Endwalker Main Scenario Commentary & Feedback

[kaynide]

I’m a bit late to the party, but I’m where I can throw my hat in this commentary on the story. Obviously spoilers!

I’ll start with the to;dr:
I enjoyed the expansion a lot! I would give it a solid B+. I’m not considering any technical issues at all in this- my score is based strictly on mechanics, story and the overall package. The good by far outweighed any grievances I have and I would recommend it whole heartedly.

So what was good? bad? What might I have done differently? (Not that my version would have been better..just my thoughts)

For me, the story up to the moon is rock solid. A+. After that a lot of…started to jump the shark a bit for me.

Story:
1) Post Garlemald, it felt rushed. I felt getting to the moon should have been more involved. Like going to Azys Lla to get tech, ultimately going to the Elpis zone to get space travel. In the same vein, I had thought the Zodiark boss would be closer to 87-88, with the expansion ending with the threat of the Sound looming as a massive cliffhanger. As in, we would have just identified the source of the sound.

2)If Fandaniel was indeed Amon, we should have seen more of that (like, maybe he created the original Garuda in Azys Lla along with the original Ixal. Perhaps Garuda was his sort of unconscious attempt at creating Meteion).

3) I would like to have utilized the Void/13th more. Once we saw how Zodiark worked, I thought perhaps the Ascians attempted to free Zodiark on the 13th shard, which triggered the Sound of that dimension to destroy everything and that ultimately caused the Ascians to realize they can’t free an incomplete Zodiark. I had thought the void sent/Cloud of Darkness were created by the sound warping.

4) I don’t like new “out of thin air” concepts. Or convenient things to take care of plot holes. The idea of “another form of energy” in Dynamis is.. interesting and might eventually be a bigger deal, but it felt very tacked on. As I said above, I would have utilized the void/emphasized it was being “of the void” rather than this alternate form of energy or even needing new names. Similarly the memory restoration upon death.

5) Time Traveling shenanigans. I get why it was done (moar Emettttt) and it was done well…but if you are going to do time travel shenanigans, go all the way and do a full expansion on it. Also “it was all a dream!/memory wipe” was..cheap. Elpis could just exist in modern days, with ancient happenings done via the Echo. At the end of Elpis it was done well to explain Emet’s support of us once his memory was restored upon death…but that goes into my point 3. Also, if we need to time travel, wouldn’t we instead utilize Cid to fix “Alexander” in the basement? And if so much energy was needed to go, why can I now just aether warp there for a few hundred gil?

It might have been better to flashback and just be Azem. The story being told there (what has a right to live) was good enough it didn’t need us telling them the future/having a men in black moment.

6) The source of the Sound being caused by the ancients was a good move. I was team Lavos for the longest, but it was an incredibly sad moment to learn that the universe (as far as Meteion saw) was empty barren/dead. The “ultimately, we are completely, utterly all we have in the entire universe” message is poignant.

Even with all these criticisms, the story ties together and does it well. At first Elpis felt like a misstep..and I’d still argue it kinda is..but it was done well and was certainly enjoyable. Again, good call.

Mechanics:

1) The new stealth escorts were not bad…I’m glad they are trying something fresh. This needs more work..like a circle around the NPC to indicate how close is too close, but overall nice idea.

2) The team has taken lessons learned from Shadowbringers and used them well. Boss moves like tank busters are well marked and mostly clear/understandable. Splitting the story into 2 parts at the beginning to lessen traffic and introducing the first 3 zones quicker with back and forth most likely keeps traffic down. Even just having more downtime moments (like G’raha handling that hamburger) was a great move.

3) With the amount of actual tragedy/death, I think this would have been a good point to actually kill off some Scions. I love them all, but if ever there was a point this would have been it.

4) If you are going to develop resources to let us play as other characters (like Thancred), utilize it more; possibly as side content or flashbacks. The stealth mission in Garlemald was fun for me, I wouldn’t mind seeing more side content entirely around Scions doing special side missions.

[Cleretic]

2)If Fandaniel was indeed Amon, we should have seen more of that (like, maybe he created the original Garuda in Azys Lla along with the original Ixal. Perhaps Garuda was his sort of unconscious attempt at creating Meteion).

3) I would like to have utilized the Void/13th more. Once we saw how Zodiark worked, I thought perhaps the Ascians attempted to free Zodiark on the 13th shard, which triggered the Sound of that dimension to destroy everything and that ultimately caused the Ascians to realize they can’t free an incomplete Zodiark. I had thought the void sent/Cloud of Darkness were created by the sound warping.

I'm a tad too tired right now to really dig into your whole post, but for the first of these, that both did and didn't actually happen. Your example is confirmed to be wrong; as learned (I believe) in Fractal Continuum Hard, the 'original Garuda' was actually an Allagan general that commanded the Iksalion, who was mythologized over time to become Garuda as the Ixal gradually forgot their origins.

However, there actually were signs of it over time. Perhaps most notable was in 5.4, when the Allagan recording on tempering outright mentions that it was Amon who shut it down. Both of them utilized stuff like the dragons of Meracydia and energy-consuming towers. If you look back at info about Amon, too, you can see that his behavior is pretty much exactly what we saw from Fandaniel; it's just that people were a little blind to that because people started ascribing the qualities to Emet-Selch, despite them fitting Fandaniel closer.

And as for the void, it is actually confirmed how that fell: essentially, the Ascians hadn't figured out that a Calamity is needed on the Source when a shard is consumed, so they whacked the Thirteenth out of alignment and then went 'oh, crap, we screwed that up' when it didn't help. According to the first volume of the Encyclopedia Eorzea, the clash that tipped it over was actually Unukalhai (the Amaurotian-dressed kid from the Warring Triad questline and the Shadowbringers all-roles questline) and Igeyorhm (the Ascian that fused with Lahabrea in the Aetherochemical Research Facility).

[kaynide]

I'm a tad too tired right now to really dig into your whole post, but for the first of these, that both did and didn't actually happen. Your example is confirmed to be wrong; as learned (I believe) in Fractal Continuum Hard, the 'original Garuda' was actually an Allagan general that commanded the Iksalion, who was mythologized over time to become Garuda as the Ixal gradually forgot their origins.

There is no reason to assume Garuda did not have avian features just because she was an Allagan "person". They had many examples of experimented humanoids with bestial features, probably the most notable being Scylla with her dog heads.

And as for the void, it is actually confirmed how that fell: essentially, the Ascians hadn't figured out that a Calamity is needed on the Source when a shard is consumed, so they whacked the Thirteenth out of alignment and then went 'oh, crap, we screwed that up' when it didn't help. According to the first volume of the Encyclopedia Eorzea, the clash that tipped it over was actually Unukalhai (the Amaurotian-dressed kid from the Warring Triad questline and the Shadowbringers all-roles questline) and Igeyorhm (the Ascian that fused with Lahabrea in the Aetherochemical Research Facility).

I mean, that seems vague at best. The facts are only that it was consumed by a flood of darkness that was triggered between Unukalhai and Igeyorhm. We have no specifics on what method was used to cause the flood, nor do we have clear answers on why so many of the new Dynamis-monsters look like voidsent. The devs could easily have gone with more.. "Cthulu cosmic horror" tropes, but there are very specific creatures that look both in model and overall design as voidsent. Many identical.

As we both know, the game is quite vague to give it wiggle room for later, as in last month’s discussion on “We should assume the game isn’t lying to us and believe Elidabus is dead…until he isn’t”.