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

[Teraq]

I guess I could've phrased myself more clearly. What I am getting at is the way that Hydaelyn/Venat keep associating Meteion/Endsinger and the despair she brings with darkness. Not so much Zodiark, but on reflection, you'd have to forgive players who aren't as attentive to the lore as we are, for perhaps being confused when confronted with "The Eternal Darkness" within "The Dark Inside".

yo is this where I bring up the fact that the trial is merely called "The Martyrs' Crater" in French orrr

[Rulakir]

See my earlier statement about Buddhist parallels and the notion that "gods" have to lose their divinity and learn to become enlightened through suffering.

I believe they focused too much on themes and not enough on whether or not the story was enjoyable. It's a video game, it's supposed to be entertaining. Regarding the time loop, did no one stop to think how unsatisfying it might feel to the player to be sent back in time and be unable to save the Ancients? Did they not think that people might not want to watch their favorite character(s) suffer and die a second time? Did they not think that making the WoL inadvertently responsible for some of these events (particularly giving Venat the idea for the sundering) would be problematic?

Elpis was basically just a snuff film. What's to like about that? It was cruel bait because up until Meteion starts giving her report you think you're going to be able to save them. (No, I don't care that Elidibus said we couldn't change anything. Not following an expansion where an AU was created to save the WoL's life.)

I honestly don't know how they could have written a more unsatisfying conclusion and while the Omega quest chain was an improvement, it still wasn't cathartic enough. This isn't even addressing the copious amount of lore that we were denied due to this rush job to be done with the Ancients. Weren't we supposed to have all our questions answered in EW? Instead, there's more than ever and there's only been one Q&A with Yoshi-P visibly disinterested in discussing the lore.

They can keep their themes. I wanted a good story and I didn't get one.

[Lauront]

yo is this where I bring up the fact that the trial is merely called "The Martyrs' Crater" in French orrr

I really should switch versions fully. Another to file under the "why does this difference even exist" folder.

[Lelila38]

Elpis was basically just a snuff film. What's to like about that? It was cruel bait because up until Meteion starts giving her report you think you're going to be able to save them. (No, I don't care that Elidibus said we couldn't change anything. Not following an expansion where an AU was created to save the WoL's life.)

Elidibus said that, thinking we'd end up an intangible ghost, just able to witness, but unable to interact with anything. From the point we were discovered and given enough aether to take form, everything was possible. At least I perceived it that way.

If we're still unable to change the outcome, even cause it, that's incredibly frustrating.
They should have let us stay ghost.

[Xirean]

Elidibus said that, thinking we'd end up an intangible ghost, just able to witness, but unable to interact with anything. From the point we were discovered and given enough aether to take form, everything was possible. At least I perceived it that way.

If we're still unable to change the outcome, even cause it, that's incredibly frustrating.
They should have let us stay ghost.

100% agreed. When he said we couldn't change anything my major question was "Why not?" then the area loads and I'm a time ghost. I was perfectly ready to just follow around as a little specter and observe the tragedy knowing full well there is nothing I could do about it. It would make the whole scenario much more digestible. The moment I can be perceived, everything changes. Also the gatherer quests prove that the WoL can take objects from their back to the present. So now I'm wondering, why can't we just do what we did in ShB and put some of our Elpis friends in some auricite. They could even just snap their fingers and make a creation that would let us carry their body almost like Capsule Corp stuff.

[Teraq]

Re: Wanting Hydaelyn to turn out to be an antagonist, I very much resent the assumption (not that anyone here has outright accused anyone of this, but I wanted to make this clear) that all of us who did wanted her to be a 100% cackling villain. Personally no, because that would come out of completely nowhere. I envisioned her as perfectly benevolent, in an overbearing mother kind of way, genuinely wanting the best for the planet and mankind according to her beliefs. She just, you know. Committed genocide for it then lied about it for 12,000 years – and perhaps she was not right to think it had been the only way in the first place. And we had just found that out, alongside the fact that she was a Primal, which was treated rather ominously – remember when it was the Wham Line of the ShB launch trailer?...

...only for the story to ultimately go "hah, nevermind", handwave... quite literally all of that, and revert back to making Hydaelyn an unbridled and questionable force of goodness and light, may you ever walk in the light of the crystal, my child, and so on and so on. Every single primal tempers and leaves lasting consequences in some form or another, except magically for Hydaelyn.

...and it had zero consequence on the plot at all. Hydaelyn tempering would have been very interesting to talk about and deal with, and the fact that it's handwaved away right at the end of 6.0 with no concern about it earlier rubbed me the wrong way.

Don't forget about ShivaRyne too: that was rather foreboding when it came to Light... Granted, Ryne did have the Echo, but she was only a 1/14 Sundered. That makes it very likely that the Light aether affected her mind with ease it wouldn't have with Venat. But still, though, we then have the Elidibus parallel. Why show us his degenerating into a Zodiark AI in 5.3 then pointedly not do the same with his literal counterpart? I had expected her to have somewhat lost sight of her original goals and reasons (as she didn't have the equivalents of Emet and Lahabrea to stimulate her memory) and have the Light gnaw at her mind. Having forgotten her true name. Wondering what her original self would think of her actions now – was this truly what she had in mind? With no one left anymore to remind her to remind her of who she was and what she wanted anymore, I could have seen this be quite a dark storyline.

But we get... none of this, seemingly? Hydaelyn is just Venat drawn by Amano, and that's it. There are just so many missed opportunities here I feel.

And yeah, how different Zodiark looks from the statue we had always seen of him is weird. The only in-universe explanation that makes sense IMO is that Dark aether naturally made him look more demon-like than they had planned for, just as Light-aspected beings look very angelic. He's very different and didn't have enough snake symbolism IMO. Patch 5.3 fully going with the Zodiac-Convocation stuff as canon had me hoping for that. But you know. That lion mask was definitely a goat and such. Expectations subverted.

(snip)

Agree with everything there. And I have to add to the last paragraph: more than Emet/Hythlo/Venat, to me it was the Ancients as a whole whom I have loved since 5.0, and it was always going to be an uphill battle for Endwalker to convince me to like its plot if it revolved around demonizing the Ancients and reducing them all to dumb strawmen. It's like they didn't realize that they really had something interesting in ShB. I'm pretty sure people weren't praising the plot of ShB because of Jeryk, Thaffe and their trolley.

Endwalker really makes it look like the nuanced conflict and grey morality presented in ShB were accidents.

I do believe you bring up very good points about buddhist mythology and how it likely colored the writing – even as someone raised in a secular family in a secular country myself I would probably employ Christian tropes in stories without even realizing it.
I just find it dissonant that we should regard them as gods who deserved the fall from grace and not feel much about it because That's Just How It Is™. The way I saw them in Shadowbringers – and still see them in Elpis, talking to the NPCs and doing random side quests – is that they were very much humans in nearly all aspects, it's just that their biology gave them unique powers that affected how their society and mindset evolved. Hell, personally I related to them as soon as I saw the skyscrapers in my mostly-medieval fantasy setting, and their emphasis on academia, knowledge, research and sharing of ideas just compounded that. One of the local dungeons is the university!

And then Endwalker would tell me these people all deserved to die because [INSERT CONVOLUTED PLOT HERE] and I should feel it was 100% justified and, wow, why are you feeling bad about this? You weren't supposed to like them OH MY GOD!


Addendum for certain people lurking on this topic: I personally don't give much of a shit about what Venat's GigaSimpeus told us in the Omega quest, nor do I care about the question of whether she intentionally omitted to tell her posse about what was going to happen to them. I will say though, that him saying "We are going to miss you" in Anamnesis does point to him thinking they would still be there in any shape while apparently believing Venat's persona would be gone, and um... the opposite ended up happening, basically.
And we still do not know if she ever cared to explain everything about the Final Days, because she only afforded him very select memories. And to be fair, I'm not sure why she would wipe his knowledge of the implications of Meteion and Dynamis if he had been aware of them. Wouldn't it have been beneficial for everyone if at least one creation of Hydaelyn – be it the Watcher or the Loporrits – knew about the source of the Final Days to help the Sundered out? Literally the only explanation I have for her wiping his possible knowledge of things is making shit as convoluted as possible to perpetuate the time loop of the WoL going back in time to seek answers.
And the time loop being an explanation for things is, as we all know, an objective proof of the plot sucking ass, and I will not hear any opposing views on this particular matter, thanks.

[CrownySuccubus]

snip

Yeah, when my friend (who had finished EW months before me) giddily asked me what I thought about Elpis (after I had heaped praise on every segment of the story before that), I just stoically said, "Yeah, I didn't like it." His giddiness immediately turned dour as he asked, "The heck didn't you like?" in an accusatory manner. I responded, "I felt like that was the most preventable apocalypse ever, and only happened because everybody -- including "me" -- suddenly decided to take Stupid Pills."

Like Lelila said, when I first got to Elpis, I was like "Oh okay, so we're going to be able to watch what happens, but not change anything. That's a clever twist."

When we talk to Emet and Hyth, I thought, "Oh okay, we're going to see what happened and maybe try to warn them, but nobody's going to believe us. Tragic, but still kinda cool."

But then when we Venat turns up and we just told them everything, red flags started going off in my head. "Oh my God. They're going to contrive some reason for Hermes to hit us with the mind-eraser ray, aren't they?"

And then when that happens, and Venat says, "Oh well, we COULD tell them, but blah blah blah we need Hermes and yadda yadda", my only thought was, "This can't actually be real. I'm watching an actor for a theatrical play who knows that everybody in the theater dies as soon as the play ends decide that playing the exact same role with the exact same script is somehow going to change things. She's deciding NOT to do the ONE THING that will instantly make the future I warned her about not happen."

Then, the rest of EW happened with the "Blah blah people need suffering", "Perfection is bad", "Struggle makes you strong" nonsense we've talked about here, and I was tuning out half the dialogue.

[CrownySuccubus]

snip

Yeah, everything about that philosophical trapping has a very "fatalist" outlook to it; basically, X is inevitable, so we should fully embrace it and bend over backwards to explain why it's really a GOOD thing.

One of the reasons I staunchly disagree with Zen Buddhism (and, to an extent, the modern Japanese culture that has been built atop it) is its adherence to tradition and the status quo. EW makes the argument multiple times that trying to improve the world, trying to improve your life, and trying to strive for "perfection" is actually a bad thing, and thus everyone should just accept their lot in life.

The flaw with this argument should be obvious: where is the magical line where progress should be halted? Should human beings go back to sleeping on rocks and hunting for our meals? Should we surrender all medical progress and go back to letting diabetics who need insulin to live die without it?

The usual cop-out answer to this is "Of course not. But we should strengthen our society to be ready for the inevitable moment that we DO lose these comforts." And sure, that COULD and probably WILL happen at some point in humanity's future, but....so what? How exactly do I prepare for a world in which my relative, who has survived on insulin for 40 years, dies because the apocalypse made finding that medicine impossible? By not giving it to them?

[Teraq]

His giddiness immediately turned dour as he asked, "The heck didn't you like?" in an accusatory manner.

The average EW non-enjoyer experience...

How exactly do I prepare for a world in which my relative, who has survived on insulin for 40 years, dies because the apocalypse made finding that medicine impossible? By not giving it to them?

have you tried telling their pancreas to forge ahead

[CrownySuccubus]

have you tried telling their pancreas to forge ahead

LOL

I'm going straight to Hell for how hard I laughed at that...