Quote Originally Posted by Teraq View Post
They just stayed in their meager little echo chamber parroting their ridiculous claims and headcanons
Like your discord you're promoting? If you guys are so upset with the story because of how it treated the Ancients, to the point where you make a discord to talk about her in a safe space even after quitting from the game, then you guys must be real Warriors of Light because Hydaelyn is living rent-free in your head.



Anyhow, I'm not sure what multiple people making often unhinged tirades about how "Venat is actually evil" accomplishes at this point over a year later except to point out the clumsiness of the writing of Endwalker, which almost everyone agrees on anyway. This thread now just feels like a drawn-out episode of The Game Theorists.


I'm not going to argue that the writing isn't awkward because it is, but the whole "Hydaelyn is a genocidal maniac and is the most evil villain in Final Fantasy" angle is an alternative take and obviously not the writers' intention if in-game interactions with her don't end up reflecting that and they gave her her own image song. Despite the fact that we fight both her and Zodiark, Zodiark ended up getting represented as a grotesque tentacle monster with comedically-oversized demonic horns, which generally isn't an artistic choice you go for when you make a character that is supposed to be related to or on the side of "good". While Shadowbringers had a bunch of evil light and angelic imagery, we have no other context for something such as him being a good thing and it's definitely a questionable design choice for your world's god. I would've expected a dark, but equally beautiful Amano design comparable to Hydaelyn but wielding a giant shield. But it works in a meta-sense if you're trying to evoke certain feelings in the players and compare it to Hydaelyn later on.

The plot around Venat ended up being needlessly convoluted when all it required was for us to stay the same line of of events we thought we had in Shadowbringers, which would have had the exact same result at the end of Endwalker anyway. It's also full of confusing plot holes like her whole explanation of not telling the Convocation because "Hermes will go crazy and refuse to offer his insight into Dynamis for Zodiark, who's still needed anyway". And we're still missing swathes of information like the state of the world and the thoughts of the general populace right before the Sundering.

But with all the mess, I don't believe they were trying to make her something else. There's no conspiracy so I don't know what you're all going on about except for bad writing, which again, everyone already agrees with.


Quote Originally Posted by Teraq View Post
Such is the power of Schrodinger's Venat: both trying to prevent the Final Days and preserve the timeline of her brave little spark, even though both are mutually exclusive – this way you can plausibly argue in her favor whatever you are arguing, and she ends up looking great! I love it.
She did need to do both though and neither is mutually exclusive. If Zodiark didn't exist, neither would our timeline and Eitherys would've been destroyed by the Final Days. The splinter in Amaurotine society happened after the 2nd sacrifice. Zodiark is still needed to keep the Final Days at bay and to keep her precious life alive. What would you have expected her to do? And what would the Ancients have done even if they had known about Endsinger hanging out in space? It was already established that they couldn't accomplish much against dynamis and that Zodiark's protection was the extent of their capabilities so they couldn't have "gathered the team" and shot out into space to fight her. The reason is definitely flimsy and it would've been nice if they expanded upon it, but that's the reason the characters in-universe gave who know more about how their universe works than we do.

And if Venat was so wrong about everything and the Convocation/Ascians were right, then why did Emet-Selch rescue us against Elidibus, leading us to kill him and end all possible efforts for a Rejoining and the continuation of his people and society?


The writing for Endwalker and the journey from point A to point B was definitely clumsy at best but bad writing doesn't immediately mean that certain characters were designed to be bad. Or that the writers are purposefully wronging a fictitious group of people who they were responsible for anyway considering Emet-Selch, Venat, the Ancients, and all of their motivations and events came out of the same heads. If this were an actual historical story with real people, things would suspicious for Venat. But this is a fictional story with fictional characters and the most plausible reason for Venat's actions is that her story is full of plot holes while attempting to treat her as a fully sympathetic yet more complicated character and not that they intended on making her genocidal on purpose, so I'm more willing to read the intent of the character than the implications.

Everything felt very rushed and the finale to the decade-long story was quickly wrapped up in an x.0 patch when all other stories get extended to x.3 and don't have as many loose threads to tie up at once. The writers then decided to plunge into time travel, which NEVER EVER works for a story unless it was written specifically for that from the very beginning and all time travel rules are standardized and followed to the letter. The moon didn't get the utilization it deserved based on the hype on promotional material and half of the zone ended up being an oversized rabbit bunker. Some things ended up getting bad explanations like Hydaelyn's "travelers ward" or not getting explained at all like the aforementioned situation before the Sundering.

The Ancients didn't even exist in the original story and the whole game has been the writers trying to build the chocobo cart while they were driving it. They had to come up with a reason why the Ascians were doing what they were doing years after they had already been in the game doing bad things, and make it something people to empathize with to make a compelling villain. Then they had to rectify that with the secret villain they had apparently to have because they mentioned the last boss wasn't meant to be Hydaelyn or Zodiark and all of these moving pieces ended up being too much for them to put together a story that satisfied everyone and doesn't have gaping wide plot holes that we're "not supposed to think too hard about".

Basically everything around Venat and a lot around the events leading up to the Sundering should have been better explained, given better motivations, or should have been completely rewritten in order to have a fully cohesive story. As neat as Elpis was and seeing the big 3, the story around and in it was a complete mess and led to this thread getting as long as it has.


All that said, the expansion was still enjoyable enough. The mini-games at the very beginning and the end of the Garlemald arc were really fun. The characters were done really well. Parts of the story made me scratch my head, but it didn't meander around as much as some other expansions, mostly having 1 main story to tell while hitting Garlemald on the way that didn't feel out of the way.

If the playerbase at large agreed with you that EW was objectively bad and that Reddit and Twitter are outliers, why does the 3rd post in this thread have nearly double the amount of likes as the OP when it disagrees with the OP?