[6.0 - 6.4 Spoilers] An interesting video detailing Venat's polarizing reception

[Absimiliard]

...yes it does. Yoko Taro games in general do that a lot, to the point where even the raids he wrote for FFXIV do it at least twice; I'd say unreliable narration might be the main hallmark of his storytelling style through the years. Automata might even be the worst about it, one of the most common plot beats in Automata is 'learning someone lied to us both as characters and people'. Perhaps one of the big turns of the back end of Automata is when we finally get to play as a character that's being honest to both us and themselves.

I haven't played Reincarnation (if you have that would be a wonderful asset to bring to the table here), but from what I've been told and learned about Mama, she's... well, also a liar, albeit mainly in the context of the actual story of the game. When it comes to the context of the collab--basically, a story she tells--is that she's flowery, but detached: she'll big up this story, but it's ultimately second-hand, from a person who cares more about dramatics than veracity. Basically, it's someone telling us Emet's story, as told by Emet... which is how we got it in the first place. So it contains no new information, and anything that appears new could easily be explained as Mama Being Fancy.

I have indeed had the misfortune of playing NieR Re[in]carnation. It's... aight, yeah, I'mma just be real; it's not great. I really only took it up because I had a feeling they'd shove some lore over there. And sure enough, they did.

I suspect I wasn't clear enough in my assertion regarding NieR Re[in]carnation's lack of the unreliable narrator trope. Allow me to elaborate briefly. Being the type of game it is, there's a lot more telling than there is show. You'll have instances where the narration hams it up, but the game is always very clear on what is actual narration of events versus what is not. You've been correctly informed regarding Mama's predilection for deception within the context of the game's main story, but the same is not true when she is serving purely as a narrator. Flowery words and dramatics are likewise for the most part absent from the crossover event's narration.

So here's the deal. For the most part you are correct in that it does introduce anything new, save one detail: the state of the sundered. As shown in the image above, there's really no mincing words. We get a brief example of what their attempts at communication were supposed to have been like, a line clearly meant to reflect Emet-Selch's feelings on what they'd become (i.e. malformed creatures), and finally a direct statement regarding the Sundering's immediate fallout for those affected by it. The entire crossover event is handled pretty much the same way. Things are kept consistent and clear, with easily recognized lines drawn between what is Emet-Selch's impression of something, what Emet-Selch is doing, and what simply is.

There's some extra stuff in the descriptions of some items, but none of it is of any real consequence. Mostly just neat little tidbits that have no real bearing on anything.

From a meta standpoint, the dialogue from NieR may have been written by FFXIV's writers, but I don't think it was necessarily written for FFXIV's audience and meant to be a complete 1:1 retelling of events. Unless one of them outright says that the NieR mobile game overwrites Shadowbringers, I'd hesitate to consider anything that pops up in another game as pure and completely accurate canon. Especially since it appears to have just been a 2-panel blurb to inform players of a different game the context for a crossover event of something they're maybe unfamiliar with.

The crossover event contains several more panels. Those were simply the two most relevant to the topic at hand. Incidentally, the crossover actually came out several months into Endwalker's life.

You also have to remember that Emet-Selch also refuses to recognize the sundered as actual people and he uses the same "malformed creatures" line in regards to his own grandson. Part of the Echo is being able to connect your soul to the wavelength of another, which I would find difficult if you don't view the other side as human.

Nothing in the game, to my knowledge anyway, indicates your view of a person (or a non-person, so long as they have a soul and serviceable intelligence) has anything to do with whether or not the Echo will work on them.

I took from this that the people sundered had definitely lost part of themselves, but they still had "fragments and fleeting memories". They felt like they were missing something and painted it onto the walls. Nothing in Emet-Selch's speech here in the game suggests that immediately following the Sundering, people were blobs who couldn't speak.

Cave paintings are quite old irl, the oldest we've found being something like 64,000 years I think? They suspect it was the work of a Neanderthal. Our ancestors and their cousins were by no means dumb for the eras in which they lived, but they possessed barely a fraction of the intellectual advancements we enjoy today. One can be of extremely primitive intelligence and still manage to convert the images in their head into art or hum a tune. Heck, even chimpanzees have demonstrated the capacity for drawing.

In any case, I do recall it being said in Shadowbringers the Sundering split all attributes of its victims, not just their physical and aetherial mass. To quote the EN localization, "strength, intelligence, the soul itself--all is halved." Getting all that split fourteen ways is awfully excessive, even for something as advanced as an ancient. How could they not be reduced to mere shells? Doesn't mean they would remain that way. They did rebuild with time. They invented new languages, came up with new forms of art, and even worked out types of magic they were capable of using. Having said this, the key word is time. Who is to say that cave painting was made by the original Sundered? Or even if it was, would that in any way diminish the suffering an event like the Sundering would inflict on those first created by it?

I suppose, to sum things up:
I'm not here to argue on behalf of NieR Re[in]carnation or what have you. I popped in to bring to light something which contains potentially relevant information for the topic at hand, which I believe supports the premise of the Sundering indeed being comparable to, if not in some ways worse than, death. To connect this back to the prior discussion which I seem to have unintentionally derailed: death of personality is death all the same, to many people. Having your body and soul disassembled and reconstituted as something new, even should it somehow wind up with your face or even fragments of your memories, does not mean that thing is you.

Death in Final Fantasy XIV means returning to the lifestream wherein your soul will either be cleansed and reincarnated or broken down into its constituent aether and be counted amongst the building blocks of a new soul. Either way, you're not you anymore. The cleansing process removes your memories, save those burned deep into your soul (as by the Final Days or Kairos). The dissolution process presumably just gets rid of you entirely, but they weren't really clear on how that works. It's just a thing that can happen.

The Sundering split people, physically and spiritually, into fourteen pieces. FFXIV itself tells us these fourteen shards retained little of anything save their residual memories of the Final Days and seemingly bits and pieces of information from the world before. In other words, the Sundered were new people. They were not a continuation of the ancients from which they were created. For practical purposes this is basically a trip to the lifestream with extra steps and some really nasty side effects.

[Cleretic]

So here's the deal. For the most part you are correct in that it does introduce anything new, save one detail: the state of the sundered. As shown in the image above, there's really no mincing words. We get a brief example of what their attempts at communication were supposed to have been like, a line clearly meant to reflect Emet-Selch's feelings on what they'd become (i.e. malformed creatures), and finally a direct statement regarding the Sundering's immediate fallout for those affected by it. The entire crossover event is handled pretty much the same way. Things are kept consistent and clear, with easily recognized lines drawn between what is Emet-Selch's impression of something, what Emet-Selch is doing, and what simply is.

Yeah, none of that reads to me as a reliable piece of intel, because it's being told through the lenses of two different characters who are, to be brief, massive drama queens. Not only that, but both Nier and FFXIV are happy to twist and accentuate representation even to the point of hiding factual truths for the sake of underlining emotional truths; my favorite example there is the Tsukuyomi fight, but it's also been used in the Ancients' story through way of Venat's post-Elpis scene.

Basically, I don't see that story as having new facts: I see it as having new embellishments.

Now, the interesting thing that one could bring up here was the Twelve. We get their story several degrees removed from that origin point as well, but there are new factual pieces to that 'immediate post-sundering' time, if that's what you care about: namely, the Twelve's yokes. These were things that needed overseeing in the immediate wake of the sundering; therefore, not only can we take as a given that concepts like glaciers, the tides, and time existed, but that they were at that point shaky enough to need some guiding hands to make sure things didn't fall apart. Most of those yokes are largely focused on natural or abstract phenomena, although they all have elements relating to man in some way, but most interesting to me is Byregot: construction and 'fortifying the works of man' only make sense if people are actually building things, which suggests to me an element of stability and advancement that isn't there in Emet's retelling. (And of course, that element's not there in Emet's retelling because he doesn't really care; both his and Mama's retellings of it focus on his emotional pain, and his feelings don't care if they're building things.)

[Absimiliard]

Yeah, none of that reads to me as a reliable piece of intel, because it's being told through the lenses of two different characters who are, to be brief, massive drama queens. Not only that, but both Nier and FFXIV are happy to twist and accentuate representation even to the point of hiding factual truths for the sake of underlining emotional truths; my favorite example there is the Tsukuyomi fight, but it's also been used in the Ancients' story through way of Venat's post-Elpis scene.

Once again, Mama's drama queen tendencies only show through when she is actively taking part in the story. Instances of her acting solely as a narrator, of which there are several, see those elements completely removed. Additionally, the FFXIV crossover is, and I stress this, not part of NieR Re[in]carnation's storyline. It's simply a thing that is there in some form, and while presumably also canon to that world (as the NieR raids were on FFXIV's end, per the terms both teams agreed to), it's not something relevant to game's overarching plot at all. It's also not really being told from Emet-Selch's point of view. He is the character upon which the story focuses, but he plays no part in its actual telling outside of being one of several "actors" involved. That was kinda their intention with the crossover - it was to be his story, not necessarily that of the ancients. Not a story he participates in telling, but the story of his part in things. The crossover announcement and promotional materials corroborate.

Now, the interesting thing that one could bring up here was the Twelve. We get their story several degrees removed from that origin point as well, but there are new factual pieces to that 'immediate post-sundering' time, if that's what you care about: namely, the Twelve's yokes. These were things that needed overseeing in the immediate wake of the sundering; therefore, not only can we take as a given that concepts like glaciers, the tides, and time existed, but that they were at that point shaky enough to need some guiding hands to make sure things didn't fall apart.

It stands to reason those things, which were part of the world prior to its division, would remain in some form afterward. I'd have been more surprised to learn they were for some odd reason absent. I do find it logical they were unstable enough to require supervision immediately following the Sundering. Perhaps less so time since it's something of a universal constant (gravitational influences notwithstanding, of course), but I suppose that comes with the territory when you divide something into fourteen separate yet connected dimensions. It tracks that a blatantly unnatural event would have equally unnatural consequences.

but most interesting to me is Byregot: construction and 'fortifying the works of man' only make sense if people are actually building things, which suggests to me an element of stability and advancement that isn't there in Emet's retelling. (And of course, that element's not there in Emet's retelling because he doesn't really care; both his and Mama's retellings of it focus on his emotional pain, and his feelings don't care if they're building things.)

I'm not seeing the conflict here. We've ample reason to believe the sundered were in extremely poor condition immediately post-sundering, but that doesn't mean they would remain as such forever.

So if you consider the crossover event of no count, what do you consider acceptable sources other than FFXIV itself?

[Cleretic]

So if you consider the crossover event of no count, what do you consider acceptable sources other than FFXIV itself?

They all 'count'; they're just not providing new information. That's actually pretty much universally true across the games FFXIV's had 'actual story' crossovers into: FFXV, Monster Hunter, Nier Reincarnation, Dissidia (both NT and Opera Omnia), none of them have information about XIV that isn't in XIV unless you count unusual character interactions like Dissidia NT showing what Y'shtola does when she doesn't have anything better to do, or the timeline weirdness of Opera Omnia having expansions-era Alisaie and Lyse interacting with ARR-era Scions. There's also someone summoning a primal in another world in FFXV, but I don't think anyone considered that too surprising or impossible.

The way XIV's writers write/authorize external content isn't in a way that makes otherwise unrelated media essential reading. Some franchises do that: some RPGs make their Japanese-only audio dramas canon, some MMOs shunt important scenes into tie-in novels, some movie franchises disclose important lore through Fortnite. But XIV doesn't do any of those; when there's a XIV event in another game, it provides interesting hooks for that game's crowd, and a fanservice nod for the FFXIV fans; it doesn't provide new information.

So to answer your question: it's not that you picked a collab event I arbitrarily don't think is an acceptable source, they're all acceptable sources... that never tell us something we don't already know. (EDIT: Which personally, I consider a good thing: I don't want to have to play a limited-time collab event in a gacha game for another franchise to learn something important about the game I actually want to play.)