Final Fantasy XIV - Kiwi Free Company

[Shieldman]

I will never understand why you people mod the game to play itself. Theres no fun in thaf, but to each their own. Probably since im a casual and i cant drop 12 hours of my day into the game, maybe im just not seeing it.

Honestly for me, it was just the novelty of it. I always wanted to use a bot on other MMOs, but could never actually bring myself to pay for one.
And second, setting up and configuring is more fun than actually doing it.

It kind of puts things in perspective as well, scrip farming for enough Condensed Solutions to craft one of the new sets can take several hours just by itself, not counting other materials. that would have been spent by me watching the spawn clocks and baby sitting my crafting macros anyway.

I started playing this game last week on the free trail and have been having alot of fun with it, might upgrade to a paid account but I don't know if the dlc content is worth playing.

Careful, if you pay once, you can't go back to free.
I remember starting the game when the free trial only got to level 30. So I leveled every single class to 30 before actually buying, lol.

 

[SnowBall]

FF14 is and never becomes a good MMO experience so your enjoyment depends mainly on the the visual novel story. ARR through Stormblood is about geopolitical conflict where the limited physical limitations of the world and consequences cannot be handwaved away. If you like that story then you will be disappointed by the direction the story goes after Stormblood, as it ditches the geopolitical conflict, handwaves away resource shortages/animosity between groups/issues/etc (the inner provinces and Garlemald that was promised storyline never came to fruition), and the story becomes about a small handful of sulking immortals. The story rehashes satanic messaging three expansions in a row. You will stop getting a side party of locals and will almost exclusively only adventure from the samey Scions. Setting aside the writing and plot construction, the moment-to-moment experience of going through the story will be padded out tremendously as you go many more hours without any tension or setpieces. You will spend more and more time running between NPCs to read dialogue boxes or watch canned cutscenes where people stand around in a circle and emote.

I do not think the story becomes irredeemably bad, but you are going to have to like FF14 for things other than the story for it to be worth spending another 300+ hours progressing through after Stormblood, mainly the visuals and the music. But you are also going to have to decide whether or not that is worth your time versus playing through and completing a classic JRPGs that are only 30 hours long.

I don’t want to sound like an ass but satanic messaging? Seriously? Also we were never promised a Garlemald expansion. They floated the idea of a Garlemald expansion but it never came to be. Also let’s be honest the political stuff in this game is Game of Thrones for 13 year olds quality. I used to think the political writing was good and nuanced when I was younger a decade ago but when I replayed through ARR-SB last year I found the politics were so juvenile, heavy handed, patronizing, and mired in shonen anime tropes. Also HW completely walked back on the entire bloody banquet and made every thing ok. Even SB ended in a saccharine Disney movie song number after Zenos necks himself, which to be fair was an awesome moment (reclaiming an anthem from your oppressors) but still felt too Disney move like for me execution wise.
There are good political bits in ARR-SB but they’re drowned out in anime nonsense and simplistic writing. Or when they try to do something realistic they shoot themselves in the foot with removing consequences (Bloody Banquet in HW) or shove anime in it (the ending of ARR is pure shonen cheese and SB has Zenos being a shonen villain killing whatever tension the expansion is supposed to have. Also the human experimentation and artificial echo nonsense that shows up in the last third of SB.) Don’t get me wrong I’m not saying the stuff after SB is the epitome of deep or good realistic writing but in my personal opinion I really don’t see ARR-SB as any better.

 

[Golfing on the Moon 1971]

I don’t want to sound like an ass but satanic messaging? Seriously?

The story of the last three expansions over and over is that "we were once immortals and lived in a perfect world, we and our world have become shallow reflections of what we once were, but instead of aspiring to become whole again we must instead chose to remain broken. Short lives of suffering and then oblivion is better than living forever! We must reincarnate over and over (sometimes as lesser beings like animals) until our planet's lifestream/mother crystal burns up, and then that's it!". God is revealed to be a fraud and there is no afterlife. The creators were so close to the truth that we are eternal beings in need of restoration, but they don't want to cross that last threshold because then you start dividing people based on whether or not they serve God or not, so they turn around and try to demonize it. And it is insidious how this programming is marketed as popular story for the masses to passively consume.

There are other alarming messages in there such as the globalist agenda where every country must join the United States of Alphinaud or they are an enemy. You have the Kurenai questline where the old guy trying to prevent his people's wealth from flowing out is demonized. Also don't forget all of the democratic revolutions. And so on.

Also we were never promised a Garlemald expansion.

It was announced in the ShB fanfests.

 

[Baguette Child]

And it is insidious how this programming is marketed as popular story for the masses to passively consume

The inability to simply enjoy entertainment as entertainment is a large part of why no one wants to be religious anymore. You guys come off as utter killjoys. Not every game or book is part of a secret conspiracy against God.

 

[lolcowtipper]

The story of the last three expansions over and over is that "we were once immortals and lived in a perfect world, we and our world have become shallow reflections of what we once were, but instead of aspiring to become whole again we must instead chose to remain broken. Short lives of suffering and then oblivion is better than living forever! We must reincarnate over and over (sometimes as lesser beings like animals) until our planet's lifestream/mother crystal burns up, and then that's it!". God is revealed to be a fraud and there is no afterlife. The creators were so close to the truth that we are eternal beings in need of restoration, but they don't want to cross that last threshold because then you start dividing people based on whether or not they serve God or not, so they turn around and try to demonize it. And it is insidious how this programming is marketed as popular story for the masses to passively consume.

There are other alarming messages in there such as the globalist agenda where every country must join the United States of Alphinaud or they are an enemy. You have the Kurenai questline where the old guy trying to prevent his people's wealth from flowing out is demonized. Also don't forget all of the democratic revolutions. And so on.



It was announced in the ShB fanfests.

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I can't imagine how you were able to play the game itself being this braindead

 

[RIPRhongoBongo]

The story of the last three expansions over and over is that "we were once immortals and lived in a perfect world, we and our world have become shallow reflections of what we once were, but instead of aspiring to become whole again we must instead chose to remain broken. Short lives of suffering and then oblivion is better than living forever! We must reincarnate over and over (sometimes as lesser beings like animals) until our planet's lifestream/mother crystal burns up, and then that's it!". God is revealed to be a fraud and there is no afterlife. The creators were so close to the truth that we are eternal beings in need of restoration, but they don't want to cross that last threshold because then you start dividing people based on whether or not they serve God or not, so they turn around and try to demonize it. And it is insidious how this programming is marketed as popular story for the masses to passively consume

Sir, this is The Drowning Wench

 

[Ravana]

The story of the last three expansions over and over is that "we were once immortals and lived in a perfect world, we and our world have become shallow reflections of what we once were, but instead of aspiring to become whole again we must instead chose to remain broken. Short lives of suffering and then oblivion is better than living forever! We must reincarnate over and over (sometimes as lesser beings like animals) until our planet's lifestream/mother crystal burns up, and then that's it!". God is revealed to be a fraud and there is no afterlife. The creators were so close to the truth that we are eternal beings in need of restoration, but they don't want to cross that last threshold because then you start dividing people based on whether or not they serve God or not, so they turn around and try to demonize it. And it is insidious how this programming is marketed as popular story for the masses to passively consume.

There are other alarming messages in there such as the globalist agenda where every country must join the United States of Alphinaud or they are an enemy. You have the Kurenai questline where the old guy trying to prevent his people's wealth from flowing out is demonized. Also don't forget all of the democratic revolutions. And so on.



It was announced in the ShB fanfests.

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What is all this retarded shit

 

[Well Intentioned]

I will never understand why you people mod the game to play itself. Theres no fun in thaf, but to each their own. Probably since im a casual and i cant drop 12 hours of my day into the game, maybe im just not seeing it.

The addons I tend to use are done to either give me quality of life improvements (Yes, Already and Autoretainer, for example, which are good for cutting down on redundant button presses of 'Accept, Confirm, Yes,' that XIV is a slavish adherent to, or to cut down on some of the boring redundancy (eg, gathering 3000 crystals or whatever after I've already gathered 30 million of them.)

Actually playing the game and shit that automates doing instances or shit? Yeah, I don't get it, outside of doing things like leveling up your Grand Company Squadron for the emotes they drop or whatever.

I'd rather play the fun parts of the game and do the repetitive grinding as it suits me, if that makes sense.

 

[Froggy Fresh Sextape]

The inability to simply enjoy entertainment as entertainment is a large part of why no one wants to be religious anymore. You guys come off as utter killjoys. Not every game or book is part of a secret conspiracy against God.

A large portion of KF can't enjoy anything because they always read hidden messages into everything instead of laughing while you kill the evil elf pope

 

[Well Intentioned]

It was announced in the ShB fanfests.

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The best segment of EW was doing exactly that. Not sure what you're getting at, unless we were bait and switched (which I could see happening given how stupid popular Emet-Selch got and bringing him back would've been $$$ for SE.)

I do miss the smaller scale geopolitical stuff and I think that's part of why I was unhappy with Dawntrail. I felt like it was going to be a springboard into that rather than just everything being neatly tied up in a bow because Trooncat is so awesome.

 

[Brandy [◉'']]

It was announced in the ShB fanfests.

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To be fair, the translation of that is way more dramatic than the Japanese. 'The time for the final act is looming to... finally confront the Garlean empire.'. I can see why the translator put the 'take down' part into this, because everything around it has an air of finality (and they might have been privy to development plans that fell through), but the verb has nothing to do with taking down or defeating anything, its more to 'confront' or to 'face off'.

Every now and then this happens in the translation in game as well that for sake of drama certain things get exaggerated or added.

Spoiler: translation notes

I don't even mind it, the translation of XIV has a lot of soul and would lose a lot of charm if they were to translate it 1 to 1. Koji Fox especially added a lot of fun stuff imo. The Rogues Guild speaking in thives cant? 100% only an english phenomen for example. Sadly, this does cause for some inaccuracies at times; when Matoya tells Y'shtola using aether to see will kill her in HW (I think she said 'will cost you your tail'), the Japanese version is much less urgent and more or less tells Y'shtola that using too much aether will tax her body for example.

He used this style a lot in his work on FF XI where he took a lot of creative freedoms with dialogues. Tarutaru having very individual ways of speaking is mostly his. Shantotto doesn't rhyme in Japanese and Koru-Moru does not speak like Ned Flanders, neither does Markov, the male dance troup leader in one of the later expansions talk like a flamboyantly gay man with a lisp.

 

[Tanner Glass]

Also we were never promised a Garlemald expansion. They floated the idea of a Garlemald expansion but it never came to be. Also let’s be honest the political stuff in this game is Game of Thrones for 13 year olds quality.

While @Golfing on the Moon 1971 wrote what could be described as a manifesto, they did very much setup Garlemald as much bigger part of the story moving forward than it was. They setup a ton of threads around it and it tied into Dalmasca only for them to hurriedly just write off all loose ends in the Save the Queen Adventure Journal or whatever, but they clearly hard pivoted away from that for Endwalker's current story (a journey of Friendship and more Ascian stuff/time travel).

I get that they probably didn't want to do another set of liberating areas from the Empire (Bozja and Dalmasca) with another set of young and idealist leaders - but going from the FFT Raids, the SHB relic area, the live letters, etc - it's not unreasonable to think the game would have focused in those areas. It was also not unreasonable to think that the topping of Garlemald would take longer than 2 patches and be a huge important focus but it was hastily written off.

What's worse is they abandoned those ideas and in essence just reuse some of them for Dawntrail - with Princess Ashe (FF12) being put to sleep for 30 years and then waking up, with shaky memories, to rebuild and fix her nation. "Real" Sphene is doing this same arc in DT, which might speak to how behind the 8 ball BU3 was on writing deadlines.

A part of me wonders if Endwalker was rushed to free up some of BU3 for FFXVI, that it was always planned but moved up by 2 years and replaced the Garlemald/Bozja/Dalmasca content which is why it feels so off-pace and jarring between SHB and EW.

 

[Rich Evans Ayypologist]

I think the abrupt narrative shift was brought about by Ishikawa getting the lead role, who - compared to Oda - clearly didn't like great-power-conflicts and geopolitical themes. Norvrandt is almost designed from the top down to be a soft reboot, with a new world curiously bereft of political quibbles beyond Eulmore as a clear antagonistic-entity. The Scions get effectively reintroduced as more fleshed-out characters with the convenient hand-wave of time shenanigans, and the entire tone of ShB takes a ninety-degree turn. When we see old characters in brief snippets, there's a level of character depth that plainly wasn't there before: Lyse's cameos in ShB-EW paint a much better idea of her character than does her entire SB arc.

What makes it work in a lot of ways is that Ishikawa was adept at taking the parts of the story that she liked and rolling with them - whereas the parts she clearly didn't, like Garlemald, are essentially dealt with off-screen and a far more straightforward antagonist is inserted in their place in the form of the telepheroi and Fandaniel. In the end you have a story that feels less like an abrupt-turn, even though it is, because the new direction pays homage to themes and ideas that were built-up earlier. It's also why the midsection of ShB feels so weak to me: largely self-contained events and stories that don't really feel like they build into anything that has been established, and are just stupid "wouldn't that be cool?" asides.

The lead writing role very clearly comes with a lot of narrative freedom, and Hiroi is an example of what happens when that freedom is given to someone who is just completely uninterested in the old story. Dawntrail doesn't feel like it belongs in anyone else's story, despite mostly just being a ripoff of major beats from older entries. Beyond the deus-ex-machina of Vrtra appearing to save the day (and then not stick around, which leads me to think that was just a plothole they covered up), basically nothing from the older games appears in Tural. The Scions are cardboard cutouts who feel completely different, and you just have this shitty story that had may as well be from a totally-different game.

 

[SnowBall]

I don’t know if this is true but apparently Bozja’s story wasn’t well received by the Japanese fanbase and/or whatever plans Matsuno had didn’t pan out. Also the amount Ascian stuff and Elpis with Emet being in EW was planned from the beginning and ShB’s popularity didn’t have anything to do with it. From what I read Hiroi was one of the writers for the Bozja plot as well.

 

[Honka Honka Burning Love]

What is all this retarded shit

The only thing I have ever read regarding FF14 that is more Retarded than the Realm Reborn story.

 

[Ravana]

ARR may have been very dumb but it still has its moments

 

[Brandy [◉'']]

I think the abrupt narrative shift was brought about by Ishikawa getting the lead role, who - compared to Oda - clearly didn't like great-power-conflicts and geopolitical themes.

I want Oda to do the worldbuilding and never touch any of the characters and Ishikawa do the character writing but get reigned in when it comes to stakes. We kinda got the opposite. The worldbuilding is very weak in DT and so are the characters. Despite being 20% longer very little actually happened and it is mashup of a theme of family, coming of age and shitty cyberpunk. The plot was both very underwhelming in its stakes in the first half and got stupidly high stakes and out there (what if SPACE SHIPS FOUGHT DRAGONS?) and none of the characters actually got time to shine.

 

[Xerxes IX]

They've mashed some things together to reduce button bloat (PLD was a big benefactor of this) but otherwise no square considers 123123 to be gameplay. XIVCombo will put all that crap on a single button, which is as far as I will go with automating this game. It's a huge QOL improvement.

Raidtrannies will tell you this is important and can never be changed because pressing 123 in the right order is skill expression, it'd invalidate the parse they worked hard for if you could press 111 instead for the same effect.

I don’t know if this is true but apparently Bozja’s story wasn’t well received by the Japanese fanbase and/or whatever plans Matsuno had didn’t pan out. Also the amount Ascian stuff and Elpis with Emet being in EW was planned from the beginning and ShB’s popularity didn’t have anything to do with it. From what I read Hiroi was one of the writers for the Bozja plot as well.

Do you know if anything about the cause of the final days was planned? I can buy that Fandaniel was always meant to be involved since XIV post patch foreshadowing is predictable but stuff in SHB sounds directly contrarian to what we learn in EW. It's been a while since I checked.

 

[Ravana]

I remember the prevailing theory being something like Lavos being the cause of the final days. Which would have been cool but square would never do anything related to Chrono Trigger other than acknowledge it exists every once in a while.

 

[SnowBall]

To be fair Banri Oda and Ishikawa had the exact same roles in ShB and EW as they did in SB at least according to multiple sites and interviews. Oda shares the same lead story designer position Ishikawa does in EW and is listed as a msq writer for Shb and SB with her too. And now they’re both in the same Senior writer spot for DT. I don’t think we’ve ever been told which one was responsible for what parts of ShB and EW so who knows if it was an Ishikawa thing or a higher ups/group writers decision to do something different thing. Ishikawa did the Doma sections of SB which were pretty political and a lot of people praised those parts so I don’t think it was fully her to do a switch from ShB onwards.

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm10264560/

https://www.mobygames.com/person/695951/banri-oda/

https://www.mobygames.com/game/129290/final-fantasy-xiv-online-shadowbringers/credits/playstation-4/

https://www.mobygames.com/game/176792/final-fantasy-xiv-online-endwalker/credits/playstation-5/

https://www.mobygames.com/game/90940/final-fantasy-xiv-online-stormblood/credits/windows/