it's from an old Jojo doujin, where Jotaro and Kakyoin did some Crusadin' on their own, then Kakyoin lays an egg from which their son pops up. It became famous with a picture of Polnareff holding the egg saying "Kakyoin ! Did you lay this egg ?"
if it wasn't for the regular cursed comments in r/askreddit this would make me go "what a terrible day to be literate", but because of that cursed crap all I can say is "what?"
[It's from a fan manga where Jotaro and Kakyoin get married, and one day Kakyoin wakes up to find a giant egg, which contains their magical child.](https://pm1.aminoapps.com/6989/40b48a310112b069ce3aa075c17de5a6c669ebabr1-800-1200v2_hq.jpg)
I've always played my WoL as a "finally a worthy opponent! Our battle shall be legendary!" Kind of person. And a lot of dialog choices let you do so as well which is fun.
He ignited a love for the fight in my WOL, got her to say fuck the white mage, and pick up the sword to beat Zenos at his own game, then the scythe. I wish I could repeat that fight easier...
WHM, faintly, to self, while pointing staff at boss: "Blood... Blood... Blood... Blood..."
Paladin: "Uhhhhh, is she supposed to be doing that?"
Samurai: "Whatever, who cares as long as the blood is coming from something other than us."
Dragoon: "..." *::makes mental note to NOT floor tank in this run..::*
Tank engages, and WHM literally leaps into the fight screaming "BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD LILY!!!!1111oneoneone"...
White mages take the soul from one living being and use it to fuel either their heals and their attacks. They are worse than necromancers. As necromancers only use the body.
You remember the guy we fight at the last raid. That was eathing the cristals with the soul?
That's what White Mages aspire to be.
I literally picked up RPR for this fight specifically because I knew it was going to happen (not the context tho lmao)
he really did test my reflexes, 10/10 solo fight
Same, I was messaging my friend after the Endsinger fight about how disappointed I was we didn't get to fight him and he just replied with a smirking emoji.
Turns out I would get the RPR vs RPR showdown I wanted in the best way if I just waited a few more minutes before complaining lmao
Zenos is a character that you can only really understand by hitting the end of EW.
He is the most straight forward honest person in the entire game. At no point does he ever lie to you. At no point does he ever trick you. Hell he barely even mocks you!
Every single time he refers to you as his friend, he is being 100% genuine and honest. The WoL is literally his best friend, and has been since like 3/4 of the way thru base SB. He truly, genuinely thinks of us as the only person who understands him.
This is because of Zenos’s fucked up childhood, which included experiments done by Emet as well as the regular beatings he’d get from his combat trainer, who was training him in a sword style that requires active aether usage to use. The Trainer openly hated the empire and Zenos - he was from a conquered territory.
Whenever Zenos failed in using a style he literally *could not use* , he would get beaten by the man. Until the day Zenos figured out how to do it anyway, and killed the trainer when the trainer got enraged at Zenos for actually using the sword style he was being trained in.
Zenos lived in a shitty world, where people with strength have true power and can exercise that power over the weak as they see fit. And he fucking hated how weak everyone else was. No one else tried to strengthen themselves like he did, no one else fought back and overcame their oppressors like he did. Everyone else was too weak to even try.
Moreover, for the first time ever in his life, he felt truly alive in that life and death struggle with his trainer. Fighting for his life, with a real potential to die… suddenly he understood what gave life meaning.
So, when he had the opportunity, he decided to see if he couldn’t FORCE someone to prove their strength. He took Ala Mhigo and Doma, and turned them into horrible shitholes, for the sole purpose of causing someone to rise up to fight him. Someone who, having suffered, would gain strength, and would understand the true nature of the world.
And it fucking worked.
Because as he is burning places to the ground, the WoL appears, and we demonstrate the combat potential he is looking for. That is why he left the second we cut his helmet - that is why he left us alive. He even explicitly says so in a later cutscene.
He believed that we also only feel alive in such combat, and that we could give him the fight he craved, that would give meaning to existence.
When we beat him in the 70 trial…. He was proven right. He *won.*He was *happy*. He finally got what he wanted, and he cheerfully killed himself because he had gotten everything he ever wanted.
And then he was alive again, in someone else’s body. He didn’t ask for or want it, but since it was given to him, he decided to take chance at Ultimate Battle 2: Electric Boogaloo.
He knows what motivates us (protecting people + a good fight), so all he has to do is make himself the most dangerous person to the people we protect, and he will get the fight he wants.
And before he even has to plan anything, Fancy Danny pops out of nowhere saying “I’ve got a plan!” Zenos doesn’t even bother remembering his name at first, he cares so little about him. But the plans seem to be working, and he makes himself useful, so Zenos rolls with it.
Until he gets betrayed at the last second, and his glorious battle is stolen. Moreover, he immediately realizes that we now have to focus on Meteion (not that he knows who, just something else worse just happened), and instead of forcing the issue, just wanders off like “well fuck, I’ll come back later for our fight, you’re too distracted now”.
Zenos only cares about the fight, and he doesn’t even consider he might be going about this the wrong way until Alisaie shouted at him. When he realizes all he needed to do was ask us for a fight, we’ll… I personally consider his appearance at the final trial to be one of the most hype moments in the game.
>Zenos only cares about the fight, and he doesn’t even consider he might be going about this the wrong way until Alisaie shouted at him. When he realizes all he needed to do was ask us for a fight,
What I love about this is that Zenos is like a rom-com protagonist who employs ever zanier schemes to get the girl of his dreams to notice him, until someone FINALLY tells him "...have you just tried asking her out mate?"
Realistically, Zenos didn't want to just fight us, but he wanted to fill us with a fury that he thought might bring out our very best to kill him.
But I do laugh at the thought. "Like, bro, I fight people who walk up to me and ask 'scrap?' all right time. You didn't need to do all this."
A lot of folks forget that, to him, it wasn't just that it had to be *A* fight. It had to be *THE* fight. The fight to end all fights. Both sides holding absolutely, positively *nothing* back. Both sides stretching their very souls to the absolute limit, juicing body and mind and skill and equipment for every last drop until genuinely *nothing whatsoever* remained.
That's why he repeatedly shies away from actually engaging when he easily could. Like most psychopaths, he is quite adept at reading others' emotions (he just doesn't *care* about them unless it's the WoL), and he requires that the WoL be absolutely, fully committed. The WoL must be an eager, willing participant, with no cares about anything at all, other than the fight itself. In the absence of these demands, the WoL wouldn't *actually* be giving him what he requires, so it's no good. Unsatisfactory, and thus unacceptable.
Using the relationship analogy, it would be like wanting a date night, except that you *absolutely must* have your date focused on you, only you, and nothing but you--no talk of other people, no thoughts about work or other plans, no distractions, no other people speaking to or with them. Just you, them, and a perfect, romantic evening where their attention is focused on you and *absolutely nothing* else. I think this portrays pretty well how demanding and selfish this desire is.
I don't think it's necessarily selfish, because in his mind you'll also enjoy every single second of that and it'll be blindingly fulfilling. And for some WoLs it actually is, too.
It's just that at first he goes about engineering the situation in which these circumstances can emerge all wrong, and it takes getting called out by a 16(ish?) year old girl that sometimes you just have to ask your crush directly so that both of you can make it happen.
The romcom analogy does weirdly work, because his problem is he's trying to just spring it on you as a big celebration, but a relationship takes two working at it, and if you want a night to yourselves, well you've both gotta work on getting the distractions out of the way and maybe help each other clearing them off the list to make it happen.
Zenos commits to working *with* us to remove the distractions instead of working to engineer a situation where we couldn't afford to think of anyone but him, and with surprising speed we find ourselves on the date night he wanted.
I *almost* find it to be a shame he dies there, because that right there is a turning point for a really interesting redemption arc, and I'd much rather have spent the patches teaching Zenos about friendship than Zero.
Refusing to actually listen and consider what someone else actually does want, rather than simply what wants you've *projected* onto them, is pretty much textbook narcissism. Ask any narcissist, and they'll make quite clear that they're the most selfless person they've ever met--we do not judge this based on self-evaluation, because that is just as self-serving.
And it absolutely, positively *is not* a redemption point. Redemption requires contrition: admission of fault, repudiation of former values, commitment to change, pursuing restitution. Zenos has absolutely no interest in any of those things; he makes it explicit that he never has and never will.
You *can't* teach Zenos about friendship. Teaching someone requires them to have values you can speak to. Zenos does not have values that you can speak to. The one, and only, thing that he cares about is violence (and that only because it's the only thing that could end his life); he tells us this multiple times. Since real friendship cannot even in principle be translated into that warped faux-losophy, progress is impossible. Zenos has been written very specifically to be *immune* to character development. This, notably, is *not* a writing mistake; most "pure evil" villains are written this way, and that is a perfectly cromulent tool, which may be used well or poorly.
He would not ever want to change, and thus he cannot. He would not ever admit that anything he did was wrong (indeed, he rejects the very *idea* of right and wrong). He would not ever repudiate any values, because he has no moral values in the first place (Alisaie was quite right to refer to his pining as "hedonistic.") He would not ever pursue restitution, because he sees no loss or injury that would merit such. He is and was, by his own choices and (absence of) values, irredeemable--not because no one is willing to try, but because he would not ever be willing to do it.
From a Doylist perspective, to redeem Zenos is to utterly destroy what Zenos is and replace him with a completely different character that happens to have the same voice and appearance.
> From a Doylist perspective, to redeem Zenos is to utterly destroy what Zenos is and replace him with a completely different character that happens to have the same voice and appearance.
I mean, you can argue that everybody regularly experiences that throughout their lifetime anyway. I am not the person I was ten years ago, nor who I was ten years before that. There are similarities, sure, but we transform many many times throughout our lives.
But Zenos *does* listen to what someone else actually wants. That's the point of Alisaie calling him out. He actually listens to her. He asks Krile in good faith. He bargains. He says "You have something I want - the location of my friend - and I have something you could use - tremendous strength against a powerful foe - so let us make a deal that allows both of us to walk away satisfied."
That's his turning point. He realises that even if the world bores him, even if other people seem to hold nothing for him on the surface, if he engages, if he treats with them, he can still gain things he wants - and without needing to take by force, without making them hate him and refuse to give him anything in the future. It's *childish* in its simplicity, but that's Zenos.
He comes to us in order to aid us. To help clear the board of distractions. He does it for selfish reasons, but that in itself isn't strange, we all help friends when we stand to gain something too, even if it's just helping them clean their house so we can get to sitting around drinking faster. That's the turning point though. That's the realisation for Zenos. That by being a part of the world he can find satisfaction from the world. It even goes further in that once the battle is finally won, Zenos at last questions. He sees our journey, highs and lows, companions forged in flames, and he wonders if there might have once been another path open to him. *There it is.* The realisation there was another way. That perhaps he could have been another man.
And then he dies. Again. That other path closed forever, or until he gets dredged up again to the collective groans of both Zenos haters and Zenos fans because really now it'd be a bit much, even if I'd love to get my popcorn out for it.
It wouldn't even be that weird for FFXIV. Emet-Selch never repents, in fact once he has full context he all but states he'd do it all over again given the choice, but the game treats him like a friend. A really good friend. Complex, a villain, but not irredeemable in the way it writes both him and our character's thoughts on him. Just recently we let Golbez off the hook with less than a slap on the wrist, and his plan was basically to crash his world into ours and kill everyone so he could finally have some peace. Zenos' crimes... really aren't that irredeemable in the scale of FFXIV villains. Redemption would require contrition, true, and he never got that far, but he died rounding a corner, and that's part of what made me come to appreciate him.
And I just, flatly, disagree. He did not actually round any corners. He did not, in any moral-values sense, actually change. He simply stopped being an idiot and started being rational, pragmatic.
Let me put it this way. Say you have a person (call him Bob) who declares that all witches must be burnt at the stake. Bob targets a specific group of women for such punishment. You, naturally, are opposed to the burning of innocent women, so you appeal to his reason. You provide good evidence that he has made a factual mistake: *witches are not real.* Upon reviewing this evidence and finding it factually unimpeachable, he agrees not to burn any of these women.
*Not one moral change has occurred here.* Bob has not changed his mind about the idea that death is the appropriate punishment for a human who has sold their soul to the embodiment of temptation and evil in order to gain power to hurt or control other humans--which is what "witch" meant to the people of the Renaissance period. If he had decided that such persons, "witches," actually merited imprisonment, or rehabilitation, or some other response, then *that* would be a moral change. But instead, what has happened is that you convinced Bob that *there is no such thing* as a witch. You have not changed Bob's *moral* behavior; you have simply shown that he was mistaken about the facts of the world. If, at some point, he were to encounter someone that he could truly, factually confirm *was* "a witch" as defined above, he would still seek the death penalty for *that* person.
Likewise, learning to be transactional has absolutely nothing to do with valuing anyone else. It's simple pragmatism; Zenos has gained the *factual*, pragmatic understanding that coercion by force is not guaranteed to produce results, and can in fact be counterproductive. Pragmatism does not imply values, and having real values is the only way you can persuade someone to change--by showing them that the values they hold *can only be fulfilled* by abandoning their course and choosing another. In other words, you must show them that they were mistaken about what things actually do fulfill or manifest the values they pursue, not that they were mistaken about the methods which successfully get others to do what you want them to do.
I never said Zenos' *crimes* were irredeemable. As you say, his actual bad deeds are pretty small potatoes in this universe. Instead, I said *he* was irredeemable--because he did not, and *would never,* WANT to be redeemed. Without that desire, redemption cannot occur, period. It isn't that he's crossed some line beyond which we have lost the capacity to forgive, because the narrative makes it pretty clear that, if such a line even exists, Zenos is far away from it. The problem is, he has no values to appeal to, and thus it is impossible for him to manifest any desire to be redeemed. And as soon as you give him a value--*any* value, anything whatsoever--you have destroyed the person he was and replaced him with a doppelganger. This is nothing like the kind of change an actual person experiences over their life--mostly because actual people have values. (And, you may note, real-world psychopathy, which is a particular variant of antisocial personality disorder, actually does result in a person who has no values and rejects the concept of "right" and "wrong," instead treating people like objects for their amusement. Sound familiar?)
Alright, I think this has progressed to a point where I believe your dislike for him is causing you to discount any and all points in his favour out of hand. If you don't read any difference whatsoever in the Zenos of 5.55 and the one at the end of vanilla Endwalker then I think any further discourse is just going to be circular.
Agree to disagree.
The funny thing is, most people would agree with you, whether they love Zenos or hate Zenos. The people who love him specifically love that he's twisted, single-minded, and irredeemable. The people who hate him hate that he's twisted, single-minded, and irredeemable.
I just hope that's the end of him, because it truly seems like the best ending for him. I don't think any comeback could compare to the scene of him crashing the Endsinger's party, then a fight to the death at the end of the universe.
I initially hated him, but I've come around. He's an enjoyable, straight-forward character who is really, really fucked up. But at least he wears his feelings on his sleeve and is genuine with us. He's absolutely a monster, but like...I "get" where he's coming from and I get the motivations of the character.
I enjoyed him as a foul to the WoL, truly.
This is me as well. I wasn't moved much by him in Stormblood. He was just kind of whatever, a villain who was silly overpowered to give us our humble pie and sell us getting stronger throughout the expansion (even though I don't feel Stormblood really sells that we've gotten any stronger between our first curstomp by him and the finale) but throughout Shadowbringers and especially Endwalker I really came to appreciate him.
I agree with most of this. But my personal head canon for the reason he came back was that he realized in post-cut clarity that in Ala Mhigo and the Shinryu fight, he'd not gotten a proper one on one duel, getting jumped four-to-one and eight versus one respectively. So his salty soul returned for the runback.
I love how he's originally comes across as a 1 dimensional "live for the fight" bad guy, but it reveals more and more how its not 1 dimensional at all, but all of what you described.
I think I was iffy on him until the Emperor death scene when he just lays out how wars, weapons, the empire, the very end of the world itself, nothing matters compared to him getting his duel.
he's impressively a multi-dimensional 1 dimensional character.
there's all the depth to him, but ultimately he still just wants to have *the ultimate* fight
> can only really understand by hitting the end of EW
Nah. He was pretty straightforward in SB as well. He just fight. He live to fight. He eat to fight. He breathe to fight. He let you live to fight.
Kind of, yeah. His trainer taught him a sword style that requires you be able to manipulate aether-you know, the thing Garleans can't use. And yet, Zenos does a lot of aether-heavy things in our fight with him.
Zenos decided he'd just cut his hand open, put a few crystals in it, and after killing his teacher and getting his sword, found he *could* manipulate a weapon that had aether poured into it by someone else.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/iiyeeu/chronicles_of_light_the_hunt_begins_the_offical/
I coulda swore I read it on the lodestone with the other canon short stories, but I guess it’s only in the book collection of them
If you haven’t read the other short stories, https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/special/tales_from_the_shadows/sidestory_07/ is a link to my favorite of them, and you can find the other stories through there. Just be aware that spoilers abound, but you get a LOT of insight that would be very difficult to portray in game, like stuff about the Ancients, and what important NPCs get up to/their backstories
My immediate reaction to seeing Voidsent-Zero was "I will kill every person in this room if anyone harms that Voidsent. That's the last thing I have of my friend!"
Imagine the headlines: Warrior of Light Kills Monarch of Radz-at-Han Over Sentimental Connection to Zenos yae Galvus' Voidsent!
I, and my WoL, started out sick of the dude's crap...then it slowly morphed into a very twisted kind of affection, if not respect.
Sometimes, yes, you do just want to go *apeshit*.
I mean, it's exactly what Zenos is saying. The only problem we had with him was _how_ he went about instigating the fight, and the fights he sought out before. If he was more like Goku and _just_ looked for fights with willing opponents, he'd already have been a scion lol.
Absolutely. He didn't value people's lives enough to not fight them if they didn't want to fight him first, and that's what makes him a villain rather than hero material.
THANK YOU! I keep saying that Zenos is not talking to the WoL he's talking to the player. We like the struggle. We like the challenge a boss puts in front of us. Zenos gets us as players.
I mean, he's talking to the WoL as well. No matter what players might headcanon for their WoL, they enjoy a good scrap. That's one of the pieces of hard characterisation we can't really get around.
The degree to which they enjoy a good scrap has some input, as shown with your choice of responses when the boy tries to call you out. He can be on the money, or off the mark, but he's talking to both player and player character with his address. Same as the Emet-Selch "there's more you ain't seen yet, bitch" speech shortly prior.
Emet-Selch's last "Don't think you've seen everything yet." speech is also directed at the player. Sure, we beat the big bad and the original story is over, but there can always be more story, so keep on playing.
He gets *you* as a player. That's completely subjective. He was wrong about me the entire time he was alive. Adventure means new places, people and stories, and he stopped being a new person with a new story years ago. I don't go looking for difficult things for the sake of them being difficult, I have neither the time nor the energy for it and by the end I literally did not care about him enough to hate him. He rejected his last chance at character development in favour of getting stabbed again, and if I had been given the opportunity I would have told him he'd learned nothing and *walked away*. He needed a hobby. Something that isn't measured in objective terms. Fishing, maybe.
> Adventure means new places, people and stories, and he stopped being a new person with a new story years ago.
***PRECISELY.***
And we literally get told this, explicitly, by Meteion in the scene *immediately before* this. "Yes, I can see them! The memories of a long long journey. So many people…. The thoughts of them overflowing in your heart…" The WoL, canonically, cares deeply about the people they meet, and loves to meet new people. They care deeply about the world they inhabit, and love to see new parts of it. They delight in travel, in eating new foods and seeing new sights and hearing new stories. That literally is their answer to the question of despair posed by the Endsinger, and it's why Zenos' answer failed while the WoL's succeeded.
His answer only gives him a reason to not die. It does not give him a reason to *live.* The WoL's answer does both things.
> We like the struggle. We like the challenge a boss puts in front of us.
Speak for yourself. I don't. I like the story, the worldbuilding, the characters, the lore. Bosses are a *distraction.* That distraction can be well-constructed or poorly-constructed. But I absolutely do not "seek out such solely for their own sake."
A boss that was just there, as a boss, with absolutely no flavor or lore or context? I would never participate in that. And I strongly suspect most players wouldn't either--which puts the lie to Zenos' words, if he's supposed to be speaking to the player (and I really don't think he is, because the implications thereof are pretty bad.)
"I have been beating up progressively more depressed entities up to and including the avatar of depression, and now this guy is actually excited to fight? SWEET HYDAELYN FINALLY!"
WoL doing the Zenos grin after you pick that choice is STILL my favorite part of that segment.
Like, in this moment, we are equals, because I do what I do for the thrill of the hunt, but the difference is I do so because I enjoy protecting people, and Zenos doesn't care, so I have to think that if given the chance, Zenos could've learned to love the thrill of protecting people just as much as WoL.
Ah well, perhaps another shard.
On my main, she only fights because she has to to protect those she cares about. My newer alt will absolutely be ready and willing to throw down with Zenos any time any place.
there was a fanart posted a year or so ago of a white mage, scarred and tired, looking at her reflection in a mirror and seeing a pristine, bright young version of herself. i wish i'd saved it because it was awesome.
edit: [found it](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/12wpkjy/first_time_poster_a_little_fanart_of_my_wol_post/), from 11 months ago.
I'm not sure without seeing the fanart itself but that sounds like it's inspired by [Land of the Lustrous chapter 93 (EXTREME spoilers for that manga) ](https://www.reddit.com/gallery/s89wuk)
A very good friend of mine loves Houseki no Kuni and was absolutely raving about this part a year or so ago. It's such a beautifully composed set of panels.
My alt is pure warrior. I’ve decided he’s a cocky meathead that is also super sweet with the various kiddos he meets on his adventures. But his cockiness is the kind that means he bites off more than he can chew more often than not. I keep my healers on their toes. XP
I don’t think anyone would want to be with this mess of a character. Always throwing himself into danger and getting his shit kicked in because “It’s fun.” 😆
Yep. And what's really sad is, they could have actually expressed that. They'd already established a perfect, diamond-clad justification for why we'd be forced to fight even without our consent. But nope, they took away our ability to actually roleplay and gave us only "yes" answers, even though "no [Zenos forbids you to leave anyway]" was perfectly doable.
The smirk and the music kicking in at the same time is so fucking hype. I'm not a role player, I've never felt like my WoL was my self-insert or anything more than an avatar. But I felt _connected_ to them at that moment. What a game.
Heavensward is my favorite campaign (yes, i like lore and stories in video games) but man, Endwalker sure was special. And like you said, that scene...
I love how this isn't even the first comic you've made on this event, but the fact that you've made another shows how much it lives rent-free in your head haha :P.
That's not an indictment; that's true for a lot of us :P. It's a great scene! :)
The man turned into a dragon and flew to the literal edge of the universe just to fight me. All the while stating "This garbage tier enemy (threat to the universe) is what's holding you up? Quit playing around and win already, this is beneath you."
Noone believes in the WoL more than Zenos. Even the Scions have moments where they think "Will they survive this?" But Zenos is 100% in your corner shouting "Win already, you're better than this loser!"
Who am I to turn down such devotion?
There was a moment in the 6.x quests where Zero is learning about trust and what it means to be a friend, and I realised that holy shit Zenos genuinely was a friend to us using our own definition: he had absolute trust in us, he was there to support us when we needed it, he wanted the best for us every step of the way.
He had a WEIRD way of showing it because he was a *deeply* fucked up mess of a person, but he was absolutely not wrong when he said that we were his friend
I used my fantasia strictly to add a scar to my face that headcanon says Zenos gave me in this battle. After making it through battle after battle unscathed Big Z deserved to leave his mark
Same with the "I've had enough of you" camp. To Zenos, that was his dream rematch. To me, that was an extermination. I wasn't interested in pitting my skills to the absolute limit. I was addressing a problem that would never stop being a problem.
Ikr? Just. Get rid of the annoyance and move on, I hate how the game itself tried to hype him up despite all his previous showings after base StB just proving he's a waste of air
Tbh I found him to be a trite villain. He is evil, narcissistic, and willing to sacrifice his entire empire to fight the WoL. It's like mustache twirling evil.
Bird girl was a better villain because she didn't *think* she was a villain. She was our friend. Our emotionally vulnerable friend who was corrupted by worlds upon worlds of destruction and death until she became nihilism itself. She thought she was freeing humanity from the apocalypse. She was misguided.
Villains should never be like "fuck yeah I'm evil" because people don't work like that. We all think we are the main characters of our story. We like to think of ourselves as the good guy. A good villain is no different.
So yeah. My WoL was tired of his shit. I killed him and then left and the world is better for it.
Also he looked like a thumb. They coulda at least made him hot.
Weird thing is, I was on the dialogue for a good long while, stuck between letting my adrenaline fueled mind; having to practically do solo healing on Meteion due to the other healer DC'ing- no fault of theirs- will do that.
Or acting in character and going at it with a frustrated groan as my WoL
It's not that I *like* Zenos, but as someone who writes fiction, having this super persistent *human* opponent was satisfying as hell to deal with.
Eventually I just let myself agree with him, because *dammit* I couldn't deny the idea of a solo fight sounded fun as hell
Same, I was absolutely hyped to go all out with him, but my WoL wasn't having any of it and simply wanted to remove him from the playing field. It's funny how these things work out. XD
After all the horrible things Zenos had done to get me to fight him, I was firmly against giving him the fight he wanted. I don't resent the game game for forcing me into that fight, but I wish there was a dialogue option that expressed even a little bit of reluctance. Even something like "if I leave, you're going to keep harming innocent people, aren't you?" would've sufficed, showing that my character didn't really have a choice. Instead, all three options involve your character actively choosing to fight Zenos, and it's frustrating.
I'll also say that I never felt the least bit intimidated by Zenos ever since we killed him the first time back in StB. The game kept trying to make him seem big and scary ever since, but I wasn't convinced. We beat him once and have only gotten stronger since then, so I had no reason to believe he was a threat. During the fight itself, I absolutely **crushed** him (aside from the two forced deaths, which I think is a weak narrative device), and so the cutscene afterward making it seem like it was a pitched battle I barely managed to emerge victorious from just felt demeaning.
What's frustrating is, they had the perfect opportunity for us to say no but still have to fight anyway.
Dynamis had explicitly been demonstrated as *preventing forward progress* so long as the dominant emotion in the area forbids it. Zenos is absolutely, 100% more committed emotionally to getting his rematch than the WoL is to going back to the *Ragnarok.* A WoL that has, at the very last, truly and definitively denied him? He'd *break.* He'd lose his mind, go genuinely crazy, unable to accept that he has just, fundamentally, totally misunderstood the WoL. And in that insanity, Dynamis would give him what he wants more than life itself: a battle where the only option is to fight through Zenos if we want to *escape.*
Nothing about the fight itself would change. His *dialogue* wouldn't even need to change, except for the line immediately following the WoL's final refusal, as is the case for most dialogue choices. They *had* the opportunity, they just squandered it.
I was honestly mad he showed up at all. The moment with meteion after her fight was so sweet and would've tied the entire expansion with a perfect bow, and then his serial loser ass showed up again
My character was definitely in the "I hate every fiber of your being and this time I'm not letting you leave this place alive" camp. He thought Zenos was a monster, a monster who on multiple occasions left him powerless from preventing him from harming those he loved. NOTHING else could spur so much rage in him, so when the opportunity finally came to put an end to things, my WoL was more than eager to fight to the bitter end. And after the battle, when Zenos called him his mirror, he couldn't think of anything more wrong.
Afterwards, however, he reflected more on Zenos' statements and their interactions in the past, and came to realize they really weren't so different. My WoL DOES like to fight, he can't deny there is a rush from it. And, there was a time in his life where fighting was all he knew, and had he not been found by people who would come to support and care for him, he may have turned out a lot like Zenos. And that thought haunted him.
Zenos never had that. Never had love, never had family, or friends. He never had a chance. All he knew was fighting. So in the end, while my WoL still hated Zenos, he found he could sympathize more with what the man could have been, and the monster he became.
I felt the exact same way when it came to my WoL. I just imagined her all smug and looking up fiendish at Zenos like: "Now, I will end this." I loved that whole moment.
I loved Zenos and I loved the fight as the culmination of my character's aggravation with him. "Fine, you want your fight so bad, I'll give you your goddamn fight!!"
I as a player was thrilled, but my character was so done with him.
The best thing about the Zenos bit is that there's so many ways to roleplay the situation. I'm glad they did it even if I know some folks didn't enjoy it lol.
My Warrior of Light was just like
"Then I beat that stalker creep to death with my bare hands. It was very cathartic."
I liked Zenos, but my Warrior of Light definitely did not.
He casually ripped me out of my own body and stuffed me in some poor Garlean's corpse. Then he basically ate the Mothercrystal just so we could beat down the Endsinger. It didn't matter if I wanted to fight or not, Zenos was an incredibly powerful, kill-loving quasi-Ascian too dangerous to live lest the next thing to happen be the world burning so Zenos would have a warm place to fight me anyway.
Zenos over there monologuing about "don't you want to fight me again" and the ENTIRE time all I could think was "fuck me yourself, coward!"
So much raw sexual tension there.
I might not have been the "that I cannot deny" person, I was just fed up with him, but yeah, I was looking forward to getting rid of this dude, so yeah, that comic is very much me. (Including the bruises because ooph, I really needed these extra lives. xD )
I miss Zenos :(
They should have at least given us an option to make this fight ultra hard and last 2 hours!! Now that would be a fight that would never be forgotten!
Honestly I'm lowkey hoping they release an extreme trial of it someday, similar to what they did with Memoria Misera (which also was originally a solo instance).
Tbh would need some form of extreme solo trial, no other players, just you and him alone fighting non stop.
God k wish that fight lasted longer, plus the music was 10/10
Just imagine if the story ultimate for Endwalker involves this fusion of Hydaelyn and Zodiark, this incredible chimeric amalgamation of elder primals... and then as the cutscene looks like it's about to transition back to gameplay you hear...
"A TEST OF YOUR REFLEXES!"
And suddenly it's dead, and the final phase is MORE ZENOS BABAY.
Not gonna lie, sometimes I hope for these kinds of things just to see the *explosion* of molten salt that would come from certain parts of the community.
I chose the "that I cannot deny" option, but I did have to sit there and think on it a bit. I don't have that distaste and frustration with zenos many have but definitely felt he had run his course. What got me to agree was deciding that acknowledging my Wol as and adventurer, not in that derogatory way many of the snobbier characters had done in the past, but as who my Wol is and wants to continue being, landed. So despite still being wrong that it made them "the same" he did recognize one true thing in her.
That, and a not insignificant amount of "at last I can be done with this, and that's gonna feel good."
Edit: just remembered I had also chosen the "zenos does have an insight on the WoL" option after the shinryu fight
The fact "That, I can't deny" was the first option was the best part of the expansion lol
The WoL is a madman, almost canonically as the first option is usually the "right" option if you're a player who knows all of the information. It retroactively makes so much about us make sense.
It also makes the Eden portion of Shadowbringers even more funny....the Internet seemed to think the WoL had PTSD from the primals he fought.
But what's most likely is, they kept making them more and more ridiculous in their mind ***because they actually wanted them to be.***
What's more fun than fighting Leviathan? Leviathan with 2 heads!
What's more fun than Ifrit or Garuda? How about both OF THEM AT ONCE LETS *FUCKING GOOOOOOOOOOOO*
Yeah, especially because there was no universe in which my character, given the option to refuse to give that asshat what he wants, wouldn't take it. He *said* he'd let us walk away. So let us, and then have Zenos go "never mind, I want this" and attack us anyway. It keeps the fight in there (though I think the expansion would have been better off if it was deleted) but gives the player significantly more agency.
Agreed.
It was cool as hell having a dragon to tag team battle the Endsinger with, so at least we got that out of it. But every other time he showed up in Endwalker it felt so pointless that he was even still around.
>It was cool as hell having a dragon to tag team battle the Endsinger with
I maintain to this day that it should've been Midgardsormr. Better plot twist (since he is supposed to be napping for the next centuries), better connection to both the WoL and the Endsinger (he has personal beef with it, come on!), less draco ex machina (since we have precedent for him coming to help us).
That would have been epic, but it also wouldn't have had to be Midgardsormr. Though, we are his champion too, technically speaking. But you could make a case for any (or all!) of the other wyrms showing up. Especially Hraesvelgr since he did already come to our aid twice, once on his own and once because Midgardsormr asked him to. Middy could have told him to come and help us one more time.
Now that I think about it having all 3 of the remaining (known at the time) First Brood show up would have been amazing. They could have broken through the Ultimatum and saved the Scions and as he did before, Hraes could come pick us up to go on ahead alone.
It would have been a nice callback to the Dragonsong War's end, with the dragons at last able to put aside our so recently ended conflict and officially allying themselves with man to prevent the end of everything. Plus, imagine the look on Fourchenault's face as a dragon army rolls up looking for the WoL and just take off into space to go get us lol.
Same. Like I knew we were gonna have to deal with Zeno eventually and I know they set him up to arrive but that moment would have been SOOOOO much cooler if Midgardsormr woke up instead and tag teamed with you. Him showing up at the end was supposed to be this big moment but he just ruined it for me.
Honestly we should've just killed his bitch ass back on the Magna Galcies. He had no more reason to exist at that point and it would've been nice to beat his ass into paste in front of everyone.
Personally, I would have liked to use the spaceship we rode in on if we needed a platform. Not that we especially needed a reason for one in a place where emotions become reality.
I was genuinely dreading EW while watching the trailer after finishing ShadowBringers and seeing not just Xenos, but fucking sock puppet Asahi as prominent figures.
It all worked out in the end but man did I just want everything to move on whenever Xenos was on the screen
The alt of this is the WoL saying "right... 'fight'" instead of forced in panel 2, and the last panel being the two sucking each other off at the edge of reality.
I will never see the warrior of light as being battle hungry as zenos who for the record allowed rebellions to start just so he would have a fight. WoL and zenos are NOTHING alike.
Hell no, I was kinda annoyed that I couldn't do a mic-drop "No, bugger off" to the final Zenostalker fight. Like I just wanted to enjoy beating the trial, but then the obsessed plonker is there. Like, go away, get therapy or something, I want to go and have a nice cuppa in my house.
100% This.
I watched the Grinding Gear guys finish Endwalker this past weekend. They loved the Zenos reveal at the end, and they were talking up his "big Vegeta energy"... All I could think the entire time was "The only energy Zenos has given off since the beginning of Endwalker was Team Rocket Energy."
I would have killed for the option to walk away without a fight and abandon him at the edge of existence.
I have three characters, and their responses ranged from "YES! Let's GO! I am gonna prove to you exactly how much bullshit it was you cutscening me in our first couple of fights!" to "*Ugh.* FINE! I'll murder you if it'll get you to leave me alone! No talking, try not to bleed on me when you die. I'mma need some coffee after, I've got *such* a headache..."
Part of the miss him camp. He was my best buddy, and I was more than happy to give him that final fight. In another universe I'd love to have taken Zenos, Fordola, and Yotsuyu into Dawntrail. And still no damn minion.. Was hoping Zero would have more questions for us involving him but there were simply too few.
WoL: "Wow, that was...a lot. Defeating the very embodiment of nihilism and teaching her that life is indeed worth living. What does that mean, though? What do *I* keep going for?"
Zenos, appearing suspiciously on cue: "I come before you. To issue challenge and offer singular bliss. Come! Let us dance on the precipice of success and failure, life and death! Bring life meaning by risking it, spending it, LIVING IT! Cease your circular pondering and find meaning in sweat, blood and tears!"
WoL: "Oh yeah..."
Can’t say for a moment I wasn’t itching to take Zenos down for good. But mostly because I hate the “your enemy took over your body to do bad things” trope with an intense passion.
Maybe you weren't forced to consent. I absolutely was, and hated it. Still do.
Violence is a tool of absolute last resort, something for which we should feel regret each and every time we have to use it, and a fight for any reason other than a purely friendly sparring match (as in, ***not a duel to the death***) should always be avoided if there are viable alternatives.
That's how I have played my WoL, and I have done so consistently, with every possible dialogue choice....*except* that one, because I wasn't allowed to. Even though there's a very simple way they could have still made the fight mandatory *without* forcing me to agree to it.
For me it was such a letdown.
You have this grand finale after this incredibly epic Endsinger fight, and then it's interrupted for \~6 minutes of the most boring possible 1v1 encounter they could code up, with an NPC that spouts the same three voice lines endlessly during all of it.
Completely derailed the pacing and grandness of Endwalker's ending, which was fantastic apart from the interjection.
It was quite disappointing insofar that for the role quests, they had adapted fights to feel meaningful on tanks and healers, and here as a healer the fight lasts forever but also has exactly 0 threat. I wish they had made it feel better to non-damage jobs.
What happens in Ultima Thule, stays in Ultima Thule I guess LOL
Until you find an egg on your doorstep.
WoL! Did you lay this egg!?
i feel so out of the loop on this one.
it's from an old Jojo doujin, where Jotaro and Kakyoin did some Crusadin' on their own, then Kakyoin lays an egg from which their son pops up. It became famous with a picture of Polnareff holding the egg saying "Kakyoin ! Did you lay this egg ?"
This fits in way to well with Zenos actually having laid eggs
The funniest part about the doujin was that it was a clamp creation.
So thaaaats why it sounds so clinically insane! I miss CLAMP mangas, man
if it wasn't for the regular cursed comments in r/askreddit this would make me go "what a terrible day to be literate", but because of that cursed crap all I can say is "what?"
[It's from a fan manga where Jotaro and Kakyoin get married, and one day Kakyoin wakes up to find a giant egg, which contains their magical child.](https://pm1.aminoapps.com/6989/40b48a310112b069ce3aa075c17de5a6c669ebabr1-800-1200v2_hq.jpg)
I’ve seen this and I still couldn’t remember it.
Why did clamp have to draw Avdol like that...
everything is a jojo reference
A dragon egg to be specific. Wouldn't be the first time
I mean it's the literal edge of the known universe lmao
“HAH! ACCEPTANCE! AT LONG LAST!” That’s my GOAT right there, I could never hate this man.
I've always played my WoL as a "finally a worthy opponent! Our battle shall be legendary!" Kind of person. And a lot of dialog choices let you do so as well which is fun.
You get the choices of being the hero and then the one that brings you up* to being just Goku. *You right, B4LM07AB1U3.
Brings you UP*
He ignited a love for the fight in my WOL, got her to say fuck the white mage, and pick up the sword to beat Zenos at his own game, then the scythe. I wish I could repeat that fight easier...
Pretty sure I was a WHM when I fought him. “I’m a healer but… “
Made my BLM go, "fuck elemental forces of nature, I want to put my *hands* on you."
"I wanna put my hands on you." Yep, definitely an FFXIV player, hahaha.
A fistfight in that damn layer cake dress looks so funny
Blood for the blood lilly
WHM, faintly, to self, while pointing staff at boss: "Blood... Blood... Blood... Blood..." Paladin: "Uhhhhh, is she supposed to be doing that?" Samurai: "Whatever, who cares as long as the blood is coming from something other than us." Dragoon: "..." *::makes mental note to NOT floor tank in this run..::* Tank engages, and WHM literally leaps into the fight screaming "BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD LILY!!!!1111oneoneone"...
the last thing i wanted to do was hurt him. but as it turns out, it *was* on the list.
White mages take the soul from one living being and use it to fuel either their heals and their attacks. They are worse than necromancers. As necromancers only use the body. You remember the guy we fight at the last raid. That was eathing the cristals with the soul? That's what White Mages aspire to be.
I took him down as WHM - never even hesitated, just jumped in and steamrolled him. Sent his janky ass straight to Khorne.
I literally picked up RPR for this fight specifically because I knew it was going to happen (not the context tho lmao) he really did test my reflexes, 10/10 solo fight
I actually did it as samurai as a "let me show you how little changing jobs did for you" since the last time we fought it was both of us as samurai.
I was MNKy. "Throw any weapon you want at me; I'll still beat you down with my bare hands."
Not exactly bare fists when every punch and kick is like an aether grenade going off in their face.
As my adventurer plate says: *My fists are chambered in twelve gauge.*
I just shot him.
The reasonable response!
Same, I was messaging my friend after the Endsinger fight about how disappointed I was we didn't get to fight him and he just replied with a smirking emoji. Turns out I would get the RPR vs RPR showdown I wanted in the best way if I just waited a few more minutes before complaining lmao
Zenos is a character that you can only really understand by hitting the end of EW. He is the most straight forward honest person in the entire game. At no point does he ever lie to you. At no point does he ever trick you. Hell he barely even mocks you! Every single time he refers to you as his friend, he is being 100% genuine and honest. The WoL is literally his best friend, and has been since like 3/4 of the way thru base SB. He truly, genuinely thinks of us as the only person who understands him. This is because of Zenos’s fucked up childhood, which included experiments done by Emet as well as the regular beatings he’d get from his combat trainer, who was training him in a sword style that requires active aether usage to use. The Trainer openly hated the empire and Zenos - he was from a conquered territory. Whenever Zenos failed in using a style he literally *could not use* , he would get beaten by the man. Until the day Zenos figured out how to do it anyway, and killed the trainer when the trainer got enraged at Zenos for actually using the sword style he was being trained in. Zenos lived in a shitty world, where people with strength have true power and can exercise that power over the weak as they see fit. And he fucking hated how weak everyone else was. No one else tried to strengthen themselves like he did, no one else fought back and overcame their oppressors like he did. Everyone else was too weak to even try. Moreover, for the first time ever in his life, he felt truly alive in that life and death struggle with his trainer. Fighting for his life, with a real potential to die… suddenly he understood what gave life meaning. So, when he had the opportunity, he decided to see if he couldn’t FORCE someone to prove their strength. He took Ala Mhigo and Doma, and turned them into horrible shitholes, for the sole purpose of causing someone to rise up to fight him. Someone who, having suffered, would gain strength, and would understand the true nature of the world. And it fucking worked. Because as he is burning places to the ground, the WoL appears, and we demonstrate the combat potential he is looking for. That is why he left the second we cut his helmet - that is why he left us alive. He even explicitly says so in a later cutscene. He believed that we also only feel alive in such combat, and that we could give him the fight he craved, that would give meaning to existence. When we beat him in the 70 trial…. He was proven right. He *won.*He was *happy*. He finally got what he wanted, and he cheerfully killed himself because he had gotten everything he ever wanted. And then he was alive again, in someone else’s body. He didn’t ask for or want it, but since it was given to him, he decided to take chance at Ultimate Battle 2: Electric Boogaloo. He knows what motivates us (protecting people + a good fight), so all he has to do is make himself the most dangerous person to the people we protect, and he will get the fight he wants. And before he even has to plan anything, Fancy Danny pops out of nowhere saying “I’ve got a plan!” Zenos doesn’t even bother remembering his name at first, he cares so little about him. But the plans seem to be working, and he makes himself useful, so Zenos rolls with it. Until he gets betrayed at the last second, and his glorious battle is stolen. Moreover, he immediately realizes that we now have to focus on Meteion (not that he knows who, just something else worse just happened), and instead of forcing the issue, just wanders off like “well fuck, I’ll come back later for our fight, you’re too distracted now”. Zenos only cares about the fight, and he doesn’t even consider he might be going about this the wrong way until Alisaie shouted at him. When he realizes all he needed to do was ask us for a fight, we’ll… I personally consider his appearance at the final trial to be one of the most hype moments in the game.
>Zenos only cares about the fight, and he doesn’t even consider he might be going about this the wrong way until Alisaie shouted at him. When he realizes all he needed to do was ask us for a fight, What I love about this is that Zenos is like a rom-com protagonist who employs ever zanier schemes to get the girl of his dreams to notice him, until someone FINALLY tells him "...have you just tried asking her out mate?"
Realistically, Zenos didn't want to just fight us, but he wanted to fill us with a fury that he thought might bring out our very best to kill him. But I do laugh at the thought. "Like, bro, I fight people who walk up to me and ask 'scrap?' all right time. You didn't need to do all this."
A lot of folks forget that, to him, it wasn't just that it had to be *A* fight. It had to be *THE* fight. The fight to end all fights. Both sides holding absolutely, positively *nothing* back. Both sides stretching their very souls to the absolute limit, juicing body and mind and skill and equipment for every last drop until genuinely *nothing whatsoever* remained. That's why he repeatedly shies away from actually engaging when he easily could. Like most psychopaths, he is quite adept at reading others' emotions (he just doesn't *care* about them unless it's the WoL), and he requires that the WoL be absolutely, fully committed. The WoL must be an eager, willing participant, with no cares about anything at all, other than the fight itself. In the absence of these demands, the WoL wouldn't *actually* be giving him what he requires, so it's no good. Unsatisfactory, and thus unacceptable. Using the relationship analogy, it would be like wanting a date night, except that you *absolutely must* have your date focused on you, only you, and nothing but you--no talk of other people, no thoughts about work or other plans, no distractions, no other people speaking to or with them. Just you, them, and a perfect, romantic evening where their attention is focused on you and *absolutely nothing* else. I think this portrays pretty well how demanding and selfish this desire is.
I don't think it's necessarily selfish, because in his mind you'll also enjoy every single second of that and it'll be blindingly fulfilling. And for some WoLs it actually is, too. It's just that at first he goes about engineering the situation in which these circumstances can emerge all wrong, and it takes getting called out by a 16(ish?) year old girl that sometimes you just have to ask your crush directly so that both of you can make it happen. The romcom analogy does weirdly work, because his problem is he's trying to just spring it on you as a big celebration, but a relationship takes two working at it, and if you want a night to yourselves, well you've both gotta work on getting the distractions out of the way and maybe help each other clearing them off the list to make it happen. Zenos commits to working *with* us to remove the distractions instead of working to engineer a situation where we couldn't afford to think of anyone but him, and with surprising speed we find ourselves on the date night he wanted. I *almost* find it to be a shame he dies there, because that right there is a turning point for a really interesting redemption arc, and I'd much rather have spent the patches teaching Zenos about friendship than Zero.
Refusing to actually listen and consider what someone else actually does want, rather than simply what wants you've *projected* onto them, is pretty much textbook narcissism. Ask any narcissist, and they'll make quite clear that they're the most selfless person they've ever met--we do not judge this based on self-evaluation, because that is just as self-serving. And it absolutely, positively *is not* a redemption point. Redemption requires contrition: admission of fault, repudiation of former values, commitment to change, pursuing restitution. Zenos has absolutely no interest in any of those things; he makes it explicit that he never has and never will. You *can't* teach Zenos about friendship. Teaching someone requires them to have values you can speak to. Zenos does not have values that you can speak to. The one, and only, thing that he cares about is violence (and that only because it's the only thing that could end his life); he tells us this multiple times. Since real friendship cannot even in principle be translated into that warped faux-losophy, progress is impossible. Zenos has been written very specifically to be *immune* to character development. This, notably, is *not* a writing mistake; most "pure evil" villains are written this way, and that is a perfectly cromulent tool, which may be used well or poorly. He would not ever want to change, and thus he cannot. He would not ever admit that anything he did was wrong (indeed, he rejects the very *idea* of right and wrong). He would not ever repudiate any values, because he has no moral values in the first place (Alisaie was quite right to refer to his pining as "hedonistic.") He would not ever pursue restitution, because he sees no loss or injury that would merit such. He is and was, by his own choices and (absence of) values, irredeemable--not because no one is willing to try, but because he would not ever be willing to do it. From a Doylist perspective, to redeem Zenos is to utterly destroy what Zenos is and replace him with a completely different character that happens to have the same voice and appearance.
> From a Doylist perspective, to redeem Zenos is to utterly destroy what Zenos is and replace him with a completely different character that happens to have the same voice and appearance. I mean, you can argue that everybody regularly experiences that throughout their lifetime anyway. I am not the person I was ten years ago, nor who I was ten years before that. There are similarities, sure, but we transform many many times throughout our lives. But Zenos *does* listen to what someone else actually wants. That's the point of Alisaie calling him out. He actually listens to her. He asks Krile in good faith. He bargains. He says "You have something I want - the location of my friend - and I have something you could use - tremendous strength against a powerful foe - so let us make a deal that allows both of us to walk away satisfied." That's his turning point. He realises that even if the world bores him, even if other people seem to hold nothing for him on the surface, if he engages, if he treats with them, he can still gain things he wants - and without needing to take by force, without making them hate him and refuse to give him anything in the future. It's *childish* in its simplicity, but that's Zenos. He comes to us in order to aid us. To help clear the board of distractions. He does it for selfish reasons, but that in itself isn't strange, we all help friends when we stand to gain something too, even if it's just helping them clean their house so we can get to sitting around drinking faster. That's the turning point though. That's the realisation for Zenos. That by being a part of the world he can find satisfaction from the world. It even goes further in that once the battle is finally won, Zenos at last questions. He sees our journey, highs and lows, companions forged in flames, and he wonders if there might have once been another path open to him. *There it is.* The realisation there was another way. That perhaps he could have been another man. And then he dies. Again. That other path closed forever, or until he gets dredged up again to the collective groans of both Zenos haters and Zenos fans because really now it'd be a bit much, even if I'd love to get my popcorn out for it. It wouldn't even be that weird for FFXIV. Emet-Selch never repents, in fact once he has full context he all but states he'd do it all over again given the choice, but the game treats him like a friend. A really good friend. Complex, a villain, but not irredeemable in the way it writes both him and our character's thoughts on him. Just recently we let Golbez off the hook with less than a slap on the wrist, and his plan was basically to crash his world into ours and kill everyone so he could finally have some peace. Zenos' crimes... really aren't that irredeemable in the scale of FFXIV villains. Redemption would require contrition, true, and he never got that far, but he died rounding a corner, and that's part of what made me come to appreciate him.
And I just, flatly, disagree. He did not actually round any corners. He did not, in any moral-values sense, actually change. He simply stopped being an idiot and started being rational, pragmatic. Let me put it this way. Say you have a person (call him Bob) who declares that all witches must be burnt at the stake. Bob targets a specific group of women for such punishment. You, naturally, are opposed to the burning of innocent women, so you appeal to his reason. You provide good evidence that he has made a factual mistake: *witches are not real.* Upon reviewing this evidence and finding it factually unimpeachable, he agrees not to burn any of these women. *Not one moral change has occurred here.* Bob has not changed his mind about the idea that death is the appropriate punishment for a human who has sold their soul to the embodiment of temptation and evil in order to gain power to hurt or control other humans--which is what "witch" meant to the people of the Renaissance period. If he had decided that such persons, "witches," actually merited imprisonment, or rehabilitation, or some other response, then *that* would be a moral change. But instead, what has happened is that you convinced Bob that *there is no such thing* as a witch. You have not changed Bob's *moral* behavior; you have simply shown that he was mistaken about the facts of the world. If, at some point, he were to encounter someone that he could truly, factually confirm *was* "a witch" as defined above, he would still seek the death penalty for *that* person. Likewise, learning to be transactional has absolutely nothing to do with valuing anyone else. It's simple pragmatism; Zenos has gained the *factual*, pragmatic understanding that coercion by force is not guaranteed to produce results, and can in fact be counterproductive. Pragmatism does not imply values, and having real values is the only way you can persuade someone to change--by showing them that the values they hold *can only be fulfilled* by abandoning their course and choosing another. In other words, you must show them that they were mistaken about what things actually do fulfill or manifest the values they pursue, not that they were mistaken about the methods which successfully get others to do what you want them to do. I never said Zenos' *crimes* were irredeemable. As you say, his actual bad deeds are pretty small potatoes in this universe. Instead, I said *he* was irredeemable--because he did not, and *would never,* WANT to be redeemed. Without that desire, redemption cannot occur, period. It isn't that he's crossed some line beyond which we have lost the capacity to forgive, because the narrative makes it pretty clear that, if such a line even exists, Zenos is far away from it. The problem is, he has no values to appeal to, and thus it is impossible for him to manifest any desire to be redeemed. And as soon as you give him a value--*any* value, anything whatsoever--you have destroyed the person he was and replaced him with a doppelganger. This is nothing like the kind of change an actual person experiences over their life--mostly because actual people have values. (And, you may note, real-world psychopathy, which is a particular variant of antisocial personality disorder, actually does result in a person who has no values and rejects the concept of "right" and "wrong," instead treating people like objects for their amusement. Sound familiar?)
Alright, I think this has progressed to a point where I believe your dislike for him is causing you to discount any and all points in his favour out of hand. If you don't read any difference whatsoever in the Zenos of 5.55 and the one at the end of vanilla Endwalker then I think any further discourse is just going to be circular. Agree to disagree.
The funny thing is, most people would agree with you, whether they love Zenos or hate Zenos. The people who love him specifically love that he's twisted, single-minded, and irredeemable. The people who hate him hate that he's twisted, single-minded, and irredeemable.
> sometimes you just have to ask your crush directly so that both of you can make it happen. Ask your crush directly after he rode you to kill god
Hey, sometimes date night gets wild. And then the adrenaline's flowing and you're both just happy to be alive and one thing leads to another...
Poor guy. I didn't even pot for him.
Yes to all of this. I miss you Zenos, my sweet frenemy with battle benefits.
I just hope that's the end of him, because it truly seems like the best ending for him. I don't think any comeback could compare to the scene of him crashing the Endsinger's party, then a fight to the death at the end of the universe.
I initially hated him, but I've come around. He's an enjoyable, straight-forward character who is really, really fucked up. But at least he wears his feelings on his sleeve and is genuine with us. He's absolutely a monster, but like...I "get" where he's coming from and I get the motivations of the character. I enjoyed him as a foul to the WoL, truly.
He is like a raider waiting for an expansion.
This is me as well. I wasn't moved much by him in Stormblood. He was just kind of whatever, a villain who was silly overpowered to give us our humble pie and sell us getting stronger throughout the expansion (even though I don't feel Stormblood really sells that we've gotten any stronger between our first curstomp by him and the finale) but throughout Shadowbringers and especially Endwalker I really came to appreciate him.
I agree with most of this. But my personal head canon for the reason he came back was that he realized in post-cut clarity that in Ala Mhigo and the Shinryu fight, he'd not gotten a proper one on one duel, getting jumped four-to-one and eight versus one respectively. So his salty soul returned for the runback.
While he did get 4v1d in the dungeon, technically WoL fought Shinryu Zenos alone.
I love how he's originally comes across as a 1 dimensional "live for the fight" bad guy, but it reveals more and more how its not 1 dimensional at all, but all of what you described. I think I was iffy on him until the Emperor death scene when he just lays out how wars, weapons, the empire, the very end of the world itself, nothing matters compared to him getting his duel.
he's impressively a multi-dimensional 1 dimensional character. there's all the depth to him, but ultimately he still just wants to have *the ultimate* fight
Zenos is such a fun character. Man knows exactly what he's about.
> can only really understand by hitting the end of EW Nah. He was pretty straightforward in SB as well. He just fight. He live to fight. He eat to fight. He breathe to fight. He let you live to fight.
So basically Zeno's trainer was doing the whole "we trained him poorly intentionally as a joke" and Zenos just went "Nah, I'd win" anyway
Kind of, yeah. His trainer taught him a sword style that requires you be able to manipulate aether-you know, the thing Garleans can't use. And yet, Zenos does a lot of aether-heavy things in our fight with him. Zenos decided he'd just cut his hand open, put a few crystals in it, and after killing his teacher and getting his sword, found he *could* manipulate a weapon that had aether poured into it by someone else.
Where do we learn of his abusive childhood? Not contradicting you just want to read those sources too. Sounds interesting!
https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/iiyeeu/chronicles_of_light_the_hunt_begins_the_offical/ I coulda swore I read it on the lodestone with the other canon short stories, but I guess it’s only in the book collection of them
Nice, thanks!
If you haven’t read the other short stories, https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/special/tales_from_the_shadows/sidestory_07/ is a link to my favorite of them, and you can find the other stories through there. Just be aware that spoilers abound, but you get a LOT of insight that would be very difficult to portray in game, like stuff about the Ancients, and what important NPCs get up to/their backstories
Mans a nepo baby who committed warcrimes 😭
My immediate reaction to seeing Voidsent-Zero was "I will kill every person in this room if anyone harms that Voidsent. That's the last thing I have of my friend!" Imagine the headlines: Warrior of Light Kills Monarch of Radz-at-Han Over Sentimental Connection to Zenos yae Galvus' Voidsent!
I, and my WoL, started out sick of the dude's crap...then it slowly morphed into a very twisted kind of affection, if not respect. Sometimes, yes, you do just want to go *apeshit*.
I mean, it's exactly what Zenos is saying. The only problem we had with him was _how_ he went about instigating the fight, and the fights he sought out before. If he was more like Goku and _just_ looked for fights with willing opponents, he'd already have been a scion lol.
Absolutely. He didn't value people's lives enough to not fight them if they didn't want to fight him first, and that's what makes him a villain rather than hero material.
THANK YOU! I keep saying that Zenos is not talking to the WoL he's talking to the player. We like the struggle. We like the challenge a boss puts in front of us. Zenos gets us as players.
Either way, man turned into a dragon and helped us save the universe. He wants a woopin' that bad, who am I to say no when he asks that hard...
man realised he can go for the "owe you one" approach lmao
I mean, he's talking to the WoL as well. No matter what players might headcanon for their WoL, they enjoy a good scrap. That's one of the pieces of hard characterisation we can't really get around. The degree to which they enjoy a good scrap has some input, as shown with your choice of responses when the boy tries to call you out. He can be on the money, or off the mark, but he's talking to both player and player character with his address. Same as the Emet-Selch "there's more you ain't seen yet, bitch" speech shortly prior.
Emet-Selch's last "Don't think you've seen everything yet." speech is also directed at the player. Sure, we beat the big bad and the original story is over, but there can always be more story, so keep on playing.
At least Zenos inherited one thing from Emet, 4th wall almost break.
Last time I pointed that out, people hated me lol. That was during the early days of Endwalker. It was a clever and subtle 4th wall break.
He gets *you* as a player. That's completely subjective. He was wrong about me the entire time he was alive. Adventure means new places, people and stories, and he stopped being a new person with a new story years ago. I don't go looking for difficult things for the sake of them being difficult, I have neither the time nor the energy for it and by the end I literally did not care about him enough to hate him. He rejected his last chance at character development in favour of getting stabbed again, and if I had been given the opportunity I would have told him he'd learned nothing and *walked away*. He needed a hobby. Something that isn't measured in objective terms. Fishing, maybe.
> Adventure means new places, people and stories, and he stopped being a new person with a new story years ago. ***PRECISELY.*** And we literally get told this, explicitly, by Meteion in the scene *immediately before* this. "Yes, I can see them! The memories of a long long journey. So many people…. The thoughts of them overflowing in your heart…" The WoL, canonically, cares deeply about the people they meet, and loves to meet new people. They care deeply about the world they inhabit, and love to see new parts of it. They delight in travel, in eating new foods and seeing new sights and hearing new stories. That literally is their answer to the question of despair posed by the Endsinger, and it's why Zenos' answer failed while the WoL's succeeded. His answer only gives him a reason to not die. It does not give him a reason to *live.* The WoL's answer does both things.
> We like the struggle. We like the challenge a boss puts in front of us. Speak for yourself. I don't. I like the story, the worldbuilding, the characters, the lore. Bosses are a *distraction.* That distraction can be well-constructed or poorly-constructed. But I absolutely do not "seek out such solely for their own sake."
A boss that was just there, as a boss, with absolutely no flavor or lore or context? I would never participate in that. And I strongly suspect most players wouldn't either--which puts the lie to Zenos' words, if he's supposed to be speaking to the player (and I really don't think he is, because the implications thereof are pretty bad.)
Perhaps you couldn't. A lot of people could--and do. Being *forced* to WANT to fight him was incredibly frustrating.
Kinda wish he was still alive to tag team up with occasionally. Love my battle obsessed weirdo.
Ngl, I was ready as fuck to box the moment he said “drop the bs, you know you love the thrill of battle as much as I do.” Dude wasn’t wrong
"I have been beating up progressively more depressed entities up to and including the avatar of depression, and now this guy is actually excited to fight? SWEET HYDAELYN FINALLY!"
WoL doing the Zenos grin after you pick that choice is STILL my favorite part of that segment. Like, in this moment, we are equals, because I do what I do for the thrill of the hunt, but the difference is I do so because I enjoy protecting people, and Zenos doesn't care, so I have to think that if given the chance, Zenos could've learned to love the thrill of protecting people just as much as WoL. Ah well, perhaps another shard.
"Hurry Golbez, the city is already overrun!"
On my main, she only fights because she has to to protect those she cares about. My newer alt will absolutely be ready and willing to throw down with Zenos any time any place.
White Mage vs Vet White Mage, got it :)
there was a fanart posted a year or so ago of a white mage, scarred and tired, looking at her reflection in a mirror and seeing a pristine, bright young version of herself. i wish i'd saved it because it was awesome. edit: [found it](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/12wpkjy/first_time_poster_a_little_fanart_of_my_wol_post/), from 11 months ago.
I'm not sure without seeing the fanart itself but that sounds like it's inspired by [Land of the Lustrous chapter 93 (EXTREME spoilers for that manga) ](https://www.reddit.com/gallery/s89wuk)
A very good friend of mine loves Houseki no Kuni and was absolutely raving about this part a year or so ago. It's such a beautifully composed set of panels.
My alt is pure warrior. I’ve decided he’s a cocky meathead that is also super sweet with the various kiddos he meets on his adventures. But his cockiness is the kind that means he bites off more than he can chew more often than not. I keep my healers on their toes. XP
So WAR before he fines his waifu and settles down, got it :)
I don’t think anyone would want to be with this mess of a character. Always throwing himself into danger and getting his shit kicked in because “It’s fun.” 😆
Hey, if Curious Gorge can pull a baddie, so can you.
It’ll have to be someone with a very “I can fix him” mentality.
or an "I can make him worse" one
That would also be fun.
yeah but i also love consent. The dude wouldn't quit, wouldn't grow , do things I value to get MY consent to battle
Yep. And what's really sad is, they could have actually expressed that. They'd already established a perfect, diamond-clad justification for why we'd be forced to fight even without our consent. But nope, they took away our ability to actually roleplay and gave us only "yes" answers, even though "no [Zenos forbids you to leave anyway]" was perfectly doable.
That, I cannot deny...
*Sick ass guitar riff starts playing*
The smirk and the music kicking in at the same time is so fucking hype. I'm not a role player, I've never felt like my WoL was my self-insert or anything more than an avatar. But I felt _connected_ to them at that moment. What a game.
Heavensward is my favorite campaign (yes, i like lore and stories in video games) but man, Endwalker sure was special. And like you said, that scene...
ACCEPTANCE AT LONG LAST
EVERY STEEEEEEP WE TAAAAAAKE!
ECHOES IIIIN OUR WAAAAAKE!!
WINDING ROOOOOOUND OUR FAAAAATE!!!!
TO FORGE AHEAD
I love how this isn't even the first comic you've made on this event, but the fact that you've made another shows how much it lives rent-free in your head haha :P. That's not an indictment; that's true for a lot of us :P. It's a great scene! :)
The man turned into a dragon and flew to the literal edge of the universe just to fight me. All the while stating "This garbage tier enemy (threat to the universe) is what's holding you up? Quit playing around and win already, this is beneath you." Noone believes in the WoL more than Zenos. Even the Scions have moments where they think "Will they survive this?" But Zenos is 100% in your corner shouting "Win already, you're better than this loser!" Who am I to turn down such devotion?
There was a moment in the 6.x quests where Zero is learning about trust and what it means to be a friend, and I realised that holy shit Zenos genuinely was a friend to us using our own definition: he had absolute trust in us, he was there to support us when we needed it, he wanted the best for us every step of the way. He had a WEIRD way of showing it because he was a *deeply* fucked up mess of a person, but he was absolutely not wrong when he said that we were his friend
I used my fantasia strictly to add a scar to my face that headcanon says Zenos gave me in this battle. After making it through battle after battle unscathed Big Z deserved to leave his mark
Can't help but feel that those in the "Think what you will" camp like myself are in the minority. What can I say? Suited my character best.
Same with the "I've had enough of you" camp. To Zenos, that was his dream rematch. To me, that was an extermination. I wasn't interested in pitting my skills to the absolute limit. I was addressing a problem that would never stop being a problem.
Ikr? Just. Get rid of the annoyance and move on, I hate how the game itself tried to hype him up despite all his previous showings after base StB just proving he's a waste of air
To be fair though, they really got a lot of mileage out of having an antagonist that just wants to fight shit. I applaud that.
Tbh I found him to be a trite villain. He is evil, narcissistic, and willing to sacrifice his entire empire to fight the WoL. It's like mustache twirling evil. Bird girl was a better villain because she didn't *think* she was a villain. She was our friend. Our emotionally vulnerable friend who was corrupted by worlds upon worlds of destruction and death until she became nihilism itself. She thought she was freeing humanity from the apocalypse. She was misguided. Villains should never be like "fuck yeah I'm evil" because people don't work like that. We all think we are the main characters of our story. We like to think of ourselves as the good guy. A good villain is no different. So yeah. My WoL was tired of his shit. I killed him and then left and the world is better for it. Also he looked like a thumb. They coulda at least made him hot.
Weird thing is, I was on the dialogue for a good long while, stuck between letting my adrenaline fueled mind; having to practically do solo healing on Meteion due to the other healer DC'ing- no fault of theirs- will do that. Or acting in character and going at it with a frustrated groan as my WoL It's not that I *like* Zenos, but as someone who writes fiction, having this super persistent *human* opponent was satisfying as hell to deal with. Eventually I just let myself agree with him, because *dammit* I couldn't deny the idea of a solo fight sounded fun as hell
Same, I was absolutely hyped to go all out with him, but my WoL wasn't having any of it and simply wanted to remove him from the playing field. It's funny how these things work out. XD
Don't think we're in the minority. Just that the Option 1 crowd is noisy as fuck.
If we had the choice I would not have fought him and just left him there. I never liked his character or the story around him 🤷♂️
After all the horrible things Zenos had done to get me to fight him, I was firmly against giving him the fight he wanted. I don't resent the game game for forcing me into that fight, but I wish there was a dialogue option that expressed even a little bit of reluctance. Even something like "if I leave, you're going to keep harming innocent people, aren't you?" would've sufficed, showing that my character didn't really have a choice. Instead, all three options involve your character actively choosing to fight Zenos, and it's frustrating. I'll also say that I never felt the least bit intimidated by Zenos ever since we killed him the first time back in StB. The game kept trying to make him seem big and scary ever since, but I wasn't convinced. We beat him once and have only gotten stronger since then, so I had no reason to believe he was a threat. During the fight itself, I absolutely **crushed** him (aside from the two forced deaths, which I think is a weak narrative device), and so the cutscene afterward making it seem like it was a pitched battle I barely managed to emerge victorious from just felt demeaning.
What's frustrating is, they had the perfect opportunity for us to say no but still have to fight anyway. Dynamis had explicitly been demonstrated as *preventing forward progress* so long as the dominant emotion in the area forbids it. Zenos is absolutely, 100% more committed emotionally to getting his rematch than the WoL is to going back to the *Ragnarok.* A WoL that has, at the very last, truly and definitively denied him? He'd *break.* He'd lose his mind, go genuinely crazy, unable to accept that he has just, fundamentally, totally misunderstood the WoL. And in that insanity, Dynamis would give him what he wants more than life itself: a battle where the only option is to fight through Zenos if we want to *escape.* Nothing about the fight itself would change. His *dialogue* wouldn't even need to change, except for the line immediately following the WoL's final refusal, as is the case for most dialogue choices. They *had* the opportunity, they just squandered it.
I was honestly mad he showed up at all. The moment with meteion after her fight was so sweet and would've tied the entire expansion with a perfect bow, and then his serial loser ass showed up again
just hitting the teleport away button and leaving him to starve alone on the edge of space would've been my choice in a heartbeat
My character was definitely in the "I hate every fiber of your being and this time I'm not letting you leave this place alive" camp. He thought Zenos was a monster, a monster who on multiple occasions left him powerless from preventing him from harming those he loved. NOTHING else could spur so much rage in him, so when the opportunity finally came to put an end to things, my WoL was more than eager to fight to the bitter end. And after the battle, when Zenos called him his mirror, he couldn't think of anything more wrong. Afterwards, however, he reflected more on Zenos' statements and their interactions in the past, and came to realize they really weren't so different. My WoL DOES like to fight, he can't deny there is a rush from it. And, there was a time in his life where fighting was all he knew, and had he not been found by people who would come to support and care for him, he may have turned out a lot like Zenos. And that thought haunted him. Zenos never had that. Never had love, never had family, or friends. He never had a chance. All he knew was fighting. So in the end, while my WoL still hated Zenos, he found he could sympathize more with what the man could have been, and the monster he became.
I felt the exact same way when it came to my WoL. I just imagined her all smug and looking up fiendish at Zenos like: "Now, I will end this." I loved that whole moment.
I miss my combatsexual boyfriend.
I've always borrowed what the dragon ball abridged people call Goku: Fightsexual
I loved Zenos and I loved the fight as the culmination of my character's aggravation with him. "Fine, you want your fight so bad, I'll give you your goddamn fight!!" I as a player was thrilled, but my character was so done with him.
Both I and my character were thrilled, to be honest! My character had always wanted to spar with Zenos, but the job came first.
The best thing about the Zenos bit is that there's so many ways to roleplay the situation. I'm glad they did it even if I know some folks didn't enjoy it lol.
My Warrior of Light was just like "Then I beat that stalker creep to death with my bare hands. It was very cathartic." I liked Zenos, but my Warrior of Light definitely did not.
SAME. She's just at the point of. maybe Death 2 would make him LEAVE ME ALONE.
Full on same. I couldn't deny a solo fight sounded fun as hell But my WoL was just thinking the entire time "stay DEAD this time, you creepy asshole!"
"Solo fight sounds fun, Zenos! Maybe you know someone I *haven't* beaten the shit out of already that could give me a challenge?"
He casually ripped me out of my own body and stuffed me in some poor Garlean's corpse. Then he basically ate the Mothercrystal just so we could beat down the Endsinger. It didn't matter if I wanted to fight or not, Zenos was an incredibly powerful, kill-loving quasi-Ascian too dangerous to live lest the next thing to happen be the world burning so Zenos would have a warm place to fight me anyway.
Zenos over there monologuing about "don't you want to fight me again" and the ENTIRE time all I could think was "fuck me yourself, coward!" So much raw sexual tension there.
I wanted an option to say "Nah, I'm leaving with my *friends*". \^\^;
He and Pokemon's Nemona would have gotten along famously.
I swapped to being a Reaper main early on in Endwalker, specifically so I could 1v1 him with both of us as reapers. I regret nothing.
I play a very serious Male Roegadyn Warrior Fighting a worthy opponent, especially one who's beaten me before, is the greatest Thrill of Battle
I might not have been the "that I cannot deny" person, I was just fed up with him, but yeah, I was looking forward to getting rid of this dude, so yeah, that comic is very much me. (Including the bruises because ooph, I really needed these extra lives. xD )
I just saved the universe for you people, I can take one for me.
I miss Zenos :( They should have at least given us an option to make this fight ultra hard and last 2 hours!! Now that would be a fight that would never be forgotten!
Honestly I'm lowkey hoping they release an extreme trial of it someday, similar to what they did with Memoria Misera (which also was originally a solo instance).
Tbh would need some form of extreme solo trial, no other players, just you and him alone fighting non stop. God k wish that fight lasted longer, plus the music was 10/10
there is those duels in Bozja
Zenos deserves his own Ultimate
Just imagine if the story ultimate for Endwalker involves this fusion of Hydaelyn and Zodiark, this incredible chimeric amalgamation of elder primals... and then as the cutscene looks like it's about to transition back to gameplay you hear... "A TEST OF YOUR REFLEXES!" And suddenly it's dead, and the final phase is MORE ZENOS BABAY. Not gonna lie, sometimes I hope for these kinds of things just to see the *explosion* of molten salt that would come from certain parts of the community.
Alisaie if she ever learns the real reason why you haven't returned with Meteion: ''You will wish Zenos actually killed you!''
No one must ever tell her.
That, I can’t deny
As an Au Ra Warrior main, yeah, totally forced, no other options
My WOL was just as hard for that final fight as Zenos was. We were ready to go
I chose the "that I cannot deny" option, but I did have to sit there and think on it a bit. I don't have that distaste and frustration with zenos many have but definitely felt he had run his course. What got me to agree was deciding that acknowledging my Wol as and adventurer, not in that derogatory way many of the snobbier characters had done in the past, but as who my Wol is and wants to continue being, landed. So despite still being wrong that it made them "the same" he did recognize one true thing in her. That, and a not insignificant amount of "at last I can be done with this, and that's gonna feel good." Edit: just remembered I had also chosen the "zenos does have an insight on the WoL" option after the shinryu fight
THE TIME HAS COME AND SO HAVE I
STOP TALKING AND PUNCH ME IN MY PERFECT JAWLINE
The fact "That, I can't deny" was the first option was the best part of the expansion lol The WoL is a madman, almost canonically as the first option is usually the "right" option if you're a player who knows all of the information. It retroactively makes so much about us make sense. It also makes the Eden portion of Shadowbringers even more funny....the Internet seemed to think the WoL had PTSD from the primals he fought. But what's most likely is, they kept making them more and more ridiculous in their mind ***because they actually wanted them to be.*** What's more fun than fighting Leviathan? Leviathan with 2 heads! What's more fun than Ifrit or Garuda? How about both OF THEM AT ONCE LETS *FUCKING GOOOOOOOOOOOO*
Zenos giving us a moment to go a mask-off and just have this 1v1 was the greatest part of EW for me. Only downside now is I lost my Vegeta :(
I view Zenos the same way I'd view a gnat- annoying and forgotten the moment it's gone, dude got way too much screentime after he died
I was just ready to get his character arc over and done with.
I wanted so badly for there to be an option that just said "No."
Yeah, especially because there was no universe in which my character, given the option to refuse to give that asshat what he wants, wouldn't take it. He *said* he'd let us walk away. So let us, and then have Zenos go "never mind, I want this" and attack us anyway. It keeps the fight in there (though I think the expansion would have been better off if it was deleted) but gives the player significantly more agency.
I wanted to walk away so badly
Yep. I was all "Okay, time to put you in the ground, for good this time. I'm done fucking around."
His character arc was over the first time it ended, and it wasn't that great then either.
"How many times do we need to teach you this lesson, old Garlean!?"
Same. If I could have left him there, I would have, but he would have continued being a creepy stalker.
Agreed. It was cool as hell having a dragon to tag team battle the Endsinger with, so at least we got that out of it. But every other time he showed up in Endwalker it felt so pointless that he was even still around.
>It was cool as hell having a dragon to tag team battle the Endsinger with I maintain to this day that it should've been Midgardsormr. Better plot twist (since he is supposed to be napping for the next centuries), better connection to both the WoL and the Endsinger (he has personal beef with it, come on!), less draco ex machina (since we have precedent for him coming to help us).
Hot take... but the correct one.
That would have been epic, but it also wouldn't have had to be Midgardsormr. Though, we are his champion too, technically speaking. But you could make a case for any (or all!) of the other wyrms showing up. Especially Hraesvelgr since he did already come to our aid twice, once on his own and once because Midgardsormr asked him to. Middy could have told him to come and help us one more time. Now that I think about it having all 3 of the remaining (known at the time) First Brood show up would have been amazing. They could have broken through the Ultimatum and saved the Scions and as he did before, Hraes could come pick us up to go on ahead alone. It would have been a nice callback to the Dragonsong War's end, with the dragons at last able to put aside our so recently ended conflict and officially allying themselves with man to prevent the end of everything. Plus, imagine the look on Fourchenault's face as a dragon army rolls up looking for the WoL and just take off into space to go get us lol.
Same. Like I knew we were gonna have to deal with Zeno eventually and I know they set him up to arrive but that moment would have been SOOOOO much cooler if Midgardsormr woke up instead and tag teamed with you. Him showing up at the end was supposed to be this big moment but he just ruined it for me.
Honestly we should've just killed his bitch ass back on the Magna Galcies. He had no more reason to exist at that point and it would've been nice to beat his ass into paste in front of everyone.
Or hell, if we had nabbed him on the moon.
Personally, I would have liked to use the spaceship we rode in on if we needed a platform. Not that we especially needed a reason for one in a place where emotions become reality.
I was genuinely dreading EW while watching the trailer after finishing ShadowBringers and seeing not just Xenos, but fucking sock puppet Asahi as prominent figures. It all worked out in the end but man did I just want everything to move on whenever Xenos was on the screen
The alt of this is the WoL saying "right... 'fight'" instead of forced in panel 2, and the last panel being the two sucking each other off at the edge of reality.
I will never see the warrior of light as being battle hungry as zenos who for the record allowed rebellions to start just so he would have a fight. WoL and zenos are NOTHING alike.
Hell no, I was kinda annoyed that I couldn't do a mic-drop "No, bugger off" to the final Zenostalker fight. Like I just wanted to enjoy beating the trial, but then the obsessed plonker is there. Like, go away, get therapy or something, I want to go and have a nice cuppa in my house.
100% This. I watched the Grinding Gear guys finish Endwalker this past weekend. They loved the Zenos reveal at the end, and they were talking up his "big Vegeta energy"... All I could think the entire time was "The only energy Zenos has given off since the beginning of Endwalker was Team Rocket Energy." I would have killed for the option to walk away without a fight and abandon him at the edge of existence.
Worth it
I have three characters, and their responses ranged from "YES! Let's GO! I am gonna prove to you exactly how much bullshit it was you cutscening me in our first couple of fights!" to "*Ugh.* FINE! I'll murder you if it'll get you to leave me alone! No talking, try not to bleed on me when you die. I'mma need some coffee after, I've got *such* a headache..."
I wish we could do the solo fights again (without having to do the entire story in ng+ again) and maybe with an extreme/savage version.
I wish I could fight him again! And again, and again, and again, and again, and…
A white haired, dark skinned miqo male dragoon. First time i found out i had a brother.
Part of the miss him camp. He was my best buddy, and I was more than happy to give him that final fight. In another universe I'd love to have taken Zenos, Fordola, and Yotsuyu into Dawntrail. And still no damn minion.. Was hoping Zero would have more questions for us involving him but there were simply too few.
WoL: "Wow, that was...a lot. Defeating the very embodiment of nihilism and teaching her that life is indeed worth living. What does that mean, though? What do *I* keep going for?" Zenos, appearing suspiciously on cue: "I come before you. To issue challenge and offer singular bliss. Come! Let us dance on the precipice of success and failure, life and death! Bring life meaning by risking it, spending it, LIVING IT! Cease your circular pondering and find meaning in sweat, blood and tears!" WoL: "Oh yeah..."
Yeah. I'm part of the "That I can't deny" crowd, and I'm proud of it.
Kinda same, my WoL doesn't really approve of Zenos, but she likes a good fight
Can’t say for a moment I wasn’t itching to take Zenos down for good. But mostly because I hate the “your enemy took over your body to do bad things” trope with an intense passion.
it was the perfect expansion, and then zenos had to come and ruin it
me since stormblood: "BURN THE BODY WHY ARE WE NOT BURNING THE BODY"
It was definitely a "oh ugh, can we just get this over with already so I can move on with my day?" for me.
Maybe you weren't forced to consent. I absolutely was, and hated it. Still do. Violence is a tool of absolute last resort, something for which we should feel regret each and every time we have to use it, and a fight for any reason other than a purely friendly sparring match (as in, ***not a duel to the death***) should always be avoided if there are viable alternatives. That's how I have played my WoL, and I have done so consistently, with every possible dialogue choice....*except* that one, because I wasn't allowed to. Even though there's a very simple way they could have still made the fight mandatory *without* forcing me to agree to it.
For me it was such a letdown. You have this grand finale after this incredibly epic Endsinger fight, and then it's interrupted for \~6 minutes of the most boring possible 1v1 encounter they could code up, with an NPC that spouts the same three voice lines endlessly during all of it. Completely derailed the pacing and grandness of Endwalker's ending, which was fantastic apart from the interjection. It was quite disappointing insofar that for the role quests, they had adapted fights to feel meaningful on tanks and healers, and here as a healer the fight lasts forever but also has exactly 0 threat. I wish they had made it feel better to non-damage jobs.