Chimera Squad Enemy Analysis: Gray Phoenix Crew Chief Yarvo

HP: 14 (+2/+4)

Armor: 1 (+0/+1)
Aim: 80/80/85/85 (+2/+5)
Mobility: 10
Damage: 4-5 (+1/+2)
Crit Chance: 20%
Will: 80 (+10/+20)
Initiative: 120

Alert Actions: N/A

As always for Investigation bosses, Yarvo doesn't do anything in the Breach Phase and cannot be targeted during it. In his case this is easy to not think of as weird behavior because in 2/3rds of the variations on the Take Down Gray Phoenix mission he starts behind a force field that prevents you from doing anything to him and prevents him from doing anything in general... but in the final variation he can easily be in the open and not targetable anyway, just like Violet always is; the force field isn't why.

Mental Fortress
Passive: Immune to Mind Control and Verge's Neural Network abilities.

Have I mentioned this is standard to all faction leaders?

Also, Yarvo is immune to Torque's Tongue Pull and Bind abilities, which is maybe a bit unfortunate; I imagine there are players who ran into this without having used them on regular Praetorians and so incorrectly assumed that regular Praetorians are immune by virtue of being huge or whatever. I suspect the other faction leaders are immune as well, but somehow I've never managed to finagle things so it came up either way; I'm honestly not sure how I've managed that given Torque is probably my favorite agent to use.

AI Pistol

Passive: Primary weapon is buggy and has an inconsistent response to ammo drain effects.

Still a universal issue with Pistol-equipped enemies!

Though Yarvo's situation makes it easy to just never come up, much more so than most Pistol-equipped enemies.

Bolster

Passive: When Crew Chief Yarvo is damaged, if he is not currently disabled (Being on fire counts as disabled) he immediately gains 1 point of Armor. This effect can stack unlimitedly, but all Armor provided by this effect vanishes at the start of his next turn.

Yarvo's higher HP gives Bolster more opportunity to matter than with regular Praetorians, with the contrast being especially strong if you're playing on a lower difficulty since Yarvo's HP isn't actually affected by difficulty. If you're playing on Normal and hit Gray Phoenix first, Yarvo has a 40% HP advantage on regular Praetorians!... whereas if you're playing on Impossible and hit Gray Phoenix last, Yarvo has an about 13% HP advantage and you might not even realize he has a couple more HP than a regular Praetorian. That's low enough it's easily drowned out by damage variance on your weapons.

In practice, how relevant this is depends on a player's overall experience and where they took on Gray Phoenix; for a first-time player who hit Gray Phoenix first, Yarvo can be a rude surprise, especially if they've been accidentally bypassing Bolster on regular Praetorians. (eg by using Stupor on them -an option that doesn't work on Yarvo) He's potentially even nastier of a surprise if Gray Phoenix is hit second and the player is slow to get Mastercrafted weapons online, which is pretty likely for a first-time player to do; in that case Bolster can make Yarvo take forever to die and so reinforcements keep getting to stream in and a player can potentially be overwhelmed to the point of failing the mission outright!

On the other hand, if a player already has Mastercrafted weapons Bolster becomes a sufficiently mild boost to his survivability it might not matter at all, or if the player already knows how Bolster works and how to get around it and brings appropriate countermeasures and all it might once again be non-notable.

This is all clunky, though at least reduced in its jank by Yarvo being so obviously a Praetorian; while it is possible to not figure out Bolster's rough mechanics before fighting Yarvo, it's not strongly likely. I'd be a lot more negative on Bolster being on an Investigation boss if it was exclusive to the Investigation boss and so basically guaranteed to be a nasty surprise for a first-time player in particular. As-is, I think it could've been handled better, but it's an understandable awkwardness to arrive at.

Bash
Turn ending action: Crew Chief Yarvo moves-and-melees a single enemy for 3 damage, knocking them Unconscious if this reduces them to 0 HP. This attack cannot miss and ignores Armor.

I'm almost completely certain this doesn't matter at all; regular Praetorians can at least be Puppeteered and so the player can elect to make them use Bash, but Yarvo is immune to mind control, so unless there's some edge case that will lead to his AI using Bash this effectively doesn't exist.

Melee Strike

Turn-ending action: Crew Chief Yarvo move-and-melees a single enemy for 4-5 (+1/+2) damage, using his base Aim for accuracy.

Yarvo of course does actually use Melee Strike, and much like regular Praetorians tends to actually prefer it over firing his Pistol. This is convenient since it means Yarvo tends to pull himself out of his defensive position if he gets a turn, making it easier to down him.

Duel

1 action point: Crew Chief Yarvo targets a single visible enemy. He is unable to miss the Duel target, but the Duel target is also unable to miss him. This effect lasts until Crew Chief Yarvo is downed or disabled, or until his target is downed.

This of course works exactly like with regular Praetorians, including the part where Yarvo heavily prefers to attack his current Duel target over other possible targets.

In spite of being a boss, Yarvo doesn't really have any quirks that make Duel particularly different when he uses it compared to a regular Praetorian using it. So I don't really have anything to add here compared to what I said about regular Praetorians.

Warcry

Free action: All Muton allies gain 1 point of Armor until Crew Chief Yarvo goes down. 1 turn global cooldown.

As I noted with regular Praetorians, Yarvo himself doesn't benefit from Warcry. Oops! This includes that he doesn't benefit from his own Warcry, which is especially conspicuous. Whoops!

I think his AI is aware of this point, at least, as I've never seen Yarvo use Warcry unless there's at least one Muton ally about to benefit from it. Though that could pretty easily just be coincidence; it's not like Praetorians are guaranteed to use Warcry if able, and I've only once had Yarvo last particularly long.

In any event, Yarvo's access to Warcry has less relevance than you might expect, in part due to the global cooldown and the fact that there's regular Praetorians running about. If you hit Gray Phoenix second in particular, it can easily just never come up at all, especially if you're already familiar with the mechanics of the mission to optimize appropriately.

Riot Guard

Turn ending action: Crew Chief Yarvo gains 1 point of Armor, is considered to be in Low Cover even when flanked, and acts as Low Cover to adjacent allies. Effect ends the first time damage is sustained.

I've never seen Yarvo use Riot Guard and would be a little surprised if he is willing to use it so I'm mostly-sure him having this is a technicality. Less so than I am with Bash, though.

As I laid out in Violet's post in regards to the Take Down the Progeny mission, Take Down Gray Phoenix uses 5 maps in total but only 3 in a given run, starting on later Encounters if Gray Phoenix is hit later.

Map 1 is a room with four large pillars that each have 2 consoles adjacent to them (For a total of 8 consoles), with the consoles placed opposite of each other on a given pillar. It also has two entrances, one on the left and one on the right, though they're not particularly different; you mostly care about what Breach modifiers they offer. The map starts with a Round-based time limit; if it runs out, you lose, but interacting with a console adds an extra Round to the timer. (Note that interacting with consoles is a free action) At any given moment only one console is valid to interact with, though, and once you interact with a console a different console becomes valid to interact with.

I'm not sure what happens if you run through all 8 consoles; I've never had that happen organically, and it would be a pain to play out for testing purposes, so I've never gotten around to it. Realistically, you should clear out the room long before that point... or lose, either/or.

Regardless, aside needing to activate at least one console per Round to avoid losing, the Encounter is a straightforward enough map; there's enemies, you win once they're all down, there you go.

Map 2 is a long map with a UFO at the end opposite from your team's starting point and a bunch of enemies clustered up by where your team starts. Each Round, up to 2 enemies will be marked as wanting to flee to the UFO, and if they successfully do so they'll show up in map 3, with their current HP remembered by the game. (Though not any other elements of their state; if you Poison a Praetorian and it escapes while Poisoned, it won't start map 3 Poisoned)

This is unfortunately one of the maps where there looks to have been a pretty clear concept and said concept really doesn't work. Once one of your agents gets close enough to the UFO, a Sectopod will exit the UFO and be added to the end of the Timeline; I'm pretty sure the idea is that the player will stumble into triggering this while chasing fleeing enemies. In actuality, though, so few enemies try to flee at all and they furthermore are so unreliable about properly fleeing (An enemy marked as wanting to escape can still elect to advance on your squad and attack) that I've literally never had an enemy get to the UFO except when I deliberately let them do so to confirm the transfer-to-next-map mechanic.

I dunno, maybe there are real players who did organically stumble into this, but I'm honestly a bit skeptical.

Whatever the case, if you do successfully wipe out all the enemies without triggering the Sectopod, the map doesn't end; you still need to go up to the UFO, trigger the Sectopod into coming out, and destroy it to actually finish the Encounter. Done this way, the Sectopod is a joke that you can easily take out without it ever getting a single turn. It's... not ideal design, especially since it often takes 3~ Rounds of just running the squad forward with absolutely nothing happening to get close enough to trigger the Sectopod, which is just tedious.

Among other issues, there's absolutely no time pressure in this Encounter, so you're free to get the squad fully set up before actually triggering the Sectopod, no matter how many Rounds setting up takes. Go ahead and reload, have Terminal fully heal everyone for free, etc. Though do note that, counterintuitively, setting up Overwatch won't catch the Sectopod when it spawns, even though it literally walks into the map like a reinforcement unit and normally Overwatch will catch enemies doing that. So don't bother to set up Overwatch on it; its turn is set at the end, so every agent will get their turn and so end their Overwatch without getting a chance to fire.

Map 3 is the inside of the UFO from the second map, and is essentially a plus shape. (+) At the back of the plus shape is a console, and each Round starts by designating an enemy who wants to run to the console. If such an enemy successfully reaches the console and then gets another turn, you instantly fail the mission -particularly unfortunate is that if you hit Gray Phoenix first then Yarvo will be right on top of the console and can in fact be randomly selected by the game, even on the first turn. This can put you in a do-or-die situation where you must take out Yarvo with one Round of agent actions or lose, when he's a very tough target to take down so quickly -you're not likely to have Mastercrafted weapons in time, for one. It's one of the more frustrating design oversights if you run into it, and an argument for not hitting Gray Phoenix first in an Ironman run.

The default entrance drops your team at the opposite end of the plus sign from the console, while the two sides of the plus each have a Secure Entrance into them. The Secure Entrances are, unfortunately, a bit of a trap -taking a Secure Entrance will be protective in the Breach Phase, but will leave your agents in awkward positions that don't have clear line of fire on the console area and aren't even flanking any enemies in the center or anything. This isn't too bad if your squad is fairly mobile (eg Zephyr, Godmother, Axiom), but if your squad is made of more turret-y agents it can be a big problem that they're having to spend at least one action point on getting into position, potentially failing the mission where taking the main entrance would've let your team work at full effectiveness from the very first Round.

Thankfully, this is the one mainline plot map with optional non-standard entrances where an issue like this crops up. Other mandatory maps are pretty reliable about non-standard entrances being strongly good ideas to take if the option is available, like how in Take Down the Progeny's fourth map the Explosive Entrance is absolutely worth taking.

Map 4 (of Take Down Gray Phoenix, I mean) is where you'll encounter Yarvo if you didn't hit Gray Phoenix first. As I mentioned earlier, he starts out behind a force field, where you can't target him and he just skips his turn every time it comes around; there's two consoles near the force field you'll need to have an agent interact with (Which is a completely free action, for reference), and once both are interacted with the force field goes down and Yarvo is loose. (Note that he still exists in the Timeline and just skips his turn if it arrives while he's behind the force field; delaying hitting the second console can be useful if it means you skip his turn)

Ideally, you'll do this as soon as possible; reinforcements will be announced at the start of the second Round and will arrive regularly until all enemies are down, with Yarvo counting for this purpose even while behind the force field. Letting things drag can get your team worn down or even overwhelmed because the reinforcements just keep coming. The Encounter itself doesn't end until every enemy is down, with no further qualifiers; the only quirk is the need to get the force field down so you can actually affect Yarvo.

Map 5 takes place in a room with two large areas of low ground, with two entrances to pick between; a left one and a right one. You're directed to destroy 'power cores', and told that they 'cycle'; what this means is that only one power core exists as a gameplay entity at any given moment. Once you've destroyed a power core, a different one will become vulnerable; this happens 3 times for a total of 4 power cores to destroy. The power cores themselves have exactly 3 HP and are all placed in the low ground areas, two per pit, with the 'cycling' alternating between pits, making it difficult for a single agent to take out even 2 at a time even though the power cores are so fragile.

At the beginning of Round 2, a Sectopod enters the room from the left side, with its turn placed at the end of the Timeline; this takes the place of the 'steps out of the UFO encounter' version of fighting the Sectopod since hitting Gray Phoenix last skips past that Encounter. I'd tend to argue this encourages using the left entrance so your squad can jump right on dealing with the Sectopod, but if you'd rather have some distance I guess the right entrance is better.

Regardless, those two wrinkles are it; the narrative context implies time pressure, but the gameplay of this Encounter doesn't reflect that, oddly enough. (Literally every other map in this chain has time pressure mechanics!) I don't think you can even have reinforcements kick in from taking too long. All you need to do is smash the 4 power cores and take out all the enemies; you win at that point.

Narratively, Take Down Gray Phoenix is probably the easiest to miss what changes for different Act placement, and probably the strangest in how its progression works. Gray Phoenix are always hitting City 31's starport and trying to get starships off the ground; if you hit them first, they don't have any starships in the air when you arrive and your intervention completely prevents liftoff. If you hit them second, instead they've already got some UFOs in the air but they don't yet have a command ship up, and your goal is to stop the command ship from taking off. (Seeming to imply the UFO map is said command ship in this and only this version of events, oddly) If you hit them last, they've got all the aforementioned ships up and are in the middle of setting up for the entire starport to take off.

I say the progression is strange because Investigation order of course results in a difference of weeks, but the overall presentation of Take Down Gray Phoenix is that the assault on the starport takes maybe a few hours total, so it's not really clear why getting around to Gray Phoenix some weeks later results in them getting an hour or whatever further along. There's ways to imagine this working that are more or less functional, where for example you can imagine Gray Phoenix is infiltrating the starport the entire time and their greater forward progress if hit later is a product of them managing to lay more groundwork in the weeks of delay that works out to the timetable of the assault being an hour ahead or the like, but the game unfortunately doesn't suggest such ideas and I'm somewhat skeptical they were what the devs were thinking. I kind of suspect the strangeness is simply their own design rules pushing them into a particular mold that they didn't cleave to perfectly, in short.

Regardless, Take Down Gray Phoenix has a fair bit more than that to talk about, for several reasons.

First of all, the starport taking off bit touches on a bit of worldbuilding I actually really like; that the starport is in fact a massive Ethereal ship that flew low, melted a hole in the ground, and then landed in the hole to act as a starport, back in the initial occupation days. Given the Ethereals have apparently been on the move for centuries, it makes a lot of sense that they'd have standardized methods to rapidly set up some key infrastructure when they do stop somewhere, rather than relying on gathering local resources and manufacturing local facilities, and the basic shape of 'use our stellar firepower to make a hole to then socket into' is pretty reasonable! (I do suspect the internal concept is a bit unrealistic in a 'imagining the ground ceases to exist' way, but still)

Second, Gray Phoenix has the unique quirk that they're narratively led by two people: Crew Chief Yarvo, but also Technician Xel.

Yarvo is present in gameplay, but almost nonexistent as a narrative entity. He actually has no voice acting whatsoever -nor a talking portrait- with his only explicit characterization coming from post-mission text. The text in question is actually interesting to me, in that Yarvo is perhaps the only time the game really treats its aliens as alien; a bit of lore that comes up here and there in Chimera Squad is that most aliens were given a cat as a test of their ability to integrate, and in Yarvo's case we learn he gets two such cats killed and refers to the second one as 'breaking' and that he tried to 'fix' it when it 'broke', and he ultimately ends up ranting about how, essentially, it's unreasonable to expect aliens to think and behave like humans and then judge these aliens negatively if they can't fit inside this mold of human-ness.

Which actually suggests another layer to Gray Phoenix's demographics; probably a decent portion of their ranks are aliens who feel most, well, alienated by the attempts at integration. The aliens who don't readily fit in to this new society, who don't want to fit into this human-shaped (In multiple senses) society; this is readily connected to the goal of 'leave the planet', too. If you don't want humans trying to make you act like a human, getting away from the humans is an obvious course of action.

And honestly, it's easy to imagine a decent portion of these individuals have this suspicion that integration with human society would just be the Ethereal-controlled society all over again, just with humans holding the leash once held by the Ethereals. Chimera Squad does a decent job of selling the idea that such suspicions aren't accurate, but if you're an alien who doesn't speak local languages, never really interacted with humans during the occupation, and are kind of at the fringes of the new society, you may simply not have access to information clearly pointing in the direction of 'this new society doesn't live down to your worst fears'. So it's not a narrative design problem that such concerns are assuaged reasonably effectively for the player perspective.

As an aside, the cat test looks to me like it's a deliberately low threshold. Cats are pretty widely understood to be fairly self-sufficient pets, not necessarily needing much care at all to survive; they're generally not the kind of pet that dies because you forgot to feed it and groom it and all for a day or so. So I suspect the thought process here is that a test cat dying is generally going to be a sign of significant carelessness (eg crushing the cat while walking or sitting because the individual wasn't trying to maintain a general awareness of the cat's position) or of something more like malice aforethought. (eg getting frustrated by the cat making noise and killing it to make it shut up, even though the individual knows that the cat's survival is important to their own future)

Notably, a bit of backstory you can randomly get with Axiom is that he ended up skipping the cat test because he was present at the Bugtown Massacre and rallied to help fight off the Chryssalids, which also isn't a terribly high standard for 'good enough to try to integrate'. (Axiom's own survival was on the line, after all; concern for others wasn't actually necessary)

This is all interesting to me, in that when fiction touches on the idea of aliens and humans potentially substantially sharing social space they tend to take one of two extreme viewpoints: that either integration will be so minor an obstacle as to not be worth acknowledging at all, or so significant an obstacle as to... still not be worth acknowledging at all, but in the sense that the story's attitude to aliens is 'don't bother with diplomacy, just kill them all'. Either way, the view is generally taken completely for granted, where 'integration is effortless' or 'integration is impossible' is just taken as an absolute truth not worth scrutinizing at all. Both of which are pretty ridiculous oversimplifications; it's not like human social systems are so binary in this regard.

When I do see fiction touching on the notion of aliens integrating into human culture in a more nuanced way, the bar for admission tends to be set very high compared to what Chimera Squad seems to be going for, generally to an extent that is quite eyebrow-raising if you think about what humans will tolerate from their fellow humans, especially if you think of how much 'bad behavior' will get a pass if it's coming from a child who is assumed to not yet know any better. Screaming in a public space, for example; this is pretty widely frowned upon by human cultures, but if a baby is doing it, or even a child who's old enough to walk, the standard response is very much not 'time to drown this kid and start over with one who doesn't scream so readily' and in fact most people would be completely horrified and/or disgusted if someone seriously suggested that as a possible response. And even from adults, if the screaming is happening for a reason like 'I just broke a bone and am in extreme pain', it's similarly not going to be judged harshly by onlookers. (Usually)

Nonetheless, I've seen a non-trivial amount of fiction treating aliens integrating into human societies as, essentially, 'if they can't be perfectly well-behaved by adult human standards from literal day 1, it's not worth the effort and we should just kill them'.

So it's noteworthy to me that Chimera Squad seems to place the initial bar fairly low; this is consistent with the game's broader themes of acceptance and all, but is worth emphasizing because plenty of stories that are pushing the idea that acceptance is good on an explicit level still often have inadequately-scrutinized elements that are very inconsistent with such a notion.

Funnily enough, this low bar is also actually a good foundation for justifying the gameplay; the relatively hands-off approach the new world government is presented as taking as part of this relatively accepting policy is actually pretty natural to result in the current social environment being a bit of a chaotic mess. I'm not sure whether this is a point consciously recognized by the team, as the game itself doesn't directly suggest such an idea and honestly I'm used to pop culture generally trying to downplay or ignore the potential downsides of the views they are pressing as moral positives... but whether they intended it that way or not, it works out pretty well.

Anyway, moving on from Yarvo because honestly it's a minor miracle I extracted 10 paragraphs of Viagoe writing out of a character who barely exists as a narrative entity, it's on to Xel.

Well, before I get into that properly, I should mention I quite like a bit of info Axiom will drop if you've recruited him before the cinema in which Director Kelly introduces the Gray Phoenix leadership; that Yarvo and Xel are pretty obviously aliases, because they're just words from a dialect or language Axiom calls 'forge speak'. I especially like how Axiom offers a couple different translations of each word -pop culture engaging with fictional languages (And occasionally when engaging with real languages) all too often acts as if all languages are really just ciphers of each other, where all the meanings and connotations of a given English word are fully replicated in 'equivalent words' in other languages. In actuality this is basically never fully true for a wide variety of reasons, and I would fully expect this point to hold with languages from actual aliens. So Axiom waffling on exactly how to render these into English is a nice moment of realism.

Especially since there's a clear implicit awareness in how the thing being language-ified can shape the perceptual connotations. For Yarvo, Axiom suggests 'newly-forged' and 'birthed in fire' as translations -you can tell that Yarvo as a word is pretty specifically a word that was made to describe something being forged in the sense of shaping metal with intense heat, and specifically is probably a term for a specific stage in the process ('The stage in which it is done or nearly done', rather than being a word describing a forging process as a whole), with more metaphorical connotations growing out of the core of the act it's a name for. There's also a suggestion of history in here, in that it seems likely that Yarvo as a word was probably made pretty expressly to describe an element of forging, rather than being an existing word to describe a prior process that was then adapted to describe a new process. Notably, this would be consistent with Enemy Unknown implying Mutons were something along the lines of tribes of hunter-gatherers when the Ethereals found them and abducted them; it's entirely possible that the process of using intense heat to shape metals was an entirely new idea to the abducted Mutons and they ended up inventing a lot of words to describe this whole new set of concepts.

This is all surprisingly thoughtful-looking compared to what I'm used to seeing with alien names and languages in pop culture, and is especially surprising given Enemy Unknown and XCOM 2 basically didn't touch on alien languages and names at all. War of the Chosen giving the Chosen randomly-selected names heavy on dashes was more or less it prior to Chimera Squad, and was pretty typical of pop culture in that it's pretty clear the primary goal was to make those names 'sound alien'. (Or more accurately to look alien; a dash inside a name sure does look weird as text, but pop culture using this bit pretty clearly generally has given no thought to what the dash is supposed to represent as far as pronunciation, and normally dashes in English don't represent anything as far as pronunciation)

Anyway, Custodian Xel.

I'm covering Xel in Yarvo's post because of course Xel doesn't actually have any gameplay representation, the converse to Yarvo barely existing as a narrative entity. Xel is the one who talks to Chimera Squad during the Take Down Gray Phoenix mission, which is the main narrative distinction she gets in practice; we're told that Yarvo handles the 'martial' end of Gray Phoenix while Xel handles more or less everything else, but the game doesn't illustrate this distinction anywhere. It's not like Yarvo will complain at Chimera Squad in some mission types and Xel will do so in other mission types, for example.

Xel and Yarvo unfortunately feels like the team somewhat forgetting their own lore; I've talked before about how Axiom has a conversation with Claymore where he describes Claymore as 'fighting like a woman' and then talks in terms of leading from the front and inspiring others and all...

... but then Yarvo and Xel are Mutons and fit into a dynamic that shows up in pop culture all the time; the lead-from-the-front male warrior and the lead-from-the-back female non-warrior who are a team. This certainly isn't impossible to have happen from an in-universe standpoint, but in terms of fiction design this is the game's main opportunity to really back up Axiom's statement as being Normal Muton Cultural Context and the opportunity... wasn't taken. Exacerbating this is how Xel and Yarvo fit together with regular Praetorians; Praetorians on their own fit well enough to Axiom's statements that it's easy to guess Praetorians are supposed to be primarily or exclusively female Mutons, but they don't get any voice acting at all and Yarvo is our one and only explicitly gendered Praetorian... and is male.

Xel herself is written decently enough within this framework, but the framework is out of step with the worldbuilding, and problematically so given there's not alternatives. That is, if Chimera Squad was instead something like an RPG with main quests and side quests, and the side quests had plenty of cases of front-line warrior Muton women and fighting Gray Phoenix was a main quest with Yarvo and Xel set up the way they are, I'd still feel like it would be better for the main quest the player is guaranteed to see to actually illustrate this quality, but it would at least be the case that the quality absolutely did unequivocally exist in the game. In Actual Chimera Squad, though, Xel and Yarvo are basically it; Axiom's conversation with Claymore, Legionnaires and Brutes getting both male and female voice acting, and arguably the Berserker bits from XCOM 2 (That Chimera Squad doesn't actually reiterate) are the only bits of Chimera Squad that provide evidence of this notion existing, and are all varying degrees of weak support. (Among other points, regular enemy voice acting plays pretty rarely, and as far as I'm aware almost all regular enemies that have voice acting at all have both a male set and a female set; the Shrike Viper is the only case I'm aware of being an exception, where they do have voice acting but don't have a male voice set)

I do at least like how Xel's fatalistic attitude is held to in a coherent way across the permutations of the mission. If you don't hit Gray Phoenix last, Xel talks about how it doesn't matter where you keep her and her fellow Gray Phoenix members; they view the entire planet as a prison. If you hit Gray Phoenix last, this fatalism leads to Xel relatively casually performing a Heroic Sacrifice; for unclear reasons, Xel can't interrupt the takeoff process without going into an extremely hot room, so hot that it will kill her (You destroying power cores is to get the temperature down from 'so hot she'll be vaporized in seconds' to 'will still kill her, but slowly enough she has time to actually get the shutoff done'), and once she's decided Gray Phoenix isn't getting off the planet her 'this planet is our prison' attitude clearly means death doesn't really bother her.

(Normally I'd complain 'why would the starportship be designed this way', but War of the Chosen successfully characterized the Ethereals as exactly the sort of callous planners who I'd legitimately buy would respond to 'the emergency shutdown will kill whoever performs it in the current proposed design' with 'that's a sacrifice I'm willing to have others make', aside that they'd presumably dress up their response to sound more compassionate and all)

The fact that Xel doesn't actually communicate that she's going to die by doing this until right before she's going to head into that one-way-trip is also something I appreciate; a lot of stories run into problems when they try to do heroic sacrifice scenes because they want it to be a big production with a big emotional impact on the audience, and in pursuit of that goal they tend to end up laying out what's going to be happening noticeably before it will happen and have plenty of opportunity for other characters to object and in fact to actively intervene, and often the character performing the sacrifice is intended to be someone the audience likes and will be upset to see die. This often works out very poorly, especially in games because if the game has succeeded in that general idea then obviously the player will have an impulse to stop the person from killing theirself, and such games basically never do an adequate job of making it so the player being unable to intervene makes realistic sense; with Xel, here, the point at which the player is even aware of the issue to potentially object is the point at which it's already too late to stop Xel.

Stepping back a bit from 'pure story/game construction', I also appreciate how this matches much more closely to real-life suicides than is typical of pop culture. Real people who commit suicide tend to hide their intentions quite deliberately, where they may consider it for weeks ahead of time without letting on this fact, or may even mentally commit to a specific date and then endeavor to arrange things so nobody around them will know that's what they're doing until it's too late to stop it. (Whether that's 'family finds them dead' or 'the intent to suicide is only communicated in the seconds before they plan to jump off a cliff') Pop culture's tendency to want to present suicidal actions as a telegraphed, emotionally dramatic thing where onlookers can make a fairly involved attempt to dissuade the suicidal individual from their course has little to do with reality, and I honestly think this trend is actively harmful by giving people unrealistic notions of what individuals considering suicide look like and how they go about performing the act if they commit to it.

(As a comparison point, 'exploding cars' being a pop culture meme is dumb and I hate it, but I doubt it instills unrealistic notions of how the world works in a manner liable to cause problems for people; even if someone is ignorant enough to genuinely believe cars in real life do explode at the drop of a hat, I have trouble imagining how this would lead them to make bad life choices that harm themselves and the people around them)

So Xel very carefully leaving out 'this will kill me' until the absolute last possible second is much more like a real suicidal person than average for pop culture. This also extends to what I pointed out about her broad fatalism leading into it; I imagine a lot of players don't respond to Xel's fatalism by worrying she might be considering suicide, same as people interacting with someone considering suicide will often completely miss even fairly obvious warning signs.

So even though I feel the Muton gender-and-social-organization point was a bit mismanaged here, I do find myself overall positive on Xel's writing, and indeed on Gray Phoenix's writing overall.

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Next time, we move on to an introduction to Sacred Coil.

See you then.