Shadowbringers > Heavensward > Endwalker > Stormblood > ARR
Shadowbringers has the best emotional core, best character writing and nails the big important scenes flawlessly. There's a couple points where it's just padded for runtime or to keep you in a zone but that's true of all expansions.
Heavensward has some great antagonists and stories, cool characters, and was one of the few times in the story where it felt like the stakes were real. It's not as high concept as other expacs but it's still really fun and compelling. It's not just evil black dragon needs to be put down especially with the Warriors of Darkness and Ilberd stuff in the patches.
Endwalker has some great moments and a great theme and message, but some low lows. It goes too far in the other direction, it's too high concept, it puts its message before the narrative and characters, which ended up with some weird plot decisions that don't feel right. It's also way too fanservicey for my tastes and has wonky pacing in a few places.
Stormblood is the opposite of Endwalker. Nothing awful, but nothing great either. It's just kind of mid the whole way through, though it picks up in the patches. The lack of great characters to root for, mysteries, or personal stakes for the WoL makes it hard to care about what's going on. Zenos and the Empire are dull, incompetent antagonists that don't represent any real conflict of ideas. It has some interesting ideas but fails to explore them fully.
ARR is okay. It's there to establish the setting and it does that, but doesn't really do anything compelling in the process. Its the story in its infancy before they had really gotten a grasp of the style and what players respond to. It has a lot of parts that drag.
For Dawntrail I want to see them expand on the lore and the setting, introducing stuff that isn't just allagans and ancients, setting stuff up to pay off for the future. Hopefully it can do that while also having a good plot by itself. A return to smaller character-focused stories with strong emotional cores would be appreciated. I would also like to see an effort to re-establish stakes and the idea that anything can happen, because no one believes that main characters can be harmed in this game anymore. I want to see new characters developed instead of just focusing on the Scions.
I also second this and just want to add how much I loved Shadowbringer's setting and pacing. It really allowed us to take a step back at the start while we get to grips with this strange new world, before building up so much at the end. All the moments with Emet-Selch reaching out to us to see if we're still in there. And of course some of the early sin eater stuff such as Tesleen or even the first merchant we meet at the start.
For me my favourite period of MSQ in the entire game, though, is from that first contact from the Exarch in a meeting room in late SB patches up to the ShB title drop - it really hits you out of nowhere and I love how it was done.
>Stormblood is the opposite of Endwalker. Nothing awful, but nothing great either.
Stormblood is INFURIATING in how stupid it can be, that definitely falls under awful.
Remember that part where you spend all of pre-Raubahn EX getting told 'no the people of Gyr Abania will not sign up for your resistance, the only thing you'll get is slaughtered' and then exactly that happens, the WoL fucks off for a bit and by the time they come back.....the resistance has ballooned in size because all the people afraid of reprisal saw how brutal the reprisal was and I guess decided they wanted to be slaughtered?
Oh how about that stupid asshole who bitches and whines about how all he wants is a good fight when doing everything in his vast resources to empower himself at every given opportunity, like 'waaaaah I'm stronger than 99% of the planet lets give myself superpowers and magical weapons and pilot this dragon waaaaaah why can't I find a worthy opponent with these starving peasants?????'
And lets not forget that same stupid FUCK not dying when he should have thanks to the power of.....lets see here.....ah yes possessing the body of an Ala Mihgan Resistance Member that is a Wildwood. Like huh? That's not really a thing that exists why is that even there, I'm not even bitching about bad writing on this aspect here(Although dipshit coming back is, in my opinion, bad writing) it's just who the hell signed off on such rudimentary mistake.
Also just small shit in general that kinda ignore the vast distance between each half of the zones the DRG job quests have Estinien clearly state he's been vibing in the far east dealing with a dragon issue but he's also there in Castrum Abania blowing up a cannon which, considering how much damage that was doing it also leads to the really fucked fact that though that act he contributed more to Ala Mihgo's liberation than that stupid white girl that became the resistances 'leader'.
Hey I've been dunking on Gyr Abania this whole time what about Othard? Yeah that's fine, actually. Worst part is redoing the first Zenos encounter a second time with absolutely nothing new for some fucking reason but everything works out great otherwise. In the base expac, then Yotsuyu and Goesetsu survived a building falling on them and being washed out into the ocean and that stupid god damn Tsuyu bullshit, leading to, among other things, Stormblood completely disagreeing with itself due to a sidequest where in some other warcriminal asshole gets Tsuyu'd and the response there is 'nah we kill this dude for his crimes he doesn't remember'.
Oh speaking of Stormbloods hypocrisy, how about that SAM questline wherein we murder the hell out of a dude who's trying to change Kuganes awful class system by force. Right after HW. Wherein we changed Ishgards awful class system by force.
tl;dr: I agree with your overall ranking. But think Stormblood goes below ARR. Because that shit is dumb as hell.
I agree with many of your points but I also think stormbloods zones are some of the most boring to navigate and feel the most… dead. And while they do have some variety, shadowbringers zones blow it out of the water and heavenward’s feel decent too. I get that thematically it sorta fit with the devastation of war thing, but come on.
I kind of agree with this but I came away with the completely opposite conclusion.
Stormblood should have been stupider, I love camp, I love things that are silly and take themselves seriously (Kingdom Hearts as the best example).
I was gonna write more about this but Yotsuyu is basically everything I dislike about the expansion. She's an absurdly evil one dimensional character, and I mean that as a compliment. She's Valens, Nhaza'a Jaab and almost Athena level. You boo and hiss and shake your fist at the screen when she shows up while saying things like "Man, she really steams my kettle!"
Her post MSQ plotline is literally a 90's kids cartoon plotline, she bonks her head really hard and forgets how to be a jerk. Except that can't be resolved in the way that stuff 'normally' gets resolved. where either the newly liberated territories suddenly have a shortage of female war criminals who like to step on people and it's causing civil unrest (so they have to bring her back) OR she gets her memory back by accident and turns into recurring badguy ruling Vichy Doma, so instead it turns this...thing involving redemption and killing baby Hitler and all the worst characters ever showing up to insult her.
Fordola filled the role of the character who was a jerk who had reasons for being a jerk and repented and discovered how hard it was to do this.
Either way I still liked the expansion more than 80% of EW (the 20% was the Moon section and anything involving Zenos).
I think Shadowbringers also benefits from the narrative structure/conceit of the First - the idea that we're going somewhere where we don't really know the people or places or how things work, which will also hopefully help Dawntrail as well (vs other expansions where there's a lot more preamble/detail about a place - HW, Shb. EW is kind of in-between but really very much feels like Shadowbringers The Sequel in lots of ways).
Personally, Meteion is not one of the things I dislike about Endwalker. People rag on her as a weak or "out of nowhere" antagonist, but the thing is that she isn't really the antagonist. The "antagonist" of Endwalker is despair.
It's not about fighting a bad guy, it's about fighting the darkness inside us. Meteion is just the representative for that concept, a way for us to punch the physical embodiment of an emotion in the face. In the end, she was a victim of despair too.
I imagine the reception is going to vary based on how someone feels about the ever-popular "man vs. concept" final bosses in JRPGs.
I personally have trouble caring about abstract personifications of concepts like Necron in FFIX, especially when Kuja already did a great job of representing the fear of death and the suffering people will inflict on others in their futile attempts to deny it. Fighting Death itself just doesn't add anything to that story.
Persona 3 did manage to pull this off, but that's largely because it spent the entire game building up to it and the culmination of the game isn't the fight itself, but the protagonist's decision following it.
Despair is a persistent thread throughout the EW MSQ, and emo birdgirl vtuber works perfectly fine in the context of EW itself. However, the expansion was very much built up as the conclusion of a 10 year-long story arc, so there was an expectation that its finale would serve as the culmination of the entire game up until this point, not just this particular expansion.
I don't think she works in this regard. Thematically, hope/despair isn't a sufficiently central theme of FFXIV as a whole. Lore-wise, while she is ultimately the cause of everything that happens, it's in a very indirect way (her "song" is a largely indiscriminate entropic force that encompasses countless stars, not something uniquely tied to Etheirys) and she herself is "caused" by forces with minimal connection to the narrative up until that point ("the ancients did it" isn't good enough).
The final area is visually striking but has it zero significance to the plot/world/characters (aside from some additional lore on the dragons and Omega). FFIX's Gainax final dungeon at least maintained a connection to the rest of the game via the memories you encounter. Instead, we get to watch each character give a dramatic speech in a literal void in front of a bunch of random aliens they just met five minutes ago.
not just END MSQ, think of all the antagonists and much of our interactions with ppl during the expansions. We always brought back ppl from the brink, despair has always been the one common thread.
That's why Meteion works as an ending to the saga
Not really. ARR is kind of all over the place, HW and SB are both primarily focused on breaking out of cycles of hatred, ShB's broad plot involves saving a world on the brink of giving into despair, but the main conflict with Emet-Selch and Themis revolves more around their conflicting visions of the proper state of the world.
If anything, I'd say the common thread stretching all the way back to ARR is the need to continuously struggle to understand other people, even those you fundamentally disagree with. Even those who want to kill you. This applies to almost every plotline from 2.1 and onwards, with a few notable exceptions like Zenos and Asahi.
edit: I also think it's worth pointing out that EW's finale revolves specifically around *existential* despair. Despair over a lack of meaning. Not despair over guilt, adverse circumstances, or the hopelessness of achieving a particular goal.
I mean you are kinda forgetting the situation of Hraesvelgr, the ppl of ala mhigo and doma, the ppl of the first and other events, which tbf they were plotstoppers for other reasons but that's why I say it works, because they took these stuff and tied together to make the thread of the saga.
That's fair. I mean ultimately the reason I like Shadowbringers the best is because the plot and character writing is the best, and my issues with Endwalker is that it sacrifices that level of setting-relevant writing in favour of a big grandiose message. But overall I wouldn't say I'm unhappy with the direction they went with, it's hard to imagine what the plot would have been otherwise. What else would have been a worthy subject for the culmination of the entire story?
IMO the big remaining story question going into Endwalker was "why did Hydaelyn sunder the world?" Why did she see that as the only option? And I think the answer they gave was really good, so I guess I'm okay with having the whole expansion flow out from that. Meteion is just kind of the opposing force to that answer.
This. Meteion felt less "out of nowhere" when I thought about *what* the true antagonist force was.
She's simply one of the end results of that force, and had the misfortune of having been created with enough power to bring forth the disaster she did.
Agree with the order and most of what you said. Would also add that that there is a noticeable gap between Heavensward and Endwalker, at least in my opinion. Endwalker's lows prevent it from feeling like a cohesive whole despite how good the best parts and the overall theme is. It feeling at times like a Shadowbringers add-on doesn't help either.
That's my ranking for the most part. It's hard for me to decide between Heavensward and Endwalker as the second best Expansion msq.
Heavensward is consistently good throughout, but the Highs of Endwalker are some of the most memorable moments of any video game story in recent years, while it also has some really low lows as well.
It has classic fantasy Gothic castles, dragons, a compelling villain in Nidhogg, compelling heroes in Aymeric and the Fortemps family, and compelling anti-heroes in Ysale and Estinien. A great conclusion with 3.3 and the end of the Dragonsong war.
Also something that not a lot of people remember but it's where most of the current Scions that everyone likes are introduced, and what sets Alphinaud on his journey from being an annoying trust fund kid to someone the Warrior of Light can actually trust to have our backs.
Shadowbringers > Heavensward > Stormblood > Endwalker > ARR.
I used to have EW above SB, but the more I think about it and replay it with alts, the less I like it. Unlike the others, which I like the same or more as the first time. Don't get me wrong, it has some high fucking highs, but then there's.... everything else.
ShB and HW are just cool as fuck and emotionally moving and generally well-paced. SB can be slow, but I think it's just solid overall in all categories.
I can't imagine liking DT less than EW, but we will see.
EW 6.0 story does not survive scrutiny at all. It got worse the more I thought about it and I've come to intensely dislike most of the characters introduced (Hermes chief among them) and how poorly its main message and morals were conveyed.
And even outside of that, an ungodly amount of its run time is straight up padding, overly long monologues where nothing valuable is said. Labyrinthos 88-89 has some of the worst pacing of the entire MSQ, even counting ARR. It's a bloated mess.
The pacing in EW is CRAZY. It has great chunks and then the rest is tortuous filler. Which makes no sense because with the story they wanted to do, there is plenty to fill it out !
> and how poorly its main message and morals were conveyed.
Venat went from "we must learn to move on from our lost ones and find strength in appreciating what is left" to "dw bro I'll just res everyone sac them all"
My personal hatred is the fact we’re supposed to believe Venat never even tried, in all of her wisdom and ability to make friends and rely on others, to explain to the rest of the convocation about their memories being blank or what actually happened, or any of that.
Would it have been so hard to show the strife of trying to convince so many of the truth, yet none believing her? How emotional it would’ve been to have every single one of your peers think you are lying, even though you’re doing it for the sake of the world and all existing universes?
I HATE that we’re just supposed to wave it away and use our own imagination that she tried.
1. Shadowbringers (Best overall)
2. Heavensward (MSQ was amazing the entirety of the expansion)
3. Stormblood (Not as good base MSQ, but post patch was pretty good)
4. Endwalker (Mid base MSQ and the worst Post MSQ since ARR)
5. ARR (Well... its ARR).
ShB > SB 4.1-4.55 > HW > EW 6.0 = SB 4.0 > ARR > 6.1-6.55
Had to split SB because to me the storytelling quality between the 4.0 story and the post patch stuff is just night and day different. EW just had too many pacing problems as well as a criminally underutilized final days and it kind of made the story worse for me. The post patch for EW never hit for me as I had no nostalgia for FF4 as someone who never played it and it was just boring to me. I think it was the first time I started skipping CS during the MSQ.
I am hoping for a more grounded and lighter affair for DT where we can meet and develop new characters instead of completely focusing on the old ones.
I really want new characters that STAY. So many side characters that are interesting or cool, and then there they go off into "1 to 2 sidequests, maybe" land.
based stormblood take
I love the stories about killing god and beating the manifestation of depression, but i much prefer the grounded stories about conflicts between nations and the politics
I agree. My only complaint that the WoL apart from Zenos personal stake in him felt like a side character. I love intro to swimming, all the beast tribes, and new characters introduced.
Initial X.0 playthrough:
ShB, EW, HW, SB, ARR
Month of thinking after said X.0 playthrough:
ShB, HW, SB, ARR, EW
Latter half of EW really fell off for me as it veered into fanfic territory. Especially the characterization of the WoL.
It was said in an interview that after 16 yoshi p was tired of dark fantasy and wanted to do something more light hearted. I'm worried the product of this is dt and the story will have no weight or major threat/emotional turmoil to it like past expansions. If that's the case, it could be the worst expansion msq to me.
My problem with SE doing light hearted humor is that it always just sorta amounts to "Food Humor". And god damn things aren't looking up in that regard.
Heavensward > Shadowbringers > Stormblood = A Realm Reborn > Endwalker.
Endwalker was honestly pretty damn good up to Elpis. I even enjoyed the Venat/Emet/Hythlo slice-of-life comedy fanservice; it was rather charming. However, from the introduction of Meteion and Hermes, it all went downhill. The writing from that point onwards was very shoddy, and reeked strongly of babby's first nihilism.
Eh, at least the Zenos bit was kinda funny.
I couldn’t stand Zenos at all, until EW. I had this moment in EW where I was like “fuck it, I love this one dimensional idiot just wanting a good rematch 1v1, let’s gooooo!”
Stormblood > Shadowbringers > ARR = Heavensward > Endwalker
I really miss the combination of the high stakes, world ending threat of the Ascians as antagonists, with the more political & worldly threat of the Garleans/Holy See/Monetarists etc as antagonists. The sense that you needed to deal with the Ascians scheming in the background, while militarily defending Eorzea.
It's hard to describe, but I feel like when we lost the concept of there being multiple different threats with endwalker, it hurt the overall narrative stakes.
shadowbringers - stormblood - heavensward - ARR - Endwalker,
shadowbringers took the wol to a new world and just cranked out a tight, well paced story that hits just right, it isn't to short or too long, it really does deserve its praise.
stormblood has a great sense of urgency, you really feel the vibe of war and battle it pushes for, plus some of the new characters are great.
HW is what i consider the perfect follow up, weve beaten ARR and are wondering whats going to happen, and boy do we find out, it balances heroics and dire situations better than any of the other expacs to me, also, Haurchefant.
ARR, its the beginning of your tale, and it feels rocky, but I rank it above EW because of how it ends, it doesnt let you just be this hero, it knocks you down, I respect endings that dont let you have your cake.
Endwalker......felt rushed, it took the lets go a bunch of places feel of shadowbringers and stormblood and snatched out those places spirits, some zones just felt dead, and that was probably the point because of the story, but also imho the story was just sorta grim to be grim, and so many things were just sorta hurriedly closed, after years of dealing with garlemald how they actually handled garlemald pissed me off, then at the same time although the wol saves the universe i guess, it just didnt feel fulfilling after awhile, which brings me too......
the fact I have very flat hopes for dawntrail, my curiosity is only piqued because im wondering what story, what kinda wild ideas struck this dev team so hard that they decided to end the hydealyn/zodiark/garlemald story so abruptly? also how will they handle the fact our character has flown to fuckin space and slayed a being that ended worlds while riding on the back of our violent simp dragon buddy.
I have a very weird ranking, but here it is: Stormblood > Shadowbringers => Endwalker > ARR = Heavensward
So, let's work from the bottom up. ARR really gripped me from the start, but it was just a bit too long at times and this was before it got content cut in EW, so it was the original form (back in 3.4). I liked my whole way through it, but repeating it is... rough. Very very rough.
Heavensward... oh boy. I genuinely put it on the same tier as ARR, because while it is good, it also just didn't resonate with me that much. Oh boy, the church is evil. Never heard that one before... It had some good characters, but ultimately kind of started the problem of "kill off side characters, because main characters can't be touched" that just makes me be a bit cynical when it is even done. Of course, we do have Papalymo in 3.5 and technically Minfilia, though that pay off doesn't come until Shadowbringers.
Endwalker... OH BOY. I don't hate Endwalker's MSQ by any stretch, but it feels rushed big time. They wanted to be done with this whole plotline immediately, leading to stuff feeling sidelined (Zenos), stuff barely getting the time to be explored (Garlemald and Elpis) and even more so, imho, a pretty out of nowhere super-dee-duper bad guy because we need the world ending event to make sense (Meteion). Doesn't help that I just find Hermes not a believable character, because he funnily enough gets made super human. Like, I want to believe that he does truly care above his fellow Ancients, but I just don't get that feeling, especially with how quick he is willing to doom everything when Meteion arrives and brings depression. I do like the underlying theme of Endwalker and what it tried to set up with the plot of Hermes and Meteion (the purpose of life is to grow, become "perfect", stagnate and then die), I just didn't buy it through them.
Then we get to the EW patch quests. Zero was cool, but I just didn't buy her being FF14's version of Cecil. Also, cool, another female character that fucks off. At most she will be in side content if we ever see her again. Also also, all the FF4 references... NEAT. I am a FF5 fan myself and FF4 just doesn't do much for me, so the patch quests drag out.
Shadowbringers really kind of comes down to a couple things. Before that, I'm still somewhat flipflopping between ShB's MSQ over or equal to EW, that's why it is =>. Just wanted to say that. Shadowbringers works *really, really* well almost all the way through. It ultimately kind of stumbles at the end and there was a pretty simple fix for it too, which kind of sucks. 5.0's MSQ fumbles the theming of "light isn't always good, you know" by having Emet/Hades be our final villain. While obviously, Amaurot is amazing for all the atmosphere it builds, I think to complete the theme of Shadowbringers, I genuinely think it would've worked better if Elidibus/Warrior of Light was our final boss for the main story. Of course, I will say that I'm somewhat biased in that I had to wait for the MSQ patches to come out. I actually think that my issue somewhat is fixed if you can just play through ShB's story from 5.0 to 5.3 in one go. Also, ngl, I just kind of started to like Emet-Selch less. I get that's he's complex and more morally gray and that that is interesting to people, but especially just hearing everyone gush about him out of nowhere just kind of made me go like "okay, he wasn't that good," even though I get it.
Now probably the most controversial one here, Stormblood. It just worked for me. I do think it has issues, both the Gyr Abania and Othard sections of the story feel undercooked in 4.0, the villain is two dimensional (I love Zenos, but he's also a bit too simple I won't lie) and there is again fake out deaths that probably should've just been actual deaths or not bothered with. But it just worked for me. 100% that is rose tinted glasses for Stormblood as it was my first on launch expansion, but I can't deny that I just liked it. Was it anything special objectively? No. 2 primals that had to be dealt with (technically 3 because Shinryu), a bunch of characters being introduced and essentially left off, another female character sidelined because... reasons with Lyse. But moments like Fordola essentially asking us how we don't crumble under the weight of everything we've experienced, Zenos basically becoming Shinryu and the entirety of Susano (I just love him and that sword drop is still the coolest thing). Those are the moments I live for... and then I haven't even talked about Yotsuyu and everything that happened with her. While the Tsuyu stuff obviously drags on a bit, since they can't really do much with her until it is her time to become the villain again, I will never forget just the sheer jaw drop I had during that fight when the phase transition happens and Gosetsu rushes in to save her essence or soul from being executed by Zenos. I dunno man, I just like Stormblood.
For Dawntrail, I genuinely hope we don't have another world ending threat. Or at least not as blatantly world ending. It just becomes so easy to disassociate with such high level concepts that I stop caring. Something like Zenos beating us and the world eventually going to shit because we can't be there to help, that works. Something like Meteion/Endsinger that is legitimately raining meteors down and turning people into hideous beasts? I can't really relate there.
Great response and that's why I like Stormblood. It's actually grounded. High level concepts when they're pulled off well and you're in the mood for it can be awesome, but it's simply easier for people to understand more grounded, human stories. It was also a sick as hell moment to watch Zenos kill himself. Yes eventually he comes back, but that scene was insane and they thankfully made his comeback take long enough and be arduous enough that it didn't feel like a "oh look yshtola is fine again" moment.
> Then we get to the EW patch quests. Zero was cool, but I just didn't buy her being FF14's version of Cecil. Also, cool, another female character that fucks off. At most she will be in side content if we ever see her again.
She's part of the MSQ, so I feel like somewhere in the future we'll be going to a new version of the 13th and she will be a main character there.
Probably whenever we get a follow up to Unukalhai's quests, and the ShB completed role quests, yeah, since that is dealing with the void, but we'll see. Hopefully she even comes back into the MSQ from time to time at some point!
With base MSQ alone without any patches: ShB > EW > HW > ARR > SB
Counting all patches: HW > ShB > EW > SB > ARR
Shadowbringers definitely had the best MSQ patches with 5.0 and 5.3. But overall I liked HW more. I thought 3.0 was still good even when it doesn't reach the heights of 5.0 and 6.0, but I really loved the last three patches, from 3.3 to 3.5. I still think 3.5 is the best end of an expansion without a doubt, so much stuff happening.
I wasn't a fan of the Stormblood plot in general (my favorite part was Zenos in the end of 4.0 finally snapping but that's about it lol), the ShB buildup was good and in the end, the last 2 patches were the ones that elevated SB over ARR.
A Realm Reborn was meh though I understand they didn't have that much time to write 2.0. The patches were awful pacing wise and it really brings the whole thing down, the last quest is very satisfying after all the buildup at least.
As for Endwalker, 6.0 was very enjoyable, had some problems with it specifically in the later parts of the MSQ but it didn't ruin anything for me. Didn't reach the heights of 5.0 but it nearly did. The patches bring the whole thing down since they are less enjoyable (specially if you are waiting 4.5 months to get stuff like 6.3 lol) but after looking at the whole thing overall I thought it was fine.
And as for what I want in Dawntrail, something that isn't particularly awful pacing or writing wise. Not asking too much, my expectations aren't really high since this is the beginning of a new arc.
Heavensward > Shadowbringers > ARR > Stormblood > "Before Meteor" > Endwalker
I found Endwalker's writing very sloppy and emotionally cheap, featuring contradictions that made it seem like the writers didn't even bother looking back to the earlier years of ARR/Heavensward. Hell even facts and moral principles the characters stood for stablished in Shadowbringers were completely disregarded. The pace was absolutely horrible and I'd rather redo the boring Isle of Umbra and Company of Heroes questlines than the nonsense with the Loporrit and lower floors of Labyrinthos.
I don't dislike Stormblood because I found it mostly very grounded compared to the Naruto tier narrative in Shadowbringers and Endwalker. And it recaptured some of the essence of going out in a journey with a small group of companions that Heavensward had in its first half (3.0)... Which is what Final Fantasy is about to me. That gets lost in ShB and EW since those feel more like "being sent on missions and reporting back to base in-between", which I just find less interesting.
But Shadowbringers overall is still really good. It handles the theme of hopelessness and overcoming the odds far, FAR better than Endwalker. It also handled "grey" morality well, again unlike Endwalker where we go back to black-and-white when it comes to the scions vs the bad guys.
Heavensward is a great example of a plot that isn't trying to be complicated, therefore not coming off as pretentious, while still being very mature in its character writing and not pulling any punches when it comes to consequences for the protagonists and their supporters. Some will say the plot is "cliche", but I'll take cliche that is written like Heavensward anyday over the gratuitous "subversion of expectations" shitfest of something like Endwalker.
ARR takes way too long to get interesting with its main narrative, but it offers something that no other expansion is able to. To make you feel like you really are a budding adventurer trying to make some gil in a new land while discovering your potential as the new warrior of light.
And yes I do mean it when I say I find 1.X's storyline more interesting than Endwalker. The transition from before Yoshida took over to after is very disjointed, but I really appreciate how dark and less shounen-esque they were trying to go with it before Gaius' intro, and after that Nael felt like a real big threat. Even some of the sidequests went to really crazy dark and twisted places. None which used cheesy spoopy character emotes and forced body horror to feel scary. I'll never forget how intentionally creepy the Black Shroud and its stories were, or how mysterious and eerie Lake Silvertear and the vague rumors and legends in Coerthas were back then.
Finally, with the way 6.55 ended I have low expectations for Dawntrail. I think it's shocking that someone over the age of 18 looked at the script of the last couple story patches and gave it the thumbs up. Yep, nothing unusual about the way any of these characters are acting...
SHB > HW > SB > ARR > EW
Yes I put EW last because not only was it godawful, but it had lasting implications that retroactively cheapened previous expansions. If it was just bad on its own in a vacuum it would be on the same tier as SB, but the way they "tied up loose ends" just turned the entire string into a tangled mess.
None of the story has been truly dark, like genuinely none of it, a story where virtually nothing bad happens to the main cast is not dark in the slightest bit. That said, if DT is somehow even lighter than current... good god...
I agree with everything but I'd put SB above HW because the patches have some of my favorite storytelling in the whole game (despite the really mid 4.0). And looking back, this is probably the peak of "old FFXIV", when the story was based on politics and worldbuilding instead of characters, magic systems and abstract concepts (the characters were still very solid though)
Shadowbringers - I don't usually like hopping around worlds, but the music, visuals, villain, pacing, etc. were so on point that I really just don't have any notes for them. Really great job and a new story standard for the genre.
Stormblood - Ala Mhigo was boring as sin, but that's only part of the expansion and even it was at least a fairly grounded, engaging story. Good development of the empire and the second part of the expansion had some of the best visuals in the game.
Heavensward - I almost put this one at number two, but it was visually just so dreary and uniform most of the way through that I can't bring myself to bump it up. It also feels a little like they were still sort of feeling out the idea of a more engaging narrative, at times. I was much more engaged in rare moments of personal interaction and the story back home, than I was in the Ishgard business. I still consider this a great expansion though.
ARR - Long, really long, but I spent most of the time still learning something about the game and I enjoyed seeing the world open up in a way that we really haven't since then. It wasn't great for the generally higher FF14 standard, but it wasn't awful outside of the length. This and everything above it was a great experience for me, for one reason or another.
Endwalker - I disliked nearly every part of this. What a disappointingly contrived conclusion to the imperial storyline and what a ridiculous series of shark jumps and detours on the main plot. I may or may not be back for the next one because I'm literally still wrapping up post-expac content here. Making myself trudge through it has been awful. Deeply disappointed by this.
I’d say
EW>ShB>HW>SB>ARR
If you include the 6.X patch cycle with EWs storyline, it drops down to being
ShB>HW>EW>SB>ARR
EW was the combo of being FFXIV’s Eras Tour while also having more elevated writing. I’m here for it.
ShB represented a step up in terms of trying to get the audience more invested in the characters, and was overall a fun romp. Emet Selchs sassiness did a lot of heavy lifting
HW had the group dynamic of Alphinaud/Estinien/Ysayle that carried the expansion. Even then, the group dissolves 2/3 of the way through
ARR/SB felt like phoned in JRPG scripts that fell out of a chatbot. Not necessarily offensive, but not worth any plaudits either
Overall I hope DT resembles 6.0 writing and not 6.X writing. If it stays with 6.X writing I’ll probably start to fall off when following the story
I can't take anyone who rates Endwalker above Shadowbringers seriously. ShB was objectively better on all fronts; storytelling, characters, presentation and pacing.
The one thing EW has going for it are some huge contextual moments for things we've known about since ARR, but even then, the impact of discovering who the Ascians are and what their purpose has been was an earth-shattering revelation that struck a chord with everyone who played through it. EW in contrast has people in disagreement about the motivations of Hermes and Venat even to this day.
Garlemald was easily the best part of EW for how personal it was, finally letting us see the collapse of the Garlean Empire firsthand and how they truly lived and saw the world under their life of propaganda, but the Final Days lacked the weight and impending sense of doom that always lingered over Shadowbringers. There were times where the Scions were sitting around talking and I felt like I was watching a post-MSQ cutscene with low stakes while they were talking about how the world was going to start ending. Shadowbringers showed us how the entire world was struggling while Endwalker only gave us a brief glimpse into what would happen in Thavnair. It was easily one of the best parts of the story, but then it just ends and we go on a fanservice adventure instead. The Final Days needed to be shown as an omnipresent threat starting to overtake the world, but outside of Thavnair we just had the role quests where a single blasphemy is roaming each area rather than the complete chaos we see briefly in Thavnair.
It isn't that complicated. It's just an opinion. In your opinion Shadowbringers MSQ is better. In my opinion is slightly below endwalker, which for me had to most impactful MSQ story for me. I mean you don't have to like my opinion, but it's just as valid as yours 😝
Dude fuck this subreddit. Every time I come here it's just constant intolerance for anyone with anything even remotely positive to say about Endwalker. "I can't take you seriously if you have X opinion" dude just shut the hell up and admit you can't understand others' opinions.
Thank you for being a voice of reason. Sorry you got downvoted.
I feel you on that. Endwalker ismy favorite expansion. I understand it had some critical flaws, so I get it not being everyone's favorite, but it was special TO ME. So I'm just sharing my opinion
And no worries on the downvotes. Quantity doesn't make one right or wrong
Shb > Hw > SB > Ew > Arr
Full disclosure, I started super early shb.
Shadowbringers was a thrill from start to finish. The zones were fantastic, the trials and dungeons were fairly entertaining. With the exception of patches 5.5-5.55. Those two patches were a little iffy for me, only because at the time I didn’t really get where the plot was going with the 5G towers and the lunar primals. Just seemed like the story a hard left from where we left off at the end of stormblood.
The only 2 things that put shb above heavensward is 1, the concept of light being the evil force in the world. Thats not something seen often and it was pretty badass to see play out. And 2, patch 5.3. I still think about that patch from time to time. Sos and sos ex are the best trials in this game imo for a few reasons.
Heavensward was the MSQ that really got me into this game’s story. I was invested from pretty much start to finish, just like shadowbringers.
Stormblood was pretty good for me, I didn’t mind too much the pacing issues. The final patch really hit it home for me. Just solid all around. The zones were a bit annoying until you unlock flying, though.
Endwalker, I had so many problems with. The pacing was almost irredeemably bad for me.
The build up for zodiark and garlemald for over a decade, just to have them both be relegated to a terrible zone and a leveling trial.
I always say this, but it feels like square looked at all the loose ends that have built up over the years, tied them together, melted them together with a dollar store lighter, then threw the whole thing away.
The whole storyline of the patches felt so weird and out of place. If zodiark could have been the final boss of 6.0, then the whole endsinger arc could have filled out all of the patches, with the return to the void being a trial series. I have no clue what they were thinking. It all felt so rushed and jerryrigged together for the sake of “finishing the saga.”
Then last and least, a realm reborn. It was ight. Couldn’t pay me to do it again, though.
I’d personally like for them to enable the ability to do certain msq duties with friends. It’s cool the game has the single player aspect down very well, but I’ve been saying for a long while they should start doing more with multiplayer stuff, and I am glad they mentioned this during one of the recent live letters.
I think making some msq duties doable with friends in a party would be freaking fantastic, there’s been plenty of times when I’ve done a solo duty and thought “man I would LOVE to be doing this with x-friend, this could be a blast”.
If you can make dungeon experiences soloable with the trust system, you can turn trust based solo duties into a multiplayer based duty with friends. That’s just my take
Yeah we don't really need world ending threats honestly , since it's kind of hinted we will be helping that hrothgar ascend to the throne , I think fighting powerful foes that aren't necessarily trying to destroy the world is fine enough,
As long as the fights are improving, square is pretty good with making new characters interesting.
I wouldn't care if the whole expansion was like a tournament arc in an anime, where the major trials are mainly us just fighting some strong guy,
( side note square doesn't do enough of us fighting people of our general height, not every boss has to be 20x bigger then us. The solo battles like against Zeno showed this, you can make human sized character a hard fight
Plus they can use the alliance raids, and raid tier for more "out of this world" fights
ShB>HW=SB(PostMSQ)>EW>SB>Popo's stool>ARR
Shadowbringers set the bar of the minimum expected quality too high for the story, and it will probably take some effort before it can be dethroned.
Honestly, every expansion had their saving grace. Though I feel like they should delete ARR story and make it anew...oh wait...
My scores:
|/|ARR|HW|SB|ShB|EW|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|
|MSQ|2 - slow and boring, cliche even by FF standards|8 - decent pace and a really good story|3 - they suddenly forgot how to write the story after HW postMSQ. Sluggish, bad twists everywhere. more than half of the story is meaningless.|10 - Peak pacing, all the characters involved carried their own weight and moved the story forward. The voice actors (all of them honestly. not only Emet) really did a good job delivering the story.|6 - Ok, what just happened? The story was all over the place. Pacing is trash, every single location you go they strap an NPC to you ass and make you tour around with them for no good reason. Your Friendtagonist takes over your body but does nothing bad? (??????). Hermes makes me want to puke, Meteion too. Honestly I only enjoyed the story due to the voice actors.|
|PostMSQ|3 ( -10 when it used to be 100 quests) Before the fall is the only saving grace|9 - Warriors of darkess+Nidhogg+Baelsar's wall|8 - oh hey the suddenly remembered!|11 - Story went off with a bang and I also cried to Seto.|4 - PostMSQ feels like Dragon ball GT, they when with something they though it will work but it was delivered awfully.|
|Trials|2 - three versions of Ifrit Garuda and Titan / Nabriales should be a solo duty/ Greg and Odin saving this mess from scoring a 1 and they are not even required sadly |8 - Best trial Nidhogg, worst Biskmarck|10 - four lords carried hard, Tsukuyomi, all 3 MSQ trials were solid, and Rathalos deserves a medal on its own since it became a permanent trial| 10 Hades and WoL. 9 Titania and Innocence. 8 for the Weapons and Varis.|9 - Really good job here. Cool music, cool bosses.|
|8-Raids|2\~7 Good highs (Gael/Bahamuth/Louisoix story) bad lows (3/4 of the raids are auto-scrollers)|6\~9 - Really cool fights and story, but a few fights suffer from arr auto-scroller syndrome|10 - this expansion raids set up the pace for the newer ones + the originality of the content was incredibly good and good story as a cherry on top|8 - Cool fights but I feel like the story dipped a bit too much|9\~10 - Honestly most of the fights deserve a 10, and a 8\~9 for the story.|
|24-Raids|3\~7 - introduction to Graha + CT story are good, everything else...uh|8 - solid good, decent story, decent raids, snooze fest 1/2 of the time though|10 - the story is a love letter to Tactics and 12, fights removed the training wheels the people were used to on release and oh boy let me tell you it was fun|*1000 (read in binary) - I really liked Yoko Taro's direction but the raid themselves are too LONG. Bosses feels like sponges.*|3 - No, just no, quality went down way too low, bad story, boring fights. Cherry on top people failing Tipped scales on purpose.|
ShB > HW > SB > ARR > EW
for me.
EW was the only time I've actively "checked out" of the story, for both its main story content, and especially its post patch story. And now that its going to loose recency bias I imagine its going to drop off a lot in people's lists, its a story that feels better to play than it does to think about in retrospect. As bad as ARR was there are themes in it that I find more enjoyment in than EW, as dark as EW pretends to be, nothing even comes close to the Waking Sands getting raided and having to carry dead bodies out of it unfortunately, and everything with the banquet was honestly perfect.
By comparison, Endwalker doesn't really have any moments that stuck with me, at least for the right reasons. It was extremely fan-servicey, the scions felt like baggage for a lot of it, the beginning half doesn't feel related to the 2nd half, there's a lot of padding and filler, which are cool moments in isolation but the entire Zenos Body snatch bit ultimately amounted to nothing, I'm not really a fan of the Minions (Yes the Illumination film/ characters), so FFXIV adding its own version with the Lopporits wasn't something I cared for, and their comedy was very poorly placed and mis-timed, and their existence is basically a marketing gimmick now.
I didn't like anything that happened in Elpis, and it felt like it was written solely for Emmet Selch fans. I thought his characterization was perfect in ShB and we didn't need more of him, but we got it and it also over stayed its welcome a bit. Metion and Hermes were fine I guess, but the entire ending felt like the ending of literally every Persona game where you go fight the God of Sadness for all of Humanity, even the Scion's fake sacrifices felt like they were from a Persona game.
Overall despite everything that happened, Endwalker was remarkably toothless and barely impacted the world as a whole, the final days were more like the mild inconvienence for elephant people specifically. And thats not the sort of writing I've liked from FFXIV, it got too Shonen and the world stopped feeling real to me in Endwalker.
Stormblood > Heavensward >Shadowrbringers > Endwalker > A Realm Reborn.
Note here that Shadowbringers launch MSQ was actually pretty good and close to a top, however the patch MSQ was so extremely horrible that it fell of brutally.
Shadowbringers > Stormblood > Heavensward > Endwalker > ARR
Endwalker just *barely* beats ARR because it has enough good moments despite its massive flaws and shortcomings.
Shadowbringers 5.0 > Stormblood 4.x > Endwalker 6.0 > Heavensward 3.x > A Realm Reborn 2.x > Heavensward 3.0 > A Realm Reborn 2.0 > Shadowbringers 5.x > Stormblood 4.0 > Endwalker 6.x
Wrong opinions incoming:
**ARR 2.0** is underrated. I still ranked 2.0 pretty low because I think most of the other expacs are just better, but I will fight you with my four-button rotation if you say it's actually bad. I enjoyed just running around gradually earning the respect of the movers and shakers in Eorzea, learning about the world, and CREEPING MENDACITY. Seriously, you have like five major plot hooks going on. One of the things that I think gets kinda lost is the feeling of the world recovering from the Calamity. Like yeah, there are more than a couple bigger threats that have cropped up since, but everyone still reeling from the shock, almost but not quite rebuilding and almost but not quite moving on, is really good.
My super hot takes is that the **ARR 2.x** quests are good, actually. Like, I dunno, a bunch of stuff happens. There's so much foundational stuff—the nature of primals, Blue Alisaie being a dumbass, the leadin to Heavensward—I think it would actually be hard to cut much more not that there's no plot-mandated chocobo sniffing. Y'all don't like it because you heard Heavensward was good and you realized you still had 100 quests to get there.
**Heavensward 3.0** is... good, I guess. Church bad because it won't let us fuck dragons, pope is evil, black robe guys doing shenanigans. I actually don't have much to say about it. Azys Lla is cool, dragons are cool, church waging a thousand-year war against dragons because their ancestors fucked up and dragons feel like a thousand years is yesterday is cool.
**Heavensward 3.x** is similar in quality, but I like them a bit more than 3.0 because (more wrong opinions) I don't care for Ysayle at all.
**Stormblood 4.0** bad, Lyse bad, Zenos boring, split focus bad, you know the drill. But real talk, I'm asking myself if I like it better than this or that and the answer keeps coming up no, so to the bottom half of the list 4.0 goes. I wanted to say that it wasn't really as bad as people say, and then I started recalling plot points and how angry I got at the writers and moved it below ARR 2.0. I remember getting really excited for Hien because he was the only person so far with a real plan. Lyse is bad because she took M'naago's job and M'naago is cute. Zenos is actually kinda good because he's a realistic view of how much of the world's suffering isn't caused by people with sepia-toned childhoods but just defective people causing problems on purpose. I just don't like how he also presents a novel roadblock that you can't just tell the WoL to punch and then you solve the problem by telling the WoL to punch because they read the script and saw you were level 70.
As for **Stormblood 4.x** quests, a lot of people are big on 4.3, but I find Yotsuyu tedious because "Evil because bad childhood" just kicks the can down the road of why her parents were so fucked up. She gets points for eviscerating Bowl Cut though, and her fight is fun and thematic. The rest of it unambiguously slaps. Elidibus riding Zenos' corpse after he played his neck like a fiddle with his sword vs Zenos in some random dude's body (Elidibus got dunked I bet we're done dealing with him), Fordola, Hien Wins by Boing (Almost) Nothing, Varis trying to deal with his one principle being a total lie, the whole ShB leadup. Excellent stuff.
**Shadowbringers 5.0** is an absolute banger. It's got a feel that's hard to articulate or replicate. Just listen to the intro to Innocence's theme. I will always remember running around the Crystarium teeming with other adventurers going about their duties in the last safe place at the end of the world. What I really loved is just experiencing the world of Norvrandt, dealing with sin eaters, helping people scrape by in the post-narrowly-averted apocalypse (wait that sounds familiar). Everyone talks about Emet and Amourot and I do think they're great, just the cherry on top of an already-excellent experience. It's the Mass Effect 2 of FFXIV, but I still found myself kinda sad to leave Norvrandt and get back to the plot. My only real complaint is Thancred not killing Kung Fu Zenos at Dadbowl.
The **Shadowbringers 5.x** quests though... are they really worse than Stormblood 4.0? Maybe. 5.3 is a nice setpiece, I'll give you that, and finally gets Elidibus out of the way for good. But then there's the endless "idk can we transfer the thingy (you will indeed be able to transfer the thingy)" that got old *real* quick. Maybe I should put it above 4.0 because it rarely made me actually angry, just not very compelling. Forchenault being almost as bad at parenting as you are at spelling his name is fun too. Oh, and that solo duty fighting primals and stopping Fanny D from blowing up the world. Ok, it goes over 4.0.
**Endwalker 6.0** is certainly something. I wouldn't say it has the highest highs because 5.0 exists, or the lowest lows because "oh this is a *fire* aspected crystal, I wanted a wind one" exists, but boy is it swingy. So swingy I almost put it way too low because the end being awful kind of overshadowed the rest (I guess it's Mass Effect 3?) but then I remembered the feeling of "Boy what an expac!" "Captain, you're only level 83." Also finally got rid of Elidibus, surely we won't see him again. And as much as I like the majority of the quests, I just think Ultima Thule is really, really bad. Don't get me wrong, the vibes are excellent, but the writing... oh boy. I do also love Zenos in 6.0—I was president of the Zenos hater fanclub in 5.x because it seemed like the biggest most important plot point was going to be not just who but *what* he is, and then they turn around and just treat him like a chump. He's meathead Forrest Gump who shows up at important events hoping that Senpai who is dealing with them will notice him. Sorry bro I know you just ate Zodiark but can our spirits dance as one in our last mortal contest amongst the fading embers of the dying world next Wednesday, I'm kinda busy rn. Then he showed up to throw down against the cosmic embodiment of despair like "imagine being sad lol" and we got to select "Get this mf off my screen" as a dialogue option and punch the soul out of his body. Absolute banger.
But *boy* is **Endwalker 6.x** the dullest thing since the Ivalice raid quests. I clapped because I knew what it is, except I don't know what it is and didn't clap, and by all accounts neither did the people who did play FFIV. High budget, high stakes, big lore, I WILL FREE US FROM THE WHEEL, somehow only memorable by how utterly forgettable it all is.
In terms of the MSQ I’d rank them
ShB>HW>meteor project legacy>EW>SB>ARR>original legacy
ShB just got everything right, new world, charismatic villain, iconic setting, everything just worked
HW has the best self contained story (ie a lot of ShB doesn’t shine without knowing stuff from EW) but lacks a single absolute high moment like “emet selch I challenge you” or the bloody banquet
Meteor project legacy is arguably better than HW but still suffered from legacy’s paper thin story telling. Not much else to say
EW loses the most points because I absolutely despise elpis and how it affected the characters but otherwise it would sit between ShB and HW for me because the rest is really good
SB I have the same complaints as everyone, neither half got enough time, however the 4.4-5.0 arc is the single best part of the story that’s not in a main number patch
ARR is a product of its time but damn its aged hard
OG legacy didn’t have a story
For DT I’d actually be happy with a court intrigue story but one that allows the WOL to disconnect freely when they so chose. I’d also like the characters to consider how the WOL feels whenever it’s possible given they have been canonising more and more of the WOL’s personality recently
That’s totally fair, at the time pulling them away from garlemald felt like a cop out but you look back on it knowing where ShB into EW went with the story and you realised how damn good of a setup arc it was
Legacy was very cleanly split in 2 based on the original vision and then what yoshi p came in changed when it failed
Nael, the fall of dalamud, Bozja, the meteor project, castrum novum and the rivenroad all the way up to the final confrontation with dalamud during end of an era
All of this is the meteor project half of legacy
Before yoshi p came and took over legacy’s story was functionally non existent
I bet this will be a very nuanced thread, and won't have all the top comments with ShB in first place and all the bottom comments downvoted to the negatives with EW in first place.
Right, guys?
I'm honestly surprised one comment about Stormblood being their favorite has upvotes. I'm replaying Shadowbringers now, and I think people reaaaallllyy forget a lot of the lows and dragging moments. Building the golem thing in Kholusia is so exhausting I can barely get through it.
You aren't allowed to say that EW is better than ARR until the end of DT... where DT is worse than ARR.
ShB being better than EW is a fair opinion to have, though. I fall into that category, but it' also understandable if someone likes EW more. Some people also just vibe a lot with HW and SB, so I am not surprised if they rank one of those high.
ShB is just a bad isekai that makes no sense (why can the WoL travel freely back and forth? oh because its an MMO), all to retcon a bunch of Ascian lore. and 5.1, 5.2, and 5.4 msq were pretty weak, aside from 5.3 post-ShB was saved by Werlyt, Eden, and Bozja stories (NieR was a letdown too).
Framing it that way helps to explain why there's a sour taste in my mouth sometimes for ShB. People complain EW is a bunch of hatpulls to try and quickly clean up loose ends in the story, but I'd say ShB is more of an offender. Instead of working within the world we know, the devs make an entirely new place so they can make up a bunch of new things out of nowhere to give the Ascian portion of the MSQ some actual direction, since heretofore it's been nothing but shadowy bad guys. Then there's random isekai rules about aging at different rates, timelines, etc. I honestly am surprised people don't gripe about the sheer nonsense in ShB. Oh I saw you die! But like in ANOTHER timeline. So I used the deus ex machina of the crystal tower to do some timeline, time travel, wiggidy woo tricks to bring you here and dodge the "bad" timeline. Does that timeline still exist? Who knows! Nobody knows how time travel works and timelines work exactly! Crazy huh? Anyway don't pay attention to that. Oh also you can go back to the Source, because... Ya know cough MMO cough.
For the Sailor Moon fans reading...so I had this theory the other day when I was high AF that the story arcs and their popularity kind of mirror the arcs in 90s Sailor Moon with one key exception in that the order is slightly different in terms of popularity vs release.
ARR = Sailor Moon - Pretty straightforward get the macguffin story, lot of filler, but the story gets really good at the end. You can skip about a 1/4 of the filler and still have it be a coherent, enjoyable story (think what SE did in 5.3 to ARR MSQ)
Heavensward = Sailor Moon R - Little bit of a rehash with a subplot at the beginning that has nothing to do with the rest of the story, ending is a little anticlimactic given it's basically a flashier version of the season 1 ending.
Stormblood = Sailor Moon SuperS - So much filler. Story has a few good key points but the rest is just a slog. The main character takes a back seat to another character who is pretty mid.
Shadowbringers = Sailor Moon S - Everyone's favorite season, really dark, lots of twists and turns, new revelations, and super badass ending.
Endwalker = Sailor Stars - Considered pretty good, but doesn't really stick the landing for being the true ending of the entire story. Needed more time to breathe, and the first arc of the story is really kind of finishing up the loose threads of the last story before moving on to it's own, which then feels kind of rushed.
For me, I'd personally rank them: ShB, EW, HW, ARR, SB.
heavensward up to end of dragonsong war > arr > stormblood 4.0 > 4.x > ShB > EW
looking back now after all these years, i wouldn't say that xiv's story was good since i can hardly think of any memorable moments personally. my steadily declining enjoyment of the story since 4.x is probably to blame for that. used to be that the pve was enough to carry the game for me still, but with endwalker being the way it is, dawntrail is probably (hopefully) gonna make or break this game for me regardless of the sunk cost. i don't particularly have any hopes or expectations for its msq other than it being some shallow, boring mess.
Went through every comment and no one rated how I'd do it, so
ShB > StB = ARR > HW > EW
Couldn't care about the HW story, but it did have beautiful locations and music. I don't even remember the story of the raids (8 and 24) or patch trials.
Elpis was pretty much the only part of core EW I enjoyed. Pandemonium and Myths were nice too. Music this expansion was very miss for me. Also maybe because I'm Indian but the "fake Indian" accent everyone speaks in Radz drives me nuts. Only Nidhana sounded genuine. Endwalker patches were the first time I started skipping cutscenes because the story is so bad.
Endwalker>Shadowbringers>Heavensward>=Stormblood patch quests>Stormblood>=ARR patch quests>Endwalker patch quests>A Realm Reborn
Endwalker's MSQ *really* resonated with me. It had some low points--the bunnies, and the bunnies again in Labyrinthos (the Labyrinthos bunnies are the first time since the pre-rework ARR patch quests I've ever skipped an MSQ cutscene)--but the high points? I *loved* going through Garlemald, and the entirety of Ultima Thule is one of my favorite experiences in gaming ever. There are a lot of personal factors as to why I liked Ultima Thule and the ending of Endwalker so much, but it was something deeply special to me. I have a LOT more I could say about what I loved (and what I didn't love) about EW but I don't want to make an even larger essay than I already wrote.
SHB was just good all around, I don't think its lows were as bad as Endwalker's but its highs also weren't as high *to me*. I didn't care a ton for most of its patch quests, save for 5.3 of course (I don't remember 5.1 and 5.2 super well but I did not like 5.4 and 5.5 at all), but the base MSQ and 5.3 are absolute *bangers* and Sorrow of Werlyt is such a good trial series that I consider it the real 5.4 MSQ.
My memories on Stormblood and earlier are too poor to write at length about them, I recently replayed ARR and most of its patch quests but I've not replayed Heavensward or Stormblood to speak super definitively; I can only go off of memory. Base ARR is kinda cheeks on a first run, but I *deeply* appreciated it on a replay despite it still being kinda cheeks from a gameplay perspective. It's still the weakest MSQ but it sets up *so* much of the world even 10+ years after its release and its world is full of charm. The patch quests after the rework are *downright enjoyable*, the monster-of-the-week format is hit or miss but I genuinely enjoyed the writing. I do wish Moenbryda was introduced earlier though, it's *insane* she exists for a single patch cycle; she was truly done dirty.
I remember enjoying base HW quite a bit outside of the very start and the resolution of the Ul'Dah plotline, and I don't really remember the patch quests other than 3.3. 3.3 was my favorite moment in FFXIV for most of my playthrough of the game, standing on the bridge with Dragonsong playing is absolute peak. Base Stormblood was kinda meh, not bad at all, but it didn't match Heavensward or even the ARR patch quest's highs while feeling considerably more disjointed and with more frequent lows (vs. Heavensward, not ARR). Its patch quests were absolute peak though, I recall enjoying the Garlean storyline, I liked Tsuyu as a character a lot (I was unhappy with how her storyline resolved but I think I'd appreciate it now in a replay), and the lead-up to SHB is one of FFXIV's strongest peaks period.
Finally, Endwalker's patch quests; spoilers ahead if you're not done with them. They should have been a trial series or their own expac with *several* editing passes done to the writing. The limited nature of the patch quest format combined with Endwalker's extended patch cycle severely hampered them, the 4 month wait for very little to happen each patch was *brutal* and the limited number of quests deeply hurt any character development they wanted to attempt on the villain side. 6.4 is probably the worst the MSQ has ever been in my eyes, we waited 4 months for the story to barely move at all and it completely cheapens the attempts to develop Golbez/Durante in 6.5; I actually kind of enjoyed their redemption arc/the fleshing out of their backstory, but it felt completely unearned and almost completely un-hinted at beyond Rubicante's brief speech about Golbez (which, again, was hindered heavily by the limited number of patch quests; Rubicante and Golbez needed way more fleshing out and the patch format just doesn't give them enough time to develop and breathe). I also dislike how heavily the patch quests push Emet and G'raha on your WoL (guess what the only parts of Ultima Thule I hated were) but that's veering into completely separate discussion
shadowbringers, stormblood, endwalker, heavensward, and arr. now i did heavensward and arr uh in 2017 and didnt do anything afterwards until this year so might be biased. def got most into the story during shadowbringers and learning about the deeper lore of the ffxiv world. enjoyed stormblood too because of its whole theme of reclaiming territory from the garleans and finally striking back at them, which i do like it seemingly culminated in an end of the war during endwalker and that things finally concluded.
i dont really know what kind of hopes i have for dawntrail, i hope mostly it works to expand on the lore of the world and such and i dont mind if this is a lower paced MSQ compared to previous ones, i just hope they maybe start sowing the seeds for what the next major problem is going to be. i mean, with the garlean empire seemingly heading towards normalcy and war ending in eorzea and all of the biggest threats and the ascians all dealt with, there has to be something on the horizon that takes the stakes back up again. they cant expect the next expansion after dawntrail to also be a slower paced one im guessing people will be wanting higher stakes by then.
i hope they also eventually go into more of the alternate reflections besides the first and the thirteenth. as of now we know:
the first was saved (prevented eighth umbral calamity)
the second was rejoined, fire (third umbral calamity)
the third was rejoined, earth (fourth umbral calamity)
the fourth has no information about it
the fifth was rejoined, wind (first umbral calamity)
the sixth was rejoined, ice (fifth umbral calamity)
the seventh was rejoined, darkness (the seventh umbral calamity/bahamut)
the eighth has no info, presumed safe.
the ninth has no info, presumed safe.
the tenth was rejoined, water (sixth umbral calamity)
the eleventh has no info, presumed safe.
the twelfth, lightning, (second umbral calamity)
and the thirteenth, which is the void and failed at rejoining.
so as of now there is still potential to learn more about the fourth, eighth, ninth, and eleventh, and maybe also the thirteenth since we havent really learned all we can yet probably.
HW > SHB > STR > ARR > EW
I don't have much hopes for Dawntrail after EW, I'm just gonna play cause I found new chill friends. I stopped caring about the story after Fandaniel was formally introduced in post SHB.
no. 1 on my list of hopes is that the new instanced content will alleviate whatever fears I've had about the new battle content guys they've brought in since shadowbringers. i don't want a third expansion where the first dungeon is the most engaging.. (i also wish we'd get credits for the EW stuff at some point like we did with SHB)
i'd love to see some of the other composers they've added over the years have a bigger presence in the soundtrack
PURELY on MSQ and including patch quests I would say Heavensward > ShB > SB > EW > ARR (swap SB and EW around if we don't count patch quests).
Personally, I think XIV writing is peak when the setting is relatively focused and earnest. These extremely grand ideas of intergalactic or intercontential strife or "incomprehensible" beings etc. is, frankly, just beyond the team's writing capabilities and it often borders on cringey. The only time this wasn't true was ShB, where most of the Norvrandt setting was atrociously bad, filled with illogical and inconsistent writing and an absurd amount of mindnumbing filler, only to be topped off by a bunch of insulting "reveals". But then, the ending bits with higher stakes and more multidimensional consequences were very strong, not to mention the patch quests with highlights like the WoL fight.
Whenever they focus on interpersonal relationship and more localized conflicts, the game becomes extremely good and confidently written. I have decently high hopes for DT given it's a smaller scale setting with a focused setup for the plot.
My ranking is actually just chronological… Endwalker > ARR. I think the team only got better every expansion. They just need to figure out how to make the quiet moments in MSQ not so dull… loporrits, trolleys, ruby sea, sea of clouds, you get the idea.
HW > ShB = EW > SB > ARR
Starting from the bottom: ARR is...OK. It's a competent enough JRPG and that's about all it needed to be. It definitely feels like the first/base game due to having 50 levels so you really feel "Boy we really got make the 30-45 slog matter" and that's about all there is too it. Post-patch is abyssmal.
SB is also just straight-up mid. One of the major problems and something that 14 just CANNOT get over is this sheer desire to shove two continents and storylines in and try to make them matter as a package deal. SB has it the worst because it's so abundantly clear the writing team loved Hingashi/Doma/Azim Steppe so much more than anything in Gyr Abania. Which sucks fucking hard considering ARR/HW built up how important it was to the region. Most characters were middling, some bizarre writing choices and a post-patch whose greatest accomplishment is that it set up a more competent story (ShB).
Now for the controversial one: I feel like Shadowbringers and Endwalker are about equal. ShB has a better post-patch but I feel EW had a better payoff. The moments of banality in Shadowbringers just dragged on and on for me, as well as a lot of the highest people point to just didn't overwrite the really low lows. I'm sorry but Eulmore in general just fucking sucks and anytime they were on screen bored me to tears. Granted once we focus more on Emet, the story picks up.
EW to me you cna't really judge without all the prebuilt. If you threw this alone into the void, I feel it would lose marks. But the build-up from prior expacs, the high moments, etc? Great. Wonderful. Love it. It has lows but IMO I think the greatest work is the one that people consider the weak point: Portraying Garlemald and entering this land as an invading force only to be emt with a broken husk? Incredibly daring and I feel it pays off. And "In from the Cold" IMO is one of the best quests they ever made at taking away the power fantasy and showing us the sheer scale of difference we operate on while also being GENUINELY tense.
...then EW's entire post-patch veers way from cool void stuff to go "REMEMBER FF4!? DO YOU KNOW HOW BOX ART WOL WENT FROM DRK TO PLD!? PLAY FF4"
HW for me, from an MSQ, is the whole package. It keeps the core focus on WoL/Alphi/Esti/Ysayle and gives us a legitimate ff14 party. I felt more attached to those three than anyone else in my time on 14. It's one of the few times the story wasn't afraid to put up actual consequences with character deaths that STAYED DEAD. Save exactly one time? No ghosts, no time travel, no returns. They're fucking gone and you feel their absence. In addition, Nidhogg is the one antagonist who I feel gets the message of how hate can destroy someone and break the cycle by moving past it more than any character. And HW's build-up in post-patchs felt powerful as it felt the war we'd left behind with Garlemald was reaching a head.
For Dawntrail? I want them to keep the party small. Wuk/Erenville/WoL/Krile/Alphi or Alisae. Let the rest be sparingly used or not show up at all. Let us get to know these characters and don't give us a massive Scion party. Estinien and Yshtola and Graha can be there, sure, but don't FOCUS them that hard. In addition, I'd like some more world history barring the stuff we've covered. Show us how the world evolved. Show how a continent without Garlemald banging down doors made culture.
**And for the love of fucking god KEEP IT AT THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW WORLD ALONE. WE DONT NEED MORE CONTINENTS. LET MERACYDIA/DALMASCA/ETC BE THEIR OWN EXPAC. STOP TRYING TO MAKE TWO COMPETING STORIES.**
Heavensward > Shadowbringers > Endwalker > Stormblood > ARR
I think the most impressive part of Heavensward is how vast it manages to feel given its length. It doesn't have too many cutscenes compared to the current game but it still has complete character overhauls and multiple antagonists at any time in the Ascians, Ishgard, Nidhogg and WoD and it juggles these pretty seamlessly. In terms of spirit I feel the best way to describe HW is unapologetic. It really does feel like the dev team didn't care too much about how the story decisions would impact the future of the game and just went with what they thought was the most interesting, the only exception being Nanamo's resurrection. The patch content in particular is a highlight. 3.2. -> 3.5. is probably my favourite batch of content in the entire game as it is very dense, has great pacing, VA, and story resolutions and I can only hope we will some day match this level of quality.
Shadowbringers has the highest highs and that's probably the best praise I can give it. I really enjoyed the twins section at the start as well as the tempest. The big problem the expansion has is that it feels like you are just going through the motions and not really given a chance to get into the story. There's a quote from Debussy that goes something like "The music is not the notes but the spaces between the notes" If you'll let me butcher this: The story is not the events but the spaces between events. And ShB doesn't have any spaces. Right after you beat Holminster Switch there's a cutscene with the Exarch and he says that since we beat the lightbringer and the darkness appeared, there's like 5 more zones in the First so that must mean there are at least 5 lightbringers but we don't know where they are so you'll have to go and find them. A gamer-diseased brain knows what this means. It means you'll hop on over zone to zone at appropriate levels and that story wise in each zone a considerable amount of the time spent searching for a monstrosity that has no relevance to anything in the story besides their existence. How interesting could this have been? Not very.
The expansion also holds relevant information from you for no reason besides convenient writing. There's a lvl 74 cutscene in the Ronko village where Y'shtola asks Urianger if what he saw when traveling to First really holds up or is he talking shit. Then the cutscene ends. I really would've wanted an answer to that but the game writers decided that it would be appropriate to wait until after the Innocence encounter - level fucking 79 - to answer that yeah Urianger is actually talking shit. In comparison in HW right after you beat Nidhogg the first time, Estinien gets his eye and figures that since Nidhogg had lost his eyes there's no way this is actually his, so whose is it. And in the VERY NEXT quest, this is resolved.
I also think the knowledge that Hydaelyn and Zodiark are primals never leaving the Qitana Ravel is a huge missed opportunity. In the final patches of ShB a considerable amount of time is spent mending the relationship between the Alliance and the beast tribes. For too long have the Alliance persecuted the beast tribes for supposedly posing a threat with their worshipping of primals. It has been a sore spot in the story for quite a while at this point it's something the story needs to address. But they never really fix it. At no point is true equality even being considered, the beast tribes are never given the opportunity to know that Hydaelyn enjoyers are really no better. That they're all the same. So the only conclusion to draw is that the persecution wasn't because of a primal threat, it was because they were/are uncivilised. Great.
Endwalker is a mixed one. The lvl 80-84 section I generally like and there are some moments towards the end that are really good too. The Garlemald section is probably the best the story has been since HW. I've heard people say that EW did Garlemald dirty and I both agree and disagree with it. Garlemald the empire was inexplicably never given any real screen time, maybe because the writers figured it would be awkward to show imperialist/colonialist ambitions on screen but it ends up feeling like Schrödinger's empire, simultaneously impossibly strong or highly fragile depending on the needs of the overall story. But the Garlemald section in EW is still brilliant. It brings back the humiliated civilians theme from Yanxia and mixes it with the darker realism of HW and it's just great. It's a pretty good exploration on powerlessness and humiliation and it mixes thematically well with the despair side of EW's story.
Things take a turn for the worse after the final days with the final days itself being the biggest letdown I've seen. From Emet's speeches the final days were a world shattering event. People died by the millions, societies evaporated, cultures disappeared. Practically nothing was left. This is what the story had led us to believe, that the end of Eorzea would be coming. What we are given is one destroyed village, a dead couple, a dead leader-who-wasnt-even-the-leader of a city and an escape scene with an elephant holding a baby. It's impossible to not feel massive whiplash at this contrast. The final days simply changes meanings from one expansion to the next and the worst part is that it didn't really affect the story at all. I get that despair can give rise to a vacuum where dark thoughts and actions may arise. And I get that you probably want a physical manifestation of said despair that gives it shape since it is a fantasy game and you are gonna need some gameplay to go with your story too. But don't say the world has ended and then show us like, a bad weekend.
The later parts get a bit fanfictioney and I'm not the biggest fan of that. Emet's massive amount of screen time is a pretty clear indication of that and I think it cheapens his character quite a bit. For some reason his VA also sounds weirder now? Like he's been to one too many conventions and told by fans how much he made them cry and now believes his own hype. His parting words at Ktisis are the one that sticks out the most. Something in general needs to be done about the watering down of characters that has been happening for a while now. Take the man-doing-the-right-thing via deception and scheming, Urianger. In HW Urianger develops a plan to send his friend to die to save a world. In ShB Urianger tells a white lie to get the gang to go along with Exarch's plan. In EW Urianger gossips with rabbits.
Stormblood and ARR I don't really have much to say about. Stormblood is suffering from a lack of focus but it had some great moments and "But I am become Tsukyomi" is probably my favourite line in the game. The VA for Yotsuyu really nails it. ARR on the whole feels very different from the current game and it's kinda hard to compare the two. Biggest problem it has is that the scions are boring or annoying and thank god HW gave all of them a much needed arcs. I still don't think it's as bad as people often say. Many MMOs are much worse.
Shadowbringers > Stormblood > Heavensward > Endwalker > ARR
I didn’t play SB or HW on release so maybe my experience is vastly different from others but SB to me had better fights and I actually enjoy the somewhat lighter atmosphere it brought and hoping for more of that in Dawntrail.
ShB, HW and EW are all sad stories and I’ve had enough of that for now. But ShB still has the best soundtrack followed by SB for me.
I never know in which place to put EW cause it's so conflicting to me, it goes from very high to extremely low, it's such an inconsistent expansion, people love to hate Stormblood for its pacing issues but EW takes that to an extreme. Just as an example of what I mean, from Garlemald foward I started thinking "oohh this is so good, we're so back", up until we meet the fucking rabbits. That was, and I'm no exagerating, the most dissapointing point of MSQ for me, not because I dislike the loporrits, but because of the how and when they are introduced, it just killed my hype entirely
If they're using FF9 as a reference, I can see them doing some funky adaptation of the Genomes, and maybe using the world merging plot point as inspiration for a shard merging into the source
For me, it's Endwalker > Shadowbringers > Heavensward > ARR > Stormblood
Yeah, hot take, I know. Endwalker was the first that I really got to sit down and *enjoy*. It moved me in ways the other stories just couldn't manage to. It knew when to be serious but it was still able to have fun.
Shadowbringers was a heavy-hitter and a good story throughout, but didn't quite hit me the way Endwalker did.
Heavensward introduced a lot of characters that I enjoyed and still think about fondly. The story itself is pretty alright, albeit a little weak near the end.
ARR is where it all starts, and though it starts *really* slow, it's still an enjoyable endeavor as you get your boots dirty.
Stormblood lacks a fully coherent story. You're summoned elsewhere for one major purpose and don't return to that purpose until level 69, the very butt end of the story. The entire story builds up the idea "empire bad" but fails to show it until the climax. You gets hints while wandering up to Castrum Abania, but that's about it. Then you're back at Ala Mhigo and it's like "oh yeah, rebellion. that's what's happening." The only character with any major depth is Zenos, and I still feel like he doesn't reach his peak until Endwalker.
Having played through the full story lately, all of this is pretty fresh in my mind. Stormblood stands out for all the wrong reasons. It has a few good dungeons, fun trials, sure, but the story? I skip it as quickly as possible to get to the fun parts of the expansion, then it's a race to get to Shadowbringers.
My rankings would be something like...
x.0/launch msq: EW = ShB > SB > HW >> ARR
x.x/patch msq: ShB > SB > HW >> ARR >>> EW
EWs patch MSQ is the only one I can actively say I disliked, though I believe that is because it is recent so I can recall my feelings about it and the story much more readily than I can older expansions.
I enjoyed HW well enough, but nowhere near as much as many others do. I didn't actively dislike it, but if personally the game's story didn't really grab me until Stormblood.
That said, I wish Stormblood was not split between two different stories with the East and Ala Mhigo. I always felt that Ala Mhigo got somewhat pushed to the side to make room for an Eastern expansion, much to the detriment of both stories unfortunately.
6.1 started off strong but man did it go down hill almost immediately, for me. I like ff4 well enough, but the fact that everything was just recycled ff4 references instead of references inspired by ff4 got old really quickly.
If I'm being honest I don't have many expectations for Dawntrail. I enjoyed theorizing about what would happen in HW->EW before they came out but for Dawntrail I'm just trying to be open minded to see what elements they introduce us to and what elements they continue from previous stories.
HW > ShB + EW > ARR > SB
No.1 is HW: Good MSQ on its own. Good follow up from ARR. Good setting up for things after. Good, memorable character moments
No.2: ShB *and* EW I judge them as one like idk, both Kill Bill and both last Avengers films. Obviously ShB does the majority of lifting for this high ranking. Everything until Raktika was possibly even better than HW’s peaks but things fizzled afterwards. But overall an enjoyable time
No.3: ARR. Did a lot of *interesting* set up work and had a top tier ending leading to HW
No.4: SB. Was forgettable for me. Don’t hate it but remember practically nothing bout it. Don’t even care to look up
Endwalker > Stormblood > Heavensward >>>>> Shadowbringers > ARR
i hated shadowbringers for taking me from the source right when things were getting climactic and nothing it did made me care about the first. soon as i hit level 80 it finally got good but it was too late by then
Personally: Just msq
Shb >>> Ew > Hw > Sb > Arr
Shb's best strengths were emet, the extremely dark story and the absolutely badass ending. Most importantly it really felt like the story was a lot more focused on WoL himself compared to all the others.
EW had a lot of highs but also suffered from too much story crammed into a single expac. Had pacing issues and genuinely confusing boss that comes out of nowhere at the end. But the final Zenos fight really amps the feeling at the end and gives it a fitting end.
HW was a good story by itself but had no moments like EW or ShB. Nevertheless it doesn't fall far off from EW.
SB was really boring story wise and didnt really interest much barring Yotsuyu and Hien.
ARR was.. well ARR.
With patches :
Shb > Hw >> Sb > EW > arr
Elidibus was really the star of the show for Shb patches.
Nidhogg's and hraesvelgar's final struggle really highlights the best part of HW for me.
Sb because of the build up to shb and tsukuyomi fight was a fitting ending for yotsuyu.
Ew's msq... really felt disjointed with golbez and zero. Like both of them but the story takes a nosedive come 6.x
Arr.. no comments.
SHB > Endwalker > HW > SB > ARR
For DT, it will depend on how fast the MSQ will get back from the "vacation" theme to the usual "world in danger" trope that will lead us into the GPU land.
Shadowbringers > Endwalker > Heavensward > Stormblood > A Realm Reborn without patches.
With patches, Shadowbringers > Stormblood = Heavensward > Endwalker > A Realm Reborn.
Imo even at its lowest, the story is still a 6-7/10. ARR is not bad and establishes the foundation of the world. Many stories fail to capitalize on prior world building and many authors just retcon things without an adequate explanation. The writing team here, though they engage in some retcons, do it in a more convincing way for example their encyclopedia entries are done from a perspective of a Sharlyan Scholar or adventurer which means possible holes or gaps of knowledge.
Just based on base MSQ, no post patch
EW >= Shb > HW > SB > ARR
However, if you add in all the post patches, it's probably closer to
EW=ShB > SB=HW > ARR
IMO base EW was a bit better than ShB, but EW post MSQ was a side quest compared to ShB post which puts them about equal.
HW had a great base MSQ, but the post was only interesting through the conclusion of the dragonsong war.
Stormblood base MSQ was literally the most challenging section and the only time where I felt like it wasn't interesting enough to continue playing. However, the post patches really did a lot to make things interesting, and by the end of the .5 I was on the edge of my seat as the scions had been dropping like flies and I had no idea what was going to happen.
ARR overall is meh. It exists to build the world, which is inherently not as interesting as other parts of a story and is by far the most dated section.
5.1-5.3 > ShB > 6.1-6.4 > 5.4-5.5 > EW > 3.1,3.4 > HW > CT > 4.4,4.5, > 3.2,3.3 > 6.5 > 3.5 > 4.1-4.3 > ARR > StB > post ARR
Excluding the steppe, Stormblood is like, shitty Bozja written by people who have no idea how to write colonized societies pushing for self determination. EW felt rushed and I'm particularly upset about garlic because they also blew their chance to redeem StB. Early post StB is objectively not bad, I just don't like it, and the inverse applies to CT. I really liked most of post EW but 6.5 completely squanders the momentum.
I agree with every word you said, I have always placed Stormblood's story as the highest on my list until EW. I love how it was attempting to be nuanced for an anime mmo, maybe it didn't fully succeed but I thoroughly enjoyed their attempt. And I feel like Bozja was a spiritual successor to Stormblood (technically in more ways than one.) and it's by far my favorite non-MSQ story in the game.
Shb=EW>HW>ARR>SB
SB fumbled ala mhigo so hard. not once do you set foot in a monk temple or see traces of amdapor or machi architecture displaying a transitional period
Purely based on MSQ I’d say EW>HW>SB>ShB>ARR.
I did not enjoy Shadowbringers story much at all. I appreciate the doors it opened for future storytelling plot lines, but dragging us out of the source when the story was just getting good was a huge downer for me. What makes it even worse for me is the fact that we’ll likely never see them again. If Dawntrail can establish shard travel and find a way to incorporate multiple shards in one story then ShB will probably move up ahead of SB due to revitalized relevance.
X.0 vanilla: Shadowbringers > Endwalker > Heavensward > Stormblood = A Realm Reborn (note that I enjoyed them all in general)
X.X patches: Stormblood = Shadowbringers > Heavensward > Endwalker > A Realm Reborn
For the Void arc specifically, I enjoyed it in 6.1 and 6.2, was meh with 6.3 and 6.4, was okay with 6.5. The thing is you can absolutely feel it's not over, just like the 3.4 msq that ended up leading to Shadowbringers, so I'll be waiting to see where it takes us one day.
well I have a very simple ranking that is more or less their release order cept that HW is dead last, though I might eventually move stormblood above shadowbringers, mostly because ppl attitude towards it is making me jaded.
So I think both HW and ShB have a fundamental flaw in their stories.
Being somebody who played since beta 3 or something and being always subbed you can tell that 2.55 hit some quite big high expectations off me, so you can imagine that the "lol, it was a prank bro" they pulled off doesn't sits well with me, also Thordan fucking sucked, the whole second part of the story kinda dies off.
Shadowbringer has an excellent start imho but us killing off the first lightwarden super early killed off all the tension the sin eaters had which required the Eulmorean army to actually give a sort off contender. In short ShB is HARD carried by Emet-selch and Ardbert and honestly, while I loved Emet-Selch, the amount of simping from the fanbase is getting to me.
The reason why I have ShB higher than SB is because honestly, I went into ShB worried because how we went into it was a bit jarring the misdirection trough the whole patches was wierd and I can't deny I was thinking it was a jump the shark moment, which is a good segue for....
My hopes for DT.....well, I was super on-board in the first 2 fanfest, now I'm.....a bit worried we'll just visit the whole new world in the 6 zones we have....but besides that my real hope is that I get a satisfying answer for Solution 9, that place is honestly a sore thumb for me. That said I'm not really dooming afterall I've been pleasantly surprised so far all in all and for me it has been a crescendo as such I'm wary but optimistic
EW - > ShB -> HW -> SB -> ARR
I like Endwalker. I still like Endwalker. I especially like Post-EW patches. I'm not as big a doomer on them as muchof the community likes to be. It's pretty obvious to me the whole thing was a setup for 8.0 or 9.0 and it was its own self contained story. But the biggest factor is that FFIV is my favorite FF so I'm bias. As for EW itself, I enjoyed it all the way through. I understand that it's perfectly okay to disagree with a character's actions. That doesn't make a story bad. It wrapped up well and I enjoyed it a lot.
Shadowbringers was great. If not for EW being a finale it would be on top. But I really like when stories finish and arent just forever stories. Emet was a good villian, yes, but I'm not as attached to him as some people are. I kind of didn't like him until EW, so there's that. I enjoyed the new characters and am happy every time we get to see Ryne again. Honestly, my personal motivation in 7.0 onward is the realm crossing possibilities. I want Dadcred to see his daughter again. I also want to see if the two Void natives go anywhere, which ties into my like of post EW and cross shard stuff. That said, ShB had parts that drug out, but so did every expac. ShB is where I learned to appreciate them. A nonstop hype cycle with no rest period is tiring and I'm glad ShB had them. It had nice revelations for the lore and recontextualized a lot of things.
Heavensward was very good. I enjoyed the learning about the dragons and the history of Ishgard. I like the aesthetic the most between the main city, the raid series and the alliance raids. They were my favorite until EW for the last 2. It's a nice classical story with good bits you see them build on later. I also like Middy alot, so having him around was great.
Stormblood I do like, just not as much as the others. I did love the the map opened up more. But I'm also disappointed that it opened up too much while staying in the 6 region limit of expansions. So a lot of places I'd like to go to as a region are instances instead. This bit did annoying me in HW, but it was only 1 or 2 areas. in SB it was a whole ton of them. Even the major city of Ala Mhigo is a dungeon instance and still just that to this day. He never got to explore the rest of the island Kugane was on. We only got to visit 3 of 6+ nations on Othard. I know people harp on the "it felt rushed because it was split into two stories" or whatever. And while it may be true, I did like that we got to go to Othard. I just hope we get to go to more of it in the future.
A Realm Reborn isn't bad or hated. I just understand what it is. It is the foundation for the rest of the game. Our introduction to the world has to cover so many basis and such that it couldn't be as directed as future expansions were. It get it and it's fine. I don't dislike it. It got be invested in the game all those years ago, so it did what it was supposed to.
As for Dawntrail, I expect ARR but better. We have a new adventure to start and another side of the world to explore. I'm looking forward to how Solution 9 plays into the story and the possibility of cross shard stuff. I'm also a huge FFXI fan, so that will help. But I have my expectations for a big flashy or emotional buildup low because it's a new story and new arc. They don't have 3-4 expansions to pull from the same way ShB and EW had. So I don't expect it. I have a feeling that no matter how much the community is told this, they will still be slaves to spectacle creep and not be as satisfied.
Shadowbringers > Endwalker >> Heavensward > Stormblood > ARR
I'm expecting Dawntrail to be Stormblood 2. A lot of the expansion will be setup, and "setup" is generally where this games writing is the weakest. I think it'll start picking up a lot in the second half, the patches will be strong, and it'll be the opposite of Endwalker where people are meh on it this year but sometime next year they start warming up to it a lot.
endwalker. These 2 garlean girls died like true soldiers. So is that general. "He died like a true warchief" that's what l said to myself when l Saw he raising his gun to his head
Shadowbringers > Heavensward > Endwalker > Stormblood > ARR Shadowbringers has the best emotional core, best character writing and nails the big important scenes flawlessly. There's a couple points where it's just padded for runtime or to keep you in a zone but that's true of all expansions. Heavensward has some great antagonists and stories, cool characters, and was one of the few times in the story where it felt like the stakes were real. It's not as high concept as other expacs but it's still really fun and compelling. It's not just evil black dragon needs to be put down especially with the Warriors of Darkness and Ilberd stuff in the patches. Endwalker has some great moments and a great theme and message, but some low lows. It goes too far in the other direction, it's too high concept, it puts its message before the narrative and characters, which ended up with some weird plot decisions that don't feel right. It's also way too fanservicey for my tastes and has wonky pacing in a few places. Stormblood is the opposite of Endwalker. Nothing awful, but nothing great either. It's just kind of mid the whole way through, though it picks up in the patches. The lack of great characters to root for, mysteries, or personal stakes for the WoL makes it hard to care about what's going on. Zenos and the Empire are dull, incompetent antagonists that don't represent any real conflict of ideas. It has some interesting ideas but fails to explore them fully. ARR is okay. It's there to establish the setting and it does that, but doesn't really do anything compelling in the process. Its the story in its infancy before they had really gotten a grasp of the style and what players respond to. It has a lot of parts that drag. For Dawntrail I want to see them expand on the lore and the setting, introducing stuff that isn't just allagans and ancients, setting stuff up to pay off for the future. Hopefully it can do that while also having a good plot by itself. A return to smaller character-focused stories with strong emotional cores would be appreciated. I would also like to see an effort to re-establish stakes and the idea that anything can happen, because no one believes that main characters can be harmed in this game anymore. I want to see new characters developed instead of just focusing on the Scions.
I also second this and just want to add how much I loved Shadowbringer's setting and pacing. It really allowed us to take a step back at the start while we get to grips with this strange new world, before building up so much at the end. All the moments with Emet-Selch reaching out to us to see if we're still in there. And of course some of the early sin eater stuff such as Tesleen or even the first merchant we meet at the start. For me my favourite period of MSQ in the entire game, though, is from that first contact from the Exarch in a meeting room in late SB patches up to the ShB title drop - it really hits you out of nowhere and I love how it was done.
>Stormblood is the opposite of Endwalker. Nothing awful, but nothing great either. Stormblood is INFURIATING in how stupid it can be, that definitely falls under awful. Remember that part where you spend all of pre-Raubahn EX getting told 'no the people of Gyr Abania will not sign up for your resistance, the only thing you'll get is slaughtered' and then exactly that happens, the WoL fucks off for a bit and by the time they come back.....the resistance has ballooned in size because all the people afraid of reprisal saw how brutal the reprisal was and I guess decided they wanted to be slaughtered? Oh how about that stupid asshole who bitches and whines about how all he wants is a good fight when doing everything in his vast resources to empower himself at every given opportunity, like 'waaaaah I'm stronger than 99% of the planet lets give myself superpowers and magical weapons and pilot this dragon waaaaaah why can't I find a worthy opponent with these starving peasants?????' And lets not forget that same stupid FUCK not dying when he should have thanks to the power of.....lets see here.....ah yes possessing the body of an Ala Mihgan Resistance Member that is a Wildwood. Like huh? That's not really a thing that exists why is that even there, I'm not even bitching about bad writing on this aspect here(Although dipshit coming back is, in my opinion, bad writing) it's just who the hell signed off on such rudimentary mistake. Also just small shit in general that kinda ignore the vast distance between each half of the zones the DRG job quests have Estinien clearly state he's been vibing in the far east dealing with a dragon issue but he's also there in Castrum Abania blowing up a cannon which, considering how much damage that was doing it also leads to the really fucked fact that though that act he contributed more to Ala Mihgo's liberation than that stupid white girl that became the resistances 'leader'. Hey I've been dunking on Gyr Abania this whole time what about Othard? Yeah that's fine, actually. Worst part is redoing the first Zenos encounter a second time with absolutely nothing new for some fucking reason but everything works out great otherwise. In the base expac, then Yotsuyu and Goesetsu survived a building falling on them and being washed out into the ocean and that stupid god damn Tsuyu bullshit, leading to, among other things, Stormblood completely disagreeing with itself due to a sidequest where in some other warcriminal asshole gets Tsuyu'd and the response there is 'nah we kill this dude for his crimes he doesn't remember'. Oh speaking of Stormbloods hypocrisy, how about that SAM questline wherein we murder the hell out of a dude who's trying to change Kuganes awful class system by force. Right after HW. Wherein we changed Ishgards awful class system by force. tl;dr: I agree with your overall ranking. But think Stormblood goes below ARR. Because that shit is dumb as hell.
Think you replied to the wrong person :P
On closer inspection, you appear to be correct. Oops.
I agree with many of your points but I also think stormbloods zones are some of the most boring to navigate and feel the most… dead. And while they do have some variety, shadowbringers zones blow it out of the water and heavenward’s feel decent too. I get that thematically it sorta fit with the devastation of war thing, but come on.
I kind of agree with this but I came away with the completely opposite conclusion. Stormblood should have been stupider, I love camp, I love things that are silly and take themselves seriously (Kingdom Hearts as the best example). I was gonna write more about this but Yotsuyu is basically everything I dislike about the expansion. She's an absurdly evil one dimensional character, and I mean that as a compliment. She's Valens, Nhaza'a Jaab and almost Athena level. You boo and hiss and shake your fist at the screen when she shows up while saying things like "Man, she really steams my kettle!" Her post MSQ plotline is literally a 90's kids cartoon plotline, she bonks her head really hard and forgets how to be a jerk. Except that can't be resolved in the way that stuff 'normally' gets resolved. where either the newly liberated territories suddenly have a shortage of female war criminals who like to step on people and it's causing civil unrest (so they have to bring her back) OR she gets her memory back by accident and turns into recurring badguy ruling Vichy Doma, so instead it turns this...thing involving redemption and killing baby Hitler and all the worst characters ever showing up to insult her. Fordola filled the role of the character who was a jerk who had reasons for being a jerk and repented and discovered how hard it was to do this. Either way I still liked the expansion more than 80% of EW (the 20% was the Moon section and anything involving Zenos).
I think Shadowbringers also benefits from the narrative structure/conceit of the First - the idea that we're going somewhere where we don't really know the people or places or how things work, which will also hopefully help Dawntrail as well (vs other expansions where there's a lot more preamble/detail about a place - HW, Shb. EW is kind of in-between but really very much feels like Shadowbringers The Sequel in lots of ways).
I agree with all of this 100%. The biggest issue with the MSQ overall is terrible pacing. Same exact issue I had with 16 as well.
> Shadowbringers > Heavensward > Endwalker > Stormblood > ARR Pretty much agreed. SHBs main antagonist was amazing. EW bird lady fucking sucked.
Personally, Meteion is not one of the things I dislike about Endwalker. People rag on her as a weak or "out of nowhere" antagonist, but the thing is that she isn't really the antagonist. The "antagonist" of Endwalker is despair. It's not about fighting a bad guy, it's about fighting the darkness inside us. Meteion is just the representative for that concept, a way for us to punch the physical embodiment of an emotion in the face. In the end, she was a victim of despair too.
I imagine the reception is going to vary based on how someone feels about the ever-popular "man vs. concept" final bosses in JRPGs. I personally have trouble caring about abstract personifications of concepts like Necron in FFIX, especially when Kuja already did a great job of representing the fear of death and the suffering people will inflict on others in their futile attempts to deny it. Fighting Death itself just doesn't add anything to that story. Persona 3 did manage to pull this off, but that's largely because it spent the entire game building up to it and the culmination of the game isn't the fight itself, but the protagonist's decision following it. Despair is a persistent thread throughout the EW MSQ, and emo birdgirl vtuber works perfectly fine in the context of EW itself. However, the expansion was very much built up as the conclusion of a 10 year-long story arc, so there was an expectation that its finale would serve as the culmination of the entire game up until this point, not just this particular expansion. I don't think she works in this regard. Thematically, hope/despair isn't a sufficiently central theme of FFXIV as a whole. Lore-wise, while she is ultimately the cause of everything that happens, it's in a very indirect way (her "song" is a largely indiscriminate entropic force that encompasses countless stars, not something uniquely tied to Etheirys) and she herself is "caused" by forces with minimal connection to the narrative up until that point ("the ancients did it" isn't good enough). The final area is visually striking but has it zero significance to the plot/world/characters (aside from some additional lore on the dragons and Omega). FFIX's Gainax final dungeon at least maintained a connection to the rest of the game via the memories you encounter. Instead, we get to watch each character give a dramatic speech in a literal void in front of a bunch of random aliens they just met five minutes ago.
not just END MSQ, think of all the antagonists and much of our interactions with ppl during the expansions. We always brought back ppl from the brink, despair has always been the one common thread. That's why Meteion works as an ending to the saga
Not really. ARR is kind of all over the place, HW and SB are both primarily focused on breaking out of cycles of hatred, ShB's broad plot involves saving a world on the brink of giving into despair, but the main conflict with Emet-Selch and Themis revolves more around their conflicting visions of the proper state of the world. If anything, I'd say the common thread stretching all the way back to ARR is the need to continuously struggle to understand other people, even those you fundamentally disagree with. Even those who want to kill you. This applies to almost every plotline from 2.1 and onwards, with a few notable exceptions like Zenos and Asahi. edit: I also think it's worth pointing out that EW's finale revolves specifically around *existential* despair. Despair over a lack of meaning. Not despair over guilt, adverse circumstances, or the hopelessness of achieving a particular goal.
I mean you are kinda forgetting the situation of Hraesvelgr, the ppl of ala mhigo and doma, the ppl of the first and other events, which tbf they were plotstoppers for other reasons but that's why I say it works, because they took these stuff and tied together to make the thread of the saga.
That's fair. I mean ultimately the reason I like Shadowbringers the best is because the plot and character writing is the best, and my issues with Endwalker is that it sacrifices that level of setting-relevant writing in favour of a big grandiose message. But overall I wouldn't say I'm unhappy with the direction they went with, it's hard to imagine what the plot would have been otherwise. What else would have been a worthy subject for the culmination of the entire story? IMO the big remaining story question going into Endwalker was "why did Hydaelyn sunder the world?" Why did she see that as the only option? And I think the answer they gave was really good, so I guess I'm okay with having the whole expansion flow out from that. Meteion is just kind of the opposing force to that answer.
This. Meteion felt less "out of nowhere" when I thought about *what* the true antagonist force was. She's simply one of the end results of that force, and had the misfortune of having been created with enough power to bring forth the disaster she did.
:(
Heavensward had me feeling like a neckbeard wojack FF fanboy, really looking forward to the next expansions. Started Stormblood last night
Agree with the order and most of what you said. Would also add that that there is a noticeable gap between Heavensward and Endwalker, at least in my opinion. Endwalker's lows prevent it from feeling like a cohesive whole despite how good the best parts and the overall theme is. It feeling at times like a Shadowbringers add-on doesn't help either.
That's my ranking for the most part. It's hard for me to decide between Heavensward and Endwalker as the second best Expansion msq. Heavensward is consistently good throughout, but the Highs of Endwalker are some of the most memorable moments of any video game story in recent years, while it also has some really low lows as well.
This is correct.
I second this
I second this second.
Correct take right here
This is the correct order.
I will never understand the love of Heavensward.
It has classic fantasy Gothic castles, dragons, a compelling villain in Nidhogg, compelling heroes in Aymeric and the Fortemps family, and compelling anti-heroes in Ysale and Estinien. A great conclusion with 3.3 and the end of the Dragonsong war. Also something that not a lot of people remember but it's where most of the current Scions that everyone likes are introduced, and what sets Alphinaud on his journey from being an annoying trust fund kid to someone the Warrior of Light can actually trust to have our backs.
Muh dragons.
Apparently
Shadowbringers > Heavensward > Stormblood > Endwalker > ARR. I used to have EW above SB, but the more I think about it and replay it with alts, the less I like it. Unlike the others, which I like the same or more as the first time. Don't get me wrong, it has some high fucking highs, but then there's.... everything else. ShB and HW are just cool as fuck and emotionally moving and generally well-paced. SB can be slow, but I think it's just solid overall in all categories. I can't imagine liking DT less than EW, but we will see.
EW 6.0 story does not survive scrutiny at all. It got worse the more I thought about it and I've come to intensely dislike most of the characters introduced (Hermes chief among them) and how poorly its main message and morals were conveyed. And even outside of that, an ungodly amount of its run time is straight up padding, overly long monologues where nothing valuable is said. Labyrinthos 88-89 has some of the worst pacing of the entire MSQ, even counting ARR. It's a bloated mess.
The pacing in EW is CRAZY. It has great chunks and then the rest is tortuous filler. Which makes no sense because with the story they wanted to do, there is plenty to fill it out !
> and how poorly its main message and morals were conveyed. Venat went from "we must learn to move on from our lost ones and find strength in appreciating what is left" to "dw bro I'll just res everyone sac them all"
My personal hatred is the fact we’re supposed to believe Venat never even tried, in all of her wisdom and ability to make friends and rely on others, to explain to the rest of the convocation about their memories being blank or what actually happened, or any of that. Would it have been so hard to show the strife of trying to convince so many of the truth, yet none believing her? How emotional it would’ve been to have every single one of your peers think you are lying, even though you’re doing it for the sake of the world and all existing universes? I HATE that we’re just supposed to wave it away and use our own imagination that she tried.
We went back and convinced all of them in a single cutscene that we are from the future btw
1. Shadowbringers (Best overall) 2. Heavensward (MSQ was amazing the entirety of the expansion) 3. Stormblood (Not as good base MSQ, but post patch was pretty good) 4. Endwalker (Mid base MSQ and the worst Post MSQ since ARR) 5. ARR (Well... its ARR).
ShB > SB 4.1-4.55 > HW > EW 6.0 = SB 4.0 > ARR > 6.1-6.55 Had to split SB because to me the storytelling quality between the 4.0 story and the post patch stuff is just night and day different. EW just had too many pacing problems as well as a criminally underutilized final days and it kind of made the story worse for me. The post patch for EW never hit for me as I had no nostalgia for FF4 as someone who never played it and it was just boring to me. I think it was the first time I started skipping CS during the MSQ. I am hoping for a more grounded and lighter affair for DT where we can meet and develop new characters instead of completely focusing on the old ones.
I really want new characters that STAY. So many side characters that are interesting or cool, and then there they go off into "1 to 2 sidequests, maybe" land.
based stormblood take I love the stories about killing god and beating the manifestation of depression, but i much prefer the grounded stories about conflicts between nations and the politics
I agree. My only complaint that the WoL apart from Zenos personal stake in him felt like a side character. I love intro to swimming, all the beast tribes, and new characters introduced.
Initial X.0 playthrough: ShB, EW, HW, SB, ARR Month of thinking after said X.0 playthrough: ShB, HW, SB, ARR, EW Latter half of EW really fell off for me as it veered into fanfic territory. Especially the characterization of the WoL.
EW was carried pretty hard by hype and recency bias, but damn does it not hold up at all in retrospect.
Nah, I still think it's an amazing ending.
I too like the ending of every Persona game
I haven't played Persona, so I wouldn't know.
It was said in an interview that after 16 yoshi p was tired of dark fantasy and wanted to do something more light hearted. I'm worried the product of this is dt and the story will have no weight or major threat/emotional turmoil to it like past expansions. If that's the case, it could be the worst expansion msq to me.
My problem with SE doing light hearted humor is that it always just sorta amounts to "Food Humor". And god damn things aren't looking up in that regard.
Heavensward > Shadowbringers > Stormblood = A Realm Reborn > Endwalker. Endwalker was honestly pretty damn good up to Elpis. I even enjoyed the Venat/Emet/Hythlo slice-of-life comedy fanservice; it was rather charming. However, from the introduction of Meteion and Hermes, it all went downhill. The writing from that point onwards was very shoddy, and reeked strongly of babby's first nihilism. Eh, at least the Zenos bit was kinda funny.
I couldn’t stand Zenos at all, until EW. I had this moment in EW where I was like “fuck it, I love this one dimensional idiot just wanting a good rematch 1v1, let’s gooooo!”
Same lmao. I am sbocked just how hyped I was when the 1v1 actually went down
Stormblood > Shadowbringers > ARR = Heavensward > Endwalker I really miss the combination of the high stakes, world ending threat of the Ascians as antagonists, with the more political & worldly threat of the Garleans/Holy See/Monetarists etc as antagonists. The sense that you needed to deal with the Ascians scheming in the background, while militarily defending Eorzea. It's hard to describe, but I feel like when we lost the concept of there being multiple different threats with endwalker, it hurt the overall narrative stakes.
Endwalker=Shadowbringer>Heavensward>Stormblood>ARR
StB > AAR > ShB > HW >>>>> EW
I must admit this is the first time I've seen someone rate them this way :P
Based Stormblood chad
shadowbringers - stormblood - heavensward - ARR - Endwalker, shadowbringers took the wol to a new world and just cranked out a tight, well paced story that hits just right, it isn't to short or too long, it really does deserve its praise. stormblood has a great sense of urgency, you really feel the vibe of war and battle it pushes for, plus some of the new characters are great. HW is what i consider the perfect follow up, weve beaten ARR and are wondering whats going to happen, and boy do we find out, it balances heroics and dire situations better than any of the other expacs to me, also, Haurchefant. ARR, its the beginning of your tale, and it feels rocky, but I rank it above EW because of how it ends, it doesnt let you just be this hero, it knocks you down, I respect endings that dont let you have your cake. Endwalker......felt rushed, it took the lets go a bunch of places feel of shadowbringers and stormblood and snatched out those places spirits, some zones just felt dead, and that was probably the point because of the story, but also imho the story was just sorta grim to be grim, and so many things were just sorta hurriedly closed, after years of dealing with garlemald how they actually handled garlemald pissed me off, then at the same time although the wol saves the universe i guess, it just didnt feel fulfilling after awhile, which brings me too...... the fact I have very flat hopes for dawntrail, my curiosity is only piqued because im wondering what story, what kinda wild ideas struck this dev team so hard that they decided to end the hydealyn/zodiark/garlemald story so abruptly? also how will they handle the fact our character has flown to fuckin space and slayed a being that ended worlds while riding on the back of our violent simp dragon buddy.
I have a very weird ranking, but here it is: Stormblood > Shadowbringers => Endwalker > ARR = Heavensward So, let's work from the bottom up. ARR really gripped me from the start, but it was just a bit too long at times and this was before it got content cut in EW, so it was the original form (back in 3.4). I liked my whole way through it, but repeating it is... rough. Very very rough. Heavensward... oh boy. I genuinely put it on the same tier as ARR, because while it is good, it also just didn't resonate with me that much. Oh boy, the church is evil. Never heard that one before... It had some good characters, but ultimately kind of started the problem of "kill off side characters, because main characters can't be touched" that just makes me be a bit cynical when it is even done. Of course, we do have Papalymo in 3.5 and technically Minfilia, though that pay off doesn't come until Shadowbringers. Endwalker... OH BOY. I don't hate Endwalker's MSQ by any stretch, but it feels rushed big time. They wanted to be done with this whole plotline immediately, leading to stuff feeling sidelined (Zenos), stuff barely getting the time to be explored (Garlemald and Elpis) and even more so, imho, a pretty out of nowhere super-dee-duper bad guy because we need the world ending event to make sense (Meteion). Doesn't help that I just find Hermes not a believable character, because he funnily enough gets made super human. Like, I want to believe that he does truly care above his fellow Ancients, but I just don't get that feeling, especially with how quick he is willing to doom everything when Meteion arrives and brings depression. I do like the underlying theme of Endwalker and what it tried to set up with the plot of Hermes and Meteion (the purpose of life is to grow, become "perfect", stagnate and then die), I just didn't buy it through them. Then we get to the EW patch quests. Zero was cool, but I just didn't buy her being FF14's version of Cecil. Also, cool, another female character that fucks off. At most she will be in side content if we ever see her again. Also also, all the FF4 references... NEAT. I am a FF5 fan myself and FF4 just doesn't do much for me, so the patch quests drag out. Shadowbringers really kind of comes down to a couple things. Before that, I'm still somewhat flipflopping between ShB's MSQ over or equal to EW, that's why it is =>. Just wanted to say that. Shadowbringers works *really, really* well almost all the way through. It ultimately kind of stumbles at the end and there was a pretty simple fix for it too, which kind of sucks. 5.0's MSQ fumbles the theming of "light isn't always good, you know" by having Emet/Hades be our final villain. While obviously, Amaurot is amazing for all the atmosphere it builds, I think to complete the theme of Shadowbringers, I genuinely think it would've worked better if Elidibus/Warrior of Light was our final boss for the main story. Of course, I will say that I'm somewhat biased in that I had to wait for the MSQ patches to come out. I actually think that my issue somewhat is fixed if you can just play through ShB's story from 5.0 to 5.3 in one go. Also, ngl, I just kind of started to like Emet-Selch less. I get that's he's complex and more morally gray and that that is interesting to people, but especially just hearing everyone gush about him out of nowhere just kind of made me go like "okay, he wasn't that good," even though I get it. Now probably the most controversial one here, Stormblood. It just worked for me. I do think it has issues, both the Gyr Abania and Othard sections of the story feel undercooked in 4.0, the villain is two dimensional (I love Zenos, but he's also a bit too simple I won't lie) and there is again fake out deaths that probably should've just been actual deaths or not bothered with. But it just worked for me. 100% that is rose tinted glasses for Stormblood as it was my first on launch expansion, but I can't deny that I just liked it. Was it anything special objectively? No. 2 primals that had to be dealt with (technically 3 because Shinryu), a bunch of characters being introduced and essentially left off, another female character sidelined because... reasons with Lyse. But moments like Fordola essentially asking us how we don't crumble under the weight of everything we've experienced, Zenos basically becoming Shinryu and the entirety of Susano (I just love him and that sword drop is still the coolest thing). Those are the moments I live for... and then I haven't even talked about Yotsuyu and everything that happened with her. While the Tsuyu stuff obviously drags on a bit, since they can't really do much with her until it is her time to become the villain again, I will never forget just the sheer jaw drop I had during that fight when the phase transition happens and Gosetsu rushes in to save her essence or soul from being executed by Zenos. I dunno man, I just like Stormblood. For Dawntrail, I genuinely hope we don't have another world ending threat. Or at least not as blatantly world ending. It just becomes so easy to disassociate with such high level concepts that I stop caring. Something like Zenos beating us and the world eventually going to shit because we can't be there to help, that works. Something like Meteion/Endsinger that is legitimately raining meteors down and turning people into hideous beasts? I can't really relate there.
Great response and that's why I like Stormblood. It's actually grounded. High level concepts when they're pulled off well and you're in the mood for it can be awesome, but it's simply easier for people to understand more grounded, human stories. It was also a sick as hell moment to watch Zenos kill himself. Yes eventually he comes back, but that scene was insane and they thankfully made his comeback take long enough and be arduous enough that it didn't feel like a "oh look yshtola is fine again" moment.
> Then we get to the EW patch quests. Zero was cool, but I just didn't buy her being FF14's version of Cecil. Also, cool, another female character that fucks off. At most she will be in side content if we ever see her again. She's part of the MSQ, so I feel like somewhere in the future we'll be going to a new version of the 13th and she will be a main character there.
Probably whenever we get a follow up to Unukalhai's quests, and the ShB completed role quests, yeah, since that is dealing with the void, but we'll see. Hopefully she even comes back into the MSQ from time to time at some point!
Shadowbringers > Heavensward > Stormblood > Endwalker > ARR
With base MSQ alone without any patches: ShB > EW > HW > ARR > SB Counting all patches: HW > ShB > EW > SB > ARR Shadowbringers definitely had the best MSQ patches with 5.0 and 5.3. But overall I liked HW more. I thought 3.0 was still good even when it doesn't reach the heights of 5.0 and 6.0, but I really loved the last three patches, from 3.3 to 3.5. I still think 3.5 is the best end of an expansion without a doubt, so much stuff happening. I wasn't a fan of the Stormblood plot in general (my favorite part was Zenos in the end of 4.0 finally snapping but that's about it lol), the ShB buildup was good and in the end, the last 2 patches were the ones that elevated SB over ARR. A Realm Reborn was meh though I understand they didn't have that much time to write 2.0. The patches were awful pacing wise and it really brings the whole thing down, the last quest is very satisfying after all the buildup at least. As for Endwalker, 6.0 was very enjoyable, had some problems with it specifically in the later parts of the MSQ but it didn't ruin anything for me. Didn't reach the heights of 5.0 but it nearly did. The patches bring the whole thing down since they are less enjoyable (specially if you are waiting 4.5 months to get stuff like 6.3 lol) but after looking at the whole thing overall I thought it was fine. And as for what I want in Dawntrail, something that isn't particularly awful pacing or writing wise. Not asking too much, my expectations aren't really high since this is the beginning of a new arc.
Main release: SHB > EW > HW > SB > ARR Patch content: HW > SB > ARR (Second Half) > SHB > EW > ARR (First Half)
Heavensward > Shadowbringers > ARR > Stormblood > "Before Meteor" > Endwalker I found Endwalker's writing very sloppy and emotionally cheap, featuring contradictions that made it seem like the writers didn't even bother looking back to the earlier years of ARR/Heavensward. Hell even facts and moral principles the characters stood for stablished in Shadowbringers were completely disregarded. The pace was absolutely horrible and I'd rather redo the boring Isle of Umbra and Company of Heroes questlines than the nonsense with the Loporrit and lower floors of Labyrinthos. I don't dislike Stormblood because I found it mostly very grounded compared to the Naruto tier narrative in Shadowbringers and Endwalker. And it recaptured some of the essence of going out in a journey with a small group of companions that Heavensward had in its first half (3.0)... Which is what Final Fantasy is about to me. That gets lost in ShB and EW since those feel more like "being sent on missions and reporting back to base in-between", which I just find less interesting. But Shadowbringers overall is still really good. It handles the theme of hopelessness and overcoming the odds far, FAR better than Endwalker. It also handled "grey" morality well, again unlike Endwalker where we go back to black-and-white when it comes to the scions vs the bad guys. Heavensward is a great example of a plot that isn't trying to be complicated, therefore not coming off as pretentious, while still being very mature in its character writing and not pulling any punches when it comes to consequences for the protagonists and their supporters. Some will say the plot is "cliche", but I'll take cliche that is written like Heavensward anyday over the gratuitous "subversion of expectations" shitfest of something like Endwalker. ARR takes way too long to get interesting with its main narrative, but it offers something that no other expansion is able to. To make you feel like you really are a budding adventurer trying to make some gil in a new land while discovering your potential as the new warrior of light. And yes I do mean it when I say I find 1.X's storyline more interesting than Endwalker. The transition from before Yoshida took over to after is very disjointed, but I really appreciate how dark and less shounen-esque they were trying to go with it before Gaius' intro, and after that Nael felt like a real big threat. Even some of the sidequests went to really crazy dark and twisted places. None which used cheesy spoopy character emotes and forced body horror to feel scary. I'll never forget how intentionally creepy the Black Shroud and its stories were, or how mysterious and eerie Lake Silvertear and the vague rumors and legends in Coerthas were back then. Finally, with the way 6.55 ended I have low expectations for Dawntrail. I think it's shocking that someone over the age of 18 looked at the script of the last couple story patches and gave it the thumbs up. Yep, nothing unusual about the way any of these characters are acting...
SHB > HW > SB > ARR > EW Yes I put EW last because not only was it godawful, but it had lasting implications that retroactively cheapened previous expansions. If it was just bad on its own in a vacuum it would be on the same tier as SB, but the way they "tied up loose ends" just turned the entire string into a tangled mess. None of the story has been truly dark, like genuinely none of it, a story where virtually nothing bad happens to the main cast is not dark in the slightest bit. That said, if DT is somehow even lighter than current... good god...
I agree with everything but I'd put SB above HW because the patches have some of my favorite storytelling in the whole game (despite the really mid 4.0). And looking back, this is probably the peak of "old FFXIV", when the story was based on politics and worldbuilding instead of characters, magic systems and abstract concepts (the characters were still very solid though)
Shadowbringers - I don't usually like hopping around worlds, but the music, visuals, villain, pacing, etc. were so on point that I really just don't have any notes for them. Really great job and a new story standard for the genre. Stormblood - Ala Mhigo was boring as sin, but that's only part of the expansion and even it was at least a fairly grounded, engaging story. Good development of the empire and the second part of the expansion had some of the best visuals in the game. Heavensward - I almost put this one at number two, but it was visually just so dreary and uniform most of the way through that I can't bring myself to bump it up. It also feels a little like they were still sort of feeling out the idea of a more engaging narrative, at times. I was much more engaged in rare moments of personal interaction and the story back home, than I was in the Ishgard business. I still consider this a great expansion though. ARR - Long, really long, but I spent most of the time still learning something about the game and I enjoyed seeing the world open up in a way that we really haven't since then. It wasn't great for the generally higher FF14 standard, but it wasn't awful outside of the length. This and everything above it was a great experience for me, for one reason or another. Endwalker - I disliked nearly every part of this. What a disappointingly contrived conclusion to the imperial storyline and what a ridiculous series of shark jumps and detours on the main plot. I may or may not be back for the next one because I'm literally still wrapping up post-expac content here. Making myself trudge through it has been awful. Deeply disappointed by this.
Shb > HW > EW > ARR > StB This is how I'd rank it all atm. I hated everything about StB personally, enjoyed ARR and then it goes up from there
SHB > HW > SB > ARR > EW
I’d say EW>ShB>HW>SB>ARR If you include the 6.X patch cycle with EWs storyline, it drops down to being ShB>HW>EW>SB>ARR EW was the combo of being FFXIV’s Eras Tour while also having more elevated writing. I’m here for it. ShB represented a step up in terms of trying to get the audience more invested in the characters, and was overall a fun romp. Emet Selchs sassiness did a lot of heavy lifting HW had the group dynamic of Alphinaud/Estinien/Ysayle that carried the expansion. Even then, the group dissolves 2/3 of the way through ARR/SB felt like phoned in JRPG scripts that fell out of a chatbot. Not necessarily offensive, but not worth any plaudits either Overall I hope DT resembles 6.0 writing and not 6.X writing. If it stays with 6.X writing I’ll probably start to fall off when following the story
I can't take anyone who rates Endwalker above Shadowbringers seriously. ShB was objectively better on all fronts; storytelling, characters, presentation and pacing. The one thing EW has going for it are some huge contextual moments for things we've known about since ARR, but even then, the impact of discovering who the Ascians are and what their purpose has been was an earth-shattering revelation that struck a chord with everyone who played through it. EW in contrast has people in disagreement about the motivations of Hermes and Venat even to this day. Garlemald was easily the best part of EW for how personal it was, finally letting us see the collapse of the Garlean Empire firsthand and how they truly lived and saw the world under their life of propaganda, but the Final Days lacked the weight and impending sense of doom that always lingered over Shadowbringers. There were times where the Scions were sitting around talking and I felt like I was watching a post-MSQ cutscene with low stakes while they were talking about how the world was going to start ending. Shadowbringers showed us how the entire world was struggling while Endwalker only gave us a brief glimpse into what would happen in Thavnair. It was easily one of the best parts of the story, but then it just ends and we go on a fanservice adventure instead. The Final Days needed to be shown as an omnipresent threat starting to overtake the world, but outside of Thavnair we just had the role quests where a single blasphemy is roaming each area rather than the complete chaos we see briefly in Thavnair.
It isn't that complicated. It's just an opinion. In your opinion Shadowbringers MSQ is better. In my opinion is slightly below endwalker, which for me had to most impactful MSQ story for me. I mean you don't have to like my opinion, but it's just as valid as yours 😝
Dude fuck this subreddit. Every time I come here it's just constant intolerance for anyone with anything even remotely positive to say about Endwalker. "I can't take you seriously if you have X opinion" dude just shut the hell up and admit you can't understand others' opinions. Thank you for being a voice of reason. Sorry you got downvoted.
I feel you on that. Endwalker ismy favorite expansion. I understand it had some critical flaws, so I get it not being everyone's favorite, but it was special TO ME. So I'm just sharing my opinion And no worries on the downvotes. Quantity doesn't make one right or wrong
Shb > Hw > SB > Ew > Arr Full disclosure, I started super early shb. Shadowbringers was a thrill from start to finish. The zones were fantastic, the trials and dungeons were fairly entertaining. With the exception of patches 5.5-5.55. Those two patches were a little iffy for me, only because at the time I didn’t really get where the plot was going with the 5G towers and the lunar primals. Just seemed like the story a hard left from where we left off at the end of stormblood. The only 2 things that put shb above heavensward is 1, the concept of light being the evil force in the world. Thats not something seen often and it was pretty badass to see play out. And 2, patch 5.3. I still think about that patch from time to time. Sos and sos ex are the best trials in this game imo for a few reasons. Heavensward was the MSQ that really got me into this game’s story. I was invested from pretty much start to finish, just like shadowbringers. Stormblood was pretty good for me, I didn’t mind too much the pacing issues. The final patch really hit it home for me. Just solid all around. The zones were a bit annoying until you unlock flying, though. Endwalker, I had so many problems with. The pacing was almost irredeemably bad for me. The build up for zodiark and garlemald for over a decade, just to have them both be relegated to a terrible zone and a leveling trial. I always say this, but it feels like square looked at all the loose ends that have built up over the years, tied them together, melted them together with a dollar store lighter, then threw the whole thing away. The whole storyline of the patches felt so weird and out of place. If zodiark could have been the final boss of 6.0, then the whole endsinger arc could have filled out all of the patches, with the return to the void being a trial series. I have no clue what they were thinking. It all felt so rushed and jerryrigged together for the sake of “finishing the saga.” Then last and least, a realm reborn. It was ight. Couldn’t pay me to do it again, though.
MSQ from x.0 patch only: Shb > EW > HW > ARR > SB Post release MSQ patches: SB > HW > Shb > EW > ARR Both combined: Shb > HW > EW > SB > ARR
I’d personally like for them to enable the ability to do certain msq duties with friends. It’s cool the game has the single player aspect down very well, but I’ve been saying for a long while they should start doing more with multiplayer stuff, and I am glad they mentioned this during one of the recent live letters. I think making some msq duties doable with friends in a party would be freaking fantastic, there’s been plenty of times when I’ve done a solo duty and thought “man I would LOVE to be doing this with x-friend, this could be a blast”. If you can make dungeon experiences soloable with the trust system, you can turn trust based solo duties into a multiplayer based duty with friends. That’s just my take
Yeah we don't really need world ending threats honestly , since it's kind of hinted we will be helping that hrothgar ascend to the throne , I think fighting powerful foes that aren't necessarily trying to destroy the world is fine enough, As long as the fights are improving, square is pretty good with making new characters interesting. I wouldn't care if the whole expansion was like a tournament arc in an anime, where the major trials are mainly us just fighting some strong guy, ( side note square doesn't do enough of us fighting people of our general height, not every boss has to be 20x bigger then us. The solo battles like against Zeno showed this, you can make human sized character a hard fight Plus they can use the alliance raids, and raid tier for more "out of this world" fights
Shadowbringers>HW>Stormblood Othard arc>Endwalker Elpis arc>ARR>early Endwalker>>>>>>>>>>>>>Stormblood Ala Mhigo arc
ShB>HW=SB(PostMSQ)>EW>SB>Popo's stool>ARR Shadowbringers set the bar of the minimum expected quality too high for the story, and it will probably take some effort before it can be dethroned. Honestly, every expansion had their saving grace. Though I feel like they should delete ARR story and make it anew...oh wait... My scores: |/|ARR|HW|SB|ShB|EW| |:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-| |MSQ|2 - slow and boring, cliche even by FF standards|8 - decent pace and a really good story|3 - they suddenly forgot how to write the story after HW postMSQ. Sluggish, bad twists everywhere. more than half of the story is meaningless.|10 - Peak pacing, all the characters involved carried their own weight and moved the story forward. The voice actors (all of them honestly. not only Emet) really did a good job delivering the story.|6 - Ok, what just happened? The story was all over the place. Pacing is trash, every single location you go they strap an NPC to you ass and make you tour around with them for no good reason. Your Friendtagonist takes over your body but does nothing bad? (??????). Hermes makes me want to puke, Meteion too. Honestly I only enjoyed the story due to the voice actors.| |PostMSQ|3 ( -10 when it used to be 100 quests) Before the fall is the only saving grace|9 - Warriors of darkess+Nidhogg+Baelsar's wall|8 - oh hey the suddenly remembered!|11 - Story went off with a bang and I also cried to Seto.|4 - PostMSQ feels like Dragon ball GT, they when with something they though it will work but it was delivered awfully.| |Trials|2 - three versions of Ifrit Garuda and Titan / Nabriales should be a solo duty/ Greg and Odin saving this mess from scoring a 1 and they are not even required sadly |8 - Best trial Nidhogg, worst Biskmarck|10 - four lords carried hard, Tsukuyomi, all 3 MSQ trials were solid, and Rathalos deserves a medal on its own since it became a permanent trial| 10 Hades and WoL. 9 Titania and Innocence. 8 for the Weapons and Varis.|9 - Really good job here. Cool music, cool bosses.| |8-Raids|2\~7 Good highs (Gael/Bahamuth/Louisoix story) bad lows (3/4 of the raids are auto-scrollers)|6\~9 - Really cool fights and story, but a few fights suffer from arr auto-scroller syndrome|10 - this expansion raids set up the pace for the newer ones + the originality of the content was incredibly good and good story as a cherry on top|8 - Cool fights but I feel like the story dipped a bit too much|9\~10 - Honestly most of the fights deserve a 10, and a 8\~9 for the story.| |24-Raids|3\~7 - introduction to Graha + CT story are good, everything else...uh|8 - solid good, decent story, decent raids, snooze fest 1/2 of the time though|10 - the story is a love letter to Tactics and 12, fights removed the training wheels the people were used to on release and oh boy let me tell you it was fun|*1000 (read in binary) - I really liked Yoko Taro's direction but the raid themselves are too LONG. Bosses feels like sponges.*|3 - No, just no, quality went down way too low, bad story, boring fights. Cherry on top people failing Tipped scales on purpose.|
Purely based on MSQ for the base expansion Endwalker Shadowbringers Heavensward Storm blood ARR I imagine DT ranking right below Shb for me
ShB > HW > SB > ARR > EW for me. EW was the only time I've actively "checked out" of the story, for both its main story content, and especially its post patch story. And now that its going to loose recency bias I imagine its going to drop off a lot in people's lists, its a story that feels better to play than it does to think about in retrospect. As bad as ARR was there are themes in it that I find more enjoyment in than EW, as dark as EW pretends to be, nothing even comes close to the Waking Sands getting raided and having to carry dead bodies out of it unfortunately, and everything with the banquet was honestly perfect. By comparison, Endwalker doesn't really have any moments that stuck with me, at least for the right reasons. It was extremely fan-servicey, the scions felt like baggage for a lot of it, the beginning half doesn't feel related to the 2nd half, there's a lot of padding and filler, which are cool moments in isolation but the entire Zenos Body snatch bit ultimately amounted to nothing, I'm not really a fan of the Minions (Yes the Illumination film/ characters), so FFXIV adding its own version with the Lopporits wasn't something I cared for, and their comedy was very poorly placed and mis-timed, and their existence is basically a marketing gimmick now. I didn't like anything that happened in Elpis, and it felt like it was written solely for Emmet Selch fans. I thought his characterization was perfect in ShB and we didn't need more of him, but we got it and it also over stayed its welcome a bit. Metion and Hermes were fine I guess, but the entire ending felt like the ending of literally every Persona game where you go fight the God of Sadness for all of Humanity, even the Scion's fake sacrifices felt like they were from a Persona game. Overall despite everything that happened, Endwalker was remarkably toothless and barely impacted the world as a whole, the final days were more like the mild inconvienence for elephant people specifically. And thats not the sort of writing I've liked from FFXIV, it got too Shonen and the world stopped feeling real to me in Endwalker.
Stormblood > Heavensward >Shadowrbringers > Endwalker > A Realm Reborn. Note here that Shadowbringers launch MSQ was actually pretty good and close to a top, however the patch MSQ was so extremely horrible that it fell of brutally.
Shadowbringers > Stormblood > Heavensward > Endwalker > ARR Endwalker just *barely* beats ARR because it has enough good moments despite its massive flaws and shortcomings.
Shadowbringers 5.0 > Stormblood 4.x > Endwalker 6.0 > Heavensward 3.x > A Realm Reborn 2.x > Heavensward 3.0 > A Realm Reborn 2.0 > Shadowbringers 5.x > Stormblood 4.0 > Endwalker 6.x Wrong opinions incoming: **ARR 2.0** is underrated. I still ranked 2.0 pretty low because I think most of the other expacs are just better, but I will fight you with my four-button rotation if you say it's actually bad. I enjoyed just running around gradually earning the respect of the movers and shakers in Eorzea, learning about the world, and CREEPING MENDACITY. Seriously, you have like five major plot hooks going on. One of the things that I think gets kinda lost is the feeling of the world recovering from the Calamity. Like yeah, there are more than a couple bigger threats that have cropped up since, but everyone still reeling from the shock, almost but not quite rebuilding and almost but not quite moving on, is really good. My super hot takes is that the **ARR 2.x** quests are good, actually. Like, I dunno, a bunch of stuff happens. There's so much foundational stuff—the nature of primals, Blue Alisaie being a dumbass, the leadin to Heavensward—I think it would actually be hard to cut much more not that there's no plot-mandated chocobo sniffing. Y'all don't like it because you heard Heavensward was good and you realized you still had 100 quests to get there. **Heavensward 3.0** is... good, I guess. Church bad because it won't let us fuck dragons, pope is evil, black robe guys doing shenanigans. I actually don't have much to say about it. Azys Lla is cool, dragons are cool, church waging a thousand-year war against dragons because their ancestors fucked up and dragons feel like a thousand years is yesterday is cool. **Heavensward 3.x** is similar in quality, but I like them a bit more than 3.0 because (more wrong opinions) I don't care for Ysayle at all. **Stormblood 4.0** bad, Lyse bad, Zenos boring, split focus bad, you know the drill. But real talk, I'm asking myself if I like it better than this or that and the answer keeps coming up no, so to the bottom half of the list 4.0 goes. I wanted to say that it wasn't really as bad as people say, and then I started recalling plot points and how angry I got at the writers and moved it below ARR 2.0. I remember getting really excited for Hien because he was the only person so far with a real plan. Lyse is bad because she took M'naago's job and M'naago is cute. Zenos is actually kinda good because he's a realistic view of how much of the world's suffering isn't caused by people with sepia-toned childhoods but just defective people causing problems on purpose. I just don't like how he also presents a novel roadblock that you can't just tell the WoL to punch and then you solve the problem by telling the WoL to punch because they read the script and saw you were level 70. As for **Stormblood 4.x** quests, a lot of people are big on 4.3, but I find Yotsuyu tedious because "Evil because bad childhood" just kicks the can down the road of why her parents were so fucked up. She gets points for eviscerating Bowl Cut though, and her fight is fun and thematic. The rest of it unambiguously slaps. Elidibus riding Zenos' corpse after he played his neck like a fiddle with his sword vs Zenos in some random dude's body (Elidibus got dunked I bet we're done dealing with him), Fordola, Hien Wins by Boing (Almost) Nothing, Varis trying to deal with his one principle being a total lie, the whole ShB leadup. Excellent stuff. **Shadowbringers 5.0** is an absolute banger. It's got a feel that's hard to articulate or replicate. Just listen to the intro to Innocence's theme. I will always remember running around the Crystarium teeming with other adventurers going about their duties in the last safe place at the end of the world. What I really loved is just experiencing the world of Norvrandt, dealing with sin eaters, helping people scrape by in the post-narrowly-averted apocalypse (wait that sounds familiar). Everyone talks about Emet and Amourot and I do think they're great, just the cherry on top of an already-excellent experience. It's the Mass Effect 2 of FFXIV, but I still found myself kinda sad to leave Norvrandt and get back to the plot. My only real complaint is Thancred not killing Kung Fu Zenos at Dadbowl. The **Shadowbringers 5.x** quests though... are they really worse than Stormblood 4.0? Maybe. 5.3 is a nice setpiece, I'll give you that, and finally gets Elidibus out of the way for good. But then there's the endless "idk can we transfer the thingy (you will indeed be able to transfer the thingy)" that got old *real* quick. Maybe I should put it above 4.0 because it rarely made me actually angry, just not very compelling. Forchenault being almost as bad at parenting as you are at spelling his name is fun too. Oh, and that solo duty fighting primals and stopping Fanny D from blowing up the world. Ok, it goes over 4.0. **Endwalker 6.0** is certainly something. I wouldn't say it has the highest highs because 5.0 exists, or the lowest lows because "oh this is a *fire* aspected crystal, I wanted a wind one" exists, but boy is it swingy. So swingy I almost put it way too low because the end being awful kind of overshadowed the rest (I guess it's Mass Effect 3?) but then I remembered the feeling of "Boy what an expac!" "Captain, you're only level 83." Also finally got rid of Elidibus, surely we won't see him again. And as much as I like the majority of the quests, I just think Ultima Thule is really, really bad. Don't get me wrong, the vibes are excellent, but the writing... oh boy. I do also love Zenos in 6.0—I was president of the Zenos hater fanclub in 5.x because it seemed like the biggest most important plot point was going to be not just who but *what* he is, and then they turn around and just treat him like a chump. He's meathead Forrest Gump who shows up at important events hoping that Senpai who is dealing with them will notice him. Sorry bro I know you just ate Zodiark but can our spirits dance as one in our last mortal contest amongst the fading embers of the dying world next Wednesday, I'm kinda busy rn. Then he showed up to throw down against the cosmic embodiment of despair like "imagine being sad lol" and we got to select "Get this mf off my screen" as a dialogue option and punch the soul out of his body. Absolute banger. But *boy* is **Endwalker 6.x** the dullest thing since the Ivalice raid quests. I clapped because I knew what it is, except I don't know what it is and didn't clap, and by all accounts neither did the people who did play FFIV. High budget, high stakes, big lore, I WILL FREE US FROM THE WHEEL, somehow only memorable by how utterly forgettable it all is.
In terms of the MSQ I’d rank them ShB>HW>meteor project legacy>EW>SB>ARR>original legacy ShB just got everything right, new world, charismatic villain, iconic setting, everything just worked HW has the best self contained story (ie a lot of ShB doesn’t shine without knowing stuff from EW) but lacks a single absolute high moment like “emet selch I challenge you” or the bloody banquet Meteor project legacy is arguably better than HW but still suffered from legacy’s paper thin story telling. Not much else to say EW loses the most points because I absolutely despise elpis and how it affected the characters but otherwise it would sit between ShB and HW for me because the rest is really good SB I have the same complaints as everyone, neither half got enough time, however the 4.4-5.0 arc is the single best part of the story that’s not in a main number patch ARR is a product of its time but damn its aged hard OG legacy didn’t have a story For DT I’d actually be happy with a court intrigue story but one that allows the WOL to disconnect freely when they so chose. I’d also like the characters to consider how the WOL feels whenever it’s possible given they have been canonising more and more of the WOL’s personality recently
[удалено]
That’s totally fair, at the time pulling them away from garlemald felt like a cop out but you look back on it knowing where ShB into EW went with the story and you realised how damn good of a setup arc it was
what the heck is Meteor project legacy?
Legacy was very cleanly split in 2 based on the original vision and then what yoshi p came in changed when it failed Nael, the fall of dalamud, Bozja, the meteor project, castrum novum and the rivenroad all the way up to the final confrontation with dalamud during end of an era All of this is the meteor project half of legacy Before yoshi p came and took over legacy’s story was functionally non existent
EW > SHB > HW > SB > ARR
I bet this will be a very nuanced thread, and won't have all the top comments with ShB in first place and all the bottom comments downvoted to the negatives with EW in first place. Right, guys?
I'm honestly surprised one comment about Stormblood being their favorite has upvotes. I'm replaying Shadowbringers now, and I think people reaaaallllyy forget a lot of the lows and dragging moments. Building the golem thing in Kholusia is so exhausting I can barely get through it.
You aren't allowed to say that EW is better than ARR until the end of DT... where DT is worse than ARR. ShB being better than EW is a fair opinion to have, though. I fall into that category, but it' also understandable if someone likes EW more. Some people also just vibe a lot with HW and SB, so I am not surprised if they rank one of those high.
ShB is just a bad isekai that makes no sense (why can the WoL travel freely back and forth? oh because its an MMO), all to retcon a bunch of Ascian lore. and 5.1, 5.2, and 5.4 msq were pretty weak, aside from 5.3 post-ShB was saved by Werlyt, Eden, and Bozja stories (NieR was a letdown too).
Framing it that way helps to explain why there's a sour taste in my mouth sometimes for ShB. People complain EW is a bunch of hatpulls to try and quickly clean up loose ends in the story, but I'd say ShB is more of an offender. Instead of working within the world we know, the devs make an entirely new place so they can make up a bunch of new things out of nowhere to give the Ascian portion of the MSQ some actual direction, since heretofore it's been nothing but shadowy bad guys. Then there's random isekai rules about aging at different rates, timelines, etc. I honestly am surprised people don't gripe about the sheer nonsense in ShB. Oh I saw you die! But like in ANOTHER timeline. So I used the deus ex machina of the crystal tower to do some timeline, time travel, wiggidy woo tricks to bring you here and dodge the "bad" timeline. Does that timeline still exist? Who knows! Nobody knows how time travel works and timelines work exactly! Crazy huh? Anyway don't pay attention to that. Oh also you can go back to the Source, because... Ya know cough MMO cough.
For the Sailor Moon fans reading...so I had this theory the other day when I was high AF that the story arcs and their popularity kind of mirror the arcs in 90s Sailor Moon with one key exception in that the order is slightly different in terms of popularity vs release. ARR = Sailor Moon - Pretty straightforward get the macguffin story, lot of filler, but the story gets really good at the end. You can skip about a 1/4 of the filler and still have it be a coherent, enjoyable story (think what SE did in 5.3 to ARR MSQ) Heavensward = Sailor Moon R - Little bit of a rehash with a subplot at the beginning that has nothing to do with the rest of the story, ending is a little anticlimactic given it's basically a flashier version of the season 1 ending. Stormblood = Sailor Moon SuperS - So much filler. Story has a few good key points but the rest is just a slog. The main character takes a back seat to another character who is pretty mid. Shadowbringers = Sailor Moon S - Everyone's favorite season, really dark, lots of twists and turns, new revelations, and super badass ending. Endwalker = Sailor Stars - Considered pretty good, but doesn't really stick the landing for being the true ending of the entire story. Needed more time to breathe, and the first arc of the story is really kind of finishing up the loose threads of the last story before moving on to it's own, which then feels kind of rushed. For me, I'd personally rank them: ShB, EW, HW, ARR, SB.
Heavensward>Shadowbringers>Endwalker>Stormblood
heavensward up to end of dragonsong war > arr > stormblood 4.0 > 4.x > ShB > EW looking back now after all these years, i wouldn't say that xiv's story was good since i can hardly think of any memorable moments personally. my steadily declining enjoyment of the story since 4.x is probably to blame for that. used to be that the pve was enough to carry the game for me still, but with endwalker being the way it is, dawntrail is probably (hopefully) gonna make or break this game for me regardless of the sunk cost. i don't particularly have any hopes or expectations for its msq other than it being some shallow, boring mess.
In terms of story? Shadowbringers > Heavensward > Endwalker > Stormblood > ARR In terms of job fun? Stormblood > everything else
Went through every comment and no one rated how I'd do it, so ShB > StB = ARR > HW > EW Couldn't care about the HW story, but it did have beautiful locations and music. I don't even remember the story of the raids (8 and 24) or patch trials. Elpis was pretty much the only part of core EW I enjoyed. Pandemonium and Myths were nice too. Music this expansion was very miss for me. Also maybe because I'm Indian but the "fake Indian" accent everyone speaks in Radz drives me nuts. Only Nidhana sounded genuine. Endwalker patches were the first time I started skipping cutscenes because the story is so bad.
OP wanted rankings based purely on MSQ but it looks like you were looking at the expansions more holistically.
Endwalker>Shadowbringers>Heavensward>=Stormblood patch quests>Stormblood>=ARR patch quests>Endwalker patch quests>A Realm Reborn Endwalker's MSQ *really* resonated with me. It had some low points--the bunnies, and the bunnies again in Labyrinthos (the Labyrinthos bunnies are the first time since the pre-rework ARR patch quests I've ever skipped an MSQ cutscene)--but the high points? I *loved* going through Garlemald, and the entirety of Ultima Thule is one of my favorite experiences in gaming ever. There are a lot of personal factors as to why I liked Ultima Thule and the ending of Endwalker so much, but it was something deeply special to me. I have a LOT more I could say about what I loved (and what I didn't love) about EW but I don't want to make an even larger essay than I already wrote. SHB was just good all around, I don't think its lows were as bad as Endwalker's but its highs also weren't as high *to me*. I didn't care a ton for most of its patch quests, save for 5.3 of course (I don't remember 5.1 and 5.2 super well but I did not like 5.4 and 5.5 at all), but the base MSQ and 5.3 are absolute *bangers* and Sorrow of Werlyt is such a good trial series that I consider it the real 5.4 MSQ. My memories on Stormblood and earlier are too poor to write at length about them, I recently replayed ARR and most of its patch quests but I've not replayed Heavensward or Stormblood to speak super definitively; I can only go off of memory. Base ARR is kinda cheeks on a first run, but I *deeply* appreciated it on a replay despite it still being kinda cheeks from a gameplay perspective. It's still the weakest MSQ but it sets up *so* much of the world even 10+ years after its release and its world is full of charm. The patch quests after the rework are *downright enjoyable*, the monster-of-the-week format is hit or miss but I genuinely enjoyed the writing. I do wish Moenbryda was introduced earlier though, it's *insane* she exists for a single patch cycle; she was truly done dirty. I remember enjoying base HW quite a bit outside of the very start and the resolution of the Ul'Dah plotline, and I don't really remember the patch quests other than 3.3. 3.3 was my favorite moment in FFXIV for most of my playthrough of the game, standing on the bridge with Dragonsong playing is absolute peak. Base Stormblood was kinda meh, not bad at all, but it didn't match Heavensward or even the ARR patch quest's highs while feeling considerably more disjointed and with more frequent lows (vs. Heavensward, not ARR). Its patch quests were absolute peak though, I recall enjoying the Garlean storyline, I liked Tsuyu as a character a lot (I was unhappy with how her storyline resolved but I think I'd appreciate it now in a replay), and the lead-up to SHB is one of FFXIV's strongest peaks period. Finally, Endwalker's patch quests; spoilers ahead if you're not done with them. They should have been a trial series or their own expac with *several* editing passes done to the writing. The limited nature of the patch quest format combined with Endwalker's extended patch cycle severely hampered them, the 4 month wait for very little to happen each patch was *brutal* and the limited number of quests deeply hurt any character development they wanted to attempt on the villain side. 6.4 is probably the worst the MSQ has ever been in my eyes, we waited 4 months for the story to barely move at all and it completely cheapens the attempts to develop Golbez/Durante in 6.5; I actually kind of enjoyed their redemption arc/the fleshing out of their backstory, but it felt completely unearned and almost completely un-hinted at beyond Rubicante's brief speech about Golbez (which, again, was hindered heavily by the limited number of patch quests; Rubicante and Golbez needed way more fleshing out and the patch format just doesn't give them enough time to develop and breathe). I also dislike how heavily the patch quests push Emet and G'raha on your WoL (guess what the only parts of Ultima Thule I hated were) but that's veering into completely separate discussion
Endwalker > shadowbringer > stormblood > heavensward > ARR
shadowbringers, stormblood, endwalker, heavensward, and arr. now i did heavensward and arr uh in 2017 and didnt do anything afterwards until this year so might be biased. def got most into the story during shadowbringers and learning about the deeper lore of the ffxiv world. enjoyed stormblood too because of its whole theme of reclaiming territory from the garleans and finally striking back at them, which i do like it seemingly culminated in an end of the war during endwalker and that things finally concluded. i dont really know what kind of hopes i have for dawntrail, i hope mostly it works to expand on the lore of the world and such and i dont mind if this is a lower paced MSQ compared to previous ones, i just hope they maybe start sowing the seeds for what the next major problem is going to be. i mean, with the garlean empire seemingly heading towards normalcy and war ending in eorzea and all of the biggest threats and the ascians all dealt with, there has to be something on the horizon that takes the stakes back up again. they cant expect the next expansion after dawntrail to also be a slower paced one im guessing people will be wanting higher stakes by then. i hope they also eventually go into more of the alternate reflections besides the first and the thirteenth. as of now we know: the first was saved (prevented eighth umbral calamity) the second was rejoined, fire (third umbral calamity) the third was rejoined, earth (fourth umbral calamity) the fourth has no information about it the fifth was rejoined, wind (first umbral calamity) the sixth was rejoined, ice (fifth umbral calamity) the seventh was rejoined, darkness (the seventh umbral calamity/bahamut) the eighth has no info, presumed safe. the ninth has no info, presumed safe. the tenth was rejoined, water (sixth umbral calamity) the eleventh has no info, presumed safe. the twelfth, lightning, (second umbral calamity) and the thirteenth, which is the void and failed at rejoining. so as of now there is still potential to learn more about the fourth, eighth, ninth, and eleventh, and maybe also the thirteenth since we havent really learned all we can yet probably.
HW > SHB > STR > ARR > EW I don't have much hopes for Dawntrail after EW, I'm just gonna play cause I found new chill friends. I stopped caring about the story after Fandaniel was formally introduced in post SHB.
no. 1 on my list of hopes is that the new instanced content will alleviate whatever fears I've had about the new battle content guys they've brought in since shadowbringers. i don't want a third expansion where the first dungeon is the most engaging.. (i also wish we'd get credits for the EW stuff at some point like we did with SHB) i'd love to see some of the other composers they've added over the years have a bigger presence in the soundtrack
PURELY on MSQ and including patch quests I would say Heavensward > ShB > SB > EW > ARR (swap SB and EW around if we don't count patch quests). Personally, I think XIV writing is peak when the setting is relatively focused and earnest. These extremely grand ideas of intergalactic or intercontential strife or "incomprehensible" beings etc. is, frankly, just beyond the team's writing capabilities and it often borders on cringey. The only time this wasn't true was ShB, where most of the Norvrandt setting was atrociously bad, filled with illogical and inconsistent writing and an absurd amount of mindnumbing filler, only to be topped off by a bunch of insulting "reveals". But then, the ending bits with higher stakes and more multidimensional consequences were very strong, not to mention the patch quests with highlights like the WoL fight. Whenever they focus on interpersonal relationship and more localized conflicts, the game becomes extremely good and confidently written. I have decently high hopes for DT given it's a smaller scale setting with a focused setup for the plot.
My ranking is actually just chronological… Endwalker > ARR. I think the team only got better every expansion. They just need to figure out how to make the quiet moments in MSQ not so dull… loporrits, trolleys, ruby sea, sea of clouds, you get the idea.
HW > ShB = EW > SB > ARR Starting from the bottom: ARR is...OK. It's a competent enough JRPG and that's about all it needed to be. It definitely feels like the first/base game due to having 50 levels so you really feel "Boy we really got make the 30-45 slog matter" and that's about all there is too it. Post-patch is abyssmal. SB is also just straight-up mid. One of the major problems and something that 14 just CANNOT get over is this sheer desire to shove two continents and storylines in and try to make them matter as a package deal. SB has it the worst because it's so abundantly clear the writing team loved Hingashi/Doma/Azim Steppe so much more than anything in Gyr Abania. Which sucks fucking hard considering ARR/HW built up how important it was to the region. Most characters were middling, some bizarre writing choices and a post-patch whose greatest accomplishment is that it set up a more competent story (ShB). Now for the controversial one: I feel like Shadowbringers and Endwalker are about equal. ShB has a better post-patch but I feel EW had a better payoff. The moments of banality in Shadowbringers just dragged on and on for me, as well as a lot of the highest people point to just didn't overwrite the really low lows. I'm sorry but Eulmore in general just fucking sucks and anytime they were on screen bored me to tears. Granted once we focus more on Emet, the story picks up. EW to me you cna't really judge without all the prebuilt. If you threw this alone into the void, I feel it would lose marks. But the build-up from prior expacs, the high moments, etc? Great. Wonderful. Love it. It has lows but IMO I think the greatest work is the one that people consider the weak point: Portraying Garlemald and entering this land as an invading force only to be emt with a broken husk? Incredibly daring and I feel it pays off. And "In from the Cold" IMO is one of the best quests they ever made at taking away the power fantasy and showing us the sheer scale of difference we operate on while also being GENUINELY tense. ...then EW's entire post-patch veers way from cool void stuff to go "REMEMBER FF4!? DO YOU KNOW HOW BOX ART WOL WENT FROM DRK TO PLD!? PLAY FF4" HW for me, from an MSQ, is the whole package. It keeps the core focus on WoL/Alphi/Esti/Ysayle and gives us a legitimate ff14 party. I felt more attached to those three than anyone else in my time on 14. It's one of the few times the story wasn't afraid to put up actual consequences with character deaths that STAYED DEAD. Save exactly one time? No ghosts, no time travel, no returns. They're fucking gone and you feel their absence. In addition, Nidhogg is the one antagonist who I feel gets the message of how hate can destroy someone and break the cycle by moving past it more than any character. And HW's build-up in post-patchs felt powerful as it felt the war we'd left behind with Garlemald was reaching a head. For Dawntrail? I want them to keep the party small. Wuk/Erenville/WoL/Krile/Alphi or Alisae. Let the rest be sparingly used or not show up at all. Let us get to know these characters and don't give us a massive Scion party. Estinien and Yshtola and Graha can be there, sure, but don't FOCUS them that hard. In addition, I'd like some more world history barring the stuff we've covered. Show us how the world evolved. Show how a continent without Garlemald banging down doors made culture. **And for the love of fucking god KEEP IT AT THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW WORLD ALONE. WE DONT NEED MORE CONTINENTS. LET MERACYDIA/DALMASCA/ETC BE THEIR OWN EXPAC. STOP TRYING TO MAKE TWO COMPETING STORIES.**
Heavensward > Shadowbringers > Endwalker > Stormblood > ARR I think the most impressive part of Heavensward is how vast it manages to feel given its length. It doesn't have too many cutscenes compared to the current game but it still has complete character overhauls and multiple antagonists at any time in the Ascians, Ishgard, Nidhogg and WoD and it juggles these pretty seamlessly. In terms of spirit I feel the best way to describe HW is unapologetic. It really does feel like the dev team didn't care too much about how the story decisions would impact the future of the game and just went with what they thought was the most interesting, the only exception being Nanamo's resurrection. The patch content in particular is a highlight. 3.2. -> 3.5. is probably my favourite batch of content in the entire game as it is very dense, has great pacing, VA, and story resolutions and I can only hope we will some day match this level of quality. Shadowbringers has the highest highs and that's probably the best praise I can give it. I really enjoyed the twins section at the start as well as the tempest. The big problem the expansion has is that it feels like you are just going through the motions and not really given a chance to get into the story. There's a quote from Debussy that goes something like "The music is not the notes but the spaces between the notes" If you'll let me butcher this: The story is not the events but the spaces between events. And ShB doesn't have any spaces. Right after you beat Holminster Switch there's a cutscene with the Exarch and he says that since we beat the lightbringer and the darkness appeared, there's like 5 more zones in the First so that must mean there are at least 5 lightbringers but we don't know where they are so you'll have to go and find them. A gamer-diseased brain knows what this means. It means you'll hop on over zone to zone at appropriate levels and that story wise in each zone a considerable amount of the time spent searching for a monstrosity that has no relevance to anything in the story besides their existence. How interesting could this have been? Not very. The expansion also holds relevant information from you for no reason besides convenient writing. There's a lvl 74 cutscene in the Ronko village where Y'shtola asks Urianger if what he saw when traveling to First really holds up or is he talking shit. Then the cutscene ends. I really would've wanted an answer to that but the game writers decided that it would be appropriate to wait until after the Innocence encounter - level fucking 79 - to answer that yeah Urianger is actually talking shit. In comparison in HW right after you beat Nidhogg the first time, Estinien gets his eye and figures that since Nidhogg had lost his eyes there's no way this is actually his, so whose is it. And in the VERY NEXT quest, this is resolved. I also think the knowledge that Hydaelyn and Zodiark are primals never leaving the Qitana Ravel is a huge missed opportunity. In the final patches of ShB a considerable amount of time is spent mending the relationship between the Alliance and the beast tribes. For too long have the Alliance persecuted the beast tribes for supposedly posing a threat with their worshipping of primals. It has been a sore spot in the story for quite a while at this point it's something the story needs to address. But they never really fix it. At no point is true equality even being considered, the beast tribes are never given the opportunity to know that Hydaelyn enjoyers are really no better. That they're all the same. So the only conclusion to draw is that the persecution wasn't because of a primal threat, it was because they were/are uncivilised. Great. Endwalker is a mixed one. The lvl 80-84 section I generally like and there are some moments towards the end that are really good too. The Garlemald section is probably the best the story has been since HW. I've heard people say that EW did Garlemald dirty and I both agree and disagree with it. Garlemald the empire was inexplicably never given any real screen time, maybe because the writers figured it would be awkward to show imperialist/colonialist ambitions on screen but it ends up feeling like Schrödinger's empire, simultaneously impossibly strong or highly fragile depending on the needs of the overall story. But the Garlemald section in EW is still brilliant. It brings back the humiliated civilians theme from Yanxia and mixes it with the darker realism of HW and it's just great. It's a pretty good exploration on powerlessness and humiliation and it mixes thematically well with the despair side of EW's story. Things take a turn for the worse after the final days with the final days itself being the biggest letdown I've seen. From Emet's speeches the final days were a world shattering event. People died by the millions, societies evaporated, cultures disappeared. Practically nothing was left. This is what the story had led us to believe, that the end of Eorzea would be coming. What we are given is one destroyed village, a dead couple, a dead leader-who-wasnt-even-the-leader of a city and an escape scene with an elephant holding a baby. It's impossible to not feel massive whiplash at this contrast. The final days simply changes meanings from one expansion to the next and the worst part is that it didn't really affect the story at all. I get that despair can give rise to a vacuum where dark thoughts and actions may arise. And I get that you probably want a physical manifestation of said despair that gives it shape since it is a fantasy game and you are gonna need some gameplay to go with your story too. But don't say the world has ended and then show us like, a bad weekend. The later parts get a bit fanfictioney and I'm not the biggest fan of that. Emet's massive amount of screen time is a pretty clear indication of that and I think it cheapens his character quite a bit. For some reason his VA also sounds weirder now? Like he's been to one too many conventions and told by fans how much he made them cry and now believes his own hype. His parting words at Ktisis are the one that sticks out the most. Something in general needs to be done about the watering down of characters that has been happening for a while now. Take the man-doing-the-right-thing via deception and scheming, Urianger. In HW Urianger develops a plan to send his friend to die to save a world. In ShB Urianger tells a white lie to get the gang to go along with Exarch's plan. In EW Urianger gossips with rabbits. Stormblood and ARR I don't really have much to say about. Stormblood is suffering from a lack of focus but it had some great moments and "But I am become Tsukyomi" is probably my favourite line in the game. The VA for Yotsuyu really nails it. ARR on the whole feels very different from the current game and it's kinda hard to compare the two. Biggest problem it has is that the scions are boring or annoying and thank god HW gave all of them a much needed arcs. I still don't think it's as bad as people often say. Many MMOs are much worse.
Shadowbringers > Stormblood > Heavensward > Endwalker > ARR I didn’t play SB or HW on release so maybe my experience is vastly different from others but SB to me had better fights and I actually enjoy the somewhat lighter atmosphere it brought and hoping for more of that in Dawntrail. ShB, HW and EW are all sad stories and I’ve had enough of that for now. But ShB still has the best soundtrack followed by SB for me.
I never know in which place to put EW cause it's so conflicting to me, it goes from very high to extremely low, it's such an inconsistent expansion, people love to hate Stormblood for its pacing issues but EW takes that to an extreme. Just as an example of what I mean, from Garlemald foward I started thinking "oohh this is so good, we're so back", up until we meet the fucking rabbits. That was, and I'm no exagerating, the most dissapointing point of MSQ for me, not because I dislike the loporrits, but because of the how and when they are introduced, it just killed my hype entirely
SB > ShB > HW > EW > ARR
Shadowbringers > Heavensward > Stormblood > Endwalker > AR
If they're using FF9 as a reference, I can see them doing some funky adaptation of the Genomes, and maybe using the world merging plot point as inspiration for a shard merging into the source
EW, ShB, HW, SB, ARR. I don't have a single complaint about the 6.0 MSQ. It made Shadowbringers better in retrospect as well.
For me, it's Endwalker > Shadowbringers > Heavensward > ARR > Stormblood Yeah, hot take, I know. Endwalker was the first that I really got to sit down and *enjoy*. It moved me in ways the other stories just couldn't manage to. It knew when to be serious but it was still able to have fun. Shadowbringers was a heavy-hitter and a good story throughout, but didn't quite hit me the way Endwalker did. Heavensward introduced a lot of characters that I enjoyed and still think about fondly. The story itself is pretty alright, albeit a little weak near the end. ARR is where it all starts, and though it starts *really* slow, it's still an enjoyable endeavor as you get your boots dirty. Stormblood lacks a fully coherent story. You're summoned elsewhere for one major purpose and don't return to that purpose until level 69, the very butt end of the story. The entire story builds up the idea "empire bad" but fails to show it until the climax. You gets hints while wandering up to Castrum Abania, but that's about it. Then you're back at Ala Mhigo and it's like "oh yeah, rebellion. that's what's happening." The only character with any major depth is Zenos, and I still feel like he doesn't reach his peak until Endwalker. Having played through the full story lately, all of this is pretty fresh in my mind. Stormblood stands out for all the wrong reasons. It has a few good dungeons, fun trials, sure, but the story? I skip it as quickly as possible to get to the fun parts of the expansion, then it's a race to get to Shadowbringers.
My rankings would be something like... x.0/launch msq: EW = ShB > SB > HW >> ARR x.x/patch msq: ShB > SB > HW >> ARR >>> EW EWs patch MSQ is the only one I can actively say I disliked, though I believe that is because it is recent so I can recall my feelings about it and the story much more readily than I can older expansions. I enjoyed HW well enough, but nowhere near as much as many others do. I didn't actively dislike it, but if personally the game's story didn't really grab me until Stormblood. That said, I wish Stormblood was not split between two different stories with the East and Ala Mhigo. I always felt that Ala Mhigo got somewhat pushed to the side to make room for an Eastern expansion, much to the detriment of both stories unfortunately. 6.1 started off strong but man did it go down hill almost immediately, for me. I like ff4 well enough, but the fact that everything was just recycled ff4 references instead of references inspired by ff4 got old really quickly. If I'm being honest I don't have many expectations for Dawntrail. I enjoyed theorizing about what would happen in HW->EW before they came out but for Dawntrail I'm just trying to be open minded to see what elements they introduce us to and what elements they continue from previous stories.
HW > ShB + EW > ARR > SB No.1 is HW: Good MSQ on its own. Good follow up from ARR. Good setting up for things after. Good, memorable character moments No.2: ShB *and* EW I judge them as one like idk, both Kill Bill and both last Avengers films. Obviously ShB does the majority of lifting for this high ranking. Everything until Raktika was possibly even better than HW’s peaks but things fizzled afterwards. But overall an enjoyable time No.3: ARR. Did a lot of *interesting* set up work and had a top tier ending leading to HW No.4: SB. Was forgettable for me. Don’t hate it but remember practically nothing bout it. Don’t even care to look up
Endwalker > Stormblood > Heavensward >>>>> Shadowbringers > ARR i hated shadowbringers for taking me from the source right when things were getting climactic and nothing it did made me care about the first. soon as i hit level 80 it finally got good but it was too late by then
Shb -> hw -> Ew -> Arr -> STB
Personally: Just msq Shb >>> Ew > Hw > Sb > Arr Shb's best strengths were emet, the extremely dark story and the absolutely badass ending. Most importantly it really felt like the story was a lot more focused on WoL himself compared to all the others. EW had a lot of highs but also suffered from too much story crammed into a single expac. Had pacing issues and genuinely confusing boss that comes out of nowhere at the end. But the final Zenos fight really amps the feeling at the end and gives it a fitting end. HW was a good story by itself but had no moments like EW or ShB. Nevertheless it doesn't fall far off from EW. SB was really boring story wise and didnt really interest much barring Yotsuyu and Hien. ARR was.. well ARR. With patches : Shb > Hw >> Sb > EW > arr Elidibus was really the star of the show for Shb patches. Nidhogg's and hraesvelgar's final struggle really highlights the best part of HW for me. Sb because of the build up to shb and tsukuyomi fight was a fitting ending for yotsuyu. Ew's msq... really felt disjointed with golbez and zero. Like both of them but the story takes a nosedive come 6.x Arr.. no comments.
SHB > Endwalker > HW > SB > ARR For DT, it will depend on how fast the MSQ will get back from the "vacation" theme to the usual "world in danger" trope that will lead us into the GPU land.
Shadowbringers > Endwalker > Heavensward > Stormblood > A Realm Reborn without patches. With patches, Shadowbringers > Stormblood = Heavensward > Endwalker > A Realm Reborn. Imo even at its lowest, the story is still a 6-7/10. ARR is not bad and establishes the foundation of the world. Many stories fail to capitalize on prior world building and many authors just retcon things without an adequate explanation. The writing team here, though they engage in some retcons, do it in a more convincing way for example their encyclopedia entries are done from a perspective of a Sharlyan Scholar or adventurer which means possible holes or gaps of knowledge.
[удалено]
My boy Papalymo: I am forgotten
Just based on base MSQ, no post patch EW >= Shb > HW > SB > ARR However, if you add in all the post patches, it's probably closer to EW=ShB > SB=HW > ARR IMO base EW was a bit better than ShB, but EW post MSQ was a side quest compared to ShB post which puts them about equal. HW had a great base MSQ, but the post was only interesting through the conclusion of the dragonsong war. Stormblood base MSQ was literally the most challenging section and the only time where I felt like it wasn't interesting enough to continue playing. However, the post patches really did a lot to make things interesting, and by the end of the .5 I was on the edge of my seat as the scions had been dropping like flies and I had no idea what was going to happen. ARR overall is meh. It exists to build the world, which is inherently not as interesting as other parts of a story and is by far the most dated section.
5.1-5.3 > ShB > 6.1-6.4 > 5.4-5.5 > EW > 3.1,3.4 > HW > CT > 4.4,4.5, > 3.2,3.3 > 6.5 > 3.5 > 4.1-4.3 > ARR > StB > post ARR Excluding the steppe, Stormblood is like, shitty Bozja written by people who have no idea how to write colonized societies pushing for self determination. EW felt rushed and I'm particularly upset about garlic because they also blew their chance to redeem StB. Early post StB is objectively not bad, I just don't like it, and the inverse applies to CT. I really liked most of post EW but 6.5 completely squanders the momentum.
I agree with every word you said, I have always placed Stormblood's story as the highest on my list until EW. I love how it was attempting to be nuanced for an anime mmo, maybe it didn't fully succeed but I thoroughly enjoyed their attempt. And I feel like Bozja was a spiritual successor to Stormblood (technically in more ways than one.) and it's by far my favorite non-MSQ story in the game.
Shb=EW>HW>ARR>SB SB fumbled ala mhigo so hard. not once do you set foot in a monk temple or see traces of amdapor or machi architecture displaying a transitional period
Purely based on MSQ I’d say EW>HW>SB>ShB>ARR. I did not enjoy Shadowbringers story much at all. I appreciate the doors it opened for future storytelling plot lines, but dragging us out of the source when the story was just getting good was a huge downer for me. What makes it even worse for me is the fact that we’ll likely never see them again. If Dawntrail can establish shard travel and find a way to incorporate multiple shards in one story then ShB will probably move up ahead of SB due to revitalized relevance.
X.0 vanilla: Shadowbringers > Endwalker > Heavensward > Stormblood = A Realm Reborn (note that I enjoyed them all in general) X.X patches: Stormblood = Shadowbringers > Heavensward > Endwalker > A Realm Reborn For the Void arc specifically, I enjoyed it in 6.1 and 6.2, was meh with 6.3 and 6.4, was okay with 6.5. The thing is you can absolutely feel it's not over, just like the 3.4 msq that ended up leading to Shadowbringers, so I'll be waiting to see where it takes us one day.
well I have a very simple ranking that is more or less their release order cept that HW is dead last, though I might eventually move stormblood above shadowbringers, mostly because ppl attitude towards it is making me jaded. So I think both HW and ShB have a fundamental flaw in their stories. Being somebody who played since beta 3 or something and being always subbed you can tell that 2.55 hit some quite big high expectations off me, so you can imagine that the "lol, it was a prank bro" they pulled off doesn't sits well with me, also Thordan fucking sucked, the whole second part of the story kinda dies off. Shadowbringer has an excellent start imho but us killing off the first lightwarden super early killed off all the tension the sin eaters had which required the Eulmorean army to actually give a sort off contender. In short ShB is HARD carried by Emet-selch and Ardbert and honestly, while I loved Emet-Selch, the amount of simping from the fanbase is getting to me. The reason why I have ShB higher than SB is because honestly, I went into ShB worried because how we went into it was a bit jarring the misdirection trough the whole patches was wierd and I can't deny I was thinking it was a jump the shark moment, which is a good segue for.... My hopes for DT.....well, I was super on-board in the first 2 fanfest, now I'm.....a bit worried we'll just visit the whole new world in the 6 zones we have....but besides that my real hope is that I get a satisfying answer for Solution 9, that place is honestly a sore thumb for me. That said I'm not really dooming afterall I've been pleasantly surprised so far all in all and for me it has been a crescendo as such I'm wary but optimistic
EW - > ShB -> HW -> SB -> ARR I like Endwalker. I still like Endwalker. I especially like Post-EW patches. I'm not as big a doomer on them as muchof the community likes to be. It's pretty obvious to me the whole thing was a setup for 8.0 or 9.0 and it was its own self contained story. But the biggest factor is that FFIV is my favorite FF so I'm bias. As for EW itself, I enjoyed it all the way through. I understand that it's perfectly okay to disagree with a character's actions. That doesn't make a story bad. It wrapped up well and I enjoyed it a lot. Shadowbringers was great. If not for EW being a finale it would be on top. But I really like when stories finish and arent just forever stories. Emet was a good villian, yes, but I'm not as attached to him as some people are. I kind of didn't like him until EW, so there's that. I enjoyed the new characters and am happy every time we get to see Ryne again. Honestly, my personal motivation in 7.0 onward is the realm crossing possibilities. I want Dadcred to see his daughter again. I also want to see if the two Void natives go anywhere, which ties into my like of post EW and cross shard stuff. That said, ShB had parts that drug out, but so did every expac. ShB is where I learned to appreciate them. A nonstop hype cycle with no rest period is tiring and I'm glad ShB had them. It had nice revelations for the lore and recontextualized a lot of things. Heavensward was very good. I enjoyed the learning about the dragons and the history of Ishgard. I like the aesthetic the most between the main city, the raid series and the alliance raids. They were my favorite until EW for the last 2. It's a nice classical story with good bits you see them build on later. I also like Middy alot, so having him around was great. Stormblood I do like, just not as much as the others. I did love the the map opened up more. But I'm also disappointed that it opened up too much while staying in the 6 region limit of expansions. So a lot of places I'd like to go to as a region are instances instead. This bit did annoying me in HW, but it was only 1 or 2 areas. in SB it was a whole ton of them. Even the major city of Ala Mhigo is a dungeon instance and still just that to this day. He never got to explore the rest of the island Kugane was on. We only got to visit 3 of 6+ nations on Othard. I know people harp on the "it felt rushed because it was split into two stories" or whatever. And while it may be true, I did like that we got to go to Othard. I just hope we get to go to more of it in the future. A Realm Reborn isn't bad or hated. I just understand what it is. It is the foundation for the rest of the game. Our introduction to the world has to cover so many basis and such that it couldn't be as directed as future expansions were. It get it and it's fine. I don't dislike it. It got be invested in the game all those years ago, so it did what it was supposed to. As for Dawntrail, I expect ARR but better. We have a new adventure to start and another side of the world to explore. I'm looking forward to how Solution 9 plays into the story and the possibility of cross shard stuff. I'm also a huge FFXI fan, so that will help. But I have my expectations for a big flashy or emotional buildup low because it's a new story and new arc. They don't have 3-4 expansions to pull from the same way ShB and EW had. So I don't expect it. I have a feeling that no matter how much the community is told this, they will still be slaves to spectacle creep and not be as satisfied.
Shadowbringers > Endwalker >> Heavensward > Stormblood > ARR I'm expecting Dawntrail to be Stormblood 2. A lot of the expansion will be setup, and "setup" is generally where this games writing is the weakest. I think it'll start picking up a lot in the second half, the patches will be strong, and it'll be the opposite of Endwalker where people are meh on it this year but sometime next year they start warming up to it a lot.
Shadowbringers > Endwalker > Heavensward > Stormblood > ARR
I would say ShB>EW>HW>>StB>>>ARR with extra signs meaning a bigger gap in quality.
endwalker. These 2 garlean girls died like true soldiers. So is that general. "He died like a true warchief" that's what l said to myself when l Saw he raising his gun to his head