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

[Vyrerus]

reasoning to the point where they would push such a horrible message?

The moral of Endwalker was supposed to be that Suffering is inescapable, so you have to bring what joys out of it that you can, and just continue onwards. Basically that even attaining theoretical perfection would just birth a new type of suffering, so accept your imperfections.

It was very on the nose, and the reason it fell flat was because Venat was most definitely hamfisted and portrayed as an anti-villain "unintentionally."

When you meet her and she asks you about your adventures, she responds to your stories with her own. She describes basically a spiritual awakening where she felt a greater unifying will, which she doesn't know a word for, so she says, "Fate, I suppose." This caused her to have the massive paradigm shift that turned her away from the Ancients' way of thinking. It also made her feel like she couldn't really convey it to anyone, and that her fresh eyes made her superior to other people of her time. It made her feel the need to shepherd them, to stay alive for as long as anyone of them needed her.

The irony being that by staying alive, she stole the challenges, the suffering they were to experience without her holding their hand.

In this light, her having to perform the Sundering by decree of predestination is a karmic rebalance, for the eons she spent forcibly coddling the Ancients, who she looked down on.

[Rulakir]

It was very on the nose, and the reason it fell flat was because Venat was most definitely hamfisted and portrayed as an anti-villain "unintentionally."

I admit thematically EW was a huge miss for me. I just wanted a good story that was entertaining and EW was neither. However, my main point of contention is the justification/celebration of the Ancients being decimated and the glorification of the individual(s) responsible, which sullies not only EW as a whole but all of the game lore. Not to mention I no longer have faith the writers/devs can appropriately handle certain themes, particularly not a "conflict of values".

The time loop is a substantial secondary part of it. Do not send my character into the past to interact while not being able to avert either of the two biggest omnicidal events in history. Worse, the WoL is now an accomplice to at least one of them for having given Venat the idea of the sundering in the first place. (I don't care if it's a paradox, it's effed up they did this at all.)

[Theodric]

I'd attribute it to their attempts to pander directly to Twitter, in all honesty. Of the many reasons as to why I loathe the social media sphere, the bizarre glorification of suffering and wearing it as a badge of honour is somewhere near the top of the list. I liked the story better when it allowed the player to draw their own conclusions about the various conflicts within the setting but considered freedom and personal agency to be core values to always strive to protect.

Unfortunately Endwalker did away with that and tried desperately to present Venat as a 'good person'. Yet a 'good person' does not stand by idly with knowledge of an approaching apocalypse whilst allowing it to happen. A 'good person' does not then decide to murder the survivors because they reacted the 'wrong way' to the tragedy. A 'good person' does not then lie and misdirect in an attempt to shift the blame elsewhere, nor does a 'good person' seek to snuff out all memory of their former people's existence.

Even the reaction from Venat's most devout is perfectly in alignment with the sort of nonsense peddled on Twitter. Someone may live a comfortable and peaceful life but then rather than push for more people to be able to do so, there's very weird and alarming fantasies posted about how the person with a nice, comfortable existence should suffer and lose absolutely everything that they ever liked or cared about. It's a very spiteful mentality.

The writers made the wrong move by trying to assume that their take on 'despair' was universal and/or the 'correct' one.

There's likely more to it, of course. I'm not convinced that they're even being given authentic feedback that comes from actual enthusiasts of the game's story. Nor I do I trust any of the streamers to give fair and unbiased statements given that many of them are, coincidentally, the type to have drunk mommy Hydaelyn's kool aid.

[anhaato]

This actually just made me realize an inconsistency in the message they were trying to tell. From all of the Scions' "emotional" words before fake-dying one by one, each of them was something around the lines of "we know some form of suffering is inevitable but we won't give up on living a happy life" which is, while bland and uninspired, not a terribly egregious platitude. But then when we look back at the sundering cutscene, Venat is straight up saying "avoiding suffering is bad so I'll make sure mankind will never be able to" before killing everyone. I believe the former was supposed to be the Tru Message of the expansion, because you never see any other character arguing what Venat was arguing, and that cutscene was the only time she ever said such a thing herself.

Once again, I 10000% believe the 2 week delay was YoshiP demanding they shoehorn in some altered dialogue and cutscenes to make Venat a "good guy," because while the writers can be forgetful and leave holes here and there, I do think they would've been smarter than intentionally writing "but if I told the truth no one would believe me!" as being said by someone who is one of a people who were demonstrated as being able to USE THE ECHO AT WILL. Change the cutscene to make Venat not get memory wiped (there's no reason she should've made it out after chasing down Meteion for as long as she did in direction away from the rift), add in some copouts as to why she can't tell the truth, change the following cutscene from something that could easily have come across as morally gray or even ominous/evil, and do so by making her say some bullshit about "suffering good" to try to make us believe that her making humanity suffer in new ways for all eternity is good, actually. Make sure to add an "I'm so virtuous" monologue so it REALLY gets the point across, these readers will buy anything we sell them!

Basically my conspiracy theory about the final Elpis cutscene is that it would've originally carried out much the same had they not made her a "good guy" because a change in context can easily make the tone completely different. Between the reinterpretation of Answers, which, as someone else pointed out, now sounds evil/mocking if you think about it (that was probably the original intent in its reuse), and the way she was covered in black (this game has shown blood before, there's no reason they'd censor it now) looking less like she's suffering for our sake and more like she's being corrupted and becoming a monster, I think these make it really obvious where the last minute revisions were that completely ruined the message of the story. Everything else that carried after it only had to be altered ever so slightly in the dialogue to make sure Hydey Good stayed consistent.

Edit: "What about the Plenty, they'd surely have finished that part of the dungeon long before the delay and it was consistent with what Venat was arguing!" From the looks of it in the game, it was a small area of a few people floating above a destroyed star in a nice little golden park area. That's hardly "life became too good," that to me seems more like "in their pursuit of trying to make life as pain-free as possible they actually made it worse by going nuclear Marie Kondo, and died off in a state of mass delusion due to their refusal to accept what they had done." That's much easier to stomach than Life Too Good Is Bad Actually.

[KariTheFox]

The life experiences the writing team had was probably "living in and being raised in a country that is heavily influenced by Buddhist beliefs" - which among other things, teach that suffering is an inevitable part of life. So the only sense that suffering is "good" is the fact that life is good. Suffering is a part of life, and allows us to feel compassion, so in that sense it's good. (Though really it's not accurate to describe suffering as good or bad in this framework, it simply is.)

I think a lot of western audience get tripped up because they're looking at the concept of suffering through a Western-Christian lens, where it is a punishment placed on mankind for its sins (hence all the framing about Venat "punishing" the ancients with death and suffering) when really, it's just that suffering is a part of our lives, and turning away from or denying it only makes it fester.

[jameseoakes]

The life experiences the writing team had was probably "living in and being raised in a country that is heavily influenced by Buddhist beliefs" - which among other things, teach that suffering is an inevitable part of life. So the only sense that suffering is "good" is the fact that life is good. Suffering is a part of life, and allows us to feel compassion, so in that sense it's good. (Though really it's not accurate to describe suffering as good or bad in this framework, it simply is.)

I think a lot of western audience get tripped up because they're looking at the concept of suffering through a Western-Christian lens, where it is a punishment placed on mankind for its sins (hence all the framing about Venat "punishing" the ancients with death and suffering) when really, it's just that suffering is a part of our lives, and turning away from or denying it only makes it fester.

The problem with this is that the Venat directally inflicts this suffering on people and often some pretty extreme a vile things. So she does punish the people of Etheris for not meeting her standards, as far as we can see the Anicents lived rich full lives so there doesn't seem to have been a sudden need to make a world of disease, malnutrition and children freeze to death in the snow, there seems to be little effort in showing how such suffering made peoples lives better but we see a lot of how the suffering Venat inflicted broke people.

[Vyrerus]

The life experiences the writing team had was probably "living in and being raised in a country that is heavily influenced by Buddhist beliefs" - which among other things, teach that suffering is an inevitable part of life. So the only sense that suffering is "good" is the fact that life is good. Suffering is a part of life, and allows us to feel compassion, so in that sense it's good. (Though really it's not accurate to describe suffering as good or bad in this framework, it simply is.)

I think a lot of western audience get tripped up because they're looking at the concept of suffering through a Western-Christian lens, where it is a punishment placed on mankind for its sins (hence all the framing about Venat "punishing" the ancients with death and suffering) when really, it's just that suffering is a part of our lives, and turning away from or denying it only makes it fester.

Kinda hard to umbrella it all under Buddhist influence when Buddhism discards the notion of the soul. It also doesn't hold that life is good or bad, just that it is temporary, and that temporary things are something to free one's self from.

Like sure, there's some Buddhist elements, but the events of the story are largely free from it, mainly due to all of the violence. There's also Zenos who is rather like the antithesis to Buddhism, thrusting simple desire so powerfully in front of despair as to be half of the force that beats it, serving as the vehicle from which it cannot escape.

[KariTheFox]

I'm sure concocting elaborate conspiracy theories about last minute rewrites must be fun, but I think a simpler explanation is that a story was written with a moral framework and belief system you don't agree with.

[Theodric]

I'm sure concocting elaborate conspiracy theories about last minute rewrites must be fun, but I think a simpler explanation is that a story was written with a moral framework and belief system you don't agree with.

I'm not sure why you keep brushing it off as a 'conspiracy theory' when multiple people have linked you the interview where it has been stated outright by the developers themselves that an expansion was cut out entirely and the story was rewritten right up until the last minute. Granted, you might have conveniently missed it each and every time it happened but hopefully you'll see it this time around!

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme..._with_yoshida/

Interviewer: When did you decide to bring the story so far to a conclusion?

Ishikawa: After Shadowbringers released, around the end of 2019, Image Studio [note: the CGI studio within Square Enix that produces the high-quality cinematics in various SE game] had to be provided with storyboards. In autumn and winter of that year, we went on a residential together in order to decide the main points of the story for the next expansion. But the problem was… we’re used to the writing process, and so feeling that “here and here are the remaining parts of the story we have to talk about, so let’s accept the rest”, the residential went very smoothly. I was in charge of filling in the details of the story elements, but when I looked at the structure of the content again, I thought “this might be okay for just another expansion, but if this is labelled the ‘finale’ is it really okay?” So I reworked the story from the plot outline. The end result was ready 2 days before the deadline.

[KariTheFox]

So I reworked the story from the plot outline. The end result was ready 2 days before the deadline.[/I]

Do... do you think the "deadline" here is referring to Endwalker's release date, and not an internal preproduction deadline around the end of 2019-2020 like the quote was talking about?