Must the last dungeon always be.... (7.0 spoilers)

Behold, these are the final days of Amar-lexandrea

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Originally Posted by aquarys

Unfortunately, I think you are right. There are a lot of problems with DT's story, but to go any other way other than a kind of joyful adventure would be to give up on the "new adventure arc" before it even began.

As I have said before, I enjoyed DT Part 1 more than I enjoyed Part 2 despite my earlier expectations being quite the opposite. This is due to the scales of the adventure itself being more grounded than the previous expansions. It was an adventure where we explores a new continent not outside our world, without any sense of urgency to stop a villain from executing a world-ending catastrophe. A journey where we meet and talked to the inhabitants of this new lands, and learned about the ways of their lives and their cultures. It might be slow, but it's to establish and build-up a connection between you, the players, and Tural. In fact, some life lessons and reminders can be taken from Part 1, which I found to be a bit surprising to me.

Yes, Valigarmanda could have been executed better, such as having him wreaking havoc (Maybe on a smaller scale?) but something to demonstrate its destructive abilities in action in front of everyone, rather than simply being scars on the lands from decades ago. It might even remind some players about the destruction that followed the wake of Bahamut, which will add more to the sense of urgency: "We must take down that beast, immediately!" instead of what we got which was: "We must track the beast and kill it"

Part 2 fails, because it uplifted the scale immediately from a grounded adventure, to a cosmic threat where it was even implied that Sphene wouldn't stop at the sources' shards and may continue to worlds beyond, but there wasn't any proper build-up to it. Sure, we got introduced to her before she made her plans known, but she was already suspicious so it was foreseen and expected. We have zero sense of urgency because even the NPCs didn't until the plot demanded (Almost the entirety of the last zone is basically you strolling around instead of just taking the tower down by any means necessary)

If you want to see a proper build-up, then look no further than the previous saga. ARR was a grounded adventure, which built up over its course to have the realm at stakes, but just that. The realm. HW continued that level of stakes, if not tuning it down a little bit to let you build-up more with the realm inhabitants, then SB would raise the stakes back to having the realm in danger with both the empire on the move again and Shinryu being unleashed, and so on and on, building up eventually to EW (Which feels like rushed, but most of the way for the saga was built-up throughout the course of several expansions)

I hope the point is made clear.

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Originally Posted by Oizen

Behold, these are the final days of Amar-lexandrea

Somehow, the Final days returned once more.

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Originally Posted by Kranel_San

If we take a look at the past, Gaius, Lahabrea, Thordan, and even Zenos were already good villains because they had different motives and were not simply sad boys and girls consumed by despair.

Not even despair, she wanted them to live forever, when they already died of natural age having lived a full life using souls, and now she wants them to "live" as data forever...using more souls and aether from living beings... Sphene is just a psycho AI

The game is fossilized at this point imo. It's everything, even down to the music. I couldn't shake that they were constantly trying to copy that they did in EW with the music (the dawntrail theme in no way compares to Dynamis, sorry) while also just making almost every single song the trailer theme.