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I will say that the one thing that makes killing our silent protagonist even faintly plausible is that that literally happens in one of the games that's clearly a visual inspiration for at least part of Endwalker. You just need the Scions to, uh, find a WoL dummy somewhere (the millennial fair's nearest equivalent is the Gold Saucer so...make Godbert make one?) and do some sick time-traveling to bring us back to life. 3 hour long RP duty, v simple.
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Nov 21, 2021 00:11
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Pigbuster posted:The WoL goes to kick a blitzball and it blows up, sending their severed head flying into Yshtola's arms. when you think about it, what is hydaelyn or zodiark but a dream of the fayth, in many ways.
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Nov 21, 2021 00:19
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SyntheticPolygon posted:Maybe i'm just cynical but everything revealed about Azem makes him seem like less a fully realised character and more just a function to show that the WoL's past self was a solid dude and had the right of things, and it just makes that aspect feel boring and contrived. I'd read it in the other direction, sort of. Azem isn't good to boost the WoL's cred, Azem has to be blandly good because that's one of the only things that's universally true about the WoL as a player character. If Azem picked a side either way on the Zodiark stuff people would probably feel weird about if that means anything for their character. Instead, I think the Azem reveal serves to: 1) make real, in genre fashion, the WoL's role as heir to Amaurot (we're the one who remembers it, etc., making the WoL literally a sundered member of the convocation just confirms that and puts it in a nice little bow); 2) make it feel less bad that we systematically kill off everyone *else* who remembers Amaurot (not that defeating Emet-Selch or Elidibus is something that needs justifying, but it softens the blow of the idea that we're the villains to them. If anything, the WoL actually remembers Amaurot better than Elidibus, by the end); 3) give us an Amaurotine who isn't weirdly chill about mass death and destruction, which most of the others are and which is kind of alienating; and 4) marry major gameplay conceits like the roulette and duty finder thematically with the narrative. The stuff people find off-putting or lame follows on, I think, from trying to implement the above in-fiction: Azem being blandly good is a function of the reveal needing to be something the whole playerbase won't feel too weird about, while Azem being a renegade removed from the Ascian history books, so to speak, by the convocation explains why no other Ascian has recognized us yet or cares about us the way Mitron pursues Gaia. e: really I think Azem also does a lot to sort of patch up stuff that reads as weird about Amaurot. With just what we see from Emet and Elidibus, Amaurot can feel a little monstrously utilitarian and cruelly above-it-all. But if it can produce someone like Azem, i.e. someone who in all important respects ("every life counts" and "doing good is important and worthwhile") matches what the story says is true about the WoL, it clearly can't be that hosed up. Valentin fucked around with this message at 02:22 on Nov 21, 2021 |
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Nov 21, 2021 02:01
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Endorph posted:azem exists because emet selch is hot and sexy and the moral of shadowbringers is how much you can and should kiss hot evil bad guys, so azem exists to make your doomed romance with emet selch more tragic as its happened once before. tragic for him maybe, not the player's business that the stalker you can constantly tell to gently caress off has a fatal flaw of "sabotages own perfectly good relationship with heroic morons over politics." the hot evil bad guys should try not switching into a second bigger and more evil form to kill you if they're so sad about it. anyways as it stands I actually do think Azem has very little to do writing-wise with Emet-Selch and a lot more to do with Elidibus. That goes out the window if the internet's favorite sexy skunk is back for endwalker in any big way tho
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Nov 21, 2021 02:30
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Endorph posted:no, that's the hottest part. im sorry you dont understand art. they ought to do the franchise-approved hot tragic nemesis thing and come fight shirtless in your mind palace after you beat up their five-story-tall eldritch creature phase. if they wanna spend their final moments on-screen yelling about dead cultures instead of focusing on their intensely intimate mental bond with the protagonist that's their business.
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Nov 21, 2021 02:49
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Senator Drinksalot posted:Elidibus is probably the most tragic character of all. elidibus failing to recognize you as azem or even any kind of sundered amaurotine, then realizing mid-fight that emet-selch betrayed him but being unable to understand why, is a great moment, takes all of two seconds each time, and is both sadder and more interesting than anything the text has done with azem and emet-selch. Valentin fucked around with this message at 07:21 on Nov 21, 2021 |
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Nov 21, 2021 07:17
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Gearhead posted:I also feel like the parallels I see between Elidibus and Alphinaud are not an accident. yeah, not even a little accidental https://twitter.com/zucchini_loaf/status/1457450069171400705 elidibus is the youngest of the convocation, but also their putative leader (kind of? it's not super clear), lead diplomat, mediator, and the heart of zodiark. he's a bright, idealistic young man who doesn't have the worldly experience of the rest of the convocation, looks up to azem the wandering hero, and leans on book smarts to try to keep up with his duties. the convocation both values his presence and is worried about him because he's taking on so much responsibility. when all seems lost he tries to save everything with a big speech. and then he completely beefs it and goes insane, rip. e: it's why I think alphinaud dying or somehow sacrificing himself for the team isn't likely no matter how hard they tease it, on top of the fact that we just finished the "self-sacrifice is stupid" expansion: elidibus literally already did it and then we killed him. no point in doing it twice. Valentin fucked around with this message at 07:53 on Nov 21, 2021 |
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Nov 21, 2021 07:26
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Gearhead posted:EDIT: He was basically Alphinaud. Brilliant ahead of his years, not as wise as he was intelligent, but in a position of authority in a time of crisis where others really couldn't talk him out of what turned out to be a horrible plan. Where Alphinaud survived an assassination attempt and realized you can't just build a unified kingdom in a summer in Eorzea, Elidibus made a god to save the whole world. It's all about the magnitude of the fuckup and the fallout of it. yeah in addition to this and the points I made on the last page, he's very explicitly Alphinaud based on this interview. Yoshi-P posted:[W]e tried to make Elidibus easier to understand as a character by projecting him onto a particular someone who supports the Warrior of Light. I'll leave it up to everyone's imagination as to who we projected Elidibus on, though. Between the dialogue parallels, the the similar set-up, and Yoshi-P all but saying it*, it seems pretty clear that at least one aspect of what's going on with Elidibus is that he's Bad End Alphinaud. *though I find this wording kind of unclear; if you're projecting Elidibus on to someone the text literally does that with the Exarch, but that doesn't require imagination from the players, and also the Exarch already has Emet as a foil. Seems to make more sense that things got slightly muddled in translation in the interview and Elidibus is kind of a projection of someone else, but that means flipping the directionality from what they explicitly have Yoshida saying in the article. e: which means he's also unukalhai because unukalhai is also alphinaud (well and also the side stuff is pretty clear that elidibus knows unukalhai is a bit of a parallel to him). as pointed out below this means he's also louisoix, so louisoix is also alphinaud. it's alphinauds all the way down. Gearhead posted:All indications are that the IDEA of Zodiark was his plan, even if the actual design work was farmed out to Lahabrea. He deliberately gave himself up to be Zodiark's heart because only a young idealist could hold the idea of an all-saving God of Heroism in their mind to create it. I don't know that this is entirely true though? at the very least we know Loghrif was the actual first Heart of Zodiark choice, though that goes almost completely unexplained. Valentin fucked around with this message at 08:01 on Nov 21, 2021 |
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Nov 21, 2021 07:47
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Mordiceius posted:So here’s what I’m wondering - do you all think the ending of Endwalker be seen as controversial by a substantial number of players? even irrespective of what happens in the plot broadly, there are so many people online who think character X has to die while character Y can absolutely not die, as a matter of arcs and narrative structure, that at least some of them have to end up disappointed when zenos not only doesn't die but lives forever as the new word of the mother. speaking of hydaelyn: what exactly do the scions think of hydaelyn prior to 5.0? they're some of the only ones to call her the mothercrystal, and iirc they accord importance to the echo, which they (like most people who have any contact with it) think of as hydaelyn's blessing or gift. But is she a god? the spirit of the planet? what do people think it means to be "hydaelyn's champion" before we learn she's basically a very very big primal? I can't tell if I've forgotten all this or it's just never quite conveyed. Religion in general feels so sort of intentionally vague in FFXIV, save that the Garleans are literally militant atheists.
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Nov 30, 2021 18:51
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i just finished and i have to be honest for me that hosed extremely hard. i'm almost a little embarrassed how well it worked for me. i'm perfectly fine with it going full shonen, I'm ludicrously willing to consider "isn't playing games...super dope" a perfectly satisfactory emotional note to end on, and it fit the mental image i had of my warrior of light. being a paladin was absolutely the correct decision, even if the paladin af gave my character canned hams for fists. really an expansion that rewarded playing the wol to type, from the endsinger responding specifically to the tank limit break to the fistfight throwdown at the end. if that wasn't you, or you didn't want an expansion-long victory lap, if you didn't enjoy the game speaking directly to the player through zenos, if you didn't care for zenos and/or emet selch, i feel like it probably didn't work for you. the game stacks shadowbringers and stormblood's weaknesses and crams in 4 expansion's worth of end zones from garlemald on, so you also have to like that pace. but man all the moments landed for me to a degree that genuinely sort of is truly embarrassing. please tell me there's been discussion of estinien sending aymeric the elephant suit. anyways back to read from the beginning of the leaks. i have no idea what The Screenshot is for this expansion but I know what moment felt correct to me: agreeing that it would in fact be dope to have a dragon ball z fight here at the end of the universe.  e: i'm unironically excited for new game+ so i can fight zenos on different classes, which i cannot believe. give me zenos ex like memoria misera got one. Valentin fucked around with this message at 06:59 on Dec 16, 2021 |
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Dec 16, 2021 06:56
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reading through some of the early reactions, i fully get why some people don't think it would be appropriate for their WoL to fight zenos or don't believe they would find it fun, but I think it's interesting to note that the game itself pushes us this way. Not just in like "oh the WoL eats primals for breakfast" type dialogue, but in the fact that basically anytime anyone is depicted as joyous in FFXIV, they're fighting. like, there's fairly few characters in the game who are ever depicted on screen just plain having a good time (to me it feels like basically a running joke that thancred is by informed reputation the most "i'm just here to have a good time" of the scions and is pretty much never shown having a good time until you get to the scene at the last stand, pretty much), and not just in a "ah, this is nice" way, but in a "gently caress yes I am fully enjoying myself" type way. off the top of my head the list aside from zenos is like: ravana (REJOICE IN THE GLORY OF COMBAT); susano (WILD AND PURE AND FOREVER FREE); and alisaie (leaping off the mor dhona battlements to go fight). iirc, the WoL is even depicted, no choice, as being very excited to fight raubahn in the grand melee and lyse atop the rhalgr statue (and obviously she's hype too), and there's very few moments where the WoL is actively excited about anything. there's other happiness, sure, there's teary relief at someone's survival and there's convivial joking and moments of contentment, but sheer reckless joy and abandon in FFXIV in the MSQ occurs pretty much always and only through combat (I'm probably forgetting something huge but that's half the fun of loreposting; there's probably more joy in the hand/land quests but those aren't MSQ). it always made sense to me the WoL must on some level find combat enjoyable when it's the only thing in FFXIV anyone seems to truly enjoy. no one in the scions is ever talking about the epic highs and lows of high school football or something. Valentin fucked around with this message at 13:05 on Dec 16, 2021 |
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Dec 16, 2021 12:48
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can't say I see the point in going very deep on whether the residents of the Fantasy Garden of Eden had appropriately ethical standards on life and its creation when the point of the garden of eden is that it's loving gone and there's nothing you can do about it. Did Amaurot have good housing policies? Who loving cares; it's gone and there is no way to bring it back. Endwalker drives this point further home by making it clear both implicitly and explicitly that further sacrifices to Zodiark would not have addressed the root cause of the Final Days and could at best merely kick the can down the road. You cannot reclaim a perfect paradise (for one thing, any lost paradise is self-evidently imperfect by nature of its own dissolution). Meteion drops Endwalker's thesis on life, inasmuch as it has one, in the post-90 trial scene: quote:What they live for, what gives their lives meaning...there was never a single answer. You gather pieces of happiness, precious and fragile, only to lose them. Then start again. On and on it goes, until death takes you into it's gentle embrace. Reading the allegory of Amaurot in these terms, it becomes much more understandable: like any other happiness, it was precious and fragile, and cannot be remade once lost. There is nothing to do but start again. Hythlodaeus gets this, and he's been at peace with everything pretty much since day one, it seems like. Venat gets it, and she sunders mankind explicitly so they will have to work through the grief and disaster of the fall of Amaurot rather than attempting to blindly reconstruct it. Emet-Selch, Hermes, and the Meteia (and Nidhogg, and pre-Final Steps Estinien, and Legate Quintus, and that one woman who summons Lakshmi to bring back her dead daughter, and and and), on the other hand, all have obvious and severe issues processing grief, which is why we have to kick their asses (which, pretty explicitly in FFXIV's narrative, is many times basically an aggressive therapeutic intervention, rather than literal violence). Trying to read it on any literal level and do a moral reckoning of in-universe actions is a mug's game and bound to lead to circular discussion, because it's an allegorical exploration of life after loss in an already high-concept fantasy world. The dead giveaway for this should be the fact that the finale takes place in the literal land of emotion where feeling things hard enough makes them real.
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Dec 17, 2021 04:34
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PoorWeather posted:And in the same expac, in spite of their mass murders, we go out of our way to help the Garleans overcome their national trauma constructively, with the story being very clear about how the solution is not to just go and murder them. Or to whack them with a magic stick that turns them into 14 1/14th sized Garleans who have lost their original identities in order to make sure they're never powerful enough to do Empire again. I mean the story is also pretty clear that to the extent you're helping "the garleans" you're helping like, at most a traumatized and fully powerless 5% of what was once their population. the whole point of that sequence is that the garleans are incapable of mounting any effective resistance to anyone (a point alphinaud brings up again at the very end of the game when he says he and alisaie are going there to help protect them from political meddling), and you just being there is basically causing them to kill themselves out of fear. the fear of the 1st legion sequence isn't that they might kill a bunch of your friends (even the twins are literally never in real danger, thancred is right there the whole time), it's that if you get it wrong you're going to have to kill them in self defense, and it's not gonna be hard but it's gonna feel awful. if we got to garlemald and they were planning to sacrifice half the planet to restore the capital to the way it was, it seems fair to say the story's consistent belief in the necessity of justified intervention would likely have won out over its belief that there isn't much point in revenge-killing traumatized people. meanwhile, both the Amaurotines attempting to further sacrifice to Zodiark and the Ascians are real, active threats to everyone. Emet-Selch basically tells you if you die he's gonna genocide the First on his way to finishing the rejoinings. not sure a constructive solution existed there. Valentin fucked around with this message at 05:14 on Dec 17, 2021 |
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Dec 17, 2021 04:59
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ImpAtom posted:This is not an unintentional parallel with the Ascians who could not be talked down and who would not back down and whose victory involved the complete and utter destruction of everyone else. If it was remotely possible to help the Ascians we would! This is specifically something they make a point of! rewatching ShB cutscenes in the runup to endwalker, I realized that something neat is that Urianger is the only member of the Scions who is still, literally moments before taking a dark magic crystal to the gut, trying to talk Emet-Selch into seeing their common cause at the end. louisoix has one true living disciple and it's no one named leveilleur. 
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Dec 17, 2021 05:07
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e: goddammit quote is not edit. anyways congrats to urianger for getting his "I'm a cool and deep character" expansion, and hoping that despite the Scions disbanding, yshtola may one day be allowed to have an arc. The disparity in focus among the Scions is always very interesting to me, and I'm really curious what prompted them to go "okay, it's urianger's time now" (aside from him having increased fan appreciation after he Got Hot in the first.) Valentin fucked around with this message at 05:12 on Dec 17, 2021 |
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Dec 17, 2021 05:08
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thetoughestbean posted:Y’shtola is very popular and the story acts like she’s very important but like… she doesn’t actually have many personality traits? She’s smart and kinda snarky. She’s not had much of an arc, either. She became blind but now she has cool aether vision so it’s not like that was much of a problem she's almost absurdly two-dimensional in a way that sort of undercuts the game at points; you can feel the script straining every time it's doing a big highlight for each individual scion and has to scramble to find something to say about her. in the closing seconds of the expansion they really try hard to go all in on "y'shtola's deal is that she cares about knowledge and learning the truth of the world", which, uh, sure, but that's not an arc or a very interesting character trait, lol, and also it's a super common trait even among the Scions. her sacrifice is even turned into urianger's sacrifice because it wouldn't be interesting as just hers. Thancred (her nearest peer among the Scions) may be a terrible dad who inspires Discourse, but it turns out that's way more interesting than having your character reduced to being a talking version of those insanely ugly goggles that let you see aether they used to all have. she is truly my least favorite Scion by virtue of being almost lethally bland; she even gets out-gothed by a teenager in the expansion where she goes goth. she's less of a person than minfilia, whose dialogue was 50% waking sands by volume. she's also one of the only scions besides graha tia to tell you she wants to join your future journeys outside of that post-credits epilogue, so it feels likely we'll continue to see her. making alisaie hate pickles and thancred creeped out by loporrits is proof they're advancing their minor character quirk tech. they even made Estinien into mostly a comedy character, and it worked! god willing they apply those skills to her. edit: ImpAtom posted:Y'shtola is probably the most active, driven and confident of the Scions and is probably the most willing to take crazy risks too which is part of the reason why she has so many fake deaths. Her snark and intelligence are part of it but a big chunk is just that she is basically the Scion who goes all-in pretty much all the time. this actually very helpfully crystallized (lol) for me a lot of why I find her superfluous: not only is the bolded a relatively uninteresting character trait in a game with a finale of "let's all go on a suicide mission to the end of forever" (and she doesn't even get to fake die first there!), but also that's the PC's job. It is hard to out-action the player character. Valentin fucked around with this message at 05:37 on Dec 17, 2021 |
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Dec 17, 2021 05:30
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blatman posted:emet-selch requires too much suspension of disbelief, i'm fine with the dimension hopping and the godslaying and whatnot but I refuse to believe hythlodaeus could put up with his poo poo as long as he did nah that makes perfect sense. Just as emet selch fulfills the fantasy of "greasy mean rat boyfriend with a secret pure heart...no, greasier", hyth fulfills the fantasy of "literally endlessly patient and supernaturally perceptive bf who finds my inability to engage in small talk or healthily express emotions quirky and fun". meanwhile, venat is a cool smart action lady with a cool dog AND a cool sword, whose first appearance is fighting the best shark ever. The Elpis trio is really flawlessly made in terms of having the broadest possible appeal across FFXIV player psychologies.
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Dec 17, 2021 05:52
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Vermain posted:Y'Shtola's character arc in Shadowbringers, such as it was, was her reclaiming the human element that she'd been slowly losing to academic myopia. She starts off her arc not recognizing you, seeing you only as your component parts; she makes the coldly intellectual decision to sacrifice herself for the good of the many, only to realize after how much that practical action deeply affected the people that care for her; and it ends with her asking her dear friend to describe the night sky not in terms of what it is, but what it appears to be. It's pretty tidy, all things considered. 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.
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Dec 17, 2021 06:31
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Draxion posted:Nope. If you go back and talk to Y'mhitra she basically goes "I cannot loving believe my sister went to the edge of the universe to fight a giant bird and didn't tell me beforehand" She says basically the same thing in the SMN 80 quest post-shadowbringers, and basically the same thing earlier when you have to find her in the heavensward postpatch as part of getting yshtola back. Even more impressively rude now that we know alphinaud was writing regular letters to his parents an ocean away. Excellent depiction of a certain kind of sibling experience.
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Dec 17, 2021 06:54
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Cephas posted: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. This also dovetails nicely with the unexpected (but pleasantly surprising, imo) bit of mmo/gaming meta-commentary they delve into with Zenos at the end. The real battle is over by the time you show Meteion the field of flowers, both because thematically it's a fight about hope and despair and structurally because now it's not a cutscene, it's just a trial. And we always win trials. You can get messed up in a solo duty or near-killed in a cutscene, but once the story reaches the point of a trial we know the outcome is no longer in doubt: the WoL will vanquish this foe, almost certainly without a scratch. Zenos winks at that fact without undermining the climactic tone of the narrative at all, in the same way he later will when glancingly acknowledging the WoL as fundamentally a backgroundless mmo PC, which is fun. He even outright asks you if you enjoyed the game! While at the same time, in-fiction, reflecting on the possible hollowness of how own existence. one unexpected but very fun overlap between FFXIV and Nier Automata is that at the end of their stories about hope and despair they take a second to directly implicate the audience and argue that just by seeing the game through to the end, you yourself have committed to at least some small meaning in life and pursued that meaning despite setbacks and challenges. FFXIV is a lot less direct about it than Nier (DO YOU THINK GAMES ARE SILLY LITTLE THINGS?), but it really ties a nice little bow on the games' shared concerns and themes. In both cases it's a bit of a swing that I'm sure didn't work for some people, but I quite enjoyed it. Valentin fucked around with this message at 09:06 on Dec 17, 2021 |
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Dec 17, 2021 08:54
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e: whoops this had a question meant for main thread. here instead is my question for the spoilers thread: the scion color coordination is pretty obvious and fairly easy to explain for two of its groups. Original blend scions/circle of knowing archons are in black and white, while the heavensward boys are in blue. What's the thematic link I'm supposed to see for alisaie and graha? both big shadowbringers characters, both WoL stans?Kazy posted:(89 trial) this is perfect Valentin fucked around with this message at 23:23 on Dec 17, 2021 |
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Dec 17, 2021 23:20
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thetoughestbean posted:The Ancients also made Morbols and Behemeths so maybe they did have it coming an oft-overlooked part of the "were the ancients moral?" debate is that their standards for stewardship of Etheirys were clearly loving insane. poison everywhere, flying fish, violent ambulatory vegetables, sharks in all forms, goobbues, behemoths, morbols, ixion. beavers! this is not a defensible society.
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Dec 18, 2021 19:52
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sexpig by night posted:They're not sadistic monsters cackling as they shove space puppies into furnaces, they don't even really view 'death' as a thing as we see. That's part of the problem, though, they're cosmically speaking not wrong that death is simply a return to the star's lifestream and all but they do ignore the pain and sorrow caused by such things. yeah the game doesn't need you to see the ancients as sadists or anything (as the Amon flashback shows, it's more than capable of driving that point home if it wants to), but the way ancients feel about death is actually intended to feel weird to the player, it seems. it both represents a significant point of cultural departure from pretty much any modern culture and signals that the ancients shouldn't necessarily be understood 1-to-1 as people because, among other things, they appear to be immortal, or at least effectively so (the game uses angelic metaphors a lot, from Venat's speech to the line literally describing the sundered ancients in To the Edge as "like broken angels, wingless, cast from heavens' gates"; lends weight imo to the idea that they're inspired at least in part by Buddhist devas). it's a point the side quests in Elpis hit too: there's one about an ancient frantically searching for her mentor, because she wants to give her a farewell gift by telling her the concept the mentor made has been approved and is ready for naming. the mentor completely brushes it off, because her work is done and she must go join her predecessors in the hereafter, and says some stuff that indicates the mentee had already tried to dissuade her from dying previously. the game doesn't have any issue with the idea of death as rejoining the lifestream, but does flag that the ancients generally have a very alien culture around death which is implied to involve at least some degree of emotional repression (and their ostensibly accepting facade completely cracks and falls apart once zodiark is created and half the ancients die. understandably so!). Valentin fucked around with this message at 23:09 on Dec 18, 2021 |
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Dec 18, 2021 23:06
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I've seen a couple people other places debate this like it was a live question, and I thought the story was fairly clear on it but maybe I'm over-reading. The return of the teleporter functions as a payoff to the thread of the scions, esp. the twins, hoping not only to save the world but specifically to give the WoL a happy ending, right? Urianger's post-story dialogue flags it as "a miracle befitting the nature of that place, where emotion becometh tangible reality" and explicitly introduces the possibility that it wasn't just the WoL's desire to live, but "another's fervent prayer." The twins press the happy ending thing a lot in Ultima Thule and its runup, especially in the You're Not Alone quest, and that's otherwise a setup that doesn't really get fulfilled (the intervention of the ancients and return of the scions is explicitly the work of azem's crystal and creation magic; zenos's arrival is the work of your allies on etheirys, not a dynamis-made miracle; the free tank LB3, per the in-fight dialogue, is about hope in the face of despair). If the teleporter returns as a deus ex machina that's a product of your friends' prayers, though, then everything ties out emotionally and it makes sense of both narrative beats.
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Dec 19, 2021 20:27
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Terper posted:Yes but also: at the end Zenos wished for us to live and that's why it showed up at the end and not at the start, his was the tipping point that made that prayer reality the power of friendship...truly the strongest force in the universe...
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Dec 19, 2021 20:35
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how happy do you think krile was when you all came back without zenos? like, absolute win for her there, risky decision that fully pays off with zero consequences. krile & zenos MVP. also very good to consider zenos showing up to a gathering of literally all of your allies and 1) a "worldly affairs official" in sharlayan letting the abdicated(?) garlean emperor walk in on the strength of claiming he knows a guy, and then 2) the entire decision on whether to not only accept help from said emperor/insane murder machine/guy who tried to start the apocalypse literally last week but allow him to turn back into his world-destroying god form falls to krile, an undeniably effective scion but someone with no actual authority. and she got kidnapped and had invasive brain surgery done on her at zenos's command two expansions ago, to boot. a whole drama played out in old sharlayan that we know nothing about. good spot for one of their web stories to cover. e: real example of zenos' character growth to show up calling her "that woman who shares your gift" instead of a mewling piglet, as he does back in stormblood. Valentin fucked around with this message at 21:03 on Dec 19, 2021 |
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Dec 19, 2021 20:52
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HPanda posted:I'm not sure if I like or dislike that cutscenes happen with whatever weather and time of day is going on. There's a scene in I think the 5.X patches where you're at a table with Thancred and Urianger and thancred's like "look at that view, spectacular" and it was literally just a wall of fog for me, absolutely nothing visible. perfect cutscene.
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Dec 20, 2021 09:15
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good(?) news: it is not suddenly much more compelling if you like Gundam (unless you didn't like the G-Warrior stuff but frankly I refuse to imagine that anyone didn't like it), lmao. Interesting that they had Gaius explicitly offscreen for this entire expansion, not even a cut to red skies in Werlyt or something. He doesn't even send an actual message with Cid!
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Dec 20, 2021 18:33
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Erwin the German posted:Yeah, this needed more Cid and Nero for sure. C'mon, we had airships and everything going in, easy in for them. speaking of, thought it was very funny there was a whole thing in the shadowbringers patches about the Scions finally getting their own airship, and then the Bonanza didn't show up even once.
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Dec 20, 2021 18:45
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Lord_Magmar posted:But I cannot understand the idea of not giving her the ability to eat, it's such a vital part of so many cultures. this is true but the amaurotines are very explicitly Weird About Food as a matter of their stewardship of the star and view the eating of food as wasteful in itself and justifiable only by the need to maintain one's health, even if they recognize food can also be tasty. designing a familiar that can eat, which is such a ghastly inefficient way to consume aether, is probably a major faux pas. this is why sharlayans and loporrits are the way they are, to boot. terrible civilization, deserved to fall e: okay actually: food is a running motif in endwalker, and the stagnancy of culinary culture in Sharlayan, Amaurot, and Ea is a thread linking these cultures which prize reason to such a degree that they attempt to deny their earthly desires entirely. The Amaurotines and Sharlayans reach it only imperfectly: it's clear that while the Ancients are weird about food culturally, individual Ancients obviously enjoy eating in itself. The same is true in Sharlayan, where the Last Stand is nobly preventing the entire country from subsisting solely on Valentin fucked around with this message at 20:53 on Dec 20, 2021 |
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Dec 20, 2021 20:47
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FeatherFloat posted:I've always had the suspicion that the founder, he of the big ol' calamity-surviving boat, had something special going on beyond being a big ol 'smarty. I think we never really get deep into the whole deal with Nyunkrepf Nyunkrepfsyn (perfect name), but given that he is one of a named group of heroes who helped save the people of Eorzea from a previous calamity, it would not be surprising to learn he had the Echo/Blessing of Light, on top of the direct contact with Hydaelyn the Forum made back in Dravania.
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Dec 20, 2021 20:58
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Begemot posted:The Ancients in Elpis are a really interesting mix of "oh these are just normal people" with "wow they are totally alien and bizarre". I think you are supposed to be a little creeped out by how casually they treat creating new life. It's really not that far from what the Allagans were up to in Azys Lla, the Ancients make a lot of weird monsters just because they think they're cool. Yeah, there's a lot of push and pull in this thread because obviously everything has to be all one thing or the other, but it feels pretty straightforward that the Ancients in Elpis are supposed to be both recognizably human AND weirdly alien. And re: the quoted text, it's absolutely not a mistake that the glimpse we see of hedonistic Allagan sadism through Amon's eyes is explicitly about creating a hosed up minotaur. The line about how the test subject's words come out as panicked lowing even kind of parallels the whole deal about "well, scrap these lupins, we'll give the next ones the ability to talk." Minotaurs come from Elpis, it's worth noting! The Ancient's attitudes towards death (both their own and others), which are shown to be a point of friction for more people than just Hermes in the side quests; their repressive attitudes around personal pleasure (eating for the sake of pleasure is evil) and personal expression, which despite everyone ostensibly sharing nevertheless obviously clash with their personal desires; their lockstep ideological conformity (Elpis is a research facility so it's not too surprising, but it's worth noting that Hermes is the "worst" Ancient we see in terms of living up to their culture and he joins the Convocation, there's no real clash with the dominant culture until Zodiark/Hydaelyn); and their utterly batshit approach to environmental conservation (there is simply no ecological niche for a malboro or a behemoth. or a landshark. or a particularly mean tomato), all of these are clearly meant to ping as kinda hosed up even as their motives and behaviors remain recognizably human to a large extent. Valentin fucked around with this message at 21:08 on Dec 20, 2021 |
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Dec 20, 2021 21:03
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really maybe the most dissonant thing about the ancients, and the least explored because it's obviously half a joke about "where do monsters come from, anyhow" is that they, or a good number of them, very clearly see Etheirys as little more than a battle royale arena for their many creations. Otherwise, why the violent tomatoes, and why else are more than half the things you see being researched in Elpis violent apex predators? The lykaones, the behemoths, there's a whole FATE chain where a guy asks you to kill different concepts pretty much just so he can watch. I don't think we're meant to read it too seriously, but it's an interesting thread. They have godlike power, but they certainly seem to find a level of violence in nature not only inherent but deeply appealing, and as Hermes notes, death is much more horrifying for their creations than for them, making it pretty hosed up! e: VVV it's almost like...attempting to remove life's problems entirely as an intellectual exercise, rather than learning to deal with its vicissitudes as they come, can lead a society to a twisted and stunted end...makes u think...:ra-lathunk: Valentin fucked around with this message at 21:17 on Dec 20, 2021 |
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Dec 20, 2021 21:11
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TGLT posted:I mean I think we are meant to take that kind of seriously. An undercurrent running through Elpis is how they have a hard time really understanding the suffering of their creations because they're immune to a lot of it. Which then helps explain why when they're hit with it they fail to handle it. Oh yeah their inability to understand suffering is absolutely an important beat that this grows out of, I just think it's unwise to read FATEs as a literal expression of story and think the Behemoth quest is mostly meant as a gag. To the extent that it reinforces the Ancients' fundamental disconnect from the world, though, it's all intentional.
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Dec 20, 2021 21:25
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Pharohman777 posted:And Hydaelyn doesn't look like any race or species of people, she made the decision to pretend to be a giant crystal to everyone meeting her. unbelievable that the community in general isn't talking about this more. venat spent 12,000 years pretending to be a rock? A rock that was basically just a giant clot of aether? what did she do in the early sundering when, I assume, the rock was much smaller?
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Dec 21, 2021 04:30
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it is fun that transformation means, as far as we've seen, that pretty much every ancient had a monster OC they dreamt up and sketched out in careful detail in their heads, attack names and all. I don't know if a society where everyone has a secret insanely elaborate (you can't tell me Hermes' and Hades' transformations were all function over form) boss form ready for a two-phase-plus-adds encounter is a healthy society, but it's definitely a fun one. e: VVV Can't wait for the short story revealing this, —All You Ashkin— Valentin fucked around with this message at 02:08 on Dec 22, 2021 |
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Dec 22, 2021 02:05
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got my samurai to 90 tonight, so finished all the role quests. Healer (Ala Mhigo) is definitely the best, Tank (Gridania) the worst, with the others somewhere in between.
curious to see how they pull these together for the combined quests (they said those are coming vaguely in future patches, right?). outside of melee phys saying "THIS GUY'S IMPORTANT", not seeing what elements there are to seize on, aside from it presumably being a multi-national effort. not really sure why these were role quests, aside from ticking "role quests" off of a list. they're serviceable in that respect, but nothing great, imo.
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Dec 22, 2021 08:34
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yeah, always love to see a solo duty use interrupt, and tank was certainly the final duty that felt closest to a real fight. the ranged phys also had an interrupt and the healer one wanted you to esuna, which was nice
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Dec 22, 2021 08:49
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OddObserver posted:I would personally prefer if it turns out that Lahabrea was just always a jerk. I think the sad, tragic, boys quota has been well-filled. yeah the unsundered were more interesting when the emphasis was on their extremely divergent reactions to the sundering and their subsequent millennia of loving around. returning to their point of commonality doesn't really interest me at all.
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Dec 22, 2021 21:22
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 12:40 |
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what renders gridania boring is the problems seem pretty intractable, tbh. With the dragons there's actual conflict because there's the possibility of change, since they're sapient and have desires and opinions that are comprehensible. the elementals (fittingly) are more of a force of nature which can to some extent respond to stimuli but which is more of a fact of life to which gridanians must accommodate themselves rather than a leader or enemy they can interact with. Probably the most interesting way to do it, since Square seems disinclined to seriously question their role explicitly, is to do a story about how people interact with each other under the elemental regime, like that one hearer in crafting quests who exploits their role as spiritual leader to fulfill their whims. Or we could finally do a Gelmorra story c'monnnn
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Dec 23, 2021 00:58
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