Dawntrail's Final Zones destroy everything the story has built.

[Jojoya]

An extra possible plot hole to add to the pile.

What happened to Erenville's mom when we turned off Endless? Did the soul that was used returned to Aetherial Sea?

We know that when the soul returns there, it regains all memories. It can undo memory alteration since it undid Emet Selch and Hydlodaeus memory wipe. If so, the soul that was used for the Endless regained original memories, and now has implanted memories on top.

While the real soul from which memories were taken has no clue about what happened after its death whatsoever.

In other words, the Endless really did not do anything after death, did not meet relatives or dealt with unresolved issues, all this process did just dumped some fake memories on unrelated souls.

Her AI avatar had no soul. The soul had long been since been used either to power LM's computer or to grant another person an additional life after accidental death.

What the MSQ didn't clarify is what happens to the cleansed souls once they're used. By being stripped of all memories then imprinted with the memories of the dead person they revive, does that soul become that second person? What if the soul is used solely as a power source for the computer - are they destroyed completely just as the souls of those who became Blasphemies were destroyed?

While the Aetherial Sea may give souls access to all memories of their previous life, I suspect those memories would still need to be imprinted on the soul in some way. Kairos seemed to overwrite memories as opposed to completely remove them. It seems to be similar to how we can delete files from a hard drive but someone with the proper knowledge can still retrieve and restore those files.

The Alexandrian process is supposed to completely remove the memories for storage in a separate container (the computer) as opposed to overwriting them. Would the Aetherial Sea still be able to retrieve and restore them considering they're no longer part of the soul?

I'm definitely not a fan of the second half of the MSQ but this whole "oh no, it's made me a murderer" complaint is silly. Nothing that was alive was killed because nothing in LM was alive except the group travelling from the Source.

Honestly, the lore is extremely brutal to creatures that "don't have a soul". All of Elpis is basically the Ancients messing around creating and destroying life for fun and science, and only Hermes seems to have any sort of empathy or compassion for these creatures.

I disagree. While that segment of story was fairly brutal, it was emphasized to show how the Ancients were flawed and not to validate their actions.

DT is doing the same thing through a different path. The Endless are not living. There is no creature - if you noticed there was no body left behind when the terminals were powered down. They simply disappeared because they did not actually exist. They were a simulation.

But the computer that was running their simulation was intent on killing actual living beings solely for the purpose of sustaining the simulation. It had no morals, good or bad, it was simply doing what it was programmed to do.

[Kaecilius]

I disagree. While that segment of story was fairly brutal, it was emphasized to show how the Ancients were flawed and not to validate their actions.

DT is doing the same thing through a different path. The Endless are not living. There is no creature - if you noticed there was no body left behind when the terminals were powered down. They simply disappeared because they did not actually exist. They were a simulation.

But the computer that was running their simulation was intent on killing actual living beings solely for the purpose of sustaining the simulation. It had no morals, good or bad, it was simply doing what it was programmed to do.

Eh, the problem is that the simulation displayed sentience for the avatars. It's a machine intelligence, one that doesn't seem to have any overriding logic for anyone except Sphene.

If they were just silly puppets dancing on Living Memory's strings, the entire last zone attempts at emotional manipulation of the player are just wasted time. If they actually have sentience, we destroyed something unique in existence, even if it wasn't alive.

The real villain of zone 6 is the writing.

[TheMightyMollusk]

What the MSQ didn't clarify is what happens to the cleansed souls once they're used. By being stripped of all memories then imprinted with the memories of the dead person they revive, does that soul become that second person? What if the soul is used solely as a power source for the computer - are they destroyed completely just as the souls of those who became Blasphemies were destroyed?

A soul's aether can be used up like any other power source. Venat spent the last of her soul to fight us as Hydaelyn, and Zenos does it later at the end of Ultima Thule (he openly refers to it as "burning the candle of my life"). In both cases, the implication is that they're deader than dead, with not enough left to return to the aetherial sea and reincarnate. Whether that happens to the souls used up by the Endless is as yet unrevealed, but given that they need to keep taking more rather than relying on their own world's lifestream replenishing itself, it seems likely.