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

[Boblawblah]

That he was surprised that people cared deeply about the game's lore. Honestly this kinda proves my whole point made in another thread about answering some lore questions in one of the recent live Q&As. Basically the whole thing about him coming up with a reason for why Venat purposefully allowed some of the big Convocation members to escape unsundering like Lahabrea, Emet-Selch and Elidibus etc. That answer felt...half-assed since:

1. It wasnt a detail that was ever brought up in the main story (as far as I'm aware) and

2. Its goes against the entire purpose of sundering. Although we could debate that her reasoning of seemingly leaving those 3 members intact was for the belief of preserving the WoL's timeline as she believes that "us" were the key to solving the dilemma. After all, the WoL explained the events that transpired in his timeline to Venat, Emet and Hythlodeus so the plausibility of her basing her actions on what has already come to pass is warranted. However I still go with the fact that usually with these kind of stories its never too well to try to rationalize a story as long as it feels reasonable grounded but obviously some people dont think so and that in of itself is a whole 'nother debate.

But basically my idea was that Yoshida isnt too wrapped up in the game's story details and its almost always the writing team themselves whom come up with the meat and potatoes of the plot with Yoshida supervising and giving direction and layout to the game's plot. Which makes sense for his position. So him giving such a out of the blue answer like Venat letting them go, feels so out of the left field. Well...at least for me it does.

Do you have a source on that quote?

[Teraq]

I am in the minority, but I hated Elpis. I'll use it to segue into your statement "Endwalker was popular and a success". I'm just going to be blunt, but I have been working in a specific environment that has brought my attention that people's comprehension levels are absolutely abysmal and it's embarrassing. People do not read. People do not have patience. People do not give an f-bomber plane about anything beyond surface level. People just want their hand held because it's easier. […]
I'm not going to say my comprehension levels are great. People liked endwalker because they saw a pretty game with great music and a neat story. They're not going to look into it much more than that. I don't need my hand held for the story, I don't need it held for the lore, and I don't want it held for the combat.

Absolutely this. I don't deny there are lore people who actually pay attention and still somehow love Endwalker, more power to them, but it honestly just seems the vast majority does not care this much and is just in it for a fairly enjoyable, "don't think too hard about this" romp, like most blockbuster movies are. Most people don't care to dissect a story and point out every little plot hole. It's the irony with FFXIV: it's touted as this amazing story, but at the same time, people will chide you for analyzing it too closely. "It's just a video game!". Yeah, it's just another media to tell a story. This does not mean it has to be subpar and not stand up to scrutiny.

That is when people are not giving you the ol' "Have we played the same game? / Pay attention to the cutscenes sweetie…" while in the same breath spouting headcanon like "Ancients were going to keep sacrificing lesser humans to their blood god" like it's the truth. Christ, dude. I've been obsessing over Ascians and Ancients for the past three years. I have this big folder of collected fan art right here. I can recite every Convocation seat and the color of their associated crystal in the order of the zodiac. I've done every side quest and spoken to every single NPC I could in Amaurot and Elpis, sometimes in multiple languages. If only I had never cared enough to pay this amount of attention. I truly, truly wish I hadn't.

This argument is especially bad when it's followed by the person regurgitating Endwalker's bad plot and aesop at me. Yeah. I got it the first time around when I suffered through it, because I happen to have a functioning brain. You repeating this stupid story but embellishing it with personal insults is not exactly making its case any better. People will just reply to criticism of Venat with a link to her martyr-o-vision cutscene, as if they think they are making a point that is completely new to me.



Here it is: Endwalker having all the subtlety of a brick the writer is throwing directly at your face, featuring everyone's favorite race. To be fair you must have a very high IQ to understand…

All in all, I cannot figure out what precise amount of attention I had to give Endwalker to enjoy it. I can only suppose that paying simultaneously too little and too much attention works exactly the same as the logic that the Ancients were both too perfect to live (the sheer gall of them to have been born with biological immortality and creation magics that instantly make their society post-scarcity!) and too flawed to be brought back: the answer is You Are Wrong.

Elpis was a frustrating mess for me for the bad dialogue and the pointlessness of conversations. To use an example, the scene where Hades is teaching the critter to fly and Hythlo would not shut up. Look, hes a great person. Look at him helping! I am not joking in that Elpis helped people realize that Hades wasn't always a big meanie pants. I mean, I thought that was obvious in Shadowbringers. That he was a normal person until 12k years of suffering.

You are entirely right, of course. However, I would posit that the subtle brick being thrown directly at the player's face is exactly what most of this player base needs. This reminds me of that post-5.3 interview where Yoshida says they made the incredibly unsubtle parallel between G'raha and Elidibus with that one line explicitly so players could better understand Elidibus through G'raha. I honestly found that insulting. Who even needed that to empathize with Elidibus??

YoshiP knows his audience, I suppose. Even as Pandaemonium bashes you over the head that the guy was nothing but the most precious of sweethearts (which was already made plainly obvious in 5.3 and its accompanying short story), you'll still find people wishing they could be hostile to Themis in dialogue options, because I guess they enjoy roleplaying their WoL as a moron with a grudge and no grasp of time and logic. Even though everyone and everything is telling them the Unsundered have been warped by trauma and 12k years of suffering and loneliness. Glad these people got the option to accuse Lahabrea of things he did literally twelve thousand years into the future, though. Gotta throw the Minority Report pre-crime people a bone, after all.

Yet, the worst part of Endwalker is Yoshida's attitude toward it. Him not knowing people cared about the lore so much. I'm sorry, but he doesn't have an excuse to not understand. Does he just forget about all the lore QandA? Is the game not marketed for its story? Do you not have lore books? A major complaint people had about WoW was the lore being retconned. This and Yoshida clearly wanting to be done with the story so he can "move on" to other stories.

Happy anniversary to this Q&A, by the way. The nail in the coffin of 6.0.

I particularly love that this was his immediate response to a question about Ascians in particular. It's like he's surprised people even care about them when they aren't named Emet-Selch.

It comes across as the polite way to say "wow, you guys care so much more about Ascians than I ever did!". I know, man. I know. I've played through Endwalker. I know you don't care about Ascians, you don't have to say it out loud.

And even Emet he expresses confusion about, sometimes bordering on resentment it seems, when he draws a false equivalence between him and Hermes and Venat in the very same Q&A, asking why people would resent Venat and Hermes but not Emet. This man truly, absolutely does not get it.

(And in case you were wondering, yes, of course I'm still mad about the obvious lion mask apparently not being Fandaniel's. I still refuse to accept YoshiP's answer. This is stupid. It's a lion, not a goat! At least PRETEND it was big brain foreshadowing for a main antagonist instead of "uhhhh random lol")

[kpxmanifesto]

What exactly was the statement he made that gave him this reputation?

During the Letter from the Producer LIVE Part LXVIII, Yoshi P just seemed kind of unprepared to answer the fans' questions about EW's lore. He'd make comments like "I didn't actually imagine anybody would ask this" (3:40:57) or "wow you guys are paying close attention to this game!" (3:45:55). Like, dude this game is renowned for its story. Why is he so surprised that fans are looking for closure and want to ask questions that tie up loose ends?

He also couldn't answer basic questions about FFXIV's timeline, like how long has it been since 1.0 - "As far as the actual story is concerned, I don't really have an exact figure in mind or an exact imagining of how long it has been since 1.0 (3:49:20).

He would also deflect some of the questions by saying things like "when you're making this world you'll just sort of sometimes ignore things that are inconvenient" (4:25:35) and "I think you guys can come up with your own theories for this one" (4:08:49).

Overall, it just wasn't a very satisfying Q and A session for people either seeking answers to unresolved storylines or trying to fill plot holes.

You can watch the whole thing here at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRpdIL7_NII

[PeaTearGriffin]

He would also deflect some of the questions by saying things like "when you're making this world you'll just sort of sometimes ignore things that are inconvenient" (4:25:35) and "I think you guys can come up with your own theories for this one" (4:08:49).

I suppose we have our answer as to why there are continuity errors between how shadowbringers and endwalker describe the sundering. Perhaps sticking to shadowbringers' version of the sundering might have been too inconvenient for the devs, so they glossed it over with a different version.

[AwesomeJr44]

There's some stuff I like in endwalker. It's just that I feel the rest was terrible enough to bring it down to "hates endwalker". What was good, was really good and it just contributes to the frustration as I feel that endwalker "almost had it".

I'm in the same boat with Endwalker. There are indeed some good parts in the expansion, even some that I loved, but none of that makes up for how terrible the rest of the expansion was. For every great scene like 'Anxiety Elephant', there's countless parts that are trash-tier like the fish selling, the 'fake-out' deaths in UT, or literally anything including the Lopporits.

I'll use it to segue into your statement "Endwalker was popular and a success". I'm just going to be blunt, but I have been working in a specific environment that has brought my attention that people's comprehension levels are absolutely abysmal and it's embarrassing. People do not read. People do not have patience. People do not give an f-bomber plane about anything beyond surface level. People just want their hand held because it's easier.

This is a big reason why popularity doesn't necessarily equal quality. Most people quite frankly have terrible taste in most things as they don't bother to think about what they consume beyond a surface level. I've compared Endwalker to a typical Marvel movie in the past for this reason. Both are very skin deep with their logic and rely on the viewer to turn their brain off to enjoy it. However, both will always make bank as their viewer/playerbase is completely willing to ignore gaping plotholes if it means they get to look at a pretty screen or hear some sad music play at the right times. Both Marvel Studios and the FFXIV dev team know that they can churn out low effort stories with very skin deep writing and they'll still have their main audience raving for more. There's no incentive to make a proper gourmet meal when your target audience will not only gobble up any old slop you feed them, but thank you for it and ask for more. It's sad because both franchises used to hold themselves to a higher standard.

I'm still here because I still have hope that Endwalker was a fluke. I enjoy playing this game with my friends and the other content it has to offer, just not the story.

Hopefully once 7.0 is released, the 'current expansion' honeymoon phase can end and we can all look back at Endwalker as a fluke while enjoying a great expansion. At least that's what I hope for anyways. For now, I'll keep enjoying the gameplay (when it's not riddled with bugs like TOP is) but I'm waiting for the day when I can enjoy the story again too.

To this day I still cant wrap my mind around this statement. It makes him look so out of touch.

He looks out of touch because he is out of touch.

[Vyrerus]

I wasn't planning on posting this anymore

I like the sentiment behind this post, as well as most all of the post as well.

I will say though, it's a common thing in RPG video games for information to be repeated ad nauseum. This is usually because the information itself is miss-able or at least deemed to be miss-able or perhaps hard to digest. Combine that with the fact that in Japanese fiction in general, repetition for emphasis has always been part and parcel to stories... Yeah, we get way more repetition than we need.

You'd think this would help the people who are barely paying attention, but I guess it just becomes a drone if they do, and might even cause more people to tune out.

[aveyond-dreams]

Had a lot of fun going in and fixing the travesty that is the current Myths of the Realm storyline. All 3 acts posted here.

[KageTokage]

I feel like it's pretty hard to top "near extinction of all life on the planet" when it comes to tragedies, so the angle that Venat was trying to "play it safe" by not making any effort to change anything doesn't really vibe with me.

The main thing that bugs me is that they could've avoided most/all of the unpleasant and likely unintentional negative implications by simply having her memory get wiped as well, but they seemed care more about forcibly establishing a stronger connection to the player character for the sake of drama then anything else.

[Atelier-Bagur]

I feel like it's pretty hard to top "near extinction of all life on the planet" when it comes to tragedies, so the angle that Venat was trying to "play it safe" by not making any effort to change anything doesn't really vibe with me.

The main thing that bugs me is that they could've avoided most/all of the unpleasant and likely unintentional negative implications by simply having her memory get wiped as well, but they seemed care more about forcibly establishing a stronger connection to the player character for the sake of drama then anything else.

Which is fair that people can feel that way about the situation. Its just not something I would necessarily go that far into since the point of the story wasnt about changing the past anyway. But I do agree that it would've been better for her memory to have also been wiped but then it wouldnt explain Hydaelyn's secret plan to harvest the planet's aether to use it as a means to head into Ultima Thule or having her make the backup plan of escaping the star on a gamble.

It would've just left more holes into the established plot since it relies on her keeping her memories of Hermes and Meteion's plan.

[BRVV]

This isn't limited to Endwalker but is anyone anoyed by the writing and it's shortcomings in general?

The omega quests are about an entity that just wants to battle. The inserted old FF stuff in there is super forced. It reads like a fanfic.

I finally started the Bozja questline... it begins with a bunch of characters all talking the same way (like almost all characters in this game do) and spouting out lore. Did no one on the writing team hear about "show dont tell"?