Quote Originally Posted by Kyrj View Post
I didn't care for the "Final Days" bit. Not one thing about it felt "Final Days"ish, not one. You don't see any other zones affected by this other than one small cutscene showing a guy stumbling around in Ishgard and most of it takes place in a few quests in Thavnair and that's it, you're TOLD about it but never experience it. Once you've done the quests you're sent to Elpis to fap about chasing an NPC that had no real point being in the story. You come back and do some crap in Sharlayan and then that's it, off to the main bad guys base of operations, no resistance, no fights, no nothing. The towers? Nothing ever came of that, if Zenos could've just gone to the moon and destroyed the seals...why didn't he just do that to begin with? What was the point of alerting the entire world with your giant towers if it was just going to fail and for you to go "welp guess we'll just have to go there and one shot the remaining seal ourselves" while our character just stands there and watches no less....
There has been a lot of convenient "telling" what happened off-screen instead of showing in Endwalker, at least as far as I've gotten. So far, we have had:

* Thavnairian research team making hundreds of talismans overnight.
* Garlean prisoners being rescued almost as soon as they are locked up.
* Body swapping (at least twice), in possibly the most inconsequential doppelganger arc I've ever encountered.
* The 10th legion seeking aid from the Eorzean Alliance.
* The repairing of one of the six seals almost immediately after it got shattered.

So far I admit to some disappointment in the quality of the writing. Unlike every other expansion that came before it, I feel like I am rushing through a checklist of things they wanted to cram into the finale. I think the Sharlayan/Garlemald duality is the strongest core of the story, but with each only receiving one zone they tried to pack in too much else around that...Thavnair, the moon, the past, the final days...

Maybe I will feel differently when I finish the expansion, but everything else just feels so tight by comparison: Ishgardian v. Dragon zones; Gyr Abania v. Doma zones; alter-Aldenard zones. And here there's no real thematic or geographical unity so far...just a bunch spare threads they wanted to halphazardly tie up. I think they either should have pushed back the Ascian resolution on the Moon to 6.X/7.0, or otherwise saved Thavnair for 7.0 when we could visit the southern continent and/or the rest of Garlemald...