Quote Originally Posted by MikkoAkure View Post
She sings the main theme of the whole game so it would have been awkward to make her bad all of the sudden.
Actually, that's a woman named Susan Calloway. :P

But to provide answers(winking face) to your questions I'm gonna hafta get long winded as I am wont to do.

At a fundamental level I would not have had a problem with Endwalker if it didn't sacrifice characters on the altar of Venat. Basically, if they'd had the cast react more realistically, and had a real heart to heart, real depiction of what she did, then I would likely have no big grievances with Endwalker. Of course, they didn't do that, and what they chose to do was rather foolish. What they chose to do was try to walk back the moral grey area they had laid the story into in Shadowbringers. Worse still, they tried only to walk it back, not depart from it fully. Rather than painting anyone as the villain, they attempted to paint no one as a villain, and it fell flat on its face as a result. And they didn't stop there. Simultaneously, they entered into this Venat praise cycle with the NPC companions, singing her praises even when she herself did not. It was jarring. Immersion was at a negative level. In no other expansion did I get to the final area, and say to myself constantly, "It's only a game. Try not to think about it too hard." Which is something the devs themselves bid us to do, too.

I was fine with the Garlean arc. I had no strong expectations for it, and it was rather enjoyable overall save for Zenos doing absolutely nothing with our body.

In regards to the Sound and the Ancients being the root cause for it... I was expecting that, and I would have been fine with it. I would have liked a monster far more monstrous than Meteion. I'm sure they saw her as killing three birds with one stone though. She's technically a product of the Ancients, but also technically an outside force. I would have preferred something like one of the raid bosses from Pandaemonium or hundreds of such things. I would have preferred the Ancients actually being monstrous enough that the Sundering was actually reasonable. My issue with the Sundering is entirely that it was an unreasonable reaction to events, especially since she had foreknowledge and her memories. But if the Ancients had really been monsters churning out monsters rather than milquetoast undergrads shipping their government figures together...

Endwalker is essentially a lukewarm bride with clear commitment issues that goes through with the marriage anyway.