I feel pretty bereft, not gonna lie! The disappointment and disillusion I feel over the main story is pretty intense. Bad pacing, asinine presentation, very flat ambient sound design in cutscenes which made the feeling of unreality and alienation caused by the bad story and character presentation even more other-worldly. I keep feeling like it's all been a horrible dream I'm still asleep on July 4th and I'll wake up soon and none of this will have been real. It certainly is making it hard to engage with the world at large because I keep being reminded of how much wasted potential I can see. I took my time after the msq to go back through each zone and do every sidequest and at this point I'm just pretending the msq never happened and my actual MSQ was the blue aethercurrent quests - helping out the NPCs in each zone and connecting them to each other to solve their problems.

Battle content is great, but my job [blm] feels awful to play and I don't have the energy to try to feel optimistic about the balancing changes tomorrow - just gonna let that one wash over me. I really hope the raid story is satisfying. I'm happy with not getting exactly what I want - I'm really hard to please so I'll take being not actively irritated as a victory at the very least. I'm pretty optimistic about the fights too and I'm looking forward to seeing how savage is going to be. And it means my friend group will be active again so it won't just be me and my partner alone disassociating on Tuliyolal beach trying to forget the shared 40hrMSQ fever dream we both had happen to us.

I wish they had been bolder in how they present the msq. The loop is much the same as it always has been [identical, if actually lacking in a few features this time around. but the biggest sin is not adding *anything* new] but the pacing and ordering of the content around the monotony of run forward - cutscene - run forward - cutscene feels very poorly thought out and only highlights all of the worst aspects of the games creaky systems.

One final moan there's way too many re-used gearsets - extra salty stingy in the wound if you didn't like any of those glams the first time around. I hate always being so extremely critical of gear design but until they unlock glam restrictions, these few meagre droplets are all we get for months at a time and I wanna have fun doing dumb dress up :< I'm already condemned to being the angry goth forced to be at the beach for the next 2 years at least let me do it in style.