While Mike is messing around over at Blizzard HQ, we thought it was finally time to bring you his final thoughts on the Endwalker MSQ. Spoilers about obviously.
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Well as you have probably seen Mike is off galivanting around Blizzard HQ for some reason this week, so it's only appropriate that my ass is stuck back in the office editing this bad boy 😂. In all seriousness though, we know it took a while to get this done – but good news is now we are up to date, we can start getting into some deeper subjects which should be good fun.
Endwalker story was so great I am being brought to tears just remembering my play through as you talk about your experiences.
You know what the saddest thing about Garlemald is? That it's not just fiction.
When G'raha disappears, that is when the vocal track gets added to the zone music. Hits even harder if you think about the zone music being sung by G'raha.
There was an interview with the story creater. The fact that you don't really believe they are gone is intentional. It it hope and belief even through that darkest times light wins. light everlasting.
The bunnies killed it for me
I'm sad to see this video skipped over The Aitiascope entirely. I absolutely loved that dungeon.
I also highly recommend anyone who has completed all of the the DRK quests to go back to Sidurgu after finishing 6.0. He only has a few, brief, new lines of dialogue, but it is such a perfect encapsulation of the entire story of Endwalker.
The thing I like most about Garlemald as a storytelling choice is that, for years, the common thought was we'd have to conquer or defeat it in some way and we'd be celebrated as liberators of the people and feted as heroes. Much of the community assumed that that's where the story was headed after 4.3 and Tsukuyomi. And instead, we ended up with a story about the power of propaganda and about the prejudices of the elder generations being transmitted to the younger like some sort of sickness. Extremely bold subversion of our expectations, and it worked better than the other would have by far.
Hydaelyn did make us make a sacrifice PepeHands
00:33 A Mike reborn
Yeah big agree, “Shitty trash weeb game.”
Glad you enjoyed it preach!
Oh goodness…. hearing the music in the intro was enough to get me emotional. omg.
The voice actor who picked up Alphinaud from HW on definitely helped me like him more. I love Sam Riegel (critter here!) but jesus his voice for Alphi was awful 🙁
Losing each scion one by one was pretty obvious but I thought it worked even though it was obvious. It forced us to walk that last bit of road a lone and I think that was important even if we knew they would come back later.
MIKE thank you so much for sharing your thoughts with us. Its honestly the treat of all treats that you've enjoyed FFXIV as much as we all have.
I disagree with your bit about Meteion. It's not her , the single entity that the WoL came to know, that caused the Final Days. The Meteion we got to meet was part of this collective of sisters, all of whom went across the universe for Hermes' answer and 'our' Meteion was like the antenna and loudspeaker for the findings of her sisters. By being connected to her sisters, 'our' Meteion got overwhelmed by the emotions they felt, and thus did she turn the way she did. I do agree that the entire universe having turned nihilistic is something you can debate is a bit much, but I can also see how it is a likely outcome of societies of various types.
But that's a philosophical debate for another time.
The scene with Moenbryda's parents utterly destroyed me. This game has made me cry but I was bawling. I had to take a break, but this was during launch so I had to get back before the AFK timer and 6 hour queue haha.
As for the scion sacrifices at the end, I don't think we were supposed to think it was permanent, especially after it kept happening. But the characters didn't know that! Watching their struggles and resolve, watching them knowingly sacrifice themselves to infinite despair for you? It was heartbreaking. Like Alisaie has been so staunchly against heroic sacrifices for years ever since her grandpa sacrificed himself, and here at the edge of the universe she's being asked to sacrifice herself? They're just kids! And I'd promised their parents that I would protect them. Each of them was a gut punch for me.
I think people often don’t consider that the entelechies as creations of Hermes are likely predisposed towards nihilism and what they found is not always the reality but rather their perception of it. It even says they brought the end to some worlds just to spare them falling to despair.
I never felt like I was expected to relate with Meteion, I'm about the farthest away from nihilism you can get. Nor, that I was being tricked to expect that the scions were meant to stay dead, as the game literally tells me we can wish them back. It was more or less the conclusion to each character's development and their answer. I do think from having watched all of Preach's videos he was very very critical on the games story and characters, sometimes unjustly so, but for him to come out on the other side of the story feeling the way he does says a lot about a video game story that took 10 years to make.
Shadowbringers: 9.4
Endwalker: 9.6
Endwalker really was that bitch…
i saw a lot of my younger self in meteion & my older self in hermes. of course, ive struggled with depression my entire life, & it was only until this year that i have (seemingly) climbed & clawed my way out of it. with depression, all feels hopeless, dark; like there is no way out, there is no light. even with the support of family or friends, everything still feels hopeless. it didnt matter what someone said to me, it felt like i was completely alone. loneliness, & hopelessness, like a black cloud that engulfed me.
so, when i played this expansion, i was still struggling with my depression. it hurt, but in this way where i felt understood or heard. i cried multiple times during my playthrough & the only other game that ive had similar reactions to was mother 3. rarely has a game (or any media really) had such an impact on me. the messages of hope had me thinking about my own life & my own hopes & dreams. here i am today, surviving & thriving
There is a layer of nuance to Garlemald's propaganda that most people won't get. It's not just propaganda for the sake of state aggrandizement. It's propaganda born form a period of real actual existential threat that hasn't even passed that far from a people's living memory. It's easy to trick a people into thinking the world is filled with barbarians ready to storm their gates if they have been, historically, a people pushed from their ancestral lands by foreign powers. It's easy to paint foreigners as monsters if your grand parents were being oppressed by foreigners.
As someone from a country whose modern domestic propaganda and foreign policies are born from a century of foreign encroachment, a period that only ended 70 years ago, I loved the way that zone was written.
This could come off as really ignorant, or stupid of me to think, but hopefully it'll make sense.
I gave up on you back in WoW, or rather, your content. It was always so negative near the mid to end of BFA and I couldn't relate to your experience as an end-game content player, or as someone who has a group of people to regularly play with. I was a solo player, with no connections, hearing this guy constantly ragging on a game I was trying to enjoy, and failing at. So of course, I did the stupid thing, blamed you, and content creators who voiced opinions like yours, instead of thinking on it and asking "Am I unhappy because of them, or am I unhappy, and blaming them, while they're also unhappy, but for different reasons." The answer is obvious in retrospect now but it wasn't so much then.
I quit WoW and started FFXIV Sep 20th, 2020. Not too terribly long before you Mike. I loved the story, so much. So when I heard you were going to give it a shot, I was apprehensive. Here comes a content creator that I had looked up to, lost interest in because of negative sentiments, coming into this new space that I found fun in and was concerned you were just going to tear it to shreds.
But you didn't. Even if you did, I don't think it would have been the same as I feared cause, I'm now confident in FFXIV as my primary RPGMMO, and would gladly back it as something I personally enjoy immensely, without anyone else's approval.
That doesn't matter though cause well, you did and do enjoy it. And I can now say safely, yeah. I was upset at you, for no fault of yours. I misplaced my frustrations with WoW onto you, and disregarded your gripes with the game and well, here I am exposing myself as an ass just so I can say:
Thank you Mike, and PG crew. I respect the shit out of you guys and the grind. And to Mike personally, I'm sorry, and I'm really enjoying your content again. Cheers, and respect.
Alphinuad has the best character development of a videogame character of all time.
there is something very philosophically deep with the many lives/iterations of Hermes, he's the biggest success of the story and people sort of overlook it, the many problems if this setting all come from him, but not because he is some driven, maniacal villain who desires power, but because he wanted to know the meaning of existence, and he unfortunately.. got an answer.
Meteion isn't mean to be like Emet or Elidibus, she's a vessel for despair as a concept, it isn't that the universe is utterly full of it, its that she's meant to be the Avatar of it, period, so that the hero's can battle not just a villain, but the very concept of despair, they wanted the "Final" thing of the series to be tackled in this plot up till now, to be the very conceptual villain of the story as a whole.
My feeling regarding the Scions "dying" was that you were absolutely intended as a player not to believe they were gone for good. The sequence was more about showing each character confronting despair with their unique strengths. I didn't feel like the writers were trying to fake me out. The Scions and WoL themselves were portrayed as believing everyone might potentially be dying for good, but I never got the sense that I was supposed to buy into it.
the Scions all dying was not to raise the stakes, it was never meant to feel like real deaths, it was to conceptualize the concept of the main theme of the expansion, that you have to walk to the end of life so that others can carry on later, each one sac's themselves so you can move forward, its supposed to be the very essence of humanity, each one finds meaning in their sacrifice, making Meteion's words hollow.
Meteion is like bad code. You ask it to do something but you didn't code an alternative. so it either goes into a endless feedback loop or it just throws multiple errors.
when they were sacrifices at the end got me too emotional to think lol
Not killing any of the scions was lame.
Some of the choices you pick actually changes the cut scenes slightly with Vanna and if you pick the right choices it's really heart breaking
I never doubted Hydaelyn, she had the epic series prelude theme when you first meet her. No way she was bad being connected to the prelude.
What Meteion felt was really summed up to an outlook on life:
1. There is no meaning to life. Despair is always there. It's better to die. There's no point if you're going to die anyway.
2. There is no meaning to life. Despair is always there, but we share joy and make the best of what we can while we're alive. Even if living is nonsensical and we're fated to die, it is still reasonable to live for moments of happiness before dying — and this is what drives us to live on – to have reason to hope. For those who walked before us and for those who may yet come after.
Imo, Endwalker isn't perfect, but the takeaway is good. Reminded me and a lot of other people who were in a dark place & were in some really tough situation exactly this, and gave people some hope. For those who have not yet experienced absolute despair, it's hard to really relate to Meteion. She basically goes through many levels of Depression to the point of hysteria and lunacy — but all this wasn't really shown from her PoV, only told.
I went threw EW MSQ in that first month of release and I remember all the absolute stunned comments when we went in to Zodiark as the FIRST trial. It was the first moment of whiplash i had in the expansion, like what no but im only half leveled what the hell is going to happen now. Well lets just say "I was not prepared" lol.
IMO ShB is the best standalone story and EW is the best culmination story with themes tackled that ive never seen before in a game.
personally I think what they did with Fandaniel was perfect, they basically did what they should have done with Zenos. they are plot device villains, they are not deep, they only exist to move the plot. the problem with characters like that is that they can easily overstay their welcome, and that is what happened to Zeons. but with Fandaniel they just got him out of the way after he moved the plot, perfection. now the problem was Zenos, and again I think what they did was genius, there was too much build up behind him to just get him out of the way, but he already overstayed his welcome, so how you deal with him ? make him minimally involved with the plot, and in the end give the play that satisfying honest to god duel we never had to end it all.
We love the story so much but only few of us get the message from the story tellers.
"Do not rush to hate at first glance" Try to listen and relate.
What made Shadowbringers brilliant was that its message of not sacrificing the new to bring back a seemingly better nostalgic era of old was a quandary not only being faced by Emet Selch but the player as well, when the idea is floated of potentially sacrificing the seemingly weaker Ryne to bring back Minfilia. My core criticism of Endwalker is that its messaging of pushing forward despite the losses and the grief doesn't stick the landing because the suffering is all experienced by secondary characters outside of the Scions' circle. If they had killed off a scion for good at the end of the Garlemald arc while the WoL was possessed and the rest of the expansion was the Scions coming to terms with the senseless grief, it would have clinched it. But Yoshi didn't have the guts…
I was the same with Alphano. Naively full of information he wasn't sure of. And when something went wrong, and only when he grew-up from his realization he couldn't get the end results he expected did I began to like him. Alphano was becoming more human. More on the level with everyone else that was helping trying to protect the world. Us. The warrior of light. 😃
The point of the scions "dying" was to show how willing they were to sacrifice themselves for you to go on. They all went with such confidence and willingness, a show of their faith in you and those of Eorzea to find an answer to Meteion's despair. I really don't think we were supposed to think they were actually going to die. In game, the stakes are completely different and the characters themselves however, really did think they were sacrificing themselves.
I think Meteion's Innocence and optimism was so severely shattered by the sadness and hopelessness she perceived beyond, that she just desperately tried to fix it, and inadvertently made it worse, actually causing extinction before it was her intent.
The nihilism that infected the sisters was the way they coped with the horror, still a very innocent and naive perspective, but the ideia of mercy was all they could cling to.
For me for the critics @ 22:25
Its prob ishikawa writing that came from her enviroment, japan from the outside looks like a heaven of improvement. But actually really depressing places to live, u gotta live in set of boxes, traditiion in front of problem, ppl commiting suicide and not having will yo live.
Endwalker for me is like ishikawa letter to ppl, live sucks, u will find a lot of shitty things being done to ur enviroment and to u. But heaven and good place r not something u can find, its something u created when u bond and find ur friends in life.
Honestly its really beutifull letter in form of game for us to fight on.
As emotional as it was playing the first time, watching Preach's takes are always just as if not more impactful. Bravo Preach! You help me get even more (far more) out of my sub even for the best part of the game.
The way I read the Meteia is that they became a self-fulfilling prophecy. They might have encountered a world gripped by despair and then from there began exuding that in small amounts to the next planets they arrived on. Always tipping the scale a little bit more, and then ultimately creating a feedback loop where they expect despair, then create it via their entelechy powers, resulting in the Meteia themselves despairing further.
Meteion is an entelechy, and the Meteia were a hive mind. Say you had ten thousand of them, gone to as many different worlds.. all it takes is one, experiencing the overwhelming despair of a single world driven to self-destruction, to poison the hive mind. Her emotions flow out, and suddenly there's a second world, on the tipping point, that succumbs. Then two more, then four.. and on and on, until even the happiest worlds are drowned in the growing nihilistic certainty of the hive mind that everything is meant to end. The real tragedy of Meteion is not that she suffered the deaths of countless worlds.. it's that she caused them. And as other commenters have been noted, the game itself has heavily implied or outright confirmed that this is exactly what happened. And it wasn't misrepresented to us.. she knew she did it, but she (the hive mind) saw it as a natural conclusion, like entropy itself.
I wonder if Preach was ever given the argument that the path Meteion took sent ripples of despair and worry out into the universe and that in turn influenced the other societies into a downward spiral. Despair fed despair. We have no idea how the number of years for the residents of Elpis relates to our understanding of time, Young Metieon could have had influence on those other cultures for centuries on our scale of time. For all intents and purposes the residents of Elpis are immortal, so thier time scale could be talking about 100's of our years like they were just yesterday for them.