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UK Filmmaker Kai Zammit REACTS to Final Fantasy XIV Online – ALL TRAILERS + Filmmakers Breakdown.
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Yeah each of these trailers is a massive expansion for the game. The main guy from the start is representing all of us, the player, he's like a default hume male. Throughout the trailers it showcases new jobs that will become available in that expansion, and thus the main guy gets new outfit/armor/job such as a Dragoon in Heavensward trailer, a samurai in Stormblood, a dark knight in shadowbringers (where he also rapidly swaps between his older jobs when fighting that evil angel), etc
This is how the gameplay works, every character can learn all jobs and you can swap between them in-game
The brightness of those felt really weird, like all of them were slightly overexposed and same for the sound balance was off. But maybe it just me.
Kai is a furry confrimed. x:
RACES INFO :
– Rabbit ears peoples = Viera race = They are a race of hare-like humanoids who originally appeared in Final Fantasy 12 (FFXII) PS2, and one of the important playable character from it was Fran from Viera. I prefer they appeared as they should be like in FFXII because It is already Correct.
– Lion peoples = Hrothgar race = they are a burly people of lionlike appearance. Lion people race first appeared in Final Fantasy 10 (FFX) PS2 which they were called Ronso. In FF14 Shadowbringer expansion, Ronso race also reappeared as the other name of Hrothgar race in an another world called "the first" where the MC (us, players) transported into.
– Cat ears peoples = Mi'qote race = They are a race of hare-like humanoids of Final Fantasy 14 World. It's cat peoples of Final Fantasy 14, different than usual cat peoples you know. They exhibit bestial traits, some similar to the Mithra race of Final Fantasy XI (FF11).
– The small/little peoples = Lalafell = They are a gnome-like race of FF14. it's FF14 version of gnome. They shares similarity with the Tarutaru race from Final Fantasy XI (FF11). There are two types of Lalafell. The Plainsfolk live in thatched-roof homes and have great hearing, and the Dunesfolk who live in the desert and herd animals.
– Tall Elf-like peoples = Elezen = The Elezen are a characteristically very tall people, elf-like ears, long of limb and slender of build. They are also possessed of a somewhat extended lifespan in comparison to the Hyur. In FF11, these Elezen were called the Elvaan race
– Human peoples = Hyur race = They are the most populous race in Eorzea FF14. In FF14 Shadowbringer expansion, on the world called the First, the Hyur race are called the Hume race. And Hume are a human race name in Final Fantasy XI.
WEAPON AND MC INFO :
– The GunBlade Weapon first appeared in Final Fantasy 8 (FFVIII) used my MC named Squall Leonheart and his rival Seifer Almasy. In Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age there was a Gunblade called Ras Algethi.
– Warrior of Light is a recurring term in the Final Fantasy series since the first original Final Fantasy, referring to the player character. And in FF14 The player character is an adventurer in Eorzea during the Seventh Umbral Era who joins one of the three Grand Companies and becomes a key member of the Scions of the Seventh Dawn.
– The main guy shown often are all the same person as the first trailer, but aging. The name is Meteo (the official name of the MC of FF14), and the Meteo doesn't talk in the game either, because the MC is us (players, we create the appearance and renaming Meteo in character creation).
P.S :
Squareenix (Was Squaresoft) known for make story telling only using sound effects, music, visual animation, and without voices (or grunts), for examples the 3D CGI of the original FF5, FF6, FF7, FF8, and FF9. It was their style at the time and I love it so much and i think it was amazing and more attractive. It makes me concentrate, thinking, and can fantasizing my own version of their voices in my mind (well, its Final Fantasy). So it felt extremely nostalgic when they did the same in FF14 trailers Flame of Truth, A Realm Reborn, and Storm Blood. You need to check FF8 and FF9 CGI Scenes or maybe only the openings)
Not everything has to be voiced to do story telling, voicing should comes last if needed. (remember the impressive charlie chaplin 1915 film, The Johnstown Flood 1926 film, and Nosferatu 1922 film, those are real story telling arts).
45:10
It is, in fact, the bloke with the bow.
I feel like this is certainly not the best quality at which I have seen these trailers, not even on YouTube. It even looked as if the gamma was raised in some of them? There are supposed to be bright spots, surely, but not glare like that..
The brown haired man is a stand in for the player.
Time for some random trivia for @kaizammit : The dragon in the second trailer, Bahamut, has a measured wingspan of 12.88KM.
That should provide a sense of scale.
Id love to see a breakdown of the Planeside 2 trailer.
The no dialogue thing was a meta thing of the age, and the media its a set thing of a game especially when its an MMO, it'd be like having people say your flim is lacking because it lacks interactivity, that it takes them out of your flim because they can't make choices and change things in it.
I can say the early trailers(First 2) did have that brightness problem but it became less once Heavensward rolled out. In Stormblood, the patch trailers actually got VERY good and by Shadowbringers someone finally convinced them that dialogue in the cinematics would enhance the trailer(My theory is whomever was in charge of Stormblood patch trailers was behind that decision).
This right after Black Myth? Massive subscribe for your amazing taste
dude sees other anthromorphic race: "what the fuck?" forgot the final fantasy has fantasy in it..
50:15 When you make your damage type the ability to draw yourself doing their mom. (Never let the meme die.)
One of these days, somebody with video editing skills needs to merge "Answers", "Flames of Truth", and "A New Beginning". "Answers" was what played when they shut down the servers at the end of the original version of the game, "A New Beginning" was added when 2.0 was launched, and "Flames of Truth" was a revelation of what happened between the two videos that's earned by doing the 2.0's 8-man raid series. Merging all three together into one mega video would be really useful for all these compilation playlists.
Also will admit some disappointment that you didn't re-watch the ShadowBringers trailer with the knowledge you gained from the first few, allowing you to realize that it was the same character throughout all the trailers (the flashback scene is all of his previous adventures flashing through his mind). It would have been interesting to do a re-watch analysis instead of just splicing in the old reaction, especially since some of your complaints about the ones that came before were addressed in it.
Most of the CG trailers started out for the players already invested, to get them hyped about the next leg of their journey. It was around the end of Stormblood when the CG team was making the ShB trailer that Marketing stepped in and told them to make them a bit more accessible and enticing to outsiders to draw in more players. And boy did ShB deliver. Endwalker was a bunch of Easter Eggs for the players since it was the end of ten years' of storytelling, including having the musical elements of the previous expansions blended into the song.
DawnTrail is the start of a new adventure. The world isn't in need of saving anymore, we can sit back and take a breather for a time until the game ramps back up towards whatever finale comes in the next ten-ish years. Even the fight we, the player character stand-in you see with two swords this time, are just having a duel for fun. There's no stakes involved, we were invited to fight big lizard guy and both had fun doing it, hence the smirk he drops a few times while fighting.
1:11:17 the "tattoos" aren't traditionally placed as they would be in the real world where it's ink threaded into the skin. Its more akin to an "arcane stamp" that's magicked onto them to show they belong to a specific order of study.
It's sad to see people still shilling for black market key resellers in 2024, but get that bag I guess.
The brownhaired guy is a player character surrogate. He's standing in for you as the player, who might be one of the catpeople, elves, big blue guys, etc.
Every blind reactor gets the idea that Raubahn is a villain from the Heavensward trailer, and that hurts my friggin heart man. I mean I get why they think that, but he's a godsdamned hero! Also my favorite character.
It might be an online game, but they've done all that they've could to ensure you can play nearly all of it as a single-player experience.
A big part of these trailers is the teasing of new playable races, new "jobs" (classes), and locations. For example, the long camera view of the bunny girl in shadow bringers was when that race and job was added to the game. Later, those "flying lasers" is when the "sage" job was added to the game (that uses those). There is a lot of story that is sorta only makes sense to players. All that said, I had NO idea there was so much technical work in these. It's no secret that early in the game's life, they didn't have a lot of money. (Really early, they didn't have a huge budget for voice actors). You can see as the game gets bigger, more players, and more $$$, they get to stretch their legs.
Awesome vid, thanks for making it!
The whitness overexposure is a YT Problem. The Original Videos arent THIS bright…
I legit hate that people include the Flames of truth version of the ARR vid instead of just End of an Era since it's such a ridiculous spoiler that requires game context to understand beyond the "OMG DBZ FIGHT WTF IS HAPPENING" and the original ending with the sacrifice is so much more impactful.
It does seem like the version you watched is way too exposed. I don't recall this being this bright.
45:30 Ironically enough, FF14, prior to Dawntrail's release was, during each installment patch leading up to Dawntrail, adding a feature called Duty Support to almost all of the mandatory group content for the story that did not yet have it, aside from a few of the harder mandatory fights, so technically speaking you actually can now play this massively multiplayer online game as a single player game almost exclusively should you choose to, which is even more impressive. Outside of Big set piece boss battles, every mandatory dungeon, and even some of the mandatory set piece boss fights, can be done fully on your own with AI party members filling in for other players (and they do a respectable job. Not as fast as a player party, but fast enough that you'll never be in there for like 50+ minutes).
Because of stuff like this, I, and many other people, tend to refer to FF14 as an RPGMMO instead of an MMORPG because the game very much emphasizes the RPG aspect first and supports it with the MMO aspect second, as opposed to the MMO demanding players adhere to it in order to properly utilize the RPG mechanics. FF14 is happy to let you interact with the RPG mechanics, but won't force you to commit to the MMO mechanics unless its fairly narratively or cinematically relevant, making FF14, strangely enough, one of the least "Massively Multiplayer Online" MMO's ever, based on player choice.
Kinda of sucks you got flames of truth instead of the original release opening. Basically, mage teleports everyone away and then it cuts to years later with the land healed and the point of view characters warping back into reality into a new world, without explaining what happened with the mage or the dragon or any of it. The Flames of Truth cinematic is what is played near the very end of the hardest content in the game at the time after you had gone through the nearly entire game as it was available then and the cinematic was optional and sort of a secret that people didn't know was in the game until after rumors of it's existence started spreading around.
Always remember tailers are suppose to tease the story not tell the story
12:30 "this is like Dynasty Warriors"
As someone who took part in the Final Fantasy XIV 1.0 shutdown event (or at least tried to) …. yes.. yes it was. If you could stay connected long enough in this zone to fight that is.
Okay, you talked about overexposure and bright light the entire video…. and I'm no filmmaker nor have much more than basic knowledge of photography and digital display tech…. but is your gamma set too high, or mine set too low? Cause it looked fine to me lol. It's also hilarious that you keep saying "why isn't there any dialogue?" because one of the big complaints (particularly from players coming from other MMOs) is how much reading there is and how many of the cutscenes are unvoiced, with dialogue boxes to read.
Also the thought of "it's too daunting for me to try to get into it now" is exactly how I felt until my sister finally convinced me (and our mom) to play during COVID lockdowns… and despite the longevity of the franchise, every game (except some of the titles followed by a "-2", i.e. X-2, XIII-2, etc.) are completely self-contained narratives taking place in different worlds, and the only things connecting them to other titles in the series are recurring names, beings, enemies, themes and sometimes places, but usually used in a different way or reimagined to align with the particular title's world, often as an homage to the game in the series that originally introduced it. I've since gone on to play other games in the series, and it's been cool to see things I recognize from 14 in the games that predated it by years or decades.
It's also not just you that doesn't really know what's going on in the trailers, us players don't either until after we start playing the expansion for the trailer, as they sort of highlight the themes and set the mood for the trailer… only after finishing the story and going back to watch it again does it fully make sense. Except the launch trailers, those are more direct and sometimes spoilery (especially the Shadowbringers one – they spoiled a major plot point, that was supposed to be a shocking revelation about a long-standing thing in the game's lore… and they just came out with it before it even launched, to a lot of backlash from the fans of the story)
The narrative of 14 is a slow burn, but very worth the time to digest it, and you can play 3/4 of it for free…. have you heard of the Free Trial? (insert meme here.)
The character of each trailer is all the same person. He's called the warrior of the light, or the midlander(named as such in the first trailer). He's meant to represent you as the player. The fact that he has different weapons/armor in each trailer is meant to showcase the different jobs you can do.
These are expansion trailers for FF14's various launches and expansions, going from version 1.0 to 2.0 to 3.0 to 4.0 to 5.0 to 6.0 to 7.0. As advertisements their goals is to intrigue a new audience into trying out the game while also pushing forward the plot, giving a bit of sampling for previous players to expect, and try and show so cool moments to draw back old players who dropped the game. Since it's in theory building on previous knowledge players may have they can use visual short hand to convey messages to those current players as well. For example, they big toothy monster in the Endwalker trailer was in the previous expansion as a boss fight within a memory of a past cataclysm that basically destroyed most of the world and was the herald of that event. By having it show up for real in the trailer you can easily communicate to current players that hey, things are getting very real now. Would be the same as say seeing a star destroyer in Star Wars a New Hope and then seeing another appear to attack Hoth in Empire Strike's Back. Because you already have a vague idea of what they mean you know the stakes better in subsequent movies.
Actually you can complete most content alone or with npcs if you don't want to play it like typical online game. There is hundreds of hours of story told through dialogue and cutscenes so it doesn't feel like your typical online game
Interesting in how different all people are. I don't think i myself even required a dialogue to connect to something.
If i may add something up, there is not a lot of talks in their first trailers, cuz it's was, at this time, appropriate, since with lore you had the intel you needed + the lyrics of the song were important.
And as many already said, you follow the same guy in all these trailers, it's representing the players in a way
Different races. Hrothgars are more regular "cat race". Miqo'te are more humanoid cat race.
Funny thing though. While they have some feline features like eyes and tails they have horse ears. This is why it might look odd to some. Me though? I love it
I play as a Seeker of the sun miqo'te boyo. He's my main character.
1:02:25 of course they look youthful, they are 16 years old twins ;p
I think if you had re-watched the Shadowbringers trailer you would have put together that it is the same dude in every cinematic. I like this batch watching and picking one to analyze.
Another less noticeable one with the endwalker trailer, the cloaked man near the end, is one of only a few characters who look directly forward and centered mid screen, everyone else except him and the final guy are looking or angled slightly left or right
Yes these are expansions, more to make you ask "wow what is that?!" So that you can play to find out.
The main character in these are a stand-in for the player, which can be any race (human, chibi, animal ears, skinny, large), male or female. And as a rule your player character has no voice, as that could take the self ownership away from the player. The main character is unnamed but the community refers to him as either WoL(warror of light) or "the derplander" as he is a vacant starring "Midlander Hyur" which means human.
Shadowbringers and Endwalker were very very depressing story themes, which is why Dawntrail is suddenly a happy time.
i honestly think the trailer for Shadowbringers is the BEST trailer in all of media ever. the hype was so peak.
i wonder if it's so good because of the context?
It's probably been said but the bunny people are called veria and the chibby people are called lalafel and yes the character you see in all openings is the warrior of light and is the same guy each expansion gave him a new class so 1.0 he was an archer a A Realm Reborn he was a warrior in HW he became a dragoon in SB he became a Samurai in ShB he became a Dark Knight in EW he became a Paladin and in DT he became a Viper (new class that was added in DT) so yeah he was the same character from the beginning in 1.0
Yeah man, the videos you have are way more overexposed than what we’re used to. Oh well.
A bit of explanation. The 1.0 game was a disaster. No one liked it, so they fired the dev team and brought in a new one. They patched the 1.0 at the same time they rebuilt it. The cinematic where the red moon falls was run just after the 1.0 was shut down and 2.0 was launched.
As to the hi-key lighting, they really didn't have ANY budget too spare for 2.0, they just hoped it would do well enough. By the time the next expansion released there was a bit more cash, so they opted for new VA rather than animators/artists. Both the 2.0 and 3.0 were so well received, that the 3rd expansion had much better animations and from then on the trailers got better with dialog and camera work.
Also yes, they kind of assume you've played the previous games to understand what's going on.
To put it in simple terms, the hero has the blessing of a "goddess" that allows him to occasionally see visions of the past experiences of other people. Most bend that a little to retroactively apply it to the 1.0 trailer as the Echo showed him a vision of the past while holding the card, which is essentially a job request. You'd go to a counter in cities and pick up job requests to go do and earn experience for completing them. The 1.0 game was a disaster from a design standpoint and failed miserably.
Square appointed a new director/producer – Naoki Yoshida – who dove in and evaluated everything they had and presented two options:
Patch the game and make it playable but forgettable and likely dead in a few years still.
Patch the game and make it playable to limp along telling a story while SIMULTANEOUSLY having the same team build a completely new MMO. They would tell the story that culminates in the battle in the second trailer and destroyed the 1.0 game along with the world as they knew it. The first half of the trailer played when they shut down the servers. Months later, A Realm Reborn launched to high praise from critics and players. The second half of the trailer, when they appear in the forest, was the additional launch trailer.
In fact, the final patches of 1.0, players started questioning if the second moon – the red one – looked larger in game. Eventually there was no question it was larger until it was an enormous red ball in the sky on the final patch. Nobody truly knew what it was or what was going on. The final hours of the game being live, the developers were spawning monster after monster after monster near cities, making players fight endless waves of enemies. Players got on a specific, large, mount and formed a wall along the outside wall of cities "The Great Goobue Wall" which is now part of the game's actual lore as adventurers defended cities from the chaos. This eerie version of the music in the trailer played as the clock ticked down. The servers shut down and this trailer played, giving them a vague idea of the devastation that had befell their world.
It is the same character through each trailer, representing the player's own character "The Warrior of Light"
Hi, I think the reason they don't put grunts in the trailers was VA related newer in game trailers have voices for returning actors