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

[Rulakir]

I'm one of the few(?) here who doesn't particularly care about Garlemald, so I had no thoughts about that nor did I think we'd be addressing the 'Sound' in EW.

As for Venat, I expected nuance. I've said before, Hydaelyn never impressed me as being 'good' for a multitude of reasons and nothing along the way (even prior to ShB) changed my mind to think otherwise. I figured she'd be the mirror to Emet. We'd get her side of the story, which was something we'd also be opposed to and would have to put a stop to her.

Ultimately, what we did get was an antagonist just shrouded in gratuitous gaslighting and every other character in the game bent or broken to praise her. The Ancients being portrayed as somehow deserving of being ended was deeply unsettling and certainly not anything I would've thought would happen in the narrative after ShB. Some have commented on how they loved that the Ancients weren't 'othered' in ShB, but they very much were in EW and it was highly disappointing.

As Teraq mentioned, Hydaelyn conveniently not having any of the downsides of being a primal was laughable (especially given that her tempering would actually make the story make more sense). Nobody questions whether or not she did the right thing, they just accept her assessment (that genocide was necessary, wtf) even though all her reasons for the sundering had already been debunked earlier in the story. Nobody chastises her despite her being an amalgamation of prior antagonists we'd condemned.

I also thought at the end of the Hydaelyn and Zodiark saga there would actually be Zodiark in it as something more than a gundam suit cast aside in a level 83 trial. Not to mention no Elidibus, his heart, for any of this. He's on screen for about 5 minutes just long enough to become time travel fuel.

I had hoped the WoL would finally learn some control over the Echo and use it to tap into Azem's memories (as well as the unsundered), through which we would piece together the events preceding the Final Days. Instead, we got a god awful time loop where the player character is now an accomplice to the worst events in Ancients' history.

Hermes was a terrible villain with a terrible motive and Venat's character is basically redundant with his, they both essentially serve the same purpose which makes EW's storytelling all the more bizarre especially considering one is framed as a villain and the other as a heroine.

The story in 6.0 works if and only if they change the narrative surrounding Venat, which means the Scions criticizing what she did, Emet cursing her existence, etc. You know, the polar opposite of how they all treated her. I'd still be unhappy with the time loop though and I still think Hermes is a terrible and an almost completely pointless character (so much for being Ishikawa's favorite) since the sundering was basically the same result with a similar intent that ultimately overshadowed the Final Days. They were never going to be able to justify it being on purpose let alone with knowledge of the future. (It causes 10.9 genocides overall just related to Etheirys? Fantastic, sounds like a plan!)

Oh, and that cutscene, how could I forget that we were deprived actual lore in order to give Venat a pity party music video. (I never liked the song Answers and I especially hate it now.) Since she can't be made to look bad I guess that's it for ever learning more about the Final Days or the Sundering! Suffer, lore nerds!

Anyway, this is mostly a late night mind ramble. Maybe I'll have something better tomorrow. :P I didn't even address the problematic messaging of EW, the whole story felt preachy and like I was going through an interactive self-help seminar. I think they focused more on themes than writing a compelling and entertaining narrative.

[Skyborne]

"Life sucks sometimes, but you gotta deal with it, now go on and be free"

Oops, turns out that the writers made everything be deliberate and on purpose! Because nothing can really be an accident, aside from the birdloli being corrupted. To seal this, they added the time loop, because everyone loved Alexander with the *touches scar* and gobbycheese.

There's the daily grind of life, losing friends and family, illness, making ends meet... then there's having an apocalypse deliberately dropped on you twice with a little soul-breaking and civilizational erasure in between. Then the message comes across as someone stomping on you with the expectation that you smile through the bootprint on your face as you ask for more.

I used to like Answers a lot, too, and it was especially powerful with the T12 version, I feel, considering the great sacrifice he made. Kind of like a certain white-robed red-masked shortking!

Since you asked the question I will hard pass, since it's always followed up by someone wandering in to go "wow, you guys think you're better than the writers, lol your fanfic sucks, glad you didn't write!"

[Lubu_Mykono]

The 10 + year villain was a blue haired teenage girl with bird wings for ears.
Instead of the ripped chad anchored to the moon that was written in the lore and carefully referenced multiple times over the years.

Any of y'all that cared about the story got what ya'll deserved.

[EgilTheStressedMage]

Again, Meteia would have been a fine villain if they weren't introduced in the latest expansion and instead were properly built up alongside Zodiark. This is not something that would have been hard to do if the game wasn't an MMO and had to adapt to keep people playing. I strongly believe that if XIV were single player, it would be the best FF game to date. But we have to keep people who would otherwise never touch an MMO playing so it be what it be.

[Vyrerus]

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.

[Lucida3b]

More a random thought I had just now, but im pretty certain the dynamis stuff was not decided until post 5.3 writing.

For the simple reason of graha, he should have a soul just as dense IF NOT MORE dense then a average ancient as he would be a person from 8 rejoinings merging with someone from 7 REJOININGS, yet he seems capable of manipulating dynamis....

[anhaato]

-

I agree with everything except the bit about the ancients. Any justification for a race getting wiped out that tries to frame it as the “correct” option, even if it involves writing them down to being completely evil strawmen, will always be diabolical to me. Pro-genocide narratives are bad no matter what, and that’s why this thread has so many pages.

We all thought the sundering was an accident, or that Hydaelyn was simply not good. There’s really no good way to portray her as good if the sundering was purposeful. A “better” setup of the ancients as a race that “needed” to die wouldn’t fix that, and would’ve made the writers even more reprehensible in my eyes.

[ReynTime]

Again, Meteia would have been a fine villain if they weren't introduced in the latest expansion and instead were properly built up alongside Zodiark. This is not something that would have been hard to do if the game wasn't an MMO and had to adapt to keep people playing. I strongly believe that if XIV were single player, it would be the best FF game to date. But we have to keep people who would otherwise never touch an MMO playing so it be what it be.

Based on what?
Apart from story it does all single-player FF aspects worse than every decent FF game. Even some of the bad ones. Because of its design compromises to fit as a MMO that caters to people who don't like learning how to play video games.

[YukikoKurosawa]

More a random thought I had just now, but im pretty certain the dynamis stuff was not decided until post 5.3 writing.

For the simple reason of graha, he should have a soul just as dense IF NOT MORE dense then a average ancient as he would be a person from 8 rejoinings merging with someone from 7 REJOININGS, yet he seems capable of manipulating dynamis....

Oh wow I never even thought of that. He's like 15 times rejoined technically.

[CrownySuccubus]

Based on what?
Apart from story it does all single-player FF aspects worse than every decent FF game. Even some of the bad ones. Because of its design compromises to fit as a MMO that caters to people who don't like learning how to play video games.

Eh?

Being quite frank, FFXIV's post-2.0 gameplay (especially combat gameplay) is way more directly involved than most mainline games in the series. If we're arguing that this game caters to people "who don't like learning to play videogames" more than FFXII's Gambit System, the FFXIII series' Auto-Battle system, or FFXV's "Just get close and hold one button" system, I'm gonna have to disagree.

I'm nowhere near a fan of FFXIV's gameplay or progression loops, but I'm seriously curious how one can even come to this conclusion.