7.3 MSQ Was Absolutely Terrific

It definitely had good cinematic delivery and some of the quests were really good, especially the 'puzzle-based' ones.

Substance of the story itself... It's not crap... It's OK.. But they can still do much do better... Beyond a certain point, the whole "It's clear your strength cannot be gauged by ordinary means" just loses all meaning whatsoever when you repeat this line after every attempt at trying to take us down.

Whole story with Geode felt a bit empty.... I get they wanted to try and tug at the heart strings, but I came out of this with the impression of "Nice, we got a Duracell battery with Geode's soul and aether" rather than actually feeling emotional, which felt like that was their attempt.

I have heard this, but after over a year of this expansion I was more shocked at just how little I cared about the whole thing. I tried really hard but about half way through found myself still skipping cutscenes because I just could not bring myself to care anything about Sphene, Wuk, Living Memory, Alexandria, stock anime scientist #2824, etc. I was annoyed in the dungeon, annoyed at the cheap busy-work puzzles, even more annoyed in the trial. I had a glimmer of hope when I saw Wuk laying still after I skipped a cs and was like, "omg they actually did it! I need to go back and watch everything!" then found out she was just hurt and stopped caring again.

All this patch solidified for me was just how much I don't care about anything in this story. I am going to really try in 7.4 since it's a new arc, but we will see. They may have already lost me completely.

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Originally Posted by MicahZerrshia

I have heard this, but after over a year of this expansion I was more shocked at just how little I cared about the whole thing. [...]

All this patch solidified for me was just how much I don't care about anything in this story. I am going to really try in 7.4 since it's a new arc, but we will see. They may have already lost me completely.

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Agree, while I do acknowledge it was okay, much better than 7.1 of course and more meat to it than 7.2 it was just so hard to care about stuff after 7.0 and 7.1 killed my interest in the MSQ of DT.

I do like Shale and Sphene as characters and how they were presented especially in 7.3 but....
apart from themselves I cared little about anything else going on.

I also severely disliked whenever Wuk Lamat came on screen and would've really preferred if she stayed bedridden after another finale containing "lowercase yelling".
I really shouldn't have switched back to EN voices I now realize till she was gone....

Idk about terrific, it wasn't as good as shadowbringers .3 not even close
It was better than endwalkers for sure, but i did enjoy it unlike the .0 story we got so thats a plus

I am so done with all this cyberpunk sci fi garbage in DT.

The highlight in 7.3 for me definitely was when we finished off bland boring anime trope nerd kid.
Seeing him revived only minutes later and built up to be the enemy for who knows how many patches and xpacs utterly and completely killed it for me.

Glad you all liked it. But for me, the 7.3 cliffhanger was the proverbial straw on the camel's back. So unless they manage to pull another Emet Selch, I won't be around for more abysmally bad writing.

I enjoyed 7.3! :)

I'm with you!!

I haven't been this excited about msq since Shadowbringers!

It was a better patch than the last ones. The story seems somewhat interesting.

I do hate dawntrail, but this was decidedly better and was worth paying for the month whereas I'm very glad I did not pay for any months to play 7.2 and 7.1 prior to this as those were not that great, 7.2 was still better than the expansion launch though, but when the bar is that low, mostly everything is better than it.

I do still have a lot of things that I feel negatively about but it's really not worth talking about yet. We'll see where they go from here.

I agreed with OP. (not forgetting the 24man collab brings back nostalgic memories of FF11)

ShB sets the bar very high because it is more of a closure of a 10 year story line.

Looking forward to the new story arc but I do hope they don't drag it too long. We need more villains like Ascians Emmet, Zenos & etc

I felt like the story was good in theory. I just didn't really care for it because it's not my thing. More perfectly good FF9 lore ruined with a sickening amount of electrope and Smile used at an obnoxious moment again instead of starting at the beginning of the track.

Too many cutscenes spent on them nodding their heads at eachother, praising eachother, raising eachother's spirits, thanking eachother and stating the obvious even more than usual. As usual they just need to dare to have someone disagree, get upset, have internal conflict amongst the scions, have sarcastic responses, dare to kill people off sometimes instead of the rubber bullet in Shaaloani (by this I mean it's too convenient that Sphene survived 400 years). And so many of the cutscenes just aren't voiced now.

I feel like the nodding heads thing has always been the case but we've just never had it more noticeable than now because the story had a compelling arc before with the progression through to Endwalker, so there was a clear focus on reaching the end of the Ascians that limited the extent to which it happened, whereas now it's off the rails.

I did like Gulool Ja's path and what they are going to do, but I also felt like they portrayed him as more mature than is realistic for a child. That's not to say that children can't be mature - I was as a child myself, but even accounting for that they were discussing some very adult concepts with him, like complex politics and the sundered world.

I liked the puzzles simply because they are meant to be in a video game. I felt they could have made the puzzels way harder, but you know how the playerbase is. If they had made the puzzles even slightly challenging, people would be complaining about it like they did In From The Cold. We were still inundated with cutscenes though so it's not any sort of big change to how they design the MSQ.

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Dungeon was absolutely spectacular. Music was insane, visuals were aesthetically pleasing, and all the bosses were super fun and the 2nd boss especially was wild. I really enjoyed the trial as well

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This is always the case though. The FFXIV visual effects, environment design and music teams are the best. There has never been a problem with these things, and in many ways they carry the game through all the other things people have a problem with.

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Living Memory restored was the total cherry on top

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I wonder if that was due to everyone using NG+ for it or if they actually planned it all along. Because it looked like the sort of thing that was added in a follow-up quest with the knowledge many were using NG+ to restore it.