Quote Originally Posted by BHGlobbd View Post
Another thing to note, the entire questline is about creating a weapon with a soul, a living weapon. The glow effect is representative of the soul, which is why the base weapon is so simplistic. The emphasis is on the glow effect, not the weapon itself.
This has been the theme since the original relic questline in ARR. The glowy stuff is the soul of the weapon - sure.. .Doesn't mean the weapon has to look like an Iron Labrys or dual-wield Iron Gladius....
Compare the latest model with Ragnarok for WAR or Sasuke's Blades for NIN (which is probably my favourite weapon design for NIN) as a final step and you should understand. The glows were still fairly flashy and well defined, but the weapons didn't look fresh out of Battlecraft NPC in Limsa marketplace..

They were both also rather "simplistic" but obviously had quite a decent amount of work put into designing them.

To me it's rather apparent that a lot of the weapon designs were rushed, too much focus was spent on the glow effects, and that they were trying too hard to be creative and produce something different.

The texture pattern and detail on some of those base models is dirt poor. It looks like they were copy+paste out of an old MMO like FF11.

Do the glows look good / have some effort put into them? Sure (most of them). The base models is what really bothers a lot of people, myself included.