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

[Lauront]

I did not bother trying to introduce or account for the element of Dynamis in my rewrite. It was simply too ridiculous of a device to use in any serious story. Think about the target audience - how in the world are you going to try and pass off the literal power of friendship onto a playerbase that is in their late teens/twenties? By that point that kind of nonsense just isn't palatable or believable.

I will however encourage you and other frequenters of this thread to finish and post all of your respective rewrites, can't wait for these streamers to open the first page of General Discussion and see it flooded with multiple works that are highly likely to outdo and course correct the direction that Endwalker went in. We may as well make this territory our own.

The removal of dynamis is no more than is necessary to steer the story back from the false path.

When you have a game as immensely popular as FFXIV, there will inevitably be some small minority disagreeing on anything you can think of. Go practically anywhere outside these forums (even Reddit, usually a cesspool of negativity), and you'll find that the overwhelming majority of the playerbase *loves* the MSQ. It's okay to not like it, but to act as if your opinion is somehow representative of everyone when it isn't even close is bad form.

So take these other sites representing a minority of the playerbase in their own right as licence be gaslit into the statement that a majority of the playerbase loves loves loves the MSQ? No, I think I won't.

While I think it's fair to say that a good portion of the playerbase is happy with the story, there has been enough murmuring and dissent to move the writers to do a Q&A, address story mixed messages in interviews and add a follow-up quest to (at least try) introduce nuance that was sorely lacking in base EW. I've seen quite a few mentions even within sites which lean more positive, like Reddit, of how they find the story depressing, and this is not even ancients fans necessarily. Just people who found the way EW presented its "themes" and messaging depressing in spite of its aim to deliver a hopeful message. I would say as time has progressed, the needle has moved, and we are probably in a position where there are two polarised groups that either love or hate the story, both of which are fairly sizeable minorities, and a majority that is content with it but has reservations about this or that aspect, just not story-breaking ones. There is no way to categorically prove this, but there is also no real evidence to claim the story is universally loved, and as Vyrerus put it, there are good reasons to dispute the notion that Reddit (which is slowly beginning to show more dissent on the story), Twitter or Metacritic are the final say on this, in addition to the fact that they too represent a fairly small proportion of the playerbase in their own right (Reddit may boast 600k members but its actual post engagement is far, far below this.)

[KageTokage]

The removal of dynamis is no more than is necessary to steer the story back from the false path.

Honestly, at this point I kind of want them to do more with it so it feels less like something that was thrown in simply to create a threat that could actually bring down Ancient society.

Considering the shenanigans the XIIth legion was able to pull off with the Resonant tech and the VIIth with synthetic auracite, some other legion finding a way to manipulate dynamis through research and analysis of the transformed wouldn't feel like much of a stretch; particularly after the final role quest plainly stated there's still fallout from the Final Days lingering on Etheriys.