The many writing missteps of Dawntrain.

[TheMightyMollusk]

Wasn't that only Sphene though? So deal with the force behind that - and we do by killing her. Could've done that without turning off the terminals (which in the end did nothing at all), and just let the people fade away while still making the fountains work and doing the plays and helping people to give them a happy sendoff if we so wanted.

So we should've left four towers full of souls on our way to confront an opponent who can power up by absorbing souls? Yeah, the story probably should've just said so, but it seemed pretty clear to me.

[Eyrilona]

So we should've left four towers full of souls on our way to confront an opponent who can power up by absorbing souls? Yeah, the story probably should've just said so, but it seemed pretty clear to me.

Those did not contain souls, they contained memory records. Pretty much the entire supply of souls had already been used up in the previous trial before we even get to that zone.

[TheMightyMollusk]

Those did not contain souls, they contained memory records. Pretty much the entire supply of souls had already been used up in the previous trial before we even get to that zone.

The stored souls in Solution 9 were spent. The souls in Living Memory were out of Zoraal Ja's reach. Otherwise his orders to commandeer all of the civilian souls to empower the military would've logically taken those offline too.

[ThorneDynasty]

The stored souls in Solution 9 were spent. The souls in Living Memory were out of Zoraal Ja's reach. Otherwise his orders to commandeer all of the civilian souls to empower the military would've logically taken those offline too.

The whole point of the cloud was they were just memories, separated from souls, which were used as a resource by the living.

[Granyala]

It came across as more of a child's anime scene similar to 'we had a massive explosion but luckily, no one died!' It took me out of my immersion and made me believe the writers just wanted to unleash the beast but find a way for it not to kill anyone, even though they had previously been repeatedly hyping it up as being a deadly and dangerous creature. So they came up with this whole excuse of 'oh, he's weakened and needs to replenish.' The whole thing was very anticlimatic after all the hype. Not a plothole, sure. But it turned out to be something hyped for no reason. A complete non-payoff.

Eeeh, I don't need some random NPC carnage as a "payoff".
Whether they killed a bunch of Yok Huy or not would not make a lick of difference to me. I didn't have enough time with them to form a bond.

The whole point of the cloud was they were just memories, separated from souls, which were used as a resource by the living.

Incorrect.
The Endless run on soul energy as well, that is why Sphene wants to depopulate the source in the first place. She needs that specific energy to keep the endless "alive".

That being said: only the few endless that are ACTIVE currently use/have souls attached to them. The ones dormant in the terminals do not. That is literally just stored data.

So there was no lore reason to delete any endless at all. A simple shutdown and putting the memories into cold storage would have had the same effect: currently used soul energy would dissipate and return to the lifestream.

[Vrahjin]

So we should've left four towers full of souls on our way to confront an opponent who can power up by absorbing souls? Yeah, the story probably should've just said so, but it seemed pretty clear to me.

The Terminals in Living Memory had no souls. The souls of the dead were taken to Origenics where they were separated into the Soul part to use as power/energy and the Memory part (lots of information in the terminals in Origenics how it's done), to live in the Cloud (Living Memory, I suppose?). Was Living Memory powered by soul energy? Probably, since Sphene mentioned needing to suck other worlds and peoples dry of souls in order to keep it going, but even so Sphene would never have used those souls, because that would mean she would have to kill everything in Living Memory and that went against her core programming. As we saw, her "kind" parts even got overwritten so it's safe to say that even IF she were to make the decisions to take down Living Memory herself for a soul juice boost, the security/programming most likely would've hindered that. Because, again, goes against what she's created for.

So, disabling the Terminals were never going to do anything.