FFXIV Zodiark: A Fumbled Finale
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- Опубліковано 25 кві 2024
- FFXIV: Endwalker was the culmination of nearly a decade of narrative development. But how well does it stand to scrutiny? Let's review it together in this critique of the game! This is officially my first video uploaded to UA-cam.
Final Fantasy XIV and all related content is property of Sqaure Enix. I have no claim to them.
Time Stamps:
0:00 Introduction
3:33 Wait, What?
6:11 Fendaniel's Rationale
8:42 The Twist
15:58 The Dynamis
19:57 Additional Explanations
23:19 Closing Argument
25:14 In Conclusion
You made some really good points. I've been thinking about DT and how weird it's gonna be when some tribal leader kicks our teeth in after we've killed 20+ gods. I'm gonna be sitting there like, "why didn't they send THIS guy to go save the universe then?"
And how the tribal quests show that Ultima Thul allows people to create anything they want and that those things can be brought back to Etheirys without losing form. We brought an Omicron to Etheirys to get some dessert tips from the children of their victims... "What kind of food do you think would help your great aunt forget how we murdered all her kids?"
Yeah. That's pretty much where my head's at, too. You don't even need to look beyond Endwalker itself to find these sorts of issues.
In the defense of the DT trailer. The WoL is using a new class I imagine if shit hits the fan they'd bust out PLD
who cares there is dungeon trash that will kill you pretty quickly, by that logic you can send a lvl 90 trash mob to kill ultima weapon....
Zodiark just being swept to the side like he was after nearly a decade of build-up was the point where I started questioning what the heck the writers of EW were thinking. Then they got into the true motive of Venat/Hydaelyn and that somehow ended up feeling even worse because putting all of your faith into a concept as ill-defined as dynamis as the trump card against Endsinger when its utilization supposedly required causing the end of the world and humanity as they knew it *on purpose* does not come across as sound reasoning to me.
Now I'm feeling insanely cynical about the quality of DT's storytelling between the rest of 6.0 and the dull post-patch MSQ. As mentioned, power scaling is going to be a perpetual issue, and it really does feel like the writers care more about telling their intended story then having it all come together in a way that makes sense.
With ya 100% on that. Venat's story is a topic I intend to cover in the not-so-distant future. There is ALOT wrong with her writing, unfortunately. I can only hope the writers find some interesting loopholes to make future narratives appealing in the wake of EW.
The lack of exertion is one of the things that annoys me the most. Should've been evident with the conflicts in SHB and EW but... no, nothing. It's dull to me. While there are lore excuses they gave for this, I agree that this was unsatisfying. I was hoping we'd see him and Hydaelyn join their power together to end the true cause of the Final Days and that, if there was a fight against him, it'd more so take the form of assisting the souls in him to overpower any attempt to thwart him for bad ends. The way Fandaniel went about it was far too simple and boring. At the very least he should've had a safeguard to actively repel anyone trying to slot into his heart's place that wasn't Elidibus or sanctioned by him - beyond merely just being an Ascian.
They overshot massively by having the two most powerful primals (yes, Hydaelyn is much weaker but she's still supposed to be ahead of modern day primals) and some supposed cosmic sinkhole of despair (even if she's a pathetic joke), Endsinger, die at your hand, then refusing to depower you, by having the blessing linger, then also keeping up the pretence that anything after could ever compare as a threat, especially on the scale they're currently pitting against the WoL. Just weird decisions all around. All told, Hades came across as the opponent that took the most effort to defeat given all the plot devices it required, and Zodiark should've made even that seem trivial.
With regards to LBs, even EE3 continues describing them as aetheric phenomena. I think Endsinger is an instance of fuelling one with dynamis, but coupled with the fact that the ancients (and especially Elidibus as the WoL, fuelled by prayer) can also wield them, coupled with how weak it's described as being relative to aether, I'd say they painted themselves into a corner to ever using it as a singular explanation for them - it's at best either/or. Even with Endsinger, it's its sheer quantity that she gulped up that could be the problem and... she's still so underwhelming as a boss minus charting a path to her. While dynamis could've been conceptually cool, the way they implemented it it comes across purely as a plot device to rid of the ancients (in reality, the sundered are the ones who are vulnerable to it, which you'd think would be worse than being unable to easily wield it directly) and an excuse to scream the loudest and stamp your feet the hardest to win. Power of friendship in energy form.
A big problem, IMO, is that they introduced it too late and that aether already features susceptibility to emotions as its own trait. They'd have been better off going with an entity like/related to the High Seraph as the cause of the crisis. She was an alien being with corruptive powers, mediated by the auracites, that worked on one's desires, and you could easily extend something like this to warping creation magicks or the echo. It's a shame they relegated her involvement to Panda and didn't think to use something like this for the Final Days. They had a possible Jenova type threat they could've built up, with Fandaniel as its willing accomplice.
Seriously when I got to that fight I was...what? How can this fight happen at this point? How? Why?
I love where your head is at, because Endwalker overall was a big disappointment to me, but I feel compelled to point out the inconsistencies with Zodiark's being (which will still damn the writing, but I'm not trying to save it).
Zodiark is made of half of the remaining, unkilled population of the Ancient Ascians. This is never given an exact number, but it's a lot less than the world wide population, because a lot of them died due to The Final Days, the ritual to create Zodiark incomplete until even Amaurot came under its effects. After that, half of that half was used to restore the planet. It's never stated whether or not that those used to restore the planet became part of his being or not, though, or if they were completely consumed as fuel.
But because whatever Ancient Ascians were still whole and themselves, given Hythlodaeus's state and those that wander the moon, this means that when his being was split, it was split even more unevenly than any individual Etheirysian. His strongest constituent people(parts) may still be separate from him, due to his incompleteness.
Then, note that Fandaniel took control of him, instead of allowing Zenos the helm. Fandaniel upon taking control snuffed out the souls that still asserted their will, surviving within, leaving him to be what remained inside.
It's also never how much his fight with Hydaelyn drained out of him, 12,000 years prior.
Finally, note that Zodiark has been imprisoned and projecting his aether barrier into the celestial currents of the planet for 12,000 years, and is still passively maintaining them even as Fandaniel fights with us. There's no telling just how much of his overall power goes into the upkeep of that.
So he has all of these weakening factors and a pilot that's actively sabotaging him. In my eyes, the point of the fight with the WoL was to tip the scale such that Fandaniel could deliver a killing blow to the god even with his limited control of Zodiark's being. He did not want Zenos to actually gain control, because Zenos wouldn't have had his goal in mind, and would not have weakened Zodiark. He was using Zenos as a means to control Anima and funnel aether into Babil to crack the seal, and Zenos personally broke the last ward when they got to the moon as well.
His lamentation that he wishes he'd killed the WoL was more of an after thought, "Oh, he's still alive and might be able to resist what's to come in some way, maybe."
But all that said, I still think it was too easy of a fight, and did not have enough importance and proper build up. It was a play for shock value to try and up the stakes for the rest of Endwalker, but in hindsight, it was all flash and no substance. Quickly followed by the boring as hell Hummingways.
That's a good point, about still maintaining the aether shield. It can be argued that took more out of Zodiark than we may've realized. Maybe some choice words from the Watcher at some point could have alluded to that, help cover some of the gaps. Thanks for the input.
@@durantes Looking forward to your future vids!
@@durantes They mention in EE3 that his restoration of the star had weakened him a bit, and even so that Hydaelyn could barely overcome him, lacking his pilot, without dragging the entire star with her, but yeah while it may all make lore sense the fight was handled anticlimactically in both their cases. At least neither was as bad as the cringefest that was Endsinger, I guess.
The explanation is at odds with what Yoshi said in the Q&A, that Zodiark was made powerful enough to not require drawing on the souls of those inside him, in the sense that the second sacrifice was a surplus step to enable him to restore the world. So you'd think his base power level is already very great - and after all, he is exerting a stimulant effect via his dark aether on the celestial currents, so he is reinvigorating the aether rather than supplying it outright to maintain a barrier, so all of it is a bit weirdly cobbled together in my view. Ah well.
The worst part is that his whole "incomplete" line could have worked if he used it against us rather than using it to explain why Zodiark lost.
Amon/Fandaniel is shown to be quite theatrical in nature. Perhaps he was simply toying with us the whole time and when we "defeated him", it was simply him acting like we had won when we were exhausted and out of energy to defeat him simply to make us feel true despair as he kills himself without us being able to do anything about it.
This wouldn't have even taken much effort to implement, you could have kept things almost the exact same. All you'd have to do is make our character use the "breathless on our knees" animation, remove the parts of his dialogue refering to Zodiark as weak and either remove the line about him wishing he could kill us or keep it in and play it off as him simply wanting to confuse you in an unvoiced cutscene somewhere.
I should note that I'm not saying this is the ideal outcome, it's just a **better** outcome that requires little dev time and could have probably been done in like 2-3 hours tops.
You're not wrong. That alone would have improved the issue considerably.
Really good watch, this had a lot of points i've agreed with for a while and me think a lot more about some others.
I personally hated the story of EW to the point of personally rewriting it for my WOL (since i'm a big WoLore Nerd). Definitely gonna wanna use that element of losing to Zodiark and having Fandaniel just simply wanted to beat us down for fun before continuing his plan.
Though my rewrite also has Zodiark as the final trial, with the Zenos instance happening right after. So at least now it makes sense for my WoL to not be very useful in Radz when the Depression Monsters start popping up
Taking some initiative. I like it!
So let's talk about Amon/Fandaniel for a sec and how he relates to one of the overarching themes of ShB amd EW. In both games, a core theme is what do you do when faced with an existential crisis. Do you accept it or defy it? Most of the cast relevant to the story, whether protagonist or antagonist, chose to defy it. But there are 2 who chose to accept it: Hermes and Amon.
We all know what Hermes did, but Amon was broken by Xande. Amon was already unstable, and Xande shattered all that was left by telling him there's just nothing after death when he got revived. For Amon, a mad scientist essentially, this was all the proof he needed that nothing mattered. He no longer saw anything as having consequence since in the end, they were all just gonna fade to nothingness and he had proof of it. He accepted his fate.
Later we more or less see that's not entirely true. We find out souls get revived. We see it implied that even those with no energy left (Venat) are still there in the nothingness. But for the Scions to even learn this required staring the end of existence in the face and giving it the middle finger. They defied their fate.
So while Zodiark's usage feels anticlimactic, Fandaniel's actions fit thematically with the story. He eas faced with the ultimate answer to his mortality and completely lost it. It's honestly fitting that later Asahi would show up to give him the ultimate end. Becuz Amon was powerful even without the power of being Fandaniel, amd he was sooo sure of the impending nothingness after death. Yet here comes this incredibly weak man in life to drag him down when by Amon's own logic, should have not existed in a meaningful form.
So the thing to remember I think here is that *technically* we defeated Zodiark back in 5.3, when we beat up Elidibus and trapped his soul in the Crystal tower. That left Zodiark as basically a mech suit with no brain, a bunch of power with no guiding consciousness and no will. Fandaniel lets us know his plan is to go to the moon and take this power for himself, which of course we can't let him do, hence why we chase him up there and fight him in the first place.
The anticlimactic nature of the fight is because Fandaniel doesn't know how to use Zodiark's powers fully; has no real intent of actually winning; and his goal is to kill Zodiark to disperse the shield around Etheirys and hopefully make *us* do it to punish us for our relentless optimism that he. Can't. Stand.
Zodiark is no longer the great thing that the Amaurotians made to save their world, it is just a husk; a powerful husk that we can't allow anyone with Fandaniel's or Zenos' mindset to be in control of but not really a creator deity level power; not with someone who doesn't know how to use it at the controls. I thought the story was hinting at this well in advance of the point where this fight kicks off.
(It is indeed somewhat anticlimactic that Zodiark who's been talked about since 2.0 is a first-of-the-expansion trial, but there was setup for it. Also, there may be some lampshades thrown in the EX trial quest. I haven't checked them as I'm not an EX trial person. )
Those are some good points. Elidibus as Zodiark's core leaving the primal vacant was even exploited by Hydaelyn when she sundered the planet, making clear Zodiark was at a huge disadvantage at that point. However, Elidibus was the core, not the bulk of Zodiark's power. At least nowhere in game is that ever stated. So, the ludicrous power difference here is still something ignored by the writers.
Also. I can see how Fendaniel controlling Zodiark is a significant step backwards from Elidibus. Even at 8/14 complete, it would probably be difficult to manage such a force. Still, we've seen how people can control primals (like Zenos did with Shinryu) and maintain enough control to be a threat. Especially something of Zodiark's caliber. Maybe, had they not let the second phase involve "complete control" over Zodiark, we could all see this idea more clearly.
But none of this accounts for Fendaniel ending Zodiark himself, meaning the fight was still a waste of his time. But. Game logic. I know how it is.
I appreciate your input. It's given me something to think about moving forward.
1:10 IDK... I distinctly remember on my first playthrough during this scene saying to my mate on VC "Wait, are we they bad guys?". I def didn't see it cut and dry!
14:55 my head canon to make this whole situation suck less is that he needed to have a battle, regardless of whether it was a good match or not, to assume full control and thus allowing him to do the alt+F4.
16:50 ngl I kinda hope it never comes up again unless they have something letigimately interesting to do with it...
20:25 another thing I try to use to rationalise it is "Maybe instead of his power being halved by each sundering it was multiplicative?" so instead of it being 100% / 14 it was 100% / 2 fourteen times. Then even after 7 rejoinings he'd still be less than 1% his true power.
A lot of work to justify frustrating writing, but still... the possibility is there lol
22:00 you right tho
I genuinely wonder how much of the awkwardness of the story comes down to the localisation. Echoes of Etheirys have pointed out discrepancies that exist only in the English script and honestly the patch content's writing was... kinda very bad. I did pre-order and will be playing Dawn Trail in about 3 hours, but I do have concerns.
I'm not going to lie, it really sucks playing through the rest of FFXIV knowing that Endwalker is the finale waiting for me
Don't get me wrong. FFXIV has loads of appeal within its storytelling. I hope you'll keep playing and experience the good with the bad.
Here's to seeing if Dawntrail has more to offer us.
@@durantes Oh yeah, I'll be playing through the rest, it's just like "damn, what a bad way to conclude _7 years_ of story. Combine this with the Giant Space Flea From Nowhere that is Meteion, and it all leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I need to meet my boy G'raha
Zodiark is just a primal, it could never have been the final Boss