The Survivor (Chapter 3 Spoilers Within)

-WARNING-
This thread contains unmarked spoilers for a side story in Chapter 3.
You have been warned.

So I have been playing the game for a while now. Exploring, grinding, collecting jobs, saving the world, whatever. I had started to notice a bit of a trend. Whenever I collect a new asterisk, I tend to leave the former carrier of it sort of...dead. This trend was honestly getting a little distressing (I'll get to why a bit later), when something happened.

I defeated the wonderful Praline à la Mode. What made this interesting was that she survived. Every other asterisk-bearer I had fought wound up dead. No matter what their role, what their relationship to the characters, we fought and defeated them all.

Praline, however, merely chose to give up her life as a psychotic pop idol of death, and to return to a simpler life as a regular girl, apparently giving up her asterisk to us in the process.

I was a little shocked, to be honest, because it was so unexpected. I had all but given up on the possibility of any of the asterisk-bearers surviving, to the point that seeing one was pretty much just a check in my mind "yep, there's another dead character", and only the fact that I wasn't completely aware of what all the jobs looked like kept certain characters from being written off for doom immediately.

However, Praline's survival opens up so many more possibilities. While I'm still not expecting any other survivors (if any was going to survive, it would be the young pop-star), it still opens up so many more possibilities. Maybe Alternis will die heroically, and give up his asterisk after also betraying the duchy (not going to happen, because they're going to give us at least one boss fight against the dude, but I can dream)? It also opens up further opportunities for Bravely Second. If asterisks can be passed on without having to kill people, maybe we can have quests to learn jobs from friendly characters. Imagine if Kamiizumi was actually still Edea's trainer, and he gave up the asterisk after a bout in which you earned it, or something even more creative than that.

Don't get me wrong, I love the number of boss fights, and the sheer fun and creativity that went into each one. But I still think that there are some missed opportunities for some alternatives that would help emphasize the killing of the others, and Praline's survival, in my mind, opened the door to seeing more variety in the quests, and I'm hoping that, come Bravely Second, we'll not only see more jobs, but more ways to obtain them.