did all the bastok nation quests and the main expansion storyline
cute seeing how ffxiii-2's opening retconning the ending to the previous game has precedent in the franchise. here it's done in an extra funny fashion because the retcon is revealing these weird guys you met during the base game are actually millenia old racists
also cute how openly cute they got with how vague the instructions to some of the missions are, now they say stuff like "it'd be no fun if i told you where it was!" a couple times
the bastok missions introduced in year 2 are a step up writing wise for sure, spending more time with the racism of bastok without doing goofy white saviorisms. it's not incredible but there's a few touching moments and it has more momentum, including in how the missions are designed at large.

the main questline is cool too. of course the zilart could never actually reach their goal for the game to make any sense but there's more of the type of cutscenes i actually enjoyed in the base game (the ones that aren't just capping off the missions), some of the new places are really great, especially starting with the bit where you put the stones in the slots, and there's some cool enemy design, including the crystal bosses who are like evil versions of the 5 player races. of course the pacing is still wonky, especially in that boss rush bit that's got a nonsense amount of walking between fights, and one of those bosses in specific is way harder than the other 4 for no real reason, but it's got actual narrative momentum for a decent amount of stretches. just an all around improvement over the base game content

A good improvement on the base game. I did San d'Oria's questline and the 6-10 missions are a notable step up plot-wise. The main plot is a good continuation off the base game story as well, and continues the threads of characters I was eager to see more of. I think it's still a little more bare story-wise than I'd like but it's better than the base and was interesting enough to keep me invested. Final area provides a good challenge and atmosphere. Some missions are still annoyingly grindy (notably, anything in the Tonberry area, and that one horrible Limit Break quest) but overall I had a good time. Not a huge fan of the jungle zones but they were an interesting try at a different type of map.

Surprised Dragoons only got added in this expansion - they're such a series staple in my mind! Looking forward to Chains of Promathia, which I've heard is incredible.

Note on all expansions: Every part of FFXI takes an enormous hit in my ratings for existing within the god awful, unconscionable interface, code base, and general design philosophies of FFXI. These things are the foundations of the whole game, and thus no expansion can fully escape these sins. Despite this I have chosen to log them all separately because they are each different beasts.

RoZ feels like part of the base game, and in North America apparently it was. It carries forward the same style of long, globetrotting, dungeon diving quests with scant few scraps of story in between. What little there is to the main story looks good on paper and was ambitious for its time, but removed from that era just about all of RoZ's characters ring hollow, and the plot beyond its sheer premise is very simple.

That's not inherently negative. It's perfectly fine to have a light and simple story, even in a Final Fantasy game and especially in an MMO. Besides, beefy extensions to the originally barren nation storylines add quite a bit more. Is it worth putting up with the gameplay to see these stories? No. It's still really, really not... but we'll keep reevaluating that as we go along.

Where the player will find their entertainment (if they find it, of course) is in the grandiosity of the quests and dungeons. It is quite common for RoZ to task the player with reaching the bottom of a huge new table-topily designed dungeon by demystifying its inscrutable laws. As a solo player in 2023 this led to me spending an entire day suffering in the miserable bowels of a Tonberry temple... but does that not qualify as "an adventure?" Much like many of the base game World of Warcraft quests, RoZ succeeds in feeling "epic" in a way that newer entries in the genre seldom ever do, but then again newer entries in the genre include basic game design and usability that are COMPLETELY absent here and aren't built around wasting hundreds upon hundreds of hours of your time. So yeah.

Story-wise it definitely feels more like setup for CoP but a lot of the lore and worldbuilding feels like pretty key buildup to that storyline. The zones added in Zilart feel like they fit in very well with the base-game areas, especially the ones directly connected to the original world, it really helps it feel like an actual expansion, although if you got the game when it released for NA I guess this would have been the version you were already playing. While this could be said for the entire game the music is very chill and atmospheric, and the battle themes are great. The stretch of the final zone is Really Cool in how it's layed out if not also incredibly confusing (fun) once you get into the dungeon proper. Won't comment too much about the gameplay since I didn't play it while it was current and much about the game has changed, but I did try to keep within the level range of the monsters and Bosses/NMs where I could even though I was using trusts the whole time, and I did also do Divine Might for the earring since I needed it lol