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

[Teraq]

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.

Speak for yourself, please. Granted, I haven't been playing the game from the very beginning, but as someone who finds the vast majority of good guys boring as sin, I never cared for Hydaelyn, and thought the Ascians obviously were going to be developed more. It doesn't matter how long I've heard Hydaelyn repeat at me the same damn words, because she had always been a non-entity to me before Shadowbringers dropped a nugget of information that finally piqued my interest: the possibility of her being not that good.

I would posit Shadowbringers was critically acclaimed exactly because it brought much needed nuance to the boring "Hydaelyn good, Zodiark bad".

But as Endwalker went on to prove, the story becoming morally grey was a fluke at best.

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.

Debatable, but they could have very well left him in some sort of sleep mode to ward off the Dynamis waves until they found a way to deal with them.

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.

Correct. This implies that Ancients would have had to forge ahead anyway, had they been afforded the chance to.

but Elidibus, leader of the Ancients,

um

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.

look I'm an Eli simp but he, like everyone else in the FFXIV universe, was unaware the 8th UC timeline did, in fact, continue. And as you pointed out, they didn't seem to have any practical knowledge of time travel, only theories of what might happen.

The fact remains that an AU was possible.

[Kolsykol]

I would posit Shadowbringers was critically acclaimed exactly because it brought much needed nuance to the boring "Hydaelyn good, Zodiark bad".

I don't think the point was that '' Zodiark bad ''...
That's a matter of pov and context at your disposal, Zodiark wasn't created as an evil entity and I don't think that Endwalkers changed that at all.
In the end of the day Zodiark was more of a tool that was neither good nor bad, the same with Meteion she wasn't good or bad she was a victim of circumstance and of how she was created.
I think the one that the strongest argument for being '' evil '' could be made would probably be Hermes, but both Zodiark and Meteion didn't really have all that much autonomy of their own.

It's fine to prefer more grey characters I tend to prefer them too.
But I also don't think it's somehow inherently better or worse either.
Especially in a game as long-running as FFXIV too I kinda think that you need both otherwise it becomes too cliché when they're all the same.
I actually hope that they keep Lahabrea as more unhinged like he was in ARR for this reason I don't think every Ancient needs to be sympathetic.