Endwalker Main Scenario Commentary & Feedback

[RyuDragnier]

Could someone explain what exactly the twins did this entire expansion? I must of missed it between them failing at everything again and giving long ideological speeches. Feels like them and the scions are given too much credit for the events this time. Technological advances were not theirs, hostility towards the forum was misplaced and I don't count fake sacrificial deaths as contributions.

The moments the WoL was away from them were the best parts. So you could be the hero you actually are.

Helped discover that the Forum has been hiding something big for some time, big enough to where they're refusing to help save the world. They helped take down a tower, and helped untemper the people from said tower. Their words and actions managed to convince Garleans to trust in the Alliance. They saved lives of people who were attacked by Terminus, and managed to even prevent a few from turning. They fought off and saved refugees from Terminus, managed to help get the ship up and running, met Hydaelyn and actually fought her with us, and helped us push through to the final boss.

Just because you don't like them doesn't mean they didn't do anything.

[Atlas-04]

Forum was in fact saving the world and when the time finally came revealed the Final Days and their plan. Taking down a tower means they are just regular soldiers and they aren't required to untemper. The Garleans didn't stop attacking until the other legions went to the Eorzean Alliance for assistance, they were tossed in a room to freeze to death. Fighting off and saving villagers is what regular soldiers have been doing this whole time, they also failed to 2v1 the monster who then killed the mother of the baby, good job twins.

They did not get the ship up and running, that was a very dumb plot point. The engineer knew what he needed, how to use it and where to find it but some how the Gleaners were unable to get it with all their resources. Never mind they helped out anyway so them being unable to do so was a lie. Anyone one of the scions could of made that call. Being a game they are allowed to help in that fight despite always being portrayed as much less skilled fighters. Them helping push us to the final boss was perfect because that is all they do, spout ideological hopeful nonsense.

I was hoping for more character growth but none came and they received praise and credit for deeds they did not do. I hope we get a long vacation from them so they stop riding the WoL coattails.

[Puksi]

The good:

Music's great!

Nidhana's amazing. I hope she has more parts to play than just a scrip machine.

I didn't expect to like Estinien ever, but EW did it.

Too long in coming, but seeing some closure for Papalymo/Moenbryda was better than none.

I enjoyed the Loporrits, though they made Hydaelyn seem REALLY ill-prepared for something she knew was coming.

Seeing Anima's design again was great despite the new context.

I'm afraid the MSQ made this list rather short, and the rest rather long, though.

The bad:

Stop using Arenvald in a wheelchair as a prop for other characters' development. Show his own.

Pacing all over the place, and heavy-handed sermonizing.

I know those fish aren't going to sell themselves, but believable priorities please?

Convenient ore. The sudden Tempering wards also felt very deus ex machina. (The "porxie method" already seemed a little too easy, and Alisaie really pushes immersion with how often she does it with no convincing aftereffects.)

Fake-out deaths are way overused, so if the narrative tries to engage me with one, it has the opposite effect.

Two sheltered sixteen-year-olds are always inexplicably given important roles they're not qualified for.

The narrative's selective outrage has really been bothering me for a while, and EW brought it to sharp focus. Lyse really did say we all do war crimes every now and then and called Fordola a hero, although Fordola was directly in the Garlean chain of command for some of those war crimes. Lyse even framed the people who refused to assist in a negative way.

Nanamo freely offered aid to Garlemald. In Stormblood, Godbert convinced her to let Ala Mhigans pull themselves up by nonexistent bootstraps.

Gridania came to Garlemald's aid when they were perfectly content to let Gallien just die in ARR.

More common decency was displayed for a Legatus of the First Legion than was ever shown to Vauthry, who the WoL discovered was a victim of Emet-Selch since before birth.

Ishgard came to the aid of Garlemald faster than it assisted its own people in the Brume--and by "assist", I mean either charge them rent they clearly can't afford, or let them "work it off" for the "lords" who apparently couldn't offer any space in their luxurious mansions for two expansions.

The Blasphemies take people with valid anger and trauma, and turn them to monsters. Fordola lived through that healer chain while a man whose brother she murdered died horribly, made into a prop for her character "development".

The time loop.

It's like the game itself caused Meteion to become that. The story is so unrelentingly grim, lighter moments hit about as weak as most of Alphinaud's counterarguments.

The really ugly:

The implication that not all races are fragments of the Ancients puts an entirely different and especially atrocious spin on the Ascians--it's no longer a matter at best described as "sad man misses friends and selfishly rejoins their fragments until he gets the past back". The Ascians have been snuffing out billions of unrelated beings because they are simply seen as "lesser" to the Amaurotians, and so are of no consequence. Why are the writers pushing sympathy for this? Emet-Selch called his future self a "megalomaniacal madman", but at the end he seemed to be doubling down on his deeds. The attempt to parallel him to my WoL in the ending art made it even worse.

[Cleretic]

First of all: I recommend you do Endwalker's healer role quest. Some of the things you've said tip me off to the fact you're gonna like it.

As to the 'really ugly'...

I'm curious where you got that implication, because I normally have a nose for that kind of thing, and I never saw that myself, nor anyone else come to that conclusion.

That said... while it isn't on racial lines, the Ascians literally have been 'snuffing out billions of lives because they are seen as lesser and of no consequence'. That's not even implied or subtext, that was literally said, in a voiced cutscene, in Shadowbringers, by Emet-Selch himself. If the fact they tried to make that character sympathetic is a problem for you (and fair enough, it was for me), you kinda have to draw the line a couple years earlier than you have.

[Puksi]

Did I miss something in that questline?

All I recall is the man's trauma over his murdered brother was used as a plot device to tell us how hard poor Fordola "The Butcher" had it--and Raubahn's dialogue implied the other Crania Lupi must've been free to go despite their deeds, too? We probably should have checked if Ungust had a sick mother back in ARR, I guess.

The writers' preoccupation with handwaving atrocities and ignoring the victims is really offputting.

Experiment notes in Ktisis Hyperboreia describe what sound a lot like the Lupin--intelligent, bipedal, wolfish creatures that were created and then deleted for "improvements" because they were not capable of speech, which is a pretty grotesque take all its own.

My "really ugly" comment was made in regards to a neighboring thread's spin of E-S' body count:

What is a genocide when all you erase is memories and not the soul themselves, who just reincarnate later? What is a mortal life to a being who will see that selfsame soul come back to an eternal state later on?
Emet-Selch himself says it: "I don't consider you to be alive, ergo i'm not commiting murder". He's just mending the broken souls and healing the world, in his view.

--which is pretty much done and dusted if the Lupin implication is correct. Personally, I'm sick of all the excuses made for his atrocities in general, both from his fanbase and the writers, and have been since ShB was launched.

[Cleretic]

Did I miss something in that questline?

Apparently you did miss something in that questline, yes.

A huge part of the healer role quest is that Arenvald has found a new cause--and is actually pretty good at it, being able to convince people that the Crania Lupi deserve a chance to be treated as equals rather than pariahs. The role quests are all about the nations coming to terms with some unspoken social issues, and for Ala Mhigo, it's that they never really managed to resolve one of the consequences of liberating a nation; the fact that some amount of its people were turned on their own countrymen through no fault of their own, and are now vilified for what was ultimately a choice made out of desperation and often protection of their family. It's not like the Empire and Resistance were sitting with equal-sized stalls at the career fair.

It's a complicated issue, one that's played out in many nations in the real world, and one that Ala Mhigo, up until this point, hasn't really faced. But Arenvald's whole story is tied into furthering that dialog, reaching out that hand.

And as to that 'really ugly' comment...

I don't know what character you played as in Elpis, but it's mentioned in Elpis that we resemble a familiar--no matter what race we are (and in some cases they make fun of us for being made with weird proportions...). So it's not just that the sundered races had strengths and traits comparable to Ancient familiars, but that apparently that's where some of those appearances came from, somehow--maybe we'll learn that in Pandaemonium, who knows.

But remember the oft-forgotten vital piece of evidence about Ancient souls: That the Sahagin Priest had the Echo, and the Echo is sign of a sundered Ancient soul. So an Ancient soul can be of any form, the playable races aren't any more or less special. You can't point to a whole race and say 'these don't count as people' by this metric, because all of them could have a Sundered soul.

...the Ascians instead point at all races and say 'these don't count as people'. Again, in the text, in the post you quoted. So the Lupin implication isn't wrong, but it's not relevant; the Ascians look at a viera, a lupin, a sahagin, and an axolotl and see them all as 'not really counting'. This fact hasn't actually changed since Shadowbringers, there is no extra evidence to claim the statement's validity.

[KageTokage]

Did anyone else find it a touch...suspicious that they suddenly decided to dig up the topic of the post-calamity memory loss that happened all the way back in 1.0; the thing that was the source of most of changed dialogue for legacy players?

I'm wondering if maybe that's the mystery Yoshi P was trying to draw attention to because I recall him also stating it was a long established plot point that many people would've forgotten about by now.

[Rieze_Xeero]

Assume full MSQ spoilers. 2/3

Hydaelyn:

Venat was an incredibly divisive character for me. They made her likeable in Elpis only to ruin it at the end. We essentially made her omniscient and for her to not do anything differently was unthinkable to me especially as none of her choices up to that point had resulted in saving the star. I firmly believe Elpis should have branched into an alternate timeline. Not talking to Emet and Hythlodaeus was nonsensical, especially as a handful of quests earlier she was teaching us how to view memories of the past. I found all of her excuses flawed and had to resign myself to the writer(s) wanting a closed time loop so badly that I would have to suffer through the illogic of it all.

I did not care for the 'montage' scene after the end of Elpis either. It confused too many people because what was depicted didn't match with events as detailed in ShB. The audacity of Venat, giving that sanctimonious speech while acting as judge, jury, and executioner to a civilization she doomed with her secrecy. Her character ended up not being much different than Hermes. I was not moved by her 'suffering' either, which was her choice knowing exactly how it would play out unlike everyone else who suffered from her choices in ignorance.

The problem with this is Venat/Hydaelyn is written unquestionably as a "good" character to the extent of being the loving motherly figure to all. There's no arguing that she was in the wrong because - and this is another of my gripes - all shades of grey were stripped from EW. Your WoL, the Scions, the other non-Ancient NPCs, all view her as benevolent and just. (I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised by this as the Scions have always been zealous regarding her.) The fact that she does have two moments of self-awareness also trick you into believing she's a better person than she is.

Her reasons for sundering also change from Elpis to the Mothercrystal. First it's because she believes the Ancients incapable of the change she deems necessary and then it's because they were too dense in aether to deal with dynamis, something she never told anyone they needed to figure out how to deal with in the first place. Here's an idea: how about you consult with your experts, apprehend and interrogate Hermes, and inform the public to allow them the opportunity to adapt instead of letting the Final Days descend with no one having any idea why or how to adjust. Venat wasn't smarter than anyone else, she simply had access to information they didn't and because of that we'll never know if there could've been an alternate path for them. Knowledge is power and she refused to share it.

Amazing! You get my sentiments as well! What wasted potential for Hydaelyn/Venat and Zodiark!

[Fenral]

Did anyone else find it a touch...suspicious that they suddenly decided to dig up the topic of the post-calamity memory loss that happened all the way back in 1.0; the thing that was the source of most of changed dialogue for legacy players?

I'm wondering if maybe that's the mystery Yoshi P was trying to draw attention to because I recall him also stating it was a long established plot point that many people would've forgotten about by now.

That was Louisoix's doing, IIRC. Alphinaud and Alisaie couldn't comment as much without revealing the whole Phoenix thing, which is a secret they're supposed to keep.

If it wasn't though, then hmmmm....

[EdwinLi]

Learn to accept life is not Perfect and Perfection does not exist.

This topic I feel is not delivered well to a point as a lot of players do not understand this part of the storyline or it went completely over their heads. This topic really need more time to develop and be explore but 6.0 story did not give it enough time.

It is a rather important focus of this storyline because the Ancient's motive for existing was to create a Perfect World that has no flaws since they have passed the point where they no longer need to concern themselves with providing everyone with daily necessities due to resolving this issue in their society.

As Cookingway said, Perfection does not exists. Every aspect of life is flawed in their own way. The Ancient's path in life will have eventually resulted in a Final Days of their own making due to one day they will realize Perfection is impossible and flaws will always exists in life. Thus some, or if not the majority, will eventually seek to create their own Final Days and destroy all life in on the planet due to falling into despair from realizing this truth that Perfection is impossible and life will always have flaws such as pain, despair, and etc.

In fact, Meteion's report (despite not getting the full one) did show the greatest flaw that lead to each world's destruction by creation of their own Final Days was their constant search for Perfection in one shape or form. Even worlds that were already destroyed before Meteion's sister arrived had the same goal to seek perfection in some way but that eventually lead to their own destruction by a Final Days of their own creation.

Meteion and her sisters may have began destroying worlds at some point due to realizing each world always ends up reaching this point but the main factor is that even without Meteion's influence, these civilizations in each world will eventually conclude they could not reach Perfection and thus fall into despair and cause their own Final Days. Even if they do not reach this point certain worlds caused their own Final Days by the actions of trying to reach Perfection itself eventually damaging their own world to a point the process of reaching Perfection became their Final Days.

As for the ones Meteion interacted with, they would have eventually reach the same conclusion as well as I mentioned earlier but Meteion just accelerated it to be soon.

One world where Meteion's sister made contact with even ended up causing their Final Days because the question she gave them caused a existential crisis since they realized they themselves are not perfect. Eventually someone in their own civilization or another seeking to explore worlds would have asked the same question and resulted in the same outcome. All it took was one being on their civilization to ask that question and they would have come to the same conclusion.

Another believed in away that their civilization was perfect because Meteion's sister choose to visit them first so they put themselves above other civilization that eventually started a war that became their Final Days. However, this civilization's mindset would have resulted in giving into the same belief by some other means since they seek to have a reason to consider themselves Perfect. Meteion may have given them that reason but something else can easily have done the same at a later time.

This is the major factor that caused Meteion's sister to conclude that "Death was the only option for all life" because no matter the civilization they reach a point that all necessities are covered then they seek perfection and eventually they cause their own Final Days through the process of trying to reach Perfection or reach what they believe is Perfection only to realize eventually they have not reach Perfection, Perfection does not exists, and give into despair to a point they want a Final Days.

I'll discuss this more in the post I created about the Consequences of other Stars but this is just my thought on this aspect of the 6.0 Storyline.