Final Fantasy XIV - Kiwi Free Company

[SnowBall]

Personally I think it’s too little too late to kill off a Scion. At this point it would feel like it was done for shock value or because the writers were tired of people begging them to kill one off so they did it solely to stop said begging. Also they never had the balls to kill off any popular Scions. We only lost two major ones and I don’t know about Papylamo but Minfilia was not liked at all outside of gooners and the “if you hate her you’re sexist” crowd.

 

[lolcowtipper]

regardless, killing main characters is generally cheap unless its earned in games like this, they already pulled the heartstrings with Crystal Exarch's not-Death, but don't worry, in long stories like this.. THIS is about the point someone dies off or gets seperated from the cast for good.

People saying the death needs to be a scion forget Haurchefant was introduced and died in Heavensward. You can whinge about how his death has been a dead horse beaten since then, but at the time it was very effective. I'm one of only 10 people who care about Moenbryda and she only lasted a few patches.

Imo, I think the twins could just get shipped off to college at this point and then we could get a fun reintroduction to them in a couple patches and they're suddenly full grown elezen.

 

[Troon Whisperer]

Imo, I think the twins could just get shipped off to college at this point and then we could get a fun reintroduction to them in a couple patches and they're suddenly full grown elezen.

The twins should have spent all of Dawntrail helping Garlemald rebuild, like they said they were going to at the end of Endwalker, rather than constantly popping back and forth. Then they could re-introduce them in this upcoming patch where funky stuff is happening in Garlemald.

Fortunately Thancred and Urianger have fucked off somewhere and haven't been seen for a while, and Estinien is off murderhobo'ing until Tataru yanks on his chain.

 

[Setzer Gabbiani]

People saying the death needs to be a scion forget Haurchefant was introduced and died in Heavensward. You can whinge about how his death has been a dead horse beaten since then, but at the time it was very effective. I'm one of only 10 people who care about Moenbryda and she only lasted a few patches.

Moen...my daring. Got to love a woman with muscles and brains.

 

[Pigeon Enthusiast]

Makes me wonder if it's a foreign thing since the British cast seem to love the characters and the fanbase way more than the American VAs do.

I think it is a consequence of the sort of VAs being hired on different sides of the pond.

The likes of Jonathan Bailey or Gideon Emery being hired on the British side of things are serious, trained, actors with real dramatic chops and strong resumes before coming to this game. They are more invested in what they do and the characters they play.

Meanwhile the US studio pulls literal whos like Sena Bryer and random anime dubbers, who... I'm sure they try to play their roles well, but there's a very different culture they are coming from.

Just speculating, though.

 

[Zenos Yae Viator]

People saying the death needs to be a scion forget Haurchefant was introduced and died in Heavensward. You can whinge about how his death has been a dead horse beaten since then, but at the time it was very effective. I'm one of only 10 people who care about Moenbryda and she only lasted a few patches.

Imo, I think the twins could just get shipped off to college at this point and then we could get a fun reintroduction to them in a couple patches and they're suddenly full grown elezen.

Haurchefant was introduced in ARR

 

[King Of Braves]

Haurchefant was introduced in ARR

Yeah he's literally one of the first NPCs you interact with in Heavensward because ARR basically ends in his office from what I remember.

 

[Setzer Gabbiani]

Yeah he's literally one of the first NPCs you interact with in Heavensward because ARR basically ends in his office from what I remember.

He is, it does, and if I recall he's in charge of that area when you are doing quests there during ARR.

 

[Lou's Sentient Backfat]

He is, it does, and if I recall he's in charge of that area when you are doing quests there during ARR.

You save him from being Inquisitioned during the Coerthas zone story in ARR, that's why he becomes your bro for life in HW.

 

[Fcret]

Makes me wonder if it's a foreign thing since the British cast seem to love the characters and the fanbase way more than the American VAs do.

The British VAs all come from theater and shit. Much smaller, less well-compensated community so the gratitude for a consistent role that raises your profile is higher. Game and anime voice roles in the US pay a lot and the people are all in a weird incestuous polycule where none of them actually has to seriously look for work because the guy who nutted in them two days ago can always get them a role.

It's crazy because there is definitely some insane pool of voice talent in the US that isn't overflowing with shitheads but it's not in California and it's not union shit so all of the studios refuse to touch it.

 

[Abbadon's Gate]

well remember his, arc was also stop trying to make the big sacrifice and die because he thought so little of himself.

the real answer is Y'shtola or Thancred, Y'shtola because her blind aether eye strain was flagged forever ago as a possible issue, and Thancred because he's basically ran to the end of his natural progression.

They don't need to kill Thancred, but they could critically injure his ass so he can't tank anymore and retire him to the first where he can spend the rest of his days helping out his surrogat daughter and I think you could clear the board with him. You'd still have people talking about how much he sacrificed, give him the chance to go out on his shield, and catch the wave of people who want to see that Father/Daughter dynamic captured in a Video Game.

Hell if you really wanna go for the full experience, make Memphila barefoot so that Null can have a twitter melty about how it of all things in FFXIV is secretly gooner coded and made to degrade the white race.

 

[Sheep King]

I think all of the Scions have undergone their journeys at this point except Y'shtola who never had an arc in the first place.

If they try and use them for smaller personal parts in the MSQ like that part in DT where we ride a gondola with G'raha, it feels like a waste of time. If they try and give them a big transformation, it trivialises what they went through up to Endwalker. Alphinaud is like 16 and has already gone through so much shit nothing will realistically make him change aside from throwing him off a cliff or getting his dick wet.

The ideal would be to maybe bring one Scion along for future expacs to fill duty support and act as the WoL's voice, and maybe use optional raids to give them side stories the same way they used to use Cid, rather than having them get in the way of the MSQ.

 

[lolcowtipper]

Haurchefant was introduced in ARR

Man some of those quests feel like such a blur in retrospect. I even questioned if I was right but shrugged it off. Regardless, it's not like he was around for several expacs before killing him off.

 

[Dread First]

I remember Final Fantasy XIV on launch back in 2010 being abject rubbish, and then coming back to it in 2018 adoring the shit out of my Marauder -> Warrior and Thief -> Ninja characters in A Realm Reborn... then I exhausted myself by the time Heavensward started and I just stopped caring. FF14 is honestly the most fun I ever had playing a (technically) mainline Final Fantasy game since OG FFX way back in my teen years. I wonder how my observations from back then hold up today?

a) #LIMSAGANG. Best city in the entire game for a noob... except those bots in the town square who are all catgirl avatars that keep dancing.

b) Famfrit >>> Brynhildr by leaps and bounds. Idk what the fuck them niggas on Brynhildr were on, but it's so obvious that people from Brynhildr just got carried the whole way through and couldn't do any dungeon segments with randos via matchmaking.

c) What the fuck is up with FF14's entire combat shtick boiling all dungeons and raids down to 2 DPS, 1 Tank, 1 Healer? I know niggas were calling ARR "weebshit World of Warcraft" but I never expected the comparison to run that deep. So many iconic jobs like Thief -> Ninja are basically suboptimal DPS and take forever to get matches... but then my Marauder -> Warrior was able to get matches left and right because he's a tank. Sucks to have like 60-70% of the most iconic jobs in FF history to basically get pigeonholed as subpar DPS.

d) Ul'Dah and Gridania didn't spark joy for me when I was playing. Desert merchant city's colour scheme reminded me too much of Ailing Loran from Bloodborne, and Gridania just felt like an idyllic starting village from any of the older Final Fantasy games like Cornelia, Altair, Ur, and so on. Not bad, but it felt like I already saw this before.

e) The story progression tracker is both a huge blessing and a huge curse. A huge blessing because it explicitly outlines every single task you need to do, a huge curse because it just keeps going... and going... and going until such a point comes where it's like "dude, I need to put this down... I need a break" and then I'm not sure what to do for "fun." I'm a RuneScape kid through and through; I eschewed questing wholesale for skilling. There's definitely an equipment crafting system, I remember fiddling with the artisan classes in Limsa like Blacksmithing, but to that end? I have no fucking clue how to do an FF14 Ironman build, and I'm not even sure in the slightest if I want to do that.

f) piggybacking off the story tracker: I feel like it detracts from keeping track of the plot because in my head, I wasn't really concerned with the storytelling so much as I was "getting that annoying quest marker in the upper left of my screen to go the fuck away."

g) Dudes wanna talk mad shit about RuneScape's Evolution of Combat in 2012 being button mashing mania. That ain't untrue, but ho-lee fuck was Ninja basically an exercise in button mashing until I got the right combination for my jutsus, no wait I mean hand signs, no wait I mean mudras. Related: the UI in A Realm Reborn didn't exactly feel "intuitive" to modify. It wasn't until I stopped playing on my PS4 and moved over to the Steam version when I was finally able to modify my UI accordingly, but even then, a far cry from World of Warcraft's polish or RuneScape 3's sheer granularity.

h) Apparently there's a whole ass dysfunctional late game meta where there's like a literal housing crisis in FF14, botting/macroing/autoing, and a robust black market for in-game currencies, items, and of course "real estate." Never got that far, and frankly, I don't think I have the mental acuity.

 

[Well Intentioned]

I wonder how my observations from back then hold up today?

- Limsa is basically the troon/gooner hangout spot. Best avoided if you can help it.
-No idea about Primal DC. Aether generally became the high end/raider DC.
- Holy trinity (tank/dps/healer) and DPS having wait issues is a problem for virtually every MMO
- Bloodborne comparison for Ul'dah is interesting but kind of apt if you delve into the history between it and its sister city. The aesthetics for Gridania/Ul'dah are appropriate for the biomes theyr'e in, IMO, and stereotypical fantasy aesthetics is fine.
- The story does drag in ARR and gets better, but the fact you have to go through the whole thing to unlock all content is an issue, yeah.
- There has been like a supplemental guide players can refer to for plot points, and that thing in the top left will never go away.
- A lot of those issues stem from XIV being both console and PC. The GCD is actually slower compared to other MMOs and took some adjusting to for myself.
- That's both true but also not really relevant. Yeah, there are issues with botting and plugins, and there's generally a controversy whenever the high end progression races crop up. The housing crisis is kind of a thing because they created a finite number of houses and there are people who have bought up large swathes of plots for themselves. No real black market as most of the currencies in game are either bound to the character or virtually worthless. There are Paypal clears you can buy, but those types are pretty easy to suss out.

 

[Dread First]

- Limsa is basically the troon/gooner hangout spot. Best avoided if you can help it.

I didn't know that until like... 2023ish when there was that PG lolcow community thread for FF14. I just went with Limsa because one of my buddies from college said that it was cool as hell, and he started there too. I loved the Thief -> Ninja and Marauder -> Warrior pipelines, the scenery was friggin awesome to my untrained eyes, and I loved the "outskirts" of Limsa that I could skulk about in, with or without the aid of a chocobo. I never liked the catgirl/catman race to begin with because it was just waifu bait to me, so I just went with a normal human.

 

[Tanner Glass]

Wasn't it confirmed FFXIV is doing its own thing? There are visible differences between it's version of Ivalice and the OG.

FFXIV did the same thing in Ivalice as it did with every other version of the FF crossovers, where in "It's the same, but different because of <x>"

The main "twist" is Ivalice canonically goes FF12 -> 1,200 years -> FFT, where FFT's "ruined advanced culture" is the one from FF12 - Where as FFXIV has FFT as happening in the ancient past but has FF12 Characters (as well as Dalmasca's Imperial Occupation) in the current year.

You see this with the FF6 references also. In the City of Doma for example - in FF6, the city is lost when then Imperal Mage Kefka poisions the water supply, killing nearly everyone save for a single Samurai who takes revenge against the same empire where as in FFXIV an Imperial Warrior (Zenos) kills their King in a duel, leaving Hein as the Samurai who will (eventually) take up arms against empire. They also do the cheeky thing of naming Hien's dad "Kaien" (after the FF6 character) and in FF6 Kaien's son is name Hein.

I am a little confused by the decisions shown in this slide.

View attachment 8913841

Paladin is the job that has passage of arms, and utility actions meant to support allies. Why wouldn't it have been picked for the OT category given those stated criteria instead of... y'know, Warrior? The largely selfish tank job?

I'd imagine it's a simple as
Main Tank -> Has a shield in the Offhand and
Off Tank -> Has a two handed weapon instead

It'd imagine they're going do the "Reborn" focus around PLD and ShieldJob2 having small-window reactive skills that give some kind of bonus on successes where as Warrior/DRK/GNB will get more raid-wide or single-target helpful skills (things like WAR's Shake it Off or Nascent Flash). I'd imagine that PLD/SJ2 will have skills (including Passage of Arms) that focus on Mitigation where as WAR/DRK/GNB will have skills that focus around healing/recovery instead - with some spillover to not force people out of their preferred class.

I'd also imagine they're moving away from the Dungeon Meta of every tank having the exact same mitigation tools they click largely in order without ever thinking about it (Rampart, then Small One, then Big One, with Quick one every time it's off CD, then Rampart -> Repeat) into something more engaging. No idea how it turns out, but, I'd imagine something like WoW tried to do with WOTLK tanking/ "active mitigation" without all of the hilarious issues caused by scaling.

 

[BlazikenLover]

I hope the battlepass encourages people to do raids (alliance and normal) more, because it is an absolute nightmare anytime I wanna go back and complete one of the raid storylines I have pending. I am in aether and alliance raid queues can take anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes

 

[Not your Buddy Holly]

I hope the battlepass encourages people to do raids (alliance and normal) more, because it is an absolute nightmare anytime I wanna go back and complete one of the raid storylines I have pending. I am in aether and alliance raid queues can take anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes

all this time and everyone still bitches about Crystal Tower being the only fucking thing people unlocked, they really should just bite the bullet and make all the Alliance raids mandatory. They figured it out with the trials series, but refused to do it for Alliance raids.

 

[Agarathium1066]

all this time and everyone still bitches about Crystal Tower being the only fucking thing people unlocked, they really should just bite the bullet and make all the Alliance raids mandatory. They figured it out with the trials series, but refused to do it for Alliance raids.

Its what they did to make CT so ubiquitous. If you wanted to do the SHB story you had to do Crystal Tower so you had an idea who the fuck G'raha even was. Though with others you'll then be forced to do a crossover with Nier and now Evangelion later on.

I don't think they've bothered making the alliance raids relevant to the main story again because of CT.