What's the point with that quite lackluster story in Endwalker?

[Reinha]

What would the ancients have done if Venat didn't sunder the world?

Found more reasons to sacrifice lives to Zodiark until no one was left to enjoy the paradise he would restore. Another world to Meteion's report.

Sundered people may be weak and face a lot of struggles but at least they cling to life. They don't just wave goodbye to a friend who is about to commit suicide, nor do they celebrate the death of their close ones. Venat in essence removed all nuclear weapons from earth at the expense of causing famine and wars. It's cruel, but it also stopped people from destroying the world entirely.

[Stachiko]

That wouldn't make any sense. Her action benefits us and she is not against us, so we have no reason to fight her as a villain.

I do feel like I've explained why but I suppose I've not been clear enough. So here you go.

Venat chose to take all of mankind's and Etheirys' future in her own hands, by herself. Her justification was a web spun to us by Square that we were forced to accept. You may have happily accepted it, I did not.

Any mortal, regardless of how good, who openly states they alone will decide the future, is immediately a villain. I admit there are situations where such a statement would not burn a hole in my heart, but this was not one. We barely knew Venat as a mortal, barely knew any of them, and yet we put all of our trust in her.

What if she had messed up? What if Zodiark somehow won? What if, what if. Who is she to decide the future of all things for generations to come? Why are we thus robbed of free will? Why were our parents, or our parents' parents, or so on and so forth robbed of their free will? She made the choice and we were forced to accept it.

Had Venat, Emet-Selch and Hythlodaeus all agreed upon a singular path, it would be different. Multiple minds as opposed to one. That's a more acceptable approach (Barely). But it didn't and Square forced us into accepting that.

Make sense? You can believe and accept it if you want. There's nothing wrong with that considering it's the narrative. I won't though. Time travel and man-driven life-creation are huge no-nos in fantasy. Square broke both.

[EaraGrace]

...or because the Rejoinings don't necessarily automatically yield ancients. We've seen this from the Source vs the First, where the life forms are more or less indistinguishable barring soul density, and very distant from an ancient. Bearing in mind that amongst the sundered are fragments of ancient souls which they very much would've wanted to restore, like Emet's old pal, Azem. Which makes arguing back from their end result and what would be required at the end of them to restore the ancients, to what would've happened before then when we're talking about vaguely specified "new lives", an exercise in futility. You're free to consider it as evidence of some prior plan but it's not very compelling, IMO.

I think it very compelling. Emet being willing to, and in fact planning on, sacrificing human rejoined souls says much about the lengths they were willing to go to to bring back those they lost. Likewise, you’re free to disregard it or insist that the plan was completely different in the past, but I think most would agree it suggest that more than small animals were going to be sacrificed in Amaurot.

Any mortal, regardless of how good, who openly states they alone will decide the future, is immediately a villain. I admit there are situations where such a statement would not burn a hole in my heart, but this was not one. We barely knew Venat as a mortal, barely knew any of them, and yet we put all of our trust in her.

If the future was to be in the hands of one person of good moral standing vs many people with evil designs, I’d choose the former every time. Not blindly, not without consideration, but if they are still right, then I guess I would choose the villain.

What if she had messed up? What if Zodiark somehow won? What if, what if. Who is she to decide the future of all things for generations to come? Why are we thus robbed of free will? Why were our parents, or our parents' parents, or so on and so forth robbed of their free will? She made the choice and we were forced to accept it.

Many of the things in our lives is this way. We are born into nation states bound with laws we didn’t have a say in, born into circumstances we had no control over. To rage against it is to rage against time itself. The simple truth is the Ancients choose to believe that paradise could be found in Zodiark, and Venat knowing what she knew, had to choose between allowing them to walk that path to oblivion, or intervene.

Make sense? You can believe and accept it if you want. There's nothing wrong with that considering it's the narrative. I won't though. Time travel and man-driven life-creation are huge no-nos in fantasy. Square broke both.

And that’s totally fair. I don’t begrudge those who didn’t like the narrative direction taken.

[linayar]

I do feel like I've explained why but I suppose I've not been clear enough. So here you go.

Venat chose to take all of mankind's and Etheirys' future in her own hands, by herself. Her justification was a web spun to us by Square that we were forced to accept. You may have happily accepted it, I did not.

Any mortal, regardless of how good, who openly states they alone will decide the future, is immediately a villain. I admit there are situations where such a statement would not burn a hole in my heart, but this was not one. We barely knew Venat as a mortal, barely knew any of them, and yet we put all of our trust in her.

What if she had messed up? What if Zodiark somehow won? What if, what if. Who is she to decide the future of all things for generations to come? Why are we thus robbed of free will? Why were our parents, or our parents' parents, or so on and so forth robbed of their free will? She made the choice and we were forced to accept it.

Had Venat, Emet-Selch and Hythlodaeus all agreed upon a singular path, it would be different. Multiple minds as opposed to one. That's a more acceptable approach (Barely). But it didn't and Square forced us into accepting that.

Make sense? You can believe and accept it if you want. There's nothing wrong with that considering it's the narrative. I won't though. Time travel and man-driven life-creation are huge no-nos in fantasy. Square broke both.

I'm not treating someone as a villain on "what if" scenarios.

And what you're basically saying is that the present is affected by the actions of the people of the past. That's not going to make me want to fight people older than me just because I may not disagree with their past action (and I don't disagree with Venat's actions) when they are our allies in the present (and in the past too in the case of Venat).

Considering we started in the present, her actions ensure that our present remains where we know our place in the world and have a purpose.

So, regardless of whether her past action is disagreeable, if Venat is to be a villain, it would have to be based on her actions in our present, not the past.

[Stachiko]

At this point, I was only trying to defend my opinion. Answering the why when asked. If you want to convert me, I can say for certain that most likely won't happen.

I by no means want to convert anyone here, just putting my opinion out there.

[DevonEllwood]

I haven't logged in in a while, but 52 pages is kind of compelling. I haven't read everything but I have read most of the thread and I feel other people have explained adequately my frustrations with endwalker but I'll try to sum it up as best as possible.


I used to be okay with endwalker and then made the mistake of looking further into it and the more I do the more disappointed I am with the direction of the story. I still appreciate the really good "high" areas, such as Thavnair (especially the second half) and I'm one who really like the Garlemald section as well. I feel it captured the desperation and bleak future rather well.

I can forgive the awful pacing in certain areas and the bizarre split choice they had between Thavnair and Sharlayan. Shadowbriger's story split made sense and doing one or the other first didn't conflict with the atmosphere as it did with Endwalker. I went Thavnair first so it was awkward to say the least. Watch cat eat burger while this important character is a captive in a tower, that's nice.

I can forgive the loporrits and how they grind the story to a halt every time they're on screen with their very unfunny "funny" antics. Playing dress-up with rabbits while the world burns is not exactly what I wanted, but I guess I can deal with. What I can't understand is Elpis onward.

Elpis introduced a second type of time travel that was already pre-established in the game from the last expansion by the same head writer. Apparently according to someone on the lore forums this messed with the continuity enough to make it to where the time line we are currently in shouldn't exist at all.
Anything and everything in Elpis doesn't matter because time loop. I can state how poor Hermes's and Venat's reasoning are for what they did but it doesn't matter because time loop. Had to be the exact same, time loop. Doesn't matter.
What Venat did was just as terrible as Hermes, we just need one line of her stating it and we are all good. Just one line. No need to dwell on anything like "necessary evils" or anything to keep with the theme no , just skip it. Give us more stupid rabbits.
Give us a spaceship, some anime action scenes, and some magic that definitely won't bring the scions back from something stupid. We also need to neglect those these that the expansion established in the last zone. We can't have the scions disappear and not come back and win everything. We can't have any meaningful sacrifices or consequences. We win all the time because good guys.

All I've learned from this expansion is that it's not a good idea to look deeper into the story. Just look at it at the surface level and be done. I have so many questions with things that were established in the last expansion and I'm not even sure I should bother waiting on them to be answered. I feel the likelihood of all the leftovers will just get hand waved away or just ignored. I really hope Endwalker was just Yoshi P saying, screw it, just do whatever for the second half of the story and it's not what is to be expected onward. Yoshi P wanted people to get emotions from Endwalker. I felt frustrated and disappointed. I don't think that was what he was going for.

Loporrits aren't funny. Stop letting the scions "win" all the time, have some consequences, not everyone actually cares about them anymore. G'raha Tia isn't "cute" to everyone, he's downright creepy to some. Please, please don't do something like Endwalker again. I don't feel more time would have helped, what they needed was a different direction. It just seemed liek they were too caught up in making twists and wowing people for the sake of it.

[Stachiko]

Watch cat eat burger while this important character is a captive in a tower, that's nice.

I had completely forgotten how urgency felt so misplaced throughout the entire expansion. We just calmly handle everything that comes to us. There's no "Oh cool Emet, that's nice and all, but... MY WORLD IS DYING AND I NEED YOUR HELP!" Instead we pranced around on their whims.

Granted it was time travel and they could just send us back to the same point in time, so that's kind of moot. But there were other instances where a sense of urgency was completely lost. I just uh... can't recall them vividly.

I will say it was a pretty solid anime.

[linayar]

At this point, I was only trying to defend my opinion. Answering the why when asked. If you want to convert me, I can say for certain that most likely won't happen.

I by no means want to convert anyone here, just putting my opinion out there.

I'm not asking you to convert anyone, but in trying to defend your opinion, you're showing why it does not make sense. Your opinion is basically based on a mischaracterization of our relationship with Venat.

[Garet]

Yes, but Venat's words suggest that the method was also wrong. If the method was irrelevant due to the nature of the new life, then it wouldn't have to be mentioned.

In that case, they wouldn't need a living sacrifice, merely a sufficient concentration of aether.

From what I can recall Venat and her group did not entirely opposed the creation of zodiark. Only after zodiark failed and the other ascians wanted to sacrifice more people that venat and her group opposed it. Zodiark was only a stopgap measure and not something that can reach and kill meteion at that point. Zodiark shielded and revitalized the ancient world temporarily but when despair was again starting to creep in the solution of sacrificing more to the point of extinction seemed pointless to Venat.

Even Meteion bragged to us as we made our way to her that even if we were to create another zodiark like shield that she will just wait for the shield it creates to go down eventually and her despair will eventually overwhelm our planet. Hence Venat created the moon ark in case the WoL cannot defeat Meteion because eventually the shield provided by zodiark willl go down even without Fandaniel's schemes which made it go down earlier that estimated.

[KizuyaKatogami]

All these people bashing the ancients for sacrificing etc. I’m really curious then on how you all feel with Venat’s backup plan being to sacrifice all of the other shards and only have the people on the source survive. So much for all of her “children” hm? Or how about we talk about ironworks, instead of moving forward, decided to mess with time and jeopardize billions of people just to being 1 person back to life. So much for the sundered moving forward and not being tied to the past. Oh but i’m sure this is just one of many examples of it being perfectly okay when the protagonists do it, but when the antagonists do it it’s wrong.

As far as Venat telling people goes, we at the very least know she didn’t even tell the truth to her own people who were going to sacrifice themselves for Hydaelyn. As per the anamnesis cutscene, it seems they didn’t even know she was going to die or that they would be sacrificed. But also, i’m not sure why people are acting like she was some horrible person the ancients hated and would never believe? She’s an ex-convocation member. She’s friends with one of the most popular ones. She used to be Azem. There are many many ways she could’ve gone about telling them. About the whole “well she talked them later on” yes, she talked them after the fact, after the planet was dying, and they had lost their loved ones. The fact is she could’ve prevented all of that completely. Instead she lost hope for her own people, and placed it in a single person. Of whom by the way, is part of a group of people(sundered) who give into despair just as easy if not even easier than the ancients did. So i’m not sure why that’s even an argument. We have both garlemald and thavnair for that. Just because our plot armor scions don’t give into it doesn’t change the fact 90% of the sundered would give into despair just as easily.