Gyr Abania - The Poorest Designed Country in XIV

[wereotter]

While I do like Othard, and think it's culture and environment are both great, I have to agree with the original sentiment here. We had the build up at the end of Heavensward that we're finally going to Ala Mhigo. As someone who started in Ul'Dah, I saw the issues regarding the refugees from basically level 2, plus as a monk I was really excited to see that this was happening.

Then my excitement was dulled when the full trailer was launched, samurai was shown in the trailer, along with Kugane, and my hesitation regarding the excitement of Gyr Abania was confirmed when not even did we hit level 61, but we were off to Othard and didn't really do anything at all in Ala Mhigo until the end of the main bulk of the expansion, having spent nearly all our time in Othard. Then I had hoped this story would be fleshed out more in the later patches, only to have basically everything we've done focused on Othard.

It's a massive disappointment to have such potential for that zone wasted, and as was stated, I think the two areas deserved to be separate. Square seemed to want to tell both stories, and they didn't really give either of them the full attention they deserved (though they seem much more intent on telling us about Doma than Ala Mhigo.) And to those talking about how we've known about Ala Mhigo since the 2.0 days, I'd remind you it wasn't long after that we started learning about Doma as the refugees and Yugiri first showed up all the way back in patch 2.2, so both have been known in game for about the same length of time.

[Cybylt]

Going off of interviews it seemed more the case that they simply had very little left to say or show concerning Ala Mhigo beyond the expectation to see it for ourselves. They, at the time, spent the past five or six years drip-feeding us its culture, history, geography, everything. I'd wager we have a more complete history of Ala Mhigo than even some of our original three city states. Given that, what is there TO add beyond the condition of Garlean oppression. And why would that not be better served by also exploring new cultures?

Doma has been known about, but we had very little beyond it being japanese inspired. Ala Mhigo we know every major step of its history, of its people, from now back to when its people made up a majority of Amdapor before their displacement into Gyr Abania. We also always knew it to be a barren, rocky, mountainous land. So much so that they attempted an annexation of Gridania when being a trade route and collecting tolls was taken from them by the advent of larger ship travel.

Monks couldn't be a major cultural touchstone anymore either, the past thirty or so years of Garleans and the Mad King saw to that. Although I'd say that having a three hundred foot tall statue to the god of monks, the 4.x Toll/Idyll being a Monk Monastery, and having one of our first endgame dungeons take place even further into said monastery is about equal to the combined three sentences or so of "Oh hey you're an Azure Dragoon too" that makes Heavensward focal to dragoons.

[ObsidianFire]

Stormblood as a whole suffers from being in-between Heavensward and the Garlean-focused expansion. Heavensward was all about ending a conflict that had lasted a millennium and had a long build-up and an epic conclusion appropriate for that. That story-arc aside, the FFXIV story as a whole has been pointing to the WoL coming into conflict with Garlemald proper ever since 1.0.

Everyone, the players and devs alike, have been wanting to see what happens when that conflict takes place. But there's some things that have to happen before that takes place. Ala Mhigo and Doma being freed would be the biggest things that need to happen before we can go to Ilsabard. This presents a bit of a problem for the devs though, because if Ala Mhigo and Doma each got their own expansion, they'd have two expansions back-to-back that are telling variations of the same liberation story. And they'd be putting the Garlean expansion off for another two years. So they combined both liberation stories into the same expansion. This runs the risk of not developing either side of the story enough. However, the Ala Mhigan side had been talked about in the game already, so at least that conflict/culture wasn't new. Everything in Othard though? No one knew anything about that.

Stormblood feels a lot like a set-up expansion, rather then a self-contained one. It's almost like its main purpose isn't to be a complete story in and of itself, but to give all the information and plot development necessary to get from Heavensward to 5.0. This leads to some of it feeling more like the dev team was working off of a check-list of things that needed to happen rather then letting the story properly develop on it's own terms.

[PangTong]

Ala Mhigo was pretty disappointing to me too. The focus was clearly on Othard, but ultimately I don't feel like either location really got the attention they needed to make their stories feel properly fleshed out and satisfying. The liberations happen far too quickly and easily, and rather than making our faction feel powerful it instead made the Empire seem like bumbling incompetents. The conflict doesn't feel serious, the resolution doesn't feel satisfying. Ala Mhigo as both a story and a location just feels like filler, like they were getting it out of the way quickly and with as little effort as possible so they could focus on things they wanted to do more, which is pretty disappointing considering how long the plot thread had been building up for, and also how it ended up making the Doma story feel rushed anyway.

One thing which sticks in my mind is during the Vegas Fanfest in 2016 where Koji Fox reassured everyone that Ala Mhigo would not just be dusty desert and showed some screenshots of a cool creepy swamp area to prove it. Then the following year when the expansion finally launches it turns out that swamp is just one tiny corner of a single zone and almost the entirety of the rest of Ala Mhigo is, in fact, dusty desert.

[Remedi]

More like a rocky mountain region tbh

[wereotter]

Going off of interviews it seemed more the case that they simply had very little left to say or show concerning Ala Mhigo beyond the expectation to see it for ourselves. They, at the time, spent the past five or six years drip-feeding us its culture, history, geography, everything. I'd wager we have a more complete history of Ala Mhigo than even some of our original three city states. Given that, what is there TO add beyond the condition of Garlean oppression. And why would that not be better served by also exploring new cultures?

Doma has been known about, but we had very little beyond it being japanese inspired. Ala Mhigo we know every major step of its history, of its people, from now back to when its people made up a majority of Amdapor before their displacement into Gyr Abania. We also always knew it to be a barren, rocky, mountainous land. So much so that they attempted an annexation of Gridania when being a trade route and collecting tolls was taken from them by the advent of larger ship travel.

Monks couldn't be a major cultural touchstone anymore either, the past thirty or so years of Garleans and the Mad King saw to that. Although I'd say that having a three hundred foot tall statue to the god of monks, the 4.x Toll/Idyll being a Monk Monastery, and having one of our first endgame dungeons take place even further into said monastery is about equal to the combined three sentences or so of "Oh hey you're an Azure Dragoon too" that makes Heavensward focal to dragoons.

By that logic, they could have lumped Ishgard and Ala Mhigo together considering we also got force-fed a lot of lore regarding that region, it's culture, and it's conflict before even finishing the 2.0 storyline, yet they still were able to develop an entire region for it and gave us even more lore and information, and rehashing things we already knew. Ala Mhigo doesn't seem to have been given any real thought or love at all by developers when it comes to how it was actually put into the game. At the very least, the Ala Mhigan quarter could have been the site of a second set of Doman Enclave style weekly quests, but they didn't even do that. Once the enclave quests were complete from their first iteration, they added more of them rather than letting us see Ala Mhigo getting rebuilt and refurbished after Imperial occupation.

[Remedi]

Tbf Ishgard wasn't the only zone of HW, much of it's lore resides in the dragonsong war, dravania, the sea of clouds and Azys Lla. Coerthas is a very minor part of HW and frankly most of coerthas is still unusable to this day

[wereotter]

Tbf Ishgard wasn't the only zone of HW, much of it's lore resides in the dragonsong war, dravania, the sea of clouds and Azys Lla. Coerthas is a very minor part of HW and frankly most of coerthas is still unusable to this day

My point is less geographic, and more that you could justify we knew all about the Ishgardians and the Dragonsong War from the quests we got going through Central Coerthas in 2.0. We found out through the Heavensward quest that there was a lot more to it, and Square did a good job of showing us just how much we didn't know. So by claiming we already know everything about Gyr Abania people discredit the fact that there most certainly is more lore, more history, and more they could have shown us in the region than they actually did because the area was so overlooked this expansion in favor if focus on Othard.

[ObsidianFire]

It also could be that there really wasn't much more to tell us in the first place. Ishgard was all about finding out what really happened.

In Ala Mhigo and Gyr Abania, we already know what really happened. We know that Gyr Abania was already in really bad shape before the Garleans took over. Theodiric, the last king of Gyr Abania was crazy and a tyrant. To the point that some Ala Mhigans didn't care all that much that the Garleans took over. Stormblood wasn't revealing anything new; it was confirming that things were as bad as we hoped they weren't.

[Remedi]

What obsidian said.
The dragonsong war was written as a thousand year conflict but we had no prior knowledge of it, which made the whole arc more malleable, meanwhile Ala Mhigo had a more detailed story which made things less malleable. Not to mention that the whole dragonsong war was between 2 nations close to one another, while Garlemand and Ala mhigo aren't exactly close.

Usually thousands years conflicts are used to obfuscate things, because it gives an air of antiquity, importance and ofc it makes it more likely that the two parties doesn't remember what really sparked the conflct in the first place.
That said there are some instances of show, don't tell in Gyr abania, which are very well welcomed for the whole lore of the zone