[Spoilers] I’m irrevocably Unimpressed

[Seraphor]

Don't forget Emet-Selch is looking through rose-tinted glasses, focused over thousands of years.

Why did their world get destroyed in the first place? How do we know his entire enchanted city wasn't sugar coated?

Why was their first solution to a calamity to summon an all-powerful thought-dictating soul vampire?

Yeah, I said to my peers when we defeated him: why the hell were we even able to make a dent here? This is a sorcerer of eld, we should not have stood a chance whatsoever against THAT kind of knowledge and power.

Though the way I see it, we only managed to win due to the accumulated light of the wardens. That gave us the energy required.

Definitely deus-ex machina. But what else is a DEV to do if losing would mean there was no game anymore?

On the other hand, we've already defeated Lahabrea, and he shouldn't be any more powerful than him...

[Lersayil]

Why was their first solution to a calamity to summon an all-powerful thought-dictating soul vampire?

I've heard this in a few places, but cant recall anything that would directly imply this. Can you provide a source please?

From the Amaurot quests it was implied that they were researching the calamity, but made very little headway into the actual cause. Via the last dungeon, we know that Amaurot did burn, and that it was one of, if not the last bastion of civilization, so deffinetly not a first (or easily made solution).

The thought dictating part can be theorized from the word use of Emet (tempered), and possibly from that he fixed creation magic (?), but never stated outright.

The soul-vampire part is pretty much BS at this point, as from the information provided, Zodiark works pretty much in accordance with what we know about Creation magic. Everything has a price in aether. A single, questionably weak primal-like being (Quezacotl) required the life-force of a single Amaurothian (which based on what we know is already a vast amount of aether).