Endwalker was a great mess(SPOILERS)

[LukaRoselia]

Man this is getting boring now. Why do i have to play dress up for the robot bunnies WHEN THE WORLD IS ENDING?

Glad I wasn't alone in that. The entire Lopporrits arc just felt like serious comic relief annoyance to me. The freaking world is ending down there, people are dying, losing their families, homes and we're just playing dress up and giving our opinions on some freaking moon bunnies fashion designs. Wtf.

[GrizzlyTank]

Only issue i can see with time travel in this game is that they have used both closed loop (Alexander and MSQ) and alternate timelines (Crystal tower).

Closed loop being the easiest to work with, but the other ends up unleashing a messy can of worms, unless it somehow turns out to be another closed loop leading to that...

Either way Time Travel have at least been portrayed as being quite costly with alexander slowly killing the world and the crystal tower being worlds largest battery.

[Akiudo]

As well as the overall main villian of 7 years of buildup was somebodys failed science experiment. I've only been around since 2019 but i wonder what the 2014 players think.

only going to go into this aspect here but to answer your question, i personally found it perfectly fine, acceptable and at this point not even really out of the blue.
obviously we didn't know anything about meteion until halfway through this last expansion, so really late into this 7 year buildup which might feel like she came out of nowhere, that however is only superficially true. while meteion in particular could have been explained away by pretty much anything else that doesn't make her any worse than anything else.

what i mean by that is the following. originally we had the ascians which prayed to zodiark. from the very beginning we never knew why that is, what made zodiark so special. this however was answered to us in shadowbringers, in a manner that specified right away that zodiark in fact was the response to something else, which turned out to be meteion. alltogether that meant that this 7 year buildup began with us knowing nothing, slowly working towards what we thought was the top (zodiark) and than being told 2 years in advance of actually defeating zodiark that there was in fact something else, which also answered the "why zodiark at all" question. therefore i'd say meteion didn't come out of nowhere, even if we only had half an expansion worth of knowing her, and making her "just" a failed experiment i would say actually adds an interesting layer to her character. she was bad enough to make the ascians sacrifice 3/4 of their people, yet she wasn't some ultimate evil but more misguided and the result of happenstance, i'll actually take this over some generic ancient evil 10 times out of 10.

[Catwho]

This reveal is giving me a headache. I want to wonder what caused Graha Tia's timeline to happen. Like Shadowbringers made it appear it was the original timeline. But it's not now, which means something clearly happened to prevent us to meet past Venat, which would prevent her from making us her champion in that timeline. But seeing how that timeline went unhindered, that must mean we have went into a different past and told Venat, but that is not the case cause that event impacted our timeline to prevent it from diverging.

That's a good point. If the WOL died before they could travel to Elpis, then we can only assume Venat chose to become Hydalaen of her own accord in that timeline. (And, not knowing of the cause of the Final Days being Meteion, may not have created the Lopporits....)

But she was also unsuccessful at stopping the Ardor, and with the 8th Calamity, the Source world was rejoined to all shards, Hydalaen was presumably weakened to the point where she could no longer contain Zodiark, and at the end of the world, we can assume Emet and Elidibus sacrificed all of the souls on the world to try to bring back Amaurot. But Zodiark is a blood god, and would he be satisfied with that alone? Would Zodiark's power be enough to prevent Meiteion and Dynamis?

[Sathona]

was it no major character died during the scene, nothing destoryed and even what was was so limited to a single zone. There was no sense that it was a threat other than if people cry are scream or feel angery they turn into voidsent (Which was hardly any where IN THE ENTIRE GAME) they weren't even in the ultima thul lol so honestly it wasn't

It was a huge joke lol


and even their letter from the producer basically LIED when they said a price had to be paid EVERYONE IS STILL PERFECTLY FINE LOL

Legitly the only deaths was amon being thrown into zodiarks tummy and zenos going all emo fight with us.. .everyone and everything else was perfectly safe...

and to frank we shouldn't have been able to save it as quickly as we did

Just because the Scions didnt have any loses doesnt mean the overall world of Eorzea didnt, the fact you only think of the main cast and not the OVERALL world is not ideal IMO[thavnair and garlemald didnt look safe to me, but maybe we played different versions of the game]

Also Amaurot was the LAST place the Final Days reached in the past, it didnt spread at the same time everywhere, why would it on Etheirys now? Meteion didnt grow stronger or something over the years, she just kept singing.
Which leads to why we fought Zodiark early, as Fandaniel said he didnt care if he used Zodiark or if Zenos did as long as either of them died while possessing him. We knew Zodiark was creatted to defend the world against something, in ShB we didnt know what. We learn he acted as a shield against Meteion, so to me atleast it makes sense he had to die early, plus the rejoinings werent complete so he was incomplete regardless and we knew that btw, he was never going to be as strong as ppl hyped him up to be.

[Havenchild]

This reveal is giving me a headache. I want to wonder what caused Graha Tia's timeline to happen. Like Shadowbringers made it appear it was the original timeline. But it's not now, which means something clearly happened to prevent us to meet past Venat, which would prevent her from making us her champion in that timeline. But seeing how that timeline went unhindered, that must mean we have went into a different past and told Venat, but that is not the case cause that event impacted our timeline to prevent it from diverging.

Wasn't this explained in SHB? Emet-Selch + Ascians engineered sources of darkness that upon defeat, leaned the First to aether aligned with light / passivity. The defeat of Mitron / Logrif /Shadowkeeper by Ardbert and friends then causes the already heavily aligned light aspected aether to burst out causing the flood on the first now that no dark aspected aether remained. This flow of light aspected aether that eventually consumes the First flows into the source, thus initiating a calamity (rejoining) related to the initial cause (passivity). Incidently, the ascians + garleans are engineering Black Rose (poison causing passivity of aether) as well on the Source.

Gaius was against it, and had it canceled (likely Lahabrea + Emet Selch first initiated this), but Elidibus for sure restarted it after Gaius left the Garlean Army. This leads to the future that Crystal Exarch comes from where WoL and Scions were killed.

[Havenchild]

Is the average consumer gonna be able to realize all this? It’s like trying to get your irl friends to play the game, they won’t get it ..Especially somebody that works and plays like 8 hours a week? Lmao

Well outside of the Logrif / Mitron exclusive parts that were part of the Eden raids, the rest of it is in..the MSQ. It helps to do New Game+ or revisit the Inn when some of these details could be foggy over time but all of it is there.

[Lersayil]

That's a good point. If the WOL died before they could travel to Elpis, then we can only assume Venat chose to become Hydalaen of her own accord in that timeline. (And, not knowing of the cause of the Final Days being Meteion, may not have created the Lopporits....)

Unless Grahas time travel was also a part of a yet unexplored closed time loop, or some sort of self correcting fate kinda situation going on in the background, mending the broken time loop the WoLs death caused.

...I like time travel shenanigans, but yeah, I'm also starting to get a headache.

[Havenchild]

Unless Grahas time travel was also a part of a yet unexplored closed time loop, or some sort of self correcting fate kinda situation going on in the background, mending the broken time loop the WoLs death caused.

...I like time travel shenanigans, but yeah, I'm also starting to get a headache.

I'm not sure this needs to be explained persay. There is enough room to assume that in the timeline Crystal Exarch comes from, your particular WoL was not chosen by Hydaelyn because you made it into the past. In SHB, they explained that when the meteor showers occured (vestiges of the Final Days), people around the world awakened to the echo. At least on the First, you know this happened several times in history. I would imagine the same applies to the Source.

If you make the assumption that Hydaelyn was just reaching out to people at random in that timeline, there's enough room to assume she just hit your WoL too. I think alot of people are hung on the fact that Hydaelyn refers to you as her chosen, but that you had to have gone back into the past to be "chosen". But that's not necessarily true as evidenced by many others having the Echo simultaneously on the Source / First.

[Lersayil]

I'm not sure this needs to be explained persay. There is enough room to assume that in the timeline Crystal Exarch comes from, your particular WoL was not chosen by Hydaelyn because you made it into the past. In SHB, they explained that when the meteor showers occured (vestiges of the Final Days), people around the world awakened to the echo. At least on the First, you know this happened several times in history. I would imagine the same applies to the Source.

If you make the assumption that Hydaelyn was just reaching out to people at random in that timeline, there's enough room to assume she just hit your WoL too. I think alot of people are hung on the fact that Hydaelyn refers to you as her chosen, but that you had to have gone back into the past to be "chosen". But that's not necessarily true as evidenced by many others having the Echo simultaneously on the Source / First.

This would assume however, that basically we changed nothing by going back to the past, and Venat would have done everything exactly the same without her knowledge of the things to come, or even the main reason behind the Final Days. While possible, I personally dislike this explanation. Too many decisions leading to the same outcomes via different reasons.

If nothing else, her secrecy and vague guidance was attributed directly to the fact that she did not want to risk changing the events that lead to us going back in time and talking to her.