This review contains spoilers
What happens when wild popularity collides with massive overambition?
Endwalker is such an abominable mess it feels almost insulting that it's part of the same game as Heavensward. I don't even really know what to say about it - it's so uniformly poor outside of Garlemald that it kind of beggars belief?
I have well and truly fallen in love with XIV this year. It's brought me new friends, new hobbies, new obsessions. I'm starting up a static. I've done content I thought I'd never touch. I've talked at length about lore, backstory and implications of beats with people who have become exceedingly close to me in just a few months. And Endwalker strolls up and detonates its story bomb directly under that.
Elpis is abysmal. The fanbases rehabilitation of Emet-Selch is writ fully into canon, from a grimy manipulative ancient race supremacist to uwu softboy bishonen in one scene. It (as well as many other retcons in this expansion) cheapen Shadowbringers completely, even erasing the impact "remember that we lived" has.
I like Meteion, to some extent. She very much didn't ask to be born - but assigning the final days as an event entirely to her doing is supremely boring. The sundering no longer makes sense - Hydaelyn actively makes things more difficult by doing it. Zenos is written out of the story entirely for most of it. You don't see him for about 30 hours after he wanders off in Garlemald!
The zones are pretty terrible all-over - Ultima Thule and the moon especially, which are a complete nightmare to navigate until you get flight. 2 of the 3 trials are mediocre at best, wwith only Endsinger being interesting. Two of the dungeons are just different towers.
Rushed development and covid clearly hit this pretty hard, but there's only so many excuses you can make. Especially when it is so clear that squishing two expansions into one is such an abject failure that, sadly, kills any potential either had with the finality the ending provides. We will now never see Garlemald's decline. We'll never see an expansion entirely focused around the ancients. Slamming them together is a disgrace to both.
And don't even get me started on the horrible fucked up dog that venat has. I hate it. I hate looking at it. Get rid of it.
At least pandaemonium is fun, and I've heard good things about post-expansion MSQ. But right now, Endwalker leaves a really sour taste in my mouth.
Endwalker is such an abominable mess it feels almost insulting that it's part of the same game as Heavensward. I don't even really know what to say about it - it's so uniformly poor outside of Garlemald that it kind of beggars belief?
I have well and truly fallen in love with XIV this year. It's brought me new friends, new hobbies, new obsessions. I'm starting up a static. I've done content I thought I'd never touch. I've talked at length about lore, backstory and implications of beats with people who have become exceedingly close to me in just a few months. And Endwalker strolls up and detonates its story bomb directly under that.
Elpis is abysmal. The fanbases rehabilitation of Emet-Selch is writ fully into canon, from a grimy manipulative ancient race supremacist to uwu softboy bishonen in one scene. It (as well as many other retcons in this expansion) cheapen Shadowbringers completely, even erasing the impact "remember that we lived" has.
I like Meteion, to some extent. She very much didn't ask to be born - but assigning the final days as an event entirely to her doing is supremely boring. The sundering no longer makes sense - Hydaelyn actively makes things more difficult by doing it. Zenos is written out of the story entirely for most of it. You don't see him for about 30 hours after he wanders off in Garlemald!
The zones are pretty terrible all-over - Ultima Thule and the moon especially, which are a complete nightmare to navigate until you get flight. 2 of the 3 trials are mediocre at best, wwith only Endsinger being interesting. Two of the dungeons are just different towers.
Rushed development and covid clearly hit this pretty hard, but there's only so many excuses you can make. Especially when it is so clear that squishing two expansions into one is such an abject failure that, sadly, kills any potential either had with the finality the ending provides. We will now never see Garlemald's decline. We'll never see an expansion entirely focused around the ancients. Slamming them together is a disgrace to both.
And don't even get me started on the horrible fucked up dog that venat has. I hate it. I hate looking at it. Get rid of it.
At least pandaemonium is fun, and I've heard good things about post-expansion MSQ. But right now, Endwalker leaves a really sour taste in my mouth.
2 Comments
If you ever come in to one of my posts and well actually again I will break your legs
rodlucero
1 year ago
Well, ackshaully... no, she didn't? Sundering was her trump card, actually. The ancients' aetherical density was too high, so they couldn't face Meteion's Dynamis thing. By sundering souls (and, thus, aetherical densities), the sundered became able to fight Meteion and Dynamis.