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

[Theodric]

On one hand, they managed to flesh out Nidhogg retroactively during the finale of the Dragoon job quests. On the other, the game itself seems to have a dire allergy to ever admitting that the so called 'good guys' only exist at the expense of other people. I think it's telling that if you read between the lines Emet-Selch is more torn up about the idea of restoring his people at the cost of the Sundered than then Scions are about their continued existence arising as a result of the extinction of the Ancients.

I was thinking earlier that even the 'REMEMBER US' angle is likely to be twisted and become less about honouring the memory of the Ancients and more about Yoshi-P speaking through Emet to tell us not to unsubscribe because there's a list of places still to see.

[KageTokage]

I mean, they probably will. The dev team is no stranger to doing damage control, even for story things. Given how much of this game's story is written in advance, we'll probably get a sudden slew of hamfisted anti-Venat narrative beats in 6.4 or 6.5 or something. It won't be satisfying, especially given she's too dead to be held to account for anything, but it is something I'm expecting them to do.

I think the most "organic" way they could pull this off is to just have the Source and the shards start suffering repercussions from her absence so both the audience and the characters in the story are forced to acknowledge that the Sundering might've been a big mistake in the long run even if it saved the world for a time.

[Rulakir]

Given Venat's disregard for anything that isn't the Source, I could easily see her final plan involving a gradual full rejoining. Zodiark being destroyed unwrote the 'laws of nature' so Hydaelyn being destroyed should theoretically remove the barrier separating the shards. Her two goals have at this point been achieved, The Plenty was avoided and Meteion defeated.

[BaconBits]

What's even more interesting is that many questions throughout the years during Q&A sessions were devoted to Garlemald. Players were always interested in the place, and the development team were well aware of that. So it's rather bizarre that it was thrown away in such a manner. I don't know why they insisted on hiding all the nuance away in side quests in favour of pushing silly caricatures over in the MSQ's.

The game has a problem with depicting grown adults and seasoned soldiers making logical calls and reacting in a human manner when things go south. FFXIV would benefit immensely from a character such as Jack Garland who is brash, hot headed and willing to call out nonsense no matter who says it.

Though because such a character might dare to look as someone's comfort character the wrong way we're stuck with barely any of that sort of thing at all.

Jullus and Fordola were the exception rather than the rule. Unfortunately if they get further focus I'm sure they'll go the same way as Estinien and be watered down until nothing exists beyond another pretty face.

Jack is too much of a gigachad to exist within the confines FFXIV.

[SentioftheHoukai]

Given Venat's disregard for anything that isn't the Source, I could easily see her final plan involving a gradual full rejoining. Zodiark being destroyed unwrote the 'laws of nature' so Hydaelyn being destroyed should theoretically remove the barrier separating the shards. Her two goals have at this point been achieved, The Plenty was avoided and Meteion defeated.

Unfortunately, if they pulled the whole "you're still the Warrior of Light despite Hydaelyn's demise" then I rather doubt her act of Sundering the shards will somehow sublimate now that she's gone.

[Theodric]

Jack is too much of a gigachad to exist within the confines FFXIV.

I suppose so. FFVIIR and FFXVI seem to be much more suited to such a character popping up.

Unfortunately, if they pulled the whole "you're still the Warrior of Light despite Hydaelyn's demise" then I rather doubt her act of Sundering the shards will somehow sublimate now that she's gone.

I suspect we'll see some manner of stale status quo or hidden benefit. Whenever the story introduces something that should be a double edged sword it usually decides to have it indirectly benefit the protagonists somehow rather than admit that maybe it wasn't the best thing to happen.

[YukikoKurosawa]

The whole "suffering good" message is a very strange one. I just wonder where the writing team got this message from. What life experiences did they have that led them to this conclusion which they felt they wanted to preach to the playerbase? What kind of lives have they led that made them draw the conclusion that pain and suffering and death are all good things that give life meaning and without them we'd just lose that meaning and want to die?

Of course I realize this is most likely the idea that one can learn and grow from pain, from bad experiences can actually lead to positives that you would have never gained without these horrible experiences. But goddamn is it ever told horrendously, to the point where it seems they are outright suggesting that suffering itself is good. Because, my god, that is a horrible message. It seemed very clearly suggested with the Plenty, a civilization that literally wanted to die because life was "too good" and they had erased all suffering. The conclusion they seem to want us to draw is that suffering is, in fact, good, and without it life has no meaning and just sucks and you'll want to die.

Again, I ask, what life experiences did our writing team have that led them to this conclusion? Because this sounds like something that some college student read somewhere that sounded "deep" and wanted to hamfist into the story, a story that has never before dealt with any overt themes to begin with. Or was this just the writing team using galactic levels of mental gymnastics to justify Venat's actions and reasoning to the point where they would push such a horrible message?

[Vyrerus]

reasoning to the point where they would push such a horrible message?

The moral of Endwalker was supposed to be that Suffering is inescapable, so you have to bring what joys out of it that you can, and just continue onwards. Basically that even attaining theoretical perfection would just birth a new type of suffering, so accept your imperfections.

It was very on the nose, and the reason it fell flat was because Venat was most definitely hamfisted and portrayed as an anti-villain "unintentionally."

When you meet her and she asks you about your adventures, she responds to your stories with her own. She describes basically a spiritual awakening where she felt a greater unifying will, which she doesn't know a word for, so she says, "Fate, I suppose." This caused her to have the massive paradigm shift that turned her away from the Ancients' way of thinking. It also made her feel like she couldn't really convey it to anyone, and that her fresh eyes made her superior to other people of her time. It made her feel the need to shepherd them, to stay alive for as long as anyone of them needed her.

The irony being that by staying alive, she stole the challenges, the suffering they were to experience without her holding their hand.

In this light, her having to perform the Sundering by decree of predestination is a karmic rebalance, for the eons she spent forcibly coddling the Ancients, who she looked down on.

[Theodric]

I'd attribute it to their attempts to pander directly to Twitter, in all honesty. Of the many reasons as to why I loathe the social media sphere, the bizarre glorification of suffering and wearing it as a badge of honour is somewhere near the top of the list. I liked the story better when it allowed the player to draw their own conclusions about the various conflicts within the setting but considered freedom and personal agency to be core values to always strive to protect.

Unfortunately Endwalker did away with that and tried desperately to present Venat as a 'good person'. Yet a 'good person' does not stand by idly with knowledge of an approaching apocalypse whilst allowing it to happen. A 'good person' does not then decide to murder the survivors because they reacted the 'wrong way' to the tragedy. A 'good person' does not then lie and misdirect in an attempt to shift the blame elsewhere, nor does a 'good person' seek to snuff out all memory of their former people's existence.

Even the reaction from Venat's most devout is perfectly in alignment with the sort of nonsense peddled on Twitter. Someone may live a comfortable and peaceful life but then rather than push for more people to be able to do so, there's very weird and alarming fantasies posted about how the person with a nice, comfortable existence should suffer and lose absolutely everything that they ever liked or cared about. It's a very spiteful mentality.

The writers made the wrong move by trying to assume that their take on 'despair' was universal and/or the 'correct' one.

There's likely more to it, of course. I'm not convinced that they're even being given authentic feedback that comes from actual enthusiasts of the game's story. Nor I do I trust any of the streamers to give fair and unbiased statements given that many of them are, coincidentally, the type to have drunk mommy Hydaelyn's kool aid.

[anhaato]

This actually just made me realize an inconsistency in the message they were trying to tell. From all of the Scions' "emotional" words before fake-dying one by one, each of them was something around the lines of "we know some form of suffering is inevitable but we won't give up on living a happy life" which is, while bland and uninspired, not a terribly egregious platitude. But then when we look back at the sundering cutscene, Venat is straight up saying "avoiding suffering is bad so I'll make sure mankind will never be able to" before killing everyone. I believe the former was supposed to be the Tru Message of the expansion, because you never see any other character arguing what Venat was arguing, and that cutscene was the only time she ever said such a thing herself.

Once again, I 10000% believe the 2 week delay was YoshiP demanding they shoehorn in some altered dialogue and cutscenes to make Venat a "good guy," because while the writers can be forgetful and leave holes here and there, I do think they would've been smarter than intentionally writing "but if I told the truth no one would believe me!" as being said by someone who is one of a people who were demonstrated as being able to USE THE ECHO AT WILL. Change the cutscene to make Venat not get memory wiped (there's no reason she should've made it out after chasing down Meteion for as long as she did in direction away from the rift), add in some copouts as to why she can't tell the truth, change the following cutscene from something that could easily have come across as morally gray or even ominous/evil, and do so by making her say some bullshit about "suffering good" to try to make us believe that her making humanity suffer in new ways for all eternity is good, actually. Make sure to add an "I'm so virtuous" monologue so it REALLY gets the point across, these readers will buy anything we sell them!

Basically my conspiracy theory about the final Elpis cutscene is that it would've originally carried out much the same had they not made her a "good guy" because a change in context can easily make the tone completely different. Between the reinterpretation of Answers, which, as someone else pointed out, now sounds evil/mocking if you think about it (that was probably the original intent in its reuse), and the way she was covered in black (this game has shown blood before, there's no reason they'd censor it now) looking less like she's suffering for our sake and more like she's being corrupted and becoming a monster, I think these make it really obvious where the last minute revisions were that completely ruined the message of the story. Everything else that carried after it only had to be altered ever so slightly in the dialogue to make sure Hydey Good stayed consistent.

Edit: "What about the Plenty, they'd surely have finished that part of the dungeon long before the delay and it was consistent with what Venat was arguing!" From the looks of it in the game, it was a small area of a few people floating above a destroyed star in a nice little golden park area. That's hardly "life became too good," that to me seems more like "in their pursuit of trying to make life as pain-free as possible they actually made it worse by going nuclear Marie Kondo, and died off in a state of mass delusion due to their refusal to accept what they had done." That's much easier to stomach than Life Too Good Is Bad Actually.