What happened to SB (story)?

[Dualgunner]

(And I still say the Kojin were a poor choice if you wanted Susano to be bootleg Ravana).

Susanoo is not a bootleg Ravana. I think I can see where you're coming from; they both have a deep enjoyment of what they do. The main difference is that Ravana is a God of War; he rejoices in combat because he loves fighting. The more he can fight, and conquer, the better he feels. Susanoo is a God of the Revel.

Susanoo takes great delight in everything he does and does what he takes great delight in doing. His mount's description amounts to "This is a cool dog but it could use more flying. Now we shall revel!" We only see him reveling in combat because we put him down immediately after he shows up. I bet he'd be a hit at the parties.

tl;dr: Ravana "Let us rejoice in combat for combat is glorious!"
Susanoo: "Let us revel in combat for reveling is grand in all we do!"

EDIT: I'm not versed enough on the Kojin themselves, but yes it is a bit jarring that a culture given to seclusion and collection of artifacts worship a God that celebrates being "wild and pure and forever free".

[Dark-Saviour]

1) We only see him reveling in combat because we put him down immediately after he shows up. I bet he'd be a hit at the parties.

2) I'm not versed enough on the Kojin themselves, but yes it is a bit jarring that a culture given to seclusion and collection of artifacts worship a God that celebrates being "wild and pure and forever free".

For 1, they should have fleshed him out more or played with the fight more if that was the direction they wanted to go; combat seems to be his initial go-to. Had he initially said, "Nah screw fighting. Let's party!" until you pressed him, that characterization would fit better. Likewise, if the fight were broken up with more "whimsical" elements (Like what Halicarnassus does with the desert bit), it would sit better as well.

For 2, the Kojin god really should have been more like Gilgamesh from F/SN. Just spams a bunch of random treasures that he covets.

[Lewtskie]

EDIT: I'm not versed enough on the Kojin themselves, but yes it is a bit jarring that a culture given to seclusion and collection of artifacts worship a God that celebrates being "wild and pure and forever free".

The Kojin do not worship or believe in a single deity. The believe in the Kami, which are many. They fanatically collect artifacts and trinkets that hold ancient energies or possibly Kami, the three token items they especially coveted were felt to house a particularly strong Kami and the value in that led to their obsession over them in particular. When Susan first appeared, they were drawn to him because he is, to them, a Kami and could bring them great prosperity.

[Belhi]

To be honest I suspect 4.X and 5.X will end up playing out as one large Garlemald arc. In many ways Zenos was our main villain in 4.0 but clearly there was more going on that we only just touched on with Garlean experiments and the fallout from the uprisings.

The patch cycle will almost certainly deal with the fallout of the liberations. Doma should be pretty sound but Ala Mhigo will be a problem, something the NPCs in game comment on. There is no unified structure and the people of Ala Mhigo make up many different factions, settlements and resistance groups that are going to all have to come to a concencus on how to build a new government or there is going to be risk of further conflict. That is way easier said than done.

Personally I really liked SB's story. It was clearly laying the seeds for a lot of future developments while telling a pretty straight forward story but one with some very interesting details and developments.

[KalinOrthos]

I always felt like patches 3.1-3.3 were more dealt in cleanup with some interferance with those pesky Warriors of Darkness, and it felt like the story of Ishgard probably could ended at the Reactor; most, if not all, of the loose ends were pretty soundly tied up. For this, we actually have a good number of loose ends yet up in the air: the refounding of Doma and Ala Mhigo under new leadership, and their relationship with the Eorzean Alliance; the fate of Fordola and the remaining Skulls; the identity of the White Ascian; the Garlean response to the loss of two kingdoms; finding out when Magnai will make me hi--erm, make Cirina his wife...

[dinnertime]

I liked Stormblood better but I do think the pacing is way too quick for two nations to be immediately liberated. I also liked the characters there better (except Yotsuyu and Zenos who are just disgusting people lol)
The Primals seem out of place in the story though and they're just there to follow the formula.

Other than that, hopefully the next patches means we help rebuild Doma and there will be more about the far east because it was the best part of SB.

[Quite]

However, you do have to remember that XIV's story is little more than an interactive book, while there is some flexability in things ultimately the story will play out in exactly the way SE wants to tell it which means they can't really give us "impactful" choices. On top of that, they have to code all of this in and they only have limited resources to do that, so they give us the best they can while still adhering to the previous limitation.

I am aware that I wasn't going to have an "impactful" choice, that wasn't my complaint though. My complaint is that, for the first time (and multiple times after that) my choice was as clear as mud. It felt like the speech system from fallout 4 where you don't actually know what you're really going to say. I just wanted clarity; instead I felt betrayed by being mislead. And for a point in the story that's supposed to lock in that feeling of inclusion, it failed miserably.

You're right, the Devs wanted it that way, they wanted a couple things actually:
1. They wanted us to look at Zenos and wonder what the heck he actually is.
2. They wanted to show that there is a LOT of things about the world and about the Echo (which is what makes us the WoL) that our characters, the Scions and ourselves don't know.
3. They wanted us to HATE Zenos, more than we've ever hated anyone before.

I honestly could care less about what the devs wanted me to see, my point was the fact that I was thinking of the devs at all. That's not supposed to happen. I want to get lost in the story like I did with ARR and HW - when Haurchefant was killed I began to cry a little. I immediately hated the knight responsible and wanted to murder the character. I was thinking about the knight, about Thordan, about all the evil that I was up against. But when I faced Xenos, my immediate thought was "Why did the devs attempt to create a 'starting from scratch' feeling? Why would they make that story choice?" It was the moment I stopped caring about Xenos and what he was. If he was going to beat me, then fine. But to do it in the way they did it was bad writing.

...Actually letting them carry on served his purpose because Zenos wanted one thing above all others: A worthy opponent that could make him feel -anything-.

So killing everyone at Rhalgar's Reach helped him do that? That was a morale killing blow, and the only reason it didn't end the rebellion was because we convinced them to continue. Kemp literally said "Our fight is over." Fordola's goal was this exact thing, so that her people could eventually become accepted citizens of the empire. That is the exact opposite of what Zenos wanted, yet not only did he allow the action, he acted as the final nail in that coffin. And to say that Xenos knew that the alliance would motivate the Ala Mhigans would be meta, which is also poor writing. I stand by my words.

I agree that this zone was technically smaller than it should have been, but I decided that this archipelago was the Westernmost portion of the sea and that entrance was just a boat ride between Kugane and the Ruby Toll.

I'm glad that you were able to come to terms with that design decision, it means you were able to enjoy the area more than I was. But for me, that's different. I'm a huge stickler for details, and putting the main base of the confederation (with all of 2 war ships) right at the western-most portion on the sea, practically on Doma's shores, did everything to make the world feel very small. We were in a new land, yet it felt so very small.

I think there's more to Yotsuyo's story that we don't know yet and will get in later story as we progress through the patches.

What they decide to do with her later is up to later, but for all intents and purposes, they took the potential emotional masterpiece of a scorned woman with no sense of home and avoided it whenever someone asked why. She had so much to work with and we got none of it while we were most interested in her backstory. Once we finally do get her backstory, we've already lost quite a bit of that initial curiosity. Instead of a "Wow, she's had a really hard life." moment, I get a "So that explains it." feeling. The timing was so incredibly bad that I lost a potential moment of genuine awe and reflection.

This was because Yugiri lost her patience with their people of Doma and she was dedicated to saving her master's life, even if it meant throwing away her own life. She doesn't want Hien to die, and she doesn't want him to die because the people don't have the courage to fight. Also, remember, that up until this point Yugiri hasn't had any real "skin in the game", as it were. She wasn't in her homeland before, but she is now so everything is much, much more personal here.

I will respectfully disagree with you here. I don't see it that way. We didn't get any previous indication that she was beginning to fray so badly at the edges from dialogue with her. She wasn't happy in that uncanny way, there was also nothing desperate from her dialogue. Until suddenly she finds out Xenos will be near by; and then she seems to lose it. Don't get me wrong, I love to make similar assumptions which can be very logical. And if she were showing signs of breaking down well before that point, I'd definitely agree with you. But due to the way it all happened so suddenly, and with no prior signs she was wearing so thin, I just don't agree this time. For all I know, you're right about what the story writers were thinking. However, their execution of this event just sucked.

We always turn the dial up to 11 like this... Nothing new here.

Actually, there is something new here. The buildup that we got to every story arc conclusion was proportionate to the ending we received. The dial is slowly turned up to 9-10 before it finally gets cranked up to 11. This time though, it wasn't there. The dial was at a 3-4 and suddenly got cranked up to 11. My complaint isn't the ending - that was epic - but the disconnect of the buildup. In other words: "Why was the buildup not a buildup?" There's this thing called the plot diagram that loosely depicts how a climax ought to be achieved with the best payoff; it's considered good writing practice. But there was nearly no rising action before the final climax, which made the event just pass by like a small town on a long drive: blink and you miss it.

Yoshida was very clear that this Expac is NOT about the Ascians (even though everything eventually comes down to Ascians... I'm not saying it was Ascians... But it was Ascians), but more about Garlemald and dismantling more of their influence.

That's about all I have here, I'm sorry you didn't enjoy the story, I found it quite enjoyable, but you really needed to understand the subtext and the character motivations in order to know WHY things happened the way they did. I hope you find things more enjoyable in the patches to come.

I understand the subtext, character motivations, and why things happened. My issue isn't that those things are non-existent, but that they were done so poorly. This is a Final Fantasy game, story is a big deal. People hated other ff games and raged against Square Enix for some of the games that lacked in the execution of the story. XIII makes a good example of this. I was thoroughly pulled into the story for ARR and HW, but SB just made so many errors in story execution via poor writing/design decisions that I am extremely disappointed this time around. Uniting the three nations of ARR felt huge and epic. One war against dragons felt absolutely massive and the subplots were insane and insanely well done. But a war on two fronts felt tiny, made nearly all the actions my character took feel tiny, and wrecked my immersion in both the game and story.

And as far as the Ascians go, HW wasn't about them either. But they made enough of a splash that we always felt under pressure from two threats/struggles. It was a brilliant way to create that sense of urgency. And if Yoshida wanted them to have no existence during the events of SB my question then becomes, "Why on earth would that be a good idea?" If you think that excluding them almost completely and having our allies seem to forget they exist was a good idea, I won't argue with you. That part is completely subjective. But you have made me realize that they haven't lost track of the plot (so thank you for that). They've just lost track of professionalism when it comes to building a story. They (I will not pin this on one person, that would be ridiculous) get paid to work on a final fantasy title, something known for generally having an amazing story. Is it too much to expect a story that at least comes close to the previous two expansions in terms of both world and character building? They could have done most of what they did much better if they decided to slow down the advancement of the story.

I probably would have not had any cause to write what I did if 4.0 ended with the first fight against Xenos in Rhalgar's Reach. If the same length of campaign and 6 of the 8 new maps were dedicated to just the first half of the Ala Mhigan resistance story, it could have been so much better. Too much was attempted with not enough and a lot suffered for it.

Anyways, I genuinely thank you for your comment. You have caused me to think over my initial post, and while not much of my opinion has changed, it has caused me to think. Thank you. The community of this game will always be awesome.

[Quoyan]

Folks keep complaining that the Ruby Sea is too small. Guys. pls.
It's only a sea. It's not an ocean.

A sea is a large body of salt water that is surrounded in whole or in part by land.

No minimum size mentioned there.

And here is a real life sea:


That's the Dead Sea. It's only about 11 miles across at its widest point.

3. They wanted us to HATE Zenos, more than we've ever hated anyone before.

lmao if that was their goal they failed spectacularly. I (and many others I know of the fancying-men persuasion) found him disturbingly attractive :')

[Vayanne]

lmao if that was their goal they failed spectacularly. I (and many others I know of the fancying-men persuasion) found him disturbingly attractive :')

While he's generally pretty, they did a fine job in giving him those creepy vacant eyes. I still could not hate him, just pity him the way I would pity an animal whose brain is destroyed by rabies.

[Quoyan]

While he's generally pretty, they did a fine job in giving him those creepy vacant eyes. I still could not hate him, just pity him the way I would pity an animal whose brain is destroyed by rabies.

I can see where pity would come in tbh. I mean, in a lot of ways he's kind of a victim of circumstance himself (can almost guarantee his childhood/upbringing was all kinds of screwed up)

I think I just have a soft spot for the damaged-villain type... rip :')

That was one of the things I really liked about SB though, honestly. Zenos, Yotsuyu, and Fordola all had dimension to them. Sure, they were the villains, but they were also really human. (Well, Zenos was arguably damaged to the point of psychopathy, but you could still feel for him.)
I like it when the "bad guy" has that element of humanity to them. Not to the point where you're rooting for them, necessarily, but at least to the point where you're like "damn... you had it rough" or whatever. You empathise with them, even if you don't agree with them.

I feel like in the more recent storyline areas SE's done a really god job with this. Nidhogg and the Warriors of Darkness had a good solid dose of it, too.