Why I like SB MSQ more than HW

[KDSilver]

If the Ala Mighan arc would have ended in 4.2, maybe it could have been far better.

But still prefer HW (the main plot : dragonsong, not the shame we got after)

[Vhailor]

Wherever an MMO chooses to focus on, it will consume much of the lifecycle of an expansion. I don't see the issue with a focus on far eastern culture in a Japanese, MMO, personally. As for it not being authentic to the FF brand, it is more so than dwarves, which you mentioned. Talking animals, such as moogles and the Four Lords are also a part of past Final Fantasies. I think you must no be too familiar with the earlier parts of the series. Dragons were covered extensively in HW, and I am sure Shinryu will make another appearance. You can't focus on dragons for 2 years, either.

Besides, it's scarcely a year at this point, and SE is done with the Doma quest line, and is moving on to another. So I am not sure what the complaint is.

I don't share Linx0r's issue with the far eastern theme, but I will say, I think Kugane might have been a key component here. As Enkidoh so astutely pointed out, Kugane was an entirely unnecessary detour that largely served to bog down the plot. What it also did, though, was hijack the theme of Stormblood, given that it served as the main hub city (despite not being near anything geographically), and also as the anchor for the new residential districts.

And Kugane was half-arsed at best. It was incredibly stereotypical, offering very little that I, at least, hadn't seen before. It felt to me like a city built to the Western impressions of Asia. Maybe that means the general Western impressions are accurate - I don't know, I haven't had the pleasure of traveling to that region of the world yet. Regardless, I didn't find it half as interesting as Othard, which introduced far eastern themes and environs and cultures that I hadn't seen in a video game before. The net result is that the glitzy and unnecessary hub city sort of co-opted the feel of Stormblood, and the expansion suffered for it.

I think I'm just not a big fan of Lyse and how she was put in a sudden position of leadership.

I am optimistic with the focus shifting to wherever the story takes Alphie and """the hunter""".

I wholeheartedly agree in regards to Lyse. It was a terrible missed opportunity, too, because I really love her as a character - but there was a criminal lack of attention paid to her rise to leadership. We needed to see her struggle more, needed to see her grow, and the whole thing happened in the blink of an eye. She needed a level of treatment closer to what Minfilia got.

I'm also optimistic about our old friend 'the hunter' and the direction the plot is heading with him. I sincerely hope this isn't a short one-off a la the Warriors of Darkness from Heavensward. If the next expansion were to focus on the Ascians and Garlemald, I'd be overjoyed. Both are interesting plot points that for too long have hovered around the perimeter of what we've been doing. Even Stormblood, which was supposed to focus on the liberation fight against the Empire, didn't really feel like it returned focus to Garlemald, simply because Zenos (and Asahi later) both sort of went off the rails and did their own thing. As a result, it feels more like we've been fighting against rogue lunatics than focusing on the threat that last received meaningful attention back in ARR.

[Alleo]

In HW I felt like the main story in 3.0 carried over into the patches for so long, till 3.3, that the story just felt like it started to drag. Then we never got to spend much time with the Warriors of Darkness, and then only one patch to set up 4.0.

In SB, because we finished the over all story of freeing Ala Mhigo and Doma in 4.0, the patches have been able to set up 5.0 from the get go. Which I really hope continues as we get more patches leading into 5.0.

For me it was the complete opposite. I felt like SB was going way too fast and thus felt kinda unbelieveable while HW was the right pace. I am not saying that everything was perfect. WoD story line and the Uldah part was not to my liking but the rest was quite good. We had that one big conflict that took a whole expansion to solve which is much more realistic than solving two conflicts in the 4.0 part and then start to rebuilt both again.

Nidhogg remained the big bad till the end which made sense since he was a son of Middy and should not have been a one time only fight. It was not all well in Ishgard too and we had inner conflict to solve. It was still a bit fast but still better than SB for me. I mean we somehow are able to take back two countries and mostly just solved both of their main conflicts already. It did not feel like we are at war against Garlemald and felt too easy. Now we are seemingly already done with Doma and Ala Mhigo is also starting to establish a government and they already have a good income through the treasue and the saltery.

I really hope that we only have one conflict at a time so that they can take their time to go through with that and not have us jump around the world to solve things for two countries.

[Imakun]

Hence the Kugane arc just dragged on to me and felt so.... borrring. Personally I really didn't start enjoying SB's story til the liberation of Doma, and especially once we returned to Eorzea and Rhalgr's Beacon began (and yes, I was extremely satisfied with the 4.0 story's ending, even you-know-who and his not-death - my character's backstory made that very personal indeed and it felt very satisfying to finally resolve that part of her backstory). It's just the getting there that was lacking.

It was basically the other way around for me.

I find the whole Ala Mihgo situation pretty uninteresting just like the characters involved in it. I never really had any appreciation for Ala Mihgans while playing ARR, it kind of made them look like a bunch of whiny crybabies that never get anything done.
I should add that I didn't like Zenos either, I'm not really a fan of characters being evil just for the sake of being evil. Nidhogg had a plan and a backstory that supported his actions and gave a meaning to the whole story arc. Zenos is like Sephiroth in my eyes, basically wet paper consistency.


On the other hand I loved Doma's arc, it brought so much more interesting characters and dynamics between them. Hien, Gosetsu, Yotsuyu, the tribes in the Steppe.. it was all done and brought together beautifully. And now that that's over, I don't fell really excited about the future storyline for the reasons I mentioned earlier and in other threads.

The Garleans do nothing for me, hopefully 5.0 will bring more to the table in terms of story and characters.

[Theodric]

Kugane made perfect sense to visit. It was the only location at the time in the region that was both civilised and not in ruin. Hingans are also very interesting and it was great to see things from the perspective of a nation that isn't at war with Garlemald. Since it was effectively neutral territory it also paved the way for encountering things such as the Prima Vista and the Garlean Consulate which we would never had seen had the major city for the expansion been located elsewhere.

[RubixCube]

I much preferred HW. SB felt as if SE took two separate plots and merged them together, cutting out a lot of the important filling in the process to leave two disjointed plots with a tiny thread to hold them together. It meant that Ala Mhigo’s plight and subsequent liberation, mentioned from the very start of ARR, was starved of attention in favour of a nation that had no mention until the end of HW, that we were expected to suddenly be invested in.

Quite frankly, I felt the entire expansion did a disservice to Ala Mhigo and I would have preferred them to focus on one of the nations, perhaps Doma first, then spend the subsequent expansion giving Ala Mhigo the attention it needed. Lyse’s promotion may have also felt more realistic if it had two expansions worth of development behind it.

Meanwhile, HW remained focused on Ishgard and the dragon war through out, and the decision to let us travel with a band of companions to Dravania gave me a similar feeling to the likes of the hobbit and other fantasy. It felt well developed and explored the issues in more detail and complexity. Loved it.

[Lauront]

I think the aesthetic of Kugane is fine. I doubt the Japanese devs of the game would deliver something that they thought their Japanese playerbase would disapprove of, and lest we forget, it's a rendition of medieval Japan, not the modern day region, so I doubt travelling there would really make a big difference, unless one has a time machine.

Perhaps the expansion did move too fast by focusing on two regions and splitting the focus. It's been my speculation that they weren't too fond of Ala Mhigo but felt they needed to bring that story arc to a conclusion. I enjoyed the Far East much more than I did Gyr Abania. On the other hand, they only have time for so many expansions, so I can understand the desire to merge certain regions into one expansion, to cover more ground.

[Lauront]

I wholeheartedly agree in regards to Lyse. It was a terrible missed opportunity, too, because I really love her as a character - but there was a criminal lack of attention paid to her rise to leadership. We needed to see her struggle more, needed to see her grow, and the whole thing happened in the blink of an eye. She needed a level of treatment closer to what Minfilia got.

If you mean vanishing into the lifestream, sure!

[Enla]

I wholeheartedly agree in regards to Lyse. It was a terrible missed opportunity, too, because I really love her as a character - but there was a criminal lack of attention paid to her rise to leadership. We needed to see her struggle more, needed to see her grow, and the whole thing happened in the blink of an eye. She needed a level of treatment closer to what Minfilia got.

What kills me about this is that I think they originally intended to expand upon her character in greater depth, as throughout the story until the end of the Azim Steppes her character arc was continuing at a fairly steady pace. I didn't necessarily like her in any capacity, but she had a genuine arc that was only /just/ beginning to see fruition. Especially with her time spent with Hien and learning that there's more to being a leader than bull rushing one's way through every problem with one's fists. It was something and I actually was interested to see what they would do with a character that up until that point I had found annoying at best and just how far they would take the character driven narrative. I'm a sucker for those when handled well.

Instead the second we returned to Ala Mhigo all her progression was regressed and we were left with a character that might as well not have gone East with the WoL for all the good it did. It's like the writers suddenly were told they had to wrap up the rebellion within the initial patch a good of the way into development and it left them scrambling to make up for an entire expansion's worth of build up in less than fifteen quests. It was jarring as all hell due to this and especially more so when in 4.1 they decided to backtrack on /that/ and say that instead of the super special awesome leader Lyse had just always been all along, she actually /gasps/ is really new at this and makes mistakes. Except it happened at the expense, once again, of plot cohesion and world building when the Scions of the /bloody/ Dawn conveniently forgot that there's no in-universe way to cure tempered individuals. It's like the whole shebang with Ifrit and Ramuh never happened, with us personally being told that the Flames soldiers that accompanied us for the former had to be executed because of their tempering, and for what? So we can go back to thinking that Lyse still has a lot to learn? That ship kinda sailed when they skipped Steps 5-13 of her character arc and just ab-sailed straight towards the climax.

Lyse is honestly the biggest casualty of SE's split focus with this expansion, and another genuine reason I wish they hadn't decided to dedicate time to both Othard /and/ Ala Mhigo. It just ended up hurting more than it helped and left the plot a mess in places.

[Ameela]

The biggest problem with Lyse is that it feels like the writers didn't fully understand what kind of character they wanted to make.

Most of her dialogue in SB is her crying about how she's supposed to charge into the enemy, supposed to take action and be the main character but she's always being outshined by the WoL.
Yet this doesn't lead anywhere, it feels like at some point there should have been a scene where Lyse charges into enemy territory blindly, a bunch of allied troops go after her and she ends up causing a bunch of casualties. Hell I was surprised it was Alisaie who got all gung-ho during the Lakshmi scene.

As it is now Lyse just whines and cries until she gets what she wants, she's never forced to mature and even at the very end she's mad that she wasn't the one who got to kill Zenos.