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So I just finished 5.3 finally. Really happy that G'raha managed to avoid not one but two death flags. I hope that the plot manages to finagle Ryne coming over somehow, though, because she seemed to really work well with the rest of the group. edit: Oh, someone posted a picture of a lalafel holding the staff with Exarch, was curious about that ImpAtom posted:He was a primal dedicated to spreading heroism as a counterpart to the Ascian's villainy in order to achieve their overall goals though. How does this work exactly? I never figured out how this would help the Ascians in any way. Isn't the only thing important to them managing to cause the big catastrophes by making one of the shard worlds overflow with a particular type of aether? Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 08:02 on Sep 23, 2020 |
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Sep 23, 2020 07:52
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When was it mentioned about Ardbert and party killing a couple Ascians? Saw some posts mentioning this, but I don't remember it.
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Sep 23, 2020 08:47
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MadFriarAvelyn posted:Everyone keeps saying Elidibus was just some kid, but he's got a pretty deep voice for one. It fits better with the JP voices. His JP voice could pass for a teenager's voice and has a generally "immature" sort of sound to it.
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Sep 23, 2020 09:55
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I just finished the MSQ (credits going now) and it was great. A couple questions: - Are we ever really given an answer as to why *literally every planet* has already fallen to despair/apathy? Seems like you'd randomly come across at least some that haven't reached that point yet. Does the nature of dynamis just cause strong feelings of despair to exponentially go wild and spread throughout the universe if you don't have a bunch of aether to protect your planet? The examples we're shown of other societies don't seem to imply that's the case, though. Or is it maybe that Meteion encountered some of the ones that fell to despair, absorbed their overwhelming negative emotions, and then spread them to the "healthy" societies she encountered (it seems like this is maybe what happened with the last empty town you see in Ultima Thule). - I was under the impression that Venat had some faction behind her (and that this enabled the summoning of Hydaelyn which, while not as powerful as Zodiark, would still presumably require the sacrifice of a bunch of people). But the cutscene just shows what I assume is her doing the summoning. Maybe she had already arranged things with the other people who opposed the Zodiark option? All in all, I think they presented that sort of subject matter about as well as they could. I like when Hydaelyn points out that her goal isn't really good/just and is still damning a bunch of people. I think my favorite scene in the MSQ is the one that follows Hydaelyn while Answers is playing (revealing that Answers surprisingly has lyrics directly describing the main Endwalker themes). Doing the final fights as Paladin convinced me that tank is the way to go for story fights. Not only is it more forgiving for mistakes, but you feel like a badass when you use the shielding moves (like Paladin's thing that protects people behind them). Final trial kinda struck a perfect balance where there were close calls (I think that at least like half the party was new to it, including both me and the other tank - I ended up MTing, not that that involves much in that fight) without any wipes. Zenos fight seems like it could have been a little tough as a DPS. vvv I'm pretty sure most songs we hear in English have lyrics written or partially written originally in English by Koji Fox (and generally have remarkably good lyrics - I kind of feel bad for the Japanese players that most probably don't get to appreciate how well the lyrics work). Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 03:06 on Jan 23, 2022 |
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Jan 23, 2022 02:59
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Thanks to everyone who pointed out that Hydaelyn scene not being literal; that makes more sense. Been reading through portions of the rest of this thread and the parts where people argue about the Ancients/Hydaelyn's actions and I feel like a lot of people were kind of off-base from both angles (while I think some others understood it the same way I did). I don't think you're supposed to view Hydaelyn's actions as being righteous (she even says herself that her actions weren't just). My interpretation (and one I saw some other people have) is that she came to (probably correctly) believe that the Ancients' society would have ended up like one of the "dead end" societies, largely because their very nature makes any sort of emotional growth difficult (and they were already on the cusp of sacrificing most other life to bring back the other Zodiark sacrifices IIRC). It wasn't an absolute thing, since you obviously had people like Venat and the others who agreed with her, but the aforementioned scene seems to represent her reluctantly coming to understand that the bulk of their society is going to be willing to do literally anything to return to how things were before (up to and including any level of sacrifice of other life). The Sundering could be seen as necessary due to the "making people have limited life-spans" and "making people more open to and capable of manipulating dynamis" elements probably being required to deal with the whole "threat to all life in the universe." But I think the most relevant/important thing is that it's supposed to be a morally ambiguous decision. Venat is basically hoping that beings forced to deal with mortality and hardship will be capable of confronting the Final Days (both the root cause of them and just becoming a society more capable of dealing with bad things), but that's of little consolation to either the surviving Ancients who were sundered or the countless mortals who experienced horrible suffering. Overall, I thought that all this stuff was more well thought-out than I expected. edit: Unrelated to anything else, but a couple days ago I came across the goofy leopard-skin top from the Loporrit fashion quest on one of the NPCs during the Marauder quest line. edit2: And another random thought I just recalled - it's goofy when Hythlodaeus is like "I wish I could have seen the traumatized Emet-Selch who has been around for thousands of generations!" Like what the heck man, lol edit3: And another - I have nameplates turned off and there was a very confusing moment when I visited the Omega weapon robot people (Omicrons? lol) and I saw a large pile of dead bodies and spent like 20 seconds trying to figure out if they were actually supposed to be there. Apparently there was a large group of players just playing dead there for some reason. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 05:41 on Jan 23, 2022 |
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Jan 23, 2022 05:04
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PoorWeather posted:I guess I just can't agree with the idea that loss and difficulty are an essential part of growing emotionally and learning to accept life, which feels so fundamental to the themes and moral framework of the expansion beyond its general "life is worth living" message. If you read through it, I'm sure you saw that I spent a long time in this thread harping obnoxiously about what I feel were technical problems or dissonance with the writing, but I think it ultimately comes down to that. I thought the whole discussion was interesting, so nothing to apologize for there. There are a couple reasons I don't come away with that same interpretation. One (and probably the main one) is that the writing seems pretty clear about not thinking lesser of people who can't just recover from the horrible things that happen to them and will reiterate how even despite having Won The Plot there are countless people who have lost their entire families from everything that happened and nothing is going to bring them back. There's not really an implication that the Scions are better people than "random grief-stricken elephant person." It's good if someone can manage to recover from their grief, but if they can't it's not their fault and others have a responsibility to help the ones still suffering (I think this latter part is important and really distinguishes between this attitude and one implying that people have some sort of responsibility to get past their pain). The other is that there are different types of suffering, and some *is* essential and inevitable; I think one poster put it as "suffering and capital-S Suffering." In a world where individuals exist and form relationships with one another, for example, there's no avoiding the suffering that will inevitably arise through people wanting conflicting things from one another. In the case of the Ancients specifically, the issue isn't so much that they were having trouble dealing with things, but that their way of dealing with things was "just keep sacrificing people to Zodiark to undo the bad things that happened, in a way that strictly prioritizes the lives of Ancients over literally everything else." Because they were mostly incapable of dealing with grief/loss (due to the nature of their existence and world), they were incapable of recovering from a tragedy that did occur without deciding to just keep making sacrifices until they could return to their past (something that was probably impossible). I think that Venat had pretty good reason to think that, if she didn't do something, there wasn't really any going back from constant Zodiark sacrifices (and the only plausible way to counteract Zodiark was with another deity + the Sundering, since there weren't enough people who agreed with her to summon something capable of counteracting him otherwise). It was basically a situation where the future of life on the planet was at stake and she had to make a choice (and as she says herself, what she did wasn't in any way "just"). And her choice is one that she at least knew would result in life continuing to exist, via time-traveling WoL. I guess one way to think of it is that there's a difference between "working to alleviate suffering" and "working to undo bad things that already happened, no matter the cost (to others)" (with the latter happening as a result of the sort of life the Ancients had lived before, where they never really learned to process any sort of grief). As I think others mentioned (and I hadn't really thought of, even though it makes perfect sense), Quintus is basically an analogy of sorts as someone who simply chooses to reject a (from his perspective) bad outcome instead of working to improve things in the future. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 20:24 on Jan 23, 2022 |
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Jan 23, 2022 20:20
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PoorWeather posted:Something I learned in the NGE and Madoka fandoms and am re-learning again with this game is that I'm probably not a Buddhist. Strap me into the meaningless utilitarian escapist pleasure machine. Shove those Odyssian lotuses into my mouth loving right now, please. I don't think it's so much "personally learning from loss" as "having an existence where loss meaningfully exists as a thing in the first place" (and the impact that has on humanity as a whole). So it's not really about how you personally deal with it as much as how your society as a whole deals with it. So an individual Ancient might not deal with grief any worse than any individual sundered person, but the latter exists within a society in which suffering is present as a shared experience (even if you haven't had a close loved one die yourself, you can comprehend the impact it has on others), which makes empathy and mutual understanding far more possible. This obviously doesn't mean that "shared capacity for suffering yields empathy and understanding," because obviously it doesn't (since you really need a society/culture that help encourage it as well). But it at least creates the possibility for it. But the Ancients didn't really have that same capacity to find succor in one another, because they had the shared societal experience of not really comprehending suffering (so when the Final Days came, they just all had their own personal grief with no emotional support from their peers, who were just as confused and disoriented by what was happening). We actually see this directly with Hermes. Hermes' main issue wasn't so much the grief he felt, but the inability of any of his peers to comprehend it (very directly shown via the fact that literally no one else seems to turn the Elips flowers into a "negative" color, at least until you come along). Even the ones with genuinely good intentions just can't really understand. I think it's that lack of mutual understanding that is the main problem, because it prevents people from "lifting each other up," so to speak. So I guess what I'm saying is that it makes the most sense to think of societies collectively learning to deal with suffering, rather than individuals. It's not that individuals have a responsibility to "transcend their pain," but that it's good to have empathy and collectively work to help ease the pain of others. Onmi posted:The Martyr is an interesting title for Zodiark because both he and Hydaelyn are Martyrs, they sacrificed themselves, their beings, their existence, to save the people they loved. Neither would ever do anything to harm the people of Etheirys. I think that's the ultimate twist "Zodiark's the evil god, no Hydaelyn's the evil god!" Wrong, neither of them are the evil God, they both love the people of the world and want nothing more than to save them. I mean, to be fair I think there's a pretty big difference in that Zodiark has a different definition of "people" that probably doesn't include any of the sundered.
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Jan 23, 2022 22:33
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PoorWeather posted:To say that any society that arrives at this point must be destroyed feels like a message against meaningful progress being possible. I think this is where the issue is (at least with the Venat stuff), because this isn't the reason the society was destroyed - it was destroyed as a last resort because it was on the cusp of doing (another) genocide of its own that would inevitably result in repeated future genocides. And it was probably the last chance Venat would have to do it (and certainly the last chance she knew would at least result in some sort of life-filled world, via time-traveling WoL). The issue with the Ancients is directly tied in with their power. The situation would be entirely different if they didn't have the power to create a god and sacrifice any amount of life in pursuit of returning to a "lost paradise." But unfortunately they did have that power (at this point already turned into a deity), and they had proved they were going to use it regardless of what a dissenting minority of them might think. The existence of "souls that return to the lifestream" also changes the ethics a bit from those in our world, since (from what I understand) being sacrificed to Zodiark means your soul is basically trapped, while Venat's "solution" at least lets them continue to "circulate." I can see where you're coming from with the Ultima Thule sequence. The main difference in my interpretation is that I think it's possible to believe that "gaining something from bad experience (when possible)" is good while also not condemning people who can't do that (and that the rest of the story reflects this). If we only saw stuff like the Ultima Thule sequence I'd probably agree with you, but the story is full of countless other situations where it approaches issues like grief/suffering in a way that is very respectful/compassionate towards victims and certainly doesn't condemn them for "being weak." cheetah7071 posted:Idk if you're saying it exactly but people have definitely posted variants on "everything would have continued on just fine forever if Hermes had submitted Meteion to peer review" but that's a fundamental misreading of the text. I mean, to be fair, that's kind of true. Meteion was basically a being with the special powers to absorb terrible vibes and spread them through Dynamis, so Hermes actually hosed up extremely badly by sending a bunch of Meteions with a shared hive-mind all over the universe. It's transparently a recipe for disaster, but Hermes was basically acting out of desperation because he couldn't get any sort of understanding from his fellow unsundered (and, just like his fellow unsundered, he wouldn't be aware that there are other places where really terrible things happen beyond anything the unsundered have ever experienced as a society/species). Like Meteion is basically what you'd come up with if you were specifically setting out to create a universal cataclysm, given the nature of their universe/dynamis. Hermes obviously couldn't have reasonably known this from his position (and the rest of his society also probably wouldn't have, though they at least probably wouldn't have approved his "project"). Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 06:17 on Jan 24, 2022 |
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Jan 24, 2022 06:12
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PoorWeather posted:Well, I wrote that in response to you saying that the Ancients had a kind of societal immaturity when it came to understanding suffering that led to them wanting to do the sacrifices in the first place, which the Sundering ultimately needed to 'correct'. Or in other words, though it wasn't directly the reason it was destroyed, it was the reason for the reason. I definitely wouldn't call it "immaturity" (if I did I was wrong to do so, though I don't think I did). I actually think that the main element specifically resulting in the tragedy was their power. Their unfamiliarity with things like "involuntary mortality" certainly exacerbated the situation and would have made Venat's goal much harder (which basically required persuading enough people to prevent the successful summoning of Zodiark, so she basically had to persuade a threshold of people within a limited time), but it's easy to imagine regular humans doing the same thing if they had the power to do so. Like if a country had the ability to resurrect half its people who died at the cost of a bunch of other random countries, it's definitely conceivable that could happen. And it could certainly happen on an individual level (like if you handed someone whose loved one died a "resurrect them at the cost of some other person" button). So I don't think anything about the situation that occurs in the game is meant to be viewed as a just or fair outcome (and the game itself seems pretty clear that you're not supposed to think that the Ancients were just incompatible with existing or something). It's basically an unfortunate outcome of a society having a massive amount of power (used to form a separate god-like entity formed from the desires accompanying its summoning, so it's not like you can persuade it to change) and a will to use it in bad ways that can't really be directly confronted. Their situation is one that can't really be reproduced in the real world. It's specifically because the Ancients had the power to reject death - but only at great cost to other life - that there was such a major problem. It was a society where mortality was almost entirely voluntary, but then suddenly had involuntary mortality thrust upon it (while retaining the ability to undo it at the cost of probably ending all life in the future). If you remove power from the equation, there won't be the same issue (because they wouldn't have access to the "resurrect loved ones at the cost of all other life" button). Regarding the whole "understanding suffering" element, it seems to me that doing so is inherently dependent upon there being some history of it to draw from. A mortal race will at least come to understand mortality (and its accompanying suffering) through that lens and perhaps develop coping mechanisms and the ability to derive aid from others who have experienced the same thing (I mean, this is the whole idea behind support groups - you can learn from others who have experienced similar things). And over time we learn how to better treat people who experience painful things, because human psychology is difficult and complex and there's more to it than just having empathy. So it seems to make perfect sense that a society oblivious to a certain form of pain would have a problem if it suddenly experienced that pain on a massive scale. Everyone would be new to it. They'd have no history or experience with which to understand how to heal from it, leading to bad decisions. And the idea that you can heal from something doesn't mean that experiencing it was somehow good and won't leave permanent scars that make your life worse. There are many ways to react to pain that not only don't help, but make things even worse. So even if healing isn't possible, simply "mitigating the pain" usually is. But if everyone in your society has no experience with it and is suddenly subjected to it, you have nowhere to turn to. There's no societal infrastructure for dealing with a whole range of psychological issues. It's basically taking a society with immense magical powers and traumatizing them, but with no tools to deal with that trauma. With the Ancients specifically, the situation is meant to be a tragedy. It would have been ideal if their society was simply never subjected to such a horrible cataclysm. Just like it'd be ideal if people in our world never had to experience (traumatic thing). But think of how awful it'd be if, in a world that had never experienced (traumatic thing), suddenly most of the population experienced it. Everything we know about how to help people who have experienced a particular form of trauma wouldn't exist. So given a choice between "the current reality where virtually everyone has been suddenly thrust into a traumatic situation" and "an alternate reality where traumatic situations occasionally happen to people in the course of regular life," there aren't any good options. No one is really at fault in either scenario. But Venat can look at the direction her world is heading and then look at the world the WoL describes to her and reasonably make the choice that the latter has more hope for a better future (and on a kind of complicated ethical level, after meeting the future-traveling WoL she's also having to account for all those future lives when making her decision - it suddenly becomes a trolley problem of sorts). All of this being said, after thinking about this, I don't really agree with the posters who think this exact kind of thing was inevitable. I think that a different sort of cataclysm that wasn't so monumental in scope could have prompted a much more reasonable response. The specific response prompted by the Final Days only occurred because of its sudden magnitude. If it was more limited in scope, you wouldn't have as many people willing to push the "create a deity with human sacrifice" button. And I think that the Ancients absolutely have the capacity to change just like anyone else. The aether/dynamis stuff just makes it harder for them (my read on it is that it it makes their emotional state a lot more inelastic). After all, Venat had a decent-sized faction behind her. Given more time, it probably could have been grown further.
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Jan 25, 2022 01:15
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lol this random detail if you visit the Astrologicum in Ishgard after finishing the MSQ: (it's Aenor's sister)
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Jan 26, 2022 10:18
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Chillgamesh posted:As #1 Goblin enthusiast I was extremely happy to see Brayflox again personally. I feel like it says something about the Goblin race how bonkers their primal was compared with literally all other primals you ever encounter short of Zodiark/Hydaelyn themselves.
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Jan 28, 2022 04:51
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Lord_Magmar posted:I mean, someone else designed Alexander and tried to build/summon him. The Goblins just thought that was rad and used it for themselves. I thought that Alexander was originally just a fortress and that the Goblins/Illuminati were responsible for primal-ing it, using the Codex as some sort of guide or something.
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Jan 29, 2022 21:35
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Super Foul Egg posted:It's probably a console/controller player. The stance is one of the first skills you get it so just drops it into the same area as your main attacks, and configuring the bar is such a mental hurdle for new players, a lot of people just leave their auto-mangled arrangements intact for way longer than you'd think. I've seen maxed out players with teleport still bound to their primary attack cross-hotbar, among other horrors. I've definitely had this happen some since I started playing tanks with controller, though not as often recently. Occasionally I'll just get butter-fingers and press "double-L2 + left d-pad" (toggle tank stance) instead of "double-R2 + left d-pad" (Rampart).
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Jan 30, 2022 08:27
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I like to think of the perspective of thee random adventurers the WoL summons with Azem's crystal. Like someone is just sitting there eating lunch and suddenly they're teleported in front of Zodiark.
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Feb 10, 2022 23:56
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Lord_Magmar posted:I'm pretty sure Venat literally just supercharged the crystal, not that it changed the magic spell it does. So the Scions came back because you called them back, Venat's supercharge maybe lasted that long. But you can probably call them say, from anywhere on Ethierys if you yourself are there. I think Venat specifically gave the crystal the ability to create matter - i.e. turn the Scions from bodyless spirits back to people with bodies (and same with Emet Selch/Hythlodaeus). The crystal on its own can just summon people to you (but people who already physically exist somewhere). So that's the distinction. ImpAtom posted:No, Hades in his own twisted way was doing exactly that. That's the entire point. His viewpoint was that he was doing the exact same things they were doing in Elpis, destorying the malformed so they could be created in a better way. He genuinely believed it was the only path available to rescuing his people and was willing to do anything and stand against anyone to do it. The fact that you eventually broke his resolve and proved him wrong didn't change that was who he was. Someone willing to do anything and everything from what they thought was right, even if other people (correctly) considered them a monster for it. Hades realized pretty early that the new sundered people had value, though. He was in denial about it (largely because of what it implied about his own actions), but he definitely didn't just have unfaltering conviction until you came along. Long before the events of Shadowbringers, he had already reached a point where he was having doubts (and on some level probably realized that the sundered people were people with value), but there was just too big of a sunk cost (plus the fact that admitting this would reframe his past actions as atrocities). Gaius is better in some ways and worse in others. He has less of an excuse for not realizing that killing a bunch of people is bad (since he's a person himself of the same nature of those he hurt), but the magnitude of his actual actions (and the importance of his role in them) is significant less than Emet Selch's. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 00:03 on Feb 15, 2022 |
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Feb 14, 2022 23:41
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Bloody Emissary posted:Chai Nuzz isn't Cid because he's good at machines, he's Cid because there's a clear parallel naming structure with Garlond Ironworks and Daedalus Stoneworks, and Cid is the head of the former while Chai-Nuzz is the head of the latter. I'm always extremely doubtful about any sort of theory that relies upon stuff like "words sounding similar," given the similarities in question often (if not usually) either don't exist or don't really make sense in the Japanese. Out of curiosity I looked this up, and "Daedalus Stoneworks" appears to just be ダイダロス社 (Daedalus Company) in the Japanese (while Garlond Ironworks is actually "Garlond Ironworks" in katakana - ガーロンド・アイアンワークス).
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Aug 6, 2022 09:23
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Nessus posted:It is a loving crime how they have such dogshit lighting in the character editor screen. My goodness. I played FF14 on and off for years before finally finding a look I liked (I think it wasn't until the gap between Stormblood and Shadowbringers), partly due to constantly getting annoyed at my character looking different in-game than during character creation. I'd get increasingly aggravated as they'd show up in cutscenes while feeling "off" somehow. Addressing this had a surprisingly big impact on my enjoyment of the game, I guess because it allowed me to fully "buy into" my character as the protagonist. I find that my myself in character creation for FF14 differs significantly from my mindset with other MMOs. With other MMOs, I'm usually trying to make characters that look cool/unique (partly because there's a bigger social element, so comparing your character with others is a bigger factor), but with FF14 it's more about finding something I'm personally comfortable with as the main character in cutscenes, etc.
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Oct 30, 2023 02:11
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