Spoiler, Sploilers, and more Spoilers

[SamsaraTrickstar]

Sorry i have to say it: enemy not at full strengh, time travel, memory erase.

All this is a really, really cheap resource to tell a history.

Is used a lot becouse is easy to fix or manipulate everything.

im dissapointed nothing else.

Yes sadly this was the cheap part. It's never good when you need to e travel and memory erase to tell as story. It's a shame as there really strong part in the story.

[Penthea]

Yes, because Hermes already released Meteion's sisters to the expanse and Meteion was already "corrupted". What our presence there helped do was give Venat the foresight to one day fight against the Final Days.

Blows my mind how some have missed this part. By the time we arrived in Elpis the damage had already been done. Meteion's sisters had already left to explore the universe. With or without our presence Hermes would have requested an update on what they found. Him sending them off to the universe is what caused the Final Days. Not us going back in time.

Venat may have done the Sundering anyway due to a distaste for the repeated sacrifices being made to Zodiark. If our unsundered self didn't approve of it, then why couldn't anyone else? Especially someone who held the same seat as we did. Furthermore our unsundered self felt this way even without knowing about any of the time travel Venat knew about.

I think making Venat a villain would have been very cliché because over and over again we ended up in conflict with those who summoned or became primals. She would have been "just another primal" if she turned out to be a villain. And before anyone brings up Iceheart remember that she was at first treated as a villain to the point that we fought her to undo her summoning. We did not go to Hydaelyn with this intention even though we knew what she was. Instead Venat turned out to be someone who only had bad choices presented to her and chose to do what she believed to be the least terrible decision.

Going to Elpis showed us that the past was not the perfect paradise Emet-Selch had lead us to believe. Everyone was expected to be happy and Hermes felt isolated because of this. Had his depression been properly acknowledged by his peers he may had never made Meteion. He couldn't find proper connection among his people so he sought it among the stars. If people had simply thought twice about how messed up it is to just coldly erasing creatures they made Hermes may not have felt so alone with his thoughts and feelings.

Also Meteion explains why the Ancients had no choice but to summon Zodiark. They had no idea that what was responsible for the Final Days was something from outside the planet so they couldn't even fight it. All they could do was create a shield and hope that would be enough. Sure Venat could have told them but it's not like they would all believe her. It would have divided their people even more and Zodiark would have been summoned anyway.

And without the sundering the Ancients would have been doomed to be entirely wiped out instead of just have their souls sundered. Eventually they would have explored the stars when their great work on their planet was done, and they would sooner or later encounter Meteion. People would have gone back to their home with their overpowering despair and use their creation magics to end themselves. Something similar to that already happened with another Ancient-like race Meteion found. Her repeated questions about happiness drove them to scrutinise themselves too much so they concluded that death was the only path.

I like that there is no clear villain in this situation. Hermes' personal problems being largely ignored drove him to make a reckless well-intentioned mistake when he had the Meteia explore the stars. The Meteia were tasked with answering a deceptively complex question that has no clear answer and they lacked the life experience to understand nuance, so they were doomed to be drowned in despair. Zodiark had to be summoned to stop the Final Days. The Sundering had to happen because at best Zodiark was a temporary solution that only protected the Ancients as long as they never left the planet, but without knowing that the Final Days came from outside their planet they wouldn't have known to never leave. The ascians only wanted to revive their people, they didn't induce calamities for fun or conquest.

The story shows that you don't need an ill-intentioned entity for disaster to happen, sometimes people have the misfortune of being presented with only terrible choices and that knowledge is power but you need to be careful about the questions you ask.

/wall of text

I enjoyed the EW msq a lot.

[Jadedsins]

snip

I agree with this, The impact it had when we showed that we also felt sad at times was huge. Not only that but Metelon might have been a double edge sword for him, because he cared for her deeply, but his doubt, his pain caused her to feel that as well, and it kinda made him bottle it up so much, that we saw it at last exploded at the end in the dungeon.

As much as I like Venat, her comment at the end, about how Hermes has to live with it, that his doubt of his people caused all this...Showed that Venat while a very good person, was not perfect as well. Hermes had reasons to doubt his people, and how they treated life. Sure she could have not meant anything by it, but it came off as she also was jaded by the views of her people. I could be looking way too much into it, just how it felt.

[KizuyaKatogami]

Unfortunately this convoluted mess of a story is why I am simply going to let my sub lapse at this point and be done with the game. I doubt there will be any marked improvement in the future in terms of story content. I don't really like Ishikawa's style much (at least what we've seen of it in SHB and EW), and she's failed to instil any sympathy for Venat's actions, even through this very tortured method of story telling. The game's mechanical aspects are just about mediocre as it is, so there's nothing really holding me to it. I was willing to give it a chance even though 5.3 disappointed me in a similar manner but this was more - and even worse - of the same.

Agreed. The amount of plot holes are crazy as well. This whole sundering allowing people to harness dynamis thing. In that case should the sundered ascians not have been stronger? Like Nabriales? The time travel stuff is a mess. I remember back in ShB they were ragging in the ascians telling them it’s not right to mess with time, that they need to move on and not live in the past and then time travel is used twice for the protagonists…nice double standard there. I found it kind of funny how as much as i despise Zenos, we didn’t even get to offer up a thanks at the end and instead basically tell him to f off yet, we hug the main creature behind all this who has destroyed countless planets. It’s funny too because i guarantee if Meteion and Venat weren’t pretty girls and if they looked more like Varis people wouldn’t be so inclined to protect their bad writing lmao.

[Jybril]

I think that we really needed this story to conclude with 7.0 as originally planned. Far too much happened in too short a period of time and as such it wasn't able to properly 'settle'. Much of the story also ended up being needlessly convoluted and I daresay it almost feels as though it was written to get maximum 'feels' even at the cost of what made sense to actually occur. Worse yet, certain characters and zones were clearly not given their fair share of time in the spotlight in order to mash everything together.

I also think it jumped the shark and escalated things to a ridiculous degree. I wasn't pleased when WoW did that and I am certainly not pleased with FFXIV going down the same route.

They could had done it all throughout the entirety of EW and not just a single patch.
The pacing issues is everything shoved into one patch which happened in SB.
All of Ala Mhigo was said it done in a single patch and it was pretty underwhelming...
So much so, I can barely remember what happened. I just know Lyse is such a bad character now and I miss Yda lol.

Also, why was Zodiark the level 83 trial boss...That really through me for a loop. O_o

[KizuyaKatogami]

Also, why was Zodiark the level 83 trial boss...That really through me for a loop. O_o

Honestly this upset me a lot. They completely shafted both Elidibus and Zodiark, what are supposed to be key figures in this entire arc and expansion, yet they got nothing more than 10 minute cameo’s. Meanwhile Venat gets an entire section dedicated to her lmao. And more. At this point it feels like it’s the end of the Emet,Hythlo,Venat arc. Not the Hydaelyn and Zodiark one.

[QT_Melon]

Blows my mind how some have missed this part. By the time we arrived in Elpis the damage had already been done. Meteion's sisters had already left to explore the universe. With or without our presence Hermes would have requested an update on what they found. Him sending them off to the universe is what caused the Final Days. Not us going back in time.

Convenient for the story right?

Also Meteion explains why the Ancients had no choice but to summon Zodiark. They had no idea that what was responsible for the Final Days was something from outside the planet so they couldn't even fight it. All they could do was create a shield and hope that would be enough. Sure Venat could have told them but it's not like they would all believe her. It would have divided their people even more and Zodiark would have been summoned anyway.

Good ol' Communication problem trope that's worse than the Good was Always Evil one.

EVEN THOUGH it was made obvious that Herme's magical 2002 memory erasing device DID something to Emet and Hythlodaeus. They were made aware their memories were erased. Somehow Venat could not communicate to those two at the very least. But us, non corporeal and all could be made to be given form, ALLOWED US to tell our story and as ridiculous it seemed was worth investigating by the very same duo. ...okay. Oh wait, she can't change the future - but that's not to say NOT telling would have done the same because it's not like WE told her how events with Emet and Hythlodaeus specifically played out since we only got bits of it BECAUSE WE WEREN'T THERE.

But then again, we actually already died in the 8th Umbral Calamity. So...protecting the 'future' doesn't cut it as we already had time branching off

Look I did like most of Endwalker and did enjoy Elpis and glimpse of Ancient life through Elpis but there's really some jank parts of the story that just broke me out of it. I think the montage made it worse since even though I know it was to focus on Venat - it made her feel like a totalitarian authority even though in Anamesis Anyder there was a group, and convenient how Azem was "missing"...

[Rhysati]

After reading the thread, Im not sure what some were expecting here.

Cool, let me help you with that as far as I'm concerned: What I expected was a story that made logical sense. I expected a story that didn't throw a ton of random stuff at the wall in the hopes that it all stuck.

Why build up Zodiark since the beginning of the game's existence only to kill him like he's nothing a couple levels in? Why did none of the scions, nor the Warrior of Light understand that killing Zodiark would be really, terribly, horribly bad? I sure knew that straight away. When you have to deities locked into a tense balance and you straight up murder one of them...gee, who would have thought bad things would happen?

What I wanted was to NOT have a Hitchhiker's ripoff that handwaved a bunch of stuff because suddenly the moon is actually a spaceship piloted by bunny people. What I wanted was to not have people build a mass-effect level spaceship in a universe that doesn't HAVE any technology that looks like that. I wanted the tying up of things in Garlemald to feel longer than 20 minutes since the plot from day one has been about the Garlean empire. What I wanted was to not travel back in time and spend 2-3 levels of xp talking to Emet and company while the ending of the world had literally JUST begun.

This whole expansion jumped the shark for me and I flatly stopped caring about any of it. This expansion took everything that I enjoyed about FFXIV and its storytelling and dumped that off a cliff to tell a rushed story filled with tons of new things we haven't known anything about until it is a convenient plot device.

I went from being so pumped over the previous expansion being hands down the best expansion I've played for any MMO in a very long time to actually wondering how they managed to make a worse expansion than WoW.

[Misplaced_Marbles]

I despise JRPG stories for one simple reason: if you think about the story for all of one second, it becomes clear it's stupid. After that, the writing solely relies on the fanbase to fill numerous holes in the writing to provide reason to everything established in the story.

[Jadedsins]

I despise JRPG stories for one simple reason: if you think about the story for all of one second, it becomes clear it's stupid. After that, the writing solely relies on the fanbase to fill numerous holes in the writing to provide reason to everything established in the story.

Clear stupid? A story is a story. A story does not have to make sense. I mean life does not make sense at times. A story does not need to be perfect.

Did the story make you feel something? Even negative feelings, than it did its job.