beyond the scope of this study guide.

PSA for accessing Kiwi Farms on Tor

 Regardless if you are an enemy or a friend of the Kiwi Farms, the below information is being provided to both sides.

They have a Tor address to access them here:

http://uquusqsaaad66cvub4473csdu4uu7ahxou3zqc35fpw5d4ificedzyqd.onion/

You will need one of these two browsers to access a Tor link:

Tor Browser

Brave Browser also allows for securely accessing Tor links, useful if you just want to read the forums, use the Tor Browser for greater security.

https://brave.com/

They have a public facing RU site here:

Public facing .ru domain here, uses DDOS-Guard, not Cloudflare


https://kiwifarms.ru/

The One Man Armies of Biblical Times

 Now, before I begin the post proper, I am going to attempt to emulate the style of the following website:

https://www.badassoftheweek.com/

However, while I do like how Ben Thompson takes the subject of history and makes it entertaining for the people who would otherwise zone out at the issue, I shall refrain from the profanity and as much crude humor as I can, though I will attempt to emulate his signature bombast and larger than life writing.

FYI, before I continue, I do want to say, despite a few differences I have with Ben as a fellow student of history (primarily minor nitpicky stuff really), he is a legitimate historian, and writer of several excellent books on the subject, and I do appreciate how he tries to make the subject of history appeal to a wider demographic.

With that out of the way, let's begin.

The Bible has long been a font of all sorts of interesting information. Ranging from religious instruction to legal codes to life stories to random wisdom, there is something for everyone, even if you are not a person who is a member of the Abrahamic faiths. The historical aspects of the record are also tales of people who did amazing feats of selflessness and courage, most involving war and acts of violence, though not all. I shall recount some of the higher profile stories of people who were so lethal that they didn't need reinforcements, they WERE the reinforcements.

And while the name Sampson usually heads that list for the casual reader, I shall not be going over his story except to say he's not the only guy who raised havoc all by himself, this post is going to cover some others who did the same.

Shamgar - If you read towards the end of the third chapter of the Book of Judges, in a section you could almost miss by accident after they detail how God's ninja Ehud assassinated a tyrant so fat they couldn't find the murder weapon because it disappeared into his own lard (not making that up, the guy was a blubber factory), it seems after said tyrant and the Moabite people learned not to mess with the Israelites, that's when the Philistines tried their earliest crack at being a scourge to the people.

Now, a bit of background. The Philistines were one of the Sea Peoples, that is, they were known for hanging around the Mediterranean Sea, and historians often concur they originated somewhere around Crete and migrated to the area known in the modern day as Palestine. In the process, they picked up a love of military expansionism, being absolute douchenozzles to anyone they could conquer, and worshiping a creepy, fish-headed being called Dagon, which H.P. Lovecraft later adopted as a low-grade cosmic horror for his stories.

Now, the Philistines could generally get away with being conquerors because they were early adopters of the Iron Age while most of the time they were still subjugating people still mastering bronze. In military terms, this was guys with AK-47s taking on guys using flintlocks, so whoever they decided to conquer was generally so owned they might as well have had "slave" stapled to their kicked backsides.

Now, the Philistines had noticed the Israelites had recently muscled into Canaan and had been setting up shop, and they figured they'd make these latest migrants bend the knee.

Or that was the plan until they encountered Shamgar.

Shamgar, son of Anath, he was just a simple farmer, specifically, he herded oxen, and one day, as he was trying to scratch out a living for himself, the Philistines showed up, declared everyone else to bend the knee or be gutted, and tried shaking down the Israelites for tribute.

Well, Shamgar just wanted to herd his oxen in peace, and he decided he was not going to take these guys lying down. Being a farmer, he took the only weapon he had, his ox goad, and he decided he was going to make the Philistines regret ruining his people's happiness.

Now, this is not exactly an ideal weapon. An ox goad was basically a bronze stick with an end barely sharper than a pool cue, mainly used to get a stubborn ox to move forward. Versus a bunch of guys with iron weapons and armor, this was not exactly a good weapon for anyone to go challenging them with.

But Shamgar did not care. The Bible is not clear on whether he just marched up to their armies and told them to throw down or if he decided to take a page from Ehud's book and shanked Philistines in the throat in the middle of the night with his ox goad, but the Bible does make clear over 600 Philistines were slain after Shamgar decided to take a stand.

The Philistines decided discretion was the better part of valor and they more or less sodded off for the next few generations, at least waiting long after Shamgar was dead, before they tried to invade Israel again.

The epilogue only makes this more incredible. Several generations later, when the events of the Book of Samuel happened, the Philistines tried to subjugate the Israelites again, only this time they seized control of the blacksmithing industry to prevent another Shamgar, like this:

 [19] A blacksmith could not be found in all the land of Israel, for the Philistines had said, "This will prevent the Hebrews from making swords and spears."  [20] So all Israel had to go down to the Philistines in order to get their plowshares, cutting instruments, axes, and sickles sharpened.  [21] They charged two-thirds of a shekel to sharpen plowshares and cutting instruments, and a third of a shekel to sharpen picks and axes, and to set ox goads. 

(I Samuel 13:19-21 [NETtext])

Yeah, you read that right, the Philistines were still so terrified of that farmer who murked over 600 of them with a farming implement that they wanted to know with receipts who owned anything remotely pointy, just to make sure that never happened again.

Ittai the Gittite:

Now, let's fast forward a bit. Sometime after David became King of Israel, his son Absalom got ideas about bumping off his old man and seizing the throne for himself, sending his daddy into hiding with his loyalists while he did all sorts of stupid things to cement the breach like setting up a big tent with all of his dad's wives and concubines (that didn't escape with David) and making clear to everyone nearby by the noises from the tent he was marking his territory in the crudest way possible, and also making clear even if Daddy tried to forgive him, he was going to make it nigh impossible to make things right later.

Given Absalom was a retarded pretty boy with more arrogance than sense, I'll spare a detailed account of how he wound up dead for his hubris.

However, that said, let's detail one of the guys who stuck by David at the time when Absalom convinced a lot of them to switch sides.

 [17] The king and all the people set out on foot, pausing at a spot some distance away.  [18] All his servants were leaving with him, along with all the Kerethites, all the Pelethites, and all the Gittites - some six hundred men who had come on foot from Gath. They were leaving with the king.  [19] Then the king said to Ittai the Gittite, "Why should you come with us? Go back and stay with the new king, for you are a foreigner and an exile from your own country.  [20] It seems like you arrived just yesterday. Today should I make you wander around by going with us? I go where I must go. But as for you, go back and take your men with you. May genuine loyal love protect you!"  [21] But Ittai replied to the king, "As surely as the LORD lives and as my lord the king lives, wherever my lord the king is, whether dead or alive, there I will be as well!"  [22] So David said to Ittai, "Come along then." So Ittai the Gittite went along, accompanied by all his men and all the dependents who were with him. 

(II Samuel 15:17-22 [NETtext])

Now, this just sounds like a loyalist and his peeps signing on with David, despite the fact David was vastly outnumbered, but let's cover a few things.

Ittai was from the Philistine city of Gath, meaning at one point he and David had likely crossed swords. Later, David, during the events earlier in the Books of Samuel, spent some time in Philistine territory, doing a clever double agent act where he pretended to do raids on his own people in exchange for being able to hide out in Palestine since King Saul wanted David's head at the time. In reality, he was offing all sorts of thugs like the Amalekites and other vulture-like raider tribes who were preying on the Israelites, covering his tracks by making sure he killed everyone and just brought back some loot for the Philistines, who bought this BS story hook, line, and sinker.

In the process, David got to meet some genuine tough guys on the Philistine side, some of which decided to sign on with him, realizing he was an up-and-coming warlord whose blade they didn't want to be on the wrong side of.

Ittai was one of them.

Now, at the time Ittai scraped together some of his fellow mercenaries for hire and convinced them to sign on with David, David was kinda screwed. Most of his army had deserted him for his upstart son, David was cut off from almost all support, and even with Ittai's mercs rounding out his resistance forces, David's odds looked pretty bad strictly from a numerical perspective.

But Ittai knew better. Despite David basically telling Ittai he appreciated the vote of confidence, this would make him an outcast to his people, he was signing on for some crummy odds, and he would be putting his life in the hands of a guy who made the Philistines' lives suck for years after becoming King of Israel.

Well, Ittai knew this. And he did not care. He willingly told David he had his loyalty until death, and despite his Philistine birth, Ittai knelt before the same God as the guy who made his people cry uncle because he knew David was the man on the winning side, and Ittai wanted to be one of his right hands.

As it turned out, Ittai made a smart bet. Despite the fact David had barely two brigades worth of men on hand (and that's including all the noncombatants with him), it was a slaughter.

Twenty thousand idiots who decided to side with Absalom were absolutely steamrollered by a tiny fraction of their number. Ittai was one of the three leaders of the warriors of King David that delivered overwhelming victory for their liege lord and his Lord in turn.

The Thirty:

Now, King David was a tough guy in his own right, but he had a pretty good eye for talent, and he had his group of elites that he christened "The Thirty".

Technically, he had almost forty men in this group, but given the numbers hovered around the thirties most of the time, this was a pretty decent summary of these over three dozen face-smashing engines of destruction he considered the tip of the spear that was his standing army.

Let's cover a few of these guys, shall we?

 [8] These are the names of David's warriors:Josheb-Basshebeth, a Tahkemonite, was head of the officers. He killed eight hundred men with his spear in one battle.  

This guy saw Shamgar's record and said "Hold my wine."

[9] Next in command was Eleazar son of Dodo, the son of Ahohi. He was one of the three warriors who were with David when they defied the Philistines who were assembled there for battle. When the men of Israel retreated,  [10] he stood his ground and fought the Philistines until his hand grew so tired that it seemed stuck to his sword. The LORD gave a great victory on that day. When the army returned to him, the only thing left to do was to plunder the corpses.  

When the army shows up to help and there you are sitting on a mountain of corpses asking your buddies "What took you so long, they're already dead."

[11] Next in command was Shammah son of Agee the Hararite. When the Philistines assembled at Lehi, where there happened to be an area of a field that was full of lentils, the army retreated before the Philistines.  [12] But he made a stand in the middle of that area. He defended it and defeated the Philistines; the LORD gave them a great victory.  

This guy had nothing but himself and a bean field between him and the Philistines winning. So he made himself a scarecrow with an attitude and dared them to take the field from him. They wound up fertilizing it while all the wimps who ran ahead hung their heads in shame.

[13] At the time of the harvest three of the thirty leaders went down to David at the cave of Adullam. A band of Philistines was camped in the valley of Rephaim.  [14] David was in the stronghold at the time, while a Philistine garrison was in Bethlehem.  [15] David was thirsty and said, "How I wish someone would give me some water to drink from the cistern in Bethlehem near the gate!"  [16] So the three elite warriors broke through the Philistine forces and drew some water from the cistern in Bethlehem near the gate. They carried it back to David, but he refused to drink it. He poured it out as a drink offering to the LORD  [17] and said, "O LORD, I will not do this! It is equivalent to the blood of the men who risked their lives by going." So he refused to drink it. Such were the exploits of the three elite warriors.  

Let me explain why this should impress you if it doesn't sound special. Imagine three grunts during World War I jumping out of the trenches, running across no man's land while defying artillery strikes and machine gun nests, making it behind enemy lines, stealing the canteen of the guy commanding the other side, then making it BACK to their own lines without a scratch on them just to impress their own commander.

Now, David, he could have drunk it, but he decided to be classy. God had blessed him with three guys willing to do insane stunts like this out of sheer loyalty and live to tell the tale, so he instead gave that water they risked their lives to get as an offering of Thanksgiving to the Lord in gratitude for blessing him with such hardcore, fearless warriors.

 [18] Abishai son of Zeruiah, the brother of Joab, was head of the three. He killed three hundred men with his spear and gained fame among the three.  [19] From the three he was given honor and he became their officer, even though he was not one of the three.  

Now, this guy was so awesome that his brother Joab made a special point to kill the guy who offed his brother as contemptuously as possible. Unlike his brother, Joab was a total prick who, while competent and hardcore in his own right (literally scaling the walls of Jerusalem on his own just to kill all the guys on the walls just to impress his boss), was disqualified from the Thirty because he took the concept of honor and wiped his own butt with it. In fact, the guy he killed to avenge his brother had been King David's former commander Abner under King Saul, who had surrendered into David's service in good faith.

David not only gave Abner a state funeral as an apology for his murder, he never forgot Joab's treachery, and Joab was later killed in front of the altar in the Temple of the Lord by his son Solomon, honoring his father's wish to make sure that "Joab's gray head would go to the grave in blood" for all the murders and treachery he had committed.

[20] Benaiah son of Jehoida was a brave warrior from Kabzeel who performed great exploits. He struck down the two sons of Ariel of Moab. He also went down and killed a lion in a cistern on a snowy day.  [21] He also killed an impressive-looking Egyptian. The Egyptian wielded a spear, while Benaiah attacked him with a club. He grabbed the spear out of the Egyptian's hand and killed him with his own spear.  [22] Such were the exploits of Benaiah son of Jehoida, who gained fame among the three elite warriors.  [23] He received honor from the thirty warriors, though he was not one of the three elite warriors. David put him in charge of his bodyguard. 

Now, most of this is self-explanatory, but some clarification. A cistern was typically a hole in the ground for collecting water, and Benaiah killed a lion while trapped in one while it was freezing, and yes, despite being in a desert-like a region, it can snow there and it can get COLD.

[24] Included with the thirty were the following: Asahel the brother of Joab, Elhanan son of Dodo from Bethlehem,  [25] Shammah the Harodite, Elika the Harodite,  [26] Helez the Paltite, Ira son of Ikkesh from Tekoa,  [27] Abiezer the Anathothite, Mebunnai the Hushathite,  [28] Zalmon the Ahohite, Maharai the Netophathite,  [29] Heled son of Baanah the Netophathite, Ittai son of Ribai from Gibeah in Benjamin,  [30] Benaiah the Pirathonite, Hiddai from the wadis of Gaash,  [31] Abi-Albon the Arbathite, Azmaveth the Barhumite,  [32] Eliahba the Shaalbonite, the sons of Jashen, Jonathan  [33] son of Shammah the Hararite, Ahiam son of Sharar the Hararite,  [34] Eliphelet son of Ahasbai the Maacathite, Eliam son of Ahithophel the Gilonite,  [35] Hezrai the Carmelite, Paarai the Arbite,  [36] Igal son of Nathan from Zobah, Bani the Gadite,  [37] Zelek the Ammonite, Naharai the Beerothite (the armor-bearer of Joab son of Zeruiah),  [38] Ira the Ithrite, Gareb the Ithrite  [39] and Uriah the Hittite. Altogether there were thirty-seven.  

(II Samuel 23:8-39 [NETtext])

The last name on the list is a really bittersweet one. Uriah was a loyal man who, if you know of David's history, was the husband of Bathsheba, a woman David decided he wanted for himself and he sent Uriah off to a battle that would mean certain doom just to kill him and have his way with her.

David would never live this down, and God made sure the stain of this act would haunt David for the rest of his life, and it only gets more disgusting when you consider why Uriah deserved better.

Uriah was a loyal officer in David's army, and after David wound up sleeping around with the guy's wife, he realized she got pregnant and tried to cover it up by calling Uriah back, telling him to take a load off, spend some time with his wife, and hopefully, he'd not find the timing odd.

The thing is, not only was the ploy not successful, Uriah refused to do this because he was not only a soldier, he was a devout man of God, and it was God's own instruction to the military to put aside all other earthly pleasures while campaigning, and he informed David he could not afford to get drunk on wine and sleep with his wife when he could be back on the field, sharing in the troubles of the armed forces, who were still engaged in a military campaign.

Now, David could not lawfully order Uriah to NOT put pleasure above his duty, and he knew it. Instead, he decided to send him back to the front and sent sealed orders to Joab to make sure Uriah wound up cut off from support and left for dead.

Joab had a pretty good suspicion why David ordered this, and while he reluctantly did as the boss said, he basically send back a politely worded note in his battle report on the results calling his boss a cold blooded weasel in a roundabout way.

Now, Joab was a man who was pretty treacherous himself, so for HIM to be appalled at your skullduggery, you had to be an utter scumbag. 

David at the time let the hint even his own commanding general considered him miserable bag of feces pass him by, but God decided to give David a far more permanent reminder of the same in a way David could not ignore long after, and the guilt of Uriah's murder by David's callous disregard for a faithful soldier who did not deserve to have life and happiness taken from him by his own commander would never go away. The rest of David's life was riddled with trouble because David had sacrificed a man who was worth an army for his own lust and greed.

As part of his lifelong atonement, David made sure that the annals of history would forever know Uriah was one of the Thirty.

On whether Christians should support "Gays Against Groomers"

 Recently, an alliance of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals have come out in opposition to what they see as the excesses and depravity of the transgender movement lobby, specifically, against the "grooming" by the transgender lobby of impressionable minors into getting body-altering drugs and surgery to become transgender themselves. Given said lobby advocates against parental consent and often want to separate children from proper supervision by their legal guardians to involve children in discussions of sexual activity and the permanent alteration of their minds and bodies with surgeries and hormones as an apparent panacea for the stresses and rigors of adolescence, this alliance of the LGB have come to view the transgender lobby as a threat and believes such things should be legally barred from anyone who is not a consenting adult or at least such activities should only take place with the active knowledge and participation of parents, with the parents having veto power over the transgender lobby if they so choose. Otherwise, this alliance as stated above considers the transgender lobby as "grooming" minors into unhealthy activities and exposing them to sexual activity, discussion, and imagery while still under the age of majority.

With this in mind, I have encountered some Christians on the fence about allying with the said group for political and moral reasons, fearing even an alliance against what they deem a shared evil would still be giving tacit approval to homosexuality, which runs counter to all standard Christian ethics and morality. Others would argue such an alliance, temporary as it may be, would still be of political and moral benefit to help roll back evils both sides can agree are beyond the pale.

Now, I consider myself a political moderate and this post is merely to examine the problem from both a secular and moral perspective, both to help Christians come to a better decision on this matter and for the non-Christians reading, hopefully, this will give you better insight into their evaluation of morals and ethics as regards real-world politics.

From a purely political and pragmatic viewpoint, I would see no reason such an alliance, temporary as it may be, would be a problem for either side. During World War II, Winston Churchill and the British people allied with the Soviet Union over their shared enemy of Nazi Germany. Churchill was an especially ardent foe of Communism, the official ideology of the Soviets, but remarked (and the below is a paraphrase of the essentials), on the pragmatic consideration for the alliance,

"If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons."

Basically, Churchill knew such an alliance would be of limited scope and purpose, and afterward his nation and the Soviets would still agree on little, but the Nazis were such a threat a temporary alliance against their shared foe made more sense, even if only for the short-term, as long-term a Nazi victory was anathema to both sides.

However, Christians view such real-world political situations in moral terms, and thus wish to adhere their real-world politics to the ethics of the laws of God as established by the Bible, and below will give an example of the good and bad of such alliances with non-believers in God and under what situations this proved wise and unwise, to hopefully provide insight for those still considering the above mentioned real-life problems to come to a decision.

During the reign of King David and his son Solomon, a profitable and mutually beneficial alliance was struck with the state of Phoenecia. The Phoenicians were a primarily commercial culture established mostly in what would be modern-day Lebanon. During the reigns of David and Solomon, despite differences in their religions, culture, and politics, both forged an effective alliance based on trade and maritime commerce, particularly with King Hiram, as detailed in the Books of Samuel and Kings. Within the strict framework of trade, this was an alliance that served both sides well.

One of the best examples of this alliance panning out well for both sides was for the building of the Temple of the Lord, which David had wanted to build, but God refused to allow it, instead saying it would be David's successor who would do so. Thus, during the reign of Solomon, with the commercial assistance of Hiram, the Israelite people were able to acquire many of the key building materials needed for the Temple of the Lord, which included the famed "cedars of Lebanon", which were renowned for their excellence in building and construction.

Now, according to the Books of the Law, there were no formal prohibitions on an alliance with a foreign power, unless God specifically forbade it, like was commanded by God concerning the Canaanites, whom God insisted be wiped out during the military campaigns detailed in the Book of Joshua.

Otherwise, alliances were not formally forbidden, so long as said alliances did not supplant trust in the Lord nor did the alliance lead to the importation of any idols or worship of gods other than the Lord. Otherwise, any purely secular benefits such as pacts of non-aggression, right-of-way passage, and trade were in no way formally condemned. As seen above, such trade even proved beneficial in building one of the finest monuments to the glory of the Lord.

However, later in the Books of Kings, this Phoenecian alliance did not augur so well. King Ahab of Israel (as the Kingdom of David had fractured into the polities of Judah and Israel at this point) foolishly chose to cement an alliance with Phoenecia by marrying Jezebel, a daughter of the reigning king of that land.

Contrary to God's strict instruction to not let a foreign marriage lead oneself or others into sin and depravity, Ahab did nothing as his foreign wife imported idols and priests of Ba'al, and not only did he allow her to poison the people against the Will of God, he also allowed her to wage pogroms against the worshippers of the Lord, trying to wipe them out and establish Ba'al worship as the only state religion.

Now, later in life, Ahab repented of his sin, and Jezebel met an ignoble end for her crimes against the Lord and His followers, but this is when alliances with non-Christians turned into a curse as opposed to a blessing for both sides.

It's worth noting earlier on, during the reign of Solomon, King Hiram remained well aware of the laws and strictures of the Israelites and respectfully honored their moral limitations, rejecting an offer from Solomon to continue trade arrangements with Phoenecia in exchange for grants of towns and territory under Israelite dominion. Not only was the offer essentially scorned, but Hiram also called the lands offered the "lands of Cabul", essentially calling them pointless and worthless, as it was not the policy of Hiram's people to expand via conquest or demographic dominion, largely content to exist as the shopkeeper for other nations. It was also in contravention of the Books of the Law for Solomon to make this offer, as the Lord made clear no territory under Israelite dominion should ever be willingly ceded to a foreign power, especially not any lands from Canaan, which had explicitly been set aside as a communal inheritance for the people of Israel.

All the above said, for Christians on the fence about the decision mentioned in the lede, I have outlined Biblical precedent on the good and bad of alliances with non-believers, and under what limits such alliances could work and what excesses would cause more harm than good.

Regardless of which side of the divide you fall on, I merely hope that the above precedents and information provide better guidance for making decisions in accordance with God's Will. Also, regardless of whether my arguments on the merits and possible pitfalls were convincing, I advise my Christian brethren to not only consult with fellow believers on the wisdom of such decisions but that they also enter into prayer with the Lord for guidance, if only to make sure that the proper road to His Will is followed.