Endwalker was "meh" (for reasons other than technical issues)

[Thoosa]

I felt that Garlemald was a wasted opportunity - it would have been nice to see how the city was before it was bombed out - to see the parks and buildings and civilian technology (cars, etc), even if it was in some cutscenes, but no, we get coerthas 2.0 except with some railways.

The first half of the Garlean quests felt hollow and unsatisfying - everyone saying they hate you and they felt like filler without much depth. The themes of liberators being seen as conquerors and the propaganda elements were quite good though. The second half picked up nicely with the mindjack solo duty and was fun to do.

I enjoyed the moon piece much more and the Loporitts had a really fun story and at this point to me it was starting to get really good. The fact Fandaniel tricked us into killing Zodiark to trigger the end of days was a nice trick. Even the acknowledgment from Y’shtola that the moon evacuation wouldn’t likely be the best course of action, I felt was nice. At this point Zenos felt redundant.

We go back to the second zone (from memory) and people start turning into monsters (which I found hilarious given that the monsters looked a bit like comedy muppets-like monsters) and never laughed so much in my life lol.

Now IMO I feel the story really becomes stupid - we end up going back in time (zzz) to Elpis which was an amazing zone but then we find out that Hermes creates a bunch of terminators who want to destroy the world because people must not be allowed to feel negative emotions and life as to be pure pleasure at all costs or it’s worthless living. I could handle the moon stuff, I could handle the monsters, but this was ridiculous.

It felt like the writers thought Fandaniel and Zenos were weak characters so they had to up the anti to a character we had no prior history with and something they just chucked in at the end, so for me no really big shock plot twist or surprise and it felt even beyond the realm of believability to Eorzea reality.

And as for that space ship…..

[Luluna]

I loved Endwalker for so many reasons...11 years and I felt lots of emotions. I love FFXIV and the story though and that is why I play.

Nothing is perfect and not everyone will feel the same but I feel this was amazing.

[Nataruma]

Snip

With the way the story unfolds and that this giant tower is erected in the middle of the city, while the populace is likely used as fodder for the machine, I think it made sense that we only see Garlemald as the broken husk it has become when we first go there. I also think Square wanted to punch home the post-war feeling, almost like a 1940's post-war depression era, especially with people huddled around radios and the like. I personally felt super invested since I'm a war survivor, it hit me hard and I connected with it a lot in the way they showed it.

You missed the point of Elpis if that's all you got out of it, it was basically tackling the views of nihilism and the topics of the value and meaning of life and living beings. Hermes didn't create Meteion with bad intentions, he wanted to feel like there was meaning to life and that all living beings were precious and deserved to have a place in existence, he also felt that 'returning to the star' i.e. dying was a waste of life (it upset him when it was brought up as a normal thing to happen). By sending Meteion and her sisters out to different planets he was hoping to get a positive confirmation of his beliefs, what he got instead was Meteion's inexperienced interpretation that life is without meaning or value and ends exclusively in suffering, pain, death and destruction and that all man wants is to destroy himself. It's not about life has to be pure in order to be worth living, it was that upon observing so many worlds that came to violent or 'meaningless' ends Meteion changed her ideas about life and decided to protect Hermes's emotions by getting rid of what would upset him; Eitherys and all life. Because according to Meteion, if nothing is alive Hermes can't be upset, neither can anyone else be upset or suffer if she snuffs everyone out prematurely. Granted her vision is flawed, but that is on purpose, since she's not a fully developed creature and has very elementary thought processes, almost like a child still learning things.

Fandaniel was just coocoo for Cocopuffs, but that has a lot to do with Amon's story so if you're not very familiar with it I can see how his part seems pretty small in the overall story, I also personally feel like he was added in too late in the overall FFXIV story as his final iteration.

I personally found Zenos a boring one-dimensional mwahaha villain from the very beginning when we first meet him in FFXIV and wasn't surprised he remained the same, they literally could have yeeted him out of the game and NOTHING would have been different. An unnecessary character that some people fangasm over for some weird ass reason, I mean, if you can see past the potato plastered to the centre of his face I suppose he might be somewhat attractive? Maybe? Nope, just don't see it personally. Anyhow his whole thing just... Falls flat for me.

[JanVanding]

Knowing the origins of your boring generic doomsday villain does not make it any less of a boring generic doomsday villain.

You must really hate the final fantasy series then, given that kind of villain is in oh, I dunno....every Final Fantasy game to ever exist.

Backstory is Important to understanding the why they went that way.

[DoH]

Put differently, “Endwalker” was to the FFXIV franchise what “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” was to the Indiana Jones franchise.

[Warlyx]

It's funny, I didn't expect to care about the talking elephant guy at first, but they sold that scene really well and I had myself genuinely praying that at least those two could be saved. If anything, my sole complaint is that we didn't get to see more of it － the role quests were pretty dry and standard "we must hunt this monster/primal/sineater/rhino thing from marauder quests" type quest, all things considered, and that's the extent of the blasphemies in the other regions. Nothing at all like the trailers of Vylbrand on fire, and the segment where we saw a hole burning on the map of the world made me think other areas would start burning, but... never really played out the way I was hoping.

hope we get more of him later on i liked that guy

[Silver-Strider]

Yeah, how dare they were creating lore. Why didn't they just skip all the stuff and give us a list of what happened and will happen right when we started the MSQ? Why even bother following the story when you can just read up a summary on the internet?

World building is fine when it actually has significance to a story, which Thavnair doesn't. The story of Thavnair could have happened virtually anywhere and have changed nothing in regards to the story presented and while it might play a role in the future, the fact is that there was no reason for the zone to exist in regards to the 6.0 story. The moon being a space ship is another wasted story element because it's never used. That's bad storytelling.

[Ririta]

You must really hate the final fantasy series then, given that kind of villain is in oh, I dunno....every Final Fantasy game to ever exist.

Backstory is Important to understanding the why they went that way.

Please don't drag the beloved villains like Kuja, Sephiroth and Kefka down just to make a point in favor of the most boring villain even inside of FFXIV. I mean, come on, we just came from Emet-Selch of all people.

[technole]

I feel I can almost understand why they delayed EW, because the story is so jam-packed and they probably felt a lot of arm-twisting to get the ironing board out until the 11th hour. Then having to QA this entire story is probably maddening it itself. Sometimes I do think they spent so much time on perfection, even if it's not there it was still way more than "meh", it's very good.

Nonetheless I enjoyed what we got, sure some of the pacing is off at certain points but I suppose there were things on the cutting room floor in-order to make this story work, not be too long, and cover all the big points.

Garlamald does hit you on the heart because that situation is very real. You can't just expect to meet peace with charity by words. It has to be done with action, and we faced that head on with our new friend in the story. Even in the real world this occurs with trusting exercises. I enjoyed this section quite a bit, more than I realize. In fact it kinds of brings tears to my eyes again thinking about it when he cried getting something warm from our Ala Mhigo friends.

[Raim]

You completely zoned out on the Garlean storyline then. Its a nationalist, isolated military country that despises its neighbors which it is perpetually at war with. Theres 24/7 propaganda blaring on their radios before the Final Days. Their leader was assassinated and their capital exploded, all of which was blamed on Eorzeans through propaganda. And now you stroll in with multiple armies and you think its weird that they don't trust your intentions? They think you're there to conquer, to get revenge. It doesn't matter if you claim to just want to give them food and aid. For all they know you are just waiting to get their guard down and be complacent so you can enslave them. The Garlean's concerns are completely realistic given the situation.