[Review written during 6.25]
After being mostly disappointed (tho still enjoying) Shadowbringers, I wasn’t really expecting Endwalker to be any different, so I was pleasantly surprised to be proved wrong by the game. Endwalker doesn’t fix all my issues with the game (which, to be fair, is impossible since a lot of them stems from the game being a MMO), but at least it tones them down a lot. The big pacing issues i had with ShB are mostly gone: sure, it’s still a MMO, meaning they still sometimes drag out how long certain part of the story are, but for the most part, in this expansion the “filler quests” feel more involved in the ongoing story or are self contained stories that are usually pretty good, like in Heavensward, instead of being “help those dudes and they’ll help you back” like in ARR/SB/ShB. There’s a couple of moments where the MSQ really feels like it should progress faster and overall it’s still way better paced than the previous expansions. This pacing being better also applies to the story: unlike Shadowbringers, the story actually concludes in 6.0, with 6.1 and onwards just being a new arc starting. And the story itself goes at a way faster pace than before: what i thought would be the endgame happened pretty early on into the game, and basically everything they advertised in trailers etc happened by the halfway point i’d say, meaning you had a lot of surprises in the game. And overall, the story is really good! Some might say that its last third is too conventional because it shares themes found across a lot of other RPGs (nihilism bad), unlike ShB that had something more unique to its themes, to which i would agree, EW is less original than ShB for its themes. However, i still really enjoyed the end of the game, because it’s a theme i really enjoy and also it’s literally just the plot of Gurren Lagann which instantly makes it raw. Gameplay wise, i’m still not a fan of how the game is played but it’s just me simply not being a fan of this kind of gameplay and not it being boring. There’s been a few fun fights tho, there’s like a couple single player instances that are really good, the last one of them being probably the rawest moment of the entire game, and there’s even a trial you can do with the scions instead of a party of player which is really really cool (tho alisaie has a tendency of literally griefing i died a couple times because she decided it’d be funny to run away from everyone else while having a stack marker on her)
Overall, i still think i would have had a way better time just watching cutscenes on youtube than playing this game (at least it’d have been shorter), but apart from that, Endwalker was a surprisingly better time than i expected it to be. It’s not at the level of my fav FF games (6, 7, 9 and 10) and having to go through ARR and SB was soul sucking, but HS, ShB and EW are all pretty good stories tho the game they’re in really made them less enjoyable for me.
After being mostly disappointed (tho still enjoying) Shadowbringers, I wasn’t really expecting Endwalker to be any different, so I was pleasantly surprised to be proved wrong by the game. Endwalker doesn’t fix all my issues with the game (which, to be fair, is impossible since a lot of them stems from the game being a MMO), but at least it tones them down a lot. The big pacing issues i had with ShB are mostly gone: sure, it’s still a MMO, meaning they still sometimes drag out how long certain part of the story are, but for the most part, in this expansion the “filler quests” feel more involved in the ongoing story or are self contained stories that are usually pretty good, like in Heavensward, instead of being “help those dudes and they’ll help you back” like in ARR/SB/ShB. There’s a couple of moments where the MSQ really feels like it should progress faster and overall it’s still way better paced than the previous expansions. This pacing being better also applies to the story: unlike Shadowbringers, the story actually concludes in 6.0, with 6.1 and onwards just being a new arc starting. And the story itself goes at a way faster pace than before: what i thought would be the endgame happened pretty early on into the game, and basically everything they advertised in trailers etc happened by the halfway point i’d say, meaning you had a lot of surprises in the game. And overall, the story is really good! Some might say that its last third is too conventional because it shares themes found across a lot of other RPGs (nihilism bad), unlike ShB that had something more unique to its themes, to which i would agree, EW is less original than ShB for its themes. However, i still really enjoyed the end of the game, because it’s a theme i really enjoy and also it’s literally just the plot of Gurren Lagann which instantly makes it raw. Gameplay wise, i’m still not a fan of how the game is played but it’s just me simply not being a fan of this kind of gameplay and not it being boring. There’s been a few fun fights tho, there’s like a couple single player instances that are really good, the last one of them being probably the rawest moment of the entire game, and there’s even a trial you can do with the scions instead of a party of player which is really really cool (tho alisaie has a tendency of literally griefing i died a couple times because she decided it’d be funny to run away from everyone else while having a stack marker on her)
Overall, i still think i would have had a way better time just watching cutscenes on youtube than playing this game (at least it’d have been shorter), but apart from that, Endwalker was a surprisingly better time than i expected it to be. It’s not at the level of my fav FF games (6, 7, 9 and 10) and having to go through ARR and SB was soul sucking, but HS, ShB and EW are all pretty good stories tho the game they’re in really made them less enjoyable for me.
Flore
1 year ago