What is with the constant mistreatment of the Garlean story?(6.1 Patch spoilers)

[MikkoAkure]

There's a lot of intriguing Garlean lore hidden away in side content that I really would have liked to have seen shuffled over to the MSQ's. It's kind of weird that the MSQ's pushed the stereotypical caricatures of cruel and ruthless soldiers so heavily. That sort of thing worked better back in the days of ARR when every in-game nation was portrayed as flawed and yet over time many soft and heavy retcons or story resolutions led to a 'nicer' image for the major City States.

It's weird that they saw fit not to give the Garleans that same treatment until after everything had crashed and burned.

The Garleans come from a continent we barely have any access to up until now and have been one of the primary enemies in the game for 12 years, driving the plot by being the bad guys and wrecking stuff.

The three city-states are located where the game takes place, are not our enemies, and are the people we work for so it makes sense for their image to be smoothed out before the Garleans'. Especially since the story started to stop with internal politics and squabbling in Eorzea and concentrated on the bigger threat of Garlemald and the cosmic threat of the Ascians.

It also makes sense that now that the Garleans are no longer our enemy, their own image will be rehabilitated over the course of the upcoming story.


I'm not sure why this is a mystery to you.

[Raven2014]

It's not the writing itself, it's the pacing and structure. And tbh, I don't think that will ever change since it seems this is the way Yoshi want FF14 to be. Even if you increase the quality of the writing by a factor of 10, I don't believe you will have a lot of room for noticeable effect.

Here is what I meant specifically:

- In most other MMO, the launch of an expack pretty much only set the foundation that we would then see developed over the next 2-3 years. Hitting max level usually means you're only about half way through the story. This give the build up more room and time for exposition, and you see a much more gradual build up for the climax.

- In FF14, the story is basically done and wrapped at launch. And we spend the rest of the expansion's life time on ... after story content because the story already reached and passed its climax. By itself that's not a bad thing, the problem is ... jamming the whole main story in 10 levels is just not enough.

This has been an issue since HW, and I would say 6.0 became the worst. This is why almost every major story point and encounter feels very underwhelming consider their build up. (Galmerald, Anima, Zodiak, and even Endwalker). In my opinion, the story would be much more flesh out if it was like this:

- 6.0 should stop at Zodiak, with that encounter given the proper respect it deserves, with a lot more exposition on the Galmerald expedition.
- 6.2 is Elpis and the time travelling stuffs, give it more time to develop the history of the ancient.
- 6.4 is Ultimate Thule (with a much more expansive prepration for the journey, instead of a series of busy body quests) and the grand finale.

You can see this structure problem persist with how the story is distributed as well, or rather, what's being used to distributed the story. Usually Raid encounters are used as the main climax for story milestone, but FF14 pretty much relegate it to after story and side content and almost entirely disconnected from the main narrative.


Again, I don't think FF14 will ever change this structure, so the story, whether what you think about it, is what you will get every time. It's not a question of will, but mean. No writer can make what we see here significantly better if they only 10 level of leveling content to climax the story. In the end it's a matter of preference really. Say you have a novel that you would love to see an animate adaptions, there are 3 choices:

- Movie theater.
- Several OVAs.
- 2 seasons of TV series.

Each will have its strength and weakness. I think FF14 goes with the Movie/OVA format, and if you are someone who prefer the longer developing time of a TV series, Movie/OVA will never be enough irregardless of how good it is done.

[Theodric]

It's not the writing itself, it's the pacing and structure.

I'd say it's a bit of both. Some of the writing is pretty solid and interesting, though the game seems terrified of the idea of actually following through with a grand conclusion that isn't just another flashy fight with no actual stakes or lasting consequences to speak of. For as much as the game seems to want to become more of a single player experience and traditional JRPG, if we look at the other titles in the franchise there's a lot more going on in general. Especially in the more 'recent' titles that were able to have fun with cinematics.

I still remember all the cool cutscenes in FFIX where Eidolons were summoned with dramatic consequences. That we had more effort put into a cutscene of G'raha eating a burger instead of an Echo flashback showing the devastating and horrific effects of Hydaelyn's genocidal campaign as well as the clash between Hydaelyn and Zodiark.

I just wish the game was more open and honest. Back in the days of ARR it certainly did not have any signs of ending up as a glorified visual novel with a heavy focus on slice of life and 'comedy'. I remember Koji Fox explaining that stuff like Hildibrand was deliberately locked away in a side quest because it was so divisive and not everybody's cup of tea/style of humour.

How times change, I guess...

I'm pretty excited about going to explore the Void, though so many plot points have been suddenly dropped or hastily wrapped up that I'm reluctant to get my hopes up too much.

[VelKallor]

Look at Garlemald...and then look at what happened to Cardassia.

[MikkoAkure]

I just wish the game was more open and honest. Back in the days of ARR it certainly did not have any signs of ending up as a glorified visual novel with a heavy focus on slice of life and 'comedy'. I remember Koji Fox explaining that stuff like Hildibrand was deliberately locked away in a side quest because it was so divisive and not everybody's cup of tea/style of humour.

Every story needs specific points to have a breather, especially with how the MSQ in the X.0 expansions is getting longer. It's called "comedic relief" for a reason. At least to me, the rare bits of levity in between everything bad happening isn't detracting from the story. It's better than just one long 50 hour slog of bad things happening.

It's nothing new either. We've had comedic relief bits in ARR too. Right before half of the Scions were killed and the story got serious we had "Tidus" and had to rescue goblin cheese from a dragon. This is an MMO and the story is meant to be easy to get into and enjoy for the most amount of people. I wouldn't call the few bits of cutscenes and interactions between characters in between arcs "a glorified visual novel with a heavy focus on slice of life and 'comedy'" either. It's just storytelling. And by most metrics, the storytelling has gotten better since ARR when we were treated with mostly silent cutscenes with stilted dialogue and cardboard characters telling us to go to point A to kill X amount of rats until an Ascian showed up and talked about how evil he is and about how he's going to do evil things with no explanation except that we're not worthy of an explanation.

You're really scratching the bottom of the barrel if you're comparing the MSQ to Hildebrand and I'm not sure what specific moment you're trying to compare it to. They're completely different. There's no over-the-top antics and slapstick humor in the MSQ. With as many legitimate issues there are in the writing, there's better and more important things to criticize other than "I'm upset that something funny happened in my dark story". I'm gonna need a source on that Koji quote too because all I could find was him mentioning Oda saying that a lot that happens in Hildebrand doesn't make sense and it's about as canon and real as you want it to be. Nothing about it being specifically relegated to side content because of "divisive humor". It's always been side content, all the way back to 1.0.


I would have to agree that the main issue is the pacing and structure. They started the game without knowing where it's going to end up, started coming up with ideas midway through the 2nd expansion, and then followed that up with a poorly paced expansion that spent most of it's time thousands of malms away from anything we knew about until that point, and then revealed way too much in the follow-up expansion to the point where they ruined the pacing of the story and decided to end it quickly in one patch story rather than have it finish in X.3 like the other expansions. That isn't to say that the writing doesn't have problems either. In Endwalker it feels like they rushed a lot of revelations, didn't give them time to sink in, and didn't properly explain a lot of stuff very well. It's like they knew how it was going to go and what the characters were thinking, but failed to translate that into the game, to the point where people are still fighting over it to this day. If they had paced the game better and gave more thought earlier on in how we were going to go through the story instead of one expansion at a time, I think the writing overall would have been better.

[anhaato]

They've definitely forgotten how to use comic relief effectively. What should ideally be used like a pinch of sugar in a spicy dish to balance the flavors has instead become them dumping an entire bottle of honey into it because they've somehow rationalized that some = good, so more = better.

[ElizanderNorisse]

I was verily disappointed by how they treated Nerva in 6.1. The devs could’ve at least given him an actual HUMAN model like all the other blasphemies…

He could’ve been a potential ally.

I assume that his father Titus also shared the same fate since he’s nowhere to be found. Lucia did say that he and his son Nerva took advantage of the rumours that Zenos was being possessed by a demon. Who was Elidibus at that time. So he didn’t die in the War of Successions and might be in hiding after the civil war.

I also wonder what happened to Varis’s bodyguards, Annia & Julia.

[TaleraRistain]

Every story needs specific points to have a breather, especially with how the MSQ in the X.0 expansions is getting longer. It's called "comedic relief" for a reason. At least to me, the rare bits of levity in between everything bad happening isn't detracting from the story. It's better than just one long 50 hour slog of bad things happening.

That's one of my main complaints with Heavensward and while I thought it was well written and good storytelling, I hold it in lower regard than others do. That expansion managed to make even moogles feel heavy. People give Stormblood a lot of grief, but I thought the balance there was much better and they did successfully lighten things up instead of it just being one bad thing after another like Heavensward. I'm eager to see how XVI turns out but I do have concerns since it's the HW story team working on it.

[ElizanderNorisse]

Despite the Nerva issue, I’m actually looking forward to what the devs have in store. I’m sure they’ll redeem Garlemald somehow.

[Carin-Eri]

It's a petty and small detail but it's kind of funny that every NPC just unanimously decided to all call us Adventurer and no longer the WoL. Did they all pass memos to each other? Also, the 'adventure!' music triumphantly blaring whenever the word 'adventure!' comes up.

At this point I'd like to just jump into the Void so all the cheese will melt off of me. Maybe walk in on Diabolos reading a newspaper on his couch, only for him to see us and immediately sweat bullets.

Good point - and there doesn't seem to be any real reason for it either. I mean, I guess one might argue that some decided the title was defunct with Hydaelyn no longer around, or that the change was our character's preference, but still..... seems a little odd for everyone to stop referring to the WoL AS the WoL considering that, like it or not, being the WoL kinda defined our character.