Zodiark's Presentation in EW

I can already assume that this won't be a popular opinion, but I figured, hey, why not make my own thread in which most commenters refute the OP.

But I wanted to gush about how Zodiark was presented and handled in EW. Exceeded my expectations.
After the initial shock that his trial was the 83 instead of the 87 or 89 that I was expecting (did anyone think he'd be the final boss?), I was in giddy delight at how ...anticlimatic but in a satisfying way he was. Zodiark was nothing more than the giant well of aether and desire to stop the destruction caused by the Final Days. A glorified aetheric magnetic field protecting the planet from cosmic radiation with evil intent. And that fits with what we learned in Shadowbringers - he's only a primal, if one with a vastly larger quantity of aether than the ones we faced so far, so he's comparable to Eden (or Phoenix as we also learned in Coils) in how it is through the flooding of aether into the land leads to the rejuvenation of planetary life. But that how Zodiark operates isn't something completely different from these previous examples.
That Zodiark was never meant to address the root cause of the Final Days, but be the effective cure for the effects of the Final Days but to do so in a resource hogging way and one that kicks the can down the road by not address or offering a solution to the cause. Which feels extremely realistic to the real world, even if one discounts that his creation was a rush job under pressure.

And with the heart [Elidibus] missing, that Zodiark was mostly void of personality and direction allowing Fandaniel to mold it. I liked that! Sure, the Fandainel-Zodiark was akin to piloting a suit, perhaps - but also that we know from established primal lore that while each time a primal is summoned they share characteristics, but the will of the summoner can influence their behavior (Ga bu and Titan). With Elidibus detached from Zodiark and then killed, there was this weird Schrodinger's Cat vibe to Zodiark himself, almost this feeling of why was he still manifesting as a summoned being instead of returned to the Lifestream.

But I like even back in ARR there was this question of why did the Ascians worship Zodiark in the first place/what was the point of him, and that Shadowbringers answered that by establishing the Final Days and thus making Zodiark himself secondary to the actual enemy of the cause of the Final Days (Meteion being a more fleshed out and fully realized Necron, especially with how the Z/H and Ascian plot mirrors FF IX was another realization that made me beam with delight). Therefore I adore that Zodiark's role in Endwalker's narrative was not lingered on and addressed so quickly instead of overstaying its importance. To me, we got exactly the amount of Zodiark that we needed. But I know that feeling is subjective.

Plus, hey, the Amano artwork recreation was nice too (and Hydaelyn even better).

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Originally Posted by Denishia

I can already assume that this won't be a popular opinion

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NGL, going by a lot of recent posts you're probably right... All the more reason to make the most of my post! \o/

I went into Endwalker expecting (more "hoping", really) that after all the Zenos / Fandaniel build-up they'd get swept off the table for Zodiark, in the end, but I couldn't figure out how they were going to do it. The void was useless, his heart Elidibus was dead, all the Originals were dead, Sabik was in the wind. How do even you get out of that?

It turns out you don't! HA!

I didn't expect Fandaniel to be playing his ambition straight at all, so I was surprised/amused/impressed when he declared himself Amon (another oddity we expected more from back in the day) to pre-subvert the Fandaniel identity and any possibility of lingering effects of tempering. Solid defying of expectations, imho. To a degree, so was Zodiark's re-writing of the laws being tied to his eternal existence. "No Ontological Inertia" there was an unexpected card to play, given the circumstances, but the new info made it work.

Even the 11th hour Final Fantasy swerve of declaring the Ascians small potatoes and focusing entirely on the Sound was at least quasi-rooted in things we knew we'd be addressing.

I have a few axes to grind with Endwalker as a pedantic loremonger, but it did most of what I thought it made sense to do and addressed most of what I thought it'd make sense to address while at the same time subverting my expectations by quite a wide margin. I like being wrong if the right things aren't ignored.

Sacrificing Zodiark as a major plot device seems worth the cost, especially to keep Elidibus / Emet-Selch on top of the Ascian arc climax.

I certainly expected him to be a final boss, or at least later into the story. I expected to go to the moon, prevent the barrier from falling, and have a proper fight with him at a later date. I actually said out loud "Really we're doing this now!?" when the trial opened.

I have nothing really bad to say about it. It does make sense as we've effectively spend the entire time since ARR dismantling him and his supporters. I just expected more if a fight.

I think everybody said that Atamis. Nobody expected it. XD

What they did with Zodiark surprised me in how much it actually didn't surprise me, if that makes sense? I felt in my gut that there was no way that Zodiark was 'Final Boss' material, and I guessed/hoped that if we did fight Hydaelyn in Endwalker, it was either an outright test of our strength to prove that we were strong enough to fight Zodiark and then whatever the Final Days cause was (I was mostly right about this) or a fight against Hydaelyn to change her mind that we would be strong enough to defeat them and that she needed to have faith in our abilities and give us her trust (which, turns out, she had more trust in the mental/emotional/physical strength of Sundered life and the WoL as its representative than she did in herself, nice). So I was expecting the order to be swapped. But doing more with Zodiark than they did would have felt like unnecessary padding. We were primed by Shadowbringers to be focused on the Final Days. Zodiark didn't cause the Final Days, nor was he a way to solve it, thus he couldn't take over what our focus had to be. (Does this hilariously make Zodiark even more like Zenos, a mostly flat one-dimensional antagonist that turns out to be the Team Rocket side issue?)

I wasn't surprised by fighting Zodiark so early because 'I thought he was the final boss' necessarily, but more because every predictive model anyone had expected Zodiark to be far later (I think the most common prediction put him as the second trial, as basically the equivalent of Shadowbringers' Innocence fight). Which generally led to a response of 'what the hell will the rest of this expansion look like', because... well, everyone was predicting that the 'proper' Mare Lamentorum MSQ leg and Zodiark fight was much later leading into the final act, so now nobody knows what's going on. It's one of the best parts of Endwalker's story, in large part because it completely blows apart any preconceptions that we know what we're getting into.

...but also Zodiark's actual appearance destroyed any notion that the Ascians could ever be heroes. When your god looks like that, you're due for a serious 'are we the baddies' discussion.

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Originally Posted by Cleretic

I wasn't surprised by fighting Zodiark so early because 'I thought he was the final boss' necessarily, but more because every predictive model anyone had expected Zodiark to be far later (I think the most common prediction put him as the second trial, as basically the equivalent of Shadowbringers' Innocence fight). Which generally led to a response of 'what the hell will the rest of this expansion look like', because... well, everyone was predicting that the 'proper' Mare Lamentorum MSQ leg and Zodiark fight was much later leading into the final act, so now nobody knows what's going on. It's one of the best parts of Endwalker's story, in large part because it completely blows apart any preconceptions that we know what we're getting into.

...but also Zodiark's actual appearance destroyed any notion that the Ascians could ever be heroes. When your god looks like that, you're due for a serious 'are we the baddies' discussion.

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What does Zodiark’s appearance have to do with anything? Even the devs said themselves appearances are deceiving regarding the artwork and that there was no good or evil in the art. If anything i’d say Hydaelyn’s appearance both in the art and game are far more scary as they’re pretty stoic and neutral despite the horrific events she’s caused.

As far as his presentation goes, i figured he would be kicking the bucket in one form or another, i didnt expect it to be so soon and i think it couldve overall been better. What was built up for about 10 years ended up turning into a 10 minute ordeal which then was preceded with rabbit party dress up fiasco which....was just a bad pacing issue. I think my biggest gripe however is that both him and Elidibus didnt get any credit whatsoever for essentially saving the world. Instead all of the focus is put on Venat and Hydaelyn where both are regarded as benevolent and Zodiark/Elidibus are reduced to nothing more than an afterthought. Everyone is entitled to their opinions though and its interesting to see how others interpreted it. Im just hoping we get some form of savage fight with him to showcase his actual power.

It's a visual shorthand for purple = evil in Japanese media, and at no point was I really convinced that the game would reverse Zodiark to be on our side or good - neutral at best, which is what we sort of got with the mindless shell of power, and Zodiark's visuals enforced that. If anything I was shocked at the tentacles grafted onto the Amano 'Demonic Chaos Face', but then I remember the various voidsent who are pure aetheric beings of Darkness and wonder why I was surprised at that element of Zodiark's design.
Personally I thought he was suitably ugly (the barding is cool though), but others thought he looked hot/cool, so everyone wins. The mask during phase one was an odd choice, been then I haven't liked any of the masks in XIV so maybe I'm just not a mask person.

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Originally Posted by Denishia

It's a visual shorthand for purple = evil in Japanese media, and at no point was I really convinced that the game would reverse Zodiark to be on our side or good - neutral at best, which is what we sort of got with the mindless shell of power, and Zodiark's visuals enforced that. If anything I was shocked at the tentacles grafted onto the Amano 'Demonic Chaos Face', but then I remember the various voidsent who are pure aetheric beings of Darkness and wonder why I was surprised at that element of Zodiark's design.
Personally I thought he was suitably ugly (the barding is cool though), but others thought he looked hot/cool, so everyone wins. The mask during phase one was an odd choice, been then I haven't liked any of the masks in XIV so maybe I'm just not a mask person.

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Right but they even said themselves appearances aren’t everything. I’d say they did a good job of painting Zodiark as pretty good. A being who kept the world safe for thousands of years and also reversed the effects of the final days thus restoring the planet to its former glory is pretty good in my book, especially when what we're shown of his will basically begs you to put an end to him before he can be abused for evil purposes.A being shattering the world and everyone on it not so much.

Zodiark was never portrayed as 'evil' and is one of the reasons as to why the Sundered even exist. Both due to reversing the effects of the original Final Days and due to acting as a shield against their return even after the Sundering took place. I didn't find his appearance to be particularly sinister in nature - to me he simply looked powerful and refined and fairly close to how I'd imagine a giant Xaela with a body covered completely in scales.

Let's also not forget that the developers themselves have frequently stated that what is 'good' and 'bad' in the story is very much open to personal interpretation and a matter of perspective.

So, each to their own!

Yes, as we learnt, you should always judge a book by its cover and appearances are all that matter.

https://www.pcgamesn.com/wp-content/...de-900x506.jpg

I actually liked Zodiark's appearance, for the reasons Theodric listed. And we all know how well tentacles go down in some circles in Japan. ;)

Yes, which is why Shadowbringers, with its theme of villains with 'light-side' window-dressing, was where we got Elidibus the Warrior of Light Primal who cloaks himself in the stolen desires of other Warriors of Light to facilitate his goal of Salvation for his people at the expense of the worlds of the Warriors of Light to whose prayer he is using. That's where our sympathetic but still must be stopped motives and decidedly not-evil in appearance 'Zodiark' was, so actual Zodiark needed to be something different.

Joining Zodiark - or even seeing his continued existence as a solution that the WoL would entertain- was never an option, so his visual design reflects that, and thinking of how to rewrite XIV to make a even somewhat-pro-Zodiark not dismissed out of hand I think the seeds would have to have been planted in ARR. At least for me judging how much time can pass on a story before a writer swaps the alignment tables. But EW the only part of how Zodiark that honestly surprised me was that his defeat happened before the 'Hydaelyn tests your strength to ensure your conviction and strength are enough defeat Zodiark and then Final Days' trial, which I was unsure would be a trial or solo duty. And the mask and tentacles on his design.

But hey, the beauty of message boards and forums, to see what interpretation and emotional reaction that thought was obvious to them and to discover radically different but no less valid ones.

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Originally Posted by Denishia

Yes, which is why Shadowbringers, with its theme of villains with 'light-side' window-dressing, was where we got Elidibus the Warrior of Light Primal who cloaks himself in the stolen desires of other Warriors of Light to facilitate his goal of Salvation for his people at the expense of the worlds of the Warriors of Light to whose prayer he is using. That's where our sympathetic but still must be stopped motives and decidedly not-evil in appearance 'Zodiark' was, so actual Zodiark needed to be something different.

Joining Zodiark - or even seeing his continued existence as a solution that the WoL would entertain- was never an option, so his visual design reflects that, and thinking of how to rewrite XIV to make a even somewhat-pro-Zodiark not dismissed out of hand I think the seeds would have to have been planted in ARR. At least for me judging how much time can pass on a story before a writer swaps the alignment tables. But EW the only part of how Zodiark that honestly surprised me was that his defeat happened before the 'Hydaelyn tests your strength to ensure your conviction and strength are enough defeat Zodiark and then Final Days' trial, which I was unsure would be a trial or solo duty. And the mask and tentacles on his design.

But hey, the beauty of message boards and forums, to see what interpretation and emotional reaction that thought was obvious to them and to discover radically different but no less valid ones.

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It’s also the same expansion where we become the warriors of darkness, people who decide to defend themselves against a race of people defending themselves from extinction by the other side. As i’m sure everyone knows if they’ve been playing since Shadowbringers, it’s been agreed that there aren’t really any heroes or villains in the shadowbringers story. It’s simply a battle of perspectives. Each side is their own hero and the opposing side is the villain, hence the devs leaning more towards the term antagonist in regards to the ascians or even zodiark. Elidibus was one such person who saw himself as a beacon of hope, the ancients’ last hope for survival, thus taking the moniker of WoL, he was fighting against the warrior of darkness who had taken so many of his people away. Another reason why Shadowbringers just wins in terms of expansion storytelling for me. If only Endwalker solidified that stance and gave both sides their due time.

*shrug* I'm happy with Endwalker as far as antagonists go because I thought Zodiark was exactly what he needed to be for the story and didn't overstay his plot relevance or be an independently motivated antagonist separate from the Ascians and especially Elidibus- that Elidibus showing up was also just the right amount and I'm still cackling that 'Themis' is continuing his role as 'Important Plot Presence during the patch cycle'. The MSQ even redeemed (somewhat) Zenos for me in demoting him to his proper place as a Team Rocket side villain and tying his ennui and single-minded bloodlust, which is a popular characterization trope in not just Japanese manga and anime that I find deeply uninteresting and unsatisfying, into the greater theme of Endwalker. (I have quibbles with the final duel dialogue options, but Endwalker raised Zenos from my least favorite XIV character up a few notches). I liked what they did with Hermes and I especially liked how they subverted my expectations on Meteion's space exploration to not take what to me would have been the narrative cop-out and blame her inevitable heel-turn to despair on some Jenova/Lavos eldritch being out-of-context third party, but to make her despair and a manifestation of one of the societal/philosophical flaws of Hermes/the Ancient World itself the root cause, turning her into a elegant version of Necron and the personification of the nihilism of other FF villains like Seymour and Kuja.

Hmm, maybe if Zodiark's mask was a blindfold I might have liked that visual element more, as a visual symbol of how he was the shield of the Ancients to try to revert their world back to how it was (which didn't work, Paradise had Fallen and they weren't returning to it) while turning away from the cause, the worship of their new primal a manifestation of their unwillingness to face suffering or a lack of perceived perfection that the Venat Sundering scene was outlining.
But that would have been too much like the Sin-eater aesthetics, and Zodiark needs to have Voidsent aesthetics.

I agree with you on all of this, 100%... It was fantastic getting to that part of the story and thinking we're fighting Zodiark at level 83? ...but wait, level 83?! I was sold. It makes me laugh that nearly everyone had the exact same reaction, that's wonderful haha.

And I was intensely happy that they gave him the exact right amount of pomp and circumstance for where we were at that point in the story and what we now knew about what Zodiark really was. He was no longer the source of evil like we thought he was back in ARR. Powerful? Yes. Played an incredibly important role in the entire history of our star and in our own journey through the story? Absolutely yes. But still a primal nonetheless. We have ways of dealing with primals. No longer is and never was the biggest threat to our star, and they didn't treat him as such.

I was actually laughing when we got to fight him at that level I thought it was hilarious also during the fight I kept joking around and asking who gave Fandaniel the keys to Zodiark....

Then again. I was laughing my ass off when we fought the magus sisters and Anima as the dungeon bosses.

I went into Endwalker with a let's wait and see attitude for the whole thing and it did not fail to impress me

I agree with you OP. After some thinking (I was a bit disappointed after the trial itself) I too believe that this was a good ending for him. He was after all without a heart and by making him a puppet of Fandaniel he was also not portrayed as really evil, just a thing to be used. Bascially we freed him and now all the souls can finally rest without being used for the destruction of the planet they loved.

For me this is much better than having him as the big bad at the end.

Yoshi P even said months ago that people would be like "wait we are doing this now?" for the 83 trial.

Encountering Zodiark the way we did in EW was one of those moments that surprised me in how much it played out exactly how you'd expect it to given the established lore. We've been slowly dismantling him over the years and when we finally see him, of course it's going to be a half-finished god with no will of its own.

So many times in storytelling (and even at later points in EW) you get some sudden unexplained plot device that brings the enemy to life or to full power and then you have an epic battle. But with Zodiark it was a moment of "well what did you expect?". You've destroyed his most devout followers, prevented the rejoining required to bring him back to full strength, and destroyed his heart/will. So yeah, of course what you're left with is what we see in EW. I enjoyed how straightforward he was dealt with as it actually respects all the work we've done over the past 10 years to impede him being made stronger.

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Originally Posted by Theodric

Let's also not forget that the developers themselves have frequently stated that what is 'good' and 'bad' in the story is very much open to personal interpretation and a matter of perspective.

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Shhhh! Such gray morality is for other expansions! Endwalker makes it nice and easy for you and just tells you what to think, so it's obviously better. Stop thinking so much and think what you're told payer- I mean player. :)

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Originally Posted by Lauront

And we all know how well tentacles go down in some circles in Japan. ;)

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Aight, take your godsdamned like and go. lol

Was I the only one who wasn't surprised that Zodiark was dealt with so early on? I was always under the impression he wasn't our final boss in Endwalker. I never could have guessed that Fandaniel would have hijacked Zodiark's incomplete body, but I wasn't particularly shocked that he wasn't our endgame.

The introduction of the Final Days suggesting there was some greater existential threat at play made me assume that was going to be our final boss.

However, Final Days returning as a result of Zodiark's destruction was an "Oh duh" moment because it somehow didn't occur to me that the simplest way to bring back a problem would be to just get rid of the thing that stopped it.

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Originally Posted by Darkstride

Was I the only one who wasn't surprised that Zodiark was dealt with so early on? I was always under the impression he wasn't our final boss in Endwalker. I never could have guessed that Fandaniel would have hijacked Zodiark's incomplete body, but I wasn't particularly shocked that he wasn't our endgame.

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I'm curious as to where exactly you expected him to go down. Because as I mentioned on the first page, I don't think a lot of people predicted him to be the first trial even if most of us predicted he wasn't the final boss; most common seemed to be to put him in the second trial spot, where Hydaelyn ended up, essentially as the third-act twist.

I'd say a lot of that was also aided by people's natural assumption that everything we knew prior to Endwalker's launch was more of the story than it was;. From what I saw, people largely assumed the only thing we didn't have was the final zone (which was true of our knowledge of Shadowbringers before its launch), so the general 'prediction meta' was to structure all the pieces we were aware of into the first five zones' worth, and then take your best guess as to where the sixth would go. It was up to the individual whether 'the best guess' was purely wishful thinking for what they wanted to see, a genuine extrapolation based on existing info, or a combination of the two.*

And all of those predictions fell over because we assumed we knew more than we did; we assumed the overall framing of 'go to the moon and fight Zodiark' was bigger than it turned out to be, so we placed that point later in the predictions than it was. That led to misinterpreting Vanaspati and the Dead Ends, getting Elpis completely wrong, so on and so forth.

*For what it's worth, my prediction was a combination, and looking back at it had that wonderful vibe of 'identified all the pieces that would be important, but put them all in the wrong places'. My final zone/dungeon pick was the Lunar Subterrane, which was both a really common prediction and a total whiff, and I had a really extensive permutation of the 'Two Fandaniels' theory which was complete bunk... but the Fandaniel theory was 'only one is an Ancient, the other is a mortal who hates those guys' which did somehow end up true in a sideways way, and my pick for the final dungeon/boss was 'an Ancient secret related to Fandaniel that recontextualizes what we knew of Amaurot', which was correct even if I got the specifics wrong.

It's pretty silly, but you can basically interface spoiler the entire zone progression of Endwalker just from looking at the Rowena collectables list because some of them spell out pretty plainly that they're from the moon, as well the Ultima Thule items that go on about how otherworldly they are.

You also know when the second half of Labyrinthos and Thavnair are going to play out from the level of the FATEs in those areas.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

It's pretty silly, but you can basically interface spoiler the entire zone progression of Endwalker just from looking at the Rowena collectables list because some of them spell out pretty plainly that they're from the moon, as well the Ultima Thule items that go on about how otherworldly they are.

You also know when the second half of Labyrinthos and Thavnair are going to play out from the level of the FATEs in those areas.

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Ooh, you've got a point there. it's a lot easier to predict after release than before it, even if you're still managing to go as spoiler-free as possible, just because of the minor interface spoils. You can tell loosely when Mare Lamentorum is, you can see the Labyrinthos and Thavnair revisits, you can tell that there aren't Garlemald and Mare Lamentorum revisits...

Even those minor, near-subsconscious interface spoilers are giving you more than we had before release, so you're gonna fall into less predictive holes and see things like the early Zodiark fight coming.

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Originally Posted by Cleretic

I'm curious as to where exactly you expected him to go down. Because as I mentioned on the first page, I don't think a lot of people predicted him to be the first trial even if most of us predicted he wasn't the final boss; most common seemed to be to put him in the second trial spot, where Hydaelyn ended up, essentially as the third-act twist.

I'd say a lot of that was also aided by people's natural assumption that everything we knew prior to Endwalker's launch was more of the story than it was;. From what I saw, people largely assumed the only thing we didn't have was the final zone (which was true of our knowledge of Shadowbringers before its launch), so the general 'prediction meta' was to structure all the pieces we were aware of into the first five zones' worth, and then take your best guess as to where the sixth would go. It was up to the individual whether 'the best guess' was purely wishful thinking for what they wanted to see, a genuine extrapolation based on existing info, or a combination of the two.*

And all of those predictions fell over because we assumed we knew more than we did; we assumed the overall framing of 'go to the moon and fight Zodiark' was bigger than it turned out to be, so we placed that point later in the predictions than it was. That led to misinterpreting Vanaspati and the Dead Ends, getting Elpis completely wrong, so on and so forth.

*For what it's worth, my prediction was a combination, and looking back at it had that wonderful vibe of 'identified all the pieces that would be important, but put them all in the wrong places'. My final zone/dungeon pick was the Lunar Subterrane, which was both a really common prediction and a total whiff, and I had a really extensive permutation of the 'Two Fandaniels' theory which was complete bunk... but the Fandaniel theory was 'only one is an Ancient, the other is a mortal who hates those guys' which did somehow end up true in a sideways way, and my pick for the final dungeon/boss was 'an Ancient secret related to Fandaniel that recontextualizes what we knew of Amaurot', which was correct even if I got the specifics wrong.

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It's funny that you mention pre-release misinterpretations, since many people I know theorized Elpis had some inspiration/tie-ins to Chrono Trigger. If anything, Endwalker should have taken more inspiration from Chrono Trigger. Seeing as how it's a master-class act of storytelling, while Endwalker is.... not.

The release of the launch trailer ended up making me predict some things that weren't that far off the mark, such as the clip of the first portion of the Dead Ends making me think we'd end up having to go to another star entirely to stop the Final Days.

As much as people like to say "It's not a spoiler without context", the pieces very quickly start falling into place through process of elimination, interface spoilers, and other elements that quickly set expectations for how things are going to play out if you're paying attention.

Yeah, I try very hard to not look at parts of the map I'm not up to yet, knowing it'll be a clear puzzle piece if I check what level FATEs are there or whatever.

Once I know them, I can't stop trying to assemble them into predictions.

Zodiark was so hot. Not to mention there's something very, very sexy about a bound god being overriden by a mortal and forced to do things against what the god was doing. Not only that, but having a male in the barrier maiden role??? Delicious simply delicious.