Quote Originally Posted by Cleretic View Post
It's interesting to see these dungeons as essentially a playable form of the Villainous Infodump Monologue. It's a bit disappointing that they've gone to the well three times, but I think it works fairly well in terms of merging storytelling and gameplay.

I think the Lunar Subterrane does it best, in part because there's actual sort of 'mechanical' reason it's happening (it's Real Golbez's crystal acting up), and partly because it actually does have a physical presence outside of the vision so we did actually Do A Thing, but also because it's much more sparing about narration. The bad part of endgame dungeons being like this isn't that they're visions, it's that they're going to be a near-daily experience for a lot of players, and when that experience involves a very rote speech then it starts to get tedious. It's like if Gaius' monologue played during his boss fight.
I liked it well enough the first time, but I do think there are far more interesting ways to integrate narrative and gameplay than falling back on the post-mortem monologue again even if it has been competently done in the past. I really liked the new Cape Westwind, Lahabrea, and Steps of Faith instances which actually managed to expand the principal characters of each (and the Scions!) by making them more involved with mechanically and visually appealing encounters, but those pesky time-consuming mechanics too would become tiresome day after day in a roulette with two encounters in it.

This is just my personal preference, but my favorite dungeons will always be the ones that involve a lot of set pieces and prominent NPCs: the Ghimlyt Dark, Heroes' Gauntlet, and Tower of Babil are my top 3 favorite dungeons solely for those reasons.