[Megathread] Final Fantasy XIV

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Have you been keeping up with the forum thread in general? Prior to it getting derailed (again :P)

I last checked yesterday. Just caught up now.

we were having an interesting discussion about how the narrative in EW is crafted in such a way as to make you like her to the extent of attributing things to her that she wasn't responsible for, off-loading things she was responsible for onto other characters, and otherwise whitewashing her actions.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around why Yoshida thought that this was a good idea. He does play his own, game, right? When he was playing Elpis and doing those quests about the nice wizards taking care of their own creations and trying to make a better world, how did he think "this is a corrupt society that needs to be sundered"?

[Lane]

I'm still trying to wrap my head around why Yoshida thought that this was a good idea. He does play his own, game, right? When he was playing Elpis and doing those quests about the nice wizards taking care of their own creations and trying to make a better world, how did he think "this is a corrupt society that needs to be sundered"?

He has some... odd takes. Apparently he thought players would find Elpis scary?? He also didn't understand the love for Emet in ShB and he was surprised players didn't feel the same way about Hermes in EW. Some of the stuff I've seen shared that he's said about the story and characters is just bizarre.

I think he was also taken aback by the fact that he needed to defend Venat in the LL Q&A. I know she and EW are still hugely popular in Japan, but clearly he's seen enough debate to "communicate she's not a bad guy". He sure wouldn't have seen that on fan sites in the west at the time outside of the ENG lore forum and they never list the official forums as a source of feedback.

[DodgeHellcat]

It's not the overall DPS I'm worried about. It was the gameplay loop. It felt great to build up to your 5 seconds of glory. You were keeping your speed buff refreshed, and then your attack damage buff, and you used your filler combo once a minute, and the spent time building up your 2 meditation stacks, and now your rage bar is almost full. Your Tsubame-gaeshi is about to come off cooldown. All of your ducks have been lined up. You chug your potion, buff up with hissatsu kaiten, and then it is time for your 5 seconds of glory as use your maximum powered midrare and follow it up with a tsubame, all the while dumping all of your rage into Shinten spam. When you executed everything perfectly, it felt great. I fear that removing Kaiten is going to dampen the feeling of that build up.

And it's not like Samurai is a complicated job to learn to play. You just press Kaiten right before applying your DoT and right before popping Midare. Removing it isn't going to make the job massively easier to learn. It just feels like dumbing down for dumbing down's sake.

How is *any* of that different by removing Kaiten?
Kaiten doesn't affect anything you just mentioned, you don't even really lose an oGCD because you will use another shinten instead.
There is no "build up" to Kaiten and it loads all your DPS into skills that *need* to crit/directhit due to it, you use it 4 times IN your opener alone. It's just part of the muscle memory.



just look at that beauty. It combos so well into Iaijutsu's animation as well.

(post count limit)
youtube.com/watch?v=KWE7yosGf9M

It just feels like dumbing down for dumbing down's sake

lol? That would be kinda the point then... wouldn't it?

[MsSideEye]

Goal number one was to make you like Hydaelyn. It's that simple and that crass. Earlier plot points they established, while winging it with no real plan in mind, made it so that Hydaelyn destroyed the world and the Ancient society that the audience ended up way more in love with and sympathetic to than most of the team had expected. So if you need to be made to like Hydaelyn after that, well, she NEEDS to have a "good reason" to have killed all of those people. What would be a "good reason" to kill the Ancients? Well... we established they were good people with a good society, so what if they were... too good? And what if being too good... was bad!?

So in the end, the route they hit upon to make Hydaelyn sympathetic and worthy of your support was making it so the Ancients were "bad" for being "too good," and thus we end up with "suffering good, bettering societal conditions bad, bam, Hydaelyn justified. Now look at how hard it was for her to kill all those people."

Ok, I honestly only ever come over into the forums on this site to just see the hilarious bad takes so many people have here, but it was this post here that made me actually make an account, because this is such a completely bad take that I'm honestly have to ask if you even looked at anything in the game during this bit. Most likely it's going to be me spitting in the wind here, but I've HAVE to get this out of my mind.

If you think the Ancients were 'too good' at the ending bit of Elpis, then you clearly haven't payed attention to that entire cut-scene, much less any of Shadowbringers. Not only were they shown to be fairly callous for the most part, with only Hermes being sympathetic to the very creatures they were playing god with (And we all know how that turned out), but then you've got the very action that every player should know about the Ancients. That to stop the End of Days, they sacrificed half of the total number of Ancients to create Zodiark.

Now that, Hydaelyn could understand... and knew in the end it would help save their home. By creating Zodiark, you've stopped the End of Days from doing anything to the planet. The problem came, and the entire reason she sundered the world, was the actions of those who remained. Because to live, to survive after they had saved their home wasn't enough for the rest of the Ancients. They wanted this 'paradise' they used to live in, a world where they had before, where they created without restraint and had all the people they knew. And how were they going to do this?

By sacrificing half their numbers again, so that the god they created would grant that wish.

Let me repeat this: To return to the world they had before... they were willing to kill off half of their people again. And this is not new knowledge, this is something that we knew since Shadowbringers in how things went down. There's a huge difference in sacrifice lives in trying to, you know, survive an apocalypse and sacrifice to try and get back to a state of living that you saw as 'perfect'.

And that was the whole point. The Ancients were effectively putting their heads in the sand and saying 'if life just goes back to normal, everything will be ok', ignoring the very, VERY real circumstances of what their old world produce because of their ignorant ways. You add in Hydaelyn's knowledge thanks to the player and the events of Elpis that sundered beings could work with Dynamis, which would be a key feature in being able to fight off and stop the End of Days from happening all together, and you've got a formula for the sundering of the world. Instead of letting the Ancients continuing in a cycle of constantly seeking paradise that would lead to more problems, she instead split their souls and the world itself to prevent that from happening.

Because as Endwalkers entire theme and idea behind it was: To live is to suffer, but that's where the joy comes from, the life. One must accept the pains along with the joys. Or as the game appropriately put it:

Thou Must Live, Die, and Know.

[Merie]

The ancients wanting to sacrifice people for good times is either a bit of a ret con on Endwalker's part or a biased portrayal of Venat's interpretation of events. But they don't quite mesh with Hythlo's claims. In Hythlo's Words, while Zodiark's summoning had halted the world's total destruction, the planet had never the less suffered so terribly that the earth was blighted, the air was still and the water was poisoned. If it was literally that bad, Etheris probably was not even been capable of supporting life in the state it was in after the final days were temporarily halted. But maybe an Etheris where the water wasn't literally poisoned was by Venat's estimation tantamount to demanding paradise. The ancients' corpses litter the streets, the survivors surrounded by fire and flames for as far as the eye can see. Venat strolls on in and is like "This is fine". The third summoning to be and the one that got Venat's goat was in Hythlo's words about restoring the lives that had been lost. More than anything though, the biggest red flag in regards to Venat's actions is that Azem, her own successor and personal protege, flatly refused to align with her and her rival group. Going so far as to spurn an invitation.

[MsSideEye]

The ancients wanting to sacrifice people for good times is either a bit of a ret con on Endwalker's part or a biased portrayal of Venat's interpretation of events. But they don't quite mesh with Hythlo's claims. In Hythlo's Words, while Zodiark's summoning had halted the world's total destruction, the planet had never the less suffered so terribly that the earth was blighted, the air was still and the water was poisoned. If it was literally that bad, Etheris probably was not even been capable of supporting life in the state it was in after the final days were temporarily halted. But maybe an Etheris where the water wasn't literally poisoned was by Venat's estimation tantamount to demanding paradise. The ancients' corpses litter the streets, the survivors surrounded by fire and flames for as far as the eye can see. Venat strolls on in and is like "This is fine". The third summoning to be and the one that got Venat's goat was in Hythlo's words about restoring the lives that had been lost. More than anything though, the biggest red flag in regards to Venat's actions is that Azem, her own successor and personal protege, flatly refused to align with her and her rival group. Going so far as to spurn an invitation.

I'd argue interesting storytelling over retcon, since things I call retcons are events that go and completely rework everything we knew about a previous plot point that had been around for years at that point for the worst, such as what they did with the Forge of Souls. You could argue biased portrayal of Venat's view of the events, because it's being told from Venat's point of view. There are few instances where we see something from a characters point of view and said character doesn't think they're right.

And yes, but Hythlodaeus words do imply that the planet had been blighted, and had suffered. But never to the point where it wasn't recoverable. I'd have to go back to the exact cut-scene myself, but I do believed it was implied that not all points of the star had been harmed either. The Final Days had done a lot of damage, but it wasn't something that wasn't salvageable. Considering how many calamities that the Source suffered after that, I think it's pretty obvious they could bounce back after a time, especially considering how long lived the Ancients are.

As far as 'wanting clean water' being tantamount to demanding paradise, I think you're way over reaching here. Especially going by Venat's version of events (Since, unlike Hythlodaeus, this is the only instance where we get to see the events of the sundering through a characters eyes instead of just them recalling what happened outside of the Amaurot dungeon), this summoning wasn't going 'hey, make this place livable again', it was 'hey, revert things back to the way they were before the Final Days.' IE: Let us go back to the way we were before. It's that and the fact that they were completely ignoring Venat about the fact that there is no such thing as a perfect world, no such thing as to live without pain that caused things to escalate.

And need I point out the last time we had a primal resurrect someone who was dead? What we ended up with was a shambling mindless corpse of a snake who was little more than a puppet to Lakshmi's strings. Even as powerful as Zodiark was, there's no guarantee that he wouldn't just do the same thing. So congrats, you just killed off another half of the Ancients to bring back the ones given up before as Zombies.

As for your biggest red flag, here's something you might have missed during my entire original post: No where in it do I say Hydaelyn is right.

With the knowledge that she had, and seeing what lay before her, Venat took the route that she felt would ensure the best chance for survival, the best way for the people she loved for more than anything to grow and live. To her, what the Ancients were about to commit was a horrific act. In many ways, this is not unlike the horrific act that Emet-Selc saw by leaving us fractured, split apart into so many parts. And there in lies the beauty of Final Fantasy 14's storytelling:

We can understand a characters motivation, their reasoning for WHY they did something, even if we don't agree with it.

I don't agree with Emet's desire to cause more and more calamities just so he can return the world back to before Venat sundered it. But I can understand it. In his own mind, and with his reasons, he was justified. Venat, in my opinion, is the same. She saw a situation, saw what was going to be done, and took action with the knowledge the player had imparted on her. Yes, Azem refused to align with her, because they didn't agree with her. You can easily disagree with why a character or a real person is doing something, their reasons for it, while still understanding it.

[DodgeHellcat]

I'm not sure I follow your (you guys) points incorrectly or if you are the ones confusing something.

Both groups mention the sacrifice of new life for the old life. Emet is willingly doing it in Shadowbringers as well and mentions that he'll gladly do it because we are just "inferior" and not worthy. So it's not a retcon, it's his position from the very beginning. Or at least from Shadowbringers onwards.

Venat:
Sacrifice 1: Ancient sacrificed -> Calamity stalled - okay
Sacrifice 2: Ancient sacrificed -> World made habitable again - okay
Sacrifice 3: New Life sacrificed -> To get back the ancients that sacrificed themselves -> not okay.

Venat didn't literally stroll around a burning Amaurot being happy while her brothers and sisters were slaughtered left and right.
The 5 minute cutscene was portraying a unknown timespan of who knows how many events and years and planning.

[Lane]

Loathe as I am to get into this, I feel compelled to point out that Venat didn't intervene in either the first or second sacrifices and it was the second that restored life to the world. Additionally, the souls of those who sacrificed themselves to Zodiark were trapped within him in a sort of purgatory. Even assuming they couldn't be brought back to life, which we don't know because the situation is not the same as it was with Lakshimi, they were still prohibited from 'returning to the star' which made the third sacrifice more justifiable than we were led to believe in ShB.

Regardless, it wasn't about the sacrifices and Yoshi-P clarified that in the LL Q&A. Venat sundered the world because 1) she did not think the Ancients could stop Meteion being so dense in aether and 2) she didn't think they could change as a people and thought that would always be their own undoing, specifically that they would go the way of The Plenty.

[Ghost of Cow]

The problem with all of this is that EW establishes that it's not about the sacrifices or Zodiark being out of control or anything else.

EW also establishes that "real" summoning doesn't produce all the bad behaviors out of primals that Eorzean summoning does.

EW does tell us that the sundering was about the ancients trying to be some perfect world and how they needed suffering and some message about that....but then turns around and says, "Psych!" because it's really about a sad bird girl that we need to be sundered to defeat.

It's all rather muddled.

[Lane]

Well, the Final Days were Meteion, the sundering was Venat. EW was arguably masterful about conflating the two so that most of the blame is shifted to Hermes. However, Venat agreed to and with his test (you'd think her being of the same mind as the antagonist would be a clue here), but despite the Ancients having found a way to avert their demise (which was Hermes' challenge) they still failed to prove to her that they wouldn't end up like The Plenty.

[Ghost of Cow]

Well, the Final Days were Meteion, the sundering was Venat. EW was arguably masterful about conflating the two so that most of the blame is shifted to Hermes. However, Venat agreed to and with his test (you'd think her being of the same mind as the antagonist would be a clue here), but despite the Ancients having found a way to avert their demise (which was Hermes' challenge) they still failed to prove to her that they wouldn't end up like The Plenty.

I know the final days were Meteion, it's just that the motivations for the sundering become a little muddled with the two things.

If - as Hydaelyn says - we needed to be sundered to defeat Meteion, then nothing else matters. All the lies about Zodiark, all the proselytizing about how the ancients world was too perfect, or they brought about their own doom, references to The Plenty, etc. None of it matters if we needed to do that. There's nothing the ancients could have done to satisfy Venat because the sundering had to happen no matter what they did.

On the other hand, if Zodiark really did solve the issue of Meteion, then Venat simply took it upon herself to destroy the world because...she didn't like it? Because she took it on good counsel from Meteion that their world would be too perfect? Just because she lost the debate on the course their people would take? Because she didn't get her way?

It just all seems so pointless if it's the former, and absolutely awful if it's the latter.

[Yarathir]

Here we go again...

[Maljinwo]

Can we have the "Venat bad" discussion in a separate thread please?

[Ghost of Cow]

Oh, sorry, I forgot where I was.

teehee everyone xiv kawaii best mmo 2023 for reals kehehe ^_^ i luv u all

[hzjf]

im still baffled by how bad the overall Interface in FF14 is. Browsing the Menu feels absolute awful and sluggish like you are missing true Mouse Support. The Interface is still stuck in their early 2.0 Days. The Camera Movement in this Game is also horrendously bad, you move your Character and again it feels sluggish as if you had delay. I assume this is because of Console ?

Man whatever they do for their next Expansion this Yoshi Guy needs to go play WoW again and learn once again

I mean. it doesnt need to copy WoW to its core but man does Blizzard do a good Job on their Menu Interface

[eschatological]

I'm not sure how people even play this game on console. There's way too many abilities to map to a controller, even with their left/right trigger modifiers to open new cross hotbars.

Like, how do you heal on a controller? Mind-boggling. My dragoon opener has like 3 double weaves and like 4 jumps. Come on man. Not sure I could play the game without an MMO mouse, something I've never said with WoW, but that might be because I hate the Ctrl and Shift modifiers, which rest under my (dominant) left hand. I've found my hand placement on keyboards is very non-traditional as is, the only modifier I use is left-alt which rests under my left thumb.

[DodgeHellcat]

im still baffled by how bad the overall Interface in FF14 is. Browsing the Menu feels absolute awful and sluggish like you are missing true Mouse Support. The Interface is still stuck in their early 2.0 Days. The Camera Movement in this Game is also horrendously bad, you move your Character and again it feels sluggish as if you had delay. I assume this is because of Console ?

Man whatever they do for their next Expansion this Yoshi Guy needs to go play WoW again and learn once again

I mean. it doesnt need to copy WoW to its core but man does Blizzard do a good Job on their Menu Interface

The interface is one thing, but I don't feel like the camera has any problems.´
Maybe an FPS issue?

I'm not sure how people even play this game on console. There's way too many abilities to map to a controller, even with their left/right trigger modifiers to open new cross hotbars.

I honestly didn't try it myself but it's probably easier on the fingers/hands to reach all the skills with a controller than it is on your keyboard.
I think movement would be more of an issue for me. Or orientation in general.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I'm not sure how people even play this game on console. There's way too many abilities to map to a controller, even with their left/right trigger modifiers to open new cross hotbars.

Really? I was able to comfortably play every job except Gunbreaker on controller. GNB is the one job that I felt actually had a few too many buttons to comfortably fit on controller.

It's one of the easiest jobs in the game, IMO. The "three different combos" thing is intimidating at first glance, but after you practice for a bit it begins to become easier.

Here is my controller setup:

• Holding both triggers down

• Squeeze the left trigger twice

• Squeeze right trigger twice

• Hold RB + 2 (or B button on xbox controller) to shift to AoE hotbar. (Hold RB + 1 (or Y button on Xbox controller) to shift back to default/single target hotbar seen at the top.

Samurai rotation basics:

...

Like, how do you heal on a controller?

I mark the tank as my target and can easily target him with one button. I can also quickly scroll through and target anyone on the party and alliance raid lists using the D pad.

[Cthulhu 2020]

Ok, I honestly only ever come over into the forums on this site to just see the hilarious bad takes so many people have here, but it was this post here that made me actually make an account, because this is such a completely bad take that I'm honestly have to ask if you even looked at anything in the game during this bit. Most likely it's going to be me spitting in the wind here, but I've HAVE to get this out of my mind.

If you think the Ancients were 'too good' at the ending bit of Elpis, then you clearly haven't payed attention to that entire cut-scene, much less any of Shadowbringers. Not only were they shown to be fairly callous for the most part, with only Hermes being sympathetic to the very creatures they were playing god with (And we all know how that turned out), but then you've got the very action that every player should know about the Ancients. That to stop the End of Days, they sacrificed half of the total number of Ancients to create Zodiark.

Now that, Hydaelyn could understand... and knew in the end it would help save their home. By creating Zodiark, you've stopped the End of Days from doing anything to the planet. The problem came, and the entire reason she sundered the world, was the actions of those who remained. Because to live, to survive after they had saved their home wasn't enough for the rest of the Ancients. They wanted this 'paradise' they used to live in, a world where they had before, where they created without restraint and had all the people they knew. And how were they going to do this?

By sacrificing half their numbers again, so that the god they created would grant that wish.

Let me repeat this: To return to the world they had before... they were willing to kill off half of their people again. And this is not new knowledge, this is something that we knew since Shadowbringers in how things went down. There's a huge difference in sacrifice lives in trying to, you know, survive an apocalypse and sacrifice to try and get back to a state of living that you saw as 'perfect'.

And that was the whole point. The Ancients were effectively putting their heads in the sand and saying 'if life just goes back to normal, everything will be ok', ignoring the very, VERY real circumstances of what their old world produce because of their ignorant ways. You add in Hydaelyn's knowledge thanks to the player and the events of Elpis that sundered beings could work with Dynamis, which would be a key feature in being able to fight off and stop the End of Days from happening all together, and you've got a formula for the sundering of the world. Instead of letting the Ancients continuing in a cycle of constantly seeking paradise that would lead to more problems, she instead split their souls and the world itself to prevent that from happening.

Because as Endwalkers entire theme and idea behind it was: To live is to suffer, but that's where the joy comes from, the life. One must accept the pains along with the joys. Or as the game appropriately put it:

Thou Must Live, Die, and Know.

This is spot on 100%. All too many are whitewashing the society of the ancients to paint them as true good and that mommy must have been evil for sundering the world, and the story forced this on us, etc. It was quite clear, even from Shadowbringers, that the ancients were not great people. People freaking love Emet, but let's take a real look at him. He's callous. People go "Oh he's just tsundere" but I don't really see the "dere" in there aside from a couple of smiles he gives you at big moments in the story. He looks down on any imperfect creations that do not serve the star, and once humanity was sundered he saw all sundered beings as inferior and worth toying with. If he'd beaten the Warrior of Light at the end of Shadowbringers, he'd have gone right back to playing his game of Sid Meier's Civilization where every single life is worthless and expendable in bringing about the rejoinings.


Emet is not a good person. He's snarky, bitchy, whiny, selfish and just in general a massive C yoU Next Tuesday. Hythlo had to guilt trip him just to do even basic good deeds.

He was a well written villain, for whom the audience could easily sympathize with, but he's far far far far far too popular for the amount of overall love he gets.

[Merie]

He wasn't a good person, but he ultimately became one. He ultimately accepted the fate of his people and regarded the sundered with the dignity their lives deserved. And his final act is to give up his second chance at life to give the sundered the final push they needed to truly surpass them and carry on their legacy. That is why he's loved.