Board 8 > FFXIV ENDWALKER FINALE unmarked spoilers topic (FULL 6.0 SPOILERS)

(+) Yeah! (+)

Fucking dying trying to find this Saigaskin map location on Ultima Thule.

screenshot it?

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/0/4/3/AAeolZAACs3L.jpg

Also if I have a crafting item with no recipe yet (and I've bottom the v crafting volumes already, I assume this is for use with as of yet unreleased recipes? Double-edged Herb was a rare gathering item with a high perception requirement.

looks like right above the 2 here, east of the starting point

https://cdn.fanbyte.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FFXIV-Endwalker-120821-Ultima-Thule.jpg?x60655

double-edged herb and other 1* mats likely to be used for crafting savage gear yeah

Oh....I'm used to the location hints on the map being much, much smaller than that. It didnt even cross my mind it could be zoomed back that far.

I am annoyed with my internet, it has been hiccuping once every 20 minutes or so for a week now and I don't feel comfortable pugging EX content with it like this ;/

And beat the second EX trial as well. My PF prog had a handful of tanks that had no idea how to do adds phase, which was an experience

Finally finished. So good.

trdl23 posted...

One question that's irked me: How the hell did the recall-teleporter get to us at the end of the final Zenos duel and its aftermath? Did Meteion go back and toss it to us?

Urianger (iirc) mentions this if you talk to him again after the required conversation at the very end. He implies that it was the result of someone's (I'm assuming all of the Scions') prayers being answered through dynamis.

Meteion does say she'll bring us back to the ship so I figured it was her

Ah yeah could be

Actually, Im rewatching that scene to get a screenshot (of the WoLs shit-eating grin after telling Zenos that you do live to fight, which was so good), and I think its actually the WoL who wishes for the teleporter to appear; Meteion tells you to hold the wish in your heart.

I really liked the exchange of "That, I can't deny" and "Finally, acceptance!" for my character and Zenos too because I denied calling him my friend at the end of Stormblood.

Still wouldn't, but I like to think of it as Zenos changing the way he thought about things, but still finding satisfaction that there is common ground.

Also just in general I feel like a lot of people miss Zenos' importance to the meta narrative of Nihilism vs Existentialism that Endwalker has. Like yeah, he's still not the most compelling character there is, but as a plot device to serve that he's GREAT because he is literally the walking definition of living for the moment and screw all else.

So you end up fighting the extremes of both sides of the argument.

Likewise, it's interesting that Hermes and Meteion show up walking alongside Venat, Emet, and Hythloadaeus in the ending art. Because Hermes might have been seriously depressed and channeled that in the wrong way, but he also had a point. It wasn't right to treat others the way the ancients did, and the WoL and Venat were clearly bothered by it (as would, I feel, most players be). He wasn't evil, he just lacked a proper support system and the one he created was inherently flawed in a way that no one in that society knew how to repair.

I think Endwalker more than any other expansion benefits from going back and researching these scenes.

I remember we were memeing on "Fannyboy" literally a week or less before launch.

https://i.redd.it/5mwr3vi777681.jpg

Also I love the reddit community, they are like "Alisaie sent him to his room to think about what he had done...and he fucking did it."

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/2/2/9/AAAelnAACtZV.jpg

Xenos went from 'he is okay but I am not sure about him being the big bad" to completely selling me. "Is this your prey?" oh my god

"Why does it still live, surely it is no match for you?"

DoomTheGyarados posted...

https://i.redd.it/5mwr3vi777681.jpg

I'm dying.

so going back to expansion debates

I think end of 5.0 before the final trial is the best moment in the entire XIV saga so far, for me. I haven't done most of the optional stuff but for MSQ I mean.

But on a 'top 20 moments in XIV history' I think endwalker has like half of them and I feel like that makes it the best base game so far for MSQ.

Nothing beats the guitar riff I think tho

Possibly recency bias but I think I liked Endwalker better. Emet-Selch is still the best antagonist, of course.

I'd put it the same. There's no beating Emmet and the climax of Shadowbringers is supreme, but Endwalker broke me.

5.0 ended with a fuck yes. 6.0 ended in tears. Nothing beats tears.

Pre final trial of 5.0 is so hard to beat. Still my favorite moment of the game. But overall this expansion had so many more moments

When you realize the Endwalker logo had nothing to do with the moon but it's the Ragnarok and the dead planet in the middle of Ultima Thule

I'm fairly certain that logo is going to represent a patch quest for Pandemonium. Or possibly reference a Lunar Cry event from 8.

Honestly I think Hien just needs to slice up anybody who's on the ground in front of him at this point.

Ah, doing the range role quest, are you?

Just beated.

Overall I thought it was pretty good, but ShB has it beat. Part of this is because Shadowbringers got three patches of additional story that's already out, and according to the devs we shouldn't expect that for Endwalker. The other part is that Endwalker had the unfortunate task of having to tie up every outstanding major plot point in the game, resulting in some things feeling a little disjointed (hello Zenos!). Overall, Endwalker has more highs (though not the highest - Amourot is still my favorite area in either expansion), but as a cohesive unit it falls a bit short to me.

Everything else is just personal minor nitpicks. For example while I don't think the swerve into existential sci-fi elements is completely out of place in a fantasy game, unfortunately I just don't think the writers are nearly as well suited to it.

Wow the healer and ranged DPS role quests were like, identical stories, except the ranged one was better.

The healer one was set in Ala Mhigo, and the ranged one was set in Doma... Where have I seen that before? HMMMM...

The healer role quest ironically enough needed Lyse. Arenvald and Raubahn weren't quite the emotional foils Fordola needed for the closure that role quest was going for.

Doubly so after that Tales from the Twilight short story that revealed that Fordola was the girl Yda died protecting.

I still don't care about Arenvald

Oh yeah, I guess I should maybe finish the healer role quest at some point.

I still don't care about Fordola

Well I dont care about the company of heroes (but I kinda do after the melee role quest)

I feel so dumb not knowing before that the Baldesion Annex theme is FFV. Which makes sense

Haha FFV is my favorite game in the series so I picked up on that immediately

Interesting that it's based off of Lenna's theme, though!

Mac Arrowny posted...

People seemed to like the themes of the later stuff, but I really wasn't into the "all civilizations other than humanity give up on life and desire death" thing. I wish they'd emphasized that those were only the ones Meteion ran into or that she misinterpreted somehow. Stuff like giving up on life because you know the universe is going to die feels bad since we in the real world already know the universe is going to die and no one really cares.

Reading through the topic now and when I said I had quibbles with the sci-fi storytelling this is what I meant. I'm glad to see I'm not alone on this. Despite the incoming walls of text I don't really want to rehash the argument, buty personal problem boils down to that even arguing the stories of other civilizations as non-representational, there are still fundamentally true things contained within them philosophically AND in terms of in-universe lore (the dragons and omicrons for example we are absolutely supposed to take mostly at face value, this is a lore payoff four expansions in the making). Dynamis is presented as a force that links emotional and physical reality and is explicitly synthesizing these two elements. So the accounts we are getting are biased, but still true.

So yeah where the themes starts to lose me are where it flattens existential dilemmas I have to navigate every god damn day. From a sci-fi writing perspective most of my issues are fixed simply by showing societies that reject Meteion's message but fail against the Final Days anyways, or by showing more apocalypses directly caused by her (the only one we see like this is the final one in Dead Ends, which I do love conceptually). I think these are largely avoided to make us/Etheiris feel more special, which I'm not a huge fan of.

If anyone has read Three Body Problem I had a hard time getting it out of my mind as I went through the final zone. I'm not really sure why, these are VERY different stories apart from dealing with existential dread on an intergalactic scale. But this is probably influencing my thoughts on the matter. Three Body is WAY more bleak, and Endwalker is a game where you can punch despair in the face. I guess what I'm saying here is my preference just leans towards acceptance and ambiguity rather than the adversarial Endwalker is forced to do as a video game.

So to end on a more positive note: the postgame dungeon story where Jammingway walks into the realm that physically embodies the cosmic horror of mortality, basically says "lmao this completely fucking owns," and opens The Restaraunt At the End of the Universe? And even the supposedly fake constructs of pure despair are on board with self reflection and personal growth??? Hell yes. THIS is the shit I love to see.

I was actually wondering if that restaurant might lead to an omicron beast tribe hub or something like that.

BK_Sheikah00 posted...

I was actually wondering if that restaurant might lead to an omicron beast tribe hub or something like that.

I think so, you can ask Jammingway for lore on other civilizations, of which there are currently only one. So it's definitely going to be a side questline. Could be tribes, trials, or even dungeons (which might not be only MSQ anymore now that the scions are disbanded). I'd love to keep running through dungeons for dead civilizations, personally.

I'm a big fan of the Hitchhiker's references.

Seeing people soloing Stormblood Extremes now with Warrior. Hopefully Paladin can do it too.

my mind was blown when the 6.01 antagonist was revealed to be bargain bin denathrius, down to the fangs and telekinetic sword. cmon ffxiv, you're doing great, why you gotta be like this?

i don't really mind. looking forward to meeting athena or whoever the final boss is gonna be

I doubt he's the final boss, but I think it's clear that Lahabrea will be Zeus.

My money's on Hephaestus.

Regarding Pandemonium, some theories on chatacters: i think Themis is our Elidibus right? We're gonna kill Lahabrea in p12 and Erich will turn out out to be the succesor and the Lahabrea of our time. Awkward.

I'm calling this guy Eric and there's nothing anyone can do to stop me

Them and Eric awesome show great job

Everytime I hear clips of Japanese FFXIV it's so wierd.

I know Yuyuhase is the meme, but there a bunch of other strange ones too.

Why does Matsaya sound like a 5 year old girl?

That reminds me I wanted to look up the cutscene that plays after the 87 dungeon in JP to see how Meteion sounds. The EN dub came across as an instance where the direction didn't quite match the character animations. Not Asahi tier but still.

I can't seem to find it on YouTube right now so just a self-reminder for later.