Review of 6.3 Story Content

[MikkoAkure]

I'm not inherently against levity and feelsy moments, but the amount of it in EW was a bit...jarring to me compared to what was previously presented in XIV.

It feels like there's been a definite shift in the style of storytelling for better or worse.

You say that as if the story about the never-ending cycle of hopelessness, war, death, and revenge didn't have Moogles suddenly appear right before the climax of that part of the story and bar our passage until they were given enough kupo nuts. Or cartoony catfish people (who eventually got an IRL children's book) who get drunk off tea weren't squatting in an abandoned mansion in the middle of a bombed-out hellscape.

I wasn't a fan of those, nor the placement of the Lopporits in the story (or taking up half the moon zone), but they aren't new things.


If you or someone else is going to bring up burgers, other food scenes, or moments of levity between the Scions, then how would you yourself make the players feel for the main characters of the story if they were just cardboard cutouts that were each just there being serious all the time? Moments of filler are necessary for character development and making a group of characters come together. Y'shtola is commonly referred to as not having much personality and then as soon as the writers give her 1 haha moment, threads appeared about it with people being angry which says enough about this forum.

The writing changed in that it's focusing more on building up the main characters together and that began in earnest in ShB, but I don't remember anyone having a problem with it back then. It's more noticeable now because there's more downtime in the plot due to it taking place over a much longer period of time instead of ShB's couple of weeks or so as well as the fact that the gang was all united from the beginning of the story instead of spread out. Even then, ShB still repeatedly brought us back to the inn room for quiet contemplation of the previous arc and story time with Ardbert with occasional appearances by the Exarch's picnic basket.


The creative director has obviously been static this whole time. Oda created the current lore for everything and has been on the writing credit for ARR and each expansion. It doesn't feel like they're purposefully altering the story to suit some sort of agenda or anything. They've just been writing it without a clear focus to the end, accidentally struck gold with part of the plot and characters in ShB, and seemingly haven't been able to recreate that in EW to the same degree.

As far as styles, HW was specifically mentioned by Yoshi-P as being written to be "dark fantasy" just like SB was obviously written to be a war story, ARR/ShB are heroic fantasy, and EW was a mix of them all with a dash of sci-fi. People are going to have preferences for one of those genres more than the others, but they have long since made a creative decision to dabble in a lot of things.

Personally, I'm a little exhausted of the heroic fantasy and hope the next thing is something different, but I'm still going to play it.

I think its a shame when media nowadays is reduced to things like 'dark = adult, fun = chidish' as its a really restrictive way to look at fiction and what stories it can tell. Media and art suffer when we cannot conceptualise and analyze its layers.

+1 to this.

The Graveyard Book and Coraline are both very dark books intended for children, but on the other side you also have fun things like the Discworld series that (depending on the book) are for adults but are almost nothing but levity that may have some darker moments.

The Gentleman Bastard series (which I highly recommend to literally anyone and everyone) is intended for adults and has a blend of pure dark moments and pure fun moments just like EW does but I've never heard anyone say its for babies or that it's a comedy series.

If you're looking for something that's dark and serious all the time, Final Fantasy isn't the place to go. No matter how dark the game, cutesy mascots like moogles, chocobos, and cactuar will show up that clash with the rest of the design and themes of the game. Even FFXV had Kenny Crow and FFXIII had a baby chocobo that lived in a guy's hair and grew up to be a scantily clad mascot human who sold potions and ghysahl greens.

It's also really strange to expect "a story written for adults" when you can play as a three-foot-tall cutesy munchkin.