Living Memory fails thematically for me because it's written to have two conflicting things be true at once:

1) The Endless are not living creatures. They are a magical databank of dead people's memories, but are not real, living people with souls. While they may simulate life in a believable way, they are not and never have been "alive," and the people they are based on are long dead. They cannot feel pain or despair and even when told we are going to shut down the terminals, make no attempt to preserve their own "lives" because they are not alive at all, in the same way that your Sims will not beg for their lives if you choose to delete them.

2) The Endless are living creatures. They are sentient beings capable of forming new thoughts, learning new information, changing their minds, pursuing their own goals outside of a set program, and for all intents and purposes act identically to a real, living person with a soul. We are supposed to see them as real people whose wants and desires are meaningful and deserve our respect and reverence. Their lack of a soul does not make them any less real and "alive" than other creatures in the world of FFXIV like the Omicrons and advanced magical constructs.

Both of these statements cannot be true, but the writing of this last zone can't decide whether 1 or 2 is the truth. Caciua tells us over and over again that 1 is true and we have no reason to believe she is lying. Yet her own existence calls this into question and all the side quests in the area make 2 seem true...until they suddenly don't and make 1 seem true again. I think if the writers had actually picked which scenario is true instead of trying to have it both ways we wouldn't be having this debate. But the feeling I got all through the zone is that they are operating under the idea that 1 is the true statement but then worry that means we won't be emotionally invested enough so then write the side NPCs as if 2 were true. It came off as confused and careless writing to me, which contributed to me emotionally tuning out of the entire last zone. They so desperately wanted me to feel bad about the digital memories of dead people while at the same time telling me over and over that they aren't real and to not feel bad about deleting them. It's not even a good or interesting moral quandary, it's just confusing and annoying.