I'm beginning to think this is a dev issue rather than a player issue. Like covid, Soken's cancer, and whatever else we may not know about just wrecked the team so much they can't handle working on anything but fluff now. I'm flashing back to Yoshi-P's comments about how they have to be into what they're doing and I guess what they're into right now is abject silliness. This doesn't bode well for the rest of EW if they considered 6.0 to be so heavy* that the rest of the patches are just going to be nonsense.

* It really wasn't, not with lack of consequences and the gratuitous amount of jarring, immersion breaking 'comic relief' scenes.

Speaking of which, FF14's general brand of humor doesn't work for me either. I just want a good story and it's looking like ShB was the end of that. I'm an adult, if I feel the game themes are too much or that all I want to do is laugh I'll log off and watch a stand-up comic. I don't play FF14 for comedy and trying to force me to 'have fun' with very subjective forms of humor isn't what I'm looking from my gaming experience. FF14 already wasn't as serious or dark as the other numbered titles, but now it's straight up starting to feel like the kiddie pool version of FF titles.