Stormblood thoughts

Alrighty, so been a little while since I made one of these on FFXIV - I think the last one I covered was through base Heavensward so I guess it’s time to go over Heavensward through base Stormblood.

So the structure of post HW content is very strange to me - honestly, the base story barely feels finished in HW until after the final stuff with Nidhogg dies and while, yes, they clearly had plans for the post content, I feel like in a theoretical world, the base game probably ends on the fight against Nidhogg on the bridge but I guess they probably didn’t have enough time to finish before they hit their deadline. Honestly, that’s probably one of the better things about the release schedule - I’d imagine they’re much more able to ship with missing story content with the intent to finish it later.

As an aside, I like how I literally went “yep, throwing the eyes off the bridge didn’t do shit” and sure enough, yep, they come up literally a few patches later.

The post HW story was pretty solid. I think the Nidhogg stuff wasn’t the most exciting other than that Estinien is still great but although the Warrior of Darkness arc was short, I think it did a lot well. I appreciated them adding Alisae back into the main party, given that she makes a great contrast with her brother, while just being an all around great character in her own right. Even the concept of her using a sword as a final “I am not my brother” so they can change her class from Arcanist to Red Mage honestly works super well as a moment that was built to extremely well, even from ARR. This is probably the best trend the game’s managed, which we’ll get to more of with Stormblood but it genuinely feels like they realized that while ARR was extremely bloated in characters, the characters inside weren’t necessarily irredeemable, but just needed time to breathe - hence the paring down of the Scions to literally being just Alphinaud and Tataru, slowly expanding as they went. I think it was the story decision that actually basically made the writing go from “okay” to “wow, I really like these characters now”.

The Warrior of Darkness stuff was pretty solid although I feel like it ended too soon. That probably means it’s coming back but if there’s anything they’ve gotten better with over time, it’s villains - ARR’s villains basically didn’t exist, HW’s were better but still not great and I’d call the Warriors of Darkness the first great villains in the game.

I guess before getting into the very end with the setup into Stormblood and such, this is probably a good point to mention I took like a month long break from playing the game, in part because the game just stopped running well on my PC. I’d average about 45 FPS which is like… it’s enough to be playable but not enough to not be a kinda miserable experience that takes you out of the game. So I figured that with the game back on sale and getting 30 days of playtime with it, I’d pick it up on PS4 and play there instead. HOLY SHIT what a difference.

It took a good week or so to adjust to playing on pad (while you can do KBM, I don’t want to move my setup back and forth) and there’s a lot of weird technical stuff that was really annoying (having to completely rebuild the layout was annoying, as was the fact that by default the pad controls don’t really give you everything they should - RL and LR don’t work by default, neither does RR and LL and even then, the default there is to set 8, not set 2. Also targeting takes a LOT of practice, especially on healing, although admittedly, temporary targeting is soooooo nice as someone that mains WHM. In general, I’m pretty impressed - I’m probably better with maybe 30 hours on pad than I was with 200 on KBM. I’m sure at the absolute highest level, it’s better to play KBM but I was basically plateauing there anyway, and didn’t really feel like pushing it further.

Anyway - Stormblood - is extremely interesting. While ARR and HW 100% have Alphinaud as the “protagonist” (the character you’d play as if it was a normal FF), Stormblood basically says “yeah, screw that, Lyse is the protagonist now”. And if you’d said in the middle of ARR that Yda was actually going to be one of the best characters in the game, I’d have laughed at you. But somehow… it works? Making Yshtola go back to the background and even reducing Alphinaud’s role shouldn’t work… but it does. Lyse is great (major props to her VA, she killed it), and I’d say it’s much, much better than anything before it.

As an aside, Sadu and the rest of the nomad tribes are metal as fuck. I’m not really convinced they’d fight for Doma but they kick ass anyway.

That said, it’s not even because the protagonists are great. This is the first expansion to focus on legitimately great villains. Fordola and Yotsuya are by far the best villains the game has focused on so far - they feel like nuanced, interesting characters. I don’t really think Yotsuya should be alive anymore - the game’s weird refusal to let anyone die is rivaling George of the Jungle at this point. Like, I liked Gosetsu and her as much as anyone but like… their arcs are over. Gosetsu’s in particular, I feel like loses something because he survives. It just feels like there’s a lack of consequences for a lot of characters at this point.


All in all, I’m glad I stuck with it, I’ll probably be through Shadowbringers in a few weeks.

As far as the dungeons go - I’m surprised at how few mandatory ones there were. I think it was something like 4 or 5 dungeons and 3 trials? I’m starting to come around a bit on trials - leveling a Machinist on the side shows that they’re not *that* bad when it’s not “survive or the party wipes” (I’m sorry, a 7 second channel to use Phoenix Downs in combat would not break the game Square) and while sometimes the more obtuse mechanics just make them kinda unfun to play (and having people leave if a Trial roulette hits extreme is such terrible design. It’s so unfun to wait 10+ min for a queue pop only for someone to leave as soon as it starts because they expect the trial to take 30 min. I dunno what the solution is but there has to be a better way to handle it.

The dungeons themselves are still great. No major complaints.

The only other complaint I’m starting to have is that I feel great… as a level 50 anything. Because you do so many dungeons at a lower level, it actually feels weird to be playing at your current level. I don’t know what the solution is. Nerfing damage and making higher level players play as level 80 characters but only doing level 16 or 50 damage is… not good. Like you want to feel rewarded for playing the more complicated version of the class but learning and practicing is not really easy when the game doesn’t give you a ton of avenues to do so?


All in all, enjoying it a lot more on PS4, see you guys either at the start of Shadowbringers or at the end of Shadowbringers.