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Entenzahn posted:can we do video essays as well You'd better
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Jan 10, 2021 23:31
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Erwin the German posted:Oh, and Civ 4 has the incredible Baba Yetu, so I rest my case. The first time a video game ever won a Grammy, even if the composer had to sneak that track in another album as a rerelease to trick them into thinking it was anything other than a theme song composed for an actual, honest to goodness videogame. A stealth Grammy.
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Jan 12, 2021 02:53
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So, I put Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin up as my No.3 for the 2020 thread, and it's still been fresh in my thoughts even as I approach what I was assured to be the end of the main game. Most of my thoughts, I've already given, though the game continues to provide food for more. Mainly, aside from thinking a lot about rice farming growing processes, I've found myself scouring google for information about traditional Japanese food. Specifically, desserts, though I'm curious about a lot of the savoury dishes as well. Like Boar Meat Jelly, described in-game as something of a soy sauce-based aspic. Some of them I had heard of before, like senbei and sweet rice cakes. But some were interesting to learn about. Like mugwort dumplings, or more properly, yomogi dango, the seasonal springtime snack: https://www.chopstickchronicles.com/yomogi-dango/  Or dried persimmons, hoshigaki. https://www.thespruceeats.com/hoshigaki-japanese-dried-persimmons-1327537  But one particular dessert eluded me, kenpin, made with walnuts, sesame, sugar, and soy sauce. After a few perfunctory searches of my own, a friend of mine got curious enough about it to try a more thorough search. Apparently, kenpin was popular during the Edo period but hasn't been especially popular in modern japan. To the point where the only english language reference he could find involved a Japanese museum collaborating with local cafes to showcase these sweets for a limited time. Really, mostly using its flavors in the form of ice cream, or pound cake. Finding proper traditional kenpin might actually require that I be able to read Japanese. https://hokusai-museum.jp/modules/Event/events/view/1601?lang=en   Though in-game, its sprite is represented as something like a sweet handroll. I think this is closer to the traditional kenpin confection. Again, my friend's curiosity was piqued, and he passed this find on as well. https://cookpad.com/recipe/3892632  And now I'm at a bit of a loss as I want to try them quite a bit, and getting my hands on them might prove to be a challenge. Especially in these trying times. (Still thinking 'bout that yomori dango rn) 
Runa fucked around with this message at 12:04 on Jan 14, 2021 |
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Jan 14, 2021 11:54
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I have different picks for memorable Suiko2 music, though I will say Gothic Neclord is definitely memorable. This is one of my favorite tracks but I will admit, to my embarrassment, that for a number of years I forgot it was from Suikoden and spent some time scouring youtube playlists for various jrpg osts looking for it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bHIu3iUjQQ (but the standard version of the track had the telltale suiko2 vocal accompaniment so more fool me) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=595nmwHehjE The Suiko1 version of this next track in entangled with some bittersweet memories of the nighttime scene with Odessa, and I won't lie, a lot of why it's one of my favorite tracks is because of the first game, but that's got to count for something. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQKRp2vQESY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgiZiS14xhg Also the opening was pretty incredible for its time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_f4eGQ9MIWM
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Feb 9, 2021 15:16
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That makes me want to *re*play it.
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Jun 16, 2021 21:00
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Freespace 2 is incredible because of the slow dawning realization that you're not playing a space opera war story, you're experiencing two civilizations realizing that their efforts are futile against a threat so vastly overwhelming with motives so inscrutable that they may as well be facing a hostile act of God. Every grand triumph is fleeting, every crowning achievement dwarfed, and-- DIVE DIVE DIVE HIT YOUR BURNERS PILOT
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Jul 6, 2021 12:08
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I still think about how Shadowbringers managed to get into the SA GOTY top ten two years in a row, and that was before everyone and their dog with even a mild curiosity in MMOs decided to give it a shot. Shadowbringers is still my favorite Final Fantasy and pound for pound the best written of them, though. Note I avoided including A Realm Reborn, Heavensward, or Stormblood in that superlative. That said the free trial meme is probably gonna be dead for a while, the current influx of new players has overwhelmed the servers to such a degree that the devs just put out a patch that gives paid subscribers priority in login queues. This will probably be reversed should interest normalize downwards again but for now it's a rough time to be a free trial player.
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Jul 21, 2021 00:27
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dead gay comedy forums posted:Homeworld This is a drat fine post. E: heck of a snipe
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Oct 2, 2021 20:20
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Be that as it may that doesn't make their experiences with that game invalid. This is the thread for people to celebrate their favorites, after all.
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Jul 15, 2022 22:15
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Hmm, I was wondering if I ought to save my GOTY 2021Thread write-up for FFXIV in this thread for posterity. It was a bit of a long one. E: Jerusalem posted:The answer is ALWAYS Yeah, alright. Also it's been a half a year, more content was released, the base game experience had a rather dramatic overhaul, and I feel more comfortable adding more commentary to it now that some time has passed. Runa fucked around with this message at 12:26 on Jul 16, 2022 |
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Jul 16, 2022 10:12
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quote:For context, as mentioned above the original version of this post was written for the 2021 GOTY Thread on Dec. 31. While the post itself functioned as a vote for the Endwalker expansion in that thread, proper, it also serves as a retrospective on my feelings about the game as a whole. A slightly updated version of that post is presented here because, if there were any place on these forums for an extended write-up of a game from a place of fondness, it would be this thread.  FFXIV Endwalker Walking alone unto journey's end, the burden weighing heavy.  Before 2019, my relationship with FFXIV was decidedly more mixed. I played this game because my friends did, even though I didn't really stick around much between major expansion releases. I had limited experience with other MMOs. Their stories were perfunctory at best and while I understood this to be standard for the genre, they still left me with not much to emotionally latch onto. Oftentimes you were just another random adventurer (or setting-appropriate analog thereof) and if grander designs were in motion you only played a bit part. While a number of older-school MMO players preferred things this way, to feel as though a wider world were going on around them while they were merely a part of that world, this narrative approach left me cold. In Final Fantasy 14, however, I was presented with the opportunity to take up the role of the Warrior of Light (or WoL for short), a recurring title with no small amount of symbolic cachet within the Final Fantasy franchise as a whole. And I wouldn’t have taken this shot had Naoki Yoshida (Yoshi-P) not somehow pulled off a miracle and salvaged one of the most notorious failures in gaming history. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________  A Realm Reborn, while an impressive technical feat on the development side, was merely "good for an MMO" rather than genuinely good. The story was less personal, more generic. For the most part fine, if standard fantasy fare, though not without its problems. If the ARR story had a theme it wasn't one that was distinct enough to note. There were genuinely interesting moments, sure. Almost all of them surrounding the early game's major threats, magically summoned deiform constructs called Primals. The most urgent threat facing the realm, a single Primal is capable of corrupting the minds, and eventually bodies, of any souls unfortunate enough to draw near in a process called tempering. Right from the start the WoL is introduced as one of the chosen champions of the goddess Hydaelyn. And you are charged with protecting the world from an unnamed threat. They are eventually named soon enough, though. And they are the Ascians, devotees to the sundered god Zodiark, split into fourteen pieces by Hydaelyn's power. They seek to bring forth Calamities in order to reawaken their god and to bring forth what they maintain to be the true world. This is all established as far back as ARR, though what these motivations actually mean, and the mechanics of what they're actually doing, aren't made clear until much, much, much later. You can be forgiven for assuming it's all a bunch of cryptic folderol. I certainly did at the time. However, chosen by a goddess or not, every hero has to start somewhere. They first make their name as one of those adventurers with an uncommon, but not unheard of, resistance to a Primal's corruptive influence. This is understood to be part of Hydaelyn's blessing though why her chosen have this resistance is left a mystery. Shortly thereafter they are recruited by a fellowship of scholars and adventurers dedicated to defending Eorzea from the Primal threat, the Scions of the Seventh Dawn. Or Scions for short. They quickly find distinction among even this group by defeating many of these threats, most notably an invasion force sent by the mighty Garlean Empire, thereby becoming Eorzea's preeminent godslayer by the end of ARR's main storyline. But yes, dramatic fights aside, significant portions of the ARR story, before the patch content, were simply, well boring. Not just a matter of having lower stakes with less personal investment in events, chunks of the story were deliberately and blatantly put in to waste time. Unfortunately, those chunks of story also provide just enough worldbuilding and context that they couldn't simply be removed. And the main antagonists lurking in the background, the Ascians, were utterly uncharismatic. Cryptic black-robed masked men and women, they were like Kingdom Hearts rejects who were ashamed to show their faces. There were hints of personality and charm in the story, if you cared to look, but it was the ARR patch content (patches 2.1-2.55) that took the pieces provided by the base game and started to build towards something special. Something that set its sight on loftier goals. quote:Note: Since the time of the original post, the devs dramatically revamped the ARR main scenario questline even further by expanding their NPC dungeon party system, now called Duty Support, to cover the story-required dungeons and trials in this content range. This means that players are now capable of soloing all content from the start of ARR to the finale of 2.0. Furthermore, the 2.0 campaign finale dungeons were also entirely revamped, making them a more streamlined experience to actually play, while introducing more interesting mechanics to fights and pacing them so that they feel suitably climactic. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________  The first expansion, Heavensward, was the release that first earned FFXIV its acclaim not just for the circumstances of its revival but on its own merit as a game and story. On the broad scale HW's plot centers around a thousand-year war between the alpine country of Ishgard and the dragons of Nidhogg's Horde. Though the story itself was concerned with how prejudice, societal injustice, and vengeance feed into each other and perpetuate a vicious cycle. Well-trod territory, to be sure. But it's told effectively through not just the main storyline but the sidequests as well, including a number of class-specific questlines. As the WoL discovers the facts behind the events which predicated this war and the truths underpinning the whole of Ishgardian society, they are aided by companions and confidants with differing backgrounds and beliefs whose character development forms the story's emotional core. The story of Ishgard matters because the people of Ishgard matter and the characters put a human face to their tragedies and triumphs. When the WoL and their allies work to challenge the social injustices in Ishgard, to strive to build a better future for a people once bereft, when you actually change the status quo for the better, in an MMO no less, you feel it. And near the end, something happened. Through most of the game up to that point, whenever the player is given the opportunity to make a dialogue choice for the WoL, the choices given are usually blandly inoffensive. Generic "you're a hero" fare. In the wake of a tragic event in late Heavensward, the player is given another opportunity to respond in dialogue. And one of the options was noticeable in that it was surprisingly intense. Not particularly notable in a vacuum, but taken in the context of prior opportunities for characterization, it stands out. From that point on, the WoL slowly but surely, over the course of many years of expansions, grows to become not just a blank slate avatar but a character in their own right. A character who, while mostly unspoken, begins to develop an implicit personality through their expressions and the tone of their dialogue choices. And whose personal story develops through the various class quests they can pursue, as told most powerfully through the Dark Knight questline. The Scions, too, start to develop into a role beyond simply being colleagues, advisors, and questgivers. Their designs become more distinctive and they're given more characterization. They don't go so far as to steal your spotlight but as characters they become more comfortable fitting into the role of your direct supporting cast. After the villain of Heavensward is defeated, as he lays dying on the floor, he looks up in horror at the Warrior of Light and asks, "Who are you? What are you?!" Normally, when a villain says this it is a purely empowering moment for the hero as the villain cannot fathom how the hero can accomplish the things they've done. But something about the presentation of this scene, how ominous the Warrior of Light looks, and how genuinely terrified the villain was, sat uneasily with the players. These were words that would linger for years, inspiring speculation as to what he actually meant. What did he see, as the light faded from his eyes? A question worth asking. The story of Heavensward affected so many players that, for a large part of the playerbase, Ishgard felt like home. Which makes the fact that nobody can buy a house there pretty funny, to be honest. Next year that will change with one of Endwalker's patches. Until then, there's always the Firmament. quote:Since the time of the original post, the player housing district in Ishgard, the Empyreum, was opened to the public. As Ishgardian real estate is in rather high demand among players, and the chance to buy a plot of land is determined by a lottery system, for many, they still can't buy a house there. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________  Stormblood, the second expansion, is interesting. In terms of gameplay it was clearly superior to both the base game and the prior expansion. Here, the devs really started to get a feel for how they wanted the game to play and both of the later expansions iterate on the design principles that StB established. To this day, I genuinely feel that Stormblood's Alliance Raid series is some of the best 24-player content I've played. Unfortunately it's paired with some of the worst story a raid questline has ever offered. As far as the main storyline was concerned, reception was more mixed than it was with Heavensward. In terms of pacing, it's gutted by having two distinct major story arcs with their own tones and climaxes, one interrupting the other and playing out in full before returning to the first. In terms of core characters, the writers try to do something similar to HW's companion characters though they're limited by the fact that these characters don't have the same tension in their dynamic and thus room for interpersonal growth. Frankly, the two primary companions who follow you throughout StB are fundamentally very similar characters--brave, outgoing fighters who wear their hearts on their sleeves. While they have their charming moments there's just less character work being done when they're on screen. The main antagonist, Zenos, was as divisive as the story itself. He starts off aloof and uninterested, and thus uninteresting, before the WoL's ability to stand up to him in a fight inspires the most excitement he's had in his entire life. Shallow but straightforward, he had both fans and detractors. Thematically, Stormblood was more grounded than Heavensward but no less ambitious. A tale of revolution and the effects of colonialism on occupied peoples, Stormblood was stark, nuanced, and dreadfully realistic. The story shows what happens to people raised in a society that teaches them their race, and the cultures of their parents and grandparents, are inferior to those of their abusers. How monsters are made by internalized hatred and a desperate desire to earn a better place for themselves and their families. But, well. You can't go through four entire zone arcs hammering the same relentless message of how hopeless things are without the player starting to get emotionally exhausted. One zone, the Azim Steppe, became my favorite of the expansion by virtue of being a palate cleanser from the heavy tone and subject matter of preceding zones. It's an introduction to a Mongolia-inspired culture that treats its source inspiration with genuine affection, with a story filled with larger-than-life characters and refreshingly enthusiastic competition. In other fantasy works the Mongols are usually the primary inspiration for a faceless marauding horde, if not outright monsters entirely. Here, the Xaela of the Azim Steppe are treated as people with a charming culture and longstanding martial traditions that would probably be some cause for concern if the result weren't so drat fun. In terms of story momentum, the Azim Steppe is also the point where Stormblood's theme of revolution begins to look like it's finally within reach. It's where things start to feel like they're turning around. Also the scenery and music are pleasant, too.  But as Stormblood wrapped up, and a final confrontation with the Garlean Empire seemed imminent, the story took a surprising turn. After cooling on StB, I was unsure of what to make of this new direction, to be honest. Going into Shadowbringers, my expectations were low. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________  And when I played it, I fell in love with this game for the first time. The music was incredible, the world vibrant and haunting, the characters endearing, and the story a triumph. It's very difficult to talk about Shadowbringers without spoiling things. Even the premise itself is a surprise. With an unexpectedly fresh setting and a hard reset on the narrative momentum, Shadowbringers has to work hard to make the player care. And in its first zone arcs it spares no effort to establish the stakes. The player bears witness to the injustice, tragedy, and suffering plaguing their dying and broken land. And it gives you the opportunity to do something about it. The results are dramatic, breathtaking, and extremely effective at making you feel like a hero. The trajectory of the first arc establishes the basic structure for what follows, both in each individual zone arc as well as the expansion at large. Though it must be noted the first two thirds of Shadowbringers are very deliberately paced. While other expansions focused on pushing forward with constant forward momentum, each zone arc in Shadowbringers is treated as its own story with its own distinct take on the expac's themes and tone, and structurally there was a clear intermission between each arc. Some players disliked that, and felt that the story only really kicks into gear in the final act. I understand those criticisms, but I cannot agree with them. I came to become deeply familiar with the lands and their people and only cared more and more strongly about them as time went on. And every return to the Crystarium--the WoL's home for the duration of the expac--gave me valuable time to decompress and process the emotional rollercoasters the story insisted on putting me through. And most importantly, gave characters the opportunity to be people. The Scions receive a good deal of character development here, just in time for the player to finally be able to bring them into dungeons as actual party members. After years of being a more distant supporting cast, in Shadowbringers they together with the WoL feel like a cohesive team. Which is good, because the bonds between these characters, including the WoL, are what gives the story of Shadowbringers its strength. Thematically, it's about love and sacrifice. From individual zone arcs to the motivations of both your allies and your antagonists, every major plot throughline illustrates and reinforces these themes. Shadowbringers does not ask how much would you be willing to sacrifice for those you love. The answer to that question is treated almost as a given as heroic characters are constantly shown to be willing to sacrifice themselves while villainous characters are all too ready to force others to make those sacrifices for them. Instead, Shadowbringers presents you with the costs of these sacrifices both of the self and others. It asks of the selfish to consider the lives of those they mean to sacrifice to be of equal worth to those loved ones they've lost. It asks of the selfless to value their own lives as much as those loved ones they hope to save. And it asks the Warrior of Light to carry a special burden. To truly become the protagonist of the story. Even as the plot grows in scope to the scale of worldwide threats, even as the curtains are pulled back and the man behind the man is revealed, Shadowbringers focuses first and foremost on characters. As the scope increases the context becomes more intimate, more emotional. For the Warrior of Light, Shadowbringers is their darkest hour and most personal triumph. It's a brave decision for an MMO narrative to take the player avatar, especially one that began as an entity with as little narrative presence as possible, and build them into a character in their own right. By giving that avatar a range of personality that exists within the narrative, however limited, that avatar becomes constrained by new limits that would otherwise not be present. This sacrifices the freedom of imagination and pure player-driven roleplaying in order to allow this avatar to exist as a character in a written narrative. And we are richer for it, because this allows the Warrior of Light to become a character for the player to grow invested in. This approach has not gone without some pushback. More than a few times you may find people posting online about how the WoL's personality, personal attachments, and even priorities, do not match how they imagine their self-insert character to be. This is a fascinating problem to have. Contrast this with SWTOR which wrote its player avatars to be characters from the start. And voiced, too. Though that approach also has its limits, especially when it effectively meant they had to write eight different main storylines in parallel. But a story with a villain is only as good as that villain and FFXIV had for years been saddled with carrying the burden of being driven by the actions of the then-maligned, once-forgettable Ascians. Shadowbringers, in focusing on characters first and foremost, did the same with these black-robed blackguards and humanized them. They became tragic, even sympathetic. And it was thanks in no small part due to the lead writer, Natsuko Ishikawa, giving us the greatest and most compelling villain in the entire history of Final Fantasy, Emet-Selch.  (I will note here that Ishikawa also wrote the Dark Knight questline, the Crystal Tower quests, and the Far East half of Stormblood. She'd cut her teeth telling emotionally charged stories with charismatic and compelling characters, including the WoL themselves. In retrospect, had I learned who she was and that she had been selected to be Shadowbringers' main writer ahead of time, perhaps my expectations would not have been so low.) Among the greatest of the Ascians, Emet-Selch is a sneering, tired, depressed old rear end in a top hat who had been working in the background of the story under other aliases, one of which was actually known to the player before this point. Here in Shadowbringers he steps out into the spotlight and he milks it for all its worth. This slouchy, greasy rat man inveigles his way into the story in charmingly catty fashion and steals every scene he's in. And most refreshingly, and surprisingly, he's upfront and honest. Disarmingly so. Worryingly so. He's incredibly frank about what he and the Ascians are doing and he's even willing to entertain the idea of trying to recruit the WoL and the Scions to do it, though the likelihood of them agreeing is infinitesimally faint. More so than any other Ascian, he takes a genuine interest in the Warrior of Light. It's clear he sees something in them that the other Ascians didn't and that makes his involvement in these events deeply personal to him. (While I will not go into detail or explain more than the broad strokes, just talking about the thematics of the final confrontation at the end of 5.0 veers close enough to actual spoilers that I felt it was appropriate to provide spoiler tags as a courtesy. Whether or not you choose to read this following passage, be reassured that you have my thanks for reading this far regardless of your choice.)  Emet-Selch is the one who draws back the curtains and finally explains, in full, who the Ascians are and what it is they are actually fighting for. They were victims and now perpetrators of an incredibly profound tragedy on a grand scale. And when presented with what the Ascians, what Emet-Selch, had lost, and the burdens they carried, I felt that loss keenly. I was heartbroken, not just to be presented with this tragic tale, but to finally understand what Zodiark fought for and what it truly meant when Hydaelyn sundered him. But allowing Emet to succeed in his goals was unacceptable, however much I understood why he fought. A victory for the Ascians would mean the end of everything, everyone, the Warrior of Light held dear. The Warrior of Light had to keep fighting. I had to keep fighting. And when it looked like Emet was about to win, and all hope was lost, we got a little push. A gentle shove in the right direction to turn the tables and take one final stand. We could prove to him, here and now, that the Warrior of Light was not just some broken shattered thing. That they could challenge Emet-Selch not just as a trumped up mortal pawn but as a peer and fellow champion. As someone who he could respect, however much he denied it. Someone whose existence, and by proxy the lives of those they fought for, was of equal value to his and those he had lost. The finale of 5.0 was the first time I'd actually cheered and shouted at the climax of a story. It's deeply rousing, spectacular, and heartfelt. Every little bit of presentation lands perfectly and by the end it was the most satisfying conclusion to a Final Fantasy I had ever played. The follow-up story, from the Eden raid questline to the MSQ patch quests from 5.1 to 5.3, had a lot of expectations to live up to. But they met them with great aplomb. The 5.3 trial is still an utter delight to play and the patch as a whole was a fantastic send-off to an amazing story. A heartwarming coda that brought me to tears multiple times. And the Eden raids left things on a highly optimistic note, even showing the opportunity of redemption for an Ascian, and helping them find a place in this world, with people who love and care for them. A deeply satisfying conclusion in its own right, Shadowbringers still laid down the foundations for what was to come. It paved the way for us to walk to the End. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________  This is the hardest part to talk about because everything is a spoiler. The devs made sure to meet the expectations players had, both in terms of quality as well as content, and then continued far past those limits. Even the narrative structure of the expansion pack is a spoiler, A Realm Reborn, and even 1.0, had a particular theme song. Composed by Nobuo Uematsu, whose legacy Masayoshi Soken carries forth to this day, its lyrics ask a question common to the human experience. Why do we continue to live, and why must we fight on, if to live is to know suffering? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39j5v8jlndM This song not only sets the stage for A Realm Reborn, but it also encapsulates the story of FFXIV as a whole, as it stands. It is the theme of the saga of Hydaelyn and Zodiark, of which Endwalker is the final episode. Both Endwalker and this song pose the same questions on a philosophical level, and, indeed, provide their Answers. Going into the final expansion, the Warrior of Light knows who they are. The player knows. The only thing to do is to go forth and make things right. Right? Well. Endwalker has the unenviable position of being the sequel to a wildly, fervently beloved chapter in a long-running series. Everyone going in had their doubts, especially about the villains that dominated much of the promotional material. Emet-Selch is an extremely tough act to follow and, even in the best of times, Endwalker's villain hadn't really wowed the audience. But it works! Powerfully so. As a conclusion to the FFXIV story it succeeds and leaves room for new stories to be told. It's satisfying, and moving, and brings a strong sense of closure and resolution. Thematically, well, EW opens with its themes right when you load up the game. The instant you hit the title screen you're presented with a voice softly singing, "Tales of loss, and fire, and faith." The opening zone acts spur you on to adventure, a relatively breezy aperitif for the largest expansion pack by sheer volume of content. While mysteries emerge, and dramatic reveals are made, Endwalker begins with an air of excitement. We're about to reach the end, it seems to say, we're going to cancel the apocalypse! But make no mistake, Endwalker is not afraid to lay on the heaviest of drama and most painful of tragedies. Because the core theme, spoken right from the start, is the question of suffering. We're made to bear witness to countless tragedies, many preventable, if not for all too-realistic human flaws and prejudices, but many that are not. Tragedies that people are forced to endure regardless of anyone's best efforts because this mortal world is not a kind and perfect place. When the tragedies compound on each other it's all the heroes can do to take what small victories they can, to save those who are willing to listen and to place their trust in them. Nowhere is this most clear than in Garlemald. Before Shadowbringers, and before Stormblood, players would often discuss what would the story look like should the war finally move away from defending Eorzea and its allies and towards the Garlean Imperial homeland. People were genuinely worried about what things would look like should Eorzea become the conqueror and Garlemald the conquered. No surprise, then, that this was an ever-present worry among Garlemald's citizenry, too. The entire Garlemald zone arc is a study in the effects of war, not just occupation, and generations of propaganda on an otherwise innocent population. Instead of an army of conquest, Eorzea and its allies send its best on a mission of mercy. They make an honest show of good faith to save the civilians of an embattled country faced with the prelude to the apocalypse. One that nearly backfires in spite of their best efforts, as the world is never quite so simple. Pride and patriotism nearly doom a dying people. But the heroes never stop trying. The world is a place of suffering, but they believe they can build a better one and will not give up on it. It's a powerful story arc, with a resolution that brings a lot of closure to the story of the Garlean Empire. It could've been a rather fitting ending in its own right if not for the fact that the story was still in its first act. Like in Shadowbringers, the writers have learned their lessons from Stormblood. Rather than compounding tragedy after tragedy, Endwalker gives the player time to digest the story they've experienced, to recover from any hits they might've taken. And, importantly, to remind them of the beauty and wonder of the world, and what it is they're fighting for. Heavy story arcs are given time to wind up and land harder while lighter story arcs give time to provide important information and context. And this also allows the characters time to breathe as well and, once more, be people. To be fair, it is not subtle in expressing its themes. Large portions are clearly informed by Buddhist philosophy, which should come as no surprise considering that the story is greatly concerned with suffering and what best to do about it. Faith is a major part, not just in terms of religion and spirituality, but faith in people. One of the most compelling, and controversial, character arcs in the story is predicated on one particular character’s faith. Not just in mankind as a whole, but in one brave hero with whom they could entrust a light into the future. The story goes big, and I mean really big. Cosmic, even, though always grounded in an emotional context the reader can still connect to. It’s endearingly self-indulgent, relentlessly powerful, and a musical delight. Its story and characters inspire fierce discussion, philosophical and otherwise. It swings for the fences and knocks the ball out of the park. But it's the quiet moments, those scenes where the bulk of the character work is done, that lend it the emotional core that makes that cosmic story feel like it matters. This, as it turns out, is something that's rather tricky to do, to write a story of grand scope but intimate stakes. But Endwalker treads that line, even if at times the sheer bleakness of some parts threatens to overwhelm the player with despair fatigue. But behind it all, there is a warmth and earnestness that radiates throughout. From parents helping their late daughter's boyfriend grieve their mutual loss and reconnect, to friends quietly taking the time to have a late dinner and enjoy the simple pleasures of eating a hamburger with people who you care for, and who care for you. Endwalker is a story about people facing overwhelmingly profound tragedy and despair and not just surviving, but working to make their lives whole again, and to do the same for others. In the original version of this post above, I mentioned that, thematically, the story mostly dealt with suffering. But that's only part of the equation. Suffering lies at the core of the questions it asks, but the answers are where the real heart of the theme lies. It's a story about healing. And it’s easily my second favorite Final Fantasy. After Shadowbringers. 
Runa fucked around with this message at 12:37 on Jul 16, 2022 |
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Jul 16, 2022 10:45
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Y0 and YLAD are kind of the peak of the series writing and nothing else really reaches those levels. But one thing you can be sure of is that it's always going to be buckwild. Y6 suffers for being the first game of a completely brand new engine and has less content for it, but it also has a story thats surprisingly solid despite not really playing to the strengths of the franchise's history and characters for being Kiryu's last hurrah.
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Jul 18, 2022 19:06
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Heran Bago posted:Good writeup Runa. It's hard for me to vocalize what the game does so right. Especially since it's different things at different times. You described the highs really well without spoiling too much. Thanks! It's a little weird talking about an mmo and not really talk about what makes it an mmo. Usually people talk about mmos in terms of the social experience, their guild, the friends they made. A specific moment in their lives that they remember with great fondness, one they can't go back to but which has left an indelible mark. Meanwhile here I am essentially blogging on a forum with a thousand-word book report, gushing over the guy who managed to beat Sephiroth in a Japanese poll for "Best Final Fantasy Villain." But that's just the kind of game FFXIV is, it's a Final Fantasy game first and an MMO second, and comparisons to, say, WoW as though it were a replacement for WoW cheapens them both. It doesn't offer the sort of second-life promise that other mmos do, it isn't built for the same sort of constant engagement. It's a vehicle to deliver stories, big and small, and when you're done you can just unsub and come back later when new content is released. It's perfectly fine, the devs even encourage this! They're fully aware of how exploitative MMOs and their cousins, the GaaS model can be and deliberately avoid the worst of it. But one thing FFXIV has over other mmos is that its emphasis on story being the content rather than the filler means that every player who has played through the main storyline up to the level cap has had a shared experience with every other player of the game in a more concrete way than any other mmo has. Almost nothing is skipped or obsoleted. Even reworked content is still there, largely, just refined. It's an uncommonly ambitious gem in the mmo space and it's almost a miracle it exists at all when you consider the state in which FFXIV 1.0 released.
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Aug 4, 2022 14:30
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Holy crap! I'm not entirely sure this would be my cup of tea to actually play but it sounds like a fantastic digital space to visit.
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Aug 5, 2022 00:44
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