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

[DevonEllwood]

This is going to be a long post since I haven't really commented on the story and I wanted to actually defend it for a change.


I'm going to be completely honest, I have just been skimming the story. My friends are always further into the story, Tuesday is a 12 hour day for me, and I don't know if it's because of that or I'm generally getting impatient and just wanting to unlock things. Yoshida said he wasn't aware of people paying that close attention to details (in reference to the Shadow hunter scene....zooming in on the masks and people able to potentially identify them) but going on that I'll assume small details don't matter. I've been reading the first and last part of paragraphs and just, getting the general idea of what's going on.

All that being said, I feel the patch content has been okay. Not great or bad, just general middle of the road, kind of boring, but okay. The pacing seems fine if a bit slow, the characters have been okay, I don't feel like I'm being manipulated, there's no time travel, and cut-scenes were okay. I feel like this is a vast improvement over most of endwalker. I'd rather have a slow, boring story over whatever endwalker was. I did enjoy the character animations, especially for the eyes. I feel it gave them more life and maybe the writers might actually get me to eventually care about the characters. What I didn't like was Y'shtola being completely stupid. The dragon being sensed in Garlemald was an obvious trick. All they needed was for her to say, "this is probably a trick, keep your guard up" or something instead of "hey she may have been able to escape for a short time?". It was frustrating. The scene after defeating fire dude was weird too, I may have missed something. I was just letting the autoplay go for it and I guess I'm supposed to feel bad for him because he came to our world to die and rejoin the cycle of rebirth. I don't know, there was sad music playing. I feel like a lot of these story bits have already been done in the game and it's fine to re-do them, just bring something new to the table. I don't feel the patch quests have been doing that.

On to the food/slow scenes. I never cared for the burger scene. I felt it was awkwardly placed and served little to no purpose. I also just find hamburgers disgusting. The slow scenes have been on an incline since shadowbringers I feel. We've had them before, but they're nothing new. I am not concerned about budget being wasted on them, but if they continue like this, I feel that some of the slow/eating scenes will become saturated and feel less special. I liked the scene Where Jullus shares food with Zero. Did I skip it? Yeah...toward the end, again, that's on me. I'm impatient. I do appreciate that it was a way for Zero to remember being human, companionship and camaraderie. It was also a callback to the Jullus soup moment, which is one of my favorite scenes in the game. Off the top of my head, that one, anything with Beaten in it, every second Fandangle Dingobills was on screen, Vidofnir getting attacked (I was ready to kill a dragoon for that), and Bacon Moses Frog parting the Red Sea.

On where it started going downhill for me. I've said it before but 5.3. I really did not lie it. Great trial and music though, hated the story. Shadowbringers was a balancing act with the more "friendly and Disneyfied" moments and the darer scenes. It wasn't perfect, but I felt shadowbringers did a much better job at letting the heavy scenes play out to a natural conclusion. Also, I've been playing since 2.0, the reveal at the end of 5.0 felt like a payoff and I loved it. That being said, I really like Hades as a character, but...that's Elidibus's spot. He was the white rabbit motif we had in ARR, the ascian following us should have been him. The only thing is that the whole friendship with Hades, but then again, that could have been Elidibus.

On Ishikawa. She made a tweet that she was stepping down from lead writer about a month before endwalker. She made crossover content showing the sundering for an entirely different game series. I don't thin the fault of the endwalker mess lies with her at all. I feel that she wasn't allowed to do what she wanted to. Yoshida saying he stepped in to help because she was overworked, mentions of a re-write, covid issues and movie everyone to work from home, everyone potentially wanting to get a last say in to the "end of the story". These are the things I feel made the problems. It seems that things that get delayed, have too many writers, or are passed from one person to another, are things that have more potential to have problems. Because of corporate reasons, we may never know the truth and all Ishikawa can say was "that it was meant to be this way". Actions speak louder than words, her stepping down and writing material for another game shows to me she was not happy with endwalker.

Picking apart a story and analyzing it should make it better, not worse.

Also if we are going to complain about powerlevels: the ancients sacrificed half their population to create a being to make a shield, and another half of the remaining to jumpstart life. Venat munched 13 souls and created 13 worlds worth of budding life.