Quote Originally Posted by Fawkes View Post
I liked it a lot more than the Eden raid series. They gave us a tiny bit of FF8 up front and that just made me want more FF8. Then when we got a weird tree thing instead of Ultimecia it was a big letdown. Although even if I hadn't been expecting Ultimecia that boob tree would have still been a weird disappointment.

With Nier I didn't know what to expect and got most of what I wanted. I could still write a list a mile long of things they could have done, but at least I feel satisfied with what I got.
I'm the complete opposite. I haven't played FF8 or Nier, so I was able to come into both Eden and Yorha not knowing what to expect. I really enjoyed Eden. The fights were fun. They made sense in regard to the story, and they didn't have to throw in some gimmick like "hacking" to make it interesting. I didn't have to know Squall, or even the story of FF8 for things to connect. No rundown of FF8, or Googling was needed to understand it, or explain it.

Yorha left me with more questions than answers. Questions I really don't care to have answered, because none of it really sparked my curiosity enough to dig any deeper into Nier lore. I consider it done now, and I probably don't have to revisit it in FFXIV again. It was a cheesy they came from outer space story that never told us why any of it existed. Then it all just disappeared. (Insert quizzical Viera head tilt here.) I think it was solely used to increase sales of another game. It's easily forgettable. The characters that drove the narrative were faceless dwarves that are hardly relatable. There was no Ascian intrigue like the Eden raid. Nothing to connect it to FFXIV's lore or worlds. Both the protagonists and antagonists begged outside explanation, because they never took the time to explain their presence in the moment.

Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against Nier. I can only guess that it is a very strange game that needs more than a three part raid to understand it. I wanted to like the raid on purely a content level. However, the story, visuals and pink balls didn't live up to what very little expectation I had going into it. I play FFXIV for story mostly, and got nothing impactful story wise from Yorha. So without story I turn to the content's fun factor, or how visually striking it is. I got nothing in that department either. A lot of ugly brown factory settings, contrasted with a lot of washed out white, and an alien(?) ship. It's an ugly raid, and the fights aren't exactly fun. Hundreds of androids, tanks, jets and pink balls later, and I still don't know what was going on in there.

Looking at past raids, they made them fit into the overall story of FFXIV. The Crystal Tower raids were taken from FF3, but they gave them a reason why they are in FFXIV, and the reason came back later for SHB. Same with Void Ark and Ivalice. The Ivalice story was continued into Bozja, while I'm thinking we might use some kind of Void Ark tech to reach the moon in 6.0. It might even be the tech behind the towers. There is a legitimate (and continuing) story and/or lore reason why they are all there. Yorha was a crashed satellite with... things(?) in it, that couldn't quite be explained. Some big white ball... All of the reasoning behind it poofed with a "thanks for all the fish" letter, and I'm pretty sure we'll never hear about it again in a future expansion. (Unless they need to sell another Nier game.)