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

[PawPaw]

Isn't the most prevalent fan theory that the spooky ghost from 6.1 is a corrupted/evil fragment of Azem? I don't know if that's better or worse than going through Emet's laundry list verbatim.

Yeah, the theory is that Zenos' Voidsent is our fragment from the Thirteenth, and honestly, it's probably an accurate theory. Since it has returned to the Void and we'll presumably also be headed there then I guess we'll meet up and share war stories about Zenos with it before we eat it somehow and become 10/14ths.

[Ishe-P]

Dang, I was hoping it was Zodiark out for revenge since he got done so dirty in 6.0.

[DevonEllwood]

People mentioning that Endwalker started undoing their interest in the story, and 5.3 was where it started doing that for me. I had my expectations set pretty low and I still somehow managed to be disappointed.

Also mentioned was the voice actors for the 24 man raid and yeah, they sound weirdly familiar. I thought the third one sounded like Titania and the last boss sounded like Hermes and Hades.

For future characters I want someone abrasive, foul mouthed bad guy/gal (but not a Bad Guy) that the "good guys" have no choice but to work with.

Endwalker kind of contradicts Shadowbringers in humanizing the ancients. Which is baffling, it was just last expansion.

On Fandaniel fighting the WoL, it wouldn't matter if he killed them, he in fact could have done more damage. Not only would the one thing standing between him and the planet's destruction be gone, but he could take Zodiark for a joy ride and continue that destruction. Would have made Zenos angy to have his BFF dead resulting in Fandaniel being killed anyway. Would have been an interesting hypothetical for Zenos to pick up where the WoL left off and be the savior of the planet.

I don't feel Hades acted any different in Elpis than in Shadowbringers. There's two short stories where he acted just like that, it's just in the game now. He's still a butthole.

For the Elpis butterfly, " you can turn butterflies into clothes, just like that?" option doesn't seem to imply the character was horrified to me, but more suprised...it was that easy. I thought that was what it was about. Not that my character would be horrified by it? That makes no sense.

I don't think the "primals don't actually temper people" bit wasn't an excuse to say Hades wasn't tempered, I think it was more an excuse to have everyone around Hydaelyn not be tempered. It's just a traveler's ward yo

Now for the Venat Vomit.
Did Venat want to protect mankind or all life? If she wanted to protect all life then why did she want to abandon the planet to its fate as her main plan? It was Sharlyan's idea to rescue as many species as possible, not hers. Her decisions make no sense if she wanted to protect all life. She literally did nothing as Meteion frolicked across the universe killing even more things before the sundering.

If Venat was not Hydaelen and if she did not directly benefit the player character, anyone could see her as an antagonist. I sometimes see people bring up mental wellness with Hermes, but never with Venat. She seems just as equally unwell as him. That trial with her was kind of unsettling. I felt the music was weirdly aggressive, the walls of light attack didn't make any sense . Why would she use that? That's what almost ended the first. Bust her expression caught me off guard the most. She looked completely cold and unemotional. There was no expression, no sense of what Venat used to be in there. I went into Endwalker thinking the developers would never make Hydaelen bad guy, yet, between what Brinne said about the connections between Venat and Hermes and Rulakir mentioning that Ishikawa only kills off side characters or villains...and we have Hydaelen dying off completely. Either she was originally written as a villain or she's sneaking that in. Yoshida's confusion would make more sense.

I honestly would love for a character in game to call Venat/hydaelen on her BS, but I honestly don't think that will ever happen. The average character isn't even aware of what happened and probably wouldn't care.It would probably have to take someone existing pre-sundering and still alive to do that.

As for why the thread still exists, it's because people still care. I've been playing since 2013 and the ancient reveal felt like complete payoff after all those years. Endwalker felt like it completely undid it.I am still on the copium though and still feel like next expansion might be a bit better. I'm still not done with the patch though I completely forgot about it for a while.

[Lauront]

5.3 is where a drain on my enthusiasm for the game's lore began as well. I sort of made peace with the portrayal of Elidibus but there's still a lot of that patch's writing I did not like, and I feel it limited their options in that Elidibus could've been an antagonist with the potential to cooperate with you later down the line... which is sort of how they handled it anyway, in a much more roundabout, less satisfactory way. I'd have liked to see more of his connection with Zodiark. 100% agree on the Venat stuff.

[CrownySuccubus]

For the Elpis butterfly, " you can turn butterflies into clothes, just like that?" option doesn't seem to imply the character was horrified to me, but more suprised...it was that easy. I thought that was what it was about. Not that my character would be horrified by it? That makes no sense.

No, this doesn't quite follow what I remember Hyth saying. Hyth goes into this brief spiel of "Oh don't worry, it was just a concept and we broke it down back into its basic aether" that directly gives the impression that the WOL was meant to find the killing of the butterflies as shocking as the method in which it was done. Granted, this could have been some strange cultural/translations dissonance whereupon we're meant to see the slaughter of beings for personal use as disrespectful unless you took great effort or care or gave it a sporting chance to fight back or something (a lot of indigenous / animistic cultures have beliefs like that), but I think the fact still remains that we're meant to see Ancients as "scary" because they don't really care about killing concepts so casually.

[Caurcas]

Some good ole fashioned regular conflict would be refreshing.

[anhaato]

Either she was originally written as a villain or she's sneaking that in. Yoshida's confusion would make more sense.

I'm a staunch believer that she was going to eventually be a non-hero (not specifically a villain) since day one, I'm talking 1.0 day one, and that never changed until YoshiP started getting his bedizened fingers on the story. We now know that every day is out of touch Thursday for YoshiP so I bet he seriously thought we would've been upset with her turning out to be Not Good, and I don't mean evil, I mean anything less than lawful good. That's why he made a point to go on live letters and say SHE'S GOOD WHY AREN'T YOU UNDERSTANDING THAT SHE'S GOOD!?!?!? The thing he doesn't get is that this game's players are usually so incredibly easy to compel as long as you make characters look stressed enough that they'd buy absolutely anything, unless you're trying to sell them something that directly flies in the face of established knowledge or morality, hence how we ended up here. VERY few people would have complained about Hydaelyn being neutral-at-best if they had just slapped on some OTT cutscenes of her being shady, and anyone trying to pipe up about "but that would be so boooooring" can stay quiet because none of you complained about another rehash of Church Bad in Heavensward, I KNOW how low your standards are. I'd sooner take another JRPG cliche that keeps us morally consistent over a "twist" that's just kissing the ass of someone who killed others but spared us. My god may have killed all of you but idk what to tell you man, sucks to suck, she loooooves us!

To be fair, it was unexpected! As in, I never expected a message so callous and self centered from these devs who gave us pretty morally sound stories leading up to these. (But at the same time, Ishikawa did give us Hien colonizing Mongolians to turn them into conscripted foreign mercenaries for his war, so maybe she just has a shitty moral compass overall.) So I guess they succeeded in their grand twist in the end, at the cost of us having a believable hero status, and a lot of people's excitement for future stories.

[PawPaw]

snip

Well said, I agree with your points. You're right, I would have been infinitely more "okay" with a Venat that was shown to be morally dubious instead of being force-fed the narrative that she is pure, lawful good and cannot be questioned or doubted when I can see with my own two eyes that she is very much the former. That's really my main issue surrounding her and a huge part of why the story disgusted me. I simply don't appreciate being gaslit when I play a video game.

[KageTokage]

I'm interested in the current story direction, but I think I'm going to be genuinely annoyed if it ends up being setup for 7.x taking place in a different shard after they've been relentlessly teasing us with bits of information about Ilsabard and Meracydia.

The continued emphasis on the future of story being "unpredictable" in the interviews concerns me because being predictable isn't necessarily a bad thing. The mention of "adjusting the script based on reactions" is another point that bothers me because they could easily misinterpret that the plot twists in Endwalker that largely came out of the left field like the time travel were things that people loved when for me it's been the reverse. Seeing subtle foreshadowing and lingering plot threads addressed after months/years of build-up was much more fulfilling to me then any manner of surprise/shock factor they've thrown in.

[KizuyaKatogami]

I'm interested in the current story direction, but I think I'm going to be genuinely annoyed if it ends up being setup for 7.x taking place in a different shard after they've been relentlessly teasing us with bits of information about Ilsabard and Meracydia.

The continued emphasis on the future of story being "unpredictable" in the interviews concerns me because being predictable isn't necessarily a bad thing. The mention of "adjusting the script based on reactions" is another point that bothers me because they could easily misinterpret that the plot twists in Endwalker that largely came out of the left field like the time travel were things that people loved when for me it's been the reverse. Seeing subtle foreshadowing and lingering plot threads addressed after months/years of build-up was much more fulfilling to me then any manner of surprise/shock factor they've thrown in.

I mean if another shard was 7.0, it wouldn’t be too different from what they did with ShB, where they constantly teased garlemald and then….yeahhhh