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.

[Graeham]

pretending to not understand English

We understanding the confusion. Guild it make the post in the Russian and the German script it confusing the chara that do not understand it. Is OK guild it translate it to help in teaching you true script where No Shadow God is winning. Main disgust of tread is in the English is why in English forum. Is like Tariq say is to bring back oppose to the narrator.

[Teraq]

That's okay, sweetheart. You're quite clearly upset we are capable of speaking multiple languages and are pointing out inconsistencies in the game's localization, particularly singling out the EN localization taking liberties the other two don't. After all, you've never had any argument to oppose, so better take that and turn it into "were just mad zodiark didnt win!!!!!!!!!!! light bad dark good!!!!!!" with your troll account. Disingenuity has always been your strong suit.

[Graeham]

That's okay, sweetheart.

The Ellwood is only new join member so is OK to forgive Tariq. As guild leader we is pardoning them. Will teach them way to translate the Russian script. We give them the link below.

Link

[Brinne]

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.

Still medication-posting, against my better judgment, for some reason.

(Also, obligatory side declaration of being That Person who not only thinks Endwalker Zenos ruled and was perfectly written, but thinks Garlemald's general fate was narratively appropropriate and while it could have used more screentime and time to breathe, a dedicated Garlemald expansion almost certainly wouldn't have fixed Endwalker's issues.)

Yeah, this basically hits on what made Shadowbringers both touching and compelling. Again, what came after is ultimately the result, I think, of the devs sitting down and deciding their priority for Endwalker was to deliver a message from Them, The Developers, to Us, The Players - rather than concentrating on their lore and worldbuilding as, well, a living and breathing world that encourages empathy in an outward direction, towards the representations of others who aren't us. Endwalker is almost breathtakingly inward-directed. In this way, when considering a global pandemic that caused a lot of widespread depression, the devs thought that "is life even worth living?" was one they wanted to tackle head on and answer with a clear, affirmative YES - for our sakes, the sakes of the ones sitting in their gaming chairs - rather than "the question is inherently invalid," which is the approach Shadowbringers took because Shadowbringers focused on the human elements of the in-universe characters.

In this way, Venat's speech on the bridge where she starts talking about feeling a "presence without" - that she thinks God is talking to her, more or less - ends up being true! The devs' voices are directly in her ear, guiding her actions from the priorities of a different reality altogether, rather than adhering to the logic of the one Venat actually resides in. This is why she had to Sunder, leading ultimately to the game we play. This is why she had to accept the challenge of the question and the "test" - to deliver that direct, affirmative YES to us, rather than possibly sidestepping the question and saving billions of lives around her.

From that perspective, the "good intentions" make sense. Unfortunately, though, for those who do care about and primarily see things from a worldbuilding, in-universe perspective for the story, a different message entirely gets created, because anything in a game would be expendable compared to that theme delivered to us humans on Earth, right? But when you take people not in the player in-group as people (as they were presented as of one (1) expansion prior), rather than simple thematic devices that exist for our sake, you form an extremely unfortunate contrapositive where there also exists a negative answer - THEY failed the test to prove they were "worthy to exist," unlike US/YOU. A failure state to the question of "are you worthy to exist" is created, and then worse, illustrated. And it's done so by suggesting problems of individual weakness, or even more unfortunately, sometimes, inherent racial or cultural problems on such a broad scale that it ends up providing grounds for the writing off of and subsequent mass murder of billions - to pave the way for people (us!!!) who will be worthy by contrast.

And not universally, but I suspect several depressed or struggling people are inclined to see the crafted existence of a failure state as "I would obviously be someone vulnerable to that failure state" and relate to its illustrations moreso than the heroes. People who bought into Shadowbringers's "humanize and validate everyone" approach would be thrown by "wait, since when is it okay to write off entire swaths of people as inherently unworthy to live, or by unideal emotional responses be 'shown' to be unworthy? That's really messed up?" And some weird people (hello) are generally brainbroken and tend to be inherently suspicious of the heroic fantasy tendency (and extremely ugly historical tendency) to otherize and invalidate people who don't belong in the POV characters' in-groups.

For Endwalker, well, it's a video game! They were never alive. They're just symbolic generalities. They're a vehicle to deliver that heartwarming, affirmative message to YOU! Don't worry about it! Their failure state could never apply to YOU! Even the people who failed to answer YES to the question are now rallying behind YOU and are happy that even if they couldn't, YOU are the one who gets the affirmation! And YOU are so great in being capable of answering YES to the question that you can even inspire and uplifts the others who couldn't do it for themselves! Happy ending for everyone.

I mean, I can see the good intent, but from my perspective - yeah, and my own values and ideology - that question will never ring true except as an excuse, intended or no, malicious or benevolent, even if born more from thoughtlessness than anything targeted - to create that contrapositive and the possibility of the failure state. Endwalker, in this regard, is wrong. Nobody is unworthy of existing. Nobody has to justify themselves. Nobody has to prove that it's okay for them to live. Nobody has the right to cut someone's life short or declare them dead ends, just because of a belief that they're heading towards a nebulous "bad outcome." Sometimes, in the broader world, decisions do have to be made - allocations of limited resources, or harm reduction, what have you - but Endwalker was completely uninterested in engaging with or trying to convince anyone who thinks that question being framed as a yes/no is ugly and invalid from the very beginning. It, well. It sure knew what it wanted to say, I suppose.

[Fiel_Tana]

And not universally, but I suspect several depressed people are inclined to see the crafted existence of a failure state as "I would obviously be someone vulnerable to that failure state" and relate to its illustrations moreso than the heroes. People who bought into Shadowbringers's "humanize and validate everyone" approach would be thrown by "wait, since when is it okay to write off entire swaths of people as inherently unworthy to live, or by unideal emotional responses be 'shown' to be unworthy? That's really messed up?" And some weird people (hello) are generally brainbroken and tend to be inherently suspicious of the heroic fantasy tendency (and extremely ugly historical tendency) to otherize and invalidate people who don't belong in the POV characters' in-groups.

For Endwalker, well, it's a video game! They were never alive. They're just symbolic generalities. They're a vehicle to deliver that heartwarming, affirmative message to YOU! Don't worry about it! Their failure state could never apply to YOU! Even the people who failed to answer YES to the question are now rallying behind YOU and are happy that even if they couldn't, YOU are the one who gets the affirmation! And YOU are so great in being capable of answering YES to the question that you can even inspire and uplifts the others who couldn't do it for themselves! Happy ending for everyone.

Thank you for writing this!

Yes! That was my experience of it. Was so hyped to play EW, looked forward to it for ages since FFXIV had become where I went to try to mend my brain, a place to relax, be social, think and be able to get away from thinking when needed, and be a bit happier. Endwalker hit me HARD and I spiralled badly back into a depression I was already struggling to get out of.

The question "Is life worth it?" being answered with "if you're the right type of person, with only acceptable emotions (absolutely NO sadness or fear!), in with the right crowd, in the right time and place. If not, then no, you're just not strong enough or what we consider worthy". Damn!

Not the message they wanted to send, but that's how it was received by me during play through. Add to it the gaslighting ("they deserved it", "there was no other way", "suffering is beautiful", "it hurt mommy more. Think of her pain!" etc.) and I spent literally months trying to crawl back out from under the dark storm cloud in my head.

I know that's not what the writers intended, EW was meant to be uplifting (others seemed to feel it was?), but for me, it was the direct opposite.

[MoofiaBossVal]

Thinking on it, it seems a lot of people really like Amaurot, despite the story boiling down to an us vs them scenario. I haven't seen anywhere near as much enthusiasm for any of the city states in FFXIV. Even Garlemald seems to have more fans. It seems that there has been a critical failure on part of FFXIV's narrative to get the audience to care about the survival of the protagonist's civilizations of Ul'dah/Gridania/Limsa over the antagonists' civilizations. Even more puzzling given that Amaurot is introduced in the last hour of ShB, whereas the player has been running around inside and fighting for Ul'dah, Gridania, Limsa, etc for hundreds of hours before. I wonder what makes the city states less sympathetic or endearing despite having orders of magnitude more screentime? Is it that Amaurot and Garlemald get cool cutscenes in the MSQ while the city states don't? Or perhaps those hundreds of hours spent in the city states creates a familiarity that makes those factions seem mundane? Or is it just impossible to beat the appeal of wizards who create fantastical creatures or men in cool judge armor with mecha and airships?

[Striker44]

Thinking on it, it seems a lot of people really like Amaurot, despite the story boiling down to an us vs them scenario. I haven't seen anywhere near as much enthusiasm for any of the city states in FFXIV. Even Garlemald seems to have more fans. It seems that there has been a critical failure on part of FFXIV's narrative to get the audience to care about the survival of the protagonist's civilizations of Ul'dah/Gridania/Limsa over the antagonists' civilizations. Even more puzzling given that Amaurot is introduced in the last hour of ShB, whereas the player has been running around inside and fighting for Ul'dah, Gridania, Limsa, etc for hundreds of hours before. I wonder what makes the city states less sympathetic or endearing despite having orders of magnitude more screentime? Is it that Amaurot and Garlemald get cool cutscenes in the MSQ while the city states don't? Or perhaps those hundreds of hours spent in the city states creates a familiarity that makes those factions seem mundane?

I wouldn't call it a "critical failure" of any sort whatsoever. Rather, I see it as a huge success in writing that saw the playerbase come to sympathize with groups that we had originally been "led" to despise. The writers also did a great job in helping players distinguish between the leaders of those civilizations - the Ascians, the Garlean Emperor, etc. - and the common people within them (it also helps when some of those leaders end up supporting us a la Gaius).

There's also the really important point that we didn't come to sympathize with those groups until they faced actual destruction. We shed tears for the Amaurotines because they had this near-utopian society that was suddenly facing destruction from a source they couldn't fathom and which they didn't cause (to our knowledge). We grew a soft spot for the Garleans when their capital was razed to the ground and all of our experiences with them were helping the commoners who suffered as a result. It's natural to sympathize with people in those situations. By contrast, there's never been any real threat to Ul'dah/Gridania/Limsa. There are "threats" such as the sahagin, ixal, etc., but there's never really any fear that they would succeed in destroying any of the major city-states.

I usually refrain from WoW comparisons, but I think there's an apt one here. The general WoW playerbase over the years didn't really have much "enthusiasm" for Teldrassil (Night Elf home). Even players who created Night Elves frequently got out of Teldrassil as quickly as possible and leveled elsewhere. But when the WoW writers had the Horde actively burn Teldrassil to the ground? Suddenly there was outrage. The point - it's simple human nature to have stronger feelings of sympathy for groups that are actually destroyed than for groups that are never really "threatened", and doubly so when you spend your time seeing how the common people in those groups suffer.

[KageTokage]

Liking the antagonists does not mean you endorse them succeeding/winning. They're just very prone to being more captivating then the good guys for a variety of reasons. Having all the cool technology/powers and/or deeper, more complex motivations are two reasons that I feel are particularly common.

In the case of the Ancients, my initial perception of Amaurot was as some kind of "too good to be true" scenario where Emet-Selch's longing for the days of old had painted a far more idealistic picture then reality. Come Endwalker...it really wasn't far off the mark. The world was not perfect, but they realized that and had several measures in place to help ensure that their society would not collapse in spite of everyone being possessed of nigh god-like powers. It's only when someone blatantly sidestepped protocol followed by another effectively shirking their duty to enable mankind to be "tested" for gods know what reason that their world fell apart.

Endwalker tried, but failed to convince me that the world of old was so critically flawed that it had to be destroyed for the greater good and that the present is somehow a net positive, which isn't really helped by XIV's story MSQ or otherwise spending much of its time going down the laundry list of reasons for why humanity sucks...and will likely continue doing so going forward as running into more human antagonists with questionable motivations is a given. The story interviews just really further drove home how insanely out of touch I was with the writers, given statements like how the Ancients were meant to be perceived as "scary" and that their happiness was "superficial" as though suffering is somehow a key component to "true" happiness despite the concept being highly subjective by nature.

[SaitoHikari]

-snip for char limit-

My guess? We're told a lot about Ul'dah/Gridania/Limsa, but the game doesn't really show us much about them from an organizational level. Even the individual Grand Companies might as well be completely indistinguishable in regards to your membership within them, though you used to be completely locked to whichever faction you joined in PvP until the devs realized that it was a pretty bad idea as far as faction-based PvP matching went. We know way, WAY more about the Ascians and the Legati more than the high ranking members of each Grand Company aside from the leaders, for instance. This disconnect is arguably part of why something like the whole Chasing Ivy arc in ARR was a bit hollow - you're just told that the Alliance is trying to root out a spy, and you don't get to do anything in regards to that until you're asked to confront her at the last moment. Then she escapes once, gets caught again, and her existence is completely forgotten after that aside from a passing mention from Varis (though we should have had a chance to question Emperor Varis about her). Even the Garleans don't really seem to address any differences between the Grand Companies either - Varis is literally the only Garlean in the entire game that acknowledges any differences between the Eorzean city-states.

It's also important to note that we also see a lot of the societal flaws within those three city-states, while we only distantly observe them at best when it comes to Amaurot and Garlemald, because both end up getting destroyed before we get to witness their flaws for ourselves.

I'd say people would actually care a lot more about Ul'dah/Limsa/Gridania if we were actually more involved in the Grand Companies that we're supposed to be members of. For years, I had been kicking around an idea about how Squadrons and the entire GC ranking system should be completely overhauled into a serious Final Fantasy Tactics-like minigame where you lead your entire Squadron into lore-relevant missions, complete with involved questlines that differ depending on your choice of Grand Company enlistment (although you'd get invitations to assist the other Grand Companies later). For example, if you were a part of the Malestrom, you'd get to see how diplomacy works between the pirates that you keep hearing so much about, and raid Garlean ships and deal with stuff like Sirens out at sea. Twin Adders could deal with stuff like cultists, thwarting Imperial patrols from Baelsar's Wall, and expeditions into the West Shroud. Immortal Flames could go into corruption and dealing with cultists on their side of the border.

At the same time, some Garleans could stand to address your GC rank more - some extra world building flavor to add weight to your own threat level beyond just a simple adventurer that happens to be allied with Eorzea and kicking everyone's asses for breakfast.