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

[KizuyaKatogami]

Interviewer: What is the purpose of expanding the options for solo players?

Yoshida: “We want people to be able to play FF14 which has a good reputation as one of the best stories in the Final Fantasy series. That is all.

Shb i could potentially see. Endwalker? In your dreams Yoshi P.

[PawPaw]

I was thinking about it last night and sadly, the only thing I care about in 6.1 anymore is Ishgard housing so I can finally get an apartment in the city my char considers home. The only reason I log on anymore is to craft furniture for it and I honestly can't dredge up a way to give a damn about an epilogue to the bad story I just played through. I'm sure I'll check it out eventually but this is the first time I haven't been excitedly reading interviews and researching what's to come. Don't give a shit, just let me know when I can buy my apartment so I can pretend I'm playing the Sims, putter around with my furniture and forget that almost every character I've ever loved is dead.

[Sicno]

Interviewer: What is the purpose of expanding the options for solo players?

Yoshida: “We want people to be able to play FF14 which has a good reputation as one of the best stories in the Final Fantasy series. That is all.

Shb i could potentially see. Endwalker? In your dreams Yoshi P.

Well to be the devil's advocate regardless of if we don't agree with the writing direction and think the story falls apart we can't pretend there isn't a lot of people who did love it and went full tears and talked a lot about it online. So he's not really misguided in his notion.

[CrownySuccubus]

Well to be the devil's advocate regardless of if we don't agree with the writing direction and think the story falls apart we can't pretend there isn't a lot of people who did love it and went full tears and talked a lot about it online. So he's not really misguided in his notion.

Yeah, we run the risk of this thread becoming an echo chamber. As I said in a previous post, people who dislike Endwalker's story are still very much a minority.

Even in my case, I think it's fair to say that I liked the story "beats" (chasing Hermes in Ktisis Hyperboreia felt intense, even if I felt the circumstances leading up to it were stupid, and the "Final Walk" was probably one of my favorite moments in gaming ever even if by then, I was skipping past the 10 billionth "Never Give Up" speech and yelling "I GET IT!" at the screen).

This thread just happens to grab the attention of a lot of people with complaints, and that makes it easy to assume that our opinion is the standard one.

[Lauront]

Yes, if you go on sites like reddit (and others), it is indeed the minority view. I've seen more criticism filtering through to places like Twitter, MMO-champ, 4chan and yes, even reddit, and it's good that it was enough to get them to address it in the Q&A to some degree, but many look past or did not notice many of the issues many here didn't like. I think they were able, through the post-Elpis cutscene, to obscure a lot of the intricacies SHB had put into place, and a lot of the stuff giving a fuller image of the ancient world is relegated to the Elpis sidequests.

The issue for me is it's just about decent as an MMO - take the story aspect away, and I'm left with that, which is fairly "take it or leave it", rather than anything compelling to me.

[SeverianLyonesse]

As I said, I could literally sit here all day and give a point-by-point list of all the problems with Endwalker's philosophy of "suffering-fetishism", but one of the major ones is exactly as you said. A period of time without major suffering or challenge is, essentially, just a time of normality. Acting as if a life without suffering is bad or makes people weak begs what the alternative should be: should people constantly be striving to make every aspect of life worse, just for the hell of it? If there are no sources of suffering and terror, should we make our own until we eventually get used to that, and then make something even worse just to make sure there's still a prerequisite amount of horror?

While I do disagree with fetishizing or normalizing suffering as a *necessity*, periods without suffering are actually quite abnormal. They are the improbably infrequent times when peoples manage to collectively pull ahead of a rather harsh and indifferent environment. Which tends to require so much collective education, effort, and care that they are both rare and as fleeting as it takes a generation or two to forget to maintain the edifice supporting them. Not to mention very few--if any--periods of peace or comfort weren't built on the backs of an exploited class.

I appreciate that EW tried to tackle the idea of suffering, and it did inch toward some interesting ideas. But I do think that it fumbled quite a bit and resorted to trite aphorisms to cover up a lack of follow-through. And I think one of the most fundamental missteps it made was painting suffering as *necessary* rather than *inevitable*, two related perspectives with completely opposite implications.

[KizuyaKatogami]

Well to be the devil's advocate regardless of if we don't agree with the writing direction and think the story falls apart we can't pretend there isn't a lot of people who did love it and went full tears and talked a lot about it online. So he's not really misguided in his notion.

To be fair the majority in this community would be fine with getting nothing but slop as content and still would be worshipping the devs. It isn’t even about just my personal bias. Endwalker is objectively flawed in so many ways, but the whole suffering is necessary angle just takes the cake. The devs and writers trying to preach about something like that while using the moral issue of genocide to get the point across is somewhat humorous, but also downright depressing. The other games in the series don’t preach to you like this one does.

[Misplaced_Marbles]

Acting as if a life without suffering is bad or makes people weak begs what the alternative should be: should people constantly be striving to make every aspect of life worse, just for the hell of it?

Obviously (/s) sleeping on a warm soft bed makes us soft and weak, so we should all move back to caves and sleep on rocks. It builds character or whatever.

[CrownySuccubus]

While I do disagree with fetishizing or normalizing suffering as a *necessity*, periods without suffering are actually quite abnormal. They are the improbably infrequent times when peoples manage to collectively pull ahead of a rather harsh and indifferent environment. Which tends to require so much collective education, effort, and care that they are both rare and as fleeting as it takes a generation or two to forget to maintain the edifice supporting them. Not to mention very few--if any--periods of peace or comfort weren't built on the backs of an exploited class.

You're not wrong, but this only furthers my point in two ways: 1) suffering and problems still existed within those halcyon eras, if only for a marginalized class and 2) the definition of "suffering" is eternally relative. I said that periods without suffering are times of "normality", not that they were common -- perhaps the word I should have used is "stability" or "comfort". My point, though, is that virtually any status quo will become something humans normalize; we're biologically conditioned to tune out as much existential dread as possible.

We live in an era where more people live for longer periods of time, and problems and diseases that existed longer than humanity has existed have all but been eradicated. On those metrics, people who lived in 3,000 BC would consider this paradise. However, we also live in an era where the ability to self-determinate has probably never been more difficult and the threat of the complete annihilation of all life everywhere because of two crazy bastards pressing a red button at the same time is a constant worry. The idea that people are getting "weak" because things are too easy is stupid and sounds like something Kim K or some other foppish rich person would say alongside the notion that "people don't want to work these days".

[AziraSyuren]

In this case, it's the same thing.

As I said, the writers were trying to convey the idea that a life without suffering is either impossible or delusional. That's the entire reason we see the Ancients during the Final Days panicking and longing to go back to the way things were. The argument is that, without a life of suffering to make them "stronger", the Ancients were ill-prepared for when it finally came. Thus, they were doomed to fall into even more delusional and blissfully-ignorant dreams of "utopia" if they ever got their paradise back.

I could spend all day unpacking the faults with this philosophy, why it doesn't quite work as the writers intended, and why it's potentially harmful, but my point at the moment is just to explain why, to the story's logic, the Ancients were painted as "delusional".

I don't think it's the same thing. I think the story was attempting to portray the Ancients constantly trying to undo their suffering rather than living on and learning from it, which supposedly would've led directly to them being unable to stop the Final Days should Zodiark falter. However, we were never actually shown that and just left to infer it from the potential third sacrifice, a few lines of dialogue in the last Elpis cutscene, and the last dungeon in the Dead Ends, so there's not nearly enough reason to believe that that's the case.