VIERA AND HROTHGAR COMPLAINT MEGATHREAD

[Midareyukki]

Viera Hairstyles:

[XiRon]

That hair isn't too bad. That forehead though... y i k e s

I don't think it helps that the Hyur is missing eyebrows.

Reminder this hair is a random drop from EO so if you dont like it you could probably make a few million on the marketboard, depending on how often it drops.

[Midareyukki]

Reminder this hair is a random drop from EO so if you dont like it you could probably make a few million on the marketboard, depending on how often it drops.

Issue is that I do like it.

[Caro178]

Anyway, apologies in advance for the big pic dump, but I was extremely pleased with last patch's assortment of new hairstyles and I hope we get a few more fan favourites in 6.3 like Gyr Abanian Plait and Styled For Hire. Personally I think every hairstyle from 6.2 looks either good or great, even the hairstyles I don't really care for on a design basis. The Lyse ponytail in particular looks absolutely fire on femViera.

[Renalt]

I will always be a fan of any Viera using this hairstyle.

[XiRon]

Issue is that I do like it.

Issue is will it look alright or will look like sad brendan frasier meme on hrothgar.
It is the next best thing to getting a Bald hair update (which nobody should want for hrothgar bc every glitched hrothgar gets bald and it looks awful)

[Allegor]

Issue is will it look alright or will look like sad brendan frasier meme on hrothgar.
It is the next best thing to getting a Bald hair update (which nobody should want for hrothgar bc every glitched hrothgar gets bald and it looks awful)

It only looks awful because they're smooth as a p- ....baby. Give them fur texture and I'm sold on bald Hroths

[Zebraoracle]

Issue is will it look alright or will look like sad brendan frasier meme on hrothgar.
It is the next best thing to getting a Bald hair update (which nobody should want for hrothgar bc every glitched hrothgar gets bald and it looks awful)

...I thought bald hroths looked kinda nice... They at least look better than the April 1st hairs, that's for sure. (Obviously IMO, before someone gets all ruffled)

[Gullis]

Issue is will it look alright or will look like sad brendan frasier meme on hrothgar.
It is the next best thing to getting a Bald hair update (which nobody should want for hrothgar bc every glitched hrothgar gets bald and it looks awful)

I would use a bald option, over anything I currently have accsess too

[Midareyukki]

Sorry to post this here, but it's more so to bring it to the correct topic rather than derail the other one again...

Story is king

I agree.

Yasumi Matsuno was and is my favourite writer in the entire Square Enix department. Yes, even moreso than the vaunted Natsuko Ishikawa. Because I was a kid and I thought games were just straightforward hallways with polygons until I played FF12. Every little corner had something to explore, every area had something that related to that part of the world, and there were bits of lore for me to find which made the world feel grandiose. I thought games were just quirky things for entertainment, until I actually stopped to consider what I was being told from the heavy and dry FF12, the harsh and convoluted Tactics, and the childish but also relevant even into adulthood Tactics Advance... and that's Final Fantasy alone. He worked on Tactics Ogre and Vagrant Story, games which I still to this day urge people to try and experience.

Because that man knew two things. How to tell a story, with all the complex motifs and messages that he's trying to make the player consider. And how to make the world be more than just the story. FF12 was more than just my first foray into the FF series, it was literally the one game that stood out from RPGs and platformers. None in the series came close. It encouraged me to learn English, it helped expand my creativity and want to make a world as large, expansive, with so many stories that connected with one another in it. Though, sure, that might also be because I'm a gigantic history nerd. So sue me. But the world felt and looked magical. A magic that I always associated a lot with Vieras: beautiful, mysterious, earthern but also fantastical.

FF14 came, I tried ARR, and it felt so much like FF12. There were details everywhere, the lore was vast and complex, there were histories in the past that may or may not have had influenced what we experience today in the MSQ directly. And the messages were a bit cartoonish at times, sure, but there was still sobriety there. The refugee crisis in Ala Mhigo, for example, at times paralleled oddly with real world events, and it was interesting to see how characters in-game approached the logistics of suddenly needing to provide for people while also having personal interests when it came to them.

When I heard Matsuno was going to write the story for Return to Ivalice, I was excited. "Finally, Ivalice getting some recognition and something a bit more complex being added to this". I got the complexity, alright. It hit as hard as an anvil. In came the complaints that you required too much information from other games to understand or care about what was being given to you. And half of it was just contradicted by what you were seeing, so you needed to know Ivalice-for-Nostalgia and Ivalice-for-Relevance.
I had some trepidation going into Bozja because of it, but I still had hopes. It was a Type-0 esque take on Hrothgar lore, but as a continuation of the Return to Ivalice story. "Finally, some details! And Matsuno will definitely help these races have some lore, right?! "

...Bozja sucked on so many aspects, it was painful.

Disjointed. Gratuitous. Violent. Stupid. A mockery.

The story didn't add up half the time. It had a lot of plot points, half of which were just handwaved away.
The violence was just overdone and the tones were rather marked. And I'd forgive that because Werylt was going on at the time, which was also violent and harsh... but Werylt ends in some sweet note. Bozja ends with the most sour tone possible.
When you have a story making me yell at my monitor why we're freezing whenever Misija is just standing there.
When you have a story making me wonder why the hell we're listening to someone whose precognition is limited and vague at best, dangerously misleading at worse...
And when your story is making me feel like I just wasted my time doing absolutely god knows what for no pay-off other than seeing characters I cared about die in nonsensical ways...
Ways that we actually had a cure. You can't do Delubrum Reginae at all without doing 5.3, which is when we have a cure for Tempering. But then no, it's all moot and they get mutated on the spot!
It's P A I N F U L.


I can go into details on why that might have been. I have on other threads, from Covid limitations to Matsuno's writing not meshing well with the game they've established. But overall, there was so little quality assessment and cohesion that it was painful.

Lore is easy, and story is the juice like Pip said. But christ almighty. It feels like lately Square has zero interest in making lore that isn't hair-brained, and whatever story they go along with it is either cliché'd or thrown together for the hell of it. So much of what Yasumi Matsuno could do was just thrown into the air. It makes me wonder how much of it he actually wrote, or if he just went down the same rabbit hole as the others. I don't remember his stories, even at their corniest and most boring, being THIS piddly.

I'm sorry if this sounds harsh, I really do. But I can write better than Bozja.

And I wish I could! FF12 was my inspiration, it made me seek out how to do it. Something Square so clearly lost! That way I could give Hrothgar AND Viera the lore they deserve, the story they deserve. Really interesting, unique and mystical-looking races, thrown into the bin because "lmao no time".

Ah yes, but to write about why Sad Birb was Sad, you dedicated a whole expansion, didn'tcha...