This is definitely my favourite expansion story so far. While I don't have total brainrot for it, the way others do it and I do other things, the character drama and plot mysteries are gripping. While Emet-Selch's foppery is mostly just kind of annoying, and Vauthry is a horrible trope incarnate, after my complaints about the villains of Stormblood I'm happy to say that I find the main antagonist much more compelling here, in terms of believable yet opposable motivation. Even where some twists were kind of easy to see coming, the fact I was engaged enough to try and predict them, and things were foreshadowed such that I could be correct, is a good sign.

I am not without complaints - the alternate universe aspect seems kind of half-baked. they give all of the races different names, but then just stop there. All sorts of other specific things like speech patterns and distance measurements are exactly the same. It comes off as shallow. Also, Y'shtola's blindness going from a secret she's hiding to something openly acknowledged without any reaction at all from other characters is a huge waste of potential character moments.

The new role quest system is kind of a mixed bag - I totally understand why they didn't want to have to keep writing questlines for every job, and the ability to tell more general stories that still reference your general abilities is really cool. I quite like the use of them to explore the backstories of the Warriors of Darkness. However, the lack of contextualisation for new class skills is a huge letdown. As a Summoner, everything leading up to learning how to summon Bahamut was a huge deal. Here, I just kind of suddenly get Phoenix after doing one too many dungeons, and the reaction is "oh ok cool i guess this is here now".

I wrote most of this review relatively early into the expansion, and as I continue to play I haven't felt much I wanted to add or change. I'm just having a mostly good time!

Don't mind the longer than usual playtime of this one, I stalled out finishing it to prepare for Dawntrail.

(This builds on my reviews of previous expansions)

This one's a bit messy. My thoughts on it evolved a lot as I played through it further, especially through the patch content, so a lot of notes I took earlier on aren't entirely accurate. I've got to try to cobble things together and we'll see if it remains coherent.

While things are not nearly as padded as ARR, the pacing of Stormblood seems like a significant downgrade from Heavensward. A major factor in this is, of course, the split between the two different regions, and Othard itself is diverse enough to slow things down yet more. You need to be introduced to several different locations, several different local cultures, and ingratiate yourself with them through several different rounds of tedious errands. The idea of the Ala Mhigan rebellion suddenly going to pot is an interesting one, but in execution it leads to the pace resetting entirely in Othard, and when you come back all of the consequences have been resolved while you were gone and you pick up exactly where you left off, so the impact is lost.

I'm not a big fan of either of the major villains. Both of them talk up their love for violence/killing/torture as appropriate to a tedious and one-dimensional degree. I get the impression they're supposed to be "love to hate" villains, but it mostly falls flat for me, I just hate to hate them. Zenos' bloodthirsty antics, actively sabotaging his own war just to rile up the WoL, kind of undermine the resistance's agency in their own rebellion narrative, and his attempts to say the player is "just like him" come off incredibly trite.

I find Yotsuyu similarly bland in the main questline, and the flashbacks to her past are poorly timed and come off like a bad sob story, but I do like what they do with her in the patch content, which helps assuage things. Speaking of flashbacks though, I feel like I noticed a greater-than-usual reliance on them (and similarly "meanwhile" cutaways) for storytelling in this expansion, often at times where such explicit detail wasn't necessary.

I ragged on the Scions a bit in my ARR review, and they were absent for a lot of Heavensward, but I'm happy to say they come into their own more here, especially with the help of new additions to the roster.

This is a rather specific nitpick, but musically, the fact that the Stormblood main theme is included in the normal battle theme, dungeon boss theme, and most location themes makes it really oversaturated. It's hard to assign the motif any clear narrative meaning since it's diluted across the expansion's two disparate settings, so it just feels unoriginal.

There's a lot of complaining in this review, but it's not all bad, obviously, it's just when the expansion is one part of a larger package you can only really comment on the differences, and in this case those happen to mostly be a step down.

One minor detail I did really like is how the quests for Aether Currents, rather than being one-off menial tasks as they were when introduced, more often lead into a longer chain of sidequests with an interesting story. That's a clever way to focus the player's attention.