Endwalker - Tumblr Posts

Still old but not as dusty art

Tried my hand at writing!

“You see it too, yes?”

“… I haven’t the foggiest what you’re talking about.”

Hythlodaeus: I will pray so that we [Hythlodaeus, Emet-Selch and the Warrior of Light] will meet again and finally be reunited in our next lives.

WARRIOR OF LIGHT, ME AND A WHOLE FUCKING FANDOM:

So, the battle against the final boss of Endwalker was won because the Warrior of Light saddled Zenos.

...and what a perfect scene it was.

Endwalker final fight be like:

Smiling Warrior of Light is best Warrior of Light

Oh, ancients, my beloveds

2021 Endwalker fan arts

Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn vs. Endwalker → First + “Last” Words

We will. We will.

"The beauty of light when it shines across a dark and starless sea… A dream that from the soil of worlds now lost to sorrow, life will spring forth once more…"

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Something I made through tears and an aching heart while waiting in Endwalker queues back in December. Decided to touch it up not too long ago.

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[DO NOT REPOST/REUPLOAD, MODIFY/EDIT, OR USE MY ART WITHOUT MY PERMISSION]

(IG and TW: @neneeroo - you can also find them in my bio!)

This year was my 4th anniversary of playing FFXIV, so I drew Amidra in the official Endwalker illustration style to celebrate it!

friend

Venat and Emet-Selch were both justified in their own way. They both seeked the survival of their races, both sacrificied themselves for their goals, paid the prices and consequences.

Not Hermes. Hermes created the problem. His choice were not motivated by anything but himself. Putting his own feeling and beliefs above anyone else. Everything he did was wrong. The mission was failed from the very beginning, the very moment Meteion was to be the observator, thus directly influencing the situation and data. And in impredictible way too, so you can't even "correct" it so it would be useable. He took a snap decision of killing everyone, without even reviewing the data in-depth. You just started the job. You can just start to formulate a hypothesis, and you go to the conclusion with immediate action? You would need complementary study, where you choose select racr and see how it evolves. Hell, the ancient could have helped the different race to solve the despair. Helping the dragons to rebuild their homeworld would have been pretty easy, with all the Elpis research and creation magic they have access to, and would also have helped the ascians too with feeling like stagnation.

In conclusion, Hermes was a very bad scientist. Also, very selfish. How did a dude like this manage to get at teh top of what is effectively a eco-biological research facility?

what will you say? >they were all justified in their own way >none of them were.

this is how that one part went right

Oh yes. From what my mate told me I visibly paled when reaching him and discovering geometry. I'm pant at math, but I'm even worse at geometry. This was... An experience. Also.... Why? Was the rotating arena bot enough of a challenge for spatially challenged people?

(sorry healer)

Oh no, I failed that class!

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I agree with you.

Neither side were right, nor wrong. They did what they belive was right, what would save their people. They paid the price, and they didn't make excuses for themselves. They knew their solution was imperfect, and yet, it was a solution. It was a hope. Still thinking someone should have dragged a statistical analyst in this to explain to the Zodiark group their solution would just entropy them. But Venat was also a gamble. One she took measure to, back up plan, but still a gamble.

And that's why I for once enjoy the story of "the ancient pseudo-gods screwed over the world" for once. They don't try to make it perfect, like they were totally in the right, or like they made mistakes and look, they are repentant now!

The only Ascian I feel was in the wrong in all this mess was Hermes. Fuck this guy. I don't card about your depression bozo. You're supposed to be the leader of a biological experimental facility. You know about data analysis! You know about cleaning up your data and check it for bias! Anyway, him just taking the data and running with it, with barely a glance to said data analysis was just a hard no for me.

And I'm done with the lvl 87 Endwalker quests, ending on the Venat cutscene.

The very first thought that jumps out to me is actually an annoyance: I really don't care for when the story uses jumpscares.

The only time during the game I have thought it was effective happened to be with Edda and it's because the mood was built for it in different ways.

It didn't work with Titania's introduction and it effectively annoyed me with Meteion.

Her transitioning to a grown woman's voice and listing off the dead worlds in a robotic tone was effective enough.

But they just keep doing the jumpscares with her and the more they do the less effective it is for me.

But to transition to some more character thoughts, I love how Hermes's words towards Meteion are also relevant towards Hermes himself.

"Though I gave you these wings to soar the heavens, I did not teach you how to walk the earth."

In the end, as Emet said, Hermes could not see anything good right in front of him on Etheirys. He simply could not find happiness or purpose in his own world, so he hoped to find it in others.

And so it lead to his flawed question and the painful result of it for the rest of the world and Meteion.

He hoped he would find the answer for his quest for meaning in other worlds. Perhaps use those discoveries to pave the way for a more empathic world that did not deny negative feelings. Perhaps to convince the ancients all lives had value. Perhaps to find companionship in his sadness and loneliness.

It was a two-sided issue, as the ancients also worked to not look at negativity, which probably would have had some bad consequences on a bigger scale eventually, no matter how you look at it.

Again, we go back to the idea of mental illness creating tunnel vision. All Hermes could see was the flaws of the society, but the society itself also did not address the issues within. (Or did they, looking at some of the side quests in Elpis?)

Across all of Endwalker, the idea of emotional resillience has popped up over and over again.

And when I first reached some of the parts about emotional resillience while watching someone else's playthrough, I really wasn't sure about the story leaning into the idea of "what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger".

Thavnair especially felt this way.

And that perspective is incredibly hostile towards the individualised nature of emotional struggles. What doesn't kill you does not, in fact, always make you stronger.

But Elpis and everything afterwards put in a lot of effort to make it much more nuanced than that.

"As fragmented, imperfect beings, yours is a never-ending quest. A quest to find your purpose, knowing your end is assured. To find the strength to continue, when all strength has left you. To find joy, even as darkness descends. And admist deepest despair, light everlasting."

Might just be the most important quote of Endwalker.

In reality what the game says (at least what I think the writers aim to say and I read the story as) is that we should try to appreciate the good when we have it because it isn't eternal.

And yet we should not look away from the bad and instead digest it in a healthy way.

As I touched on a few lines above, I think the point of the characterisation of the ancients is that negative feelings hurt, but burying and invalidating them will end up hurting more and more and eventually lead to some sort of issues.

Therapy good.

And as the Ascians show us, their tactics just lead to more and more sacrifices, to the point where it started feeling worse and worse and the rift between the two sides of the ancients happens.

The world of the ancients treats mental illness just like our world does and this story is simply commenting on the current mental health crisis, which was even worse during Covid times.

I'll touch on it more in my upcoming posts because I know that Alisae has a few really important lines regarding this idea, but I know I had this criticism for a while and I was really happy the story addressed it.

Another criticism I see Endwalker given is related to precisely the idea that by creating this causal loop the game implies all of this suffering HAD to happen (and that is why it is okay), everyone had to be sundered to survive and thus it fully also excuses Venat's actions.

But to me the nuance here is that while the game agrees with Venat, it never says what she did was "right".

"I create a world of suffering to mire and plague."

She created so much suffering by sundering the world.

And to me that's what makes it interesting. The Goddess of Light, image of "all good" was driven by her own very human beliefs to save humanity, which also lead to much suffering.

Neither side is completely right or wrong and to me that's the most interesting part of this.

Even if affinity to Dynamis was necessary for humanity to survive.

Even if the 13th is an useless void so the full Rejoining was never possible to begin with.

Even if the Ancients just kept sacrificing themselves and were on a path of unsustainable self-destruction, Venat still caused untold suffering with her choice.

And she takes full responsibility for it.

And to me that's a super cool element to the struggle between the two sides of the ancients.

Because on the other side, the Ascians absolutely were driven by love for their people. This was true all the way through.

Duty, love, desire to get back their paradise. There WAS so much beauty and actual kindness in the ancient world, it just had its own struggles, just like the present world gas its own.

Both sides were literally fighting for the same thing.

One looking to the past. One looking to the future.

And I just do not get why people have the need to appoint the right and wrong in this conflict when I think both having their own flaws is the entire point (and far more interesting to me).

I think Venat's manouvering after Hermes uses Kairos goes under this, too.

Her decisions are all driven by her personal perspective as a character (what she believes in, what she gleaned from Meteion's words etc). I've seen her judgements and the memory erasure be criticised as too wishy-washy on a writing level, but I like it because it is so tied to the characters of those affected.

To me her caution and hesitation makes sense considering what is at stake, especially.

I think Emet is the shaky one because I feel he would look into this as deeply as he could. He accepts his memory being gone a little too easily, I think, but I take it considering the biggest tangible loss we see is two familiars (Meteion and WoL).

Finally, I'll comment on the dungeon.

I think Ktisis Hyperboreia is probably my least favourite of the Endwalker dungeons up to this point.

But that also doesn't mean I hate it. I just think we've had so much cooler set pieces and also much cooler bosses with cooler mechanics in other dungeons.

This IS a dungeon in the ancient world with you exploring an ancient facility and you get the ancients as Trusts, which is super cool, but outside of the final third almost being space, it didn't feel particularly unique or interesting to me as a set piece.

I did notice a bunch of bird cages in a room and the notes, but setting aside, the first two bosses in particular were nothing special to me mechnically, either.

The Hermes boss fight did cause some wipes, though. The beams had a very particular pacing a positioning, which caught me off guard and others in the team also had forgotten the fight so we had 4-5 wipes at the Hermes fight, I think.

Overall, though, once again, a very solid bit of story in my eyes.

The end

them

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