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

[aveyond-dreams]

Ok anyway so maybe let's stop with the "philosophical" antagonists based off whatever it was they were trying to do and get back to people who are actually interesting and entertaining. I found the militaristic dictators and scheming manipulators like Varis, Emet, and even Thordan a lot better than "oh, there are really no clear antagonists!" thing they did in Endwalker.

[Brinne]

I mean, I'm not saying you're wrong, and that that isn't a valid lens from which to view the story that could help clarify a few points to people. I've seen discussion in other circles about the Buddhist angle in particular, and I think it can be interesting for media to be a platform to understand other perspectives on broad questions like "suffering." Particularly if it paves the way to a conversation - almost all of the points you outlined there, I can think of some angle in the Western culture I grew up in in that basically leads the same conclusion and ultimate goal, frankly, of abetting of existing power structures. But the specific problems I have with Endwalker are ones I have almost never encountered to this degree over decades' worth of slurping up Japanese media like the nerd that I am. You can say that certain forms of the abuse apologism can be contextualized to a certain extent by understanding the cultural history it originated from, but that doesn't make it a "fundamentally Japanese" approach to take by any means, or make it any less a baffling choice that it went as far and as grotesquely as it did. Even in FFXIV itself, I would argue that the approach to Venat and the Ancients stands out as strange and callous and mean in a way we haven't seen before - that the story seemed to be attempting to reject in most other instances, if anything.

I'm not saying you're doing this, but I'm just fundamentally uneasy with accepting a stance that hems pretty close to "the reason this story seemed morally repugnant and approving of an abusive attitude to you is because it's so Japanese." Alarms just begin instantly blaring in my head, particularly in this day and age.

[CrownySuccubus]

Ok anyway so maybe let's stop with the "philosophical" antagonists based off whatever it was they were trying to do and get back to people who are actually interesting and entertaining. I found the militaristic dictators and scheming manipulators like Varis, Emet, and even Thordan a lot better than "oh, there are really no clear antagonists!" thing they did in Endwalker.

Emet was an example of "there are really no clear antagonists". The fact that he actually had a good point (before EW tried to erase most of it) was one of the reasons he was so popular.

Likewise, when discussing HW, the antagonist most people remember is Nidhogg who, again, was someone who wasn't a clear black-and-white antagonist. On the other hand, the Garlean villains like Gaius, Varis, and Zenos have at best met with lukewarm reception.

If anything, I think the misstep here was trying to maintain a "gray" morality while also trying to state that there is one, objective way to deal with oblivion. Those two things are not compatible, because by definition, oblivion is the blackest possible morality, and thus whatever defeats it is being called the "whitest".

[Rulakir]

I don't have high hopes for Pandemonium. I'm hoping Eric isn't 'our' Lahabrea (and that seems plausible given that Claudien looks like his sundered form) and so far I've found most of the story boring. Partly because I don't particularly care about this guy combined with wanting to have an Elidibus adventure that's just been a lot of long, drawn out dialog about things of no interest to me.

The purpose of the Ancients seems to be to break our hearts since the powers that be won't lay a finger on the Scions.

Elidibus' fate just confuses me. G'raha implies the process of the Crystal Tower cycling aether would've destroyed his soul. Elidibus himself says he's using the last of his "essence" to send us to the past, but then mentions seeing his loved ones again in the "promised land". I also don't know what the 'truth that warms his heart' is going to be since thanks to the time loop nothing we do in Pandemonium is going to spare him his fate.

As far as EW goes, the writing was annoying at times. Y'shtola outright states that Hydaelyn is the one who forestalled the Final Days by sundering Zodiark and I was like, WTF?! Elidibus says that the future we return to exists as a result of the Final Days when, no, actually it exists as a result of the sundering. It's little things like which add up to stacking the deck in Venat's favor that's infuriating. Like I've said, the gaslighting in EW is real.

[Theodric]

To be fair, plenty of people liked the various Garleans. It just so happens that the FFXIV community has a very vocal portion of players who attacked and threatened anyone who spoke up in favour of them because a not insignificant amount of FFXIV players seem unable to grasp the idea that the Garleans were clearly inspired by Russians and Romans rather than a certain German organisation.

[Skyborne]

Ok anyway so maybe let's stop with the "philosophical" antagonists based off whatever it was they were trying to do and get back to people who are actually interesting and entertaining. I found the militaristic dictators and scheming manipulators like Varis, Emet, and even Thordan a lot better than "oh, there are really no clear antagonists!" thing they did in Endwalker.

Definitely on my list of 'things that Endwalker brings out in people' is the notion that liking the story or certain characters in EW makes you a super deep philosopher-king, and anyone who didn't like the story or whatever aspects of it is some knuckle-dragging trog pleb who just didn't understand it and never picked up a philosophy book in your life. Yeah, I get it, the "villain" was the abstract concept of despair. Amazing, clapclapclapclappityclap. If you liked it you liked it, no need to swaddle yourself in some sort of "I am very smart" security blanket. Might be rose-tinted glasses but I don't recall this sort of thing in HW or StB. A bit in ShB, but not at such a fever pitch.

Would've thought that the Q&A with the writers going "wow, I didn't think you guys would think about this so deeply" and admitting they often wrote stuff as they went along/improvised would've silenced a lot of it, but it continues. And then, on the other side, you have the extreme "don't think about the story of this story-driven game that gets endlessly praised for the story, okay, turn your brain off".

[CrownySuccubus]

I mean, I'm not saying you're wrong, and that that isn't a valid lens from which to view the story that could help clarify a few points to people. I've seen discussion in other circles about the Buddhist angle in particular, and I think it can be interesting for media to be a platform to understand other perspectives on broad questions like "suffering." Particularly if it paves the way to a conversation - almost all of the points you outlined there, I can think of some angle in the Western culture I grew up in in that basically leads the same conclusion and ultimate goal, frankly, of abetting of existing power structures. But the specific problems I have with Endwalker are ones I have almost never encountered to this degree over decades' worth of slurping up Japanese media like the nerd that I am. You can say that certain forms of the abuse apologism can be contextualized to a certain extent by understanding the cultural history it originated from, but that doesn't make it a "fundamentally Japanese" approach to take by any means, or make it any less a baffling choice that it went as far and as grotesquely as it did. Even in FFXIV itself, I would argue that the approach to Venat and the Ancients stands out as strange and callous and mean in a way we haven't seen before - that the story seemed to be attempting to reject in most other instances, if anything.

I'm not saying you're doing this, but I'm just fundamentally uneasy with accepting a stance that hems pretty close to "the reason this story seemed morally repugnant and approving of an abusive attitude to you is because it's so Japanese." Alarms just begin instantly blaring in my head, particularly in this day and age.

I mean, I could also go on at length about how Western/American media gets its own cultural values wrong (for example, Detroit: Become Human is a master class in not understanding how civil rights movements work). Or that one issue of Batman where Tim Drake tries to tell off a teenager for smoking weed and accidentally proves why it's actually not that bad. Saying a work hamfists a cultural morality into its story badly isn't inherently criticizing the culture itself. For example, I can point to Persona 3 as much, much better game at tackling the concept of Mono no Aware or...hell, if we're looking within the same franchise, Final Fantasy VI.

[AziraSyuren]

That's Japanese philosophy 101. Japanese society emphasizes the suppression of self, whereupon one is not supposed to speak too much about how something makes themselves feel and instead, direct attention to how someone else feels. It's considered a taboo to even tell someone "No" outright; you always have to mince your words in phrases like "It would be difficult" or "I will put it under consideration" because telling someone "no" supposedly indicates how little you care that it hurts them.

Naturally, it's a system that is highly abusable, since Japan is also strictly hierarchical. Someone who is lower in social standing or in less of a unique position, always has to take the feelings of those above them in mind (and those equal to them, but that's a lesser concern). The constant emphasis on how Venat felt when she sundered the world and how Hermes felt when he...well, basically fisted the universe up its rectum...is a very Japanese thing. It's supposed to be like, "These were very respected and powerful people who held unique agency over every life on the star, so we should be respectful how difficult it must have been for them to do the very stupid things that they did."

Hear me out: Ancient society was heavily built around this idea and the first person we were shown who butted heads with it (Hermes) proceeded to go absolutely insane and doom their society and potentially the universe. I think part of the reason this flew over people's heads and/or fell flat is because we were never shown the true consequences of this outside of Hermes himself.

Instead, we were shown that it works, and were never even asked if we would want to live in a society like that because we were led to believe that the guy who had a problem with it was the crazy one and that everything was fine. Ancient society was too good for the story's own good.

Were we not shown that, it would've been easy to buy that the Ancients were supposed to be "scary." Literally all it would've taken is a few throwaway lines of dialogue at least, although it would've been preferable to spend more time showing us otherwise.

[AziraSyuren]

I don't have high hopes for Pandemonium. I'm hoping Eric isn't 'our' Lahabrea (and that seems plausible given that Claudien looks like his sundered form) and so far I've found most of the story boring. Partly because I don't particularly care about this guy combined with wanting to have an Elidibus adventure that's just been a lot of long, drawn out dialog about things of no interest to me.

The purpose of the Ancients seems to be to break our hearts since the powers that be won't lay a finger on the Scions.

Elidibus' fate just confuses me. G'raha implies the process of the Crystal Tower cycling aether would've destroyed his soul. Elidibus himself says he's using the last of his "essence" to send us to the past, but then mentions seeing his loved ones again in the "promised land". I also don't know what the 'truth that warms his heart' is going to be since thanks to the time loop nothing we do in Pandemonium is going to spare him his fate.

As far as EW goes, the writing was annoying at times. Y'shtola outright states that Hydaelyn is the one who forestalled the Final Days by sundering Zodiark and I was like, WTF?! Elidibus says that the future we return to exists as a result of the Final Days when, no, actually it exists as a result of the sundering. It's little things like which add up to stacking the deck in Venat's favor that's infuriating. Like I've said, the gaslighting in EW is real.

This is also something that would've been easily resolved with a few lines of dialogue along the lines of "a full unsundered Zodiark could not sustain himself forever and would've eventually vanished and caused the Final Days to restart again," which is something that could've been sold by the internal logic of the story given how aether-hungry primals are. This would've left a plot hole over how Hyd didn't cause the same, but I think I'd take that over the tonal mishmash that we got.

I mean, I could also go on at length about how Western/American media gets its own cultural values wrong (for example, Detroit: Become Human is a master class in not understanding how civil rights movements work). Or that one issue of Batman where Tim Drake tries to tell off a teenager for smoking weed and accidentally proves why it's actually not that bad. Saying a work hamfists a cultural morality into its story badly isn't inherently criticizing the culture itself. For example, I can point to Persona 3 as much, much better game at tackling the concept of Mono no Aware or...hell, if we're looking within the same franchise, Final Fantasy VI.

Or Final Fantasy X, which was a masterful repudiation of the idea that life sucks and that we should learn how to cope with it instead of trying to solve the sources of our suffering.

(outside of that fucking audio drama lol)

[Theodric]

I don't really look to video games for deep and meaningful takes on complicated moral and societal issues, personally. Of the games I have enjoyed that tackled heavy topics, they just so happened to allow people to come to their own conclusions about what was happening rather than forcing a particular reaction or opinion. In turn, that's why I consider Shadowbringers to be far superior to Endwalker. It clearly showcased Emet's position and point of view but it didn't force the player to agree with or go along with what he had in mind. Had Venat been given the same treatment, Endwalker would have been a lot more enjoyable to me.

I just want a cool story at the end of the day. I'm not interested in weird attempts at justifying genocide or eco-terrorism from what is meant to be a mature narrative.