Spoiler, Sploilers, and more Spoilers

[Penthea]

Except past final fantasies have also killed off main characters to move the story forward. Past final fantasies baring a few have at least given proper exposition to lore plot points and try to leave out as few plot holes as possible.

We already had several main characters die, two of them being scions. What you're doing is comparing other complete FF games with a FF expansion and that's frankly unfair. EW isn't a whole game or a whole story on its own. May as well start comparing the entirety of FFVIII to FFVII Intergrade if you want to continue making unfair comparisons.

This game had alot of deaths already, you don't need your main cast die in every expansion. I would actually hate it. Would it have impact? Sure, but for the wrong reasons.

We would end up expecting someone to die which would make any deaths less meaningful because we'd be hanging around just waiting for it to happen and place bets on who's next. The suspense would be gone.

[Theodric]

Very few characters of note have actually died during the story and the fact that we had to have flashbacks to characters who died nearly ten years ago should say it all, really.

Perhaps more people should simply admit that they aren't able to handle anything bad actually happening to even minor characters that they like and as such falsely claim that a story would be 'bad' if it actually had some meaningful stakes across the board.

Let's also not forget that the game has an incredibly bloated cast and this is the second expansion in the row where very few new characters emerged to stand in the spotlight and persist. Worse yet, we had the opportunity to have a Raen guy step into a major role and yet he was unceremoniously killed off instead of being allowed to stick around.

[CKNovel]

Very few characters of note have actually died during the story and the fact that we had to have flashbacks to characters who died nearly ten years ago should say it all, really.

Perhaps more people should simply admit that they aren't able to handle anything bad actually happening to even minor characters that they like and as such falsely claim that a story would be 'bad' if it actually had some meaningful stakes across the board.

Let's also not forget that the game has an incredibly bloated cast and this is the second expansion in the row where very few new characters emerged to stand in the spotlight and persist. Worse yet, we had the opportunity to have a Raen guy step into a major role and yet he was unceremoniously killed off instead of being allowed to stick around.

They also killed a Garlean general who wasn't allowed to shine. He was just fodder to communicate the despair in Garlemald.
Due to the game being MMO, it's difficult to kill important characters.
They appear in previous quest, we know that they're supposed to be from a past time but it seems SQEX absolutely wants to keep them, even if Estinien is present in DRG quests in old armor.

Also, let's not forget that the Scions are quite powerful, now. Thancred is very unlikely to die, he 1v1 the top 1 pvp player in Norvrandt.
Estinien is, based on MSQ, much more powerful than the WoL.

IMO, it would have made no sense that a Scion would die, it would've been forced in this kind of "humanity versus monsters" situation when we already understand the sense of despair.
"We have no use for this character anymore, die please". Killing for the sake of killing would've made things worse, like a horror movie where the most experienced guy die.

[Averax]

This is honestly pretty standard for a FF story, though to be honest my mind is more drawn to the Fabula Nova Crystalis chapters they tried to do when i think about it.

I will say Labyrinthos was pretty slow, but other than that, they wanted to give us an over the top and bombastic end to the story arc they had cultivated since 2.X, and they did just that

[KizuyaKatogami]

We already had several main characters die, two of them being scions. What you're doing is comparing other complete FF games with a FF expansion and that's frankly unfair. EW isn't a whole game or a whole story on its own. May as well start comparing the entirety of FFVIII to FFVII Intergrade if you want to continue making unfair comparisons.



We would end up expecting someone to die which would make any deaths less meaningful because we'd be hanging around just waiting for it to happen and place bets on who's next. The suspense would be gone.

Comparing to other final fantasies is what other people are doing though. Also i’d say an expansion is pretty much the length of a typical game considering the hours. Also i’m simply comparing character deaths how is that unfair. What several main characters have we had die since Stormblood? Please enlighten me. I don’t know how we can expect deaths when people already don’t expect it with the case of yshtola who has “died” every single expansion and had her whole blindness and slowly sapping life energies plot mysteriously removed. It’s detrimental to a story when you need to rely on plot armor and plot holes time and time again to keep characters alive. If you want to talk about suspense being gone or meaningless, that’s basically what this expansion was. An apocalypse that once destroyed a civilization of god-like entities and the entire planet, is solved by the scions who suffer literally no consequences whatsoever, especially considering in some ways this apocalypse was worse with the whole total erase of the soul plot. If a story has no stakes then it’s dull and that’s a problem endwalker and even shb had. These horrific very threatening events that are dulled down because the scions are invincible and can come back from death time and time again through plot armor.

They also killed a Garlean general who wasn't allowed to shine. He was just fodder to communicate the despair in Garlemald.
Due to the game being MMO, it's difficult to kill important characters.
They appear in previous quest, we know that they're supposed to be from a past time but it seems SQEX absolutely wants to keep them, even if Estinien is present in DRG quests in old armor.

Also, let's not forget that the Scions are quite powerful, now. Thancred is very unlikely to die, he 1v1 the top 1 pvp player in Norvrandt.
Estinien is, based on MSQ, much more powerful than the WoL.

IMO, it would have made no sense that a Scion would die, it would've been forced in this kind of "humanity versus monsters" situation when we already understand the sense of despair.
"We have no use for this character anymore, die please". Killing for the sake of killing would've made things worse, like a horror movie where the most experienced guy die.

Thats the thing, Yoshi P himself said when he was teasing Endwalker and Shb, characters appearing in past quests wasnt an issue. It supposedly wouldnt prevent them from being killed off. He even said prior to EW "no one is safe" yet nothing ever came from that.I think it wouldve made perfect logical sense for the scions to die. Again,the themes of the game from ARR onwards has always been sacrifice for the greater good. They had a perfect chance in the final zone but instead brought them all back with no reperucussions. Irregardless though see my above statement on why it isnt really all that crazy for the scions to die. The twins arent that strong besides anyways. Alphinaud barely even knows sage.

[Lauront]

Cool, let me help you with that as far as I'm concerned: What I expected was a story that made logical sense. I expected a story that didn't throw a ton of random stuff at the wall in the hopes that it all stuck.

Why build up Zodiark since the beginning of the game's existence only to kill him like he's nothing a couple levels in? Why did none of the scions, nor the Warrior of Light understand that killing Zodiark would be really, terribly, horribly bad? I sure knew that straight away. When you have to deities locked into a tense balance and you straight up murder one of them...gee, who would have thought bad things would happen?

What I wanted was to NOT have a Hitchhiker's ripoff that handwaved a bunch of stuff because suddenly the moon is actually a spaceship piloted by bunny people. What I wanted was to not have people build a mass-effect level spaceship in a universe that doesn't HAVE any technology that looks like that. I wanted the tying up of things in Garlemald to feel longer than 20 minutes since the plot from day one has been about the Garlean empire. What I wanted was to not travel back in time and spend 2-3 levels of xp talking to Emet and company while the ending of the world had literally JUST begun.

This whole expansion jumped the shark for me and I flatly stopped caring about any of it. This expansion took everything that I enjoyed about FFXIV and its storytelling and dumped that off a cliff to tell a rushed story filled with tons of new things we haven't known anything about until it is a convenient plot device.

I went from being so pumped over the previous expansion being hands down the best expansion I've played for any MMO in a very long time to actually wondering how they managed to make a worse expansion than WoW.

Exactly this.

[Xaruko_Nexume]

Maybe I am simple minded. Maybe I have low expectations. Maybe I can appreciate bad media. But I cant help but read this thread and feel like Im on a red letter media forum, with the grossest of nitpicks and whining about this beautiful story. Was it perfect? No. Id say there were a few moments where pacing felt off and I felt the music was reused and not as amazing as previous expansion but my God, Soken worked on this music while in the hospital with cancer, during a pandemic. This isn't Shakespeare or War and Peace. It's a video game, and in my 38 years its the most amazing one ive ever experienced. Some of the complaints I am seeing here are laughable.

[Theodric]

Yes, well it cannot be denied that some people go through life accepting whatever is put before them and deem even the slightest bit of criticism, no matter how constructive, to be 'whining' or some horrid, deeply personal slight against them.

[Xaruko_Nexume]

Yes, well it cannot be denied that some people go through life accepting whatever is put before them and deem even the slightest bit of criticism, no matter how constructive, to be 'whining' or some horrid, deeply personal slight against them.

You don't know me. I don't accept whatever is put before me at all, which is why I left WoW after playing it the majority of my adult life. I think long time XIV players are just spoiled and anything less than perfection leads to whining.

[Rin_Kuroi]

Yes, well it cannot be denied that some people go through life accepting whatever is put before them and deem even the slightest bit of criticism, no matter how constructive, to be 'whining' or some horrid, deeply personal slight against them.

Then there's the other side. People who do nothing but criticize and pull apart every little thing as if its their sole purpose in life. I have a friend like this and I genuinely have to wonder if they enjoy anything at all. It's downright toxic behavior and its kinda miserable being around people like this.

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