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

[Absurdity]

Zodiark was just a name they drop once or twice, how did he "deserve better?"

>friendship is magic is a tired trope,

Ahh so this is a troll post. Else I have no idea why you are suffering to play a Final Fantasy game where friendship is pretty much *always* the magic. Maybe go play COD or GTA where everyone is an edgy as**le?

Zodiark's name may have only been dropped once or twice until Shadowbringers, but he had been built up since as early as ARR. The Ascians regularly talked about their master, their god, the force behind everything they do. Over the various expansions we learned more and more about them and consequently about Zodiark as well, they didn't need to drop his name every single time.
Until 6.0 Zodiark was building up to be the final enemy we had to defeat, only for him to get axed in such a nonchalant and abrupt way that it felt jarring to say the least. Did it subvert expectations? Sure. Was it executed well? Debatable.

I also wouldn't immediately dismiss this as a troll post either, Droxy isn't necessarily wrong, they're just not doing a good job at explaining their point.

Yes, over the course of pretty much every expansion we did often use friendship to solve the respective issues in the story, but it was significantly more grounded and believable within the game's universe. We forged bonds and alliances with people and nations to overcome adversity by working together, using numbers and diverse skill sets to overcome what we couldn't on our own.

But with the introduction of Meteon and Dynamis the power scaling just went completely off the rails, it was an enemy so much more powerful than what we thought would be the final boss, Zodiark, even at his prime. Meteon became a problem that we just couldn't realistically defeat with anything so far established in the game, even if the entire planet worked together we would just lose.

So besides dropping an even bigger bad than Zodiark on us out of nowhere in the last stretches of the game the devs also had to invent a plot device to allows us to defeat it, making Dynamis pull double duty as the force that makes Meteon this comically powerful and also the force that would allow us to have a fighting chance, literally turning friendship into magic.


One could even argue that this turned XIV from a more grounded fantasy universe into a generic shounen anime, where we don't manage to defeat the enemy with training, experience, preparation and cooperation, instead we get more powerful just because we believe.