[ENDWALKER SPOILER!] On Zenos

[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.

[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...

[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.

[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.

[HyoMinPark]

I really like Zenos
hes not trying to be deep or anything special,
he reminds me of Griffith the fact that so many hate him makes him a good villian.

I don’t know anything about who Griffith is—but hating a character doesn’t mean they’re a good character; be it hero or sidekick or villain. You can have two kinds of hate for a villain or villainous character: hate for them actually being a terrible human being within their story or the universe of a given story, or hate for them being unfulfilling in their role in the story.

For me, I dislike Zenos because he literally adds nothing to the story or the plot after Stormblood is done with (4.0; not the 4.x patches since that “Zenos” is technically Elidibus). He’s like an annoying little gnat or mosquito that likes to buzz around your character, begging them to fight him so that he can actually feel something. After SB’s main story, you could completely remove him from the MSQ and nothing would change in terms of how the story progresses. He experiences no development at any point outside of developing an obsession for you, and he’s just all around one-dimensional and flat. And I personally find characters like that extremely boring. The writers want him to be our “arch nemesis” (for lack of a better word here), but he isn’t really that, in my opinion. He’s just an annoyance. I groaned aloud every time he showed up on screen during the MSQ.

There was actually potential for him to experience some kind of growth—albeit far too late to have any sort of redeeming quality on his character—when

Alisaie speaks to him in Garlemald when he wanders up after we’ve been killing blasphemies, and tells him that he’ll never get what he so desperately wants; from our character or from anyone else. There was potential there for him to step back and have some serious introspection, but I didn’t really see that happen. Instead he wandered to the Ala Mhigan Royal Palace, stood there for a moment—and then decided “meh I still want to fight the WoL anyways” and went to Sharlayan.

If it happened but off-screen, I think that makes it all the worse to not show it to the audience.

A friend and I were discussing this earlier, and there could have actually been some interesting potential back when he was trapped in that Elezen body. Maybe he would have had to find a way to become stronger so that he “could be a match” for us? Or be stronger to wrestle his body away from Elidibus—but instead, the writers had Elidibus just peace out and give up his body with very little struggle. That was very unimpressive, in my opinion; and I think more could have been done with the 4.x plot chain with him.

Deus ex machina moment aside, I could actually appreciate riding along his back and fighting Endsinger on top of it—but after that, he really should have just peaced out from the scene. After the emotional catharsis I was feeling from freeing Meteion and having her sing a final song of hope and joy, he completely ruined it with his “hey, so you wanna fight now?” nonsense. I was completely pulled out of the moment, and the only slightly satisfying thing about his solo instance was my character haymakering him. And I think that was only because I had been dying to punch him in the face myself…since the writers decided to keep him alive after he had slit his own throat at the end of 4.0, and he continued to do absolutely nothing to drive the plot forward.

I can only really halfway appreciate his parting words—and they had better be his parting words because if the developers bring him back a third time, I may actually scream. Not only because I’m tired of seeing him pop up randomly everywhere, but it would also undo everything about that last fight scene, including his parting words.

In the end, I think Natsuko did what she could with him. It wasn’t much, but it was probably the best she could do with what she had to work with. Giving him development now would feel too little, too late.

There are tons of excellent villains and antivillains and opposing forces in this game, but I would never count Zenos as one of them.

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.

Given the knowledge we have about sundered souls with regards to our soul and what Emet-Selch told us during Shadowbringers, I don’t think there’s any way Zenos could be a part of Azem simply because we fulfill that role on the Source already. Emet mentions that we are already “more whole” being from the Source, because the Source has been 7 times rejoined. Which implies that our soul is also seven times rejoined. Ardbert was a shard of Azem, and he merged his soul with ours, giving us the 9/14 rejoined that we are now.

I don’t think there’s anything explicitly said that a sundered soul exists one per shard or the Source, but that’s the implications that have been spelled out with Shadowbringers.

This is, of course, not accounting for the fact that Zenos’s Echo is artificial. Elidibus said that when the Echo is awoken in individuals by Hydaelyn, the star shower represents the Final Days. I know Zenos magically out of nowhere has been dreaming about them for his entire life, but I don’t really think that’s an implication that he’s a piece of Azem. Or even a sundered Amaroutine to begin with. To be honest, that entire tidbit was mentioned and then promptly swept under the rug and never mentioned or explained ever again…so I’m not sure what the point of it even was other than to give Fandaniel talking points until his character was fleshed out more.

[Roundhound]

I have the same problem with Zenos in that I just don't care about him. I don't love or hate him, I'm just annoyed by him. I never even felt he was my foil. He just felt like a powerful jerk.

While the final fight was cool along with the Trial having to ride on his back he felt really out of place. Also, as a white mage punching him just feels really weird.

I also feel like you could have replaced his plot points after 4.0 with another character and been just fine. Garlemald could have suffered a bit I think but you could just have an insane Legatus instead just fine.

I am curious what people actually enjoy about his character though. Not everyone needs to have Emet levels of backstory but I feel he fails in basically any villain category after 4.0. He always felt more of an attack dog than an actual villain.

[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.