I've been lurking and enjoying this thread for a while. I'm glad it's still going. I too, was disappointed by EW.


I think it made the same mistake the writers did in ARR and SB where we had a lot of telling rather than showing. Minfillia, Lyse and now Venat, the game tells us what to think about them but if you look for reasons in-game, they're either skated over far too quickly or absent.
With Venat, I cannot follow her reasoning for doing what she did. Deciding to act alone when she has the combined wisdom and powers of the convocation to call upon, seems foolhardy to say the least. Seeing the consequences of her actions I find it hard to accept her as a 'good person', even if she is sorry.
Her defeat of Zodiark and the sundering rather defies logic too, how did she do that if she was so much weaker than he was?

We have a lot of plot holes. So often I found myself thinking along the lines of,
'But if we could do that, why didn't we just...'

No real consequences for our companions was another thing I found annoying. Vitra did a great build up, telling us the awful cost to our friends of simply being associated with us, but that turned out to be 5 mins offstage with yet another fake death, or in this case a whole slew of them.

I thought there was too much filler. Meals with the Scions, visits from them, walks....
And I the only person sick of Tataru at this point? And it turns out she hasn't been keeping the Scions afloat after all, that was mammy Levellieur (and that little detail has me questioning quite a bit of what happened post-ARR).

Garelmond was rushed and somehow the Garleans were reduced to 'nice people, just a bit misguided'. When we were asked why we couldn't accept Garlean rule, our character couldn't even come up with an answer. The whole of SB gave us plenty of answers, even ARR gave us answers. But even though I don't see the Empire as a force for good, I did want to see more of it, I wanted to see how the citizens lived, I wanted to see more of Maxima and the Populares, I wanted to meet some of the miltary and political leaders we'd been hearing about.
I wanted to find out if the story of the Garleans being driven out of their homeland by the magic users was true, partly true or pure fiction dreamed up by Emet to keep the people afraid and to justify some of the things the Empire did.
And I wanted some depth and development for Zenos. It was a bit sobering to do the final ARR beast tribe quest recently and discover that Zenos had basically been given a dry run as 'comedy, fight-me cat-boy'! Exact same motivations and a similar level of depth. If I'd been given the choice to just walk away and leave Zenos instead of having that last fight, I'd have taken it.
I was also disappointed to see Garlemond looked surprisingly like our own cities, with citizens apparently owning cars, yet we have seen no wheeled vehicles besides trains in Garlean territory up to this point. It felt like a clumsy attempt to show us that the Empire's people were just like us and to make them more sympathetic, but where Amaurot succeed, this felt forced.

The theme of lying to people, or concealing facts, supposedly for their own good, was never really explored. Everyone is perfectly ok with it.
Sharlayan began as a place where everyone had an equal voice; it's ended up as somewhere where the majority are kept completely in the dark for decades, and nobody, in this highly educated population, takes issue with it.
Vitra's deception of his people I could understand far more and I felt that was well-handled.
Hydaelin lied to us right from the start and we're told it's also 'understandable' and we're not allowed to think otherwise. It's fine, end of.
Except it really isn't fine. In fact, Elidibus' words about if we had mastered the Echo, we'd be on the same side, ring far more true now. If we had known then what we know now, would we have chosen to throw our lot in with Hydaelin or would we have sided with the Ascians?
Making Hydaelin more nuanced would have strengthened the story imo, and making us tempered by her would have cleared away a lot of issues I have with us following her so blindly.

Giving us more detail about the proposed final sacrifice could have strengthed her case. Venat says she and her followers didn't want to see this new life snuffed out, but what was it exactly?
If we are talking about people born after the creation of Zodiark, I can see a serious moral dilemma and I could understand people dissenting (count me in), but if she was trying to justify leaving people dead who could have been ressurected, including her friends who had sacrificed themselves, just to save a few plants and animals, then she comes across as crazy as Hermes.
And while we are on the subject of Hermes, how come our oh-so-intelligent friends didn't see even the tiniest hint of mental instability there? Convocation material he is not.

I do suspect a little (?) tampering from the Director might have caused some of the issues I am having with EW, it was disturbing to read that the story was re-worked and only finished with days to spare.
I am hoping that the post EW quests will be more interesting and will do what the post SB quests did for that expansion