Final Fantasy XIV - Kiwi Free Company

I'm tired af after a long day of work, guess I'll go through it tomorrow when I am not missing as many brain cells.
Click on the enemies, and you'll note that there's an orientation to them denoted by the little arrow on their circle. They don't see behind them, and many are static. The ones that move, you just watch their patrol patterns - and even then, it's fairly lenient. You don't heal other than with the duty action, so you spend most of it just avoiding the enemies. There are only a handful of times that you can't really avoid a fight, and you can't really deal with fighting more than one thing at a time.

The sequence on the whole is an interesting one, especially compared to the bread and butter of fetch, escort, and 'kill these 3 things' quests, but it does seem to come quite out of nowhere and probably needed a little more of a reason for why they couldn't just pull that on you... like, I dunno, whenever they wanted. It's very anime, even if the actual cutscene is the good kind of schlock.
 
it is quite literally: demoralization: the duty. Props to the gameplay designers. I failed that shit like four times before i made it through

Anybody make a Metal Gear Solid: Endwalker joke yet?
Besides the couple obvious stealth-focused solo instances/bits where you have to trail behind a NPC without he/she noticing you until the end, that Garlemald one's ending bit where you crawl with the last bit of strength reminds me of the microwave hallway scene from 4
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/830/753/84e.gifLIQUI--ZENOS!!!
 
The sequence on the whole is an interesting one, especially compared to the bread and butter of fetch, escort, and 'kill these 3 things' quests, but it does seem to come quite out of nowhere and probably needed a little more of a reason for why they couldn't just pull that on you... like, I dunno, whenever they wanted. It's very anime, even if the actual cutscene is the good kind of schlock.
I think the reason is twofold, at least on a "why don't the bad guys just do this and win?" level.

Zenos wants a proper and fair fight, and he sees this body swap as a means to propel the WoL into action and push beyond their limits even more. It is trial by fire, and Zenos' personal experience with this sort of thing compels him to believe it'll make the WoL stronger. So Zenos just uses it as a training session of sorts to get the WoL all primed up for the ultimate showdown.

Fandaniel is a bit more confusing. Fandaniel ultimately doesn't care about anything beyond the end result being his suicide and to drag everyone else down with him, the WoL can't really stop him as shown when he just jumps into Zodiark's pit after a 15 second monologue so he just wants to make the WoL squirm, squeal, cry, and give up but as the WoL refuses to give up their is no reason to do that further unless he just wants to kill you. Your death may bring others despair, but it would vindicate him more if he just made the WoL give up entirely. He even admits that he is his own worst enemy in Thavnair in that he could stop all things that could disrupt his plan yet he refuses to (their is a more specific reason given much later that attempts to answer this), and that is hinted at when he eventually dies and he says some cryptic nonsense about how he seemingly wants to see if the WoL can truly beat him despite him...you know dying right now. Their are a few more reasons I can assume, but that involves much later spoilers as the MSQ talks about him a lot more.

How exactly the machine ultimately works is vague, we knew the man who made it was the 2nd boss in Ala Mhigo and he could literally rip souls from our bodies as a mechanic, so it isn't a stretch to make something like this. The bigger question is how Fandaniel can just teleport us away like nothing and why literally no other Ascian has ever tried that (that I can remember)?

tl;dr: Neither of the two antagonists want to use this to win in the normal fighty way, they have very different purposes to all of this. Zenos' super simple, Fandaniel is contradictory but their is a reason for the contradiction.
 
Found an easter egg

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1639017144190.png
 

Which in turn is an easter egg in FF4, and leads to a bonus dungeon in the GBA version.

 
Just finished 4th dungeon and the scenes immediately after.
So, got to Elpis, and the first 95% of it was incredible, best area with very interesting plot. Then at the very end the writers take one of the biggest shits I've ever seen.

hermes has a mental breakdown for literally no reason. Instead of saying "hey emet, wait just a sec, let me hear the whole report" he goes berserk and absconds to 4th dungeon. Why? There was literally no reason to do that!

Whatever. So you get to the end and he continues to mentally break down because it turns out the writers are bad.
Then, him and his autistic bird sex toy simultaneously decide to I AM BECOME DEATH just because they discovered the fermi paradox. venat and wol escape.

venat.
wtfwtfwtf
So, instead of just going to emet and the other guy and privately telling thim what happened(i.e. the same result as if the memory device hadn't wiped them), she keeps it a big fucking secret for no fucking reason.
Then she decides shes god and shatters the world again for the worst faux moralized reddit bullshit. jfc im raging. This writing is awful. It's retroactively ruining this whole games story. Hydalin is a literally reddit retard/sociopathy, and the game is portraying her as being morally justified. I'm mad at the internet.
Never before have I ever hoped that the Japanese's cliche where you band together to kill god comes into effect again. If I don't get to put her head on a spike by the end of this I'm seriously gonna consider quitting. I wanna join "team merge the shards" out of spite at this point.

So anyway, yeah, less than pleased.

Edit: also the lions share of it is a movie so you can't even speed read through the worst of it, you're gonna sit there for the whole fucking thing.
 
Última edición:
Just finished 4th dungeon and the scenes immediately after.
So, got to Elpis, and the first 95% of it was incredible, best area with very interesting plot. Then at the very end the writers take one of the biggest shits I've ever seen.

hermes has a mental breakdown for literally no reason. Instead of saying "hey emet, wait just a sec, let me hear the whole report" he goes berserk and absconds to 4th dungeon. Why? There was literally no reason to do that!

Whatever. So you get to the end and he continues to mentally break down because it turns out the writers are bad.
Then, him and his autistic bird sex toy simultaneously decide to I AM BECOME DEATH just because they discovered the fermi paradox. venat and wol escape.

venat.
wtfwtfwtf
So, instead of just going to emet and the other guy and privately telling thim what happened(i.e. the same result as if the memory device hadn't wiped them), she keeps it a big fucking secret for no fucking reason.
Then she decides shes god and shatters the world again for the worst faux moralized reddit bullshit. jfc im raging. This writing is awful. It's retroactively ruining this whole games story. Hydalin is a literally reddit retard/sociopathy, and the game is portraying her as being morally justified. I'm mad at the internet.
Never before have I ever hoped that the Japanese's cliche where you band together to kill god comes into effect again. If I don't get to put her head on a spike by the end of this I'm seriously gonna consider quitting. I wanna join "team merge the shards" out of spite at this point.

So anyway, yeah, less than pleased.

Edit: also the lions share of it is a movie so you can't even speed read through the worst of it, you're gonna sit there for the whole fucking thing.
So three main things.

1: FFXIV's time travel appears to works as if you dramatically change the past the future does not change it instead will erase the timeline (that's what G'raha believes happened to the 8th umbral calamity timeline). This means our entire timeline is dead as far as the WoL knows if we undo the whole Amarout Final Days, and considering they heard G'raha explanation about his time travel it is assumed Venat knows this too. So even if Venat could fix everything, she'd basically erase us from history as far as she knows and through this series of events she believes her society is fundamentally flawed because it created Hermes in the first place because Hermes literally cannont cope unless 2+2 = meaning of life is an answer somewhere out there. Eldibius also says this too before you enter Elpis, he effectively says "you can't change the past".

2: FFXIV has always had its antagonists throw emotional tantrums of varying sorts. Yotsuyu is probably the biggest example of this, Ilberd is another example. The reason the Scions are the heroes is because they have the fortitude to achieve things that others deem impossible because "such good thing is impossible, we just have to murder people to solve our problems.". It is very on theme for this embodiment of nihilism be the "final boss". So to me Venat's fits the theme of the game about being content with your emotions instead of just going "actually we just need paradise again, when said paradise is why any of this happened in the first place". Their is another reason why she broke the shards, but that is explained just before the final zone.

3: The whole reason any of this happens is because the ancient's have terrible emotional understanding and cannot accept anything less then their paradise, they're all about duty and doing the objectively right thing for the star at the cost of anything else (in the ShB side quests in Amarout for example are implied to be isolationist and just observe the outside world's problems at a distance instead of getting off their asses to do literally anything helpful). That's why Emet says that the WoL's recollection of his actions are so unbelievable, he literally can't fathom him having such an emotional breakdown because "My people did their duty, I would never disrespect that!". This focus on objectivity means Hermes' question is doomed to fail and cause him to go insane, the man is so depressed that he can produce the black elpis flower even though no one else can make the flower turn into any color due to aether density and such. That is why he feels happy that the WoL can also produce a black flower.

Hermes is in general is a ticking emotional time bomb and his stupid goal is why this happens. Even if he got the full report it doesn't matter, he was just going to react this way anyway because he's trying to apply objectivity to a subjective belief. Emet basically predicted that Hermes wouldn't like the answer, so he tried to stop it before it got fully out of hand. Now in hindsight if they fought Hermes there and then, instead of in the dungeon (with the whole dampening field plot device) they'd probably have a better chance at getting out of this alive, but Emet I don't think knows this even exists.

tl;dr: Time travel is fucked and cucks everything. FFXIV antagonists are almost all depressed individuals pretty much flailing at the world, so why not have a nihilist be the final boss of this arc? I feel it is very on theme with not just EW, but the entire story up to this point. Hermes was going to fuck everything no matter what happened, he is too desperate for answers to a question you can't really get an answer with the scientific method so who even cares what Emet does?
 
Just finished 4th dungeon and the scenes immediately after.
So, got to Elpis, and the first 95% of it was incredible, best area with very interesting plot. Then at the very end the writers take one of the biggest shits I've ever seen.

hermes has a mental breakdown for literally no reason. Instead of saying "hey emet, wait just a sec, let me hear the whole report" he goes berserk and absconds to 4th dungeon. Why? There was literally no reason to do that!

Whatever. So you get to the end and he continues to mentally break down because it turns out the writers are bad.
Then, him and his autistic bird sex toy simultaneously decide to I AM BECOME DEATH just because they discovered the fermi paradox. venat and wol escape.

venat.
wtfwtfwtf
So, instead of just going to emet and the other guy and privately telling thim what happened(i.e. the same result as if the memory device hadn't wiped them), she keeps it a big fucking secret for no fucking reason.
Then she decides shes god and shatters the world again for the worst faux moralized reddit bullshit. jfc im raging. This writing is awful. It's retroactively ruining this whole games story. Hydalin is a literally reddit retard/sociopathy, and the game is portraying her as being morally justified. I'm mad at the internet.
Never before have I ever hoped that the Japanese's cliche where you band together to kill god comes into effect again. If I don't get to put her head on a spike by the end of this I'm seriously gonna consider quitting. I wanna join "team merge the shards" out of spite at this point.

So anyway, yeah, less than pleased.

Edit: also the lions share of it is a movie so you can't even speed read through the worst of it, you're gonna sit there for the whole fucking thing.
I think a big factor in Elpis' ending is that Hermes is, essentially, in an existential crisis. He's sent the Meteia out in hopes that they will be able to find some nobler truth, some more meaningful philosophy, than the perfect world the Ascians envision.

The 'truth' meteion finds will absolutely crush him, and she knows it, that's why she flees and tries to suppress it. If you seek hope among the stars, a reason to live, and find every single civilisation has either died or wishes for death, it's not at all surprising he'd go mad from the revelation.

As for Venat, a big problem is that very few if any people know what Dynamis/Akasa is, and even less would know Meteion is made of Dynamis. You can't really discuss Meteion's fall and the risk of the final days without including hermes, and if you do that, you risk a relapse of Hermes into his madness. Emet struggled to believe us with our direct testimony, and watching our actions from the moment we arrived. The only reason he remotely accepts we're from the future is that Venat only meets us later. If she arrives with us, that one piece of evidence is going to fall apart. There's another matter you don't quite have the full picture yet, spoilers for just before the last zone: Another reason for the split is to make the people of Etheirys emotionally stronger and better at dealing with hardship, as well as being able to wield dynamis to a degree. Venat still acknowledges that she is basically the root cause for nearly all the suffering in the world, but without her, they'd all just blindly worship Zodiark, and sacrifice other lives to rebirth their friends from him (which is entirely in keeping with their actions in Elpis).

@Zeke Von Genbu is wrong on the time travel aspect, as revealed in some of the tales from the shadows. The post-eighth-calamity world still exists as it's own timeline, but creating our timeline didn't save their one, and as far as we know, G'Raha can't return to the world he came from. By extension, if we change the timeline, such that the Ascians are saved, we won't be able to save our own.
 
Some people are arguing that it doesn't count as foreshadowing that Answers is the very theme off the story.

Now Answers originally was about the 7th Umbral Calamity, and with already one failed launch I doubt the writers had to luxury of thinking five expansions ahead. But is it not preferable that they write the story around Answers rather than ignoring it entirely?


I also don't see the problem with Venat's actions. What help could the 14 bring by knowing the truth behind the Final Days? Likely it might mean no Zodiacs summoned, ending the world then and there. Venat had to endure all the suffering in the world to share the location of the end of the universe with the future.
 
1. Yes, I knew that actually changing the future was never an option. The inevitability of outcome is a completely separate issue from acting like a fucking retard. From her point of view, what the weirdo from the future says is inevitable shouldn't prevent her from using every avaliable means of responding to an existential threat. Its the burden of the writers to reconsile the inevitable with the characters still acting to their utmost, something they failed at from my perspective.
2. Responding to "hey we want to fix shit" with "hey imma shatter your souls and planet lmao" is fucking evil. They didn't do what she wanted so she takes it upon herself to "make them walk"? I absolutely refute the morality of this, it's psychotic. And living in a paradise didn't cause this, crazy bird lolis did, the game is conflating moralistic/philosophic stimuli with practical ones and then moving the goalposts constantly in order to make it look less insane. I'm looking forward to whatever her other reason is, it better be a fucking doosie.
3. Again, paradise didn't cause this, a batshit zookeeper and his crow harem did(conflating moral and physical stimuli, goalposts, yadda yadda). As far as hermes breakdown, the cliche of normally functioning member of society who randomly goes into "delete the universe" mode in the span of 20 minutes is absolute bottom of the barrel dogshit writing. The dude threw a tantrum because he had to put down a pitbull, jfc, utter trashtier motivation.

Disc: in the space of like an hour of casual investigation wol venat emet and the other guy got a pretty good grasp of the situation, going back over it is far from unreasonable. As far as hermes goes, here's what I thought up while the cutscene was going on:
"Hey emet and other guy, I need to talk to you privately, super important"
*proceeded to explain everything*
"Okay, now we just keep shithead birdfucker in the dark, find an excuse to rescind invitation, he didn't really want it anyway, work with council to put concerted effort into extensively researching feels-aether, and go from there"

All these guys are supposed to be the smartest of the smart, I came up with above littleally while the cutscene was playing, to say that they litterally couldn't come up with anything is insulting to the viewer.

Ubertroon: they could have worked to stop it, instead of flailing blind not knowing the cause. just because wol said it would happen doesn't mean they wouldn't have a vested interest in trying to stop it anyway. And no, I'm not saying that changing the future should have happened, I'm saying her reasons for acting as she did were first retarded, and then evil.
 
Última edición:
1. Yes, I knew that actually changing the future was never an option. The inevitability of outcome is a completely separate issue from acting like a fucking retard. From her point of view, what the weirdo from the future says is inevitable shouldn't prevent her from using every avaliable means of responding to an existential threat. Its the burden of the writers to reconsile the inevitable with the characters still acting to their utmost, something they failed at from my perspective.
2. Responding to "hey we want to fix shit" with "hey imma shatter your souls and planet lmao" is fucking evil. They didn't do what she wanted so she takes it upon herself to "make them walk"? I absolutely refute the morality of this, it's psychotic. And living in a paradise didn't cause this, crazy bird lolis did, the game is conflating moralistic/philosophic stimuli with practical ones and then moving the goalposts constantly in order to make it look less insane. I'm looking forward to whatever her other reason is, it better be a fucking doosie.
3. Again, paradise didn't cause this, a batshit zookeeper and his crow harem did(conflating moral and physical stimuli, goalposts, yadda yadda). As far as hermes breakdown, the cliche of normally functioning member of society who randomly goes into "delete the universe" mode in the span of 20 minutes is absolute bottom of the barrel dogshit writing. The dude threw a tantrum because he had to put down a pitbull, jfc, utter trashtier motivation.
2. No, her mentality is not "Fuck you I'm going to shatter you guys for wanting to live". The Ascians wanted to live in complacency over a hungry primal who over time wanted to consume more souls from sacrifices to keep himself sated rather than the Ascians charging into the problem head on that they lazily decided to blow off like it was nothing. Venat, in an understandable fit of rage because of the ascians apathy, basically said, "Fine, if you're not going to deal with this, I'll MAKE you deal with this myself." and sundered all of the souls to keep Zodiark bound while at the same time buying time for the sundered to gather the strength needed to fight Meteion. Zodiark was not a long term solution because eventually he would've died off if he didn't get any sacrifices as with Hydaelin who is slowly running out of power if you paid attention in the previous expansions.

3. Paradise did cause this; the direct consequences of the ascians wanting to linger in bliss at the expense of innocent people being sacrificed lead to a festering problem that would've eventually given out because, like I said, Zodiark wasn't a forever solution to the problem. "Well then they would just make a new god" yeah, but what does the God they have now need and how much more over time? Are they going to have enough to sate him? Also, no, Hermes does not throw a tantrum over a pitbull, he's mad that his bonds with the natural world he created himself and grew attached to was being treated like a superficial facility made only for the purposes of possible luxury or to fulfill a need. The ascians, who are rightfully considered flawed, after they retire from their positions have to give up their own lives because now they don't serve a purpose to society. Hermes rightfully thinks this is bullshit and how the Ascians, who got very comfortable with their apathetic lives and philosophy regarding Hermes' work, are sociopaths who care nothing about him or his friend who is about to be sacrificed for the sake of the convocation. Meteion was his last chance seeing if maybe there was a reason to maybe leave his position on Etheirys or maybe convince the convocation there is a better way, but he finds nothing and is rightfully pissed off (making meteion a proxy to his anger causing her to become corrupt) because life outside either made the same mistakes the Ascians did or they just killed themselves because they had nothing left to live for.

Disc: in the space of like an hour of casual investigation wol venat meet and the other guy got a pretty good grasp of the situation, going back over it is far from unreasonable. As far as hermes goes, here's what I thought up while the cutscene was going on:
"Hey emet and other guy, I need to talk to you privately, super important"
*proceeded to explain everything*
"Okay, now we just keep shithead birdfucker in the dark, find an excuse to rescind invitation, he didn't really want it anyway, work with council to put concerted effort into extensively researching feels-aether, and go from there"


No, that's even more fucking retarded than what the writers came up with. It's made very clear that the theory behind the final days is because of stagnation of aether causing it to rot and causing energy to form entities of despair like primals do. We had no idea the Final days were perpetuated by Meteion and neither did Hermes either meaning no matter how much information we gained about Dynamis, it wouldn't have changed shit because Meteion would've still been corrupted by Hermes' anger and would've been commanded to just end the earth because of the motives I mentioned above. Only difference is the warrior of light would have no knowledge of this and basically by that point Etheirys would've been completely fucked and it'd be impossible to forestall the Final Days.
 
@Zeke Von Genbu is wrong on the time travel aspect, as revealed in some of the tales from the shadows. The post-eighth-calamity world still exists as it's own timeline, but creating our timeline didn't save their one, and as far as we know, G'Raha can't return to the world he came from. By extension, if we change the timeline, such that the Ascians are saved, we won't be able to save our own.
Literally no one knows this exists though, we as an audience might know this, but Alexander, G'raha, and Elidibus never bring this up or have any inclination of knowing it, and they're the closest thing we have to experts on time travel. Eldibus quite literally says "you can't change the past" before we go to Elpis.

This is either a case of either, unreliable narrator (In this case G'raha/Eldibus) or SE is riding this whole time travel rules by the seat of their pants and just made this shit up so Elpis could happen without changing the future.

This entire section very much jumps the shark with time travel as a plot device after they had a decent landing with G'raha time travel adventures, but the pay off of what we get out of it is imo worth it.
 
Well that was a thing. Really could have been two expansions, but I guess YoshiP told Ishikawa to wrap up every single fucking plot point or he would personally murder the fuck out of her, her family, and everybody she knows.
Shadowbringers is still the only expansion in this game that you could cut off everything before it and cut off everything after it and it would be a self-contained story with no real need to wrap up anything. Endwalker doesn't have that luxury. The sheer scope of it all is kind of mid boggling when you think about it. It's definitely larger than probably any standalone FF game ever. But if you think of it as a meta-ending to about four differnet FF games, then it starts to make sense.

The bad
- too broad a focus
- incredibly jarring tonal shifts
- really needed more time to breathe
- I get why they did a bunch of shit, but I don't have to like it

The good
- Making me care about random NPCs dying
- Apparently Yoko Taro and the XIV team have been drinking a lot together
- The mechanics are neat/MGS:Endwalker
- The callbacks to IV and other old FFs are always good.

The lopporits are fine, play some old FF
Venat is best goddess
Globohomo is evil
Living is literally suffering
Zenos status = ridden like a motherfucking chocobo
The get your blood pumping music while you're running around with spaceship logistics is fucking terrible and repetetive
 
I kinda like the loporrits they are cute but God I hate their placement in the story, the pacing/tonal whiplash is awful.

Idk I'm not feeling the story much this time around.

Garlemald was GREAT.
Now I have to fuck around on the moon for 6 hours with sped dwarf rabbits....the sense of urgency is abyssmal this xpac.
 
ive been progressing super slow, just done the 3rd-ish dungeon, i swear to christ if i have to do more oddjobs for the fucking moonrabbits post that big apocalpyse in thavanir i will commit a hate crime in minecraft

also, every male viera in my DC looks the same lmaooo

also it was kinda wierd to me that you just have fucking anima appear and he gets jobbed in a dungeon, atleast Yiazmat and Kefka got raid apperances
 
I think the Loporrits are adorable, but their part in the gameplay/story is fucking awful. I think they would've worked better as just a beast tribe that lived in Labyrinthos already.

If I could do a treatment on the story I would remove the moon as a vessel altogether and give the Sharlayan stuff more room to breathe, it really feels like we spend no time there.

Maybe have it where the Sharlayans were still knowledgeable about what had the potential to happen, but only had the resources to save Sharlayan itself and decided to make that decision for the greater good; I think that fits in pretty well with their established culture. That way we're not all over the place with pacing and there's actually secrets to uncover in the Forum.

ive been progressing super slow, just done the 3rd-ish dungeon, i swear to christ if i have to do more oddjobs for the fucking moonrabbits post that big apocalpyse in thavanir i will commit a hate crime in minecraft

I'm so sorry for whoever your victims are, but you're gonna fucking hate levels 88-89.
 
I think the Loporitt's place and purpose in the story is to sort of introduce an "unsundered" perspective into the sundered world that isn't antagonistic like Emet. Their whole way of seeing the world as the sort of sterile husk of life that focuses on function over form, and it is meant to communicate that without that form life rings hollow. The outfits you get are pretty much just more poor versions of the Ancient's boring sterile robes including the mask, their food is just raw efficient produce, and their "forest" focuses on the purpose of a forest but it just feels empty and soulless.

Nevertheless I think their first section exists about an hour and a half too long, especially in at the very end where they're very blatantly trying to waste your time for their own reasons. I don't mind the tonal shift, as going from Garlemald > The main moon event > Thavnair round 2 would be a little too much depressing shit back to back a story that is supposed to give the audience hope and see the beauty in the flaws of life.
 
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