6.4 Initial Review. Obvious Spoilers.

[Ath192]

After doing the content I enjoyed enough of it to give it a 6/10.

The good:

MSQ

For me the msq delivers some good cinematic moments and makes excellent use of camera angles and the characters expressions. They do a good job at bringing things to life.

The MSQ makes a compelling enough story I'm not bored or skip any cutscenes.

Fights

Golbez Ex is a good fight. It's a lot more straight forward and fast paced than the puzzle solvers we've been having. I think it's my favorite EX trial this expansion.

Normal Raids look promising. Themis is an obvious Thancred clone but that's not necessarily a bad thing as long as the fight is good and there's enough variation.

I like the setting and colors of Athena's arena. This is a breath of fresh air from the cramped castle room and the dark dungeon setting of the previous tier villains. On the other hand it does remind me of Edenverse a bit. It would be nice to have some more varied settings for raids like forests, oceans, caves instead of the weird more abstract nature of these fighting locations.

Gear
I did like the crafted gear a lot. The raid gear looks better in game than the photos suggested.

The bad:

MSQ

The downside with this team is that they continue the trend of everyone being okay and bringing every villain back to life for some reason. A prime example of this is that I was incapable of feeling any sympathy or worry for the loss of Vrtra's sister because I know we're going to save her, and it took 5 minutes for Zero to say she can be saved as well. This is extremely overused and the stories they write for the game don't have the impact they otherwise would because of this insistence on nothing bad "really" happening.

To further strengthen this point, they brought Valens back? I know it's not the real "Valens" but basically a clone. Gaius essentially made a point to say they didn't kill him so they can no doubt imprison him and make him see the error of his ways and probably go on this redemption arc like Fordola. The problem with OG Valens crimes was that he was a child abuser and so even the SE writers couldn't come up with a way to save him. So they did the next best thing. Which is this. Like seriously? Just let the character die. Nobody asked for him.

The MSQ wasted a ton of time appeasing the people of Garlemald, in a real life scenario these people are at their mercy and with a pressing issue like the one we were dealing with the best they could expect was to inform them what was going to happen, not ask for permission. That's really dumb and completely unrealistic.

Gear

Re-used assets again, and the hilarious part is that the OG asset was dyable and this new dungeon gear isn't. So its like, the same gear but worse lol. I really hope 7.0 makes everything dyable. Fat chance but it would make sense.

Character Creation
Putting the RGB values in skin tone and eye color is useless if I can't modify them. The logical choice would be to replace the color table with RGB and a color wheel. If the skin needs to dye in a particular hue so you don't find some neon orange people out in the world that would be the way to go but nonetheless the update in this regard sucked.

The rest
-PVP mount is meh
-Island Sanctuary continues to be just okay content I do on the side. I do appreciate the Island vib glams, as I do enjoy them.