thank you so much for listening. And I really dont want to take away from what you took away from the story- I think perseverance is a virtue and there is a lot of meaning in holding onto hope despite it being . Stubbornness can be based asf. I think the main difference in my thinking is that my perspective is that perseverance is a collective thing; It’s about finding resources and options available to you, and a lot of the time the most effective ones are other people. Like you’ve pointed out this is rather explicit in the game. You can summon others to help you and stuff. I think the only issue is that this help might not be enough alone for some players, and while it might seem cheap or devaluing to the hostility of the world to give them the option to make it easier, I think it fits into the theme of perserverance well. For perseverance as a message to be portrayed to the player, they have to have a chance of succeeding, and giving accessibility and easier options enables that for disabled people. From that perspective I think it would only take away from the hostility of the world if players enabled accessibility options needlessly on purpose. Which while I understand the concern about it, I feel like if someone is choosing to play a famously challenging game, them turning around making it trivial for themselves on purpose is a huge Skill Issue and means they probably wouldn’t properly internalize the themes anyways.

Or in other words, perseverance is a communal effort and giving accessibility options could help players without access to the community for whatever reason to still receive that message