Anyone else feeling disappointed by Endwalker MSQ? MAJOR MSQ SPOILERS!

[kpxmanifesto]

Criticism isn't allowed I guess.

Yeah how dare you criticize their favorite video game.

[Velnora]

The time travel aspect was sloppy. (As usual for anything really)

[Remilia_Nightfall]

Weird, I found it even better than Shadowbringers.

[Fredco191]

Personally, I thought it was pretty good. Although, I was pretty surprised at how fast we went to the moon and fought Zodiark.

[Lihtleita]

Personally, I thought it was pretty good. Although, I was pretty surprised at how fast we went to the moon and fought Zodiark.

on one hand im worried the devs burnt through all the story threads that could have lasted the rest of the patch cycle.

on the other, it makes me wonder what theyre rushing us towards, now that the 1.0 story threads are all but resolved.

[Edhel]

Have to agree with what the OP and many others say here, having followed the story since early HW I was very disappointed with Endwalker too.

Frankly, I think EW failed in culminating the Zodiark/Hydaelyn arc and tying everything together. Primarily because everything we thought we knew about Zodiark and Hydaelyn was... well not retconned necessarily, but the plot twists in that regard felt cheap, and was not well executed at all. The stark difference in tone and thematics in Endwalker and ARR/the other expansions for me is impossible to ignore, and taken together it feels incredibly disjointed. Pulling a Necron at the final moment does the story as a whole an immense disservice. That the last 8/11 years of story culminates in us fighting a magical android that became depressed because she went to space and as a result decided to bring about the end times frankly feels surreal. While I liked Elpis well enough for the first 15-ish ms quests, everything that came after that with Meteion and Dynamis taking the center-stage completely ruined the rest of the story for me. I get that she's supposed to be a representation of death, despair and nihilism rather than an actual character, but that really doesn't help things. Her Danganronpa-ish dialogue too drags down her character, and makes a lot of supposed "serious" moments come off as outright cartoonish (even if the actual visual presentation of everything has been amazing this expansion). Her dialogues doesn't give Meteion any more depth, nor does it make her come across as menacing. How she actually brought about the Final Days beyond... feeling bad, I guess, was explained very poorly. Plus, Dynamis as a concept is just ridiculous on its own, but hinging the entire story on it frankly feels incredibly lazy.

[Edhel]

(full post was apparently too long, sorry :/)

More in general, I feel like the quality and the tone of the dialogue in particular also really took a hit this expansion. That there's kingdom hearts-esque power of friendship speeches every 20 minutes, a lot of them in very unfitting situations, is extremely grating and makes it feel like the writers wanted to get an emotional reaction out of the players more than... actual meaningful / plot related dialogue between the characters? It's out of place for many of the characters, too. Not to mention that there's so many of them really cheapens the impact when scenes like that are actually fitting, like in the 89/90 quests.

And this might be a petty complaint, but while the way that they incorporated Answers into the Endwalker plot was skillfully done, I really dislike the way that the story tried to recontextualize it as “actually” being about Amaurot’s Final Days and Venat / Hydaelyn’s suffering. Removing it from its original context of the Seventh Umbral Calamity and the battle of Carteneau is just… idk, it feels jarring to me. It feels like yet another victim of “you thought you knew what this thing is / is about, but you actually dont!” style of writing that’s been so frequent in EW. While that's to be expected in this kind of expansion, many of the revelations in the msq feels more like retcons or hastily latched on plot-points more than anything else for me. Things like for example Hydaelyn originally being Venat, the Blessing of Light vs the Echo, or everything about Meteion and Dynamis, might make sense within the context of Endwalker and arguably SHB, but it is unfitting and doesn't make sense when the story is viewed as a whole.

[Sclair0]

I LOVED it.

There are a few things I thought were a little lackluster. The time travel was a bit sloppy, and Hydaelyn knowing all along sort of undercuts her struggle with Zodiark and the Ascians, making those stories less important. I wish the segment on the moon prior to Zodiark was a little longer... I felt like the healer role quest was a bit boring till the ending.

But all those tiny criticisms I have pale in comparison to how much I loved it, particularly the Garlemald sequence and ending sequence.

[Silver-Strider]

Goth Chick and her simp try to unmake the world only to lose to our character and their simp/stalker.
And thus ends the story of Hydaelyn and Zodiark

I was disappointing to say the least.

[KageTokage]

Honestly, the only twist in the MSQ I felt came out of the left field was time traveling to Elpis and was much rather expecting the place to be some relic of Ancient society that had persisted to the present by some miracle.

Dynamis could be credited as the inexplicable source of power that's consistently left our foes dumbfounded throughout the whole of the story, while Meteion's existence was suggested by the mention of the "sound" that preceded the coming of the Final Days in 5.0, and as far back as HW, Hydaelyn's seeming distinction between Zodiark and the "darkness" she's mentioned repeatedly.