Quote Originally Posted by Sylve View Post
The first sacrifice was to form Zodiark and create the barrier between them and Meteion.
The second one we see when Venat confronts the group of Ancients who ignore her pleas and instead of working to make the planet better, suicide into Zodiark so he can "bring perfection back"
Bit of a late correction but that would have been the 3rd summoning that was interrupted. We know from SHB that 2 were successful: the first stopped the end of days, the second kickstarted the planet's ecosystems into being capable of sustaining life again. The 3rd sacrifice would have been an offering of the new life to free the souls involved in the first 2 and thats when the Amaurotines first began to disagree on how to move forward. What we see in the "flashback" is a weird dramatized version of what happened. It didn't play out 1:1 like that.


As for the message of the xpac, while I liked EW overall I will say that they kinda muddied the story with the time loop.
"Bad things happen and life isn't always fair but we need to move on" = good
"Bad things happen and life isn't fair because thats how you said it needed to be, move on" = less good
Others already stated it, but imo the story just needed Venat to have her memory wiped and EW would have played out so much better because it would have set up Zodiark and Hydaelyn as two ways of confronting a terrible thing that one did not foresee....because that was ultimately the point of the end of days. It was a test to see how people would react to a terrible, unforeseen thing.