Accolonn is finally in Final Fantasy 14 Stormblood and he has some thoughts.
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I really dislike the "you didn't like it because it's more grounded" excuse, it completely falls apart the moment you realize the 3rd zone of Endwalker exists and is a far better realistic scenario comparatively.
SB's biggest problem has and always will be its pacing, the story itself is quality, but the presentation shoots it in the back of the head, and I don't want to hear about how its a "worldbuilding expac, it's normal for it to be badly paced" when it was immediately followed by ShB, which delivers far more world-building by its very nature while being arguably slower in delivery, but slow never equalled to bad pace.
It's only "bad" to the extent that "it's not as good as Heavensward, Shadowbringers, and Endwalker". It's still 100x better than BFA or Shadowlands.
Bahamut tried to destroy the world cous he was angry, very, very angry, the fact that the allagans who stuck him in the moon and used his kin to power their empire aren't around anymore is not important, this is just about revenge and anger
Luckily the patch content is the quality we expect.
i actually think stormblood is a bit better than heavensward and shadowbringers gets even better. as does endwalker
Stormblood was excellent as a package, probably the best expansion content wise so far. Obviously this is hindsight, provided, SB development was not impacted by covid and many other glaring issues like Shadowbringers and Endwalker was. So far, from what the PLLs have showcased, Endwalker may follow a similar roadmap as Stormblood did content wise, which is very encouraging.
The weakest part of Stormblood was 4.0 MSQ, undoubtedly lacking focus, and many other things that have been repeated to exhaustion. Regardless of that, Stormblood, at its worst, is head and shoulders above Shadowlands at its best, so KEKW
Stormblood was world building, not always exciting but pays off later on.
I love FF14 villains/antagonists. I like how you mentioned they're evil because their goals are opposition to yours. But what if you encounter one that has the same goal and fighting for the same thing? đ€đ€đ€
Is Stormblood the worst expansion – yes, for me what killed my interest in it was the zones were boring. 3/5 zones were bland desert.
Heavensward was amazing. Shadowbringers was <sweary word> amazing.
I left the game back in ARR before the patches, returned in stormblood, by patch 4.4, never left since, stormblood is where the gameplay got a massive step up, and SE found the design they are still using to this day in dungeons, trials and raids and Soken got cut loose. Also loved the story, it was a nice change after how feels heavy heavensward is. People say that is disconnected, I always saw it as two story threads developing relatively at the same time, so never felt pacing issues, and has the best post MSQ patch cycle to date… my two cents.
I think what you're trying to describe is a tragic individual. I believe someone said that they are tragic heroes.
It's not even close to bad. It's not as good as Heavensward, Shadowbringers, or now Endwalker, but you're talking about three superb expansions. It's better than ARR, and the post-4.0 content is incredible. Hell, the raid design alone is enough to say Stormblood as a whole is very good. That's when the dungeon/trial/raid design team really came into their own. Add onto this, the world-building of Stormblood is still being felt in Endwalker. Seriously, I can think of one Stormblood character off the top of my head that completely changed the face of the game on every conceivable level–and no I'm not talking about Zenos.
That character alone elevates Stormblood into an expansion that was worth experiencing.đ
I didn't think it was bad at all i loved stormblood. Particularly the post msq pre shb patches that were just fantastic. Also agree with you entirely in their ability to write a morally grey character in the right way.
The first 30 level IS NOT boring, it is after the first 30 level, when trying to find a path to titan you have to find the (fake) company of heroes that made you produce some wine or something, that kind of lame ass wtf plot.
I think stormblood was doing a lot of world building. More so than HW and nearly at the level of ARR. Shadowbringers does world building too but more on the level of HW and endwalker is just a whole new level.
People like HW, SHB and EW. Not so much ARR and SB. I've thankfully been able to enjoy all of it as the world of FF rarely disappoints (i say rarely because FF15 >_>)
Stormblood's main-patch MSQ is…meh…and that's the main reason SB gets called "bad." It isn't bad per-se (It's still better than ARR IMO) but it feels like a step back after the absolute masterpiece that was Heavensward. It has pacing problems, Lyse was not well written, and it just doesn't have the cerebral or emotional impact that Heavensward before it, or Shadowbringers and Endwalker after it do.
That said, the gameplay content of Stormblood is fantastic across the board, the post-patch MSQ is very, VERY good (It's almost as if the devs and writers listened to the player base and took the feedback to heart…a novel concept I know), and the Trial and Raid series are absolutely phenomenal (Though both raid series require knowledge of prior Final Fantasy games to truly appreciate…particularly the alliance raid).
Stormblood gets shit because the base MSQ is probably the weakest of all the expansion MSQ story-wise. Its not that it's bad – its that the others are so much better that it makes it look bad by comparison.
I actually liked Stormblood way more then Heavensward. Maybe because I liked the Stormblood cast (Hien, Yugiri, Gosetsu etc.) more than the Fortempts or Almeric but also but also maybe because I play Au Ra.
Even to me that skipped all the cutscene and story, Stomblood was not enjoyable like the others expansions, BUT in my opinion has the best raid tier.
I preferred Stormblood to Heavensward overall. I think HW had a few higher 'highs' but the locations, characters, dungeons etc of SB were great. Your powers expand and your role feels way more fulfilling to play and the variety of locations you get is class. I didn't play them through the expansion cycle, so it will have felt very different for people who did and I appreciate that but I can only relay my own experience. The post patch stuff is top, top quality and because I essentially binged the MSQ and patch content, I see them as a whole which might be why I rate SB a bit higher.
As I said, I'm sure for those who have been playing for years and who actually played through the expansion cycles will see it differently and probably felt very different to how it feels to binge it. The transition from SB to SHB was epic and personally better for me than any other general 'phase' I've played so far (I'm now up to 5.4). Starting SHB was so exciting and you can only get that because of the work put in by SB.
The thing with Stormblood I found dour was the double resistance story. The need to get help from Othard to save Ala Mhigo but first have to help the Domans.
I still think it'll flow better if we had started in the East. A small snowball resistance that grew into an avalanche with Ala Mhigo resistance.
I'm starting to feel like a broken record here, but Stormblood is the 3rd book of a 5 novel series. It's the end of the beginning and the beginning of the end. You have the main expack story, the Doma section, bookended by bigger picture story, the Ala Mhigo parts. Combining this with the fact that a lot of people don't like Lyse and it follows Heavensward, it gets a bad rep that it doesn't deserve.
But this IS an mmo and the MSQ is only part of the expansion. The dungeons, trials and raids were an amazing step up from Heavensward imo.
From Garlean pov Eoarzean are like savage ppl, merely beast tribe that will invade them if Magitek technology was not developed. You are evil from their pov.
I've never thought of it as bad or even the "worst". I often seen its criticism boiled down to people just not really paying attention to either its themes or characters, especially in regards to Ala Mhigo. People in particular seem to despise Lyse as if she were an offensive character which she isn't
Ok, I have a problem with the way people are saying this. FFXIV doesn't suddenly get better at any particular point.
FFXIV is constantly getting better. From the moment you start, it starts getting better, then you unlock dungeons and it gets better, then you unlock your job and it gets better, then you finish ARR and it gets better, then you finish HW and it gets better, etc, etc…
It gets better until you hit that point where you realize you're really enjoying it. Then it's just a great game!đ
When people say a final fantasy game is bad they usually mean from a final fantasy scale… Ff8 may be considered a bad game ff-wise but it's high a tier compared to non final fantasy games.
the story of Stormblood isn't bad, what's bad is that the pacing of the game is very bad. Also, at least for me, Stormblood also feels like the WoL is the secondary character in the narrative.
The .1-.5 patches in Stormblood are EXCELLENT. They salvage a good number of flaws with the base expansion story. While HW, ShB and EW are epic highs, I think the community perception/tone about ARR/SB are way too negative for the actual quality of the content and story.
Stormblood not only takes a trope that's hard to do well, at the best of times, but tries to do it twice in the same amount of time.
After Rhalgr's the enemy does not feel like a threat, which is where the entire revolution plot just falls on it's backside for me. I've no idea why Namai isn't a smoking crater by the end of 4.0. It then decides, to dedicate an entire zone to a tournament arc, completely out of the blue, and I kind of wish Yugiri had a dead sister too, because there's no way that 2.x Yugiri is the same as 4.0 Yugiri, she was absolutely butchered.
It's pacing is appalling, clinging way too desperately to the formula set in HW (and still hasn't been shaken up anywhere near enough in ShB or EW) to the point where the first primal boss feels like it was written in when someone realised 'Oh shit, last EP we had a trial at Lvl x3.'
Stormblood is a mediocre story told in the worst possible way.
But the soundtrack slaps and it still has the best post game content in the forms of trials, alliance raids and main raid series, so overall it checks out, and I still regret not being around for those post patches when they were current content.
Which is a shame, because if they stuck to the 'fighting this war on two fronts' angle, which was the reason we left Gyr Abania for Othard in the first place, and we were actually involved in guerilla operations for both sides, there's absolutely no way they could have ever topped Stormblood, but nah. Just straight up jank from like 62 onwards.
Bad? No. Just the first half of the main story is really dry and drags on. The latter half and the gameplay and combat aspects of it are great. Some of my favorites dungeons and raids are in stormblood.
To me whining about Stormblood is just a matter of received opinions from people who complained about it after the fact because it wasn't as good as Heavensward, and people with the attention span of a goldfish who refuse to apreciate world-building – so the same reasons as to why ARR was considered bad. Heavensward is a 10/10 story and Stormblood is a 9/10, so because there can be no nuance on the internet, it might as well be a 1/10. (Final Fantasy as a series is unfortunately cursed with this kind of take- overblown expectations of the games creates a chunk of the "fanbase" that can't appreciate anything but a 10/10- case in point, FFXV- has both the critics and the audience score hovering around 85% and yet it's treated like it's the worst game Sqeenix ever made)
That being said though, I noticed after NG+-ing the whole game, that Stormblood is slightly better on the second take, because you pay attention to more details and references, and Lyse's story makes way more sense when you know how it ends from the start. Knowing the ending enhanced my experience with Stormblood, but it didn't do the same for Heavensward- knowing the ending made HW's story less impactful.
Heavens Ward & Coils of Bahamut Spoilers
Bahamut was the embodiment of the dragon's a Meracydia's rage and vengeance. Of course he is a primal so he's intelligence is somewhat alien. The intention of the summoning shapes the personality of the god. So imagine being the embodiment of wrath then subjugated and enslaved for thousands of years bound in a tiny prison to which you couldn't even move. He's a tad sympathetic, especially when you've seen what became of his followers. Placed in vats and in a state of constant turmoil so that they would continue to pray to Bahamut for succor.
The only non sympathetic villain that I've so far encountered is The Cloud of Darkness. Just a bad bitch you wants to devour our world. But even then you do the Waring Triad and find the origin of the Void/World of Darkness. And you realize that the Cloud was probably at one point a great hero that became a victim of the tools she used to fight what she thought were threats to her world onto to be consumed by the darkness and forever have an insatiable hunger for the Light. So even she isn't unsympathetic.
I just though it was a bit slow and a lot mashed together. It also didn't help that Lyse/Yda wasn't written very well imo. Apart from that I thought storm blood was good. Was it heavensward good…nope. was it ARB good…yeah?
No, it's really good.
Ads will frick with you when you arrive at point when some cutscenes auto advance :/
wait until you have experience more Zenos and your opinion of him will probably change.
What's funny is that out of all the expansions, Zenos is probably the most one note and least morally ambiguous villain they have and if you enjoy him, you'll love what's to come.
And while base SB is slower, the pay off in the patches is 100% worth it.
Stormbloodâs weakness is the split plot between doma and Ala Amigho as itâs 2 writers. The better writer went onto write everything after and did it great.
So, Iâm not going to comment on your opinions themselves, because they are built on a flawed or incomplete understanding of objective things that are known about up to the point you are at in the game.
A lot of your facts and evidence supporting your talking points are objectively false. The age and might of the empire. The nature of Bahamut. And things youâve said in other games.
Itâs a bit off-putting.
Other than that, yeah, FFXIV does shades of gray better than WoW. The writers for XIV care about putting out a good narrative experience. The writers at Blizzard just want to put in as little work possible to meet metrics to justify their salary.
Its just slow, so many of my friends quit during SB and almost all my wow refugee friends stopped halfway to SB.