Відео

Great video great pacing

I followed a different path of the story, one that focuses on the growth of the WOL and becoming Azem. Throughout most of the first half of the story the WoL is an observer of Hear, Feel, Think through Wuk Lamat's growth. When the two camps of Wuk Lamat and Koana were near each other, Hear, Feel, Think was confirmed by Koana. Then there was the final Endwalker short story, which talked about Azem's crystal concept left with Hythlodeaus. This crystal was based on traveling not only between reflections but time as well. This crystal reappeared in the hands of the Milala leader, who used the crystal, question who taught her how to use the crystal, I suspect it was Azem. The possiblility of Azem going forward in time to leave the crystal with the Milala, would explain why he didn't answer Venat's call before the sundering. I also think after giving the crystal to the Milala, he taught their leader how to use the crystal to send them back in time for the sundering. It is interesting that this concept crystal went under the eye of the convocation. The fight with Sphene showed the key as being Azem's crystal when the WoL used the memory crystal, the key had the mark of Azem light up with the same symbol (the sun). An interview with Yoshi P he had confirmed we were not done with the ancients 6 more and Azem still exist, and we were going to get more of Azem's story. Makes you wonder which souls the WoL is going to get. Emet-Selch pointed out should we survive every calamity we would be his equal. The story also told us that there was a bit of darkness in each of us, curious which dark souls are we going to get, Zenos or the original Golbez? What about the fallen scions?

He would have been sorted into House Huffelpuff.

Hermes isn't evil. He's mentally ill.

Zenos: You think you're better than me? Emet: No. I know I'm better than you

Zenos is my favorite villain in ff14, I always saw more than the monster. I wanted nothing more for Zenos to find the error in his way and join the scions in endwalker. The ending he got was acceptable but I’ll always regret how short our team up lasted, I considered him a friend all the way, a friend who needed help.

Otis is my favorite character in Alexandria and, with little screentime, made me want to spend more time with him. 👍 A stark contrast to my feelings on Wuk Lamat, who said far too much too often and was never off-screen for long and had a finger in every region we went to. 👎

You need to speak with Wuk Lamat about it... This is by far worsest character in video games i ever experienced (and I'm 44 years old) - terribly written, obnoxious, childish and so annoying and as chefs kiss it's played by worsest voice actor in industry, hell the ARR VAs are way better, frikin wooden plank...

I suspect he may be on the spectrum with his tells of nerves

I like that Otis sounds like Paul Bettany

I can’t remember the exact quote, but essentially she says she had to do it, to prevent who ever came after from doing the same thing and repeating the mistakes of her race.

But the endless don't act like people. They interact with old friends, carry out old hobbies, and reunite with old loves. They don't make new ones. If you want to see a copy of a dead person's memories acting like a real person and arguably being alive after a fashion I would recommend the Safehold series by David Webber. I guess despite all the players complaining about Endwalker's messaging being ham handed players just don't understand subtlety and do indeed need to be hit over the head repeatedly with point blank fourth wall breaking statements to understand what is happening.

The Endless were definitely alive, but they weren't the same beings as the people who their memories come from, so the people who died didn't come back to life; they had their memories (but not their souls) transplanted onto a new creation. That said, basically destroying them was a pretty sad thing even if they weren't the original people, since they still had their own unique identities and self-awareness, although it was unfortunately necessary since their continued existence would endlessly cost more innocent lives to keep them "alive" per say, and like G'raha Tia said, continued reflection attacks wouldn't be a permanent solution.

Interestingly enough there is a BRD quest that involves locating the "Ballad of Oblivion" which might be a nod to the "Song of Oblivion" Meteion was searching for.

The NieR Raids are the only ones not mandatory... For now...

Awww G'raha is so freaking adorable. My lovely husbando Nr. 2 right after Daddy Thancred.

There was no dilemma. Their continued existence was only possible by that wholesale slaughter of -all- life, across every reflection. Eventually, the aether and souls would run dry, and the Endless too would die off.

13:57 Azem's echo power is watching the PLL to get info early.

I didn't feel at all like it was a dilemma. Like voidsent, they consumed souls, unlike voidsent it wasn't a battle of individual personalities that could potentially return if the main host is slain and they're left undisturbed in the Thirteenth. The Living Memory only had me view it as a case of the Blasphemies, the soul has been cleansed for use in regulators, this blank soul is then expended, used to stitch and revive the non-natural dead. The Living Memory is the residual memories and what was left of the person now being sustained through the consumption of others, countless men, women, children, no matter their age for their paradise until inevitability shutting down because there is no more living to harvest. They're already long gone, they're just the memories of the life that they once were, now being kept alive through technology emulating their once personhood, sustained through the butchering and consumption of others because they are Alexandrian and others are not.

No. WE DID COMMIT GENOCIDE. If they are living souls, then we killed them. If they're just data, then no. You give the example of Steiner, I will now contrast that with the person we help recover the ring for in the first part of Living Memory - he expresses regret at never having asked his beloved to marry him, and so corrects that wrong. If they are not capable of change and growth, then he would not have done that. If you need further proof, there's Wuk Lamat's nursemaid, who appears in living memory as a young woman, and then shifts to her aged self when she meets Lamaty'l. I'm furious that we're forced down this path, when it's clear that Sphene wants to try to make a way forward. Hell, during our fight with Sphene, Kmat goes all Kool-aid man and busts into the fight to yell "WE CAN FIND ANOTHER WAY!" You mean to tell me that 30 years passed inside the barrier, when it was a couple of days for us outside of it, and we couldn't take the time to engage with the greatest minds of Sharlayan, Raha's knowledge of the Allagans (plus the accumulated knowledge at the Crystal Tower), and Beqq Luc's knowledge of the soul? It's lazy writing and I hated it. I still hate it.

The endless are just flash copies of what they were confined to a space they can't influence they exist in this perfect state as they see themselves some got younger while children never grow as they have no way to see themselves as older. I would argue to live is to have all the good and bad and living memory has no real danger in it or obstacles to overcome so there is no need to innovate Otis is the perfect lens for this issue what place in utopia does a defender have if there is nothing to protect, what purpose does a architect have if there is nothing that can be made, a doctor with bodies that can never suffer any ailments, a farmer with nothing to grow. All living memory is is just that a memory that runs the risk of destroying the present, the future, and then the past in the pursuit of preserving a past and loved ones that no one remembers till they join it. The natural process of rebirth in the Aethereal sea is basically living memory but the choice is there to move on to get a new perspective on life and further influence it or wait for others that you wish to reunite with and reminisce but you would still be aware of current events and you would remember all of your past experiences to reflect upon. It also doesn't help that Alexandria became dependent on having more than 1 soul to live so more souls are used to maintain 1 person which made them reliant on excess souls instead of finding better ways to protect themselves from the over exposure to lightning aether and the mutations that came from it in the environment and wildlife that adapted to it the soul system was a good band aid fix till other solutions could be found but instead finding ways to fix the big problem they focused more on the power of souls ignoring the very clear limit of what they could use it for. One last thing to harp on we have fixes for all of their problems but unfortunately at this moment the main cast forgot these solutions to tell Sphene that about 80% of her nation's problems are solved with different aspect aether to balance out the shard, and the remaining 20% is solved by just a better simulation why use all this electrope to make a real city that holograms live in instead of making a computer simulation that ran off of aether to more accessible resource? I bet you dynamis would be a better power source than souls (I know aether is confirmed to be more potent but come-on why are we using at minimum 1 life to maintain 1 that will indefinitely increase as more people die and join living memory).

In living Memory, I didn't interpret Otis locking up as him conflicting with his programming, I interpreted it as ptsd. His comments after the play ends indicates it was almost certainly that. Not that he literally doesn't remember Sphene's death.

Hythlodaeus is Emet Selch's G'raha

Thank you for your phenomenal work, I seriously love your channel! I think this is one of my favorite videos you've made. Especially since I think DT's discussion points like this have (generally) been ignored. I'm very excited for the post MSQ story. Is there anything you want to see personally? As for me - it would be counter-productive to his arc - but I'd be lying if I didn't say I was extremely disappointed we didn't end DT by adopting a certain chivalrous robo-knight as our newest Scion inductee. Maybe that glowing crown might lead to something? =)

Reminder that we're now 2/2 on following up on Emet Selch's bucket list leading us to places with *profoundly* fucked up rebirth cycles.

Souls are organs that maintain life. Like a heart or lungs. The memories are who a person is. Like damn if grandma gets a heart tranplant do you consider her a clone unworthy of living?

Tbh they should have just placed the souls of their dead in robot suits like Otis and there wouldn't have been an issue. But without an issue there's no story

I still have no clue what DT actually wanted the player to ponder with Living Memory. If you boil it down to what the writers seem to want you to think, Living Memory is Sphene playing dollhouse. It's lifeless, pathetic and sad. Her insistance on holding on to the past is something we need to help her get beyond. Which would be fine, if it didn't feel like we're just repeating previous themes verbatim. The whole story of the Ascians, of Emet & Elidibus, is refusing to let go of the past. With Aumarot as a visual representation of that. A fake husk filled with shades of the past that go through the motions. If so, why just regurgetate that on the back of a completely different story? We already did this, but it was done way better than DT did it. The way Living Memory was presented and handled is just a completely miss to me. I was on board for this animated mausoleum. It seems like the idea of legacy, about how our progenitors, parents, friends, influence who we are and will become, and even if they are gone the memory of them is valuable and important. The Yok Huy say that death isn't when you die, it's when you're no longer remembered by your people. This seems to directly contrast with Living Memory. To give up those essential memories is awful. I was thinking we'd get to see how these memories are 'used'. Not in an afterlife, but as a mockery of one. To just lifelessly go through the same dialogue options in a fake world. But we didn't get that. Instead they play with the idea of these memories having some serious self actualization. Memories that can experience things beyond what they did in life. But then turns around to act like it's the former. To me the writers want to have their cake, but eat it too. I would have liked to see how us destroying these memories in Living World would bestow the memories of those people back to the living in Alexandria. And that they would realize that despite having lost them, the pain they feel, they wouldn't want to lose the memory of them. They never even got the chance to miss them. Going full circle with the idea that even if we lose people, they will always remain a part of us and in that way are 'alive'. But instead we just got a jumble of a little bit of everything and in the end it just amounts to nothing. What was I supposed to feel at the end of the game? Because I felt nothing. A grey blob of rehashed, surface level themes and idea. XIV has never been this bland and boring. Not even with 6.X's "Are we able to change past the mistakes we made in the past, even if too much time has made it feel nearly impossible", which was largely panned by the playerbase. The central question to me is: Why would I give a damn about Sphene, an Endless, while also not giving a damn about the other Endless?

I never felt that there was a dilemma in shutting down the terminals and putting an end to the Endless. Life is for the living, and to sacrifice the lives of people who are living _now_ for the sake of those who have already had their time, no matter how cruelly cut short it may have been, is wrong. The game also takes _pains_ to point out that it's a perversion of the natural order, halting the cycle of reincarnation and contributing to a declining birth rate. I was 100% with Alisaie in her repulsion at listening to how the system works. Alexandrians are so disconnected from the concept of death that they're completely removed from the cycle of life. They alter their own memories upon the deaths of literally anyone they know because they're afraid of living with the pain of loss. As someone who has lost three family members to death just this year, one of whom was my father a month ago, I could never be convinced to give up their memory for _anything_ . The pain of grief means that we continue to love the departed, and to numb ourselves to it is an insult to our relationship with them. But at the same time, while I would give almost anything to have just another moment with my dad, I wouldn't kill a living person for it. And yet Solution Nine's entire system is _built_ on the deaths of others. They're so afraid of it for themselves without even stopping to consider that the souls they're so reliant on have to come from _somewhere_ . They could be consuming the soul of their own family member and would never be any the wiser. It's a kind of unnatural spiritual cannibalism, and that to me is horrifying. The Sphene that we met in Heritage Found was a perversion of the original, kind Sphene who lived four and a half centuries ago. Mankind's hubris and fear of their own mortality twisted a gentle personality into a genocidal mockery of the person she once was. We did her a mercy in putting her out of her misery.

The problem the Endless system is without souls returning to the sea to be reborn there can be no new life so eventually you will doom your star by maintaining such a system.

The thing is that we already have a definitive answer as to whether the endless can be considered alive or not. They can use dynamis so the answer is resoundingly yes. The Omicron beast tribe quests go out of their way to prove that beings made of dynamis can still grow and change. Even the mere memory of the past civilizations in Ultima Thule are alive by every conceivable metric within the setting of FFXIV. They can even make new life. So the endless are DEFINITIVELY alive by the game's own logic.

Even if she was driven to do what she did by Hermes, what she did was still undoubtedly abhorrent and "something wrong". She committed genocide on an interstellar scale, enforcing the fermi paradox and killing millions, if not billions, over the span of 10,000+ years. She is never once held accountable for just about anything. Most human monsters in history have human reasons for acting like they do, some of them being easy to sympathise with as their pasts may have influenced them and their actions like Meteion. They still aren't touted as having "done nothing wrong" in the end though, since their actions in the end tend to be objectively abhorrent.

This idea that we are "doing the same thing Emet-Selch did" is bogus. Emet-Selch didn't view sundered people as real. The Endless simply _are_ not real. Emet-Selch sought to remove the sundered to bring back people who are already gone. We end the Endless to preserve people who are still alive. We are not the same.

Even if whatever the Endless are passes the test of "truly alive" they still need to be deleted. Their existence now depends on them being "aetheric vampires" and they are completely unsustainable. Even if someone would choose to doom all other existence to feed the Endless "species" they are still doomed in the end. The Endless are doomed from the start, the only question is, do we let them take everything else with them? obviously not. The interesting part is how the beings themselves aren't malicious entitites, they are copies and / or inheritors of genuine people, most of which are normal and innocent, it's just the mechanics behind their existence are indefensible and impossibly destructive.

It's a no brainer I don't even need to watch. The Endless are not alive. They're practically AI given personality due to uploaded memories. Without the soul they're nothing more than an imitation and to kill living being for the sake of fake ones is ludicrous.

There are a bunch of inaccuracies in this. The most glaring one is the assertion that the system is blocking the memory of Queen Sphene's death. How could Otis have written a play about it if he can't recall it? And he's not struggling to recall it, he's frozen with PTSD. I don't know if you're purposely being disingenuous about the Endless, but if your assertions were true, Cahcuia wouldn't have been able to run a rebellion from inside of Living Memory and she most certainly wouldn't have been able to strongarm the group into destroying Living Memory. The only person whose motives have been tampered with as far as we're told is Sphene's. Had they tampered with everyone, then Cahcuia shouldn't exist in the way that she does.

I still strongly believe that what happened to the Endless is still genocide, no matter how much the themselves say it isn't. For all intents and purposes, the Endless are indistinguishable from other living beings. Sure, Odeus lives the same cycle over and over, but what about that couple who got together to get married as Endless when they died separate in life? They achieved something that couldn't happen in their original lives, and for the first time because they hadn't had the opportunity until then because they had never been around at the same time until then. And it's not like arguing about originality, or the composition of the body/soul is a good argument either. Omega was a machine, yet almost gained a soul though its actions. It's arguable that Alpha did gain a soul through interacting with the WoL. The Endless are indistinguishable from the originals, as was proven via Erenville not noticing until he realized that his old friend couldn't remember his mother. The WoL committed genocide under the guise of it being the "only way" according to someone who had already accepted her own death, and made the decision behind the backs of potentially millions who were to be affected by that decision. There wasn't even any attempts at trying for an alternative, and it was simply made into a looped conversation decision with only one possible outcome. Honestly, I don't see how the Endless Odeus was any inferior to the mechanical Odeus. They were equally alive and equally had the right to chose to live. And this doesn't even start on how dirty Krile was done this expac as well.

There is no dilemma. The endless are a parasitic form of life that breaks the natural cycle. Even the most destructive forms of natural life simply hasten the cycle of birth/death/decay/rebirth. The endless break the cycle, stopping everything at death. There is no decay or rebirth, meaning less and less new life is made. It will, eventually be forced to destroy all life in all shards to simply maintain a status quo. That includes us. There is a moral imperative to destroy the Endless. To not do so consigns literally uncountable numbers of future people to non existence. Under no reasonable moral code would the destruction of the Endless not be correct. Only ideals as myopic as complete pacifism would even consider preserving the endless as a non endless as something reasonable. To find a state where preserving the endless is a morally justifiable idea you need to change the circumstances to thoroughly so as to render thr question moot. I'd the endless do not break the natural cycle, there is no question. Preserve them because they are thinking life. But there is no known way. So we must destroy them. To suggest that we find a way also ignores the fact that we don't have time as we know that the endless will destroy the world if we hesitate. To answer the endless should be preserving requires asking a completely different question than the one we are presented.

What if we just get a doman enclave style donation basket for the 13th lol

I mean. I think the way it was initially presented. These are the living embodiment of them people’s memories was great. It’s essentially a man-made recreation of the Aetherial sea, especially after theirs had probably been destroyed by an umbral calamity (likely due to the meddling of Ascians). But then nothing was given to that, we were led by the nose down to a specific understanding and it was very disappointing. It was made clear which conclusion we should come to from the very start, even before we knew it would be us vs world ending Sphene. We were kind of railroaded into the understanding instead of the story having the space to breathe and see how it was happening/if there actually was no way to salvage some semblance of LM. “This be is the way it is, this is the point we are making, no nuance necessary, here’s a moment to feel sad for your companion, now go kill.” One of the expansions overt themes was to respect learn to live with others’ cultures/help them adapt - and we went imperialist and imposed our own with our own already arrived at conclusion. Of all people, WL seemed the most open to actually trying to learn, and that was super rushed because the whole story was. I mean, who’s to say we couldn’t find another energy source to at least run a smaller version of the program temporarily until those who remember the departed depart themselves. Or that it’s bad to give those parents the chance to see their children who died young, happy one more time? Or vice versa? I don’t disagree with the decision, the execution was just poorly done.

Another interesting philosophical connection is in the Origenics dungeon: Origen of Alexandria was an early Christian theologian/philosopher who had much to say about the nature of souls and memory (specifically, the preexistence of souls). Thanks for this video, it hit a lot of points I'd been thinking of after completing the MSQ!

I apologize if this was answered already and I missed it, but when we say the WoL is a shard of Azem, and Azem is the title of the seat holder, does that make us a shard of Venat?

Themes from FF9 really resonate in Dawntrail. Aside from all the philosophical discussion, Living Memory's music feels a lot like Melodies of Life, but it feels more stuck in nostalgia whereas Melodies of Life is bittersweet and triumphant. FF9 itself was created in the idea of nostalgia for the past -- and did a good job of telling us that we can carry on with those memories without succumbing to despair or becoming stagnant and trying to preserve the past. It can never be what it once was.

Sphene isn't an Endless. She died before Origenics was completed, before the memory copying tech existed. The Sphene we meet is a cobbled-together construct that only holds public records of what the queen was like, and second-hand accounts from the few who knew her in life like Otis. You witness her death in the Level 100 dungeon, when the lightning breaks the shield of her airship and it careens over the wall in flames. She would be dead and gone for YEARS before they completed the system, her soul and memories processed through the Aetherial Sea of her reflection's world.