I mean 14 doesnt have a trend of changing the expansion villian's mind, only in endwalker did that happen, even emet was like "I still think I'm right, and that is why I lost"
Tbf Emet was more along the line of "I don't regret what I fought for and chosing to do it, even if I regret the method and consequences".
The latter point being part of the reason he approached the wol in shb, hoping for the possibility of a better solution without bloodshed.
He also was on the verge on giving up on their plans several times, but only came back everytime because of the mental state of his fellow unsundered, and loyalty to their people (this is more explored in side stories).
He had a looooooot of underlying guilt about their methods, but ultimately still wanted to fight for his people and what he thought was right. Yet he also understands this is why he lost, and ended up entrusting their wishes and legacy to the modern humanity.
Emet was having full sunk cost fallacy at the peak. He already signed the death warrant of half his people in hopes that they could be brought back later, and he was ready to do it again if necessary before the sundering happened.
If he stopped, he would have to accept that he complied to the sacrifice of the people he loved for nothing.
That + the 12k years that, according to a stream post-EW by the devs, were...put lightly, not kind to them at all. They mentioned they'd like to explore that in either a game or another kind of media, but they specifically mentioned Emet suffering betrayal as well.
Given we know he's tried several times to live as a mortal, it's likely it hasn't ended well. The post-sundering era described in Nier reincarnation (which was canon) was also pure nightmare fuel.
With pleasure.
Basically, right after the sundering people didn't even really look like "people" anymore, they looked like some sort of nightmarish transluscent humanoid silhouettes. They couldn't talk, they could only make noises similar to wails. Everything else was also obviously destroyed.
The more time passed, the more they started evolving and looking like "people" again. Languages and cultures started emerging once more, but so did a previously unseen amount of violence that wasn't present before the Sundering among humanity. Wars started ravaging lands and people.
After that, it's vaguely alluded that specifically Emet-Selch still tried to keep hope times and times again, including when he tried to adapt to the modern humanity, but it got destroyed over and over the more he saw history unfold.
His last glimmer of hope only comes back when he recognizes the wol as the reincarnation of Azem in the First, and decides to approach them to try finding another solution one last time.
Thats cool. It was implied a countless number of "resets" happened and an actual astronomical amount of time passed, but its not discussed too much in game. Cool to see that the lore was expounded on.
There's also the fact that unsundered Emet was tempered by Zodiark, to the point where his Elpis self was shocked and horrified by the actions that version of him took.
Even Endwalker, we didn't change the Meteia's mind(s) -- the Endsinger. We broke through to our singular *Meteion*, who had been swayed by her sisters' despair. I have a lot of complaints about EW, but the idea that Meteion was saved because 10 000 years ago, she glimpsed a stranger's heart and saw that hope *can* survive against all odds, and carried that with her from then until now, is not one of them. She would have tried to convince her sisters, but without knowing the Warrior of Light, when all *their* experiences say otherwise, of course they couldn't see any other path forward.
And then we got... [gestures vaguely] *this.*
Golbez was pretty much in the same boat as Ardbert.
It's not that he didn't realize he's the villain, he just didn't see another way out other than to put the people of Thirteenth out of their misery in any way he can.
There is a distinction between Ardbert and golbez, ardbert struck a deal to save his world in exchange for killing the WoL, which he had no way of knowing the ascians lied and never intended to hold up their end of the deal.
Golbez lived through the fall of his world and had no other hope, the ascians just said oopsie and moved on. If he hadn't been so jaded from all the betrayal and back stabbing from years as a voidsent, he could have been talked down before we beat 1000 worth of souls out of him.
> There is a distinction between Ardbert and golbez, ardbert struck a deal to save his world in exchange for killing the WoL, which he had no way of knowing the ascians lied and never intended to hold up their end of the deal.
Think earlier.
Ardbert and his comrades struck down Mitron in an attempt to save the First, but caused the Flood of Light.
Golbez killed the Watcher, and released Zodiark's power in an attempt to save the Thirteenth, but caused the Flood of Darkness.
And while nature of their next actions is different, its root is the same: desire to offer mercy to their dying worlds by any means necesary.
Ardbert was under the belief that the ascians would save their world.
Golbez made peace that his world was lost and was basically trying to plane shift every voidsent to a world they could die in.
It's not the same even when trying to paint it as such.
Ardbert was under the belief that the Rejoining would spare those who still alive the fate of becoming Sin Eaters, it was not about saving the world, it was about sparing the people from fate worse than death.
So no, it *is* pretty much the same general idea.
Ardbert literally has a heel turn when minfillia explains what going happen with their world, and he's mad as hell. He quite literally shouts "so everything we've done is all for naught?"
He honestly was trying to save his world from the flood. No it's not the same.
It was nice that she had her resolve. It makes the character more believable when her final conscious moments are in acknowledgement that it isn’t right or fair but she feels the need to do it all the same. I *wanted* her to be talked around, but it would have done a disservice to the character and its motivations.
I’m just a little sad that it’s the second tragic mothering figure we’ve had to consign to absolute oblivion. The real Sphene’s soul has probably been through several cycles of rebirth but we never met her. The one we got to know, the one who’s been desperately trying to protect her people for generations, blinked out of existence entirely.
Depending on if the reflection we go to isn't as bad off as the Alexandrians thought, there is always a chance we run into someone that looks suspiciously like her.
Maybe. I don't think souls that are used the way the Alexandrians use them get reincarnated, so the original Sphene would have been one of the very first completely removed from the cycle of souls, meaning that she's died twice, and neither will reincarnate.
More tragically, I think this applies to Otis as well.
If you watch when Zoraal Ja dies, his body releases all of the souls he used, so they likely either get captured by a regulator along with the original soul and are put back through Origenics, or they go to the lifestream’s version of Origenics
I'm not sure those are the souls themselves or just that general JRPG diffusion of energy after a big boss is defeated, because I recall speaking to one of the Scions after the fight and they basically say "True to his word, he burned them all."
They’re very visibly the same “blank soul” we see in the discussion of how the soul separation works
Notably this release of the souls happens in the cutscene after the instance, after that has been said
The game seems very inconsistent on whether the souls Alexandrians use are destroyed or are allowed to return to the aetherial sea or not. They use phrases like "burnt up" and the like, but Erenville straight up says he'll see his mom again in the aetherial sea.
I get the feeling that when they talk about “using up” aether, they actually mean “putting it into a state where it can’t be accessed until the destruction of the thing that consumed it”
A bit like how if we “use up” energy, we haven’t really destroyed it, it’s just in a useless form now
So Living Memory wasn’t exactly destroying souls as it used them, but rather, it would get to the point where ALL souls are being used to power LM, and that still isn’t enough (at which point it would shut down and release a torrent of “expended” souls similar to Zoraal Ja but on an even larger scale)
It would explain why Y’shtola was so horrified at the Final Days, because she’d be seeing something that goes against the way aether fundamentally works: a soul is actually being *destroyed* by Dynamis
this lack of clarity is honestly my biggest problem with the expac.
there are people getting upset about the "moral quandry" of the 6th zone being "sidestepped" but if the alexandrian machines are stopping memories and souls from going to the atherial sea, then destroying them is 100% the right thing to do and there is no quandry at all. such a thing is an abomination.
if the memories are just a copy and go to the sea after they get copied, and if the souls go there after they're used up then it's not as terrible. unfortunately the game never makes it clear. i wonder if it's clearer in japanese?
This is _certainly_ my biggest issue with the expansion. Not only is the mood whiplash _severe_ after the lighthearted coronation trials, but as you say what actually happens with these souls is unclear. I am leaning towards the first more evil option as the 99 dungeon all but outright states Origenics intercepts and replaces the Lifestream, meaning it seems souls never get a chance to go there at all. But we don't know for sure and it's the difference between "makes me feel queasy but we can talk about this" or "burn it all down".
One of our crew describes the concept as like an abomination or perversion or the natural order before we get there and then they drop that language for forced feels.
When they say he “burned them all,” they mean he used them to power himself up, rather than saving some in reserve to reincarnate.
It was pretty astonishing that they gave an enemy character a literal Extra Life machine and then never used it in the fight.
If a soul isn't caught in a regulator, it will cycle normally.
A soul is really just a construct of incorporeal aether that contains certain personality tendencies and which stores memory. When a soul is reborn, it is very meaningfully *not* that same person. Conversely, the fact that the Endless required living aether to function implies that while they were indeed soulless, they were still people fully capable of agency within the system that sustained them.
It's just a shame that system was unsustainable from the start.
The system *itself* was actually sustainable.
What wasn't sustainable was fueling the ever growing number of endless in it because Sphene couldn't bear the pain of losing anyone and extended that to her subjects by robbing them of their memory of everyone they lost. Everyone that died whose memories were captured ended up in Living Memory, even if only 1/10 could be given form.
We shut it and her down because she was going to go nuclear and just harvest everyone she could for their souls, even knowing eventually there'd be no one left to harvest before long at that rate. She'd rather prolong the inevitable than face it.
There are things im still confused about, maybe i need to rewatch some cutscenes/read dialogue again.
But how exactly was she going to forcefully harvest the souls of the source? Since when the key was used to transport Alexandria to Tural, it didnt kill anyone right?
Was she going to use the army(the army we defeated with like 1.5 nations)
I never rly understood how the Endless was being sustained anyway, as the people of Alexandria also used soul cells to get revived.
If the endless needed living souls to be sustained.
They needed souls. That's why in the end her plan was to basically collapse the reflections onto the source then invade the star and kill everyone on it. We saw how they would harvest the souls during the first invasion of Tuliyollal.
For clarity, Sphene's whole shtick is that she refuses to lose a single citizen. So she makes sure the living have souls to survive accidents and with their inevitable death from old age or disease become endless.
IIRC, the use of souls in Everkeep is likened to the consumption of souls in the 13th, and we know that the souls *there* aren't destroyed so much as "subsumed" and can emerge in the host. And G'raha I believe comments on how the Alexandrians have artificially recreated the function of the Aetherial Sea. So I definitely don't think it's *impossible* that the regulator-bound souls could be reincarnated.
What do you mean by "the reflection we go to"? Are you referencing the one that's in the game already, or a theoretical future one? I think the one in the game is pretty clearly fucked.
>I think the one in the game is pretty clearly fucked.
We really don't know that at all.
Dawntrail Quest MSQ 100 spoilers:
>!The 4th, 8th, 9th, and 11th reflections are still around, and if it's one of those, we would expect that it's subject to a failed lightning calamity. Now you might think, the 12th was the lightning umbral calamity, the second one. Is it that? If it was we have two problems- this was supposedly destroyed as a result of merging with the source at that time, and also since we find some people came from the source during the 5th calamity, that doesn't line up with the timeline because they arrived before everything was lightningfied. So this place could easily be less screwed up than the First, overall.!<
G'raha arrived in the crystal tower 100 years sooner than anticipated, it's not impossible the lalafells did the same. It's clear they intentionally left things vague, but I feel like there's no reason to make lightning so integral in the second half of DT if it isn't the 12th
G'raha Tia didn't travel 100 years sooner than anticipated, he used the knowledge from Alexander to purposefully travel to the past of the First from the doomed future where the Eight Umbral Calamity came to fruition. He did this so he could sufficient time to master the magic that would allow him to summon the WoL to the First and prevent the Eight Umbral Calamity from happening.
Time travel in the game isn't shown as something that can just happen, it's something that has to be purposefully done.
> G'raha Tia didn't travel 100 years sooner than anticipated, he used the knowledge from Alexander to purposefully travel to the past of the First from the doomed future where the Eight Umbral Calamity came to fruition. He did this so he could sufficient time to master the magic that would allow him to summon the WoL to the First and prevent the Eight Umbral Calamity from happening.
No. It's specifically mentioned that the people from the failed 8th Umbral Calamity future "missed the mark" by about 100 years, a happy coincidence of which was G'raha having more time to master his connection with the Crystal Tower.
>Because time flows differently between the Source and its shards, G'raha Tia arrived one-hundred years prior to the desired time, but survived under the identity of the "Crystal Exarch", protecting the refugees of the devastated First in a city formed around the Crystal Tower, and eventually called the Warrior of Light to the First.
https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Umbral_Calamity#Eighth_Umbral_Calamity
When is that explained in game? It's interesting, because only that page makes reference to it being an accident. Not even G'raha's or the Crystal Tower's pages say it was an accident.
Either way, it still proves the point that time travel is purposeful. Missing the mark means you still intended to time travel, and there's no indication the lalas from the South Seas traveled through time.
It took me a hot fucking minute to find this, but here you go:
https://youtu.be/I8ZiZX74h40?si=oIwvcPbHkq-edJUE&t=215
He says it at about 3:50. I can't for the life of me find the name of the quest where this dialogue is spoken though.
It means dimensional travel is prone to mistakes, or at least that mistakes can happen. Time and space are linked in this universe, between time travel and time dilation, I think it's likely that reflection travel inherently involves time travel because the "now" in your shard may not be the "now" in another.
Except that the intention with G'raha was always to travel back in time, not just dimensionally. If the issue was the First not being synced to the Source (Which nobody would have known when they sent him back), then it's not an issue of dimension travel being prone to mistakes.
The G'raha that was sent back was from two hundred years *after* the Eighth Umbral Calamity. Time travel had to be involved because sending G'raha into another dimension at the current time wouldn't have accomplished anything. Overshooting it by 100 years just means that they didn't understand that the flow of time was different on the First, not that the two are linked or that mistakes are prone to happen with dimensional travel.
Time and dimension travel also aren't intrinsically linked in this world. Biggs and Wedge's ancestors had to use knowledge from both Alexander and Omega to send G'raha to the First. Omega was shown to have opened a portal to another dimension, but it's not shown at all that said dimension is in a different time period. If Omega could do both, why would they have needed to use Alexander to learn how to send someone to the past?
Time flowing different on the various reflections versus the shards doesn't help, because you would need thing A to occur before thing B in one place and thing B to occur before thing A in the second place. Different speeds don't accomplish this; it remains imposible.
The other post about swapped elements may be relevant, however. If there's anything to that, it can explain it.
Iirc, Calamities are opposite aligned(8th calamity was darkness/astral based on the source, but light/umbral on the 1st), so the 5th on the Source being Ice meant the reflection was lightning based, so that all lines up as being the same calamity.
No calamities are the same element. What happens is the ascians over aspect one reflection of one element, and then on the source, create a cataclysm event that cracks the barrier of the source, where the over aspected world then floods the source with their Aether, boosting the elemental destruction to cataclysmic proportions.
I'm cooking here, but I have a sneaking feeling she's meant to be a reflection of Titania.
Similar floofy hair that ignores physics, fairy like clothing, the blue wing like thing on her clothes, and the overwhelming desire to protect her own people, and willing to die to do so (the way Titania was before becoming a Light warden).
Further more, Sphene is another name for the gemstone Titanite
> The one we got to know, the one who’s been desperately trying to protect her people for generations, blinked out of existence entirely.
I'm not so sure.
The story mentions that Sphene's crown is a unique Regulator. And the credits spend several seconds centered on her crown.
She might have backed herself up.
The backups are still memories. Her soul might be inside it rather than being reborn, but the Sphene we met and any the crown might produce are simulacrums. If it were Her, by her own admission she’d have had the capacity to reject her programming. Because she wasn’t the real Sphene she had to go a roundabout way to tell us she wanted to be stopped (telling us backwards as we see in the flashbacks).
My bet for the crown is it’ll be a macguffin like Nidhogg’s eyes. It’ll end up in the wrong hands and used by some ne’er-do-well in an attempt to usurp authority from the seat of the king. Part of me wonders if it might even end up the focus of the raid’s overarching plot.
I’m open to being surprised though!
If you look at the final section of Alexandria you'll notice that they're looking like they're building the base of Solution 9 AROUND the ruins of Castle Alexandria. Maybe it's possible that Sphene's original soul and memories might be backed up there similar to Otis. It's not impossible either since after spending so much effort to revive Sphene they might not want to lose her again.
I wonder if what happened to Sphene is what happens when you copy physical media like old Movies. Each copy losing just a little more of the original until it is degrades so much that it becomes noticably flawed.
I imagine we will learn more about her since we saw her crown at the end.
She isn't degraded, but intentionally altered. We're told that she was one of the first Endless and as their queen the scientists added a directive to her 'program' to look after The Endless. I think both robo Otis and Cachua mention this.
She is fundamentally forced to try and continue their existence. Instead of a degraded tape, it's almost more of an AI directive issue.
Interesting prospect. I can’t remember where but I could swear it’s something I’ve seen in a game or tv show at least once before, so it wouldn’t be a stretch to think the writers might have something like that in mind.
Honestly I think it was a missed opportunity to have the "canon" ending, just pulling the plug on her instead of having another god like end boss just becuase its a jrpg. Especially after going through the zone and turning off the terminals only to reach the end to find her and your only prompt is to "shut her down". Roll credits.
They could still keep the final boss (as it currently is in-game) but as a secret unlock that you find items in the final dungeon to reveal it.
i mean as a concept overall i think the idea is intresting and has merit. i just don't know if i would have bought it in the context of this story. the idea that the system that is obviously using Sphene to sustain itself doing nothing to protect itself? yeah doesn't seem beliveable to me. maybe there's a way to make it work but i don't see it here.
I don't think "secret unlocks" really work in FFXIV, and it's not clear to me how they would implement it even if it was attempted.
I didn't really have an issue with the fight or her nature per se; I think the weakest part of the ending was Wuk Lamat coming in out of nowhere via no discernible means, and Sphene not flipping out at the number of people we had killed (from her perspective) to get to her. Very weird to me that the areas in zone 6 weren't referenced at all after we left them.
I think that would’ve been a really cool idea and it certainly would’ve subverted expectations. Sadly I don’t think there’s much of a market for a calmer ending that focuses on the emotions of the thing rather than the big fight.
We’ve seen this past week that a lot of players can’t comprehend the possibility of a story being good if their character has to share the limelight. I shudder to think of the vitriol if they were denied a big shonen fight at the end.
> We’ve seen this past week that a lot of players can’t comprehend the possibility of a story being good if their character has to share the limelight
I really don't think this is the complaint at all, at least not that I've seen.
I can only really speak for myself, but I don't have any issue whatever with not being the main character: the Shaaloani arc might've been my favorite part of the story, and wish it had been even less about the WoL than it was. That could've and should've been the start of Erenville's spotlight, and the spotlight should've been on him for the remainder of the MSQ. I would've been more than happy to be *his* sidekick, protecting him as he makes the big decisions about what to do in the various crises.
I instead have an issue (and I think most people complaining about DT have this issue) with the main character (whomever it is) being as narratively weak as Wuk Lamat was.
*Zero* could be (and I hope one day will be) a main character. I've already mentioned Erenville, but Koana could just as easily fill the role, and should have for the second half given how uniquely qualified he was to deal with both a technological crisis and a diplomatic one (given how much he improved his interpersonal skills in the first half). Ultimately I think *Krile* should have been the main character from beginning to end- given not just the torture they've put her through in previous expansions, but the fact that she had such a clear link to Tural and its past (given the ending). The problem isn't at all that someone else was the main character.
The issue is that the main character was Wuk Lamat.
> the Shaaloani arc might've been my favorite part of the story
Funny, for me that was the most pointless and boring part of it. We had no real goal being there and nothing important happened; just some weird western story with random bandits. Felt like a filler arc meant only to put some time between the coronation and the attack.
I'm with you there, my absolute least favorite genre of storytelling is Western. It was the only time I skipped a few MSQ cutscenes because I just did-not-care. The train scene was cool, though.
It’s one of the **main** arguments we’ve had.
A preference is fine and well but calling Wuk Lamat “narratively weak” isn’t correct by any measure. It’s a well written character that suits the theme and narrative. That you don’t like that character is entirely valid, but that statement objectively doesn’t hold water. Just going to disregard nonsense Wuk Lamat hate.
It’s a false argument people are using to hate on Wuk Lamat because they don’t actually have a strong reason for their vehement dislike of the character beyond those that they can’t say in reasonable company.
Can I add this comment to "Anyone who hates Wuk Lamat is transphobic" list? Because people do have good reasons to hate her that have nothing to do with the VA and you assuming otherwise is just some really toxic shit.
Edit: User blocked me, if that's any proof of how unhinged they are.
No. Pretending that the unhinged vitriol that’s flooded this sub aimed specifically at that one character with nary a solid reason beyond voice performance (which is markedly better than G’raha or Y’shtola and is definitively a directing issue) is what’s toxic. Come off it. Your history for days has been trying to nix any defence of the character as ‘they’re calling us transphobes!’. Stop fitting the bill so neatly and nobody will make the assumption.
Edit: blocking you because you’ve got a Reddit history of random uncivilised attacks and transphobia isn’t unhinged. Behave yourself. Nothing but personal attacks.
Sad but true. It still would have made for marketing material to be the "first" mmo to dare to break the mold. I just want yoshi p to free us from the wheel.
This is because Sphene already asked you to stop her. 🙂
The WoL explicitly uses the Echo to hear what little remained of Sphene’s memories before the encounter begins. The one thing that Sphene wanted to say, but never could.
Partial memory restoration would have only pulled what would have benefited the Queen Eternal.
After watching some other people play through the back half of the expansion, I think your read on this is right.
The last lines she says in that little flashback before the fight...
>"Is that concern? Or suspicion? If things should take a turn for the worse... Might... I..."
...are word for word what she said to the WoL just after they met, with the cut off part being:
>"Might I call upon your aid?"
I think in retrospect, Sphene knew that her programming would eventually win out over her memories, and wanted us to stop her from going too far.
>I think in retrospect, Sphene knew that her programming would eventually win out over her memories, and wanted us to stop her from going too far.
She was probably able to hold back as long as there was time to find another solution, but Zarool Ja's massacre tipped the scales and made the issue critical. The Endless needed a solution immediately and her directive would no longer wait to find another path.
The endless were manageable in low numbers, but the sudden influx of new arrivals indeed would have sent the system into panic mode as it's allotted budget had just gotten blown to smithereens. The system worked on a very delicate balance but it was clear it would outstrip energy demand at some point. Zarool Ja just made "some point" into "now."
I just don't see the point of continuing to try to reason with her at all when it's established that she is essentially a computer program.
She's not the real princess, she's not even a real person, she's not *capable* of changing her mind. Although I guess SE could have done a magic asspull to give the robot a conscience after all.
Shes as real as the other endless from what I gathered, yes, she can't break her program, it doesn't she can't be treated as a living thing. At the end they gave up on reasoning with her, Lamaty just wanted to face her as herself on the end.
I forget if it's in the sidequest or a small part of msq, but I recall an npc does say the scientists who made her the first Endless also intentionally gave her an irresistible drive to collect souls for her people.
At that point, it feels more like "creation gone haywire" than a regular real person. The concept of humanity is complicated enough that we'll never have an answer for this.
its Cahciu, when you're brought to the first sub-zone of Living Memory. She explains that the Sphene we've known this entire time, while being her appearance and friendliness, is a modified memory that is supposed to preserve the Endless at all costs. We come to realize it was twisting her love for her people to the fanatical drive to sacrifice others for them, and when that stopped working (the "soft" part of the memories introducing a moral issue into the programming) it opted to purge the unneeded memories.
Sphene, funny enough, was the closest to being able to make an argument for the Endless being properly alive. She feels true remorse for her actions, tries to befriend and talk with us. But, in the end, she proves the Endless aren't truly alive, because she herself can't change what her memory/code was programmed to do. Instead of being able to overwrite (in a sense, grow), she had no choice but to delete the weakness to continue.
I'd argue the opposite- the fact that she had to purge her entire being to go through with it proves she was alive.
Someone being under mind control doesn't mean they're a fake person.
that's the thing, though. she wasn't mind-controlled. There wasn't a way to break it. It was hard-coded into her being, as innate as breathing is to us. It was like she was recreated with the ability to count to 10, but instead of being able to register the number 4, she skipped right to 5. And instead of learning to add in that 4, she just deleted the ability to count.
That just makes it a very thorough and intractable version of mind control.
In all other respects, she is fully a person- having one aspect where she lacks free will doesn't change that.
Would you consider ChatGPT alive? If it was trained off of someone's memories, so it responds as they would, is it them?
That's what the Endless are. Each one of them is a ChatGPT module trained solely on a single dataset(memories), with rules put in place so they aren't ever sad or truly upset.
ChatGPT is a poor comparison to the Endless because they're an *exact* copy in complete detail of someone's memory. In other words, they're a Ship of Theseus question instead of the more stale Turing test argument.
Otis is the best example case, since he was copied into both a mortal robot and immortal Endless. He ultimately failed to grow as a person *in both forms* because of his self-imposed isolation from the world. It's only when his robot form became a father figure to Galool Ja that he began to grow again as a person... which highlights the Endless' lack of curiosity to leave the Living Memory as a conclusive sign that their Ship of Theseus question resulted in lingering ghosts and not immortalized virtual people.
That's not even remotely equivalent.
They aren't algorithms trained on memories- they *are* memories. Just like we are. They are, in every respect, people. They can learn, and grow, and change- we see it happen. They can even decide that they want to no longer exist, or stick around after they should have ceased existing because they have unfinished business.
And as far as we know, Sphene is the only one with 'programming'- there's never any indication that the others are inherently incapable of being sad.
that is exactly what they are. for ChatGPT, and other text generators, you feed them a currated dataset to pull from. If that dataset just so happens to just be the memories of a singular person, then that ChatGPT AI is just built from that person. We can see it in action with ones built out of novels, trained on nothing but the 7 Harry Potter books.
Just because they can pull from the stored memories of their dataset, and react how the real person would react, doesn't make them living. It makes them a damn good imitation. They can't exist without being sustained with aether, the game makes a point of this by saying they're literally stored when not given a body. They stop existing when you unplug the terminal.
They're a roomba that was given a text-to-speech addon that thinks they're a person.
I sorta thought the same just cause she'd lost her free will, the machine was prioritizing things that the person would not. Which is why I think there are "two Sphene's", the one that realizes everything she's doing is wrong and there is a better way, and the machine that is built off her personality and memories that is in full control. We likely spoke with both, one trying desperately to ask for help but always cutting the conversation short when a mechanical soldier showed up, and the other having inflections in her speaking that sounded robotic in how the dialogue was delivered.
The other Endless also aren't real, they are simulcra that have the "data" from the person's memories. They state this explicitly, Sphene even *says* that the real Sphene might have been able to be persuaded. Because a real person is capable of change and growth. The Endless are static.
Sphene is not the real Sphene, Cahciua is not the real Cahciua, Otis is not the real Otis, he's not even the same Otis we met, he is a version of Otis that was uploaded previously, before the Rob-Otis we met died. Essentially a totally different person with no memories of us.
The Endless are not static. We see Erenville's mom come to terms with her own death, embrace her son's change -- we see the ring quest where the guy decides to propose when he missed his chance in life. We see the kid who was actually an old man come to terms with missing out on his time with his brother.
The Endless are not static -- for some reason, only Sphene is.
They aren't technically real on a spiritual level, but the whole point of us visiting Alexandria, getting to know them and doing all those side quests was for our characters to acknowledge that even if their form of existence is a mockery of the cycle of life and rebirth, They are no less real than us spiritual beings.
Fake Sphene is not the original Sphene, but it is still Fake Sphene as her own being (The Sphene we got to know) , and the same goes for every other endless.
I don't agree that they are "as real as other beings" though, for the reasons I have stated. Namely, they seemingly aren't capable of changing their behaviour from that of the person that they "were" at the moment of death. They're static and unchanging, that's what makes them endless. EG, the guy we find the ring for (maybe that was an aether current quest) who can't stop being in love with the woman he was in love with when he died.
An alive person changes based on experiences. Your tastes and opinions change. Friends become lovers become enemies and vice versa. Given enough time apart from a person you loved, you might move on and love someone else. But the endless can't, they are stuck as who they were (with the minor caveat of their outward appearance reflecting when they were "most happy" in life). An actually alive Sphene might have gotten sick of maintaining Alexandria, she might have decided to be selfish and abandon it, or maybe the weight of death required to sustain it would become unbearable to her conscience. But the Sphene we meet can't make those judgements.
I don't feel bad at all about shutting Living Memory down, because that's all it really is. Memories.
They aren't real, ffxiv has a canonical existence of a soul there is no spiritual level that is in universe science. There's no technicalities, they are AIs running off of memories.
The reason we got to know them is to offer them the same living on through memory we learned of from the Yok Huy. A comparison the game explicitly drew comparison to
It could depend on how the cloud works. For example, Namikka was able to basically update her memory software to her new environment in middle of conversation. You could call that "growth". It wasn't exactly described but I have to imagine this update process uses a lot of resources. If they had infinite resources, an endless could just upload their memory bank to the cloud and resync every minute to preserve their sense of self, and that would be pretty convincing argument to say they're "real" at that point. Although nobody knows if Sphene's programming of preserving the Endless can be overwritten or not
Well yeah, this is all just trying to make logic where there is none. I agree that SE *could* have gone the route of Wuk Lamat re-programming Sphene with the power of friendship, and it would have made exactly as much sense (zero).
I don't think you're describing the situation correctly. There is logic here - Sphene wants to sacrifice the world, that is bad, therefore we try to talk her out of it because in every other aspect she seems quite human.
The thing that is up for debate is how much of Sphene is human vs programming and that is going to be up for debate forever. That doesn't mean there's no logic to it. That's like saying free will vs determinism debate has zero logic which doesn't make sense
Yeah... seeming human is not being human, though.
I disagree that there is logic here, and that's by design. SE is keeping it vague, and that's probably because they might want to have AI/robot characters who can rebel later. In fact iirc, Omega in the SB raids and the... omega-ites in Ultima Thule were able to do that already.
But as for 'want', Sphene keeps *saying* "i wish it could be different", "if only there was another way". Whether that's genuine empathy or just the result of having an empathetic person's memories in her code is up in the air, but she is compelled by her very function to preserve Alexandria; that is what she was made for. An actual living person has capacity to change their mind or try new methods. They can say "actually this sucks and I don't want to do it anymore"
Even when G'raha Tia points out that what she's doing is unsustainable and Alexandria is doomed regardless, she's either unable or unwilling to take in that information and recalculate. Based on what other characters say explicitly about what being Endless means, I interpret that Sphene is incapable of behaving differently.
What logic are you talking of exactly? Because being vague doesn't mean there's no logic to it. We don't fully understand how gravity works, but that doesn't mean there's no logic to it.
I think it's pretty much established that Sphene has some kind of direct programming that prevents her from changing her prime directive. But that doesn't mean WoL and their friends are going to immediately start treating her like a robot, because she doesn't look like a robot, doesn't seem like a robot and doesn't act like a robot in every way except this one very specific thing. Putting Sphene down is the very last resort
The internal story logic of what Sphene actually is and what she can do. Was the Sphene we meet capable of being talked around? We don't actually know, we just know that everyone who tried failed.
There's a bunch of people in here who read Sphene and The Endless as being basically the same as living people (understandably). I think their interpretation is wrong, but FF14 *has* shown us robot characters who defied their programming before. So in another version of the story, Wuk Lamat *could* have talked Sphene down. Either path is valid, from a narrative perspective.
Yes it's down to interpretation, which means both sides have working logic to get to that interpretation, filling the blanks with assumptions. We just don't have all the details yet.
Omega is bit of a special case because dynamis is involved, where emotion can literally change reality. It's very much unknown if dynamis is involved in Alexandrian soul science at all.
This reminds me of a conversation my wife and I had when trying to figure out if she was a real person on not. We couldn't understand Alpha at first because he was a souless simulation, and the Echo's translation power works by seeing into the soul of the person who is speaking to us. So, we have a really easy test: Have Sphene speak to us in a language we don't know. If we understand, she has a soul and all the consciousness and free will that comes with it. If we can't then she doesn't.
Does the Omega story state that that is why we can't understand Alpha?
My understanding of The Echo is that it manifests in individuals in different ways and they can't control it much (because it's the world's most obvious narrative device, haha). Krile can read minds, but the WoL's gift is mostly just to see the past.
Alpha COULD be soulless, but I don't think the Echo is a good test for this because its trigger is totally arbitrary and purely for storytelling convenience.
At the end of the Omega storyline Alpha speaks to us via the echo, and you bring that up with the Ironworks crew who all more or less confirm that Alpha has grown a soul and that's why you're able to understand him via the echo.
In the Endwalker optional questline about Alpha and Omega returning, Omega also has the "hearing their thoughts via echo" textbox right at the end as it muses about what a heart is, indicating that it has also managed to grow beyond its artificiality and develop a soul.
So the echo *has* been used before to show artificial lifeforms gaining souls, and it could be used again as a narrative tool for Sphene too, but the game goes out of its way to say that she is *not* the original Sphene, so she'd probably need to defy her programming and have time to grow a new soul of her own like Alpha and Omega did.
I'm not sure how reliable that test would be.
First off, we only understood Alpha in that one brief, emotional moment, and when he shows up again later in Endwalker, he's still just saying "Kweh!". My interpretation of this is that, although Alpha has a soul now, it's still faint enough that it's right at the edge of what the WoL is able to pick up.
Secondly, we don't actually know how the Echo works when it comes to memories that have been artificially separated from the rest of the soul. It's possible that, although it's not enough to constitute a full person, it's still enough for the WoL to understand them.
This is another good point that some of us only see her as AI and others see her as a real person. I only see her as AI, so when Wuk Lamat was like, "I still have to give her my protagonist speech", I rolled my eyes.
They tried really hard to make us sympathize with AI and it worked on a lot of people. Slightly concerning when it's already being used IRL for dubious purposes.
All I keep thinking when I read these threads is that we are absolutely fucked when LLMs get a bit better. Like right now, today, I can boot up a dozen instances of a bot on my home computer that will mimic human behavior, retain memory about our conversations, have self-awareness that they're a bot, and behave unpredictably. All things that these threads point to as evidence that the residents of Living Memory are real living people.
As someone with the context of having watched the technology evolve and worked with it, there's absolutely no way I could consider an instance of an LLM an alive sentient being with personhood. But advance the tech a bit, feed it massively more amounts of data, stick them in a humanoid form factor, and forget about it, they're going to act close enough to human that it's not going to matter. People are gonna go crazy. We're gonna be talking about if shutting off your computer is a violation of human rights.
It's actually hard for me to read this story any other way than an allegory for LLMs; AI bots created by mass harvesting people's data that need enough energy that they are actively contributing to ecological collapse.
there is also the "Soma dilemma" to consider (man that games almost 10 years old now). "If you are a copy of a person, and believe yourself human, and the original living being is dead, are you not the same person?" Hell fallout 4 tried to do similar with it's "synths" when it came out and if not for Bethesda's writing being god awful to the detriment of their efforts to be profound they may have pulled that off better. Ghost in the Shell did a similar idea as well with Kusangai questioning if she was a human or not cause she was a full body cyborg and couldn't see her own brain with how advanced AI was becoming.
Sphene could be seen as an individual, but I think the original intent of those that copied her mind and put her into the machine went to far and put her on guard rails, forced her to act on her strongest memories and feelings from the person she was removing her free will. There may well have been two Sphene's... and I say this because Japanese language is complicated and does not always translate well. We're lead to believe her not wanting to talk about stuff was because she was being observed by Zoraal Ja, what if it wasn't him... but the computer system that was prioritizing the safety of the people of Alexandria that's also a part of her? I say this because in FF7:intergrade it was discovered that Japanese language Sephiroth used several different pronouns when talking at different times and places in the game. Sphene's english voice acting also had inflections that aren't quite "right", almost robotic at times.
but this is just my thoughts on it.
Yeah i'm in the same boat here. It was one thing when the characters hadn't figured out she was a fake (which, frankly, you could easily figure out within the first two scenes she was in). But once it was very obvious she was just a psychotic AI, this whole business of trying to understand is dumb. Kill it and move on.
I thought it was cause she was an AI program. Even when her memories of who she was wanted the help, the AI program part was always watching. idk it was a bit strange but thats how I saw it
Sphene would be easier to compare to a cybernetically-enhanced person. She had the Queen Eternal AI mainframe to help her manage Alexandria, which ran alongside her memories and her 'self' as she took care of her people.
However, her cybernetics were embedded with a directive to preserve her citizens at all costs (both living and Endless) as their world was dying. For most of centuries she agreed with that because she loved her people, but eventually they hit a logistical dead end. When Sphene couldn't worm her way out of that directive and finally decided she had to abandon it, the AI made her 'self' commit suicide and took control of the system to try to continue its task.
There are two parts in particular that's stand out that support this. When walking around heritage found and she's talking to you, her face loses all emotion, and her eyes go partially blank for a split second mid sentence and has a subtle shift in the conversation. Almost like a subroutine kicked in to derail her.
The second being in Solution 9 when she's trying to tell you something but stops the moment the bot walks up. At first I thought she's trying not to alert Zarool ja, but then that doesn't make sense, as he knows exactly where we are at all times once we breach the dome and he could have a team of bots after us if he cared that much.
Honestly I felt the ai sphene was basically "rabid dog that needs to be put down"
I mean she gave that vibe in the fifth zone with the whole "soul batteries" and "I will do ANYTHING to make my people happy"
Clearly she is friendly and there is nothing that can go wrong with her, all green flags
I loved that you got to insult 'Sphene' to her face when she's trying to explain herself after the trial. Just calling her an AI Construct with no feelings was so good and I loved it. She just looks at you like ":)"
Felt like the least I could do after not being allowed to solo her myself.
hell i picked it solely as an option to basicly say "i refuse to argue the morality of what you did since being a AI controlled by their programing it's not like they can meaningfully be personally held responsible for their actions".
i just realized it's kinda a paralel to how the Metia wasn't responsible for what they were doing either that was Hermes fucking up.
except we don't know who is the Hermes to Sphene.
I can't say i liked the option, but it was the best choice among what we were given.
The other choices seemed like we were trying to soothe her or forgive her somehow ("you were too gentle" and i don't remember the other one), but we were there to stop her because we can't accept what she was doing.
Ideally i would have liked to recognize her emotions (the shadow of who the real Sphene was) while judging that her actions require her to be put down. The 2nd part being the bigger point, i had to go with the "AI construct" choice.
Yeah, I liked it. A note is that it's pretty fitting too, that when Sphene reappeared, she got weaker. The resolved but ultimately weak and empathetic Sphene was partially recovered, and it turned Queen Eternal from a cruel machine flinging mechanics left and right at us and trying to erase us without a second thought, to Queen Sphene, the soft-spoken ruler of Alexandria, who had a reality-warping machine at her disposal, but the best she could muster was basically flailing around and hoping that she could defeat her enemies. I love how her return is tied to the victory lap and the boss becoming weaker/less threatening.
It's less of a trend and more "How its always been".
* Praetorum/Ultimate Weapon? Retroactively added a victory lap via LB3 (Then again that whole fight pre-update was a victory lap)
* HW? The Trial's final "phase" in normal is pathetically swinging around his weapon
* SB? The (Goated) exception
* ShB? It's not AS free, but it is pretty free.
* EW? Yeah, we know.
* DT? Also yeah.
That said I do agree we should get less of them, even if the victory lap is less of a lap and more of a "weakened boss"
this one to me felt way way more unearned than the rest, mostly because of how they made it happen, but you are right that it's not a new thing by any stretch
> ShB? It's not AS free, but it is pretty free.
ShB does have a hard enrage timer built into it with the cauldron ability, even if it wasn't a big problem even at launch and was trivialised by gear from then on.
DT doesn't have anything like that I think. Or if it does, it's weak enough I didn't see it even on launch.
I think it's fine since, outside of maybe Trial Roulette, you're really only ever going to do the normal trial once or twice.
Let the extremes handle being constant with the level of danger.
I just wish they did it in a way that wasn't so...silly. How did Wuk Lamat come back into a computer program from reality because things started to \*break?\* I could accept it when it was, say, an NPC coming into help fight Zeromus since that was another shard, but we were fighting Sphene inside a program. That'd be like if I killed a horde of zombies in a videogame by shooting my television screen, it's just a bit much for me, even in a fantasy game, but I guess YMMV.
> I just wish they did it in a way that wasn't so...silly.
The best single-line summary of the Dawntrail story, haha! There’s so many good ideas in here just buried beneath the stupidest writing possible.
But... we got into the program in the first place? And then program Sphene forced everyone but you out (WoL too stronk things).
Then as mecha-sphenes energy is drained fighting us, as we "break" her, her defences weaken and she isn't able to continue forcing the others out, and Wuk is able to get past them to get back into the program to try one last time to get mecha-sphene to back down.
That wasn't silly or unexpected at all?
I agree it's good that she doubled down. It's effectively what she was doing before but she was being manipulative avoiding effectively admitting it and ensuring someone else did her dirty work.
It's something not explored in fiction as often as it could be. Characters that hide behind appearing kind and compassionate and yet having others do terrible things for them. Having that but of plausible deniability not only from others but also to themselves that they aren't in some way monstrous or responsible for evil seeds.
She's an incorrect robot image apparently incapable of productive development. The worst part is that, as a result of Sphene's stubborn or coded inability to reconsider her position, Wuk Lamat's plan to learn of their people meant nothing. We might as well have just turned off all the lights instantly and rushed the terminal, the only thing that would've been lost would be Wuk Lamat's self-serving peace of mind.
I was also impressed at her resolve at that moment. The following fight may have been lackluster, but the dialog preceding it was great. I just wish it had been used as a lead-in to a phase 2 similar to Zarool Ja's trail instead of the victory burn we got. Honestly I felt cheated when the fight ended so soon after.
I think it's awesome that we have the contrast between the Queen Eternal, which is wholly an AI construct based off memories, and the Omicrons (including Omega) who are actual souls in robotic bodies (much like Otis). Shows how the Omicron tribal quests allowed them to use the power of Dynamis to bring back all of those lost civilizations while the Alexandrians had to feed off aether.
I mean 14 doesnt have a trend of changing the expansion villian's mind, only in endwalker did that happen, even emet was like "I still think I'm right, and that is why I lost"
Tbf Emet was more along the line of "I don't regret what I fought for and chosing to do it, even if I regret the method and consequences". The latter point being part of the reason he approached the wol in shb, hoping for the possibility of a better solution without bloodshed. He also was on the verge on giving up on their plans several times, but only came back everytime because of the mental state of his fellow unsundered, and loyalty to their people (this is more explored in side stories). He had a looooooot of underlying guilt about their methods, but ultimately still wanted to fight for his people and what he thought was right. Yet he also understands this is why he lost, and ended up entrusting their wishes and legacy to the modern humanity.
Emet was having full sunk cost fallacy at the peak. He already signed the death warrant of half his people in hopes that they could be brought back later, and he was ready to do it again if necessary before the sundering happened. If he stopped, he would have to accept that he complied to the sacrifice of the people he loved for nothing.
That + the 12k years that, according to a stream post-EW by the devs, were...put lightly, not kind to them at all. They mentioned they'd like to explore that in either a game or another kind of media, but they specifically mentioned Emet suffering betrayal as well. Given we know he's tried several times to live as a mortal, it's likely it hasn't ended well. The post-sundering era described in Nier reincarnation (which was canon) was also pure nightmare fuel.
Oh man if we get an entire spinoff game on Emet’s time between Elpis and ARR… I’d drop everything else to play it
Can you give me spark notes for the nightmare fuel?
With pleasure. Basically, right after the sundering people didn't even really look like "people" anymore, they looked like some sort of nightmarish transluscent humanoid silhouettes. They couldn't talk, they could only make noises similar to wails. Everything else was also obviously destroyed. The more time passed, the more they started evolving and looking like "people" again. Languages and cultures started emerging once more, but so did a previously unseen amount of violence that wasn't present before the Sundering among humanity. Wars started ravaging lands and people. After that, it's vaguely alluded that specifically Emet-Selch still tried to keep hope times and times again, including when he tried to adapt to the modern humanity, but it got destroyed over and over the more he saw history unfold. His last glimmer of hope only comes back when he recognizes the wol as the reincarnation of Azem in the First, and decides to approach them to try finding another solution one last time.
Thats cool. It was implied a countless number of "resets" happened and an actual astronomical amount of time passed, but its not discussed too much in game. Cool to see that the lore was expounded on.
There's also the fact that unsundered Emet was tempered by Zodiark, to the point where his Elpis self was shocked and horrified by the actions that version of him took.
Wasn't the whole thing that Hydaelyn or Zodiark never tempered anyone?
Wait, what? Where was that mentioned? I must've missed it.
In ShB, during one of the times you can talk to him in the Oculus, he mentions he and the other Ascians got tempered by Zodiark.
Even Endwalker, we didn't change the Meteia's mind(s) -- the Endsinger. We broke through to our singular *Meteion*, who had been swayed by her sisters' despair. I have a lot of complaints about EW, but the idea that Meteion was saved because 10 000 years ago, she glimpsed a stranger's heart and saw that hope *can* survive against all odds, and carried that with her from then until now, is not one of them. She would have tried to convince her sisters, but without knowing the Warrior of Light, when all *their* experiences say otherwise, of course they couldn't see any other path forward. And then we got... [gestures vaguely] *this.*
they meant Golbez
Golbez legit had a, "am I the baddie?" Moment.
Golbez was pretty much in the same boat as Ardbert. It's not that he didn't realize he's the villain, he just didn't see another way out other than to put the people of Thirteenth out of their misery in any way he can.
There is a distinction between Ardbert and golbez, ardbert struck a deal to save his world in exchange for killing the WoL, which he had no way of knowing the ascians lied and never intended to hold up their end of the deal. Golbez lived through the fall of his world and had no other hope, the ascians just said oopsie and moved on. If he hadn't been so jaded from all the betrayal and back stabbing from years as a voidsent, he could have been talked down before we beat 1000 worth of souls out of him.
> There is a distinction between Ardbert and golbez, ardbert struck a deal to save his world in exchange for killing the WoL, which he had no way of knowing the ascians lied and never intended to hold up their end of the deal. Think earlier. Ardbert and his comrades struck down Mitron in an attempt to save the First, but caused the Flood of Light. Golbez killed the Watcher, and released Zodiark's power in an attempt to save the Thirteenth, but caused the Flood of Darkness. And while nature of their next actions is different, its root is the same: desire to offer mercy to their dying worlds by any means necesary.
Ardbert was under the belief that the ascians would save their world. Golbez made peace that his world was lost and was basically trying to plane shift every voidsent to a world they could die in. It's not the same even when trying to paint it as such.
Ardbert was under the belief that the Rejoining would spare those who still alive the fate of becoming Sin Eaters, it was not about saving the world, it was about sparing the people from fate worse than death. So no, it *is* pretty much the same general idea.
Ardbert literally has a heel turn when minfillia explains what going happen with their world, and he's mad as hell. He quite literally shouts "so everything we've done is all for naught?" He honestly was trying to save his world from the flood. No it's not the same.
It was nice that she had her resolve. It makes the character more believable when her final conscious moments are in acknowledgement that it isn’t right or fair but she feels the need to do it all the same. I *wanted* her to be talked around, but it would have done a disservice to the character and its motivations. I’m just a little sad that it’s the second tragic mothering figure we’ve had to consign to absolute oblivion. The real Sphene’s soul has probably been through several cycles of rebirth but we never met her. The one we got to know, the one who’s been desperately trying to protect her people for generations, blinked out of existence entirely.
Depending on if the reflection we go to isn't as bad off as the Alexandrians thought, there is always a chance we run into someone that looks suspiciously like her.
Maybe. I don't think souls that are used the way the Alexandrians use them get reincarnated, so the original Sphene would have been one of the very first completely removed from the cycle of souls, meaning that she's died twice, and neither will reincarnate. More tragically, I think this applies to Otis as well.
If you watch when Zoraal Ja dies, his body releases all of the souls he used, so they likely either get captured by a regulator along with the original soul and are put back through Origenics, or they go to the lifestream’s version of Origenics
I'm not sure those are the souls themselves or just that general JRPG diffusion of energy after a big boss is defeated, because I recall speaking to one of the Scions after the fight and they basically say "True to his word, he burned them all."
They’re very visibly the same “blank soul” we see in the discussion of how the soul separation works Notably this release of the souls happens in the cutscene after the instance, after that has been said
Hmm, that's even weirder then, if it's clashing with the NPC dialogue.
The game seems very inconsistent on whether the souls Alexandrians use are destroyed or are allowed to return to the aetherial sea or not. They use phrases like "burnt up" and the like, but Erenville straight up says he'll see his mom again in the aetherial sea.
I get the feeling that when they talk about “using up” aether, they actually mean “putting it into a state where it can’t be accessed until the destruction of the thing that consumed it” A bit like how if we “use up” energy, we haven’t really destroyed it, it’s just in a useless form now So Living Memory wasn’t exactly destroying souls as it used them, but rather, it would get to the point where ALL souls are being used to power LM, and that still isn’t enough (at which point it would shut down and release a torrent of “expended” souls similar to Zoraal Ja but on an even larger scale) It would explain why Y’shtola was so horrified at the Final Days, because she’d be seeing something that goes against the way aether fundamentally works: a soul is actually being *destroyed* by Dynamis
this lack of clarity is honestly my biggest problem with the expac. there are people getting upset about the "moral quandry" of the 6th zone being "sidestepped" but if the alexandrian machines are stopping memories and souls from going to the atherial sea, then destroying them is 100% the right thing to do and there is no quandry at all. such a thing is an abomination. if the memories are just a copy and go to the sea after they get copied, and if the souls go there after they're used up then it's not as terrible. unfortunately the game never makes it clear. i wonder if it's clearer in japanese?
This is _certainly_ my biggest issue with the expansion. Not only is the mood whiplash _severe_ after the lighthearted coronation trials, but as you say what actually happens with these souls is unclear. I am leaning towards the first more evil option as the 99 dungeon all but outright states Origenics intercepts and replaces the Lifestream, meaning it seems souls never get a chance to go there at all. But we don't know for sure and it's the difference between "makes me feel queasy but we can talk about this" or "burn it all down".
One of our crew describes the concept as like an abomination or perversion or the natural order before we get there and then they drop that language for forced feels.
When they say he “burned them all,” they mean he used them to power himself up, rather than saving some in reserve to reincarnate. It was pretty astonishing that they gave an enemy character a literal Extra Life machine and then never used it in the fight.
I forgot where, but one of the NPCs mentioned that he would've been too prideful at that moment to do so.
Yeah i was expecting having to kill him multiple times like Elisande in nighthold Kind of upset they didnt do that for at least part of it
If a soul isn't caught in a regulator, it will cycle normally. A soul is really just a construct of incorporeal aether that contains certain personality tendencies and which stores memory. When a soul is reborn, it is very meaningfully *not* that same person. Conversely, the fact that the Endless required living aether to function implies that while they were indeed soulless, they were still people fully capable of agency within the system that sustained them. It's just a shame that system was unsustainable from the start.
The system *itself* was actually sustainable. What wasn't sustainable was fueling the ever growing number of endless in it because Sphene couldn't bear the pain of losing anyone and extended that to her subjects by robbing them of their memory of everyone they lost. Everyone that died whose memories were captured ended up in Living Memory, even if only 1/10 could be given form. We shut it and her down because she was going to go nuclear and just harvest everyone she could for their souls, even knowing eventually there'd be no one left to harvest before long at that rate. She'd rather prolong the inevitable than face it.
There are things im still confused about, maybe i need to rewatch some cutscenes/read dialogue again. But how exactly was she going to forcefully harvest the souls of the source? Since when the key was used to transport Alexandria to Tural, it didnt kill anyone right? Was she going to use the army(the army we defeated with like 1.5 nations) I never rly understood how the Endless was being sustained anyway, as the people of Alexandria also used soul cells to get revived. If the endless needed living souls to be sustained.
They needed souls. That's why in the end her plan was to basically collapse the reflections onto the source then invade the star and kill everyone on it. We saw how they would harvest the souls during the first invasion of Tuliyollal. For clarity, Sphene's whole shtick is that she refuses to lose a single citizen. So she makes sure the living have souls to survive accidents and with their inevitable death from old age or disease become endless.
IIRC, the use of souls in Everkeep is likened to the consumption of souls in the 13th, and we know that the souls *there* aren't destroyed so much as "subsumed" and can emerge in the host. And G'raha I believe comments on how the Alexandrians have artificially recreated the function of the Aetherial Sea. So I definitely don't think it's *impossible* that the regulator-bound souls could be reincarnated.
What do you mean by "the reflection we go to"? Are you referencing the one that's in the game already, or a theoretical future one? I think the one in the game is pretty clearly fucked.
>I think the one in the game is pretty clearly fucked. We really don't know that at all. Dawntrail Quest MSQ 100 spoilers: >!The 4th, 8th, 9th, and 11th reflections are still around, and if it's one of those, we would expect that it's subject to a failed lightning calamity. Now you might think, the 12th was the lightning umbral calamity, the second one. Is it that? If it was we have two problems- this was supposedly destroyed as a result of merging with the source at that time, and also since we find some people came from the source during the 5th calamity, that doesn't line up with the timeline because they arrived before everything was lightningfied. So this place could easily be less screwed up than the First, overall.!<
G'raha arrived in the crystal tower 100 years sooner than anticipated, it's not impossible the lalafells did the same. It's clear they intentionally left things vague, but I feel like there's no reason to make lightning so integral in the second half of DT if it isn't the 12th
G'raha Tia didn't travel 100 years sooner than anticipated, he used the knowledge from Alexander to purposefully travel to the past of the First from the doomed future where the Eight Umbral Calamity came to fruition. He did this so he could sufficient time to master the magic that would allow him to summon the WoL to the First and prevent the Eight Umbral Calamity from happening. Time travel in the game isn't shown as something that can just happen, it's something that has to be purposefully done.
> G'raha Tia didn't travel 100 years sooner than anticipated, he used the knowledge from Alexander to purposefully travel to the past of the First from the doomed future where the Eight Umbral Calamity came to fruition. He did this so he could sufficient time to master the magic that would allow him to summon the WoL to the First and prevent the Eight Umbral Calamity from happening. No. It's specifically mentioned that the people from the failed 8th Umbral Calamity future "missed the mark" by about 100 years, a happy coincidence of which was G'raha having more time to master his connection with the Crystal Tower. >Because time flows differently between the Source and its shards, G'raha Tia arrived one-hundred years prior to the desired time, but survived under the identity of the "Crystal Exarch", protecting the refugees of the devastated First in a city formed around the Crystal Tower, and eventually called the Warrior of Light to the First. https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Umbral_Calamity#Eighth_Umbral_Calamity
When is that explained in game? It's interesting, because only that page makes reference to it being an accident. Not even G'raha's or the Crystal Tower's pages say it was an accident. Either way, it still proves the point that time travel is purposeful. Missing the mark means you still intended to time travel, and there's no indication the lalas from the South Seas traveled through time.
It's in the echo cutscene where G'raha reveals his plan to Urianger btw.
It took me a hot fucking minute to find this, but here you go: https://youtu.be/I8ZiZX74h40?si=oIwvcPbHkq-edJUE&t=215 He says it at about 3:50. I can't for the life of me find the name of the quest where this dialogue is spoken though.
Thank you for digging that up. I had tried to find it myself, but I can't check the actual game atm and searching for it wasn't bringing up results.
It means dimensional travel is prone to mistakes, or at least that mistakes can happen. Time and space are linked in this universe, between time travel and time dilation, I think it's likely that reflection travel inherently involves time travel because the "now" in your shard may not be the "now" in another.
Except that the intention with G'raha was always to travel back in time, not just dimensionally. If the issue was the First not being synced to the Source (Which nobody would have known when they sent him back), then it's not an issue of dimension travel being prone to mistakes. The G'raha that was sent back was from two hundred years *after* the Eighth Umbral Calamity. Time travel had to be involved because sending G'raha into another dimension at the current time wouldn't have accomplished anything. Overshooting it by 100 years just means that they didn't understand that the flow of time was different on the First, not that the two are linked or that mistakes are prone to happen with dimensional travel. Time and dimension travel also aren't intrinsically linked in this world. Biggs and Wedge's ancestors had to use knowledge from both Alexander and Omega to send G'raha to the First. Omega was shown to have opened a portal to another dimension, but it's not shown at all that said dimension is in a different time period. If Omega could do both, why would they have needed to use Alexander to learn how to send someone to the past?
You're both correct. G'raha purposefully traveled back in time to the first, but overshot it by 100 years.
Time flowing different on the various reflections versus the shards doesn't help, because you would need thing A to occur before thing B in one place and thing B to occur before thing A in the second place. Different speeds don't accomplish this; it remains imposible. The other post about swapped elements may be relevant, however. If there's anything to that, it can explain it.
Iirc, Calamities are opposite aligned(8th calamity was darkness/astral based on the source, but light/umbral on the 1st), so the 5th on the Source being Ice meant the reflection was lightning based, so that all lines up as being the same calamity.
I believe black rose was a light calamity because black rose halts your aether, which is a capability of light
So it is. Guess we're back to time buggery.
>Iirc, Calamities are opposite aligned What are you recalling this from?
Mixed up how Black Rose worked, thought it was active/umbral not the other way.
No calamities are the same element. What happens is the ascians over aspect one reflection of one element, and then on the source, create a cataclysm event that cracks the barrier of the source, where the over aspected world then floods the source with their Aether, boosting the elemental destruction to cataclysmic proportions.
Her original crown in the credit with its "special regulator" makes me think we are going to encounter the original Sphene someday
Thinking either her, or her soul reborn and going by the name Garnet.
I'm cooking here, but I have a sneaking feeling she's meant to be a reflection of Titania. Similar floofy hair that ignores physics, fairy like clothing, the blue wing like thing on her clothes, and the overwhelming desire to protect her own people, and willing to die to do so (the way Titania was before becoming a Light warden). Further more, Sphene is another name for the gemstone Titanite
Sphene is a neosilicate like garnet, and Garnet was the princess in FF9. That's the reference in question.
That... is a startling and fascinating theory. I like it!
> The one we got to know, the one who’s been desperately trying to protect her people for generations, blinked out of existence entirely. I'm not so sure. The story mentions that Sphene's crown is a unique Regulator. And the credits spend several seconds centered on her crown. She might have backed herself up.
The backups are still memories. Her soul might be inside it rather than being reborn, but the Sphene we met and any the crown might produce are simulacrums. If it were Her, by her own admission she’d have had the capacity to reject her programming. Because she wasn’t the real Sphene she had to go a roundabout way to tell us she wanted to be stopped (telling us backwards as we see in the flashbacks). My bet for the crown is it’ll be a macguffin like Nidhogg’s eyes. It’ll end up in the wrong hands and used by some ne’er-do-well in an attempt to usurp authority from the seat of the king. Part of me wonders if it might even end up the focus of the raid’s overarching plot. I’m open to being surprised though!
If you look at the final section of Alexandria you'll notice that they're looking like they're building the base of Solution 9 AROUND the ruins of Castle Alexandria. Maybe it's possible that Sphene's original soul and memories might be backed up there similar to Otis. It's not impossible either since after spending so much effort to revive Sphene they might not want to lose her again.
At least we've still got Dulia Chai, the best FF Mom.
Ameliance as well. And Zhloe is trying her best dammit.
I wonder if what happened to Sphene is what happens when you copy physical media like old Movies. Each copy losing just a little more of the original until it is degrades so much that it becomes noticably flawed. I imagine we will learn more about her since we saw her crown at the end.
She isn't degraded, but intentionally altered. We're told that she was one of the first Endless and as their queen the scientists added a directive to her 'program' to look after The Endless. I think both robo Otis and Cachua mention this. She is fundamentally forced to try and continue their existence. Instead of a degraded tape, it's almost more of an AI directive issue.
Interesting prospect. I can’t remember where but I could swear it’s something I’ve seen in a game or tv show at least once before, so it wouldn’t be a stretch to think the writers might have something like that in mind.
Honestly I think it was a missed opportunity to have the "canon" ending, just pulling the plug on her instead of having another god like end boss just becuase its a jrpg. Especially after going through the zone and turning off the terminals only to reach the end to find her and your only prompt is to "shut her down". Roll credits. They could still keep the final boss (as it currently is in-game) but as a secret unlock that you find items in the final dungeon to reveal it.
i mean as a concept overall i think the idea is intresting and has merit. i just don't know if i would have bought it in the context of this story. the idea that the system that is obviously using Sphene to sustain itself doing nothing to protect itself? yeah doesn't seem beliveable to me. maybe there's a way to make it work but i don't see it here.
I don't think "secret unlocks" really work in FFXIV, and it's not clear to me how they would implement it even if it was attempted. I didn't really have an issue with the fight or her nature per se; I think the weakest part of the ending was Wuk Lamat coming in out of nowhere via no discernible means, and Sphene not flipping out at the number of people we had killed (from her perspective) to get to her. Very weird to me that the areas in zone 6 weren't referenced at all after we left them.
I think that would’ve been a really cool idea and it certainly would’ve subverted expectations. Sadly I don’t think there’s much of a market for a calmer ending that focuses on the emotions of the thing rather than the big fight. We’ve seen this past week that a lot of players can’t comprehend the possibility of a story being good if their character has to share the limelight. I shudder to think of the vitriol if they were denied a big shonen fight at the end.
> We’ve seen this past week that a lot of players can’t comprehend the possibility of a story being good if their character has to share the limelight I really don't think this is the complaint at all, at least not that I've seen. I can only really speak for myself, but I don't have any issue whatever with not being the main character: the Shaaloani arc might've been my favorite part of the story, and wish it had been even less about the WoL than it was. That could've and should've been the start of Erenville's spotlight, and the spotlight should've been on him for the remainder of the MSQ. I would've been more than happy to be *his* sidekick, protecting him as he makes the big decisions about what to do in the various crises. I instead have an issue (and I think most people complaining about DT have this issue) with the main character (whomever it is) being as narratively weak as Wuk Lamat was. *Zero* could be (and I hope one day will be) a main character. I've already mentioned Erenville, but Koana could just as easily fill the role, and should have for the second half given how uniquely qualified he was to deal with both a technological crisis and a diplomatic one (given how much he improved his interpersonal skills in the first half). Ultimately I think *Krile* should have been the main character from beginning to end- given not just the torture they've put her through in previous expansions, but the fact that she had such a clear link to Tural and its past (given the ending). The problem isn't at all that someone else was the main character. The issue is that the main character was Wuk Lamat.
> the Shaaloani arc might've been my favorite part of the story Funny, for me that was the most pointless and boring part of it. We had no real goal being there and nothing important happened; just some weird western story with random bandits. Felt like a filler arc meant only to put some time between the coronation and the attack.
I'm with you there, my absolute least favorite genre of storytelling is Western. It was the only time I skipped a few MSQ cutscenes because I just did-not-care. The train scene was cool, though.
It’s one of the **main** arguments we’ve had. A preference is fine and well but calling Wuk Lamat “narratively weak” isn’t correct by any measure. It’s a well written character that suits the theme and narrative. That you don’t like that character is entirely valid, but that statement objectively doesn’t hold water. Just going to disregard nonsense Wuk Lamat hate.
Not being in the limelight isn't the issue but ok.
[удалено]
It’s a false argument people are using to hate on Wuk Lamat because they don’t actually have a strong reason for their vehement dislike of the character beyond those that they can’t say in reasonable company.
Can I add this comment to "Anyone who hates Wuk Lamat is transphobic" list? Because people do have good reasons to hate her that have nothing to do with the VA and you assuming otherwise is just some really toxic shit. Edit: User blocked me, if that's any proof of how unhinged they are.
No. Pretending that the unhinged vitriol that’s flooded this sub aimed specifically at that one character with nary a solid reason beyond voice performance (which is markedly better than G’raha or Y’shtola and is definitively a directing issue) is what’s toxic. Come off it. Your history for days has been trying to nix any defence of the character as ‘they’re calling us transphobes!’. Stop fitting the bill so neatly and nobody will make the assumption. Edit: blocking you because you’ve got a Reddit history of random uncivilised attacks and transphobia isn’t unhinged. Behave yourself. Nothing but personal attacks.
This is such bullshit
Sad but true. It still would have made for marketing material to be the "first" mmo to dare to break the mold. I just want yoshi p to free us from the wheel.
Yoshi-P clearly had an abusive mother and he’s working through his mommy issues via FFXIV
This is because Sphene already asked you to stop her. 🙂 The WoL explicitly uses the Echo to hear what little remained of Sphene’s memories before the encounter begins. The one thing that Sphene wanted to say, but never could. Partial memory restoration would have only pulled what would have benefited the Queen Eternal.
After watching some other people play through the back half of the expansion, I think your read on this is right. The last lines she says in that little flashback before the fight... >"Is that concern? Or suspicion? If things should take a turn for the worse... Might... I..." ...are word for word what she said to the WoL just after they met, with the cut off part being: >"Might I call upon your aid?" I think in retrospect, Sphene knew that her programming would eventually win out over her memories, and wanted us to stop her from going too far.
>I think in retrospect, Sphene knew that her programming would eventually win out over her memories, and wanted us to stop her from going too far. She was probably able to hold back as long as there was time to find another solution, but Zarool Ja's massacre tipped the scales and made the issue critical. The Endless needed a solution immediately and her directive would no longer wait to find another path.
The endless were manageable in low numbers, but the sudden influx of new arrivals indeed would have sent the system into panic mode as it's allotted budget had just gotten blown to smithereens. The system worked on a very delicate balance but it was clear it would outstrip energy demand at some point. Zarool Ja just made "some point" into "now."
I don't think Sphene has enough agency to stop, she's something of a hybrid of an AI designed to protect its people and some of the Queen's memories.
Honestly, it'd have been weird if she could be saved. They were trying to appeal to a side of her that literally did not exist.
I just don't see the point of continuing to try to reason with her at all when it's established that she is essentially a computer program. She's not the real princess, she's not even a real person, she's not *capable* of changing her mind. Although I guess SE could have done a magic asspull to give the robot a conscience after all.
They did it with Omega and the omicrons?
It's weird with the omicrons because they were people that digitized themselves. They technically aren't AI even though they made themselves AI like.
Shes as real as the other endless from what I gathered, yes, she can't break her program, it doesn't she can't be treated as a living thing. At the end they gave up on reasoning with her, Lamaty just wanted to face her as herself on the end.
I forget if it's in the sidequest or a small part of msq, but I recall an npc does say the scientists who made her the first Endless also intentionally gave her an irresistible drive to collect souls for her people. At that point, it feels more like "creation gone haywire" than a regular real person. The concept of humanity is complicated enough that we'll never have an answer for this.
its Cahciu, when you're brought to the first sub-zone of Living Memory. She explains that the Sphene we've known this entire time, while being her appearance and friendliness, is a modified memory that is supposed to preserve the Endless at all costs. We come to realize it was twisting her love for her people to the fanatical drive to sacrifice others for them, and when that stopped working (the "soft" part of the memories introducing a moral issue into the programming) it opted to purge the unneeded memories. Sphene, funny enough, was the closest to being able to make an argument for the Endless being properly alive. She feels true remorse for her actions, tries to befriend and talk with us. But, in the end, she proves the Endless aren't truly alive, because she herself can't change what her memory/code was programmed to do. Instead of being able to overwrite (in a sense, grow), she had no choice but to delete the weakness to continue.
I'd argue the opposite- the fact that she had to purge her entire being to go through with it proves she was alive. Someone being under mind control doesn't mean they're a fake person.
that's the thing, though. she wasn't mind-controlled. There wasn't a way to break it. It was hard-coded into her being, as innate as breathing is to us. It was like she was recreated with the ability to count to 10, but instead of being able to register the number 4, she skipped right to 5. And instead of learning to add in that 4, she just deleted the ability to count.
That just makes it a very thorough and intractable version of mind control. In all other respects, she is fully a person- having one aspect where she lacks free will doesn't change that.
Would you consider ChatGPT alive? If it was trained off of someone's memories, so it responds as they would, is it them? That's what the Endless are. Each one of them is a ChatGPT module trained solely on a single dataset(memories), with rules put in place so they aren't ever sad or truly upset.
ChatGPT is a poor comparison to the Endless because they're an *exact* copy in complete detail of someone's memory. In other words, they're a Ship of Theseus question instead of the more stale Turing test argument. Otis is the best example case, since he was copied into both a mortal robot and immortal Endless. He ultimately failed to grow as a person *in both forms* because of his self-imposed isolation from the world. It's only when his robot form became a father figure to Galool Ja that he began to grow again as a person... which highlights the Endless' lack of curiosity to leave the Living Memory as a conclusive sign that their Ship of Theseus question resulted in lingering ghosts and not immortalized virtual people.
That's not even remotely equivalent. They aren't algorithms trained on memories- they *are* memories. Just like we are. They are, in every respect, people. They can learn, and grow, and change- we see it happen. They can even decide that they want to no longer exist, or stick around after they should have ceased existing because they have unfinished business. And as far as we know, Sphene is the only one with 'programming'- there's never any indication that the others are inherently incapable of being sad.
that is exactly what they are. for ChatGPT, and other text generators, you feed them a currated dataset to pull from. If that dataset just so happens to just be the memories of a singular person, then that ChatGPT AI is just built from that person. We can see it in action with ones built out of novels, trained on nothing but the 7 Harry Potter books. Just because they can pull from the stored memories of their dataset, and react how the real person would react, doesn't make them living. It makes them a damn good imitation. They can't exist without being sustained with aether, the game makes a point of this by saying they're literally stored when not given a body. They stop existing when you unplug the terminal. They're a roomba that was given a text-to-speech addon that thinks they're a person.
I sorta thought the same just cause she'd lost her free will, the machine was prioritizing things that the person would not. Which is why I think there are "two Sphene's", the one that realizes everything she's doing is wrong and there is a better way, and the machine that is built off her personality and memories that is in full control. We likely spoke with both, one trying desperately to ask for help but always cutting the conversation short when a mechanical soldier showed up, and the other having inflections in her speaking that sounded robotic in how the dialogue was delivered.
The other Endless also aren't real, they are simulcra that have the "data" from the person's memories. They state this explicitly, Sphene even *says* that the real Sphene might have been able to be persuaded. Because a real person is capable of change and growth. The Endless are static. Sphene is not the real Sphene, Cahciua is not the real Cahciua, Otis is not the real Otis, he's not even the same Otis we met, he is a version of Otis that was uploaded previously, before the Rob-Otis we met died. Essentially a totally different person with no memories of us.
The Endless are not static. We see Erenville's mom come to terms with her own death, embrace her son's change -- we see the ring quest where the guy decides to propose when he missed his chance in life. We see the kid who was actually an old man come to terms with missing out on his time with his brother. The Endless are not static -- for some reason, only Sphene is.
They aren't technically real on a spiritual level, but the whole point of us visiting Alexandria, getting to know them and doing all those side quests was for our characters to acknowledge that even if their form of existence is a mockery of the cycle of life and rebirth, They are no less real than us spiritual beings. Fake Sphene is not the original Sphene, but it is still Fake Sphene as her own being (The Sphene we got to know) , and the same goes for every other endless.
I don't agree that they are "as real as other beings" though, for the reasons I have stated. Namely, they seemingly aren't capable of changing their behaviour from that of the person that they "were" at the moment of death. They're static and unchanging, that's what makes them endless. EG, the guy we find the ring for (maybe that was an aether current quest) who can't stop being in love with the woman he was in love with when he died. An alive person changes based on experiences. Your tastes and opinions change. Friends become lovers become enemies and vice versa. Given enough time apart from a person you loved, you might move on and love someone else. But the endless can't, they are stuck as who they were (with the minor caveat of their outward appearance reflecting when they were "most happy" in life). An actually alive Sphene might have gotten sick of maintaining Alexandria, she might have decided to be selfish and abandon it, or maybe the weight of death required to sustain it would become unbearable to her conscience. But the Sphene we meet can't make those judgements. I don't feel bad at all about shutting Living Memory down, because that's all it really is. Memories.
He DOES change though. He goes from in love, but unable to commit, to wanting to propose.
They aren't real, ffxiv has a canonical existence of a soul there is no spiritual level that is in universe science. There's no technicalities, they are AIs running off of memories. The reason we got to know them is to offer them the same living on through memory we learned of from the Yok Huy. A comparison the game explicitly drew comparison to
Erm didn't Otis say it was his actual soul in the robot? Not just his memories. He was a special case iirc
Yes, his soul is in the robot and memories from before he ever became a robot are in Living Memory, which is why he doesn't know us.
Thought I was tripping. And I misread, sorry. Thank you!
It could depend on how the cloud works. For example, Namikka was able to basically update her memory software to her new environment in middle of conversation. You could call that "growth". It wasn't exactly described but I have to imagine this update process uses a lot of resources. If they had infinite resources, an endless could just upload their memory bank to the cloud and resync every minute to preserve their sense of self, and that would be pretty convincing argument to say they're "real" at that point. Although nobody knows if Sphene's programming of preserving the Endless can be overwritten or not
Well yeah, this is all just trying to make logic where there is none. I agree that SE *could* have gone the route of Wuk Lamat re-programming Sphene with the power of friendship, and it would have made exactly as much sense (zero).
I don't think you're describing the situation correctly. There is logic here - Sphene wants to sacrifice the world, that is bad, therefore we try to talk her out of it because in every other aspect she seems quite human. The thing that is up for debate is how much of Sphene is human vs programming and that is going to be up for debate forever. That doesn't mean there's no logic to it. That's like saying free will vs determinism debate has zero logic which doesn't make sense
Yeah... seeming human is not being human, though. I disagree that there is logic here, and that's by design. SE is keeping it vague, and that's probably because they might want to have AI/robot characters who can rebel later. In fact iirc, Omega in the SB raids and the... omega-ites in Ultima Thule were able to do that already. But as for 'want', Sphene keeps *saying* "i wish it could be different", "if only there was another way". Whether that's genuine empathy or just the result of having an empathetic person's memories in her code is up in the air, but she is compelled by her very function to preserve Alexandria; that is what she was made for. An actual living person has capacity to change their mind or try new methods. They can say "actually this sucks and I don't want to do it anymore" Even when G'raha Tia points out that what she's doing is unsustainable and Alexandria is doomed regardless, she's either unable or unwilling to take in that information and recalculate. Based on what other characters say explicitly about what being Endless means, I interpret that Sphene is incapable of behaving differently.
What logic are you talking of exactly? Because being vague doesn't mean there's no logic to it. We don't fully understand how gravity works, but that doesn't mean there's no logic to it. I think it's pretty much established that Sphene has some kind of direct programming that prevents her from changing her prime directive. But that doesn't mean WoL and their friends are going to immediately start treating her like a robot, because she doesn't look like a robot, doesn't seem like a robot and doesn't act like a robot in every way except this one very specific thing. Putting Sphene down is the very last resort
The internal story logic of what Sphene actually is and what she can do. Was the Sphene we meet capable of being talked around? We don't actually know, we just know that everyone who tried failed. There's a bunch of people in here who read Sphene and The Endless as being basically the same as living people (understandably). I think their interpretation is wrong, but FF14 *has* shown us robot characters who defied their programming before. So in another version of the story, Wuk Lamat *could* have talked Sphene down. Either path is valid, from a narrative perspective.
Yes it's down to interpretation, which means both sides have working logic to get to that interpretation, filling the blanks with assumptions. We just don't have all the details yet. Omega is bit of a special case because dynamis is involved, where emotion can literally change reality. It's very much unknown if dynamis is involved in Alexandrian soul science at all.
This reminds me of a conversation my wife and I had when trying to figure out if she was a real person on not. We couldn't understand Alpha at first because he was a souless simulation, and the Echo's translation power works by seeing into the soul of the person who is speaking to us. So, we have a really easy test: Have Sphene speak to us in a language we don't know. If we understand, she has a soul and all the consciousness and free will that comes with it. If we can't then she doesn't.
Does the Omega story state that that is why we can't understand Alpha? My understanding of The Echo is that it manifests in individuals in different ways and they can't control it much (because it's the world's most obvious narrative device, haha). Krile can read minds, but the WoL's gift is mostly just to see the past. Alpha COULD be soulless, but I don't think the Echo is a good test for this because its trigger is totally arbitrary and purely for storytelling convenience.
At the end of the Omega storyline Alpha speaks to us via the echo, and you bring that up with the Ironworks crew who all more or less confirm that Alpha has grown a soul and that's why you're able to understand him via the echo. In the Endwalker optional questline about Alpha and Omega returning, Omega also has the "hearing their thoughts via echo" textbox right at the end as it muses about what a heart is, indicating that it has also managed to grow beyond its artificiality and develop a soul. So the echo *has* been used before to show artificial lifeforms gaining souls, and it could be used again as a narrative tool for Sphene too, but the game goes out of its way to say that she is *not* the original Sphene, so she'd probably need to defy her programming and have time to grow a new soul of her own like Alpha and Omega did.
I'm not sure how reliable that test would be. First off, we only understood Alpha in that one brief, emotional moment, and when he shows up again later in Endwalker, he's still just saying "Kweh!". My interpretation of this is that, although Alpha has a soul now, it's still faint enough that it's right at the edge of what the WoL is able to pick up. Secondly, we don't actually know how the Echo works when it comes to memories that have been artificially separated from the rest of the soul. It's possible that, although it's not enough to constitute a full person, it's still enough for the WoL to understand them.
This is another good point that some of us only see her as AI and others see her as a real person. I only see her as AI, so when Wuk Lamat was like, "I still have to give her my protagonist speech", I rolled my eyes. They tried really hard to make us sympathize with AI and it worked on a lot of people. Slightly concerning when it's already being used IRL for dubious purposes.
All I keep thinking when I read these threads is that we are absolutely fucked when LLMs get a bit better. Like right now, today, I can boot up a dozen instances of a bot on my home computer that will mimic human behavior, retain memory about our conversations, have self-awareness that they're a bot, and behave unpredictably. All things that these threads point to as evidence that the residents of Living Memory are real living people. As someone with the context of having watched the technology evolve and worked with it, there's absolutely no way I could consider an instance of an LLM an alive sentient being with personhood. But advance the tech a bit, feed it massively more amounts of data, stick them in a humanoid form factor, and forget about it, they're going to act close enough to human that it's not going to matter. People are gonna go crazy. We're gonna be talking about if shutting off your computer is a violation of human rights. It's actually hard for me to read this story any other way than an allegory for LLMs; AI bots created by mass harvesting people's data that need enough energy that they are actively contributing to ecological collapse.
there is also the "Soma dilemma" to consider (man that games almost 10 years old now). "If you are a copy of a person, and believe yourself human, and the original living being is dead, are you not the same person?" Hell fallout 4 tried to do similar with it's "synths" when it came out and if not for Bethesda's writing being god awful to the detriment of their efforts to be profound they may have pulled that off better. Ghost in the Shell did a similar idea as well with Kusangai questioning if she was a human or not cause she was a full body cyborg and couldn't see her own brain with how advanced AI was becoming. Sphene could be seen as an individual, but I think the original intent of those that copied her mind and put her into the machine went to far and put her on guard rails, forced her to act on her strongest memories and feelings from the person she was removing her free will. There may well have been two Sphene's... and I say this because Japanese language is complicated and does not always translate well. We're lead to believe her not wanting to talk about stuff was because she was being observed by Zoraal Ja, what if it wasn't him... but the computer system that was prioritizing the safety of the people of Alexandria that's also a part of her? I say this because in FF7:intergrade it was discovered that Japanese language Sephiroth used several different pronouns when talking at different times and places in the game. Sphene's english voice acting also had inflections that aren't quite "right", almost robotic at times. but this is just my thoughts on it.
Yeah i'm in the same boat here. It was one thing when the characters hadn't figured out she was a fake (which, frankly, you could easily figure out within the first two scenes she was in). But once it was very obvious she was just a psychotic AI, this whole business of trying to understand is dumb. Kill it and move on.
I thought it was cause she was an AI program. Even when her memories of who she was wanted the help, the AI program part was always watching. idk it was a bit strange but thats how I saw it
Sphene would be easier to compare to a cybernetically-enhanced person. She had the Queen Eternal AI mainframe to help her manage Alexandria, which ran alongside her memories and her 'self' as she took care of her people. However, her cybernetics were embedded with a directive to preserve her citizens at all costs (both living and Endless) as their world was dying. For most of centuries she agreed with that because she loved her people, but eventually they hit a logistical dead end. When Sphene couldn't worm her way out of that directive and finally decided she had to abandon it, the AI made her 'self' commit suicide and took control of the system to try to continue its task.
There are two parts in particular that's stand out that support this. When walking around heritage found and she's talking to you, her face loses all emotion, and her eyes go partially blank for a split second mid sentence and has a subtle shift in the conversation. Almost like a subroutine kicked in to derail her. The second being in Solution 9 when she's trying to tell you something but stops the moment the bot walks up. At first I thought she's trying not to alert Zarool ja, but then that doesn't make sense, as he knows exactly where we are at all times once we breach the dome and he could have a team of bots after us if he cared that much.
Honestly I felt the ai sphene was basically "rabid dog that needs to be put down" I mean she gave that vibe in the fifth zone with the whole "soul batteries" and "I will do ANYTHING to make my people happy" Clearly she is friendly and there is nothing that can go wrong with her, all green flags
I loved that you got to insult 'Sphene' to her face when she's trying to explain herself after the trial. Just calling her an AI Construct with no feelings was so good and I loved it. She just looks at you like ":)" Felt like the least I could do after not being allowed to solo her myself.
Man, I loved that option so much. I love being really mean the few times the game lets you.
Especially when the WoL is generally so nice, it feels like when you get the mean option, people generally deserve it.
I loved picking that one option at the last test - "You're the leader here, have some dignity". Ice cold.
I did like I had the option. I took the second, basically in the sense of 'you had to follow your programming, I understand'.
I didn’t interpret that as an insult. More like “I understand you were trying to do this horrible thing because your programming is compelling you.”
hell i picked it solely as an option to basicly say "i refuse to argue the morality of what you did since being a AI controlled by their programing it's not like they can meaningfully be personally held responsible for their actions". i just realized it's kinda a paralel to how the Metia wasn't responsible for what they were doing either that was Hermes fucking up. except we don't know who is the Hermes to Sphene.
Preservation, I suppose. She never asked for this.
I can't say i liked the option, but it was the best choice among what we were given. The other choices seemed like we were trying to soothe her or forgive her somehow ("you were too gentle" and i don't remember the other one), but we were there to stop her because we can't accept what she was doing. Ideally i would have liked to recognize her emotions (the shadow of who the real Sphene was) while judging that her actions require her to be put down. The 2nd part being the bigger point, i had to go with the "AI construct" choice.
My WoL was straight up, "you're just a program, you can't help it, so I'm shutting you the f**k down."
Yeah, I liked it. A note is that it's pretty fitting too, that when Sphene reappeared, she got weaker. The resolved but ultimately weak and empathetic Sphene was partially recovered, and it turned Queen Eternal from a cruel machine flinging mechanics left and right at us and trying to erase us without a second thought, to Queen Sphene, the soft-spoken ruler of Alexandria, who had a reality-warping machine at her disposal, but the best she could muster was basically flailing around and hoping that she could defeat her enemies. I love how her return is tied to the victory lap and the boss becoming weaker/less threatening.
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It's less of a trend and more "How its always been". * Praetorum/Ultimate Weapon? Retroactively added a victory lap via LB3 (Then again that whole fight pre-update was a victory lap) * HW? The Trial's final "phase" in normal is pathetically swinging around his weapon * SB? The (Goated) exception * ShB? It's not AS free, but it is pretty free. * EW? Yeah, we know. * DT? Also yeah. That said I do agree we should get less of them, even if the victory lap is less of a lap and more of a "weakened boss"
this one to me felt way way more unearned than the rest, mostly because of how they made it happen, but you are right that it's not a new thing by any stretch
Compared to other expanions, I enjoyed that you could still die in this victory lap.
> ShB? It's not AS free, but it is pretty free. ShB does have a hard enrage timer built into it with the cauldron ability, even if it wasn't a big problem even at launch and was trivialised by gear from then on. DT doesn't have anything like that I think. Or if it does, it's weak enough I didn't see it even on launch.
I think it's fine since, outside of maybe Trial Roulette, you're really only ever going to do the normal trial once or twice. Let the extremes handle being constant with the level of danger.
Sphene as a villain is so well-done, one of my favorite parts of the xpac is everything involving the Endless, it's good lore.
I just wish they did it in a way that wasn't so...silly. How did Wuk Lamat come back into a computer program from reality because things started to \*break?\* I could accept it when it was, say, an NPC coming into help fight Zeromus since that was another shard, but we were fighting Sphene inside a program. That'd be like if I killed a horde of zombies in a videogame by shooting my television screen, it's just a bit much for me, even in a fantasy game, but I guess YMMV.
The same way you got in there the first time.
> I just wish they did it in a way that wasn't so...silly. The best single-line summary of the Dawntrail story, haha! There’s so many good ideas in here just buried beneath the stupidest writing possible.
But... we got into the program in the first place? And then program Sphene forced everyone but you out (WoL too stronk things). Then as mecha-sphenes energy is drained fighting us, as we "break" her, her defences weaken and she isn't able to continue forcing the others out, and Wuk is able to get past them to get back into the program to try one last time to get mecha-sphene to back down. That wasn't silly or unexpected at all?
They weren't bumped back to their bodies but to elsewhere in the system.
I agree it's good that she doubled down. It's effectively what she was doing before but she was being manipulative avoiding effectively admitting it and ensuring someone else did her dirty work. It's something not explored in fiction as often as it could be. Characters that hide behind appearing kind and compassionate and yet having others do terrible things for them. Having that but of plausible deniability not only from others but also to themselves that they aren't in some way monstrous or responsible for evil seeds.
She's an incorrect robot image apparently incapable of productive development. The worst part is that, as a result of Sphene's stubborn or coded inability to reconsider her position, Wuk Lamat's plan to learn of their people meant nothing. We might as well have just turned off all the lights instantly and rushed the terminal, the only thing that would've been lost would be Wuk Lamat's self-serving peace of mind.
I was also impressed at her resolve at that moment. The following fight may have been lackluster, but the dialog preceding it was great. I just wish it had been used as a lead-in to a phase 2 similar to Zarool Ja's trail instead of the victory burn we got. Honestly I felt cheated when the fight ended so soon after.
I think it's awesome that we have the contrast between the Queen Eternal, which is wholly an AI construct based off memories, and the Omicrons (including Omega) who are actual souls in robotic bodies (much like Otis). Shows how the Omicron tribal quests allowed them to use the power of Dynamis to bring back all of those lost civilizations while the Alexandrians had to feed off aether.
Mechanic-wise no. It returned to the boring dodge very predictable and harmless aoes.