What's the point with that quite lackluster story in Endwalker?

[Ishe-P]

Dang, I was hoping it was Zodiark out for revenge since he got done so dirty in 6.0.

[DevonEllwood]

People mentioning that Endwalker started undoing their interest in the story, and 5.3 was where it started doing that for me. I had my expectations set pretty low and I still somehow managed to be disappointed.

Also mentioned was the voice actors for the 24 man raid and yeah, they sound weirdly familiar. I thought the third one sounded like Titania and the last boss sounded like Hermes and Hades.

For future characters I want someone abrasive, foul mouthed bad guy/gal (but not a Bad Guy) that the "good guys" have no choice but to work with.

Endwalker kind of contradicts Shadowbringers in humanizing the ancients. Which is baffling, it was just last expansion.

On Fandaniel fighting the WoL, it wouldn't matter if he killed them, he in fact could have done more damage. Not only would the one thing standing between him and the planet's destruction be gone, but he could take Zodiark for a joy ride and continue that destruction. Would have made Zenos angy to have his BFF dead resulting in Fandaniel being killed anyway. Would have been an interesting hypothetical for Zenos to pick up where the WoL left off and be the savior of the planet.

I don't feel Hades acted any different in Elpis than in Shadowbringers. There's two short stories where he acted just like that, it's just in the game now. He's still a butthole.

For the Elpis butterfly, " you can turn butterflies into clothes, just like that?" option doesn't seem to imply the character was horrified to me, but more suprised...it was that easy. I thought that was what it was about. Not that my character would be horrified by it? That makes no sense.

I don't think the "primals don't actually temper people" bit wasn't an excuse to say Hades wasn't tempered, I think it was more an excuse to have everyone around Hydaelyn not be tempered. It's just a traveler's ward yo

Now for the Venat Vomit.
Did Venat want to protect mankind or all life? If she wanted to protect all life then why did she want to abandon the planet to its fate as her main plan? It was Sharlyan's idea to rescue as many species as possible, not hers. Her decisions make no sense if she wanted to protect all life. She literally did nothing as Meteion frolicked across the universe killing even more things before the sundering.

If Venat was not Hydaelen and if she did not directly benefit the player character, anyone could see her as an antagonist. I sometimes see people bring up mental wellness with Hermes, but never with Venat. She seems just as equally unwell as him. That trial with her was kind of unsettling. I felt the music was weirdly aggressive, the walls of light attack didn't make any sense . Why would she use that? That's what almost ended the first. Bust her expression caught me off guard the most. She looked completely cold and unemotional. There was no expression, no sense of what Venat used to be in there. I went into Endwalker thinking the developers would never make Hydaelen bad guy, yet, between what Brinne said about the connections between Venat and Hermes and Rulakir mentioning that Ishikawa only kills off side characters or villains...and we have Hydaelen dying off completely. Either she was originally written as a villain or she's sneaking that in. Yoshida's confusion would make more sense.

I honestly would love for a character in game to call Venat/hydaelen on her BS, but I honestly don't think that will ever happen. The average character isn't even aware of what happened and probably wouldn't care.It would probably have to take someone existing pre-sundering and still alive to do that.

As for why the thread still exists, it's because people still care. I've been playing since 2013 and the ancient reveal felt like complete payoff after all those years. Endwalker felt like it completely undid it.I am still on the copium though and still feel like next expansion might be a bit better. I'm still not done with the patch though I completely forgot about it for a while.

[Lauront]

5.3 is where a drain on my enthusiasm for the game's lore began as well. I sort of made peace with the portrayal of Elidibus but there's still a lot of that patch's writing I did not like, and I feel it limited their options in that Elidibus could've been an antagonist with the potential to cooperate with you later down the line... which is sort of how they handled it anyway, in a much more roundabout, less satisfactory way. I'd have liked to see more of his connection with Zodiark. 100% agree on the Venat stuff.

[Caurcas]

Some good ole fashioned regular conflict would be refreshing.

[KageTokage]

I'm interested in the current story direction, but I think I'm going to be genuinely annoyed if it ends up being setup for 7.x taking place in a different shard after they've been relentlessly teasing us with bits of information about Ilsabard and Meracydia.

The continued emphasis on the future of story being "unpredictable" in the interviews concerns me because being predictable isn't necessarily a bad thing. The mention of "adjusting the script based on reactions" is another point that bothers me because they could easily misinterpret that the plot twists in Endwalker that largely came out of the left field like the time travel were things that people loved when for me it's been the reverse. Seeing subtle foreshadowing and lingering plot threads addressed after months/years of build-up was much more fulfilling to me then any manner of surprise/shock factor they've thrown in.

[Rulakir]

Isn't the most prevalent fan theory that the spooky ghost from 6.1 is a corrupted/evil fragment of Azem? I don't know if that's better or worse than going through Emet's laundry list verbatim.

It's better if the WoL becomes 10/14, it's worse if not. :P

Did Venat want to protect mankind or all life? If she wanted to protect all life then why did she want to abandon the planet to its fate as her main plan? It was Sharlyan's idea to rescue as many species as possible, not hers. Her decisions make no sense if she wanted to protect all life.

She seems to have only cared about the sundered on the Source. We're told by Yoshi-P in the LL Q&A that she purposely left an opening in the sundering spell for Emet to escape, she knew that the shards were collateral damage. Add on the Watcher telling us that the shards share the fate of the Source and, yeah, her 'love of life' was extremely limited.

I honestly would love for a character in game to call Venat/hydaelen on her BS, but I honestly don't think that will ever happen.

We can only hope the writers/devs have seen enough divisiveness about her character that they quit pushing her as good. Unfortunately, a lot of people did love her so they're probably not going to retcon her as having done anything bad as opposed to just dropping the subject.

We now know that every day is out of touch Thursday for YoshiP so I bet he seriously thought we would've been upset with her turning out to be Not Good, and I don't mean evil, I mean anything less than lawful good.

This was the reasoning behind my belief that she would never be evil. I was shocked they wrote her actions to be significantly worse than I could've imagined, but apparently the copious amount of gaslighting to convince players she was well-intentioned and had no other choice worked for a lot of people. :\

I'd sooner take another JRPG cliche that keeps us morally consistent over a "twist" that's just kissing the ass of someone who killed others but spared us.

The ridiculous part is that on paper she's absolutely a villain, arguably the main one in the game, so they did still go that route. The only thing that 'subverted expectations' was their shoddy job of trying to portray everything she did as a good.

The continued emphasis on the future of story being "unpredictable" in the interviews concerns me because being predictable isn't necessarily a bad thing.

I have no faith after EW, especially when they went on about 'matter of perspective' and no one side is right or wrong only to give us Venat.

As for the shards, they're supposed to be reflections of the Source. How are they going to pull another Norvrandt where we can only go to one small area of an entire world unless they're going to write all the shards as being in bad shape? I'm not interested in saving every 'on the brink' shard. I'd rather move the survivors to the First or the Source and be done with this sundering nonsense.

[KizuyaKatogami]

I'm interested in the current story direction, but I think I'm going to be genuinely annoyed if it ends up being setup for 7.x taking place in a different shard after they've been relentlessly teasing us with bits of information about Ilsabard and Meracydia.

The continued emphasis on the future of story being "unpredictable" in the interviews concerns me because being predictable isn't necessarily a bad thing. The mention of "adjusting the script based on reactions" is another point that bothers me because they could easily misinterpret that the plot twists in Endwalker that largely came out of the left field like the time travel were things that people loved when for me it's been the reverse. Seeing subtle foreshadowing and lingering plot threads addressed after months/years of build-up was much more fulfilling to me then any manner of surprise/shock factor they've thrown in.

I mean if another shard was 7.0, it wouldn’t be too different from what they did with ShB, where they constantly teased garlemald and then….yeahhhh

[Theodric]

Each to their own, though I wouldn't place establishing nuance on the same level as taking poison. Light isn't inherently good and Darkness isn't inherently bad. It was also established as far back as ARR that too much of any element served to cause problems for both the environment itself and living beings.

[CrownySuccubus]

Each to their own, though I wouldn't place establishing nuance on the same level as taking poison. Light isn't inherently good and Darkness isn't inherently bad.

When we're talking fictional metaphysics that do not exist in real life, coherent and original story themes take precedent, since writers can literally make these things mean whatever the writers want them to mean. Nuance and moral relativity done well are fine, but done poorly, it runs into false equivalence. Such as trying to tell us that it's really a good thing that the Ancients died because they killed butterflies.

The story literally suffered for trying to force "nuance" on the Ancients rather than simply sticking to the theme that they were better than modern mortals in pretty much every way and their deaths were an unjust tragedy.

[Theodric]

I'd say the Ancients were screwed over not because of the nuance that existed where Light and Dark are concerned but more so because of the agency of pretty much every character in the story being sacrificed in the name of trying to push the idea that Venat was 'right'. Well intentioned extremists have always been one of my favourite character tropes but FFXIV forgot about the 'extremist' part of the trope and decided to have absolutely nobody of note criticise the consequences of Venat's actions. Worse yet, they were pushed as a 'necessity' despite deciding to tie Venat herself to every sinister event that took place in the game's story on either a direct or indirect basis.

I agree that the Ancients should have continued to be portrayed as being above the petty squabbles of the mortal races - and their demise being an unjust tragedy rather than something that 'had' to happen. At the very least, I think Amaurot served as a better look into the Ancient world than Elpis. The writers would have done well to sit back and let the story 'rest' for a while before deciding to rush to the finale. 6.0 being another largely self contained expansion along the lines of Heavensward would have been wonderful.