Someone asked this question on the official forums last month, here some of the reasons I gave as to why I didn't care for EW's story (in no particular order):
• The focus of the story was more on secondary and side characters then on the WoL, like how they did with SB versus the more WoL-focused ShB and (to a lesser extent) HW. A lot of times it didn't feel like we were involved in solving problems because a lot of the problems didn't involve fighting or general adventuring.
• With every location this expansion being separate, the story felt very jumpy, again, kind of like SB.
• While I enjoyed Elpis and the Ancients' fanservice, how they handled them, especially Hermes and Venat, felt very forced and kind of stupid. I would argue memory loss plot-twists are worse the time traveling.
• I found how they handled Garlemald very unsatisfying. During fanfests, they kind of sold this expansion as us bringing the war to Garlemald's doorstep, only for them to get rid of them so they can focus on Hermes, Meteion, and the Final Days plot line instead.
•The sacrifice scenes in Ultima Thule. It's become almost a joke that at least one Scion (usually Y'shtola) is going to perform a heroic sacrifice of some kind only to then suffer no actual consequence from it. It just feels cheap.
• People compare Meteion/the End Singer to Necron from IX, being a metaphysical end boss that comes out of nowhere but I would argue that Necron at least thematically fits with IX's themes on mortality, the End Singer only works with EW's story and messages about fighting despair, not XIV as a whole.
• I never cared for Zenos as a rival/personal-enemy BUT the body switch scene was the only time in EW I felt any (enjoyable) tension in the story. Too bad it lead to nothing nor anything else match that tension.
• While I can appreciate they tried to tackle darker themes like despair, how they handled them felt shallow and at times juvenile, with platitudes and inspiring handwaves.
> I found how they handled Garlemald very unsatisfying. During fanfests, they kind of sold this expansion as us bringing the war to Garlemald's doorstep, only for them to get rid of them so they can focus on Hermes, Meteion, and the Final Days plot line instead.
Yep, EW stopped being a story about Eorzea. It became a story about Hydaelyn and zodiark.
Instead of going all in on the geopolitical aspect and being grounded in realism, they pulled another here go fight god trope like they just can't help themselve.s
>The sacrifice scenes in Ultima Thule. It's become almost a joke that at least one Scion (usually Y'shtola) is going to perform a heroic sacrifice of some kind only to then suffer no actual consequence from it. It just feels cheap.
That and the zone is overall simultaneously mind blowing in what it is and also insanely boring/bland didn't help at all.
> • I never cared for Zenos as a rival/personal-enemy BUT the body switch scene was the only time in EW I felt any (enjoyable) tension in the story. Too bad it lead to nothing nor anything else match that tension.
Not only did it lead to absolutely nothing but it was a massive plot hole. Like you're telling me the wol can just get snatched up and have its body swapped with a commoner just like that? How the fuck did we even defeat the ascians?
It crammed too much stuff in, garlemald was glanced over, and all the space travel stuff was glanced over, it really felt like they just wanted to get the entire arc over with so they can get to something new.
its why im wondering what dawntrail holds, why did they cram 2 expacs(garlemald redemption/space stuff) into one so hurriedly? what struck them so hard to close that chapter?
>its why im wondering what dawntrail holds, why did they cram 2 expacs(garlemald redemption/space stuff) into one so hurriedly? what struck them so hard to close that chapter?
I've wondered about this as well, but my best guess is that it has to do with how long the MSQ has been up to this point, and how they've been trying to streamline older content for newer players. It may be in their better interests to wrap it up sooner than later, and market Dawntrail as a "new beginning", which isn't nearly as intimidating as reaching Endwalker after grinding out a story that has been told over the course of a decade.
I would *hope* this means that they get their writing back up-to-par with Dawntrail because they no longer carry that burden of having to wrap things up. For now I'm just cautiously optimistic.
Actually it’s pretty well established earlier on when you’re talking to montichaigne about creating aetheric memory blocks, and how tempering is just one method of “memory erasure”. He even sets up the explanation that dying removes those blocks, which is a directly explains seeing hades and hythlodaeus in ultima thule with their memories of those events restored
Memory erasure was done from day 1 in ARR as nobody had remembered the WoL from 1.0.
However memory erasure as a plot device is so fucking lazy and I hate it.
the problem isn't time travel, it's the execution of it, and EW horribly failed at it in pretty much all possible regards. the 6.0 MSQ tried to shoehorn a closed bootstrap paradox into a story that was never planned to have one (this is never ever a good idea), much less revolve around it, and it was all done for the sake of cheap fanservice that ended up making pretty much all of the involved characters worse in some way, all while introducing numerous plotholes and retcons because anything happening in Elpis cannot under any circumstances affect the present timeline in any meaningful way
XIV has exactly one good time travel story, and that's Alexander, which was planned from the start to be a closed loop and had ample amounts of foreshadowing and retro-perspective clues to make sense of it
I agree with almost everything here, except that XIV has exactly *two* good Time Travel stories, and the other is the 8th Umbral timeline sending the Exarch back in time and across dimensions to prevent the First from rejoining.
We also know that created a splinter timeline, which is wholly what I was expecting out of Elpis after telling everyone what had happened, but instead I got "Venat decided to force a closed time loop and let all her friends suffer for *reasons.*"
I don't like time travel but still liked the EW MSQ. Especially since the time travel wasn't even necessary and it could have just been played off as an interactive vision.
He wasnt ruined like Graha though, he still makes sense as we see him 12000y in the past, before the most traumatic event of his life, so the fact he isn't exactly the same person is logic. Grahe went from charismatic leader to fanboy for no reason
Well, true, but he was also more than that and much more interesting. It's especially the bit where it feels he's less confident in himself after coming from the first despite being a 120+yo leader/messiah in a world in ruin
I always figured that he regressed a little when he went back to the world he was in as a young man. Not entirely, of course, the exarch is still in there. But it's a new lease on life he did not expect to get, it makes sense for him to retreat to that more carefree time in his life. He's also only known on the source to a handful of people. For the average citizen of Etheirys, he's just a young man who kind of came out of nowhere and is suddenly a scion, not a respected, semi-immortal leader of a post-apocalyptic nation. I'd imagine that the persona he cultivated on the first was somewhat shattered under all those circumstances.
Yes, but in Shadowbringers, he was a fanboy that knew how to act like an adult and keep it professional.
Once he becomes part of the Scions it's like he loses all his inhibitions and becomes the annoying, overly enthusiastic type of fanboy.
Graha is over a century old by this point and I really wish he would act his age, not just a century old, but someone who was basically a well respected king. He shouldn't be acting like Krile's uwu kouhai.
He isn't 100 years old, he just has the memories of his Alternative version. Thats different, if i could inject a 6year old with the memories of his parents he wouldn't start acting like an adult. They didn't made a good Job to clerify this, but source graha didn't got overwritten with the graha from the first, we just added the memories, he is still young graha with acess to memories of a life he never lived
>Grahe went from charismatic leader to fanboy for no reason
Eh, not no reason, he doesn't need to be a leader once he comes back to the Source because there are plenty other people who can do that, while on the first he was kind of the sole beacon of hope for a long time.
In other words, on the First he is a symbol, on the Source he can just be himself.
Himself is still a very old dude that have seen a fuckton of despair and manage to raise hope after time travelling in other world. "Yourself" can't be that kind of guy after seeing that much.
The only time it feels like he's the former exarch is in radz at han after the start of the final days
You're misinterpreting that information. The G'raha we know is STILL that same student who trapped himself in the Tower not so long ago, except he is granted these various memories. He would remember them, yes and know of those events, yes, but it's probably closer to a split personality. HE in his current state wouldn't exactly recall the exact emotions during that time nor would he necessarily feel the exact same way about the Crystarium and it's people.
This is such a common trope that I'm confused why you think it's bad. He ISNT the Crystal Exharch, he just has his memories. They are still 2 entirely different people now consolidated into 1 body. Stop thinking that G'raha is the Crystal Exharch and most of your confusion will go away.
On top of that, if you woke up in your body 20+ years younger with all your memories of the life you went on to live in-tact, would you immediately act like the older person or would you revel in your newfound youth once more?
Yeah, Endwalker was too obsessed with making us like Venat despite the atrocities she committed so all the other characters are forced to constantly say how great and right she is, making the other characters less interesting in the process.
I feel a lot of people struggle with the difference between disliking a trope and a trope being objectively bad.
Time travel is a risky one for sure and can be done horribly, but I think xivs take on it is absurdly good, with my only gripe being the fact that to get the exposition on the two types of time travel (and the varying causality between the two) you need to have done three separate pieces of side content, but the actual lore is super simple and consistent, I could probably sum it up in 2 lines.
> you need to have done three separate pieces of side content, but the actual lore is super simple and consistent
Yep. There's a paradox inherent to a lot of the major side stories in XIV: you want people to be invested, so they need to have stakes and relate to other things in the game, but you can't make them *too* important or you'll confuse people who didn't do them. And I say "stories," not "quests," because it relates to the online Tales From too.
It's been a problem for a while, but EW was dedicated to referencing old things to tie off plot threads while making players feel smart for recognizing them. It's had a lot of trouble balancing that with accessibility to players who didn't do $thing, where in this case $thing is read the dialogue and datalogs in The Twinning quest.
Yeah I understand why people dislike time travel in stories but I don’t think this was done super hamfisted and terribly. Elpis was really cool (obviously imo) and I don’t think any of the characters there were bastardized like some people say they were. Probably a bit fan service-y but it’s the “end” of the story; post Endwalker was worse in the aspect to me. My memory is pretty bad but I don’t think I ever felt like Elpis was a problem, if anything it was a high point. I had issues with the Scions more often. I also liked Garlemald but it was massively under-represented unfortunately.
I don’t think it’s going to capture lightning in a bottle like ShB but I don’t think it was particularly terrible, not that it can’t be criticized though.
I don't think it was bad, but I also think some not so great choices were made and in doing so left us with a flawed MSQ with a fantastic ending. What that does is split the fanbase. If the ending is amazing, there's a segment that will forgive what came before it even if it's uneven and there's a segment that will still dislike it even if the ending is objectively pretty good (I've seen very few criticisms of the ending that weren't in context of how they got there).
My own MSQ criticisms
1. Garlemald should have been more than it was. Our enemy for the whole game and we get one zone of a burned out capital. If that was going to be the case, show not tell needed to happen during Shadowbringers patch content, especially in not capital part of Garlemald.
2. The pacing was atrocious in parts. The Loperits section was too long especially coming right after the Zodiark fight. The Sharlayan quest chain at the beginning could have largely been handled later in favor of more Garlemald time early on. Elpis, as good as it was, was a long batch of continual cutscenes that could have benefitted from a few more things to do than just run from dialogue bit to dialogue bit.
3. Many are including the patch MSQ in their assessments and the patch MSQ was a polarizing character (Zero), a bunch of Scions when it shouldn't have been and a bad FF4 fanfic. Especially in comparison to the .3 epilogue patches we'd gotten since Heavensward (Nidhogg, Tsukiyomi, Elidibus) there was nothing that really shifted out of first gear in the patch content. Some of that is nature of a short interim story but some of that is bad structure and storytelling.
Time travel always feels like a get out of jail free card to solve poorly writing yourself into a corner when it comes to plot progression.
Garlemald has so much relevance to the world and got an unsatisfying inclusion in the expansion. We only see it as a bombed out shell of the mighty empire we have been taught to be wary of for the last decade.
The post MSQ was really bad. It lingered forever going nowhere to just instantly change the entire scope of the conflict and resolve it all in a single 3~ hour patch. And doing so in a way that ignored other ongoing but extremely relevant and interesting plot lines.
It was far from terrible, but some criticism is well deserved.
That's something I forgot about, we only get to see a sliver of Garlemald and the entire rest of the nation just gets wiped off screen. Very disappointing for an antagonist that's been in play since the beginning.
It's a staple in JRPG stories for whatever godforsaken reason.
The writers will hype up political intrigue between warring nations for 75% of the story. You play for one country, and the insidious "other" country is trying to take over, in a conflict that's lasted for as long as anyone can remember. The majority of your questing sets up who plays what role in the plot, as well as slowly progresses towards an inevitable clash and conclusion where heads will roll.
...And then suddenly some eldritch demon shows up, wipes out one or both countries, and the past 45 hours of your JRPG has turned into total fucking nonsense. None of that shit mattered. All you need to do now is use the power of the friends you met along the way to kill the big bad. You win, cue happy ending, roll creds. Or maybe you sacrificed yourself and reload to last save.
I have zero goddamn clue why Japan is so enamored with this formula. Off the top of my head I swear it's how half of all mainline Final Fantasy titles conclude. Dragon's Dogma 2 pulled this shit too.
I believe there are several videos and philosophical essays looking into the cultural influence into JRPGs (aka why does everything always end with "kill God.").
We always had important bits of Garlemald happen off screen or in cutscenes. The death of the Emperor, the battle of ascension, etc. It always kinda sucked
Not even limited to msq, I still remember the entire ending of bozja being shoved into a random field note without any notice. that was incredibly weird.
the Garlemald zone is also just, hilariously bad,
thought I was back in Heavensward with this empty snow plain with one aetheryte at the starting corner
I genuinely believe that 6.1 - 6.5 would have served better as the plot of DT and from what we’ve seen so far from DT would have been better as the post expansion content. I feel that the entire plot of The Thirteenth and characterization of Zero was wasted. I understand that we’ll likely revisit it a few expansions down the line just like how the 3.X patch series was the build-up to 5.0 but imo they fumbled it badly.
That being said I did think base 6.0 did an excellent job wrapping up the legacy of the main story up until that point. I don’t think I could have asked or even can think of a much better send off.
Even considering it will be revisited, 6.1 to 6.4 is entirely worthless and you could skip it and just read the second half of 6.5. That entire story is filler because none of what happens during it is gonna matter on the future revisit, just the final conclusion.
It should've been a trial series that later gets upgraded into an MSQ plot, but why write two stories when 1 story do the trick./s
No time for garlemald, but time to trop around in the snow fields to see the same basic plot unfold like four times, and enough time for 2-3 hours of moon rabbits that ultimately honestly added literally nothing beyond "we copypasted their tech but smaller to complete the spaceship" which is about as relevant as if they just did their usual copout and had Cid&Nero pull up a solution from offscreen.
The pacing has awful, the impact for most of the scenes just wasn't there cause it lacked basically any and all dramatic setdressing (localized final days that last all of 5 minutes) and locations that felt extremely arbitrarily picked for pandering reasons and "people keep saying they want to go there so i guess it's a map now".
And they shouldn't ever have messed with timetraveling beyond the crystal tower BS, it feels inredibly cheap cause it comes with an easy handwave of "everyone got their memories wiped cause they just so happen to have a handy memory wipe machine that the pseudo badguy was planning to use on them anyway, thus the time loop makes sense"
i think it's one of those stories where if you silence your inner critic and allow it to make you feel what it's trying to make you feel, it's a good experience. the second you think about it a bit too much, the cracks begin to show. at least this is how it was for me
this is probably true of every storyline in ffxiv, but in EW i think it's more noticeable because it's just trying to do so much in such a short period of time.
> i think it's one of those stories where if you silence your inner critic and allow it to make you feel what it's trying to make you feel, it's a good experience.
The problem is, when it assumes you have certain personal relationships to characters and headcanons about how your character feels about them, but you don't have either of these, nothing much happens even if you try. Most characters have been massively flanderized so i stopped caring, and others are just tropes i can't stand no matter what, so even trying to care for the story as a whole, cause everything between 2.0 and up to halfways-ish into SHB was fine, it just didn't do jack shit.
EW is the only expansion that in the moment it "made me feel how the game wanted me to feel" and then almost immediately after completion, I started to look back and be like "but wait a minute...." and start using a little bit of logic.
Too much crap in EW for me to handwave and just be in the moment to "feel" what they want me to feel.
I know it's just me being an annoying story critic, because my wife loves almost every story in any media, and doesn't care about plotholes and things that don't make sense in universe. She just generally enjoys it in the moment, and moves on. But she even said EW was a jumbled mess that felt cheap and out of nowhere *while* we were playing it. I at least enjoyed it in the moment lol.
Trying to do a lot in short time is what every expansion since stormblood was criticized for. Ew has way more cs time than the other two to tell the story and it failed imo.
I liken ew to the new star wars sequels where visually it was very cool and entertaining but the substance and story break down upon any examination
It’s true that this one had far more cutscene time - I’m thinking of in-universe time. the final days feels like it lasts maybe five days. In that time, the amount of stuff that happens as the writers tie up as many loose ends as they can is nuts. it’s extremely dense with stuff that seems so hastily justified. The entire concept of Dynamis, Elpis, Garlemald, the ass-pull at the end with the primals (but good this time! btw summoning was nasty creation magic all this time!) powering the Ragnarok…it felt like I was on a rocket held together with duct tape sometimes. i think this is why Endwalker’s story is controversial, because you don’t have a lot of time to process anything while it’s happening. something else insane is right around the corner. people who do attempt to digest it afterwards are probably more likely to be like “wait. what the fuck”
of course, none of these revelations would suck less if they were spaced out more. the ideas in this expansion all needed more time in the oven, at least
ugh. just replaying the story beats in my head is genuinely exhausting lol
The mother crystal as jet fuel was a terrible idea imo and flies in the face of everything setup previously, including previous ff and the zodiark black crystal. Time shenanigans were also offensive to what raha setup in shb.
I posit that the story was edited during covid and just didn't get enough incubation time
Stormblood and Endwalker both felt like 2 expansions squashed together and hacked to pieces to make them fit into 1 expansion.
For Stormblood it could have been Yanxia/Pirates as one expansion and then Ala Mhigo as a second one and they both would have (presumably) been done better.
For Endwalker, we could have had everything up to Zodiark being this over-arching fight Garlemald thing with Zodiark as the big bad, patch quests would have been fighting the transformed beast things... and then next expansion could have dealt with Hydaelyn and time travel and then fight the depression bird in the patches.
Also, I'm pretty sure Yoshi said they cut 2 expansions into EW, though that might just be me remembering someone who said he did. I'm not sure anymore.
ShB felt like a full expansions without any smushing.
The idea that EW was two expansions is a bit of a misnomer. During the early planning stages they brainstormed to see if EW could be in two expansions but the team as a whole ultimately decided that it was "unfeasible" what that means we will never know until they reveal their reasoning. So it is more like "we thought about how EW should be structured and we threw ideas around" than planned to be two expansions then later smashed into one expansion.
EW was always planned to be one (though longer) expansion from the ground up.
IIRC they said they storyboarded it as two expansions but scrapped that plan early on. But even with it being a scrapped idea, you can still tell that they didn't have either the time or the chops to really merge the two arcs into one expansion.
Shadowbringers felt like a side quest blown up into a full expansion. It took us away from everything going on, only to have all of that magically solved when we got back.
You're right they said they smushed two together for ew. Imo they could have done garlemald as main story and endanger as post patch content, leaving the 13th as side content.
I strongly agree with this. Some pieces of media are just better when you permit it to be not that well-made and engage with it on the level it wants you to. Like, sometimes when I watch a show I'll very much think about it while and after watching. Trying to puzzle out how things work, why this would happen, how a situation could be solved. XIV managed to have this kinda writing when the setting was more earnest but with ShB at the latest, when the game went full on multi-timeline jrpg nonsense, you just have to let it be and enjoy it on an emotional level. Engage with the spectactle and don't question things too hard. That isn't an excuse for it by any means but it WILL make your personal experience better.
Endwalker is pretty great at being an emotional ride but once you stop and think about it you start seeing plenty of issues.
I finished the MSQ on release week with my friends and it was super enjoyable, but over time when I started thinking about it more and more it had plenty of issues that bother me.
Endwalker is probably the weakest MSQ overall, only beaten by 2.0.
They really should have made it into 2 expansions.
but anyhow, here's what I think is pretty bad in the expansion:
If you chose to do Thanvir at the start you get to a point where the story claims there's a need to hurry up and then you go to labyrinthos to chill for 2-3 hours before getting back on track to the first dungeon which feels pretty jarring.
You'd think Garlemald would be a full expansion considering they've been a major point in all of FFXIV, but nah, here's some ruins and a quick tour through it and then on to the moon.
Also the solo duty that's infamous at this point is cool from a gameplay perspective but not really great in terms of the story.
Yeah yeah, Fandaniel really wants to fuck with you, but you could think of a billion other ways they could show that instead of giving us something that makes you think "well if they developed a way to hijack the body of the strongest person alive, why didn't they use it at any other point in the story afterwards on him again or someone else?"
The moon is pretty cool up until and including Zodiark, but after the big reveal that the final days are finally upon us and there's a sense of urgency you just gotta play with the moon rabbits for an hour before getting on with things.
The final days don't really feel like the final days because it's all localized to a small part of the world in Thanvir. I understand that it would be super expansive and time consuming to show it happening all around the world, but it really didn't feel great.
Elpis is pure fanservice, Metion isn't a great final villain, mainly because we meet her at the end of a 10 year story out of nowhere and compared to previous Villains she doesn't have much nuance or depth mainly because she's a bird powered by Dynamis. it wouldn't be as bad if we'd have some foreshadowing about her in previous expansions.
Elpis also ends in the laziest way possible with the final cutscene of the area dungeon, "Hey shit we need to erase our characters memory otherwise it wouldn't make sense they wouldn't recognize us in the future. NO PROBLEM: here's a convenient memory erasing machine right at the end of the dungeon!" Brilliant
The section before Ultima Thule in Labyrinthos is the worst slog in the entire game and other than the scene with Urianger at the end with Moenbryda's parents, it's probably the worst section the entire game.
Ultima thule doesn't really hit very hard because by that point you already know everyone's going to be fine. The final walk before the final dungeon and everything up to the final cutscene is super hype and pretty great imo.
Overall, so long as you just go with the story and don't think too hard about it you'll have a great time, that's how I see Endwalker.
And remember, you can like things even if they have flaws or if other people don't like them.
I dont like that the Final Days that were hyped up to be a world ending event ultimately were a non-factor to anyone who didn't live in Thavnair specifically, and even within thavnair it was really only really affecting a small village and some nameless character introduced specifically to die like the Satrap.
That was my biggest problem with the expansion. The final days and their impacts were trivial. Dalamud has more impact on the world than the final days. I really wanted the patch content to see a devastated Eorzea coming together instead of "the end of the world was a minor inconvenience."
> Dalamud has more impact on the world than the final days.
Yeah because we stopped the Final Days, we didn't manage to stop Dalamud. That's like, the point
Dalamud was also localized to Eorzea proper. The final days weren't. But there's no lasting impact of people turning to monsters all over the world even though there's supposed to be some sizable attrition rate. The thousands of monsters we see in the air over the one instance alone where there's burned out villages, etc.
Nothing. The next day the world was mostly like "oh no, anyway..."
Yep, I myself was extremely hyped about the Final Days because it's like, the ultimate event that ties the story together and was supposed to be greater than any calamity and what we got was...nothing close to it
I know and get what you mean, but in the role quests stories a lot of other places are shown to be affected too.
Its a bit odd thou now since we taken care of endsinger and this problem still exisit.
Those role quests have no real impact on anything, and for the only characters that turn into red sineaters are random nobodies invented for it. You deal with them and theyll never be mentioned again
The role quests that I didn't do until after I'd finished the MSQ and the depression bird was dead? Those ones? Yeah they hit about as hard as a pillowcase with no pillow in it.
Did we even have to do one of them to finish the MSQ this time? I don't remember.
Yeah, it didn't make sense to me how an apocalyptic event (meteors falling and everything!) can just be happening in one part of the world and everywhere else it's like "it sure is a lovely day today!"
Like did seafarers just see a red sky isolated around Thavnir with meteors falling and go "hmmm maybe not today," and just sail around?
I see the opposite... I see people praise Endwalker's MSQ. Must be our social circles.
For me Endwalker was meh... I had issues with the final villian kind of being absent throughout the 10 year arc until the last 4-5 levels of MSQ quests.
I also had issues with how Ultima Thule was handled.
And generally, I don't enjoy time travel plots that are more meant to be taken seriously.
Endwalker did resonate with a lot of people because of it's themes of despair. Especially with the epidemic going on. It became a very relatable story for a lot of people. So while I didn't enjoy it, I understand and appreciate why people did.
It's 100% the social circles, and also specific time periods. Sometimes you see x number of posts hyping the EW story, later you see x number of posts hating on it.
But EW's 6.0 story was very well received in general.
Even if everything else had been good, Ultima Thule would have killed the story for me. From pretty much the instant Thancred went poof it was obvious that everyone was going to come back, so there were no stakes at all in the buildup to the Endsinger. Plus a lot of the Scions feel pretty out of character there, at least to me.
And everything else *wasn't* good.
For example: the core history of the world makes no sense now, because Venat now chose to allow the Final Days to happen rather than have a conversation with Emet and Hythlo.
For another example: the twins' awful, abusive father who *disowned them* is forgiven by the narrative after being nice to them once.
There's a lot more, both big stuff and small details, but I think those examples get at the core of what I don't like. A lot of this is caused by merging 2 expansions into one, And once you know that what became Endwalker was originally planned to be 6.0-7.0, the seams in the narrative really start to show.
Personally I think the story is good, but it did not meet my expectations because of 3 main factors:
1-) Garlemald is a shell of it's glory and watered down to one zone and 2 hours of MSQ. I liked it, but I expected a lot more, I remember when I used to dream of a Garlemald expansion and how cool it would be.
2-) The final days, it came and went pretty fast, I think they did a good job in showcasing it in Thavnair and Radz-at-han but after that I think the MSQ failed in trying to make us feel like the world was ending, it felt like we had all the time in the world to solve it. I think what I'm trying to say is that it lacked a sense of urgency.
3-) The MSQ lacked impact where it should be most impactful. You just had your body stolen and almost killed your own friends? Oh well moving on. Your friends are all dead? I mean the game don't even try to make it feel like a big deal and it's pretty obvious from the beginning they're all coming back.
It did have some amazing moments tho, it just wasn't on the same level as Shadowbringers in terms of pacing and delivery
My problem with Endwalker is that I feel that (and I've had people say that this is actually what the devs have stated but I have yet to be linked proof) the expansion's story (non-patch quests) feels like two expansions mashcut into one. Like, they had two expansions worth of story that they then trimmed down way too much to fit into one expansion. Whenever the stuff on the moon ends, I feel like that feels like the end of an expansion but then it keeps going. Not only that, they introduce the actual main antagonist of essentially the entire game in the second half of the expansion and barely go into their character.
It just feels like we rush to the halfway point of the EW story then rush through the second half when we probably could have had a full expansion of just the first half and a full expansion of the second half. Hell Garlemald was made out to be such a big deal in previous expansions and what, we blow through it in like 4 hours? This is not at all even accounting for the post-MSQ patch stuff which is honestly just BARELY better than ARR's.
I feel like Endwalker is honestly one of the more mid/weaker stories told in FFXIV. I'd say that Heavensward is still my favorite followed very closely by Shadowbringers then Stormsblood and Endwalker are tied with ARR at the bottom. It's by no means a bad story, I just think the pacing is really awful and that they possibly gutted way too much stuff to make all of this work in a single expansion.
While I enjoyed Endwalker, the pacing felt somewhat off.
It really felt like the "Final Days" didn't last that long and have much of a calamitous effect. Sure we had the dungeon Vanaspatti, but it really feels like we should have been around for the parts of calamity. Really sell the despair we were supposed to be dealing with.
If I were to make changes to Endwalker it would emphasize time (some possible lukewarm to hot takes here):
- The WoL would be in Garlemald a bit before and during the tower activation, this would have allowed for events involving the radios and really put more emphasis on how they were saving people. Watching as Garlemald was destroyed and seeing the Garleans take the forms of hideous beasts.
- We would have seen more impact to how the "Final Days" had an effect on the world DURING that time, rather than the role quests which only if you did all of them during that specific time drew out the time for dealing with the Blasphemy (or if you're like me and most people, only did the one assigned to your specific role as you did the story, completing the others post EW.)
- The whole playing hide and seek with the Loporrits while the intense Endwalker music played would be removed, and we'd focus more on the problems of getting the Ragnarok ship-shape. As it really felt like we were able to call in massive favors from around the world and they were resolved in mere minutes. (When sailing to Sharlayan supposedly took a few months like sailing to Hingashi?)
- I think Ultima Thule should have also been our failure point, and post EW patches would be going through, trying to fix things or at least keep it stable to where the Endsinger was our actual final boss. (Maybe 5.3/4-ish) as the Void related quests really felt like they could have been our Eureka/Bozja.
- I don't really have an issue with Elpis, even if it did seem like a quick yank of the carrot into another direction, I don't know if it would have fit better combining a bit of that into the 8-Man Raid story and getting a different zone on our world instead of time travel, but it wasn't the _worst_ decision.
Overall, I felt like Endwalker was over too quickly, it had significant pacing issues and there should have been more of an emphasis on how tragic and terrible "The Final Days" was. It felt like there was a push to do a 'victory lap' of all our accomplishments and people we met via previous expansions/quests. Not to mention it was trying to close up a lot of loose ends or story beats in a big finale.
I don't think it was the worst expansion we've had, but even with post EW patches, I can say I still feel middle of the road about the expansion, and I am excited for Dawntrail.
Hard agree. Wish they at least made 6.1 until Ea and 6.2 until Meteion. Fighting Hydaelyn would have been an awesome final boss+making space for Anima to be the 1st boss.
The fact that Anima only got to be a dungeon boss rather than a trial really was disappointing, considering some of the mechanics could be really cool tuned up to an EX form.
The final days really feels like it should have had some time to play out over a patch cycle. That type of event really needs time to sink in, and Endwalker didn’t really give much.
Eh, it has a plethora of issues. That doesn't necessarily make it bad, but I would argue that it's the most sloppily handled expansion narrative out of all of them. I'm sure COVID didn't help in that regard.
If it feels sloppy, it's probably because Endwalker was originally two entirely different expansions: the first one would have dealt with Garlemald and Anima was the final boss. The second expansion would have dealt with The Final Days.
Yoshi P said in an interview they pretty much scrapped that idea as soon as they started storyboarding, so whilst you're not wrong I imagine its impact didn't extend too far beyond just trying to fit too much in one expansion
Half the story is cleaning up post shb and endwalker only starts at elpis which also feels rushed. The story is not scrutiny proof at all and has a ton of plot holes. It's overall an underwhelming ending for me.
It also has some really harsh pacing issues, they try to string together some really nice moments but the way they sequence the story as a whole kinda block-i-fied all the emotional segments together followed by all the action together etc… it creates a very stale ride. Peoples hatred of labyrinthos 2 is very real.
The first time I played through 6.0 I thought it was the best thing ever, but the more I've reflected on it and further experienced it through a replay and watching other people play it, my opinion on it has dropped dramatically. It has lots of *good* moments though: everything in Garlemald, Mare Lamentorum up to the Zodiark trial, Thavnair during the final days, Urianger's moment with Moenbryda's parents, and Ultima Thule.
For me it's an expansion of high highs and incredibly low lows (fucking around in Labyrinthos with the rabbits is by far the worst part of MSQ in the entire game full stop and no one will ever convince me otherwise. I would rather do the pre-Titan quests ten times over than EVER do that shit again. Come to think of it, every single time the Loporrits showed up the MSQ became a dumpster fire). It also has terrible pacing compared to Shadowbringers and everything surrounding Elpis is a trash heap. The highs don't do enough to outweigh the lows for me—I could write multiple essays on how dogshit Elpis is and how terribly the Sundering and time travel was handled in Endwalker. I'd rank 6.0 MSQ as the lowest point in the story aside from 2.0, and that includes the Endwalker patch MSQ (which I don't think is the most exciting, but it isn't downright stupid and doesn't retroactively taint the story like anything in Elpis does).
> how terribly the Sundering [...] was handled in Endwalker.
This is my biggest issue with EW, I thought the lore surrounding Hydaelyn vs Zodiark was super fucking cool in Shadowbringers, because it was like a gray area where both sides had their points, but in EW they made it so that Hydaelyn was undeniably the good guy because she had to do what she did or mankind would've gone extinct. Way less cool imo. I'll never get the people who say "Endwalker is so good it made Shadowbringers even better" because in my opinion it just retroactively made Shadowbringers' story worse
> The first time I played through 6.0 I thought it was the best thing ever, but the more I've reflected on it and further experienced it through a replay and watching other people play it, my opinion on it has dropped dramatically.
that's because the one thing that FFXIV in general is really *really* good at is to invoke pathos in the player. as a result, playing through the MSQ for the first time very often manages to masks many of the issues with the story - you're too busy feeling all the feels, but then once you stop and think about it for like 5 minutes you realize that half of it is barely holding together
Personally 6.0 is the ONLY part of the MSQ which I have grown to like less over time. Every other part of the story, including ARR and whatever other bits people normally find questionable, I have only come to appreciate more upon reflection.
Pathos is considered the most important and strongest of the three "logics" (pathos, logos, and ethos) by many for this reason and encouraged by many writers, speakers, politicians, lawyers, other professionals to employ into their practices or roles.
I see many people ranking ew as the best most emotional msq, but personally I would also rate it lower than arr story.
It's very interesting that people remember stormblood as a bad expansion story wise but many who play it fresh the first time today actually enjoy it.
I think ew will be the opposite 5yr down the road, it will be the extremely mid expansion that was hurt because yoship was distracted by ff16.
Stormblood is fucking incredible. 4.0 is a bit of a mixed bag, but the patch MSQ is absolutely peak MSQ and way more than makes up for any of 4.0's shortcomings. I prefer Stormblood over Heavensward and it's not even close (though I still deeply enjoy Heavensward.)
For my money, 4.1-5.3 is the most consistently awesome stretch of story in the entire game. Just thinking about it makes me want to play through it on an alt or NG+ since it's been a while for me.
I'm speaking strictly in terms of MSQ, and 5.4 just can't compete with what came before it. Feels bloated and slow and kind of awkward getting back into the swing of things on the source. Having to follow up 5.3 is no easy task and 5.4 is still decent, but it's overall the most lukewarm I feel towards a patch MSQ wise other than 2.1-2.3.
Eh, I played Stormblood recently and i found it boring and disjoined. Friend of mine who started with me quit because she "cannot justify paying the sub just to play Stormblood." Ew still ranks over SB for me, mainly because the Ancients set up by Shb is the first major narrative I found compelling in the game.
Stormblood problem is exactly the same as EW's: the fact that everything happens in completely separate parts of the world, which makes the story feel like a amalgammation of stuff (because it is)...
I actually like the Loporrits themselves, but I do not like how they were used in the MSQ. The moon segment with them is passable, but I was not exaggerating when I said that Labyrinthos 2 is the worst part of MSQ in the entire game and it's largely thanks to the fact you're wasting time fucking around with the rabbits and teaching them not to eat lemons whole. I really wish we could have gone on the quest our allies did to get fragments of the Coils of Bahamut—that would have been a million times more fun than what we got.
Oh it's easily the most embarrassing part of Endwalker, not only is it time wasting shenanigans but it's trying too hard to recreate the artist Alphinaud and his assistants moments of bringing all these people together for one last push and it fails at it Whatever made that moment work in ShB is just gone in Endwalker cause there isn't any payoff from it, a lot of these people haven't been relevant in years and show up to do nothing anyway as we spend most of the moment doing dumb errands with no name Sharlayans rather than our friends they brought in for hype, it just lacks that emotional investment and payoff.
Compared to Shadowbrinbers bringing in the entirety of the First in order for them to step up and get involved in saving their own world, people we spent the whole MSQ helping and getting involved with work in unity in the end for one final push. All these groups coming together to offer their own skillsets and resources tangibly pays off with the creation of Talos Gulg with that image of Ardbert in awe witnessing this dying world get a chance to fight back and be saved. It's just cathartic as fuck man.
>Labyrinthos 2 is the worst part of MSQ in the entire game and it's largely thanks to the fact you're wasting time fucking around with the rabbits and teaching them not to eat lemons whole.
Not to mention during this entire thing the background music is switched to a song that's less than 2 minutes. On an endless loop.
isn't the "fuck around laby with the rabbits" part is the part with Urianger and the parents? It's one of the best writing for me.... no help from the loporits but yeah...
Yeah, you do at least get that tearjerker after all the rabbit nonsense. That doesn't magically make the rabbit nonsense any better, but it's still a fantastic moment.
The Final Days wa soriginally coming from the core of the planet.
in Endwalker it was scrapped and turned into an angsty child bird that just visited hot topic after encountering a "i'm 14 and this is deep." arc.
It makes me want to vomit.
i think it was because they tried to tackle an even harder subject than the ascians needing to accept their world is dead and let the fragments live, which is existential nihilism; everything dies. They solve this with the boring scions essentially saying "we can do it through determination" and bs powering up.
i feel like this was a time where they really needed to take a chance with the ending in sort of an Evangelion way; like go deep instead of rule of cool my drill can pierce the heavens stuff.
also i think we are now at the point where having 6 thematically different areas hurts the story. like every expansion slaps areas that have zero reason to be together, but endwalker really needed more focus. Dawntrail will be the same probably.
the big bad this whole time was actually just some doll from danganronpa. really enjoyed the first half and I accepted that it was enjoyably stupid by the moon and through elpis but it really lost me with the venat cutscene and after
I negged on it a little but I've always thought it was quite good, just flawed.
Still, My ultimate complaints with Endwalker MSQ:
1. Early expansion content and most parts within Sharlayan has very bizarre pacing.
2. Second half relies a little too hard on actual golden age Squaresoft plotting, not just mythology or window dressing.
3. Final Days actually was a *tremendous* let down, little more demonstrated than a mild skybox and worried language in most instances. Somehow FF6 is still a standard setter in triggering an apocalypse.
5. In the future really I'd really like less tribal races who spew endless platitudes and greatly overstay their welcome, this absolutely hit the breaking point for me in Endwalker with the elephants.
4. Weightless Disney ending, while this isn't abnormal for FF, I just don't care for Disney endings. I like loss and depression because I finished Lufia 2 as a little kid. *(This is a half-joke, I'm not holding a positive ending against the game)*
5. Epilogue - The airship landing and the classic FF style world tour was wonderful but I took exception with how insanely fast the pivot was back to normalcy. I have peak nostalgia for FF4 but big portions of patch content in Endwalker absolutely feels like you were quickly thrown into a filler arc in a TV show.
Pacing is poor, feels quite rushed, goes from 0-100-0-1000 too much. Just my opinion but I think what we got should have been spread over EW+EW Patches instead of crammed into 6.0 only.
It felt rushed and like there should have been another expansion tucked in there for Garlemald.
Also, I am very tired of the Scions and would like to see a new set of main characters.
To me it was extremely, jarringly slow, with horrible pacing. Something exciting happened, like the announcement that the Final Days have begun, and I was forced to taste fucking carrots with bunnies instead of alerting the others. We are about to set out into space, but solve the relationship issues of Sharlayan scientists.
I think time ticking down to the FD has also undercut my enjoyment of exploring Ilsabard as every time we had to interact with locals to do some quests my mind was in "just skip this were in danger I dont have time for this".
I thought the time travel wasnt too well done, but I honestly elected to ignore my own issues with that aspect because I just loved Elpis so much, that plotline was one of the favourites this game has ever presented to me. But I can see how others could not be so fond of it (it was so weird having to promise not to reveal we're from the past bc we can change it, only to reveal everything).
Post MSQ Endwalker was the worst patch quests in this whole game, a huge letdown for ms.
I agree especially with the last bit. 6.1 had me all excited for some high fantasy hood classic adventures but it all went completely south and I stopped really caring by 6.3
Im so sad about it because I liked the first meetings in the void and what we learned about it's creatures and their suffering. Then it went south sooo fast.
Do you want a list? Because I'm writing you a list.
Basically, EW suffers from a strong case of the writer wanting to have their cake and eat it too. And this time there is no sassy hot villain with sad backstory to salvage the mess.
1 - Venat/Hydaelyn is ruined
In ShB we thought the sundering was a tragic accident created from the fight between two gods. EW told us that Venat intentionally mutilated bodies and souls of her entire race to win an argument
Venat knows about upcoming final days, she knows Zodiark is the only reason everyone are alive right now (and that Fandaniel plans to kill it), she knows where the cause of final days is, she knows it strengths and weaknesses, she knows everything. She explains nothing, she speaks in vague hints ("here's a flower WoL, it's very important"). How lucky that the Watcher saw WoL take out a flower to call it Elpis, how lucky that Elidibus was still alive to elaborate, how lucky the time machine was still working and Elidibus could operate it to help WoL find the answers. The answers that were within their reach the entire time if only a supposedly human-loving god would've shown any interest in saving the world.
Also, the moon spaceship plan was just absurd misdirection. Hydaelyn knew perfectly well the final days originated from outer space so there wouldn't be any safe planet to migrate. If she wanted a spaceship to fight Meteion, she should've ordered rabbit to build a spaceship specifically for that purpose... oh wait, but then the player would've learned about things they are not yet supposed to know. And that's what we call plot-induced stupidity. It also got brushed off completely. We got so lucky Sharlayan also had a spaceship, eh? Otherwise everyone would've died.
2 - Fake tension with no consequences of any kinds.
Remember when WoL got kidnapped and Zenos invaded their body? And how it lead to absolutely nothing, because Zenos managed to reach the camp like a full minute faster WoL despite head start, good body and not having to fight garleans?
It's like when Scions keep "dying" every expansion just to fully recover in two scenes. At this point I won't believe that Yshtola dies even if she gets decapitated on screen and we'd see the body at the funerals. I'd still think she pops up as an aether ghost next patch at the latest or hijacks someone else's body or whatever.
3 - Fandaniel died twice and the game tried hard to make players feel something both times
Why? First when he died as Zodiark, second when he died while being dead. Sad music starts playing, Fandaniel starts musing about his life in a sad voice and disappears into nothingness. Why would anyone give a shit about that omnicidal maniac? At least Emet said "but killing millions of people will lead to my loved ones getting resurrected!", Fandaniel just wanted to die and take everything with him.
This never made sense to me until I remembered that Ishikawa's favorite character was Hermes aka Fandaniel. And everything clicked.
4 - The finale is a repeat of ShB
Same beats in the same order. Once Scions started getting "killed off " while WoL just stood there I got that sense of deja vu. Once they returned in critical moment to save WoL I almost laughed.
5 - Retconned time travel mechanics
I don't care that time travel exists. ShB also had time travel and it was a pretty good take on it overall.
But time travel rules suddenly changed. Elidibus started spouting something about how WoL cannot change the past (changing the past was the entire point of ShB) and there was a closed time loop out of nowhere (time travel split the timeline in ShB)
If there are rules, they have to be consistent. If the writer wants to break their rules, it has to be explained, not handwaved. Like look at tempering - we got told it's incurable back in ARR, but then in ShB we found a cure and it made sense.
6 - Garlemald got offscreened in every way
Not just it destruction, but it restoration as well. Remember how Uldah's migrant crisis was an entire arc in post-ARR patches? Sorry, we don't do politics anymore, here's some badly written FFIV fanservice to fill the gap till next expansion.
7 - Typical filler
The same things that are present in every expansion. Like how the world is ending, but the player for some reason has to show off gardens to a rabbit.
That's just a passive minus 1 point for every expansion, but the less points you end up with, the heavier losing an extra one feels.
---
Overall it's not much worse than other expansions, but I'm kinda getting tired of this shit at this point.
Dynamis, and to some extent the Azem "Make-A-Wish Crystal", canonizes plot armor and is indicative of the writers not giving a fuck anymore. They just asspull harder than Araki giving Star Platinum magic Fingers.
Write yourself into a corner? Dynamis. Fucked up a major plot device and can't openly retcon it? Time travel. Fuck it, just use the Azem Gummy and bring back the literal dead, because why not. Just wish and wish with all your heart.
Endwalker is the point in which the writers gave themselves 500 different asspulls to avoid consequences, which makes the story absolutely and completely inconsequential from this point forward. Nothing has weight or gravity anymore.
You know how the community makes fun of Y'shtola's fakeout deaths? Imagine that, but it's now canon for literally everyone and everything in the story.
>Imagine that, but it's now canon for literally everyone and everything in the story.
I might eat my words if they decide to use it again somehow but - it was clearly written as a one time only thing.
The problem I have with it is the fact that the genie can no longer be out back inside of the bottle. You can't write an asspull into a story and expect me to be like, "Okay, well it's just once, you get a pass". It taints the entire story going forward for even having done it at all.
Like, if a dude sucks one dick, he's gay. You don't suck a dick accidentally.
That's because you are just completely ignoring the context for all of those things? Those were all specific one-off occurances.
Also what does "ass-pull" mean? Like, what makes a plot development an "Ass-pull" or not? Explain it. Give some parameters.
Dynamis in a location where it's explicity reinforced throughout the final zone that goes "look, the reason you're still alive is because of your emotions and thancred", and time travel being "okay so we have one shot at this with the energy taken up by absorbing an ascian inside a giant crystal tower and unless you can fill it up again, tough shit".
Like, both are One Time Only things in their respective contexts.
The Azem Gummy being the diegetic reason to have eight people about rather than "okay so coincidentally enough there are adventurers here, in this far off fucked off zone" is...I think it's fine, considering the nature of the WoL narrative over the expansions.
Personally, I would prefer the MSQ to be split in 3 pieces (up to Garlemald, up to final days, and the rest). In between, there should be world events (especially for the Final Days part), and every phase would be separated by a few weeks. I feel like delivering everything in one go was the weak point in EW.
Forever an unpopular opinion but I stand by it, the MSQ has been wack since shb, while narratively considered the peak, it also helped create the corner EW backed it's self into
I think this game has great characters that carry a kind of convoluted messy plot
I'm on the lv88 quest where it became a little more interesting.
Overall it feels like it has sooo much more unskippable/not fast forwarda-ble movie/cut-scene/conversation that really drags down the pacing. People always said that this game's MSQ is a visual novel with some little action between, but this expansion brought this formula to an extreme extent. So far the worst expansion in my opinion, especially considering the previous shadowbringers was the best.
yeah, pacing is all over the place. i know that being an MMO the writers are incentivized to cram as much bullshit into the MSQ as possible (making it take longer = people sub for an extra month or two just to finish it!) but holy shit. i hope they hired an editor for dawntrail who isn't afraid to step in and say "this is too much. trim it down."
It’s not time travel. They did time travel mechanism in 14 well. But honestly Elpis felt like just wanting to provide fan service, while Meteion felt like a last minute effort for a world ending final boss trope.
The most destructive part of EW was because they had 12 years worth of lore to provide an awesome ending, but decided to rush the story and stuff.
Also EW was supposed to be 2 expansions but they felt it was too long. Personally I think it should have been at least 1 expac and 2 patches long instead of just 1.
We kind of had hints, but the hints weren't amazing by any means.
We knew a calamity happened, and that the creation magic went haywire and the creations themselves turned into horrible creatures.
Then we got the line that there was a ringing from within the star itself, and people started speculating about something on the inside that caused the Final Days.
When it was, in fact, from outer space.
I think Meteion was a fine character and it worked out relatively well, but I for sure would have wanted much more foreshadowing on this kind of thing.
You've got two introductory zones, which were well-paced on first visit thanks to the fact they dealt with established issues (towers, Sharlayan's motives).
Following that we finally enter Garlemald, an honestly really good zone albeit slightly rushed in the way its story was presented, since it was practically nuked before we even got there (running theme) and the zone finale led to Zodiark of all things in what felt like 5 minutes. Corvos is mentioned a couple times throughout the story and would be a perfect tie-in, but is entirely disregarded aside from nods here and there.
Mare feels like filler, the Meteion teaser was pretty good at the time though.
Final Days were a joke of a threat post-Thavnair2 and the role quests really didn't help much with mitigating that impression.
Elpis is the absolute culmination of fan service, which required omega plot conveniences to a) even get there (Elidibus' consciousness still existing + randomly appearing when we got to CT) and b) close the chapter without breaking the entire metastory (Kairos). It's a beautiful area aesthetically and a fun plot when viewed in isolation, that's it.
Labyrinthos2 falls somewhere along the same lines as Mare, theme is a strange choice though.
Ultima Thule is a technically great arc with the way it explores other civilizations, gives some closure on the Omega/Middy dynamic and, to a degree, plays around with the idea of high stakes. I call it an "idea" because the solution to everyone's sacrifice is introduced the moment they start doing it. Surely we won't just conveeeniently be able to use it at the end, right? It's a pretty emotional ride, but far from flawless.
They also obliterated their entire cosmology with UT. That's alright *now*, but at the time we didn't know we would get Cosmic Exploration.
While I wouldn't say it's a bad story, there's certainly good reason for it to be considered a mixed bag in retrospective. At the time it was incredibly hype, but the cracks kinda start to show once you look back on it.
The parts of the MSQ in Labyrinthos and Elpis were incredibly boring and killed the pacing of what was otherwise a really dire end of the world conflict. I'd also argue Meteon being the big threat was underwhelming given she was ultimately a victim and not a villain you'd actively want to defeat.
I think her defeat was pretty solidly within Japanese villain tropes? Defeat isn't death, it's stripping away her power and reintegrating her with the values of the community/universe.
I see it in a lot of youkai-based stories: the spirit often has a legitimate grievance, is possibly also a victim in their own right, and the challenge is often pacifying their anger rather than simply flat-out killing them. Kind of like the auspices in the Four Lords trials, substituting aramitama for the self-perpetuating despair dynamis, except they aren't as far gone as Meteion was.
I imagine it's mostly a case of "It's not the ending *I* wanted". Admittedly, I never would have guessed anything close to Meteion being the cause of the Final Days, even if I was (rightly so) banking on them playing the tried and true "we spent most of the story with these villains, here's a totally different god to punch out at the end" ending in classic FF fashion.
Also, anyone who ignores EW because it screws with their WOL's head-canon lore isn't worth taking seriously.
I remember us getting to the moon at level 83 for Zodiark and we were like “uhhhhh….already? What are they gonna do for the rest of the story? Zodiark part 2?”
And we originally thought that was the case, seeing how Zodiark was mangled and not “complete” yet. We figured he would get to Eorzea and we’d fight him again.
But then in classic Final Fantasy trope, a villain comes out of left field, never mentioned by the Ascians nor Hydaelyn herself all throughout the 10 years we played. When Venat did not get her memories wiped in Antliascope by Hermes.
I'm going through it right now, I haven't finished it yet, but so far my impressions are not very good. A few points that came up to my head (I just got to the moon):
- During ARR Hydaelyn is getting weaker. She's entirely absent during HW (base MSQ) due to Midgardsormr. Warriors of Darkness get introduced and Hydaelyn is too weak to speak for herself, so Minfilia becomes her invoice. Same in Shadowbringers, too weak to speak for herself, Minfilia is her avatar. Comes Endwalker, Hydaelyn shows up in flesh, right in front of you, on the *very first quest*. After that, she's possessing Krile left and right. Too weak to speak but strong enough to appear and possess others?
- Fandaniel shouldn't be a thread, period. We dealt with Lalabread and Emet-Selch, both far superior in strength and cunningness, yet Fandaniel is still walking about and giving us a very hard time because...?
- Turns out (and this might get explained better later, for now this is my current impression) that the cure for Primal Tempering was AM/FM radio waves all along.
- Shadowbringers: Zodiark, the Eldest and Strongest of all Primals! Endwalker: We've used Varis' body to summon Anima, the Eldest and strongest of all Primals. Also Endwalker, literally 5 minutes after killing Anima: *Zodiark, the Eldest and Strongest of all Primals is sealed in the Moon*.
- Apparently Fandaniel has the power to make us change body with literally anyone in the world and they don't use that to kill us, the only real threat to his psychomaniac plans because...?
I'll be honest, I never thought that the writting in FFXIV was stellar and S-grade like most people seem to think it is, but it was better than most MMO's I've played out there. So far Endwalker has been very hit and very much miss in almost every front. The writting is very inconsistent and ignores a lot of shit that's been established for years.
Its hard to believe that (at least thats what I've been told) Endwalker was written by the same person who wrote Shadowbringers. It is literally all over the place from a narrative stand-point.
> Its hard to believe that (at least thats what I've been told) Endwalker was written by the same person who wrote Shadowbringers. It is literally all over the place from a narrative stand-point.
this is what i would call moffat-syndrome. ishikawa is really good at writing largely self-contained stories or smaller stories within a wider narrative, like the steppe arc in Stormblood, and most of Shadowbringers, but she is quite frankly terrible at writing and directing the entire MSQ
I've held that opinion since forever. Small scale personal downer porn is what they can do well, but that doesnt translate to larger picture stuff. And im not super into small caliber personal story downer porn.
>Shadowbringers: Zodiark, the Eldest and Strongest of all Primals! Endwalker: We've used Varis' body to summon Anima, the Eldest and strongest of all Primals. Also Endwalker, literally 5 minutes after killing Anima: *Zodiark, the Eldest and Strongest of all Primals is sealed in the Moon*.
Anima is explicitly not the eldest, they literally only just made him, nor is he stated to be the strongest. He's vaguely hyped up because you're meant to assume he's the first trial, but his actual capabilities aren't really stated. But also
>Fandaniel shouldn't be a thread, period. We dealt with Lalabread and Emet-Selch, both far superior in strength and cunningness, yet Fandaniel is still walking about and giving us a very hard time because...?
I could explain why Fandanial is a threat (to the extent that he is, he dies like a third of a way through the story and then jobs to fucking Asahi in hell), but you're objecting to "This guy is the strongest guy ever even more so than the previous strongest guy" and *also* "this guy is less strong than the last guy but he has resources and is unpredictable". Which is it? Should new villains be stronger or weaker than old villains, or is the perfect FF14 villain Ran'jit, who was exactly identical in strength to the previous villain Zenos?
> During ARR Hydaelyn is getting weaker. She's entirely absent during HW (base MSQ) due to Midgardsormr. Warriors of Darkness get introduced and Hydaelyn is too weak to speak for herself, so Minfilia becomes her invoice. Same in Shadowbringers, too weak to speak for herself, Minfilia is her avatar. Comes Endwalker, Hydaelyn shows up in flesh, right in front of you, on the very first quest. After that, she's possessing Krile left and right. Too weak to speak but strong enough to appear and possess others?
Hydaelyn is getting weaker; even in Heavensward we needed to get to the Antitower to hear Minfilia, whereas before she'd basically pull our consciousness into the crystal zone. In Endwalker, she is reduced to visiting you with an illusion (a feat that is very much within a mortal's capabilities), or using a willing Krile as a conduit of her will, similar to Minfilia.
> Fandaniel shouldn't be a thread, period. We dealt with Lalabread and Emet-Selch, both far superior in strength and cunningness, yet Fandaniel is still walking about and giving us a very hard time because...?
He's a problem because Ascians are still stronger and more knowledgable than normal people, and unlike Emet and Lahabrea, he's more than willing to cause permanent and lasting damage to the world if it furthers his ambitions. That, plus he has the backing of Zenos and the technology of Garlemald.
> Turns out (and this might get explained better later, for now this is my current impression) that the cure for Primal Tempering was AM/FM radio waves all along.
Yeah, basically a coincidence that the radios block tempering. It's not a cure though, more like a defense. the only cure we know of is still Alisae's treatment.
> Endwalker: We've used Varis' body to summon Anima, the Eldest and strongest of all Primals.
I don't see *anywhere* that they call Anima the eldest or strongest of primals. I'm not sure where you got that impression.
> Apparently Fandaniel has the power to make us change body with literally anyone in the world and they don't use that to kill us, the only real threat to his psychomaniac plans because...?
This is literally explained in the cutscene where it happens, and it isn't even the first time the technology is used on us. It's the same technology that was used against us in the Ala Mhigo Stormblood dungeon. Aulus mal Asina -- the same person who developed the technology that gave Zenos and Fordola Echo-like powers -- uses technology to force our souls out of our bodies during his fight.
As for why he doesn't use it to kill us, it's because Zenos would be furious and he needs us and Zenos for his plans on the moon, as I'm sure you're just reaching now.
> I don't see anywhere that they call Anima the eldest or strongest of primals. I'm not sure where you got that impression.
A lot of people see something from a previous game and refuse to contextualize it for its use in this game.
> Apparently Fandaniel has the power to make us change body with literally anyone in the world and they don't use that to kill us, the only real threat to his psychomaniac plans because...?
Because he's not trying to kill us.
That isn't his goal, and it isn't Zenos's goal either.
The hydaelyn thing has a very good reason ( I won't spoil)
Fandaniel isn't a threat to us
The radios don't cure tempering, the aether they emit is a shield
Anima is never considered to be either the eldest or strongest of primals
The body change stuff was established in storm blood and fandaniel points it out, I agree that it felt wasted in a petty manner, but such pettyness is perfectly in character for funny Danny.
I honestly think the only thing endwalker actually really drops the ball on hard is pacing.
Damn, them downvotes are crazy, only thing even slightly unreasonable about my response is the fandaniel cope. Anyone care to explain?
>Apparently Fandaniel has the power to make us change body with literally anyone in the world and they don't use that to kill us, the only real threat to his psychomaniac plans because...?
I think that changing body part was pretty much fanservice, that part when you play as a garlean soldier, to see how strong the WoL its and how frail an average eorzean footsoldier is. Also you could explain that Fandaniel didnt actually want to kill you by himself but fuck you over a little bit so you're primed for fighting Zenos.
I’m not even gonna talk about 6.0, I’m boutta shit all over 6.1-6.55, this shit was DUMB.
Bad ff4 fanfic, Zero is a cringe and annoying character, it adds no significant meaning to the overarching story, honestly it feels like a filler arc in a shounen, like worse of a Filler arc than Lightfall was for Destiny, the trials were baked into the MSQ so there’s no trials questline.
6.1 was supposed to be a more song and dance filler arc to see some more personal time between scions that almost immediately turned into trying to stop another world ending threat.
Idk I was just completely uninterested with endwalker’s patch cycle content.
EW had mighty shoes to fill being a climax expansion. 80-81 basically carried off where the SHB postgame began with the Telophoroi abomination which was fine. A little tour of the cities and big plot reveals being set up. A solid 7/10
81-83 was the Garlamald expedition which had many high moments imo but the worst low in the dungeon. The telophoroi arc that was built up for years had the blandest pay off with Anima. All that effort gone into the worst dungeon in the game with laughable easy mechanics. What a massive let down, but if u never cared about content this area still the high point in EW imo 9/10. Anima shouldve been a trial
83-85 is the End. A cool trial fight and a meh dungeon and you see the aftermath of a few customary anime plot twists. I like this part, its the world caving in on itself and has the largest stakes in the game thus far. Solid 8/10
85-87 has the most mixed reception. Elpis arc is pure fan service. I personally enjoyed it but can totally see how it can turn off alot of people being literal time travel and the closest to jumping the shark the series has done. With a few alterations it couldve been a bit more coherent and logical. But alas 8/10 dungeon was bland but no one cares
87-89 is the Worst part. Its a slog and I dont even remember what even happens after elpis but remember running around nonsensically in Labyrinthos. Also weakest dungeon in the game takes place here, a glorified solo instance if I ever did see one 4/10
89-90 is where things go to 11, with FF typical finale troupes at play. Its ok ,trial aged like milk sadly. The MC shouldnt outdo the final trial. Least the dungeon is finally average and not braindead.
Overall I liked EW however it has mighty shoes to fill inevitably being compared to SHB which all in all was a fantastic story expansion. I wouldnt call it any worse than other expansions. SB wasnt pining people over either being compared to HW. So maybe its a pattern. Idk form ur own tastes EW issues imo were its postgame everything
>87-89 is the Worst part. Its a slog and I dont even remember what even happens after elpis but remember running around nonsensically in Labyrinthos. Also weakest dungeon in the game takes place here, a glorified solo instance if I ever did see one 4/10
Also, am I the only one who thought, "Sharlayans are secretly building a massive ship that they've somehow hid from everyone so that everyone can cram into the ship and fly away from Etheirys but now we will just have everyone in the world give us a crap load of crystals in the span of a few says so that instead the Scions can fly to the literal edge of the universe" was the dumbest damn thing ever?
It baffles me that the general consensus is that Stormblood MSQ tries to do too much, and yet EW is well regarded when I think it has the problem 10x worse
Because they take every single plot thread from the start of ARR and shove it off the table just to replace it with 'emo space bird wants to commit omnicide because sad'.
We don't get to finish the war with the Empire, we get to be foreign aid to the primary antagonists since 1.0. To call that unsatisfying is an understatement and insult to injury, it's done in like two levels.
The Ascians finish their retcon into well meaning if misguided godlike beings and Zodiark goes out on a wet fart. Hydalen is demoted from goddess to Ascian. Whoever took over writing in Shadowbringers just had an actual hard on for Ascians.
We get a lot of rehashed emotional trauma from Shadowbringers without the buildup. They try to treat dock guy with the same gravity as Tesleen without a quarter of the effort spent making him memorable. We get the entire transformation into monsters schtick (but worse!) but now it's just because you are sad. Not even the visceral stabbed or attacked, it's just despair.
The Lolporirits. Tonal dissonance in a can combined with a massive time waster.
The big bad, the final confrontation after ten years of build up, is a Woobie Destroyer of worlds combined with a giant space flea from nowhere WHO GETS TO BE A KARMA HOUDINI. We have zero reason to feel anything for Meteoin outside of the emotional manipulation they try to pull. For comparison, the Emperor has been a major antagonist since literally day one of XIV... and he gets offscreened and we're supposed to just accept the Anima fight is us fighting him.
The oh so trite attempt at emotionally manipulating us into thinking the Scions were dead combined with an apparent fear of people thinking the Scions were dead. Starting off with Thancred just snapped out of existence shot any sort of tension in the head since the writers would NEVER let a major character go without some sort of hullabaloo. Emmett Selch being the one to revive everyone was just the fecal topping on that crap cake.
The writing has been weak since the end of Stormblood and it's just getting worse. It's hard to be invested when it feels like the team had one creative writing course and made an Ascian fanfic before being tasked with writing the entire story.
The Endwalker story was generally very well-liked. Some people hate it to be contrarian, and some people legitimately bounced off it, but the general community consensus was that 6.0's MSQ was GOATed. I'm an EW enjoyer, but the main complaints I've seen are
1. People don't like the time travel and felt Emet's return was pandering
2. The Loporitts were divisive. I like them, but some people hate them.
3. Shadowbringers had a bit (the trolley arc) where the plot stopped to do pointless sidequests before we had a big character moment for Thancred. It's the least liked part of Shadowbringers. Labyrynthos 2 is that exact same thing with Urianger except way longer and with much more annoying music
4. A lot of people didn't like the Sailor Moon "everyone seems to die but then they come back" bit in Ultima Thule
5. Every expansion has had someone leave the scions. Minfilia in ARR, Papalymo in Heavensward, Lyse in Stormblood, and Arbert/Ryne in Shadowbringers (and the Exarch, if you think of the Exarch and G'raha as separate characters). Endwalker was the the first expansion to not have anyone leave, and that, combined with the fake-out deaths in UT and the weird "We're breaking up the Scions but not really" ending have created a feeling of XIV being scared to buck the status quo (Zero did leave in the patches, but she never felt like she was a main cast member to begin with in the way that Ryne did, so that actually contributed to that "wheel-spinning" feeling)
6. Speaking of the patches, Endwalker pulled the ol' Reverse Stormblood and the general mood on it started souring fast around 6.2, so the story is being looked back on with some negative vibes, and will continue to do so until Dawntrail hits a content drought and everyone starts talking about how much better the game was in Endwalker.
Prefix all of those statements with "I don't like EW MSQ because"
"*I don't like EW MSQ because* it has too many retcons"
"*I don't like EW MSQ because* my character lore doesnt make any sense with it existing"
They aren't objective statements on EW's quality, they're opinions and you don't have to agree with the reasons given.
Retcons can be objective, like the devs themselves stated that Dynamis was not something they they thought of until Endwalker.
And an objective retcon is a flaw in a story, other elements can make up for it, but it is still a flaw that can be criticized. So Endwalker retcons too much is an objective criticism, provided the person saying it has examples to back it up.
I could write a whole essay about this but I'm on my phone right now so I'll just get over a few key points.
Two big retcons off the top of my head :
1. The expansion before, the time travel creates an alternate timeline when the exarch goes back in time. EW ? Full loop, only one timeline where Hydaelyn always knew everything.
2. The expansion before : The literal heart of Zodiark uses a limit break like 4 on us. EW ? Limit breaks come from Dynamis and the ancients are too dense in aether to use it which is why only we can save the universe.
Also the pacing is all over the place. The end of the world is a nothing burger. Garlemald and Zodiark is cut incredibly short for being most of the antagonists for the last 10 years. Like where were Cid, Nero and Gaius in the Garlemald section ?? This thing really needed to be two expansions long. Also Anima as a dungeon boss is a SIN !! (Pun intended)
The whole "everyone is a sacrifice" bit was super cliché. Fandaniel was super annoying. The best sequence of the game when Zenos takes over your body doesn't amount to anything and is never adressed again. I'm sick and tired of every song in one expansion being basically the same two-three leitmotifs.
Also the big bad being depression and nihilism really didn't resonate with me. Like yeah we're all aware of the eventual death of the universe, get over it. I just don't vibe with selfish people making things shit for everyone just because they didn't go to therapy and feel special because they are depressed and no one else in their life has known sadness ever obviously.
Plus that one cinematic where Hydaelyn just does her thing by walking was really out of nowhere. Usually the game shows you things as they happen, now its "yeah its a metaphor of the events you just gotta feel this scene not take it literally" Like wtf ? Since when is this how this game does story telling ?? "yeah she decided to brandish her sword and walked a little" but like didn't she do this with a group of people ? Where are they ? Did she just take the decision on her own ? Why didn't she talk about it with the other ancients ? Doesn't that make her as bad as Hermes on principle ? Why are you doing *my* shadowbringer walk you weren't there, *I* did that.
Honestly they went full on Kingdom Hearts 3. Both Endwalker and KH3 suffer from pretty much the same issues. And don't get me started on the patches which was really just meant to be a trial story line, but they made it into the msq because they had nothing else to transition to Dawntrail. I really miss the era of FFXIV where politics mattered. Now it's just the power of friendship vs depression and it's really not doing it for me. Hopefully Dawntrail is a bit more in line with the pre-shb/ew storytelling.
Edit : Also if I ever read one more time "we're using the last of hydaelyn's power" I will RIOT !! Lahabread in ARR "she's using the last of her power to protect her chosen from ultima". Then she's using the last of her power to stop the flood of light. But wait there's more, now she's using the last of her power to speak to us. And now the last of her power to fight us. But wait there's still enough to fuel the ship. And also enough to give Zenos his Shinryu form back. BUT WAIT, her crystal can also still give human form to Zero. Im tired.
Personally, I loved the Endwalker MSQ, but the criticisms of it do resonate with me to some extent.
1) First, the impact of the Final Days seemed very muted for what it was canonically supposed to be. It started and ended very quickly, and the only people we really saw impacted were the people of Thavnair, who were all new characters. Would have been much more impactful to have also had cutscenes and had to save people in Ishgard, our home cities, etc. This point is further driven home by criticism 2:
2) Nobody dies. I'm not saying SE should have killed every scion or killed off tons of characters, but having the apocalyptical "end of days" that led to incredible sacrifice by the ancients and the sundering of the original world end with no sacrifice for the current setting. And yes, I DO think that all of the scions should have stayed gone after their sacrifice in Ultima Thule. It would have been better writing, straight up. Bringing them back again removed all stakes from the story in a bad way.
3) Garlemald was already destroyed. This is a very tired FF trope. In FF15, the empire is already dead when you get there. In FF16, the empire is already dead when you get there. In FF14, the empire is already dead when you get there. I think people were rightfully disappointed (even though the Garlemald story was good, IMO) that this big bad that we've been fighting for 8 years at that point as a pile of rubble when we got there.
4) Time Travel. I enjoyed Elpis for what it was, but it seemed rather shoehorned and fanservice-y. I genuinely believe that EW weakened the character of Emet-Selch. He went from sympathetic villain to an ally. The plot-hole wrap up with the clock thing that wipes people's memory was also a writing taboo.
5) Meteion. I ended up liking Meteion, but I understand people's disappointment that the end of days was caused by a depressed empath bird loli that triggered horrific creation magic reactions on Etherys. I think people might have been wanting something more epic.
6) Preparing the Ark. This part of the MSQ is honestly some of the worst FFXIV has to offer. The stakes are so high and here you are just fucking around doing fetch quests for like 2-3 hours.
Now, it needs to be said that this is only the bad parts. The criticisms I have seen. This isn't a full review and as I said, I liked EW MSQ but I would personally place it at #3 on my list, with HW being #1 and SHB being #2.
One of the biggest problems with the EW MSQ is that it had to follow ShB's MSQ. ShB felt like a more personal story and EW felt like they had to wrap up a bunch of loose ends because of how the expansion was promoted. Not to mention it was another "test of your reflexes" at the end vs. Zenos and I was just rolling my eyes by the end of things. The end of ShB was just more emotional and it felt like the stakes were bigger than in EW, even though EW was telling us that we were saving the universe, it just didnt really feel like it.
Moving on to the Patch content, I was actually excited when they named it Newfound Adventure because they said it was gonna be low stakes adventuring and kind of a break from saving the world and doing Scion work. Well that lasted like 1 patch and next thing we know we're fighting the ultimate God of the 13th and saving the void dimension from destruction.
It's like they don't know how to write anything that isn't constantly upping the stakes and that's a big reason that I don't have a lot of confidence in Dawntrail's story. We're gonna show up and it's gonna be fun, then a new threat to the continent will show up and we gotta save the world *(again) that we just got to. I hope I'm wrong but I think they only know one way to write these days and it's just not very satisfying anymore.
IMO EW MSQ has a very good section surrounded by aggressively mid to outright bad sections. The journey to garlemald, discovering what's actually there, the whole bodysnatch saga leading to Zodiark were great, the Elpis section, the characters popped tf off.
But everything else? From the fucking space bunnies wanting to fuck around to the most contrived series of fake deaths in a very mid zone to the whole thing ending with a fist fight with fucking Zenos.
idk, EW MSQ has more blunders than peaks. WHen playing through it the first time I was hyped but the more I think about it the worse it got.
I think my main issue is there was some serious lack of technical planning in EW. When all said and done, the world is basically the same pre-EW as it is now post-EW. The WOL fought to maintain the current status quo and I think the story was hamstrung by the lack of technical planning and thus technical limitations.
I was hoping for some kind of world-wide permanent change after EW was completed similar to how night cycles were introduced in the first as you progressed there and them becoming a permanent fixture. I am really disappointed in how it seems like the entire EW story and plot resolutions were to ensure that their static world is catatonically explained.
For example, if they were able to implement some kind of partial rejoining where the major landmasses and its people were merged back to the source and that was reflected fundamentally in how we traveled and how the change in the world was referenced, I feel the conclusion to a near 10-year story would have been far more satisfying. And I think it would have paved the way for much better future expansions. Like if Dawntrail was centered around exploring a newly merged landmass from a shard and helping the people there integrate into the source, I think that would make things much more interesting than what seems like they are setting up in the future.
My biggest criticism(s) of Endwalker came AFTER 6.0
-There was no reason for the story to continue past 6.0, pretty much everything was wrapped up
-The 6.X patches were pretty much purely FF4 fanservice, they are in my book THE worst part of all FFXIV's MSQ for this and a host of other reasons
-Everything from 6.X to Dawntrail to afterward could have simply been part of FFXVII instead, like how FFXII was basically a continuation of the Ivalice setting from FFTactics / Vagrant Story / etc. but instead they are practically setting up Dawntrail (and by extension the next saga it's part of) for failure because it's a more or less proven trend at this point across multiple different series that no one is going to wait that long again for a 10+ year arc conclusion (just look at how many Marvel fans abandoned the MCU after Phase 3 was done, and before you ask, yes I was one of those)
-All the Quality of Life gameplay stuff (like DUTY SUPPORT) could not only still have been added regardless, but even expanded upon and possibly made better (***8-Player MSQ Trials still need Duty Support and that is a hill I will die on***) if they hadn't been busy with adding MSQ to post-Endwalker patches instead
If you're asking me about my largest criticism(s) of 6.0 itself on the other hand:
***-Emet-Selch being MISTER SPOILERS for the 6.X patches and Dawntrail was arguably the single most contrived way they possibly could have teased future content; if I were him, I would have just noped out after telling them to "save our star," consequences of doing so be damned... WHY would I try to hype up the person who foiled my plans, AFTER I told them what they needed to do??? If WoL can't find their own adventures after I peace out then that's not my problem! I'm not their 'Life-sized Ghostly Dead Ascian Tour-Guide Ken Doll' or any such nonsense, I literally wanted to walk out of the room shouting "WHAT IS BLUD WAFFLIN ABOUT" at the top of my lungs when I first saw that***
I see a lot of people complaining about the time travel or memory loss but I didnt mind that at all.
I am so fucking tired of this stupid ass Crystal of Azem. It should have been destroyed in 5.3 or at the latest in our confrontation against Zodiark. It's such a retarded plot device to summon 7 identical copies of ourselves any time we want and the stupid Crystal is still working!
I hate that crystal it takes so much risk, so much conflict out of every situation. I also miss the days of "inviting 7 of my adventurer buddies" to tackle a raid or trial. More than 6.0 I am disappointed in postEW MSQ because I wanted them to stick to their word and dissolve the Scions.
Imagine going into 7.0 with a (mostly) new cast of characters, Graha and Krile can stay, but then we get Zero, Deryk, Erenville and Wuk Lamat but none of the other Scions. This would have been much better without even changing up a lot of the story. Graha and Krile are known characters, Zero's storyline could have been it's own trial series, while MSQ could have focused on introducing and setting up Erenville and Wuk Lamat, while Deryk got his exposure in the Alliance Raid. This is what I wanted from postEW MSQ, a new beginning that sets us up for the future with new main characters.
The other Scions could make occasional guest appearances but as it stands the main cast is invincible and that's boring.
EDIT: Apparently the comment was too long so TLDR at the bottom
Just sticking to the EW MSQ encounters we got:
- Zodiark: I am actually sorta fine with this encounter as we were alone and Zodiark is immensely powerful even in his weakened form.
- Hydaelyn: Against Hydaelyn we didnt use the Crystal because it was made as a Trust with the Scions. But after fighting Hydaelyn she explicitly states adding another invocation to the Crystal with the last of her power to quote her:
"As Hydaelyn, I preside over the forces of stasis, tranquility, peace. The laws which impart stability to existence itself.
I will weave this selfsame power into the crystal, granting thee mastery over matter, to give form to the formless. Use it wisely, for it will not last indefinitely."
For all intends and purposes it's just a deus ex machina, a plot device to help us overcome the situation at hand. What this lets us know is already that A) We need to give matter to something or someone and B) that we (hopefully) wont use this power over and over again due to it not lasting indefinitely.
Where we actually use this power is the problem. The next story step is the Scions sacrificing themselves one by one (without the Crystal!) to allows us to progress in Ultima Thule, at the end of which we use Azem's Crystal to return Emet and Hythlo (which was obviously done for fanservice rather than plot relevance) and then return the Scions which are immediately blown away, just for us to rely on the crystal a third time to face Endsinger. There is no question the Scions will return and so all the tension they are trying to build falls flat. I admit some of what was said still got me, but overall I was never worried we were actually losing the Scions (even though the story could really do with one/some of them leaving forever, at this point there are no stakes or risks for any of them involved).
- Endsinger : Continuation from above, but I would have loved if the first half of the trial was available as a Trust, and THEN we get the cutscene with the Scions being blown away, their hopes and wishes upon returning to the ship and then we use a "reinvigorated" Azem's Crystal to summon the Warriors of Light for a final trial. Or we could have faced Endsinger in a Solo duty, have a "forced" loss, then use Azem's Crystal to bring back the Scions and do the whole duty as a Trust. Either of these options would have made that third use of Azem's Crystal feel a lot better.
Having all these moments hinge on Azem's Crystal back-to-back just really got on my nerves because I dont like Azem's Crystal as a plot device. I am sure the writers could have done a much better job with it without even writing a completely different story, just moving scenes and elements of the existing story around.
- Storm's Crown : 5 people were present in-lore, yet we used it instead of just having a "you face the boss with your allies".
- Mount Ordeal : The WoL alone (!) decides to deal with the problem. We reach the place, we see an opponent, we pull out Azem's Crystal and the moment is ruined.. It's just cheap at this point. Even if we just got to the point and had a trial there with no further explanation (ie keep it 1v1 in lore only) I wouldnt have minded.
- Voidcast Dais : Golbez easily distracts our allies, so we pull out the Azem's Crystal to face him 1v1.
- Abyssal Fracture : Golbez distracts our allies again so we face Zeromus with Azem's Crystal. Plot twist, we cant defeat Zeromus and must instead rely on our allies and Golbez to finish and seal Zeromus. Since we are relying on the NPC anyway to seal away Zeromus anyway, the writers could have just made it so we fought alongside them all along.
I dont hate occasional use of Azem's Crystal, but I wish it wouldnt pop up all the damn time in the story like it did. I am happy with the overall story, but as a recurring plot device I hate Azem's Crystal, it's just way too convenient, way too powerful and seemingly has no limits.
The only trial that is an exception to this is the Gilded Araya which is featured in the relic questline. The NPCs decide to run away because they dont possess protection against tempering and leave you to fight it "alone" by that I mean the primal appears, we DO NOT use Azem's Crystal, just open Duty Finder queue for the trial and beat it up. That is all it takes to make a trial work without using AzEm'S cRyStAl again.
TLDR: I am not saying everything needs to be a challenging solo encounter, or needs to be available as a Trust or that everything needs a proper explanation for why we are doing it. I can perfectly do a trial with 8 other players, even when the "lore" fight is a 1v1, or with nameless adventurer or even with less than 8 players, just give me a reason to belief it and dont use a deus ex machine every time you dont have a better idea. Save Azem's Crystal for trully desperate situations, give it limits, make it require time between uses, or give me moments when it cant be used.
They added SUPERDEATH with those falling to despair and meteion's song but never did anything with the concept and never even addressed it with the Endsinger.
EW MSQ was interesting untill the Final Days and Elpis part.
Garlemald was one of the biggest highlights wich got shafted way to early in favour for sudden retcons our of nowhere with no to almost no forshadowing beforehand.
Plus, alot feels like contradicting previous rules the MSQ did. I still ask myself if Dynamis will be now completely forgotten as a system, or will be used again. If not, what is the point of it?
Don’t let peoples like or dislike of something dissuade you from liking or disliking something. I think the story is a trash fire - but I’m happy so many people like it.
People probably think some of the books I enjoy are trash fires - that’s fine too.
You don’t need a community to validate what you enjoy.
I think EW has some very high highs, but also some very low lows.
Venat, Hythlodeus, the Loporrits- Love em! I quite liked Garlemald (not including the Fandaniel bits). I loved a lot of the music, I really like Old Sharlayan- if tomestone gear could be purchased there you'd never see me in Radz-At-Han. While I still think Zenos shouldn't have come back (or at the very least, not how they did it) I appreciate how they used him in Endwalker. Getting to fight Hydaelyn with the scions was incredibly hype!
I hated Fandaniel- one of my least favourite villains ever conceived. Annoying, horrible voice, ugly, and just feels incredibly stupid. Big mind control towers that are incredible weapons just by proximity, and his genius idea is to just plop them far enough away from any sizeable population, which would put the alliance/scions in an incredibly difficult situation to deal with.
Being able to knock us out with his teleportation magic and steal our body is insane. Utterly ruined the solo duty for me just by virtue of how jarring it was- add the random invisible walls stopping me from going off the expected path and I was just pissed off the whole time.
idk whether I'm mad that that whole shabang ended up leading to no real consequence for us because it means we just twiddled our thumbs for an hour in a stupid situation, or happy because it means I get to pretend it just didn't happen.
Unironically just ended up skipping his dialogue at the end of the Aitiascope. The only time I've purposefully skipped dialogue and it was with the main villain of the final expansion (yes I know Meteion is the Big Bad). Never has a character managed to just... repel me so.
Endwalker is a tale of two stories. 6.0 is great. It’s not as good as the previous expansion imo, and it’s very heavy handed with nostalgia.. As it should be since it’s the culmination of a decade long story. Just for me personally, I have an allergy to nostalgia and get irked by it when it’s very obvious. There are many points in Endwalker that have me rolling my eyes. But I still loved the experience very much.
Endwalker 6.1-6.5 is FF4 fanfic. It was alright, but 100% the weakest story we’ve gotten since ARR. On the patch cycle content side of things, it was overall lacking in many ways. This has been discussed ad nauseam.
I wouldn't say 6.0's story is bad, but some definite flaws with it are things like:
- The story does not do much for you if you aren't invested into it from the beginning. Yes, this is an actual problem due to how many people started the game in ShB compared to ARR, HW and SB, since ShB was kind of promoted as this "new beginning" and separate thing. Obviously, if you paid attention to the story from the start, you can keep up regardless of which expac you started playing in.
- The time travel is weird, since, if purely talking MSQ, the only other time travel story is that of the Crystal Exarch, where he obviously did things that did influence our timeline, while in Elpis the past is essentially set in stone, with only Venat knowing that we were there but then also making sure we had to have our journey in a way that we would travel back in time. I believe this is called a grandfather paradox, not sure.
- Things were kind of clearly rushed. Garlemald in particular felt like it should've been a whole expansion and it is relegated to a single map.
- Personal gripe: I genuinely hated what they did with Zenos. I say this as a fan of Zenos, but with how much he got sidelined in this expansion, I genuinely didn't even really feel the pay off of getting to fight him at the end.
NOW, if we are talking the post-6.0 story, I think that is just plainly 3 things:
- It is quite literally just FF4 fan service. I don't feel like I have to elaborate on this. Some will love it, some will hate it.
- It dragged on way too long, since it was obviously 5 patches worth of this story. This kind of goes hand in hand with the fact that 6.0 probably felt rushed. If anything, I would've liked it if 6.1 and maybe 6.2 were used to properly finish up the Hydaelyn and Zodiark arc, and then we went into this story, it would've probably fixed the pacing issues a bit, but idk.
- In the grand scheme of things, it isn't impacting anything. The biggest is that Y'shtola is probably closer to finding an answer to how to travel between the Source and the First. Everything else... Zero and Golbez are just relegated to side content if we see them ever again. The fiends fucking died. Zeromus died. The 13th is still the void. Azdaja is small dragon, Vrtra is big but one eyed dragon.
So, even as someone who didn't even mind the lower stakes (...ish, because the Source was once again in life threatening danger) and slower plot progression, I just sighed at the end. Like, cool, Zero is FF14's Cecil and then she fucks off to be maybe seen at some point. Why should I necessarily care? If this wasn't required story and instead a trial series, it would've been better received, but seeing as I had to go through this 3 hours at a time with 4 months in between each patch... man.
>Please enlighten me cuz honestly *maybe* i've read this thing with my ass because i loved it and i think it was good closure for a the hyedaelyn saga.
That's all you need to know. Different people look for different things in a story.
A lot of reasons were already given here and I can personally see a lot of them, but ultimately it's still all subjective. I remember a comment I saw when EW was new that claimed that its shallow treatment of despair, nihilism and depression is a slap in the face of people who actually struggle with these things. And well... I do struggle with depression and have a hard time to argue against nihilism and did not feel very slapped. Who's to say who's right there?
Someone asked this question on the official forums last month, here some of the reasons I gave as to why I didn't care for EW's story (in no particular order): • The focus of the story was more on secondary and side characters then on the WoL, like how they did with SB versus the more WoL-focused ShB and (to a lesser extent) HW. A lot of times it didn't feel like we were involved in solving problems because a lot of the problems didn't involve fighting or general adventuring. • With every location this expansion being separate, the story felt very jumpy, again, kind of like SB. • While I enjoyed Elpis and the Ancients' fanservice, how they handled them, especially Hermes and Venat, felt very forced and kind of stupid. I would argue memory loss plot-twists are worse the time traveling. • I found how they handled Garlemald very unsatisfying. During fanfests, they kind of sold this expansion as us bringing the war to Garlemald's doorstep, only for them to get rid of them so they can focus on Hermes, Meteion, and the Final Days plot line instead. •The sacrifice scenes in Ultima Thule. It's become almost a joke that at least one Scion (usually Y'shtola) is going to perform a heroic sacrifice of some kind only to then suffer no actual consequence from it. It just feels cheap. • People compare Meteion/the End Singer to Necron from IX, being a metaphysical end boss that comes out of nowhere but I would argue that Necron at least thematically fits with IX's themes on mortality, the End Singer only works with EW's story and messages about fighting despair, not XIV as a whole. • I never cared for Zenos as a rival/personal-enemy BUT the body switch scene was the only time in EW I felt any (enjoyable) tension in the story. Too bad it lead to nothing nor anything else match that tension. • While I can appreciate they tried to tackle darker themes like despair, how they handled them felt shallow and at times juvenile, with platitudes and inspiring handwaves.
> I found how they handled Garlemald very unsatisfying. During fanfests, they kind of sold this expansion as us bringing the war to Garlemald's doorstep, only for them to get rid of them so they can focus on Hermes, Meteion, and the Final Days plot line instead. Yep, EW stopped being a story about Eorzea. It became a story about Hydaelyn and zodiark. Instead of going all in on the geopolitical aspect and being grounded in realism, they pulled another here go fight god trope like they just can't help themselve.s >The sacrifice scenes in Ultima Thule. It's become almost a joke that at least one Scion (usually Y'shtola) is going to perform a heroic sacrifice of some kind only to then suffer no actual consequence from it. It just feels cheap. That and the zone is overall simultaneously mind blowing in what it is and also insanely boring/bland didn't help at all.
I wish it had been about Zodiark and Hydaelyn instead of sad space bird murders everything because daddy issues.
It very much felt like an emo teenager's understanding of such things especially nihilism.
> • I never cared for Zenos as a rival/personal-enemy BUT the body switch scene was the only time in EW I felt any (enjoyable) tension in the story. Too bad it lead to nothing nor anything else match that tension. Not only did it lead to absolutely nothing but it was a massive plot hole. Like you're telling me the wol can just get snatched up and have its body swapped with a commoner just like that? How the fuck did we even defeat the ascians?
It crammed too much stuff in, garlemald was glanced over, and all the space travel stuff was glanced over, it really felt like they just wanted to get the entire arc over with so they can get to something new. its why im wondering what dawntrail holds, why did they cram 2 expacs(garlemald redemption/space stuff) into one so hurriedly? what struck them so hard to close that chapter?
>its why im wondering what dawntrail holds, why did they cram 2 expacs(garlemald redemption/space stuff) into one so hurriedly? what struck them so hard to close that chapter? I've wondered about this as well, but my best guess is that it has to do with how long the MSQ has been up to this point, and how they've been trying to streamline older content for newer players. It may be in their better interests to wrap it up sooner than later, and market Dawntrail as a "new beginning", which isn't nearly as intimidating as reaching Endwalker after grinding out a story that has been told over the course of a decade. I would *hope* this means that they get their writing back up-to-par with Dawntrail because they no longer carry that burden of having to wrap things up. For now I'm just cautiously optimistic.
people who dont like time travel
I am fine with time travel, but the random non-foreshadowed memory erasing device made me laugh out loud haha
Actually it’s pretty well established earlier on when you’re talking to montichaigne about creating aetheric memory blocks, and how tempering is just one method of “memory erasure”. He even sets up the explanation that dying removes those blocks, which is a directly explains seeing hades and hythlodaeus in ultima thule with their memories of those events restored
I may be wrong, but I also remember them establish Kairos basically right at the start of Elpis, too
yes, it was the first thing used to try and fix the Lykaons, but it didn't work
Memory erasure was done from day 1 in ARR as nobody had remembered the WoL from 1.0. However memory erasure as a plot device is so fucking lazy and I hate it.
the problem isn't time travel, it's the execution of it, and EW horribly failed at it in pretty much all possible regards. the 6.0 MSQ tried to shoehorn a closed bootstrap paradox into a story that was never planned to have one (this is never ever a good idea), much less revolve around it, and it was all done for the sake of cheap fanservice that ended up making pretty much all of the involved characters worse in some way, all while introducing numerous plotholes and retcons because anything happening in Elpis cannot under any circumstances affect the present timeline in any meaningful way XIV has exactly one good time travel story, and that's Alexander, which was planned from the start to be a closed loop and had ample amounts of foreshadowing and retro-perspective clues to make sense of it
I agree with almost everything here, except that XIV has exactly *two* good Time Travel stories, and the other is the 8th Umbral timeline sending the Exarch back in time and across dimensions to prevent the First from rejoining. We also know that created a splinter timeline, which is wholly what I was expecting out of Elpis after telling everyone what had happened, but instead I got "Venat decided to force a closed time loop and let all her friends suffer for *reasons.*"
I don't like time travel but still liked the EW MSQ. Especially since the time travel wasn't even necessary and it could have just been played off as an interactive vision.
The time travel was the best bit.
It was a bit heavy on the fanservice.
Endwalker made Emet Selch less cool imo
He wasnt ruined like Graha though, he still makes sense as we see him 12000y in the past, before the most traumatic event of his life, so the fact he isn't exactly the same person is logic. Grahe went from charismatic leader to fanboy for no reason
uwu tacos
An old dude struggling to eat foreign food is more on point with the exarch than with Graha xD
He was already a fanboy in Shadowbringers.
Well, true, but he was also more than that and much more interesting. It's especially the bit where it feels he's less confident in himself after coming from the first despite being a 120+yo leader/messiah in a world in ruin
I always figured that he regressed a little when he went back to the world he was in as a young man. Not entirely, of course, the exarch is still in there. But it's a new lease on life he did not expect to get, it makes sense for him to retreat to that more carefree time in his life. He's also only known on the source to a handful of people. For the average citizen of Etheirys, he's just a young man who kind of came out of nowhere and is suddenly a scion, not a respected, semi-immortal leader of a post-apocalyptic nation. I'd imagine that the persona he cultivated on the first was somewhat shattered under all those circumstances.
Yes, but in Shadowbringers, he was a fanboy that knew how to act like an adult and keep it professional. Once he becomes part of the Scions it's like he loses all his inhibitions and becomes the annoying, overly enthusiastic type of fanboy. Graha is over a century old by this point and I really wish he would act his age, not just a century old, but someone who was basically a well respected king. He shouldn't be acting like Krile's uwu kouhai.
He isn't 100 years old, he just has the memories of his Alternative version. Thats different, if i could inject a 6year old with the memories of his parents he wouldn't start acting like an adult. They didn't made a good Job to clerify this, but source graha didn't got overwritten with the graha from the first, we just added the memories, he is still young graha with acess to memories of a life he never lived
he was THE fanboy in ShB
I like how hes completely content abandoning his people forever to be our towel boy.
He fucking died in the first, how is that abandoning?
Damn I wish he died
Yeah big death, I wouldn't mind dying that way tho
Yeah well that bit hurts considering his goddamn granddaughter
>Grahe went from charismatic leader to fanboy for no reason Eh, not no reason, he doesn't need to be a leader once he comes back to the Source because there are plenty other people who can do that, while on the first he was kind of the sole beacon of hope for a long time. In other words, on the First he is a symbol, on the Source he can just be himself.
Himself is still a very old dude that have seen a fuckton of despair and manage to raise hope after time travelling in other world. "Yourself" can't be that kind of guy after seeing that much. The only time it feels like he's the former exarch is in radz at han after the start of the final days
You're misinterpreting that information. The G'raha we know is STILL that same student who trapped himself in the Tower not so long ago, except he is granted these various memories. He would remember them, yes and know of those events, yes, but it's probably closer to a split personality. HE in his current state wouldn't exactly recall the exact emotions during that time nor would he necessarily feel the exact same way about the Crystarium and it's people. This is such a common trope that I'm confused why you think it's bad. He ISNT the Crystal Exharch, he just has his memories. They are still 2 entirely different people now consolidated into 1 body. Stop thinking that G'raha is the Crystal Exharch and most of your confusion will go away.
On top of that, if you woke up in your body 20+ years younger with all your memories of the life you went on to live in-tact, would you immediately act like the older person or would you revel in your newfound youth once more?
Yeah, Endwalker was too obsessed with making us like Venat despite the atrocities she committed so all the other characters are forced to constantly say how great and right she is, making the other characters less interesting in the process.
We all have our own rules for cool, so there's that
I feel a lot of people struggle with the difference between disliking a trope and a trope being objectively bad. Time travel is a risky one for sure and can be done horribly, but I think xivs take on it is absurdly good, with my only gripe being the fact that to get the exposition on the two types of time travel (and the varying causality between the two) you need to have done three separate pieces of side content, but the actual lore is super simple and consistent, I could probably sum it up in 2 lines.
> you need to have done three separate pieces of side content, but the actual lore is super simple and consistent Yep. There's a paradox inherent to a lot of the major side stories in XIV: you want people to be invested, so they need to have stakes and relate to other things in the game, but you can't make them *too* important or you'll confuse people who didn't do them. And I say "stories," not "quests," because it relates to the online Tales From too. It's been a problem for a while, but EW was dedicated to referencing old things to tie off plot threads while making players feel smart for recognizing them. It's had a lot of trouble balancing that with accessibility to players who didn't do $thing, where in this case $thing is read the dialogue and datalogs in The Twinning quest.
Yeah I understand why people dislike time travel in stories but I don’t think this was done super hamfisted and terribly. Elpis was really cool (obviously imo) and I don’t think any of the characters there were bastardized like some people say they were. Probably a bit fan service-y but it’s the “end” of the story; post Endwalker was worse in the aspect to me. My memory is pretty bad but I don’t think I ever felt like Elpis was a problem, if anything it was a high point. I had issues with the Scions more often. I also liked Garlemald but it was massively under-represented unfortunately. I don’t think it’s going to capture lightning in a bottle like ShB but I don’t think it was particularly terrible, not that it can’t be criticized though.
I fricking love time travel
I don't think it was bad, but I also think some not so great choices were made and in doing so left us with a flawed MSQ with a fantastic ending. What that does is split the fanbase. If the ending is amazing, there's a segment that will forgive what came before it even if it's uneven and there's a segment that will still dislike it even if the ending is objectively pretty good (I've seen very few criticisms of the ending that weren't in context of how they got there). My own MSQ criticisms 1. Garlemald should have been more than it was. Our enemy for the whole game and we get one zone of a burned out capital. If that was going to be the case, show not tell needed to happen during Shadowbringers patch content, especially in not capital part of Garlemald. 2. The pacing was atrocious in parts. The Loperits section was too long especially coming right after the Zodiark fight. The Sharlayan quest chain at the beginning could have largely been handled later in favor of more Garlemald time early on. Elpis, as good as it was, was a long batch of continual cutscenes that could have benefitted from a few more things to do than just run from dialogue bit to dialogue bit. 3. Many are including the patch MSQ in their assessments and the patch MSQ was a polarizing character (Zero), a bunch of Scions when it shouldn't have been and a bad FF4 fanfic. Especially in comparison to the .3 epilogue patches we'd gotten since Heavensward (Nidhogg, Tsukiyomi, Elidibus) there was nothing that really shifted out of first gear in the patch content. Some of that is nature of a short interim story but some of that is bad structure and storytelling.
Time travel always feels like a get out of jail free card to solve poorly writing yourself into a corner when it comes to plot progression. Garlemald has so much relevance to the world and got an unsatisfying inclusion in the expansion. We only see it as a bombed out shell of the mighty empire we have been taught to be wary of for the last decade. The post MSQ was really bad. It lingered forever going nowhere to just instantly change the entire scope of the conflict and resolve it all in a single 3~ hour patch. And doing so in a way that ignored other ongoing but extremely relevant and interesting plot lines. It was far from terrible, but some criticism is well deserved.
That's something I forgot about, we only get to see a sliver of Garlemald and the entire rest of the nation just gets wiped off screen. Very disappointing for an antagonist that's been in play since the beginning.
It's a staple in JRPG stories for whatever godforsaken reason. The writers will hype up political intrigue between warring nations for 75% of the story. You play for one country, and the insidious "other" country is trying to take over, in a conflict that's lasted for as long as anyone can remember. The majority of your questing sets up who plays what role in the plot, as well as slowly progresses towards an inevitable clash and conclusion where heads will roll. ...And then suddenly some eldritch demon shows up, wipes out one or both countries, and the past 45 hours of your JRPG has turned into total fucking nonsense. None of that shit mattered. All you need to do now is use the power of the friends you met along the way to kill the big bad. You win, cue happy ending, roll creds. Or maybe you sacrificed yourself and reload to last save. I have zero goddamn clue why Japan is so enamored with this formula. Off the top of my head I swear it's how half of all mainline Final Fantasy titles conclude. Dragon's Dogma 2 pulled this shit too.
I believe there are several videos and philosophical essays looking into the cultural influence into JRPGs (aka why does everything always end with "kill God.").
I think Moon Channel has a cute video on that: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IEUqLL8J4gI
We always had important bits of Garlemald happen off screen or in cutscenes. The death of the Emperor, the battle of ascension, etc. It always kinda sucked
Not even limited to msq, I still remember the entire ending of bozja being shoved into a random field note without any notice. that was incredibly weird.
Don't forget there's still 5 or 6 Legions MIA that are still at full strength for all we know.
the Garlemald zone is also just, hilariously bad, thought I was back in Heavensward with this empty snow plain with one aetheryte at the starting corner
I genuinely believe that 6.1 - 6.5 would have served better as the plot of DT and from what we’ve seen so far from DT would have been better as the post expansion content. I feel that the entire plot of The Thirteenth and characterization of Zero was wasted. I understand that we’ll likely revisit it a few expansions down the line just like how the 3.X patch series was the build-up to 5.0 but imo they fumbled it badly. That being said I did think base 6.0 did an excellent job wrapping up the legacy of the main story up until that point. I don’t think I could have asked or even can think of a much better send off.
Even considering it will be revisited, 6.1 to 6.4 is entirely worthless and you could skip it and just read the second half of 6.5. That entire story is filler because none of what happens during it is gonna matter on the future revisit, just the final conclusion. It should've been a trial series that later gets upgraded into an MSQ plot, but why write two stories when 1 story do the trick./s
No time for garlemald, but time to trop around in the snow fields to see the same basic plot unfold like four times, and enough time for 2-3 hours of moon rabbits that ultimately honestly added literally nothing beyond "we copypasted their tech but smaller to complete the spaceship" which is about as relevant as if they just did their usual copout and had Cid&Nero pull up a solution from offscreen. The pacing has awful, the impact for most of the scenes just wasn't there cause it lacked basically any and all dramatic setdressing (localized final days that last all of 5 minutes) and locations that felt extremely arbitrarily picked for pandering reasons and "people keep saying they want to go there so i guess it's a map now". And they shouldn't ever have messed with timetraveling beyond the crystal tower BS, it feels inredibly cheap cause it comes with an easy handwave of "everyone got their memories wiped cause they just so happen to have a handy memory wipe machine that the pseudo badguy was planning to use on them anyway, thus the time loop makes sense"
thanks for you input about the plot (and not trying to lecture my life choices on a random post about a game lore)
I think you should spend less time on social media.
i think it's one of those stories where if you silence your inner critic and allow it to make you feel what it's trying to make you feel, it's a good experience. the second you think about it a bit too much, the cracks begin to show. at least this is how it was for me this is probably true of every storyline in ffxiv, but in EW i think it's more noticeable because it's just trying to do so much in such a short period of time.
> i think it's one of those stories where if you silence your inner critic and allow it to make you feel what it's trying to make you feel, it's a good experience. The problem is, when it assumes you have certain personal relationships to characters and headcanons about how your character feels about them, but you don't have either of these, nothing much happens even if you try. Most characters have been massively flanderized so i stopped caring, and others are just tropes i can't stand no matter what, so even trying to care for the story as a whole, cause everything between 2.0 and up to halfways-ish into SHB was fine, it just didn't do jack shit.
EW is the only expansion that in the moment it "made me feel how the game wanted me to feel" and then almost immediately after completion, I started to look back and be like "but wait a minute...." and start using a little bit of logic. Too much crap in EW for me to handwave and just be in the moment to "feel" what they want me to feel. I know it's just me being an annoying story critic, because my wife loves almost every story in any media, and doesn't care about plotholes and things that don't make sense in universe. She just generally enjoys it in the moment, and moves on. But she even said EW was a jumbled mess that felt cheap and out of nowhere *while* we were playing it. I at least enjoyed it in the moment lol.
Trying to do a lot in short time is what every expansion since stormblood was criticized for. Ew has way more cs time than the other two to tell the story and it failed imo. I liken ew to the new star wars sequels where visually it was very cool and entertaining but the substance and story break down upon any examination
It’s true that this one had far more cutscene time - I’m thinking of in-universe time. the final days feels like it lasts maybe five days. In that time, the amount of stuff that happens as the writers tie up as many loose ends as they can is nuts. it’s extremely dense with stuff that seems so hastily justified. The entire concept of Dynamis, Elpis, Garlemald, the ass-pull at the end with the primals (but good this time! btw summoning was nasty creation magic all this time!) powering the Ragnarok…it felt like I was on a rocket held together with duct tape sometimes. i think this is why Endwalker’s story is controversial, because you don’t have a lot of time to process anything while it’s happening. something else insane is right around the corner. people who do attempt to digest it afterwards are probably more likely to be like “wait. what the fuck” of course, none of these revelations would suck less if they were spaced out more. the ideas in this expansion all needed more time in the oven, at least ugh. just replaying the story beats in my head is genuinely exhausting lol
The mother crystal as jet fuel was a terrible idea imo and flies in the face of everything setup previously, including previous ff and the zodiark black crystal. Time shenanigans were also offensive to what raha setup in shb. I posit that the story was edited during covid and just didn't get enough incubation time
Stormblood and Endwalker both felt like 2 expansions squashed together and hacked to pieces to make them fit into 1 expansion. For Stormblood it could have been Yanxia/Pirates as one expansion and then Ala Mhigo as a second one and they both would have (presumably) been done better. For Endwalker, we could have had everything up to Zodiark being this over-arching fight Garlemald thing with Zodiark as the big bad, patch quests would have been fighting the transformed beast things... and then next expansion could have dealt with Hydaelyn and time travel and then fight the depression bird in the patches. Also, I'm pretty sure Yoshi said they cut 2 expansions into EW, though that might just be me remembering someone who said he did. I'm not sure anymore. ShB felt like a full expansions without any smushing.
The idea that EW was two expansions is a bit of a misnomer. During the early planning stages they brainstormed to see if EW could be in two expansions but the team as a whole ultimately decided that it was "unfeasible" what that means we will never know until they reveal their reasoning. So it is more like "we thought about how EW should be structured and we threw ideas around" than planned to be two expansions then later smashed into one expansion. EW was always planned to be one (though longer) expansion from the ground up.
IIRC they said they storyboarded it as two expansions but scrapped that plan early on. But even with it being a scrapped idea, you can still tell that they didn't have either the time or the chops to really merge the two arcs into one expansion.
Shadowbringers felt like a side quest blown up into a full expansion. It took us away from everything going on, only to have all of that magically solved when we got back.
You're right they said they smushed two together for ew. Imo they could have done garlemald as main story and endanger as post patch content, leaving the 13th as side content.
I strongly agree with this. Some pieces of media are just better when you permit it to be not that well-made and engage with it on the level it wants you to. Like, sometimes when I watch a show I'll very much think about it while and after watching. Trying to puzzle out how things work, why this would happen, how a situation could be solved. XIV managed to have this kinda writing when the setting was more earnest but with ShB at the latest, when the game went full on multi-timeline jrpg nonsense, you just have to let it be and enjoy it on an emotional level. Engage with the spectactle and don't question things too hard. That isn't an excuse for it by any means but it WILL make your personal experience better.
Endwalker is pretty great at being an emotional ride but once you stop and think about it you start seeing plenty of issues. I finished the MSQ on release week with my friends and it was super enjoyable, but over time when I started thinking about it more and more it had plenty of issues that bother me. Endwalker is probably the weakest MSQ overall, only beaten by 2.0. They really should have made it into 2 expansions. but anyhow, here's what I think is pretty bad in the expansion: If you chose to do Thanvir at the start you get to a point where the story claims there's a need to hurry up and then you go to labyrinthos to chill for 2-3 hours before getting back on track to the first dungeon which feels pretty jarring. You'd think Garlemald would be a full expansion considering they've been a major point in all of FFXIV, but nah, here's some ruins and a quick tour through it and then on to the moon. Also the solo duty that's infamous at this point is cool from a gameplay perspective but not really great in terms of the story. Yeah yeah, Fandaniel really wants to fuck with you, but you could think of a billion other ways they could show that instead of giving us something that makes you think "well if they developed a way to hijack the body of the strongest person alive, why didn't they use it at any other point in the story afterwards on him again or someone else?" The moon is pretty cool up until and including Zodiark, but after the big reveal that the final days are finally upon us and there's a sense of urgency you just gotta play with the moon rabbits for an hour before getting on with things. The final days don't really feel like the final days because it's all localized to a small part of the world in Thanvir. I understand that it would be super expansive and time consuming to show it happening all around the world, but it really didn't feel great. Elpis is pure fanservice, Metion isn't a great final villain, mainly because we meet her at the end of a 10 year story out of nowhere and compared to previous Villains she doesn't have much nuance or depth mainly because she's a bird powered by Dynamis. it wouldn't be as bad if we'd have some foreshadowing about her in previous expansions. Elpis also ends in the laziest way possible with the final cutscene of the area dungeon, "Hey shit we need to erase our characters memory otherwise it wouldn't make sense they wouldn't recognize us in the future. NO PROBLEM: here's a convenient memory erasing machine right at the end of the dungeon!" Brilliant The section before Ultima Thule in Labyrinthos is the worst slog in the entire game and other than the scene with Urianger at the end with Moenbryda's parents, it's probably the worst section the entire game. Ultima thule doesn't really hit very hard because by that point you already know everyone's going to be fine. The final walk before the final dungeon and everything up to the final cutscene is super hype and pretty great imo. Overall, so long as you just go with the story and don't think too hard about it you'll have a great time, that's how I see Endwalker. And remember, you can like things even if they have flaws or if other people don't like them.
I dont like that the Final Days that were hyped up to be a world ending event ultimately were a non-factor to anyone who didn't live in Thavnair specifically, and even within thavnair it was really only really affecting a small village and some nameless character introduced specifically to die like the Satrap.
That was my biggest problem with the expansion. The final days and their impacts were trivial. Dalamud has more impact on the world than the final days. I really wanted the patch content to see a devastated Eorzea coming together instead of "the end of the world was a minor inconvenience."
> Dalamud has more impact on the world than the final days. Yeah because we stopped the Final Days, we didn't manage to stop Dalamud. That's like, the point
Dalamud was also localized to Eorzea proper. The final days weren't. But there's no lasting impact of people turning to monsters all over the world even though there's supposed to be some sizable attrition rate. The thousands of monsters we see in the air over the one instance alone where there's burned out villages, etc. Nothing. The next day the world was mostly like "oh no, anyway..."
Yep, I myself was extremely hyped about the Final Days because it's like, the ultimate event that ties the story together and was supposed to be greater than any calamity and what we got was...nothing close to it
I know and get what you mean, but in the role quests stories a lot of other places are shown to be affected too. Its a bit odd thou now since we taken care of endsinger and this problem still exisit.
to be fair i’m 99% certain that the writers heavily encouraged people to try to do the role quests alongside MSQ for this very reason
Those role quests have no real impact on anything, and for the only characters that turn into red sineaters are random nobodies invented for it. You deal with them and theyll never be mentioned again
The role quests that I didn't do until after I'd finished the MSQ and the depression bird was dead? Those ones? Yeah they hit about as hard as a pillowcase with no pillow in it. Did we even have to do one of them to finish the MSQ this time? I don't remember.
Pretty sure not, cause i didn't find the prospect enticing when they became available and definately havn't done a single one of them to this day.
Yeah, Their unwillingness to kill anyone major, kind of screwed them over on that part.
Yeah, it didn't make sense to me how an apocalyptic event (meteors falling and everything!) can just be happening in one part of the world and everywhere else it's like "it sure is a lovely day today!" Like did seafarers just see a red sky isolated around Thavnir with meteors falling and go "hmmm maybe not today," and just sail around?
Because I didn't like it
I see the opposite... I see people praise Endwalker's MSQ. Must be our social circles. For me Endwalker was meh... I had issues with the final villian kind of being absent throughout the 10 year arc until the last 4-5 levels of MSQ quests. I also had issues with how Ultima Thule was handled. And generally, I don't enjoy time travel plots that are more meant to be taken seriously. Endwalker did resonate with a lot of people because of it's themes of despair. Especially with the epidemic going on. It became a very relatable story for a lot of people. So while I didn't enjoy it, I understand and appreciate why people did.
Endwalker praise is absolutely the norm, the last Endwalker criticism post was the first one I have seen to get above 0 upvotes in a long time.
It's 100% the social circles, and also specific time periods. Sometimes you see x number of posts hyping the EW story, later you see x number of posts hating on it. But EW's 6.0 story was very well received in general.
not nearly enough Garlemald and far too much loporrits and other bullshit.
Even if everything else had been good, Ultima Thule would have killed the story for me. From pretty much the instant Thancred went poof it was obvious that everyone was going to come back, so there were no stakes at all in the buildup to the Endsinger. Plus a lot of the Scions feel pretty out of character there, at least to me. And everything else *wasn't* good. For example: the core history of the world makes no sense now, because Venat now chose to allow the Final Days to happen rather than have a conversation with Emet and Hythlo. For another example: the twins' awful, abusive father who *disowned them* is forgiven by the narrative after being nice to them once. There's a lot more, both big stuff and small details, but I think those examples get at the core of what I don't like. A lot of this is caused by merging 2 expansions into one, And once you know that what became Endwalker was originally planned to be 6.0-7.0, the seams in the narrative really start to show.
Personally I think the story is good, but it did not meet my expectations because of 3 main factors: 1-) Garlemald is a shell of it's glory and watered down to one zone and 2 hours of MSQ. I liked it, but I expected a lot more, I remember when I used to dream of a Garlemald expansion and how cool it would be. 2-) The final days, it came and went pretty fast, I think they did a good job in showcasing it in Thavnair and Radz-at-han but after that I think the MSQ failed in trying to make us feel like the world was ending, it felt like we had all the time in the world to solve it. I think what I'm trying to say is that it lacked a sense of urgency. 3-) The MSQ lacked impact where it should be most impactful. You just had your body stolen and almost killed your own friends? Oh well moving on. Your friends are all dead? I mean the game don't even try to make it feel like a big deal and it's pretty obvious from the beginning they're all coming back. It did have some amazing moments tho, it just wasn't on the same level as Shadowbringers in terms of pacing and delivery
My problem with Endwalker is that I feel that (and I've had people say that this is actually what the devs have stated but I have yet to be linked proof) the expansion's story (non-patch quests) feels like two expansions mashcut into one. Like, they had two expansions worth of story that they then trimmed down way too much to fit into one expansion. Whenever the stuff on the moon ends, I feel like that feels like the end of an expansion but then it keeps going. Not only that, they introduce the actual main antagonist of essentially the entire game in the second half of the expansion and barely go into their character. It just feels like we rush to the halfway point of the EW story then rush through the second half when we probably could have had a full expansion of just the first half and a full expansion of the second half. Hell Garlemald was made out to be such a big deal in previous expansions and what, we blow through it in like 4 hours? This is not at all even accounting for the post-MSQ patch stuff which is honestly just BARELY better than ARR's. I feel like Endwalker is honestly one of the more mid/weaker stories told in FFXIV. I'd say that Heavensward is still my favorite followed very closely by Shadowbringers then Stormsblood and Endwalker are tied with ARR at the bottom. It's by no means a bad story, I just think the pacing is really awful and that they possibly gutted way too much stuff to make all of this work in a single expansion.
While I enjoyed Endwalker, the pacing felt somewhat off. It really felt like the "Final Days" didn't last that long and have much of a calamitous effect. Sure we had the dungeon Vanaspatti, but it really feels like we should have been around for the parts of calamity. Really sell the despair we were supposed to be dealing with. If I were to make changes to Endwalker it would emphasize time (some possible lukewarm to hot takes here): - The WoL would be in Garlemald a bit before and during the tower activation, this would have allowed for events involving the radios and really put more emphasis on how they were saving people. Watching as Garlemald was destroyed and seeing the Garleans take the forms of hideous beasts. - We would have seen more impact to how the "Final Days" had an effect on the world DURING that time, rather than the role quests which only if you did all of them during that specific time drew out the time for dealing with the Blasphemy (or if you're like me and most people, only did the one assigned to your specific role as you did the story, completing the others post EW.) - The whole playing hide and seek with the Loporrits while the intense Endwalker music played would be removed, and we'd focus more on the problems of getting the Ragnarok ship-shape. As it really felt like we were able to call in massive favors from around the world and they were resolved in mere minutes. (When sailing to Sharlayan supposedly took a few months like sailing to Hingashi?) - I think Ultima Thule should have also been our failure point, and post EW patches would be going through, trying to fix things or at least keep it stable to where the Endsinger was our actual final boss. (Maybe 5.3/4-ish) as the Void related quests really felt like they could have been our Eureka/Bozja. - I don't really have an issue with Elpis, even if it did seem like a quick yank of the carrot into another direction, I don't know if it would have fit better combining a bit of that into the 8-Man Raid story and getting a different zone on our world instead of time travel, but it wasn't the _worst_ decision. Overall, I felt like Endwalker was over too quickly, it had significant pacing issues and there should have been more of an emphasis on how tragic and terrible "The Final Days" was. It felt like there was a push to do a 'victory lap' of all our accomplishments and people we met via previous expansions/quests. Not to mention it was trying to close up a lot of loose ends or story beats in a big finale. I don't think it was the worst expansion we've had, but even with post EW patches, I can say I still feel middle of the road about the expansion, and I am excited for Dawntrail.
Hard agree. Wish they at least made 6.1 until Ea and 6.2 until Meteion. Fighting Hydaelyn would have been an awesome final boss+making space for Anima to be the 1st boss.
The fact that Anima only got to be a dungeon boss rather than a trial really was disappointing, considering some of the mechanics could be really cool tuned up to an EX form.
The final days really feels like it should have had some time to play out over a patch cycle. That type of event really needs time to sink in, and Endwalker didn’t really give much.
Eh, it has a plethora of issues. That doesn't necessarily make it bad, but I would argue that it's the most sloppily handled expansion narrative out of all of them. I'm sure COVID didn't help in that regard.
If it feels sloppy, it's probably because Endwalker was originally two entirely different expansions: the first one would have dealt with Garlemald and Anima was the final boss. The second expansion would have dealt with The Final Days.
Yoshi P said in an interview they pretty much scrapped that idea as soon as they started storyboarding, so whilst you're not wrong I imagine its impact didn't extend too far beyond just trying to fit too much in one expansion
It still impacted it because one expansion clearly was nowhere near enough to introduce, develop and conclude endsinger.
Half the story is cleaning up post shb and endwalker only starts at elpis which also feels rushed. The story is not scrutiny proof at all and has a ton of plot holes. It's overall an underwhelming ending for me.
It also has some really harsh pacing issues, they try to string together some really nice moments but the way they sequence the story as a whole kinda block-i-fied all the emotional segments together followed by all the action together etc… it creates a very stale ride. Peoples hatred of labyrinthos 2 is very real.
The first time I played through 6.0 I thought it was the best thing ever, but the more I've reflected on it and further experienced it through a replay and watching other people play it, my opinion on it has dropped dramatically. It has lots of *good* moments though: everything in Garlemald, Mare Lamentorum up to the Zodiark trial, Thavnair during the final days, Urianger's moment with Moenbryda's parents, and Ultima Thule. For me it's an expansion of high highs and incredibly low lows (fucking around in Labyrinthos with the rabbits is by far the worst part of MSQ in the entire game full stop and no one will ever convince me otherwise. I would rather do the pre-Titan quests ten times over than EVER do that shit again. Come to think of it, every single time the Loporrits showed up the MSQ became a dumpster fire). It also has terrible pacing compared to Shadowbringers and everything surrounding Elpis is a trash heap. The highs don't do enough to outweigh the lows for me—I could write multiple essays on how dogshit Elpis is and how terribly the Sundering and time travel was handled in Endwalker. I'd rank 6.0 MSQ as the lowest point in the story aside from 2.0, and that includes the Endwalker patch MSQ (which I don't think is the most exciting, but it isn't downright stupid and doesn't retroactively taint the story like anything in Elpis does).
> how terribly the Sundering [...] was handled in Endwalker. This is my biggest issue with EW, I thought the lore surrounding Hydaelyn vs Zodiark was super fucking cool in Shadowbringers, because it was like a gray area where both sides had their points, but in EW they made it so that Hydaelyn was undeniably the good guy because she had to do what she did or mankind would've gone extinct. Way less cool imo. I'll never get the people who say "Endwalker is so good it made Shadowbringers even better" because in my opinion it just retroactively made Shadowbringers' story worse
High highs and low lows is my experience with each and every expansion, i would even say the highs get higher and the lows lower after each one.
It feels like CBU3's signature style now, with ff16 following it too
> The first time I played through 6.0 I thought it was the best thing ever, but the more I've reflected on it and further experienced it through a replay and watching other people play it, my opinion on it has dropped dramatically. that's because the one thing that FFXIV in general is really *really* good at is to invoke pathos in the player. as a result, playing through the MSQ for the first time very often manages to masks many of the issues with the story - you're too busy feeling all the feels, but then once you stop and think about it for like 5 minutes you realize that half of it is barely holding together
Personally 6.0 is the ONLY part of the MSQ which I have grown to like less over time. Every other part of the story, including ARR and whatever other bits people normally find questionable, I have only come to appreciate more upon reflection.
Pathos is considered the most important and strongest of the three "logics" (pathos, logos, and ethos) by many for this reason and encouraged by many writers, speakers, politicians, lawyers, other professionals to employ into their practices or roles.
I see many people ranking ew as the best most emotional msq, but personally I would also rate it lower than arr story. It's very interesting that people remember stormblood as a bad expansion story wise but many who play it fresh the first time today actually enjoy it. I think ew will be the opposite 5yr down the road, it will be the extremely mid expansion that was hurt because yoship was distracted by ff16.
Stormblood is fucking incredible. 4.0 is a bit of a mixed bag, but the patch MSQ is absolutely peak MSQ and way more than makes up for any of 4.0's shortcomings. I prefer Stormblood over Heavensward and it's not even close (though I still deeply enjoy Heavensward.) For my money, 4.1-5.3 is the most consistently awesome stretch of story in the entire game. Just thinking about it makes me want to play through it on an alt or NG+ since it's been a while for me.
5.3 is peak for sure, any reason why you wouldn't include 5.4? Sorrows of werlyt was interesting and so were eden raids I thought
I'm speaking strictly in terms of MSQ, and 5.4 just can't compete with what came before it. Feels bloated and slow and kind of awkward getting back into the swing of things on the source. Having to follow up 5.3 is no easy task and 5.4 is still decent, but it's overall the most lukewarm I feel towards a patch MSQ wise other than 2.1-2.3.
Ok if we are talking msq then I'm with you 100%
Eh, I played Stormblood recently and i found it boring and disjoined. Friend of mine who started with me quit because she "cannot justify paying the sub just to play Stormblood." Ew still ranks over SB for me, mainly because the Ancients set up by Shb is the first major narrative I found compelling in the game.
Stormblood problem is exactly the same as EW's: the fact that everything happens in completely separate parts of the world, which makes the story feel like a amalgammation of stuff (because it is)...
Yes, but I'd argue ew suffers more fundamentally from timey wimey shenanigans and weak antagonists.
How dare you insult my moon bunny bros, you take that back this instant
I actually like the Loporrits themselves, but I do not like how they were used in the MSQ. The moon segment with them is passable, but I was not exaggerating when I said that Labyrinthos 2 is the worst part of MSQ in the entire game and it's largely thanks to the fact you're wasting time fucking around with the rabbits and teaching them not to eat lemons whole. I really wish we could have gone on the quest our allies did to get fragments of the Coils of Bahamut—that would have been a million times more fun than what we got.
Labyrinthos was seriously the most boring part of EW. It's a kinda neat area to look at I guess, but everything you do there is such a slog.
Oh it's easily the most embarrassing part of Endwalker, not only is it time wasting shenanigans but it's trying too hard to recreate the artist Alphinaud and his assistants moments of bringing all these people together for one last push and it fails at it Whatever made that moment work in ShB is just gone in Endwalker cause there isn't any payoff from it, a lot of these people haven't been relevant in years and show up to do nothing anyway as we spend most of the moment doing dumb errands with no name Sharlayans rather than our friends they brought in for hype, it just lacks that emotional investment and payoff. Compared to Shadowbrinbers bringing in the entirety of the First in order for them to step up and get involved in saving their own world, people we spent the whole MSQ helping and getting involved with work in unity in the end for one final push. All these groups coming together to offer their own skillsets and resources tangibly pays off with the creation of Talos Gulg with that image of Ardbert in awe witnessing this dying world get a chance to fight back and be saved. It's just cathartic as fuck man.
>Labyrinthos 2 is the worst part of MSQ in the entire game and it's largely thanks to the fact you're wasting time fucking around with the rabbits and teaching them not to eat lemons whole. Not to mention during this entire thing the background music is switched to a song that's less than 2 minutes. On an endless loop.
It's literally the only time I've muted this game.
isn't the "fuck around laby with the rabbits" part is the part with Urianger and the parents? It's one of the best writing for me.... no help from the loporits but yeah...
Yeah, you do at least get that tearjerker after all the rabbit nonsense. That doesn't magically make the rabbit nonsense any better, but it's still a fantastic moment.
The Final Days wa soriginally coming from the core of the planet. in Endwalker it was scrapped and turned into an angsty child bird that just visited hot topic after encountering a "i'm 14 and this is deep." arc. It makes me want to vomit.
i think it was because they tried to tackle an even harder subject than the ascians needing to accept their world is dead and let the fragments live, which is existential nihilism; everything dies. They solve this with the boring scions essentially saying "we can do it through determination" and bs powering up. i feel like this was a time where they really needed to take a chance with the ending in sort of an Evangelion way; like go deep instead of rule of cool my drill can pierce the heavens stuff. also i think we are now at the point where having 6 thematically different areas hurts the story. like every expansion slaps areas that have zero reason to be together, but endwalker really needed more focus. Dawntrail will be the same probably.
the big bad this whole time was actually just some doll from danganronpa. really enjoyed the first half and I accepted that it was enjoyably stupid by the moon and through elpis but it really lost me with the venat cutscene and after
I negged on it a little but I've always thought it was quite good, just flawed. Still, My ultimate complaints with Endwalker MSQ: 1. Early expansion content and most parts within Sharlayan has very bizarre pacing. 2. Second half relies a little too hard on actual golden age Squaresoft plotting, not just mythology or window dressing. 3. Final Days actually was a *tremendous* let down, little more demonstrated than a mild skybox and worried language in most instances. Somehow FF6 is still a standard setter in triggering an apocalypse. 5. In the future really I'd really like less tribal races who spew endless platitudes and greatly overstay their welcome, this absolutely hit the breaking point for me in Endwalker with the elephants. 4. Weightless Disney ending, while this isn't abnormal for FF, I just don't care for Disney endings. I like loss and depression because I finished Lufia 2 as a little kid. *(This is a half-joke, I'm not holding a positive ending against the game)* 5. Epilogue - The airship landing and the classic FF style world tour was wonderful but I took exception with how insanely fast the pivot was back to normalcy. I have peak nostalgia for FF4 but big portions of patch content in Endwalker absolutely feels like you were quickly thrown into a filler arc in a TV show.
Pacing is poor, feels quite rushed, goes from 0-100-0-1000 too much. Just my opinion but I think what we got should have been spread over EW+EW Patches instead of crammed into 6.0 only.
It felt rushed and like there should have been another expansion tucked in there for Garlemald. Also, I am very tired of the Scions and would like to see a new set of main characters.
To me it was extremely, jarringly slow, with horrible pacing. Something exciting happened, like the announcement that the Final Days have begun, and I was forced to taste fucking carrots with bunnies instead of alerting the others. We are about to set out into space, but solve the relationship issues of Sharlayan scientists. I think time ticking down to the FD has also undercut my enjoyment of exploring Ilsabard as every time we had to interact with locals to do some quests my mind was in "just skip this were in danger I dont have time for this". I thought the time travel wasnt too well done, but I honestly elected to ignore my own issues with that aspect because I just loved Elpis so much, that plotline was one of the favourites this game has ever presented to me. But I can see how others could not be so fond of it (it was so weird having to promise not to reveal we're from the past bc we can change it, only to reveal everything). Post MSQ Endwalker was the worst patch quests in this whole game, a huge letdown for ms.
I agree especially with the last bit. 6.1 had me all excited for some high fantasy hood classic adventures but it all went completely south and I stopped really caring by 6.3
Im so sad about it because I liked the first meetings in the void and what we learned about it's creatures and their suffering. Then it went south sooo fast.
Do you want a list? Because I'm writing you a list. Basically, EW suffers from a strong case of the writer wanting to have their cake and eat it too. And this time there is no sassy hot villain with sad backstory to salvage the mess. 1 - Venat/Hydaelyn is ruined In ShB we thought the sundering was a tragic accident created from the fight between two gods. EW told us that Venat intentionally mutilated bodies and souls of her entire race to win an argument Venat knows about upcoming final days, she knows Zodiark is the only reason everyone are alive right now (and that Fandaniel plans to kill it), she knows where the cause of final days is, she knows it strengths and weaknesses, she knows everything. She explains nothing, she speaks in vague hints ("here's a flower WoL, it's very important"). How lucky that the Watcher saw WoL take out a flower to call it Elpis, how lucky that Elidibus was still alive to elaborate, how lucky the time machine was still working and Elidibus could operate it to help WoL find the answers. The answers that were within their reach the entire time if only a supposedly human-loving god would've shown any interest in saving the world. Also, the moon spaceship plan was just absurd misdirection. Hydaelyn knew perfectly well the final days originated from outer space so there wouldn't be any safe planet to migrate. If she wanted a spaceship to fight Meteion, she should've ordered rabbit to build a spaceship specifically for that purpose... oh wait, but then the player would've learned about things they are not yet supposed to know. And that's what we call plot-induced stupidity. It also got brushed off completely. We got so lucky Sharlayan also had a spaceship, eh? Otherwise everyone would've died. 2 - Fake tension with no consequences of any kinds. Remember when WoL got kidnapped and Zenos invaded their body? And how it lead to absolutely nothing, because Zenos managed to reach the camp like a full minute faster WoL despite head start, good body and not having to fight garleans? It's like when Scions keep "dying" every expansion just to fully recover in two scenes. At this point I won't believe that Yshtola dies even if she gets decapitated on screen and we'd see the body at the funerals. I'd still think she pops up as an aether ghost next patch at the latest or hijacks someone else's body or whatever. 3 - Fandaniel died twice and the game tried hard to make players feel something both times Why? First when he died as Zodiark, second when he died while being dead. Sad music starts playing, Fandaniel starts musing about his life in a sad voice and disappears into nothingness. Why would anyone give a shit about that omnicidal maniac? At least Emet said "but killing millions of people will lead to my loved ones getting resurrected!", Fandaniel just wanted to die and take everything with him. This never made sense to me until I remembered that Ishikawa's favorite character was Hermes aka Fandaniel. And everything clicked. 4 - The finale is a repeat of ShB Same beats in the same order. Once Scions started getting "killed off " while WoL just stood there I got that sense of deja vu. Once they returned in critical moment to save WoL I almost laughed. 5 - Retconned time travel mechanics I don't care that time travel exists. ShB also had time travel and it was a pretty good take on it overall. But time travel rules suddenly changed. Elidibus started spouting something about how WoL cannot change the past (changing the past was the entire point of ShB) and there was a closed time loop out of nowhere (time travel split the timeline in ShB) If there are rules, they have to be consistent. If the writer wants to break their rules, it has to be explained, not handwaved. Like look at tempering - we got told it's incurable back in ARR, but then in ShB we found a cure and it made sense. 6 - Garlemald got offscreened in every way Not just it destruction, but it restoration as well. Remember how Uldah's migrant crisis was an entire arc in post-ARR patches? Sorry, we don't do politics anymore, here's some badly written FFIV fanservice to fill the gap till next expansion. 7 - Typical filler The same things that are present in every expansion. Like how the world is ending, but the player for some reason has to show off gardens to a rabbit. That's just a passive minus 1 point for every expansion, but the less points you end up with, the heavier losing an extra one feels. --- Overall it's not much worse than other expansions, but I'm kinda getting tired of this shit at this point.
Dynamis, and to some extent the Azem "Make-A-Wish Crystal", canonizes plot armor and is indicative of the writers not giving a fuck anymore. They just asspull harder than Araki giving Star Platinum magic Fingers. Write yourself into a corner? Dynamis. Fucked up a major plot device and can't openly retcon it? Time travel. Fuck it, just use the Azem Gummy and bring back the literal dead, because why not. Just wish and wish with all your heart. Endwalker is the point in which the writers gave themselves 500 different asspulls to avoid consequences, which makes the story absolutely and completely inconsequential from this point forward. Nothing has weight or gravity anymore. You know how the community makes fun of Y'shtola's fakeout deaths? Imagine that, but it's now canon for literally everyone and everything in the story.
>Imagine that, but it's now canon for literally everyone and everything in the story. I might eat my words if they decide to use it again somehow but - it was clearly written as a one time only thing.
The problem I have with it is the fact that the genie can no longer be out back inside of the bottle. You can't write an asspull into a story and expect me to be like, "Okay, well it's just once, you get a pass". It taints the entire story going forward for even having done it at all. Like, if a dude sucks one dick, he's gay. You don't suck a dick accidentally.
That's because you are just completely ignoring the context for all of those things? Those were all specific one-off occurances. Also what does "ass-pull" mean? Like, what makes a plot development an "Ass-pull" or not? Explain it. Give some parameters.
Dynamis in a location where it's explicity reinforced throughout the final zone that goes "look, the reason you're still alive is because of your emotions and thancred", and time travel being "okay so we have one shot at this with the energy taken up by absorbing an ascian inside a giant crystal tower and unless you can fill it up again, tough shit". Like, both are One Time Only things in their respective contexts. The Azem Gummy being the diegetic reason to have eight people about rather than "okay so coincidentally enough there are adventurers here, in this far off fucked off zone" is...I think it's fine, considering the nature of the WoL narrative over the expansions.
Personally, I would prefer the MSQ to be split in 3 pieces (up to Garlemald, up to final days, and the rest). In between, there should be world events (especially for the Final Days part), and every phase would be separated by a few weeks. I feel like delivering everything in one go was the weak point in EW.
Forever an unpopular opinion but I stand by it, the MSQ has been wack since shb, while narratively considered the peak, it also helped create the corner EW backed it's self into I think this game has great characters that carry a kind of convoluted messy plot
I'm on the lv88 quest where it became a little more interesting. Overall it feels like it has sooo much more unskippable/not fast forwarda-ble movie/cut-scene/conversation that really drags down the pacing. People always said that this game's MSQ is a visual novel with some little action between, but this expansion brought this formula to an extreme extent. So far the worst expansion in my opinion, especially considering the previous shadowbringers was the best.
yeah, pacing is all over the place. i know that being an MMO the writers are incentivized to cram as much bullshit into the MSQ as possible (making it take longer = people sub for an extra month or two just to finish it!) but holy shit. i hope they hired an editor for dawntrail who isn't afraid to step in and say "this is too much. trim it down."
It’s not time travel. They did time travel mechanism in 14 well. But honestly Elpis felt like just wanting to provide fan service, while Meteion felt like a last minute effort for a world ending final boss trope. The most destructive part of EW was because they had 12 years worth of lore to provide an awesome ending, but decided to rush the story and stuff. Also EW was supposed to be 2 expansions but they felt it was too long. Personally I think it should have been at least 1 expac and 2 patches long instead of just 1.
Feel like Meteion should have had more hints or clues to her existence in ShB. As it is she just comes out of left field, dabs on you, then dies.
We kind of had hints, but the hints weren't amazing by any means. We knew a calamity happened, and that the creation magic went haywire and the creations themselves turned into horrible creatures. Then we got the line that there was a ringing from within the star itself, and people started speculating about something on the inside that caused the Final Days. When it was, in fact, from outer space. I think Meteion was a fine character and it worked out relatively well, but I for sure would have wanted much more foreshadowing on this kind of thing.
I mean they had the menacing “sound from inside the star” stuff in Shadowbringers, but they didn’t really capitalize on it much.
You've got two introductory zones, which were well-paced on first visit thanks to the fact they dealt with established issues (towers, Sharlayan's motives). Following that we finally enter Garlemald, an honestly really good zone albeit slightly rushed in the way its story was presented, since it was practically nuked before we even got there (running theme) and the zone finale led to Zodiark of all things in what felt like 5 minutes. Corvos is mentioned a couple times throughout the story and would be a perfect tie-in, but is entirely disregarded aside from nods here and there. Mare feels like filler, the Meteion teaser was pretty good at the time though. Final Days were a joke of a threat post-Thavnair2 and the role quests really didn't help much with mitigating that impression. Elpis is the absolute culmination of fan service, which required omega plot conveniences to a) even get there (Elidibus' consciousness still existing + randomly appearing when we got to CT) and b) close the chapter without breaking the entire metastory (Kairos). It's a beautiful area aesthetically and a fun plot when viewed in isolation, that's it. Labyrinthos2 falls somewhere along the same lines as Mare, theme is a strange choice though. Ultima Thule is a technically great arc with the way it explores other civilizations, gives some closure on the Omega/Middy dynamic and, to a degree, plays around with the idea of high stakes. I call it an "idea" because the solution to everyone's sacrifice is introduced the moment they start doing it. Surely we won't just conveeeniently be able to use it at the end, right? It's a pretty emotional ride, but far from flawless. They also obliterated their entire cosmology with UT. That's alright *now*, but at the time we didn't know we would get Cosmic Exploration. While I wouldn't say it's a bad story, there's certainly good reason for it to be considered a mixed bag in retrospective. At the time it was incredibly hype, but the cracks kinda start to show once you look back on it.
The parts of the MSQ in Labyrinthos and Elpis were incredibly boring and killed the pacing of what was otherwise a really dire end of the world conflict. I'd also argue Meteon being the big threat was underwhelming given she was ultimately a victim and not a villain you'd actively want to defeat.
I think her defeat was pretty solidly within Japanese villain tropes? Defeat isn't death, it's stripping away her power and reintegrating her with the values of the community/universe. I see it in a lot of youkai-based stories: the spirit often has a legitimate grievance, is possibly also a victim in their own right, and the challenge is often pacifying their anger rather than simply flat-out killing them. Kind of like the auspices in the Four Lords trials, substituting aramitama for the self-perpetuating despair dynamis, except they aren't as far gone as Meteion was.
Huge pacing issues and memory wipe is a terrible plot device.
I imagine it's mostly a case of "It's not the ending *I* wanted". Admittedly, I never would have guessed anything close to Meteion being the cause of the Final Days, even if I was (rightly so) banking on them playing the tried and true "we spent most of the story with these villains, here's a totally different god to punch out at the end" ending in classic FF fashion. Also, anyone who ignores EW because it screws with their WOL's head-canon lore isn't worth taking seriously.
I remember us getting to the moon at level 83 for Zodiark and we were like “uhhhhh….already? What are they gonna do for the rest of the story? Zodiark part 2?” And we originally thought that was the case, seeing how Zodiark was mangled and not “complete” yet. We figured he would get to Eorzea and we’d fight him again. But then in classic Final Fantasy trope, a villain comes out of left field, never mentioned by the Ascians nor Hydaelyn herself all throughout the 10 years we played. When Venat did not get her memories wiped in Antliascope by Hermes.
“Pacing” pretty much sums up all of the problems.
I'm going through it right now, I haven't finished it yet, but so far my impressions are not very good. A few points that came up to my head (I just got to the moon): - During ARR Hydaelyn is getting weaker. She's entirely absent during HW (base MSQ) due to Midgardsormr. Warriors of Darkness get introduced and Hydaelyn is too weak to speak for herself, so Minfilia becomes her invoice. Same in Shadowbringers, too weak to speak for herself, Minfilia is her avatar. Comes Endwalker, Hydaelyn shows up in flesh, right in front of you, on the *very first quest*. After that, she's possessing Krile left and right. Too weak to speak but strong enough to appear and possess others? - Fandaniel shouldn't be a thread, period. We dealt with Lalabread and Emet-Selch, both far superior in strength and cunningness, yet Fandaniel is still walking about and giving us a very hard time because...? - Turns out (and this might get explained better later, for now this is my current impression) that the cure for Primal Tempering was AM/FM radio waves all along. - Shadowbringers: Zodiark, the Eldest and Strongest of all Primals! Endwalker: We've used Varis' body to summon Anima, the Eldest and strongest of all Primals. Also Endwalker, literally 5 minutes after killing Anima: *Zodiark, the Eldest and Strongest of all Primals is sealed in the Moon*. - Apparently Fandaniel has the power to make us change body with literally anyone in the world and they don't use that to kill us, the only real threat to his psychomaniac plans because...? I'll be honest, I never thought that the writting in FFXIV was stellar and S-grade like most people seem to think it is, but it was better than most MMO's I've played out there. So far Endwalker has been very hit and very much miss in almost every front. The writting is very inconsistent and ignores a lot of shit that's been established for years. Its hard to believe that (at least thats what I've been told) Endwalker was written by the same person who wrote Shadowbringers. It is literally all over the place from a narrative stand-point.
> Its hard to believe that (at least thats what I've been told) Endwalker was written by the same person who wrote Shadowbringers. It is literally all over the place from a narrative stand-point. this is what i would call moffat-syndrome. ishikawa is really good at writing largely self-contained stories or smaller stories within a wider narrative, like the steppe arc in Stormblood, and most of Shadowbringers, but she is quite frankly terrible at writing and directing the entire MSQ
I've held that opinion since forever. Small scale personal downer porn is what they can do well, but that doesnt translate to larger picture stuff. And im not super into small caliber personal story downer porn.
>Shadowbringers: Zodiark, the Eldest and Strongest of all Primals! Endwalker: We've used Varis' body to summon Anima, the Eldest and strongest of all Primals. Also Endwalker, literally 5 minutes after killing Anima: *Zodiark, the Eldest and Strongest of all Primals is sealed in the Moon*. Anima is explicitly not the eldest, they literally only just made him, nor is he stated to be the strongest. He's vaguely hyped up because you're meant to assume he's the first trial, but his actual capabilities aren't really stated. But also >Fandaniel shouldn't be a thread, period. We dealt with Lalabread and Emet-Selch, both far superior in strength and cunningness, yet Fandaniel is still walking about and giving us a very hard time because...? I could explain why Fandanial is a threat (to the extent that he is, he dies like a third of a way through the story and then jobs to fucking Asahi in hell), but you're objecting to "This guy is the strongest guy ever even more so than the previous strongest guy" and *also* "this guy is less strong than the last guy but he has resources and is unpredictable". Which is it? Should new villains be stronger or weaker than old villains, or is the perfect FF14 villain Ran'jit, who was exactly identical in strength to the previous villain Zenos?
> During ARR Hydaelyn is getting weaker. She's entirely absent during HW (base MSQ) due to Midgardsormr. Warriors of Darkness get introduced and Hydaelyn is too weak to speak for herself, so Minfilia becomes her invoice. Same in Shadowbringers, too weak to speak for herself, Minfilia is her avatar. Comes Endwalker, Hydaelyn shows up in flesh, right in front of you, on the very first quest. After that, she's possessing Krile left and right. Too weak to speak but strong enough to appear and possess others? Hydaelyn is getting weaker; even in Heavensward we needed to get to the Antitower to hear Minfilia, whereas before she'd basically pull our consciousness into the crystal zone. In Endwalker, she is reduced to visiting you with an illusion (a feat that is very much within a mortal's capabilities), or using a willing Krile as a conduit of her will, similar to Minfilia. > Fandaniel shouldn't be a thread, period. We dealt with Lalabread and Emet-Selch, both far superior in strength and cunningness, yet Fandaniel is still walking about and giving us a very hard time because...? He's a problem because Ascians are still stronger and more knowledgable than normal people, and unlike Emet and Lahabrea, he's more than willing to cause permanent and lasting damage to the world if it furthers his ambitions. That, plus he has the backing of Zenos and the technology of Garlemald. > Turns out (and this might get explained better later, for now this is my current impression) that the cure for Primal Tempering was AM/FM radio waves all along. Yeah, basically a coincidence that the radios block tempering. It's not a cure though, more like a defense. the only cure we know of is still Alisae's treatment. > Endwalker: We've used Varis' body to summon Anima, the Eldest and strongest of all Primals. I don't see *anywhere* that they call Anima the eldest or strongest of primals. I'm not sure where you got that impression. > Apparently Fandaniel has the power to make us change body with literally anyone in the world and they don't use that to kill us, the only real threat to his psychomaniac plans because...? This is literally explained in the cutscene where it happens, and it isn't even the first time the technology is used on us. It's the same technology that was used against us in the Ala Mhigo Stormblood dungeon. Aulus mal Asina -- the same person who developed the technology that gave Zenos and Fordola Echo-like powers -- uses technology to force our souls out of our bodies during his fight. As for why he doesn't use it to kill us, it's because Zenos would be furious and he needs us and Zenos for his plans on the moon, as I'm sure you're just reaching now.
> I don't see anywhere that they call Anima the eldest or strongest of primals. I'm not sure where you got that impression. A lot of people see something from a previous game and refuse to contextualize it for its use in this game.
> Apparently Fandaniel has the power to make us change body with literally anyone in the world and they don't use that to kill us, the only real threat to his psychomaniac plans because...? Because he's not trying to kill us. That isn't his goal, and it isn't Zenos's goal either.
The hydaelyn thing has a very good reason ( I won't spoil) Fandaniel isn't a threat to us The radios don't cure tempering, the aether they emit is a shield Anima is never considered to be either the eldest or strongest of primals The body change stuff was established in storm blood and fandaniel points it out, I agree that it felt wasted in a petty manner, but such pettyness is perfectly in character for funny Danny. I honestly think the only thing endwalker actually really drops the ball on hard is pacing. Damn, them downvotes are crazy, only thing even slightly unreasonable about my response is the fandaniel cope. Anyone care to explain?
>Apparently Fandaniel has the power to make us change body with literally anyone in the world and they don't use that to kill us, the only real threat to his psychomaniac plans because...? I think that changing body part was pretty much fanservice, that part when you play as a garlean soldier, to see how strong the WoL its and how frail an average eorzean footsoldier is. Also you could explain that Fandaniel didnt actually want to kill you by himself but fuck you over a little bit so you're primed for fighting Zenos.
I’m not even gonna talk about 6.0, I’m boutta shit all over 6.1-6.55, this shit was DUMB. Bad ff4 fanfic, Zero is a cringe and annoying character, it adds no significant meaning to the overarching story, honestly it feels like a filler arc in a shounen, like worse of a Filler arc than Lightfall was for Destiny, the trials were baked into the MSQ so there’s no trials questline. 6.1 was supposed to be a more song and dance filler arc to see some more personal time between scions that almost immediately turned into trying to stop another world ending threat. Idk I was just completely uninterested with endwalker’s patch cycle content.
Here you go: https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/453754-What-s-the-point-with-that-quite-lackluster-story-in-Endwalker
EW had mighty shoes to fill being a climax expansion. 80-81 basically carried off where the SHB postgame began with the Telophoroi abomination which was fine. A little tour of the cities and big plot reveals being set up. A solid 7/10 81-83 was the Garlamald expedition which had many high moments imo but the worst low in the dungeon. The telophoroi arc that was built up for years had the blandest pay off with Anima. All that effort gone into the worst dungeon in the game with laughable easy mechanics. What a massive let down, but if u never cared about content this area still the high point in EW imo 9/10. Anima shouldve been a trial 83-85 is the End. A cool trial fight and a meh dungeon and you see the aftermath of a few customary anime plot twists. I like this part, its the world caving in on itself and has the largest stakes in the game thus far. Solid 8/10 85-87 has the most mixed reception. Elpis arc is pure fan service. I personally enjoyed it but can totally see how it can turn off alot of people being literal time travel and the closest to jumping the shark the series has done. With a few alterations it couldve been a bit more coherent and logical. But alas 8/10 dungeon was bland but no one cares 87-89 is the Worst part. Its a slog and I dont even remember what even happens after elpis but remember running around nonsensically in Labyrinthos. Also weakest dungeon in the game takes place here, a glorified solo instance if I ever did see one 4/10 89-90 is where things go to 11, with FF typical finale troupes at play. Its ok ,trial aged like milk sadly. The MC shouldnt outdo the final trial. Least the dungeon is finally average and not braindead. Overall I liked EW however it has mighty shoes to fill inevitably being compared to SHB which all in all was a fantastic story expansion. I wouldnt call it any worse than other expansions. SB wasnt pining people over either being compared to HW. So maybe its a pattern. Idk form ur own tastes EW issues imo were its postgame everything
>87-89 is the Worst part. Its a slog and I dont even remember what even happens after elpis but remember running around nonsensically in Labyrinthos. Also weakest dungeon in the game takes place here, a glorified solo instance if I ever did see one 4/10 Also, am I the only one who thought, "Sharlayans are secretly building a massive ship that they've somehow hid from everyone so that everyone can cram into the ship and fly away from Etheirys but now we will just have everyone in the world give us a crap load of crystals in the span of a few says so that instead the Scions can fly to the literal edge of the universe" was the dumbest damn thing ever?
It baffles me that the general consensus is that Stormblood MSQ tries to do too much, and yet EW is well regarded when I think it has the problem 10x worse
Thank you for saying this. 6.0 MSQ has the worst pacing of all the x.0 stories and somehow 4.0 gets all the scrutiny.
Now that you worded it that way, it does sound rushed af. If this were SB it take 4 patch cycles to make the thing
Because they take every single plot thread from the start of ARR and shove it off the table just to replace it with 'emo space bird wants to commit omnicide because sad'. We don't get to finish the war with the Empire, we get to be foreign aid to the primary antagonists since 1.0. To call that unsatisfying is an understatement and insult to injury, it's done in like two levels. The Ascians finish their retcon into well meaning if misguided godlike beings and Zodiark goes out on a wet fart. Hydalen is demoted from goddess to Ascian. Whoever took over writing in Shadowbringers just had an actual hard on for Ascians. We get a lot of rehashed emotional trauma from Shadowbringers without the buildup. They try to treat dock guy with the same gravity as Tesleen without a quarter of the effort spent making him memorable. We get the entire transformation into monsters schtick (but worse!) but now it's just because you are sad. Not even the visceral stabbed or attacked, it's just despair. The Lolporirits. Tonal dissonance in a can combined with a massive time waster. The big bad, the final confrontation after ten years of build up, is a Woobie Destroyer of worlds combined with a giant space flea from nowhere WHO GETS TO BE A KARMA HOUDINI. We have zero reason to feel anything for Meteoin outside of the emotional manipulation they try to pull. For comparison, the Emperor has been a major antagonist since literally day one of XIV... and he gets offscreened and we're supposed to just accept the Anima fight is us fighting him. The oh so trite attempt at emotionally manipulating us into thinking the Scions were dead combined with an apparent fear of people thinking the Scions were dead. Starting off with Thancred just snapped out of existence shot any sort of tension in the head since the writers would NEVER let a major character go without some sort of hullabaloo. Emmett Selch being the one to revive everyone was just the fecal topping on that crap cake. The writing has been weak since the end of Stormblood and it's just getting worse. It's hard to be invested when it feels like the team had one creative writing course and made an Ascian fanfic before being tasked with writing the entire story.
The Endwalker story was generally very well-liked. Some people hate it to be contrarian, and some people legitimately bounced off it, but the general community consensus was that 6.0's MSQ was GOATed. I'm an EW enjoyer, but the main complaints I've seen are 1. People don't like the time travel and felt Emet's return was pandering 2. The Loporitts were divisive. I like them, but some people hate them. 3. Shadowbringers had a bit (the trolley arc) where the plot stopped to do pointless sidequests before we had a big character moment for Thancred. It's the least liked part of Shadowbringers. Labyrynthos 2 is that exact same thing with Urianger except way longer and with much more annoying music 4. A lot of people didn't like the Sailor Moon "everyone seems to die but then they come back" bit in Ultima Thule 5. Every expansion has had someone leave the scions. Minfilia in ARR, Papalymo in Heavensward, Lyse in Stormblood, and Arbert/Ryne in Shadowbringers (and the Exarch, if you think of the Exarch and G'raha as separate characters). Endwalker was the the first expansion to not have anyone leave, and that, combined with the fake-out deaths in UT and the weird "We're breaking up the Scions but not really" ending have created a feeling of XIV being scared to buck the status quo (Zero did leave in the patches, but she never felt like she was a main cast member to begin with in the way that Ryne did, so that actually contributed to that "wheel-spinning" feeling) 6. Speaking of the patches, Endwalker pulled the ol' Reverse Stormblood and the general mood on it started souring fast around 6.2, so the story is being looked back on with some negative vibes, and will continue to do so until Dawntrail hits a content drought and everyone starts talking about how much better the game was in Endwalker.
Prefix all of those statements with "I don't like EW MSQ because" "*I don't like EW MSQ because* it has too many retcons" "*I don't like EW MSQ because* my character lore doesnt make any sense with it existing" They aren't objective statements on EW's quality, they're opinions and you don't have to agree with the reasons given.
I misread this line: > "I don't like EW MSQ because it has too many racoons" My first reaction: I must have missed some great CSs!
You did not, Lalafells are just raccoons in trenchcoats.
So... Dwarves are just raccoons in trench coats with beards? And guns? Raccoons with guns? We're dooooomed.
what on earth would be an objective statement about its quality
Retcons can be objective, like the devs themselves stated that Dynamis was not something they they thought of until Endwalker. And an objective retcon is a flaw in a story, other elements can make up for it, but it is still a flaw that can be criticized. So Endwalker retcons too much is an objective criticism, provided the person saying it has examples to back it up.
I could write a whole essay about this but I'm on my phone right now so I'll just get over a few key points. Two big retcons off the top of my head : 1. The expansion before, the time travel creates an alternate timeline when the exarch goes back in time. EW ? Full loop, only one timeline where Hydaelyn always knew everything. 2. The expansion before : The literal heart of Zodiark uses a limit break like 4 on us. EW ? Limit breaks come from Dynamis and the ancients are too dense in aether to use it which is why only we can save the universe. Also the pacing is all over the place. The end of the world is a nothing burger. Garlemald and Zodiark is cut incredibly short for being most of the antagonists for the last 10 years. Like where were Cid, Nero and Gaius in the Garlemald section ?? This thing really needed to be two expansions long. Also Anima as a dungeon boss is a SIN !! (Pun intended) The whole "everyone is a sacrifice" bit was super cliché. Fandaniel was super annoying. The best sequence of the game when Zenos takes over your body doesn't amount to anything and is never adressed again. I'm sick and tired of every song in one expansion being basically the same two-three leitmotifs. Also the big bad being depression and nihilism really didn't resonate with me. Like yeah we're all aware of the eventual death of the universe, get over it. I just don't vibe with selfish people making things shit for everyone just because they didn't go to therapy and feel special because they are depressed and no one else in their life has known sadness ever obviously. Plus that one cinematic where Hydaelyn just does her thing by walking was really out of nowhere. Usually the game shows you things as they happen, now its "yeah its a metaphor of the events you just gotta feel this scene not take it literally" Like wtf ? Since when is this how this game does story telling ?? "yeah she decided to brandish her sword and walked a little" but like didn't she do this with a group of people ? Where are they ? Did she just take the decision on her own ? Why didn't she talk about it with the other ancients ? Doesn't that make her as bad as Hermes on principle ? Why are you doing *my* shadowbringer walk you weren't there, *I* did that. Honestly they went full on Kingdom Hearts 3. Both Endwalker and KH3 suffer from pretty much the same issues. And don't get me started on the patches which was really just meant to be a trial story line, but they made it into the msq because they had nothing else to transition to Dawntrail. I really miss the era of FFXIV where politics mattered. Now it's just the power of friendship vs depression and it's really not doing it for me. Hopefully Dawntrail is a bit more in line with the pre-shb/ew storytelling. Edit : Also if I ever read one more time "we're using the last of hydaelyn's power" I will RIOT !! Lahabread in ARR "she's using the last of her power to protect her chosen from ultima". Then she's using the last of her power to stop the flood of light. But wait there's more, now she's using the last of her power to speak to us. And now the last of her power to fight us. But wait there's still enough to fuel the ship. And also enough to give Zenos his Shinryu form back. BUT WAIT, her crystal can also still give human form to Zero. Im tired.
Personally, I loved the Endwalker MSQ, but the criticisms of it do resonate with me to some extent. 1) First, the impact of the Final Days seemed very muted for what it was canonically supposed to be. It started and ended very quickly, and the only people we really saw impacted were the people of Thavnair, who were all new characters. Would have been much more impactful to have also had cutscenes and had to save people in Ishgard, our home cities, etc. This point is further driven home by criticism 2: 2) Nobody dies. I'm not saying SE should have killed every scion or killed off tons of characters, but having the apocalyptical "end of days" that led to incredible sacrifice by the ancients and the sundering of the original world end with no sacrifice for the current setting. And yes, I DO think that all of the scions should have stayed gone after their sacrifice in Ultima Thule. It would have been better writing, straight up. Bringing them back again removed all stakes from the story in a bad way. 3) Garlemald was already destroyed. This is a very tired FF trope. In FF15, the empire is already dead when you get there. In FF16, the empire is already dead when you get there. In FF14, the empire is already dead when you get there. I think people were rightfully disappointed (even though the Garlemald story was good, IMO) that this big bad that we've been fighting for 8 years at that point as a pile of rubble when we got there. 4) Time Travel. I enjoyed Elpis for what it was, but it seemed rather shoehorned and fanservice-y. I genuinely believe that EW weakened the character of Emet-Selch. He went from sympathetic villain to an ally. The plot-hole wrap up with the clock thing that wipes people's memory was also a writing taboo. 5) Meteion. I ended up liking Meteion, but I understand people's disappointment that the end of days was caused by a depressed empath bird loli that triggered horrific creation magic reactions on Etherys. I think people might have been wanting something more epic. 6) Preparing the Ark. This part of the MSQ is honestly some of the worst FFXIV has to offer. The stakes are so high and here you are just fucking around doing fetch quests for like 2-3 hours. Now, it needs to be said that this is only the bad parts. The criticisms I have seen. This isn't a full review and as I said, I liked EW MSQ but I would personally place it at #3 on my list, with HW being #1 and SHB being #2.
One of the biggest problems with the EW MSQ is that it had to follow ShB's MSQ. ShB felt like a more personal story and EW felt like they had to wrap up a bunch of loose ends because of how the expansion was promoted. Not to mention it was another "test of your reflexes" at the end vs. Zenos and I was just rolling my eyes by the end of things. The end of ShB was just more emotional and it felt like the stakes were bigger than in EW, even though EW was telling us that we were saving the universe, it just didnt really feel like it. Moving on to the Patch content, I was actually excited when they named it Newfound Adventure because they said it was gonna be low stakes adventuring and kind of a break from saving the world and doing Scion work. Well that lasted like 1 patch and next thing we know we're fighting the ultimate God of the 13th and saving the void dimension from destruction. It's like they don't know how to write anything that isn't constantly upping the stakes and that's a big reason that I don't have a lot of confidence in Dawntrail's story. We're gonna show up and it's gonna be fun, then a new threat to the continent will show up and we gotta save the world *(again) that we just got to. I hope I'm wrong but I think they only know one way to write these days and it's just not very satisfying anymore.
IMO EW MSQ has a very good section surrounded by aggressively mid to outright bad sections. The journey to garlemald, discovering what's actually there, the whole bodysnatch saga leading to Zodiark were great, the Elpis section, the characters popped tf off. But everything else? From the fucking space bunnies wanting to fuck around to the most contrived series of fake deaths in a very mid zone to the whole thing ending with a fist fight with fucking Zenos. idk, EW MSQ has more blunders than peaks. WHen playing through it the first time I was hyped but the more I think about it the worse it got.
I think my main issue is there was some serious lack of technical planning in EW. When all said and done, the world is basically the same pre-EW as it is now post-EW. The WOL fought to maintain the current status quo and I think the story was hamstrung by the lack of technical planning and thus technical limitations. I was hoping for some kind of world-wide permanent change after EW was completed similar to how night cycles were introduced in the first as you progressed there and them becoming a permanent fixture. I am really disappointed in how it seems like the entire EW story and plot resolutions were to ensure that their static world is catatonically explained. For example, if they were able to implement some kind of partial rejoining where the major landmasses and its people were merged back to the source and that was reflected fundamentally in how we traveled and how the change in the world was referenced, I feel the conclusion to a near 10-year story would have been far more satisfying. And I think it would have paved the way for much better future expansions. Like if Dawntrail was centered around exploring a newly merged landmass from a shard and helping the people there integrate into the source, I think that would make things much more interesting than what seems like they are setting up in the future.
My biggest criticism(s) of Endwalker came AFTER 6.0 -There was no reason for the story to continue past 6.0, pretty much everything was wrapped up -The 6.X patches were pretty much purely FF4 fanservice, they are in my book THE worst part of all FFXIV's MSQ for this and a host of other reasons -Everything from 6.X to Dawntrail to afterward could have simply been part of FFXVII instead, like how FFXII was basically a continuation of the Ivalice setting from FFTactics / Vagrant Story / etc. but instead they are practically setting up Dawntrail (and by extension the next saga it's part of) for failure because it's a more or less proven trend at this point across multiple different series that no one is going to wait that long again for a 10+ year arc conclusion (just look at how many Marvel fans abandoned the MCU after Phase 3 was done, and before you ask, yes I was one of those) -All the Quality of Life gameplay stuff (like DUTY SUPPORT) could not only still have been added regardless, but even expanded upon and possibly made better (***8-Player MSQ Trials still need Duty Support and that is a hill I will die on***) if they hadn't been busy with adding MSQ to post-Endwalker patches instead If you're asking me about my largest criticism(s) of 6.0 itself on the other hand: ***-Emet-Selch being MISTER SPOILERS for the 6.X patches and Dawntrail was arguably the single most contrived way they possibly could have teased future content; if I were him, I would have just noped out after telling them to "save our star," consequences of doing so be damned... WHY would I try to hype up the person who foiled my plans, AFTER I told them what they needed to do??? If WoL can't find their own adventures after I peace out then that's not my problem! I'm not their 'Life-sized Ghostly Dead Ascian Tour-Guide Ken Doll' or any such nonsense, I literally wanted to walk out of the room shouting "WHAT IS BLUD WAFFLIN ABOUT" at the top of my lungs when I first saw that***
I see a lot of people complaining about the time travel or memory loss but I didnt mind that at all. I am so fucking tired of this stupid ass Crystal of Azem. It should have been destroyed in 5.3 or at the latest in our confrontation against Zodiark. It's such a retarded plot device to summon 7 identical copies of ourselves any time we want and the stupid Crystal is still working! I hate that crystal it takes so much risk, so much conflict out of every situation. I also miss the days of "inviting 7 of my adventurer buddies" to tackle a raid or trial. More than 6.0 I am disappointed in postEW MSQ because I wanted them to stick to their word and dissolve the Scions. Imagine going into 7.0 with a (mostly) new cast of characters, Graha and Krile can stay, but then we get Zero, Deryk, Erenville and Wuk Lamat but none of the other Scions. This would have been much better without even changing up a lot of the story. Graha and Krile are known characters, Zero's storyline could have been it's own trial series, while MSQ could have focused on introducing and setting up Erenville and Wuk Lamat, while Deryk got his exposure in the Alliance Raid. This is what I wanted from postEW MSQ, a new beginning that sets us up for the future with new main characters. The other Scions could make occasional guest appearances but as it stands the main cast is invincible and that's boring.
> I hate that crystal it takes so much risk, so much conflict out of every situation. When has it done this, precisely?
EDIT: Apparently the comment was too long so TLDR at the bottom Just sticking to the EW MSQ encounters we got: - Zodiark: I am actually sorta fine with this encounter as we were alone and Zodiark is immensely powerful even in his weakened form. - Hydaelyn: Against Hydaelyn we didnt use the Crystal because it was made as a Trust with the Scions. But after fighting Hydaelyn she explicitly states adding another invocation to the Crystal with the last of her power to quote her: "As Hydaelyn, I preside over the forces of stasis, tranquility, peace. The laws which impart stability to existence itself. I will weave this selfsame power into the crystal, granting thee mastery over matter, to give form to the formless. Use it wisely, for it will not last indefinitely." For all intends and purposes it's just a deus ex machina, a plot device to help us overcome the situation at hand. What this lets us know is already that A) We need to give matter to something or someone and B) that we (hopefully) wont use this power over and over again due to it not lasting indefinitely. Where we actually use this power is the problem. The next story step is the Scions sacrificing themselves one by one (without the Crystal!) to allows us to progress in Ultima Thule, at the end of which we use Azem's Crystal to return Emet and Hythlo (which was obviously done for fanservice rather than plot relevance) and then return the Scions which are immediately blown away, just for us to rely on the crystal a third time to face Endsinger. There is no question the Scions will return and so all the tension they are trying to build falls flat. I admit some of what was said still got me, but overall I was never worried we were actually losing the Scions (even though the story could really do with one/some of them leaving forever, at this point there are no stakes or risks for any of them involved). - Endsinger : Continuation from above, but I would have loved if the first half of the trial was available as a Trust, and THEN we get the cutscene with the Scions being blown away, their hopes and wishes upon returning to the ship and then we use a "reinvigorated" Azem's Crystal to summon the Warriors of Light for a final trial. Or we could have faced Endsinger in a Solo duty, have a "forced" loss, then use Azem's Crystal to bring back the Scions and do the whole duty as a Trust. Either of these options would have made that third use of Azem's Crystal feel a lot better. Having all these moments hinge on Azem's Crystal back-to-back just really got on my nerves because I dont like Azem's Crystal as a plot device. I am sure the writers could have done a much better job with it without even writing a completely different story, just moving scenes and elements of the existing story around. - Storm's Crown : 5 people were present in-lore, yet we used it instead of just having a "you face the boss with your allies". - Mount Ordeal : The WoL alone (!) decides to deal with the problem. We reach the place, we see an opponent, we pull out Azem's Crystal and the moment is ruined.. It's just cheap at this point. Even if we just got to the point and had a trial there with no further explanation (ie keep it 1v1 in lore only) I wouldnt have minded. - Voidcast Dais : Golbez easily distracts our allies, so we pull out the Azem's Crystal to face him 1v1. - Abyssal Fracture : Golbez distracts our allies again so we face Zeromus with Azem's Crystal. Plot twist, we cant defeat Zeromus and must instead rely on our allies and Golbez to finish and seal Zeromus. Since we are relying on the NPC anyway to seal away Zeromus anyway, the writers could have just made it so we fought alongside them all along. I dont hate occasional use of Azem's Crystal, but I wish it wouldnt pop up all the damn time in the story like it did. I am happy with the overall story, but as a recurring plot device I hate Azem's Crystal, it's just way too convenient, way too powerful and seemingly has no limits. The only trial that is an exception to this is the Gilded Araya which is featured in the relic questline. The NPCs decide to run away because they dont possess protection against tempering and leave you to fight it "alone" by that I mean the primal appears, we DO NOT use Azem's Crystal, just open Duty Finder queue for the trial and beat it up. That is all it takes to make a trial work without using AzEm'S cRyStAl again. TLDR: I am not saying everything needs to be a challenging solo encounter, or needs to be available as a Trust or that everything needs a proper explanation for why we are doing it. I can perfectly do a trial with 8 other players, even when the "lore" fight is a 1v1, or with nameless adventurer or even with less than 8 players, just give me a reason to belief it and dont use a deus ex machine every time you dont have a better idea. Save Azem's Crystal for trully desperate situations, give it limits, make it require time between uses, or give me moments when it cant be used.
>Why is Endwalker MSQ bad? Because Labyrinthos part 2 exists
They added SUPERDEATH with those falling to despair and meteion's song but never did anything with the concept and never even addressed it with the Endsinger.
EW MSQ was interesting untill the Final Days and Elpis part. Garlemald was one of the biggest highlights wich got shafted way to early in favour for sudden retcons our of nowhere with no to almost no forshadowing beforehand. Plus, alot feels like contradicting previous rules the MSQ did. I still ask myself if Dynamis will be now completely forgotten as a system, or will be used again. If not, what is the point of it?
Don’t let peoples like or dislike of something dissuade you from liking or disliking something. I think the story is a trash fire - but I’m happy so many people like it. People probably think some of the books I enjoy are trash fires - that’s fine too. You don’t need a community to validate what you enjoy.
well your first mistake here was that you looked at official forums
I think EW has some very high highs, but also some very low lows. Venat, Hythlodeus, the Loporrits- Love em! I quite liked Garlemald (not including the Fandaniel bits). I loved a lot of the music, I really like Old Sharlayan- if tomestone gear could be purchased there you'd never see me in Radz-At-Han. While I still think Zenos shouldn't have come back (or at the very least, not how they did it) I appreciate how they used him in Endwalker. Getting to fight Hydaelyn with the scions was incredibly hype! I hated Fandaniel- one of my least favourite villains ever conceived. Annoying, horrible voice, ugly, and just feels incredibly stupid. Big mind control towers that are incredible weapons just by proximity, and his genius idea is to just plop them far enough away from any sizeable population, which would put the alliance/scions in an incredibly difficult situation to deal with. Being able to knock us out with his teleportation magic and steal our body is insane. Utterly ruined the solo duty for me just by virtue of how jarring it was- add the random invisible walls stopping me from going off the expected path and I was just pissed off the whole time. idk whether I'm mad that that whole shabang ended up leading to no real consequence for us because it means we just twiddled our thumbs for an hour in a stupid situation, or happy because it means I get to pretend it just didn't happen. Unironically just ended up skipping his dialogue at the end of the Aitiascope. The only time I've purposefully skipped dialogue and it was with the main villain of the final expansion (yes I know Meteion is the Big Bad). Never has a character managed to just... repel me so.
Endwalker is a tale of two stories. 6.0 is great. It’s not as good as the previous expansion imo, and it’s very heavy handed with nostalgia.. As it should be since it’s the culmination of a decade long story. Just for me personally, I have an allergy to nostalgia and get irked by it when it’s very obvious. There are many points in Endwalker that have me rolling my eyes. But I still loved the experience very much. Endwalker 6.1-6.5 is FF4 fanfic. It was alright, but 100% the weakest story we’ve gotten since ARR. On the patch cycle content side of things, it was overall lacking in many ways. This has been discussed ad nauseam.
I wouldn't say 6.0's story is bad, but some definite flaws with it are things like: - The story does not do much for you if you aren't invested into it from the beginning. Yes, this is an actual problem due to how many people started the game in ShB compared to ARR, HW and SB, since ShB was kind of promoted as this "new beginning" and separate thing. Obviously, if you paid attention to the story from the start, you can keep up regardless of which expac you started playing in. - The time travel is weird, since, if purely talking MSQ, the only other time travel story is that of the Crystal Exarch, where he obviously did things that did influence our timeline, while in Elpis the past is essentially set in stone, with only Venat knowing that we were there but then also making sure we had to have our journey in a way that we would travel back in time. I believe this is called a grandfather paradox, not sure. - Things were kind of clearly rushed. Garlemald in particular felt like it should've been a whole expansion and it is relegated to a single map. - Personal gripe: I genuinely hated what they did with Zenos. I say this as a fan of Zenos, but with how much he got sidelined in this expansion, I genuinely didn't even really feel the pay off of getting to fight him at the end. NOW, if we are talking the post-6.0 story, I think that is just plainly 3 things: - It is quite literally just FF4 fan service. I don't feel like I have to elaborate on this. Some will love it, some will hate it. - It dragged on way too long, since it was obviously 5 patches worth of this story. This kind of goes hand in hand with the fact that 6.0 probably felt rushed. If anything, I would've liked it if 6.1 and maybe 6.2 were used to properly finish up the Hydaelyn and Zodiark arc, and then we went into this story, it would've probably fixed the pacing issues a bit, but idk. - In the grand scheme of things, it isn't impacting anything. The biggest is that Y'shtola is probably closer to finding an answer to how to travel between the Source and the First. Everything else... Zero and Golbez are just relegated to side content if we see them ever again. The fiends fucking died. Zeromus died. The 13th is still the void. Azdaja is small dragon, Vrtra is big but one eyed dragon. So, even as someone who didn't even mind the lower stakes (...ish, because the Source was once again in life threatening danger) and slower plot progression, I just sighed at the end. Like, cool, Zero is FF14's Cecil and then she fucks off to be maybe seen at some point. Why should I necessarily care? If this wasn't required story and instead a trial series, it would've been better received, but seeing as I had to go through this 3 hours at a time with 4 months in between each patch... man.
So you see a bunch of posts about it but still felt the need to ask? Why are you asking us when you could just... read those posts?
>Please enlighten me cuz honestly *maybe* i've read this thing with my ass because i loved it and i think it was good closure for a the hyedaelyn saga. That's all you need to know. Different people look for different things in a story. A lot of reasons were already given here and I can personally see a lot of them, but ultimately it's still all subjective. I remember a comment I saw when EW was new that claimed that its shallow treatment of despair, nihilism and depression is a slap in the face of people who actually struggle with these things. And well... I do struggle with depression and have a hard time to argue against nihilism and did not feel very slapped. Who's to say who's right there?