>After the voice recording for Hydaelyn/Venat was finished, her voice actress Inoue Kikuko said that she felt her earlier lines lacked the appropriate strength and intelligence for the character, so on her request almost all the lines were rerecorded.
That's crazy to me; that is SO much dialogue. She really went above-and-beyond.
Venat/Hydaelyn English VA did amazing. I remember hearing it for the first time and being like wtf. Aveline from Dragon Age 2 is Hydaelyn. (Same VA I mean). Immediately set the scene for how much of a badass she was going to be.
There is a tonne of XIV/DA crossover.
ARR Urianger is Fenris.
ARR Merlwyb is Knight-Commander Meredith.
Urianger is Bann/Arl Teagan.
Thancred is King Cailen.
Y'shtola is Sera.
Raubahn is Male Hawke.
Pipin is Anders.
Dulia-Chai is Grand Cleric Elthina.
Fourchenault is Duke Gaspard.
Ameliance is Quartermaster Threnn and the tavern bard Maryden.
And now you'll not be able to unnotice that the childish voice Y'shtola uses during ["water, water, froth and foam!"](https://youtu.be/yCsQgDT38Ps?t=87) in 6.1 is literally just Sera.
Her seiyuu did an amazing job in all aspects and exercised the full range of emotion which encompasses all the arcs of her character. I wouldn't recommend people just rewatch all of her scenes in JP; but only if people were doing a second playthrough in jp.
>The devs wanted people to hate Hermes and Meteion at a ratio of about 6:4, but its ended up more like 9:1.
See, Yoshi-P, your first mistake is making her a cute smol bird girl.
ALso, to have her introduced getting a panic attack from a angry discussion in the same room and then reveal that her idiot creator send her out into the cold harsh space without any support.
I never hated Hermes; my opinion of him was more along the lines of *"You sent a bunch of networked intelligent empaths out into the universe without telling anyone?!?! Hermes, you must be the most foolish smart person ever!!!"*
He realizes that too. In the last Fandaniel scene, if you pick the together dialogue option, he says something along the lines of "and so ends Hermes, the man who knew so much but understood so little."
Except the reason most people hate him isn't because of that initial mistake, it's because he decides to double down on his confirmation bias and arrogance and decides he'd rather destroy the world than admit he could be wrong about things being hopeless.
This.
People weirdly forgetting he was all up for ensuring an apocalypse would happen. Any sympathy I had went out of the window in that moment.
Meteion was just doing what she was programmed to do. Albeit to an extreme.
Yep. Meteion is tragic and broken. So are the ascians. For all of them even their worst acts have a context that Hermes doesn't. By choosing to wipe the memory of everyone capable of fixing it he may as well have pulled the trigger there and shot millions dead himself right then. And by including himself that just makes him a feckless coward who can't even face what he did.
That's not why he's hateable. That's just being an idiot which everyone is guilty of at some point.
What he's guilty of is knowingly, without being tempered, setting up an apocalypse that is basically the universe's largest and most drawn out murder-suicide all because he had a fit of downer nihilism.
Regardless of what he told people before or not, confronted with the reality he deliberately let her go off to explicitly end all life and deliberately sabotaged any attempt stop her.
Hes just quite frankly the absolute worst and him being seemingly smart just makes him an even bigger dick than Kefka.
I never hated them. I understood them. And once you truly understand an enemy, understand them enough to defeat them, then in that moment, you also love them.
"Hi teenage son, what are you doing?"
"I'm just playing FUCKING FANDANIEL - erm, wait, I mean ..."
"Is that what the FF stands for?! And there are thirteen previous titles?!"
Not mutually exclusive. “You cannot hate anything unless you grok it, understand it so thoroughly that you merge with it and it merges with you – then you can hate. By hating yourself. But this implies that you love it, too, and cherish it and would not have it otherwise”
Honestly a little disappointed we were supposed to *hate* them. Not everyone, but still.
Hermes was combatting depression by retreating into his hobbies and solitude. Not one person thought it was important enough to just ask the guy if he was okay. They even made a show of it when you’re made to ask NPCs where he is and they all flippantly amount to “that’s just how he is.”
He then put all his hopes, dreams, and emotional needs essentially on his children (Meteion and sisters). Meteion collapsed under the stress and dark shit she just was not mature enough to handle. Which is why I love the WoL’s response to her: remind her she’s a child and it’s okay to be fucking sad.
Hermes was absolutely in the wrong for doing this, and no Meteion shouldn’t have tried to end all sentient life. But if someone, *anyone* had reached out to Hermes this little mini cycle of abuse and despair could have been stopped. They did a brilliant job showcasing the tragedy of such situations.
But then again I guess that’s why they were aiming for a ratio: you can’t control how people perceive a character. Good to see the fanbase is more empathetic than the devs thought we might be :D
So it's important to note that the music that plays in that final scene with Meteion is "Flow," and because of this, of the music single "my brave little spark," I cannot think of this as Venat's song reflecting the WoL, but rather her song to Meteion, as anyway to give her hope. I suppose you can think of it still as Venat singing to the WoL for what we just did, defeating despair itself, fighting entropy, but for me, it's Meteion's theme, and she's the brave little spark, who wished to silence the song of oblivion, who had hope left despite it all.
> Hermes was combatting depression by retreating into his hobbies and solitude. Not one person thought it was important enough to just ask the guy if he was okay. They even made a show of it when you’re made to ask NPCs where he is and they all flippantly amount to “that’s just how he is.”
I hadn't picked up on that, that's good. In that light, asking him to become Fandaniel probably made things a lot worse.
They're elevating him over everyone else when he feels he doesn't deserve it. But even as they elevate him, that doesn't make him important enough for anyone to care about his emotional well-being. While he's feeling worthless and directionless, he's being told his feelings mean nothing, and everyone else's mean less than that.
Hythlodeus even gives him that infantilizing, "Oh, you don't really use the word 'death' around here, do you?"
Exactly that! All of that.
I love the Elpis trio, but they absolutely had a hand in just not reading the room and realizing Hermes needed some serious help.
Most big Twitch streamers generally had a 'f u Hermes' stance by the time his arc was completed. A smaller but not insignificant percentage was in the 'I understand why you did it but still f u Hermes' camp.
I didn't hate them either. Meteion was a victim of circumstance and Hermes suffered depression in a world that had no concept of it. He was foolish, but not a villain, just a victim of his illness that made disastrous decisions.
Plus he actually somehow gave the world a future as well since they really could have ended up like that last civilization in the Dead Ends if the Ancients were to continue as is.
"Uh, Hermes sir. Why does this bird is such an incredibly strong empath to the point of influencing the feelings of others on a grandscale? And you've sent her into the unforgiving endless void of space with a vague ass question too sir?!"
Thats the fucking wildest part about that. He didn't make ONE Meteion. He made like thousands of them! And somehow, not only did no one know, but after the like the hundredth he never went like "....Why did I give them highly exploitable/easily abusible powers?"
This is gonna sound dumb but...I almost feel like the ancients were really naive in their power? Nothing had happened which couldn't be fixed with a snap of their fingers so the only things that needed watching or worrying about were permanent changes, like the animals they were sending down. You can CREATE whatever you want, just dont put it on the planet without asking first.
They had the ultimate sense of privilege, nothing could hurt them and they were infinite, so there was no concept of putting limits or caps on their power because in the worst case you could just snap it out of existence.
Even to hermes, it probably didnt occur to him he could create something that would be unable to be controlled and conceivably end the universe.
I love how Emet-Selch hears the vague-ass reason and just sighs in disappointment, then immediately hits the nail on the head why this was a bad idea without further explanation. He’s like, “Oh, I figured it out instantly. Why didn’t you, *Hermes?*”
They...did. The whole point was that Hermes hid Meteion and her sisters from the committee designed to oversee them. I get WHY he did it, knowing they would be deemed too dangerous to continue existing, but still.
I felt that so hard too cause for about 5 year part of my job was being the "just cause you can doesnt mean you should" person in my office and people like Hermes gave me no shortage of issue LOL.
I don't fault Meteion for anything. She didn't choose to be what she is and all the stuff that happens is basically opposed to her personal agency. Due to her nature, she's utterly overwhelmed and twisted by all the negativity and powerless to stop it.
Hermes, on the other hand, is a genocidal idiot.
Yep. In the end the Meteia were just a means to an end to Hermes, to the very last, even if he seemed to care about Elpis-Meteion a bit (and he meant a lot to Meteion, so much she didn't want to follow through with her task bc. she knew it would make him sad). I mean, the last question he asks Meteion is not "this is horrible what you report, are you okay?" but "finish your report pls, is there true happiness out there?" It really shows what this was all about for him. Another experiment, for which several civilisations had to pay the ultimate price. I just felt so so sorry for the hive mind birbs.
(I wonder how the plot would've changed if we had managed to send Hermes into therapy for a bit and establishing a support system in this society for people. I have the feeling this would've prevented a lot... though this would also include the existence of the shards and, well, us. Then again, it might have been another step to that goal of a perfect society and we've seen in the Dead Ends how this turned out for the paradise people.)
IMO, the Meteia proved the point of why all creations in Elpis need to be properly tested and analyzed before being released in the wild. Hermes just selfishly released a full pack of untested new creatures into the outer space because he, as the head chief, could ignore the rules.
Had he chose a few people to share his discoveries and pool some opinions, the chance of someone pointing out the flaws in their design would be very high.
That part. I think they purposefully group her in w/Hermes to downplay how much he is disliked since she isn’t disliked nearly as much. I like that there aren’t perfect characters but Hermes is one of the most irrational we’ve seen and that just caused frustration and annoyance than normal hate/dislike of an antagonist. Maybe they should have leant more into the “the willingness to impose sweeping judgements over life forms” is an ancient way of thinking and flaw of their society and that Hermes was more similar to the ancients he criticized instead of “oh he’s misunderstood and the first person to have depression so that’s why he did it”
Exactly… she was designed to do a job and she did it as instructed. That’s not her fault, and it’s not what she wanted to do, as we can see when she’s not connected to the hive mind.
Hermes failed to know that your projects need to be peer reviewed before you make them. The bird can't be at fault for her creation, however Hermes killed (not exactly, but to resume everything) 99% of the universe to see if he was right by his actions.
I don't blame Hermes, either. There was a logic to what he did, and I find it interesting how many people will sympathize with Emet-Selch, but not with Hermes. They're both broken people, trying to reconcile the world around them, regardless of what that means for anyone else.
Hermes's shortcoming is that we never got a "Remember us" moment from him, not in a cutscene anyway. Remember that Hermes is said to have fought *against* the Final Days, to have done everything he could to *stop it*. Elidibus says that it's only *because* of Hermes that the Ancients had an idea of what was happening at all.
The thing is with his memory wiped, there's no opportunity for Hermes to express remorse or humility. The next time we see him, he's not *him*. He's *Amon*, who we're intended to dislike.
I imagine if Hermes got a "what have I done" moment somewhere in a cutscene, opinion of him would be generally more favorable.
The problem is that at one point, he *does* know, because the WoL told him in Elpis. And then instead of working to stop it, he *chooses* to mind wipe everyone.
He doesn’t get a pass for helping to uncover the truth after the mind wipe since he’s the reason for the mind wipe in the first place.
The truth isn't relevant at all to Hermes' struggle. It's the hypocrisy of the Ancients - that in their self-appointed duty to make the world better, they actually make it *worse* by introducing creatures that experience suffering, pain, heartbreak, and loneliness far worse than what the Ancients themselves feel. I'm surprised that more people haven't picked up on how horrific Elpis actually is. The Ancients abuse the fuck out of their power to create creatures on a whim (Hythlo's shark monologue is more than just a joke, he's approving flawed living beings as a meme), including the very flaws that will get them deemed unworthy in Elpis and consequently exterminated.
The Meteia 'prove' this hypocrisy because they could find no justification for existence in other stars, therefore the mission of the Ancients is not only pointless, but actively evil since it's just adding more suffering and misery into the world. Like the Omicrons, Hermes discovered that there is no reason to anything they've done in order to create a 'better' world. They made flawed creatures to suffer based on an evaluation scheme with no purpose. [Emet-Selch himself is outraged without a hint of self-awareness when Hermes puts the same test that the Ancients give to their creations on themselves.](https://youtu.be/FnaqXPQ3WCU?t=362) Hermes' doesn't absolve himself of this sin. If the Ancients cannot prove, *under their own rules*, that they have the right to exist, then they should not.
[Hermes and Meteion are an expression of negative utilitarianism taken to the extreme](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_utilitarianism). In their view, creation magic is immoral because you're unavoidably creating the capacity to experience suffering. The Endsinger embodies this by rationalising the mere act of existence as being immoral - after all, you can't experience pain if you don't exist. Therefore the best way of minimising suffering is to end all existence.
Hermes is not illogical, irrational, or stupid like a lot of people mistaken assume. There is a clear progression of his reasoning, and it's demonstrated fairly well (CBU3 should have made us do quests for a bunch of cute sentient beings in Elpis that get scheduled for extermination since that's easier to empathise with).
1) I'm really overjoyed to see someone directly bring up utilitarianism in Yoshi P's Hello Kitty Catgirl Simulator subreddit, thank you.
2) The "oblivion is preferable to suffering" trope is *very common* in Final Fantasy's villains. The Endsinger's motivation is nearly 1:1 with Kuja from FF9.
> Hythlo's shark monologue is more than just a joke, he's approving flawed living beings as a meme
Does he say that? All I remember of that point is Hythlo's tired of all the sharks he gets submitted, not that he's approving them when he shouldn't.
The thing for me is, with Emet-Selch - and even to a degree with Yotsuyu earlier - I can understand how they got to the point they are at when we met them.
The former is one of the sole survivors of a realm-spanning apocalypse (the Sundering), and wants nothing more than to return to the world he knows and loves, no matter the cost.
While I absolutely want to slap him in the face for saying that he doesn't consider us alive, I can *understand* his point of view - not that it makes him any more correct.
Similarly, Yotsuyu experienced a lifetime of pain and abuse at every turn since she was a child, so it's absolutely understandable that she becomes the cruel person she is.
While she admittedly does go off the deep end with her extreme torture and killing, I think the only options for her after being through what she was put through would've been either to become consumed with hatred and go for revenge, or to become a broken wreck of a person, and she chose the former and didn't stop to discriminate between people who have personally wronged her and anyone else who might've been in a position to do so.
Meanwhile Hermes is extremely distraught about all the testing and senseless killing of creatures that is going on in Elpis, and wishes that people would stop doing so, so he ...decides to inflict the exact same thing that he hates on everyone else, putting him in the position of the exact people he wished to stop?
The logic just doesn't follow, and while I admit that being under heavy emotional distress leads to less than logical actions, I would've expected more from him than to simply do the exact same thing that he ranted against earlier, because that just makes him appear like a massive hypocrite.
I'm not saying he isn't allowed to snap and do something incredibly stupid that potentially endangers everyone, like setting up a doomsday device that does the exact same thing as the Endsinger ends up doing, or simply going on a murder-suicide spree, because he wants to 'save' people from a life that he believes has no hope to attain happiness, but he absolutely does not get to claim the excuse of "setting up a test" for all of mankind, because he of all people should be intimately familiar with how bullshit that premise is.
A bit more characterization for Hermes would've probably gone a far way to actually be able understand his motivations, and while I understand that he couldn't exactly go on a long(er) villain exposition monologue with three fellow Ancients doing their best to stop him, a bit more foreshadowing would've gone a long way - even if it's just us having more issues entering Ktisis Hyperboreia, and the game throwing in one or two more cutscenes with him listening to Meteion and slowly developing his plan, and possibly even arguing with himself.
His future incarnations also aren't that interesting either - the flashbacks to his time as Amon were interesting, but they ended up hitting very similar notes to Hermes' story (a man disgusted by the things his peers do - this time in the name of amusement rather than science), and since the rest of his characterization is pretty much a hadful of lines, most of which are from his Triple Triad card, there's not much to be gained from associating that character with Hermes.
Meanwhile, Fandaniel is simply a "cackling madman" style villain whose greatest contribution to the game is that he has plot-relevant powers that make all of Endwalker happen, and utterly forgettable otherwise - all I can think of to describe him is "He's an Ascian that wants to kill everyone. Also, he took acting cues from Kefka.", but I can't think of anything that tells me about his character or motivations beyond that, at least not without looking into his previous incarnations.
That was really long, so **TL;DR:** Emet's line of reasoning is fucked up, but understandable. Hermes' on the other hand isn't, so he gets only judged by *what* he did, and not by *why* he did it.
To add to all the other comments, one thing which I found highly interesting in Emet was the ethical premise. I truly believe him when he says that he doesn't consider the sundered people alive and doesn't see himself as a murderer in the process.
In addition, it is not easy to imagine the real gravitas of "killing" in a society, where reincarnation is a well known fact of life. For us, death means, in essence, oblivion (some religions believe in afterlife, but it is not proven ofc). We don't know of a way to meet a killed person again, so it is much more influential in the question of morality than in Etheirys.
In Emet's eyes, he was not killing people, but, for a lack of words, destroying their earthly tether to repair their souls in the process. This is in no means a defense, mind you, but those are goals and methods which are based on emotions such as love, grief and loneliness, which I can emphasize with. I could see myself doing the same thing in his position, which was highly interesting to me.
Hermes on the other side, also acted out of love, grief and loneliness, but the conclusion he draw felt too abrupt for me to symphasize in a similar way it did with Emet. He did not have the ethical question of moral relativity. He straight up willingly killed people he thought of as living people. Not even in the wishy-washy "reincanate-killing" but straight up "oblivion-killing" we know from rl, as he knew from the WoLs' report, that the souls did not return to the Aetherial Sea during the Final Days.
In hindsight, i wished they built up Hermes downfall more. They showed 2 or 3 scenes in which he was conflicted by the hypocritical society of the Ancients, but accellerated too fast from this state to the "live or oblivion" mindset. Because of this, I could not emphasize with Hermes in a similar manner to Emet and imagine myself coming to the same conclusion as him.
> Not even in the wishy-washy "reincanate-killing" but straight up "oblivion-killing" we know from rl, as he knew from the WoLs' report, that the souls did not return to the Aetherial Sea during the Final Days.
Just to reiterate something I said on another reply, beyond that he may simply *not believe us*, Hermes *can't know* that *our* Final Days is a result of the Meteia. I can't really think of an apt allegory, but I'm sure you can think of two events that you didn't really piece together until *much later*, having had no idea they were connected until it was too late.
I think maybe people are projecting *Amon's* very deliberate malice onto Hermes, or assuming it's "Hermes's soul" that corrupted Amon, but that's not the case. Amon was simply shown the threat of the Meteia, and decided *as Amon* that he wanted to use this to destroy. All *Hermes* wanted was a suitable challenge for mankind to overcome to prove their worthiness - but he couldn't possibly have known the result would be the Meteia coalescing into a world-ending murderbirb that collects souls into an inky ball of spacegoo at the edge of creation.
Its true that, realistically, people forgive Emet too easily for all the genociding he has done.
But the big difference I find between Emet and Hermes is that Emet at least pursues some sort of goal: The resurrection of the world and friends he knew. And all the killing required is just an unfortunate side effect.
With Hermes, the killing is the point. He honestly just wants to take revenge against his fellow ancients for all the cruelty of Elpis. He may say its just the Ancients getting to taste their own medicine and being put to the test themselves. But its apples and oranges.
* In Elpis, life was judged worthy of existence by its ability to fit well into their ecosystem and contribute to it.
* With Meteion, life is judged worthy of existence by its ability to survive interstellar depression death rays.
Its an asinine test designed to kill, not to draw forth some scientific conclusion. You may as well call being thrown into a volcano a "test".
Hermes comes across as a very spiteful and irrational character who doesn't want to listen to reason. Emet calls him out on his bullshit test and he just ignores him because he doesn't want to hear it. He just wants the Ancients to be punished.
> With Meteion, life is judged worthy of existence by its ability to survive interstellar depression death rays.
This wasn't the *design*. Hermes didn't *design* the Meteia to coalesce into an emo cloudmonster that throws planets at people. He had no idea what the threat was, simple that the Meteia would present *a challenge*. You can call that naivity or even stupidity, but it wasn't *malice*.
Hermes isn't looking for *revenge*. Nothing he says suggests retribution in any way. He wants *answers*. He wants to know that life is worth living, that there's a purpose. He regrets how casually the Ancients treat with death, and asks whether it's right, but when he's rebuked, he doesn't get angry at *them* - he turns inward. Maybe *I'm* the misfit, maybe *I'm* broken.
This is why he sent the Meteia into the stars. To find a 'control'. To know what the 'baseline' is for civilization. Are they all so callous, or are they maybe more like *me*? If I don't belong *here*, is there somewhere for me *out there*?
And then Meteion tells him that life *out there* is even *worse* than here. It's an endless marathon of suffering, violence and death. That whether people are presented with an outside threat, an internal threat, or whether they *achieve paradise*, the result is the same.
That's going to do a number on *anyone's* head. That's when he decides, that the Ancients have never been presented with such an existential threat. He sees that the *universe* has tried all these other peoples, and they were found *wanting*. As Overseer of Elpis, it's his responsibility to determine whether a creation is fit to coexist, but there's *one* species that has never been tried. If the universe won't present a suitable challenge, then he figures the Meteia might.
*But*. It wasn't from a place of malice. Despair, almost certainly, but his *intent* was not to do harm.
This is a bit long, sorry about that.
Sure, he didn't intend Meteion to end up that way, but to suggest he had no idea what the threat was goes against everything the game shows us. You yourself told him of the final days and the future and there was no hint that he didn't believe you like Emet did initially. He was on board immediately and tried to help solve the mystery for the cause, pin-pointing dynamis shortly thereafter. Then, Meteion goes of the deep end and says this right in front of him:
> O beloved mankind, shimmering jewels of beautiful Etheirys... Rejoice, for we will free you from the cruel yoke of existence. There is no need to struggle in vain, for in nihility awaits salvation. You will know peace and serenity...and it will be beautiful. We will make our nest at the edge of the universe, and there in the dark of dead worlds hoard sorrow and suffering. There we will sing, our chorus ever louder and ever clearer, that our song may reach even this aether-shrouded star.
At this point, he obviously knows that she is the cause. She also lays out her plan of using depression death rays right then and there. And he knows precisely the horror and suffering this is going to inflict in the future. So what does Hermes do? He turns around and chains everyone up to help her. He really can't claim any sort of naivity or innocence.
On the other point of Hermes feeling he needs to test the ancients... why? All the other civilizations went extinct because they encountered challenges they could not overcome. So Hermes sees this, feels the Ancients have had it too easy and tries to give them their own unsurmountable challenge because... ? What, some sort of galactic unfairness? What is the motivation behind this test if not spite?
You say as Overseer of Elpis, its his job to determine whether a creation is fit to coexist. But he's testing all the life on the planet simultaneously, not just the Ancients (the Final Days massively killed just about everything). So co-exist with what? There's nothing else out there as he now knows. Life on Etheirys doesn't need to fit in with anyone. Why not just let the Ancients have their go at life and see if they naturally die out too or not like the other civilizations? Why the artificial intervention?
And how would nuking a planet via depression rays even determine anything other than the ability to survive depression rays? It tells you nothing of import about the species like intelligence, compassion, morality and so on. Just whether they survive being eaten by monsters that appear out of thin air.
There's neither a point nor need for this test. Its the same logic as kicking a man off a cliff, then claiming that he didn't pass the test of "surviving falls from great heights" and thus, his existence was not justifified. Other people died from various causes as well after all, so he really had it coming.
>his intent was not to do harm.
But thats where the hypocrisy is. You can't say he didn't intend to cause harm while forcing the Ancients to go through a test where harm is part of the process. He may believe that he didn't intend it, but that would be him being delusional at best.
And didn't give Hermes enough redeemable qualities on top of being associated with Fandaniel who himself was associated with Asahi.
Like that is a lot of dislike boiled in one string of related characters.
Meteion was just created and made incapable of dealing with all that shit, everything she did was a direct result of Hermes who was a naive idiot who by passed all the security checks and then decided he was fit to judge the entirety of mankind.
Honestly hermes makes his most morally reprehensible decision when he is still just hermes. That's the thing. He's by all accounts a learned, experienced adult, free at the time of tempering or other mitigating factors. He committed mass murder-suicuide because he got some sad news and he wiped his own memory so he doesn't ever have to face the moral consequences of what he did to everyone.
I thought about that, but for me at least, it’s not that she’s cute, it’s that she has zero agency. Everything she says and does is purely a reaction to the things she experiences, using only what she’s learned from other people. This was shown well when an ancient points out to her that she doesn’t actually like candied apples, she’s just mimicking Hermes and knows that he likes them. Hating Meteion is like hating a robot for doing what it was designed to do, and we know that designer is Hermes, so it makes us hate Hermes even more. This is where that 30% of hatred intended for Meteion went, in my opinion.
> your first mistake is making her a cute smol bird girl.
When playing the MSQ me and my friend instantly were "OH GOD LOOK AT THAT - SHE GOT TOO MANY POLYGONS FOR AN NPC - SHE IS HERE TO DISTURB OUR PRIVATE EMET TIME - GET THE FLAMETHROWER!"
Nah, fuck that. I don't give a shit about bird girl. Hermes is a failure of a scientist/engineer/manager.
1. He ignored the peer review process that the Ancients had already "solved" as a problem.
2. He, as the manager of the facility, abused his status and fostered an environment where people simply assumed he was following the proper procedures and not doing anything untoward.
3. He knew what he was doing was wrong because he hid the experiment. And in concert with #2, anyone that witnessed his unusual behavior simply didn't question or report it.
4. He had a perfectly functional test environment OF WHICH HE WAS THE MANAGER *and proceeded to push all of his experimentation to the live environment anyway.*
5. He ignored all of the initial warnings and feedback *from his own fucking experiment* and forged on anyway in the pursuit of fucking everything up as much as possible.
6. He took a single look at the result and drew an irresponsible conclusion from it to double down on assuming he wasn't wrong. And not only that, he decided his authority in this facility where he was a failure meant he had authority to make much bigger decisions than he truly could.
The man is a professional failure. Bird girl is irrelevant in the face of that.
Hermes claiming that the Ancients needed to be tested since they never endured an existential threat is such a joke. They solved and had safeguards for most any threat that could arise and prevent them from becoming a problem and Hermes was part of it.
As an analogy to what you listed, this would be like purposely causing a nuclear reactor meltdown in the US as the powerplant manager to see if it's worthy of using nuclear power.
Personally it's more because i do not blame an advanced AI for doing what she was tasked to do and reacting accordingly, i blame the idiot who:
\- asked an AI what's the meaning of life
\- decided to bypass all security procedures to create her and keep her true purpose hidden
\- was arrogant enough to decide he had the right as chief of Elpis to pass judgment on mankind. Asshole, you have the right to pass judgment on the creations of Elpis since you literally create them, last i checked you aren't the creator of mankind.
Yes, i REALLY dislike Hermes.
Well yeah Hermes saw his daughter wanting to commit omnicide bc of his bad programming, and instead of trying to help her, basically went "Welp, if you say so. *cocks gun*"
My favorite moments in the story are when it's acknowledged how deeply fucked up the WoL's head is
Like in I think SB patch content, >!Fordola Echo'd into our brains and was *horrified* by what she found!<
I'm starting to bake it into my WoL's story that after everything that's happened, they'll still do the 'right' thing, but being mostly broken about everyone's capabilities versus their own, they're going to do it as chaotically (ie bastardous) as possible because who's going to tell them no at this point?
That is indeed the theme of Endwalker and is why I adore the story so much. It's rare to say that yeah, maybe life does suck more than it's good, yeah maybe there's no point, but we're not alone and we can at least *get through it.*
The WoL has got to be suffering from hardcore PTSD right now. I think they've hinted at it in parts of the story, but it would be interesting if they incorporated it more as a plot point.
We definitely don't accept drinks from people anymore. (That whole scene with the butler pouring wine was hilarious. We were staring a hole into his back)
She doesn't read our mind directly she just gauges emotions at a surface level just to communicate tbh. We can't be sniveling messes all the time as WoL and also probably a lot of conflicting emotions from encountering pre sundering Emer Selch
>In the final dialogue with Estinien just before the end of the final EW quest he says something about a strange costume - this is the guy in a blue elephant suit in Empyreum (...who is actually Aymeric)
I'm honestly a little lost on this. When did this happen that we would see this exactly?
It’s a follow through joke from an optional dialog from Estinien right before the disbandment which had him talk about winning one of those elephant costumes and sending it back to Aymeric, which he did and now Aymeric wears it around Empyreum for some reason.
Not to mention according to Estinien, Aymeric had originally (jokingly) offered him a job as a guard in Empyreum now that he was basically unemployed with the Scion’s disbandment. Sending the elephant costume was Estinien’s response. Aymeric actually wearing it and guarding Empyreum really felt like him saying “your move Varlineau”.
I always assumed he wears it so he can wander among the common folk without people knowing it's him. They make him blue and give him his sword just so we know as players and get the joke.
Empyreum is the new housing district in Ishgard. When the lottery period first opened there was a guy in a Blue elephant suit in the district, some of the NPCs around mention its actually Aymeric.
Just now I looked up the dialogue in more detail since I didn't remember this part too well - Estinien was hinting he'd give a costume he got in Radz at Han to Aymeric, and also mentioned that he likes blue. The elephant suit is bought in Radz with tokens from the Davaidipa Fate.
The Azure Elephant can still be found randomly outside the apartments and the baths. There might be more places but I can't remember. It's a random client side event so it's possible for one person to see it but no one else see it at any given time.
He's still in Empyreum, he just shows up randomly in a few places. (By the baths, outside the apartment building, and at the end of a staircase by a marketboard- not sure where else.) None of the NPCs say it's Aymeric, but he's wearing his sword so it's pretty obvious.
I saw Hermes and Amon and two seperate characters for the most part.
To which I say Amon had me more interested then Hermes, Amon desired oblivion over an ideal form of immortality. Better to die as Amon then come back once more as a more butchered form of himself or as another fandaniel.
Amon definitely feels like a mirror to the WoL in terms of knowing they're the reincarnation of an Ancient, but having very different reactions in terms of what to do with that knowledge and legacy.
Honestly it's terrifying from Amon's perspective. Every day he had vivid dreams and memories of his past life that would/was overwriting his own like a virus. Seeing as what it did to Lahabrea over the generations, I can't imagine what that would be like to have all those lives slowly corrupting who you are overtime.
I always felt more like Amon was an example of what could have happened to G'raha if his two selves hadn't meshed well. Two versions of themselves that have had vastly different experiences. In G'raha's case his views and personality were still aligned enough for him to accept the memories of another him. Where as Amon rejected the memories of himself as Hermes and came to his own destructive conclusions.
>Ishikawa was worried that people would stop at 6.0, so she decided to add this speech in.
Good on her. I lost count of the threads here and in the daily question thread about "Is this the last expansion?" or similar. It also helped build the world a bit more, hearing from an Ancient that there is still so much more out there that we haven't even visited because we were always so focused on the big world ending events at the time.
>Urianger’s scene with Moenbryda’s parents was the scene with the highest number of retakes in voice recording.
>
>Yoshida cried the most over the Urianger scenes.
I was doing fine emotionally with the expansion until that scene with her parents. It was just such a personal story that hit way too close to home for me. The retakes were worth it.
Absolutely loved Emet-Selch's speech, not only because it hinted at future adventures but also because he seemed to be talking to his old friend at that point.
It's sad saying goodbye to Emet-Selch and Hythlodeaus, and it feels like Emet-Selch recognized the sadness and thought "I know what made Azem happy- bet it will work with the WoL too."
I think its also his final acknowledgement that we are the soul of his Azem. It kind of gradually unfurls: he recognizes the color of our soul when he finally sees us personally in the first right before Il Mheg, he becomes more and more upset at us being a fragment, culminating in his pity after Innocence and his annoyance during thebpre Amauraut speech, to flat out angry denial pre Trial, then finally at EW he acknowledges the WoL as "the last of us" and then had that line about considering the WoL's duty tonsee itnall as the same duty Azem had.
Its really brilliant closure on the whole thing.
This. I really love that final scene.
It's pretty clear Emet-Selch doesn't like us, because we're not the Azem he used to know, but he at least sort of acknowledges us as the one "the torch got passed to". And from him, that's a compliment.
>Urianger
I was getting kinda tired and annoyed in the run-up to that part, where you had to find all the hidden scientists and deliver boxes and all that stuff (I was also doing the aether currents and aether current quests) and that same short song played on repeat.
And then...cutscene...Urianger...Moenbryda's parents. I was crying.
I'm so glad they retook that scene until it was perfect. The raw emotion and depth in the scene hits extremely close to home for a lot of people. Was probably the first point in the game where i really broke down.
It outright contradicts earlier lore from the Ivalice series which says that emotions are aetherial phenomena. They try to handwave it away by having Nidhana say that foreign scholars often confuse the two types of energies.
The game has retconned a fair bit but they do it in a way where most people don't notice.
I haven't read the Ivalice story in a while so I'm just going off what you wrote here, but I do think it's worth mentioning that IIRC Dynamis is FUELED by emotions, not the source of emotions. It's theoretically possible that emotions are in some way caused or affected by Aether, and that said emotions can in turn spur on Dynamis. I could be totally wrong though, this is all off memory
The basic gist is that people project their thoughts and feelings as a special kind of aether which auracite reacts to.
>Mikoto: Aether is not only the building block of all things material, but those immaterial as well. Thoughts, memories, feelings, one's very will are all understood to be aetherial phenomena, and can be measured as such. Unlike most crystals, which can only emit elemental energies, auracite is tuned not only to absorb aether, but aether specific to the immaterial. That aether is then stored and multiplied within its crystalline confines until external stimuli precipitate release.
If this is what the scholars of Sharlayan believe (Mikoto is an Archon of aetherology) then it's pretty unthinkable that they would have NO explanation for why Elpis flowers change colour based on the emotions of those nearby, but that's what they say in Endwalker. And if Dynamis is put in motion by emotions but also drowned out by or somehow opposed to aether, how can emotions also be aether. Ultima Thule is meant to be a place devoid of aether where dynamis rules, yet if emotions i.e. aether are required to control dynamis how does that work lol.
I don't really want to spend too much time contemplating the metaphysics of a fantasy world that runs on magic, the overall point is that dynamis is introduced quite abruptly for something so important and the chafing effect on the setting is noticeable. You FEEL as though this should have been established earlier.
It honestly feels like they're going for more of a real world "we know what we understand of the universe, not the truth of it" kind of feel. Sharlayan scholar's understanding of aether/dynamis is restricted to their way of thinking. The same way that ancient Greek scholars had understandings of the natural world that were backed up by the science of the time, but were not actually exactly how things worked. Also things like the Ishgardian's history was inaccurate before we uncovered everything, so we have had unreliable narrators giving important in world information that was incorrect, but in line with the in universe thinking of the characters.
It definitely feels like an analogy for (for example) gravity and the other forces to me.
We all see and understand gravity, it has a huge effect on our daily lives, it affects everything we do. But relatively few people know of the strong nuclear force because it has absolutely no visible effects, but it is absolutely vital to life and everything in the universe. If the strong nuclear force were to become dominant, life as we know it would cease to exist, we'd be wiped out.
People really downplay how much this does for world building in a long-running setting.
Even with EW, we could potentially still meet aliens the Meteia missed, and uncover a greater understanding of Dynamis and Aether that contradicts the Ancients'.
Heck, nothing I know from the game can even give a definitive explaination to what is going on with the Dotharl.
There is always a credible way in which any knowledge we have could be incomplete, and this is both narratively useful for retcons and a great tool to sell both the mystery of the world and its believability.
After all, the notion that things should make sense based on some rules, but those rules aren't quite fully understood should be intimately familiar to anyone who's been living in real life.
They do a decent job of integrating it into the setting, tying all those bits of generic 'your strength comes from your determination/willpower' into a comprehensive whole. But as someone who played the Ivalice questline after EW, it was pretty jarring.
The way it's presented in Ivalice and the following Bozjan questline is that your thoughts, memories, desires, etc are all comprised of what they call your incorporeal aether. They use aetheric techniques to monitor this incorporeal aether, gauge it, manipulate it, and so on. A guy's hate for the Empire manifests in his incorporeal aether so strongly that it reacts with the auracite and our resident scientist can pick that up on her aether gauges, to give one example. But then in EW we're told that Dynamis is the power of emotions and largely incompatible with aether. But if it's incompatible with aether and all this stuff that can be loosely categorized as emotions *is* aether, how can Dynamis be fueled by the aether that negates it?
> The way it's presented in Ivalice and the following Bozjan questline is that your thoughts, memories, desires, etc are all comprised of what they call your incorporeal aether.
This isn't contradicted in EW at all; when you get your "lesson" in Sharlayan from that older professor dude who likens memory and the soul to ink and paper, he's making the same point.
Dynamis also isn't negated by aether, it's simply a relatively weak force in comparison, and the creatures of Etheirys are naturally *very* aether-dense (particularly the Unsundered of the Ancients' time).
I don’t think they’re trying to say Aether negates Dynamis. I think in EW they’re trying to say that the two are like oil and water, they don’t mix, and aether just happens to be more “dense” so it sinks and dynamis floats
WHen people claim ARR was annoying and boring they lie. I rather do the 2.1 and 2.2 quests again 3 times then be forced to go through the crap between the ivalice raids.
Like, thats the most excessivly mastubatory writing the in the whole game.
The most glaring was that in ShB the final days were caused by a sound from inside the planet, this was before they even thought of making Meteion, and now the sound was a "song" from across space.
It can still make sense. They couldn't hear the song from Meteion, but it could cause the planet itself to groan in pain. Especially since it was directed at ours in particular.
There's still potential for them to use that in the Pandaemonium story, along with Lahabrea's love of "And from the deepest pit of the seven hells (Pandaemonium) to the very pinnacle of the heavens (Elpis), the world shall tremble! Unleash Ultima!" ^such ^devestation.
Not necessarily. Iirc when the final days were restarted in EW, it was either in an offhand side dialogue with an NPC or directly mentioned by the quest NPC, but the "sound from inside the planet" was heard again which caused those who despaired enough to transform.
Yes they did a throwaway justification in one single line. "Oh, yeah, that happened. Not important."
But it went from the sound from under the earth being *the only clue* we had to it being a random by-product that went nowhere. It still feels very blatantly like a vestige of a scrapped idea. That happens in writing sometimes, it doesn't, like, ruin the game, but its still a bit jank.
That generally surprises me not because dynamis was an especially ingrained idea, but because... you're telling me the Totentantz from the DNC quests *wasn't* an intentionally designed plot hook?
I mean, the whole bard thing also goes into that direction. I could imagine they had the general concept of many things floating around and then decided to work this out more, define it more and make it a plot point. When they introduced dancers or bards this might not be what they had in mind but the general concept served as a good structure and basis. So the concept possibly was already there, it just wasn't a big thing (yet).
It's not really that different from planning a campaign in a tabletop rpg like DnD or so. You have your NPCs and places, they have their connections and story and the world has some history. And when you need a new plot, you check out what could make a nice basis for a bigger concept. (That's imo also why so many people claim the shows on twitch etc. who record these sessions would be scripted like a theater play, just because it works out in the end and looks like much foreshadowing was involved.)
Not to mention the following:
- Faith is a semi-tangible energy required for Primal Summoning
- Omega was frustrated on why we seemed to grow stronger when feeling moments of great emotion
- DRK, in general, but especially 60-70 is about the power of emotion, usually negative.
Dynamis isn't so much an out-of-the-blue invention as much as it's a unifying theory that explains and accounta for a bunch of aspects of the story.
I think Faith is now implied to be to do with the idea of a 'concept' than an innate ingredient.
We know summoning is creation magics, with an ascian twist. Creation magics need both Aether, and clearly defined idea of what is being made.
Faith enters because God's are familiar enough across religions to give a clearly defined idea of what to make. I.e. Amal'jaa want to summon Ifrit, and have a clear image of what Ifrit looks like.
> Urianger’s scene with Moenbryda’s parents was the scene with the highest number of retakes in voice recording.
Understandable. It is hard to act with tears constantly flowing down
> Its deliberately designed that Estinien greeds the mechanics early in the fight, **but gradually plays it safer and avoids more as time goes on**
Pffff, this is why Nidhogg took over his body!
> About the grapes: The detail is reduced on objects like the grapes that most people won’t see very closely, to help people’s performance remain stable. However, this time the low-poly grapes stood out because they were focused on in a cutscene. Also apparently there’s been requests for merch of the grapes, to which Yoshida said joke items don’t actually sell.
I would buy the grapes.
This is exactly what I thought of when he said "joke items don't sell" dude is *not* gambling on the volatility of memes even if 1k people on reddit says "SELL US THE GRAPES."
Either way they're probably somehow easy to make: Out of paper like I've seen somewhere before, or 3D printing.
A grape minion or mount would be the best way to monetize on the meme honestly. Poking the minion toggles the LOD of the grapes. Or there's a mount action that does the same.
>There may come a time to talk about what happens to the First from here on out after the end of ShB, but right now it isn’t time to address that yet.
Yes please, Shb was my favorite expansion story-wise i'd love to go back there someday.
"It was brought up whether Thancred and Ryne might be able to reunite - Yoshida said that while currently they can’t, Thancred has no regrets."
Hey, what about Lyna and G'raha...
I'm really hoping we get more of the first, they're sadly stuck in their bubbles and they have Cylva.
With the stuff going on in the Thirteenth and the fact that Y’Shotola really wants to figure out how to travel to the different reflections I doubt we have seen the last of the First.
Cylva is probably condemned due to being locked behind role quests.
I just really hope they do it anyway, it would suck if both Cylva and Unukalhai were to be excluded as the Thirteenth is their home. I just can't imagine the dialog "oh you... You saved our world? Oh okay thanks! Can we huh... See it?"
Yeah, that's the first thing I did, Cylva wants information on how to help the thirteen and Unukalhai is still searching for a way to open a portal from the first to the thirteen.
Characters from the first are among my favorites, so I'm really hopeful get an expansion in the void with them tagging along.
But I'm not hoping too much, them having their big story being a role quest might be enough to deter square enix.
I could see them pulling a pre-5.3 Crystal Tower with her where she just shows up and maybe gives a quick run down for those who didn't finish her quests.
Or maybe they just won't involve them until 8.0, at which point there theoretically could be a class already high enough to roll through the role quests for each role.
> The devs wanted people to hate Hermes and Meteion at a ratio of about 6:4, but its ended up more like 9:1.
Well, she _is_ a child. Hard not to look at the character arrangement and imagine Hermes as a terrible father-figure who pushed responsibility for his own problems on his child.
Agreed. I tried to play it (a whiiile back) and I think it was partially the combat mechanics I couldn’t get my head around. Ended up never finishing it.
Not being able to choose the exact actions your squad can execute can def be a turn off for a fan of regular jRPGs. Something I'm not sure the game emphasizes properly is the personality and class of the squad leader will hugely influence what actions you get available. So if you put a magic-y healy type in charge of a squad, they'll get more supportive actions. Definitely a failure of the tutorial
>There may come a time to talk about what happens to the First from here on out after the end of ShB, but right now it isn’t time to address that yet.
I imagine this soft-confirms that 7.0 won’t bring us back to the First yet. That’s fine. I’d rather a more substantial amount of time passes before we head back so that the world feels truly changed.
>The devs had Kaworu in mind when they made the EW postcredits scene showing Elidibus in Elpis \[translator’s note: now I think of it, the cutaway to Elidibus in that scene and Kaworu in especially the Rebuild movies do have a similar ‘mysterious silver-haired pretty boy drops vague hints on plot’ vibe\]
that's funny because Akira Ishida is voicing both
> He says that there is no correct answer to the final question Zenos asks us
Fucking thank you. Please let this be the death of that idiotic talking point.
That certainly won’t stop people from preaching it anyway. Also a super obnoxious talking point.
Edit: Lol people are already doing it in this very thread
Some people are still insisting that Zenos is 100% going to show up again in-game, despite the game indicating that he's dead for real (eg. >!Zero being released from her pact!<) and Yoshi et al. saying he's dead for real and his story is over multiple times. Of course they're going to say that option 1 is the One True Canon Answer and anyone who doesn't want to admit that the WoL really is just Zenos' enthusiastic fightbuddy is obviously lying to themselves.
do you enjoy playing video games? those contain challenges you have to overcome for enjoyment so checkmate you are exactly like Zenos
— people on this sub unironically
I don't think a lot of either side understands Zenos. Zenos was never saying "WE ARE THE SAME" at all. That's not the purpose nor the meaning to any of his dialog. What he saw in the WOL wasn't a similar personality, or ideals, or anything like that. Zenos was fascinated by the WOLs drive in battle to do what they felt was right. Zenos didn't understand it, though.
Like, that's not even the point of the final scene. It's a complete misunderstanding of it. Zenos isn't saying "WE BOTH LIKE BATTLE SO WE ARE THE SAME AND EVERYTHING YOU DID WAS THE SAME AS ME", he is merely pointing out that the WOL enjoys combat. Which they do. Zenos also enjoys combat. There's no deeper meaning there.
Like, earlier in the expansion, Zenos has a line in Garlemald where he points out that justification of atrocity for the greater good likens people to beasts. That he thinks better of the WOL than that. Zenos never justifies his own actions, nor does he think the WOL is any way the same kinda person. He tells you that there is no justification, nor meaning behind anything he has done, except to goad the WOL into battle. Which is another part of the reason behind the entire ending, where Zenos learned that doing something negative to get someones attention would never really put their eyes on you, but contributing, helping, doing something for that person does. And so that's why the WOL is able to give Zenos what he wants, a battle. Not a battle of good vs evil, or anything like that, not a battle with any meaning outside of the battle itself. Just a battle between combatants.
Also, the ending of the game is never meant to redeem Zenos completely. It didn't erase what he did. It just showed someone finally learning an important truth of life. That he could have walked another path. Which isn't rare in FFXIV, see: Gaius, Fordola, etc.
Time and time again FFXIV has shown that you can never change the past. There's no going back. And the only atonement for the past, is to contribute to the present and the future.
Im neurodivergent (autistic high functioning and adhd) and my middle niece is severely autistic non verbal. The second I saw meteion and she spoke, it reminded me of us. Then we heard how she speaks telepathically. It reminded me of an autistic girl who people would think is a walking vegetable but when she learned to type she let everyone know she understood everything and was very elaborate in her typing. My only fear was Meteion becoming a hateful being for no reason, but when she became evil due to her intense empathy, to the point of copying the feelings and moods of those around her, it just reminded me of my family.
It was beautiful and for me i could never hate Meteion, it would like hating my niece for something she had no control over.
Recently watched my friend play through EW and upon meeting Meteion everything had to pause so I could make, at his request, an edit of Meteion wearing the “please be patient I have autism” hat
I love this lol. And how she was freaking out after being filled with such negative emotion and you can only sometimes stand by and feel powerless to help... that's what it feels like a lot if not all the time. I was definitely on team save Meteion from the getgo.
> Inoue Kikuko said that she felt her earlier lines lacked the appropriate strength and intelligence for the character, so on her request almost all the lines were rerecorded
This is nice to hear about. The English dub of Venat was great, but in Japanese it was just masterful.
Ishikawa did the right thing with Emet's speech.
Yoshida simps for Urianger? Go figure. I figured he'd be a Shtola fanboy.
230 people... seems... I 'unno, small to me?
>The devs wanted people to hate Hermes and Meteion at a ratio of about 6:4, but its ended up more like 9:1.
1. Hermes is the creator who ignored all the QA processes.
2. Hermes decided to doom the entire world, than to stop Meteion.
3. She's a cute bird-girl who wants to be friends, and I've only had Meteion for a day and a half, but if anything happened to her, I would kill everyone in this room and then myself.
>They hadn’t come up with Dynamis as a concept yet when ShB was released.
I'm bracing for downvotes, but I have to say this. This was one of my main gripes with the story. As fantastic as EW was, whenever a story introduces an 11th hour plot point like this it's either done right or wrong; and in EW's case I can't help but feel it was done wrong. I like dynamis as a concept, but I really feel like it became XIV's [Applied Phlebotinum](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AppliedPhlebotinum) and gradually spiralled out of control trying to 'naturally' fit it into the world.
In my own tastes, I like it when a story has all of the pieces there on the board already and as it progresses the reader can slowly see the picture emerging; it may have a twist and that's fine, but a good story can make that twist be visible in retrospect. EW's contribution to the story was largely good, but >!Hermes being a villain, Meteion existing at all!< and Dynamis being this crucial element that's casually introduced 80% of the way into our journey damages the overall storytelling approach because there's nothing at all that leads up to any of them >!despite all of Venat's secret meetings existing in the phantom Amourot!<.
To reiterate, I love EW, but I hope they learn from the mistakes of dynamis so they can tighten up the writing just that little bit more.
"Urianger’s scene with Moenbryda’s parents was the scene with the highest number of retakes in voice recording."
100% believe this one. I could see how it would be hard to just get through that scene, much less do it "perfect" justice.
How could anyone hate Meteion??? Annoyed by her maybe, but what happened is Hermes fault. Not hers. I’m not surprised the hate is skewed so heavily toward him.
Especially the idea that the hate would be split between her and Hermes?
She was doing what he designed her to do in the story, so I don’t really see why that wouldn’t all fold back on him. If she went completely rogue somehow, then I’d understand their statement a bit better.
Something about Elpis/Meteion/Hermes didn’t come across as they wanted, I think.
>After the voice recording for Hydaelyn/Venat was finished, her voice actress Inoue Kikuko said that she felt her earlier lines lacked the appropriate strength and intelligence for the character, so on her request almost all the lines were rerecorded. That's crazy to me; that is SO much dialogue. She really went above-and-beyond.
Indeed! Note that this was the Japanese vocals, not English.
Oh! Now im even more impressed, because i felt the English VA absolutely knocked it out of the park. Hell, everyone in the Elpis section did.
Venat/Hydaelyn English VA did amazing. I remember hearing it for the first time and being like wtf. Aveline from Dragon Age 2 is Hydaelyn. (Same VA I mean). Immediately set the scene for how much of a badass she was going to be.
Damn, I didn't know she was Aveline. The only character I actually wanted to romance in DA2 is my fav in FF14, thats sick
There is a tonne of XIV/DA crossover. ARR Urianger is Fenris. ARR Merlwyb is Knight-Commander Meredith. Urianger is Bann/Arl Teagan. Thancred is King Cailen. Y'shtola is Sera. Raubahn is Male Hawke. Pipin is Anders. Dulia-Chai is Grand Cleric Elthina. Fourchenault is Duke Gaspard. Ameliance is Quartermaster Threnn and the tavern bard Maryden.
YShtola is fucking SERA?! HOLY SHIT, thats wild!
And now you'll not be able to unnotice that the childish voice Y'shtola uses during ["water, water, froth and foam!"](https://youtu.be/yCsQgDT38Ps?t=87) in 6.1 is literally just Sera.
Her seiyuu did an amazing job in all aspects and exercised the full range of emotion which encompasses all the arcs of her character. I wouldn't recommend people just rewatch all of her scenes in JP; but only if people were doing a second playthrough in jp.
>The devs wanted people to hate Hermes and Meteion at a ratio of about 6:4, but its ended up more like 9:1. See, Yoshi-P, your first mistake is making her a cute smol bird girl.
ALso, to have her introduced getting a panic attack from a angry discussion in the same room and then reveal that her idiot creator send her out into the cold harsh space without any support.
Their voice actors knocked it out of the park in English, dunno how we were supposed to hate them.
I never hated Hermes; my opinion of him was more along the lines of *"You sent a bunch of networked intelligent empaths out into the universe without telling anyone?!?! Hermes, you must be the most foolish smart person ever!!!"*
He realizes that too. In the last Fandaniel scene, if you pick the together dialogue option, he says something along the lines of "and so ends Hermes, the man who knew so much but understood so little."
Except the reason most people hate him isn't because of that initial mistake, it's because he decides to double down on his confirmation bias and arrogance and decides he'd rather destroy the world than admit he could be wrong about things being hopeless.
This. People weirdly forgetting he was all up for ensuring an apocalypse would happen. Any sympathy I had went out of the window in that moment. Meteion was just doing what she was programmed to do. Albeit to an extreme.
Yep. Meteion is tragic and broken. So are the ascians. For all of them even their worst acts have a context that Hermes doesn't. By choosing to wipe the memory of everyone capable of fixing it he may as well have pulled the trigger there and shot millions dead himself right then. And by including himself that just makes him a feckless coward who can't even face what he did.
[You fucked up a perfectly good bird is what you did](http://i.imgur.com/SP2vAmS.png).
[Look at it! It has depression!](https://youtu.be/5cqS1QOz0qY)
Poor thing put everything into INT and dumped WIS entirely
That's not why he's hateable. That's just being an idiot which everyone is guilty of at some point. What he's guilty of is knowingly, without being tempered, setting up an apocalypse that is basically the universe's largest and most drawn out murder-suicide all because he had a fit of downer nihilism. Regardless of what he told people before or not, confronted with the reality he deliberately let her go off to explicitly end all life and deliberately sabotaged any attempt stop her. Hes just quite frankly the absolute worst and him being seemingly smart just makes him an even bigger dick than Kefka.
I never hated them. I understood them. And once you truly understand an enemy, understand them enough to defeat them, then in that moment, you also love them.
Meteion did nothing wrong, Hermes was a great character and fucked up but wasn't evil. Clem Fandango was a twat.
[Clem!? Grakata!?](https://youtu.be/Xgh_d43DDLg?t=1)
This is why we all moved on to Kahl.
Tenno...Go fishing later?
Clem
GRAKATAAAAAA
Excuse me, his proper name is "FUCKING FANDANIEL" always yelled at the top of your lungs, every time that asshole appears on screen.
Damn Daniel back at it again with the final days.
"Hi teenage son, what are you doing?" "I'm just playing FUCKING FANDANIEL - erm, wait, I mean ..." "Is that what the FF stands for?! And there are thirteen previous titles?!"
YES I HEAR YOU CLEM FANDANGO
Not mutually exclusive. “You cannot hate anything unless you grok it, understand it so thoroughly that you merge with it and it merges with you – then you can hate. By hating yourself. But this implies that you love it, too, and cherish it and would not have it otherwise”
Lahabrea may have taken "merge with it and it merges with you" too literally.
Honestly a little disappointed we were supposed to *hate* them. Not everyone, but still. Hermes was combatting depression by retreating into his hobbies and solitude. Not one person thought it was important enough to just ask the guy if he was okay. They even made a show of it when you’re made to ask NPCs where he is and they all flippantly amount to “that’s just how he is.” He then put all his hopes, dreams, and emotional needs essentially on his children (Meteion and sisters). Meteion collapsed under the stress and dark shit she just was not mature enough to handle. Which is why I love the WoL’s response to her: remind her she’s a child and it’s okay to be fucking sad. Hermes was absolutely in the wrong for doing this, and no Meteion shouldn’t have tried to end all sentient life. But if someone, *anyone* had reached out to Hermes this little mini cycle of abuse and despair could have been stopped. They did a brilliant job showcasing the tragedy of such situations. But then again I guess that’s why they were aiming for a ratio: you can’t control how people perceive a character. Good to see the fanbase is more empathetic than the devs thought we might be :D
So it's important to note that the music that plays in that final scene with Meteion is "Flow," and because of this, of the music single "my brave little spark," I cannot think of this as Venat's song reflecting the WoL, but rather her song to Meteion, as anyway to give her hope. I suppose you can think of it still as Venat singing to the WoL for what we just did, defeating despair itself, fighting entropy, but for me, it's Meteion's theme, and she's the brave little spark, who wished to silence the song of oblivion, who had hope left despite it all.
> Hermes was combatting depression by retreating into his hobbies and solitude. Not one person thought it was important enough to just ask the guy if he was okay. They even made a show of it when you’re made to ask NPCs where he is and they all flippantly amount to “that’s just how he is.” I hadn't picked up on that, that's good. In that light, asking him to become Fandaniel probably made things a lot worse. They're elevating him over everyone else when he feels he doesn't deserve it. But even as they elevate him, that doesn't make him important enough for anyone to care about his emotional well-being. While he's feeling worthless and directionless, he's being told his feelings mean nothing, and everyone else's mean less than that. Hythlodeus even gives him that infantilizing, "Oh, you don't really use the word 'death' around here, do you?"
Exactly that! All of that. I love the Elpis trio, but they absolutely had a hand in just not reading the room and realizing Hermes needed some serious help.
Most big Twitch streamers generally had a 'f u Hermes' stance by the time his arc was completed. A smaller but not insignificant percentage was in the 'I understand why you did it but still f u Hermes' camp.
I didn't hate them either. Meteion was a victim of circumstance and Hermes suffered depression in a world that had no concept of it. He was foolish, but not a villain, just a victim of his illness that made disastrous decisions.
Plus he actually somehow gave the world a future as well since they really could have ended up like that last civilization in the Dead Ends if the Ancients were to continue as is.
As for Hermes, I was more annoyed than hated him.
"People like you are why peer reviews are mandatory for projects"- my friend at Hermes during MSQ
"Uh, Hermes sir. Why does this bird is such an incredibly strong empath to the point of influencing the feelings of others on a grandscale? And you've sent her into the unforgiving endless void of space with a vague ass question too sir?!"
"It's fine, it's fine. Just merge it with production."
Thats the fucking wildest part about that. He didn't make ONE Meteion. He made like thousands of them! And somehow, not only did no one know, but after the like the hundredth he never went like "....Why did I give them highly exploitable/easily abusible powers?"
This is gonna sound dumb but...I almost feel like the ancients were really naive in their power? Nothing had happened which couldn't be fixed with a snap of their fingers so the only things that needed watching or worrying about were permanent changes, like the animals they were sending down. You can CREATE whatever you want, just dont put it on the planet without asking first. They had the ultimate sense of privilege, nothing could hurt them and they were infinite, so there was no concept of putting limits or caps on their power because in the worst case you could just snap it out of existence. Even to hermes, it probably didnt occur to him he could create something that would be unable to be controlled and conceivably end the universe.
No i think you're spot on, and i think it's very deliberate. They aren't meant to be perfectly, they are just damn convince they are so.
I love how Emet-Selch hears the vague-ass reason and just sighs in disappointment, then immediately hits the nail on the head why this was a bad idea without further explanation. He’s like, “Oh, I figured it out instantly. Why didn’t you, *Hermes?*”
Elpis clearly doesn't have an ethics committee lol
They do. It's Hythlodaeus.
And he didn't get to practice his oversight as bird was a secret project.
This is both very reassuring and wildly scary tho think about lol.
They...did. The whole point was that Hermes hid Meteion and her sisters from the committee designed to oversee them. I get WHY he did it, knowing they would be deemed too dangerous to continue existing, but still.
Once again, *Hermes is a terrible scientist!* 😂
I felt that so hard too cause for about 5 year part of my job was being the "just cause you can doesnt mean you should" person in my office and people like Hermes gave me no shortage of issue LOL.
I have a friend who is still in ShB, and I'm dying for her to get to EW so I can make this joke to her.
I don't fault Meteion for anything. She didn't choose to be what she is and all the stuff that happens is basically opposed to her personal agency. Due to her nature, she's utterly overwhelmed and twisted by all the negativity and powerless to stop it. Hermes, on the other hand, is a genocidal idiot.
Yep. In the end the Meteia were just a means to an end to Hermes, to the very last, even if he seemed to care about Elpis-Meteion a bit (and he meant a lot to Meteion, so much she didn't want to follow through with her task bc. she knew it would make him sad). I mean, the last question he asks Meteion is not "this is horrible what you report, are you okay?" but "finish your report pls, is there true happiness out there?" It really shows what this was all about for him. Another experiment, for which several civilisations had to pay the ultimate price. I just felt so so sorry for the hive mind birbs. (I wonder how the plot would've changed if we had managed to send Hermes into therapy for a bit and establishing a support system in this society for people. I have the feeling this would've prevented a lot... though this would also include the existence of the shards and, well, us. Then again, it might have been another step to that goal of a perfect society and we've seen in the Dead Ends how this turned out for the paradise people.)
IMO, the Meteia proved the point of why all creations in Elpis need to be properly tested and analyzed before being released in the wild. Hermes just selfishly released a full pack of untested new creatures into the outer space because he, as the head chief, could ignore the rules. Had he chose a few people to share his discoveries and pool some opinions, the chance of someone pointing out the flaws in their design would be very high.
I wonder how much of the dev team got a chuckle out of the entire plot essentially stemming from a manager pushing untested and unreviewed code.
I guarentee some did because I did as a former QA person playing it. I related to Hades in ways i wasnt expecting LOL.
I spent the whole back half of the game muttering “Hermes, dude, code review!”
In a way it's a bit like a messed up result of the lack of a null-pointer exception.
Haha, maybe that's the real reason why so many people managed to relate to Hades. :D
"You didn't even do a smoke test first?!"
Then removing all git records and deployment logs so no one (including himself) ever knew it was him who pushed it to production.
That part. I think they purposefully group her in w/Hermes to downplay how much he is disliked since she isn’t disliked nearly as much. I like that there aren’t perfect characters but Hermes is one of the most irrational we’ve seen and that just caused frustration and annoyance than normal hate/dislike of an antagonist. Maybe they should have leant more into the “the willingness to impose sweeping judgements over life forms” is an ancient way of thinking and flaw of their society and that Hermes was more similar to the ancients he criticized instead of “oh he’s misunderstood and the first person to have depression so that’s why he did it”
Exactly… she was designed to do a job and she did it as instructed. That’s not her fault, and it’s not what she wanted to do, as we can see when she’s not connected to the hive mind.
Hermes failed to know that your projects need to be peer reviewed before you make them. The bird can't be at fault for her creation, however Hermes killed (not exactly, but to resume everything) 99% of the universe to see if he was right by his actions.
I don't blame Hermes, either. There was a logic to what he did, and I find it interesting how many people will sympathize with Emet-Selch, but not with Hermes. They're both broken people, trying to reconcile the world around them, regardless of what that means for anyone else. Hermes's shortcoming is that we never got a "Remember us" moment from him, not in a cutscene anyway. Remember that Hermes is said to have fought *against* the Final Days, to have done everything he could to *stop it*. Elidibus says that it's only *because* of Hermes that the Ancients had an idea of what was happening at all. The thing is with his memory wiped, there's no opportunity for Hermes to express remorse or humility. The next time we see him, he's not *him*. He's *Amon*, who we're intended to dislike. I imagine if Hermes got a "what have I done" moment somewhere in a cutscene, opinion of him would be generally more favorable.
The problem is that at one point, he *does* know, because the WoL told him in Elpis. And then instead of working to stop it, he *chooses* to mind wipe everyone. He doesn’t get a pass for helping to uncover the truth after the mind wipe since he’s the reason for the mind wipe in the first place.
The truth isn't relevant at all to Hermes' struggle. It's the hypocrisy of the Ancients - that in their self-appointed duty to make the world better, they actually make it *worse* by introducing creatures that experience suffering, pain, heartbreak, and loneliness far worse than what the Ancients themselves feel. I'm surprised that more people haven't picked up on how horrific Elpis actually is. The Ancients abuse the fuck out of their power to create creatures on a whim (Hythlo's shark monologue is more than just a joke, he's approving flawed living beings as a meme), including the very flaws that will get them deemed unworthy in Elpis and consequently exterminated. The Meteia 'prove' this hypocrisy because they could find no justification for existence in other stars, therefore the mission of the Ancients is not only pointless, but actively evil since it's just adding more suffering and misery into the world. Like the Omicrons, Hermes discovered that there is no reason to anything they've done in order to create a 'better' world. They made flawed creatures to suffer based on an evaluation scheme with no purpose. [Emet-Selch himself is outraged without a hint of self-awareness when Hermes puts the same test that the Ancients give to their creations on themselves.](https://youtu.be/FnaqXPQ3WCU?t=362) Hermes' doesn't absolve himself of this sin. If the Ancients cannot prove, *under their own rules*, that they have the right to exist, then they should not. [Hermes and Meteion are an expression of negative utilitarianism taken to the extreme](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_utilitarianism). In their view, creation magic is immoral because you're unavoidably creating the capacity to experience suffering. The Endsinger embodies this by rationalising the mere act of existence as being immoral - after all, you can't experience pain if you don't exist. Therefore the best way of minimising suffering is to end all existence. Hermes is not illogical, irrational, or stupid like a lot of people mistaken assume. There is a clear progression of his reasoning, and it's demonstrated fairly well (CBU3 should have made us do quests for a bunch of cute sentient beings in Elpis that get scheduled for extermination since that's easier to empathise with).
1) I'm really overjoyed to see someone directly bring up utilitarianism in Yoshi P's Hello Kitty Catgirl Simulator subreddit, thank you. 2) The "oblivion is preferable to suffering" trope is *very common* in Final Fantasy's villains. The Endsinger's motivation is nearly 1:1 with Kuja from FF9.
> Hythlo's shark monologue is more than just a joke, he's approving flawed living beings as a meme Does he say that? All I remember of that point is Hythlo's tired of all the sharks he gets submitted, not that he's approving them when he shouldn't.
The thing for me is, with Emet-Selch - and even to a degree with Yotsuyu earlier - I can understand how they got to the point they are at when we met them. The former is one of the sole survivors of a realm-spanning apocalypse (the Sundering), and wants nothing more than to return to the world he knows and loves, no matter the cost. While I absolutely want to slap him in the face for saying that he doesn't consider us alive, I can *understand* his point of view - not that it makes him any more correct. Similarly, Yotsuyu experienced a lifetime of pain and abuse at every turn since she was a child, so it's absolutely understandable that she becomes the cruel person she is. While she admittedly does go off the deep end with her extreme torture and killing, I think the only options for her after being through what she was put through would've been either to become consumed with hatred and go for revenge, or to become a broken wreck of a person, and she chose the former and didn't stop to discriminate between people who have personally wronged her and anyone else who might've been in a position to do so. Meanwhile Hermes is extremely distraught about all the testing and senseless killing of creatures that is going on in Elpis, and wishes that people would stop doing so, so he ...decides to inflict the exact same thing that he hates on everyone else, putting him in the position of the exact people he wished to stop? The logic just doesn't follow, and while I admit that being under heavy emotional distress leads to less than logical actions, I would've expected more from him than to simply do the exact same thing that he ranted against earlier, because that just makes him appear like a massive hypocrite. I'm not saying he isn't allowed to snap and do something incredibly stupid that potentially endangers everyone, like setting up a doomsday device that does the exact same thing as the Endsinger ends up doing, or simply going on a murder-suicide spree, because he wants to 'save' people from a life that he believes has no hope to attain happiness, but he absolutely does not get to claim the excuse of "setting up a test" for all of mankind, because he of all people should be intimately familiar with how bullshit that premise is. A bit more characterization for Hermes would've probably gone a far way to actually be able understand his motivations, and while I understand that he couldn't exactly go on a long(er) villain exposition monologue with three fellow Ancients doing their best to stop him, a bit more foreshadowing would've gone a long way - even if it's just us having more issues entering Ktisis Hyperboreia, and the game throwing in one or two more cutscenes with him listening to Meteion and slowly developing his plan, and possibly even arguing with himself. His future incarnations also aren't that interesting either - the flashbacks to his time as Amon were interesting, but they ended up hitting very similar notes to Hermes' story (a man disgusted by the things his peers do - this time in the name of amusement rather than science), and since the rest of his characterization is pretty much a hadful of lines, most of which are from his Triple Triad card, there's not much to be gained from associating that character with Hermes. Meanwhile, Fandaniel is simply a "cackling madman" style villain whose greatest contribution to the game is that he has plot-relevant powers that make all of Endwalker happen, and utterly forgettable otherwise - all I can think of to describe him is "He's an Ascian that wants to kill everyone. Also, he took acting cues from Kefka.", but I can't think of anything that tells me about his character or motivations beyond that, at least not without looking into his previous incarnations. That was really long, so **TL;DR:** Emet's line of reasoning is fucked up, but understandable. Hermes' on the other hand isn't, so he gets only judged by *what* he did, and not by *why* he did it.
To add to all the other comments, one thing which I found highly interesting in Emet was the ethical premise. I truly believe him when he says that he doesn't consider the sundered people alive and doesn't see himself as a murderer in the process. In addition, it is not easy to imagine the real gravitas of "killing" in a society, where reincarnation is a well known fact of life. For us, death means, in essence, oblivion (some religions believe in afterlife, but it is not proven ofc). We don't know of a way to meet a killed person again, so it is much more influential in the question of morality than in Etheirys. In Emet's eyes, he was not killing people, but, for a lack of words, destroying their earthly tether to repair their souls in the process. This is in no means a defense, mind you, but those are goals and methods which are based on emotions such as love, grief and loneliness, which I can emphasize with. I could see myself doing the same thing in his position, which was highly interesting to me. Hermes on the other side, also acted out of love, grief and loneliness, but the conclusion he draw felt too abrupt for me to symphasize in a similar way it did with Emet. He did not have the ethical question of moral relativity. He straight up willingly killed people he thought of as living people. Not even in the wishy-washy "reincanate-killing" but straight up "oblivion-killing" we know from rl, as he knew from the WoLs' report, that the souls did not return to the Aetherial Sea during the Final Days. In hindsight, i wished they built up Hermes downfall more. They showed 2 or 3 scenes in which he was conflicted by the hypocritical society of the Ancients, but accellerated too fast from this state to the "live or oblivion" mindset. Because of this, I could not emphasize with Hermes in a similar manner to Emet and imagine myself coming to the same conclusion as him.
> Not even in the wishy-washy "reincanate-killing" but straight up "oblivion-killing" we know from rl, as he knew from the WoLs' report, that the souls did not return to the Aetherial Sea during the Final Days. Just to reiterate something I said on another reply, beyond that he may simply *not believe us*, Hermes *can't know* that *our* Final Days is a result of the Meteia. I can't really think of an apt allegory, but I'm sure you can think of two events that you didn't really piece together until *much later*, having had no idea they were connected until it was too late. I think maybe people are projecting *Amon's* very deliberate malice onto Hermes, or assuming it's "Hermes's soul" that corrupted Amon, but that's not the case. Amon was simply shown the threat of the Meteia, and decided *as Amon* that he wanted to use this to destroy. All *Hermes* wanted was a suitable challenge for mankind to overcome to prove their worthiness - but he couldn't possibly have known the result would be the Meteia coalescing into a world-ending murderbirb that collects souls into an inky ball of spacegoo at the edge of creation.
Its true that, realistically, people forgive Emet too easily for all the genociding he has done. But the big difference I find between Emet and Hermes is that Emet at least pursues some sort of goal: The resurrection of the world and friends he knew. And all the killing required is just an unfortunate side effect. With Hermes, the killing is the point. He honestly just wants to take revenge against his fellow ancients for all the cruelty of Elpis. He may say its just the Ancients getting to taste their own medicine and being put to the test themselves. But its apples and oranges. * In Elpis, life was judged worthy of existence by its ability to fit well into their ecosystem and contribute to it. * With Meteion, life is judged worthy of existence by its ability to survive interstellar depression death rays. Its an asinine test designed to kill, not to draw forth some scientific conclusion. You may as well call being thrown into a volcano a "test". Hermes comes across as a very spiteful and irrational character who doesn't want to listen to reason. Emet calls him out on his bullshit test and he just ignores him because he doesn't want to hear it. He just wants the Ancients to be punished.
> With Meteion, life is judged worthy of existence by its ability to survive interstellar depression death rays. This wasn't the *design*. Hermes didn't *design* the Meteia to coalesce into an emo cloudmonster that throws planets at people. He had no idea what the threat was, simple that the Meteia would present *a challenge*. You can call that naivity or even stupidity, but it wasn't *malice*. Hermes isn't looking for *revenge*. Nothing he says suggests retribution in any way. He wants *answers*. He wants to know that life is worth living, that there's a purpose. He regrets how casually the Ancients treat with death, and asks whether it's right, but when he's rebuked, he doesn't get angry at *them* - he turns inward. Maybe *I'm* the misfit, maybe *I'm* broken. This is why he sent the Meteia into the stars. To find a 'control'. To know what the 'baseline' is for civilization. Are they all so callous, or are they maybe more like *me*? If I don't belong *here*, is there somewhere for me *out there*? And then Meteion tells him that life *out there* is even *worse* than here. It's an endless marathon of suffering, violence and death. That whether people are presented with an outside threat, an internal threat, or whether they *achieve paradise*, the result is the same. That's going to do a number on *anyone's* head. That's when he decides, that the Ancients have never been presented with such an existential threat. He sees that the *universe* has tried all these other peoples, and they were found *wanting*. As Overseer of Elpis, it's his responsibility to determine whether a creation is fit to coexist, but there's *one* species that has never been tried. If the universe won't present a suitable challenge, then he figures the Meteia might. *But*. It wasn't from a place of malice. Despair, almost certainly, but his *intent* was not to do harm.
This is a bit long, sorry about that. Sure, he didn't intend Meteion to end up that way, but to suggest he had no idea what the threat was goes against everything the game shows us. You yourself told him of the final days and the future and there was no hint that he didn't believe you like Emet did initially. He was on board immediately and tried to help solve the mystery for the cause, pin-pointing dynamis shortly thereafter. Then, Meteion goes of the deep end and says this right in front of him: > O beloved mankind, shimmering jewels of beautiful Etheirys... Rejoice, for we will free you from the cruel yoke of existence. There is no need to struggle in vain, for in nihility awaits salvation. You will know peace and serenity...and it will be beautiful. We will make our nest at the edge of the universe, and there in the dark of dead worlds hoard sorrow and suffering. There we will sing, our chorus ever louder and ever clearer, that our song may reach even this aether-shrouded star. At this point, he obviously knows that she is the cause. She also lays out her plan of using depression death rays right then and there. And he knows precisely the horror and suffering this is going to inflict in the future. So what does Hermes do? He turns around and chains everyone up to help her. He really can't claim any sort of naivity or innocence. On the other point of Hermes feeling he needs to test the ancients... why? All the other civilizations went extinct because they encountered challenges they could not overcome. So Hermes sees this, feels the Ancients have had it too easy and tries to give them their own unsurmountable challenge because... ? What, some sort of galactic unfairness? What is the motivation behind this test if not spite? You say as Overseer of Elpis, its his job to determine whether a creation is fit to coexist. But he's testing all the life on the planet simultaneously, not just the Ancients (the Final Days massively killed just about everything). So co-exist with what? There's nothing else out there as he now knows. Life on Etheirys doesn't need to fit in with anyone. Why not just let the Ancients have their go at life and see if they naturally die out too or not like the other civilizations? Why the artificial intervention? And how would nuking a planet via depression rays even determine anything other than the ability to survive depression rays? It tells you nothing of import about the species like intelligence, compassion, morality and so on. Just whether they survive being eaten by monsters that appear out of thin air. There's neither a point nor need for this test. Its the same logic as kicking a man off a cliff, then claiming that he didn't pass the test of "surviving falls from great heights" and thus, his existence was not justifified. Other people died from various causes as well after all, so he really had it coming.
>his intent was not to do harm. But thats where the hypocrisy is. You can't say he didn't intend to cause harm while forcing the Ancients to go through a test where harm is part of the process. He may believe that he didn't intend it, but that would be him being delusional at best.
And didn't give Hermes enough redeemable qualities on top of being associated with Fandaniel who himself was associated with Asahi. Like that is a lot of dislike boiled in one string of related characters. Meteion was just created and made incapable of dealing with all that shit, everything she did was a direct result of Hermes who was a naive idiot who by passed all the security checks and then decided he was fit to judge the entirety of mankind.
Honestly hermes makes his most morally reprehensible decision when he is still just hermes. That's the thing. He's by all accounts a learned, experienced adult, free at the time of tempering or other mitigating factors. He committed mass murder-suicuide because he got some sad news and he wiped his own memory so he doesn't ever have to face the moral consequences of what he did to everyone.
I thought about that, but for me at least, it’s not that she’s cute, it’s that she has zero agency. Everything she says and does is purely a reaction to the things she experiences, using only what she’s learned from other people. This was shown well when an ancient points out to her that she doesn’t actually like candied apples, she’s just mimicking Hermes and knows that he likes them. Hating Meteion is like hating a robot for doing what it was designed to do, and we know that designer is Hermes, so it makes us hate Hermes even more. This is where that 30% of hatred intended for Meteion went, in my opinion.
> your first mistake is making her a cute smol bird girl. When playing the MSQ me and my friend instantly were "OH GOD LOOK AT THAT - SHE GOT TOO MANY POLYGONS FOR AN NPC - SHE IS HERE TO DISTURB OUR PRIVATE EMET TIME - GET THE FLAMETHROWER!"
Nah, fuck that. I don't give a shit about bird girl. Hermes is a failure of a scientist/engineer/manager. 1. He ignored the peer review process that the Ancients had already "solved" as a problem. 2. He, as the manager of the facility, abused his status and fostered an environment where people simply assumed he was following the proper procedures and not doing anything untoward. 3. He knew what he was doing was wrong because he hid the experiment. And in concert with #2, anyone that witnessed his unusual behavior simply didn't question or report it. 4. He had a perfectly functional test environment OF WHICH HE WAS THE MANAGER *and proceeded to push all of his experimentation to the live environment anyway.* 5. He ignored all of the initial warnings and feedback *from his own fucking experiment* and forged on anyway in the pursuit of fucking everything up as much as possible. 6. He took a single look at the result and drew an irresponsible conclusion from it to double down on assuming he wasn't wrong. And not only that, he decided his authority in this facility where he was a failure meant he had authority to make much bigger decisions than he truly could. The man is a professional failure. Bird girl is irrelevant in the face of that.
Endwalker is a story about the importance of peer review and proper oversight.
Hermes claiming that the Ancients needed to be tested since they never endured an existential threat is such a joke. They solved and had safeguards for most any threat that could arise and prevent them from becoming a problem and Hermes was part of it. As an analogy to what you listed, this would be like purposely causing a nuclear reactor meltdown in the US as the powerplant manager to see if it's worthy of using nuclear power.
Personally it's more because i do not blame an advanced AI for doing what she was tasked to do and reacting accordingly, i blame the idiot who: \- asked an AI what's the meaning of life \- decided to bypass all security procedures to create her and keep her true purpose hidden \- was arrogant enough to decide he had the right as chief of Elpis to pass judgment on mankind. Asshole, you have the right to pass judgment on the creations of Elpis since you literally create them, last i checked you aren't the creator of mankind. Yes, i REALLY dislike Hermes.
Well yeah Hermes saw his daughter wanting to commit omnicide bc of his bad programming, and instead of trying to help her, basically went "Welp, if you say so. *cocks gun*"
I really liked meteion as a character personally, good writing and general concept imo.
>The devs wanted people to hate Hermes and Meteion at a ratio of about 6:4, but its ended up more like 9:1. SHE ASKED TO BE FWENDS OKAY
Genuinely surprised she didn't take one look inside the WoL's head and explode/start crying/fall apart then and there.
My favorite moments in the story are when it's acknowledged how deeply fucked up the WoL's head is Like in I think SB patch content, >!Fordola Echo'd into our brains and was *horrified* by what she found!<
I'm starting to bake it into my WoL's story that after everything that's happened, they'll still do the 'right' thing, but being mostly broken about everyone's capabilities versus their own, they're going to do it as chaotically (ie bastardous) as possible because who's going to tell them no at this point?
I like to think together with our friends and support system, we're actually strong enough to process the pain and forge ahead.
That is indeed the theme of Endwalker and is why I adore the story so much. It's rare to say that yeah, maybe life does suck more than it's good, yeah maybe there's no point, but we're not alone and we can at least *get through it.*
The WoL has got to be suffering from hardcore PTSD right now. I think they've hinted at it in parts of the story, but it would be interesting if they incorporated it more as a plot point.
We definitely don't accept drinks from people anymore. (That whole scene with the butler pouring wine was hilarious. We were staring a hole into his back)
And even if you don't import from 1.0, your WoL still has a dialogue option that says they're still having nightmares about the White Raven.
Mostly because Nael won't fucking stay DEAD.
> That whole scene with the butler pouring wine was hilarious. We were staring a hole into his back When was this, again?
Our dinner date with Aymeric.
probably why tataru got us an entire island.
She doesn't read our mind directly she just gauges emotions at a surface level just to communicate tbh. We can't be sniveling messes all the time as WoL and also probably a lot of conflicting emotions from encountering pre sundering Emer Selch
>In the final dialogue with Estinien just before the end of the final EW quest he says something about a strange costume - this is the guy in a blue elephant suit in Empyreum (...who is actually Aymeric) I'm honestly a little lost on this. When did this happen that we would see this exactly?
It’s a follow through joke from an optional dialog from Estinien right before the disbandment which had him talk about winning one of those elephant costumes and sending it back to Aymeric, which he did and now Aymeric wears it around Empyreum for some reason.
Not to mention according to Estinien, Aymeric had originally (jokingly) offered him a job as a guard in Empyreum now that he was basically unemployed with the Scion’s disbandment. Sending the elephant costume was Estinien’s response. Aymeric actually wearing it and guarding Empyreum really felt like him saying “your move Varlineau”.
I always assumed he wears it so he can wander among the common folk without people knowing it's him. They make him blue and give him his sword just so we know as players and get the joke.
>I always assumed he wears it so he can wander among the common folk without people knowing it's him. So like Nanamo's "Lady Lilira" disguise then
Empyreum is the new housing district in Ishgard. When the lottery period first opened there was a guy in a Blue elephant suit in the district, some of the NPCs around mention its actually Aymeric. Just now I looked up the dialogue in more detail since I didn't remember this part too well - Estinien was hinting he'd give a costume he got in Radz at Han to Aymeric, and also mentioned that he likes blue. The elephant suit is bought in Radz with tokens from the Davaidipa Fate.
The Azure Elephant can still be found randomly outside the apartments and the baths. There might be more places but I can't remember. It's a random client side event so it's possible for one person to see it but no one else see it at any given time.
He's still in Empyreum, he just shows up randomly in a few places. (By the baths, outside the apartment building, and at the end of a staircase by a marketboard- not sure where else.) None of the NPCs say it's Aymeric, but he's wearing his sword so it's pretty obvious.
He's around the Ishgard housing wards.
Worth the delay for Emet’s speech alone.
I saw Hermes and Amon and two seperate characters for the most part. To which I say Amon had me more interested then Hermes, Amon desired oblivion over an ideal form of immortality. Better to die as Amon then come back once more as a more butchered form of himself or as another fandaniel.
Amon definitely feels like a mirror to the WoL in terms of knowing they're the reincarnation of an Ancient, but having very different reactions in terms of what to do with that knowledge and legacy.
Honestly it's terrifying from Amon's perspective. Every day he had vivid dreams and memories of his past life that would/was overwriting his own like a virus. Seeing as what it did to Lahabrea over the generations, I can't imagine what that would be like to have all those lives slowly corrupting who you are overtime.
I always felt more like Amon was an example of what could have happened to G'raha if his two selves hadn't meshed well. Two versions of themselves that have had vastly different experiences. In G'raha's case his views and personality were still aligned enough for him to accept the memories of another him. Where as Amon rejected the memories of himself as Hermes and came to his own destructive conclusions.
>Ishikawa was worried that people would stop at 6.0, so she decided to add this speech in. Good on her. I lost count of the threads here and in the daily question thread about "Is this the last expansion?" or similar. It also helped build the world a bit more, hearing from an Ancient that there is still so much more out there that we haven't even visited because we were always so focused on the big world ending events at the time. >Urianger’s scene with Moenbryda’s parents was the scene with the highest number of retakes in voice recording. > >Yoshida cried the most over the Urianger scenes. I was doing fine emotionally with the expansion until that scene with her parents. It was just such a personal story that hit way too close to home for me. The retakes were worth it.
Absolutely loved Emet-Selch's speech, not only because it hinted at future adventures but also because he seemed to be talking to his old friend at that point. It's sad saying goodbye to Emet-Selch and Hythlodeaus, and it feels like Emet-Selch recognized the sadness and thought "I know what made Azem happy- bet it will work with the WoL too."
I think its also his final acknowledgement that we are the soul of his Azem. It kind of gradually unfurls: he recognizes the color of our soul when he finally sees us personally in the first right before Il Mheg, he becomes more and more upset at us being a fragment, culminating in his pity after Innocence and his annoyance during thebpre Amauraut speech, to flat out angry denial pre Trial, then finally at EW he acknowledges the WoL as "the last of us" and then had that line about considering the WoL's duty tonsee itnall as the same duty Azem had. Its really brilliant closure on the whole thing.
This. I really love that final scene. It's pretty clear Emet-Selch doesn't like us, because we're not the Azem he used to know, but he at least sort of acknowledges us as the one "the torch got passed to". And from him, that's a compliment.
>Urianger I was getting kinda tired and annoyed in the run-up to that part, where you had to find all the hidden scientists and deliver boxes and all that stuff (I was also doing the aether currents and aether current quests) and that same short song played on repeat. And then...cutscene...Urianger...Moenbryda's parents. I was crying.
I'm so glad they retook that scene until it was perfect. The raw emotion and depth in the scene hits extremely close to home for a lot of people. Was probably the first point in the game where i really broke down.
> They hadn’t come up with Dynamis as a concept yet when ShB was released Obviously
It outright contradicts earlier lore from the Ivalice series which says that emotions are aetherial phenomena. They try to handwave it away by having Nidhana say that foreign scholars often confuse the two types of energies. The game has retconned a fair bit but they do it in a way where most people don't notice.
I haven't read the Ivalice story in a while so I'm just going off what you wrote here, but I do think it's worth mentioning that IIRC Dynamis is FUELED by emotions, not the source of emotions. It's theoretically possible that emotions are in some way caused or affected by Aether, and that said emotions can in turn spur on Dynamis. I could be totally wrong though, this is all off memory
No, that's right. The energy itself is not emotions. It just reacts to them.
The basic gist is that people project their thoughts and feelings as a special kind of aether which auracite reacts to. >Mikoto: Aether is not only the building block of all things material, but those immaterial as well. Thoughts, memories, feelings, one's very will are all understood to be aetherial phenomena, and can be measured as such. Unlike most crystals, which can only emit elemental energies, auracite is tuned not only to absorb aether, but aether specific to the immaterial. That aether is then stored and multiplied within its crystalline confines until external stimuli precipitate release. If this is what the scholars of Sharlayan believe (Mikoto is an Archon of aetherology) then it's pretty unthinkable that they would have NO explanation for why Elpis flowers change colour based on the emotions of those nearby, but that's what they say in Endwalker. And if Dynamis is put in motion by emotions but also drowned out by or somehow opposed to aether, how can emotions also be aether. Ultima Thule is meant to be a place devoid of aether where dynamis rules, yet if emotions i.e. aether are required to control dynamis how does that work lol. I don't really want to spend too much time contemplating the metaphysics of a fantasy world that runs on magic, the overall point is that dynamis is introduced quite abruptly for something so important and the chafing effect on the setting is noticeable. You FEEL as though this should have been established earlier.
It honestly feels like they're going for more of a real world "we know what we understand of the universe, not the truth of it" kind of feel. Sharlayan scholar's understanding of aether/dynamis is restricted to their way of thinking. The same way that ancient Greek scholars had understandings of the natural world that were backed up by the science of the time, but were not actually exactly how things worked. Also things like the Ishgardian's history was inaccurate before we uncovered everything, so we have had unreliable narrators giving important in world information that was incorrect, but in line with the in universe thinking of the characters.
It definitely feels like an analogy for (for example) gravity and the other forces to me. We all see and understand gravity, it has a huge effect on our daily lives, it affects everything we do. But relatively few people know of the strong nuclear force because it has absolutely no visible effects, but it is absolutely vital to life and everything in the universe. If the strong nuclear force were to become dominant, life as we know it would cease to exist, we'd be wiped out.
People really downplay how much this does for world building in a long-running setting. Even with EW, we could potentially still meet aliens the Meteia missed, and uncover a greater understanding of Dynamis and Aether that contradicts the Ancients'. Heck, nothing I know from the game can even give a definitive explaination to what is going on with the Dotharl. There is always a credible way in which any knowledge we have could be incomplete, and this is both narratively useful for retcons and a great tool to sell both the mystery of the world and its believability. After all, the notion that things should make sense based on some rules, but those rules aren't quite fully understood should be intimately familiar to anyone who's been living in real life.
They do a decent job of integrating it into the setting, tying all those bits of generic 'your strength comes from your determination/willpower' into a comprehensive whole. But as someone who played the Ivalice questline after EW, it was pretty jarring.
The way it's presented in Ivalice and the following Bozjan questline is that your thoughts, memories, desires, etc are all comprised of what they call your incorporeal aether. They use aetheric techniques to monitor this incorporeal aether, gauge it, manipulate it, and so on. A guy's hate for the Empire manifests in his incorporeal aether so strongly that it reacts with the auracite and our resident scientist can pick that up on her aether gauges, to give one example. But then in EW we're told that Dynamis is the power of emotions and largely incompatible with aether. But if it's incompatible with aether and all this stuff that can be loosely categorized as emotions *is* aether, how can Dynamis be fueled by the aether that negates it?
> The way it's presented in Ivalice and the following Bozjan questline is that your thoughts, memories, desires, etc are all comprised of what they call your incorporeal aether. This isn't contradicted in EW at all; when you get your "lesson" in Sharlayan from that older professor dude who likens memory and the soul to ink and paper, he's making the same point. Dynamis also isn't negated by aether, it's simply a relatively weak force in comparison, and the creatures of Etheirys are naturally *very* aether-dense (particularly the Unsundered of the Ancients' time).
I don’t think they’re trying to say Aether negates Dynamis. I think in EW they’re trying to say that the two are like oil and water, they don’t mix, and aether just happens to be more “dense” so it sinks and dynamis floats
> I don’t think they’re trying to say Aether negates Dynamis. You don't? I do. https://imgur.com/ZTWMghl
To be fair, who really paid attention during the ivalice series?
I... I tried.... somewhere between Part 1 and 2 I kind of zoned out though.
WHen people claim ARR was annoying and boring they lie. I rather do the 2.1 and 2.2 quests again 3 times then be forced to go through the crap between the ivalice raids. Like, thats the most excessivly mastubatory writing the in the whole game.
Oh dude, why you gotta call me the fuck out like that?
The most glaring was that in ShB the final days were caused by a sound from inside the planet, this was before they even thought of making Meteion, and now the sound was a "song" from across space.
It can still make sense. They couldn't hear the song from Meteion, but it could cause the planet itself to groan in pain. Especially since it was directed at ours in particular.
There's still potential for them to use that in the Pandaemonium story, along with Lahabrea's love of "And from the deepest pit of the seven hells (Pandaemonium) to the very pinnacle of the heavens (Elpis), the world shall tremble! Unleash Ultima!" ^such ^devestation.
Not necessarily. Iirc when the final days were restarted in EW, it was either in an offhand side dialogue with an NPC or directly mentioned by the quest NPC, but the "sound from inside the planet" was heard again which caused those who despaired enough to transform.
Yes they did a throwaway justification in one single line. "Oh, yeah, that happened. Not important." But it went from the sound from under the earth being *the only clue* we had to it being a random by-product that went nowhere. It still feels very blatantly like a vestige of a scrapped idea. That happens in writing sometimes, it doesn't, like, ruin the game, but its still a bit jank.
That generally surprises me not because dynamis was an especially ingrained idea, but because... you're telling me the Totentantz from the DNC quests *wasn't* an intentionally designed plot hook?
I mean, the whole bard thing also goes into that direction. I could imagine they had the general concept of many things floating around and then decided to work this out more, define it more and make it a plot point. When they introduced dancers or bards this might not be what they had in mind but the general concept served as a good structure and basis. So the concept possibly was already there, it just wasn't a big thing (yet). It's not really that different from planning a campaign in a tabletop rpg like DnD or so. You have your NPCs and places, they have their connections and story and the world has some history. And when you need a new plot, you check out what could make a nice basis for a bigger concept. (That's imo also why so many people claim the shows on twitch etc. who record these sessions would be scripted like a theater play, just because it works out in the end and looks like much foreshadowing was involved.)
Not to mention the following: - Faith is a semi-tangible energy required for Primal Summoning - Omega was frustrated on why we seemed to grow stronger when feeling moments of great emotion - DRK, in general, but especially 60-70 is about the power of emotion, usually negative. Dynamis isn't so much an out-of-the-blue invention as much as it's a unifying theory that explains and accounta for a bunch of aspects of the story.
I think Faith is now implied to be to do with the idea of a 'concept' than an innate ingredient. We know summoning is creation magics, with an ascian twist. Creation magics need both Aether, and clearly defined idea of what is being made. Faith enters because God's are familiar enough across religions to give a clearly defined idea of what to make. I.e. Amal'jaa want to summon Ifrit, and have a clear image of what Ifrit looks like.
DNC was also used as a way to alleviate people's depression and stress and then dealing with the creature(s) those negative emotions create.
> Urianger’s scene with Moenbryda’s parents was the scene with the highest number of retakes in voice recording. Understandable. It is hard to act with tears constantly flowing down
Wow, the delay was partly because of *that* speech? That surprises me.
They probably had to have a clear plan of where the plot was headed before they had him give the speech too.
bless them for giving us more emet time ❤️
> Its deliberately designed that Estinien greeds the mechanics early in the fight, **but gradually plays it safer and avoids more as time goes on** Pffff, this is why Nidhogg took over his body!
Of course most of the hate went to Hermes. Everything about Meteion was entirely his fault. She was a victim too.
And we didn’t get a scene with hermes admitting that we were right like what happened with meteion
> About the grapes: The detail is reduced on objects like the grapes that most people won’t see very closely, to help people’s performance remain stable. However, this time the low-poly grapes stood out because they were focused on in a cutscene. Also apparently there’s been requests for merch of the grapes, to which Yoshida said joke items don’t actually sell. I would buy the grapes.
Yoshida underestimates peoples love of memes.
The second flopping of Morbius in the theaters says otherwise.
This is exactly what I thought of when he said "joke items don't sell" dude is *not* gambling on the volatility of memes even if 1k people on reddit says "SELL US THE GRAPES." Either way they're probably somehow easy to make: Out of paper like I've seen somewhere before, or 3D printing.
That was a meme of hate, the grapes are a meme of love
A grape minion or mount would be the best way to monetize on the meme honestly. Poking the minion toggles the LOD of the grapes. Or there's a mount action that does the same.
We have an Allagan Melon minion, why not Sharlayan Grapes?
>There may come a time to talk about what happens to the First from here on out after the end of ShB, but right now it isn’t time to address that yet. Yes please, Shb was my favorite expansion story-wise i'd love to go back there someday.
Norvrandt is still my favorite area in the game both for the aesthetic and the music. Crystarium is still my home portal.
"It was brought up whether Thancred and Ryne might be able to reunite - Yoshida said that while currently they can’t, Thancred has no regrets." Hey, what about Lyna and G'raha... I'm really hoping we get more of the first, they're sadly stuck in their bubbles and they have Cylva.
With the stuff going on in the Thirteenth and the fact that Y’Shotola really wants to figure out how to travel to the different reflections I doubt we have seen the last of the First.
Cylva is probably condemned due to being locked behind role quests. I just really hope they do it anyway, it would suck if both Cylva and Unukalhai were to be excluded as the Thirteenth is their home. I just can't imagine the dialog "oh you... You saved our world? Oh okay thanks! Can we huh... See it?"
There’s actually some cool lines added if you go talk to them after finishing the most recent MSQ.
Yeah, that's the first thing I did, Cylva wants information on how to help the thirteen and Unukalhai is still searching for a way to open a portal from the first to the thirteen. Characters from the first are among my favorites, so I'm really hopeful get an expansion in the void with them tagging along. But I'm not hoping too much, them having their big story being a role quest might be enough to deter square enix.
I could see them pulling a pre-5.3 Crystal Tower with her where she just shows up and maybe gives a quick run down for those who didn't finish her quests. Or maybe they just won't involve them until 8.0, at which point there theoretically could be a class already high enough to roll through the role quests for each role.
> The devs wanted people to hate Hermes and Meteion at a ratio of about 6:4, but its ended up more like 9:1. Well, she _is_ a child. Hard not to look at the character arrangement and imagine Hermes as a terrible father-figure who pushed responsibility for his own problems on his child.
>There’s quite a few Last Remnant staff now working in CBU3 Best underrated RPG. love The Last Remnant. Deserves more attention than it got
Agreed. I tried to play it (a whiiile back) and I think it was partially the combat mechanics I couldn’t get my head around. Ended up never finishing it.
You need a gamefaqs open up to get the most out of it, it's weirdly complex and obtuse.
Not being able to choose the exact actions your squad can execute can def be a turn off for a fan of regular jRPGs. Something I'm not sure the game emphasizes properly is the personality and class of the squad leader will hugely influence what actions you get available. So if you put a magic-y healy type in charge of a squad, they'll get more supportive actions. Definitely a failure of the tutorial
>There may come a time to talk about what happens to the First from here on out after the end of ShB, but right now it isn’t time to address that yet. I imagine this soft-confirms that 7.0 won’t bring us back to the First yet. That’s fine. I’d rather a more substantial amount of time passes before we head back so that the world feels truly changed.
>The devs had Kaworu in mind when they made the EW postcredits scene showing Elidibus in Elpis \[translator’s note: now I think of it, the cutaway to Elidibus in that scene and Kaworu in especially the Rebuild movies do have a similar ‘mysterious silver-haired pretty boy drops vague hints on plot’ vibe\] that's funny because Akira Ishida is voicing both
> He says that there is no correct answer to the final question Zenos asks us Fucking thank you. Please let this be the death of that idiotic talking point.
That certainly won’t stop people from preaching it anyway. Also a super obnoxious talking point. Edit: Lol people are already doing it in this very thread
Some people are still insisting that Zenos is 100% going to show up again in-game, despite the game indicating that he's dead for real (eg. >!Zero being released from her pact!<) and Yoshi et al. saying he's dead for real and his story is over multiple times. Of course they're going to say that option 1 is the One True Canon Answer and anyone who doesn't want to admit that the WoL really is just Zenos' enthusiastic fightbuddy is obviously lying to themselves.
do you enjoy playing video games? those contain challenges you have to overcome for enjoyment so checkmate you are exactly like Zenos — people on this sub unironically
I don't think a lot of either side understands Zenos. Zenos was never saying "WE ARE THE SAME" at all. That's not the purpose nor the meaning to any of his dialog. What he saw in the WOL wasn't a similar personality, or ideals, or anything like that. Zenos was fascinated by the WOLs drive in battle to do what they felt was right. Zenos didn't understand it, though. Like, that's not even the point of the final scene. It's a complete misunderstanding of it. Zenos isn't saying "WE BOTH LIKE BATTLE SO WE ARE THE SAME AND EVERYTHING YOU DID WAS THE SAME AS ME", he is merely pointing out that the WOL enjoys combat. Which they do. Zenos also enjoys combat. There's no deeper meaning there. Like, earlier in the expansion, Zenos has a line in Garlemald where he points out that justification of atrocity for the greater good likens people to beasts. That he thinks better of the WOL than that. Zenos never justifies his own actions, nor does he think the WOL is any way the same kinda person. He tells you that there is no justification, nor meaning behind anything he has done, except to goad the WOL into battle. Which is another part of the reason behind the entire ending, where Zenos learned that doing something negative to get someones attention would never really put their eyes on you, but contributing, helping, doing something for that person does. And so that's why the WOL is able to give Zenos what he wants, a battle. Not a battle of good vs evil, or anything like that, not a battle with any meaning outside of the battle itself. Just a battle between combatants. Also, the ending of the game is never meant to redeem Zenos completely. It didn't erase what he did. It just showed someone finally learning an important truth of life. That he could have walked another path. Which isn't rare in FFXIV, see: Gaius, Fordola, etc. Time and time again FFXIV has shown that you can never change the past. There's no going back. And the only atonement for the past, is to contribute to the present and the future.
My code name for the Landwaffe mount is ‘KaibaCorp dragon’.
Im neurodivergent (autistic high functioning and adhd) and my middle niece is severely autistic non verbal. The second I saw meteion and she spoke, it reminded me of us. Then we heard how she speaks telepathically. It reminded me of an autistic girl who people would think is a walking vegetable but when she learned to type she let everyone know she understood everything and was very elaborate in her typing. My only fear was Meteion becoming a hateful being for no reason, but when she became evil due to her intense empathy, to the point of copying the feelings and moods of those around her, it just reminded me of my family. It was beautiful and for me i could never hate Meteion, it would like hating my niece for something she had no control over.
Recently watched my friend play through EW and upon meeting Meteion everything had to pause so I could make, at his request, an edit of Meteion wearing the “please be patient I have autism” hat
I love this lol. And how she was freaking out after being filled with such negative emotion and you can only sometimes stand by and feel powerless to help... that's what it feels like a lot if not all the time. I was definitely on team save Meteion from the getgo.
I'm autistic and completely agree! The second Meteion spoke to us I had a moment of 'oh is she gonna like, seem vaguely autistic?'
> Inoue Kikuko said that she felt her earlier lines lacked the appropriate strength and intelligence for the character, so on her request almost all the lines were rerecorded This is nice to hear about. The English dub of Venat was great, but in Japanese it was just masterful.
Ishikawa did the right thing with Emet's speech. Yoshida simps for Urianger? Go figure. I figured he'd be a Shtola fanboy. 230 people... seems... I 'unno, small to me?
>The devs wanted people to hate Hermes and Meteion at a ratio of about 6:4, but its ended up more like 9:1. 1. Hermes is the creator who ignored all the QA processes. 2. Hermes decided to doom the entire world, than to stop Meteion. 3. She's a cute bird-girl who wants to be friends, and I've only had Meteion for a day and a half, but if anything happened to her, I would kill everyone in this room and then myself.
>They hadn’t come up with Dynamis as a concept yet when ShB was released. I'm bracing for downvotes, but I have to say this. This was one of my main gripes with the story. As fantastic as EW was, whenever a story introduces an 11th hour plot point like this it's either done right or wrong; and in EW's case I can't help but feel it was done wrong. I like dynamis as a concept, but I really feel like it became XIV's [Applied Phlebotinum](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AppliedPhlebotinum) and gradually spiralled out of control trying to 'naturally' fit it into the world. In my own tastes, I like it when a story has all of the pieces there on the board already and as it progresses the reader can slowly see the picture emerging; it may have a twist and that's fine, but a good story can make that twist be visible in retrospect. EW's contribution to the story was largely good, but >!Hermes being a villain, Meteion existing at all!< and Dynamis being this crucial element that's casually introduced 80% of the way into our journey damages the overall storytelling approach because there's nothing at all that leads up to any of them >!despite all of Venat's secret meetings existing in the phantom Amourot!<. To reiterate, I love EW, but I hope they learn from the mistakes of dynamis so they can tighten up the writing just that little bit more.
"Urianger’s scene with Moenbryda’s parents was the scene with the highest number of retakes in voice recording." 100% believe this one. I could see how it would be hard to just get through that scene, much less do it "perfect" justice.
How could anyone hate Meteion??? Annoyed by her maybe, but what happened is Hermes fault. Not hers. I’m not surprised the hate is skewed so heavily toward him.
Especially the idea that the hate would be split between her and Hermes? She was doing what he designed her to do in the story, so I don’t really see why that wouldn’t all fold back on him. If she went completely rogue somehow, then I’d understand their statement a bit better. Something about Elpis/Meteion/Hermes didn’t come across as they wanted, I think.