Endwalker Main Scenario Commentary & Feedback

[Loggos]

I’ve read through the thread and wonder if some of us have been playing the same game this whole time.

There was no way after 11 years of the game that they were going to have a twist where Hydaelyn is malevolent. That would cheapen a lot of the game and a lot of what we’ve done for a weak payoff. It was apparent things were going to end this way when SE responded in an interview to say that we only had one side of the story.

Regarding that

Not making Hydaelyn evil is one thing the writers completely deserve commendation for. Over the years I've had to deal with so many people who were so convinced that twist was coming that it seemed like they were actually hoping for that most shallow and meaningless of subversions. "The good guy was the bad guy all along". It would have undermined the story so badly if it truly ended up being that simple. Imagine how awful the story would have ended up being if it was really just, the Ascians were right all along, Zodiark is a good guy and Hydaelyn has been deceiving you the whole time. Imagine if that's what we got instead of Shadowbringers.

In the end Hydaelyn is neither good nor evil, which is perfect. How you see her ends up coming down to whether you agree with her reasoning. Endwalker is far from the perfect ending in many respects but on that point at least I'm glad it played out the way it did

I'm also very glad that

Hydaelin didn't turn out to be the evil manipulater after all.

But I think the reason why many players felt that the story could take that turn might have been because Shadowbringers did shift the tone quite a lot.
For the first time we had a story with "more shades of grey", if you will. It also felt a lot darker to me.
Whereas ARR and Stormblood felt kind of colourful, over-idealistic and ultimately more like "clichéed optimistic fantasy" (not saying this is a bad thing - just trying to put it into words) and Heavensward was sad, more serious but not, for the lack of a better word, "bizarre", Shadowbringers - in a good sense - felt a lot darker and gritter, with some storytelling elements almost borrowing from horror genres (e.g., when I saw Tesleen's tranformation I was positively shocked because that kind of depiction felt quite unprecedented in FF14).
In ARR, HW and SB an evil Hydaelin would not have made sense thematically. But within Shadowbringers it suddenly felt like it actually might. And because people assumed they would continue to tell the story as they did in ShB they probably expected the same kind of "shades of grey" and perhaps also the same kind of darkness/grittiness in EW. (I would even argue we did get the latter. The HR Giga inspired Telophoroi towers that made you think a xenomorph is waiting behind the next corner, some of Meteion's "creepy" scenes or people turning into monsters (and stomping their own children) really embodied that spirit.)