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

[RoroCookies]

Part of me kinda wish Zenos joined us in the party for a bit. He would’ve delivered so much spice that the scions could never do because they all ‘yes man’ each other constantly.
I think part of the reason why I enjoy Zenos is for just that in general. He doesn’t care and doesn’t tries to sit on a high horse like everyone else.
Idk, maybe it’s just me wanting for there to be more unique characters that defer in opinions for once. I think at one point in this thread Theordic touched a bit on this before and I have to strongly agree. The game needs characters that don’t just blankly agree to each other.

[KizuyaKatogami]

Since Stormblood I always felt that there was more to Zenos's story, that his desire for a fierce battle in order to "feel" something would have some more development. And once I saw him made his "return", jumping from body to body I was like "yeah, I knew it! his real backstory is coming later". Aaaaaaaaaaand... it never happened. Instead he became a mere power lvl monster and a poor attempt at Vegeta, and they had the gall to flaunt "yeah, we couldn't be bothered to make an actual backstory. Would it have changed anything?" And honestly if they couldn't deal with that by the end of this story, the "story to end all stories" I don't see how I could care about anything relating to that character if he ever comes back.

Speaking of wasted potential, remember the multiple times through the story where the echo was said to allow "transcending the barriers of the soul"? Like the ascian fusion at the end of Aetherochemical Research Facility and Zenos possessing Shinryu, not to mention all his body swapping. It was said that we hadn't yet gained full control of what the echo could do... And then there's the mess with the echo and the blessing of light in EW. I'm not completely sure how that game of calvinball ended but it looked like soul-transcending was completely dropped.

I’m curious why they make comments about his backstory when he technically already had it and they described it already, although it was in short stories. He was just a bad seed from the beginning and it seemed he was just born to fail. I think at one point the devs even regarded him as the “ultimate evil.” Kind of like michael myers i guess lol. Just born to be a killer

[CrownySuccubus]

I don't think it's a case of JPRGS being bolder back in the "Good Ole Days". There were just a lot more of them.

During the "Golden Age" of JRPGs (basically, the 90s to early 2000s), there were a ton of RPGs trying to imitate the success of Final Fantasy. Legend of Dragoon, Legend of Legaia, Suikoden, Shadow Hearts, Skies of Arcadia, Lunar, Star Ocean, Grandia, Phantasy Star, Chrono Cross, etc, etc, etc. Some of them were hits, but there were a lot of misses. Some of them were bold storytelling, most were not. For every deep, mature story like Persona 2 or Shadow Hearts, there were ten formulaic and pulpy stories like Skies of Arcadia, Legend of Dragoon or Grandia. (Not calling those games bad, btw. Two of them are amongst my favorite RPGs of all time.)

These days, though, companies do not churn JRPGs like they used to. Even Final Fantasy, which pretty much had a new mainline FF every year between 1998 and 2001, only gives us a new game every 6-7 years if we're lucky. There's still Persona and SMT for more "mature" stories, but even those have started settling into formulas since the successes of SMT III: Nocturne and Persona 3.

[KizuyaKatogami]

I don't think it's a case of JPRGS being bolder back in the "Good Ole Days". There were just a lot more of them.

During the "Golden Age" of JRPGs (basically, the 90s to early 2000s), there were a ton of RPGs trying to imitate the success of Final Fantasy. Legend of Dragoon, Legend of Legaia, Suikoden, Shadow Hearts, Skies of Arcadia, Lunar, Star Ocean, Grandia, Phantasy Star, Chrono Cross, etc, etc, etc. Some of them were hits, but there were a lot of misses. Some of them were bold storytelling, most were not. For every deep, mature story like Persona 2 or Shadow Hearts, there were ten formulaic and pulpy stories like Skies of Arcadia, Legend of Dragoon or Grandia. (Not calling those games bad, btw. Two of them are amongst my favorite RPGs of all time.)

These days, though, companies do not churn JRPGs like they used to. Even Final Fantasy, which pretty much had a new mainline FF every year between 1998 and 2001, only gives us a new game every 6-7 years if we're lucky. There's still Persona and SMT for more "mature" stories, but even those have started settling into formulas since the successes of SMT III: Nocturne and Persona 3.

Even in the final fantasy series alone though, i feel like the older ones were much bolder. Some of them ended in the entire world being destroyed or forever massacred. Characters actually died and suffered consequences. Whereas now you have 14 where it’s just like an anime slice of life game where nothing bad happens to the main cast.

[EgilTheStressedMage]

I would've rewritten Meteion to just have seen all possible futures of Etherys of them all going to hell and nothing about it could have been done. Each and every one would be due to infighting amongst men as the minor disagreements now would boil over into wars later. This would include the shards splitting and several of them being dead by the time we came into existence. Even the one where the WoL dies, which would be what pushes her over. So instead of her flying to the edge of the universe, she would bury herself in the planet to see if humanity could ever figure out a way to live with each other with the knowledge the WoL had, except everyone's memory is wiped but we would have bits and pieces restored over the game, not the expansion. I'd do away with Elpis as a zone and instead be a flashback we see through an avatar of Meteion's that we meet later on, and instead of being an empath she could instead peer into memories as well. Yes this is becoming OP, but she wouldn't be a sudden appearance like she was in EW, I would have hinted at her over the course of the entire story. She could have even been Hydaelyn the entire time, and the thing that would make her resume her plans for global extinction would be seeing all of WoL's family and friends die to Zenos as his body hopping showed him memories of everyone we knew similar to what Lahabrea did in ARR, but also Zenos killing the WoL as the final battle with him proved he was perfectly capable of doing. Then Zodiark would sacrifice what little of his essence remained to bring us back and that "to the last of us" line would absolutely go to them. At this point it becomes the finale to Xenoblade Chronicles but blank isn't an asshole and blank is a woobie, the blanks being the spoilers that anyone else who's played it would know. Hell, my favorite villain ever is from that game.

I just woke up when I typed this.

[Lauront]

Hey, I think that trait can be fun and very interesting in a character. Venat is a masterclass, like many people are in reality, in carefully phrasing things in pleasantly vague ways so you will read general warmth and benevolent intent behind her words, and thus happily return to your own timeline without diving further into "wait, when you say you 'love mankind' and 'believe in mankind's potential', you mean what? And you use this as self-justification to do what?"

I mean, even her big speech on the bridge about her epiphany about the miracle of creation and seeing the world in a new way - when you look back at it, she's saying essentially nothing concrete at the time, and when you can contextualize from her future actions, it quickly becomes, uh, kind of disturbing.

In a lot of ways, I love Venat! The story did her character an utter disservice. Give me my incredibly ruthless, intelligent, unapologetic ideolog

Missed this somehow - her mentality is actually one I can relate to in the sense that I'm someone who enjoys 4x/strategy/sim games (and some RPGs, which allow for such plots), especially ones like Age of Wonders 2, where you can more or less shape a civilisation through a vision of what you want it to be, so in that sense she (and the Ascians through their "great work") is more of a "mirror" to my gaming style than say Zenos. Of course that's separate to my views on the morality of doing that to your own people, but from the perspective of games that put you in the position more or less of a "god", it clicks. Had they fully embraced her role as a type of Yunalesca, I'd have been more enthusiastic, as she is one of my favourite antagonists in the series.

[CrownySuccubus]

Even in the final fantasy series alone though, i feel like the older ones were much bolder. Some of them ended in the entire world being destroyed or forever massacred. Characters actually died and suffered consequences. Whereas now you have 14 where it’s just like an anime slice of life game where nothing bad happens to the main cast.

Only one FF game ended with the world being destroyed (FFVI). Only FFVII was bold enough to kill off a main character and never replace them (FFVI had a huge ensemble cast; some of the ones that can optionally die, like Shadow, didn't really affect the story much). Compared to most games in the series, FFXIV is pretty deep and nuanced.

FFVI and FFVII are the mainline games everybody thinks of when they talk about how "bold" FF games used to be (along with Tactics), but they were exceptions and not the rule.

[Raoabolic]

I'm surprised no one has said anything about FFVIII considering the entire concept of time gets compressed into a moment which in effect killed reality itself. Thing is, that's not even the part I remember the most vividly, it was the military school versus the "bad" military school and the good guys were launching themselves from their school using sick motorcycle jumps onto the bad guy's school. By the way, both schools were flying like they were airships or something.

[Rulakir]

Why does FFX never get mentioned? The entire game revolved around the "spiral of death". It was a beautiful world and lovely story, but everyone and everything in it was tied to tragedy.

[Raoabolic]

Why does FFX never get mentioned? The entire game revolved around the "spiral of death". It was a beautiful world and lovely story, but everyone and everything in it was tied to tragedy.

Because X-2 exists and and took a hard left from the mood of FFX. Sad thing is that I like the gameplay mechanics of X-2 but the story isn't very good and the soundtrack has a few good tracks but is mostly forgettable. Vegnagun is a pretty cool sounding name for a super weapon though.