Quote Originally Posted by CrownySuccubus View Post
At this point, I feel like we're going in circles.
Aerith dies. Zack was violently murdered. Basch failed the King. Vaan lost his only remaining family. Kefka won and brought about the collapse of the world, and Celes tried to commit suicide. Midgar was destroyed, and the cast were trying to pick themselves up amidst its ashes for years after. You're doing the same thing you've done before - picking trivial arguments and resting on them for pages and pages until the discussion becomes nigh on incoherent. Then you try to imply it's the other party desperate to have the last word.

The semantics of when and who according to your own brand of reasoning are irrelevant, enough past FF games have had the protagonists experience some hardship that hits particularly close to home; to have everything they know destroyed, to lose the ones they love, to see their worst fears realised, or go through or have experienced some form of betrayal or loss. The impact revebrates for a long while after, and the ending is often bittersweet.

XIV at the same time tackles something supposedly deeper and darker, whilst completely scaling back on the result. For a story that deals with the very essence of these themes that have been so prevalent in these past titles - overwhelming sorrow, grief, loss, and suffering - as its protagonists undergo the second coming of a universe-spanning apocalypse heralded by the harbinger of all-consuming death and despair, the consequences were ridiculously inadequate, the characters left unrealistically unaffected, and Endwalker was fundamentally affected by this, in terms of plausible writing, storytelling and the impact it had on the message it wasn't so much as trying to convey as beat you to death with. It is impossible for the stakes to have been any higher than what they were, and yet... nothing happened, and nothing continues to happen. Everyone is fine, there are no lasting repercussions, ill feelings, or traumas. It makes the entire experience ring hollow, and it isn't true to XIV itself, let alone the FF franchise. I'm weary of the notion that expecting some sort of fall-out from disaster and chaos on such a scale is somehow equivalent to asking a George RR Martin novel, when SE themselves would never have approved such a light and unrealistically inconsequential ending in any of its other games.

It's one thing to be all right with it, but pretending it didn't affect the weight of the story or deviate from what we've come to know and expect of FF is just flat out denial.