Something that occurs to me with a lot of games is that some of the in-game mechanics are clearly used to abstract away things that are being done in-universe. Naturally, this is no surprise, but for some reason, with the Xenoblade series specifically I end up thinking 'man it would be neat if those things were diegetic but only for the protagonist'

Quick travel in Xenoblade is just abstracting away the travel time of heading back to somewhere, but there's this part of my brain that's just like

'man, it'd be cool if quick travel worked like that in-universe'

ffxiv does some funny stuff in this range, like aetheryte teleportation is a common enough skill as long as you can manipulate aether, which makes it pointed when one major npc cannot

but almost anyone can do it

meanwhile it's been said that the aoe markers we see is specifically because of the echo (though sometimes that's zigzagged)

but I do love how many meta-functions in xenoblade 1 are because of the monado yes

What I want is the quick travel function in X to be diegetic, if only because ‘this weird amnesiac Elma found can fucking teleport but only to specific, arbitrary places’ is a hell of a funny worldbuilding plot point

ahhhhhh gotcha