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

[Fiel_Tana]

outside of potential hydealyn shenanigans from her crystal with Zero

The first time I've ever skipped a cutscene on purpose was the second I saw that crystal. Canonically my WoL never accepted it and my headcannon is that that Y'Shtola stuffed it in my bag when I wasn't looking so I put it to the only decent use I saw to (hopefully) be rid of it. Regaining that little bit of control over my character felt great tbh.

[jameseoakes]

I haven't even finished the 6.1 MSQ let alone the new released stuff. For everyone building up Natsuko Ishikawa like she was the second coming of a story telling god she sure came up with a whole lot of cliche "friendship triumphs over all" and indestructible plot armor. Don't get me wrong there were some really good moments but they're immediately erased by:


It's such amateur Disney level storytelling from the same person responsible for Shadowbringers and I found myself immediately going into the 6.1 MSQ saying "I don't care about any of this". It almost feels like to me 6.0 was FF14 running off a cliff in regards to lots of aspects of the game not just in the story but look at the housing fiasco and the balance issues and everything else. Island Sancts are a joke, they spent 5 months on a housing lottery no one bothered to internally test for 5 minutes to make sure the tickets drew correctly and then it took another 3 months on top of it to be fixed.

What happened?

It's been really odd, Endwalker copies so much from what worked well when they did it in Shadowbringers and then seem to show they had no idea what made it work. My feeling has been that with Endwalker they tried to pick themes and concepts they had seen work elsewhere (like the despair and nihilism) and copy them but with out them having a firm understanding of how they work

[Kazhar]

It's been really odd, Endwalker copies so much from what worked well when they did it in Shadowbringers and then seem to show they had no idea what made it work. My feeling has been that with Endwalker they tried to pick themes and concepts they had seen work elsewhere (like the despair and nihilism) and copy them but with out them having a firm understanding of how they work

The Dead Ends dungeon is a perfect representation of this IMO. In surface, it has a lot of the same qualities as Amaurot. Cool music and visuals, an impressive walk through the death of a civilization narrated by the main villain.
Except in Amaurot, everything made sense. It was the culmination of years of storytelling and showed us a crucial event which kickstarted the entire plot of the game.
Dead Ends feels a bit random in comparison. I'm still not sure why Meteion decided to narrate this to us (we had a special connection with Emet-Selch and he wanted us to know where he came from. Meteion's reasoning is much weaker here.), and most of the things we saw here are completely inconsequential to the overall narrative. The event which gave birth to Hydaelyn and Zodiark + The Sundering vs ... some random civilizations Meteion hinted at once in a scene but have barely anything to do with the plot beyond ham-fisted symbolism. It's like Shadowbringers but without the substance.
It just feels like they just copied Amaurot because it was a well-received dungeon instead of trying to make something more fitting.

[RyuDragnier]

It was Meteion trying to break us into despair, I believe. "All these worlds failed, were destroyed by themselves, what makes you think your world will be any different? What makes you think that your planet is any different from the rest of the ones that tried?" In essence, that's what she was trying to get across with the dungeon.

[jameseoakes]

The Dead Ends dungeon is a perfect representation of this IMO. In surface, it has a lot of the same qualities as Amaurot. Cool music and visuals, an impressive walk through the death of a civilization narrated by the main villain.
Except in Amaurot, everything made sense. It was the culmination of years of storytelling and showed us a crucial event which kickstarted the entire plot of the game.
Dead Ends feels a bit random in comparison. I'm still not sure why Meteion decided to narrate this to us (we had a special connection with Emet-Selch and he wanted us to know where he came from. Meteion's reasoning is much weaker here.), and most of the things we saw here are completely inconsequential to the overall narrative. The event which gave birth to Hydaelyn and Zodiark + The Sundering vs ... some random civilizations Meteion hinted at once in a scene but have barely anything to do with the plot beyond ham-fisted symbolism. It's like Shadowbringers but without the substance.
It just feels like they just copied Amaurot because it was a well-received dungeon instead of trying to make something more fitting.

Yeah that was the main one in my head when I said that, Amaurot was an amazing dungeon seeing the place we had just been walking round go through that was moving and Emets narration was really strong. The Dead Ends just repeated Thule and the narration didn't really add much and the places we see don't have much impact as they are so throw away and honestly they're not as grim as Amarout felt as they were just not well delivered.

[Boblawblah]

It was Meteion trying to break us into despair, I believe. "All these worlds failed, were destroyed by themselves, what makes you think your world will be any different? What makes you think that your planet is any different from the rest of the ones that tried?" In essence, that's what she was trying to get across with the dungeon.

I get that that was the message, but it rang really hollow for me. The whole time I was thinking, "of course people die, and civilizations end, does that make life not worth living?" And honestly the whole expansion was just constant "oh woe is us, life sucks". good lord, I get it, I went through depression too, but 30 hours of cutscenes just repeating the same message starts to drain on you. What's insane is that in the end, it took us just beating the shit out of a silly bird to knock some sense into her. It was just ridiculous.

[Kazhar]

It was Meteion trying to break us into despair, I believe. "All these worlds failed, were destroyed by themselves, what makes you think your world will be any different? What makes you think that your planet is any different from the rest of the ones that tried?" In essence, that's what she was trying to get across with the dungeon.

I get that the game explained the reason why we go there at some point, but what narrative sense did it make? You could probably cut the Dead Ends section entirely and not lose anything storywise (it retreads a lot of what was already shown in Ultima Thule). But it'd be much harder to argue the same for Amaurot.

[Lauront]

It's a shame that they didn't marshal those (or other) resources into actually depicting the Sundering and surrounding events, rather than parcelling it off to crossover content or largely remarking on it in the Q&A.

I also kind of wish that the Zodiark trial was less about trying to battle the primal, and more to do with the souls in him empowering the MC and friends to banish the parasite Fandaniel from him, maybe aetherically extinguishing him for good so we could be spared of his sanctimonious presence later on in Aitiascope to give way for something more interesting.

[RoroCookies]

It was Meteion trying to break us into despair, I believe. "All these worlds failed, were destroyed by themselves, what makes you think your world will be any different? What makes you think that your planet is any different from the rest of the ones that tried?" In essence, that's what she was trying to get across with the dungeon.

If the scions were present they would’ve just went, “not us, we’re super special” and Meteion showing us this really wouldn’t be any different than the zone itself.
I get that it’s suppose to show worlds suffering from things like diseases, war, and such but kinda little hard to take their message seriously when we have characters like the scions brushing them off without much deep reflection.

[Theodric]

I also get the impression that Endwalker was trying to recapture what made Shadowbringers successful without really understanding what gave it the 'soul' for lack of a better term. Whether people agreed with Emet-Selch or not his motives were completely understandable for the position he found himself in and hold up under scrutiny. Nobody is really left confused as to why he did what he did. The same isn't really applicable to Venat and although there's certainly people who throw their support behind her I doubt they'd accept humanity in our world being subjected to what she put everyone through within FFXIV itself.