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

[AwesomeJr44]

Rine and Prince Nyanyan and Hairy Bolder can not be the Scallion. Must bring in good chara like the God King Solus and Scottish Fordola and Grynewhat except they wearing the mask so is mystery who they are. They are fire the old Scallion and say we Scallion now. They have edgy discussion in camp with the mask. Grynewhat say it is the birthday Where is marshmellow and candle cake. King Solus say HAHAHA we burn them all and blow out candle. And story it go to help the Garlemalding defeat the Corvo Attano and restore the monarch and steal the cheesie burger for hungry Garlemalding.

...what? I genuinely do not understand what he's saying anymore. Are you alright buddy? Your recent posts have been increasingly... strange... even for your posts.

[Rotpecra]

Endwalker wasn't as good as Shadowbringers.

[Vyrerus]

...what? I genuinely do not understand what he's saying anymore. Are you alright buddy? Your recent posts have been increasingly... strange... even for your posts.

Ryne and G'raha Tia and Hoary Boulder can't be Ascians. We must have good characters be Ascians. God King Solus, Kilt Wearing Fordola, and Grynewaht wearing masks so we don't know who they are. They fire the old Ascians and say we're the Ascians now. They have an edgy discussion in camp while wearing their masks. Grynewaht says, "It's my name day, where's my marshmallow cake covered in candles?" King Solus says, "Hahaha! We burnt it all and blew out the candles without you!" And the story pivots to helping Garlemald defeat Corvos, restore its emperor, and steal cheeseburgers to feed starving Garlemald.

I probably broke him by making him remember and fantasize about Miranda's ass from ME2. I heard some folks think he's Lyth using one of Theodric's other handles from another MMO discussion site. Unsure if true, but ah, oh well.

I was having fun "cyphering" the nonsense posts though.

[fulminating]

Is scallion scion rather than ascians? There’s been the no shadow god mentioned a few times before

[RobynDaBank]

I probably broke him by making him remember and fantasize about Miranda's ass from ME2.

As a straight woman, remembering her butt breaks me too.

[Amenara]

Imagine giving the Scions a break and actually meeting new characters without Scion assistance? Dunno why they say they will disband if you get together again and then say we shouldn't all group up together but you group up with 4 to 5 of the 7 Scions like it's another Tuesday.

I'd rather be traveling with Ryne or Nanamo or Hoary Boulder.

Let the WoL go on their own adventures without the Scions my goodness.

I would love to go on some adventures with Coultenet, Hoary Boulder, Ocher Boulder, Aenor, and Clemence. Let the non-main Scions get some development.

[Rosenstrauch]

I heard some folks think he's Lyth using one of Theodric's other handles from another MMO discussion site. Unsure if true, but ah, oh well.

It would be pretty funny if one of the folks who claimed everyone who argues with them was a sockpuppet of one guy they hate turned out to be doing exactly that. But from what I've seen there was a point where Graeham was actually posting normally, with neither his new gimmick of pretending to be a foreigner cliché nor the disdain for everyone around them that's been oozing from most of Lyth's posts for the past few years.

… Wow. It has been years now since Shadowbringers upended the Lore forum, hasn't it...

Anyways, my sub will be running out soon again, I think. Aside from pushing through the MSQ, I couldn't find any desire to touch any of Endwalker's new content. Maybe I'll catch up on Pandaemonium when 5.4 drops. I seriously hope whoever is writing it stops trying to shoehorn Chrono Trigger's rules into the setting. And having said that for the third time (or more?), I probably ought to explain.


Chrono Trigger is an old SNES JRPG that uses time travel to tell the story of a few unlikely teens and the small entourage of friends they make across time. There have been numerous attempts to analyze and document how Chrono Trigger (and its sequel, Chrono Cross) use time travel as a storytelling device, but to keep things simple, I won't go into too much detail. At the start of Chrono Trigger, three rules are set up in quick succession:

1. Time travel into the past (and later the future) is possible only through discreet portals linking two locations in different periods of time.
2. Your actions, or the actions of others derived from your actions, will change how events play out. History will go down a different track, and most people will remember this new history instead of the old one.
3. There are a few characters who are mostly exempt from Rule 2—this is assumed to be because they're time travelers. But if something should happen in the past that would prevent them from being born... *poof*.

The golden ending aside, Chrono Trigger is pretty good at keeping the story consistent with these rules. Chrono Cross muddies the water considerably in its efforts to explore the consequences of reckless and/or Machiavellian abuse of time travel, but even so. These are basically the rules of how time travel works in Chrono Trigger. So why do I keep saying that the writer for Pandaemonium is trying to shoehorn these rules into FFXIV? Well, FFXIV's rules are more or less as follows:

1. Time travel into the past or future is possible through the use of magicks created by or copied from Alexander, a God of Time whose creation is mired in mystery.
2. It is not possible to change your own past. If someone attempts to do so, it will become clear that their actions in the past had already happened.
3. The past may be set in stone, but the future is not. Whatever actions everyone takes in the present can alter the course of history in ways even Alexander can fail to understand.
4. Rule #2 is contradicted in the same scene establishing Rule #3, with the revelation that Alexander had determined it could alter the timeline in any number of ways. It chose not to do so not because this was impossible, but because the cost to the environment would far outweigh the benefits acting could bring.

That last one probably sounds like how Chrono Trigger operates. It's not, or at least not provably the same, because nobody has ever actually changed the past and observed the difference up to that point. But I digress.

Shadowbringers throws a wrench into the above by shoving a displaced Syrcus Tower from 200 years in the future into Lakeland, the Mor Dhona equivalent zone on the First. This could have worked in accordance with the rules above... except that the reason for Syrcus Tower and its inhabitant, G'raha Tia, arriving in the present was to prevent the Eighth Umbral Calamity, which started when the Garlean army deployed Black Rose, a chemical weapon that killed the Scions of the Seventh Dawn.

Also I should mention right now that Shadowbringers introduces some wacky time dilation into the setting. In reality, time dilations is a very real and observable effect: Time moves faster in low gravity environments, and slower in high gravity ones. This is consistent across the entire universe, but the difference is so small that it's insignificant to most of us.

In FFXIV, this idea gets stretched to the absurd: It's only been XX Months since Minfilia departed for the First from the player's perspective, but on the First it's revealed that 100 years have passed. But once you arrived, time started progressing more or less 1:1 with time on the Source. Not for any well defined in-universe reason, but simply because the writers needed time to progress linearly on both worlds for the plot to work. More on that later.

As early as 95 years after the tower's arrival on the First, G'raha had already set into motion events that would render this impossible: He seized Thancred's soul and called it to the First. Two years later he repeated this with Y'shtola and Urianger's souls, then again two more years later with Alphinaud and Alisaie's souls. This, coupled with the disappearance of the Warrior of Light at Year 100, resulted in history on the Source being severely altered. Without the Scions to serve as the vanguard, the Grand Companies and their Alliance were forced to back off and avoid an all out war with Garlemald. And because of the sudden disappearance of the Scions, Gaius van Baelsar received an unlikely ally in his efforts to halt the development of Black Rose. Without Black Rose as their ace in the hole, Varis and Elidibus were forced to back off from all out war as well. This eventually led to Black Rose's apparent elimination, the assassination of Varis by his own son, the retreat of Elidibus, and Garlemald collapsing into civil war in the wake of the Emperor's death.

And meanwhile, on the First, we killed the two remaining Unsundered Ascians, putting an end to the plot to Rejoin the First with the Source. The Eighth Umbral Calamity, as the future G'raha came from knew it, can no longer come to pass. That history was unmade, the people who were a part of it never having existed at all. This could have had ramifications for Syrcus Tower, for G'raha, and for the First at large, since so much of their history is dependent on that future now. It... didn't, and nobody in-universe is quite sure why.

The short story "An Unpromised Tomorrow" addresses that ambiguity in a way that's very difficult to square with the implicit rules above. You see, the story reveals that G'raha traveling to the past... did not unmake that future at all. So is it a time loop? Well, no, because the plot of Shadowbringers renders that impossible. So what the hell is going on? Well... multiverse theory. By traveling to the past and altering the timeline of events, G'raha has in fact created a second universe—one which has a shared past with the future he came from, but splits off at some point during the 100 years he spent on the First. Which is fucking weird.

I am 100% convinced this development only occurred because some writer was worried fans would hate G'raha for technically erasing a universe from existence. Obviously that's not the case—G'raha regularly tops or near tops fan favorite charts in every single region. But I digress.

So with Shadowbringers and "An Unpromised Tomorrow" throwing a big ol' wrench into the rules above, we have a new Rule 4: If you "succeed" in changing your past, what you've actually done is create a new timeline. This... completely flies in the face of the old Rule 4, but whatever. Onto Endwalker and Pandaemonium!

Endwalker throws in a lot of weird uses of the word "convergence" from Venat, as if there's actually two timelines converging into one. It also has Elidibus make the weird claim that he doesn't remember you being in Elpis, while also claiming he does, giving the impression that he has two sets of memories of the events of Pandaemonium. This is so goddamn out of left field and never comes up again outside of these two characters, that I suggest ignoring it entirely. It really only complicates the already convoluted time travel in an entirely needless fashion.

But the real "what the fuck" comes from Claudien, the NPC who kicks off your journey to Pandaemonium. Claudien comes into possession of a soul crystal carrying a plea for help in Pandaemonium, and so sends you into the past to investigate. You travel back in time to Elpis, promptly fall on a man who is obviously Elidibus, and join him in his romp through Pandaemonium. Upon your return to the present you tell Claudien of this, and he immediately concludes that you have successfully changed the past, even though all evidence present suggests otherwise. Claudien even cites this contradiction in his declaration!

This can work within the rules as above. It can't work the way Claudien thinks it does, at least not under the new rules. And Claudien is an unreliable narrator—he can be wrong.

But FFXIV's writers have a habit of using characters speculating as a means of delivering the writers' intent as exposition. Meaning it's likely Claudien is correct, for no reason other than writer fiat.

I have not actually touched the second chapter of Pandaemonium yet, but from what I've heard elsewhere Claudien is used again to deliver exposition-as-speculation about how your traveling to Elpis works. Something he literally can't observe, since it's happening on a different planet altogether. And from what I've seen of the ending, Pandaemonium suddenly appears in the present day. I am... curious to see whether that got an explanation, whether it's "Pandaemonium really did spontaneously appear in the present" or "We changed history such that Pandaemonium was always there, and only we aren't aware of that".

Because one of those is fucking weird and inexplicable, while the other is exactly how it works in Chrono Trigger.

... anyways, tl;dr: I guess my complaint is less "Stop doing it like Chrono Trigger" and more "Stop trying to ignore that you already broke the rule you're using". With an additional "Fuck off with this 'convergence' shit" for good measure.


Edit: Wow. Apparently I only bust out the text walls for time travel. I think I care about that shit way too much for my own good, honestly. So here's me talking about more time travel!

I am currently in the process of rewriting chapter 22 of Amidst the Ashes of Paradise, since I was unhappy with the way I'd written and published it two months ago. The old version, despite being the sendoff for the Ancients, notably failed to include any of them except Eumetis (who is no longer canon compliant because of the Twelve, apparently!), Venat, and Elidibus. The new chapter 22 includes Hermes and Pleione, along with Atlas's familiar Maia. Or it will include them once I've finished with it. So far I'm about halfway through my revisions. I also want to write a new epilogue showing the Ancients' arrival in Ultima Thule, mirroring/contrasting with the Scions' odyssey to that lonesome graveyard of stars, and to end the fic on a hopeful note for them—that they do have the potential to succeed, even if it's not guaranteed.

[aveyond-dreams]

Endwalker wasn't as good as Shadowbringers.

At this point I’m just waiting for the writing to revert back at least some sort of “average” baseline. Because as of now Forspoken still has FFXIV beat since that game didn’t try and preach to me the same way the aspiring philosophers who wrote Endwalker tried to.

[Spooky_Tanuki]

As predictable as the fakeouts in Ultima Thule and the power of friendship against Meteion?

Face it, if they opted to have Zodiark as the final boss, you would have just said something along the lines of "well of course, Zodiark was always going to be the final antagonist".

Well, the game outright says “you can bring us back but only if you succeed” so I don’t think we were actually meant to believe the whole main cast was getting killed off.

The Meteion fight got a bit cheesy, I’ll give you that. The Emet-Selch fight did it better.

[BRVV]

Don't forget we had Thancred disappear way before we were told we could bring everyone back.

A story without consequences... what a feat