Friendly and cheerful 90% of the time, in that busybody JRPG protagonist way. Admirably patient with kids and other weirdos. Polite whenever appropriate. Goes out of his way to help people in whatever way he can, even if he can't always rein in his sass at the same time.
Usually seems slightly distant if you pay attention, though - he has few close friends and they're all more like found family.
Strongly idealistic with a somewhat naive righteous streak. Does not generally set out to kill unless it's personal, but has few qualms with potentially lethal violence if it's for what he thinks is a good cause, or in self-defense. In particular, his niceness goes straight out the window if you threaten his family.
Not great at planning; tends to go for extreme and/or impulsive methods, which occasionally work but often don't. He appreciates friends who are more practically-minded than he is.
Has trouble stopping himself from thinking aloud.
Dislikes feeling helpless and tries to avoid situations that cause it.
People can and have exploited all of the above! But he's fortunately a little less wide-eyed than he used to be.
Likes reading as a hobby and looking at art, but lacks formal education in either. Capable of studying, but mainly for specific short- to mid-term goals. He does have a decent memory all round, which helps.
Lowkey would like to be a Cool Dude, but is aware that he's not.
Really heavy sleeper. Many opinions on beds.
Likes warm temperatures better than cold, at least in the context of the temperate climate he grew up in.
Fond of high places.
Notable features:
Shares his body and soul with a second consciousness named Marno, a 1000-year-old "fragment of the wicked god" capable of speaking up through his mouth. Marno mostly sounds like a quieter Sagi when he does speak, acting as a reliable conversation partner and source of encouragement, but harbours a more depressed, cynical side empowered by Sagi's negative emotions. While the two treat each other as separate people with separate memories and have come to a friendly understanding over time, Marno's emotions sometimes bleed into Sagi's without Sagi really thinking about it.
Can temporarily augment the physical strength of his arms and hands with Marno's help. The effect is accompanied by white light and illusory bright white feathers, the same magical light as various "blessings"/mutations in BK1.
For the above reasons, his body may appear magically corrupted or monster-like to characters who can perceive/engage with that kind of thing. His soul is relatively lightly corrupted in comparison. It's possible that this is what eventually kills him, but at his canon point there's no physical sign of it and he's had no reasons to worry.
Can manifest large bird wings on his back at will, complete with long yellow heron-like plumes and a feather pattern resembling the entire back half of a bird - teal green with yellow markings on top, white and fluffy underneath. These "wings of the heart" are completely unremarkable in his canon setting. He can't actually fly for more than short bursts, but he naturally uses his wings to help with jumping, breaking long falls and balance in general, especially in combat. They may also appear by themselves under duress.
Like everyone else in his setting, he can perceive the presence or absence of other people's wings to some extent even when not fully manifested; to him, someone who isn't using their wings right now looks a little different from someone who lost them or was born without.
Carries a katana and other belongings inside "magnus", specially made cards that can trap and later reproduce a wide range of corporeal and non-corporeal objects for easy transportation. In his canon, magnus are considered basic technology, not magic. They work by encoding an object's "essence" into a machine-readable format.
Average height and distinctly babyfaced, so he looks a bit younger than he is.
Some signs of an impressively healed-over chest wound. Whether it was originally a stab wound or a laser burn is anyone's guess.
Unnamed world consisting of continent-sized floating islands in the sky, magically-polluted earth below. Humankind willingly left the surface 1000 years ago when it was no longer fit to live on and by now have largely forgotten it was ever there.
The main islands of the setting: Sadal Suud (country bumpkin land), Diadem (floor made of clouds land), Anuenue (tropical jungle land), Mira (surrealist art movement land), Alfard (evil empire land). Some other locations: Wazn (spooky snowy ice land), Duhr (containing the few remaining human settlements on the earth's surface), Hassaleh (conveniently not appearing in the first game land).
The only method of travel between islands is by boat, since they're too far apart to build bridges or fly. Most "boats" in the setting are large domesticated flying animals of various kinds - someone's "fishing boat" might be a large anomalocaris with seats on top, etc. Only the Empire prefers standard jrpg mechanical airships.
Lakes and rivers exist, some of them just flowing across the sky, but the ocean is a myth. Whales are also a myth.
Domestic animals in the setting are largely mashups or recolours of real animals, with goofy names. The most ubiquitous domestic animal is the greythorne, an amphibious dolphin-like creature. Many monsters are just large, weird wild animals, though others are more magical in nature.
The reason for the earth becoming magically corrupted and uninhabitable is the ancient god Malpercio, said to be so evil that even his corpse was too evil to properly destroy before it started rotting the rest of the world. The reasons for Malpercio existing are, uh, complicated.
Magic is powered by the strength of a person's soul, which is susceptible to things like grief and depression, and has on average declined in the past 1000 years. The most common form of magic these days is "wings of the heart", personalised wings-on-demand that most humans in the sky are born with but few can properly fly with.
Some humans just happen to have big snail shells, entire bird bodies or flippers. Some of them are just items of clothing. Some of them aren't!
The main religion in the setting revolves around the stars, and in particular the Cetus constellation, but is more a loose collection of cultural traditions than anything organised. Outside of special occasions like weddings, people mainly pray to the stars for good luck or similar mundane blessings. Residents of Wazn also pray to the Ocean, particularly for their funeral rites. The concept of "gods" in the setting means giant monsters from old fairy tales - they're often used as art motifs, but are wholly separate from religion outside of rural Hassaleh, where people occasionally pray to the ancient gods in the same way as the stars.
Very rarely, maybe once a generation, a spirit from another world adopts a person of sufficient determination in this world and grants them vast magical power. Such people are called spiriters and widely respected, although they're uncommon enough to sometimes be considered just a story. Sagi is not a spiriter, but used to think he was.
Technology is sometimes uncannily modern looking despite the fantasy setting, though almost entirely restricted to the evil empire and often covered in trumpet-like brass pipes for Aesthetic. Machine guns, film cameras and large computer consoles exist side by side.
Stupid hats.
Sagi's history notes:
Bastard son of a wealthy powerful douchebag, specifically one of the empire's foremost military leaders having an affair with his maidservant. Sagi learned the details after killing him for unrelated reasons, but isn't super torn up about it. Dude was a douchebag!
Had a piece of Malpercio's dead body grafted onto him as a baby, meaning there was basically never a time in his life when he was separate from Marno. He was only one of a dozen or so people subjected to these "malideiter" experiments, aiming to create an artificial spiriter through surgery... but the others were mainly assorted disposable adults and children, not shipped off to the lab the minute they were born. His dad was a douchebag!
His mother stole him back from the lab, escaped the empire and raised him in the small sleepy farming village she was originally from, unaware of any details of the malideiter experiments and never talking about his douchebag dad. She soon founded an orphanage for children whose parents were drafted and/or killed by the empire, so Sagi grew up among a large number of younger siblings. His cheerful attitude comes primarily from her, although he was quieter as a child and cried a lot. Of course, his highkey distaste for the colonising imperial regime also comes from her.
Despite having a loving relationship with his mom, caring greatly for his orphanage siblings and often hanging out with the other village kids, was a little bit of a loner growing up. His main friends were Marno, who first spoke to him when he was still pretty small, and Guillo, a sapient amnesiac robot-puppet-person he happened to dig up in the woods not long afterward.
Left home at nearly 13 and enlisted in the imperial army shortly after (it's a jrpg), hoping to rise through the ranks until he was in a position to assassinate the emperor. This was not a well thought out plan! He's bad at plans!
Instead, rose through the ranks until certain politicians in the empire decided it was convenient to scapegoat him for their assassination of the emperor and clean up remaining evidence of the god-surgery experiments at the same time.
Was not successfully cleaned up. Sure got beaten up a lot in people's various attempts at it though!
Actually did turn into a big gangly monster at one point like the other experiments. He got better. Specifically: he turned, got shot by a tank several times, nearly passed out from the resultant chest wound and pain, actually passed out when sedated for transport, was placed in a capsule and left to be processed later, then got better just before he woke up.
After saving the world from some dipshits in a giant nuclear airship, got happily teen married and eloped to Mira because they both thought the middle of a goddamn interdimensional vortex seemed preferable to politics. (the marriage thing is not one of the stronger bits of writing in bko lol)
In about 10 years will grow up to have a daughter and then die horribly of the plague, instigating most of the plot of BK1. gg!
Marno's history notes:
Sagi calling Marno "Marno" isn't intended in BKO itself but the entire plot twist about him requires that he has no canon second name so lmao
I'm going with the English localisation where Marno is always male.
Marno's surface personality has to be extrapolated from a handful of sparse dialogue options since the player character is technically him, not Sagi. My interpretation: tries to be cheerful and supportive, often even genuine, but compared to Sagi has a more pronounced excitable streak and a quicker temper. he absolutely chose all the rude options in conversations with verus! because those are funny and make some amount of sense!
Marno was the youngest of five orphaned siblings from a coastal town 1000 years ago, when humans still lived on the land and relied on magic more than technology. The humans back then were "gods" only in the sense that they were capable of powerful magic that modern-day humans would consider miracles, but that got distorted over the centuries into the idea of actual giant gods.
Marno was unusually bad at magic compared to his older siblings and often babied because of it, but considerably more skilled with a sword than most people in that age, who were squishy nerds. He tended to space out hard sometimes and was a little too deadpan in an oddball way for even his siblings to fully understand, but would always act fast and decisively in a crisis.
In those days, there existed Yet Another Douchebag named Wiseman who wanted to delete all corporeal bodies on earth and turn humans into unaging, unchanging souls, so that he could eat all of those souls and absorb their power for himself. You know, it's a JRPG.
The siblings spearheaded the resistance against Wiseman, but kept getting their asses kicked. When Wiseman massacred their entire hometown in retaliation, Marno's oldest brother Seph despaired and went to make a pact with otherworldly horrors for power. Shockingly, the otherworldly horrors did not play nice, demanding the bodies and souls of all five siblings after their deaths instead of just Seph. Marno and the others were desperate enough to accept anyway, creating Team Malpercio.
Before they could take down Wiseman once and for all with their newfound demonic power, they were executed by the magic police for their mass murder crimes and died without accomplishing anything, leaving the otherworldly horrors in possession of their souls and dark magic infested corpses. oops!
The five corpses, collectively labelled "Malpercio's body", were dismembered post-mortem to try and mitigate their enormous evil magical power, and all but the largest pieces were scattered into the sky as-is so that the earth could heal without them. Each corpse bit exudes magical corruption just by existing, sometimes visible as black mist. Sagi's Marno is one of these smaller corpse bits, an "afterling", which became conscious and sapient again when implanted into a host body.
Like the other god-fragments, Marno carries some of Malpercio's desire for revenge on humanity - revenge for keeping them from Wiseman, tearing them apart and sealing them away. This is roughly why human malideiters eventually turn into monsters even when they don't die: when a host is weakened by great emotional or physical stress, the afterling inside instinctively seizes control and forcibly mutates their body in order to go on an equally instinctive rampage. The mutation often just kills the host; if it doesn't, the host remains conscious and sometimes partly in control after turning into a monster, but after a short time their personality gets overwritten completely.
Marno also has some degree of empathic link with other afterlings, though it fades with distance - he feels an unspoken rapport with them when meeting them pre-mutation, experiences oppressive discomfort when he sees other afterlings getting attacked or captured, and suffers the same traumatic pain as they do if in close enough physical proximity. All of these have a tendency to transfer onto Sagi as "gut feelings".
However, Marno still has free will. (For now! [scare chord]) He was initially cagey after being stuck inside Sagi, not speaking at all for a few years and then posing as a guardian spirit rather than admitting anything about himself, but eventually realises (= gets fuckin schooled) that he put his host through a lot of pain in doing so and regrets it. Even before deciding to give up on Malpercio's revenge for the time being, he reverts Sagi's bodily transformation to let him die as himself, something not previously documented in the malideiter experiments.
Sagi's personality and identity kind of built up around Marno's existence as he grew up, since he was too young to have an established personality before getting turned into an experiment. Several of his negative personality traits, including his incongruous vengeful streak and pervasive sense of alienation outside his family, seem a bit too on the nose for Marno to not have influenced them at all. From external points of view, they make up a single composite person.
Their unique ability to eventually reconcile is partly related to the coherence of their combined personalities, but Sagi was also empathetic enough to want to try to understand Marno even as he was about to get fully taken over, so his loving upbringing and good nature despite everything were important too.
Late in the game, Marno magically releases several other afterlings from captivity through ambiguous means, with Sagi only commenting that it "doesn't hurt". My headcanon is that he absorbed them, and that they're not heard from afterwards because the afterlings in the unsuccessful malideiters never achieved full spirit-like sentience.
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