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

[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.