Endwalker foreshadows and hints from 2.0 and on?

I was wondering if anyone compiled a list of all the things from 2.0 and on that foreshadowed or gave hints to concepts from endwalker. I know 2 big ones are the entire archer job questline and the little hint at the end of the crystal tower raids, but is there anything else that hinted at stuff coming from endwalker or maybe even hints that the ascians weren't all that bad? I cant think of other examples right now would like to know what everyone comes up with! :o:cool:

I was trying to recall the Archer/Bard questline that ties into it, but I can't. There was the 'Ballad of Oblivion' quest but I don't recall the, admittedly similarly named, Ballad of Oblivion having any association with Meteion's 'Song of Oblivion', unless I missed something (which is more than possible).

The trouble with this sort of thing is, many of the big revelations in EW... were only arrived at by the writing and lore teams recently and hadn't actually been planned since the beginning (for instance, the

Mothercrystal just being a non-sentient crystal, Zodiark being just an empty shell, the direct connection to the lyrics of Answers etc etc).

So I think it's probably ill-advised to go searching back through earlier parts of the game to find hints that foreshadow those plot points as they probably don't even exist, or are deliberately ambigious at best or outright retcons at worst.

I did correctly guess one thing back at the start in ARR though - that the Ascians were

Hydaelyn's original percursor civilization,

as it was just so obvious, so that revelation was hardly surprising. :p

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Originally Posted by Carin-Eri

I was trying to recall the Archer/Bard questline that ties into it, but I can't. There was the 'Ballad of Oblivion' quest but I don't recall the, admittedly similarly named, Ballad of Oblivion having any association with Meteion's 'Song of Oblivion', unless I missed something (which is more than possible).

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There's no connection. They found the origins of the ballad and it was a siren's song. It's been given a similar label but there's no significance to it.

Thank you - didn't think so. I did play that quest-line but my memory of it isn't great!

I think the OP was thinking of Dancer rather than Archer. The Totentantz is one of the few at-first-disconnected things that were picked up by Endwalker that I genuinely think they did include with the intention of it being a setup for the payoff; they would've had the nature of dynamis and the End of Days plotted out by then, so the fact it looks awfully similar is likely intentional. Especially given it's something observed by Thavnairians, who we know actually did theorize and discover this stuff.

But for the most part, yeah, Enkidoh kinda has it. Most of the threads tied together in Endwalker weren't introduced with the intention of ending where they did; it's been mentioned in a few interviews that a lot of those callbacks are, for the writers, more an exercise in figuring out which of the leftover plot hooks they have lying around would fit well for these. Some of those were orphaned hooks intended for a storyline that just never happened (famously, pretty much everything about the Ascians before approximately the Antitower), other things were outright introduced with the intention of just being an errant weird thing to maybe explore later (like, to the best of my knowledge, Kuribu).

That shouldn't be considered a discredit to the writers, it just means they're very good at an entirely different skill than it first looks like they are. It's genuine talent that we should recognize that they're able to go 'we need to justify this plot development we're doing now, let's drag in a storyline from nine years ago to make it look legit'.