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

[Rulakir]

Unfortunately, I doubt we'll ever know the truth of the matter. I can say I feel like what we got wasn't what Ishikawa intended, but without one of them explicitly saying that's the case (which I doubt they will) there's no proof other than numerous inconsistencies that are particularly perplexing given it's the same MSQ writer and EW directly follows ShB. It's not even just ShB, the artwork for 3.2 with Minfilia chained to the Mothercrystal certainly wasn't portraying Hydaelyn positively either and that was after they started rewriting the lore for the Ascians.

Side note: It's never addressed in ShB, but I've often wondered if Hydaleyn had any say in Minfilia essentially becoming (in her words) an Ascian herself and possessing young girls to fight to their deaths. Additionally, Emet stated regarding Ryne: "But to draw on her true power, you must become one, both body and soul. To wit, one being must consume the other." Half of Thancred's arc in ShB was accepting the loss of Minfilia should Ryne choose her own destiny. Yet, in EW this is all completely undone. Somehow, Ryne got the power of the Oracle but Minfilia's soul returned to the aetherial sea where it was then ushered by Hydaelyn to the Source.

Elpis being a time loop following an expansion with an AU was also an odd choice and confusing to players like myself who were not familiar with Alexander. Venat keeping her memories was probably the most problematic part, they were never going to be able to justify the sundering of more than Zodiark being intentional and even less so with knowledge of the future. It's the one part of the story I don't understand how audiences gloss over unless they bought into the poorly substantiated premise that the Ancients were doomed. As a big fan of both Emet and Hythlodaeus, I felt like time travel without the ability to change anything was sadistic. I would've much preferred Echo flashbacks and there wasn't a reason not to do that since we had access at one point or another to every character who was there.

At any rate, I think Yoshi-P needs to trust his writers. I think he's a good director and producer and I appreciate the amount of effort he puts into making cutscenes just right, but I started having concerns as soon as I found out he wanted to rush the end of the Ancients, probably the most popular storyline and characters in the series to move on to something completely new.

[Kozh]

Brings a specific comic to my mind:

"Me invent wheel."

"You am play gods!"

Yeah, this is a consistent problem I've noticed for any story that wants to preach the folly of reaching for perfection and yet also wants to reaffirm the morality of altruism. You want me to have feels about helping people in need, but you also want to say no one should want for better? What?

So then, where is the magic line between improving other peoples' lives for the better and simply accepting and making the most of one's suffering? Mayhaps we indulged in purest hubris when we developed a cure for Tempering after 12 millennium. If only we had learned to make the most of it and simply rested our weary souls in Lakshmi's bosom.

Reminds me of one ffxiv redditor about how arenvald shouldn't get new magitek tech to help him walks again because it'll be "erasing his character growth" and he should be wheelchair bound for the rest of his life.

I mean, yeah I get the sentiment, but there's a difference between wanting someone/yourself to live better and being obsessed with impossible things (which magitek is not, in term of ffxiv world). Sometimes it's okay to not accept suffering.

Regarding the temper cure... I was thinking, what if it makes war between tribes/nation usng primals to be possible. After all, we only need crystals and faith. One thing that makes primal summoning dangerous and bad in the long run is due to how they temper their followers to serve the primal instead. Now that mindless temper isn't a thing, what stopping nations with access to big quantity of crystal to summon primals for war purposes?

[Iscah]

It's not even just ShB, the artwork for 3.2 with Minfilia chained to the Mothercrystal certainly wasn't portraying Hydaelyn positively either and that was after they started rewriting the lore for the Ascians.

The big problem with that artwork of Minfilia is that it isn't something you will ever come across naturally in the process of playing the game. If they wanted it to be an ominous warning of Hydaelyn's true nature then it (or something close to it) needed to appear within the game itself for everyone to see in the course of the story. Instead we only get the impression that Minfilia went to Hydaelyn as a willing servant, loyal even once freed back to her own consciousness in 3.4.

Elpis being a time loop following an expansion with an AU was also an odd choice and confusing to players like myself who were not familiar with Alexander.

Meanwhile, as someone who did play Alexander and subsequently spent some time hammering out a time travel theory that made sense of it and Shadowbringers existing in the same narrative, I was pleased to see that time travel here seemed consistent with my previous theory: that time naturally forms a loop unless the traveller does something to contradict their own future, at which point a new timeline branches off to contain the new events. At the end of this, the traveller would (for better or worse) likely be trapped in the new timeline with no way back to their own.

By doing so we would doom our own world to destruction, while not technically saving the ancients from any of the suffering to come. At best we could make a second copy of time where they survive, but that will not save them in the timeline we come from.

More on that below, but back in the topic of Alexander: I think it is simply the nature of the game, at this point, that the writers will incorporate plot points from side quests in ways that the main plot makes more sense if you've played the others. You're clearly expected to play them as you go. The important ones probably need to be a bit more signposted, if not made mandatory – CT now has a couple of "you really should do this" comments from the MSQ, so they could add the same heavy hinting for Alexander and Omega and anything else that gets raised in future.

Pretty sure they said that creating a new timeline is a possibility. So, worst case scenario, the WOL could save that timeline's Elpis but her own world would still be fighting the Final Days.

While we potentially can create a new timeline if we stay there long enough to avert any chance of a Sundering – not just the scenario we ultimately saw but any deliberate or accidental process that could cause it – anything short of achieving that would likely end up being part of the known timeline one way or another because we have basically no idea of what we are trying to avert.

And if we succeeded, we would have no way back to the original world that we are trying to save by acquiring information about how the original Final Days started.

Whether you like the ancient world or not, narratively that would be a terribly poor thing to just abandon everything the player has ever done and seen and worked so hard to save up to this point. Abandon all their friends to a likely doom, or almost certainly exile from their home planet if they survive.

The feeling Elpis is clearly intended to evoke, to me, is that we are ultimately viewing events that happened in the distant past and cannot interfere or we risk dooming our present and our friends.

Someone above said they'd rather it were treated as a series of Echo visions, but I feel like that's already what it was – we were warned from the start by Elidibus that we must not try to change things. We are there as an observer, trying to learn what already happened. We were not intended to go there with the mindset of changing things.

[Iscah]

On further thought, I don't know if we could even avert the Sundering if we tried, because we have so little knowledge to contradict. All we know is that someone called Venat, who we only saw as an anonymised recording, would create Hydaelyn at some point after Zodiark's creation. We have no dates for any of this. It could play out over millennia for all we actually know. It could be a different Venat altogether.

Avert one scenario and another may simply emerge to take its place.

[Brinne]

Hm. I started during Stormblood, which I think mostly got negative reception for its story. Heavensward and Shadowbringers were almost universally beloved.

Personally speaking, as always, I've been playing since ARR - and though I had my own list of criticisms about Stormblood, they were relatively "light" and mostly about craft and execution while recognizing there was mostly good intent, at least, behind the ideas. I'm projecting, maybe, but that was also generally the vibe I saw around most Stormblood criticism in general. Things like: Lyse as a character was developed clumsily, especially given all the focus on her - the pacing and focus were misaligned, too much repetition in the zone scenarios, so on and so forth. As far as "deeper" stuff, my main impression was, "this seems to be a well-intended expansion about colonialism written by people who don't actually know or have much experience with colonialism." Clearly trying to be thoughtful, but inevitably reductive and awkward regardless. Nothing really brain-breaking, at least.

Meanwhile, Endwalker criticism has a fundamentally different tenor that's more about "um, did the game I've loved for ten years suddenly swerve into basically doing a full-throated genocide apologism?"

[Kozh]

As far as "deeper" stuff, my main impression was, "this seems to be a well-intended expansion about colonialism written by people who don't actually know or have much experience with colonialism."

Genuine question, do you have some examples of why would you think like that about the story?

Just curious though! It's fine if you don't want to answer.

[Brinne]

Genuine question, do you have some examples of why would you think like that about the story?

Just curious though! It's fine if you don't want to answer.

Oh, sure. I'm certainly nowhere near an expert in colonialist theory or anything, don't get me wrong. The reason I felt that way was because it felt like Stormblood often brought up concepts related to it, and then just sort of didn't quite know what to do with them, falling back on "um, and then things worked out because everyone was inspired by our hot-blooded heroism?" For example, Lyse's issues with diaspora, which I thought were potentially really interesting when first brought up - but then it sort of fell to the wayside and wasn't explored further until suddenly after spending some time with Hien (?????), everyone now believes in her and she's able to lead the Resistance based on her relationship to her father and sister (??????). Or, for example, it's obvious Stormblood was aware of the question of generations of younger people who had integrated into the oppressors' culture - or taking into considerations whatever valid reasons ordinary people would have to submit rather join an uprising - but didn't really present a compelling solution or deeper exploration for it beyond the WoL's personal charisma inspiring the population to stand up anyway.

Stormblood also sort of had problems in figuring out whether violent revolution was justified or not - see the common criticisms regarding the samurai job quests, and also, uh, frankly, no one in FFXIV has ever won as hard as Ilberd Feare, in terms of his methods and goals working out basically exactly the way he wanted to. (Venat would be very proud!) Ala Mhigo in general also honestly had a really interesting setup in the way Garlemald took advantage of its internal turmoil and civil war that resulted from its own extremely troubled history, and how that intersected with the "people who had integrated" issue, as well as the long-running unwillingness of the other city-states to help them - but this was largely brushed over and not really talked about in any depth within the MSQ. The fight for liberation, as far as Ala Mhigo was concerned, felt like it was treated is as generalized and broad a way as possible, with the possible exception of my beloved Fordola. Who, you know, is my wife. Wait what?

[Lauront]

Huh? You mean because of time travel?

Pretty sure they said that creating a new timeline is a possibility. So, worst case scenario, the WOL could save that timeline's Elpis but her own world would still be fighting the Final Days.

Even if not, I personally wouldn't care. I'm the kind of person who wouldn't hesitate to go back in time and erase slavery and/or the Holocaust even if it erased me from existence.

Yep, the possibility of AUs pretty much nullifies that whole issue as a concern.

[Carin-Eri]

Hm. I started during Stormblood, which I think mostly got negative reception for its story. Heavensward and Shadowbringers were almost universally beloved.

I think Endwalker is suffering from "Fridge Logic"; before I finished it, I heard almost nothing but clamorous praise for it, but the closer to the end I got and the more spoiler-filled discussions I was able to participate in, the more people I found critical of it. That leads me to believe that the earliest players were the ones who were most eager to love it and least receptive to criticism, while the more measured players are the ones that started beating it in the following months. Also, some of those early players who are now coming down from the high of the "honeymoon phase" are either just starting to see criticisms they agree with or are rethinking some of their earlier takes.

As I've said a few times, I was absolutely loving the story right up until Elpis. That was the exact moment that the story started veering into "What the hell are you guys talking about?" territory.

All this being said, the people who dislike Endwalker's story or the expansion as a whole are still a minority. A growing minority, but still a minority.

That's an interesting point actually. I mean, whilst I only very recently finished Endwalker it did (for me at least) present a few big "WOW!" moments - the Ragnarok launch for example, the surprise reveal of Zenos coming to our 'rescue'. And I have to confess, the cutscenes leading into the fight with Zenos, with 'Footfalls' playing in the background... I didn't know whether to laugh or cry - the whole thing was a joy to behold.

By the same token, so far as ShB is concerned, the entire sequence with Hades is something I've revisited a few times. I can say with certainty, having seen some reaction videos on Youtube, that I wasn't the only one almost in tears from the part where Ardbert offers the ailing WoL his axe, leading up to Emet-Selch's "Remember that we lived".
And, obviously, HW gave us the clearly much-beloved (and justifiably so) 'Final Steps of Faith'
Heck, even ARR gave us the wrongly accused Scion's dropping out one-by-one to allow the (barely then known as the) Warrior of Light the opportunity to escape.

But SB? I don't really recall any standout moments. I guess the liberation of Ala Mihgo was pretty good but I don't recall anything that gave me that "wow" factor that draws me to revisit cutscenes.

[CrownySuccubus]

That's an interesting point actually. I mean, whilst I only very recently finished Endwalker it did (for me at least) present a few big "WOW!" moments - the Ragnarok launch for example, the surprise reveal of Zenos coming to our 'rescue'. And I have to confess, the cutscenes leading into the fight with Zenos, with 'Footfalls' playing in the background... I didn't know whether to laugh or cry - the whole thing was a joy to behold.

By the same token, so far as ShB is concerned, the entire sequence with Hades is something I've revisited a few times. I can say with certainty, having seen some reaction videos on Youtube, that I wasn't the only one almost in tears from the part where Ardbert offers the ailing WoL his axe, leading up to Emet-Selch's "Remember that we lived".
And, obviously, HW gave us the clearly much-beloved (and justifiably so) 'Final Steps of Faith'
Heck, even ARR gave us the wrongly accused Scion's dropping out one-by-one to allow the (barely then known as the) Warrior of Light the opportunity to escape.

But SB? I don't really recall any standout moments. I guess the liberation of Ala Mihgo was pretty good but I don't recall anything that gave me that "wow" factor that draws me to revisit cutscenes.

Yeah, most of the "memorable" stuff from SB seems to only be things which are meme-worthy, such as Scholars catching Susanoo's huge sword with their books, Lakshmi's "bosom", and Gosetsu having a whole death monologue and conversation while he struggles to hold up a collapsing building. Even when I was going through every dungeon in the game while leveling all my classes to 80, I could recount exactly why the WOL had to fight in places like the Aery, the AC Research Center, Holminster Switch, Qitana Ravel and Mt. Gulg...but I was scratching my head trying to remember what the purpose of fighting in the Sirensong Sea or Castrum Abania was.

To its credit, I don't think Endwalker is going to have that problem. For all the faults I have with its story, every dungeon was pretty memorable. The Tower of Zot is probably the least of them, but I don't think it'll be possible to forget why you're there.