a dust of hope amidst a sea of despair, i love to see the inversion between visually good and evil, both in nomenclature and visual with the sin eaters and warrior of darkness, the subversion of biblical figures and the dead, empty and sad paradise is really astonishing.

Shadowbringers story, characters, dungeons and raids didnt click with me in the same way that Stormblood did, but i was also setting the bar pretty high, and still i finished pretty satisfait with it.

Btw the last main dlc area with an OST that has the clockticking as it's beat is peak holy shit, everything being about time at that point, with our life runing out, possible world end, a city constantly relivings it's last momment, holy shit...

It's always a little weird to comeback to a Final Fantasy game and see how much they mirror historical real life events in their fantasy world without even trying to hide what is inspiring the story. Maybe it feels like a downside of the franchise (and specially XIV's Stormblood) but i honestly think it is very charming, and it never bothered me.

Stomblood seems like a depiction of WW2 with a little touch of modern problems, starting from some minor events like Fordola and her gang being a representation of the Jewish Group 13, and reaching all the way to Yotsuyu judment arch stepping in to a moraly subjective space of war crimes, punitivism, justice and so on and on, making a paralel with the obviously Nuremberg Trials, pretty bold if you ask me, but i can respect it.

Out of the historic reffernces, we can see Stormblood being a DLC much like ARR with the job of expand XIV's world and further develop our characters, but of curse, now it has the benefit of a well developed and liked roast that holds the players on the most mundane task and dialogues of the DLC.

But still, its funny to see that this style of DLC is only possible in a MMORPG, because the 200h of ARR + Heavensward we could see our beloved characters learning from their suffering and past experiences, we can see Alphinaud going from a shit ass Diplomat to one of the most political versed characters in the game, it amazing to watch the betrayal on ARR, the learning fase of the Heavensward and by the end of it, the aplication of Alphinauds experience in every little bit of the army and future alliances to be formed, and it's not something particular of him, because we can see the same happening with the Sultana, going from a political fantasy to a grounded strategy of negociation with the Ul'dah bourgeoisie, in a way that is a little sad to see her changing the "democratic dream" she had, but well fitting the FFXIV theme of being a universe forged and lived in political wars.

And on the topic of political wars, is cool to see such different cultures interacting in stormblood, specially between Gosetsu and the Au'ra people, it pretty to see an old samurai like Gosetsu contemplating the cultural differences between his own moral and ideology and the one's with the Immortal Au'ra, afterall there is no need to disrespect or invalidate others beliefs, the cultural shock is something that appears several times on the dlc and is balanced between humor and dramatic sessions.

During the war with the Empire. the bound between nations and the building of an Alliance, we watch and live among people that lost their will to fight and prefer to live in almost slave like state in the hands of the imperials, in a history that is told by the eyes of the Ala Mhigan party member Lysa, that guides and become the leader of the local revolution forcing the Imperial retreat.

And last but not least, FFXIV deserves A LOT of praise for how they use the WoL (our character) in the story, it's an extremely hard work to make a MMO character be not only a viewer of the events but an active element of the story where we directly interact with the main characters, make our own choices to give e little sense of personality building and also being consulted for every important decision making event, in a way we fell not like super protagonist that only smash and kills the problem, but a individual being, with our own share of problems, being doomed to fight a war that we didn't start, being not a "heroic tale" but in some way or another s tragic one, of just another person cursed to fight to survive like every other character of the story.