Disappointed in one Endwalker Aspect [SPOILERS]

[KizuyaKatogami]

Endwalker focusing a lot of presenting the side of Venat and Hydaelyn isn't ever really an arguable point, but something apparently easily forgotten is that it wasn't something in isolation. The 'pro-Venat/Hydaelyn' angle in Endwalker is ultimately a counterpart to the 'pro-Convocation/Zodiark' angle in Shadowbringers.

So the answer to 'where is all this attention for Zodiark' is 'one to two years and ten to fifteen levels ago'.

Except it wasn’t at all to the extent we have in Venat. I said this in another thread but compare how we treat Venat to how we treat Elidibus in 5.3. Aka telling him what he’s doing is useless and his friends/family is dead. Vs you did what you had to and you’re so strong for doing it. Also i don’t think at any point much recognition was given to Zodiark? But it’s kind of futile to say look back at shb for that because we didn’t entirely know the extent of what zodiark did outside of forestall the final days. Now we know he not only originally saved the world but continued keeping it safe for thousands of years. It was also only this expansion Elidibus sacrificed himself for us. So no it wasn’t really “one to two years ago.” It was hardly regarded at all, and considering this expansion was supposed to mark the end of the Hydaelyn AND Zodiark arc, you would think both sides would get some closure no? Also i don’t recall getting an ascian minion at the end of ShB either talking about how heroic and benevolent Emet is but my memory *is* a bit foggy at times.

[KariTheFox]

Regarding the Minstrils's ballad; going back and reading it actually paints Zodiark and the ancients incredibly sympathetically.

Born of ancient men, a divinity was freed,♪
Their hopes unrequited, they knew no reprieve.♪

Born of mortal men, a champion did arise,♪
Ascending to the heavens, ruination to defy.♪

That the ancients should sacrifice half their number to save the star... The strength of their resolve makes me tremble in admiration.

Even as it saddens me to think that one of their own would seek to lay it all to waste, so deep was his despair...

Not having lived their lives, I feel decidedly unworthy to speak of their hearts. Better that the whole truth remain with you, and you alone.

Let it suffice for me to honor a fragment of their hopes and dreams in song, that their lives and sacrifice may ever be remembered

It even says it's up to the player to determine how they feel about the morality of Zodiark and the ancients that summon them.

[vormela]

I was more replying to the original post.

We start out the game with Hydaelyn. She is a constant thread throughout the story and is what united the scions and strengthened their resolve in many ways, mainly through Minfilia's and Alphinaud's leadership. There are eight years of motivation to explain.

The development from a wooden mask wearing primal worshiped the way they were in the cutscene to whatever Hydaelyn and the bunny ship was may be one giant LEAP (haha pun intended). That could be part of it. She was also a continuation of the mitigation measures Zodiark started out with, so her story is intrinsically tied to his.

Also...Elidibus seems to be involved in the new raids somehow since his voice seems to be narrating the last cutscene of the game. And so I think a lot of the desires you, I, and others have for more of "that side" of the story will play out through the raids. There could be a whole different take on their motivations coming up and it might have little to do with Zodiark. I am still like, "who branded the ascians. Why do they body-hop. Why couldn't they have just summoned Zodiark without becoming ascians and subjecting themselves and the sacrificed people to eternal purgatory. Did they become ascians for another purpose?" We will be in a raid somehow involving the biggest body-hopper to ever walk Etheirys. And also, there is an immortal person with that very problem laying at the edge of the universe after we punched his lights out. Maybe it is premature to think we are done with stuff like that.

[KizuyaKatogami]

Regarding the Minstrils's ballad; going back and reading it actually paints Zodiark and the ancients incredibly sympathetically.



It even says it's up to the player to determine how they feel about the morality of Zodiark and the ancients that summon them.

It paints them sympathetically sure but again, compare it to Venat/Hydaelyn. The differences are immense in how both sides are regarded and treated. It’s up to the player about how they feel for Zodiark yet we’re forced to nod our head and agree with Venat and see her as a hero and benevolent?

I was more replying to the original post.

We start out the game with Hydaelyn. She is a constant thread throughout the story and is what united the scions and strengthened their resolve in many ways, mainly through Minfilia's and Alphinaud's leadership. There are eight years of motivation to explain.

The development from a wooden mask wearing primal worshiped the way they were in the cutscene to whatever Hydaelyn and the bunny ship was may be one giant LEAP (haha pun intended). That could be part of it. She was also a continuation of the mitigation measures Zodiark started out with, so her story is intrinsically tied to his.

Also...Elidibus seems to be involved in the new raids somehow since his voice seems to be narrating the last cutscene of the game. And so I think a lot of the desires you, I, and others have for more of "that side" of the story will play out through the raids. There could be a whole different take on their motivations coming up and it might have little to do with Zodiark. I am still like, "who branded the ascians. Why do they body-hop. Why couldn't they have just summoned Zodiark without becoming ascians and subjecting themselves and the sacrificed people to eternal purgatory. Did they become ascians for another purpose?" We will be in a raid somehow involving the biggest body-hopper to ever walk Etheirys. And also, there is an immortal person with that very problem laying at the edge of the universe after we punched his lights out. Maybe it is premature to think we are done with stuff like that.

Its possible we get some more info on Elidibus but i doubt much of it will overall tie into the present day stuff since Panda takes place in the past. I also dont know how much ascian stuff we'll be getting in the future since they said 6.1+ marks the start of an entirely new arc. Unless they just throw them all into the 12 raid which would be a bit lazy tbh.

[OhNooo]

I wasn't disappointed that Hydaelyn didn't turn out to be "evil." I was disappointed because I kind of went into EW hoping we would end up exploring a "third option" that I felt was hinted at back in Shb since we know Azem left the convocation and also did not respond to Venat's group. It would have been interesting for the writers to touch on something like that. My headcanon right now is that Azem didn't agree with either side and was trying to find a 3rd option.

Tbh ignoring all of the venat bad emet bad stuff for a second, one of my beyond biggest gripes this expansion is just how absolutely biased the story is in favor of Venat/Hydaelyn. We’re told and shown basically that…Zodiark saved the world, essentially twice, once during the final days and then again with the whole meteion shield, and Elidibus basically sacrificed himself to help us go back in time yet…they don’t even get a passing mention for what they did. It’s all venat venat venat. She gets her own minion depicting her as a hero, the whole minstrel’s ballad paints her as this tragic heroic figure….so where is all this attention for Zodiark? It’s just a very strange double standard in how we’ve treated Zodiark and Elidibus vs her.

I also got this impression. Does anyone else notice how the game has sort of taken over our character by having us "react" in certain parts of the story instead of the more general blank face our characters used to have? It made me feel like they were pushing the audience to the conclusion they wanted us to have. All the times we see another character and automatically reach for our weapon like we want to fight...things like that I'm not a fan of. So when we get to Hydaelyn at the end of the 89 dungeon and my character smiles at her and the other Scions look at her with this sort of reverence, it just made me a little annoyed. And the way they portrayed Zodiark in the trial like some monstrous looking being called "Eternal Darkness" and then in the Hydaelyn trial she's this angelic looking being named "Divine Light..." But that "monstrous" looking being actually kept us alive and shielded for 12k years.

I get that they're both neither evil or good, but I definitely feel like there was a bias in how they portrayed Hydaelyn's side.

[Rulakir]

I truly don't understand how anyone can think there was nothing in the game that hinted Hydaelyn was not benevolent. I even did a write-up in another post with bullet points about it. :P Hell, even after EW she's not. She outright says what she did "led to untold bloodshed and suffering" and that there was "no kindness nor justice" in it. I'm not bringing that up to defend her either. The problem isn't Venat/Hydaelyn as much as it is how the rest of the game treats her and her actions. I'll at least give her credit for having the self awareness to acknowledge she's a monster, but nothing else does. This is akin to the player unwittingly assisting Emet with a rejoining and then for the rest of the expansion everything acts as if the situation was the best possible outcome in between you having tender moments with him in cutscenes. If that sounds like something that would outrage you, well, that's how some of us felt about how the sundering and the person responsible for it was handled.

Also, as I noted in yet another post (losing track :P), had Venat always believed the Ancients incapable of dealing with Meteion without being sundered then she wouldn't have bothered trying to get her people to change nor would she have delayed past the second sacrifice to Zodiark. So, even the dynamis defense doesn't check out anymore. It basically boils down to people weren't doing what she wanted them to fast enough so she literally cut them down to size. Not quite how it was depicted in the cutscene though, with her grandiose speech and the 'this hurts me more than it hurts you' pity walk through the ages.

I never realistically thought Hydaelyn would be written as evil, however, I would not have guessed they'd not only make the sundering of everything intentional but in addition to that spend a lot of effort making it seem like it and the perpetrator were in the right the whole time. Venat was in a better moral position in ShB from the biased Ascians' POV! At least then there was question as to whether or not she realized sundering Zodiark would sunder everything, maybe it was accidental. It also wasn't supposed to be an act against her people, it was supposed to be against Zodiark. Now we know she had full knowledge of everything and did it all on purpose, I'm having a lot of difficulty understanding how the writers didn't foresee an issue with some players being morally opposed to the extent of making them BFFs with this character.

[Lauront]

Also, as I noted in yet another post (losing track :P), had Venat always believed the Ancients incapable of dealing with Meteion without being sundered then she wouldn't have bothered trying to get her people to change nor would she have delayed past the second sacrifice to Zodiark. So, even the dynamis defense doesn't check out anymore. It basically boils down to people weren't doing what she wanted them to fast enough so she literally cut them down to size. Not quite how it was depicted in the cutscene though, with her grandiose speech and the 'this hurts me more than it hurts you' pity walk through the ages.

That in turn bleeds in with dissatisfaction with the time travel aspect (the stricture of not changing the outcome) and its role, as it more or less, coupled with her other reasons, ruled out giving the ancients a full and proper accounting of what her concerns were and what she'd learnt, and therefore any real opportunity - so instead we're shown platitudes that I do not find overly convincing given the circumstances in that stylised scene.

[Denishia]

On the in-game character making physical reactions that I as the player didn't feel- having to WoL reach out distract towards Emet Selch I felt was very unearned, because Shadowbringer nor Endwalker did NOT do anything to reverse my opinion of his personality as not merely unpleasant with negative charisma but an amalgamation of every horrible condescending coworker and boss I've had to suffer through and his motivations as contrary to mine own (I would have loved a joke response to his demand that I tell him info because of his position on the Convocation with a snarky, "My only interaction with the Convocation is murdering them because they kill trying to murder me"). He and Hythlodaeus might have been Azem's good friends- but me-as-the-WoL did not have a positive emotional attachment to them.

To me, Hades is treated far more heroically and sympathetically than I feel justified and that his overwhelming continued presence and treatment inside the game was colored by his popularity outside of it.

I agree that the why the story writes the relationship with Zenos is another were me as the player is emotionally disconnecting from what me-as-the-WoL is written to feel. I don't desire to fight him because I found him boring, both as a character and his actual fights, so if the in-game model was more accurate, it'd be eyerolls instead of clenched fists.

But that is to say- how one reacts to characters is subjective. And after so many complaints about the WoL standing expressionless during cutscenes or only nodding, these later expansions are starting to address those complaints by adding in reactions- which means not all will land.

And XIV isn't an open sandbox game, at least not the MSQ, nor does it have branching paths, so the single path that it does have has clearly defined protagonists and antagonists and supporting cast and one side will be the protagonists' side and the other given the focus needed to make antagonists work for the story.

[vormela]

And XIV isn't an open sandbox game, at least not the MSQ, nor does it have branching paths, so the single path that it does have has clearly defined protagonists and antagonists and supporting cast and one side will be the protagonists' side and the other given the focus needed to make antagonists work for the story.

Right. And isn't it ingenious and also convenient that we can say, "It is an MMO, but we are all playing the same role...as individual shards of this Azem person... who has certain values and mannerisms that all of us seem to have in common for some reason, according to the other characters..." That is why my immersion doesn't break much. Even the Zenos smirk seemed off but I was like yeah, they are having an Azem moment and that is just what they do. In some ways we can't escape our inherited traits, as anyone with crappy parents can tell you.

I hope this might help some people stay invested in their character. We are all different, but in some ways the same, and the shards-of-Azem thing is an elegant solution. And even if we aren't actually shards of Azem, it is people's expectations of us that have led to main character's development and mannerisms. I guess the opposite of feeling like words are put in your mouth would be the Crystarium people who are like "WE ARE ALL WARRIORS OF LIGHT!!!" I don't think that has been the way they've portrayed main character in the narrative, either. We have some agency. Like the Azim Steppe quest where the guy was sad because he couldn't fight with the weapon he was destined to fight with and wound up being a great hand-to-hand fighter.

It has been a very meta experience to play this game. I hope I am not alone. It gives me a lot to think about aside from which side my character is on or if they don't do the vanu vanu dance quite like I would IRL.

[Denishia]

YES- that's why even if I strongly disagree with the emotional connection or lack thereof to various protagonists and antagonists that other posters on this forum do, I do feel that same disconnect if in different places and to different degrees and thus understand it. And why my biggest fear is making the WoL revolve more and more around Azem and making Azem more of a distinct character, because XIV has worked so hard to keep the WoL a blank slate hero where it can. Right now Azem going around helping people where they could and sharing like Venat did a joy and wonder for the world as a whole works. But the more they lean into Azem, my unease grows. And some of the meta commentary around Zenos as a foil of the player character didn't land for me- but I won't deny what the writers were trying to do and that it was highly effective for a large segment of the player base.