Rowan1312
2020
I'm terrified of death.
I have so far been incredibly lucky and have never had anyone close to me die. But I know that one day that will change and I am scared of that.
I am also scared of my own death.
But this game has made me slightly less afraid of death.
I have so far been incredibly lucky and have never had anyone close to me die. But I know that one day that will change and I am scared of that.
I am also scared of my own death.
But this game has made me slightly less afraid of death.
I love Final Fantasy music so obviously I'm gonna at least somewhat enjoy a Final Fantasy rhythm game.
The rhythm game itself is kinda weird at first but cool, I just don't really vibe with any of the difficulty options for most songs.
The rest of the game (the fighting monsters and leveling up stuff) is kinda weird and feels a bit pointless.
The track and character selection is far from perfect but aside from XIV it's fine.
For XIV it's awful though. I've seen reviews saying that there's too much XIV which is just absurd to me. That's 5 entire games! (or 4 I guess since they didn't bother with Endwalker, don't come at my about the release date, Endwalker was released months before Strangers of Paradise)
I will agree that maybe there was a bit much ARR but there are 4 entire tracks for Shadowbringers and Stormblood each, that is, imo, unacceptable for one of the most successful games in the series.
Also the selection of characters from XIV just being the same characters as from the arcade game from 2016 is such a massive disrespect.
Despite all of what I just mentioned the game would have still been a great game if it wasn't for the fact that long songs are cut down. At least make it an option to play the full length songs if you don't want to "force" (most songs that would have been long aren't required to unlock anything major) people to play all 17 minutes of Dancing Mad.
Especially Answers being cut down to three minutes(!) feels like a final spit in the face of XIV.
The rhythm game itself is kinda weird at first but cool, I just don't really vibe with any of the difficulty options for most songs.
The rest of the game (the fighting monsters and leveling up stuff) is kinda weird and feels a bit pointless.
The track and character selection is far from perfect but aside from XIV it's fine.
For XIV it's awful though. I've seen reviews saying that there's too much XIV which is just absurd to me. That's 5 entire games! (or 4 I guess since they didn't bother with Endwalker, don't come at my about the release date, Endwalker was released months before Strangers of Paradise)
I will agree that maybe there was a bit much ARR but there are 4 entire tracks for Shadowbringers and Stormblood each, that is, imo, unacceptable for one of the most successful games in the series.
Also the selection of characters from XIV just being the same characters as from the arcade game from 2016 is such a massive disrespect.
Despite all of what I just mentioned the game would have still been a great game if it wasn't for the fact that long songs are cut down. At least make it an option to play the full length songs if you don't want to "force" (most songs that would have been long aren't required to unlock anything major) people to play all 17 minutes of Dancing Mad.
Especially Answers being cut down to three minutes(!) feels like a final spit in the face of XIV.
2021
This game is conceptually awesome! Everyone (including you) is dying and you have to save them and yourself!
It’s made even better by the addition of Meteor Dust, a resource you can find all around the world.
You can use it to extend the lifespan of any android by 24 hours. This decision of “Which of the NPCs do you want to save? Or do you want to help yourself?” would already be really interesting but it’s made even better by the third option of spending the dust for an additional syringe, making the game much easier.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t really care about most of the NPCs. They were mostly just… there. I was doing my own thing, exploring the world and doing the dungeons, while they were slowly dying in the village.
It’s made even better by the addition of Meteor Dust, a resource you can find all around the world.
You can use it to extend the lifespan of any android by 24 hours. This decision of “Which of the NPCs do you want to save? Or do you want to help yourself?” would already be really interesting but it’s made even better by the third option of spending the dust for an additional syringe, making the game much easier.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t really care about most of the NPCs. They were mostly just… there. I was doing my own thing, exploring the world and doing the dungeons, while they were slowly dying in the village.
2012
Note: This is a review of only the port. For my thoughts on the game itself, see here
This port is straight up garbage. I can’t think of a single good thing to say about it.
The controls are awful. Arrow keys, x, c, v, and b are somewhat reasonable I guess if a bit unusual. But the insert key??? At least you can rebind it, or better yet, use a gamepad like originally intended. Oh wait nevermind, on a gamepad, you can only use the joystick for directions, not the dpad which makes menu navigation nigh-impossible. How do you even screw this up, the PSX controller didn’t even have a joystick.
The cloud save system is bad. Why did I need to log in with my Square Enix ID for this? At least I already had one from playing XIV, I’d imagine there’s a large amount of people that had to create one just for this. Weirdness with the system cost me multiple hours of progress. Steam already has a cloud save system, why not use that?
You can’t tab out of the game. On my desktop pc, tabbing out pauses the game so I couldn’t check discord while waiting for knights of the round. On my laptop, tabbing out crashes the game.
This port costs 13€. That’s pretty expensive for a 25-year-old game (for comparison, Doom 64, released in the same year, costs 5€), even ignoring all the issues I already mentioned. So, what does it add to justify this price tag? An update to the menus, bringing them to modern standards? A new localization, or at least one that doesn’t contain the R slur? A speed up button, like the PS4 and Switch port do? Nope. Nothing.
The only reason I played this port was that I could access it for free through steam library sharing with my partner, so it was slightly more convenient than emulation.
Please don’t buy this port. FFVII is an amazing game, but there are other ways to play it.
This port is straight up garbage. I can’t think of a single good thing to say about it.
The controls are awful. Arrow keys, x, c, v, and b are somewhat reasonable I guess if a bit unusual. But the insert key??? At least you can rebind it, or better yet, use a gamepad like originally intended. Oh wait nevermind, on a gamepad, you can only use the joystick for directions, not the dpad which makes menu navigation nigh-impossible. How do you even screw this up, the PSX controller didn’t even have a joystick.
The cloud save system is bad. Why did I need to log in with my Square Enix ID for this? At least I already had one from playing XIV, I’d imagine there’s a large amount of people that had to create one just for this. Weirdness with the system cost me multiple hours of progress. Steam already has a cloud save system, why not use that?
You can’t tab out of the game. On my desktop pc, tabbing out pauses the game so I couldn’t check discord while waiting for knights of the round. On my laptop, tabbing out crashes the game.
This port costs 13€. That’s pretty expensive for a 25-year-old game (for comparison, Doom 64, released in the same year, costs 5€), even ignoring all the issues I already mentioned. So, what does it add to justify this price tag? An update to the menus, bringing them to modern standards? A new localization, or at least one that doesn’t contain the R slur? A speed up button, like the PS4 and Switch port do? Nope. Nothing.
The only reason I played this port was that I could access it for free through steam library sharing with my partner, so it was slightly more convenient than emulation.
Please don’t buy this port. FFVII is an amazing game, but there are other ways to play it.
1997
Final Fantasy VII had a lot to work against if it wanted to convince me to like it. The port I played is awful (read more about that here), I had almost every plot point spoiled ahead of time, and this was the first game in my series playthrough that wasn’t a remaster so no fancy new stuff like a menu system that doesn’t cause physical pain to use or a graphical update. And of course, the game’s reputation. Saying it’s the most famous Final Fantasy game is an understatement. It’s equivalent to Final Fantasy to many people. And there was just no way for the game to be good enough for me to think it deserves that reputation.
There is a lot about this game that I dislike.
Everything takes so long. You move so slowly; sprinting is basically mandatory. Everything about combat takes forever.
Combat isn’t particularly interesting either. The Materia system is better than the Magicite system of VI, but worse than the job systems of III and V. It’s also absurdly easy, including the final boss but excluding the superbosses which are so difficult that they suck as well. Also, ATB combat where the animations are so long that it’s essentially just turn-based combat sucks.
I didn’t enjoy a single one of the minigames.
The game has 9 characters and apart from a few sections where I was forced to use or not use certain characters, I had the same party of Cloud/Tifa/Barret the entire time. And why wouldn’t I, every character is mechanically almost identical. In my FFVI review I jokingly wrote “If you’re a fan of JRPGs, don’t play this game because it will make you question why other games of the genre don’t let you use most of your characters” and… yeah. Though the game does have one advantage over the party system of VI, each line is actually said by a specific character now.
And yet I love this game. I do think that if more people played other Final Fantasy games it wouldn’t be the favourite of quite so many people but if you played a couple of other FFs and say that this one is your favourite I can totally understand why.
It has a decent main story but that’s not really what this game is about.
It’s about Cloud’s journey. Him discovering his past, coming to terms with his identity, and coping with the grief. And it’s about his relationship to Aerith and Tifa. And while parts of it could be executed better, especially with some more time spent on them, I think the overall execution of this was excellent. I don’t think I have ever played a game that was such a thorough character study and it was amazing.
And yet, despite this heavy stuff, it isn’t afraid to be silly sometimes. Two things that particularly stuck with me are the pilot on the Highwind that keeps leveling up all of the silly enemies like the Hell House
The music is also great, obviously. However, there are many scenes that were just silent that really could have benefitted from some music and also, I wish there were some more unique battle themes.
There is a lot about this game that I dislike.
Everything takes so long. You move so slowly; sprinting is basically mandatory. Everything about combat takes forever.
Combat isn’t particularly interesting either. The Materia system is better than the Magicite system of VI, but worse than the job systems of III and V. It’s also absurdly easy, including the final boss but excluding the superbosses which are so difficult that they suck as well. Also, ATB combat where the animations are so long that it’s essentially just turn-based combat sucks.
I didn’t enjoy a single one of the minigames.
The game has 9 characters and apart from a few sections where I was forced to use or not use certain characters, I had the same party of Cloud/Tifa/Barret the entire time. And why wouldn’t I, every character is mechanically almost identical. In my FFVI review I jokingly wrote “If you’re a fan of JRPGs, don’t play this game because it will make you question why other games of the genre don’t let you use most of your characters” and… yeah. Though the game does have one advantage over the party system of VI, each line is actually said by a specific character now.
And yet I love this game. I do think that if more people played other Final Fantasy games it wouldn’t be the favourite of quite so many people but if you played a couple of other FFs and say that this one is your favourite I can totally understand why.
It has a decent main story but that’s not really what this game is about.
It’s about Cloud’s journey. Him discovering his past, coming to terms with his identity, and coping with the grief. And it’s about his relationship to Aerith and Tifa. And while parts of it could be executed better, especially with some more time spent on them, I think the overall execution of this was excellent. I don’t think I have ever played a game that was such a thorough character study and it was amazing.
And yet, despite this heavy stuff, it isn’t afraid to be silly sometimes. Two things that particularly stuck with me are the pilot on the Highwind that keeps leveling up all of the silly enemies like the Hell House
The music is also great, obviously. However, there are many scenes that were just silent that really could have benefitted from some music and also, I wish there were some more unique battle themes.
Haven't played this in a while so I could be entirely wrong but:
a) Why even have objectives? It feels like every single game is decided by elemination
b) jfc that ttk is way too short
c) just be honest and make new operators only available through microtransactions. My dad played this for multiple hours each day back in 2016 and he could barely afford one new operator whenever 2 new ones came out.
a) Why even have objectives? It feels like every single game is decided by elemination
b) jfc that ttk is way too short
c) just be honest and make new operators only available through microtransactions. My dad played this for multiple hours each day back in 2016 and he could barely afford one new operator whenever 2 new ones came out.
If you enjoy Stranger of Paradise because you can tailor your build to the challenges you're facing or because it has super rough fights that you go in over and over again, dying dozens of times but you can just keep trying so it's cool then you're gonna hate this dlc as much as I do
2021
Incredibly fun, so many broken and ridicilous combos and getting another upgrade whenever you lose ensures that even losing is fun
What did you do to my Paladin
This review contains spoilers
Cw: Discussions of real-life genocide
This “review” contains heavy spoilers up to and including EW Level 83 but nothing beyond that. It’s also not really a review as much as it is an in-depth analysis of a small part of the game. If you want to know my opinion on the game, read my other review.
I’m German. The nation-state that claims sovereignty over the territory I live in is a direct successor to the Greater German Reich, more commonly known as Nazi Germany, one of (if not the) most oppressive and genocidal nations to ever exist.
From a pretty young age, I’ve been taught about the history of the Nazis. Their crimes, how they came into power, how universal their hold on the German population was. But there is one thing you’re not really taught about in German schools: What happened after the Nazis?
Denazification was a set of policies by the Allied and Soviet forces that aimed to free Austria and Germany from all influences of national socialism. The most famous part of this were the Nuremberg trials, but the largest parts were getting rid of government officials with Nazi sympathies, a ban on Nazi writings and symbols, that sort of stuff. If you see a German street named after a person who lived in the 20th century, there’s a very high chance it was called the Hitler or Goebbels street until 1945.
Denazification was only a partial success. National socialism was everywhere for 12 years, it was deeply ingrained into every part of German society. Getting rid of it entirely would have been a lot of work. And also, the Germans didn’t really like this, and the cold war was more important now and everyone wanted Germany as an ally.
I mentioned earlier that I was taught about the history of the Nazis. My grandparents weren’t. They grew up in a period where people were too ashamed of what happened to talk to their children about it. I barely know what my great-grandparents did, but I don’t really need to be told either (except for one of my great-grandfathers, he was a young engineer in east Prussia when the Red Army came and recruited him to keep their Distillery repaired, and he learned a great recipe for Pelmeni there that my family still uses).
And I wasn’t really taught everything either. I was taught about the Holocaust against the Jewish people, but the genocide against Romani, disabled, and queer people barely got mentioned. Of course this is in part because the amount of people murdered in each of those groups doesn’t even come close to the amount of Jewish people murdered and I’m not trying to accuse any of my teachers of anything, but it’s also worth mentioning that those three groups still face legal discrimination today (not saying there’s no discrimination against Jewish people of course).
Every now and then there are stories about nation socialist police group chats or soldiers, and nobody is really all that surprised. Last month, a group of Reichsbürger, members of an ideology that refuses to acknowledge that the German Reich is no longer legitimate, were raided for planning a coup. Among them were members of the 4th strongest political party in Germany right now. This barely changed anything about their poll results.
What happened after the Nazis? They're still everywhere.
Garlemald is not a 1 to 1 analogy of any real empire, and I appreciate that a lot, it makes the worldbuilding a lot more interesting. It does, however, have obvious influences. The Roman empire is the obvious main one, but so is fascism. While it doesn’t always politically fit the definition of fascism, the aesthetic inspiration should be obvious to everyone.
I think the writers didn’t really know what to do with Garlemald after the end of the Stormblood Main Scenario. You had already won 2 pretty spectacular victories over the empire, but it’s a massive empire and it doesn’t just disappear from that. But in patch 4.2 we are introduced to the Popularis, a faction of pacifists that want to stop the empire’s conquest. While it turns out that the leader of the group you met was a fraud and a traitor, the Popularis themselves are shown to be genuine. Their leader, Maxima, even defects from the Empire to help you.
But the Popularis never achieve anything. There’s lines here and there about Empire leadership trying to get rid of them but for the most part they’re irrelevant for the story from now on.
Then we find out that the Empire is just a tool. It wasn’t created by the Garlean Solus Galvus to bring peace and security to his people (which, to be clear, would obviously still not justify an empire) but by the Ascian Emet-Selch, as a tool to hasten the return of his god Zodiark. The Empire’s goal of bringing peace and stability is the opposite of why it exists. It exists to destabilize the world so that more calamities can happen. That’s why “Solus” hadn’t chosen an heir. The ensuing civil war was a feature, not a bug.
But the new emperor is different! Varis isn’t an Ascian and he fully believes in the empire’s stated goal of bringing peace to the world (which, to reiterate, absolutely still makes him a villain). Or so one might be tempted to think. There is a cutscene in I think 4.5 where Varis talks to the various alliance readers and basically tells them “Yes, I also hate the Ascians, but the way to defeat them is to do exactly what they want”. I didn’t mention this in my Stormblood review because it didn’t feel relevant at the time but looking back it really shows that the empire’s role as a plot device supersedes any development that could be happening there.
Throughout 5.0 the Empire exists mainly to threaten the release of Black Rose and then at the end, Zenos (who came back for SOME FUCKING REASON) kills his father, the Emperor. There would be no winners in the coming civil war, in part thanks to Fandaniel’s meddling, but in part also because Empires can not last forever. By the time Endwalker starts, the nation of Garlemald is no more.
After figuring out a way to deal with the tower of the Telophoroi that have been popping up all over the world, the Ilsabard Contingent gets sent out to what used to be the capital of the Garlean Empire. They have two goals there: Deal with the Tower of Babil, which seems to be a central piece in the Telophoroi’s plans, and
Help the people of Garlemald.
As I hopefully made very clear in the opening of this text, dealing with the survivors of a nation with violent, racist, authoritarian, and imperialist ideals is incredibly difficult. I personally do not know how to do it. And I don’t think a Final Fantasy game is the right medium to explore a question like this.
I mentioned that after 12 years, national socialism had ingrained itself into every part of German society. The Garlean Empire existed for over 60 years. When you arrive there to help the starving and freezing Garleans, they despise you.
At first, you try to help a small group of civilians. They make it very clear that they do not trust you and that they do not want the help of a savage like you. At some point, one of them attacks Alphinaud, one of your closest friends, and yet the game never asks, “do these people deserve our help?”. It instead asks, “Are we like invaders for doing this”.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of radical hope and redemption, but at the same time, I’m a queer person. If a person that has declared their hatred for me and suddenly they need help, I’m not going to put myself in a vulnerable position to help them on the off chance that me helping them changes their mind and they suddenly don’t want to kill me anymore. And yet the game forced me to do exactly that. And don’t try to justify this by saying that FFXIV has always been about helping or seeing the good in everyone or something like that, we’ve been killing Garlean soldiers since ARR.
The story of “helping” these people ends with one of them hating you so much that she runs away from you and dies. Good riddance. The game frames this as a sad thing, but I hope you’ll forgive me if I shed no tears for the people who tried to kill my friends.
After that, you run into a Garlean soldier who tried to steal food from you. He tells you that his legion is still around so you get sent with him to negotiate getting them some help, because apparently we’re so much into helping now, we’ll even help armies that are at war with us. It goes about as well as you might have predicted. Alphinaud and Alisaie get taken hostage and their Legatus talks to you about how your dream of peace through harmony and multiculturalism can never be achieved and how everyone needs to be united under Garlemald to achieve peace. Even with the capital in ruins and his soldiers freezing around him, he still believes in the lies of the Empire.
Eventually there is a fight that breaks out between this legion and your allies, a fight that ends as soon as the legion learns that they are literally the very last remaining people fighting for Garlemald. Now it has finally sunk in that they’re not going to win. Their leader kills himself (which the game frames as tragic LMAO) and the others get your help. Not because they ask for it, or acknowledge their weakness or anything like that, but because they’re too weak to resist anymore. In the end, you despite everything, you don’t win because you were more kind. You won because you were more powerful.
I haven’t done any patch content yet so apologies if this gets brought up there, but nothing that happened in the MSQ addressed how the Garleans will move on past the empire. All it did was show just how deeply ingrained the empire’s ideology is everywhere. And then it just expects you to move on from that, go and save the world.
What will Garlemald look like in 80 years? Will the people there wonder what their grandparents were doing during the days of the Empire? Will there be people arguing over whether the Garleans have done “enough apologizing” and need to get back to being proud of their heritage? Will there even be any apologizing? There certainly wasn’t from Japan.
This part of the MSQ opens a massive can of worms, then refuses to deal with that and tells you to move on. Nobody would have complained if the can of worms just hadn’t been brought up at all. I haven’t even gotten into the awful and frankly pointless body swap thing that happens immediately after this because it doesn’t really belong to this (that’s how pointless and out of place it is) but combining it with this awful and surface-level exploration of what to do with the survivors of an authoritarian state makes this my least favourite stretch of all of Final Fantasy XIV.
Last month I saw a reddit post pointing out that the soldiers at the Garlean consulate in Thavnair still call you a savage after beating Endwalker. People thought this was a funny example of them not updating NPC dialogue to reflect changes in the world, but I disagreed. Why wouldn’t they call you a savage anymore? It’s pretty obvious they still consider you to be one.
This “review” contains heavy spoilers up to and including EW Level 83 but nothing beyond that. It’s also not really a review as much as it is an in-depth analysis of a small part of the game. If you want to know my opinion on the game, read my other review.
I’m German. The nation-state that claims sovereignty over the territory I live in is a direct successor to the Greater German Reich, more commonly known as Nazi Germany, one of (if not the) most oppressive and genocidal nations to ever exist.
From a pretty young age, I’ve been taught about the history of the Nazis. Their crimes, how they came into power, how universal their hold on the German population was. But there is one thing you’re not really taught about in German schools: What happened after the Nazis?
Denazification was a set of policies by the Allied and Soviet forces that aimed to free Austria and Germany from all influences of national socialism. The most famous part of this were the Nuremberg trials, but the largest parts were getting rid of government officials with Nazi sympathies, a ban on Nazi writings and symbols, that sort of stuff. If you see a German street named after a person who lived in the 20th century, there’s a very high chance it was called the Hitler or Goebbels street until 1945.
Denazification was only a partial success. National socialism was everywhere for 12 years, it was deeply ingrained into every part of German society. Getting rid of it entirely would have been a lot of work. And also, the Germans didn’t really like this, and the cold war was more important now and everyone wanted Germany as an ally.
I mentioned earlier that I was taught about the history of the Nazis. My grandparents weren’t. They grew up in a period where people were too ashamed of what happened to talk to their children about it. I barely know what my great-grandparents did, but I don’t really need to be told either (except for one of my great-grandfathers, he was a young engineer in east Prussia when the Red Army came and recruited him to keep their Distillery repaired, and he learned a great recipe for Pelmeni there that my family still uses).
And I wasn’t really taught everything either. I was taught about the Holocaust against the Jewish people, but the genocide against Romani, disabled, and queer people barely got mentioned. Of course this is in part because the amount of people murdered in each of those groups doesn’t even come close to the amount of Jewish people murdered and I’m not trying to accuse any of my teachers of anything, but it’s also worth mentioning that those three groups still face legal discrimination today (not saying there’s no discrimination against Jewish people of course).
Every now and then there are stories about nation socialist police group chats or soldiers, and nobody is really all that surprised. Last month, a group of Reichsbürger, members of an ideology that refuses to acknowledge that the German Reich is no longer legitimate, were raided for planning a coup. Among them were members of the 4th strongest political party in Germany right now. This barely changed anything about their poll results.
What happened after the Nazis? They're still everywhere.
Garlemald is not a 1 to 1 analogy of any real empire, and I appreciate that a lot, it makes the worldbuilding a lot more interesting. It does, however, have obvious influences. The Roman empire is the obvious main one, but so is fascism. While it doesn’t always politically fit the definition of fascism, the aesthetic inspiration should be obvious to everyone.
I think the writers didn’t really know what to do with Garlemald after the end of the Stormblood Main Scenario. You had already won 2 pretty spectacular victories over the empire, but it’s a massive empire and it doesn’t just disappear from that. But in patch 4.2 we are introduced to the Popularis, a faction of pacifists that want to stop the empire’s conquest. While it turns out that the leader of the group you met was a fraud and a traitor, the Popularis themselves are shown to be genuine. Their leader, Maxima, even defects from the Empire to help you.
But the Popularis never achieve anything. There’s lines here and there about Empire leadership trying to get rid of them but for the most part they’re irrelevant for the story from now on.
Then we find out that the Empire is just a tool. It wasn’t created by the Garlean Solus Galvus to bring peace and security to his people (which, to be clear, would obviously still not justify an empire) but by the Ascian Emet-Selch, as a tool to hasten the return of his god Zodiark. The Empire’s goal of bringing peace and stability is the opposite of why it exists. It exists to destabilize the world so that more calamities can happen. That’s why “Solus” hadn’t chosen an heir. The ensuing civil war was a feature, not a bug.
But the new emperor is different! Varis isn’t an Ascian and he fully believes in the empire’s stated goal of bringing peace to the world (which, to reiterate, absolutely still makes him a villain). Or so one might be tempted to think. There is a cutscene in I think 4.5 where Varis talks to the various alliance readers and basically tells them “Yes, I also hate the Ascians, but the way to defeat them is to do exactly what they want”. I didn’t mention this in my Stormblood review because it didn’t feel relevant at the time but looking back it really shows that the empire’s role as a plot device supersedes any development that could be happening there.
Throughout 5.0 the Empire exists mainly to threaten the release of Black Rose and then at the end, Zenos (who came back for SOME FUCKING REASON) kills his father, the Emperor. There would be no winners in the coming civil war, in part thanks to Fandaniel’s meddling, but in part also because Empires can not last forever. By the time Endwalker starts, the nation of Garlemald is no more.
After figuring out a way to deal with the tower of the Telophoroi that have been popping up all over the world, the Ilsabard Contingent gets sent out to what used to be the capital of the Garlean Empire. They have two goals there: Deal with the Tower of Babil, which seems to be a central piece in the Telophoroi’s plans, and
Help the people of Garlemald.
As I hopefully made very clear in the opening of this text, dealing with the survivors of a nation with violent, racist, authoritarian, and imperialist ideals is incredibly difficult. I personally do not know how to do it. And I don’t think a Final Fantasy game is the right medium to explore a question like this.
I mentioned that after 12 years, national socialism had ingrained itself into every part of German society. The Garlean Empire existed for over 60 years. When you arrive there to help the starving and freezing Garleans, they despise you.
At first, you try to help a small group of civilians. They make it very clear that they do not trust you and that they do not want the help of a savage like you. At some point, one of them attacks Alphinaud, one of your closest friends, and yet the game never asks, “do these people deserve our help?”. It instead asks, “Are we like invaders for doing this”.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of radical hope and redemption, but at the same time, I’m a queer person. If a person that has declared their hatred for me and suddenly they need help, I’m not going to put myself in a vulnerable position to help them on the off chance that me helping them changes their mind and they suddenly don’t want to kill me anymore. And yet the game forced me to do exactly that. And don’t try to justify this by saying that FFXIV has always been about helping or seeing the good in everyone or something like that, we’ve been killing Garlean soldiers since ARR.
The story of “helping” these people ends with one of them hating you so much that she runs away from you and dies. Good riddance. The game frames this as a sad thing, but I hope you’ll forgive me if I shed no tears for the people who tried to kill my friends.
After that, you run into a Garlean soldier who tried to steal food from you. He tells you that his legion is still around so you get sent with him to negotiate getting them some help, because apparently we’re so much into helping now, we’ll even help armies that are at war with us. It goes about as well as you might have predicted. Alphinaud and Alisaie get taken hostage and their Legatus talks to you about how your dream of peace through harmony and multiculturalism can never be achieved and how everyone needs to be united under Garlemald to achieve peace. Even with the capital in ruins and his soldiers freezing around him, he still believes in the lies of the Empire.
Eventually there is a fight that breaks out between this legion and your allies, a fight that ends as soon as the legion learns that they are literally the very last remaining people fighting for Garlemald. Now it has finally sunk in that they’re not going to win. Their leader kills himself (which the game frames as tragic LMAO) and the others get your help. Not because they ask for it, or acknowledge their weakness or anything like that, but because they’re too weak to resist anymore. In the end, you despite everything, you don’t win because you were more kind. You won because you were more powerful.
I haven’t done any patch content yet so apologies if this gets brought up there, but nothing that happened in the MSQ addressed how the Garleans will move on past the empire. All it did was show just how deeply ingrained the empire’s ideology is everywhere. And then it just expects you to move on from that, go and save the world.
What will Garlemald look like in 80 years? Will the people there wonder what their grandparents were doing during the days of the Empire? Will there be people arguing over whether the Garleans have done “enough apologizing” and need to get back to being proud of their heritage? Will there even be any apologizing? There certainly wasn’t from Japan.
This part of the MSQ opens a massive can of worms, then refuses to deal with that and tells you to move on. Nobody would have complained if the can of worms just hadn’t been brought up at all. I haven’t even gotten into the awful and frankly pointless body swap thing that happens immediately after this because it doesn’t really belong to this (that’s how pointless and out of place it is) but combining it with this awful and surface-level exploration of what to do with the survivors of an authoritarian state makes this my least favourite stretch of all of Final Fantasy XIV.
Last month I saw a reddit post pointing out that the soldiers at the Garlean consulate in Thavnair still call you a savage after beating Endwalker. People thought this was a funny example of them not updating NPC dialogue to reflect changes in the world, but I disagreed. Why wouldn’t they call you a savage anymore? It’s pretty obvious they still consider you to be one.
2020
Pretty fun, especially in coop, but movement feels a bit bad and there were some gamebreaking bugs
This review contains spoilers
I noticed that IGDB had added all the FFXIV patches and quickly decided that reviewing all of them would be way too much work, even though according to my DLC policy I would have to review a few of them. I want to make an exception for this one though because it is, imo, wher the game peaked (so far)
The patch starts with you doing a bit of boring stuff but it's fine because you get to the good stuff pretty quickly and it's really good stuff.
I mentioned it briefly in my main Shadowbringers review already, Elidibus is my favourite villain in Shadowbringers (now that I've seen more of Fandaniel and know he's just discount Kefka I can even say that with certainty). Antivillains are incredibly difficult to pull off and they managed to do it amazingly. The solo duty is a great recap of your journey so far but from the other side, the dungeon is fun, and the trial is my favourite trial in the game.
The Seat of Sacrifice isn't just my favourite trial in the game, it's my favourite thing in the game. You simultaneously feel like you're finally battling your archnemesis and mercykilling a dying man.
"To The Edge" is a fantastic song and it is great at underlining just how desperate Elidibus is.
Emet-Selch showing up to help you is also fantastic. Even the man who so desperatly holding on to the past he recreated an entire city has realized he has lost and needs to move on, and now he's helping you make the last desperate struggler realize the same.
Mechanically it is also incredibly fun, my only complaints are that the limit break timing is a bit too tight and that the button mashing is bit much from an accessibility standpoint.
Everything that happens after the trial is also a satisfying wrapup of your adventures on the first.
Another reason I wanted to review this patch was that by talking so positively about it, I make it clearer just how annoying the annoying parts of Shadowbringers were and that pretty much sums up my feelings towards FFXIV in general; Some amazing stuff that gets dragged down by a lot of mediocre and bad stuff.
The patch starts with you doing a bit of boring stuff but it's fine because you get to the good stuff pretty quickly and it's really good stuff.
I mentioned it briefly in my main Shadowbringers review already, Elidibus is my favourite villain in Shadowbringers (now that I've seen more of Fandaniel and know he's just discount Kefka I can even say that with certainty). Antivillains are incredibly difficult to pull off and they managed to do it amazingly. The solo duty is a great recap of your journey so far but from the other side, the dungeon is fun, and the trial is my favourite trial in the game.
The Seat of Sacrifice isn't just my favourite trial in the game, it's my favourite thing in the game. You simultaneously feel like you're finally battling your archnemesis and mercykilling a dying man.
"To The Edge" is a fantastic song and it is great at underlining just how desperate Elidibus is.
Emet-Selch showing up to help you is also fantastic. Even the man who so desperatly holding on to the past he recreated an entire city has realized he has lost and needs to move on, and now he's helping you make the last desperate struggler realize the same.
Mechanically it is also incredibly fun, my only complaints are that the limit break timing is a bit too tight and that the button mashing is bit much from an accessibility standpoint.
Everything that happens after the trial is also a satisfying wrapup of your adventures on the first.
Another reason I wanted to review this patch was that by talking so positively about it, I make it clearer just how annoying the annoying parts of Shadowbringers were and that pretty much sums up my feelings towards FFXIV in general; Some amazing stuff that gets dragged down by a lot of mediocre and bad stuff.
2023
I said in my Baba is You XTREME review that people are asking for merch and instead hempuli is making troll games but this game has made me realize that these games are basically just hempuli playing with Baba, Keke, and Me like with dolls so that's basically merch but just for him but we get to watch him play with it
2022
Sometimes we have to make up meaning to cope with the pain
The plastic slowly choking you is your crown
The parasite that ate your tongue wanted to be your friend
Don't try to change anything about your situation.
The machine can't talk to you. Don't try talking to it.
Those who try to escape get crushed.
You have grown complacent.
Even when you're back in the water you're still flapping around like on land.
Do you want to go up or down?
The plastic slowly choking you is your crown
The parasite that ate your tongue wanted to be your friend
Don't try to change anything about your situation.
The machine can't talk to you. Don't try talking to it.
Those who try to escape get crushed.
You have grown complacent.
Even when you're back in the water you're still flapping around like on land.
Do you want to go up or down?
2022
The digital world levels or whatever they're called are really fun but the rest of the game just feels like a drag and it's unfortunately what makes up most of the game.