A retrospective and recap of Final Fantasy XIV Stormblood’s main story. How does the tale of Ala Mhigo and Doma’s liberation …
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A retrospective and recap of Final Fantasy XIV Stormblood’s main story. How does the tale of Ala Mhigo and Doma’s liberation …
source
Hey everyone! A big thanks again for all the support!
I had a bit of copyright trouble with this one and the original upload was completely blocked (apparently WWE own the Stormblood trailer lmao), but it's all sorted out now.
The Shadowbringers video is up and ready for next week, as well – it clocks in at just over 2 hours! I hope that's not too long…
Feel free to make fun of the glaring mistake I made about Cyan's theme 🤣 Not sure why I left it in tbh!
Anyway, I look forward to seeing what you guys think! Thanks again!
another person who wasnt here during the hype cycle that thinks stormblood is underrated… i'll never forgive them for letting us think stormblood would be an ala mhigan's and ala mhigo focused expansion for 6 months only to pull a bait nd switch and sweep them under the rug
Stormblood remains my favorite expansion. I love the story, I love Zenos and I love Eureka. I hope that Dawntrail can live up to Stromblood.
Heck yes! I've been hyped for this. Gonna be great background noise as I plow through Endwalker (I'm relatively new and loving the story! Can't wait to get ready for Dawntrail!)
Personally I agree with you, I loved Stormblood's MSQ
youre pumping these videos out! good work as always
I just really wasn't a fan of the central characters in this story. Lyse, Hien, Yugiri, Alisaie, and even Alphinaud was kind of weak this expac
I will always defend the stormblood post game patches nothing felt too rushed and it always had you questioning what was gonna happen next and what direction the next expansion would go
Thank you for this!!! Hope SHB and EW follow soon
I watched your last 2 out of order, had JUST finished the ARR one, and go to check your page to find out you served this peak an hour ago??? good bye, sunday
I still am not terribly fond of Lyse as the Resistance leader when M'naago really comes across as the better option.
Also, Zenos doing body swaps has an even older basis: the Sahaugin priest back when we fought Leviathan.
Heavensward gave me everything I wanted and I hated it, a whole expansion with Yshtola and Alphy, a pope main villain (I assumed they would go the political route like they did on FFTactics instead of the "I have power and everyone who disagrees with me dies" route they went" AND the awsome set up from ARR post patches that were unfortunatelly tossed asside and solved in basically 1 solo instanced duty.
Stormblood gave me all the cliches I hated and I liked it, mainly because I like multiple plotlines happening at once. We have to pause the story in Ala Mhigo? No problem, lets go to Doma. Shoutout to Asahi being a great psycho villain. (Will also mention that I hated that underwater quest where I had to be searching for stuff and wasted almost 2 hours on it).
I loved Stormblood. I rank it higher – much higher – than Heavensward. Lots of people criticize the focus of Lyse and her incompetency when I talk about it with other people, but that is something I actually really liked. I liked her frustrations and inability to understand the people who were dealing with the oppression. I found it very realistic. I greatly enjoy the zones (so so so much better designed than Heavensward zones, which I think are among some of the worst designed zones in any video game) and amazing battles and music.
7:14 can I bring to attention a cool little detail that I feel shouldn't go remiss? During this cutscene, if you're playing as a healer, you get unique dialog from Krile and in animation assist with the healing process. There is similar scenes within Shadowbringers, I do not know if there was one in Endwalker however. Small note but a welcome touch for the healer MSQ players non the less! :3 (Edit: I did find there is also unique healer dialog choices in Endwalker too along with many more cool dialog relating to job and racial choices.)
Stormblood had higher highs than Heavensward, but much lower lows, which averages out just beneath heavensward for me. Doma was wonderful, but it did feel like writers were pulling things out of their asses and making Urianger be an annoyingly vague dick who shows up only to give us the mcguffin they decided was needed rather than let us figure things out and work with our allies to come up with a solution.
33:33
Amazing chest ahead 😉
I actually really liked Lyse when I played through Stormblood last year. Had no idea so many people hated her. Frankly I was impressed the writers managed to wrangle a somewhat compelling character out of "Comic Relief Cardboard Cutout #4", oh excuse me, "Yda"
Stormblood was absolutely better than Heavensward. I don't even understand how this is a controversial statement.
I loved Stormblood. I don’t understand why it’s so underrated.
At the moment I don't have time to watch a 1½ hour long video, but I've been saying it for years.
Stormblood is amazing, and my personal favourite expansion of the game.
While the story have it's ups & downs, I feel like it's paced almost perfectly, it doesn't drag on forever like Shadowbringers or Endwalker, but rather it feels like you're playing it through acts, and each zone have it's own unique story to it.
And even if we disregard the story, it still holds up as one of the best expansions, the Omega raid series is amazing, and Ivalice alliance raid is also great, and the Four Lords extreme trials is really fun too, and you can't forget stuff such as Eureka and Baldesion's Arsenal, it's amazing content there for the taking. We could even go a bit deeper and talk about jobs & balance and such, and I feel like most jobs pretty much peaked during STB, not all but the majority of jobs felt very good to play back then.
Oh, and we can't forget that they introduced Ultimate raids here as well, also a massive upgrade.
For what it's worth I remember that when I first played through Stormblood, I had 0 issues with Zenos being in a separate body as he was talking about Echo, Resonance and all that jazz and he was able to control Shinryu. Which meant that he had enough power to control Primal. Ok, but here's the deal – we've already seen those souls that have enough strenght being able to be reborn in the new bodies – back in post-ARR patches with the introduction of Leviathan. So for me it just made sense that Zenos literally did the same thing and got control over the body of a random soldier kinda like what Ascians do.
We also should remember that it was during Stormblood when game was heavily updated with old combat system that used cross-class skills, TP and scalable MP was put to rest and current system with role-actions and most actions being strictly limited either by cooldowns or job resource was introduced.
Personally I feel that Stormblood suffers with the beginning – as it is rather slow and Fringes and Peaks are not as visually different as Western Coerthas and Sea of Clouds or Kholusia and Ahm Araeng from closest expansions (I am not even starting with differences between early game locations in Endwalker – those are massive)
What if the 2 others that Alphinaud recruited join us in Dawntrail?
Stormblood was good, but it had the problems of a story told over too big a space, as well as being two separate story lines run in parallel.
I think people do give stormblood too much crap. But i also think its the weakest expansions in terms of MSQ.
What i find interesting is everyone seems to have a different reason to why they dislike stormblood.
Some peolle hate the ala migan bits. Some people hate the first half of the expac, others really dislike lyse.
For me though. The thing that made stormblood weaker than the others was the fact that you repeat the same story beat 3 times back to back, to back.
I really got sick of encouraging the local populace to rebel against the empire.
I can appreciate how each peoples faces a different kind of occupation, with different kinds of challanges.
But i cant help but feel the pace was bad.
Particularly the ruby sea zone. Which is the 2nd time you encourage the local popuace to rebel, and as a zone, really drags, i think.
I think that its rated around where it needs to be. From some very abrasive main story characters to the content being poorly split between two distinct areas of the world
I wanted to like StB. It started out ok, but the story sucks, Y'da's new persona suuuuucks, and the new maps are deeply problematic (even compared to HW's 4 skyland zones). Grr Albania takes what could be an excellent high desert and gives us endless poo rocks. My family is from the high desert and S-E failed to do their homework.
Othard has a lack of focus on top of being half an expansion. Ruby Sea and the Steppe both have oversized garish landmarks that make the regions feel tiny despite being larger than ever. And Doma feels like a micro-state and has the worst ambient music I've ever heard.
Oh, and Lyse was there.
I've been on the train since 1.0, but I still watched from stem to stern. Having been in love with XIV from the jump off, I feel dutybound to support others that are passionate for it.
I think Heavensward was still a better overall story than Stormblood, but Stormblood absolutely does not deserve the supposed criticism that it gets. In terms of world-building and setting up the greater geopolitical stakes, Stormblood is a great expansion that greatly expands the world of FFXIV overall by introducing Ilsabard and Othard as the other two Great Continents. In terms of content and gameplay, Stormblood ranks far superior to Heavensward with all of the job adjustments that it introduced that fixed a lot of the major complaints HW had, as well as introducing Adventuring Foray content. While Eureka is a bit polarizing, I think it's some of the best group content of the game and is a great endgame time sink that was sorely missing in EW.
❤My not❤
I enjoyed Lyse's character. It was a breath of fresh air to have someone be unabashedly patriotic and willing to call out others. Espescially after HW had the Ishgardian cast spend the post story on their knees kissing dragon tail. Hraesvelgr tells Aymeric that he ate his own beloved alive? Aymeric apologizes for the inconvenience. Ishgardian peasants upset that the nobles are sucking up to the dragons that ate their children? The Fortempts scream at the plebs in indignant rage. Midgardsomr hypocritically tells Tiamat that 2000 years is long enough in prison, after justifying the dragon war for hours with the line "to dragons 1000 years is like an hour"? No one says a single word about it and its never brought up again.
By contrast, having Lyse exasperatedly telling everyone and anyone to shove it when it comes to freeing her homeland really endeared her to me. It showed that at least someone outside of Garlemald still has a freaking spine.
I like Stormblood more than Shadowbringers
They brought their A+ Game with the visual designs(and sound holy shit, not just music but things like the water drop in Shinryu's fight.) The trials have oomph and the most of the dungeons look glorious.
I really like the Ruby Sea(EXCEPT ITS' AETHERYTE LOCATIONS BEING IN THE NORTHEAST ONLY, LITERALLY A STONE'S THROW FROM ONE ANOTHER)
In regards to Lyse, I am one of those left sore by the "lie of Yda", because as a 1.0 player who started in Gridania, having both my Scion friends deleted for the now death-flag-immune anime power hour Scions was very sour to my palate. Would have much preferred Papalymo having to take on a serious persona and try to talk down a revenge-mad Yda who the Ala Mhigans are happy to rally behind, except she has no consideration for losses and gets her countrymen slaughtered even more vividly than Lyse's errors. It could even lead to sidelining them at the end to handle Ala Mhigo, with Papalymo taking up an advisor's role – would've been pretty neat, at least for me. In whole, I rate Lyse as more of a "meh" than as an absolutely shite character.
Sadly I didn't get to do Omegascape when it was prog content(burnout struck and I took a 1y break from the game), so outside of scrabbling together seven interested parties for a MINE run or twelve I'll never really get to experience it when some of the fights are super cool.
Stormblood was awesome, a big step up from Heavensward. Bigger world. More grounded story. Better villains. Lyse was great. Less snow. Namazu. Ninja turtles
Great stuff.
In terms of the expansions, Stormblood is my Lyse favorite…I just found the story disjointed and pacing that went all over the place. That said give me a thousand Stormbloods over 1 ARR any day of the week
Agreed, I absolutely love Stormblood
I think my impression of this expansion will always be marred by the fact that I was stuck trying to get into that Raubahn duty at the start of the msq for 3 entire days lol
There are three times I wished I could speak for my character and two of them happened in Stormblood. One during the royal menagerie because Zenos and the WoL don't actually have any conflicting interests. He wants good fights and we have the best fights. Dude was one static invite away from becoming a Scion. And another was when Varis laid out his plan for the future. I had SO many questions.
"Okay, putting aside the mass murder because clearly that's not a dealbreaker for you. It's taken 12k years for them to get about 60% way through rejoining, so maybe another 8k to finish. What's your plan to live that long? Assuming you do have a way to survive six more rejoinings, at the end there, you just become them. Why would you want to fight them after that? You've done their plan and are now them. There is no longer anything to fight over. We've killed at least three or four of them so far, couldn't we just keep doing what we're doing and not create a worldwide suicide cult? Just a thought."
Emet-Selch must have been painfully ashamed to be related to someone that embarrassingly stupid. "I'll teach grandpa! I'll do exactly what he wants! That'll show him!"
It would have made more sense if he was attempting to do the Ascian plan because he believed it would bring all mankind back to paradise than to do the Ascian plan in order to spite the Ascians. 😂
The only thing i find funny they basically abandone the war in ala mihgo. To basically free an entirely new nation.
46:00 My guess is the reason we didn't destroy the eyes back in HW is simply because we couldn't. They were pretty much fully charged then, compared to when Estinien finds them again where they are spent. But.. I mean, yeah throwing them off was a bit of a poor decision :p