What Forge Ahead Actually Means

[DiaDeem]

Actually, pretty much all of them have had multiple experiences by now:
-Y'shtola (Flow, bodied by Zenos, Norvrandt coma, Flow again, Thule)
-Thancred (Flow, Norvrandt coma, bodied by Ran'jit, Thule)
-Alphinaud (Coils, downed airship, Norvrandt coma, Thule)
-Alisaie (Coils, Abania, Norvrandt coma, Thule)
-Urianger (Waking Sands raid, Norvrandt coma, Thule)
-G'raha (Crystal Tower, Elidibus, Thule)
-Estinien (Nidhogg, Thule)
-Minfilia (Waking Sands raid, Flow)
-Krile (Isle of Val, Zenos)

You're putting all of these out of context. I have no idea how you interpreted some of these as "deaths" whatsoever. Thule I'm gonna rule out entirely. Check my previous posts as to why. Norvrandt Coma I'm ruling out as well by default. Collapses were never presented as deaths. Now...

Shtola: Flow & Flow. Two are already too much for me. Nobody ever inferred she was dying after Zenos cut her. Don't know how you came to that conclusion.
Thancred: Flow, and that's it. He beats Ran'jit, and it was never inferred he was dead.
The Twins: Coils? No idea how your mind went to death with that. We literally play as Alphinaud after the ship went down in the Burn. Many people survived the fall of the Garlean tower in Abania. It was never inferred any of the Scions had died there. Even some Garlean soldiers survived.
Urianger: His body wasn't in the Waking Sands. Why would anyone ever think he died?
G'raha: 6.3 we got his soul copied to a crystal. Only his body froze. For CT, he literally states he's going to sleep until the time is right.
Estinien: He never died by Niddhog. He asked to be killed but we saved him, that was the whole point of that scene. How was that lost on you?
Minfilia: First thing we learn as we find Noraxia dying, is that she was taken hostage.
Krile: We didn't even know her when the Isle vanished. Zenos was experimenting with her. No mention of death anywhere.

Most of these cases are mad stretches, and I think you don't actually believe in half of them. I don't understand why you'd toss some of these out, unless you're trolling or being dishonest for the sake of argument. Many of these I've never seen interpreted as deaths before this post. Not once in almost ten years of playing this game. You didn't even bring G'Raha being shot by Emet. I mean, I don't include it because Emet says 30 seconds later "cat not dead btw" but it shows me you're just picking whatever arbitrary thing that could be REMOTELY perceived as as death if you stretch it enough. You didn't even bring up Amaurot, and for that one I'm willing to give the Twins and Ryne one each, because even I got surprised Ryne was just fine after The Dying Gasp. Then again, Ryne is a retired character.

Maybe my statement goes way further than I thought it did: You truly (and inexplicably) are obsessed with the concept of Scion Deaths.

[TheMightyMollusk]

Shtola: Flow & Flow. Already too much for me. Nobody ever inferred she was dying after Zenos cut her. Don't know how you came to that conclusion.

It's extra funny if you're a healer at that point, since Krile yells at you to quit gawping and help. It's abundantly clear we weren't supposed to think she was dead.

The whole thing is really the Worf Effect in action. Y'shtola's barrier had to that point stood up to everything thrown at it without a problem, so having Zenos break it is just to show that he's a real threat.

[DiaDeem]

It's extra funny if you're a healer at that point, since Krile yells at you to quit gawping and help. It's abundantly clear we weren't supposed to think she was dead.

The whole thing is really the Worf Effect in action. Y'shtola's barrier had to that point stood up to everything thrown at it without a problem, so having Zenos break it is just to show that he's a real threat.

Love when our job actually has an effect on how the characters talk to us sometimes. Estinien has some "The Other Azure Dragoon" lines iirc. I wish it came about more often. Doesn't A-Ruhn-Senna say something to healers as well in EW? "Glad we're bringing such a capable Healer with us" or something. Or was that Alka Zolka...?

[Slayer25c]

The Lord of the Rings is terrible. Do you remember how Dumbledore comes back after the Balrog killed him? How dare they not actually kill him, terrible story no stakes.

Wrong person Dumbledore is in Harry Potter lol

[DiaDeem]

Wrong person Dumbledore is in Harry Potter lol

I know. I was making a joke. Check my Bruce Wayne on the other page.

[TheMightyMollusk]

Love when our job actually has an effect on how the characters talk to us sometimes. Estinien has some "The Other Azure Dragoon" lines iirc. I wish it came about more often. Doesn't A-Ruhn-Senna say something to healers as well in EW? "Glad we're bringing such a capable Healer with us" or was that Alka Zolka...

Several of the Ilsabard Contingent members have comments on your job. A-Ruhn is the only one to get voice acting, though. The funny part is that he'll will still say it even if you're not on that job at the time. Kinda funny getting thanked for being an experienced white mage while I'm currently a dark knight.

[DiaDeem]

Several of the Ilsabard Contingent members have comments on your job. A-Ruhn is the only one to get voice acting, though. The funny part is that he'll will still say it even if you're not on that job at the time. Kinda funny getting thanked for being an experienced white mage while I'm currently a dark knight.

Love those little perks of having all jobs maxed! Though another mount wouldn't hurt either lol

[Avoidy]

A genuine question to the people who enjoy the story as it is and think these threads are unwarranted: how can you feel any suspense, tension, or enjoyment from a story full of characters who are done progressing and for whom consequences might as well not exist? It's really difficult for me to enjoy this game's story when there's no internal conflict and the external conflict is revolving around people who straight up aren't allowed to die.

When I look back on my favorite characters and my favorite moments in the story, I always come back to the beginnings of Heavensward. I think that moment represents a lot of what was missing in EW, and I'll try to briefly explain why. Consider Alphinaud in ARR. The kid's cocky, overconfident, arrogant, naive about the ways of the world, and sincerely thinks he can leap into the arena of geopolitics and just solve problems by taking dark money to fund a solution. His arrogance gets a lot of people killed, and it sees him exiled. When HW opens, Alphinaud is sitting in the chair staring at his feet looking like Shinji from Evangelion, and you and your band are officially branded traitors. The Sultana is thought to be dead. We have no idea what happened to her right hand man (haha get it). So what do we have here? Consequences. Harsh, realistic, gritty consequences doled out for a character's flaws. And Alphinaud is forced to reflect and consider his flaws while Haurchefant hands him hot drinks and then haurchefant fucking dies and his death produces one of the saddest moments in the game; not from the death itself, but from his father's heartbreaking reaction to it. And he died protecting us, and maybe he wouldn't have had to if we hadn't been there, and maybe we wouldn't have been there if we'd done things differently in ARR. And all these thoughts are swirling amid the larger story of HW, and it's greater for it. Meanwhile, in EW, we come up from the Aitiascope after watching Hydaelyn die; this should be huge. This is like watching your greatest ally perish. It's like watching God die right in front of you. ...And two minutes later we're talking about building a battery for a space ship. I think there was a scene where they all went out and ate burgers to kind of cope, and that was it?? Nobody's even like "hey, hey guys. God is basically dead??? What does this mean?" Or when the refugee ship is built and we make the last minute decision to use it and travel to meteion, even when things seem really bleak on ultima thule nobody even mentions that we took mankind's liferaft and now we're losing, like there's never a human moment of doubt. It feels very frantic, like the writers were just tired and wanted to get the chapter over with. The skeleton was there, but the fat, the details, that make it realistic... were missing.


Imagine if a single scion had just fundamentally dis*agreed with the decision to fight meteion. And I don't mean 'gee guys is this right?' followed by immediately falling in line and boarding the ship. I mean disagreeing so hard that they try to stop the others from even considering fighting because they don't want to blow mankind's liferaft on an uncertainty. Like what if Urianger, rocked by his recently completed forgiveness arc, expressed genuine doubt in our ability to beat the bird and felt like the safe way out was best. Or hell, even in post-ew, there's a part where Y'shtola opens a void portal and just starts shoving creatures inside. And she claims it's fine because they're not real, but they're moving around and kind of expressive and I remember several people on my friends list watching that scene and at least laughing at how fucked up it seemed at face value to just march a creature into a portal. Imagine if Y'shtola's desire to fulfill her promise to return to Runar clouded her judgment and led her to continue void research after she was told to stop by concerned researchers in radz, or someone on the scion team like Alphinaud or Urianger. Imagine if a certain brash scion like Alisaie actually called Y'shtola out on endangering others for selfish reasons, while someone like Thancred (who also has strong ties to the First) defended her because he wanted to go back to see Ryne, and then maybe that's when we learn that Y'shtola's been using her life energy to see since HW or some shit and she's barely got a year left so she's desperate, and imagine if that was what ultimately led to an assault of void monsters on Radz at Han. Now we have external conflict (attacking monsters) bred from internal conflict (Y'shtola letting her emotions cloud her judgment). Obviously it doesn't have to be how I laid it out, but it just goes to show like... There are a bunch of people in the scions but they behave like a monolith sometimes and it's fucking DULL because of it. Let these grown ass adults disagree with each other on a hardcore fundamental level. Gimme drama, gimme conflict.


All this is to say, I'm sick of people reading my posts and being like "so u just want ppl 2 die huh???" What I want, is for a "story focused MMO" to stop cutting corners on its story and return back to the writing that hooked me in HW. If you're scared to give the main characters consequences, or if they're now so perfectly developed that they can't make mistakes, then we need new ones who can imo. Zero is a good start. Even though I hate her atm, I have to remind myself that I hated alphinaud at first too, and now he's my favorite character. He's also a character who's been useless to the story for a while now, and I can say this even though I like the character because I like a good story more and these characters are hindering it. They're stopping it from breathing.

[DiaDeem]

A genuine question to the people who enjoy the story as it is and think these threads are unwarranted: how can you feel any suspense, tension, or enjoyment from a story full of characters who are done progressing and for whom consequences might as well not exist? It's really difficult for me to enjoy this game's story when there's no internal conflict and the external conflict is revolving around people who straight up aren't allowed to die

Oh hey Avoidity. I think you've read how I feel. I like the Scions, but I want a new cast with new arcs and conflicts to explore. My issue is that many of the posts are just about character death, and not how else there could be an interesting conflict. Like.. there's many interesting plot devices, why is only Death being brought up as an option? I get what people say when they say it feels like there's no stakes, but this one Death plot point doesn't make or break a story. In that sense, I guess they could kill a Scion, but by then that means they've become a plot device themselves, and not a character, and why the idea doesn't attract me too much.

Sidenote: The Shadowbringers Shtola fake out death in Rak'Tika actually really annoyed me. EVERY Scion gave up on her immediately, and I was like "... guys, do you really have so little faith in her??" and only Runnar was like "Nah, let's just find a way to get her back. I'm sure she's fine." and then she was fine, and I was like "Of course she is"

party members to disagree with each other

Yeah, characters having disagreements is a topic worth exploring. I only ever remember Alisaie yelling a bit at Ryne at the end of ShB, and characters having conflicts with one another and learning to resolve them is a something other than death that can be interesting to explore.

[aveyond-dreams]

Sorry, but according to some posters who have made an appearance in this thread it is unrealistic for party members to disagree with each other, because that's a distraction. Nevermind that the cast having disagreements or conflicts with each other is pretty much the norm in countless other games.

In any case, FFXIV was made worse by catering to the people who wanted a Scion hugbox and it stands to only get worse with the addition of Krile into the mix for 7.0, which I made my thoughts known about here.

Heavensward really was when this game's writing was at its peak - I would certainly choose the likes of Maehiro removing characters once their role in the story was finished over Ishikawa's obsession with characters like G'raha Tia and Hermes any day. She'll keep her favorites alive yet she'll remove characters that had potential like Arenvald out of the story, I should have known back then that something was off but I made the mistake of trusting that things wouldn't go awry the way they did.

Meanwhile in FFXVI they already blatantly revealed that it least one major character will die by showing off their funeral scene in the music video clip for the game's official theme. Much as I like the character, I understand that it would be detrimental to the story if they were kept only to bluntly force the game's themes in my face like the average scion does. Also, it's nice to see that we'll be getting a heroine worthy of the name seeing as how Jill, unlike Y'shtola and very much like Ysayle, actually goes through an ordeal that shapes her character prior to joining the party and will hopefully continue to grow throughout the game.