A game for 4 year olds

[Cleretic]

Then by all means why don't you grace us with a rewrite of your own? One that preferably avoids the terrible mishandling of grief, depression, and genocide in Endwalker.

That's completely unrelated, but okay. I'll admit I have a failing of taking the bait.

But here's the thing: I think the story is mostly fine, so I don't need to do a whole rewrite fanfiction to 'fix' it. Most of what I'd change are more editors' notes than full alterations. But sure, I'll toss them out. For the entire live game up to now, in fact.

A Realm Reborn: A tough one, since ARR has the difficult job of introducing a bunch of the world, but not really enough screentime to make any of it appealing, so there's not a lot of rewriting you can do without losing something important. I'd probably just have a whole editing pass to make sure we lose the weirdly out-of-place stuff that's more a relic of 1.0's tone (let's maybe not put down a slave uprising in Copperbell, and lose about 80% of the sexual assault references). And a special little idea of mine: include an 'Ala Mhigan's theme' for Raubahn, Ilberd, and some other relevant Ala Mhigan NPCs, that includes the Stormblood leitmotif.

Heavensward: Let's not kill Ysayle this time; she was killed for a bad reason, and would have interesting value to the story if she were still around for later parts of it. This has the side-benefit of making the Warring Triad storyline's attempt to sell Regula as a respectable person less terrible. Other than that, Heavensward's fine.

Stormblood: This one's really hard, because the main problem with Stormblood is baseline structural: it's essentially the exact same story told twice, once in Ala Mhigo and once in Othard. And yet, just removing either would cause enormous problems both in planning the future of the game (both Ala Mhigo and Othard introduce hugely important players) and in player appeal (people like both those places a lot). My best idea is basically to spice up the Ala Mhigan areas and make them more distinct from both each other and Yanxia. Let's use the existing Ala Mhigans and make each zone a reflection of where they grew up; have the Fringes be more religious to reflect Widargelt and the Rhalgr fanatics (since their holy sites are still around there), have the Peaks be where Raubahn's from and you can see both the principles and places that shaped him and perhaps the places where he feels he failed them (so maybe it's the most like Ul'dah, but you learn that's because Raubahn influenced Ul'dah rather than the other way around), and the Lochs is where Ilberd's from and it's still a simmering powder keg with regular outbreaks of violent resistance cells. That ARR change of introducing an Ala Mhigan theme also pays off here, as it's more immediately clear during the Imperial-occupied anthem that Garlemald co-opted the anthem rather than getting 'why is the Garlean theme playing everywhere' responses.

Shadowbringers: So I don't like Emet-Selch, which means he's the main thing I'd change here. But unlike Aveyond I actually respect other people's tastes and opinions, so while I could make more dramatic cuts to him, I don't really want to. Right now the angle I think I'd take is twofold:
A: Let's not have him be the founder of Garlemald. It cheapens Garlemald that their turn towards imperialism was from an external actor rather than entirely human choices, and it causes huge problems for Emet that the guy they're trying to paint as a tragic figure who had to make heavy, abstract but difficult choices also did extremely non-abstract terrible things that rightly shouldn't be lumped in with them.
B: A bit of a weird pitch, but: we're swapping the Warrior of Light and Hades. The WoL fight takes place down in Amaurot, and perhaps it's a mystery as to who actually built the place (Elidibus can deny it was him in the ending), meaning that Amaurot gets to make its pitch by itself rather than being tied so heavily to Emet. Emet still gets to throw down and go down in 5.3, where this time it's him that's the last Unsundered standing; he delays a bit before going even bigger on the angle of 'you failed to save the First by my reckoning, I'm gonna smash the First myself' that he does in the game anyway. In all honestly, this is mostly so that 5.0 ends in a more thematically consistent way than it currently does; it really bothers me that The Lightpocalypse Expansion ends in a completely incongruous figure of darkness, so let's give it the light-iest ending it can have.

Endwalker: I've thought about this, because I don't think Endwalker is perfect, but I think there are two ways to make it better. I've posted about them here before actually.
1. Lop off Elpis' start through to when Meteion freaks out; while I respect the direction of falling action, it completely obliterates the momentum the game has to go from Thavnair's apocalypse to 'land without problems full of pretty people'. Meteion freaking out means the place isn't entirely free of complications, but is still a drop in momentum, and still gives space to introduce all the relevant players, just in a more interesting context. It also means things are a little rushed, so people don't get the idea that we entirely influenced much of anything; we can still have scenes with Venat where she learns what's up, but things never really slow down enough for her to plausibly have more than a vague idea of who we are or why we're here. This frees up a bunch of space in the quest runtime, so let's instead give that to Garlemald to expand on that camp of indentured slaves off in the south that the MSQ sorta completely forgets about after introducing them. I used to think Ultima Thule could use the space too, but the Omicron questline does that just fine.
2. I don't have a problem with a lot of the things Labyrinthos' revisit does, but it doesn't do a lot with the space it's allocated, and while there is a ticking clock in the background, it's WAY in the background. We need essentially a 'Team Rocket' to raise the immediate stakes without raising the actual stakes. So I propose that the Illuminati break in to steal parts for their own spaceship/bunker, since they're exactly the type to already be working on that. Also, the Alexander questline is conspicuously near-absent in the 'celebrate everything you did' sequence.

Wait, what videos were these? I never saw a thread like that.

Also, the videos are over here! The last one I posted here was the one on NPC jobs (which I experimented with putting in General Discussion since it was less lore-ey). Since then I've done one on FFXIV's crossovers, a series on job lore (that's currently just the ones that started in FFI), and one on 'stuff we know about Allag that isn't the focus of any major stories'.