VIERA AND HROTHGAR COMPLAINT MEGATHREAD

[Allegor]

Issue is will it look alright or will look like sad brendan frasier meme on hrothgar.
It is the next best thing to getting a Bald hair update (which nobody should want for hrothgar bc every glitched hrothgar gets bald and it looks awful)

It only looks awful because they're smooth as a p- ....baby. Give them fur texture and I'm sold on bald Hroths

[Zebraoracle]

Issue is will it look alright or will look like sad brendan frasier meme on hrothgar.
It is the next best thing to getting a Bald hair update (which nobody should want for hrothgar bc every glitched hrothgar gets bald and it looks awful)

...I thought bald hroths looked kinda nice... They at least look better than the April 1st hairs, that's for sure. (Obviously IMO, before someone gets all ruffled)

[Gullis]

Issue is will it look alright or will look like sad brendan frasier meme on hrothgar.
It is the next best thing to getting a Bald hair update (which nobody should want for hrothgar bc every glitched hrothgar gets bald and it looks awful)

I would use a bald option, over anything I currently have accsess too

[Renalt]

I will always be a fan of any Viera using this hairstyle.

[Midareyukki]

Sorry to post this here, but it's more so to bring it to the correct topic rather than derail the other one again...

Story is king

I agree.

Yasumi Matsuno was and is my favourite writer in the entire Square Enix department. Yes, even moreso than the vaunted Natsuko Ishikawa. Because I was a kid and I thought games were just straightforward hallways with polygons until I played FF12. Every little corner had something to explore, every area had something that related to that part of the world, and there were bits of lore for me to find which made the world feel grandiose. I thought games were just quirky things for entertainment, until I actually stopped to consider what I was being told from the heavy and dry FF12, the harsh and convoluted Tactics, and the childish but also relevant even into adulthood Tactics Advance... and that's Final Fantasy alone. He worked on Tactics Ogre and Vagrant Story, games which I still to this day urge people to try and experience.

Because that man knew two things. How to tell a story, with all the complex motifs and messages that he's trying to make the player consider. And how to make the world be more than just the story. FF12 was more than just my first foray into the FF series, it was literally the one game that stood out from RPGs and platformers. None in the series came close. It encouraged me to learn English, it helped expand my creativity and want to make a world as large, expansive, with so many stories that connected with one another in it. Though, sure, that might also be because I'm a gigantic history nerd. So sue me. But the world felt and looked magical. A magic that I always associated a lot with Vieras: beautiful, mysterious, earthern but also fantastical.

FF14 came, I tried ARR, and it felt so much like FF12. There were details everywhere, the lore was vast and complex, there were histories in the past that may or may not have had influenced what we experience today in the MSQ directly. And the messages were a bit cartoonish at times, sure, but there was still sobriety there. The refugee crisis in Ala Mhigo, for example, at times paralleled oddly with real world events, and it was interesting to see how characters in-game approached the logistics of suddenly needing to provide for people while also having personal interests when it came to them.

When I heard Matsuno was going to write the story for Return to Ivalice, I was excited. "Finally, Ivalice getting some recognition and something a bit more complex being added to this". I got the complexity, alright. It hit as hard as an anvil. In came the complaints that you required too much information from other games to understand or care about what was being given to you. And half of it was just contradicted by what you were seeing, so you needed to know Ivalice-for-Nostalgia and Ivalice-for-Relevance.
I had some trepidation going into Bozja because of it, but I still had hopes. It was a Type-0 esque take on Hrothgar lore, but as a continuation of the Return to Ivalice story. "Finally, some details! And Matsuno will definitely help these races have some lore, right?! "

...Bozja sucked on so many aspects, it was painful.

Disjointed. Gratuitous. Violent. Stupid. A mockery.

The story didn't add up half the time. It had a lot of plot points, half of which were just handwaved away.
The violence was just overdone and the tones were rather marked. And I'd forgive that because Werylt was going on at the time, which was also violent and harsh... but Werylt ends in some sweet note. Bozja ends with the most sour tone possible.
When you have a story making me yell at my monitor why we're freezing whenever Misija is just standing there.
When you have a story making me wonder why the hell we're listening to someone whose precognition is limited and vague at best, dangerously misleading at worse...
And when your story is making me feel like I just wasted my time doing absolutely god knows what for no pay-off other than seeing characters I cared about die in nonsensical ways...
Ways that we actually had a cure. You can't do Delubrum Reginae at all without doing 5.3, which is when we have a cure for Tempering. But then no, it's all moot and they get mutated on the spot!
It's P A I N F U L.


I can go into details on why that might have been. I have on other threads, from Covid limitations to Matsuno's writing not meshing well with the game they've established. But overall, there was so little quality assessment and cohesion that it was painful.

Lore is easy, and story is the juice like Pip said. But christ almighty. It feels like lately Square has zero interest in making lore that isn't hair-brained, and whatever story they go along with it is either cliché'd or thrown together for the hell of it. So much of what Yasumi Matsuno could do was just thrown into the air. It makes me wonder how much of it he actually wrote, or if he just went down the same rabbit hole as the others. I don't remember his stories, even at their corniest and most boring, being THIS piddly.

I'm sorry if this sounds harsh, I really do. But I can write better than Bozja.

And I wish I could! FF12 was my inspiration, it made me seek out how to do it. Something Square so clearly lost! That way I could give Hrothgar AND Viera the lore they deserve, the story they deserve. Really interesting, unique and mystical-looking races, thrown into the bin because "lmao no time".

Ah yes, but to write about why Sad Birb was Sad, you dedicated a whole expansion, didn'tcha...

[Pip_Chick]

...

Beautiful. I couldn't have said it better myself. I have played FF12 but didn't really enjoy the story. It was a bit too dry for me, but that boils down to personal taste.

But this! We could have had the Endwalker expansion focus on Bozja and Dalmasca. The same things we did in Thavnair we could have done there, even better since we know Fran and the resistance, we would have had a foothold there even before the expansion. All the information we got about the plot could have been done in one of these locations rather than Thavnair. Then focus on the Emo birb. Focus on the new races, and give them some relevant to the story lore. Get to know them better. Basaldjien could either act as an old friend (if you have finished Bozja) or like a new acquaintance (if you didn't). I think everyone would have liked that better than the side quest and 1 Alliance raid no one likes. These races have been relegated to.

Something other than the FF11 races that get all the spotlight like Hyur, Miquo'te, Au'ra (females, males seem to have the short end of the stick as the others), Lalafell and Elezen. Let the others shine, like Roegadin, male Au'ra, Viera and Hrothgar. I am so tired of seeing the same races over and over. There is nothing wrong with them being there but they never add anyone else to the point that people would be forgiven to think that Roegadin were added in Stormblood and that is why we see almost nothing about them. I want to yell from the top of the rooftop that I want the Queen to be a Hrothgar, but then I remember how happy some Roe got when they saw themselves represented. And I don't want to take that away from them.
And it shouldn't be this way! SE really needs to pay more attention to the story, bring more diversity to the cast and let others shine. It would have been cool if one of the scholars that we met were a Roegadin, I would have loved it if Makoto was actually a Roegadin and the Queen a Hrothgar (even if they had to conceal her face the entire time), how about in Thavnair you put more dialogue with male Au'Ra and Why not let some Viera and Hrothgar have more prominent features in the story?
I liked Erenville, I thought he was neat. But beside him, which new character was a Viera or a Hrothgar? None.

P.S: If you ever get around to writing that, make sure to link it, I would love to read it! Especially when I see someone write something that they are passionate about!

[Rokke]

..Bozja sucked on so many aspects, it was painful.

I find it genuinely amusing that you hate Bozja for nearly all the reasons I enjoyed it. That you liked Werlyt's ending (that I hated lmao) comparatively is extra funny lol
Agree on the little future sight Au Ra girl tho. She sucked.

Bozja and Werlyt both get dark but I like the former so much more than the latter because it presents a war thats ugly. Werlyt ends like Stormblood ends- a neat little bow, saccharine and silly when you think about what led up to the finish line.

The overall encompassing story of Bozja was showing that war doesn't just happen, its an ugly chain of dominoes falling. The queen throwing a servant under the bus was cruel. The guards murdering an innocent to hide their secret was slimey. Generations of resentment slowly boiling under the veneer of tradition, bloody battles in the street, individuals throwing in their lot with their enemy because they hate their countrymen that much...its ugly. Its proper ugly. Bozja's story doesn't end in a musical number, it ends with a handful of people finally understanding how and why everything burned down. Bozja ends with a decent NPC body count, yeah, but what war ended without lists of senseless deaths? Without unneeded violence? Would a musical number have smoothed over 50+ years of turmoil?

Im sad it was cut short and mad that planned plot points were stuffed into the little logs for sure...but overall? I loved the story. This game as a whole is terrified of things being ugly, EW's toothless EnD oF DaYs is the perfect example of it. It wasn't perfect by any means but in Bozja we were finally (FINALLY!!!!) allowed one grimey war story.

[Pip_Chick]

I find it genuinely amusing that you hate Bozja for nearly all the reasons I enjoyed it.

I think you misunderstood us.
We were referring to the Bozjan story clamouring a lot of ideas and jumping from one narrative to the next with little to no regard for cohesiveness. My point stood from the idea that the story should have only focused on the resistance, more specifically the blades. Which were shown once and then were sacrificed for Misija's arc. To the point that when they got enthralled I felt nothing. They were supposed to be the protectors of Bozja! But it was like nothing special, they got enthralled and now we have to kill them.
If instead of going around with the ironworks and the lovestruck future lizard, we were to spend time with each of the blades and get to know them better, we would have gotten some character development for them as well as have the chance to glimpse some lore about the past of Bozja and some more, accurate, lore on Hrothgars. But we were robbed on that for Makoto salivating after Cid.
By spending time with the blades and going on missions with them we would have formed a bond we are all blades after all and have to look after each other! This would have been the perfect setting for the rest to happen, Misija unleashes her Grand mommy's power on them, and they get enthralled and mutated. The WOL would have been powerless to stop this and NOW it would have made that scene actually sad and tragic, their names would have mattered and what they became would have hit the same as Tesleen had. Now having to put your comrades in arms down so that they don't destroy what they have fought so hard to build.
And even with the story being cut short they still could have focused just on the Blades and taking revenge on Misija and the imperials. More than that it would have paired nicely with the WOL's dedication to finding a cure! So that no one has to go through what your friends had.
There is potential for the story to have been done better if they only picked 1 story thread and build upon that. But as it stands right now, Bozja's story is a mess of different threads that are not nicely laid out, but tangled in a horrible mess. With a lot of stories going nowhere and the actual story being either buried under them or you have to go out of your way to find them through the logs. And a lot of people just don't do that so a majority just goes through a pointless story that doesn't have a satisfying ending, not a happy one, but a satisfying one, an ending that feels complete. What we got looked like it would have needed a narrative map for the story.

P.S.: I do make fun of the Sugar filled bunny girl that looks like she had 1 too many coffees every morning. But honestly, she was the best character in that story. It saddens me that in a story that should have been focusing on the Hrothgar, the best character is a Viera and the Hrothgars are barely in it.

[XiRon]

I find it genuinely amusing that you hate Bozja for nearly all the reasons I enjoyed it. That you liked Werlyt's ending (that I hated lmao) comparatively is extra funny lol
Agree on the little future sight Au Ra girl tho. She sucked.

Bozja and Werlyt both get dark but I like the former so much more than the latter because it presents a war thats ugly. Werlyt ends like Stormblood ends- a neat little bow, saccharine and silly when you think about what led up to the finish line.

The overall encompassing story of Bozja was showing that war doesn't just happen, its an ugly chain of dominoes falling. The queen throwing a servant under the bus was cruel. The guards murdering an innocent to hide their secret was slimey. Generations of resentment slowly boiling under the veneer of tradition, bloody battles in the street, individuals throwing in their lot with their enemy because they hate their countrymen that much...its ugly. Its proper ugly. Bozja's story doesn't end in a musical number, it ends with a handful of people finally understanding how and why everything burned down. Bozja ends with a decent NPC body count, yeah, but what war ended without lists of senseless deaths? Without unneeded violence? Would a musical number have smoothed over 50+ years of turmoil?

Im sad it was cut short and mad that planned plot points were stuffed into the little logs for sure...but overall? I loved the story. This game as a whole is terrified of things being ugly, EW's toothless EnD oF DaYs is the perfect example of it. It wasn't perfect by any means but in Bozja we were finally (FINALLY!!!!) allowed one grimey war story.

No the bozja story sucked.
"We finally get a grimy war story" yes at the cost of the newest player race being treated like garbage because some eorzean race that shouldnt be in bozja wanted power.
Not like the ENTIRE GAME has been a war story! Whether it was against dragons in hw or garleans the entire games been about war, but oh no, we have to p.o.s "war is hell" story for the only time we deign to do anything with hrothgar! And hrothgar dont even get to do anything in their own story except be cannon fodder. So yes its a wet bag of used diapers on a hot summer sidewalk.

[XiRon]

ugh sorry for multiposting but it comes and goes.
Also sorry if that was too like...confrontational or mean, I dont mean it that way I am just upset anytime I think about how badly (frequently, repeatedly) hrothgar get screwed over. Still, STILL cant use our own base racial hair, we had no time spent on us in our native homeland sidestory, and there were no hrothgar in EW unless you count a guy in Garlemald who we never get to help despite him living in a crummy cave.
It just totally blows how obviously blatantly little it is the team cares about a player race that isnt scrawny mchuman no.5.