[ENDWALKER SPOILER!] On Zenos

[Puremallace]

So this is my take on Zenos.

Zenos keeps referring to you as his mirror. Has anybody bothered to figure out the deeper story of our warrior of light character outside of being a sundered form of Azem? Our driving force is only one direction with little substance other then "Must do good" and Zenos is our polar opposite.

My real question is and I think it was hinted at in 5.3 but WHO is Zenos sundered from because he has a dream of walking around Amaurot. I bet if you watch that scene again and goto Amaurot you can probably find the area he was walking in and try to match it up. Also they were going for that Naruto/Sasuke vibe here which was just funny.

[Loggos]

So this is my take on Zenos.

Zenos keeps referring to you as his mirror. Has anybody bothered to figure out the deeper story of our warrior of light character outside of being a sundered form of Azem? Our driving force is only one direction with little substance other then "Must do good" and Zenos is our polar opposite.

My real question is and I think it was hinted at in 5.3 but WHO is Zenos sundered from because he has a dream of walking around Amaurot. I bet if you watch that scene again and goto Amaurot you can probably find the area he was walking in and try to match it up. Also they were going for that Naruto/Sasuke vibe here which was just funny.

Is he really sundered though? I know they seem to have backtracked on that whole Echo/Blessing of Light difference in EW now but at least in Shadowbringers the Echo was a remnant of sundered souls' Ascian heritage. (And the Blessing was some special...something...by Hydaelin.) Zenos' "Echo" is artificial. If he was a sundered Ascian shouldn't he have a natural Echo?

Maybe I'm mixing thins up here, though.

[QT_Melon]

Is he really sundered though? I know they seem to have backtracked on that whole Echo/Blessing of Light difference in EW now but at least in Shadowbringers the Echo was a remnant of sundered souls' Ascian heritage. (And the Blessing was some special...something...by Hydaelin.) Zenos' "Echo" is artificial. If he was a sundered Ascian shouldn't he have a natural Echo?

Maybe I'm mixing thins up here, though.

Well about Zenos

His echo is artificial but his memory of the Final Days was something he had as a child prior to experiments. Fandaniel was definitely intrigued by it...so to drop it and not address it as a future plot point is actually just very weird imo. That's why I'm not ruling out him in the future. I just don't know or feel if it's going to be him up to 7.0 but I think he will be resolved even more so in either following quests talking about him or more surprises down the line.

[Garnix]

My take on Zenos, is that he was basically used as a foreshadowing device.

A lot of the civilizations that Meteion came across are very similar to Zenos. They are one-dimensional, and it led to their own demise.
They couldn't find a purpose in life anymore, and felt the need to have a purpose (being the strongest, being the smartest etc). Just like Zenos.
After our fight with him, he literally admitted that it led him to suffer some form of depression.
It's the whole theme of the expansion.
And that's the reason why I liked him in EW. Not really as a character, but as a plot device.

Now...I still want him back. There are still things we need to learn about him, about what he is, but also about what his avatar is.
To be honest, there is no reason to believe that he died for good, so I would be surprised if we don't see him again...

[Bright-Flower]

My take on Zenos, is that he was basically used as a foreshadowing device.

A lot of the civilizations that Meteion came across are very similar to Zenos. They are one-dimensional, and it led to their own demise.
They couldn't find a purpose in life anymore, and felt the need to have a purpose (being the strongest, being the smartest etc). Just like Zenos.
After our fight with him, he literally admitted that it led him to suffer some form of depression.
It's the whole theme of the expansion.
And that's the reason why I liked him in EW. Not really as a character, but as a plot device.

Now...I still want him back. There are still things we need to learn about him, about what he is, but also about what his avatar is.
To be honest, there is no reason to believe that he died for good, so I would be surprised if we don't see him again...

I honestly really hope

he doesn't come back. They already had one fakeout Zenos death, and his character was left off at as good a spot as they can manage without completely redoing his personality and risking diverting away from what his fans do like about him now.

While they could of course explain away him coming back again, I feel like it'd be a cop out. And we don't really need him to come back in order to learn about him. Heck, an EW character short story could fill in the lore bits we don't know without having to drag him back even.

If they bring Zenos back it should be to do something new and interesting with the character, not just to give us exposition about him.

[StriderShinryu]

I haven't read/watched Berserk so I cannot really comment on Griffith but tbh I want to disagree with the last part.

My intention is not to try to persuade you to dislike him. I just want to put people not liking him into some perspective.

I don't think people hating a character alone is what makes him/her a good villain. I believe one important aspect among others is that many feel Zenos is a very unsatisfying character from a narrative standpoint in particular.

There are many villains that I hate as people, they are neither "likable" nor "sympathetic", but at the same time I think they are good characters in their story. They really make the story better. Their horrible personality is embedded in a narrative that ultimately makes their presence feel "worth it" because they have a purpose. You still don't like them. But they make sense. I think that's what makes someone a good villain.

For Zenos I think many feel that he does not make the story any better (esp. after Stormblood). One aspect they dislike about him is his perceived pointlessness, the pointlessness of is cruelty, the pointlessness of his motives, the pointlessness of the pain he causes. (I mean pointlessness from a narrative standpoint, not as in justification for his actions.) For them this pointlessness does nothing to embed his horrible personality and inhumane actions in a larger compelling narrative, it's just one more reason that makes his involvement in the story so irritating and tedious to experience.

That is certainly not the only aspect. But I think it can play a part in it.

Pretty much this.

Often when someone says they don't think Zenos is a good villain the response is that they only like villains who have some level of moral gray to them or they need a villain to have a tragic backstory or something. That's not really the case though. One of my favourite villains of all time is Kefka. No real moral gray there and I suppose a tragic backstory that never really gets explored or explained beyond "it's why he's crazy." Heck, in FF14 alone we have Asahi/Fandaniel. Crazy, Evil. Imminently punchable and with basically no real redeeming qualities. But entertaining and interesting. That's what Zenos lacks. He's not entertaining, fun, interesting, etc. He's beyond even just being boring because he's been boring for so long now and, ideally, should have stayed dead after offing himself in the Garden. Nothing major that's really happened since then has even truly required it be Zenos in that role at all.

If you just want to have a dangerous threat of a character, you can do that too. FF14 just did it with Ranjit. The difference with Ranjit is that while he was mostly just a badass physical threat to the player/party he only stayed as long as he was needed/useful. If anything, it actually left you wanting to know a little more about him. When you're dealing with the pure physical threat type of villain, they by necessity have a very short shelf life. Otherwise they stop feeling dangerous and just start becoming a joke... like Zenos.

Another major issue with Zenos as he was presented was that the player had no real input in just rejecting him, shutting him up and putting him in his place. One of Zenos pillars was that the WoL was just like him, fighting and killing for sport, always looking for stronger opponents to test themselves and feel something. But when you're dealing with an indeterminate player character, that just doesn't work. Maybe your WoL may feel that way, sure, but mine doesn't. Mine, outside of game mechanic necessity, only fights because they need to and because they are the only one who can. They're not out to test their strength or find glory, and the portrayal of Zenos being some sort of mad mirror to my character just doesn't work. It doesn't make sense. My character wouldn't have given in to a stupid fist fight at the end of the universe unless, frankly, it was the only way to shut him up. Which is pretty much how I in-character defined what happened after telling Zenos he could chew rocks and keep thinking whatever he wanted about my motivations because he clearly wouldn't ever get it. Sadly, the game didn't give me the option to just leave his sorry butt there with no fight at all but at least it gave me the option to not agree to his stupidity.

[Loggos]

One of Zenos pillars was that the WoL was just like him, fighting and killing for sport, always looking for stronger opponents to test themselves and feel something. But when you're dealing with an indeterminate player character, that just doesn't work. Maybe your WoL may feel that way, sure, but mine doesn't.

I completely agree with this. I know that your character is often forced into situations simply by nature of this game needing to tell a story but I think this fight kind of goes beyond that because it is a really fundamental moment of characterisation.

I never once felt like Zenos' mirror because I have a completely different approach to fighting. Even as someone who thoroughly enjoys fighting, I see nothing in Zenos that resembles my WoL or my battle philosophy. In fact we are total opposites.

Then again, as stated by other players, they absolutely do see themselves as his mirror.

Zenos is a relatively divisive character so the relationship that players envision with him will be vastly different but considering that this final battle happens during one of the most important moments of the whole game, it is also a quite character-defining (which I mean in a completely neutral way) relationship.

In general, the game mostly tried to leave it up to us how we want to interpret our own character. When you start the game, all the way back in ARR, you are even asked why you are an adventurer and you have different options that go along the lines of "glory vs. power vs. fortune vs. ... [silence or imagine your own response, I guess?] ".

So, as you say, it makes no sense for the game to force a very specific character-defining role onto your blank-slate character in one of the most important moments of the game, because it's not a neutral role, it really is a role that suits some personalities and not others.

Having the choice to fight him would really have been my favourite option. As I said before, there are enough Zenos fans that would have totally justified the development of that fight because there is lots of other content that is not played by everyone like PvP or raids and yet developing it is absolutely worth it.

[Caurcas]

It was MGS4, basically. That's a okay in my book.

[JeanneOrnitier]

Zenos has always been a bad character who had no reason to be revived after Stormblood, as I have gone on tirades about before and as others have said both before and in this very thread. At least this time at the end there, the game finally gave me an option to tell him to buzz off and that his rivalry is all in his head. My WoL is nothing like what he claims she is; the kind of parallel counterpart story they try to do with him doesn't work when the protagonist is a blank slate for the player to make up whatever they want. So I appreciated the option to just tell him I'm sick of him. To me that fight was just so he wouldnt come chasing me again.

It was an incredibly cool fight with the music, the backdrop, and both of us being reapers though.

The question of just what was up with his dreams and weird strength does remain. Didn't Fandaniel muse "could Emet-Selch have found a way..?" about it in ShB? I guess it will be part of something in the future, be it a side story or MSQ. Though preferably without Zenos himself coming back again. But because they never followed up on it I have to assume they still plan to in the future, it's too much of a question mark to leave hanging, even if Endwalker's MSQ would have been the preferable/obvious place to resolve it.

[Naria]

After Thavnair I had a few brief shinning days where I had hope that Zenos might actually grow a point besides being a plot ferry. But nope, in the end he still was literally a plot ferry, if a very stylish one.

I just finished Endwalker tonight so I need to sleep on it (oh boy do I need sleep), but from the moon onward Zenos was basically a drag on so many otherwise fantastic moments. The dinner scene was well done and was the high point for Zenos for me since his introduction, but unfortunately it was just a descent back into "banality" from there. I had a constant annoying awareness in the back of my mind that Zenos was going insert himself back into the story.

Considering the final fight was almost a repeat of Stormblood's and the fact that Zenos' dreaming of the Final Days etc. is still a hanging plot thread I have this gnawing dread that he isn't actually dead. Again.

If that is the case then, please, please do something with him.

Or if we really need some sort of unkillable rival character just have Elidibus body-jack him again. He wore it better anyways.