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

[EaraGrace]

To react to others having a differing take on a scene by immediately chocking it up to emotional manipulation and “propaganda” seems a bit arrogant no?

[PawPaw]

It's probably been discussed before but remember when Venat implied that she'd be judging mankind (Ancients) based on their response to dealing with despair? So she commits genocide after they respond in a way she doesn't approve of and then flash forward 12k years to us. The rules for her game aren't exactly fair, are they? Her criteria for passing or failing includes her leaving her people in the dark and completely vulnerable to what was happening to them. They had to figure it out on their own and move past it, and they fail, of course. Anyone would. I'm actually laughing at her thinking that the Sundered were going to be better than them.

So let's remove all of our access to gods and otherworldly assistance at every damn turn and imagine a Source in which the world, the Scions and the player character know big fat nothing about what is happening to them; Just like the Ancients! She thinks that sundered man would handle despair better when presented with the same dilemma, because we know suffering; This is what she murders her entire race for. Overcome it through the power of positive thinking? No chance. More like, within a week, anyone still alive would round up every frail and vulnerable member of society and forcibly feed them to a Cthulhu in the hopes that it would somehow save us from the mysterious catastrophe.

The Sundered don't even have the magical power to raise an effective stopgap shield like Zodiark. All they have is being slightly soul-broken which doesn't make them any less vulnerable, but this is also the single reason I am supposed to believe this was all necessary. They'd be absolutely helpless and even if they figured out that despair=monsters, there's not enough yoga and self-help in the world to happy thoughts the FD into ending. Sometimes I stop and think again about all the ridiculous deus ex machina used to get us to the end of the game, how instead of giving her own people a chance to live she chose to weave this ridiculous series of coincidences together in this flimsy hope that we'd pick up the slack one day. And this is all based on their failing her pop quiz whereas we are given the equivalent of an e-mailed answer sheet while taking the same test...and I'm just amazed all over again. Imagine what that society could have done differently if they had had even the slightest bit of assistance. Damn this story just makes me upset.

Ugh, rant over and bedtime.

Unfortunately, it doesn't make me feel any better how things played out as no matter what our WoL deciding to share the future in an attempt to avert it is ultimately what caused it, thus making us responsible for the sundering. It was a full on Greek tragedy. -_-

Man, I don't think I'll ever forgive the writers for this.

[Theodric]

As an aside, the latest seasonal event made me realise that there really isn't much in the way of suspense left in the game these days. The premise of the event in question is a fashion show and I had a strong hunch that our character would win and that's exactly what happened.

Does anyone else find it boring? I don't play narrative heavy games to have my ego stroked so the idea that the player character succeeds at almost every task - be it major or minor - simply doesn't do anything for me. Even indirect aid provided by the player character usually results in victory for the NPC in question. Which, again, feels boring to me. We don't see or experience much in the way of a struggle on any meaningful capacity it seems. Which is ironic given the supposed 'themes'.

It just feels off for the characters who genuinely struggle to all end up killed off by a supposedly well meaning 'herois' whereas those who get every possible advantage and 'I WIN' button handed to them are praised as saviours...despite doing very little of note.

Ah well. The Live Letter is tomorrow and the trailer for 6.1 should arrive as well. I'm curious to see what is in store next, though I'd be lying if I said I wasn't having much more fun with other games at the moment compared to this one.

[Iscah]

This is what I meant by the mental gymnastics needed for this to make sense. :P So, the loop is dependent on the 8UC timeline failing? Messy. Imagine being Hydaelyn in the 8UC and realizing you're in the failed/sacrificial timeline. It still doesn't explain the paradox surrounding the name "Hydaelyn" either.

Yes, the ultimate outcome of the Shadowbringers branched timelines is that they both exist side-by-side. One doesn't happen "earlier" than the other; they're just both there, and our timeline is immediately available as the path around which the time loop forms.

If you're able to suspend disbelief enough that the present day relies on Elpis happening and events at Elpis rely on the present day happening, then it doesn't seem much more of a stretch to accept that the loop can also rely on the branched timeline forming to open the path. I just don't think too hard about how the loop could have gotten established in the first place, and accept that it somehow can. (With a bit of periodical whinging about how it could have been written more neatly and with less paradoxes, but still.)

[Iscah]

As an aside, the latest seasonal event made me realise that there really isn't much in the way of suspense left in the game these days. The premise of the event in question is a fashion show and I had a strong hunch that our character would win and that's exactly what happened.

I would hardly count a seasonal event as an indicator of how much tension might be written in the MSQ. Have they ever been anything but fluff and paint-by-numbers happy outcomes? Even as someone who enjoys the "nicest" interpretation of the MSQ, I've never found them anything but trite.

[aveyond-dreams]

I didn't play the event nor do I plan to given the fact the headpiece, for some reason, wasn't dyeable-but anyway the overly predictable sequence of events in the final stretch of Endwalker was not handled well nor am I surprised that people are concerned for the future MSQ. Ultima Thule and the events that happened there were cheap, but most of us who played Endwalker at launch were helped along by the hype. Nowadays I don't think I could've taken the fake sacrifices seriously.

Especially not after Stranger of Paradise, Final Fantasy Meme Central, managed to pull off meaningful sacrifices in its final act. The Frank Sinatra song that apparently is supposed to represent Jack manages to feel more fitting than Close in the Distance does for the Scions, due to how little these characters evolved during Endwalker and their lack of substance. Or, in G'raha Tia's case, a total fall from grace compared to how he won a decent amount of people over as the Crystal Exarch, only to exhaust our patience once he became a plushie.

This is certainly not the case for numerous numbered mainline titles as well as spinoffs. When the time came for the final showdown, there was far more suspense and *danger* besides clouds of dark smoke. Crisis Core, anyone? FFXIII-2? FFXV? FFX gets a special mention-the Aeons, the mostly silent beings who I called on in nearly every battle became one of my last opponents. A single line each, them fighting me with the same abilities that I had given them, it all made for so much more impact than Ultima Thule.

Which is to say nothing of the events that took place after the battle with Yu Yevon. Yuna performed one last sending, and one by one they were all set free. The emotional catharsis brought on soon afterwards solidified Yuna as one of Final Fantasy's best heroines, and that cast as one of the strongest in the series.

I'm not particularly excited for the MSQ of 6.1, but my opinion could be swayed depending on what we see in the trailer. I'm still wary of Thancred allegedly having a "cool moment" which could possibly mean that we get an expensive animation of him eating sushi or something. There will almost certainly be more slice-of-life filler quests in Sharlayan surrounding the old teacher whose name I forgot, and I pray that the scene with Estinien is him inviting us to go on a monster hunt and the subsequent patch dungeon.

[AziraSyuren]

The idea that the Ancient society was supposed to be scary would’ve been a lot more believable if they were shown to be more willing to kill ostensibly innocent creations instead of just ones that were literally immediately dangerous to everyone around. But instead we were shown that the people who were more willing and/or able to kill innocents than anyone else (albeit after they lost their marbles) were the two who had problems with how it was ran or the direction it was going. That was a massive swing and a miss in terms of writing that even I can’t deny, as someone who still adores EW.

As of now, the scariest thing about the Ancients is that they could even breed two people like that.

[Erendis]

This is what I meant by the mental gymnastics needed for this to make sense. :P So, the loop is dependent on the 8UC timeline failing? Messy. Imagine being Hydaelyn in the 8UC and realizing you're in the failed/sacrificial timeline. It still doesn't explain the paradox surrounding the name "Hydaelyn" either.

In 8UC Emet-Selch and Elidibus would be alive so 2nd Final days would not be happening or at least would not be happening at the time it happened on our timeline and until they get killed in 8UC timeline.

[CrownySuccubus]

(snip)

You have to remember that, according to the writers'/story's logic (which I definitely do not agree with), suffering and mortality = good.

The entire point of Endwalker is to try to tell the player that a life with no suffering or misery is either impossible or delusional. We're shown multiple societies that reached the "pinnacle" of whatever advancement or goal they wanted to achieve (the Omicrons, the Ea and the Plenty) and such "perfection" wound up making all of them despondent for one reason or another. The devs have even confirmed that the Plenty was meant to be an allegory for what the Ancients were probably headed toward. And then, of course, we have Cookingway flat out tell us that the Ancients "caused" their own downfall by striving for perfection instead of simply making the best of their lot in life.

To the writers, the Ancients had to go because their world didn't have enough suffering. The problem was, they were also too lazy to fully commit to the idea of "Utopia is a delusion". They could have shown the Ancients creating familiars only to treat them as full-on slaves without rights. I think that's sort of what they were going for when they initially had Emet-Selch calling your character "it" and speaking of you with disgust, but that doesn't last long. By the time you reach the next MSQ, he and Hyth are treating you with a decent amount of respect. Then, throughout the rest of the Elpis storyline, we learn that a familiar/concept with sapience and reason like the WOL is pretty much unheard of. Even Meteion is specifically stated to be unique. So basically, all of their familiars/concepts are basically monsters and animals...and if they're expecting players to dislike Ancients for treating animals and monsters as disposable, they must have forgotten what videogame we're playing. If anything, the charybdis portion shows us that even though they're pretty quick to write off "defective" concepts, they'll still listen to reason and reevaluate with sufficient evidence.

So, in the end, the entire premise of the Ancient society being bad because they didn't suffer enough relies on the logic of "trust me, bro". Even the aforementioned dead worlds they offer as "proof" (the Omicron, Ea and Plenty) come across less as worlds destroyed by their own hubris and more like juvenile writing.

[AziraSyuren]

It’s less they had to go because they didn’t suffer enough and more that they couldn’t cope with suffering and move on. The irony being that Venat suffered enough to take such a drastic action herself, showing that she was also unable to cope with it. Then she proceeded to spend entire millennia entirely alone to bear the weight of what she had done and inflicted on others, leaving her as the only one who actually had to cope with that suffering.

Well, her and the ascians she left alive.