Remember when this game was good?

[Renathras]

There's no implication of the concept of "good"...etc [this whole post, basically]

All of this.

Do people just skip cutscenes or something? Or is it just that psychological thing where people tend to have memories fade/blur over time?

It had nothing to do with "good" or "evil".

It was clearly established that a controlled shift of a Shard towards one element, while the Source is shifted towards it a bit, will eventually cause that element to overtake the Shard and, due to the Source being tilted towards it, create some kind of funnel/attractive effect, sucking the energy from the Shard (and absorbing/deleting the Shard as an independent entity in the process), which then causes a flood of that element on the Source when it floods it, rejoining with the Source and making the Source (and the people on it) 1/13th (or something, it's probably more exponential the closer we get to 100%) stronger. If a Shard is pushed too far, too quickly, and without the Source being managed with it, then it simply causes the overabundance to collapse the Shard in on itself with that element, which is what happened with the Ascians first attempt, the Thirteenth/Void. After that, they learned to manage the process more carefully. (It's never said what their solution was to that problem, just kind of implied they thought they could figure out something once they finished with all the other Rejoinings and only the Void and Source remained to combine.)

The one thing I think you got wrong, though, is that the Ascians goal WAS to cause the Flood. That would have been the Rejoining. They brought [spoilers for anyone who hasn't done all the ShB Role quests and the bonus questline(s)] Cylvia over from the Thirteenth, had her work with and become a member of Ardbert's group, quest with them, and fight along side them...while all the time secretly also being the Shadowlord conjuring all the darkness and evils they strove against. Finally, she revealed herself to them as the Shadowlord and forced them to "kill" her, and by doing THAT (after purging all that Darkness from the world) and probably then going on to take down the Ascians revealed to be in charge (think how our own WoL fought Gaius as our big bad before fighting Lahabread), it pushed the First far enough towards Light/Umbral to trigger the rejoining.

...the only bit I'm a bit fuzzy on myself is why they traveled to the Source (Elidibus sent them there with a promise they could stop the Flood on the First, which was a lie, but I don't remember the WHY of it, maybe it was to help with that Rejoining...), and when they met Hydaelyn there, she sent Minfilia back to stop the Flood of Light, sparing a piece of the world. I don't think that was Elidibus' plan, though. I think they were sent to the Source to be that other part of managing the element to tilt the Source towards the First just-so to trigger the Rejoining, and us meeting them and the Hydaelyn/Minfilia thing wasn't part of the plan and paused their effort there.

Now, Black Rose was a separate issue, and an accident/unintended one.

Black Rose was supposed to be a certain level of deadly. But in the alternate timeline, the Rejoining with the First DID happen. The Source was flooded with Umbral, which causes stagnation and lethargy/weakness in all things. In effect, when that Rejoining happened, everyone's energy and immune systems, etc, were suppressed. Consider if suddenly everyone on Earth's immune system was cut to 50% effectiveness. Pandemics would run rampant all of a sudden, and be more deadly than normal Even things like the common cold and flu would be exponentially more deadly than they are today. So that's what happened. People were weakened by the abundance of Umbral/Stasis, so when Black Rose was released, it was FAR more deadly than it was supposed to have been, killing off most of the population. (This is the part of the story that was kind of explained, but they didn't explain it WELL, so most people missed that element). Everyone being tilted towards Stasis made Black Rose "Super Effective!!!", and it killed a massive amount of the population, including the Warrior of Light, Scions, and a bunch more.

While the Ascians did intend Black Rose to trigger the Rejoining (I think), it was TOO powerful because everyone's immunity/defenses against poison/etc were too suppressed by the Umbral, and it caused the catastrophe to be far worse. Though we never hear what became of the Ascians in that timeline, it may well have been considered a failure since it killed way too many people, which set back their "repopulate to offer those souls to Zodiark" plan back, possibly by tens of thousands of years.

That was the timeline G'Raha came from (which still exists; a Tales from the Shadows short story says that Midgarsormyr watched them send the Crystal Tower back in time and decided the sentient races were worthy of a second chance, and declared to them he would be their patron), and why G'Raha's soul/Aether is technically as dense as the WoL's, since the WoL had +1 Rejoining vs everyone else on the Source due to reabsorbing Ardbert while G'Raha comes from a world after the First's Rejoining, making his soul that same level of density. It also has some double-dipping with his original self's soul, so his soul is all kinds of weird denseness. The individual Shards seem to be of a kind (so say the First's part was A and the Second's was B and so on, G'Raha has two copies of several parts - all the Rejoinings that happened before the 8th calamity/First's Rejoining, and then has one copy of that shard of his soul), so they don't stack, per se. But G'Raha, like the WoL, has the Source component of his shattered soul as well as 8 Rejoinings (2 of each except for the First's shard of his soul, of which he has only one of), meaning he may actually be more powerful, in terms of soul density, than the WoL if you think about it, as both have the same total number of Shards, but G'Raha has copies of 7 of them as well as of his Source part.

...if it even adds up like that.

At the very least, he's of the same Rejoined level as the WoL is. Which is kind of interesting to think about.

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Oh, right:

And OP, you're a troll, and this is a troll thread. You guys need to give it a rest. This isn't "constructive criticism", this is just a whiny temper tantrum and a "I want to be popular/on the hate train bandwagon too~!!" type of nonsense thread. Be better, people. <_<