Endwalker was a great mess(SPOILERS)

[Floortank]

Meteion is a surprise because she was introduced in the second to last zone. Over the course of a 10 year build up. Yu Yevon was brought up over the course of 10, but seemingly appeared out of nowhere. Jecht, by many, is considered the true final boss. As with Necron, it just shows up.

The 10 or 15 hour span between our last moment with Meteion before the Endsinger is more time to sit with it and feel the product of her actions than we get from the time we actually meet Yunalesca and see what happened to Jecht and Auron firsthand, to the end of FFX. Perhaps maybe an hour or two hours of the game remains at that point. We knew details about Jecht and Braska's story, but not the full scope until those scenes. And it does not reduce the ending even one iota.

The problem with Meteion is Meteion. They rip whatever dramatic tension she represents right out of her by making her a victim and essentially good, but misunderstood.

EDIT: made some FFX references more ambiguous due to spoilers

EDIT: Also if you were surprised by Meteion to the degree that you think the Endsinger is like Metron, I dunno what to tell you. I knew I was looking at the final villain the moment I met her. There's no way the cause of the Final Days would be something so obvious Emet-Selch would miss it. She was an immediate red herring.

I read a shit ton of books.

[SieyaM]

Endwalker is pretty confusing for me, emotional wise. By all means, I'm a pretty sentimental person. You give me good cutscene with emotional music, and I'll be hooked. Always has been since ARR; when we escape uldah, fight nidhogg in 3.3, liberating doma, having the alliance soldiers open our way to Ala mhigo castle, fighting emet and elidibus, and many more.

And yet... I rarely feel that way when playing endwalker. The climax of my experience is near the end of elpis, when we can't save the Ancients again. Second in place is when we meet emet and hythlodaeus in ultima Thule. Other than that, honestly not much. Theoretically, I should be feeling something when final days hit thavnair, or when the scion sacrifice themselves (though I can say enjoy Garlemald very much). But I didn't.

I guess it's due to how I disagree with a lot of things the game try to do/tell us. Too much comedy, final days feels less threatening than flood of light, zodiark get so little time screen, time travel being stupid, lopporit, I very much disagree with venat action and motivation, and dynamis being more deus ex machina than aether.

Fortunately Zenos see the memo that he's boring, and will always be, and has the decency to remove himself for most part of the game.

The final days would have probably hit much stronger if we were sent back to one of the ARR zones to see it. Those places have a much stronger connection with most players since we have spent much more time there and the NPCs in those places have played a part in this story for a long time. As it is, having the final days really only come to Thavnair, a place we have been in just for a short bit and with all new characters that we hardly know, it just didn't really hit that hard.

[Velnora]

The 10 or 15 hour span between our last moment with Meteion before the Endsinger is more time to sit with it and feel the product of her actions than we get from the time we actually meet Yunalesca and see what happened to Jecht and Auron firsthand, to the end of FFX. Perhaps maybe an hour or two hours of the game remains at that point. We knew details about Jecht and Braska's story, but not the full scope until those scenes. And it does not reduce the ending even one iota.

The problem with Meteion is Meteion. They rip whatever dramatic tension she represents right out of her by making her a victim and essentially good, but misunderstood.

EDIT: made some FFX references more ambiguous due to spoilers

EDIT: Also if you were surprised by Meteion to the degree that you think the Endsinger is like Metron, I dunno what to tell you. I knew I was looking at the final villain the moment I met her. There's no way the cause of the Final Days would be something so obvious Emet-Selch would miss it. She was an immediate red herring.

I read a shit ton of books.

10 or 15 hours is nothing.

[RoroCookies]

Speaking of stupid pills - I wonder how the heck was leaving Eatheris supposed to save people from The Final Days. If anything it would just make them even more exposed to Meteia and their dynamis-based powers, given how most of the universe isn't actually as dense in aether as The Star. Good plan.

After learning that Meteion could easily use the song of oblivion at anyone and anywhere it made the whole moon escape plan seem really pointless. She would most likely harass the people escaped by moon until they finally die so I don’t understand how that was a solid plan in the first place. Unless Venat consider using the same method that Zodiark was capable of like coating the moon in an aethershield.
Also slightly off-topic but considering that it took our WoL to finally deal with Meteion. Venat is aware that our future self could most likely handle the situation. So why not just sunder our Azem then train them to go fight Meteion before she has 12000 years to become this strong and destroy a whole bunch of worlds. Silly idea but just a thought.

[EriShvakh]

This rings hollow though when said man is brought back to life 10 minutes later which directly goes against the themes lmao.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory

But I guess looking past literal meanings of the story is the lost art in our time.

[KizuyaKatogami]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory

But I guess looking past literal meanings of the story is the lost art in our time.

Again, it still doesn’t change the fact that they constantly push these themes that apparently the protagonists just never have to deal with or follow through. They’re impervious to all of them. We can argue what this or that meant, but the literal sense should be taken into consideration considering that’s what most players will be looking at, and all i see constantly is that the laws or rules of the various themes just simply don’t apply to the protagonists. They’re invincible.

[Rulakir]

Endwalker is pretty confusing for me, emotional wise. By all means, I'm a pretty sentimental person. You give me good cutscene with emotional music, and I'll be hooked. Always has been since ARR; when we escape uldah, fight nidhogg in 3.3, liberating doma, having the alliance soldiers open our way to Ala mhigo castle, fighting emet and elidibus, and many more.

And yet... I rarely feel that way when playing endwalker. The climax of my experience is near the end of elpis, when we can't save the Ancients again. Second in place is when we meet emet and hythlodaeus in ultima Thule. Other than that, honestly not much. Theoretically, I should be feeling something when final days hit thavnair, or when the scion sacrifice themselves (though I can say enjoy Garlemald very much). But I didn't.

I guess it's due to how I disagree with a lot of things the game try to do/tell us. Too much comedy, final days feels less threatening than flood of light, zodiark get so little time screen, time travel being stupid, lopporit, I very much disagree with venat action and motivation, and dynamis being more deus ex machina than aether.

Fortunately Zenos see the memo that he's boring, and will always be, and has the decency to remove himself for most part of the game.

Same. I am a crier and the only times I cried in EW was in Eplis when I realized we weren't going to save Emet and Hythlodaeus (thanks Venat -_-) and again in Ultima Thule because of those two. The worst part is when you realize most of the meaningful character deaths in EW? They were all Ancients, more than half of whom were already dead in the current timeline.

The Scions are clad in too much plot armor to take seriously and because of that I felt like the Ancients were used to manipulate emotions instead. I'm still torn. As much as I loved seeing my favorite characters, I did not appreciate seeing them die again and crying for them again because the writers won't lay a finger on a protagonist and haven't since HW. There's a reason why they keep having to rehash the deaths of ARR characters - there isn't anyone else!

As another poster said, "The entire narrative hinges on the idea that sundered people are better at dealing with despair and loss, and then we magically return everybody to life at the end." I feel like I vicariously experienced the bulk of the despair and loss in EW through the Ancients while once again our heroes win the day unscathed.

I also had moral issues with Venat and did not care for being forced to be on her side, especially when she admits "There was no kindness nor justice in the tragedy I wrought." So, why make the player character complicit? Replace the sundering with a rejoining, all else stays the same, and imagine the outrage.

[Sicno]

Consider this:
A man is born into the world, faced with despair and realization that existence is meaningless, then he finds his reason to live, fights with despair to protect his reasons and ideals and eventually dies, his life's work building a road for next generations to move forward and fight their own fights and eventually die, to let others go forward and others go forward and...

Like it's one of the themes for both ShB and EW or something (and whole game in general really)... "For we who walk before may lead those who walk after".

I can get the symbology behind all this. But those symbologies sound more like they would fit a dramatization in a cutscene of imagining the road ahead or reminiscing the path until this point. But considering the game had previously put an effort of explaining how "the rules" worked whenever they would affect the story, like "how to kill ascians", "how the rejoinings work", "how primal tempering works and how to cure it" (only to retcon that later for the "benefit" of a single cutscene), etc. these new "symbologies" don't hit home when they just happen and there's nothing tangible to grasp and make sense of in the road to confront the final baddie of that formerly well-explained saga where things made sense even when they were still missing other pieces.

Step 1: Confront the hopelessness.
Step 2: Prevail against the hopelessness.
Step 4: ???
Step 5: Get decomposed anyway
Step 6: ???
Step 7: Turn into a bridge.

Something is missing in between. That "something" is preventing me from taking the entire scenario seriously and makes it feel pretentious and disjointed. Especially when despite not being able to understand the nonsense I know they'll all be brought back later and none of that nonsense will matter anymore.

[Anya_Synia]

After playing through the story I felt it was rushed they could have easily used the patches to help conclude absolutely everything. Rather than use the patches to set up a new story, it would have helped with the pacing.
Saying that though the story isnt bad, and I cant say I didn't enjoy it, I just felt after Shadowbringers and the amazing storytelling there it just wasn't as good.

I think the best bits were the ancients and fleshing out the characters there.

[Akiudo]

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 ....This leaves us essentially without a villain, because she is a victim.



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.

for one she is pretty much the embodiment of despair, saying "baby had a nightmare" is ignoring that she is literally supernaturally empathetic and got pumped full of the despair of an untold number of civilizations all at once. however, even if that wasn't case, why do we need "a villain" ? first and foremost we are an adventurer, what we "need" is a problem so we can solve it, that is a role easily fullfilled by what meteion has become, villain or not.