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

[aveyond-dreams]

I actually considered it a few years back but my encounters with some of the more unhinged members of this community made me not want to put anything out there that would make me easy to identify in the real world.

That too, given the sort of mean-spirited behavior that FFXIV players engage in outside the forums whenever someone has a (valid) critique of the game, it makes it too much of a risk. FFXIV players seem to regularly interpret things like rightfully calling out characters like Venat's motives or asking for more customization options appropriate for either gender as infractions against their morals - ones that are not shared by the entire playerbase but that doesn't stop them from engaging in all sorts of behavior that would lead to repercussions in real life.

I'd rather switch games than deal with that. So I basically have, back to single player titles while FFXIV figures out what it wants to do with itself while its community carries on as usual. A playerbase whose voice is dominated by such individuals isn't worth that much of my time or effort to save from itself, especially if they're brazen enough to engage in the sort of behavior they've already demonstrated against other people.

Maybe if Yoship hadn't pandered to them not only would the story be in a better state, but there would actually be somewhat of a feeling of "home" left in this game instead of vague hostility for not towing the same line as everyone else. The only solace I have is that the kinds of players people are concerned about seem to have entrenched themselves deeply into FFXIV and seldom play other games, so I don't have to worry about them chasing after me elsewhere.

Diofield Chronicle is already coming out next week. And with it I gain a new world full of the sort of things that brought me to this game in the first place and whose absence now turns me away.

[Zanarkand-Ronso]

We don't need the latest attempt of modern media to reincarnate Hermoine Granger to join the party, certainly not in Lalafell form.

If this joke was used on Y'shtola, it would have actually been funny. Because she fits the bill a thousand times better then Krile.
I dont even remember the last time Krile was a Know-it-all Mage/Wizard that Won at Existing. Christ, she was barly even used.
But Y'shtola sure fits that bill.
Not that I dislike her at all, but if you gonna make such a comparison, this would have worked better.

But anyway moving foreword.

YouTube seems to be lacking in any kind of in-depth story analysis of Endwalker or FFXIV in general, positive or negative. It's all about story reactions with fake crying and exagerated marketable faces, or superlative adjectives but nobody to try and take it to the next level. Isn't it weird? Where is it? Even dumb shonen manga I follow get their videos essays.

I mean.....there are people unlike ya'll that did actually enjoy the story and the events that happened and legit got invested.
Its fine to not agree with them, but no need to completely dismissive just because you dont agree with it. Especially without proof.



But, getting off of all of that.
Upon multiple viewings and reactions to endwalker, Ive said before that it has its problems. The problem became bigger as I was able to watch it more critically, Im better at that after my 2nd or 3rd viewing. Elpis was good world-building, but kind of slow, and the ending of it while very interesting, did make me ask questions. Some of them being kinda "outside looking in" which you can do to any situation. But just overall Ive discovered that there is NO WAY you can ever write time travel stuff and NOT screw up something major at the end.
Then Ultima Thule WAS cool, all the way till the end at the final part with Metion and our 2 favorite Ascians....which then made you think why didnt we just use The Azem Crystal immediately?....The reasoning for it....was non-sensible, especially at the end.

Zodiark & Fandaniel was entertaining. I LOVED that twist, very 5head. But....it literally Neutered ALL of that Building up and storytelling.
I dont hate that Zodiark was solved early for a MUCH bigger plot. But I do hate how quick it was....Probly a contradiction. But I guess I mean it would have been cool if Zodiark himself was an actual threat, like he HIMSELF actually did some stuff and caused some havok and we had to make a plan to chase him and take him down. Could have even been a threat to the Lopperots and the Moon. Naw...just became a Puppet that got taken over, and INCOMPLETE puppet at that. So we didnt even fight him at full Power!
Again, there was a much bigger plot, so Zodiark Not being the final boss is fine. Just how little time and effort we spent on dealing with him is the issue.

And then we have the Final Days itself.
Only real issue that I think has been echoed many times...we can all mostly agree.....they didnt do as much with it as they could have.
Now Im not advocating from All this Suffering and stuff that Others love to harp and drone on about.....but I just think they didnt do much with it at all.
I quite enjoyed the Side stories; The Role Quests. (Although I think the Physical Ranged one was the weakest) I think they could have tried to mix in some of their narratives into the MSQ.
It probly would create some padding, but the scale fight to resist the Final Days would have been much bigger, and abit more satisfying.
Heck, would have been really cool if like the Benchmark, we eventually win over Garlemald and become temp allies and they helped around Eoarzea to help the innocents, slay the Blasphemies, and even start to bridge that once HUGE gap between the alliance and the Imperials.
Maybe we still wouldnt become Friends right away, and there would still be ALOT of bad blood to work through...but I do personally like stories were differences can be put aside for the greater good.
Plus it would have been more content and even lore for Garlemald.

Ok there is my rambling and my thoughts on the story.
Just to show and prove that I do agree that Endwalker isnt perfect, I have my grievances, I agree on some points that have been brought up.
Ill also agree that we should have some content creators speak and give some critiques. Maybe in the future
I personally doubt there are too afraid because of fan backlash, but more so that they also just enjoy the ride enough that they dont feel motivated to harp on and attack its weak points.

Ok, Done.

[ReynTime]

Chrono Trigger didn't screw up anything major with its time travel plot.
Dirk Gently's Season 1 as well.

[AwesomeJr44]

Took quite a bit of searching to find a video telling like it is regarding how Ultima Thule's writing was abysmal, and it got me wishing people as articulated as Theodric, aveyond, Lauront, Vyrerus or Teraq would make videos criticizing what needs criticizing about FFXIV's writing.
Because it's incredibly hard to see any thumbnails that don't have people who need the views to make a living as creators with these predictable dramatic expressions in their thumbnails and yellow letters saying "BEST STORY EVER MADE" etc.

There is the saying "be the change you want to make" but even if I could make videos myself I'm not well articulated at all. As can be seen in any of my posts in the forum.

I would make some critical videos on the story if I was better at speaking. I'm very good at typing but I'm very bad at speaking out loud. I can have the best ideas in the world but ask me to speak about them out loud and it's an incoherent mess.

YouTube seems to be lacking in any kind of in-depth story analysis of Endwalker or FFXIV in general, positive or negative. It's all about story reactions with fake crying and exagerated marketable faces, or superlative adjectives but nobody to try and take it to the next level. Isn't it weird? Where is it? Even dumb shonen manga I follow get their videos essays.

Gotta farm those overreacting to story clicks and views for the cash flow. Seriously though, there aren't many YouTubers making analysis videos because they're not as popular and thus don't make as much money. People would rather watch you fake cry over nothing than hear a well thought out argument. And if you wanna have a job in making videos or streaming the game, you need to do what the people want, not what you want. It's stupid, but that's how YouTube is right now.

I would simply prefer if the feedback we posted here was taken into consideration without the need for such grand overtures to be necessary to get the feedback through to the dev team about what didn't work for Endwalker.

Agreed. I'm not sure why we need big content creators to whine about things in order for them to get fixed when everyday players were complaining for far longer. SE clearly doesn't listen to the playerbase unless a big name content creator starts making noise.

I actually considered it a few years back but my encounters with some of the more unhinged members of this community made me not want to put anything out there that would make me easy to identify in the real world. I usually go by a different name in each online community that I'm a part of

Same. I don't feel comfortable sharing my irl self with certain parts of this community. There are just too many people who are absolutely unhinged and I think that if I were to make critical content of the game, I'd be lining myself in opposition to the worst parts of this community.

I think FFXIV has essentially just shifted its target audience and genre altogether at this point which is highly unfortunate. It markets itself as a 'story driven' experience but it really isn't that at all

It's the same thing that happened to Marvel. The MCU was a well thought out (it wasn't perfect but it was good) universe with good stories. However the writers realized they could put zero effort in and 85% of the audience would eat it up no matter how bad it was. That's how we got trash like She Hulk. The same thing is happening here. The writers CAN make good stories like SHB, but why do that when they can make low effort garbage and people will still praise it?

It's ironic, I suppose, that two MMO's have been ruined in large part by refusing to hold female antagonists to the same standards as their male counterparts.

This has sadly been something being pushed into a lot of media lately. Female characters get their evil actions labeled as justified by other characters while male characters who do evil things (and sometimes in cases where they don't) get labeled as the unequivocal bad guy. Back before Endwalker was released, I had the foolish hope that SE was better than that. That SE was a good company that would continue to write good stories and leave this type of crap out of it. I wish I wasn't so wrong.

That too, given the sort of mean-spirited behavior that FFXIV players engage in outside the forums whenever someone has a (valid) critique of the game, it makes it too much of a risk. FFXIV players seem to regularly interpret things like rightfully calling out characters like Venat's motives or asking for more customization options appropriate for either gender as infractions against their morals

I too am getting sick of a certain part of the community's hatred of criticism. (We all know who the ones on the forums are) If you dare have a critique about the game, if you dare not agree with the story sanctioned 'good guys', and if you dare have an idea on how to make something better, well you're just a rotten evil person to these people. I was going to write a Graha rewrite showing how I'd change the character to improve him, but I'm not sure I even want to. The same group of posters will see my thread, see that I don't think the game is perfect, and act like I killed a defenseless kitten. I might still end up posting that if I finish it, but I don't know if it's even worth doing with how the community is. I expect their kind of behavior on the cesspools that are Reddit and Twitter, but it's kinda sad to see it on the forums. The forums are meant to be a place for critiques, yet some people are just more interested in pretending that everything's fine.

[Kazhar]

I mean.....there are people unlike ya'll that did actually enjoy the story and the events that happened and legit got invested.
Its fine to not agree with them, but no need to completely dismissive just because you dont agree with it. Especially without proof.

Not at all what I meant. While I was dismissive of the reactions videos because I think it's just garbage content no matter if I appreciate the subject matter or not, I have no doubt a lot of people legitimately love Endwalker. I'm just curious why there's not much interest for an actual story analysis or dissection in FFXIV in particular, while it's something that gets quite a decent amount of views in most other popular works I know. Even other entries in the franchise.

[Theodric]

Well, the latest short story dropped on the lodestone and it revolves around Garlemald and Jullus. It gives a few more snippets of Garlean lore and is hopefully setting the table for more Garlean stuff in the future. It'd be nice if at least one of the provinces began rallying wayward Garleans to its side and gave them an authentic, permanent home after everything they've been through.

I'm glad they're not being vilified at least. I would have very much liked a Garlean focused expansion especially if the intrigue and major story beats were handled by Matsuno but what we ended up getting wasn't nearly as terrible as I feared it would end up being.

[Atelier-Bagur]

Chrono Trigger didn't screw up anything major with its time travel plot.
Dirk Gently's Season 1 as well.

I mean...if you try not to think too much about the logistics behind time travel then you can easily say that since Chrono Trigger also didn't try to delve too deep onto itself ( for the most part ).

But then Chrono Cross happened so not much argument can be had comparing FFXIV with Chrono Trigger.

[ReynTime]

I mean...if you try not to think too much about the logistics behind time travel then you can easily say that since Chrono Trigger also didn't try to delve too deep onto itself ( for the most part ).

But then Chrono Cross happened so not much argument can be had comparing FFXIV with Chrono Trigger.

Chrono Cross was an afterthought. Trigger wasn't made with sequels in mind. A good time travel story doesn't necessarily need to make sense by what you'd expect law of physics or reality dictate. The reason I consider Chrono Trigger a good example is because they stabilish their own rules of time travel clearly to the player, and stick to them til the end.
XIV throws its own rules out the window every time a new time travel scenario comes up. If the previously stabilished rules prevent them from doing something they wanted to do/makes it not as "cool" they just ignore or change it.

Another bad example like XIV's case is Avengers Endgame. They spend a scene explaining the rules and promptly break them anyway, with none of the consequences of breaking said rules happening.

[Atelier-Bagur]

Chrono Cross was an afterthought. Trigger wasn't made with sequels in mind. A good time travel story doesn't necessarily need to make sense by what you'd expect law of physics or reality dictate. The reason I consider Chrono Trigger a good example is because they stabilish their own rules of time travel clearly to the player, and stick to them til the end.
XIV throws its own rules out the window every time a new time travel scenario comes up. If the previously stabilished rules prevent them from doing something they wanted to do/makes it not as "cool" they just ignore or change it.

Another bad example like XIV's case is Avengers Endgame. They spend a scene explaining the rules and promptly break them anyway, with none of the consequences of breaking said rules happening.

No it doesn't, Chrono Trigger for the most part ignores a lot of its own rules for the sake of the plot even when they first introduce them in detail like Marle's ancestor. The reason it works it's due to writers masking the plot holes very well.

[Zanarkand-Ronso]

Not at all what I meant. While I was dismissive of the reactions videos because I think it's just garbage content no matter if I appreciate the subject matter or not, I have no doubt a lot of people legitimately love Endwalker. I'm just curious why there's not much interest for an actual story analysis or dissection in FFXIV in particular, while it's something that gets quite a decent amount of views in most other popular works I know. Even other entries in the franchise.

At the end of my Word Salad I did mention ""Ill also agree that we should have some content creators speak and give some critiques""
So I do agree with you there.