Final Fantasy XIV - Kiwi Free Company

Well Intentioned said:
Or they could just construct an elevated track in combination with the quieter train, to allow the buffalo to move around as needed.
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Yeah, but that wasn't laid out on the table in the game because this story isn't competently written anymore.

Sheep King said:
I thought Gulool Ja's mother being a stalker and Zoraal Ja chimping out was fine.
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It's hilarious that they unironically wrote "One man's BIGGEST simp commits warcrimes on the promise of getting DICKED DOWN because she thought, 'I can fix him'," as a character trait.

Also, unrelated, I GUESS I'M RETARDED AND COMPLETELY FORGOT the fucking hardlight bodies the Endless run on are actually composed of a stupid fuckton of aether for... Some reason.

You know what I hate the most? I also recalled that I completely saw this coming in some aspect immediately after Dawntrail ended. I remembered that I had the thought at one point of "An Ascian is probably going to fuck with all of this somehow". And I mean, it's not unreasonable for another rogue Ascian to just... Acquire Sphene's body and wear it like a meat puppet to do this gay shit. It tracks. "I'm going to turn everyone into Endless! But I can only turn 5,000 of you into Endless. Please look forward to it," implies to me that "she" intends to use the unchosen as aether batteries for her new Endless, and this sounds exactly like some retarded Ascian plot.

And the worst thing is, "an Ascian taking Sphene's body" isn't so farfetched because even if Alexandria, the dungeon, was trying to suggest that they managed to preserve Sphene's BODY somehow instead of her memory, an Ascian wouldn't even need that much considering how Elidibus had been shown to have exhumed a LONG DEAD Ardbert in order to wear him around for a while. What I DON'T know is how this somehow resulted in the REAL Sphene also coming back to life and materializing in an apparently meaningful way within Living Memory. I dread what they're gonna pull out of their ass to explain that.

This shit is so lazy.
 
Sheep King said:
I thought Gulool Ja's mother being a stalker and Zoraal Ja chimping out was fine. Gulool Ja is probably the only thing I care about to come out of this expac, even if he's a minor part. Every character in 7.0 acts like an intellectually stunted child, being either completely predictable or pants-on-head retarded, but at least lil bro has an excuse.

I just can't care about Zoraal Ja at all at this point. The fact that Krile explicitly pointed out at the start of 7.0 how psychotic he is ruined any chance of sympathising when he turns out to be a villain. I don't need a grand arc but consider that his entire personality revolves around his resentment of his father, but we didn't get a single conversation between the two until he murdered him, and Gulool Ja Ja (loving dad, career diplomat) apparently just handwaved his trueborn son's open warmongering away with the same "my children have much to learn" BS he applies to Wuk Lamat and Koana.

Zoraal Ja reminds me of Vauthry: narcissistic, obsessive, tyrannical, transforms into a twisted realisation of his fixations for the penultimate bossfight. But Vauthry was at least established as a dumb puppet with impotent bitchfits whereas Zoraal Ja is supposed to be seen as the major threat for most of the expansion. And while Vauthry had a horde of genuinely scary abominations that had almost destroyed the world and the capacity to brainwash a city, Zoraal Ja has... remote control drones. Which lose in a gunfight against cowboys shooting rubber bullets. They even outright shit on the mechanical soldiers as weaker than the experiments in the latest dungeon. What's the point in a villain that's neither threatening or sympathetic?

E: also that solo duty was gay as fuck. "Oh no we can't get past this boss's defences! thank god we have a machinist to shoot at its weakpoint!" said noone ever. Cope and greed Machinists, you will never be a melee dps.
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One of the things that makes me seethe is that the game wanted us to care about Zoraal Ja without offering any kind of anchor to ground that sympathy to. Zoraal Ja was literally raised alongside Koana and Wuk Lamat--surely they have some sort of relationship? Wuk Lamat likes to fight or whatever, maybe establish some kind of relationship where that was their connection. For fuck's sake, during that gay cooking challenge they had the perfect opportunity to establish a relationship between her and Zoraal Ja, and what happened to drive them apart (were they once close? Maybe they could reminisce over something? Anything??)

Completely off topic, but I think an easy way to solve a major issue with the story would be to make it so troon cat came looking for *Krile*, not the WOL. Her dad literally knew Krile's grandfather, surely it wouldn't be so out of the question for him to point her in the direction of his relative in Sharlayan as a potential companion. And then the WOL could offer to come with along with Graha (seeing as we literally promised we would go on an adventure with him, which Hiroi forgot I guess). That way the focus is heavily shifted to Krile which it SHOULD have been.

Lastly, if they were going to cocktease us with the scions being pit against each other, they should have made Estinien join Bakool Jaja, being able to relate over being retards who happen to be great at fighting.
 
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Lou's Sentient Backfat said:
You could do the same thing in the final solo duty in 7.0, can't have you upstaging Wuk LMAO
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iirc the same goes for the hien solo duty at the end of post-stormblood, and the only reason why you can't be 100% AFK is because the stack marker artificially does 10 times the amount of damage it's supposed to if you aren't in it
 
lolcowtipper said:
And then the WOL could offer to come with along with Graha (seeing as we literally promised we would go on an adventure with him, which Hiroi forgot I guess
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This point still has me mad even if it's a small thing.

Graha was quite explicitly promised by WoL to come along for our next big adventure in a big emotional moment only for us to leave him on the bench when the next big adventure starts.

What was even the point of that scene? Why even bother setting things up and then not use them? These fucking hacks are so lazy on every level and it's making me bitter.
 
My sub's lapsed and I haven't picked Dawntrail back up after dropping it at 96 out of frustration, but I've kept track of the expansion's run via friends that're still hanging onto DT rather cynically and this thread's postings. I held out some retarded hope that maybe 7.1 could be even a little more competently handled, but no. Not at all. Jesus christ.
I'm not a longtime player by any metric, I remember spectating on 1.0 being a trainwreck, trying ARR when the free trial was only up to level 20 and then proper picked it up years later when it was famously expanded up to level 60.
It still left a major impression on me as a pre-existing JRPGfag that couldn't stick with any MMOs long-term until I played it, enough of one that I finally understood the autism people can get with their characters in these games. I'll have to repurpose them for other things, going off of the distinct possibility that Dawntrail is just the norm of quality for this game going forward instead of an abortion that managed to slither out and will keep crawling until Hiroi has no more writing credits.
I didn't care for Wuk's intro and expected Dawntrail would have a lot to live up to after an arc that'd gone on for over a decade had finished, but outright bad in every way down to the dialogue feeling suspiciously like a first draft, the actual questing being a pain and a continent that'd been a mystery for years being a boring, flavorless slog? It sounds retarded to say, but it genuinely hurt playing through all of that. If I get back to the game I'm just grabbing a story skip if I can afford it, I never want to see that fucking cat again even with skipping all the cutscenes and without the troon voice.

I originally typed up praise for every expansion and its content, but all this blurb of sperg really needs is this: I think Endwalker should've been split into two expansions so everything would've been paced better and given more depth, but even then it still came together in some way and has moments of brilliance like In From the Cold and the very last solo duty with Zenos. I don't have good things to say about Dawntrail beyond Arcadion almost tempted me to suffer through the rest of the MSQ, Zoraal Ja's JP VA was perfectly casted (too bad Ono's wasted on an shit script!) and Bakool Ja Ja was fun to watch. Everything else was a waste of time, and money too.
I don't expect things to get better for awhile if they do get better, since the patches won't be reflective of any feedback until around .3, but even if they do course correct and stick to it they shouldn't be able to live down fucking this expansion up for a long, long time. Not that more than half of the English-speaking fanbase will hold them to that, of course, have to defend the ugly lion woman's honor and keep up their sub dedicated to staging ugly modbeast Gpose pics.
 
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Gravemind said:
Stormblood WAS bad.

It wasn't THIS bad, though.
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I feel like the difference is that, yeah, stormblood was rough but I still managed to find moments that were genuinely still fun.

Meanwhile DT's MSQ is just irredeemably bad without even minor qualities you can point to as enjoyable.
 
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I've begun the crafting grind, lads.
Time to get lost in the salt mines of overmelding.

Pray for me.
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Stormblood is only bad because it invokes Game of Thrones mode of travel -- ie, everyone is instantly exactly where they need to be to move the plot along.

The buildup, character development, motivation, worldbuilding, antagonists, etc. are like 5 million times better than Dawntrail.

Yeah, pacing is a bit of an issue, but as someone who likes lower stakes type stories (...up until we fight Shinryu...) and is a sucker for the plucky rebels vs monolithic empire type stories, Stormblood is fine.

Baguette Child said:
This point still has me mad even if it's a small thing.

Graha was quite explicitly promised by WoL to come along for our next big adventure in a big emotional moment only for us to leave him on the bench when the next big adventure starts.

What was even the point of that scene? Why even bother setting things up and then not use them? These fucking hacks are so lazy on every level and it's making me bitter.
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Am I dumb? Wasn't Aldazaal's Legacy and/or the EW Alliance Raid Series exactly that?
 
Well Intentioned said:
The buildup, character development, motivation, worldbuilding, antagonists, etc. are like 5 million times better than Dawntrail.
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Zenos was a big positive of Stormblood for me. He’s not necessarily a good villain per se like emet-selch, but he’s a very fun one. The writing team now would have a hard time making a likable character like that.
 
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Soycast Guy said:
Zenos was a big positive of Stormblood for me. He’s not necessarily a good villain per se like emet-selch, but he’s a very fun one. The writing team now would have a hard time making a likable character like that.
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Too bad he barely played a part in Endwalker and the writers forgot about him and decided to give him his shoe-horned in grand death at the very end because they didn't know what the fuck else to do with him.

"Sure kill him off, but at least let him goon for a bit."
 
Dopey Cunt said:
Too bad he barely played a part in Endwalker and the writers forgot about him and decided to give him his shoe-horned in grand death at the very end because they didn't know what the fuck else to do with him.

"Sure kill him off, but at least let him goon for a bit."
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His lack of screentime in EW was more than made up for the extremely kino scene of how he literally butted into the end of the world from the sheer power of autistic fascination with you. Truly the highlight of EW for me.

Also it's funny to watch Stormblood being given the Star Wars prequel treatment in real time. Not that I disagree, mind. I never actally minded Stormblood for most part because it's being carried by the gargantuan shoulders of Gosetsu and Hien, and Lyse wasn't explicitly shoved into your face every minute.
 
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Dopey Cunt said:
I just did the 24 man.
HOLY SHIT IS IT FUN.
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I think the mechanics themselves were pretty good and fun to dodge, but it doesn't really feel like an alliance raid, more like a 24 man trial with some trash mobs. The only alliance based things in the whole raid are the Ark Angel debuffs (funny thing about that is one of the debuffs is called Epic Hero, so there's a title and debuff with the same name) that force you to target different ones, (but that goes away after a while anyway) and the 3 towers on Shadow Lord. It's better than Aglaia though, which only has scales that you will often skip now so it effectively is just a 24 man trial. All the other X.1 ARs had more alliance based stuff so it's a shame we get almost nothing for this one, especially on the adds front, they're just dungeon trash at this point.

As for the actual bosses, Prishe was cool with the wind-up dynamo/chariot and knockback but she doesn't have much going on apart from that.
Fafnir was the easiest and most boring, basically just a first-timer killer where you just dodge the bad.
Ark Angels are the highlight, cool stuff to dodge and interrupts are actually used or you wipe, gives the party a reason to type a quick reminder even if it is only 1 thing.
Shadow Lord was really cool too, first run was a total clusterfuck. Giga Slash filtered casuals hard.
I do feel like they all die way too fast though, 50% or so more HP would be nice. People always complain about Nier raids for bloated HP but even they die a bit too fast for my liking, but they'd prob only need 10-20% more and they'd be fine. This AR repeats less mechs than past ones so longer fights wouldn't be that unwelcome. At the very least, the more involved mechs bode well for future trials and raids.
Welsh Catgirl Enjoyer said:
New extreme is very good imo. Especially if we compare it to last expansion's third extreme. There's a hell of a lot more variety of mechanics in the fight and repeating mechanics is pretty minimal this time round. Endwalker EX3 was a huge disappointment to me because it repeated so early and it didn't have a special "extra thing" like literally every other base expansion ending trial has. The new Extreme has an additional phase at the very end with only a couple mechanics, but still it gives a nice way to round out the trial.

We also don't have Wuk Lamat jumping in at the last 15%, so that's a significant improvement.
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Yeah, It's very cool, better than Vali and Zoraal Ja, too. Absolute Authority is kinda a joke though since you can just stack all the flares together and still live with enough mit for some reason. Earth and Ice phase are cool, kinda wish the wall with holes from the normal was in EX but I'm not sure how you'd make it better than Earth phase currently. PF does box for meteors a lot for some reason despite line meteors being braindead, and I really like the ice bridges despite the constant memes that occur. Shame the ice tethers can just be tank invulned, SE seems to really like making mechs you don't have to interact with at all, but I guess it would be cancer as caster. P2 is a cool last stand type phase too, the robot roar at the start of the phase will never not sound goofy.
Not that interested in mount though so just farming when merc parties are up. I've only seen mount once in 21 runs, it's pretty easy to farm and the mechs are fun to execute when you've got a decent group.

Dungeon was pretty bad apart from the 2nd boss cursor mech-which I always like-and the 3rd boss, which was cool all around. The Byakko Unreal is awful, Tell and Re-Tell done in 2 pulls, just a "look forward to Shinryu and Suzaku" situation. Very much looking forward to the new Ultimate, it'll be baby's first Ultimate clear attempt, so that should be fun. Very close 2nd is the Chaotic but it's so fucking far away and comes out on Christmas Eve so it'll be near impossible to prog on launch. Hoping that I can get the Ultimate done before then but that might be wishful thinking.

New icon for Chaotic is there to tease us, too.
ffxiv_dx11_3lLAG2kPYz.png

Trial icon guy sharpened his teefs.
 
Dopey Cunt said:
I've begun the crafting grind, lads.
Time to get lost in the salt mines of overmelding.

Pray for me.
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Friend, I've been in that grind for weeks. There's something about getting that little symbol next to whatever quest item you're going to overcharge some poor dumb sprout for eventually. I've had more fun with the Crafter Society quests than the actual MSQ.

On that note, I'm proud to say I have finished the GSM/BSM/ARM Shadowbringers deliveries. Currently, my CRP is 93, GSM is 80, and BSM is 51(officially done with ARR questline)
 
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