Manderville: Halfway Through Heavensward, Still No Trials

[Veritas-Ancora]

I'm really surprised that Manderville hasn't received much love over the past year.

Comparatively, A Realm Reborn brought us Battle on the Big Bridge (huge FFV song/moment), Dragonneck (huge FFVI song/moment), and Battle in the Big Keep. All of these battles were massively epic.

The Gigi story is pretty cute and all, but so far it's been nothing but teleports and cutscenes. I'm hoping that 3.4 and 3.5 brings us a real FFIX battle, or a much harder version of one of the above for fun.

[Moomba33]

I suspect that they weren't intending to make a Hildebrand questline for Heavensward and ended up rushing it out due to popular demand.
It doesn't feel anywhere near as expansive or planned out as the original quests.

[Enkidoh]

Yeah I agree with Moomba, I'm pretty sure that originally they wanted to move away from Hildibrand and hence his final questline in 2.55 was meant to be the last (and why he was sent off flying on the Treaty Blade off into the atmosphere, it was a way to 'put him on a bus' so to speak but in a way that he could be brought back at a later date if necessary).

I also believe that the Scholasticate quests were originally intended to replace Hildy (which explains why Briardien and the featureless 'man of many faces' show up in them), but given that those quests were not really popular with players, it seems that SE have decided to bring Hildibrand back as a replacement for those quests in turn, and thus they're still trying to work out how and where to take him. Give it time, SE will come up with another zany adventure to send the Hildibrands and their new Vivi-wannabe (and the resulting fanservice fights as well).