Shadowbringers is brilliant - [ Thank you Dev Team ]

[Ramesses]

First of all, it must be said... a massive thank you to every single member of the truly global team that were involved in the development of Shadowbringers. There is a sophistication to this particular expansion that just permeates every single element of the game and the incredible intense work that went into this cannot be denied.

Again, I say... Thank you.


The Music:
Soken and his entire crew seriously deserve an Oscar at this point. Virtually every new zone had superb music that gave me the gooseys. The first moment I walked into The Crystarium and heard that theme in all its grandeur, the goosebumps had me enthralled. From then on, it was just masterpiece after masterpiece... just to name a few, the compositions for Qitana Ravel, Crown of the Immaculate, and the theme played during every emotionally charged cutscene.

And Soken is right, everyone really should listen to the Shadowbringers music with headphones. Nothing short of utter bliss.


The Story:
I will actually need a separate post to fully substantiate my declaration that the Shadowbringers tale is now officially the best of all the expansions so far. Where should I even begin? One of the main keys to beautiful writing is to generate a feeling so intense in the audience that they get that tear in their eye, that sense of rage at an injustice, that "what the heck just happened?" moment... and ultimately, that sense of empathy with every main charcater who exhibits a broad range of invigorating facets.

That is where this story shines through and that is what makes Shadowbringers truly brilliant as the credits rolled up. If there were people who skipped through the story, they would have missed the truly wonderful sense of unmistakable pride at becoming the Warrior of Darkness. Plus right now, I constantly labour to imagine how it is even possible to surpass this and ironically enough, I have great faith that you guys will still continue to deliver the amazing. More of that later in another post so that I can properly hide all the spoilers.


The Log-In sequence:
Apart from having to waiting about 25 minutes when the servers initially came online, I believe I was disconnected only a few times over the last four days which was an incredible vast improvement over Stormblood. I also noticed that the careful choreography for how the quests unfolded once players arrived on the First was cleverly sequenced so that there would be very minimal opportunities for bottle neck issues like the Raubhan fiasco. It is very very well done and only a very keen eye will notice this strategy... I doff my hat as well to the QA/QC team for this.


The Trust system:

• Their dialogue is wonderful and I found a lot of their verbal transactions very instrumental in fleshing out several elements of the story.
• The AI system is actually quite sophisticated and intuitive... very responsive to mechanics.
• What needs work: They need to deliver more damage... please look into this.

The new job skills:
Obviously, I have only tested Black mage to level 80 and I must say it feels much smoother and delivers a heck more damage than before... but what really made it enjoyable for me was the careful streamlining of the rotations. This is also evident in several of the other jobs and I can understand the rationale behind this concept. For some reason, thinking of the new job skill concepts made me remember some discussions on the Alpha forums several years ago... we've all come a very very long way since 1.0. Nonetheless, I shall review more on this later in the job class forums.

The items and armour system:

• I particularly like the direction that the Dev team took on this... recoloring and reconstituting existing armour styles so that they could focus more on the really important aspect of the game: developing a beautiful world, story and environs.
• I reckon this is a great choice... because we already have a problem with item bloat and this strategy builds on your existing assets.
• In addition, the simplified method of players being able to select what weapon/armour they want (as a reward) for a particular job class is really great.
• By the way, I must say, I do like the Roken set and the King weapons very very much... great design that captures that Fae essence.

Quest mechanics:
This was another element I noticed since 2.0 that gradually kept getting more polished with every expansion. This expansion makes a great job of making the player do some backtracking to reveal some amazing hidden gems, which is fantastic in getting players to maintain a very solid engagement with the game. That was how I literally found the quests to unlock the Twinning and the Academia... speaking of which, the scene at the end of the Twinning brought some feels.

Other stuff:
Servers are almost back up for full launch, so I'll stop here and will continue the review later. In the meantime, I do have some minor mutterings regarding the tedious grind for some certain rewards, maybe a commentary or three about the return of the tome/gem system... and a weird brief lag that happens every time I enter Eulmore. However, none of these can overshadow the immense esteem I have for the Dev Team for this truly exhilarating expansion.

[Kogasan]

I would like to personally thank SE for creating dancer. Even though it's an rng based class I really love and enjoy dancer. The flow of it is amazing. I have played this game since the beginning of arr and could never find and settle with a main job till now because of dancer so ty se. I also want to add that Soken you really did a great job on the music my favorite is the rak tika greatwood music. It has me so interested that I don't even use my mounts there because it would over write the music with mount music. So it has me walking everywhere. I also agree with the OP the story imo is way better then heavensward.

[Sorimachi87]

snip

There is nothing else to be said then this to be honest.
I was in joy, in tears, anxious about whats to come, in mild rage of certain antagonists and never before

I suffered with my character so much. Collecting all that light into herself was probably the biggest task she ever had to do. Slaying primals is a joke against that. Especially when she was puking silver blood after the 5th lightbringer and before the final battle.

I really hope Square, that you can keep up this momentum. Maybe increase the numbers of quests we do with the 5.x patches??? :3
Nah i think thats too much to ask for. 7 Quests is already a good number and takes a lot of work.

Thank you Dev Team for the best expansion start in my opinion. Keep up the awesome work!

Yoshida-P didnt lie when he said he wanted to refine the story to the last minute...
And for everyone who hasn't finished it yet. You are in for a treat! Enjoy it.

[Reiryuu]

I'll bite and be a somewhat negative nancy here. First:

1) The music-- is awesome... except for the battle theme. That's all that needs to be said.

2) The dungeons and trials-- are awesome except for the first one, I didn't like that one much. Oh and the white floors on the 78/79 dungeon make AoE markers really hard to see especially when your tank pulls a lot of mobs on top of that.

3) The story. Here is where you and I will disagree a lot.

The story was OK. Not good, not bad, just OK. There were a lot of really predictable moments and I feel that a lot of times where I was supposed to be surprised fell flat on me because I was like, "Yep, saw that coming a loooooong time ago." A lot of the Solo instances and duties were incredibly boring and dragged on for way too long. Role quests? Those were really stupid and that "quest" at level 80? You can't even call that a quest and I was better off not doing it.

Giott was cute, but dealing with her up till I found that fact out was not worth it.

That solo role-play duty as Thancred was the largest and most boring waste of time I ever was forced to endure. I do not want to see anything else like that. I'm still advocating for skipping role-play duties because they're just boring and uninteresting, they drag on way too long and I just want the pain to be over as quickly as possible. But this one. THIS one... not being able to move, walking slowly while the opponent is jumping across the arena, then enduring when he becomes omniscent and having to put up with the suffering the char is going through. That. Is. Not. Fun. Period. Reading about it? Sure. Watching it? Sure. PLAYING through it? No.

And not only that, most of the solo duties put you up against the SAME FREAKING GUY almost ALL the time! C'mon!

Healers are freaking boring to play now. WTG team. What wonderful "balancing" you did. Couldn't come up with any real ideas so you made them as close to the same thing as possible. Buttered bread, peanut butter bread and jam bread with only a smidgeon of butter, peanut butter or jam to boot. Then you get YouTube guys who are part of your circle jerk, because they want to get interviews from you, to give you a pat on the back for the changes despite NONE OF THEM EVEN MAINING a healer. You obviously have no one on the dev team who plays a healer or has ANY idea on how to make one fun to play. And thus, healers get shoved to the end of the Dev queue and get lame-brained ill thought out changes. What a joke.

4) Dancer is fun. I enjoy it a lot and will probably make it my main once I get it to 80 and use my WHM only to farm tomestones for the fast queues. Because... I've been racking up a LOT of healer in need bonuses and I don't think I need to tell you why.

[purgatori]

+1

I've always loved the story, atmosphere, and music in this game, but I always felt all of these elements hearkened back in a way to early JRPGs/entries in the FF series. And while there's nothing wrong with that, my own tastes skew more towards complex lore, moral ambiguity, and bittersweet revelations, and other stylistic conventions and tropes present in some more modern titles (e.g., NieR Automata, FNC, Dragon's Dogma, Dark Souls, etc.). ShB feels like a high-quality, modern RPG, and for the first time I am curious about everything that's going on, and find myself wanting to soak in all all of the atmosphere. It's all just clicking with me, and I love it.

PS: Oh, and I agree with the above re: the battle theme. I hate wailing guitars/rock tracks in my games, and I almost immediately, and gratefully, disabled the new track. That's pretty much my only negative, other than a few minor bugs.

[MOZZYSTAR]

Amh Araeng's music is so beautiful. I've been meaning to comment on the music, but I've enjoyed virtually every soundtrack so far. So good. I do like the battle soundtrack, but I don't like how jarring it is right off the bat. I'd rather it kind of ease into the battle soundtrack cuz if you're just running by and not getting to the "nice part," it's a touch grating. The only song I don't like is the Crystarium's, but then I didn't like Mor Dhonuts or Idyllshire's music either, so. XD



Another thing I really liked were the armour chests. I thought that was very clever. Wish I had opened the first chest as DNC, though!


My main complaint about any of the areas is the slums of Eulmore. It is literally a copy paste of the same two buildings. At first I was like "I LOVE THIS!" But as soon as I noticed this one particular structure was repeated like... 4-5 times in one single alleyway, I was less enthused. I don't think I've noticed that before in any other area. I expect copy/paste with buildings meant to be uniformed, but these aren't meant to be. xD

[Maero]

The areas, music and story is great. And Dancer it has truly lived up to my expectations and is fun as heck.
Only sort of negative like thing i would say is we do still have fetch quests, just dressed up differently, lol