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

[Caurcas]

EW was not great narrative wise, but honestly the blame is on ShB. The track it took made what was built up over the last 2 expansion moot and introduced less interesting lore in its place.

[Skyborne]

All of this. It got to the point where it was kind of nauseating for me. Ok enough. I get it. We’re the best and we’ll always win.

I can’t handle another self righteous monologue or a convenient lack of dialogue options when the writers wanna push a narrative. The scions could disappear right now and I wouldn’t lose any sleep. Yoshi P was surprised at how deeply people were looking into the story. LMAO yeah so weird that people would be into the lore in a “story based mmorpg.”

I admit I was let down and needed to rant for awhile. But I’ve had time to think and I realize how silly the whole story looks to me. It’s kind of funny to me now.

Please keep this thread alive for entertainment purposes

What's funny is, the writers/art design team/music team are more than capable of things besides saccharine fluff. They made the rest of the XIV universe absolutely desolate and grimdark (pretty blue and gold worldtrees aside), and the Necropolis was my favorite part of UT. The dragons with their wartorn polluted world with the deformed/stillborn hatchlings got me too. Garlemald got the post-apocalypse depressed slav atmosphere down pretty well. The 85 dungeon was cool. The fleshy HR Gieger towers and the Telephoroi, twisted by tempering. The Ancients and their fate, full of juicy tragedy. They almost had a baby drown/turn into a beast.

Almost like the universe's Bad Stuff bounces off the Scion's plot armor and reflects elsewhere.

[CrownySuccubus]

I actually liked the lore introduced/retconned in Shadowbringers. It made me wish that had been the plan from the start, because we possibly could have been spared the "Cackling, Shallow Jerkwads Ascians" who'd been so thoroughly uninteresting before.

The only thing that it really "ruined" in my estimation was that by firmly tying the Calamities to the Ascians' goals, it retroactively meant that they are SO bad at planning that they could only manage 1 Rejoining every several thousand years, and even then, they screwed up at least 1 of those attempts.

[OhNooo]

EW was not great narrative wise, but honestly the blame is on ShB. The track it took made what was built up over the last 2 expansion moot and introduced less interesting lore in its place.

I also think Shb may have been the beginning of the end too. The hype of the trailer carried me through for awhile, but by the time I got to the end of 5.0, I definitely felt an uncomfortable sort of shift. It's like the devs decided they were making a movie and needed to add some cool plot twists. Sudenly the mustache twirling villains that were there all along actually had a tragic backstory. Then in EW I feel like they thought since Shb did so well it was time to turn up the plot twists even more. Oh you liked what we did before? Guess what, we have even CRAZIER stuff this time. You thought you knew but you have NO idea-RANDOM JUMP SCARE.

And then when everything is said and done, you realize there really wasn't much substance - just some nicely timed sad music to bring on the "feels."

[CrownySuccubus]

It's like the devs decided they were making a movie and needed to add some cool plot twists. Sudenly the mustache twirling villains that were there all along actually had a tragic backstory. Then in EW I feel like they thought since Shb did so well it was time to turn up the plot twists even more. Oh you liked what we did before? Guess what, we have even CRAZIER stuff this time.

Funnily enough, I said the exact same thing weeks ago.

I think they (the writers) had tunnel vision on adding "grey" morality to the original Ancients, in order to contrast what Emet-Selch told us in SHB. Because graying the morality of Hydaelyn and Zodiark worked extremely well to SHB's benefit, so they figured they'd do it again. No, see, the Ancients weren't actually so benevolent that they sacrificed themselves so half their number can live...they just had twisted views about death. Zodiark's summoning wasn't JUST an attempt to save their star, but also an attempt to reclaim the "paradise" they thought they deserved. Just like in SHB, we were supposed to see this as a "no one is right -- every sun has its shadow" theme of moral relativism.

The problem, however, was that in SHB the "true villain" of the entire piece was a nebulous natural disaster. The Final Days at that point could have been a tornado or an earthquake, or space radiation, which makes the gray morality work because it was simply a force beyond control. But EW then not only gave the disaster a name and a face, it then upped the ante by attaching it to mankind's final boss: oblivion. And by doing that, they undid the attempt to create moral gray; because, by definition, anything that fights oblivion is objectively good. There's no other way around it because if oblivion wins, the story is over. The Ancients, unlike Emet Selch, weren't simply "wrong from our protagonist's POV" -- as far as the narrative is concerned, they're just flat out wrong. And, by extension, Venat is narratively right. What she did may not have been pretty or fair, but as far as the story's concerned, it was objectively the correct thing.

This explains why a lot of people liked EW's story up until Elpis. That story thread was the exact moment that any sense of moral gray or relativism was thrown out of the window. After Elpis, you either agree with Venat and the Scions and take the plot's lesson as it was intended...or you disagree with them and the plot starts to make little sense the more you scrutinize it.

[Nilroreo]

wasnt there a scene where hydaelyn(or another character who we can assume speaks for her, not quite sure remembering) said that she "tried to stop the rejoinings, and failed 7 times" (paraphrased) or something along those lines?

Yeah, she did, but like I mentioned before, that can't be the case anymore as the Ascians exist as a consequence of her actions. If all she wanted to do was make mankind capable of harnessing dynamis, she simply would have sundered the entire world and left it at that. In that scenario, the rejoining's would truly be unexpected and legitimately be considered failures on her part... except that's not quite what happened.

In reality, she deliberately allowed Emet Selch to survive the sundering, the developers have confirmed this themselves not too long ago. We've already explained to her back in Elps what Emet would go on to do in excruciating detail, she already knew he would attempt to undo what she's done, which means there's no logical reason she would preserve his existence in the scenario that she genuinely wanted to protect the shards. She calls them failures, but she spared Emet, understanding full well what he would go on to do. Her dialogue and her actions are at odds with one another.

at best you can call Venat an "anti-hero" not an antagonist(well to the Ancients/ascians she was an antagonist but that... really means nothing or else almost any hero in any story is the antagonist if we view it from the oppositions view)

I don't believe Venat is an antagonist either, as that would imply she was working against us. What I DO believe however is that she's a mass murderer and a compulsive liar/manipulator, and the worst part, I can't even tell if the devs wrote her this way by complete accident or on purpose.

And to all the people who still say "why didnt we change anything in the past REEEEE timeline splits exists" first of all was it actually 100% confirmed that the timeline split? and it wasnt a open timeloop.

At a live letter, Yoshi-P proposed 2 scenarios. The first(which was his own interpretation) was that time is a closed loop. the second is that Venat deliberately ensured events would play out the same way. He didn't give a definitive answer, instead telling us to come to our own conclusions so its safe to say they didn't put much thought into this. Personally, I don't care much that we couldn't change the past. I just hate how fickle the rules of time travel are in this. If you can't do time travel right, don't bother.

[Caurcas]

I actually liked the lore introduced/retconned in Shadowbringers. It made me wish that had been the plan from the start, because we possibly could have been spared the "Cackling, Shallow Jerkwads Ascians" who'd been so thoroughly uninteresting before.

The only thing that it really "ruined" in my estimation was that by firmly tying the Calamities to the Ascians' goals, it retroactively meant that they are SO bad at planning that they could only manage 1 Rejoining every several thousand years, and even then, they screwed up at least 1 of those attempts.

The Ascian were always the weakest element of the pre-ShB plot. However, other political entities and mysteries were much stronger and interesting lore wise. Garlemald was an interesting nation state, with an arc counter to that of others. It got turned into generic evil empire designed to fail. You have plot points like Dalmasca and Bojza that were far more interesting than the first, or the ancients. Ancient civilizations like Mhach and Allag and their deals with those beyond. SE had built an interesting, and political world with tangible world building. They threw this away in favor of hitting reset and belittling what came before. By introducing the Ancients and the shards they removed mystery from the world. Its all such a bizarre 180 on narrative direction.

[Theodric]

Each to their own, I liked both the Ascians and the Garleans back in early days of ARR on the basis that their antics were a breath of fresh air to the stuffy sophistry that the game likes to pass off as political intrigue. My biggest regret is falling for the trap of believing that the game's style and aesthetics would give way to something as nuanced as Matsuno's work in the form of Vagrant Story, Final Fantasy XII and Final Fantasy Tactics.

I don't think that the introduction of the Ancients was a mistake. I was already losing interest in the story due to the caricature made of the Garleans in Stormblood. Then the story decided to treat the Ascians with dignity throughout Shadowbringers...only to then treat them with contempt as of Endwalker.

There was never any reason we could not have had an expansion focused on Garlemald and an expansion focused on the Ancients. The development team simply decided they don't care about anything but the Scions for whatever reason.

[SeverianLyonesse]

Each to their own, I liked both the Ascians and the Garleans back in early days of ARR on the basis that their antics were a breath of fresh air to the stuffy sophistry that the game likes to pass off as political intrigue. My biggest regret is falling for the trap of believing that the game's style and aesthetics would give way to something as nuanced as Matsuno's work in the form of Vagrant Story, Final Fantasy XII and Final Fantasy Tactics.

I don't think that the introduction of the Ancients was a mistake. I was already losing interest in the story due to the caricature made of the Garleans in Stormblood. Then the story decided to treat the Ascians with dignity throughout Shadowbringers...only to then treat them with contempt as of Endwalker.

There was never any reason we could not have had an expansion focused on Garlemald and an expansion focused on the Ancients. The development team simply decided they don't care about anything but the Scions for whatever reason.

The Garlemald story itself was pretty solid. I just think it deserved to have a full expansion exploring beyond that arc and filling out the empire more.

The Ascian arc was, now that you mention, awful. Whatever depth Amaurot had given the Ascians was just...sundered by Endwalker.

Also, I gotta sneak in disappointment at the Myths of the Realm lore. We have spent a ten year story arc deconstructing the relationship between popular ideology and deities, shown that primals are created by faith of all forms and that gods effectively do not exist as anything but man-made constructs. But now suddenly none of that matters and surprise gods do exist. It undermines some of FFXIV's core themes, not to mention trivializes the entire Hydaelyn arc wherein we effectively killed the supreme god-figures of Etheirys.

[Ritsuka-55]

I always thought that ShB on the source would have been a million times better. Still to this day, I can honestly say that I don't give a damn about the first and it's inhabitans.