When does Stormblood get good?[Spoilers?]

[Lunavi]

My fair opinion below, warning, contains major spoiler for 5.0 pre-patches story, so yeah...

In my honest opinion it gets better once Zenos dies, that guy really ruined the expansion by being the worst villain this game has ever seen. After that point we start to have real things happening again with villains who have ACTUAL motives and are not more shallow than the kiddie pool. Lyse doesn't get any better though, but thankfully the game starts to focus less on her as well after 5.0 and more on the rest of the crew again.

[Siete]

Well, I'm on the Steppes and stuff is getting a lot better here, maybe because of how little I get of Lyse?

I'm amazed at how they replaced Estinien and Ysayle for this ha.

[Iscah]

Lyse is still fine imo, I think.

Minfilla 1.0 was worse. She keeps getting herself in the damsel in distress situation and often orders around and never gets the work done by herself.

She gets more hate over that than she deserves. She's only been captured twice - once alongside all the Scions who weren't outright murdered in the raid on the Waking Sands, and then trying to stop Nabriales from stealing Tupsimati (a relic possibly more valuable than her life, if the Ascians got hold of it).

We don't see her work because it's meetings and phonecalls linkpearls and keeping everything running. We see her when she delegates stuff to us.


...oh and this has just made me realise (by a few steps of thought) why I didn't mind the eternal "pray return to the Waking Sands" as a new player - I liked following all the changing dialogue between minor characters in the hall, and being called back meant another step in their conversations. (Which made the raid even more horrifying...)

[Rhais]

Tbh, it could be made so intentionally. I mean... she wasn't a person for 5 years after calamity, and wasn't one either in ARR-SB period, because she was her sister. It would be weird to immediately become a whole new person when you barely regained your own name just some time ago.

The problem with all this though, is the way she was put into a position of leadership. She was underdeveloped as a character, pretty much one dimensional and what they did portray of her certianly wasn't leadership material. Yet somehow that's Conrad's first choice as a successor? And everyone else is fine with this too? She clearly isn't cut out for the role she was given, which just makes her even more irritating.

[Enla]

The problem with all this though, is the way she was put into a position of leadership. She was underdeveloped as a character, pretty much one dimensional and what they did portray of her certianly wasn't leadership material. Yet somehow that's Conrad's first choice as a successor? And everyone else is fine with this too? She clearly isn't cut out for the role she was given, which just makes her even more irritating.

Spoilers for OP's sake.

I always saw it as nepotism honestly given who her father is. Conrad specifically says that isn't the case but let's be honest 'because you're you' doesn't hold much water either as a reason when up until that point Lyse hasn't done any leading or shown any qualities that would make her seem a good fit for that role. Of course logistically there was likely a good chunk of her character development that had to be cut to make the first part of the expansion an acceptable length, so for all we know there were going to be instances where she did show she was perfect for the job. It's just if they did exist they never made it into the game.

Honestly I really wonder how different SB would have been if they had broken up the story more and had the liberation take place in a later patch. It would have given Lyse the time she desperately needed to be fleshed out because out of all the issues with that expansion, Lyse really is the character with the most wasted potential. Good on paper but the writing just did her no favors at all.

Which is a shame because has she been written competently she'd have been my favorite character in the expansion. The time she spends in the Steppes really shows growth on her part and I was excited to see where it went... And learning that Ishikawa was in charge of the Steppes content for SB I have to wonder if she had some hand in that. Because Lyse basically had a full character reversal once they went back to Ala Mhigo and it was like someone else was writing her again. Which then only got worse when whomever was in charge of her basically gave up by 4.2 because any outstanding character growth she could have had is abandoned by the time we get back to Ala Mhigo again.

[Allegor]

Yeah, I'm not a fan of that part of the story either. If anything, it's that specific moment where I thought they officially dropped the ball

Conrad: Lyse, you're in charge now

M'naago: am I a joke to you?

[dinnertime]

it had a few great moments, but all in all Stormblood was pretty mediocre and honestly felt like a filler expansion

Technically it is. There was an interview I read where they weren't too sure how to continue the WoD's story in 3.x so they took their time and held it off, and in exchange they focused on Ala Mhigo, Doma and the Far East (probably because it was popular demand, like how Heavensward probably happened because players really wanted to visit Ishgard back in 1.0)

[Theodric]

Stormblood is a very mixed bag. It tried to do too much and never really gave the regions it focused on the amount of love and attention that they deserved. The Far East was handled far better than Ala Mhigo/Garlemald.

Shadowbringers focuses almost entirely on a single region and the story is much more cohesive as a result.

[Mansion]

Stormblood is like a weird off-tone sidequest that got stretched to an entire expansion. I didn't like it anywhere near as much as Heavensward and now Shadowbringers is out, it feels like a continuity from ARR - HW - ShB while Stormblood doesn't fit the sequence. It also feels very heavy on 'dark stories' of the conquered lands and cruel treatment by their conquerors.

The patch quests got more interesting, and started leading into Shadowbringers' storyline.

This is exactly how I read Stormblood. For me, it's a collection of little stories with the themes of War / Resistance / Revolution, which have their own charm in their particular way, but the Scion's path is an awkward attempt to patch these smaller stories under a bigger narrative.
It ends up chopping them in pieces of storytelling, and it kinda deflates the build up of each resolution. Ala Mhigo is the big victim there. Somehow it's the same with Doma severed between each part of the Azim "bubble".
While if you look individually at the lore around the Azim Steppes or the Ruby Sea, it makes more sense.

[FedoraTheExplorer]

Azim Steppe is the only good part of SB.