Is it just me, or did 5.3 represent a big decline in storytelling? (spoilers)

[Arallir]

5) This applies not only to patch 5.3, but in many respects to the entire game as a whole - fan service. I understand why this is being done, and I am not against fan service as such. But first, again, can we treat everyone with an equal measure? For example, my brother and I are fans of archons, not twins. The fact that there are fewer of us does not mean that we do not exist. Does this mean that we are somehow worse than the twin fanbase? Previously, the distribution of screen time was approximately: 70% twins, 30% everyone else. And I was very happy that in the original Shadowbringers these figures were almost equal. But judging by the hint at the end of 5.3, next screen time will be: 50% twins, 50% G'Raha. And the rest may flash somewhere out there in the background. Secondly (not the least), the game imposes not only on the character his emotions and preferences (which, returning to the previous point, greatly interferes with the roleplay - I myself want and will decide who is a friend to my characters and who is not, and why), but also mine to me. And it doesn't just make me angry - it fills me with rage. To show foundation of my arguments, here some of the examples from patch 5.3:

- Tataru leads the hero to the room where the Scions lie in a coma. He does not sit by all of them (which would be fair), does not go to Thancred, who is the longest in the First, who has the most acute problem and who loses consciousness, no, our character goes to the twins and sits next to them. The imposition of addictions? I think the answer is yes.

[Arallir]

- The scene where our character, as soon as the Scions wake up, rushes, almost with his tongue sticking out, into the Crystal tower to G'Raha. Honestly, if it was necessary to cram a new one into the old G'Raha, it would be better if they did it behind the scenes. This is not only the imposition of emotions, which may not be shared by player, but this is also a morally ambiguous moment, and for the main hero, who is shown in the game as “the best of the best”, showing such puppy joy that G'Raha - Exarch will be returned. A morally ambiguous moment, because, as I said above, we are our experiences and memories. To cram into G'Raha from our time the memories (and his whole mind) of the Exarch is like rewriting his personality. But we can do that just like that. For some reason, only Garlemald cannot rewrite Weapon’s pilots (What OverSoul is doing to them) because it is horrific and disgusting.

- The scene where we cheerfully run together with G'Raha to fight the hippogriffs. Again, what should those who do not share emotions do? And what about those whose characters do not perceive their life and work as a fun happy-go-lucky adventure?

Actually, I'll stop on that note. Once again, I apologize for the volume of what I have written, but I wanted not to be unfounded in my beliefs and to argue my point of view.

[Arallir]

You can edit a post to get around the character limit.

I beg your pardon, I did not immediately notice. But I'm afraid I don't know how to edit it. I really wanted to say all of it...

[Iscah]

I think you are misremembering some characters' motives.

1) I did not like that by raising the topic “try to convince your opponent”, the developers did not realize this possibility. They did not let me convince Elidibus. I have missed this opportunity since the days of Heavensward. Even then, we were shown this- we were able to convince two old dragons in the possibility of peace between dragons and mortals, with all the features of the dragon’s memories, but we could not convince an old man (Thordan).

I think both Elidibus and Thordan showed that they refused to be convinced. Aymeric tried to reason with Thordan and was imprisoned for it. And by the time Thordan arrives in Azys Lla and takes on the power of the primal King Thordan, he makes it clear that he is beyond listening to us.

During the solo instance in Amaurot, if we try to suggest that we can reach a compromise with Elidibus he rejects it out of hand. If we truly hold our opposing ideals then we cannot let go of them. This is a declaration from him that he will not compromise and cannot be convinced, and if we believe in our cause then we should not attempt to do so.

The dragons are open to reason because they are not against us, but neutral. We only need to convince them that they cannot remain neutral.

We still solve everything exclusively by force. Why did Midgardsomr suddenly believe in us and in humanity? Because we are strong and by fighting we have restored Hydaelyn’s blessing. However, how, I would like to ask, does this answer the claims that he made against the "sons of man"? We didn’t say a thing to Tiamat’s story, which Midgardsomr wanted us to know. Why did Hraeswelgr agree to help us? Because we defeated him in his trial. But how does this respond to his claims and doubts in mortals?

I will have to recheck exactly what Midgardsormr was doing, but certainly Hraesvelgr is not simply convinced by our strength. By the time he fights us in Sohr Khai, he has already agreed to help us not because we are strong but because he is impressed by Alphinaud's determination to save Estinien. He fights us to confirm that we are physically capable of standing against Nidhogg.



Ultimately, Elidibus has stated he will not compromise - has demonstrated that he is not a reasonable human but a primal created to fixate on a particular ideal and methods incompatible with our existence. We have no choice but to fight.

And at the end of it all? We show compassion. The journal notes that we "restore his lost memories to him" by giving him the crystals.

3) From here I pass directly to the third point. The ending. So contrasting that I again want to ask - why? Why show that our opponents are also people who also suffered and fought for their world, only to say in the game: "He’s dead and good riddance!"

Where did it say that?

Elidibus's death wasn't played for a celebration. It was still sad in the end.

Yes, and G'Raha is ambiguous in this light, since with all the promise of a "paving a path for the tomorrow" he did not try to save the future in which he woke up (and there at that moment more than one generation passed), but preferred to save the past and us specifically ... By his success, by the way, he simply erased all people from that future.

We've had a lot of debate on this and yes, I agree it should have been played better - more emphasis on the world being doomed with no possible recovery, so the "save the other timeline and not ours" thing feels properly justified. If there is no chance of anyone surviving Black Rose, just a matter of how soon they die, that would make more sense than what we got.

For what it's worth, the other timeline wasn't actually erased and is even looking less doomed than before, according to the last Tale From the Shadows. (Which I'm not actually all that happy about, as it completely clashes with my thoughts on making it extra hopeless as a necessity for the storytelling, but anyway.)

Also, G'raha wasn't the instigator of the idea to travel back in time and save the WoL - it was already well underway by the time he was awoken from his stasis. Whole generations devoted themselves to this idea, somehow; he was just an obvious choice for pilot, if not the only one possible of doing it at all, and of course he is willing to do so.

Or we say: "it doesn't matter what you wanted, it is important how you got there." Then no participants should be justified. For example, tell the whole truth about Warriors of the First, including their ugly episodes. Let everyone decide for themselves whether they are heroes or not. But no, certain people want everyone inside the game to remember Warriors of Darkness as heroes and heroes only.

This is just... too much. Ardbert was misremembered as a villain who caused the Flood. We explained to people the full story behind it. Why is that a bad thing? This just feels like you're looking for every little thing you can possibly object to.

We're not making a choice between portraying them as "hero" or "nuanced individual". We are setting a record straight so that they are not remembered as "villains and villains only" when they were doing their best to save the world - including during the bit where they tried to kill us. (Much like Elidibus is, if you want to defend his actions because of his motives.)

We probably didn't explain the interdimensional travel thing because we're generally avoiding talking about the idea of us coming from another dimension.

Even wishing to revise the final cut scene on top of the Crystal Tower, I found that only the part of it with G'Raha was preserved in the "diary". They didn't even leave that part of Elidibus to me. And no, I previously treated G’Raha well, but on this basis I am starting to quietly hate and despise him. And I want to say to developers: you can keep him, I don’t want and don’t need G’Raha.

Just watch the whole thing. The scene with Elidibus is in there and inextricably part of the same scene with G'raha. They're not going to break it in half just so you can watch it starting from Elidibus's bit.

Your character is close friends with G'raha whether you like him or not, so you might as well learn to like him.

4) Role-play. The game openly started to describe who and what the player's character once was. And it would be okay if it just said that he was a member of the Convocation with a certain name. But we are told that he was always an adventurer. I always think over all my characters: their motives, views and goals, biographies, etc. This is the only way, I believe, to make roleplay possible. And not all of them are adventurers. Yes, the game presents us as an adventurer, but in the "present world" I can still mentally "delete" the Adventurer’s Guild from my character’s history if it does not fit, or imply that the others see “the adventurer” due to their perception, but when the game tells me: "you have been an adventurer at all times" - it becomes somehow hard to ignore. (And the last of the stories even went into the modus operandi of the Azem) All this would be okay if the protagonist was a prescribed character like in the old Final Fantasy games. But we have Main Character as a "blank sheet", “hollow shell” due to MMO genre.

This is not the writers' problem. For all that the character is "ours" they are still a character being developed in the world of the story. If you want to reject parts of that story for the sake of individual roleplay, you're free to do that, but I don't see how ignoring our past life as Azem is suddenly harder than ignoring any of the other things our current living character actively did on screen.

I have characters who aren't "the WoL" and it's far more jarring to see them addressed as having done things the individual character hasn't done than to know that their past life was an adventurer.

(Though of course, it's not their past life anyway but that of the scripted WoL, and they are not the WoL.)

5) This applies not only to patch 5.3, but in many respects to the entire game as a whole - fan service. I understand why this is being done, and I am not against fan service as such. But first, again, can we treat everyone with an equal measure?

It is not the writers' job to cater to your personal favourite character. Again, the WoL is played as a specific person with specific friends and relationships, whatever your personal thoughts are on those characters. They are not a perfectly blank slate for you to decide their friends and enemies, unless you do it in roleplay beyond the confines of the game story.

The game is ultimately a single-player RPG with an established protagonist, and even if you got to pick what they look like, you have no more control over their characterisation than you do over the older FF protagonists that you could choose to rename.

- The scene where our character, as soon as the Scions wake up, rushes, almost with his tongue sticking out, into the Crystal tower to G'Raha. Honestly, if it was necessary to cram a new one into the old G'Raha, it would be better if they did it behind the scenes. This is not only the imposition of emotions, which may not be shared by player, but this is also a morally ambiguous moment, and for the main hero, who is shown in the game as “the best of the best”, showing such puppy joy that G'Raha - Exarch will be returned. A morally ambiguous moment, because, as I said above, we are our experiences and memories. To cram into G'Raha from our time the memories (and his whole mind) of the Exarch is like rewriting his personality. But we can do that just like that. For some reason, only Garlemald cannot rewrite Weapon’s pilots (What OverSoul is doing to them) because it is horrific and disgusting.

I'm sorry you don't feel that way, but this is literally the emotional climax of a whole story arc. They are not going to avoid showing that emotional climax and stifle that joy for those who are invested in the story just in case some people who didn't enjoy the rest of it also won't enjoy seeing this bit.

As to the ethics of it... I wouldn't have thought they'd take that route, but since they did I can only go from the backwards approach that "it was considered okay so why is it okay?" - and my best take on it is that, simply enough, G'raha is uniquely positioned to make that decision on behalf of his other self because he does know how he would answer the question if it was proposed to him.

For all we see, maybe we did wake him up and ask him first.

It also hasn't overwritten the younger G'raha - he seems balanced between the two sides of his identity. To me, at any rate. He has the Exarch's memories but also more the personality of his younger self.

A far better comparison than Oversoul (which destroys the host, body and soul) is Soroban's state at the end of the Four Lords storyline: sharing a body with Genbu's soul but not overwritten - although G'raha seems to have merged more fully between the two identities.

[KadaRemnant]

MASSIVE MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW

When I was doing the first story quests in Amh Araeng (with the Mord in Mord Souq, before you meet Alisaie), I was worried that my favorite game had gone to hell. The writing and direction felt tacky and try-hard, like it had been handed off to SE's B-team. But then Tesleen... happened, and from then on Shadowbringers was peak FF14.

However, I get the exact same vibes from 5.3 as I got from those terrible early quests with the Mord. The events of the story were amazing, and a fitting conclusion to Shadowbringers, but the dialog and cutscene direction feels fundamentally different to what came before, and entirely for the worse. The music in cutscenes was way too schmalzy, the characters were over-emotive... and a lot of the characters just felt off. It's hard to say why, but in the final scenes on the First, Alisaie, Alphinaud, and Y'shtola especially all felt out of character. Not through what they said, necessarily, but how they said it.

There were other problems. The exposition drop leading up to the fight with Elidibus felt rushed and forced. We had no farewell scenes dedicated to Lyna or Ryne in particular, despite them both permanently losing their closest family in our return to the Source. We really don't need a wacky over-acted Asahi meat-puppet.

Overall, it feels like the story is now being told with much less art and subtlety. I don't know if it's a result of the team having to work from home with less coordination, or if they were just rushed due to disruption of workflow, or if the writing and cutscene direction have actually been handed off to new people. But 5.3 was a major artistic downgrade for FF14, even if the fights, new music, and basic arc of the story are still top-notch. It kind of ruined the ending of Shadowbringers for me, and I hope it doesn't represent the new normal for FF14 going into the future.

Just you. The story was amazing.

[KadaRemnant]

I hated 5.3 msq a lot, too many quest for nothing, we need sauce not bring food from Source to The First. Other patches before, same thing. Less quests, more juice. I hoped that the catboy die, i was happy when he sacrifices himself, but no, let's bring him in Mor Dhona. ShB had a good starting point, but it loses on all quests that brings nothing. Totally agree.

Reading this ... Wow i truly hope we never meet in game... You should leave ffxiv because we'll get a lot of catboy and you will hate it. Lots of adventures with him soon and so happy about it. don't think this is your kind of game because the story is amazing and we all love our catboy. Leave our catboy alone.

[Berteaux_Braumegain]

Yeah, between 5.2 and 5.3, repeated attempts are made to compromise with Elidibus or at least talk him down, and his response is always something to the equivalent of "No, and I also curse you for breathing, you murderer."

If Emet-Selch can come back from the dead, implicitly say "I am entrusting the fate of the world to these new people", and Elidibus follows that up by literally trying to cleave the party's head off with a Limit Break five seconds later? He's not changing his mind.

[Destati]

Funny thing is, I bet there were people who said the exact same stuff about "Solus" and his similar antics in his introductory scene. Yet Emet-Selch went on to become probably one of this game's most popular characters.

So, yeah, you never know.

Yes, while Emet initially read to me as a "Diet Ardyn", he eventually grew on me very much and now I would go so far as to call Ardyn a "Diet Emet-Selch". However, Emet wasn't piloting the body of a character I despise immensely.
What made Yotsuyu's finale so satisfying (though I'm still a bit bummed that she had to die) is that she took that worm down with her, and I was glad to be rid of him. I knew he was scummy from the second he showed up on screen, and honestly characters like him irritate the hell out of me.
So to see him make a return, even if it's not technically the same character, was infuriating. Personally I think it undermines Yotsuyu's death. The only way that will make it acceptable to me is if we get to kill him ourselves this time. If Fandango chose a different body, literally any other body, then he might have stood a chance in being another Emet, but as it stands now... no. Just no.

[Iscah]

I should add that I wasn't impressed with Elidibus's treatment in the 5.X plot either, but for different reasons - it feels like the writers didn't know how we could defeat Elidibus the patient schemer so they had to reduce him to an irrational amnesiac just so we'd stand a chance.

I also generally remain uncomfortable with the revelation of the Ascians being well-meaning "heroes of another story" made villainous only by perspective - not because I don't like the prospect of sympathetic villains as a whole, but because in this specific story's case it feels at odds with what they were aiming for in the earlier parts of the plot. It doesn't feel like a reveal that adds up with and explains everything that went before, but a sudden change in direction. The writers have done their best to cover up the gaps, but the ARR-era Ascians remain incongruous with what we now know of their "true intent all along" within the story.

[Rosenstrauch]

A morally ambiguous moment, because, as I said above, we are our experiences and memories. To cram into G'Raha from our time the memories (and his whole mind) of the Exarch is like rewriting his personality. But we can do that just like that. For some reason, only Garlemald cannot rewrite Weapon’s pilots (What OverSoul is doing to them) because it is horrific and disgusting.

I'm in some degree of agreement with you on G'raha. I was pretty happy with the Exarch as a character up to and even most of the way into 5.3. And when it looked like he had to make his heroic sacrifice after all, I thought it was a good send off for his character. But then not only did he survive his own death, but he half-hijacked his younger self's chance to grow into his own character.

There have been several characters in Shadowbringers whose lives are tied into some manner of past self: An Lad, Ryne, and Gaia. The first shares memories and their appearance with their past self, the late Titania. The second spent half her character arc struggling to come into her own under the legacy of a woman she'd never met. The third lost a significant chunk of her memories to being possessed by an unseen person who might be An Ascian, or a Voidsent, or even a fragment of Zodiark himself, and was pulled back from the brink by the love of someone who understood to an extent what she was going through and tried as hard as she could to be there for her. And in each case the idea is hammered home that these characters aren't beholden to those past lives, no matter how beloved they were. Hell, Minfilia even voluntarily ended her own immortal life so that Ryne, having chosen to become the Oracle of Light in full, would get to live her own life the way she saw fit.

Not only is this consideration not extended to G'raha, but it's actually presented as a problem: At least one character remarks that the Exarch might not even be able to stick his soul into the body of his past self because he's changed enough over the years that he may not consider himself the same person. It's a very weird double standard, not terribly well justified, and I feel the handwave meant to address this—the bit where G'raha talks about the state of his soul—only muddles the situation further. In it, G'raha talks from two different perspectives: That of a young man now possessed of memories from a life he never lived, and that of an old man now possessed of the young body from his Halcyon days. It's as if he's two people inhabiting the same body, which the same handwave assures us is not the case. It's hard to believe his soul really is as normal as the writer says it is, and it's not surprising that people other than myself feel that this treads very close to the Oversoul/Ascian Possession/Convocation Ascension stuff in its undertones.

In fact, I wonder if that might actually be the point: The same ending featured Fandaniel, an Ascian who had to be ascended to his position due to his sundered soul, expressing contempt for his Unsundered colleagues clinging to their pasts. Giving the impression that he resents them for raising him up in the first place, or so I think. If we do end up getting the topic of G'raha's soul brought up in further detail, I'd probably expect it to be compared and contrasted with Fandaniel's situation. If so, I hope they don't end up vilifying Fancy Dan for that—he's villain enough as it is without the writers breaking their own aesop twice over.

... all that said, I wish they'd just done what I expected them to do: Have the Exarch's soul be made into a Job Crystal for his younger self to wield. It's the sort of have-your-cake-eat-it-too outcome that would've completely bypassed having to think about the moral issues involved.