Can 7.0 focus on a storyline without the philosophizing

[AwesomeJr44]

Crystal Exarch, the main NPC of ShB, gets shot at the beginning of the last act of the expansion

He survives with no long term injuries.

while at the same time we're suffering from our success of killing the lightwardens and are on the verge of dying and taking the entire world with us.

We survive with no long term injuries, and a power boost thanks to Ardbert.

As well as the twins being held captive by the Garleans

They suffer no long term consequences for this.

getting pushed out of our body and needing to rush to Zenos and stop him from killing people we know while inside us.

Zenos has an on-screen kill count of 0 while possessing us, and no one suffers long term consequences from this ordeal.

No one in my examples died, but that doesn't mean there weren't stakes. "Stakes" doesn't have to always mean someone dying as a consequence of them.

No one in your examples suffered long term negative consequences of any kind. When stakes consistently have no long term impact, they lose their effect.

Killing people left and right will do nothing but make the players stop caring about the characters

Refusing to inflict long term consequences consistently will do nothing but make players stop caring about the characters in any way outside of an incredibly superficial way, as they know that all of the protagonists will suffer no consequences ever.

That's the thing though. They aren't anti despair at all imo. They just don't deal with what the average person world most times so in that regard I can see the point made to some degree. Personally the Scions have an advantage imo because they have a solid group with all of each others backs. That alone will make things easier to deal with.

If you are writing a story about overcoming despair, you shouldn't make make your characters able to deal with events so easily that they are shrugged off within 5 minutes. If you want to write a story with characters like that, you need to consider a different theme.

Next again you cannot make the claim that there's nothing to overcome if it didn't happen in EW...come on man. Emets situation didn't happen in EW it happened before ARR and yet he didn't get his real conclusion til EW. Same example Uri and his things with Moen started in ARR yet didn't end until EW. Zenos didn't find his answer to his life until SB despite canonically being around since ARR and didn't see it fully fulfilled til end of EW. You have to understand that things linger. They take time to overcome. Some better at it than others. Even still EW was more about the World itself overcoming Despair, not just the Scions.

Emet's 'situation' occurred in SHB. You keep trying to shift the discussion to an in-universe timeline when such a timeline is irrelevant. Besides that, none of these examples were introduced in EW. They are all loose threads from older expansions that happened years ago. Like I said, if there is only examples from outside of Endwalker, then that means that Endwalker is using old events to act as a crutch when it should be setting up modern examples itself. There can be callbacks and references to older material, but typically you don't become uniquely immune to new examples of despair just because you experienced it a year ago in-universe.

Also odd you say Time Travel ruins 99% of games it touches...yet we wouldn't have ARR or anything after...without time travel. Unless you're of the mind that xiv has been ruined since ARR.

Time travel being added to the plot was a retroactive change. While it has tainted earlier expansions (literally everything we ever did was preordained), it does not ruin them retroactively.