Thread: Review of 6.3 Story Content

It's quite telling when there are articles like this being written unironically. Who is this game even for anymore? We went from an era of hype and speculation back in Shadowbringers to this? Why the unnecessary fixation on food of all things? Let alone trying to score meaningless points with the crowd who is so up in arms about representation at every corner while the most basic fantasy and character creation elements to this day remain largely absent from the game.

What a waste.

https://www.fanbyte.com/games/featur...and-animation/

Problem with the food is game is promoting the bad food. It start with the low poly grape. We look at grape and want to eat. But no grape is sharp and will cut. Writer see this and they work many hour to improve the food. Next is the delicious cheesie burger. We love the cheesie burger but is food of the sin. Is opposite element to the Ayyybeyond element so it does the critical hit. Is super effective. So is forbid. So writer say they want to go health. We support this. They make the apple. The apple it is good but it can not be drain with the magic. This is not how apple is eat. Does not make any sense. Final is delicious manju bun. This is lie. Is not bun because is not have the long ear. Is just soup bread. Writer keep betray the expect of player it happen since the Shadowbringer. Is why guild fight.

After seeing this thread, I went into 6.30 expecting it to be shockingly awful.

...It was... fine??

I'm not afraid to be a merciless critic of this game when I feel like it's justified, and Endwalker's 80-90 MSQ made me want to delete the neurons that recorded experiencing it (really? The past 12 years were building to... a sad space bird? Really? That's what everything was for?!?!).

...But, like... 6.30 seemed fine to me. There was as much content, information, and story progression as most other "patch MSQs". Quite honestly, most of the Heavensward patch MSQs were notoriously glacial and "water-treading". Stormblood wasted 2 entire patches on almost nothing but the tedious drama of one dysfunctional Yanxian family, neglecting Ala Mhigo and the wider Far East heavily in the process.

By way of comparison, 6.30 was filled with story and developments. And the writing seemed fine? Better than Endwalker 80-90, certainly (although that's not exactly a difficult hurdle to clear). In fact, the "ex-Scions" are beginning to feel significantly more tolerable and natural as characters, and develop something resembling actual personalities, now that they aren't mandated to always report to the same room all the time.

Zero is unremarkable, yes, and feels like a fan-fiction character conceived by a 14-year-old girl's Tumblr account, and is following a very paint-by-numbers / connect-the-dots character progression...

...but... uh... that is not exactly new in FFXIV. Having endured characters as empty and generic as ARR Minfilia, HW Unukalhai, SB's "Surprise! I'm actually Lyse! Let's go on a road trip to Japan!", Hien Rijin (whose purpose has always been to be a pretty and marketable himbo, and not much else), SB Alpha (whose only personality trait was, and still is, "lol it's cute"), ShB's Gaia (who was basically Zero 1.0, right down to the "lol I like food!" gimmick), and probably a host of other examples that I'm forgetting...

...I honestly don't feel like Zero is anything unusual for FFXIV's writing and storytelling. This game has always had an affinity for bland, safe, hyper-tropey, copy+paste anime characters, and Zero hardly seems like the worst of them.


The food complaints

The emphasis on food in cutscenes is probably because it's something incredibly mundane to "normal people" (ostensibly us, the characters and the audience) but incredibly exotic to Voidsent. Therefore, the fact it provides sustenance in a strange way to Zero, but is an everyday thing to people on the Source, acts as a sort of logical bridge by which Zero begins to acclimate and accept this different world, since food is one of the few "living" customs that initially has any reason to interest her. Through being drawn to that interest, she inadvertently begins to form wider connections.

Food is also just safe. It's a reliable bet that most living audience members will like food and eating. And that they will associate food with peaceable and positive times, such as family gatherings and holidays. Therefore, if the writers are aiming to cultivate a sense of positivity and warmth in a scene, they can hit a large number of viewers with their emotional AOE combo by including a dining scene.

Myths of the Realm

As for Myths of the Realm, it was... fine?? Yeah, it's not going to win a Hugo Award, but... er... that's Alliance Raids in general?

The entire Crystal Tower storyline was basically written with crayons. Almost nothing happened each chapter, and what did happen was on the same storytelling tier as an episode of Pokémon. ("We blew up some pillars, wow there was a maze with a guy in it!"; "Hi we're clones, by the way, there's an evil man in the tower. Go kill him okay? Oh no! Clones got sucked into the void-hole!"; "We killed a cloud and Nero got void-eczema. G'raha left to go set up the plot of our third expansion.")

The Shadows of Mhach storyline was, again, extremely-simplistic. "Hi we're pirates, but it's okay, we're good pirates. Also the bad pirates stole the thing. Oh no, the bad pirates got killed for stealing the thing. Now the bad pirates will help us do good things. Also, a talking cat will help us kill Satan."

Return to Ivalice was only convoluted because Matsuno decided to just copy+paste FFT and FFXII directly into FFXIV almost without modification, puffing up the lore and backstory via transplantation. The actual "original" parts of Return to Ivalice were pretty damn simplistic, and basically just a vehicle to summarize the plot of FFT so that people who owned a PS1 in 1997 could do the "DiCaprio points at screen" meme for 10 hours. Rather than cringey Sharlayan researchers, you had cringey HiLaRiOuS Moogles who want to be actors! :joy: :joy: :joy:

Sadly, Shadowbringers did not have an Alliance Raid series, only an extended marketing collaboration with Yoko Taro, due to the lack of good judgment that FFXIV's director suffers from (and/or possession of a ruthlessly-shrewd business sense). Therefore, there is no story or substance to even comment on for the ShB case.

Weighed against its direct competition, Myths of the Realm is... basically right on par. Yeah, it's lacking in "edginess" I guess, but I think the writers are handling the Twelve with mittens because the player characters choose these deities at creation. It's been a part of the players's identities for a long time, and so they can't go too wild with it, or it has the potential to make some really uncomfortable situations where players don't like seeing their Patron on their character screen.

From that perspective, Myths of the Realm is basically designed to be light-hearted wish-fulfillment for the audience, and it's serving that purpose fine. I'll happily take 100 more Myths of the Realm and Snoegheims, than have to deal with brazen, empty, masturbatory, completely-pointless trash like Dark Apocalypse and the HiLaRiOuS Dwarf Twins ever again.

I also feel like the hate on Snoegheim is exaggerated. She is really not any more obnoxious than probably 100s of other bit characters that have been introduced, and honestly, outside her "haha zany nerd" scenes, she contributes plenty of perfectly-fine serious commentary to the plot. She's just a "weird researcher". It's not even an unrealistic depiction of the kinds of bizarre personalities that end up in real-life graduate and PhD tracks.

Originally Posted by Eorzean_username

Sadly,*Shadowbringers*did not have an Alliance Raid series, only an extended marketing collaboration with Yoko Taro, due to the lack of good judgment that FFXIV's director suffers from (and/or possession of a ruthlessly-shrewd business sense). Therefore, there is no story or substance to even comment on for the ShB case.

I liked the story with the dwarf twins. Their feelings of isolation and need to be accepted by their peers. Plus the ending was rather bittersweet.