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

[Lauront]

"Yeah. But it'll be on our own, unique terms."

By Forging Ahead.

Yeah, everything about that philosophical trapping has a very "fatalist" outlook to it

I am eagerly awaiting for them to turn fate into the final (?) big bad. They already have the asset models in 7R, after all.

Venat's "love" for mankind feels a lot like an abusive parent who "accepts" their child while doing nothing to actually show that love.

I was looking up a line in Japanese and stumbled across this. Whereas I felt creeped out by this "personal" connection, after my character's hand was more or less narratively forced into helping her with her scheme apparently some people enjoyed it and would've liked more of it.

The insistence on the "love" angle was another part of what made Venat's writing so insecure, and the sense that deep down, it knew that what it was trying was shaky and didn't work. And the hard overcompensation on it - especially because the technique of "NPC loves the WoL = popular NPC" has usually been very effective up until this point - led to a lot of us making connections towards the absolute cliches of abuse rhetoric and victim-blaming. Which I'm sure never occurred to the writers, but here we are.



The single member of present day humanity who embodies Venat's ideology and methods most is unironically Ilberd Feare.

I'm just impressed that they were able to dial it up even further in the Codex entry on her. And I agree, it's why this "Venat is an ancient" explanation Yoshi comes up just fails to convince me. We already had sundered antagonists think and act in very similar ways. The only difference is their narrative treatment and the scale of it. With that said, it appears to have convinced some players who, in spite of everything else we know of them, believe a genocide a day was just in their DNA.

[CrownySuccubus]

I am eagerly awaiting for them to turn fate into the final (?) big bad. They already have the asset models in 7R, after all.

I mean, that'll just be a physical embodiment of the time travel plots of 5.0 and 6.0.

"We'll totally fight Fate when it's something inconvenient to us, but completely embrace it when it's a Fate we find agreeable."

[Theodric]

I mean, that'll just be a physical embodiment of the time travel plots of 5.0 and 6.0.

"We'll totally fight Fate when it's something inconvenient to us, but completely embrace it when it's a Fate we find agreeable."

That's what worries me about the upcoming 'conflict of values'. Will we actually see the protagonists stick to their supposed 'values' or will they continue to embrace the very things they are supposedly against so long as it benefits them?

I'm fully expecting the side we oppose to be written in such a way as to be pushed into a corner like the Ascians or the Garleans. Forced to do desperate things in order to survive whilst the protagonists have every plot convenience in their favour that allows them to avoid situations where they go too far.

If nothing else, I can't say I'm looking forward to more lectures from the likes of Alphinaud.

[Rulakir]

I have zero confidence they can handle writing a conflict in values at this point, EW saw to that. The Omega quest chain re-introduced much needed nuance, but I don't know that we can continue to count on that. It seems the best I can hope for is they've gotten the message about diverse dialog options because I'm not playing my WoL through yet another expansion where I hate everything I'm doing while my character expresses nothing but positivity about it. Not to mention even the moral standards of the Scions are hypocritical now, so I can't take them seriously anymore either. I think more than just the WoL needs to do some reflection.

[Brinne]

I have zero confidence they can handle writing a conflict in values at this point, EW saw to that. The Omega quest chain re-introduced much needed nuance, but I don't know that we can continue to count on that. It seems the best I can hope for is they've gotten the message about diverse dialog options because I'm not playing my WoL through yet another expansion where I hate everything I'm doing while my character expresses nothing but positivity about it. Not to mention even the moral standards of the Scions are hypocritical now, so I can't take them seriously anymore either. I think more than just the WoL needs to do some reflection.

If it helps or clarifies anything, I think it was obvious, but Ishikawa more or less stated on Twitter that she wrote the Omega quests. They were really reassuring to me in the sense of both a) EW's missteps, however grievous, were definitely not coming from a place of malice, and b) it is really clear they were written largely in response to the concerns and criticisms expressed regarding 6.0, and shifted some of the rhetoric to accommodate. Knowing for certain the lead writer was behind this shift is nice, as well.

I probably have lighter expectations than a lot of people in this thread, but if those quests reflect the basic tone we're going to take when looking back on EW and topics like it, I do feel fairly reassured - though of course there's no way of knowing until it happens.

[Brinne]

I mean, that'll just be a physical embodiment of the time travel plots of 5.0 and 6.0.

"We'll totally fight Fate when it's something inconvenient to us, but completely embrace it when it's a Fate we find agreeable."

vague chrono series spoilers

schala schala schala schala schala schala schala

[CrownySuccubus]

vague chrono series spoilers

schala schala schala schala schala schala schala

What "Chrono Series"?

They only made one game in 1994.

And NOTHING ELSE.

[Brinne]

What "Chrono Series"?

They only made one game in 1994.

And NOTHING ELSE.

i stand corrected, my sincerest apologies

okay, for real, chrono cross is a trainwreck on a whole special level above even endwalker, but a couple of the concepts i think would have been potentially interesting extensions of trigger's events - mostly the premise of chronopolis and schala's fate. if only they weren't in, you know, chrono cross.

[CrownySuccubus]

i stand corrected, my sincerest apologies

okay, for real, chrono cross is a trainwreck on a whole special level above even endwalker, but a couple of the concepts i think would have been potentially interesting extensions of trigger's events - mostly the premise of chronopolis and schala's fate. if only they weren't in, you know, chrono cross.

Yeah, Cross was another one of those stories where the concept was cool at first, until I actually tried to sit down and think about it. When it first came out back in 2000, I overlooked a lot of these issues because I was on the dopamine high of my favorite all time game (which is STILL my fave to this day) getting a sequel.

You are correct, though, that Chronopolis was probably one of the coolest ideas. It made sense to me that, in the future of the timeline we saved, humans would eventually experiment with and learn to control time travel. Where it immediately went wrong was the entire idea of the "Time Crash", and three different magical factors (Schala, the Dragon Gods, and the Time Devourer) all deciding to use that as their big plot-defining moment). Combine that with the laughable premise that the game's entire backstory (and thus, 10,000 years of history across two separate timelines) were because one man orchestrated it, and nowadays, I point to CC as the reason I will never trust any plot written by Masato Kato.