Must the last dungeon always be.... (7.0 spoilers)

[Kranel_San]

Must the last dungeon of each storyline be a memory of past events experienced by the bad guys? We had that with Amaurot (ShB) The Dead Ends (EW) The Lunar Subterranean (Void Crusade is its standalone storyline) and last but not least, Alexandria (DT)

It's becoming quite expected, and also a little bit boring.

[MoofiaBossVal]

I complained about the final act of Endwalker for being a lesser rehash of Shadowbringers. I've since warmed up to the idea of FF14 being about fall of civilizations and its immortal survivors who dwell in despair. It's poignant. I think my dissatisfaction comes from the execution. I don't mind rehashed ideas if they are good, or even better than before. But execution in the writing is something that FF14 has been struggling with ever since the ShB patches began.

Amaurot works because the expansion made Emet-Selch very likeable, and it is revealed to be the reason why the entire game and the journey you had been through happened in the first place. It also helps that you got to walk around Amaurot before the dungeon, and your character gets retconned into being a member of it. There is also urgency as you are turning into a Sin Eater.

The later rehashes don't have that level of audience investment. I didn't care for Meteion as a character, and the Final Days hadn't wiped out any cities I cared about or killed off any major characters. I felt sorry for the polluted fish world (very reminiscent of Ayreon's 01011001 concept album about an alien race of underwater people who in their greed, built machines on the surface which destroyed their world), and the Terminator scene was also pretty sad, but ultimately I didn't feel that the Endsinger was a big deal and wound up forgetting about her, despite her being the finale of the story. Another issue is that the Scions had just been resurrected, so there was no tension.

Baron has a little bit of investment with the flashback cutscenes of Zero and Golbez during the patches leading up to it, but I didn't really have an investment in that world. The thing I remember liking about it was the reveal that Golbez had succeeded his friend's identity rather than the apocalypse. And, again, little tension. By this point, FFXIV was feeling like a disney movie in how everyone lives and there is a happy ending.

The Alexandria dungeon is a little sad because Sphene was cute and likeable, but suffers from the lack of urgency since the expansion stopped having tension after the most powerful Vidraal who ever lived didn't kill anybody. It feels weird to hear about the threat of Interdimensional Fusion, but then you spend three hours meandering around the city eating popcorn and icecream, chatting with mom and dad, taking gondola rides, looking at a garden, etc. It deflates the tension. Another issue is that I didn't find the present day Alexandria of a boring, modern urban city to be very likeable versus the quaint castle town in the flashback dungeon. The dungeon might have been stronger had you been shutting down the pylons and killing off all of those people during the fast paced dungeon, rather than in the leisurely zone prior.

The next final dungeon might be something else, which could be refreshing, but again I think it ultimately boils down to execution which FF14 has been struggling with, so even if it's different it still might not be very good.

[Kranel_San]

I complained about the final act of Endwalker for being a lesser rehash of Shadowbringers. I've since warmed up to the idea of FF14 being about fall of civilizations and its immortal survivors who dwell in despair. It's poignant. I think my dissatisfaction comes from the execution. I don't mind rehashed ideas if they are good, or even better than before. But execution in the writing is something that FF14 has been struggling with ever since the ShB patches began

The way they're currently handled, despair and sadness have already overstayed their welcome. It succeded once in ShB because it had a great storywriting and a wonderful build-up, but that doesn't mean it will succeed every time it's brought up.

If we take a look at the past, Gaius, Lahabrea, Thordan, and even Zenos were already good villains because they had different motives and were not simply sad boys and girls consumed by despair.

Honestly, I expected DT will be a step in the right direction, and while Part 1 had its dull moments, I enjoyed it much more than I did in Part 2, which is a shame because I looked up to Part 2 as the very cool part.

[aquarys]

The way they're currently handled, despair and sadness have already overstayed their welcome. It succeded once in ShB because it had a great storywriting and a wonderful build-up, but that doesn't mean it will succeed every time it's brought up.

If we take a look at the past, Gaius, Lahabrea, Thordan, and even Zenos were already good villains because they had different motives and were not simply sad boys and girls consumed by despair.

Honestly, I expected DT will be a step in the right direction, and while Part 1 had its dull moments, I enjoyed it much more than I did in Part 2, which is a shame because I looked up to Part 2 as the very cool part.

Unfortunately, I think you are right. There are a lot of problems with DT's story, but to go any other way other than a kind of joyful adventure would be to give up on the "new adventure arc" before it even began.

[Kranel_San]

Unfortunately, I think you are right. There are a lot of problems with DT's story, but to go any other way other than a kind of joyful adventure would be to give up on the "new adventure arc" before it even began.

As I have said before, I enjoyed DT Part 1 more than I enjoyed Part 2 despite my earlier expectations being quite the opposite. This is due to the scales of the adventure itself being more grounded than the previous expansions. It was an adventure where we explores a new continent not outside our world, without any sense of urgency to stop a villain from executing a world-ending catastrophe. A journey where we meet and talked to the inhabitants of this new lands, and learned about the ways of their lives and their cultures. It might be slow, but it's to establish and build-up a connection between you, the players, and Tural. In fact, some life lessons and reminders can be taken from Part 1, which I found to be a bit surprising to me.

Yes, Valigarmanda could have been executed better, such as having him wreaking havoc (Maybe on a smaller scale?) but something to demonstrate its destructive abilities in action in front of everyone, rather than simply being scars on the lands from decades ago. It might even remind some players about the destruction that followed the wake of Bahamut, which will add more to the sense of urgency: "We must take down that beast, immediately!" instead of what we got which was: "We must track the beast and kill it"

Part 2 fails, because it uplifted the scale immediately from a grounded adventure, to a cosmic threat where it was even implied that Sphene wouldn't stop at the sources' shards and may continue to worlds beyond, but there wasn't any proper build-up to it. Sure, we got introduced to her before she made her plans known, but she was already suspicious so it was foreseen and expected. We have zero sense of urgency because even the NPCs didn't until the plot demanded (Almost the entirety of the last zone is basically you strolling around instead of just taking the tower down by any means necessary)

If you want to see a proper build-up, then look no further than the previous saga. ARR was a grounded adventure, which built up over its course to have the realm at stakes, but just that. The realm. HW continued that level of stakes, if not tuning it down a little bit to let you build-up more with the realm inhabitants, then SB would raise the stakes back to having the realm in danger with both the empire on the move again and Shinryu being unleashed, and so on and on, building up eventually to EW (Which feels like rushed, but most of the way for the saga was built-up throughout the course of several expansions)

I hope the point is made clear.

Behold, these are the final days of Amar-lexandrea

Somehow, the Final days returned once more.

[Aurumis]

If we take a look at the past, Gaius, Lahabrea, Thordan, and even Zenos were already good villains because they had different motives and were not simply sad boys and girls consumed by despair.

Not even despair, she wanted them to live forever, when they already died of natural age having lived a full life using souls, and now she wants them to "live" as data forever...using more souls and aether from living beings... Sphene is just a psycho AI

[Sheriyana]

I'm tired of the hallucination dungeons too, hell I was already tired of them in Endwalker. Amaurot was a cool one off but we really don't need more of them. Alexandria even sucks as a final dungeon, there's no sense of scale like with Amaurot or even the interesting and pretty vistas of Dead Ends. Of course there's also no sense of urgency or importance in these types of dungeons when you're just hallucinating through past events with no agency in said events.

[GrizzlyTank]

While the dungeon did feel emotional, yeah it was still something they had done before. And much like the victory lap at the end of the final trail, it wasn't warranted this time around. The fall of alexandria could have been portrayed some different way.

And it's been a recurring issue throughout the expansion. They had various plot points they wanted, but messed up the delivery on most of them.

[Ririta]

While I agree on principle, finally seeing a calamity happening was quite interesting. It was silly that we saw two Final Days but only the aftermath of a calamity (on the first).

Besides Bahamut of course, but that doesn't count.

[Post]

I actually like ARF (HW) a lot. We're in a mad dash for our goal, already knowing we're on the righteous course and we're racing against the Holy See and the Garleans to stop them from obtaining incredibly powerful relics from sinister Allag.

We thwart Hydrus and find even more bizarre Allagan experiments, but it's just stuff we do doing the way and doesn't distract from the ultimate goal.

And then the Ascians show up because they recognize US as a threat, now. We beat them, and the twist is that they actually die.

It's simple, and it's badass. We know everything because it's all been set up already over the story.

Same could be said for Ala Mhigo and Praetorium, though they're just weaker on execution, I think, with Zenos' motivations being much clearer after that dungeon and Praetorium being bogged down with cutscenes in EVERY iteration.