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

[aveyond-dreams]

a post

I am too low on sleep to respond to the entirety of this post but I stopped reading after you attempted to compare the likes of the scions to party members who went on to become rulers in previous Final Fantasy games. The scions have the development of vanilla wafers compared to what characters like Garnet and Ashe endured, who opposed tyranny without being overly preachy in the way of the scions. It is concerning how several posters cannot seem to tell the difference between these two styles of expressing themes and messages. I feel like this post was written to just argue for the sake arguing and little to no evidence was provided as to how repeating the same resolution for political regime situations 4 times in a row was justified.

We are unlikely to ever agree on how the writers should handle these situations, all I know is that FFXIV's world lies in ruins with half its nations neutered and the most interesting plot elements straight up gone or wrapped up so hastily that I can scarcely believe some of this writing made it in game. Maybe the English localization team is partly responsible for this state of affairs, there was a thread that criticized their work on several pieces of dialogue regarding Venat and I can imagine their preoccupation with other factors may have had an impact on how badly they neglected everything else. I just don't know.

[Brinne]

But as cool as it would be to stop one of those real world events there is no telling the repercussions that would happen because that had changed. Heck if you changed the Transatlantic Slave Trade there's a good chance I wouldn't exist and more importantly what atrocities would(or wouldn't) occur because who exist or who doesn't exist. Fundamental butterfly effect theory.

Oh, I'm absolutely certain that if not for a number of horrific atrocities I wouldn't exist.

I still believe it's the right thing to in no uncertain terms condemn those atrocities and the people who committed them. I don't think you give slavers in the past a pass, or qualify your condemnation of what they did, because "well without them our world wouldn't exist as it does today." Shadowbringers had a good line about this when Alphinaud was talking to Emet-Selch - "we define our worth, not the circumstances of our creation." Whether or not it would be "okay" or "better" to go back and unwrite history, potentially erase timelines full of people, is a more complex question - we should probably ask for G'raha's thoughts about this! But asserting our right to live, while also acknowledging the 'circumstances of our creation' sucked and was wrong, and that the people who were wronged deserve justice, are not mutually exclusive ideas.

I had hoped that the narrative word on the Sundering would be along the lines of: "an absolutely horrific thing that should never have happened, but now that it has, probably not worth the human cost to undo at this point." Instead, we got, um, something else?

[CrownySuccubus]

I am too low on sleep to respond to the entirety of this post but I stopped reading after you attempted to compare the likes of the scions to party members who went on to become rulers in previous Final Fantasy games. The scions have the development of vanilla wafers compared to what characters like Garnet and Ashe endured, who opposed tyranny without being overly preachy in the way of the scions.

Again, if your argument here is just "I don't like them", then there's no point. I don't think anyone really cares if you, personally, like who gets put onto the fictional throne.

I mean, YOUR "better" solution was "put this OC blonde waifu on the throne". Pretty sure there's zero grounds to argue about character development.

but I stopped reading after you attempted to compare the likes of the scions to party members

Okay. So you read pretty much the entire post except a line or two, then.

It is concerning how several posters cannot seem to tell the difference between these two styles of expressing themes and messages. I feel like this post was written to just argue for the sake arguing

Dude, come on. Are we seriously preening about how superior our methods of storytelling appreciation are?

and little to no evidence was provided as to how repeating the same resolution for political regime situations 4 times in a row was justified.

As I said, FFXIV and MMOs in general repeat story beats all the time. It's nothing new, it's not "horribly bad writing", and it's not likely to end any time soon. Again, you have simply (for whatever reason) chosen "Oh no, democracy" as the specific hill YOU want to die on. If we're supposed to be complaining about repetition, then we could go all the way back to Shadowbringers revealing "Oh by the way, here's yet ANOTHER advanced ancient civilization, and it's even MORE Ancientier than the rest!".

Feel free to think whatever you like, but an objective measurement of story quality it ain't.

We are unlikely to ever agree on how the writers should handle these situations

Nor should we have to.

Forums are to discuss opinions. Even if those opinions differ. It's not for slowly developing a hivemind.

You can feel free to have whatever opinion you want, but I do appreciate that you went out of your way to provide us with your own proposed endings. I just don't think they're very good. And that's my opinion, just like you have yours.

I like how Aveyond's argument is "it's boring that all of these nations are written to go from monarchy to democracy every time," and the counterargument is "well everything in the writing perfectly justifies the writing's direction!" No shit, of course it does. They wrote it that way on purpose, of course it'll contains all sorts of justifications for its endings. It didn't have to be that way from conception, but they decided to make it so. That doesn't negate Aveyond's argument, it's just restating their issue from another angle but this time with your opinion applied to it.

I mean, I guess, excuse me for believing that the way a storyarc wraps up should follow the themes, character motivations and tone of the story. For example, if the entire point of Vauthry is that he's a hedonist who doesn't care about the future, is likely immortal, and believes that everyone should just party until the world ends....what part of this character indicates, "You know, the writers should have given him an heir"? Granted, I know he said he was mostly fine with Eulmore's finale...but my point is that changes have to make sense in context. Even if we change the context completely and go with, "Well, they shouldn't have written Eulmore to be about those themes at all", then we're basically talking about a story so different from the original that it's literally fan-fiction.

Same thing with Garlemald. We've been told since 1.0 that Garlemald's political situation is so unstable that Varis barely holds on to his power, and even a hint of a power vacuum will turn bloody. So, I don't particularly find it a "problem" when that's exactly what happens. Notice that we had to pretty much insert Princess Anastasia into the story to create the type of conclusion aveyond prefers.

[anhaato]

Next expansion should be us helping the Garleans reclaim their homeland in Corvos

[anhaato]

-

I like how Aveyond's argument is "it's boring that all of these nations are written to go from monarchy to democracy every time," and the counterargument is "well everything in the writing perfectly justifies the writing's direction!" No shit, of course it does. They wrote it that way on purpose, of course it'll contain all sorts of justifications for its endings. It didn't have to be that way from conception, but they decided to make it so. That doesn't negate Aveyond's argument, it's just restating their issue from another angle but this time with your opinion applied to it.

[Thaciscokidd]

Snip

Yep, its the blessing of helping the protagonist. Just like it was ok for us to stop others for being oppressed but we've put down the Gigas race twice. I held out hope that it would get settled out when we were making peace with the other beast tribes but nope. No primal no dice.

[Lauront]

The writers didn't stick the landing with Venat but I still maintain that there's no way that Hydaelyn was ever going to be the villain like some people in the forums had hoped. And when viewed in-universe through our character's eyes, for better or worse she's the reason us and everything we know exists. If a shadow ghost came up to me and said that 15,000 years ago people used to have amazing powers and were 20ft tall but there was a disagreement over the end of the world where they created two gods and one side wanted to cull the new life seeded onto the desolate aftermath (that led to us) to bring back their friends versus the one who said "no you can't do that" and stomped the other god so hard that the world broke, I'd pick the side that led to me and supports me continuing to live since that's all I know. Especially when that shadow ghost wants to kill everyone to bring back his god.

The Ascians and the Garleans are the same in that both try to kill you before explaining themselves. Both are also written to be the antagonists of the video game. The writers can give them more background to make you sympathize with them a bit more and make the game more interesting than what is was in ARR, but it doesn't change that they spent the whole entire game trying to kill us and as a video game the whole point is to "win" and one side has to lose. You can write your own book where the narrative ends up different, but the story here is reliant on the medium it's being told in.

She wasn't presented as a villain, but given the nature of her actions, she's not far off from one, IMO. Bearing in mind that in what can be taken as her bid to preserve the timelines, she also deliberately made an attempt to spare Emet-Selch, knowing full well what this would end in. She also decides to favour the sundered world precisely because she believes the suffering in it would be conducive to dealing with Meteion and avoiding one of the Dead Ends. That same suffering is the result of sundering the world, and the Rejoinings were also integral to this, as are the circumstances that allowed for a nation like Garlemald to spawn. Unless you wish to claim that the Ascians somehow forced the Sundered to see the Garleans as easy targets back when they chased them out of Locus Amoenus, or that they are responsible for all their frailties, which mirror those of ourselves?

Particularly if the realisation sunk in that AUs are possible in the setting, and how much destruction and tragedy could've been avoided - possibly on an interstellar scale - had a different path been charted, and given the destruction of the great civilisation of the ancients and not giving them the opportunity to handle this themselves, I can't say my character would look upon her kindly. I certainly don't. To top it all off, she lied about it all because she didn't want to dwell in the past and was too busy fending off Zodiark, or something - we'll overlook the conversation in the Aetherial Sea. It's a case of "yeah, thanks, you caused this all, now goodbye."

She's not alone in the FF genre of foes who are not necessarily evil, but nonetheless are so set in their ways, that they cause significant harm in the process and this brings them to a clash with the protagonists. Yunalesca is one example. Hydaelyn just doesn't end up clashing with the protagonists because they incidentally benefited from what she did, although only partly, because the eternal soul has been fragmented in the process, so it depends on how you frame it... but of course until the Omega quest, she really wasn't called out much at all for this; even Y'shtola rushes to say we can take the positive from her actions during her apology to the Scions.

I like how Aveyond's argument is "it's boring that all of these nations are written to go from monarchy to democracy every time," and the counterargument is "well everything in the writing perfectly justifies the writing's direction!" No shit, of course it does. They wrote it that way on purpose, of course it'll contain all sorts of justifications for its endings. It didn't have to be that way from conception, but they decided to make it so. That doesn't negate Aveyond's argument, it's just restating their issue from another angle but this time with your opinion applied to it.

Precisely. I'll add that even if the Garleans may be soured on the notion of a hereditary monarchy thanks to recent experience with one (though what of an elective one like Archades?), they have every chance to add a variety of regimes in Ilsabard as a new way of life is negotiated there, maybe one in which Garlemald plays an integral role still given the engineering prowess of its people, and the fact that it had some good civil institutions about which it can share its experience. I'm sure we will see situations similar to Bozja, where the old regime is seen in a dimmer light, and others yet where the opposite holds (Dalmasca, though further south, still seems intent to restore its monarchy.) Given the focus SE appears to be shifting away a bit from the political manoeuvring heavy writing, they may just end up skipping Ilsabard etc. for now and returning later and giving an "and this happened" account of it, but the point is, they have ample opportunity to make it interesting if they so choose. It's not like they favour democracies in the setting by default; Thavnair itself is hardly one.

[Rulakir]

The writers didn't stick the landing with Venat but I still maintain that there's no way that Hydaelyn was ever going to be the villain like some people in the forums had hoped.

It's not want as much as expect. There was little reason to believe Hydaelyn was a "good guy" leading up to EW. Matter of fact, she looks even worse in retrospect not the least of which being it appears she purposely let the First fall to the Flood of Light because it needed to in order to produce the WoL. She's still ultimately an antagonist in the history of the world and its shards. The fact that she aids the WoL, which is only due to her betting it all on their success, doesn't change that.

The Ascians want to delete 15,000 years of history and in order to do so, they need to cause untold death and destruction time and time again and each time, a whole world is destroyed and along with it all of that whole world's history and every life upon it.

This is exactly what Venat did though and for all we know it was much more than 12k years in terms of the Ancients' history. As others have said, we simply wanted consistency, but Venat is responsible for as much and more than the Ascians were yet neither she or the sundering are treated in the same way the Ascians and rejoinings are. This is true even in the Omega quest chain, which was my major gripe with it.

As for time travel, for me the only morally correct thing to do would've been to save the Ancients. You'd save trillions in the process not to mention sparing everyone's soul from being torn apart, which I have a lot of issues with since it appears that the original person still exists in some capacity and is now in an endless purgatory of being indefinitely overwritten every rebirth. It's only questionable due to the implication that the WoL would abandon their timeline to a doomed fate, but nothing about this time loop felt good.

While I accept it's well within the Azem soul's personality to be selfish when it comes to their friends over all else even that gets dicey when the WoL clearly cares about Emet and wishes to save him. I basically have to write it off as my WoL being a fool for thinking they could trust Venat to do the right thing, but that doesn't explain the treatment of her afterwards where everyone should have issues with what she's done and yet none do to the extent that I consider it inconsistent and contradictory. IMO, EW broke everything that stood in the way of depicting Hydaelyn as good. I'd even argue it cost us crucial lore because they couldn't show an accurate version of events as it would've made her look bad.

[MikkoAkure]

It's not want as much as expect. There was little reason to believe Hydaelyn was a "good guy" leading up to EW. Matter of fact, she looks even worse in retrospect not the least of which being it appears she purposely let the First fall to the Flood of Light because it needed to in order to produce the WoL. She's still ultimately an antagonist in the history of the world and its shards. The fact that she aids the WoL, which is only due to her betting it all on their success, doesn't change that.

I can understand feeling that way if you came into the game during Shadowbringers but it's different if you've been playing the game since the very beginning where it was much more black and white and the writers even said the Ascians had no further backstory other than "they do bad things and want to resurrect their bad god". Players from the beginning had years of "Hydaelyn good, Zodiark bad" sink in with nothing to make us think otherwise. Having a twist for the sake of a twist doesn't automatically make a story better or else people would still be watching M. Night Shyamalan movies.

The reason the Ascians are written as the bad guys is because they specifically are an existential threat to our character in a video game. The game cannot continue if the Ascians win. All the way from 1.0 they have been bad guys who were specifically created with skeletal imagery, wreathed in dark aether, and laughed maniacally while they caused chaos as narrative shorthand for "these are the bad guys". Starting from ARR, Hydaelyn was portrayed as the opposite and supported us with a calm voice against the people who tried to kill us over and over. You can't exactly walk that back after a decade.

This is exactly what Venat did though and for all we know it was much more than 12k years in terms of the Ancients' history. As others have said, we simply wanted consistency, but Venat is responsible for as much and more than the Ascians were yet neither she or the sundering are treated in the same way the Ascians and rejoinings are. This is true even in the Omega quest chain, which was my major gripe with it.

For me I feel like the Ancients stopped being the Ancients when the Final Days happened, their society collapsed, and they summoned two gods.

Every decision they made while the sky was falling was made in the context of a dying world. Zodiark's first two acts did save the world, but at a cost of a lot of the surviving population and the creation of a new god. To me, there is no chance at all that Ancient society would resume as normal in the presence of a physical god of their own creation who the leaders openly admit to being tempered by, even if just a nudge. Culling the planet's life would not have returned the souls of those who had died. While we don't know how many people were killed in the Final Days, it could be assumed that it was a fairly high number. Venat made her arrogant decision in the face of her opposition deciding to cull the life of the planet just for those who had already sacrificed their lives to save it.

We were given one chance at actual time travel and we didn't know we were going to be there at the creation of the Final Days and didn't even have the ability to do anything at all until we accidentally fumbled into it. The whole time travel story and the characters' reasonings for things was not written very well past the fan service, but Elidibus, leader of the Ancients, former heart of Zodiark, did say that we shouldn't and couldn't change anything. If he specifically says before we even leave that we can't save them, then I'm inclined to take his word for it.

The Ascians didn't have the ability to time travel. In order to get back what was lost, they committed themselves to destroying multiple worlds and decimating the main world 13 times. At a certain point you have to wonder how someone like Hythlodeus would feel about Emet-Selch slaughtering billions in order to undo the sacrifice he made to save the world. The Sundered aren't any less of people than the Unsundered are. Elpis showed us that they are just as prone to self-doubt, mistakes, and violence. They just happened to be a more evolved society and had an insane amount of aether. The Sundered have had 15,000 years since then. Who knows what they could have gotten up to if they didn't have the reset button hit on them every 1500 years or so? The Ascians could have even helped them get to a more enlightened point, but instead saw them as nothing but Rejoining fuel.

It would have been more interesting if the Ascians and Zodiark played the role of Prometheus and helped the Sundered, but that would have been basically repeating the story of FFXI.


All that said, I hope we get one or more Tales from the Dawn or whatever it will be called that goes over the period of time around the time when the Convocation were going to use Zodiark a third time so that we have more context for what was going on in a spot of the lore that deserves more explanation and ties everything together better than the MSQ did.

[Theodric]

It was always pretty obvious to me that the Ascians and Garleans would be fleshed out over time and given a sympathetic backstory given that...pretty much every JRPG I can think of has done just that with its own antagonists, including a lot of the Final Fantasy titles...

Furthermore, Hydaelyn was always portrayed as being evasive and shady. It just so happens that anyone who pointed that out was harassed, especially on the lore forum! Coincidentally a place infested with 'mOmMy StEpPy' types even before Shadowbringers.

It's also being ignored that many Garlean and Ascian fans repeatedly spoke up in favour of more nuance and less cackling villainy only to be shot down (ironically by some of those now lamenting the lack of nuance back in the days of ARR). Such individuals also had a habit of pushing for a 'third way forward' that allowed all factions to come to some form of mutually beneficial compromise. Which wouldn't have been difficult to create if the writers are already prepared to conjure up entire alternate realities to justify the continued existence of burger boy.

Furthermore, the Final Days happened because a nutty subversive individual in the form of Venat stood by and allowed them to happen. With that in mind, pretending as if Zodiark was a bad decision is - quite frankly - bizarre given that Etheirys only persisted as a consequence of Zodiark being summoned to fix the mess caused by Hermes and Venat...