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Cephas
May 11, 2009

Humanity's real enemy is me!
Hya hya foowah!
am i the only one who was extremely surprised that when the WoL gathers all of the scions' souls in auracite and crosses back to the Source, we didn't get a HOME..... RIDING HOOOOOOMMMEEEEE...... scene?

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Cephas
May 11, 2009

Humanity's real enemy is me!
Hya hya foowah!
I finished 5.3 a few weeks ago and I am still thinking about how great the Shadowbringers music is. Graha Tia is such a good devoted boy and Eternal Wind somehow captures his efforts and sacrifices and rewards so well. The way it's used as a dramatic heroic guitar solo in the Shadowbringers theme is so cool, since both the main story's climax and the 5.3 finale have him and the Warrior of Light working together to save the day.

Also, I adore the idea that for all this insane multi-dimensional poo poo that involves a species of Q progenitor gods, a time-space traveling crystal ark, an underwater copy of a utopian city, and face-eating apocalypse angels--the ultimate payoff for all of it is that this bookish catboy, who loves stories about heroic deeds but had to give up on having any kind of free life, gets to finally just be your friend and go on adventures with you. It's the most Final Fantasy friendship-and-found-family thing ever and I love it :allears:

Cephas
May 11, 2009

Humanity's real enemy is me!
Hya hya foowah!

Cephas
May 11, 2009

Humanity's real enemy is me!
Hya hya foowah!
Nier 1 is rough around the edges but is such an inspired game overall, the remake(???) is going to be wonderful.

i think it's really fun that Square-Enix has two edgelords in residence in Taro and Ishikawa.

Cephas
May 11, 2009

Humanity's real enemy is me!
Hya hya foowah!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uoX5lTVLnM

:yokotaro:

Cephas
May 11, 2009

Humanity's real enemy is me!
Hya hya foowah!

SirSamVimes posted:

Emet making his wings out of masks is so god drat cool.

"I shall be raised up by the prayers of my fallen brethren!" makes it seem like, this isn't exactly Emet Selch's true real form or anything, but more of an ad hoc last ditch effort manifestation of his desperation to beat you. which is pretty rad

Cephas
May 11, 2009

Humanity's real enemy is me!
Hya hya foowah!
All I know about Endwalker is that against all odds, Ishikawa is going to somehow make me cry over Minfilia.

Cephas
May 11, 2009

Humanity's real enemy is me!
Hya hya foowah!
Zenos riding to the farthest corner of the universe and busting through a dimensional rift in the form of a giant space dragon god to be like "my friend! why do you take so long to finish off your prey? surely this challenge is but a mote beneath your heel!" is a totally awesome culmination of his character and a huge highlight for me. Like the fact that they could make Zenos giving you a peptalk be thematically perfect is so great--you can't lose to despair incarnate, because of all people Zenos has absolute faith in you and is filled with the hope of getting in one last rad fight. I definitely buy the idea that the teleporter reappears because Zenos wishes that you'll survive.

Your friends protecting you with their prayers and "On Wings of Hope" kicking in is also a really wonderful and exciting way to end the story. Very Earthbound ending.

Also have to agree with how utterly Gurren Lagann it got. You go up to space and use the mysterious cosmic force of emotions to defeat a very depressed person who throws planets at you, in a battlefield where emotions control reality, empowered to win by the hopes of the people you're protecting and the memories of people who have died. The ending fistfight with Zenos is also extremely the Gurren Lagann movie ending, just two exhausted superheroes who have used up all their power slugging it out at the edge of the universe. Which I think also gives it a Metal Gear Solid 4 connection too. The whole of Endwalker felt very much inspired by MGS4 to me, for better or worse. Emotionally exhausting, a ton of cutscenes to tie up as many character arcs as possible, and trying as overtly as possible to resolve the themes of the story.

I wasn't really expecting an expansion pack for an MMORPG to feel so timely, but outside of all of the obvious video game inspirations for its plot beats, Endwalker also felt very informed by the present moment. It's really hard not to read it as a piece of pandemic writing as well as "cli-fi". The timeliness of "private interests have been working on spacefaring vessels because the planet may become uninhabitable" is pretty evident.

I'm really interested to see what the team can do for FF16, which won't be bound by the challenges of designing a story around an MMORPG format.

Cephas fucked around with this message at 16:55 on Dec 16, 2021

Cephas
May 11, 2009

Humanity's real enemy is me!
Hya hya foowah!
I wasn't really crazy about the idea of Fandaniel being the ultimate perpetrator of an ancient gambit leading to the death of the cosmos--I kind of preferred when he was just an ascian who was lower on the totem pole and was genuinely suicidal and tired of existence. But Hermes and Meteion were compelling and interesting, and although I would have rather had a more established character be the opponent, it is absolutely a Final Fantasy series standard to introduce the true evil antagonist 80% into the story. So given that she was fitting into the FF trope structure, I really liked Meteion. Her design is cute and cool, and I like her birb form, and her Endsinger design is cool too.

I especially appreciate that, although she's an ancient immortal being, she's still coded as a sad child, and the Warrior of Light saves the day mostly by talking to her and reminding her of kindness and she gets convinced. Like, Meteion was alone and extremely in over her head and literally lived in an echo chamber with her own depressive thoughts and feelings. It's just nice that the story readily affords her mercy and compassion.

It's actually kind of funny to think about, but the WoL's broad-strokes characterization makes them probably the nicest Final Fantasy protagonist out there. They aren't brusque and rude like Cloud, Squall, or Lightning, and because Ishikawa has such a tendency toward writing sincere tearjerker dialogue options, almost every time the WoL does interact with a party member, they're extremely warm and supporting, if not a little cheeky.

Cephas
May 11, 2009

Humanity's real enemy is me!
Hya hya foowah!
I used to hear people say "you can't actually be faithful to Amano's character designs in a video game, it'd look crazy" and FF14 puts the lie to them. Amano's character designs loving rock and the FF14 characters who are based on his art style look amazing.

Cephas
May 11, 2009

Humanity's real enemy is me!
Hya hya foowah!

Raelle posted:

Yes, because the concern is that the animals wouldn't have been able to survive on their own past a couple of generations, based on their observations. Then further testing happened and the evaluation adjusted. The horror!

This is Meteion's argument for wiping out sentient life in the universe. Every sentient civilization she's met has had an ultimately self-destructive nature. They wouldn't have been able to survive on their own on the ultimate scale of the cosmos, based on her observations. So she wipes them from existence.

The Unsundered enjoy creating things, so they post-hoc argue that creation magic is good for the world even though there's evidence that they're being hypocrites and have to actively destroy living matter to create things. They take matter from the world and use it to fuel creation experiments to create things like flying sharks, and then if they can't find a good use for the flying shark they kill it. So now there are two evils being perpetrated--taking wantonly from the planet, and then extinguishing a living creature because it lacks utility. They might help the planet sometimes, but the core motivation of using creation magic is that they personally derive pleasure and meaning from it, and all other justifications and rules stem from that.

This is an explicit thread running through the expansion, from Zenos to the Garlean military to the Scion's winning motivations in the end: the world is difficult to live in, so people create their own ideas of reality and meaning regardless of whether they're actually good. The Unsundered created an idea of reality that placed them as "immortal and immeasurably wise stewards of the planet, whose creations do good for the world and who suffer from no worldly want by their blessed powers." Hermes doesn't buy into this worldview, because he considers Unsundered society to be constantly committing evils by irresponsibly creating living creatures without regard for the individual creatures' wellbeing once it has been created. So in a world where his peers all have a stable sense of meaning (even if it's built on a shaky foundation), Hermes feels isolated and uprooted, unable to find meaning in his life, because his civilization is built around the idea that "creating more content is morally good" and he sees a hole in that ideology.

the unsundered think they're so powerful and that the world bends to their power, but their addiction to creating more and more things of dubious merit ends up consuming the world in hellfire. when they find that their own power has made the world suck, the one thing they absolutely don't want to accept is that they are part of the world and not above it. this is all happening on an extremely long scale of time because they are mythical demigods, but in Elpis we see people making more and more baroque creatures for their own intellectual amusement, and in the recreation of Amaurot we see that their ideas started getting more and more corrupted and worthless. Meteion's effect on Unsundered society probably just accelerated the trajectory they were already on to its breaking point, because it's implied that that's what happened to the other societies she's catalogued.

creation magicks started as taking the life of a woolly mammoth and making a fur coat to stay warm, and eventually turned into deforesting the land to dig up minerals to use for semiconductors for server farms for NFTs.

Cephas
May 11, 2009

Humanity's real enemy is me!
Hya hya foowah!

Badger of Basra posted:

yes everything is about capitalism now because it's 2021

I do find the people pointing to turning the butterflies into clothes to be a bad, weird thing that the Ancients do that shows us how hosed up they are to be very bizarre. Like actual human beings do that all the time! The Warrior of Light does it all the time! If you have a lv 90 LTW are you a monster?

They decide not to release the firebreathing flying wolf not just because it doesn't fit their ideal of what "good" is, but also because it would rampage across the planet killing countless other animals! If the issue is that they should not be creating life because they may have to end that same life if it turns out to be harmful to the environment or something, like, how do you feel about eating meat?

this is a game that literally has a character say "Let us put an end to it. To this 'paradise' built on the bones of the poor."

and yes, i'm literally saying that Hermes is the greek god equivalent of a person realizing they're a vegan in a world of omnivores. that's how he feels. I am not casting judgment on the Warrior of Light for getting all his crafting jobs to 90, but I am saying that Hermes absolutely would cast judgment. Or if not judgment, he would feel unease and alienation. It's not about whether it's good or not, but that the Ancients believed they were doing good, but they reached a point where it was unsustainable and instead of changing themselves, they wanted to cling to their comfortable past no matter how much it would cost. Venat viewed this as a path that could not lead to continued existence and sundered their souls and put them squarely in a position where they had to consciously engage with earthly suffering. She argues that her actions increased the net suffering of the world, but that it was the only path forward because the Ancients would otherwise self-destruct by continually sacrificing more and more of its population to keep being able to exist as beings superior to the whims of nature.

Cephas fucked around with this message at 02:06 on Dec 17, 2021

Cephas
May 11, 2009

Humanity's real enemy is me!
Hya hya foowah!

PoorWeather posted:

I think it's obvious that Ancient society had an element of conceit to it that we're intended to be a little uncomfortable about and explicitly understand as having led them to a kinda self-destructive position after the Final Days (in Amaurot's area text, the leadup to the Sundering is framed as being a result of their 'sins', which feels like a metatextual judgement), but I think the writers did a pretty bad job of conveying the present day societies as being more mature or empathetic by any metric, if that was their intent. Along with disease and old age now being around, the present-day setting has invented class-divides and poverty, inter-"human" racism, violent crime, and warfare. Outside of Gridania, where respect for nature is enforced violently, it also doesn't seem to have changed at all in its relationship to the natural world. People still treat animals as a natural resource to make stuff with, they still breed animals into bizarre caricatures of their natural forms to serve some need, multiple societies have come and gone which have viewed non-human sentience as basically worthless; you spend half of ARR just strolling into the land of another species and just indiscriminately murdering them, something which Merlwyb admits at the time is naked imperialist violence but just tells you to suck it up, her people's lives and needs matter more.

And the people who all this stuff is done on behalf of, the powerful are wealthy, are still just as insulted from all this - the only difference is that they use other people instead of special magic powers. Nature is still there to serve them, it's just that their tools in forcing that service are more awkward-- And often, more violent.

By any metric except for the vague hopeful positivity that EW wants to assign specifically to recognizably "normal" humans and society, Venat's actions made a whole bunch of poo poo worse, and didn't actually fix anything. This is where to justify them, you have to dive into setting fluff like Dynamis instead; the people of the Seventh Astral Era weren't more capable of defeating Meteion because they'd learned to me more empathetic, they were more capable because having shittier bodies gave them more of the special space juice. As a result, the message the writers were trying to send (if it was what they were trying to send, since EW's writing is kinda muddled) just didn't land for me. I was not convinced by what was shown to me that the greater power and lifespans of the Amaurotines made them fundamentally any worse in attitude to the contemporary societies we see, and that left the script's special judgement of them feeling strange and uncomfortable.

Regarding the Sundering, I've said this repeatedly, but I'll reiterate since there's still a drip of new people finishing and coming in: I think the critical reason it felt really weird to me was that it felt super different from the normal attitude FFXIV has to "fixing" societies. Like, take the quote about Eulmore you made at the start of your post: Yes, Eulmore sucked, and needed to change. But you don't spend the postgame patches of ShB violently tearing it down and trying to hurt or change its inhabitants so that they could never make another society like it again. Instead you pass a bit of judgement, but mostly recognize that everyone in the situation was to some extent a victim of circumstance, and try to help everyone be better. The same thing happens in EW with the Garlemald act.

The Sundering is the only time where an act of mass indiscriminate violence to fix a problem is portrayed as a good and necessary thing. In FFXIV, you fight armies, but you don't murder whole societies.

I agree that the writing is a little clunky at tying everything together coherently, but I think the internal logic is basically coherent.

The Ancients aren't bad people. Every interaction we have with them in Elpis shows them to be kind and wise and accommodating. They have a respect for life and for death, and consider stewardship of the planet to be the purpose of society. By all accounts, they are Edenic beings. The fact that they dissolve butterflies to make clothes or eradicate lifeforms of their own creation without a second thought is evidence that while the Ancients themselves are great beings, their world, in itself, is not fundamentally different from the Sundered world. It's still a world of hunger and violence and death--it's just that the Ancients themselves are superior to it. I think the whole deal with the "aetheric density" and dynamis stuff is that, because they are so powerful, they are more insulated from having to struggle with their emotions. The visual metaphor that the story uses is that during the Final Days, humans literally get eaten alive by their negative emotions and turn into monsters, but the Ancients are so powerful that they themselves are unaffected by their own darkness; like water off a duck's back, their inner darkness sluices off of them and becomes an outside force (which then devours them). Because they are so gifted and blessed, they are generally incapable of reckoning with their own inner darkness. There are some exceptions, like Hermes and Venat and presumably Azem, who seem to varying degrees to be able to touch that inner darkness, but their society as a whole does not seem like it's designed to handle it.

I feel like, while Endwalker has a lot of Eden and Olympus imagery, its metaphysics gets very Buddhist in its focus on rebirth and the relationship between the Ancients and modern humans. The Ancients remind me of the Devas in Buddhist cosmology--they're powerful and beautiful and live an existence of plenty, and they're riding that wave of good karma, but when the wave breaks they find themselves drowning once more in a turbulent sea. Because they lived an existence filled with joy, they are especially unprepared for when they inevitably face life's hardships. The idea in Buddhism is that while the Devas live lives full of harmony and splendor and goodness, and it's a blessing to be born as one, they ultimately have a harder time escaping samsara because their lives are so comfortable that they never feel the need to learn the dharma. So humans, whose lives incur some unavoidable amount of suffering, are capable of developing a clearer vision of how to live in the world and how to escape samsara.

I think that's the basic parallel structure going on with the Ancients vs. the Sundered humans. Because Ancients "have wings to bear them up to heaven instead of having to walk," as Venat puts it, they are less prepared to answer Meteion's challenge as to the purpose of existing, because they've never had to engage with the question in a moment of true crisis, and as such are unprepared when the time of judgment comes.

I think that if I'm reading the story correctly, the logic is this. Dynamis is emotional energy. Being more susceptible to dynamis means having to process emotions more deeply in order to survive (it is literally a matter of survival that you be able to process your feelings, as we see that despair can literally destroy your soul; or else leads to a dead end). Because sundered humans are by nature less powerful and insulated from loss, they have to process their emotions--positive and negative alike--more deeply in order to keep living. Therefore, they are better able to deal with grief and the fragility and impermanence of the things they care about. And that gives them a deeper capacity for existential hope, which is the only viable solution to Meteion's challenge of existential despair.

Life after the sundering is unquestionably worse, in basically every single quantifiable way. Any shortcomings the Ancients had are reflected and multiplied in the current world. I think the primary reason Venat does the Sundering is because she actively learned and understood what Hermes and Meteion were on about, and is the only person in the world who knows about it. When she sees the Ancients praying to Zodiark to return them to the old days of bliss, she says (paraphrasing) "We were spared suffering for a while, but it always existed there with us. Every paradise has its shadow. Suffering has finally caught up to us, and we can't return to living as we once had. We have to find a new way forward." But the Ancients praying to Zodiark won't have what she's saying. I think the idea is that Etheirys would become like another one of the Dead Ends if they followed the path of Zodiark. You can imagine the ways in which their ironic demise could play out: "One star was filled with powerful people who did not age or suffer. They could create grand and miraculous designs and bring them into existence. Yet eventually the source of their power failed them, and their utopia crumbled away. In one last desperate act of creation they designed a powerful savior who could shield them from catastrophe. Yet to fuel their savior, they needed to sacrifice many lives. Eventually, there were no more lives to sacrifice, and the end they so long delayed devoured what few of them remained." I think Venat basically sees the creation of Zodiark as a total death spiral that has to be stopped because Zodiark's mission, which is "restore existence to the way it once was," is fundamentally incapable of overcoming the force of the Endsinger, which is "everything ends."

So I think the extended metaphor of aether vs. dynamis is that worldly power (aether) is fundamentally incapable transforming darkness and despair (dynamis) into hope. Meteion is capable of killing the WoL and the Scions the very first moment they encounter her on the Ragnarok, if it's just a matter of physical power, because all she has to do is suffocate them and their biological functions will terminate. It's only their dynamis that is able to challenge her. That's why they have to "sacrifice themselves" and lose their corporeal forms in Ultima Thule. It's specifically their dynamis, not their aether, that opens the path to Meteion--their emotional power, not their physical power. Hydaelyn very specifically points out that it's the collective Scions, not just the WoL, who have her approval to oppose Meteion. Because they've each found a reason to continue living in the face of life's challenges, each Scion has enough emotional strength to oppose Meteion's despair.

I think it's the collective friendship and resilience to be there for one another, come what may, and also the Warrior of Light's compassion toward Meteion, that defeat the Endsinger. I think the Endsinger was basically defeated the moment the WoL shows Meteion the field of flowers. The Scions won the battle of dynamis. That's why Zenos busts in to the Endsinger's scene and is like "this little punk is just your prey, right?"--because at that point, the Scions have already conquered despair.

Cephas
May 11, 2009

Humanity's real enemy is me!
Hya hya foowah!

Valentin posted:

Y'know, this is a pretty good point, and I forgot about that yshtola & urianger scene, which is probably one of the best in shadowbringers for selling the Scions as people with relationships to each other and not just you. feels like she could've had more to say about the existentialism discourse in EW than they write for the character.

OTOH I'm really glad they started doubling up on heroic sacrifices, because I felt like those quests were starting to drag a bit much and I really did not want to have to go through 2 extra areas and extinct cultures.

Does her sister make any appearance whatsoever in Endwalker? Like in a side quest somewhere? It's pretty funny that Urianger gets a whole section where he meets and has a tearful reunion with Moenbryda's parents, and a significant segment of the story is about Alphinaud & Alisaie reconnecting with their father, but Y'shtola doesn't even say hi to her sister.

Cephas
May 11, 2009

Humanity's real enemy is me!
Hya hya foowah!

Waffleman_ posted:

How do you expect me to write you, sister, I am blind :colbert:

Anyway, time to go peruse the Great Gubal Library for a new book.

Cephas
May 11, 2009

Humanity's real enemy is me!
Hya hya foowah!
I have to believe that Hydaelyn dropkicked Zodiark so hard she caused the Sundering. Therefore, that cutscene can't be real.

Cephas
May 11, 2009

Humanity's real enemy is me!
Hya hya foowah!

Begemot posted:

It was a delaying tactic, with the hope that the people would eventually figure out a way to defeat Meteion. Since we happened to figure out way to travel to the edge of the universe, there was no longer a need to wait!

Really, the part where you take the only spaceship capable of going to the moon and fly it to the edge of the universe instead is the biggest logic leap in the game. But hey you're in the JRPG zone at that point, there's no time for arguing, you gotta go confront the personification of an abstract concept! There's a much more boring story where we get a journey across the universe as a whole 'nother expansion, fighting Meteion's Four Galactic Kings and exploring dead worlds and space anomalies like you're on the starship Enterprise. Much better to just wrap it up neat and tidy in this expac.

I mean, we go from "starship built out of ancient advanced super metals" to "starship whose engine is the crystallized hope of the mother goddess and who burns the world's deities for fuel"

Cephas
May 11, 2009

Humanity's real enemy is me!
Hya hya foowah!

Ironslave posted:

So I was responding to this and you kept editing it as I did and I don't care to keep revising it. I did misremember the loporrit line, but "be content with what you have" isn't much better as far as lines that have negative ways to read them in the context. Keep in mind I know what it's trying to say--or, at least, don't disagree with most of what you're putting forth--but that I'm talking about why people would see it differently.

Suffering is mentioned as something that made them stronger. In the context of what they mean they clearly refer to overcoming the challenges before them, which is the way many people cope with and work to get past things that have happened and are happening to them, to be motivated, to come together, to work past something and learn from it, but that mentality is not one people are going to agree on the value of. Especially if it doesn't meaningfully and clearly differentiate. Estinien overcome his hatred, but how many people died along the way or failed their own tests of pain? It's not surprising some people look at a scene where everyone is talking about the things they overcame in a discussion on the pains of the human condition and find it lacking when it seems to settle on the idea that suffering can improve you if you meet it and overcome it, dissatisfied or in open rebellion with that premise having either known others who didn't manage it, didn't manage it themselves, didn't find the suffering before them capable of being surmounted, or who for one reason or another did not have the support network they dramatically needed in a time of crisis.

"Make lemons from lemonade" is an old aphorism, one that efficiently encapsulates a lot of what the game is trying to say, but is also one many people disagree with for reasons which include humanism, their own experiences, or simply seeing it used as an accusation or excuse for why they or others are being made to deal with what they deal with.

idk, the story isn't really about how suffering makes you strong enough to pick yourself up by your bootstraps. like half the plot of endwalker is people crying and being sad over things they lost. poo poo sucks. i think what the story gets at is that instead of wishing those things hadn't been lost--which is impossible in the story, as it's impossible in real life--the characters found things outside of their loss to take meaning in. that's why the planet itself is such an important and precious thing in the story--because it's the physical center of your ability to experience wonder and mystery and connection.

like the "strength" that graha finds is the strength to still want to live in the world after years and years of being worldweary. meteion isn't like "you're right, being out here alone has made me tougher," you convince her that life has hope by reminding her of the elpis flowers, which symbolized the ephemeral natural beauty she once found joy in as well as the love she bore for her dearest friend. like it's not about becoming more macho from suffering, it's about finding the strength to keep going even after life robs you of the things you hold dear.

Cephas
May 11, 2009

Humanity's real enemy is me!
Hya hya foowah!

Pigbuster posted:

He says that creatures created spontaneously via magic don't have souls, no matter how much they resemble a normal lifeform, which to me implicates everything made out of thin air with creation magic, and that it's only after they spend time propagating and proving they can exist upon the surface that they gain souls. Hermes emphasizes that it's the star that gives true life to the creations, not mankind. He isn't even willing to explicitly say if Meteion has a soul or not, which implies it takes more than merely making a physically viable creature and boom instantly it has a soul.

I feel it's important to Hermes' character that he cares so much about soulless creations - that his compassion is somewhat irrational. The creature may show pain but if it's objectively true that no soul is experiencing that pain then what makes it different from a clay model of a creature in pain? It's a way more interesting philosophical question than if the amaroutines were killing off thinking, feeling, soul-infused beings willy-nilly.

FFXIV has an extensive in-game connection to Nier: Automata. In literary analysis, I think you could argue something like "if this sci-fi novel makes an allusion to Hamlet, then in some ways the text and ideas of Hamlet can also be made to apply to the sci-fi novel on a thematic and philosophical level." FFXIV is weird because MMORPGs with crosspromotions are a new beast in the world of storytelling. But I think that, of all the cross-promotion content that's ever been put in the game, the Nier Automata stuff is the most centrally enshrined. Like, it's a core pillar of the Alliance Raids, so it's pretty deeply integrated content compared to a butterfingers mount or even the dragon quest side content (although I think you could absolutely still talk about those critically).

I think the idea of Hermes' empathy for creatures that are stated in-universe to "lack souls" becomes even more interesting when you consider that the game has a significant link to Nier Automata. Nier's entire story is wrapped around the idea that "imitation" beings are fundamentally indistinguishable from "real" beings.

Cephas
May 11, 2009

Humanity's real enemy is me!
Hya hya foowah!
I think it'd be really neat if Her Inflorescence somehow tied into the Endsinger.

When Meteion first mentioned "a race of robots that wiped out its opposition and then found itself wondering what was their purpose in living" I was like oh poo poo, are they putting nier into the main story?

Cephas
May 11, 2009

Humanity's real enemy is me!
Hya hya foowah!
At this point I legit just want Scholar to become a Support Summoner. Like, make Seraph the equivalent of having Carbuncle out, and rotate between Summon Moggle Mog, Summon Bismarck and Summon Lakshmi as the equivalents of Ifrit/Titan/Garuda. Instead of Summon Bahamut/Phoenix it can be Summon Titania/Summon Alexander.

it'd be weird as hell to balance, but i always liked the support summons in FF games just as much as the offense ones

Cephas
May 11, 2009

Humanity's real enemy is me!
Hya hya foowah!
I freakin love the band version of Flow and can't wait for squeenix to release an official version of it. It's bonkers how good the vocal songs in Endwalker are. The "On wings of hope you rise up through the night" motif is seriously just so excellent, it's like peak Final Fantasy in the best way possible.

Also I'm probably very late to the party on this, but I was rewatching the cinematic for Answers and realized that A Realm Reborn begins with the Scions in prayer, and Endwalker ends with them in prayer (4:30)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39j5v8jlndM

Cephas
May 11, 2009

Humanity's real enemy is me!
Hya hya foowah!

Venuz Patrol posted:

i think the one change you need to make the sorrows of werlyt insanely good instead of severely mediocre is to have the last kid survive in the platinum weapon and help with the reconstruction as a 30 foot tall mecha monster that's extremely good at building houses and carting materials. i think that would have been cool

now I want a lizard orphan newtype with the Echo who says things like "magitek is just a tool, it's how you use it that makes it good or bad!" while using a WEAPON's thrusters to turn the Magna Glacies into a giant hotsprings

Cephas
May 11, 2009

Humanity's real enemy is me!
Hya hya foowah!
I really was expecting we'd see the apocalypse falling on Ishgard and Ul'Dah and La Noscea and the Twelveswood and stuff firsthand. The cutscenes imply that is happening, but we just get Raz and a little instanced sequence at Garlemald. And then a lot of time is spent at Sharlayan where everyone is very rational and hopeful bc they literally have a humankind-saving spaceship of hope, so you get an extended sequence where the apocalypse is effectively not happening on screen for several hours.

Like, the one thing I was really expecting--that I honestly thought would be guaranteed to make it in--was a Final Days dungeon styled like Heroes' Gauntlet, where we're teleporting around to different zones of Eorzea as they're burning up, saving people and defeating abominations while job NPCs like Hamon Holyfist or Curious Gorge or whoever are helping us protect familiar NPCs.

Cephas
May 11, 2009

Humanity's real enemy is me!
Hya hya foowah!

Cythereal posted:

In my eyes, real strength is to be found when you put down your weapon and extend your hand, and that that is the highest and best state of the Warrior of Light and what being an adventurer means: when you stop fighting and start talking or just rolling up your sleeves to pitch in with whatever problems people have.

That is what I wish we had the option to at least express to Zenos, that I - and my concept of the WoL - will never have a shred of respect for him as long as he thinks strength involves a weapon in hand.

I mean, for better or worse, FFXIV is a game that literally lets you level up as a fighter or level up as a crafter/gatherer, but you can't complete the storyline as a Carpenter or a Botanist. Even when fighting has a partially metaphorical/symbolic quality to it, like against Primals or Sineaters (which are effectively Ideas made physical, rather than people or animals), there's a genuine Fighting Can Be Good throughline. Either "fighting as dialectic against false ideologies" like with the Endsinger, or "fighting as literally going to war against oppressors" like in Stormblood.

i feel like the Warrior of Light has no real leg to stand on telling Zenos "actually, fighting is bad and I don't like it and no good can come from it." Just from the sheer reality of the game being a fantasy superhero war story where 95% of the content involves fighting people.

Cephas
May 11, 2009

Humanity's real enemy is me!
Hya hya foowah!
meeting azem while they're wearing a head-to-toe frog or chicken joke glamour would be amazing and also incredibly thematic

Cephas
May 11, 2009

Humanity's real enemy is me!
Hya hya foowah!
Dynamis is spiral energy from Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann

my untested hunch is that you can copy the discourse in gurren lagann about spiral energy and ctrl+replace it with "dynamis" and it will probably be 99.9% accurate, down to any discussions about beastmen and cosmic space entities fueled solely by despair

Cephas
May 11, 2009

Humanity's real enemy is me!
Hya hya foowah!
I'd be down for scouting to be a kind of green mage/geomancer. It could wield a bell-mace.

Cephas
May 11, 2009

Humanity's real enemy is me!
Hya hya foowah!
Here's some Y'shtola headcanon if you feel like she needs more characterization:

Her room is a mess
She late-night vents to Urianger so often on linkpearl that he sometimes doesn't answer, and she has to call Thancred or Graha Tia (Krile never picks up)
She dies trying to solo FATES more often than any other Scion
She's lost some really important loot rolls because her inventory was full
She is really into Lord of Verminion
Has spent real life money on pots of Jet Black Ink

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Cephas
May 11, 2009

Humanity's real enemy is me!
Hya hya foowah!
FFXI's art had such good vibes :allears: I should give the weird new single-player-viable incarnation a shot one of these days. Most of the game mechanics went over my head as a 12 year old.

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