Thank you! I appreciate the support, and I definitely hope to do more with my channel this year~

Thank you! It's good to be back!

Definitely agree! I wanted to make sure I was fair and make it clear that a lot of my burnout was due to personal reasons and it just happened to line up with Endwalker's release, not the direct result of Endwalker itself.

Hope to see you in Dawntrail! Sincerely, a future Pictomancer main cause I like the feel of it as we've had enough edgelord classes.@@SaltExarch

@@Rivvy250 Very nice! I actually want to try out Viper myself because I technically already play a dual-wielding class in NIN (most of my NIN glams use longer swords/katanas) so I feel like it's the natural choice, also I generally like this game's melee DPS classes

I thought I did a sufficient job of explaining it in the video, but the only one who's back in Doma is Mutsuki's father, who left her behind before the battle of Carteneau. Her sister, Kisaragi, stays in Ul'dah, and I mention how they reunite after the 7th Umbral Calamity at 11:30

While I think that explanation of Ultima Thule would be the best reading I've seen so far, I can't really agree that this was the writer's intentions, mostly because, if they had meant the Ultima Thule to represent that, they wouldn't have utterly botched the execution. Thancred's half-speech to Meteion before he was unmade was entirely generic given what we knew at that point. He basically just says "even if times are tough, giving into despair is bad" which is the absolute bare minimum take you get from his story and his character arc. Then you have Estinien to the old dragons, which, as mentioned in the video, is probably the best and most succinct. Honestly I don't have any faults in his speech and I feel his aligns the closest to your interpretation. Then there's Y'shtola, and I'm sorry, but her speech is out of left field. She gets pissed because the weird jellyfish aliens tell her she wouldn't understand their explanation for the heat-death of the universe or why they want to die. Does she say that she can't understand their simple desire to give up? Does she say that she would fight tooth and nail to figure out a solution? Does she condemn them for being narrow-minded, and not taking any chance, no matter how slight? No. She gets mad that they said she'd be better off not knowing and that they expected her to take their word for it. The thing I love about Y'shtola is that, despite often being considered, and also wanting to come across as, the composed, scholarly, refined one, she can get pretty reckless and emotional. She used Flow to save people close to her, not once, but TWICE, with only the slimmest hopes of making it out alive. If it was a matter of ideals and conviction, the supposed theme of Ulima Thule being "Hope vs. Despair" , she'd tell those alien bastards to shove it for giving up on a potential solution and just wanting to die, and then turn to the WoL and tell them that there was a slim chance they could all come back, not tell them not to try. That would've not only fit far better with her character, but aligned better with the supposed goal of being an antithesis to Meteion's view of the world. G'raha's speech is, like I mentioned in the video, a rehashing of his speech in 5.3, when he had no idea whether his gamble to survive and be revived back in the Source would actually work, so using him asking the WoL for more adventures I don't think is much evidence he expected to survive, only that he thought there might be a way to. And the twins and the WoL's interactions after that were really just not well written at all. No matter your interpretations of Ultima Thule, whether they be fakeout death scenes or some bigger argument, can explain why they decided to make Alisaie literally speak for the WoL and not even reflect, a little bit, on what happened. Same goes for Alphinaud. He of all people should've had something more to say about the situation, whether it be pointing out that hope wasn't loss or lamenting the loss of his closest companions. Hell, if we were going for the former, he could've pointed out his failure with the Crystal Braves, and that while at the time he felt hope was lost, and he was responsible for the loss of everyone, that he continued to forge onwards in the face of his despair. Under the most charitable of interpretations, I think that the writers might have wanted to incorporate some of those themes into Ultima Thule, but in the end, they were either pressured to or decided on their own to also try to ramp up the drama by making the player think the Scions might not make it to the end this time, and at best you have a segment of the story that's confused and is trying to bite off more than it can chew effectively, and at worse is counterproductive to the story of EW as a whole.

Oh you start talking about them later nvm

@@Alex-ks3uu Yup! I mostly use the term the "Three Great Continents" because that's what the main map of the game shows us, at least currently! Though it's clear this isn't an extensive map of the entire planet. Given it's significance in the history of the story, especially concerning the Allagans, I do hope we get to visit Meracydia at some point. Not sure about the New World, because it comes up rather infrequently, so I don't know if its going to play more of a bigger role, or be more of a "when we need to introduce a new job/concept/etc. we can always say it came from there" kind of place.

@@SaltExarch I definitely am expecting (hoping) Meracydia to be one of the next expansions. I'm only in early 6.2 now, but based on that I'm expecting we'll be getting the Thirteenth instead? I hope so at least. But I'd love to go to Meracydia. I do feel like we'll go to the New World eventually, but i think they'll keep it in their pocket until they need to shake things up... In general I'm really hoping next expansion focuses on a big new region. I liked shb and heavensward giving us mostly connected regions more than I like EW's mostly separate zones. At the very least I'd like to see something like Stormblood, with two regions that have multiple zones.

I agree, but I talk about a lot more than just cheating in this video

Please don't. Not another WoW situation. You cannot, I repeat, cannot balance around the factor X.

Can you be more specific. What automation are you referring to?

Zoom hack is pretty terrible if it was in the official game because it would ruin huge portion of the mechanics because this is the philosophy of the game. For the cooldown shit, I really see no reason to have it except if you are tank, but at this level of content, you don't have "unexpected" situations normally, so still useless... However, UI changes normally come with Cheat Engine that is more problematic. What we don't see on the screen and we don't know may be quite a lot, with cheat engine you can manipulate data coming from the server, and data going to the server.

@@Grebeny In no way are the zoom hacks ruining portions of the mechanic. Can you give an example? Regurgitating what you heard isn’t going to convince me. The cooldowns are there to push a team to the next level. Being able to see each others cool downs can provide more team expression as well as spell weaving. So no it’s not useless. Again your just repeating what you heard and not giving a reason. Unexpected situations? Your missing the point altogether. At there level nothing is unexpected. They practice this over and over again. I don’t see anything wrong with providing players more information. Especially at a stage where they obviously want it.

@@Pellumbi sure. 90% of the mechanics of this game (if you are not playing only guided potato mode) need you to find the safe spots to position. Even only ultra wide already gives quite an advantage, if we talk for current tier it would be both p5s (crystals) p8s safe boxes, snakes and more. If we go with older stuff too I can go on all night.

That would explain how Zenos beat us given the WoL has defeated gods and he's just a guy. Sure a guy trained from birth to fight, but still. It also explains why he believed increasing our hatred of him would give us a power up. Plus a comment made by Urianger suggests Zenos is the one who summoned the teleporter that sent us back to the ship, if that's true then with his dying breath he was able to wield dynamis to save us.

The guy with the black hair is the general representation of the Warrior of Light, because naturally they can't make cinematic trailers personalized to each individual player with their own character. But yes, the character you play as in FFXIV *is* the Warrior of Light, and the game's story makes this abundantly clear.

@@SaltExarch but his appearance is the Primary one because he looks like every protagonist of almost every game. The rest of you just follow his path. If you put a beard on him who would he look like

@@powahwave8915 His design looks like a basic/generic protagonist because he's supposed to represent the default Warrior of Light. He's a stand-in for your character for use in trailers and other media where they obviously can't take everyone's specific WoL design and use it just for them. Technically speaking, he doesn't exist in the story of the game as a separate character from your own, because he's your character.

@@SaltExarch they all look like ryu and jinn who does ryu look like with the beard

If you watched the video, I did mention that, yes, definitively, the canon WoL does and is willing to kill. That's definitely the stance the game wants to take and is the canonical answer to this question. Also this was before Endwalker which has a number of Garleans call you out for being basically an Eorzean war hero who has killed many soldiers/people close to them, so naturally those were not taken into consideration, even though the ultimate conclusion is still the same. My point about bringing up headcanons is simply saying that, regardless of what the game says, if you want your personal WoL to have a different stance than what is presented by the game, I'm not going to say you can't. Also in general I like to avoid bringing up events that take place in job quests since people can easily go the entire game never experiencing them.

BTW, you probably missed that, but even at the start when they were explaining about Thancred, they said he is not dead, but keeping the Ultima Thule's energy away to keep them alive and if he dies, they will die too. So the stage was set with the condition he is not actually dead. So my theory comes from there, because why would they set the stage by stating he is still alive if they want you to think the scions die in the scene. However, I kind of agree they were able to make stronger scenes for most characters, but I don't agree for Y'shtola and Alisaie. Y'shtola is all about science and knowedge from quite a lot of time, so her scene kind of made logic to her. Alisaie express worries about them not being able to help the Warrior of Light enough from really long time too, it is her motivation to push hard to become better warrior herself, so her scene was pretty logical too.

​@@Grebeny I address this very thing in the video. They come out from the start mentioning that the Scions aren't dead when they disappear. The problem is, if they remove the stakes of losing the Scions by acknowledging you won't lose them, then what is the purpose of these scenes. As I mentioned in the video, they aren't convincing emotional death scenes, they aren't good character moments for each of the Scions (more on that later), and your idea that it's to put more weight on the WoL doesn't really land with me. At no point is the WoL challenged by anything that happens in Ultima Thule, between Thancred disappearing and bringing all the Scions back. If they did bring the Scions back in the middle of Endsinger, or after some big confrontation, that would entirely recontextualize these scenes and actually give them meaning, but my whole argument is that, as they are in the game now, they lack emotional weight. They also don't give the WoL any scenes or dialogue options that really shows any emotional struggle outside of the very end when we're all alone and get a single debuff that makes us walk slow. Where was the emotion we had when we were crying over Haurchefant's body, or when we were watching G'raha "die" as the Exarch, or any of the othe countless scenes where the Warrior of light does more than make a sad face. That's my point with the scene with Alisaie and Alphinaud. I don't think anyone's particularly off-character, but I just wish they had actually allowed the twins and the WoL to express themselves more, and contextualize it around their own grief, not just the burdens the WoL is facing, especially since throughout the whole conversation, the only one who gets emotional is Alisaie. Even if they wanted her to say what she did about not wanting to put that weight all on the WoL, she could've at least acknowledged her own feelings towards it. Also as one last point. I absolutely agree that Y'shtola's passionate about research and knowledge and discovery, but she's never been so overtly heavy handed about it before, and it really felt like her whole speech was a petty response to the aliens saying she's prefer to live in ignorance. That isn't exactly out of character for a conversation for Y'shtola, but we're talking about a scene where her passions, views, and convictions are supposed to forge the way forwards in the face of despair and she's going to lose her physical body afterwards. Look at every other scene where Y'shtola risks her life. In ARR she brings down the tunnel to help her friends escape the betrayal of the Crystal Braves. In Stormblood, she puts herself in harm's way to save Lyse from Zenos, and is severely wounded. In Shadowbringers, she jumps off a cliff to save an antidote that was the only hope of saving the Night's Blessed, who she had been leading and helping for 3 years at the time. Y'sthola's all about science and knowledge, but she's also a very passionate person when the chips are down, and framing her sacrifice around her just being nerdy magic researcher girl rather than someone willing to risk it all for the sake of the world and everyone she cares about was entirely out of character for anything we've seen from her thus-far.

@@SaltExarch but you pointed out "later", it was not later, but the very first thing in this part of the game. Just after they jumped out of the ship Meteon explained them Thancred is not dead. This is the reason I say it was more about losing the helping hands, no seeing them die. I will not lie, for me at least especially the last scene with the twins and the walk to the top was really amazing and emotional. I understand the technical reasons why scions came back before the battle (they promised to not add cinematics in the middle fo dungeons/trials after ARR), but I feel like, this single battle needed to be exception to the rule or even split it on two trails, like it is the grand finale, don't waste it just because someone may skip and get annoyed, IDK.

@@Grebeny I meant later as in, later after you explore Ultima Thule a bit. There's a bit at the beginning where you're investigating and searching for Thancred before Meteion shows up and tells you. Also my point was that if it was about losing the helping hands, then it still doesn't really work because the WoL doesn't do anything after losing the Scions. You walk up to Meteion, and then almost immediately summon Emet and Hythodaeus, and they change Ultima Thule so you can summon your friends back. You don't experience any hardships or challenges with them gone. I agree that if they had changed the ending fight to bring the Scions back after the dungeon or in the middle of the Endsinger fight, that would change, but as the story is, I don't think the scenes serve that purpose well. That being said, I do totally get being emotional with these scenes, and I do think they're going to hit differently for different people, I just personally think they could've done about a dozen other things that would've been more emotionally and/or narratively impactful, or at least that explored depths to these characters in a way that felt less awkward and strung together in my opinion.

I definitely see what they were going for and I'm glad you were able to enjoy it! I definitely get the story's going to hit people differently, and that some people probably really liked it. I'm glad you appreciated my analysis anyway, and I appreciate that you didn't just write it off just because you disagreed, which can happen all too often both in the FFXIV community, and in general!

@@SaltExarch But I mean I totally get what you mean. Like after seeing Y'shtola almost die AGAIN I was like "Alright come on now".

@@jasonthomas7909 At this point "Y'shtola almost dies" is gonna become the free space on the FFXIV expansion story bingo card. You don't gotta toy with my girl like that SE.

I think it's less that the Ixali are straight-up "bad guys" and more that their goals simply don't align with the Gridanians. The Gridanians prioritize peace with the Elementals, and follow the Elementals rules of not taking too much from the forest. The Ixali got kicked out because they tried to expand too much and use up too much of the Black Shroud's resources, so the Elementals got mad. Unless the Ixali want to make peace with the Elementals and live by their rules like the Gridanians, they will necessarily be antagonistic towards one another.

Well it exploded too. that may be a part of it. but I have no doubt we killed several groups of soldiers at least ourselves.

I agree, I've seen a lot of speculation like "Maybe X job uses dynamis because it's powered by feelings", and while it's possible that dynamis has something to do with it, the primary source is still going to be aether, and so far the only confirmed use of dynamis by the WoL is Limit Break.

@@SaltExarch I’m of the opinion that a limit break is enhanced by dynamis since it does require aether to use.

@@acgearsandarms1343 of course, I didn't mean it's dynamis exclusively, but it's very clear when Endsinger reacts to the technique that the Limit Breaks are at least powered enough by dynamis that she's surprised by it.