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

[Teraq]

But the underlying reasons for that didn't begin with Endwalker - and I'm about to say something that's probably going to be really controversial in these parts, considering the whole 'Shadowbringers good, Endwalker bad' angle that some posters are arguing in this thread.

For all the praise Shadowbringers gets, people don't seem to recognize that the storytelling in Endwalker is 100% a direct consequence of the drastic shift in storytelling that began with Shadowbringers.

Namely, the COMPLETE shift from the main antagonists being the Garlean Empire (with some Ascian stuff sprinkled throughout) which was built up for all of level 1-70, to the whole Ancient stuff for levels 70-80, which ultimately ended with Garlemald being destroyed off-screen with zero input from the main cast, with the entire plot being completely hijacked by the Ancients (and Zenos being dragged along for the ride).
(good post snip)

I suppose I should bear some responsibility for the latest outburst of "MAN I MISS SHB!", though I must note that I only ever brought up its nuance on both sides of the main conflict compared to Endwalker's falling down yet another branch from the manichaean tree, not how award-worthy its story is in general (it isn't). Completely agree that the Garlemald storyline was shafted – 5.0 marked the moment when I became truly sick of Zenos as opposed to just "oh he's still alive I guess hmmmm ok", because I thought the Garlean/Ilsabardian politics in post-Stormblood had such potential, Varis had only just stepped into the limelight at long last! It's a shame this setting keeps coming up with good ideas and never really delivers on what they've built up.

They made such a rush job of both the Garlemald plot and the Ascian plot. And I mean Ascians that aren't named Emet-Selch.

They apparently rushed because they wanted to capitalize on the ShB momentum, and for what? They only had their writing "residential" for 7.0 this summer. So they… clumsily threw away their most compelling stories for a new plot they hadn't even defined yet? And so far I can't say it's been worth it, judging by the MSQ.

(By the way, you can write everything in a single long post by editing it to bypass the character limit. Just write everything you want to write, then cut enough to get the forums to accept your post, then edit it and paste what you just cut. I wouldn't be able to live without this ONE SIMPLE TRICK. Doctors hate her!)

And there were signs (and I don't recall if this was outright stated by the writers themselves, I distinctly remember something to this effect being mentioned at one point) that the writers actually weren't really sure how they wanted to wrap up the story in Endwalker until halfway through Shadowbringers too.

Yeah, I remember interviews around 5.3 saying they had basically been writing post-ShB things by the seat of the pants. They just knew they wanted the 5.3 fight to be Elidibus – but not really how. It shows. They had no idea what to do with the longest-standing antagonist of the H/Z arc and it shows.

Prior discussion has gone over every one of Venat's weird, thin, unconvincing excuses ad nauseum (what is the Echo? We just don't know), but what it comes down to is: once again, Venat agrees with the premise of Hermes's test and wants to see it carried out. She fundamentally chose to say nothing because she wanted to see mankind take on Meteion's challenge and prove her wrong. Proving that Meteion was wrong about the worth of Life as a universal concept is, to Venat, worth burning up trillions of individual lives. The second she says "we must prove ourselves equal to Hermes's test and prove man is worthy to exist," everything else is just mealy-mouthed spice on top because somewhere, deep down, both she and the writers know that it sounds really bad to flat out say "I think the Ancients should be hit with the Final Days actually" and spread a layer of very thin plausible deniability (of course, a good person would prioritize saving lives, and we want you to see Venat as a good person so mumblemumble) around it.

At its very core, Endwalker's story hinges on rejecting the notion, implied by Shadowbringers, that both sides were equal and had an equally good enough reason to fight: simply wanting to survive and exist, and fighting for that right. Both sides were people fighting for their loved ones – and it didn't matter how much better the world unsundered was or wasn't. The scenes immediately before and after the Amaurot dungeon are still IMO the most intense of Final Fantasy XIV. The humanization of the Ancients did so much heavy lifting for Shadowbringers's emotional impact, it is still inconceivable to me that they chose to go with a sequel that not only fundamentally downplays it, but pulls out a bunch of emotionally manipulative tricks to try and convince me to get on board with it. To throw away such a raw and gray conflict for a cliché as tired as "highly advanced precursor race brought down by their hubris – plucky little human so much better precisely because they aren't perfect" is almost offensive to me. Endwalker functions on the assumption that the sides of the conflict were not, in fact, equal, because the Ancients were fundamentally flawed – both morally and biologically – and this makes them deserving of their fate.

Oh, sure, it plays coy about it. We get to watch how much Venat suffers from the suffering she inflicts on everyone else but herself. We get to hear her make convoluted excuses for why her hands were SO TOTALLY TIED SHE DID THE ONLY THING SHE COULD!!!!. We get to see Hermes hermesing all over the place, which amounts to the game waving a giant "THE ANCIENTS WERE SO CALLOUS AND UNCARING AND UNFEELING" sign all throughout Elpis and wordlessly mouthing "DON'T YOU THINK THAT'S A LITTLE F'ED UP?" at us. The game both wants to play it up as a horrible tragedy for everyone involved which Venat had no choice but to follow through, while also having her take Hermes far more seriously than he deserves and uphold his stupid "test" wholeheartedly – and the rest of the story makes it unambiguous we are supposed to think she is right for it, for thinking her people unworthy of existing after having put them in a horrible situation through her own actions and selective inaction. Much like Schrodinger's Venat strives to avert the Final Days at the same time as she is making sure the time loop happens, you can't really have the plot try to take the Shadowbringers route of "omg they were all justified/right/wrong in their own right, it's so tragic!!!" while telling you out of the side of its mouth that one side was correct while the other had no future and were doomed to their shallow paradise (an assertion that is very debatable to begin with).

And worst of all: Venat gets no opposition in the narrative. Whatever balance ShB might have had in how it presented its core conflict is gone. By the time the full story is revealed in all its stupidity, Lahabrea and Elidibus are dead, and I'm not sure how to call the abomination we summon at the end of Ultima Thule, making excuses for a person that made him and his brethren into villains, suffering in solitude for twelve thousand years and ending up being killed by their close friend whom said person groomed into that role. That's okay, look at him blaming himself for being hit by Hermes's retcon beam and not… figuring it out by himself… somehow?… and that's his fault?? I guess????????

We are all dumber for experiencing Endwalker.

Congratulations, that's not what they were trying to do. At all. They were trying to undo the Sundering, which was not an act of creation, but an act of malformation.

It is also worth repeating – again – that the Convocation's original plan as we know it did not go beyond the third sacrifice, which explicitly would not wipe out all the wildlife/totally sapient humanoids/ANCIENT BABIES(?!?!). It is only in Endwalker that we are introduced to the slippery slope fallacy of "THEY WOULD HAVE SACRIFICED ALL FUTURE LIFE TO BRING BACK THE PAST!!!!" via a shoddily written parallel to strawman aliens and an atrocious scene with no basis in reality according to known backstory that can only be described as Venat suffering from a rapid-fire sequence of self-aggrandizing hallucinations. It's fine, though, there's emotional music playing in the background so everyone cried. She loved mankind (You™ in particular, though) so much, she had TRULY NO OTHER CHOICES!

The Convocation's goal is what it has always been: being the keepers of the planet which, from the Unsundered's POV, has been broken beyond recognition – hence, they are fixing it (they had TRULY NO OTHER CHOICES, tbh!). I'm not sure at which point this entails wiping out all of creation. On the Shards, perhaps? Yes, but hey, blame Venat for that one; she's the one who committed to a time loop that would annihilate at least 7 of them, and never cared enough to save them from the apocalypse.

Is this really the hill you want to die on?

I'd say mods are asleep at the wheel but that would imply they were even driving at some point. This bad faith caricature has been allowed to post since June in spite of multiple reports. Says a lot about how little SE cares, and how childish someone on the white knight side is.