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

[Kolsykol]

Just, Venat and her albatross of "we must establish she is Likable and a Good Person at all costs." Oof. (Not going to lie, it's maybe a breath of fresh air to talk about the things I actually loved about Endwalker? Maybe the wrong thread, though, so excuse me for the weird tangent!)

They didn't really have much time to develop her, and ultimately they can't rly give all that much autonomy to the player in this regard ( what the WoL thinks of characters ).
Imo I think they did a great job with her, I don't necessarily agree with her methods but I mean ultimately they kinda have to take a stance and just go with it in an expansion like this.
It's not like with Emet where he's around for one and a half exp following you around etc.

SWTOR did a really good job at giving the player a ton of autonomy, to the point you can actually kill companions or have them abandon you and they're just gone and your choices actually do matter a fair bit ( dunno about recent expansions tho, this is my memory of the base game ).
But FFXIV is pretty on rails and the WoL has an established personality and view of the characters.
Your choices are mostly just fluff that doesn't change anything and tbh a lot of the dialogue choices simply don't make sense for who the WoL clearly is.
The douchebaggy ones in particular it's pretty clear that the WoL is basically a saint ( even tho we've done questionable things in the past ).

You did get some options to question Hydaelyn but in the end of the day I don't think this exp was the time to start getting too complicated with characters like Venat.
And on some level it also needs to make some sense why people would flock to her against the convocation.
I think they did a really good job with making her have a great presence, she kinda had this larger than life saintly presence and it made a lot of sense imo.

[KageTokage]

You did get some options to question Hydaelyn but in the end of the day I don't think this exp was the time to start getting too complicated with characters like Venat.

The problem is that things did get complicated by tossing Venat/Hydaelyn into a causal loop that retroactively makes her directly or indirectly responsible for far more then just the Sundering.

The initially suggested reasons for the Sundering (Zodiark being a flawed solution to the Final Days and some Ancients wanting to preserve the lives that were be sacrificed to him) could've simply been fleshed out, but instead they opted to take a totally different angle and made it seem more like she was more opposed to the actual act of reviving the lost Ancients then the consequences and costs of it.

It essentially shifted her motives to being driven more by ideals then morals and while you can argue that she was a prisoner to fate who had no choice but to let bad things play out as we said they would, it still left me feeling uneasy in ways that the alternative wouldn't have.