#ff14 spoilers

today’s intersex character of the day is:

Venat/Hydaelyn from FFXIV

submitted by anonymous

It’s the end of the world as we know it/

and I feel fine

does your WoL remember where they were when first given the Echo?

tell me…. what colour is the elpis flower, for you?

I was delayed a lot by work, but I finally managed to finish Endwalkerand boy do I have Thoughts™.

Under the read more to hide spoilers, but if you’re on mobile and the read more didn’t work, please be aware the rest of this post is full to brim with

Endwalker spoilers!

Things I Loved:

1. That entire sequence in Garlemald hit like a truck. Watching Jullus recognize the trauma he had experienced was deeply moving. “Alea Iacta Est” was one of the most atmospheric and stage-setting quests in the game.

2. The humor sprinkled in throughout that kept the otherwise ridiculously dark storyline from becoming too overwhelming. Finding out Estinien is actually terrible with money, that Urianger curls into a ball when he feels sick, and that Alphinaud has fanboys was all so emotionally relieving after the literal crushing despair of the plot’s main events.

3. Vrtra. Just… Everything about Vrtra, especially his relationship with Estinien. Watching Estinien play big brother to a fifty-ton dragon with self-esteem issues is just so heartwarming and fantastic. I absolutely love the way dragons are handled in FFXIV–they both fulfill that ancient dragon lore itch, of the towering beast that ferociously guards its hoard (in Vrtra’s case, the hoard is people), but the FFXIV dragons are also all incredibly unique characters with decidedly human personalities, challenges, and feelings. Seeing Estinien find such respect and care for the First Brood continues to delight over and over again.

4. Lunatender… Lunatender…

5. The character interactions were absolutely what makes Endwalker. FFXIV in general would not receive nearly as much acclaim if it weren’t for the genuine love that goes into the writing of each character and their interactions with others. Alphinaud proving himself to his father, Urianger finding closure for Moenbryda’s death through her parents, sharing stories of joy with Venat on the wall in Elpis, Emet-Selch’s utter refusal to be seen as emotionally vulnerable… Every moment of the story was overflowing with the writers’ love for their characters, and the tiny interactions between these figures who we have known and cared for for so long elevate Endwalkerinto something truly magical. I cried like seven times, I don’t know about you.

6. Azem. The concept of Azem in general. The absolute care and attention that went into building the concept of Azem and tying it directly into the player’s literal journey from a level one newbie adventurer to a god-slaying Warrior of Light is just incredible. Every time the idea of traveling, drinking in the wonders of the world, and the hint of adventures still left to be enjoyed comes up in the story, the profound feeling of love this triggers in the player is nothing short of masterfully done. Being “the Traveler” is simply wonderful, both in the game and as a concept applied to the real-life players. Venat being the previous Azem was a super clever way to make players immediately care for her.

7. Related to this, the cultural influences on each zone truly give the game a global feeling. Experiencing India in Thavnair and revolutionary Russia in Garlemald (this last one surprised me; always thought it had a more Roman vibe), the ancient Greece of Elpis, and the hilariously British feel to Sharlayan creates the sense that the world of Etheirys is as wide and varied as our own. Zones are good stuff in this expansion. Ultima Thule left such an impression on me, I’m still thinking about it now.

8. The music. I don’t even need to say anything else. I resented every quest sound and battle sound effect in the last zone for interrupting my listening experience.

9. The new side characters. They really nailed it with the side characters this time around. Erenville’s push to unionize the gleaners was fantastic, Loifa getting clowned on in his own quest line was endearing, Matsya’s struggle in the jungle, Ahewann’s sacrifice… Incredibly well done side characters throughout. Hythlodaeus is single-handedly the best ancient.

10. There is a lot of underlying allusion and connotation to unpack with Meteion, especially in terms of stories like “the bluebird of happiness” and the–I’m sure–intentional references to alchemy through the concept of the “Bird of Hermes.” Although I didn’t quite think that this story had the depth of allusion that Shadowbringersdid, it’s not without its Easter egg bonuses for those who are well-versed in literature.

11.Endwalkerselected a “moral of the story” and ran with it. This expansion had a point worth making about life and finding joy in our experiences even though we all also experience suffering. It is a valuable and timely message that undoubtedly hit many, many players very hard.

Things I Disliked:

Hoo boy. Where to start. Listen. If you take Endwalkerat its surface level, it is thepinnacle of classical JRPG. It absolutely feels like being back in the 90s, playing FF6, FF7, FF9, etc., the games that reshaped your very understanding of JRPG and 90s’ video games in the first place. It has all the hallmarks of truly classic Final Fantasy through and through: quirky party members, the bizarre mash up of technology and magic that just somehow works in concept, the weird jokes, your party members following along behind you like ducklings, random mini games that appear without warning, the bosses that literally stepped out of Yoshitaka Amano artwork, the spectacular, over-the-top battles with planets being thrown around, and most notably… a high-stakes story line that makes absolutely no sense if you think about it too hard.  

I loved everything about Endwalkerexcept the actual plot. On an individual level, the dialogue of the characters was masterfully written. Everything had an incredible emotional impact. But it’s putting it gently to say the plot was a mess.

Fandaniel wants to kill everyone because he’s actually Amon, who wants to kill everyone because he enabled the collapse of his own society, because he’s actually Hermes who accidentally initiated the downfall of hissociety and killed everyone because he’s a member of PETA–

The elder primal, Lord of Darkness Incarnate you were looking forward to fighting for eight years is nothing but a husk to be possessed by said ancient clown and your character will kill him ¼ of the way through the story as if he were nothing more than a stepping stone only to realize you done fucked up and now the deaths of thousands of people are on your hands–and at no point in the story will anyone ever say “Man it probably would have been better for you to not stand there and watch dumbly while Fandaniel possessed Zodiark, WoL. You could have interrupted his monologue at any moment. Thanks for kickstarting the Final Days again, bro.”

Half way through your story, the narrative will be high-jacked by a bunch of talking rabbits, who, while cute, also serve as a walking deus ex machina plot device to dump anything you could possibly need for the rest of the story directly into your character’s pocket, all while no explanation for their existence–which breaks several previously established rules of the game’s world-building–is ever given.

Andthenwe get the fucking time travel. Let’s actually just put aside the frustrating idea that this entire scene contradicts the pre-established rules of time travel in FFXIV (that you can, in fact, change the past, and doing so just creates splinter timelines). Did I love going to Elpis and seeing Emet-Selch, Hythlodaeus (truly a joy), and learning about Venat? FOR SURE. Did Hermes pose an interesting moral dilemma in his love for all creatures great and small? Definitely. Does any of the rest of it make sense with the rules FFXIV established earlier? Not in the slightest.

It was literally laid out in previous works that things created with creation magic do not have souls. They can acquire souls by accident, spontaneously at the time of creation, or their off-spring can eventually acquire souls if they adhere to the natural order of the world. So why does no one fucking bat an eyelash at Meteion? Where did her soul come from? Is Hermes really so constantly overwrought by the deaths of subjects that, for the most part, shouldn’t even have souls?

Then we get the memory wipe nonsense with Kairos, which, honestly, while another painfully obvious plot device, would at least have made the entire fact that we went back in time to Elpis no longer a plothole-inducing nightmare… But Venat isn’t caught in the memory wipe.

Venat isn’t caught in the memory wipe. Which means she knows everything. She knows Meteion is the cause of the Final Days, she knows what is coming with Zodiark and Hydaelyn, she knows the future of mankind…

And she does nothing to stop any of it.

She lets the apocalypse happen. She lets Zodiark happen. She makes the Sundering happen.

“Oh but Echo,” I hear you saying, “the Convocation wouldn’t have believed her so she had no way to stop the Final Days from happening.” Absolute nonsense. HERMES KNOWS ABOUT DYNAMIS. You’re really going to tell me that Elidibus wouldn’t have at least listened and considered what she had to say? That Azem–who was still on the Convocation at the time–wouldn’t have sided with her if she told them an alien entity was attacking their planet? Absolute nonsense through and through.

“Oh but Echo, she had to let Zodiark happen because there was no way to shield the planet from Meteion’s Dynamis without him.” The story is really trying to tell me that people who can create entire living beings from thin air could not have come up with a better plan to shield their planet than CREATING A GOD if they were given proper warning and actually knew what was attacking them? More nonsense.

“Oh but Echo, she had to Sunder the Ancients because she needed people who could deal with despair and manipulate Dynamis to defeat Meteion.” Again, is the story really trying to tell us that there was no other way than BREAKING REALITY to develop beings capable of manipulating Dynamis? HERMES CREATED METEION. My head hurts, guys.

“Oh but Echo, Venat had to Sunder everyone because they were seeking perfection and seeking perfection is what leads to the stagnation of civilizations! They would have been their own downfall if she let them stay that course!” The story doubles down on this idea that “perfection leads to stagnation” so many times over the course of the latter zones that it’s actually painful, but it’s portrayed in such a stupidly black and white way that it breaks immersion in an otherwise fairly politically realistic story. Are you really trying to tell me that every single society in the universe that ever achieved health and prosperity eventually devoured itself from the inside out because of unflagging extremist values and that none of them ever managed to just… modulate themselves and tend toward mediocrity again? None of them ever managed to change course?

There was really no other way to prevent cultural stagnation than breaking people’s souls into tiny pieces and inventing the concepts of war, famine, disease, suffering, and violent death? No incremental social change? Ancients can create gods but can’t create the concept of activism? My head really, really hurts.

“Oh but Echo, Venat had to do all those things because she knew the WoL was from the future and she had to protect the WoL’s timeline and people too.”

Yes, the people she created by fucking up so badly in the past.

Being more serious, the real issue with Venat’s actions after Elpis is that they have nothing to do with her genuine character. None of the choices are organic. Instead, they are all done in service to the plot. The Final Days needs to happen, Zodiark needs to happen, Hydaelyn needs to happen, and the Sundering needs to happen all because the pre-established plot demands that they do. Venat’s choices after Elpis don’t happen because they are genuinely how a person in her role and with her personality would actually act–they’re just what the plot NEEDSher to do. She becomes nothing more than a sock puppet for the story rather than actually having any agency of her own. Couple all this with the retcon to Hydaelyn’s motivations that happened with Shadowbringers, and we have the recipe for truly bungled character.

And the stupidest thing is that none of these questions needed to exist–if Venat had been caught in Kairos’s memory wipe too, we would have had no doubts about her motivations and would have just said “She did all those things because she didn’t remember the future; she was only trying to stop Zodiark. She didn’t know about Meteion and had no idea they could have stopped her themselves all along…” etc. If she had just forgotten like Emet-Selch and Hythlodaeus, there would have been no issue, so why???

And that bungling occurs at all levels, introducing as many plot holes as there are shards of the star. Where did the Loporitts get their souls? How do the Loporitts have creation magic? Why would Hydaelyn tell the Sharlayans to build a spaceship when the Ancients KNOW HOW TO CREATE TELEPORTERS? How did Hydaelyn “Send Fandaniel far away”–HE CAN TELEPORT!! Why turn the moon into your escape device when it also houses Zodiark? Oh no, our memory has been wiped by this mysterious Kairos “explosion”! It sure would be convenientif we had a magical power that let us view memories left behind, imprinted on each location… Yeah, too bad that doesn’t exist, right?

Then we get to the main message of the expansion: life is hard, but you can’t give in to despair. Totally fine. Great message even, very meaningful and relevant to our time. But then the story applies this message seemingly randomly.

If it had just been a straightforward: we’re all mortal, death is inevitable, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make the most of life, it would have made perfect sense. The problem is that they also had the dimension of having the utopian world of the Ancients. So they had to figure out how to justify the downfall from utopia to painful mortality, and then stillgive people the message that life was worth living. Their solution to this conundrum was to suggest that the downfall of civilizations that seek perfection is inevitable, and that the act of seeking perfection is itself what causes cultures to collapse, and therefore mortality and failure is necessary for society to keep on persisting.

But then they’re all over the place with this idea. The dragons were literally doing nothing, just living their lives, and death came for them anyway. Sure the ancients might have been on the path to stagnation, but it wasn’tstagnation that wiped out their society; it was entirely by random chance that Meteion happened to experience what she did and happened to be able to control Dynamis the way she could. Seek perfection and you die. Don’t seek perfection and… you still die.

If any society that strives to eliminate war and famine is doomed for a downfall, then what has been the purpose of all our Warrior of Light’s peacekeeping and nation-uniting actions up to this point? We’ve spent five games’ worth of time and effort now trying to eliminate Etheirys’s wars, heal the sick, fight for freedoms–only to now hear that the only reward of the very course we’ve whole-heartedly committed our characters to for eight years now might be the eventual fall of our planet?

The ultimate point of the story is that nihility is terrible and mankind’s greatest strength is his ability to hold on to hope and not give up despite facing endless suffering. That living and pursuing your dreams in life is essential to continuing to lift yourself from the dust again and again… But also, don’t pursue your dreams too hard because if you succeed in achieving all your dreams, YOU’LL KILL YOUR ENTIRE SOCIETY.

In trying to make a powerful statement against nihility but also using fantasy races of immortals as their examples, the plot becomes an ouroboros that eats itself: The more your character strives to help people, end wars, unite countries, and make the world a better place, the closer Etheirys comes to perfection–and therefore, apparently, to total fucking annihilation.

Endwalkertried to tie too many disparate plot threads and references together to really create the sensation of a finale, but in trying to tie so many threads together, they created a tangle that will unravel if you thinkat it too hard.

And just… the tension was never where it needed to be in the last half of the story! How were we supposed to be afraid for the scions sacrificing themselves in Ultima Thule KNOWINGthat Hydaelyn had just specifically given us the power to bring them back from that exact thing??? When base Shadowbringerswas ending, I was completely on the edge of my seat, wondering what would happen, how we’d overcome both Hades and the light, how we’d get back up to do the fight, how our character would get out of the recreation of the Final Days… And when Ardbert handed us his axe and G’raha summoned champions from beyond the rift, it was like watching the puzzle pieces all fall perfectly into place. The feeling of satisfaction was immense. Watching all the NPCs gather in Sharlayan was nice, but there was never any doubt or concern for that obvious outcome. There were no stakes because everything was telegraphed so blatantly. The creation magic, the personal teleporter… Ultima Thule’s plot got the wind taken out of its sails because it was supposed to be about our character “holding on to hope and not giving into despair,” but because it was blatantly obvious that no one was in any actual danger and all the scions sacrificing themselves would be immediately undone in the end, the story in Ultima Thule gives us nothing to despair over and nothing we would desperately need to hope for either. It was disappointing to not get to experience those feelings fully because the plot devices were simply way too obvious.

Anyway, look, I can’t think about the plot for much longer or I’ll get brain cancer, so let me just talk about something else:

The pacing of the story varies wildly, and the order in which you start the MSQ really impacts the flow of the beginning of the expansion.

Splitting players in to two different zones makes sense to reduce the load of players in opening areas. Doing this in Shadowbringersworked well because whether you picked Alisaie or Alphinaud, you got a similar brief experience and then were able to move into the first dungeon without a noticeable delay. However, in Endwalker, if you choose to start in Thavnair instead of Sharlayan, the pacing of the expansion’s opening is utterly destroyed. Dealing with the drama of Nidhana being kidnapped and Fandaniel being there tormenting you in the tower… only to then leave and do a bunch of joke quests about reading books and turning into frogs to stealth past your adopted kids’ dad literally sucks all tension out of the opening before the first dungeon. And, in general, the push to the first dungeon is way too long–literally twice the number of quests it took to get the first dungeon in Shadowbringers, with twice as many cutscenes and significantly fewer battles. Unless you start in Sharlayan, the pace of the opening before reaching the first dungeon is terrible.

And the same thing happens again on the moon. The Loporitts are cute, but you’ve literally just been told that your actions straight up RESTARTED THE APOCALYPSE. Trying out blue carrots and taking a bunny on a walk ring as nothing more than hollow diversions from an already tenuously held together plot line. I likethe Loporitts, but having to spend all that time exploring the moon base was a disaster in terms of maintaining the natural progression of the story.

My only other truly major gripe was the villains. After writing such a fantastic villain in Emet-Selch, seeing this expansion’s meandering villains was such a let down. Anima was completely over-hyped and underdeveloped in the story; there should have been so much more to that reveal. The horror of hacking your own father up to use his limbs to create mindless slaves to the empire via propaganda is interesting, but the radio aspect under-utilized–if the radiohad been the medium through which Varis’s tempering was spread, I think that would have been much more interesting.

Zenos had zero actual role in the plot except as a deus ex machina at the end; he was just… there. No contributions to 9/10ths of the story, just… there. At the beginning, I thought we might actually get some kind of character growth out of him, but even all the way to the end of the story, he is never able to bridge the gap between himself and others. All the way to the final scene, he never understands the Warrior of Light. He still just asserts his own version of events into every line of his dialogue, and that’s… sad. It’s sad to see a character that could have been really interesting just flounder in a plot that is SO RELEVANT to his (obviously nihilistic) character and yet gives him absolutely nothing to do. There is no way you can convince me “Zenos learns life has meaning after meeting Meteion, the embodiment of despair” wouldn’t have been an infinitely more logical plot for his character. And there’s so much they just never explained… Why become a reaper? Why does he get such a unique voidsent avatar? Why did he dream of the Final Days? I can only assume he isn’t really dead and will be coming back to have more of a role in the future, so they’re leaving questions unanswered for now, but it was not satisfying.

Fandaniel being Amon was interesting but also criminally under-developed. We should have gotten much more extended flashbacks to the Allagans to really highlight the comparison between the Allagans and the Ancients and to show Amon‘s struggles with the dreams of horror of Hermes’ past. To really understand his motivations and his reason for choosing to cling to “Amon” specifically instead of Hermes, we needed much more of Amon himself.

And don’t get me started on Hermes. Just… don’t. Did I sniffle a little watching him say goodbye to the liokanes that had to be returned to concepts? Yes. Did the ending voiceover of granting Meteion the Elpis flowers in Ultima Thule hit me hard? Yes. Does anything else about this character make sense? No.

His point that the Ancients are callous towards their creations would feel a lot more relevant if it wasn’t a last second retcon that the Ancients couldeven create things with souls in them. Since it was previously established that their creations don’t contain souls, his bleeding heart just comes across as a bit bizarre. There’s also no explanation for why he–and he alone!–seems to have this bleeding heart, when all the others are ambivalent. It’s even kind of vaguely implied that due to having so much aether, the ancients can’t interact with Dynamis easily, and therefore you might think their feelings are more muted than humans’ would be–but not Hermes. For no reason that the story ever bothers to explain, he just really, really, really cares.

He cares so much that he hears one report’s worth of terrible news and decides… to kill everyone. Including his precious animals.

Hermes: Death is NOT beautiful.

Hermes, ten seconds later: I’LL SEND US ALL INTO OBLIVION.

This character is the literal definition of “That escalated quickly.” Even if he was faced with despair on a cosmic level, the absolute and ultimate futility of life, is that really enough to make such a gentle and peaceful man actively decide to kill everyone?

The jump from 0 to 100 happened too fast and without sufficient development to make it genuinely believable.

And what’s this fucking shit with retconning tempering to be “just something the Ascians threw in”? If Zodiark wasn’t tempering people, then that meant he was literally just doing his fucking job, bothering no one, being a savior… and Hydaelyn beat the shit out of him and imprisoned him for 12,000 years for ENTIRELY NO REASON. What a horrible life for a being to have. To be honest, this idea right here is probably the worst thing Endwalker had to offer, and I hope they fix it in the future, because retconning tempering that hard just invalidates so much of the previous story that it’s actually offensive to my sensibilities.

What do I even say about Meteion? I liked her? I felt terrible for her? Her boss design was cool and very classic Final Fantasy, but… at the end of the day, she was just disappointing compared to the theories I had been formulating in my head about what the “Sound” from beneath the earth might be for the two years since Shadowbringers. I really believed we would be dealing with some cosmic invader that feasted upon living planets to gorge itself, etc. Finding out that the cause of the Final Days was instead just a single misguided familiar invented by a single misguided Ancient tuned the scale of hype down a lot.

Not going to lie, but between the idea of a sound from under the earth and the previews of Elpis looking so much like Zeal, plus the announcement of the Chrono Cross remake, I was really, really hoping they’d be linking in some Chrono Trigger/Chrono Cross material in the story, and I was SO GAME for the “sound” to end up actually being Lavos.

Sighhhhhhh.

Anyway, this is already so stupidly long, but speaking of missed opportunities, there were three other things that I really wished we had gotten instead:

1. The final dungeon shouldn’t have been random other worlds; it should have been glimpses into the calamities that destroyed the other shards. All they had to do was throw in some line for Meteion like: “Hydaelyn tried to sunder Etheirys to protect its people from me, but no heart is shielded from dynamis. I am wherever hopelessness lives, even inside your palest reflections–” And then BAM, the dungeon opens and it’s the previous shards experiencing the calamities of wind, water, earth, lightning, etc. That would have been so much more meaningful (and a better way to close out on the shard/calamity plot) than just random collapsing planets.

2. Why do Hydaelyn and Zodiark look nothing like their statues and previous hints we’ve gotten of them? I understand they wanted to match the Amano artwork but the Amano artwork doesn’t match the story. Whyyyyyy?

3. I will never forgive Square Enix for not ending the last cutscene with the question “Where will you go, Warrior of Light?” and giving us the dialogue option “Wither the wild rose blooms.” HOW COULD YOU MISS THE EASIEST FUCKING CALLBACK, HOW–!!!

(Oh and also, one last gripe I just recalled… there were way too many follow missions at the beginning of the story. I actually liked traveling and chatting with the characters when the quests were meaningful, but some of these quests just existed specifically to show off the devs’ cool new thing. I get that they were excited but it was excessive at the start. Just saying.)

Anyway, overall, Endwalkergets a solid 7/10 from me. I cried like seven times. (It gets one point for every time it made me cry.) The character work and interactions were beyond words incredible. The music, atmosphere, zones, and battles were stunning. But the story was just so full of plotholes and underdeveloped villains, so many places where the characters were ramrodded into stupid actions simply to forward the very specific moral message the developers were trying to send the players, that I can’t forgive it.

Did I like Endwalker? Yes. But is it an example of good storytelling? No.

I’ll just be over here enjoying the little things in life, I guess…

(It’s me. I’m the little thing.)

winterdeepelegy:

All behind a cut due to spoilers.

Keep reading

Spoilers behind cut.

Okay, but what about Unukalhai?  It almost seems like he’s been forgotten.  You’d think that his having a connection with Elidibus would have warranted some kind of involvement from him in EW.  In fact, I’d kind of expected him to have some role to play, but here we are… and there he is, still just… standing there, the last body in the Rising Stones aside from Tataru.  Did I miss something?  Does… Tataru not even realize he’s there…?

I also feel like it would have made more sense for the Final Days to start in Garlemald considering the mess of things there.  There was literally nowhere else in the star which was more steeped in despair.  I can only figure that didn’t happen because of the concentration of aether in the area that was drawn in by Anima from the towers.  As stated in another post, weird choices in plot.

I don’t know how to feel about Meteion as a character.  On one hand, cute child who deserves hugs and happiness and fun things, and it’s really too bad Hermes never taught her about these things before Stuff happened. On the other, it’s enough that Hermes somehow gave her and her sisters the ability to traverse the cosmos and communicate back the way they did, but I can’t help but feel something else interfered with them other than witnessing events they weren’t prepared for. 

It doesn’t make sense that a Familiar would suddenly have the power to manipulate time, however briefly, let alone destroy the universe.  Sure, the Ancients were powerful.  Sure, Hydaelyn sundered the star into 14 shards, across dimensions, but the level of power the Endsinger had exceeded what any of the Ancients were capable of by leaps and bounds.  Hell, even Hydaelyn couldn’t do anything about her, and you  had to defeat her first which means she knew the Endsinger exceeded her power.

Hydaelyn and Zodiark’s story may be over, but the truth of what happened with Meteion is just starting to unfold. At least, that’s part of the direction I think they may take things in.

Personal release ranking:

1. Shadowbringers

2. Heavensward

3. Stormblood

4. Endwalker

5. ARR

6. 1.0

I will preface my opinions by saying that I completely and fully understand the extent of challenges they were dealing with in development, due largely to development happening remotely as a result of the pandemic.  But there are some things they still could have improved upon.

Thoughts/spoilers behind the cut below.

I honestly don’t know how to feel about this one.  After seeing so many people rave about Endwalker, about how “good” it is, and about the feels it invokes, my expectations were pretty high.  Suffice it to say, my experience wasn’t the same in that… I feel like it was lackluster.  It didn’t feel all that impactful to me, and there were definitely things they could have done better, or done with less of.

Truth be told, I felt like the end of 1.0 going into ARR really drove home the feeling of dire stakes.  The realm was in imminent danger, and they brought you into the thick of it by showing it happening in real time.  It was interactive beyond one or two dungeons and a slow spread.  You could see it coming. And when it happened, it happened everywhere over Eorzea, in the open and in the cities, it was constant. That, to me, felt more like an “end of the world” scenario than what we just experienced.

The only place in EW where I came anywhere close to this feeling was Vanaspati. The skies raining fire is not a new thing in XIV, they’ve been using it since 1.0, and to my brain that felt like an overused flex.  The slow spread of the Final Days “off camera” really made it feel a lot less urgent.  If its affects had started sooner in the course of the MSQ and actually -spread- to more areas as you progressed, especially to the main cities, or had streams of Blasphemies showing up in affected areas, I might have felt differently about it.

The last region and leg of the storyline didn’t invoke any feels for me.  Knowing you could undo what was being done to your comrades really took away from how impactful that could have been.  It felt like there were no stakes. “This is fine”. Endwalker could have benefited more from a named NPC or two dying to really drive things home.  Ahewann barely got there, but he was a minor character.

Is it fair to say my experience in 1.0 might have colored my reaction to EW?  Yes, it’s entirely possible.  On one hand, I feel like nothing will ever top that moment.  On the other hand, a part of me is glad that this didn’t cheapen that moment as I feared it would. “Oh, you thought Bahamut breaking free was bad? Hold my beer.”

It is, however, 100% a FInal Fantasy game and, as some have said, the most Final Fantasy game that ever Final Fantasy’d storywise.  I just wish I could have felt the feels that everyone else felt in the course of playing it.

Among the worst parts of EW, imo, were technical decisions.  It really felt like some of the indoor lighting in the new areas was a broad step -backwards- compared to the improvements they made over the course of HW, SB, and ShB. It’s little better in these new areas than it was in early ARR, and really makes characters look terrible.

And don’t even get me started on all the follow/stalk quests.  Who thought this - or having so many - was a good idea?  I don’t mind walking around with any of the NPCs, but the fucking follow/stalk quests need to go and whoever thought they were a good idea needs to rethink their career choices.   These were a huge drag and sticking point, and really took away from how enjoyable EW could have been.  The first one I could understand, but past that they didn’t need to keep doing it.

The maps of the new zones?  While pretty, most were a pain in the ass to navigate before flight, and certain areas prevented you from acquiring flight until you were later into MSQ.  TWICE. This was cute with Kholusia, but this was a pain in the ass this time dealing with two zones like this.  Slow me down with meaningful story events, don’t slow me down with bad geography design.

For positives, the trial boss designs definitely had Yoshitaka Amano all over them.  The designs for Hydaelyn and the Endsinger were INCREDIBLE, especially the latter.  Radz-At-Han has become my favorite of the new locations, which surprised me as I really thought I’d enjoy Sharlayan’s aesthetic more.  Elpis was also stunning, and I could spend oodles of time just hanging around there.  As for the Loporitts, I’d happily go anywhere the adorable little bunny people wanted me to go.

The ending? Pretty satisfying over all, and both looking forward to and dreading whatever comes next, in equal measure. They’re going to be hard pressed to top the last decade.

All in all, it’s a fair wrap-up of 11 years of continuous storyline.  Honestly, I’m content, I just still feel like it could have been a lot more than what was delivered.

Theory time. Cut for spoilers.

Going out on a limb now and going to say all three of the Unsundered Ascians are still alive, and that we’ll need them in EW to help “fix” things.

1. Elidibus is just trapped in the Crystal Tower in the First.  The tower wasn’t destroyed, which goes against the only known way of destroying an Ascian which, previously, required one to be trapped in a vessel and then the vessel gets destroyed. WoL still has access to the first, and ready access to a vessel of royal Allagan blood to access it.

2. Emet-Selch wasn’t trapped in a vessel before he was defeated. He aided the WoL later, and narrates the EW trailer. We haven’t seen the last of him.

3. Lahabrea… I mean come on, dude’s got his own raid series coming.  He was trapped in one of Nidhogg’s eyes, and yes, the eyes were later destroyed.  But in the intervening time between trapping and eye popping, we don’t know what happened to him, or if he was effectively destroyed later WITH the eyes.  Remember the eyes were fused to Estinien at one point.  Lahabrea could be hitching a ride in his body.