While often the least preferred of Final Fantasy XIV’s expansions, I explain why Stormblood is an absolute stroke of genius.
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Stormblood for me was the weakest of the expansion by far. The rebellion stuff was fine, the secondary antagonists were actually pretty good, but holy hell was the main antagonist as interesting as stale bread. Big strong guy who fights because big strong guy meets equally to better strong WoL and develops such a massive crush that it rises him up out death to pursue what at this point is a masochistic desire to fight them again. Just… what? Why after Nidhogg, after even the Illuminati, are we stuck with such a boring villain who does the most criminal act of villainy of not driving the action and instead waits around for you to kill them? Hell, even REGULUS VON HYDRUS is a more interesting and compelling character. You know? The mook who raced us for *spoilers*.
In my opinion they should of benched Zenos from most of the expac, had his father be the central antagonist while we get glimpses of the secondary antagonists relationship with him through the echo and have him show up to help his father a few times just to keep him in the plot, like the attack on the Reach. Themes of oppression would fit his father much more than Zenos himself, as honestly Zenos isn't really that interested in oppressing but rather what people are willing to do to stop the oppression. Could even give him a big heel turn of ruining his father's plans for the war to satisfy his first real desire and absorb *spoilers*.
“Lyse is not useless, you guys are just mean.” Lmaoooo agreed!
I understand why people might not like Stormblood as much as Heavensward, but the story of Stormblood was incredible in its own right. I felt a lot of things playing through that story.
Stormblood had the best villains, superior character arcs, and best side content. When the pacing of the story got slow in the later patches, those blue quests were being fire!
I keep seeing Tsuyu in the comments… I’m over here looking at the cough long-haired samurai yandere with the out-of-nowhere sentimentality that probably left your WoL seeking therapy. You were (and still are) the one item on his bucket list. Congratulations 🎉
Stormblood is by far my favourite expansion.
Finally. Imho SB is much better than HW. Better character arcs, better areas, better side stories and quests, better villain and dungeons. Story in HW was more "epic" but SB was much more grounded and humane.
I have a rebuttal for your cold numbers based defence of SB – Y'shtola is in every release of the game and she's all the waifu I need.
That said I love SB so yea I agree with you
You gonna catch these hands for slandering best boy Asahi. Admit it! You are attracted to his privileged insanity!
7:41 this is correct. I still can’t get over the fact that my lady Yugiri is not real ;_;
LORD HIEN IS BEST BOI GIGA CHAD blasts Cyan’s theme at max volume
I like Stormblood more than Shadowbringers (They're close. I gave them both 8/10 but I prefer Stormblood by a little bit) mainly because I don't like Vauthry and Ran'jit. Fordola and Yotsuyu are great villains. They have great backstories that explained their actions. Vauthry's backstory is just meh. Ran'jit is a villain Mary Sue. And Emet….he's ok but I don't get the worshipping of this character. He created an empire that killed many people. "He saw us as ants" is not a good excuse to forgive him. We're sapients, ants are not. He can't just kill us to bring his world back.
And it's nice not to have the Ascians involved in the whole 4.0 MSQ. It's a purely human vs human conflict.
And 5 of my top 10 music are from Stormblood. Triumph, The Worm's Tail, Wayward Daughter, A Battle Decisively, The Measure of His Reach.
I only have two disappointments of Stormblood:
– Lyse, she was a real downgrade, the way she was written made her unable to do anything on her own yet she was granted power for the sole reason she is "who she is", though she HASN'T earned it in any way. That's what annoys me.
– Zenos. He was fine on the first part, but he's actually quite lame and boring…
I really liked Stormblood but I'm immune to waifus so I'm the one person that hates Yotsuyu and didn't even kind of forgive her or believe her lol. But yeah, Lyse was… Less than great and Asahi has possibly the most punchable face of any character in the series lol. And I'm weird and like Zenos, he's basic AF bit that's cuz he's basically just the evil version of us lol.
You should do story spoiler videos where you talk about what you liked and didn’t like about the story of Heavensward, Stormblood and Shadowbringers. That would be awesome
I really disliked Stormblood's story in 4.0. The pacing was all over the place and I hated everything to do with Gyr Abania. I mean, the biggest complaint that the people in the Peaks had were that they had to pay a 20% flat tax. But then the patch story rolled around and I think the expansion's story really redeemed itself. Everything from the adventure with Arvenvald and Alphinaud, to paying off Nanamo's survival finally and giving her some character development to how they resolved Fordola and Yotsuyu's story was just great.Even though Matsuno only wrote the Raid series, you can feel his influence in all of Stormblood's story. And the patch content like Eureka was really fun. Base game bad, patches good.
I really liked this expansion too. Azim Steppe is my favorite area. Even now I like flying around it. I liked Tsuyu alot
I think I liked the drama on Stormbloos but the Lyse stuff and Ala Mhigo politics as a proud Gridanian (just messing) I don't know I just didn't get into it. But the trials in the msq and side quests were amazing. Ivalice raids and side quests. Stormblood introduces us to many amazing characters that were the reasons why I kept going! :3
HW had too many sky island maps (3 out of 6), but a great story.
SB's story wasn't bad, but was a slog at points, but the maps/exploration were good.
ShB was great in setting and story, made you question everything, and gave us some answers to big questions.
ARR laid a great foundation, although it was a slow burn, I think that it was necessary world building (good payoff).
Stormblood was bad in my opinion without hearing other people's opinions I came to this conclusion myself… But not everything was bad (few maps, songs, contents were nice), I'm just speaking in comparison with Heavensward and Shadowbringers. Stormblood bored me and I lost motivation to follow this weird story, had actually a hard time motivating myself to go on with MSQ (never had that problem later on with Shadowbringers). And I'm not trying to be be mean – Lyse simply IS a useless Barbie imo (just shut up Lyse! should have remained Yda) and wasted a lot of my time with useless conversations playing important but words that lead to nowhere (just like Minfilia – shut up Minfilia and make space for hotter characers or ones with more depth), and Zenos is just a ridiculous character. I'm just not buying this whole Stormblood story. It's like they lacked ideas for a while. It felt forced and did not get me excited.
🤷🏻♂️ Storm Captain unlocked: I’m sold.
0:00 oh wow, that intro is so breathtaking.
I wonder which game or Final Fantasy Game its from?
Is there a link to the intro to The Night Sky Prince?
I SMASHED THAT BELL
Stormblood is ungratefully put aside by people who haven't played HW when HW was actual content. Please anyone who says pre SB Jobs feel better, are either coping or have never played pre SB. The amount of quality of life changes it has brought to the table are massive and it has improved the game in every aspect possible. The amount of worldbuilding and lore expansion in SB is neglected to such a criminal degree, especially the empire. It was SB that turned the Garlean empire from a sunday morning villain to a living and breathing nation with issues and agendas far beyond "what weapon will we use today to conquer eorzea" and pointless monologues. In my tier ranking Heavensward places third comfortably above a realm reborn, it was better in every aspect the ARR but not much better mechanically… People give it a criminal rating because they either don't know how many qol changes SB brought or just simply are not over a certain character's death in HW that was in many regards a "Mary Sue" filler character as is.
Ppl hate Stormblood similar to ppl hate Kingdom heart and FF13. That usually the case, however, Stormblood has a lot of content problems.
1. Repeatable mechanics, predictable cutscenes (not everyone into drama, and drama tend to take a lot of built in time for character development). It’s easy to become unrelatable to you as a part of the story where you are often just watching things happen instead of stepping in.( It’s a bit dragonball formula included as well…)
2. Introduction of Eureka. Pretty much by the time I wrote this. It is already a “forgotten”content for new players. Mostly ppl unlock it for the Gil farming or achievements. Everything else can be done with levequests and Heaven on high
3. The combat in the first half of the expansion. Usually, ppl tend to judge a game or something with only what they are able to do and spend a lot of time into it. SB has a great amount of lore and stories but the execution is bad because they aimed base on how you knew about something about ff games.
At the end of the day, it’s an storydriven mmo. Story and mmo are usually two type of audiences. For a ppl who like action and exploration contents. They would just hate sitting hours of waiting for queueing a content and then it only took couple of min to complete.
SB second half was great as well as additional contents. Compare to HW, they have less back and forth for teleportation but a chunk of time sinking into listening to ppl problems while one by one losing to Zenos and making no real effort. Compare to ShB and other expansions, SB is the darkest of all as well as nasty one, which is why some ppl dislike putting themselves into a shitty situation where they can’t do anything than watching cutscenes till the end. It’s just a bit brutal when it’s coming to Zenos.
Endwalker might be in that particular area if Zenos is the main villain again. The Empire thing is usually the problem that ppl don’t like SB for it storytelling. Not really because it’s completely bad or disappointed.
Im still playing through Storm Blood but I think I am towards the end. Over all I think I like it better than Heavensward.
We didn't get to kill Asahi but at least we get to beat his dead body and spit on his corpse when we fight Fan-daniel
I really loved stormblood. It introduced my fav character(Lyse), my fav zone(ruby sea), my fav housing zone, my fav alliance raid(Ivalice) and my fave raid series(omega). So many favorites!
4.0 – 4.3 story was absolute garbage straight up. So much so I quit for a while. Raiding was really fun though.