Quote Originally Posted by Dewslam View Post
It feels to me like they could have introduced the whole despair and emotional power thing without having to weirdly retcon in a surprise antagonist that's secretly been responsible for literally everything, even the actual antagonists we've been dealing with the whole time, just to give us a big monster to punch and say we've punched the problems away. It gives me real Zeomus, Necron, Ultimecia, and yu yevon vibes. Which is to say that it isn't uniquely bad among final fantasy games, they literally have a history of doing this. It just feels like a lame way to do the big climax of literal years worth of story.
Yu Yevon and Ultimecia aren't surprise bosses. Yu Yevon in particular is thoroughly discussed throughout the whole story, with more layers of lies peeled off as you get closer to the truth, and the ending of the game. While Ultimecia doesn't show up until the very end, she is pointed out as the villain very early in the game and her actions are repeatedly central to the plot's focus.

The problem with Meteion isn't that she's a surprise boss. She's not. They set her up very convincingly to be our foe in Elpis. The problem is that instead of contacting some sort of diametrically opposed sentience hostile to life itself, ala Zeromus, and becoming infected by it, she simply becomes a template of all the despair and disharmony in the universe, and decides to commit universal suicide to shut it all off. This leaves us essentially without a villain, because she is a victim.

They even pull the rug out from under our feet in the final battle. "Blue" / "good" Meteion vanishes from the story at the end of Elpis, vanishes utterly, but then suddenly appears again in the final battle, fluttering about the Endsinger's head and begging her not to do what she's been doing. Again, they rip out the idea that we're even looking at a villain, and rather something like a cosmic accident or a powerful misunderstanding. It becomes annoying rather than exciting at that point, just being a janitor or a cosmic babysitter.

If they were gonna go the victim rout, they should have had her get possessed and infected by something like Zeromus. Some actual wicked alien force antithetical to life, moving through the dynamis to poison her and manifest through her. But instead they made it just "baby had a nightmare" and that makes our role the person giving her a bottle.