To me it was FF14’s version of Wrath, I don’t get why everyone hated it so much, the story with Zenos etc was fantastic.
Yet the community seemed to despise the expansion and liked Shadowbringers much better, why was this?
It had a MoP feeling to it because of its heavy Asian theme focus. Some folks don’t like that. It isn’t my favorite expansion, as aside from some job homogenization, Shadowbringers is flat out the best expansion to any MMO I’ve ever played. Legion is #2.
I actually enjoyed the dungeons a lot compared to Heavensward, and job design was pretty decent.
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Also compared to Shadowbringers, it just feels less epic.
Stormblood does have a good story, but it feels more like a filler arc than Shadowbrjngers, which tackles the main story of the entire game related to the warrior of light and our origins.
Mostly because it wasn’t Heavensward, from what I can gather. And is now sandwiched between that and the much-adored Shadowbringers.
I didn’t fully experience Stormblood’s class gameplay while it was still current, joined late in the final patch and only on a trial account. But as far as story, visuals, content, and new features are concerned, I personally think it’s a bit underrated. Even if the narrative isn’t as focused as Heavensward’s, I still liked it. And Zenos is a solid villain.
Stormblood was like MoP for me. Some streamlining, but not too much, and I slightly preferred it over Shadowbringers overall. (Heck, small improvements to tank gameplay, a bit more polish on Monk, having not taken Bard and Machinist in the direction of homogeneity, and a less short-sighted release of Eureka in terms of its systems would have made it an easy top expansion for me.)
Heavensward was the nearest Wrath (or BC) equivalent. The good was still going at full steam, even if the occasional lack of polish was evident (Wanderer’s Minuet, original Fang and Claw / Wheeling Thrust).
Also, RIP late-Stormblood Monk. You are solely missed.
I just finished Stormblood MSQ and it was epic. As a dragoon main though I do like HW more.
The only thing I felt underwhelming was the final stretch of stormblood. The ending was more muted compared to heavensward battle with nidhogg etc. Overall still a solid story etc.
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I wonder why that could be…
…and which expansion Samurai mains liked best… Hmm.
Having played WoD, it makes me laugh to no end to hear FF people call Stormblood a trash expansion. I guess ignorance is bliss…
Stormblood was great, its “crime” was that it wasn’t as good as Heavensward and Shadowbringers, but it was better than both in some ways. (It had a far better alliance raid series for example.)
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I think the dungeons in that expansion were pretty fun. I also liked that iteration of DRK much better.
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Compared to Heavansward and Shadowbringers, Stormblood’s story was…a bit heavier.
It Dealt mosty with the harsh reality of how War and Imperialism effects colonies and what that can do to the people living in them. While no Final Fantasy XIV story doesn’t deal with Politics in some form. Stormblood is where the uglier side of it came to manifest.
However, I feel the real culprit is that In the Post-Stormblood Arc from x.1-x.3, Natsuko Ishikawa wasn’t involved in any of the Far-East stuff when she wrote all the Far-East content In the Base Stormblood story. Which is more than likely why Certain characters were (mis)handled how they were.
And that’s not to even consider the opening character Reveal about Yda-we just got reunited with her and then turns out we never even met the real Yda the entire time, and then the character she became didn’t really strike a chord with most people.
This is a contrast to Heavansward where the Cast were almost universally beloved, and some of the most infamous gut wrenchers that the game still loves milking for that emotional Shot. Stormblood by comparison feels sort of like “oh right, Doma and Ala Mhigo need their thing I guess”
Which, given Japan, means we mostly spend time in the Far East and Ala Mhigo kind of gets thrown in. It definitely drew the short straw with the Dual setting premise.
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Honestly, it felt like both sides were equally short-changed or drawn thin.
Lyse never really being fleshed out (at least, as a particularly interesting character) was a disappointment, though I didn’t mind that she wasn’t Yda. In some ways, her earlier personality made more sense under that context, even if added a bit more convolution than it did enjoyable depth.
What caught me most, though, was the flagrant disregard for scale, whereby the lore stresses some point, but the map design makes that quite implausible.
Take the Azim Steppe for instance. There is no way the population could be as large as stated or so warring and yet have so few members in such close proximity without significant defensive advantages among each tribe’s holdings, which would still conflict with their allegedly semi-nomadic lifestyles.
Or take Doma as example. How does a significant nation, capable of producing so large a castle, have a grand total of three small villages sourcing it? The map doesn’t have to show us the whole nation, of course, but it should at least make some implication—through its map space and surrounds and concrete outside elements through contextualized dialogue, the world map, cutscenes, etc.—as to its true expanse.
And then somehow the capital of Ala Mhigo, a city that allegedly never grew to be that much larger than Ul’dah, has the square feet of nearly all of Thanalan combined if accounting for the city’s underlayers and multi-story buildings?
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I think when it comes to scale we all have to allow for artistic liberty.
For example if you look at WoW, there’s no way based on residential real estate size that there would even BE armies.
Stormwind itself appears to be the size of a town only. To support the size of the armies we see, SW and the various capitals would have to be about 10-20x the size.
FF14 does a better job at this as the cities are huge, and they actually have canon residential districts. So I give them some latitude when it comes to stuff like that.
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The Ivalice Zodiac Brave Story is indeed awesome. The set armor there is also very nice as well.
Both Doma and Ala Mhigo has far larger region and more provinces than what we explored. It is implied in both when it is said that other provinces and cities in their respective regions will know of the liberation of their capital and will slowly rise up etc.
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Yeah I feel they actively don’t show everything in a given area on top of the usual beleif suspension , and accounting for Gameplay.
All in alkl its’ stuff that only particular people will either Notice or care about, or even bother to interrogate.
It’s like, you don’t watch Shonen Anime expecting Sword Fights to play out like HEMA. I don’t expect my fantasy worlds to have a model scale of things down to the Ilm and Malm.
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People don’t generally hate Stormblood, it just wasn’t as good as Heavensward, and Shadowbringers is amazing because it’s better than Heavensward.
Stormblood was still an amazing expansion. Just HW and ShB is better.
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We do, but at the same time, we already know that Stormwind was once far larger, was almost entirely burned to the ground, and rebuilt later on as a sort of monument to the original in a land that was by then mostly depopulated of humans. And its scale makes sense in the newly (and barely) repopulated state of Redridge, Elwynn, Westfall, and Duskwood.
Tbf, that’s kind of what does them in when there is something later that so massively conflicts in scale, though. If most of the time X is done right, it’s a lot more noticeable when X is suddenly done horribly wrong. Not to say that they should have played fast and loose from the start, only that they should keep in mind that the rest had thus far been more grounded.
There’s a large difference between expecting proper choreography and just showing borders on a map for a place called Doma, from which we can clearly tell we’ve explored only a small part, or naming that explored part, say, Outer Doma, as not to imply it’s the full deal. Instead, the cutscenes and map all do the opposite, implying through every way but the impossibility of the nation’s size that, yes, what we see is almost entirely all there is.
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