None of these stars are story related. In fact, that missing star is straight up because of how bad, thoughtless, and insulting the story is written. If I jumped from ShB's quality of writing down to the level of storytelling Endwalker provided me with, I would shatter every fucking bone in my body. It does everything wrong that Stormblood did with it's structure and pacing (filling your quests with filler by an endless amount, yet when a story beat happens it manages to still rush it as if they had no time to develop anything) paired with it trying its best to outright copy and re-do many story beats that Shadowbringers did much, much better. What a disaster of a story. A horrible and badly made conclusion to a story over 10 years in the making. Instead of making this two separate expacs like originally planned, they mashed 2 whole storylines together and brought back Zenos for no reason. The Garlean storyline literally gets forced to end after building up a character that easily could have been BBV material, and instead makes him shoot himself after 20 minutes of meeting him. Then it introduces a whole new villain with a whole new power system in the last 3rd of the story out of NOWHERE and gives them no development until the LITERAL final fight in the form of 5 lines of dialogue. This is a terrible story, and it's only made worse by the fact that it came after the masterclass writing that was Shadowbringers. Insane how badly someone can fuck up an entire arc when the blueprint for doing such was right in front of them. They followed it, sure, but they did it while refusing to understand why the blueprint was made in the fashion it was in. So many fantastic ideas and themes are present, and not only does EW fail to deliver on those built-up promises, it outright refuses to at times. Then, it introduces the laziest and most insanely rushed FF4 reference as the plot for the postpatch, where it delivers a contrived remix of the Shadowbringers MSQ without understanding what made ShB so good. You can tell Ishikawa stepped down from Main Scenario Writer around 5.4 when Ardbert is literally dug out from his grave to give fanservice as he pet Seto. Such a bullshit scene that ruins a perfect ending for a perfect character, for a forced emotional beat. It marked the beginning of Endwalker and I mean that in every way possible.

The soundtrack, side-content, raids, V&C Dungeons, gameplay changes, mechanics, everything else that is NOT tied to MSQ specifically is so good that it redeems this expansion as worthwhile. All 4 stars are to those things alone, and the missing 5th star is how much of a tragedy this MSQ was.

I cannot imagine why anyone loves this story, genuinely, especially when it does EVERYTHING wrong that Stormblood did (which is disliked amongst many people who enjoy EW). EW is just Stormblood 2, and yet everyone acts as if this is the pinnacle of storytelling XIV has to offer. With my ShB review I mentioned how I went in expecting an 8 and was given something far beyond a 10. How my expectations were outperformed. Endwalker was something I expected to be on the level of Heavensward. Yes, a downgrade from ShB I had expected, but yet again my expectations were so undershot that I wound up shocked. This was a worse MSQ experience than Stormblood ever could hope to be. Not even ARR's postpatch left me more bored, jaded, disappointed, and discontent with it's direction like Endwalker did for me. SOMEONE in Square Enix needs to be demoted. This was made on purpose and greenlit with the intent to sell "as is." This was the intended product. It was meant to be this pile of garbage writing. And it was given the okay. Someone needs to be fucking kept away from that decision somewhere in the chain of command, because holy hell.

TL;DR - Endwalker is shortened to "EW" and it couldn't be more fitting for its MSQ. It is written the same way a CW show is written. At least Zenos became a character finally.... at the literal end. Meteion is NOT a real character by the way, I am begging the audience here to start watching some Kino, start studying literary devices in the Greek, Roman, and Victorian eras, and maybe... just maybe..... healers adjust. If ShB was Square Enix's MGS2, EW is Square Enix's MGSV.