Generally, do you like the lore/story so far?

[Alexandre_Noireau]

I guess i just like geopolitical stories with behind the courtains styles of narratives rather than magical quests and godfelling left and right.
Then... It is what it is, here we are.

I liked Shadowbringers a lot.

[Kallera]

I’ve started liking it less and less, to the point where I just checked out of it after the revelations in 5.3. I don’t like my villains making elaborate plans to slay themselves. I can’t stand the time travel plot, or that we would be so influential as to warrant time travelers coming to save us (And succeeding).
. I don’t have any faith in Zenos or Fandaniel being interesting villains, and the notion that we are not only one of the convocation, but the basis of multiple gods, including one of the twelve, turns my stomach.

[Kesey]

I’ve started liking it less and less, to the point where I just checked out of it after the revelations in 5.3. I don’t like my villains making elaborate plans to slay themselves. I can’t stand the time travel plot, or that we would be so influential as to warrant time travelers coming to save us (And succeeding).
. I don’t have any faith in Zenos or Fandaniel being interesting villains, and the notion that we are not only one of the convocation, but the basis of multiple gods, including one of the twelve, turns my stomach.

Most likely, the twelve are the convocation minus us. This is assuming that the Twins are two gods in one. The twelve also fit the zodiac, which is similar to Zodiark in spelling and pronunciation.

Zenos and Fandaniel are obviously working each other. The dynamic that makes them interesting who is going to kill who and when. The one remaining is dead to rights anyway because they will just be used to open the door to Zodiark. You're not supposed to like them and they won't be redeemed. They are pawns competing to be the new Elidibus (Heart of Zodiark) thinking it will reward them in the end. The Zodiark story is coming to an end in one more expansion. Zodiark has to be the interesting villain to pull off 6.0.

And to the original poster--I play this game specifically for the story. Gaming, to me, has always been about the story. I also believe that video games and story telling have unmatched potential that have yet to be recognized by the literature and film communities and I also believe we are still in the "dark days" of video games as an artistic medium.

[Theodric]

It's a mixed bag for me. I enjoy the setting itself in terms of world-building. There's a lot of interesting characters, locales and themes. Yet often the true potential seems to be neglected in favour of cheap and easy resolutions that either come entirely out of left field, are highly contrived or just tie everything up in a way where there's minimal lasting consequences for the protagonists.

It's also getting a bit tiresome to see calculating and cunning antagonists just throw themselves at the Warrior of Darkness when they're fully aware of the long track record of failures on that front. At least the single player games did a better job at allowing the major antagonists to score some lasting, meaningful successes of their own before being taken out or redeemed.

Overall, I think there is a lot of missed potential in regards to what could have been done with the theme of 'balance' that Elidibus spoke of. I dislike that Emet-Selch and Elidibus have both been cast aside in favour of more Zenos. In Elidibus' case, his end felt as abrupt as Varis'. Both were characters that we have been following since the days of ARR and then just when they came to the forefront after years of build up what they ended up doing...wasn't all that impressive.

I'll remain cautiously optimistic to see where the story goes next, but I'm no longer as invested in it as I used to be. I'm hoping to see and learn more of the ancient world without it just being an excuse to stroke the ego of the player character.

[Lauront]

Most likely, the twelve are the convocation minus us. This is assuming that the Twins are two gods in one. The twelve also fit the zodiac, which is similar to Zodiark in spelling and pronunciation.

I suspect what the Twelve are is a rough/approximate memory of the Convocation, rather than being numerically identical or strictly inheriting each office's traits. This is why I had said in the past I don't believe it has anything to do with Hydaelyn's summoners, per se, as they were probably not even well liked by the end, if they were even known. The devs had stated that certain memories survived in the collective unconscious since ancient times, and the notion of a benevolent body that oversaw the star's course is exactly the sort of thing you'd expect to give rise to the Twelve.

Zenos and Fandaniel are obviously working each other. The dynamic that makes them interesting who is going to kill who and when. The one remaining is dead to rights anyway because they will just be used to open the door to Zodiark. You're not supposed to like them and they won't be redeemed. They are pawns competing to be the new Elidibus (Heart of Zodiark) thinking it will reward them in the end. The Zodiark story is coming to an end in one more expansion. Zodiark has to be the interesting villain to pull off 6.0.

I agree, that aspect at least is interesting, and an answer as to why Zenos has visions of the Final Days.

It's a mixed bag for me. I enjoy the setting itself in terms of world-building. There's a lot of interesting characters, locales and themes. Yet often the true potential seems to be neglected in favour of cheap and easy resolutions that either come entirely out of left field, are highly contrived or just tie everything up in a way where there's minimal lasting consequences for the protagonists.

It's also getting a bit tiresome to see calculating and cunning antagonists just throw themselves at the Warrior of Darkness when they're fully aware of the long track record of failures on that front. At least the single player games did a better job at allowing the major antagonists to score some lasting, meaningful successes of their own before being taken out or redeemed.

Overall, I think there is a lot of missed potential in regards to what could have been done with the theme of 'balance' that Elidibus spoke of. I dislike that Emet-Selch and Elidibus have both been cast aside in favour of more Zenos. In Elidibus' case, his end felt as abrupt as Varis'. Both were characters that we have been following since the days of ARR and then just when they came to the forefront after years of build up what they ended up doing...wasn't all that impressive.

I'll remain cautiously optimistic to see where the story goes next, but I'm no longer as invested in it as I used to be. I'm hoping to see and learn more of the ancient world without it just being an excuse to stroke the ego of the player character.

I have similar sentiments, and I felt much of it was rushed and glossed over earlier plot points - ones I hope they at least re-visit in the future (e.g. Unukalhai, what powers the eldest of primals, their effect on the Aetherial Sea etc.) Other elements, such as the Amaurot gauntlet, were poorly executed, as far as I'm concerned. What they should have focused on is how the unsundered view the sundered/broken souls; Emet explained it but a more visual explanation may have helped. The gauntlet was alright but it was just a DRK quest redux. The trial was great but felt very disjointed from what I'd expect of Elidibus.

Nonetheless, I am keen to see where they take the story in terms of the Convocation, and with the main character as Azem and the plot device of the Convocation crystals, I suspect we may see the Convocation's return in one form or another, and I imagine they may crop up when dealing with Zodiark (Convocation returns to halt Zodiark's misuse) and possibly Hydaelyn, depending on how all that goes. Inheriting the duty to remember the ancient world, which evidently the MC has taken to heart, is a positive direction.

I'm not thrilled by Zenos. He puts me to sleep whenever I see him, since it's the same insufferably dull rant about wanting to reprise his ultimate match, and it is telling that they had to put someone as OTT as Fandaniel besides him to keep the audience entertained. However, the references at the end to him as the "beast" who'd kindle in the apocalypse make me wonder if his visions of the Final Days are not so much because he has an awakened Echo, or Emet implanting the memories or whatever, but because he was behind/part of whatever tried to destroy the ancient world, assuming such an entity was behind the sound. If there was a traitor/collaborator amongst the Convocation, that in turn may well have been Fandaniel and they may thus be reprising an ancient partnership in crime.

[Kallera]

Most likely, the twelve are the convocation minus us. This is assuming that the Twins are two gods in one. The twelve also fit the zodiac, which is similar to Zodiark in spelling and pronunciation.

Azemya is considered part of the theology of the Twelve.

Zenos and Fandaniel are obviously working each other. The dynamic that makes them interesting who is going to kill who and when. The one remaining is dead to rights anyway because they will just be used to open the door to Zodiark. You're not supposed to like them and they won't be redeemed. They are pawns competing to be the new Elidibus (Heart of Zodiark) thinking it will reward them in the end. The Zodiark story is coming to an end in one more expansion. Zodiark has to be the interesting villain to pull off 6.0.

At this point I don’t see Zodiark as doing anything more than being another Shinryu that paves the way for us instead of being an actual threat, given the company that is left around it. It is all but assumed he will die, and as per the medium of the genre, any consequences of that will be quite limited.

5.3 hit the wrong notes for me, and brought to the fore things I would rather see excised altogether, or made existing themes I hated worse. and thus I don’t invest any faith in the story getting better.

[Hasrat]

I might enjoy it more if the story wouldn't turn to the player so much as if our contributions mattered in the slightest. As a silent blank slate protagonist, we just have nothing to offer the story. Stop treating me like a person, dammit, and act like I'm the primal-slaying weapon that I am. Point me at what needs killing. The rest of you can handle the unimportant stuff in between.

But, that'd be why I typically play single player games where the player character is already crafted. I don't need to feel like the character represents me. I just want a character that feels alive.

[Rosenstrauch]

My thoughts and feelings on the story tend to be pretty mercurial, changing considerably depending on how much I've mulled them over or whether or not I've snagged onto a particular idea and found it hard to shake. And it's a lot easier to pick through things I don't like then explain what I enjoyed and why I enjoyed it. But for the most part, I'd say I enjoyed the story/lore thus far. Notable exceptions are mostly in Stormblood—I see most of my issues with 4.0 stemming from the decision to split the plot 10-70-20 between Gyr Abania and the Far East, so to speak. There's also the matter of how Yda and Lyse handled, but that's another thing entirely.

Shadowbringers has been mostly great by comparison, but having had enough time to let it settle, I can't say it's better than Heavensward at this point.

Heavensward only really had one big dumb moment for me, and that was everything to do with Nanamo. But then, that's at least understandable. It'd be really hard to justify continuing to associate with Ul'dah if either Nanamo wasn't revealed to secretly be alive, or there wasn't some tidying up in the nation's government. And of course, all that development had to happen at some point, so the pace-breaking "quickly, let's go halfway across the continent to do one thing, then return!" moments had to be there. Maybe they didn't need to keep dragging their feet with it, and could've instead bundled those moments together into one segment instead of spreading them out across levels 50-55 questing, but I digress.

... oh, and there was the bit where Minfilia was dead all along, and died to give us information that didn't actually help us. Everything about the origin of Hydaelyn and Zodiark that she relayed has since been revealed to be, if not an outright lie, then at the very least willfully disingenuous. The bits about the Source and Thirteen Reflections, as well as the Calamities, still hold true, but knowing that didn't actually help us in any way—we can't even say we tipped Urianger off to it, leading to his later scheming, because he was already in league with Elidibus by then. The only actual purpose her death served was in a meta sense: By delivering exposition before it would become relevant, it wouldn't come out of nowhere that the mysterious Warriors of Darkness were from another world and so on. In other words, Minfilia died for the writer's benefit, not the characters in the story. It was such an absurdly cheap death that it really deserved to be overwritten.

... but getting into Shadowbringers, I'd say the particular things that bother me about it are the way it handles time travel, Minfilia's entire role in the story, how lackluster Ryne's reasoning for becoming the true Oracle actually was, Eden in basically its entirety, but especially the quest On Thin Ice, Ardbert continuing to have a presence post-Shadowbringers (the quest), and the Exarch cheating his way out of dying and the story subsequently dodging having to explain it in the same manner that it dodged having to explain how the time travel worked out. But this post probably already hit the character limit and I'm tired, so I'll just get into all of those later.

EDIT: Oh, and the Heroes' Gauntlet. Time is of the essence! We have to get back to the Crystarium as soon as possible! So let's fly an airship across the sea, then hoof it across half the continent! What's that, teleporting to the Aetheryte would be faster? Psh, Aetherytes being acknowledged in the plot is so Heavensward.

[Ildefons]

Personally, I don't really like Shadowbringers' story and some of the decisions they've made.

The first and most personal is the way they handled Urianger and G'raha Tia's deception. I hated it. They put my character in mortal peril without explaining the risks because they had a backup plan that would solve everything before it was too late (spoiler alert: their plan failed). I felt like I was playing ARR again where everyone just sees my character a tool to be used. Or even worse because at least Minfilia asked us if she could count on us and she tried to explain the risks involved in being a Scion.

That aside, I also dislike the use of time travel and parallel universes because I feel it broke the pacing of the game and it feels like a Shyamalan level twist. "We've been building up to the fight against the empire forever now but first, go indulge this stalker cat and his random quest in another world!". And the use of time travel doesn't make much sense to me.

So, the 8th Umbral Calamity happened, meaning that one of the shards was absorbed by the source because that's why the Calamities are so devastating. That means the shard no longer exists as a separate entity. But people in the future managed to create to a time machine that could also travel across dimensions to a point in time when the First still existed, a.k.a. before the Umbral Calamity. So why not use that time machine to travel thousands of years into the past to prevent, I don't know, the 1st freaking Umbral Calamity?

I understand that traveling to a moment in history when the WoL lives is the whole point because it's our story, after all. But I feel the Time Travel plot point could have been used in more interesting ways if they'd focused on the other calamities. To see the rise and fall of the Allagan Empire in the 3rd Astral Era, the War of the Magi on the 5th, the rise of the theocracies and their crusades that led to the 3rd Umbral Calamity, etc. I would have loved to see more about the history of the world we already know and love, rather than being sent to another world with the possibility that we might never see them again except in random side quests.

Anyway, I hope 6.0 will focus more on the geopolitics and the actual war and they leave the cosmic shenanigans to a minimum.

[Ntol]

Yes, I love the story. There were bits I cared about more than others of course: for example, the dragonsong arch was a bit meh for me, but Shadowbringers was awesome from beginning to end.
The characters do a great job of making the story likeable, they are a relatable bunch whom you have seen grow and accompany you all the way through. Not only the heroes, though, we also have complex villains like Gaius or Emet-Selch whose reasoning you can understand even if you will never share their methods (then again, we also get one dimensional villains like "burn the world down just to have a duel with you" Zenos or "razzies nominee for overacting" Fandaniel).
What I like most, though, is the cohesive lore. Each expansion adds to the information we get, but it never overwrites past lore (extra points for the lyrics from Answers getting more meaningful as time goes by). Coming from Warcraft, my bar on cohesion and retcons was very low, but still this, for me, is one of the most interesting storylines in a videogame ever.