Standing There Syndrome

[TaleraRistain]

I still remember my first steps in FF14 years ago together with my wife. We take the fight back to the Garleans, and finally end up in the praetorium... to be met with Nero's 3 minute monologue "when I was little, Cid stole my cookie, wah wah" and Gaius' 4 minute monologue "me am the bestestest of the world".
At one point we looked at each other and asked "why are we even listening to this drivel, why don't we just kick this fool's butt?"
And that's the point. Nobody in their right mind would listen to the bad guy going on and on and on and on... - they would just attack. Remember Guardians of the Galaxy 1? Nebula starting trash talking her sister, only to get shot down by Drax "noboy talks to my friends like that". This is the sort of dialog FF14 needs desperately, no more villains holding endless monologues everybody just quietly listens to.

And there are countless examples of this bad anime trope throughout the MSQ. Ilberd, anyone? We find out he's about to summon a primal, so we go there, kick his sorry behind, and it's over - we could just put his head on a pike atop his very own Ala Mighan dungheap, and call it a day. But no, WoL goes into 10 minute standby, while Ilberd does the exact thing we came to stop. Oh my.

Personally I just accepted this sort of nonsense constantly happening to me. But man did it rub me the wrong way when they finished off Gulool Ja Ja while EVERYBODY was just watching. He desperately tried to fend of his son's magical infused attack for 20+ seconds, and NOBODY came to the rescue - all the saviors of the star just standing there, gaping mouth, drooling from the chin.
I liked the character of Gulool Ja Ja a lot, and seeing him getting killed this super cheap way really p*ssed me off. They did the old lizard wrong, and I'm not going to forget this.

Villain monologuing is a JRPG trope (that Stranger of Paradise poked fun at in a hliarious way) but it does make sense as another poster said because the WoL does tend to try to hear people out. Gulool Ja Ja I will agree was just stupid, though. At the very least we would have tried to disarm or incapacitate Zoraal Ja. All they had to do was throw some tech at us to disable us. We can be disabled by tech. It's happened before. We could get locked up in something like the guy in the gunbreaker job quest used and there would be nothing to stop Zoraal Ja from killing Gulool Ja Ja but we wouldn't be standing around like idiots with Wuk Lamat going on about his "honor" or something when he's getting murdered in front of us. Gulool Ja Ja can be mad at my WoL later. I'd be saving him. That's what the WoL does. They put themselves between the bad things and others.

[Carin-Eri]

Sometimes things just need to happen for the sake of the plot, but it can be rather annoying to just sit there and watch it happen...

Kind of a spoiler but

The biggest such moment I can think of was in Endwalker with Ahewann, as he gets grabbed by one of the monsters and eaten, while the WoL takes like half a minute to run a few meters just to be dramatically too late.

Worst moment I can think of was immediately after we defeated Golbez. We just stood there letting him monologue a "but this was my plan all along" line and throw Azdaja down the pit.

[Rueby]

Worst moment I can think of was immediately after we defeated Golbez. We just stood there letting him monologue a "but this was my plan all along" line and throw Azdaja down the pit.

I mean there's that one scene in HW...

Everyone stood there while Haurchefant dramatically died in slow motion. I'd understand if the light spear or w.e pierced his Lv1 shield and instantly broke it and the sudden death caught everyone off guard....even then everyone just stood and watched the dude die??? Most pointless death in the game imo...I was so upset by it when I first saw it.

[Kes13a]

I mean there's that one scene in HW...

Everyone stood there while Haurchefant dramatically died in slow motion. I'd understand if the light spear or w.e pierced his Lv1 shield and instantly broke it and the sudden death caught everyone off guard....even then everyone just stood and watched the dude die??? Most pointless death in the game imo...I was so upset by it when I first saw it.

especially since I was a WHM when I saw that... like.. hmmmm. if only someone was around that could heal or rez....

[Archeron]

I mean they can't even voice every cutscene in the game, thats something even Free to play games have found ways to do, and this is a paid, subscription game. The amount of times they fade to black to avoid having to create an animation, or do like anything interesting is simply embarassing, especially with people paying for this game MONTHLY. Make no mistake this is about budget. This is SQEENIX milking every last penny out of their cash cow to fund their other failing business endeavors.

[Hallarem]

I mean they can't even voice every cutscene in the game, thats something even Free to play games have found ways to do, and this is a paid, subscription game. The amount of times they fade to black to avoid having to create an animation, or do like anything interesting is simply embarassing, especially with people paying for this game MONTHLY. Make no mistake this is about budget. This is SQEENIX milking every last penny out of their cash cow to fund their other failing business endeavors.

I'll give you the classic defense to this from their defenders when it comes to lackluster quality and weird QoL deficiencies like hats missing from two or three races?:

- Well if they voice acted every cutscene and quest, they don't have time and money to focus on other things and we would have less stuff to do in game (DESPITE the fact that we tend to receive the same exact things in cycles in every patch)
- "Well if they fix this / that / those the game might break and then we couldn't play and I don't like change and I wanna keep playing, the game is fine as it is "

Which would be good enough IF WE WERENT PAYING A MONTHLY FEE FOR THIS GAME. If it was free to play it could be a burning garbage pile for all I care, but I and many others are paying money for this while some FREE TO PLAY GAMES Get more effort put into them than this one is just infuriating and the lacks are made even more glaringly obvious now that there isn't a good story MSQ to blanket over their mistakes and PR shield them.

"But free to play games get their money by cash shops" well NEWSFLASH, so does FFXIV with it's cash shop that doesn't even have ACCOUNT SHARING for the items you bought between characters, forcing you to sometimes buy items twice if you want to do anything for your alts.
What did we get for that money? A whole lot of same, with a horrible story they rushed Endwalker for and stuck two expansions into one for some odd reason, with updated character faces, no character customization and low quality character bodies that still wear wooden clogs because they can't program their own character models to stand evenly on ground or whatever the excuse is. Chat bubbles that npc's have but somehow is mystical alchemical magical technology for the devs to implement on a toggle off/on system. Aaand we got like .. 30-40% of a graphical update they are doing for the next 5 years probably if not more? SO yeah, I 100% believe the conspiracy theory that the C-team was left working on the expansion, while the B and A team work on some project SE is pumping out on mobile or something. Maybe another FF7 remake or FF9 remake to cash in from nostalgia instead of innovating like they used to and rewarding their long term subscribers and fans with some full focus and quality. Look at the new writing teams credentials? One of them wrote a nurse dating simulator while the others wrote a story for a raid series or worked in another department.

[Archeron]

Look at the new writing teams credentials? One of them wrote a nurse dating simulator while the others wrote a story for a raid series or worked in another department.

Are those seriously the only credentials the new writers have? That's absolutely humiliating. I feel like any random RPer could be picked off the street and they would have given us a better MSQ storyline, and probably have done so for free. Oh how the standards have fallen.

[Maxilor]

WOL to Wok Lamar: "Standing here, I realize you are just like me trying to make history."

Wuk Labutt: "What?"

WOL:

[TaleraRistain]

WOL to Wok Lamar: "Standing here, I realize you are just like me trying to make history."

Wuk Labutt: "What?"

WOL:

I'm glad I'm not the only one who had their thoughts go that way.

[Akonyl]

For the most part I don't mind this, because it's just a narrative pacing thing. It's like when a character in anime does a paragraph of monologue in the middle of an attack, but the attack's not supposed to actually take nearly that long. If they wanted, the scenes could be just as easily constructed without characters having a chance to react, but then they wouldn't be able to cover the narration/motivations/etc as they want to in the story, so I let it slide.

But in DT I remember being absolutely baffled by Ketenramm:

Not only just standing there in the throne room, but stopping us from interfering with the Zoraal Ja / Gulool Ja Ja fight. The guy was literally ambushed by Zoraal Ja just a few quests before and he's now just standing there watching him kill his friend with stolen technology? What on earth? Why was he even there? To warn Gulool that Zoraal had stolen the tech of the golden city, and then do nothing about it? ???