With Shadowbringers, FFXIV has not only finally, unquestionably earned its place among the "real" Final Fantasy games, it may have proven itself to be the best one.
A Realm Reborn (and 1.0 before it) presented a trite, threadbare narrative which gave a player little to latch onto at best, and bored them to tears at worst. Heavensward offered something much more engaging, but required the player to fight through walls of archaic prose, and many players would need to unlearn their base-game habits of ignoring such things. Stormblood rolled out every trope in the book to create a fun, simple, and effective story. After ARR's tedium and the alienatingly high fantasy of Heavensward, it was exactly what the game needed.
Shadowbringers, by contrast, has it all. The slow burn of three games worth of character development from its cast means Shadowbringers doesn't have to try very hard to get the player invested in those characters, but it does a damn fine job of it anyway. It's astounding what a new wardrobe and change of environment can do for an old face. Shadowbringers is a much needed break from the ever-present Empire saga, and everything new that Shadowbringers puts on the player's table is divine.
Shadowbringers continues a consistent patch cycle that puts virtually every other MMO to shame. I can name a handful of disastrous WoW patches off the top of my head that were released in bizarre, half-formed states, or simply never showed up at all. Every FFXIV expansion has had almost exactly the same amount of content, and it has always satisfied.
At time of writing, without having touched any of Endwalker's content yet, I truly believe that Shadowbringers is the best expansion that any game has ever had. Even Wrath of the Lich King, WoW at its absolute zenith, was a series of peaks and valleys.
Whether played as an MMO or taken alone as a single player JRPG, Shadowbringers delivers everything it could ever have promised.
A Realm Reborn (and 1.0 before it) presented a trite, threadbare narrative which gave a player little to latch onto at best, and bored them to tears at worst. Heavensward offered something much more engaging, but required the player to fight through walls of archaic prose, and many players would need to unlearn their base-game habits of ignoring such things. Stormblood rolled out every trope in the book to create a fun, simple, and effective story. After ARR's tedium and the alienatingly high fantasy of Heavensward, it was exactly what the game needed.
Shadowbringers, by contrast, has it all. The slow burn of three games worth of character development from its cast means Shadowbringers doesn't have to try very hard to get the player invested in those characters, but it does a damn fine job of it anyway. It's astounding what a new wardrobe and change of environment can do for an old face. Shadowbringers is a much needed break from the ever-present Empire saga, and everything new that Shadowbringers puts on the player's table is divine.
Shadowbringers continues a consistent patch cycle that puts virtually every other MMO to shame. I can name a handful of disastrous WoW patches off the top of my head that were released in bizarre, half-formed states, or simply never showed up at all. Every FFXIV expansion has had almost exactly the same amount of content, and it has always satisfied.
At time of writing, without having touched any of Endwalker's content yet, I truly believe that Shadowbringers is the best expansion that any game has ever had. Even Wrath of the Lich King, WoW at its absolute zenith, was a series of peaks and valleys.
Whether played as an MMO or taken alone as a single player JRPG, Shadowbringers delivers everything it could ever have promised.