Dawntrail's Final Zones destroy everything the story has built.

Because it's not life support? It's a bunch of memories stuffed into a .exe and given an algorithm to make it act like the person the memories are based off of. The moral quandary is that it's powered by the souls of ACTUAL living people and not by AAs.

I swear, some of you allow yourselves to be emotionally manipulated so easily

Nobody can really win with the way this story was shoddily written. For the record, I am of the opinion that the Endless are, or at least could become, sentient living beings. Even if their memories and emotions were being overwritten by the Meso Terminal, what makes us think that there's no possibility of changing that?

Cahciua certainly seems to have all her memories and emotions in tact, and actively makes the decision to somehow (never explained) operate a machine in our reflection. She makes the conscious decision to shut down the Endless, which makes no sense seeing as she herself is the most sentient out of all of them.

The point is, whether you think the Endless are alive or not doesn't really matter. They clearly had the capacity to be more than just AI, but the writers are uncreative hacks who don't know how to write deep meaningful plot points.

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Originally Posted by missTori

It would’ve actually made more sense if we met her dead but with no recollection of memories, since then culling the alexandrians would be like putting your pet down for mercy. There’s a lot of ways they could’ve wrote that arc better

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I have no clue what you want to say but what the writers did here actually makes sense:

We see Namikka dying of old age (natural cause) and taken away.

Later we learn that the souls of people that die that way get extracted and processed to become fuel for the technology,
while their memories end up in a databank (cloud).

Then we visit the holodeck where said memory imprints continue to "live" as interactive programs.

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Originally Posted by MarianneviBrittania

So why didn't we offer a less evil alternative solution to Sphene and the Endless' dilemma, instead of jumping straight to murder? Golbez' plan was arguably quite sinister and immoral indeed, and yet we did not hasten to stick a sword in his gullet for it. No, instead we offered him a 'third way' that proved to be quite anime indeed. I've still yet to hear a reason why this story that so much resembles other tales we've witnessed prior (the Void Arc, the Ultima Thule Allies quests, Shadowbringers itself) is so devoid of the WoL's prior displayed empathy. Dawntrail's ending honestly made me feel like my WoL was a psychopath.

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At what point did Sphene give us time for that? What we did was NOT evil, we released souls of the dead back into the Lifestream so they could no longer be used as batteries for a bunch of echoes of the past. Ya'll got a real twisted sense of morality if you think not allowing actual souls to power fake people is evil.

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Originally Posted by SirShady

Nobody can really win with the way this story was shoddily written. For the record, I am of the opinion that the Endless are, or at least could become, sentient living beings. Even if their memories and emotions were being overwritten by the Meso Terminal, what makes us think that there's no possibility of changing that?

Cahciua certainly seems to have all her memories and emotions in tact, and actively makes the decision to somehow (never explained) operate a machine in our reflection. She makes the conscious decision to shut down the Endless, which makes no sense seeing as she herself is the most sentient out of all of them.

The point is, whether you think the Endless are alive or not doesn't really matter. They clearly had the capacity to be more than just AI, but the writers are uncreative hacks who don't know how to write deep meaningful plot points.

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They didn't, though. Sphene proves that when she has to literally delete herself in order to do something against her programing. The only way they charge is if they are changed. They are nothing more than the echoes of the dead, forced to forevermore pantomime the people the memories belonged to.

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Originally Posted by Palladiamors

They didn't, though. Sphene proves that when she has to literally delete herself in order to do something against her programing. The only way they charge is if they are changed. They are nothing more than the echoes of the dead, forced to forevermore pantomime the people the memories belonged to.

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Except the “important” endless all stand in opposition to this

Cahciua as was explained still has memories and doesn’t want to be an endless stuck in living memory. Namikka was happy to be turned off but also incredibly grateful that being in living memory allowed her to finally have some closure with Wuk lamat after she got trapped in the dome. Otis is genuinely interested in the future beyond where his knowledge ends after he is reconstructed into an endless and krile’s parents both appreciated being able to see their daughter but also didn’t want their knowledge to be used for Ill

None of them were ghosts pantomiming the living incarnation they were sapient beings with thoughts and feelings. Sure the background endless played like NPC’s but I mean that’s the same of even living NPC’s. Every named endless acts fully like a real human does, expressing all emotions and not just enforced happiness by the system

But at the end of the day I agree with shady, the writing just isn’t good and it creates these problems

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Originally Posted by Palladiamors

They didn't, though. Sphene proves that when she has to literally delete herself in order to do something against her programing. The only way they charge is if they are changed. They are nothing more than the echoes of the dead, forced to forevermore pantomime the people the memories belonged to.

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The fact that Sphene can make the decision to go against her programming at all shows she's more than just an AI. She's also clearly a separate entity from the normal Endless tasked with managing and sustaining them.

And that still doesn't change the fact that Cahciua clearly has her memories and emotions in tact as an Endless. Even if you're correct, the story is contradicting itself.

Like I said, nobody can win, because the writers are crap.

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Originally Posted by SirShady

The fact that Sphene can make the decision to go against her programming at all shows she's more than just an AI.

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Sphene: yes. She has administrative privileges after all.
The other endless do not have such freedoms.

Even Cahciua doesn't. The only thing she really did was hijack one of the monitor trashmobs to communicate with the outside world. At that point, she is the only Endless except from Sphene that even gets any sort of data from outside the system.

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Originally Posted by Granyala

Sphene: yes. She has administrative privileges after all.
The other endless do not have such freedoms.

Even Cahciua doesn't. The only thing she really did was hijack one of the monitor trashmobs to communicate with the outside world. At that point, she is the only Endless except from Sphene that even gets any sort of data from outside the system.

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Cahciua feels sadness, seemingly has all her memories in tact, and comes to the conclusion that the Endless should be deleted. These are things that directly contradict what we're told about the Endless being these perfectly content facsimiles. She even makes the decision to go out and explore the outside world before she even explores the fauna section of Living Memory, for whatever reason.

Like I said, nobody can win. It's clear we're putting way more thought into this than the writers ever did. It really doesn't matter. I'm gonna save myself the headache and leave it at this...

Dawntrail's writing is crap.

It really bothers me to consider that Emet-Selch and the Unsundered would just let this go? They're cannibalizing and burning through the very souls they're trying to save. And I'm to think they couldn't do anything because of a key that was previously stored in a vault? I dunno.

Also the arguments here are so funny because it proves the story is plainly convoluted.

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Originally Posted by SirShady

Cahciua feels sadness, seemingly has all her memories in tact, and comes to the conclusion that the Endless should be deleted.

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Yeah she is definitely the odd one out, I give you that. What I also find odd is that apparently there is no actual supervision by the Meso terminal. I mean it would be trivial to monitor the thoughts of the Endless programs and identify Cahciua as a threat to the system.

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Originally Posted by missTori

It seems like people want a reason to justify culling the Endless. Killing Sphene is easy since she’s the one in charge of harvesting souls. However, reading these replies, I guess people wanted the endless to just wither away once they run out of aether.

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I don't think we as players, or the Scions or Wuk actually want that. It was stated multiple times that erasing the Endless was HARD and PAINFUL.

The fact is though: whether we erase them now or whether we just eliminate Sphene and let them run out of energy, the result would be the same either way.

In many respects, us deleting the unsuspecting populace before they know what happens is much more merciful than killing their leader and then letting the system run until it starts to break down, spreading panic, the feeling of being abandoned etc.

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Originally Posted by SirShady

Cahciua feels sadness, seemingly has all her memories in tact, and comes to the conclusion that the Endless should be deleted. These are things that directly contradict what we're told about the Endless being these perfectly content facsimiles. She even makes the decision to go out and explore the outside world before she even explores the fauna section of Living Memory, for whatever reason.

Like I said, nobody can win. It's clear we're putting way more thought into this than the writers ever did. It really doesn't matter. I'm gonna save myself the headache and leave it at this...

Dawntrail's writing is crap.

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Players putting more thought into the finer details and consistency of the narrative is a tale as old as the time I started the game. There are too many writers of too many talent levels and specializations to seriously expect something perfectly consistent or always compelling.

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Originally Posted by Turtledeluxe

Players putting more thought into the finer details and consistency of the narrative is a tale as old as the time I started the game. There are too many writers of too many talent levels and specializations to seriously expect something perfectly consistent or always compelling.

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Not just the case in games I'm afraid.
Think too much about any story, and you WILL find inconsistencies and plot holes.

Humans are imperfect beings, as such our creations will also be imperfect.

That being said: DT's story does have some pretty bloody big and gaping holes.

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Originally Posted by Willemdarke

That said, how on Earth did anyone at Square think it's even remotely plausible for the characters to just go out and pull the plug on the life support of an entire race of people? This level of genocide is simply disgusting. And why? Because 2 or 3 Endless wanted to die? Setting aside the moral debate of assisted euthanasia, the vast majority of Endless never agreed to this, or even knew it was happening.

"We don't think the Endless are alive, so we aren't guilty of murder." That was Emet-Selch's entire argument for commuting mass genocide. Just two expansions ago, we vehemently opposed this line of thinking and condemned it.

Sphene was the threat and the problem. The Endless posed no threat whatsoever to the people of the Source and Reflections. More than that, they weren't even truly "endless". They were being sustained on a reservoir of aether - one that we were specifically told is running out. Why didn't we simply let the Endless live and die of "old age", when their aether ran out????? This whole section of the game made no sense and was simply uncomfortable to play through.

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I'll try to elucidate the situation.

Firstly let me agree I did not like having to "pull the plug"

I did not like that other "endless" didn't get to choose. Or at most elect themselves to return to the Aetherial Sea similar to how the Ancients did.

The whole time I thought well... if Aether cannot sustain the endless then why not use Dynamis? The more plentiful energy source that's fueled by vibes seemed to be what Living Memory was all about was good vibes.

With that out of the way.

The Unlost City - Living Memory - The Golden City.

It's an elaborate purgatory. Not individuals themselves but the reconstituted forms of stored memories. (Same reason we can't taste this realms version of Food - because it's not food, it's synthetic imaginary food it only tastes like what those people would remember Ice Cream or Popcorn taste like and it'll only be their most fondest memory of that experience it offers no nutritional value)

in a sense, it is an Anti-Aetherial Sea.

When something dies it is supposed to return to the Aetherial Sea to be redistributed in that world to maintain a balance. The land itself FEEDS on Aether to sustain actual real life. This is one of the reasons why we stopped primal summoning for example because Primals drain our stars life energy.

In order to sustain these half-lives the Endless have put a tax on their reflection causing them to have to attempt to assimilate worlds to acquire "more aether" so they can keep this going.

These memories of the long deceased have been dead for some for hundreds of years. They've been "living" off borrowed time at the cost of the Star itself.

In order for Living Memory to continue would have been the result of countless genocides in a scale akin to a rejoining.

The situations these Endless were put in was a cruel coping mechanism for death to spare them of the great suffrage the peoples of Alexandria endured in their war torn past.

By Pulling the plug, we release that remaining aether of their manifested memories back to their full souls revitalizing and saving the Star. Both our Source and this reflection.

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Originally Posted by Turtledeluxe

Players putting more thought into the finer details and consistency of the narrative is a tale as old as the time I started the game. There are too many writers of too many talent levels and specializations to seriously expect something perfectly consistent or always compelling.

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This is true, but I've come to expect better from FFXIV. I had problems in Endwalker with how the WoL had no choice but to idolize Venat even if we disagree with how she went about The Final Days and genociding her own people. This is on a whole other level though.

These are very basic questions the writers should be asking themselves during the writing process. How do we show that the Endless are just facsimiles? How can we be sure the story is having the intended emotional affect on the player? Are we leaving this part open to interpretation? I wish the answer to that last question was "yes", but sadly the Disney music at the end suggests otherwise. And there's tons of this present throughout all of Dawntrail. It's clear they just didn't care and figured, "Eh, play whatever music fits the intention and then we won't have to actually put work into the writing."

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Originally Posted by Granyala

Yeah she is definitely the odd one out, I give you that. What I also find odd is that apparently there is no actual supervision by the Meso terminal. I mean it would be trivial to monitor the thoughts of the Endless programs and identify Cahciua as a threat to the system.

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Yeah, the rules are never made clear. Why does Sphene have to delete her personality in order to kill people to maintain the Endless? Why is she allowed to do this in the first place? Why does Cahciua operate differently from all the other Endless? Why doesn't she act characteristically with the person she's based on? Why is she allowed out of Living Memory? How does she manage to control a robot outside of Living Memory? So many questions that will more than likely never be answered.

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Originally Posted by SirShady

Yeah, the rules are never made clear. Why does Sphene have to delete her personality in order to kill people to maintain the Endless? Why is she allowed to do this in the first place? Why does Cahciua operate differently from all the other Endless? Why doesn't she act characteristically with the person she's based on? Why is she allowed out of Living Memory? How does she manage to control a robot outside of Living Memory? So many questions that will more than likely never be answered.

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At least Sphene is easy to explain: She is an amalgam of an AI designed to keep the Endless alive at all costs and her old personality.
After Zoraal-Ja's demise she has full administrative power, all remaining checks have been removed.

Eventually the softness of the personality conflicted with the primary directive of the AI, the AI seized control and deleted the personality.

As for Cahciua: it's a mystery how she got into Living Memory.
Supposedly, the rebel gang doesn't wear regulators at all, so it's kinda puzzling how she ended up being an Endless in the first place unless the Alexandrians store all memories of the dying, whether they wore regulators during their life or not. Still, Shetona are long lived, so 30yrs is not long enough for her to die of old age. If she died in an accident / fight, she must have been super lucky that the Alexandrians were still able to digi-nab her memories.

Why she is allowed to act this way? The answer to that is simple and a bit mind boggling in it's banality: Because the system has not been designed with internal security risks in mind. The Alexandrians could not conceive of a memory altered "always happy" Endless deliberately wanting to end it all and shut down the system, so they never bothered to guard it.

Energy and signals flow freely between Living Memory and the Source (Sphene clearly uses that to communicate and appear to their people), so communication via robo-derp is easy once Cahciua learned how to control one. The bots are still there after we shut down the zone, so they are actual objects with independent power sources, rather than Mirages.

It also stands to reason that they are also built in Everkeep, so Cahciua only needed to learn how to hack one and could then do so with one that is outside of Living Memory, eliminating the problem of getting a physical object out w/o having access to the portal.

The "endless" are just AI recreations of people based on what a computer thinks was their happiest moment after analyzing their memory data. They are already dead, they are not people, everything they experience is artificial, fake, programmed by a computer, and you are blatantly told they have no souls. Even Sphene (if you listen to what you are being told and pay attention) is just a AI copy of a dead person who has had her "prime directive" hard coded into her. Even she has no choice in anything she does, her programming forces her to prioritize keeping the endless online.

You didn't "genocide" anyone, you turned off a server.

Not really? We're you reading the Cs? In order to sustain those phantom abominations people In other shards would have had to die. So it needed to be destroyed. The recreation of otis was what did it for me. I knew that place was aweful as soon as I saw him

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

none of them were ghosts pantomiming the living incarnation they were sapient beings with thoughts and feelings.

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No dude. They were ai. They were programed to think and act the way there past self did. But they're about as much people as chat gpt is

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Originally Posted by sindriiisgaming

No dude. They were ai. They were programed to think and act the way there past self did. But they're about as much people as chat gpt is

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For someone who hates debating with me you searched quite a few pages to find that quote

Regardless I don’t think any of the 5 important endless (cauchia, kriles parents, Otis and namikka) acted anything like programmed AI, especially cauchia who specifically wanted to use that drone to affect events outside of living memory

When the story actually gave focus and time to an endless they were revealed to be far more than just memories acting on a system

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Originally Posted by Karkarov

The "endless" are just AI recreations of people based on what a computer thinks was their happiest moment after analyzing their memory data. They are already dead, they are not people, everything they experience is artificial, fake, programmed by a computer, and you are blatantly told they have no souls. Even Sphene (if you listen to what you are being told and pay attention) is just a AI copy of a dead person who has had her "prime directive" hard coded into her. Even she has no choice in anything she does, her programming forces her to prioritize keeping the endless online.

You didn't "genocide" anyone, you turned off a server.

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This is what the game wants us to believe and we're told, yes. People here are paying attention. The way everything is written and what you actually do in the final zone presents the opposite of what we're being told, though. That's ultimately the issue.

I do understand what the writers intended, but they failed at actually, well... writing it that way. Ex: If the writers tell us the sky is red and I look up and see blue, something has clearly gone wrong somewhere. The same way they write a character to say the Endless aren't really people, then spend an entire zone showing they are, in fact, people and are very much sentient/alive.

I agree with what's been said about it just being very very poor writing. It's just crazy to me that they basically gloss over this despite beating you over the head with what they want you to think for most of the expansion before this.

I don't understand people calling them AI or chatbots, what makes you use that term? Living Memory is a real, physical space you can walk into with your own two legs, it's not the matrix. The last area where we fight the final boss appears to be more of a digital space, but everything outside of that is "real". The Endless are memories (a real physical thing you can see with your own two eyes in this world) given shape using aether. They are not really different from how the Scions appeared on the First, just missing a soul, but what is a soul? If the Alexandrians are to be believed, souls are just energy that is completely interchangeable and there is nothing distinguishing one soul from another, once clean. They are not programs, except for maybe Sphene, who appeared to be partially a program, becoming one completely after the erasure.

Again, I think everything about this is incredibly stupid so I don't liking wasting time with semantics, but I wonder why these terms are being thrown around.

The problem with these zones is not what we did, but how it is written and presented to us. There are several questions that the writers needed to adress in that zones, but failed to do so.

The main one being, "When does someone become alive?" According to Emet-Selch, the current inhabitants of Etheirys are not, though he might have come around on that topic after Endwalker.

What does being alive mean, is a very complex question that doesn't have a clear answer, especially when it comes to artifcial life. Many Sci-fi stories tackle with that problem, but most come to the conclusion that being self-aware means you are alive. The Endless as presented in the game are clearly self-aware, ergo they should be alive. Yet XIV has another criteria: You need to have a soul. Things without one aren't alive in this setting. That's why familiars can be summoned and dismissed at a whim. But this part isn't explained in the MSQ at all and only implied in previous expansions. If the writers spent some time exploring that topic, most players would be more understanding of the choice to erase them.

As it stands in the game, there was no reason to erase the Endless before fighting Sphene. Their energy gathering facility was on the source and the connection was severed. They weren't actively leeching any energy from anyone or anything. Another reason to erase the endless was that Sphene would have no reason to go through with the fusion, if there we no more endless, but this never gets mentioned when we talk to her after the fact. We could have easily kept them running, had some more conversation with our comrades after the fight, where we conclude that nothing can be done and shut them down afterwards.

In the end, everything wrong with this zone boils down to poor writing and presentation.

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Originally Posted by Willemdarke

That said, how on Earth did anyone at Square think it's even remotely plausible for the characters to just go out and pull the plug on the life support of an entire race of people? This level of genocide is simply disgusting. And why? Because 2 or 3 Endless wanted to die? Setting aside the moral debate of assisted euthanasia, the vast majority of Endless never agreed to this, or even knew it was happening.

"We don't think the Endless are alive, so we aren't guilty of murder." That was Emet-Selch's entire argument for commuting mass genocide. Just two expansions ago, we vehemently opposed this line of thinking and condemned it.

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I think you might have got the wrong interpretation of what the Endless are. The Endless do not exist. There is no soul. No Body. They are just a simulacrum from memories. This has been explored before in fiction
- The Matrix
- .Hack//Sign
- Sword Art Online
- Black Mirror - San Junipero (also White Christmas, and Be Right Back)

Now if you read between the lines, the Endless are in the exact same situation as the characters in San Junipero, where they basically are an "endless existance" ln in the computer. Until someone pulls the plug on that computer, they still exist, even if they've "had enough", they can't self-terminate. If someone has no quality of life in reality, and are put in the computer, but can't end their existence, that's actually worse than death. That's the lesson we should have picked up from Endwalker.

If you read too hard into it however, it does look like the the endless are asking to be euthanized. Despite already being dead, the memories are simply a copy. They are not the being that was. This is made pretty clear from

Otis, not recognizing events that took place after becoming Endless, because his soul and memories were in the machine. The "endless" version of him was just his memories from an earlier time period.

. Those two existing at the same time, tells you exactly what the Endless are.

The second half is written better than the first half, if only by virtue there are no stakes for the Warrior of Light until the invasion from the dome happens. The final area however feels a bit disappointing because it's even emptier than the previous 5 areas. Like there was at most two quests in each of the 4 paths.

However it does feel like narratively-speaking, Krile basically got pushed to the backseat when we were given the impression that Krile was important to THIS part of the story from the last part of the post-endwalker expansion.

I feel everything after 2nd trial felt rush. I gave 0 f's about discount Meteion

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

They are not the being that was.

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I think most of us will agree with this. The argument is that they are an entirely new being based off the memories, able to undergo new experiences and display sentience, and that does not make them any less valid for being a machine intelligence.

The main Endless we interact with is all too happy to euthanize the entire thing, *she* wants it to be done. But she does not necessarily speak for every single one of them.

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Originally Posted by Tethan

I don't understand people calling them AI or chatbots, what makes you use that term? Living Memory is a real, physical space you can walk into with your own two legs, it's not the matrix.

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While it's a real place, all of the Endless can teleport around Living Memory willy nilly. They also can change their appearance and we see that at least twice. Also, 90% of them are stored in the servers at any one time because of aether shortages so people are randomly thrown back into the servers and recreated over and over. One NPC has had that happen 3 times. They also digitize when their terminal is turned off.

They may be made of their original memory aether combined with someone else's soul aether (which may have been taken against the subject's will) and they may exist in the real world (sometimes) but it's not a real existence and they're dependent on the computer terminals handling their data.


This whole thing is gross because it's the Alexandrians not being able to be without Sphene and then Sphene not being able to be without her Alexandrians that caused all this. No one can accept death and Sphene created a culture where they just forget about those who died and they cannot function as a rational adult unless they have someone else's soul as a back-up. I would have shut off the system even if it didn't use living souls to operate and I'm really struggling to see the other side of this and why people think that keeping up a population of the dead that requires so much energy to keep sticking around as "alive" and worthy to protect.

I think the people who are upset about this are just being way overly sensitive because I was of the understanding that most people would see this and agree with it because of how wrong it is.

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Originally Posted by Kaecilius

I think most of us will agree with this. The argument is that they are an entirely new being based off the memories, able to undergo new experiences and display sentience, and that does not make them any less valid for being a machine intelligence.

The main Endless we interact with is all too happy to euthanize the entire thing, *she* wants it to be done. But she does not necessarily speak for every single one of them.

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All of these people have previously died. They already lived full lives. There is literally no point in bringing them back "alive" or keeping them that way. The whole thing perverts the cycle of life, death, and rebirth by throwing the dead into a crumbling Disneyland full of fiends where they might get reembodied once every couple of decades or centuries.

Cacihua is not the only one who wants it to be done. Krile's parents do too, and all of the Endless NPCs in the sidequests know it's the end and they all accept it and one even shows disgust at the idea of maintaining his existence at the cost of living souls. Random non-quest NPCs you can talk to even mention the aether shortage and don't care whether or not Sphene's plan works. The whole place is stale and while the system tries to reembody those with connections after analyzing their memory data, there's only so much to do there with the infinite amount of time they have and one kid has seen that play already 70 times and just doesn't care anymore.

The only ones who can't accept this are Sphene and some players.

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Originally Posted by Kaecilius

I think most of us will agree with this. The argument is that they are an entirely new being based off the memories, able to undergo new experiences and display sentience, and that does not make them any less valid for being a machine intelligence.

The main Endless we interact with is all too happy to euthanize the entire thing, *she* wants it to be done. But she does not necessarily speak for every single one of them.

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I do find the argument "they are AI's" is probably accurate to an extent. They are not sentient, nor "alive" in any way that would make someone challenge their core beliefs of what murder or genocide is. They are just "software" that can only maintain a tangible existence powered by aether.

The game kind of muddies up the distinction between "Soul" and "Aether", considering how it was explained to us in the 13th and in the 1st. If the 13th is "endless" because the laws of physics in that reflection do not let a soul return to the aetherial sea because none exist (they can only thus "die" if they actually come from the 13th to the source. Being summoned just returns them to the 13th once the summoned vessel "dies" in the source.

Again it is somewhat muddled. If I'm getting the intent correctly, the idea is that the "endless" are not unlike the voidsent. Where the voidsent need a physical vessel in the source to exist, the endless need an aetherial vessel to exist, even in the reflection they are in. Sphene's ability to just take over a robot at will, the entire final zone being one giant facade that fades when the aether power is turned off, mirrors all of that.

Where I think the developers/writers may have screwed up the intent is the emphasis on "what" the endless are. Are they powered by Aether? Are they powered by Souls (note the writing shift to just saying "Aether" and not "Souls" after the Meso terminal activates.) Too late now.

Maybe post-DT Cid will come along and go "hey we can power Living Memory back up", and everyone will be like "but we already euthanized the endless, won't that be like raising them back from the Aetherial sea against their wishes?"

Which again, the developers muddled up. Terminating the Living Memory wouldn't do any of this. Those memories aren't returning to the Aetherial sea. The souls are also long gone. There is nothing "to return". For all intents Living Memory is nothing more than an Aether-powered Holodeck.

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Originally Posted by MikkoAkure

All of these people have previously died. They already lived full lives. There is literally no point in bringing them back "alive" or keeping them that way. The whole thing perverts the cycle of life, death, and rebirth by throwing the dead into a crumbling Disneyland full of fiends where they might get reembodied once every couple of decades or centuries.

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They lived "full lives" stuck in an eternal storm within the dome in a dead reflection. Current Solution Nine citizens seem to have it pretty good, but they were robbed of their world due to Ascian meddling. This goes doubly-so for the citizens of Yyasulani that basically got a dome-bomb dropped on them and were then severed from the outside world as they rapidly aged from the Source's point of view. The framing of the game goes out of its way to let you know they were all happy, but the situation is horrifying.

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

Maybe post-DT Cid will come along and go "hey we can power Living Memory back up", and everyone will be like "but we already euthanized the endless, won't that be like raising them back from the Aetherial sea against their wishes?"

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I do think it's too late to try something like this because it goes strongly against the theme of letting things go. It's possible that we will end up giving them "a new dawn" by helping them be reborn in the source (grab the memories, give them new actual bodies using Garlean cloning or something like that, so they can have one honest shot at an actual life), but since the game was stating that we were erasing them... I doubt it.

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Originally Posted by Kaecilius

I do think it's too late to try something like this because it goes strongly against the theme of letting things go. It's possible that we will end up giving them "a new dawn" by helping them be reborn in the source (grab the memories, give them new actual bodies using Garlean cloning or something like that, so they can have one honest shot at an actual life), but since the game was stating that we were erasing them... I doubt it.

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Define 'actual' life? Why is it fair for those who happened to be stuck in Living memory to be given a second shot at life, but people on the source aren't? You are better off just leaving them alone at this point because, as you said, the whole point of the expansion is about letting go.

It's definitely a failure of writing that there's so much confusion around Living Memory because they relied way too much on telling you how to feel.

It's established multiple time that people are brought back in their "ideal" state and set up to find a closure of sorts, the man with the wedding ring could've been used to establish that it's artificial and staged. (which I think is what they were going for)

We could have met him on the outside in a similar state to how we found him, looking for his ring. After helping him he actually proposes and gets rejected so the system saves "pre-proposing" as the happiest state. Later in LM we find him once again trying to propose but this time he actually succeeds as the system seeks to create happiness, showing how artificial it all is and the manipulation of Endless memories.

Also someone could just straight up state if they have souls or merely consume them, no soul = not alive.

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Originally Posted by Mikey_R

Define 'actual' life? Why is it fair for those who happened to be stuck in Living memory to be given a second shot at life, but people on the source aren't? You are better off just leaving them alone at this point because, as you said, the whole point of the expansion is about letting go.

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Is it fair that we gave the Crystal Exarch a second shot at life by overwriting the memories of his past self, despite him being basically a refugee from a dead timeline? We save the ones we can.

As you say, it's probably better to just leave them alone and move forward from this entire thing at this point but the choices made, and the reactions of the characters left a bitter taste for a lot of us. It may have just been muddled writing, where what they say doesn't seem to match what we see.

I think people are just overthinking and too sensitive. I totally enjoy the final part of the MSQ about soul and AI.

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Originally Posted by Kaecilius

Is it fair that we gave the Crystal Exarch a second shot at life by overwriting the memories of his past self, ...

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Just want to point out we never overwrite G'Raha Tia's memories, just add onto them.

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Originally Posted by Mikey_R

Just want to point out we never overwrite G'Raha Tia's memories, just add onto them.

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We force a hundred of years of trauma into a younger G'raha that would not have undergone said trauma because the Eight Umbral Calamity didn't happen in our timeline.

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Originally Posted by Kaecilius

We force a hundred of years of trauma into a younger G'raha that would not have undergone said trauma because the Eight Umbral Calamity didn't happen in our timeline.

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Yes, but we didn't overwrite any memories doing it.

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Originally Posted by Kaecilius

We force a hundred of years of trauma into a younger G'raha that would not have undergone said trauma because the Eight Umbral Calamity didn't happen in our timeline.

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This implies it was done against his wishes - it was not.

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Originally Posted by MikkoAkure

All of these people have previously died. They already lived full lives. There is literally no point in bringing them back "alive" or keeping them that way. The whole thing perverts the cycle of life, death, and rebirth by throwing the dead into a crumbling Disneyland full of fiends where they might get reembodied once every couple of decades or centuries.

Cacihua is not the only one who wants it to be done. Krile's parents do too, and all of the Endless NPCs in the sidequests know it's the end and they all accept it and one even shows disgust at the idea of maintaining his existence at the cost of living souls. Random non-quest NPCs you can talk to even mention the aether shortage and don't care whether or not Sphene's plan works. The whole place is stale and while the system tries to reembody those with connections after analyzing their memory data, there's only so much to do there with the infinite amount of time they have and one kid has seen that play already 70 times and just doesn't care anymore.

The only ones who can't accept this are Sphene and some players.

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Agree. Some players seems to not understand the meaning of life and why these people had to be disconnected, apart than being just AIs. They all died of age, then became endless. like Namikka. It's like if we now die and our memories are used to make fake persons that aren't us no more and they want them to keep working using energy of souls of people that were alive and were killed to use as fuel without being able to be reborn at all. It's stupid why some players defend the Endless and call them innocents when they already used the souls of other people to life full lives until dying of age and then live even more. It's selfish and stupid, and people should understand that, even if the story has bad writting, this concept it's easy to understand: they were zombies killing people that could have children and their own lives and it was wrong for them to keep living sustained in this way or any other because we all must die someday and the cycle of the souls and the aetherial sea needs to continue.

While people have brought up Emet.

It's not us that did what Emet did. It was Sphene effectively repeating what Emet wanted to do to us, but with a much worse and less sustainable result.