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

[Iscah]

...G'raha talks from two different perspectives: That of a young man now possessed of memories from a life he never lived, and that of an old man now possessed of the young body from his Halcyon days. It's as if he's two people inhabiting the same body, which the same handwave assures us is not the case.

Even taking everything at face value - accepting that his two souls have merged and it is entirely fine - this is exactly what I would expect to happen. Even if the souls merged perfectly, he's still holding two sets of memories at once, and both feel equally recent. Last week he was exploring the Crystal Tower as a young adventurer with his new friend the WoL; equally last week he was feverishly working on soul transference vessels with Beq Lugg at the Crystarium. Both sets of memories are clear and real, and he might recall and speak from either perspective depending on what he's thinking about at the time.

This would have happened even if he'd only received the Exarch's memories and not his soul.

[Rosenstrauch]

Even taking everything at face value - accepting that his two souls have merged and it is entirely fine - this is exactly what I would expect to happen. Even as one person he's holding two sets of memories at once, and both feel equally recent. Last week he was exploring the Crystal Tower as a young adventurer with his new friend the WoL; equally last week he was feverishly working on soul transference vessels with Beq Lugg at the Crystarium. Both sets of memories are clear and real, and he might recall and speak from either perspective depending on what he's thinking about at the time.

This would have happened even if he'd only received the Exarch's memories and not his soul.

I don't dispute that. But it's bizarre to me that he seems to strongly identify as both individuals while also keeping their identities as distinctly separate as he does. To explain it another way: When G'raha talks about his time as the Exarch, he doesn't use "I" and "Me". He uses "my older self", as if he's talking about someone other than himself in that moment. And when he talks about his time as the younger G'raha, he doesn't use "I" and Me". He uses "my younger self", again, as if he's not that person. It's the switching between perspectives—as if talking to two separate people—that makes it so strange.

I dunno. Maybe he just hasn't figured out who he wants to be, and is just being indecisive.

[Iscah]

I think him referring to his older/younger self is also something of an inevitability. Maybe he hasn't decided which he is, or maybe it's the opposite - he knows exactly which perspective he's thinking from (because again, he is both of them simultaneously) and he feels like he needs to clarify where he is speaking from.

I think it is something he would just need time to settle into, but also the need for that distinction is going to diminish as his thoughts and memories stop being from one self or the other, because he will start to live life and have new memories as his merged self.

[AnotherPerson]

Don't forget G'raha calls it attunement. Because of the way the crystal works, it's more along the lines of recovering 'lost' memories' (the period Exarch was awake while sourced G'raha was sealed away) rather than overwriting memories because their base memories of the past is the same. It's like amnesia, where the amnesiac will feel like they were originally 2 people if they recover their memories because they both lived different lives, but they are still one person in the end once they can come to terms with it. The only way for older G'raha to be able the meld successfully with new G'raha is if the source's G'raha didn't reject the memories.

[Arallir]

Thanks for the answer. And, I apologize, if there are further mistakes, English is not my native language.
And I still don’t know how to write this in one post, again I’ll have to do it in several.

I think you are misremembering some characters' motives.


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.

It was Emerick. I repeat, we don't even have such a thought. Emeric could not answer to Thordan. Maybe if we could give him an answer, he would have listened. (Although, I believe, Ysayle should have given it, but this is a separate topic)

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.

I remember only once when we talk about a compromise. And, people, if you answer the first objection of your opponent: "we have no choice", I am not surprised by the presence of all modern conflicts in our own world. This is not a dialogue. This only demonstrates our own unwillingness to engage in dialogue. If one says: "We have nothing to talk about," and the other echoes him, nothing will come of it. Someone has to be smarter. Nobody holds a knife at our throat, which means that nothing prevents us from arguing and arguing.

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.

As far as I remember, Hraeswelgr, after the first meeting, refused the dialogue in exactly the same way. He said dragons remember everything as yesterday, you have exhausted the limit of my trust, and therefore there can be no peace between a man and a dragon. This did not prevent the plot from establishing this world afterwards. My gripes with why this doesn't work in other cases.

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.

So says the journal. But this is a very mixed compassion. As I said, at his last words, I do not see the "peace" attributed by the journal.For example, we could have given him these crystals earlier. And maybe, remembering himself, he would be more open to conversation.

[Arallir]

Where did it say that?

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

It's in the details. It's in behavior and emotions, in the choice of words by characters, especially Unukalhai.

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.)

I admit, when I started writing my post (besides, the translation took a lot of time), the story about the future had not yet been written. But it doesn't work very well for me. Since the developers have gone into the theory of alternative universes. Regarding "our" reality, all those people are still not there.

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.

In the end, it was his decision. He could refuse and say "no, let's build our life further."
What's the irony of the same Tale From the Shadows, I concluded that after the ancient catastrophe described to us, the society itself split into two camps: those who wanted to return what was lost, and those who wanted to live on.I think there are parallels here.Relying on the same story, if they did not succeed with sending G'raha to the past, would they call the мс as an eikon? I would not be able to give a definite answer.
I am not saying that G'raha is bad and wrong. I am in favor of approaching everyone with one yardstick. What was point 3 about.

[Arallir]

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 only villains" 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.)

If Ardbert was misremembered as a villain who caused the Flood, then who caused the Flood? It can be assumed that while he was fighting with Mitron, Logriff somehow created Eden. Which does not negate the rest. Аs I see it, it's not about inter-world travel.Everyone already knows that we and the Exarch are from another world.
They are unlikely to be surprised by the fact of another one. To me it looks like when we, in our chain of memories, reach the first our meeting with Ardbert in the Source, we discard it, because it spoils the picture.
I apologize if I hurt someone's feelings, both with Ardbert and with G`Raha. As much as I not try to defend Elidibus, he is who he is. All of them. For me, Elidibus, like Ardbert , like a number of other characters (the same Tordan), is beautifully expressed - the lost sheeps. But I stubbornly see a picture that in the case of some characters, ugly moments are hushed up by the game itself, while with others they stick out.

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.

I would not write it if it were so. I tried to re-watch several times, and there is only half the scene. The one with G'raha . I urged not to break the cutscene, but just give it in its entirety.

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

This is very similar to the "deal with it primitive" answer. Why shouldn't the fanbase learn to just love Minfilia? Again, I don't want to love the NPC just because it is attributed to my character. Any of the NPCs, this is not an attack on G'raha personally. And I want to decide for myself who is my characters friends with. Other studios in other games do an excellent job of not imposing certain characters and attitudes towards the audience. If necessary, I will give examples.

[Arallir]

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 actual 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.)

For me, saying "you've always been an adventurer" is like getting into a character's head. In a part, each player can have problems with something different. It's easier for me to dismiss the actions imperfect by the character, but the root of the problem is the same. And I think this is exactly the problem of the studio and their presentation of the plot.

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.

But as I see it, that's exactly what they do. For example: many people love Ishgard, so at the end of 4.5, Estinien drags us there so that we can say goodbye to Emeric and Count Edmond.Whereas it would be much more reasonable to carry us to the nearest medical unit. But there is always a person who will love something different from others.
As for the main character, we are not given his biography, why he decided to become an adventurer, and etk.Characters can be: empty, half-empty, and fully spelled out. The protagonist of FFXIV is half-empty at best.
I'm afraid I can't do without an example here. I think the DA series is familiar here, as I've seen comparisons between specific two characters. Let's take the last part. Despite the presence of a biography, the Inquisitor is an example of a half-empty character, since we think over his motives, views, and then ourselves (Like WoL, so no, he's not a fixed character. Confirmation - the dark knight arch. Where it is said: they see one thing in you, but only you know who you really are. Only we know who we are playing.). But I don't remember being told, for example, "Varik is your best friend." I do not remember that all screen time was devoted to one or two NPCs.

[Arallir]

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.

And this is strange. I personally see this is the same fan service. It seems that they were frightened of the possible reaction of the people, if they do not leave "that very special" G'raha . After all, the original version of G'raha was not that popular. Exarch became popular. And the disgusting thing is, that knowing G'raha, if we asked him if he agreed to accept the consciousness of another self, he would agree. For us. And this is not fair.
Let everyone imagine that the consciousness of us 90 years old will be placed in us.Will we remain ourselves?

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.

For me, the Soroban and Genbu case is more like the Minfilia and Ryn case. Of these, too, in the end, there should be one.

[Arallir]

I'm in some degree of agreement with you on G'raha. I was pretty happy with the Exarch as a character up to and even most of the way into 5.3. And when it looked like he had to make his heroic sacrifice after all, I thought it was a good send off for his character. But then not only did he survive his own death, but he half-hijacked his younger self's chance to grow into his own character.

... all that said, I wish they'd just done what I expected them to do: Have the Exarch's soul be made into a Job Crystal for his younger self to wield. It's the sort of have-your-cake-eat-it-too outcome that would've completely bypassed having to think about the moral issues involved.

Oh, at least someone agreed with us on something . Thank you. I apologize for the untimely answer, unfortunately, I have exhausted the daily limit of posts, I just can't write my thoughts shorter.

Personally, I'd prefer we just wake up our G’raha in our own timeline. No more weird double standards. In my point of view, it looks like the developers, when it is convenient, forget about what they show us in story and it’s lore earlier.
If you recall such cases, except for Oversoul, you can look at the Ascians, in which case the control of someone else's body and consciousness was always considered by the game as evil and inhumane, and there is also Minfilia / Ryne and Genbu / Soroban. Minfillia could not interrupt the cycle of her reincarnations. In their case with Ryne, such condition can be attributed to a fate. But, as I recall, this was not considered by the script as a natural and good state of affairs. Soroban, on the other hand, started the ritual at the critical moment, it cannot be said that we would have won the battle against Koryu otherwise. With him and Genbu, there is also a condition that over time only Soroban will remain. In the case of G’raha, the situation either, logically, should be the same, or some kind of hybrid of two G’raha’s is meant to be by the script. In either case, it cannot be said that this is the same G’raha that remained in the tower in our timeline. This personality of the Exarch should not be affected by the fusion; he already has all the experience of his young version.
And then I thought, remembering the story of Ryne, who inherited the legacy of another woman. She, like Minfillia, has no particular choice in this matter. However, by placing the Exarch's memories in the G’raha of our time, we force him to carry the legacy of his “other self”. At the same time having a choice.
But, I doubt they will bring up the subject of his soul again, to be honest. All this looks like a very simple way to leave us the beloved version of G’raha.