Is it just me, or did 5.3 represent a big decline in storytelling? (spoilers)

[Iscah]

I think you are misremembering some characters' motives.

1) I did not like that by raising the topic “try to convince your opponent”, the developers did not realize this possibility. They did not let me convince Elidibus. I have missed this opportunity since the days of Heavensward. Even then, we were shown this- we were able to convince two old dragons in the possibility of peace between dragons and mortals, with all the features of the dragon’s memories, but we could not convince an old man (Thordan).

I think both Elidibus and Thordan showed that they refused to be convinced. Aymeric tried to reason with Thordan and was imprisoned for it. And by the time Thordan arrives in Azys Lla and takes on the power of the primal King Thordan, he makes it clear that he is beyond listening to us.

During the solo instance in Amaurot, if we try to suggest that we can reach a compromise with Elidibus he rejects it out of hand. If we truly hold our opposing ideals then we cannot let go of them. This is a declaration from him that he will not compromise and cannot be convinced, and if we believe in our cause then we should not attempt to do so.

The dragons are open to reason because they are not against us, but neutral. We only need to convince them that they cannot remain neutral.

We still solve everything exclusively by force. Why did Midgardsomr suddenly believe in us and in humanity? Because we are strong and by fighting we have restored Hydaelyn’s blessing. However, how, I would like to ask, does this answer the claims that he made against the "sons of man"? We didn’t say a thing to Tiamat’s story, which Midgardsomr wanted us to know. Why did Hraeswelgr agree to help us? Because we defeated him in his trial. But how does this respond to his claims and doubts in mortals?

I will have to recheck exactly what Midgardsormr was doing, but certainly Hraesvelgr is not simply convinced by our strength. By the time he fights us in Sohr Khai, he has already agreed to help us not because we are strong but because he is impressed by Alphinaud's determination to save Estinien. He fights us to confirm that we are physically capable of standing against Nidhogg.



Ultimately, Elidibus has stated he will not compromise - has demonstrated that he is not a reasonable human but a primal created to fixate on a particular ideal and methods incompatible with our existence. We have no choice but to fight.

And at the end of it all? We show compassion. The journal notes that we "restore his lost memories to him" by giving him the crystals.

3) From here I pass directly to the third point. The ending. So contrasting that I again want to ask - why? Why show that our opponents are also people who also suffered and fought for their world, only to say in the game: "He’s dead and good riddance!"

Where did it say that?

Elidibus's death wasn't played for a celebration. It was still sad in the end.

Yes, and G'Raha is ambiguous in this light, since with all the promise of a "paving a path for the tomorrow" he did not try to save the future in which he woke up (and there at that moment more than one generation passed), but preferred to save the past and us specifically ... By his success, by the way, he simply erased all people from that future.

We've had a lot of debate on this and yes, I agree it should have been played better - more emphasis on the world being doomed with no possible recovery, so the "save the other timeline and not ours" thing feels properly justified. If there is no chance of anyone surviving Black Rose, just a matter of how soon they die, that would make more sense than what we got.

For what it's worth, the other timeline wasn't actually erased and is even looking less doomed than before, according to the last Tale From the Shadows. (Which I'm not actually all that happy about, as it completely clashes with my thoughts on making it extra hopeless as a necessity for the storytelling, but anyway.)

Also, G'raha wasn't the instigator of the idea to travel back in time and save the WoL - it was already well underway by the time he was awoken from his stasis. Whole generations devoted themselves to this idea, somehow; he was just an obvious choice for pilot, if not the only one possible of doing it at all, and of course he is willing to do so.

Or we say: "it doesn't matter what you wanted, it is important how you got there." Then no participants should be justified. For example, tell the whole truth about Warriors of the First, including their ugly episodes. Let everyone decide for themselves whether they are heroes or not. But no, certain people want everyone inside the game to remember Warriors of Darkness as heroes and heroes only.

This is just... too much. Ardbert was misremembered as a villain who caused the Flood. We explained to people the full story behind it. Why is that a bad thing? This just feels like you're looking for every little thing you can possibly object to.

We're not making a choice between portraying them as "hero" or "nuanced individual". We are setting a record straight so that they are not remembered as "villains and villains only" when they were doing their best to save the world - including during the bit where they tried to kill us. (Much like Elidibus is, if you want to defend his actions because of his motives.)

We probably didn't explain the interdimensional travel thing because we're generally avoiding talking about the idea of us coming from another dimension.

Even wishing to revise the final cut scene on top of the Crystal Tower, I found that only the part of it with G'Raha was preserved in the "diary". They didn't even leave that part of Elidibus to me. And no, I previously treated G’Raha well, but on this basis I am starting to quietly hate and despise him. And I want to say to developers: you can keep him, I don’t want and don’t need G’Raha.

Just watch the whole thing. The scene with Elidibus is in there and inextricably part of the same scene with G'raha. They're not going to break it in half just so you can watch it starting from Elidibus's bit.

Your character is close friends with G'raha whether you like him or not, so you might as well learn to like him.

4) Role-play. The game openly started to describe who and what the player's character once was. And it would be okay if it just said that he was a member of the Convocation with a certain name. But we are told that he was always an adventurer. I always think over all my characters: their motives, views and goals, biographies, etc. This is the only way, I believe, to make roleplay possible. And not all of them are adventurers. Yes, the game presents us as an adventurer, but in the "present world" I can still mentally "delete" the Adventurer’s Guild from my character’s history if it does not fit, or imply that the others see “the adventurer” due to their perception, but when the game tells me: "you have been an adventurer at all times" - it becomes somehow hard to ignore. (And the last of the stories even went into the modus operandi of the Azem) All this would be okay if the protagonist was a prescribed character like in the old Final Fantasy games. But we have Main Character as a "blank sheet", “hollow shell” due to MMO genre.

This is not the writers' problem. For all that the character is "ours" they are still a character being developed in the world of the story. If you want to reject parts of that story for the sake of individual roleplay, you're free to do that, but I don't see how ignoring our past life as Azem is suddenly harder than ignoring any of the other things our current living character actively did on screen.

I have characters who aren't "the WoL" and it's far more jarring to see them addressed as having done things the individual character hasn't done than to know that their past life was an adventurer.

(Though of course, it's not their past life anyway but that of the scripted WoL, and they are not the WoL.)

5) This applies not only to patch 5.3, but in many respects to the entire game as a whole - fan service. I understand why this is being done, and I am not against fan service as such. But first, again, can we treat everyone with an equal measure?

It is not the writers' job to cater to your personal favourite character. Again, the WoL is played as a specific person with specific friends and relationships, whatever your personal thoughts are on those characters. They are not a perfectly blank slate for you to decide their friends and enemies, unless you do it in roleplay beyond the confines of the game story.

The game is ultimately a single-player RPG with an established protagonist, and even if you got to pick what they look like, you have no more control over their characterisation than you do over the older FF protagonists that you could choose to rename.

- The scene where our character, as soon as the Scions wake up, rushes, almost with his tongue sticking out, into the Crystal tower to G'Raha. Honestly, if it was necessary to cram a new one into the old G'Raha, it would be better if they did it behind the scenes. This is not only the imposition of emotions, which may not be shared by player, but this is also a morally ambiguous moment, and for the main hero, who is shown in the game as “the best of the best”, showing such puppy joy that G'Raha - Exarch will be returned. A morally ambiguous moment, because, as I said above, we are our experiences and memories. To cram into G'Raha from our time the memories (and his whole mind) of the Exarch is like rewriting his personality. But we can do that just like that. For some reason, only Garlemald cannot rewrite Weapon’s pilots (What OverSoul is doing to them) because it is horrific and disgusting.

I'm sorry you don't feel that way, but this is literally the emotional climax of a whole story arc. They are not going to avoid showing that emotional climax and stifle that joy for those who are invested in the story just in case some people who didn't enjoy the rest of it also won't enjoy seeing this bit.

As to the ethics of it... I wouldn't have thought they'd take that route, but since they did I can only go from the backwards approach that "it was considered okay so why is it okay?" - and my best take on it is that, simply enough, G'raha is uniquely positioned to make that decision on behalf of his other self because he does know how he would answer the question if it was proposed to him.

For all we see, maybe we did wake him up and ask him first.

It also hasn't overwritten the younger G'raha - he seems balanced between the two sides of his identity. To me, at any rate. He has the Exarch's memories but also more the personality of his younger self.

A far better comparison than Oversoul (which destroys the host, body and soul) is Soroban's state at the end of the Four Lords storyline: sharing a body with Genbu's soul but not overwritten - although G'raha seems to have merged more fully between the two identities.