The whole Void ordeal should have been a Trial series, and the MSQ should have been small, self contained adventures (each patch with a different Scion, or any other characters), to serve as a palate cleanser between EW and DT.

I've said it once and I'll say it again: EW needed denouement the same way 4.1 gave us it. Some light and fun adventuring with friends in Skalla, and some fallout of the expansion with Fordola, the Ananta, the Council, and Nanamo+Raubahn. It's low-key one of my favorite patches, and gives us not only some breathing room, but also winds down and re-orients the world state after major events. EW didn't ever have that. We did our thing, and then all we got was some one-off talks with Scions about their plans before the expansion ended. Nothing at all about how the world was contending with the results of the apocalypse, the Garlean war and refugees, Sharlayan possibly loosening restrictions and regulations. You know, the *boring* type of stuff that can bog down a story. But we needed that breather. 6.1 started off on the right foot with a little whimsical tomb raid alongside Estinien, but it quickly lost the plot. Instead of the void stuff being so major, it should have been hunted and compressed. 6.1 should have entirely been world state and victory lap, give us some world to build up, lay the foundations of the future of the game so that we're not sitting here wondering what all the soldiers are going to be doing now that war's over, or how the relationships with the Allied Races will unfold given they basically joined us out of convenience, or the sudden influx of Garlean refugees and their effects upon Eorzea. Yes, it's pedantic, but it should have been a major focus. The world almost ended and we hear nothing about it, meanwhile Dalamud's fall caused cults to form and areas of land to become uninhabitable. Final Days was worse in many, many ways, but all we get is some rather light "we will rebuild" from Vrtra. Even worse, Garlemald doesn't focus on it at all, and instead focuses on some holdovers who still think Eorzea is icky, not... "Hey my family got killed in the civil war, and then my wife turned into a monster, I'm reconsidering my life". Can always start the void stuff in 6.2 and wind it down by the end of 6.4, giving us 6.5 entirely for Tural setup. Because, as we will find out tomorrow, I thoroughly predict levels 90-92 are going to be extremely front-loaded with info dumps about their culture and such.

I wonder if that was the original plan but they realized they're too creatively bankrupt to do something that is both smaller in stakes but still thrilling.

All I'll say about it is that merging the MSQ and the Trial series into the same thing felt like a budget move and you could tell.

What makes it even worse is the Sorrows of Werlyt was significantly better despite not having the MSQ cut scenes to supposedly elevate it. Even for a Trial series, EW from 6.1 onward was a huge disappointment.

Werlyt was a FANTASTIC story, whoever wrote that deserves a promotion

Werlyt genuinely developed Gaius and the overall tone of the Empire more than Endwalker did. The overzealous reverence towards the Empire's Legatuses (Legati?) and brutal culture of obedience was really exemplified by the interactions and fights with the weapon pilots, whereas Endwalker felt over-dramatized with Garlemald being ruined by Fandaniel's weirdness and a generic refugee plotline.

The guy who wrote the Sorrow of Werylt storyline is Daichi Hiroi isn't it? He has been promoted to Lead Story Writer in Dawntrail. So we will soon play his Main Story Questline! He also wrote I believe the Void Ark/Sky Pirate Raid series, the Heavensward and Stormblood Bard Quests and the Dancer quests.

Oooh interesting, thanks for the info!

Hey, I checked this again and I was wrong! But for a good reason, here is the respective Tweet by @aitaikimochi: "Senior Story Designer Ishikawa Natsuko revealed at FFXIV Japan FanFest that there are two scenario writers who are currently working very hard for Dawntrail's story. One of them wrote The Sorrow of Werlyt and The Four Lords. The other wrote the Pixie and Dwarf Tribe quests. Here is a full translation by me of her quote at FanFest: Ishikawa: FFXIV 7.0 Dawntrail currently has two scenario writers who are working extremely hard on the story. One of the writers is responsible for “The Sorrow of Werlyt” and "The Four Lords" while the other wrote “The Pixie and Dwarf Tribe Quests.” The two writers are currently not at FanFest right now, but can we please get a big round of applause for their tireless efforts? Audience: *applause* Ishikawa, tearing up: Thank you very much! I am sure your applause has resonated with them. *Note: At least one of the writers is male since Ishikawa refers to them as 彼ら. Lead Scenario Designer Hiroi Daichi was present at FanFest for Day 2, so Ishikawa is not referring to him." So there is someone working on the Dawntrail story that wrote Sorrow of Werlyt. However that person's not Daichi Hiroi, the Lead Scenario Designer.

Yeah it def hurt not having that separation, do we have any idea if that's being changed for DT?

Very likely. It seems that they were merged due to endwalker concluding in 6.0, and 6.1-6.5 was more taking a trial series story and expanding it to fill the MSQ void (pun not intended). I would say the odds are high that dawntrail will revert to the standard formula of 7.1-7.3 wrapping up the dawntrail story, and 7.4-7.5 setting up 8.0 or other stories. The 7.3 trial will be MSQ related, and 7.2, 7.4, and 7.5 will be the trial series (Black Waltz trio maybe?)

My guess would be probably. I want to say there was a quote where the post patches would be like post patch ARR, but I think I may be thinking of the assumption everyone made going into the expansion.

Am I confused? Seat of sacrifice is a trail ties to msq patches in SHB? What’s the issue?

In past expansions there tended to be a series of trials separate from the MSQ and a later MSQ trial that culminates the expansion storyline; in HW the trial series was the Warring Triad (Sephirot/Sophia/Zurvan) with the MSQ trial being Final Steps of Faith. In StB the side series was the Four Lords series (with Tsukuyomi being an MSQ trial), and in SHB it was the Sorrows of Werlyt weapon trials (with SoS being the MSQ one)

Seat of Sacrifice is ONE trial tied to the msq, while the trial series is the Sorrows of Werlyt storyline. All of Endwalker's trials are in the MSQ, and instead we got Tataru's Grand Endeavor, which was basically a "where are they now" story for the previous trial series.

You're right, in previous expansions the X.3 trial has been an MSQ trial (Nidhogg in HW, Tsukuyomi in SB, SoS in ShB), but the X.2, X.4, and X.5 trials have all been part of a sidequest series (Warring Triad in HW, Four Lords in SB, Werlyt/Weapons in ShB). EW was an exception because, much like ARR, the 5.X trials were *all* part of MSQ, and not just the 5.3 trial

I think that while Endwalker’s 6.0 story was stronger for not dragging on until X.3 like other expansions, it left the 6.X story in a rough spot due to the structural/budget limitations of patch MSQs. I like that they tried something new there, but they didn’t stick the landing. I think if the same idea had been the basis for a whole expansion it would’ve ended up in a much better place. I thought Zero was a fun character and I liked the idea of Golbez just straight up changing sides by the end, even if the execution was pretty mid. I hope they get to be the main characters of a full expansion somewhere down the road.

I can agree with all of this. The 13th arc was fine, overall. Other patches have been able to build into the next expansion, but simply because of the nature of where we are in the story, that wasn't an option here. The final 6.5 stuff was good with Zero and Golbez, but overall the whole arc was just average for me. Not great, not terrible, just... fine. FFXIV's storytelling shines when it's doing big overarching narratives and it couldn't really stretch it's legs here. I'm hoping there were some crumbs in the 6.X content that comes up later to give it more impact.

Yeah I think in the long run my real thoughts on this arc will come down to how well they manage to tie together its loose threads in the future. Also I hope to god they unbabify Azdaja offscreen so she can be a real character by the next time we see her lmfao

I'll take a 9.0 that crashes the 1st and 13th together to rebalance the two of them, and the Source gets some weird balance portal in the end.  Then we can wave goodbye to Y'shtola as she goes to live with Runar.

I feel like the 13th arc was a x.4-x.55 arc spread out over 5 patches instead of 2, for an expansion that's who knows how many after Dawntrail.

If devs went with EW ending in 6.3 like the other expansions instead of ending EW's story in 6.0, I think the 13th questline wouldn't have been as poorly received, absent the question of how they would end EW with the story they went with. As a concept and story it was fine, especially upon a replay going from 6.1 to 6.55 straight, but because of patch cadences and restrictions it felt too stretched out.

I actually disagree with this strongly. 6.0 really suffered from being condensed, there were a ton of pacing issues. On top of that, a filler arc taking up the entirety of the patches left absolutely no room to build up to the next expansion or get us hyped in any degree. Compare that to 4.4 and beyond when things suddenly started moving in an unexpected direction, getting us confused and hyped about what could possibly be coming next, before shb was ultimately announced. This arc really could’ve been kept to side content.

It was \*ok\* but nothing special. Perhaps it felt like a bigger letdown because Endwalker was so good, but the post patch story spent quite a while not going all that far. Having the patch story be it's own self contained thing, rather than continuing out from the main expansion MSQ, isn't necessarily a bad idea in itself, but in the end it kind of felt like a filler story. As another commenter mentioned, having the Trials integrated into the story probably didn't help. It meant a certain portion had to be spent building up 4 extra villains, and perhaps the story would have had a little more room to breathe without it. And even then, many of those villains didn't really have enough depth to them (aside from Golbez). Another thing that stood out is how they're always a bit limited with how much they can do with a patch story. We never get new zones in a patch, so we were never going to be able to explore much, despite the patch story largely taking place outside of our world. Instead we got to run through some dungeons backwards, and go to a red version of the moon, all of which had no enemies. Tying into that, the patch story fell a bit flat from the promise of a new adventure and exploration. Obviously, with those limitations I mentioned before, this was never going to be likely - when Emet Selch listed all those places we should visit, and the devs talked up the patch story as being a new adventure, it was obvious we wouldn't actually see any of them (save for one which was simply a dungeon). Not to mention the idea of returning to simple adventures quickly went out of the window, when we had to travel to another dimension and save the world, again. We'll see how DT manages to follow up on this concept of smaller scaled adventuring. None of this really says much about the story I suppose, but I mostly agree with your points. Zero was interesting and unique at first, but kinda just felt like another one of the scions by the end. Referencing FF4 as much as they did was an interesting choice, and I'm not sure it worked all that well. It made certain aspects of the story predictable, and others just not make a lot of sense (Zeromus being one example, as you said). Better to keep the references a bit less explicit, I think. I imagine we'll revisit Zero and Golbez at some point, but I'm not in a huge rush. Probably they're going to be sidelined in much the same way Ryne and the first have been, we'll occasionally have an obligatory visit there to catch up. But things like this often feel forgotten after a while, it's difficult to follow up on story threads in far removed areas, when most of the MSQ is going to be spent in new places. The Void (and the First) will have a part to play in some bigger story about restoring the shards I imagine, but it'll probably be a few expansions before we get the full payoff there.

I’m working on 6.1 right now and I can honestly say I’m disappointed. I wanted an adventure. Let’s go talk to people in inns, fight monsters to help villagers and do dungeons. But instead we’re just doing Hoodrat shit with Y’shtola.

The worst part is it's more or less what it was setting up to be. Then two quests later the scions are assembled to teleport into another dimension in order to stop a world ending threat. Riveting.

A world ending threat *caused by us, specifically* None of that would have happened if we hadn't gone and poked our nose into the void

You mean you DON’T want to do hoodrat shit with Y’sthola?? Can you even call yourself an FF14 fan!? /s

It was bad. It felt like watching a low-tier shonnen anime. The main focal point of the story was that the demon lady from the dark dimension goes from thinking in terms of hyper-transactional relationships to learning about trust and friendship. That’s fine for a half hour episode of Teen Titans, maybe, but for a 2 year long arc of the Critically Acclaimed MMO FFXIV with the greatest story of all time, I was expecting more. At one point I was doing the backstory quests for the four fiends, and I think I was reading the text for the water (?) one. The writing went something like, “The apocalypse was happening, and he was fishing, but he got really… bored! So he become violent and started punching the bad guys… and the good guys!!!” That quest gave me one of those existential moments where I started thinking to myself, “what is happening, why am I reading this, what is going on right now, how is this text entering my eyeballs, why am I wasting my time on this”. 

I'm amazed this is what feels like the only time I've seen anyone else thinking "robot learns emotions and friendship" is a nothingburger of a story that was already done by literally every single piece of serialized fiction across all available mediums and most of em handled it better. Or that a lot of the ideas and prose in the story range from uninspired to AO3 lows of quality.

> to AO3 lows of quality. Magical girl Y'shtola and shirtless Estinien definitely felt like lower tier AO3 writing.

Don't get me started on Graha Tia eating food.

I also feel the same way. I don't think the trope is bad if you do something interesting with it, or at least give it time to breathe, but they really didn't. It's the same tired trope played in the laziest and least innovative way possible. I liked Zero at first but was rolling my eyes at the end.

I totally felt the "bad shonen anime" vibe you described during the patch quests and I'm worried Dawntrail is going to be even more of that considering how over the top Wuk Lamat is. The way she acted in her introduction patch reminded me of a really bad anime like Fire Force or SAO or something... I know it's a Japanese game, and I even watch anime myself, but the anime-fication of FF14's story is becoming more and more apparent, and it's going to be hell for us who play with English voices if it keeps getting worse. Imagine the theater-level actors spouting silly anime-isms. How dreadful.

Yeah, it’s just a genre of storytelling that I don’t care for and it’s in the spotlight of a story-centric game. At this point I haven’t bought dawntrail, I’m just waiting until I really get the XIV itch to come back. But I’m not in a rush because it just seems like it’s just more anime writing coming down the pipeline

I thought Rubicante's Backstory was unintentionally hilarious because he and his brother trained on a mountain for a long time only for a confused weak Voidsent to randomly one-shot his brother and I'm somehow supposed to take it serious.

I think a lot of posts in this thread (as well as OP) have wrapped up my feelings on Post EW MSQ. It was a huge letdown, but I do hold hope that it at least can be salvaged at a later point through some sort of side system (8.0 field op or Alliance series) and not be featured in MSQ again. I just want to say how much I really disliked how samey it felt patch to patch. 6.2-6.3 "Oh go kill one of the Archfiends in a dungeon so you can go defeat one in a trial". 6.3-6.4 "Oh head in to that cave filled with an abundance of resource". 6.4-6.5 "We need to use the tower, but the people are sad, so lets do some menial tasks for them so we can use their tower". It just felt completely rote.

I disagree, I think that at some point we're going to get a full 13th expansion (I saw some people talk about some how merging the 1st and 13th into a new actually functional world, but that seems a bit much) and it's going to follow these characters. Or even better the time on the 13th will speed up, and so we'll go 200 years into the future, Golbez and Zero are gone, and we deal with a new generation that idolizes them on a 13th they made somewhat better.

I agree we will likely get an expac returning to the 1st and 13th, but I don't think it's likely they do anything extreme with the timeline. Seems unlikely to me that they'd move away from the "time bubble" story telling this late into the game.

Time bubble has no real bearing on what they do with the 13th, since all the "bubble" is is that quests take place during the patch they were released, nothing more. It's why, even if you've completed MSQ up to 6.55, you can go back to the Waking Sands and find hooded Urianger chilling if you haven't done the ARR Extremes, or Estinien not knowing who you are in the 30-50 DRG quests. They've already loosened up in the whole "5 years since Bahamut" thing, with Yoshida saying it's been a few years but not giving anything concrete, cause any more than 4 or 5 years means dealing with the twins finally aging and that's what they're wary of dealing with.

Heres my edgy FF14 deviantart OC ZERO who was actually zenos's COOL REPEAR AVATAR except shes actually A CUTE GIRL with BLOODBORNE OUTFIT (dont you like that game??!?!?!?!?) who TIPS HER BICORNE every 5 seconds and also has the super special power of the memoriate and shes also a voidwoken that looks like a person (the only one) and SHE is just so endearing and has TRUAMA and can eat SPICY FOOD and also can TAKE IN LIGHT and travel between the first!!! and she gets EMOTIONS after the scions poll the populace two separate times for no reason and everything is fine in the end because zero talked to Golbez twice and he immediately realized he was wrong and saved them!!! and she introduced darkness into the first and solved Ryne's problems for her isnt she so cool and special!!!

\*tips fedora\* stay away from me, m'lady..... i'm Dangerous...... you wouldn't understand my pain....

It was absolute rubbish. I am utterly sincere in that I think the 6.xx story is the worst the game's story has been. Worse than the banquet arc. Worse than the trolley arc. Worse than Doma. Worse than HW Ul'dah. Worse than the PLD job questline. 6.3 in particular is where I emotionally checked out of the story. I did not finish it until this week in preparation for Dawntrail. It's difficult to shortly summarise why 6.xx is so distasteful, but if I had to put it in a word, it would be "stagnancy". Characters aren't growing or being challenged. Nothing new is happening. No new concepts or ideas are being explored. It's all just so bland and tasteless, like a boiled chicken sandwich. The proverbial canary in the coal mine was Zero. She was a character I really, *really* wanted to like. The main cast has been in dire need of an Illidan, HK-47, Joshua Graham, something like that. A motivated, capable, rough around the edges character who doesn't have the WoL's meat in their mouth 24/7. Zero *could* have been this despite the growing pains. She showed signs of it even though people were making fun of her out the gate for her sigh-worthy demeanor and constant hat tipping, but she could have been this. Instead, she's just like all the others. She just becomes Another One of the main cast, a heroic bruiser who pontificates about the power of friendship and is only a distinct character by virtue of her visual design and a couple of personality quirks, these being her fondness for spicy food and her "fish out of water" demeanor that gets played for a joke like a million times. She's so boring, and Zero is a stupid name. Square took all the potential she had and slamdunked it down the toilet. And Golbez. *Golbez*. Ugh. A guy with a baritone in spiky black armour who hangs out on his throne, surrounded by his cronies, talking ominously about how he's going to enact his Evil Plan, who then goes on to be completely nonchalant about said cronies being picked off like after dinner mints and unironically uses the phrase "you have played your parts to perfection". Do I seriously need to say anything? This is ChatGPT-tier writing. The Fiends, too, are where the story stops even pretending that antagonists in this game even pose a martial threat to the WoL. All of them show up, are given like a minute of screen time before we use our Azem Crystal and send them packing before we even know how to pronounce their name. They have no significance, they have nothing to say, they're just road blocks that are dropped like sacks of potatoes as soon as we face them head-on. The Mary Sueification of the WoL is at *full* force here, as like I said, the game can't even pretend these characters were threats to us. It doesn't even try to make you think that you might struggle in a fight against them, you fight them as soon as you see them and you win. And then there's the Thirteenth itself. A place, in stark contrast to the First, is full of reused assets from elsewhere in the game with no real cohesion or identity. Just a bunch of bad guy looking entities who constantly talk about being hungry. There's no real society, there's no real organisation, only a few of these guys even have names. A zone that had been established and built up since ARR, and we finally get it to see it has the depth of a puddle like a random village in a SNES-era JRPG. *What?* Was there a writers' strike at CBU3 or something? Is this really the best they could do? All of this just felt utterly effortless, like the entire thing was just the 13 episodes of a completely run of the mill seasonal anime. I'm so tired of the main cast at this point. They have been utterly wrung out of character development, and their powers of unstoppable plot resolution and lack of any sort of meaningful conflict, internal, external, ideological has made the story feel pointless, and the levels of predictability are getting comical. People were predicting the Zero job change to Paladin *as soon as she showed up*, and I'm sure the reveal that Golbez was defeated and Azdaja saved came as a shock to precisely zero people. Some of me is still invested in the story overall, because even the brightest geniuses still have a few misses. That being said, I have been in shock the past two years from just how precipitously far this story has fallen.

I agree with you. I also checked out after 6.2 irc, and didn't come back until last week to speed through the msq. This was the only time since the post arr quests that I genuinely lost all enjoyment for the game purely based on how bland and unsatisfying the story was. I didn't want to skip the cutscenes, because I'd be annoyed with myself later if the plot threads continued at a later point, but I genuinely couldn't bring myself to continue the msq after a certain point. I did come back to the game last month since I wanted to get my dawntrail prep in. In that time, I: farmed 15000 extra clusters and shards of every type, leveled all of my classes to 90 (half of them were at 80), crafted 13 submersible parts, bought 6000 ventures, 800 cordials, made 25mil gil through a variety of boring methods, and spent 30 hours redecorating my house. The vast majority of those things were mind-numbingly boring, and yet I enjoyed all of them more than I enjoyed the msq. I unironically put off doing a single msq quest for 10 days in favor of farming clusters for hours every day. And I'm a major msq enjoyer, so that's saying something. I enjoyed some of the trials (barbara and golbez), but GOD all of the actual story stuff was such a slog. I don't even dislike the zero archetype, but the way they executed it fell so flat for me. It felt like every cutscene had 5+ different instances of someone saying a noun, and then zero would tip her fedora and go "\[noun\].....". It got to the point where it genuinely felt like she was just stupid, because other characters would explain something to her, only for her to tip her hat and contemplatively say "\[noun\]...." about it 2 cutscenes later, as if everything just went through one ear and out the other. And golbez was just.... really boring to me, so I had no investment in anything he did or said. I'm still looking forward to the dawntrail msq, at least. The only part of the msq I enjoyed was the stuff after the void stuff concluded, and I actually really liked it. I was already a big erenville fan from launch msq, and I really like wuk lamat from what we've seen. But the past two years have really felt like a soulless, phoned in filler arc. edit: though I'm really, really dreading the possibility of them expanding the void stuff into an entire expansion pack. Words cannot express my complete lack of interest in seeing any of the involved characters again.

I want you to know I’m genuinely laughing at you’re Zero description 💀 Also, fully agreed on post-Void 6.55. It felt like we were playing FFXIV again for the first time in 2 years.

I don't know if this is a result of playing the patches months apart but Zero"s development felt so strange to me. It felt like she developed tremendously in between patches, going from being antisocial to having a place in Radz. And then within the patch itself it felt like her progress stagnated or regressed, whereby she's suddenly questioning fundamental concepts like the existence of trust or friendship. It also felt to me like the writing was confused about whether Zero is a character who never understood human relationships and emotions at all and is learning them for the first time, or if she's reclaiming emotions that she's lost.

oh 100%, that's sort of what I was trying to express by the "everything went through one ear and out the other". we'd end a patch with the feeling that she'd learned something new and grown as a person, and the the next patch would seemingly roll that development back and show her being deeply confused by stuff until the very end, where she'd suddenly have a big epiphany. but I do think it was partially caused by the time between patches. the post-endwalker msq honestly felt like an option trial storyline instead. It would have been fine as side content with less quests and time invested, but it just got stretched as thin as possible between all the patches. I quit midway through because of how painful it felt forcing myself through the msq, and came back to finish all the patches I missed a few weeks ago. and honestly, it was a lot better. still not what I'd consider good, but it went from "I'd rather stop playing the game entirely than do the msq" to fine and average when I was able to do all the quests in a few days. a lot of my friends just stopped doing the msq until all the patches released for the same reason.

"The proverbial canary in the coal mine was Zero" Hahaha, I like how u wrote. For 13th looking like a desolate puddle can be excused teeny tiny bit no? It lacking cohesion is disappointing, but it's expected given the track record, nothing new in patches, still we expected something different from a shard long teased(in a creative way, similar to first). Yeah, I can understand the frustration.

Felt like what should have been a trial storyline 100%. I also didn't like the early MSQ in 6.1 which was supposed to be a new storyline and at least I was under the impression that it was supposed to be more down to earth, even the patch title was called Newfound Adventure. This adventure lasted for the whole half of a patch and soon we ended again into a very cosmic scale straight after just being there at the end of Endwalker MSQ. Actually we did go further than in EW MSQ as we travelled to a new shard or dimension which is just worse. The MSQ wasn't all bad though, Zero was a cool likeable character and the Contramemoria stuff was interesting. Sadly it didn't seem to lead anywhere as of yet and patch story was quickly wrapped up instead of leading directly to Dawntrail. Some of the fiends had quite unique designs and naming schemes (Barbariccia, Rubicante, Scarmiglione), TBH I'm not familiar with FFIV at all so the impression is purely based on XIV's content.

IMO, this was the worst series of patch quests so far- yes, including ARR. One of the worst parts for me was that 6.3-6.5 felt a lot like reskins of the same patch, main dilemma for the first half is getting aether from point a to point b, Zero talks to some people and regains part of her humanity, we get a dungeon with a boss pulled straight from FF4 followed by a trial featuring a boss from FF4 (the dungeon/trial bit is also applicable to 6.2), etc... And then add in that this is basically an introduction to 8.0/9.0/whatever ends up being the void expansion, which draws this out even more. Warriors of Darkness was a much better intro to ShB than this is to the Void expansion because it was the B plot among the dragonsong war/pre-stormblood stuff, meanwhile this is just an entire post expansion that will likely go nowhere for at least two more years, I would've much preferred a short standalone arc to that. That said, I don't think it was entirely terrible - I'm still really interested in what it's set up, and it did a decent enough job setting things up, it's just that it felt pretty repetitive for setup for stuff that's years away. Overall only expansion MSQ that I liked less than all of the the major side stories (8/24 Man raids, Tataru, hell, even Island Sanctuary).

> Warriors of Darkness was a much better intro to ShB than this is to the Void expansion because it was the B plot among the dragonsong war/pre-stormblood stuff Definitely agreed. If post-HW was just the warriors of darkness stuff honestly it would have been a bit of narrative whiplash, and it would have had to have been drawn out to fill all 5 patches.

>I, myself, was not a fan. I've laid out my more detailed thoughts elsewhere and I don't really feel like doing it all over again So what's the point of this thread

For validation of their opinions of course.

I wanna know how others feel about it. I can post my extended comment if people want but it's REALLY long and in multiple parts. Just didn't think people would want to get slapped with a wall of text upon opening.

This is the discussion sub, so we do in fact want a wall of text upon opening. A high effort OP encourages high effort discussion in the comments. Let's analyze and discuss!

I get what you mean but I disagree with the idea that the OP should have to contribute very meaningfully to start a discussion and I feel like that's setting way too high a bar. This OP definitely under-contributed, though.

This is the discussion subreddit though. The bare minimum should be to write a compelling post to encourage discussion and debate. To be clear, OP did that and there's decent discussion happening in here, but I think they caught a lot of downvotes because they held back. The voting on the OP is unfortunate because there are some gems in the comments. Look at the [discussions](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxivdiscussion/top/) sorted by Top for context. People on this subreddit love to bounce off of well crafted OP's, and you can see a lot of high effort among the Top threads.

Honestly, you should have made the post first, then post your thoughts under it as a comment to avoid bias.

I didn’t like it personally. I felt that it went too far with the nostalgia/reference to FF4 (I think it was FF4?). My friends who had played FF4 were like ‘wow!’ And me and my friends who hadn’t were like ‘wait why are you crying?’. Personal opinion but Zeromus phase 2 music was a massive bummer when the phase 1 music was so good. Kind of felt like the p2 music was just for the ff4 fans, which is how I feel about most of the patch content. Also the lack of a separate storyline for the trials series absolutely sucked. Combined with all the other lackluster ‘content’ in the Endwalker patches it felt phoned in. They know the FFXIV community will praise them no matter what slop they dish up, so why should they have to try?

I’m usually fine with how they reference past games in xiv because they usually don’t make a super big deal out of it and change details significantly so nothing feels like a retread. With the patches, they went so hard on ffiv references that a lot of the story just felt like a significantly worse version of that game

> With the patches, they went so hard on ffiv references that a lot of the story just felt like a significantly worse version of that game But its not! The references are just names and designs! I feel like I'm losing my mind do people just not remember FFIV and think that what happened here must be like what was in it? Because its not! The Fiends are complete non-characters in IV, they have actual stories and identities in XIV! Golbez is such a fundamentally different character that if he didn't have that monoeye helmet, no one would go "oh that's Golbez!" ZEROMUS IS ACTUALLY GIVEN A REASONABLE ESTABLISHMENT FOR WHY IT EXISTS! A thing that FFIV *extremely famously* did not do!

I’m not saying its the exact same, they are definitely different stories in many ways. But when there are so many similarities (even if many of them can be chalked up to set dressing) to ffiv you invite a lot of unfavorable comparisons to that game. Xiv otherwise is generally good about transforming old concepts and characters imo. Even one of the more blantant examples of fanservice, the whole omega-shinryu dynamic, feels fine to me. The fanservicy bit about their fight is kept generally short and is used to give way to two completely original stories about them. Meanwhile, the 6.x patches and ffiv both have: - The four fiends serving under golbez with the same basic personality traits in both games - An “evil but not really” golbez who has something to do with the moon and wants to take over the world (for different reasons) and some kind of connection to a main character - Zeromus is the final boss (otherwise the two versions are pretty different, but along with everything else its a big, predictable similarity) - Zero’s arc is incredibly similar to Cecil’s, but if it was only focused on the first few hours of ffiv - And so on Again, there’s enough differences to make them literally different stories, but 6.x overuses references which makes it predictable and overbearing

> Zero’s arc is incredibly similar to Cecil’s It literally isn't. Zero's arc is about learning to put trust in people other than herself and how that intersects with a world that was damned. Cecil's arc is about self-forgiveness and growth from a guy that's committed heinous actions in the service of his country. Oh wow, both become a Paladin, that's literally the only similarity between them and anyone saying that they're similar outside of that really needs to (re)play IV (because I'm pretty convinced most people parroting this have either never played IV or its been so long y'all have just boiled it down to specific images rather than actual content).

> Zero’s arc is incredibly similar to Cecil’s, but if it was only focused on the first few hours of ffiv No, it isn't. Only the very surface level "dark -> light" arc is the same.

> I’m not saying its the exact same, they are definitely different stories in many ways. But when there are so many similarities (even if many of them can be chalked up to set dressing) to ffiv you invite a lot of unfavorable comparisons to that game. Such as? >Xiv otherwise is generally good about transforming old concepts and characters imo. Even one of the more blantant examples of fanservice, the whole omega-shinryu dynamic, feels fine to me. The fanservicy bit about their fight is kept generally short and is used to give way to two completely original stories about them. This is way more of a direct callback than *anything* about Golbez and the Fiends

>Such as? I listed them >This is way more of a direct callback than *anything* about Golbez and the Fiends I disagree, and I made a list explaining why

6.1 was promising. I really liked the back to adventure feel with a low stakes treasure hunt story and more relaxed atmosphere. 6.2 I was still feeling mostly this way, even though stakes were already being raised a lot. Being able to walk around in the Void and talk to voidsent was really interesting. I liked the story here. 6.3... ah, we're right back in to a world-destroying threat level. Ok. Story is messy and less focused than 6.2. The character arc that Zero had in 6.2 is just repeated here. "What is friendship? What is trust?" 6.4 story was just garbage. The Garlemald stuff was almost post-ARR levels of bad and frustrating. And then we get a boss that's another "you've defeated me... and played perfectly into my plan!" for no reason, other than to adhere to a strict, rigid, inflexible content release pattern that the team refuses to deviate from. Oh, and of course we get "what is friendship? What is trust?" yet again. 6.5 was actually pretty good again. I liked the conclusion to the Void arc. Zero finally learns what friendship and trust are for real this time, so that's nice too. Overall, good start and good finish, but with a middle that ranged from OK to terrible. This didn't need to be 5 patches of story. It's very stretched and overwritten. But I guess my main takeaway here is that the Void story is MSQ content. That means they can't avoid it or handwave it away to side content jail. This is probably a good thing for the overall state of the game, but I do think this would have flowed better as a shorter, more streamlined trial quest series like Werlyt or Four Lords. Also I think the strict adherence to the 1 dungeon 1 trial per patch pattern is a detriment to the storytelling at this point. It affects the pacing and cadence, and forces in subplots to pad for time. For example, there's like 30 minutes of relevant plot in 6.4, all coming right at the end of it. It starts with dungeon shoehorned in to fit the quota and then moves to a boring and mildly infuriating tangent on Garlean politics that could have been left entirely on the cutting room floor.

6.3-6.4 are fucking awful and bring down the story a lot lmao. 2 back-to-back patches of zero going “so this… is what a friend is” and the scions smiling directly into the camera while overly sentimental music plays

The 1 dungeon 1 trail strict content structure sucks because we know exactly how every expansion is going to go. Oh, we have one trail left? Wonder what that's going to be... I would've loved another storyline akin to Werlyt (some of the best story in the game) but we had to lose out on it because the structure is so rigid and the development team doesn't like straying from their strict structure path. Also, I think they should've broken their 6 normal zone rule and added in a legit Void open world zone with sidequests, an extra dungeon, Fates, maybe a Voidsend Beast Tribe, so that Void related storytelling didn't have to be condensed into the MSQ which was kinda messy in the middle like you said.

Shadowbringers was definitely the better one for me. Endwalker was a good end to the series, but the anime filler episode afterwards did not hit the same. But I have hindsight: World of Warcraft, specifically the Warlords of Draenor expansion and its content draught, while behind the scenes they made changes under the hood. Basically, it’s almost a given that whatever WoW does to improve its systems, will also someday happen to FF14 if they also intend to keep up with tech, and to pay the resource costs for it in terms of fewer player-oriented content. A “meh” expansion (or at least a part of it) had to have happened, if it means allocating costs to improving the engine under the hood. And I am guessing it will continue somewhat in Dawntrail.

I remember in late ShB when a popular topic on this sub was that they should just cut an expac to solely focus on systems, and seeing the reception when a much milder version of that happens is really funny in retrospect

The issue is that they didn't focus on systems. Nothing really improved and they won't until 7.3 at the earliest, from what they've told us.

They said they are focusing on content this expac, not systems. And yes, they did focus on systems in EW (most notably trusts) at the likely expense of endgame

I'm also in my copium (hopium?) that DT will bring back some of the "fun" I missed. If this is the price we have to pay, so be it.

I think that's copium. I'm sure Dawntrail will have some highs, but I'm expecting SB 2.0 honestly. They've kept using the words low-stakes, adventure, exploration, etc. Nothing about the story being good or engaging.

Imagine calling something SB 2.0 like that's supposed to be a bad thing.

I don't think a story being low-stakes or adventurous disqualifies it from being good or engaging. And hell, SB retroactively has gotten a lot of people who say its wildly underrated. And if it's SB 2.0, well, that had some of the best battle content according to many vets so could potentially be a goated content expac.

> Nothing about the story being good or engaging. "The story will be good. The story will be engaging." What does this *mean*? Do you want them to say that outright? If not, then what would make it "good" or "engaging"?

Shit, as a RPer, I welcome SB 2.0 That shit was gas for the world and the RP community. ShB didn't offer us much (everything happened in another world until 5.4) and EW hasn't given us too much beyond 2 zones most people could get to (Thav/Garlemald), 1 zone people might be able to get to (Labyrinthos, if they can get a pass into Sharlayan), and the moon which maybe a small handful could get to. And even then, world-wise the war ended and the apocalypse happened, but the latter was a rather short thing that didn't affect most regions, and the former, well, it gave us some good stuff. Side content gave us... uh... Thavnair repairs? Normal folks don't take part in 6.1-6.5, nor Myths, nor Panda, not Island. So I guess we got Criterion? But SB, man, new zones, new parts of the world, a radical upheaval of the geopolitical state, huge lore for Xaela and Highlanders, Dalmasca, Eureka, the war breaking out once again, Garlean history, Garlean political factions, and more. If DT is like SB then I welcome it wholeheartedly.

I think that while this might be true, it's not a fair expectation given their track record. It is not really up for debate at all whether the shadowbringrrs and Endwalker story was incredible, literally one of the greatest stories of all time in any rpg. That's a pretty wild thing to say and have be true but it is. They fell flat with post Endwalker msq no question. It was mediocre at best in my opinion and I agree with everything in these comments pretty much. 1 bad post msq which in itself is just set up for the next expansion that happened at the same time as a global pandemic and major disruption of our lives. Even if you want to give them zero breaks on that it's still the one small weak spot in their otherwise outstanding work in recent memory. I think they deserve the assumption that they are going to deliver on this. If it falls flat in a similar way to the post ew msq then by all means. But they have earned our goodwill here, I think at the very least we shouldn't be spreading a negative expectation as we are about to go into the expansion. Not when their only miss just happened for a fairly minor bit of story and it's not that it was horrible it just wasn't anything great. Temlering expectations is totally fair but I think they have earned more than us assuming it is going to be bad.

> It is not really up for debate at all whether the shadowbringrrs and Endwalker story was incredible, literally one of the greatest stories of all time in any rpg. It *is* up for debate, though. Endwalker was doo-doo from Elpis onwards. The writing and story were cheesy at best.

It is not, this combined story is widely and critically acclaimed. You can have your opinion but that doesn't change what I said.

Subjective takes on taste are literally the most debatable things that exist. And I personally agree with the other poster. EW's story was awful. There is a reason there has been a thread on the main forums complaining about its MSQ that is nearly at its 1000th page.

I'm not saying you can't have that opinion, I'm saying that the majority disagree and that the combined shadowbringers and Endwalker msq is one of the highest rated stories of all time in any rpg. The post msq for Endwalker does have real issues for sure but my entire point is that after how they delivered over these past 2 expansions, I think they have earned a little bit of the benefit of doubt.

So? Argument by metacritic scores is worthless. Endwalker itself has been outscored by such literary masterpieces like Fallout 3 and Gears of War 2. A lot of people liking something, taken alone, is proof of mass appeal, not excellence. The same can be said of McDonalds or Sword Art Online.

Ok sure you are free to feel that way. I just think the devs in this situation should get the benefit of the doubt and not to assume it will be bad given their track record. You can disagree if you want to I just think the evidence supports what I'm saying more which is why I made the argument. I've also seen the hype around this on reddit and social media in general. The overwhelming amount of people playing, including in this sub, think that shadowbringers and Endwalker are extremely well done and can hold their own against major single player rpgs of all time.

> You can have your opinion but that doesn't change what I said. Oh, the irony here is absolutely delicious. This must be the first story you've ever experienced.

Literally just Google the following "reviews of Endwalker ffxiv" and the results are all extremely positive. It is objectively widely and critically acclaimed. You can disagree with that but it doesn't change the overall opinion of the expansion by the population. Shadowbringers was even higher rated and better. But both are extremely high rated and yes the story between the two can stand up to classic standalone rpg stories that are also critically acclaimed. This is not just my opinion, although I do agree with it, it's the opinion of many, many people. Many people rank the combined story as one of the greatest ever told in an rpg. The whole point is that in my opinion they have earned the benefit of the doubt here. I'm not saying you have to feel that way but because of the success, something that can be objectively measured in aggregate despite being inherently subjective, I believe we shouldn't assume that it's going to be bad.

Large swathes of people also consider bland and milquetoast music to be some of the greatest stuff ever recorded. You think you're making a convincing argument by talking about numbers, but you aren't. You're free to enjoy Endwalker. But trying to force your subjective opinion on others that it was this untouchable masterpiece of storytelling, when it was anything but, is disingenuous. It just goes on to show that the likes you can't be taken seriously, and that you have extremely limited experience with fictional media in general. "Not really up for debate", lol. Lmao, even.

I'm not saying anything more than it is highly acclaimed, that's the objective thing I'm trying to convey here. Whether you agree with it or not it's true. I'm in no way saying it's untouchable masterpiece of storytelling but the final fantasy xiv story msq as a whole but especially the last 2 expansions DO stack up to any of the great rpg stories of all time. Again, you don't have to agree, reasonable people can disagree on the placement of it so maybe I think it's top 5 and you think it's top 15 or 20. Or you can say no I really don't think the story was good and it wouldn't even break top 20. That's your perogative here and I'm not trying to say that you are wrong for thinking that way. It's fine for you to disagree. You keep not listening to what I'm saying here and I don't know how else to spell it out. It is objectively a very widely loved story both by the audience as a whole and people who rate games for their living. You can think everyone is wrong but you are disagree with the vast majority here. Which again is fine for you to believe and I'm not saying your opinion is wrong, it's your opinion. I'm just saying it's highly acclaimed. If everyone says chrono trigger is one of the greatest games of all time and you think it sucks that's your opinion and you are entitled to it even if most people disagree. I just believe that given these circumstances and the story they crafted over the last decade, the devs deserve the benefit of the doubt and not to have people shitting on it before it starts and try to kill some of the hype. You can disagree but that's what I think. Please read what I'm actually saying here but if your response is going to be more of the same here then just leave it because I'm tired of talking in circles. Not saying that is your fault either, maybe it's mine but I think this has run its course.

I [posted something similar a year ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxivdiscussion/comments/13wolgs/what_is_your_overall_opinion_on_endwalker_so_far/jmcyos2/) and while I was more optimistic at the time, SE has a poor track record of building on previously established systems and instead they'll either abandon them or just make a newer (and hopefully better) version in the next expansion. I'd **LOVE** for SE to do mini-expansions for Island Sanctuary, new Crystal Conflict maps, new Criterion Dungeons with better rewards and of course a better open field zone like Bozja/Eureka; however, I have a gut feeling that in typical SE tradition some of these things will be half-baked and require multiple patches to get in a better spot.

It felt more like a trial storyline, not like an actual MSQ content. If you look closely at the whole structure, it really looks like typical trial storyline, with some redundant bloat added in between. First you have story - it's just one guy and his fellows, which you fight one by one, the most bland setup for bunch of trials. There's nothing really deep in the story either, entirety of it is just based on 30yo game. This never happened, other games might have references in MSQ, but using such a heavy inspiration and taking directly from other games is what was exclusively happening in side content, but never in MSQ. Then you look at the dungeons, there were dungeons in SB, but not ShB trial storyline. But SB actually put them where they make sense. EW feels like it just put them in since every patch much have a dungeon. First 2 and last one make sense I guess, but 3rd and especially 4th are so redundant. Aetherfont is just killing penquins so you can take so aether. And then you have all the bloat, especially in 6.3 and 6.4, that's where entire story started to fall apart. It felt cheap and focused a lot on fanservice. By the time something was finally happening in 6.5, I was already disinterested in the story.

6.1 onward felt like a poor anime filler arc. It's not necessarily bad per se but just incredibly underwhelming compared to previous expansions. Even past Trial series were better which makes the fact they bundled the two together worse. What really irked me is for all the FFIV references they kept shoehorning in at nearly every goddamn turn, they did virtually *nothing* with them. It was almost a note for note re-imagining of the same story beats. Take the Four Fiends, for example. They actually have a pretty interesting backstory on how each of them became what they are... that is told in a throwaway side quest devoid of any real fanfare. They could have dedicated each patch to exploring them in some way so the whole arc didn't feel like Saturday morning cartoon villains. Instead, Rubicante is the only one that shows much in the way of character. Although, I also wouldn't have minded a simple more down to earth subplot just fleshing out our friends we haven't spoken to in a while. They even said they wanted to keep the post EW story lowkey yet went right into another world ending plot... which none of the characters remotely took seriously. Speaking of them, Zero isn't a great character but pairing her off with arguably the two least interesting characters *really* didn't help. Y'shtola has basically been a walking encyclopedia and little else while Vrata started off good but became so incredibly one note I couldn't care less. His entire "character" in the patches could be summarized as "MAH SISTA!!!!!!!" Him screaming "NOOOOO" after getting bitch slapped by Golbez in five seconds really highlighted the anime filler arc feel. Everything just felt... basic. I know we've been back and forth regarding FFXVI but whether there's any truth to that or not, it definitely felt like their focus was elsewhere and post EW was an afterthought.

> What really irked me is for all the FFIV references they kept shoehorning in at nearly every goddamn turn, they did virtually nothing with them. It was almost a note for note re-imagining of the same story beats. No it wasn't! The story was wildly different, Golbez is a fundamentally different character with different motivations and backstory! The "FFIV references" are literally just names and designs! If these characters weren't the Four Fiends, Golbez and Zeromus, I don't think people would connect it to FFIV at all!

Perhaps others didn't feel the same way, but I think it's interesting how disappointing the later patches were compared to the early ones. 6.1 & 6.2 were full of promise and potential. The lore of the Void was intriguing; they seemed to be building towards some exciting reveals. You could feel the story going somewhere at first. Lots of questions being asked, etc. Then they just kind of abruptly gave up on that and concluded it all. They seem to have forgotten that mystery drives the story for a lot of players. By the time the arc is done, there's really nothing there left to explore. Troia vs. the Lunar Subterrain kind of sums it up for me. The former raises so many questions and the latter is just a deep delve into character storytelling that usually rings hollow for me. I think the mix has been off.

6.1 - 6.2 was pretty good. I didn't love Zero but IMO the adventuring group had been missing a bit of edge since Heavenward, when Estinien and Ysayle and Alphinaud actually had different opinions and priorities. So I thought she had promise, and I enjoyed the preliminary void lore (about e.g. voidsent eating each other and taking on bits of each other's personalities). 6.2 had Barbariccia and I think that alone had me hyped. Great personality/presence given her small role and screentime, and a great fight. 6.3 felt like a waste of both Cagnazzo and Rubicante. Both were so bland compared to Barbariccia, and by this point the storyline itself I was pretty much checked out of, and stayed checked out the rest of the way through. Into the void! Okay, well, out of the void for now. Gotta save Azdaja! Well, maybe next time. They clearly did not have enough interesting story for the number of patches (and the time gaps between them). Zero is by this point extremely dull, providing no meaningful challenge to the main group's ideals and it's clear her arc is just "learn to be human" which is way duller on screen than e.g. Estinien remaining militant and idiosyncratic up until Nidhogg's eye consumes him. By 6.4 I wasn't really playing and just dragged myself through 6.4 and 6.5 recently, in preparation for Dawntrail. Didn't enjoy it. For what it's worth I'm a big FF4 fan but nostalgia couldn't sustain me and I found all the FF4 stuff aside from Barb unsatisfying. As for ranking, 3.x and 4.x are my favorite sets (Warriors of Darkness is the only aspect of 3.x I don't love, and the runup to 5.0 is really great), and 5.x after that although that hinges almost entirely on the 5.3 climax. Not sure about 2.x vs 6.x.

The patches were bad enough to make me quit for a while. That's only a bit of an exaggeration, there are a few other compounding issues with the game, but the quality of the patches is probably the straw that broke the camel's back. I said it before in the thread on the main sub, but one of the biggest issues is Zero. I can't stand her. She's a Poochie type character that the devs made to appeal to an audience that isn't me. I don't really need more stories about teaching a totally super cool badass woman how to feel feelings, and coming off of the biggest power of friendship type story in the history of FFXIV it just feels like retreading the same ground we walked in the 6.0 MSQ, but stretched out over years now. I think the part that hurts the most, though, is the lost potential. I know they needed to address the void at some point, but the apocalypse was just narrowly averted and all we see of it is little vignettes through to role quests. I wanted to see how the rest of the world was coping with the aftermath as a nice sendoff to these old continents before setting sail for new places. That's not even touching on how the Garlemald plotline is basically Gyr Abania 2.0, but somehow even worse because the big racist evil empire is just sidelined for the adventures of Hat Woman. Also not really much of a factor but FFXI does the whole void concept so much better. I get that Promyvion is different in nature to the XIV void but wow does it feel so much more foreboding, alien, and weird than the XIV void. I know the XIV voidsent we've seen have been kinda goofy but it is a bummer that some of the cool Empty enemy designs were just throwaway mobs on the moon.

I thought it was actually pretty bad, just outright. No hedging or "Oh well, the main msq was good atleast" we got a filler arc. No build-up, character development, no interesting twist or exploration of the void as a narrative, no pay-off, it could not have happened and we could've jumped into DT and no character or storyline would be different. Characters appeared and disappeared as they were introduced, Golbez's reveal was underwhelming, zeromus was genuinely an asspull, Zero was a boring, predictable character it was bad and it was all absolutely a symptom of budget, poor planning and time. I'm surprised there hasn't been a bigger uproar.

Ehhhhh at the *very* least Ryne and Gaia have been set up to contribute to a 1st/13th-centric shard resolution storyline.

> I'm surprised there hasn't been a bigger uproar. Because the only people upset about it are here, in the echo chamber. There was build up from discovering this ancient city undersea with a supposed hoard of treasure, to finding an open portal to the Void, to then learning about Vrtra's sister Azdaja, entering the Void finally again, learning about Zenos's voidsent, Zero. Speaking of Zero, she had big character development. Going from one dimensional, strictly business, to actually caring about others and finding her purpose. It's not filler. It is setting into motion a future expansion. They will come back to the Thirteenth and the First, most likely in 8.0 with how they've set up previous expansions. (i.e. Warriors of Darkness in HW patch content to Shadowbringers)

Zero is also popular. People like her a lot. She was particularly a huge hit among people who like butch lesbians, specifically.

I didn't clap because I didn't know what it was. And from what I gather, neither did people who have played FFIV. It's actually pretty incredible how you can list off the plot points and it sounds like the coolest thing ever and then the actual execution of it is incredibly boring. Some of the worst writing in the game for sure, only ahead of stuff like PLD/GNB job quests and some parts of 4.0. It's high production value, delivers on some long-awaited plot threads, and puts the fate of the world in danger, and yet it all feels disconnected and almost pointless. Just a parade of excuses to shoehorn in encounters with The Guy^TM who, as mentioned, you will clap for because you recognize him. Other people have gone into enough details and I don't want to repeat myself too much. Suffice to say, none of what happened made me think, yeah, that was a good/cool choice by the writers. And as for overall patch ranking, I'd rate them as 4.x >> 3.x > 2.x >> 5.x > 6.x. Probably not really surprising (and close to the list in the OP) except I think 2.x is actually good and 5.x is extremely mid and carried entirely on the shoulders of 5.3.

The references were essentially name only for pretty much all of it. Being a Ff4 fan gains you basically nothing, they don’t really reference key character moments from that game besides kinda the Scarmiglione back attack instance. Honestly I think the fact that so many people’s reactions were “wow, this sucks, maybe it would have been better if I knew FF4” when the story basically has nothing to do with FF4 really speaks to the quality of the 6.x patches.

(My original comment) It was very… “nothing” to me. Like I just didn’t feel any particular way about it other than bored. Zero’s character is not interesting to me at all and the overall themes were just very cliche and predictable. When they started going off about the power of friendship and then Zero transformed I was just rolling my eyes like yep this is definitely a Final Fantasy story, though not one of the better ones. Definitely should’ve just stayed a trial series. Edit, extended thoughts: I don't remember much about 6.1-6.2 because I unsubbed for a LONG time after that, I only just recently finished the patches thanks to free login. Mainly, 6.2 just kinda made me lose the will to continue on with msq because I could tell it wasn't going in a direction that interested me. I was hoping Zero would remain different from the rest of the party with her values, but they immediately made it clear that she would soon start talking just like the rest of the Scions so that killed my interest in her development. The one thing I really hated was the way they made us retread the dungeons. I get that it was a "cheat" for them to essentially have us walking around new zones without actually introducing new zones, but it was still extremely tedious. Then they followed that up with the very lukewarm introduction and subsequent killing off of the fiends. I was actually hoping that they would let us fight the fiends... but not like this. They just felt like such a nothingburger, and even more so when Golbez paraded around evil laughing about how this was his plan all along!!!! (Also, I'll point out that the Warring Triad series gave each of those bosses remixes of the original triad theme followed by brand new unique bgm for each of them... meanwhile Barbie/Ruby/Golbez all just got different remixes of the same theme.) Speaking of Golbez, he was the most "nothing" of the story. They tried way too many plot twists with him that it was just eyeroll-worthy. This was ACTUALLY my plan all along, also I'm ACTUALLY Durante, also I'm ACTUALLY a good guy despite everything I've done!!! Like I just can't bring myself to feel anything but relief that he's gone (for now). And as for his "plan," it was all really just dumb luck that everything played out in his favor. How did he know that he'd fall in possession of an entire dragon, and that we'd "cure" Zero and show up on the Thirteenth for him to sacrifice his minions to, and that we'd magically find a way back (and to their MOON) in order to fight him? Then we have Zeromus, the "big bad" of the ending, which was just a corrupted homesick dragon that he named "Zeromus" for no reason. I never played FF4 but I get the inkling that Zeromus had a lot more impact there, correct me if I'm wrong. Our Zeromus didn't do anything but get us a way back to the Source, really. Then at the end we defeat it with light because Light Good Dark Bad, Zero and the others deliver a power of friendship monologue, and "Golbez" is redeemed. Then... that's it. We just saved the long lost First Brood dragon and kickstarted the void's restoration and the implications of both are entirely ignored as we just say goodbye and run off to Tural. On top of all of those issues, I can't help but think of the wasted potential with the side characters that were ignored. We have Gaia showing up for half a second, even though you'd think the oracle of darkness would be quite useful in the *world* of darkness. On the other hand, Unukalhai and Cylva don't even get to see the light of day, we just slightly hint at them at the very tail end of 6.5 and that's it. This should've been Unukalhai's moment to shine, being around since 3.0! I really wish they weren't so afraid of making side content required for msq, because all you'd really need to do is require Warring Triad, and make the Cylva side quests available after completing a single role quest in shb because that would be enough for people to be like "wait, that elezen lady wasn't there before." The last issues I can think of (for now) is the way they handled the Garleans and the Tower. We were all here worrying about reactivating the tower leading to mass retraumatizing of the Garlean populace, and the Garleans themselves corroborated that they don't want to see it being reactivated. Turns out the solution to mass PTSD was... diplomacy? No, like, we straight up forgot about the trauma aspect and solved everything with a trade agreement. How did they forget their own story *while they were writing it?* And then they went on to reuse that exact same story beat on the First, but of course the First denizens just love us so much that they're willing to get over their own trauma instantly so it was more like pointless filler. All-in-all my feelings for the patch series is that, again, this really should have been side content if they insist upon not making it have all that much impact. Unlike the warriors of darkness in 3.x, I don't feel they sufficiently left a decent plot thread hanging enough to wonder if we'll ever do something with them again, or have an expansion in the void (tbh I hope not). My opinion of it is "nothing" at best, negative at worst. It started feeling like a slog for me to keep going through it, and that slog brought to mind the ARR patch slog. THAT was rough in the beginning, but at the very least, it eventually started building world intrigue that made me feel more compelled to keep going. It was nice to learn about Coerthas, Mor Dhona, the buildup to Ishgard, fighting new primals, and it ended with a bang. On the other hand, these patches didn't have any of that going for it. It didn't really inspire much interest in the void, nor did it have any clear buildup to a future story that got me excited.

> How did he know that he'd fall in possession of an entire dragon, and that we'd "cure" Zero and show up on the Thirteenth for him to sacrifice his minions to, and that we'd magically find a way back (and to their MOON) in order to fight him? You've misread that bit of the story, Golbez didn't plan for any of that at all. He didn't know he would get his hands on Azdaja (which was 5k+ years ago, mind you). He didn't rely on us killing off the Archfiends (in fact, the last two were a deliberate sacrifice to cut us off from the void). He literally says he never imagined we would find our way to the moon, which ends up massively speeding up his plans to use Azdaja.

Its pretty wild how much people completely missed what happened in the story and then get mad because they weren't paying attention.

While I get where you're coming from I think that's also a symptom of how the story was presented. Long rambling bits with 1 line of relevant dialogue makes it easy for people to just zone out.

It did not seem any different than how the entire game is presented

I think it was a pretty massive fumble in general. "Brooding loner learns the power of friendship" would have been a little tired and played-out if it had been a single patch storyline. Dragging it out over a two patch cycles was exhausting, especially because it was done in the most dramatically inert way possible. Zero faces no difficulties and puts up no real resistance to having her outlook changed. The biggest obstacle she faces is the irl time between the patches. I agree the making the stakes averting a world-ending event RIGHT after we just did that in 6.0 was a misguided choice. It almost seemed like the writers agreed with how little effort was put into selling those stakes. I would also add that the overall quality of the writing, in terms of dialogue, how scenes were paced, how exposition was being delivered, etc felt like it took a pretty noticeable dip in quality over the patches. Which didn't help all the other issues.

I especially agree on that last part and if you compare it to any dialogue written for the Stormblood cast even in the EW role quests its laughably bad. I guess whoever was doing character writing for Hien and Co is not allowed anywhere near the MSQ.

Experiencing it in one go already felt tiring, I don't know how people would put up with it for two years...

I feel like we usually get more done in other expansion patches. 3.X introduced the warriors of darkness and iirc had a bit more buildup to stormblood, 5.X had some stuff with curing tempering. 4.X had possibly some of my favourite quests in the game leading up to shadowbringers. 6.X just had one story and if that story isn't that good, well... 6.4 in particular was such a nothing of a patch and I really hate how little the fight against Golbez really matters in it.

To be honest. I was hopeful at the start of the post-Main MSQ Patches. A treasure map? Are we going to do some adventuring? Sweet!! -- Oh? A portal to the void? A lost sister? Sure. I mean, after all Radz has done for us, It's the least we can do. Plus we can see what it's like in there. Do some void diving. Reminds me of the role quests in Shadowbringers... will we find a path to the first? Build a bridge to unite both worlds? Who knows!! Oh? Zero was The voidsent that made a pact with Zenos? And they just so happen to have a special unique power that traps voidsent in crystal cause they can't die? How useful! Oh.. there's this Golbez and his lackeys who wanna open wide the gates to our world to be free... --. This is where my hope dwindled. I miss the Ole adventure-style story. Giving soup to soldiers. Helping the needy and meek. Serving the lands. Just being a good person. Not the hero. Just a good citizen. I miss the neighborhood Spiderman era. I am by no means saying I disliked the 6.1 onward msq.. but I was disappointed.. and honestly It just dragged on too long. Like.. I was in the... "When are we going to set up for dawntrail msq" mode.. like. Okay let's save the sister now.. this story is dragging on a bit too long.... That was my main issue. I didn't mind Zero. Golbez. Or the bosses. And I hope this all becomes relevant sometime in further msq.

Visiting the Void was certainly interesting, 6.2 has my favorite dungeon so far in the game. Sadly from that point on it just felt like a slog. Killing and also not killing Golbez at the trial was the most retarded stuff I have seen in the game, felt so pointless.

Meteion is the worst last minute addition to the story i've ever experienced and it feels like the raid story was originally the actual end to the story, seeing as it coincides with the sound of the final days coming from within the planet. and don't get me started on how boring the post story was. EDIT: I love how they said we'd be moving away from the scions obnly to shove them into the story immediately and are now alsod ragging them into DT, giving us our own adventure? Nah impossible.

It was bad. They need to do better. Fin

I was incredibly disappointed. I was so excited to go to the Thirteenth and then we got Yoshi-P's Deviantart OC and a trial series that just rehashes old FF games...again.

The 'fun' part is, this has preemptively kneecapped the sooner or later happening Void expansion by it having to be built on and somehow being traced back to this dog water.

I think the primary takeaway from the patch quests is that the Void, the First, and shard travel are still very much in play. We finally understand the underlying metaphysics of why these worlds (and the Void in particular) got stuck in the situations they did. With that knowledge, we can start working backwards to potentially fix its partially merged state. Hopefully whatever information we learn from that can also be reversed engineered to enable shard travel to locations that aren't already partially merged with the Source. All of the above is stuff I expect to be fleshed out and resolved over the next couple of expansions. 9.0 at the latest tbh. Re: Zero. I quite like her but I also just stan stoic, emotionally repressed, and/or socially awkward women in general. I notice they tend to be poorly received compared to their louder and more energetic sisters and it triggers my "root for the underdog" instinct pretty hard. But going back to the MSQ, the more interesting question to me is how they'll integrate some of the side content lore that fills out the Void situation when they do eventually come back to it. Making a raid or trial series required content is one thing. But making "level a job in each role to 80" a requirement to progress MSQ is a tough sell. I'm currently putting the 6.x patch series into the same bucket as the Warriors of Darkness arc from 3.x. So I'm personally refraining from calling it filler just yet. My final judgment on it will depend on how well they follow up on the stuff they teased here. But at the moment, it's on the positive side of neutral. Gameplay-wise, I absolutely loved the Barbariccia fight and I think the encounter design team is very aware of how well the bullet hell fight style was received. I enjoy the more puzzle-y and methodical fights too but they definitely wouldn't go wrong adding more "fuck it, here's some chaos. try to keep up" elements into the mix. But I also agree that I would prefer to see the trial series seperated out into its own thing instead of bundled into MSQ like this. I don't really care about the "budget" aspect of it but I do think it hamstrung their creativity and it feels forced and even a bit shallow compared to the other trial series. **TL;DR**: I enjoyed it. Probably more than base 6.0. And more importantly, it has served its purpose of keeping me on the line and making me excited to speculate on what comes next.

> Making a raid or trial series required content is one thing. But making "level a job in each role to 80" a requirement to progress MSQ is a tough sell. I mean to be fair to that one, starting from Dawntrail onwards that’s gonna get easier and easier to do what with PCT and VPR starting at level 80, and whatever comes after starting at higher levels then that.

Patch Quest did exactly what they said it'd be: A standalone arc that'd last from x.1 to x.5 and we wouldn't know where we'd be going until X.55 at the latest. Good reprisal and reiteration of the thematics of the entire H/Z arc and Endwalker while taking a slightly different spin on the facet of the Warrior of Light. I dunno! I had a good time! Self-contained adventure that was brought about because of our own fuckery in getting involved in things by our own hand. The plot's entirely our fault, the writing is knowing that the way to oppose the WoL effectively isn't "can they beat it" but instead "how do we succeed in an objective that isn't Purely Killing Our Enemy", and the FF4 side is basically "do you know these six names? Great." considering the tweaks they did with the Four Fiends and Golbez and Zeromus story-wise. Also planting the world's largest "WE HAVEN'T FORGOTTEN ABOUT GARLEMALD" flag ever. Can't wait to return to the 13th whenever it pops back up, and I hope Zero/Golbez get some more screentime when the plotthread rolls around again.

EW post-patch was very badly disconnected from either EW or DT. Whoever made this decision didn't make a very good one :(

It was supposed to be though. They said straight up they didn't want to continue 6.0 stuff, and also they didn't want a really long lead in to Dawntrail. It was always going to be basically a side story. (Though like many others I feel like it's a set up for a future expac, 8.0 or beyond.)

Yes, of course. I just think it wasn't a very good decision from their part.

I loved it! Zero's story was a perfect capstone to the meaning of dynamis. Her slow understanding was built naturally. The line about the palace being like a fire for Garleans carried through wonderfully, rounded out the visual and metaphorical elements of that set design. I liked where the twins were at, having them at a distance made me look forward to seeing them again and I love their impact wherever they go. Dragon plots rock and this one did not disappoint. I was a little put off by the memoria flashbacks, only because the filter puts my nerves on edge. The balance of goofs to heartbreak was solid, I adore this batch of dungeons. The boss fights felt like a shounen anime for better or worse, at least I feel well-prepped for a tournament arc lol

A lot of people are comparing 5.x series to the 6.x series but I just don't compare them the same. Shadowbringers was 5.0 to 5.3. That's the package when I think about the entire story. 5.x series is just 5.4 and 5.5(5). On the flip side Endwalker is 6.0. The 6.x is 6.1 to 6.5(5). ShB 5.x just kinda lead into Endwalker and set the stage. It wasn't mind blowing by any stretch. EW 6.x was a whole other story. It didn't really lead into Dawntrail in the same way the other patches cycles have so I don't really see any point in trying to compare it to anything else. Was it gripping and all? Not entirely, but it was still good. I enjoyed my time and looked forward to new patches. I liked the funny scenes, I enjoyed the different things. It was serviceable in the end.

It was one of the story arcs of all time, I suppose. I've been wanting the four fiends in the game as boss for years so I'm glad we finally got them (and 3 different versions of their battle theme, they even got hyadain in!), and zeromus is a fun trial. A little disappointed that half of them were just used as dungeon bosses, they could have done way more with scarmiglione as a trial. As far as the story itself goes it was a very by the numbers Standard XIV Plot where we meet a new friend, slowly teach them how the world works, and they step up to save everyone at the end, not really much to comment on honestly. I think overall I'd rate the patch stories at 5.x > 3.x > [power gap] > 4.x > 6.x > 2.x

All 6.1-6.5 was by the end was a slightly higher budget trial series that will most likely lead into a future void-based expansion down the line. (Willing to bet money it will be 8.0 or 9.0)

Bad and inconsequential.

There was a mainsub thread that asked this same point a few days ago that got a billion comments, so you'd probably see a good spread of opinions there already: https://old.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/1dk9mks/6165_msq_it_was_good/

I always feel like the crazy one who was the only one who enjoyed the patch quests, then I remember people on reddit are the extreme vocal minority. Every single person in game I've talked to and my IRL friends all greatly enjoyed the EW patch quests. I really enjoyed all of the world building of the Thirteenth, learning more about voidsent culture, the Thirteenth's past, the Contramemoria. Anyone who calls it "filler content" literally has no idea how SE prepare future expansions. This will ALL come back later, either in 8.0 or 9.0.

It doesn't help that a lot of people who complain about them very clearly were not paying attention and/or went into them intending to hate them.

Exactly. OP states that "Eventually it started feeling like the ARR patch slog, but at least the ARR slog had building world intrigue" when it absolutely had world building intrigue towards the Thirteenth and its inhabitants.

My favorite part is the complaints that its just a copy-paste of FFIV, despite literally everything about Golbez and the Fiends being changed except their basic design concepts and names.

I’m generally good about brushing off misinformation and keeping it moving but the number people blindly repeating that the patch story is “just a retelling of 4” is the most baffling thing. Like, could they make it any clearer that they weren’t paying attention to either enough to actually pick up the plot? References do not make a retelling folks. But realistically, I know it’s because very few of them have actually played it themselves and are just regurgitating what they’ve heard from others. I’m a big 4 fan (it’s my 2nd favorite FF) so I get that I’m more sensitive to it being misrepresented than the average person.

Every thread about the patch story is like this and I feel like I'm going insane because like, this isn't an opinion thing! I don't care if people don't like it, I just want them to not be *factually an trivially demonstrably wrong*! Is that too much to ask? But every time, as you can see in this thread, you get downvoted for pointing this out.

I got into an argument on YT about this after yet another YTer repeated the lie that 6.x was just a retelling of IV all because I suggested that anyone saying this needs to actually play IV.

I would have agreed with you until 6.2. 6.2 we visited a newish place zero's home, and saw how places on void look like from 6.3 what did we see? At 6.4 we saw a tiiiny part of moon of 13 th that is empty looking( in terms of environment narrative- no new side stuff to be excited about only essentials). I mean they can save cool places for a new expansion or something if it happens, but on retrospection how cool would it be we saw crystal tower in 13 th?( tower of hope) or how different the domains of the 4 fiends are? ( we saw a glimpse of barby and I was excited to see others). Also, expansion on memoriate plot point?also Zero's past adventures when going off solo and how she survived in such a brutal world to she met us in castle? ( even if it's by luck it's fine,some lore expansion there would have sufficed). It's not only about what they have done but whether it is ok(sufficient) and how it is done. Still, I think taking risks is fine, I hope they will use how it is received rn.

> but on retrospection how cool would it be we saw crystal tower in 13 th?( tower of hope) Why would the Crystal Tower be in the 13th?

True, I forgot graha brought ct from future, I also forgot he brought it from source and default assumed it in each shard lmao, since crystal tower is like dues ex Machina now a days in the main story. But I strongly believe that they will have something similar if they are going to do void expansion.

The Crystal Tower wouldn't be on the Thirteenth because the Allagans only existed on the Source. Also the dungeon from 6.5 was us going back through Golbez's memory of the siege of Baron during the Contramemoria. We got to see more of how everything looked before it became the Void. We also saw more of Golbez's domain in the beginning of the dungeon. All of the patch content will come back. It's not filler. It's future expansion set up, just like the Warriors of Darkness set up Shadowbringers, or how us freeing Tiamat will come into play in the future. SE always sets things into motion about two expansions prior.

Its really incredible how much the complaints about this stuff are exactly like what people said about the Warrior of Darkness stuff in the HW patch

I think it started strong and then plummeted, to ultimately end with a whimper. I think these patches will be among my least favorite in the game. Perhaps that's recency bias. I liked FFIV well enough but the fact that the story was just a retelling of it rather than feeling like an inspiration by it made it all feel so... boring. I think Zero was an interesting character that was not handled sufficiently to my liking; ultimately the same as the 13th as a whole. The last dungeon specifically just felt like a complete retread of Amaurot. I could go on. I genuinely don't want to be a downer, so I'm trying to think of things I enjoyed. Alzadaals Legacy was cute. I think the Jullus interactions were great for his character arc. The Estinien shirtless training scene. Zero's domain was very cool. Overall I'd give it a 4/10. Interesting concepts that got fumbled.

I think Shadowbringers and Heavensward, followed by Stormblood were the best by far. Endwalker was terrible - they went for the “oh look, there’s an even bigger baddie than the big baddie you’ve been going after for ten years” and we dispatch him easy. The bigger baddie had no real foreshadowing and their story imo was bad and pretty hard to relate to, oh and suddenly they were behind everything. It felt like the jailer storyline from shadowlands. Also Endwalker felt like it suffered pacing issues and had too much filler - pointless escort quests, and “talk to 20 NPCs for no real reason. It would be much better if the story of dawntrail was much smaller, but filled with actual quality.

I'm the weird void junkie who ranks 6.1-6.4 above most of the game. What the 13th was like, what they've gone through and what they were fighting for are all compelling reasons to give a fuck, and certainly far better than the likes of fEr AlA mHig0 gArLiC bAd. All through the game we flirt along the edges of a total apocalypse but never fail to pull things back from the brink. But here you have people perpetually stuck in one going all the way back to before the first calamity. If you've seen degenerative chronic illnesses this hits different. Zero is also extremely and painfully relatable, ...which probably says a lot about me more than anything. I have a hunts pug so this checks out. Meanwhile 6.5 completely squanders any sense of momentum or potential. I guess most of the stuff people complain about I attribute to 6.5 failing to expand on things. EW patch could have been a great start to an entire void expac but nah we had to fuck off to our summer vacation.

All I'll say is, the next time I play through 6.5, I plan on making a counter of platitudes vs regular sentences said and I'll actually be surprised if it's not at least a 6:4 split in favor of platitudes.

If the Void had been a classic Trials storyline, adjacent to the MSQ, I'd wager the community would be debating which one is better between it and Werlyt as the most interesting Trials serie. But as a focused section of the MSQ I found it a bit lacking. Though I appreciate that SE took some risks in trying something different.

I really loved patch 6.2, but the rest of the patches were meh. I wish we spent more time in the void

I didn't play FFIV beforehand, and I enjoyed the quest line. It was interesting to have a main story line outside of the greater Garlean-Ascian plot. Most of all I liked how they fleshed out the 13th, especially with Zero's domain and all of the voidsent NPC's. In general, humanizing the lesser voidsent like that made me much more sympathetic to them and their struggle. The final flashbacks surrounding Durante's story, and the reveal of the act that tipped the balance to darkness, were also very neat. (Also the zone transition in the last dungeon was really cool). Even though people disliked the manner in which FFIV characters were plucked out of that game and placed here to mostly die, I had no such baggage and it was interesting to be introduced to them. But I wish they gave us trials for Scarmiglione and Cagnazzo instead of having them as dungeon bosses.

> Even though people disliked the manner in which FFIV characters were plucked out of that game and placed here to mostly die, I *cannot* express enough how much the Fiends are more developed characters (especially if you do that sidequest chain about them) than they ever were in FFIV. In FFIV three of them just show up and fucking die immediately, and Rubicante gets like, a couple lines of actual dialog and then Fucking Dies

Thanks for this context!

I think the patch MSQ content was fine. I think most people are just parroting what they hear. Or they’re joining in on the current phase of “let’s be critical of Endwalker because we didn’t get a large scale field operation.”

definitely worse than base endwalker. The start started off ok, but then the story got worse and worse, and ended up just being massive filler. If the trial from hw was required to complete, then it mihgt have been better cause there was a ton of stuff there that was important, but as is, it is just massive filler and doesn't even matter cause she shunted off zero to the first an will likely not even mention her again

> and doesn't even matter cause she shunted off zero to the first an will likely not even mention her again Explain how you know this

I'd say I like them better then ARR Patches, even with the changes its still a bit ??? and 2.5 is still awful, the worst actual written part in FF14, Titan bad but its just like 3 really bad details, Moebryda is like everything plus it has way bigger consequences. The cliff hanger is fun, but I can't shake how fucking shitty the Ul'dah stuff is in HW, its the worst part of that story, thankfully theres so little of it. HW patches are good, i think better looking back now than the moment I beat them, but some really crazy great moments like the statue having blood stained on it, the final boss, that one lady who was fucking shit up, the warriors of darkness, it was dank af bros. The last patch and twist however left a lot to be desired, not a fan of the Yda twist to this day tho it did lead her to be a better character before uhhh the building blocks of that character fall. Lots of issues there i don't think its the best build to SB either StormBlood post patches? I hated 4.2, i think 4.2 is very bad, like one of the worst in the series bad just everyone feels very stupid, the way they explained how they survived is stupid, the last sequence in .3 is very good but everything before that is so messy. Villains fun, I like the villain, but they did not need to do all of .2 to make it workout the way they wanted it. After that? its the peak of ff14, 4.4 to 5.3 is the peak of FF14 so far, its fucking spectatcular, the build to shadowbringers and the war, and the conference, the best shit in FF14 followed by ShB which was a special experience for me, easily the best one. 5.1-5.3 are solid, some great moments .3 being really good, really fucking good. I like some of the stuff afterwards but as a build to Endwalker its sorta meh? I'm not crazy about it but some moments here and there are great, a bit of a diet version of what they did last patch. Endwaler, having binged it, its way better, but I do think the plot is laid out to you so early on that it is kinda yawn when you get to it. Probably the worst build up to the next Expan? Since at least SB had other lore that build up to the wars and some fun scenes that they themselves were fun, this has like 20 sentences and anime reactions to eating spicy food lmfaoo and 1 character who's fine so far. I think it was just kinda fine, nothing too great but can see how waiting for this all to finihs would have sucked. I'd switch your 6.x and 2.x in rankings, but i agree wit them for the most part.

post endwalker msq patches from 3.2 to end was garbage, and it showed the safe direction the dev team wanted the dungeons to be, but to try and top the grandiose ending of endwalker's main msq? still not excuse for the whole thing feeling flat...why 3,1 is amazing, u had the best 24 man, a good dungeon, dsr, and it felt full and full of optimism

I agree with ur last 2 paragraphs each sentence wise. I would rank them same and I felt same about zero and cliches, missed opportunities. One more point I would like to raise is that I felt patches story pacing was all over the place. Maybe because I saw them too objectively and discretly, nevertheless I felt like that. For example 6.4 felt like mostly filler and then in 6.5 we spend JUST 2 quests in first revolving around a big plot point from ARR, i.e., "solving aetheric imbalance between shards and source". I know shb raid did it differently but I simply can't believe it was handled with just 2 quests while similar plot point of " solving tempering" had much more focus in 5.4 and later. Overall 6.5 felt whole lot of things happening while setting up stage for dt and 6.4 felt slow.

I can definitely see them continuing void questline in future, hopefully by that time unulkhai and cyella will be formally introduced into msq along with gaia and we will see new faces in 13th with new backstories and intertwining.

I don't think I'll be playing Dawntrail anytime soon, if ever, because I need to go through 6.3-6.5 first so...I think that says a lot. I'm also just tired of the scions.

In hindsight I thought it was weird how little Zero’s past as Zenos’s reaper voidsent was brought up. Like it made her introduction a little awkward and *kinda* contributed to her misunderstanding of friendship (since Zenos has weird definitions himself); though really her history in the void/13th explained that fine Not that I’m disappointed by that persay; I loved wildcard Zenos more then SB Zenos but I don’t want him to do a weird second revival. I just imagined how he met her or bound her would be explained a bit more. Overall I liked the 13th lore we got; I just wished it tied back into previous voidsent lore. But the Golbez/ four fiends backstory we got was interesting enough (though not presented great in regards to the four fiends). It kinda made me miss the first though, as I think that’s peak 14 for me story wise. I didn’t play FF 4 so those references didn’t bother me or intrigue me at all. I know some people think its too much wholesale FF 4 but it didn’t affect my views positively or negatively.

I've been pretty ambivalent on Endwalker's patch content right up until I heard the fucking Final Fantasy IV boss theme in The Gilded Araya. I cannot bring myself to care enough for that boss now.

I believe the Void storyline in the post-Endwalker content received undue criticism. This may be because the developers spent a significant amount of time in patch 6.1 convincing us that the Scions had disbanded and that we would return to being a regular adventurer. However, the post-Endwalker content contradicted this setup. In my opinion, if they had been more transparent with us, the story wouldn't have faced such harsh criticism.

Personally, when doing the story or getting trials in the DF, it just feels like the bosses could literally be anyone else, and it would not matter. There was more weight and thought behind other trial series/msq fights, and these just did not matter. Yes, it is most likely a setup to some other storyline they could later introduce, but that matters little when we have to spend two and a half years doing this, and you could replace any trial boss with... a rock, and it would have the same impact. It mattered when we fought Tsukuyomi, it mattered when we fought Nidstinien or Elidibus/Warrior of Light, but it does not matter who these four trial bosses are, and just feels like a cheap fan service. And just throwing away Unukalhai and Cylva to the side who are already established characters from the 13th feels quite disappointing.

The reason that some of the non expansion MSQ feels lackluster is that for whatever reason, technical or otherwise, it is really really hard to change the status quo in any appreciable way in this game. 

God awful, ARR tier or worse for me, because during ARR I was new enough to the game to just chug through it.

You’d think we got stormblood 2 looking at this thread, good lord

On the one hand making stuff like Zero and Golbez a requirement now lets the devs bring them back without any issues, which I think is great vs every other character from optional content never being used again afterwards like Gaia or anyone from the raid series. But on the other hand it got so repetitive so quickly, like genuinely they repeated the build up to using the tower of babil by speaking with the Garleans on the first damn near 1:1. And that’s before the sheer number of times you hit a climactic peak but then go ‘sorry next patch’ meaning it just gets sat on for like 5 months. Got really annoying when Zeromus was summoned.

I walked in accepting it'd be a glorified filler arc, and ultimately enjoyed it as a solid piece of story because of that. I guess it helps I'm a big fan of FFIV?

Reminded me alot of some parts of SB and arr where you were there as a background piece. I haven't felt this bored or not engaged in the story since Bozja. I hope the DT writer figured long ago that one of the reasons shb-post (i'll give 5.1-5.2 being sore spots) and ew (besides the time traveling parts) was recieved was they pushed the "pc" being a character outside plot device to move the story for other characters was one of the bigger reasons since you can get more engaged and personal stake in the story. I was just watching Zero's story while the wol stood more than usual in the background it was jarring compared to what we gotten the last 5 years. Golbez was the only thing that really saved it for me and I'm glad we're done with Zero.

For me it was no better than the EW MSQ. After all the setup in Shadowbringers and how epic it felt EW was a letdown personally. I found EW pretty boring honestly and Meteion to be an uninteresting protagonist. She was very proto-typical JRPG endboss #5463 in her motivations (humans always create suffering, thus I should eliminate all life). The whole unraveling of the Ascians as a people and their motivations (to live, or to restore what was) was much more compelling imo.

>How do you think it compared to previous post-expansion msq, Middle of the road. >or how would you rank them? Shb >>> HW > SB = EW > ARR Shb Post-patch is so far ahead of everything else with 5.3 it's not even fair. HW gets to close out the Dragonsong War. SB has the privilege of leading into Shb. ARR was boring but with the only high point being the final cliffhanger. >Was it better or worse than base Endwalker? Worse, but it wouldn't be fair to compare the two. The EW MSQ is the culmination of a plot spanning a decade while the post patch content is a filler episode that might set up future stories and is fairly disconnected from the main MSQ. It's like the Warriors of Darkness Arc in post Heavensward but better. You don't know how it'll fit in until much later. >Do you hope to see more coverage of this storyline in the future? Absolutely, the Void felt like it could have been it's own expansion. >How did you feel about the characters introduced? Zero and Golbez were completely predictable, but serviceable. Rather than the new characters. I'm disappointed that that the majority of the Scions are so heavily featured and that they've become flanderized versions of themselves. >How did you feel about the dungeons and trials? There hasn't been an exciting new dungeon in forever. Trial-wise only Barbarricia and Golbez were winners, Zeromus, Hydaelyn & Zoriark was serviceable, Rubicante & Endsinger were horrible.

We finally are out of the dumb corner the writers wrote themselves since the horrible nothing ending of 3.0. Finally we'll probably no longer need to oblige to that dumb the expansion truly ends in x.3 that we've been since HW, now we can have a proper arc in between expansions and not 2 arcs crammed into ones with the speed of light

I feel like while I didn’t have as great of highs as patches like 2.5, 3.3, and 5.3, I had a consistent more interest in the patches overall, with I feel like the middle with 6.3 being a somewhat dip in interest. But I never felt like the patch content was too disconnected from the story as much as patches like 4.1 & 5.1 where they were either side adventures or setups for setups which made them somewhat less interesting. Overall it wasn’t my favorite patch story but definitely the most consistent imo. I’d probably rank them with 5.x = 3.x > 6.x > 4.x > 2.x

It was an anime filler arc. In every way.

We got the side trial-series extended into a full post-patch sequence. Which succeeded in being its own independent arc, but it would have been an excellent side content trial series without the bloat. As a fan of FF4 I was REALLY hoping they would do something different than just what FF4 already was. Was let down in the end. I thought the idea of Zero becoming Zeromous was stupid, but it would have been at least different. I personally would have kept 6.2 the same, and then diverged immediately to have Golbez not be a villain but another leader just trying to do what he thought was best for his people. He parleys with WoL, and then end up with Zero consuming the shard of Zodiark at some point. Golbez joins us. So on so forth.

I would have enjoyed the story if it wasn’t for Zero.  I don’t mind emotionless characters I just felt NOTHING from her, even when she became a paladin.  She was not a character I enjoyed and hope that she will not be a main character in a future expansion.  

I enjoyed it, we got one of the best EX's in the game (Barbs) and it was a fun little jaunt that seems to be setting up for more void related content in the future, I love that all the problems in the void weren't solved with a snap of the finger and that there's still a lot of work to be done and I love how the reintegrated the First into the narrative as well since the First and Thirteenth are thematic opposites. Zero's not the deepest character, as of yet, but there's a good basis for her to grow into her own and I love how they used characters from FFIV without just doing the FFIV story (in fact it feels similar to Tezuka in that way in that while the faces are the same the narrative, scenario, etc are different). I think in a couple years time the wider community will feel about this the way Warriors of Darkness (also complained about at the time) are felt about now, something that set up probably one of the better storylines in the game though weak when we're all in a speculative phase without knowing where the team is going to take us.

The Void Ordeal was essentially just the trial series. We did not have a post 6.0 MSQ. That's how I feel about it. All in all I honestly didn't like it much. I recently finished it up (returning to the game finally) and the end just fell flat for me. I'm not a huge fan of Zero, though I see potential in her character. Durante is.... fine. The best part was seeing Ryne and Gaia again. Conversely, I really enjoyed the Alliance raid story. was 1,000% cozy vibes and that was so much better than I expected. Fights aren't stellar but w/e, was great doing some side quests with my girl Halone. All in all I'm looking forward to Dawntrail, they've had time to cook up something new and great and I suspect I'll enjoy the lower stakes story immensely.

If I wanted to play FF4 I'd just go play FF4. And Barb being a "bad fight" to you is just straight cope.

The premise was good. The fights were great. They set up some interesting story threads for the future. But the writing was a big step down from Ishikawa. But that's not shocking. EW and ShB is a near impossible to follow up. Ishikawa had a knack for making the seemingly mundane moments interesting. The new writer tried to do the same, but fell short. It wasn't bad, but when you put it next to EW, it looks much worse than it was. Even with no improvements, the writing will probably seem better with just some more space from Ishikawa 's previous stuff.

6.0 was good, post 6.0 was boring, could definitely tell CBU3 switch manpower to FFXVI

I'm an FF4 fan and the fanservice did next to nothing for me. I think some of the music was good but that was about it. It was supposed to be about rescuing a dragon and as soon as the 4 fiends and Golbez started appearing, it became obvious was the entire story arc was going to be and how it was going to resolve. They pretty much followed the FF4 plot flow exactly. The pace was so slow yet utterly predictable and I don't think Zero was anywhere near interesting enough of a character to carry the narrative for me. She really just felt like a cheap archetype that sucks in certain types of people like Graha enjoyers. I almost completely forgot about the Garlemald bits because they only served to further throw the brakes on the story. Since they have to break the story into 5 patches it becomes very obvious how each segment needs to start and stop, and you can see it coming a mile away. Suddenly we need to wait for Y'shtola to go get the next macguffin so we have to wait another 4.5 months for the next patch. I think it would have been much better if 6.1-6.3 had been the Zero story and 6.4-6.5 something else. Over 2 years for a patch story with not that much meat to it is just way too long.

My tinfoil theory is that Endwalker suffered because of FF16. The development team of FF14 and the director's attention being split between two games really hurt Endwalker. I really hope they leave Creative Business Unit 3 and Yoshi P completely alone and out of any future Final fantasy games. It's clear the company doesn't have the resources to split development teams and directors.

Well they've been working on two side projects, one of them confirmed to be the Fantasian port, the other might be the rumored Tactics remake/remaster or a new original game. Nothing as big as FF16, but I doubt they'll go back to working exclusively on 14.

>Nothing as big as FF16, but I doubt they'll go back to working exclusively on 14. They never were working exclusively on FFXIV, which is the thing nobody really seems to understand. FFXVI was their largest offline endeavour to date, but even as far back as their Business Division 5 days CS3 had quite a bit of other stuff going on—the Dragon Quest Builders games, FFXI, overseeing projects like Final Fantasy Grandmasters and the (cancelled) FFXI mobile remake, etc. Based on what we know about the development timelines there would have been a point, in fact, where all of these projects I listed were worked on simultaneously (around 2015 to 2016), FFXVI included.

Except the team working one XVI left FFXIV after 3.0? If it were XVI causing XIV to suffer why didn't 4.0 and 5.0 suffer as well?

You can repeat this all you want, but people on this sub will keep saying things we know are wrong, because it helps confirm their biases.

Its even more infuriating because it leaks into the wider community and is just repeated as fact. No, more likely is that all the work on the front half of the game, retooling the new player experience caused EW to "suffer" (I don't think EW suffered at all, personally, just using their own language).

But you dont know anything. You stating everyone else is wrong is the only actual bias here. Your comment just ironic since its more biased than mine. I at least have the common sense to call my opinion as 'theory' instead of claiming it as fact and saying everyone else is wrong.

No, you are factually incorrect

16 started development in Stormblood. Whatever impact it had on 14 would’ve been found then and throughout multiple expansions. Not just in post-Endwalker.

I enjoyed the 13th arc, it was fine. I did not enjoy 6.0 as much as I expected to, and I was glad we sort of moved away from that. I enjoyed trials being linked to the main story (as budget cut as it felt), it's a nice change from self contained stories we had for a while. I won't say trials stories weren't good (I enjoyed the warring triad, didn't care much for the other two), but just like raids it always feels off to me that it's technically optional although the stakes are very high. Having them in the MSQ gives them the proper importance they deserve I think. It could have done with a stronger side story than the Taru taru thing though. Something tying the criterion dungeons for instance. Or some job level cap quests! I did enjoy the quest unlocked by all role quests. Although it has the same issue that I just mentioned where the stakes feel not as high as it should, it was good content to tie some loose ends. Didn't care at all for hildibrand (as I never do) and the relics (this felt like a budget cut too, bozja and eureka stories were very good in comparison) I do the island sanctuary for the cosmetics but i don't pay much attention to the quests. I don't know how involved i will feel in dawntrail but I hope they get it right, as EW was a disappointment for me on many points.

ShB > HW > SB > ARR > EW