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08-11-2024, 10:26 AM
StealthPaladin
Yet another review. Spoiler: Sold me happy and new, gave me depressing broken record.
Since you can already tell I am not too pleased with my purchase this expansion -- the first time ever for me in a mainline Final Fantasy -- I'll start off with what I liked.
Graphics: wonderful
Battle mechanics: huge improvement, very fun
Landscapes: cool, varied, interesting, beautiful
Themes: mmm I'm not a huge fan of so closely mirroring Mayan/Incan legends and real world lore but it was well done. The FF9 theme.. have to save that part for later
vocals: amazingly well doneOn it's own as some random freemium MMO, I wouldn't have anything to complain about but I wouldn't pay more than $20 on lifetime premiums before moving on either.
First of all I'm going to be brutally honest, knowing that many will be too scared to voice this opinion, but Square, there is a line between catgirl and furry and you done crossed it and she had no other redeeming qualities. Now for a few sure great, do your thing not trying to stop ya but I mean lets be real the appeal is not broad. Wuk Lamat is perhaps the worst character ever conceived not just in appearance but in a complete lack of substance.
Yet that lack of substance is not to blame on character design, but holistically exists to the entire franchise lately. You can't be friends with everyone. You can't just constantly nonstop re-use this pattern:
- We're the "good guys" we don't believe in fighting
- We're going to unite the tribes!
- Anyone standing in our way is gonna die
- Yey bad guys are all converted or dead! Let's dance
- By the way, everyone interesting is going to die to give the story weight, because we have no real stakes.shut up. seriously stop it. this is not story telling. this is lazy.
this is most definitely NOT NEW. and NOT happy go lucky. after the llamas, which had some funny moments, everything was just constantly shoving down your throat how you are the arbiters of what is natural and not, and boy everyone is gonna die - in fact YOU go be the one to genocide them WoLgreat. great. fun times???? wut????
oh cause it's some rabbit's wish. guess what I don't care about her dumb wish.This is supposed to be a fantasy game not a constant lecture in entropy. I thought Endwalker was well done but not if you can't let go of that constant freaking nihilism. It wasn't enough to destroy the stories like this, but it's been creeping more and more and more into every FF release since ff10. Good grief! get over yourself whoever has a crush on the heat death of the universe. get a room already. We have reality for that crap. This world is for us to feel like epic, adventuring, fate destroying legends. Fantasy. Escapism.
Hear, Think and Feel what I'm saying cause you are losing the plot and pandering to a loud 2% of your player base. I rarely speak up but when I do, you can bet your butts that if you A/B test my mentality vs lets make bahamut a ... well never mind just you will make more money, better stories and happier fans.
08-11-2024, 10:27 AM
StealthPaladin
If you started out saying to yourself the game will definitely..
- not let me explore beyond the story
- act like deep bonds exist between ppl who just met
- put those bonds ahead of family ties and decades long rivals
- make 1 dimensional NPCs that you can easily forget next expansion filling every town
- make a huge deal out of collecting random garbage
- acknowledge that you're the WoL and could solve things instantly, but let 1000 ppl die anywaythen you would be 100% correct in every situation
oh but the WoL wouldn't just step in and assert an actual moral value or put down the obvious evil plot. that would be taking the offensive!
what would the world think if our 500th girl boss actually had a reason to affirmatively take action beyond lets all hug?get out of here with that nonsense. it is so fake and lame and that doesn't even matter because worse, you've already played that hand EVERY EXPANSION. I thought this was supposed to be new but it was just the same exact formula with new game assets lol.
how predictable everything was.
Bakool Ja Ja being half dead, then full dead. Surely you were foreshadowing on purpose but that's like hours and hours of wasted potential. poof. Should have had him wake his butt up and fight you properly at least once, and really get to know them more after the succession. But no, gotta make Wuk Lamat ruler real quick so she can be under pressure so of course blue boy just manages to cheap shot him. not like I got 50 healing spells ready to go or anything. oh the cut is just too deep golly.shut up.
shut UP.you really can't make anything of value that isn't standing on the 1.0 game world can you? it is sad to see and I hate being this blunt but I am actually insulted that you charged me this much for this absolute crap. you are better engineers and game designers than the 1.0 team but you have no vision at all and no idea what fun means.
hint: it never means neutral and balanced. that is the opposite of fun.
you have some kind of sick addiction to it.and where, pray tell, do we get off judging the Alexandrians?
the amount of weight the line "that's not ordinary resurrection magic" is carrying -- just amazing. how many times have we died, respawned and fought through encounters thanks to the echo, even in the story?and why couldn't you just ... do a proper crossover? ugh I can't even at this point. the whole this is just hamfisted and lazy. which is terrible for all the work some people obviously put in to the quality of delivering such a lazy story with a fetish for dark endings.
worst of all, you had all the cards to play for a great time but you just held on to your formulaic rules so tight that all creativity possible is gone, all depth is gone and I found myself actively wishing I could play against the party because you basically made us evil. guess i'm team zodiark now. smh.
08-11-2024, 10:28 AM
StealthPaladin
last -- the music
what even was that? some of the map music is good..but the main theme.. what is even going on ??! did you hire actual alley cats to sing it off pitch on purpose?can anyone tell half of what they are saying??
maybe that's a translation issue..idk... i found it very bizarre
08-11-2024, 02:31 PM
ConantSivrha
Of course female hrothgar are furries. What were you expecting? A taller miqo’te with a new shape of cat ears?
That aside, I agree that XIV’s story has become a “depressing broken record”.
We’ve ended up with this strange and seemingly unintentional juxtaposition: struggling, suffering, sacrificing, killing, and dying for a better future—a future where, you would assume, there will be less need for people to struggle, suffer, sacrifice, kill, and die—is presented as a good and noble thing, but any society that manages to distance itself “too much” from those things (pain, conflict, death, etc) is presented as unnatural, indolent, and a cancer that will doom itself/the world/the universe if it isn’t destroyed. Unless the intended lesson is “pain and death, in and of themselves, are the source of virtue and meaning”, I can’t tell what they’re trying to say.
08-11-2024, 02:47 PM
Cleretic
None. None times.Quote:
Originally Posted by StealthPaladin
and where, pray tell, do we get off judging the Alexandrians?
the amount of weight the line "that's not ordinary resurrection magic" is carrying -- just amazing. how many times have we died, respawned and fought through encounters thanks to the echo, even in the story?You can go ahead and shout your opinions from the rooftops, but you're in the lore subforum, so I'm gonna hit you with that. We have never come back from the dead. That's not what the Echo does, that's not what healer rez spells do. We've bounced back from nearly dying a fair handful of times just in the MSQ, but at no point where we in a stage where we could medically be called dead. Nor has anyone else we've 'revived', although a few of them got into some real rough situations.
That is the divide between our healer spells and regulators: regulators fix death. And while at the time in the throne room that was was a 'whoa what just happened' moment, we later learned that the way it does this is really, really bad. Which itself isn't tremendously surprising; this game has always been anti-necromancy in all its forms, it may well be the most concrete and unchanging moral stance the game ever takes, so you can't be that surprised when a new form of raising the dead turns out to be something we have to stop.
08-12-2024, 10:50 AM
StealthPaladin
Our whole entire timeline died before we unnaturally broke it with crystal tower hijinks
The way regulators work, that's purely the writer's choice to throw so much plot at them that it was intractable
How easily they could have just drawn from the excess lightning energy.. they even had a whole plot point around the material the regulator is made from
but no.. gotta use souls. for reasons. that way we have to stop them...
of course.. then again we're only denser thanks to rejoining so many souls.. hmmAlso https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZoF3rCupJs yea Hydaelyn revives the WoL vs lahabread
and we brought yshtola back from being a aetherial sea ghost lady
and Zero is basically an unzombie...so yea.
there was no reason to go all dark with ff9's auto-life
and have the backbone to actually have the real characters. why are they making up new throw aways when they have the license to such a rich world? it is crazy. absolutely crazy.heck even stay within ff14 cast and make it somehow about minfilia or something...
so many missed opportunities to do cool narratives replaces by
- walk here and click
- walk there and click
- become the arbiter of death and click
- stand there and do nothing while obvious bad things unfold around you, and click08-12-2024, 11:11 AM
StealthPaladin
I mean idk lol something just snapped in me this time like.. I have never in over 30 years of loving this franchise had an experience so bad that I actually didn't enjoy it. until now. Which I mean, that includes all the previous female leads but dang we are over saturated bad lol.. I mean cmoooon it is just so immersion breaking at this point.Quote:
Originally Posted by ConantSivrha
Of course female hrothgar are furries. What were you expecting? A taller miqo’te with a new shape of cat ears?
I feel like I'm watching a Liftetime movie every time Wuk Lamat speaks - and really a lot of the story even not focused around her feels the same. Lots of self-inserts going on and 1 dimensional thinking. Really would have liked to get to know her dad better but she aint no leader and no amount of development is turning her into one. It's all plot armor. In real life her ideals would get squashed in two seconds.
The way Bakool Ja Ja actually had inner conflict, an ornery streak, dad jokes, "good ol days" warrior nostalgia and knew there were good and bad sides to both the conqueror and the pacifist, that was the most interesting thing in the whole plot imo. but it got barely a look. yoshi p even said that it took them by surprised he was popular, yet what are we doing but running around in his footsteps?
How cool it could have been if we were joining at the time of that first conquest instead. It still would have been more unite the tribe story which is their only play apparently... but at least it would have been cool and not a bunch of spoiled rich kids crying about their feelings.
Though that voice actress is on point, I will give them that.
At this point I wish they would use a regulator to bring back Minfillia and have her do that voice instead though.08-12-2024, 01:38 PM
Cleretic
None of those examples are death. Some of them are very weird, but they aren't death, and the story underlines why they're not. Also, your 'evidence' for the fight against Lahabrea is someone's video title; it's exactly as not-death as everything else, that is not some kind of extra proof.Quote:
Originally Posted by StealthPaladin
Our whole entire timeline died before we unnaturally broke it with crystal tower hijinks
The way regulators work, that's purely the writer's choice to throw so much plot at them that it was intractable
How easily they could have just drawn from the excess lightning energy.. they even had a whole plot point around the material the regulator is made from
but no.. gotta use souls. for reasons. that way we have to stop them...
of course.. then again we're only denser thanks to rejoining so many souls.. hmmAlso https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZoF3rCupJs yea Hydaelyn revives the WoL vs lahabread
and we brought yshtola back from being a aetherial sea ghost lady
and Zero is basically an unzombie...so yea.
What, did you want a society to have just cheated death, and for us to respond with 'cool!' and the story about that element to have absolute no moral conflict or weight?
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