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

[Teraq]

Have you heard the good word? Zodiark Trance is officially over! Some people are truly bent out of shape by the fact that some people dislike a piece of fiction, and their special waifu Veness in particular. All the more proof that we are doing something right if we can get the terminally online so mad because (checks notes) a story didn't live up to some people's expectations…?

Oh no. Anyway. Back to the usual schedule of taking Endwalker apart.

But I don't understand why you guys want to remain in the game, knowing it won't change

Personally, I've managed to play WoW for years without really caring about its story, just liking the game and doing stuff like achievements and rep grinds. This is pretty much how I treat FFXIV now. Ultimately, FFXIV's gearing system caters to my play style far better than WoW's, and I appreciate that.

Before ShB, I mildly liked the story, as in it made use of some tropes I usually enjoy, coming from ASOIAF and all that, and I was curious to see where it was going to go. During ShB, I loved it so much I was actively looking forward to any new bit of information they would give us. Jumped on live letters and trailers (which was what first made me realize some localization choices were interesting…), actually got the brain rot regarding certain characters, etc. 6.0 put an abrupt end to all that (well, to the "loving it" and the "looking forward" bits, not so much the brain rot yet, alas). The story arc I was always curious about ended in the most middling of ways, and the new story we've been getting so far isn't really gripping, which is why most people here most heavily rant about 6.0 rather than 6.x. There just… isn't much to talk about in 6.x.

The comparison has been made before, but to me it is very much an equivalent to GoT S8.

So story has basically become this background thing I am apathetic towards. And unfortunately, Endwalker has been making it harder and harder still to stay subbed for the gameplay, because of the patch delays, lack of battle content such as Eureka/Bozja… they've even taken to delaying some day 1 patch content like daily tribal quests to the .5 patches. None of this is helping. I've cancelled my subscription for now, but definitely not as a definitive thing. I'll see if I'm addicted enough to renew it instantly when it drops. (btw Blizzard please give back the buyable 30 days without a sub option)

knowing Square hasn't heard anyone's voice thus far...

Especially not when so many people have praised the expansion, both within and outside the forums.

I can speak only for myself here, but to me the point of this thread and discussion isn't so much getting SE to acknowledge us, because that ship feels like it has sailed some time ago (why can't you be happy with the bone we threw you in the Omega sidequest!), but moreso being visible for the sake of other players who might feel similarly. It feels like the criticism isn't just drowned out by the overwhelming positivity, but actively being pushed out of fandom spaces. It all feels very toxic, and I want to continue speaking up against it for as long as I still unfortunately care in spite of myself. This fandom isn't a monolith, we all like different things about the story and its characters and how we interpret them, and I find rather disturbing the narrative that you need to like X characters and Y story arc or else you simply aren't welcome.

Simply put, I used to love being in the fandom with everyone else during ShB. Now I've become one of those bad Ancient fans who were let down by Endwalker and didn't just swallow the characters of Hermes and Venat and the narrative of 6.0 like the rest of the Twitter Ancient stans – and it's come across rather clearly that people don't want people like me around anymore. Which is exactly why, personally, I stick around.

But uhhhhhh onto your actual question!

I have a weird question for you guys.

...is there anything you guys liked about Endwalker?

If we're talking strictly 6.0 MSQ, Garlemald is IMO the best part once the dust has settled. There are two other parts I was excited about playing through the story: Thavnair 2.0 and Elpis. I thought things were finally ramping up good in Thavnair 2.0: much like how I mourned StB's Garlemald patch storyline but still thought ShB was an acceptable alternative that definitely made up for it, Thavnair 2.0 had me thinking "I guess I could be okay with them unceremoniously tossing out the Ascian and Zodiark storyline if the Final Days are this hype with high stakes for everyone". Spoiler alert: it kind of was just Thavnair being hype. I would have loved this to have deaths, be an actual honest to god near-extinction event for humanity like it was for the Ancients back then, have the cities we know and love hit with the full brunt of despair. Screams and skies turning red in Sharlayan. But it just ended up being a fairly underwhelming "apocalypse". Thavnair 2.0 is this tribute to how I could have liked Endwalker had it gone into that direction. Great idea and introduction, and then "that's it?".
As for Elpis, boy. I loved all the world building and being actually able to talk to Ancients. It's gorgeous. I love the BGM too. It's just a bit of a shame it happened to come with a story attached, you know? And what a story! What a story…

No, after all is said and done, I think Garlemald holds up the best still. It felt incredibly human, seeing all those exhausted survivors of horror, and to get the POV of Garlean civilians hating you or being terrified, because they grew up in a particular culture and war is ugly, but at the end of the day they're all people. It's properly depressing, and I mean this in a good way. It feels like a teaser of what I wish would have been explored more with the rest of Ilsabard and the Ancients/Ascians. The soup scene made me break down, and then came the mass tempering, and that dinner scene (though as pointed out by Rosen, Fandaniel kidnapping us made absolutely zero sense, a particularly egregious instance of "why did nobody do this any sooner?"), followed by the quest… that was so good, but then it… fizzled out… rather pointlessly? Man, I think that if I were to pinpoint the exact moment where Endwalker jumped the shark boldly enough to make Mitron blush, it would be the tail end of Garlemald culminating in us just casually teleporting to the moon like that. I thought the plot might get back up on its feet then, but it was actually all downhill from there.
But even its anticlimactic ending can't manage to ruin how I feel about 90% of the level 83 Garlemald MSQ. It was a poignant setting.

Beyond 6.0 MSQ, of course, I have Pandaemonium. I was so expecting more Ancient bashing I was actually very surprised to find out Tier 2 wasn't. I mean, of course, some people will still take away "See? I told you these people were irredeemable and deserved to die!!" from it, but they would whatever the circumstances anyway. I loved getting more insight in their society, I loved seeing Convocation members at work (wow, who could have thought they would be able to handle sensitive affairs, even stepping out of their lofty amaurotian offices to do so?), I loved Athena as soon as she opened her mouth to snark and be a psychopath, I loved Lahabrea being cold but ultimately good… basically, so far, Pandaemonium has been proving a lot of my head canons on Ancients right; it is feeding me and I am loving it.
Which is why I entirely expect it to go off the rails in Tier 3 into full Venat-riding mode, because Endwalker has taught me not to get my hopes up. Hope, after all, is only for certain people. So, so much would go wrong in Tier 3, and undo all the good will the first two tiers have garnered so far.
Also, as a shameless unabashed Elidibus simp, I am still literally unable to get over the sentiment of we could have had so much more of this in the MSQ had they bothered to care.

Yyyup. One patch was all it took to ruin the Eden story for me because I was genuinely interested in learning about Eden itself and it all went out the window as soon as Mitron appeared. Felt so lazy, "sike! it was ascians all along". Praying the last tier of Pandaemonium won't take a nosedive with its story too.

I felt the exact opposite; I couldn't be bothered with Eden until they dangled Ascians in front of me and my addled brains instantly turned on and my eyes lit up, because I am a completely honest caricature of myself.

In any case, I think both of us should probably be bracing ourselves for 6.4.

Not like "most" players liking it is especially hard to achieve. Most players in this game do not look at a story with any kind of critical eye, they do exactly what the company wants from them, buy product, consume product, get excited for next product.

All Endwalker really needed to do for a 9/10 after the ShB hype machine was give them their favourite characters from previous expansions to fangirl/fanboy over, some pretty visuals to look at, grand speeches about saving the world and some kind of feel good "message" that ties everything together neatly while actually ending the Hydaelyn/Zodiark story.

At least Game of Thrones fans weren't as hostile to the idea that yeah, they dropped the ball in a pretty major way when it came to the finale. Here we get told we skipped cutscenes or goodness knows whatever else a certain crowd often resorts to.

The same crowd who, despite their protesting, would have loved any other alternate ending to Endwalker so long as it had official sanction by Yoshi. The inverse of the logic they are increasingly desperate to use in order to silence those of us who think for ourselves. They already proved as much is the case time and time again when the groupthink "corrected" for stuff like people calling out Menphina's design, only for the story then to switch to everyone somehow loving it?

Basically both of these. I'd love to see an alternate timeline in which Endwalker went a very different way. I am fairly sure most people would praise its story, writing and characters regardless. I am willing to bet money that the people going "Hydaelyn not being 100% good would have been cliché and predictable!!!!" would have reacted with "I love that they subverted expectations of the pure goddess of light and good being 100% good because that would have been so cliché and predictable!!!". Cash money.

Yes they do because not ever sentence begins with "in my opinion". Isn't that the rules some have on posts in this thread? Oh it's just if you DIDN'T like EW.
Secondly i don't know what it is with you claiming that we think we are in the majority. From my perspective we are all fully aware that we are the minority.

No, posts only come under scrutiny when they come from a bad poster with bad opinions of Final Fantasy Fourteen: Endwalker.

Such as aveyond-dreams. aveyond-dreams is a very bad poster with certifiably bad opinions, and you need to be reminded he is bad once every few pages. Quick, aveyond-dreams posted something that is perfectly on topic as it is a direct continuation of the discussion on the previous page! He urgently needs to be mocked!

All I know is I'd rather be living the alternate timeline where Bozja wasn't ended prematurely and we received its Dalmasca arc complete with more FFXII and Ivalice themed outfits.

The treatment of Ivalice is another instance where I wish we could know everything about what went on behind the scenes. While I personally have never been in love with Ivalice and its storylines in FFXIV, ShB ending its whole story unceremoniously in field notes was… certainly… something. Just another questionable story-telling decision in ShB patches that foretold the mess that was coming.

As for Hildibrand… I enjoyed the ARR quests, the first time around. HW and StB were a bit of a blur. EW, so far, feels like XD RANDOM stuff happening rather than an actual storyline like the ARR quests.
Gating the relic weapons behind Hildibrand is entirely unnecessary. Literally the only "story hook" there is that you stumble upon Godbert on the moon. His motivation for making the weapons is completely unrelated to the Hildibrand quest storyline, as it is in reaction to the Final Days. I struggle to think of a good reason why this should be gated behind everything Hildibrand, other than a cynical "please do this content you haven't done and stay subbed!" decision.

[AwesomeJr44]

Such as aveyond-dreams. aveyond-dreams is a very bad poster with certifiably bad opinions, and you need to be reminded he is bad once every few pages. Quick, aveyond-dreams posted something that is perfectly on topic as it is a direct continuation of the discussion on the previous page! He urgently needs to be mocked!

Careful, if you point out how Aveyond is held to a different standard than everyone else, you'll be called a simp for it.

All I know is I'd rather be living the alternate timeline where Bozja wasn't ended prematurely and we received its Dalmasca arc complete with more FFXII and Ivalice themed outfits. Far as I'm concerned this expansion has permanently soured me on anything Hildibrand-related. If I had to choose between having a joke of a game and a one that takes itself seriously then the choice is obvious.

I still maintain that the optimal way to order the expansions would have been: ARR -> HW -> SB -> Cancelled Garlemald Expansion -> SHB -> EW, and I think if they started Bozja in said Garlemald expansion, they could have continued it in SHB and it would have had the time to be properly wrapped up instead of having to be 'finished' through exposition in the field notes.

This. Time loops suck balls. It only worked in the Alexander raids because it was self contained. To intentionally merc your own people to preserve a time loop? Pretty frickin' stupid.

Time travel in stories is nearly always bad, regardless of what type of time travel it is. It's just too hard of a topic to write well, and most people who attempt it fail. Time loops still are one of the worst forms of it though.

It's funny how time after time aveyond leaves a message where he has his opinion on something and has nothing to do with the current discussion.

You're ignoring literally everyone else who does this. If one person's opinion is worthless, then why is everyone else's opinions worth hearing?

We did technically finish Bozja's story... in post-it notes.

And it wasn't a good way of telling the ending.

It does kind of bug me a little that we're essentially being denied both a trial storyline and a relic storyline due to them now being baked into the MSQ and Hildibrand respectively.

I think that having trials in the MSQ patch quests is a good idea... if we're getting something worthwhile in exchange for the missing trial storyline. Tataru's Grand Waste of Time isn't cutting it. As for Hildibrand, it should never have been tied to the relics.

[Midareyukki]

And it wasn't a good way of telling the ending.

Indeed it was not. It's not just that the story itself was kind of trash (zero consequences for the bad guys except one dude, all the consequences on our side while the Warrior of Light holds a sign saying "IRRELEVANT"), the method of storytelling is trash.

This is one of the things that led to FF13 and FF15 being poorly received. Plot points should not be resolved in fluff text hidden away somewhere.

[MikkoAkure]

All I know is I'd rather be living the alternate timeline where Bozja wasn't ended prematurely and we received its Dalmasca arc complete with more FFXII and Ivalice themed outfits. Far as I'm concerned this expansion has permanently soured me on anything Hildibrand-related. If I had to choose between having a joke of a game and a one that takes itself seriously then the choice is obvious.

Bozja ended in patch 5.55. Were they supposed to keep going and invent x.6 patch just to satisfy you?

Bozja ends with Bozja being liberated. There's literally nothing more to do in Bozja with it being in the last patch of ShB and there wasn't any room to add more if there was any. Matsuno even said the Bozja part is finished.

The treatment of Ivalice is another instance where I wish we could know everything about what went on behind the scenes. While I personally have never been in love with Ivalice and its storylines in FFXIV, ShB ending its whole story unceremoniously in field notes was… certainly… something. Just another questionable story-telling decision in ShB patches that foretold the mess that was coming.

We already know some of the behind the scenes.

Yoshi-P and Matsuno said in an interview that the field notes weren't written in a panic and that was the intention. What probably wasn't the intention was not continuing the story. But from what Matsuno has said on twitter and in the interview, it seems that a combination of factors from the storyline not being well liked in Japan (the vague part we don't know), covid, and the idea that players are exhausted of war stories led to the story being left on "to be continued". Matsuno doesn't want a war of liberation arc for Dalmasca so we're not going to get it.

They've already said what the story would be like if they come back to it, and it would be similar to the first part of Bozja with a solo-playthrough and a trial.

[Midareyukki]

Bozja ended in patch 5.55. Were they supposed to keep going and invent x.6 patch just to satisfy you?

Bozja ends with Bozja being liberated. There's literally nothing more to do in Bozja with it being in the last patch of ShB and there wasn't any room to add more if there was any. Matsuno even said the Bozja part is finished.

In fairness, the plotline of Bozja continues in the Field Notes. It does not end in the cutscenes. The arc does, but the story doesn't.

Pagaga and Lyon walk around.
No word on Clarricie afaik.
Sicinius is scott free after Lyon broke him out of Dalmasca.
Gabranth "dies" but gets transplanted onto a clone. To the public, the death is staged as Lyon having murdered him.
Zero consequences for pretty much everyone that wasn't Menenius.

All of those characters save for Gabranth got introduced in Bozja proper and had a major role there. Gabranth was introduced in the preceeding arc, the Ivalice Raids, but has more development in Bozja than he ever does in Ivalice.

And right now it's left open-ended, with Gabranth musing on how he expected Bajsaljen to make the Bozjan constitution in the same vein as the Garlean rule and his own ideals (with maybe a lot less murder), and being seen walking around in Dalmasca despite being considered dead.

There's no closure due to that. They did say that if they ever came back to this story, it'd feature Dalmasca, however.

[Atelier-Bagur]

In fairness, the plotline of Bozja continues in the Field Notes. It does not end in the cutscenes. The arc does, but the story doesn't.

Pagaga and Lyon walk around.
No word on Clarricie afaik.
Sicinius is scott free after Lyon broke him out of Dalmasca.
Gabranth "dies" but gets transplanted onto a clone. To the public, the death is staged as Lyon having murdered him.
Zero consequences for pretty much everyone that wasn't Menenius.

All of those characters save for Gabranth got introduced in Bozja proper and had a major role there. Gabranth was introduced in the preceeding arc, the Ivalice Raids, but has more development in Bozja than he ever does in Ivalice.

And right now it's left open-ended, with Gabranth musing on how he expected Bajsaljen to make the Bozjan constitution in the same vein as the Garlean rule and his own ideals (with maybe a lot less murder), and being seen walking around in Dalmasca despite being considered dead.

There's no closure due to that. They did say that if they ever came back to this story, it'd feature Dalmasca, however.

and honestly they should hold on to that sorta not sorta promise. It really sucks how Bozja ended prematurely

[Midareyukki]

and honestly they should hold on to that sorta not sorta promise. It really sucks how Bozja ended prematurely

Likely happened due to the Pandemic :T We know they intended for at least one more instance, so some stuff had to be cut back. How much of it actually was and how much of it got relegated to the Field Notes we don't know, of course.

I just wonder about that weird hole left with Gabranth's future. Because it's okay if they leave it at that imo... but they do point out that Gabranth is being spotted around in Dalmasca. Is he a free man? Is he plotting something?

That and my only personal wish is bringing justice against Sicinius, but that in itself really would require a fair bit "more" out of them.

Regardless o: Whether they will or won't come back to this story and set it in Dalmasca, they did say it wouldn't be anywhere during 6.0. So we shouldn't be expecting anything further in this cycle.

[SOLOUR]

Have you heard the good word? Zodiark Trance is officially over! Some people are truly bent out of shape by the fact that some people dislike a piece of fiction, and their special waifu Veness in particular. All the more proof that we are doing something right if we can get the terminally online so mad because (checks notes) a story didn't live up to some people's expectations…?

Oh no. Anyway. Back to the usual schedule of taking Endwalker apart.

Care to drop another link to the discord?