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

[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.