Critique of Endwalker Characters

[Iscah]

I was actually kind of okay with him for a while, but when they made him op by suddenly introducing his photographic memory (and somehow able to perform a complex magic in one try) ...

I never got the impression of him having a "photographic" memory – he's read a lot, he knows a lot and clearly has a good memory but the closest to being photographic is that he had long enough to read and memorise the temper-reversing spell before the computer crashed. It could have been a fairly simple but precise phrase, or one that was easy enough to read and recall in the time he had to look at it. We never get much information about how incantations really work in FFXIV, but in battle we sometimes see people working big spells with just a few lines.

And I'm not sure whether you're referencing that same incident or his casting Float with "complex magic in one try", but the anti-tempering spell was explicitly the product of getting the computer to do months of testing for him. Getting the Float spell right might have been luck, but it's plot-driven luck and "really" there might have been every chance of it going wrong. (I think it was terribly poor storytelling that they had worked out the tower was basically summoned and likely to collapse with the core destroyed, and yet nobody thought to be prepared for this ahead of time.)

Anyway he had used the spell before, but only on himself, not on a big group of people. He said he was using it in the library to get to the high shelves.