Final fucking fantasy 22 3/4

[Friday]

Specifically Zenos is like Luca Blight, if you're familiar with Suikoden 2. He's just that goddamn strong with no "mysterious power" behind it.

And yeah, he comes back later.

[beatbandito]

perhaps they will address this in later expansions—the post 4.0 content had already revealed some of the background info I felt I was missing.

nervously tugs on collar

Shadowbringers is supposed to be where the story gets excellent. I've played a little bit this afternoon, and they've already made some fascinating choices that I'm excited to explore more.

I don't think this is a spoiler if you've already started ShB. A lot of the strength of that expansion was disconnecting from the ongoing plot and giving you a concise side story to follow. FWIW I thought that was also what made Heavensward great, but people seem to not agree with that as much.

[Büge]

Back to the good things: in addition to the more oblique references they keep doing, they just straight-up made Ivalice part of this world's geography. We've got FFXII settings and races, "Ashley the Riskbreaker" is one of the Warriors of Light from ages past, and pretty much the entire plot of Final Fantasy Tactics is ancient history suppressed by the church, and you get to work with Orran Durai's descendant, who went so far as to name his own kids Ramza and Alma. Fran from FFXII is here as a resistance general, and it's implied that she's working for Ashe, who faked her own death. It's all extremely cute nostalgia throwbacks and a great excuse to put some of those games' soundtracks into your orchestrion inventory. Also nice to finally hear audible confirmation that I've been pronouncing Beoulve correctly.

The Ivalice raids are only good if you enjoyed Final Fantasy Tactics. If you haven't, they're a long and frustrating slog. I think guest director Yasumi Matsuno is kind of a hack, but the Ivalice raids are required to unlock some later content (unfortunately also directed by Matsuno), so I held my nose and powered through.

[Newbie]

Mm. I guess they're a bit unwieldy compared to Alexander or Omega, since you have to do multiple bosses in a single instance? But coming to this from a WoW background, that's much more what I'm familiar with, and the XIV approach of "let's put like two trash pulls in front of a single boss and call that a raid" feels like a coffee break. I imagine it would have been worse when it was current; only the third instance gave my duty finder groups any trouble, but we still cleared it.

[Büge]

[Newbie]

Shadowbringers

I finished the last of the patch content and saw the second credits sequence for Shadowbringers on December 31, 2022. I've been playing it so long, I lost track of how things started. Let's think back...

Towards the end of Stormblood, the conflict between the nations of Eorzea and the empire of Garlemald seemed to be winding down, as major figures of belligerence on the Garlemald sign died off or were captured, with one notable except: Zenos, the nihilist(?) heir to the empire, whose only source of joy is in facing the Warrior of Light in battle.



It's always a delight to rewatch the opening trailer after finishing the story and notice all the ways it describes the themes of the story while still playing fast-and-loose with the events that actually occur. Notably: this story takes place on another world, a reflection of our own, and here the forces of Light have long-since triumphed over the Darkness. Too much so: a flood of Light blanketed the world and wiped out most civilization, and the survivors are plagued by angelic monsters who transform their victims into yet more of their number. It is always daytime here. Here, the "Warrior of Light" is an ancient pariah, posthumously blamed for the ongoing apocalypse, and so your protagonist is instead styled as the "Warrior of Darkness," setting out to rescue this lost world from the Light in which it drowns.

I can see why this one is so many people's favorite.

It's an extremely self-contained story: while you can pass back and forth between worlds, almost no one else can, so you have to ignore hometown politics for a while and focus on this new setting. Despite the extreme isolation of this setting, elements of this story build from seeds planted in each earlier chapter of the game. The Crystal Tower and its capabilities were explored prior to the launch of Heavensward, while that expansion saw us fight Ardbert and the other fallen heroes of the First, whose world is the one we're now visiting. And most importantly, the villain—

The villain this time around is extremely popular, and for very good reason. He's phenomenal. He first showed up in late Stormblood spouting the usual Ascian pomposities, but as we move into Shadowbringers, he demonstrates inventiveness. He's sympathetic. He is flawed in ways that are appropriate to his identity, and it's an intriguing identity. He would not make the classic villain speech: he wouldn't say "We're not so different, you and I," but he's one antagonist that actually warrants the comparison.

I was going to say more about the expansion, but I got distracted with search results for "ranked Final Fantasy villains" and "Emet-Selch all cutscenes youtube" and wasted too much time. This one's a strong contender for my favorite chapter in Final Fantasy XIV, but it's been more than a week since I played and I'm itching to get into Endwalker, so this will have to do.

[Newbie]

The folks in my discord pointed out that somebody could easily set up an East/West Bowl free company in FFXIV. Hell, "Hingle McCringleberry" is practically a lalafell name already.

[pacobird]

The villain this time around is extremely popular, and for very good reason. He's phenomenal. He first showed up in late Stormblood spouting the usual Ascian pomposities, but as we move into Shadowbringers, he demonstrates inventiveness. He's sympathetic. He is flawed in ways that are appropriate to his identity, and it's an intriguing identity. He would not make the classic villain speech: he wouldn't say "We're not so different, you and I," but he's one antagonist that actually warrants the comparison.

He's so great. He just comes right out and says he has absolutely no problem cooperating with you for the simple reason that you've figured out how to kill (or "kill") Ascians, so he, as an immortal being, is better off putting his plans on hold, directly helping you out, and waiting for you and all your friends to die of old age than he would be confronting you and risking getting murked. And he actually does!

[Thad]

I listened to a podcast yesterday where Renato Mariotti said "real estate moogles" and now I can't get it out of my head.

[Thad]

Giving FF10 a replay (the HD version on PC) for the first time since its original release and it's interesting.

It's definitely an inflection point and it's got obnoxious little papercuts everywhere. I find the fixed camera angles vexing.

The voice acting isn't as bad as its reputation but it's not great, either (except John DiMaggio, who is great but is cast in the role of a quasi-Polynesian/Carribean character, which you wouldn't give to a white guy today). I know James Arnold Taylor has chops because I've seen Clone Wars, so I'm inclined to think the real problem here is the direction. The game was released a mere 3 years after Metal Gear Solid, so I think a big part of it is probably that actual professional acting and direction in a video game was still a pretty new thing and people on both sides of the glass were still finding their footing. I also think there's a certain Japanese flavor to the way everybody talks and acts that feels stilted and unnatural, even before you factor in the stilted and unnatural movements that accompany the lines, and while there are a number of ways of mitigating that problem today, people hadn't quite worked them out yet back in those days.

The sphere grid is a really neat design choice, and has some clear influence on skill trees in later games, but it's a fucking bear to actually use. It's got serious clarity problems, with paths and connections between nodes not always obvious, and characters' names rendering on top of nodes so you can't see where the fuck you're going. On top of that it's a gigantic pain in the ass to actually move through; moving the D-pad frequently doesn't point you to the expected node, and moving the left stick, while more precise, feels slow and awkward. I'm tempted to just play on my Deck and see if navigating the grid works better with touchpads and a touchscreen.

I think I like the plot better this time around; I remember the broad strokes of what happens even if I don't remember the details, so I more or less know where things are going. I still think Yuna is the main character and Tidus's repeated declarations that it's his story are self-absorbed and wrong, but I think I've got more respect for how pivotal he is to the story anyway; he's not just the narrator, he's the outsider who's able to look at what's happening and say "this is wrong" and convince Yuna and the rest of her Guardians that there's another way. The plot centers around Yuna, but Tidus is the guy who convinces her to break the cycle.

(Plus, Auron tells him "This is your story" in the opening. Tidus didn't make that up; it was, like everything else, the result of Jecht and Auron setting him on a path.)

[nosimpleway]

The English voice actors were just handed a translation of the Japanese script. No notes or direction was included, so they were kind of winging it on inflection and trying to match the Japanese lip-flaps as best they could. Like, nobody told JAT that Tidus should be crying or choking back tears on his line reads at points where he's supposed to be pretty emotional.

I have a friend who still makes fun of Yuna's incredibly clipped "Yes"es, trying to fit them into lipflap for "hai", to this day.

[Thad]

Yeah, that tracks.

[JD]

There was also an engine limitation where the English audio files had to be the same size as the original Japanese ones, which they solved by speeding up some lines in an editor and it sounds awkward.

[Sharkey]

Yo, I know it's later days but is anyone still playing XIV? I've been fucking around with it casually but I'm starting to hit mandatory group dungeons that seem like the kind of stuff I'd rather do with people I actually like rather than a bunch of randos. If we have a guild or supergroup or whatever I'm down to drop a few bucks on shifting servers.

[Büge]

Yo, I know it's later days but is anyone still playing XIV? I've been fucking around with it casually but I'm starting to hit mandatory group dungeons that seem like the kind of stuff I'd rather do with people I actually like rather than a bunch of randos. If we have a guild or supergroup or whatever I'm down to drop a few bucks on shifting servers.

I am.

I mean, I will be, once my computer arrives...

[Büge]

Oh, uh, I'm on Aether/Sargatanas. Part of the Talking Time free company, Talking Tyrants.

Here's my card: https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodeston ... /22938589/

[Friday]

I played for about a year and I can tell you that while it's true that playing with friends is always going to be more fun, if there was ever a community that was good to rando dungeons with, it's the community in FF14. I've never known a community nicer and more respectful to first time players than FF14. It's like the anti-WoW when it comes to the playerbase. Say you make a mistake during a boss in a dungeon because you've never done it before. Instead of calling you a homophobic slur and then a racial slur and then ragequitting the dungeon, leaving the rest of you fucked and your time wasted, a FF14 player will instead explain the mechanic to you and try again. Amazing, I know.

I did have a few bad experiences with randos, of course, and was even called a racial slur one time. But those were the rare exceptions and not the norm. What is the norm is for former WoW players to switch to FF14 and realize how awful the community was in their previous game. They usually describe it as akin to leaving a toxic relationship and learning that the world doesn't have to be hard and cruel all the time.

I'm not even kidding, there are hundreds of accounts of ex-WoW players saying exactly this.

WoW players counterargument is, of course, "they're tough because their game isn't pussy carebears like that stupid weeb game for stupid pussies." Which, I mean, solid counterargument. Sounds like something a white supremacist would say about how his dad raised him by beating the shit out of him all the time.

[Sharkey]

That's heartening to hear. I've already tried a few and didn't get any grief from anyone even though I'm sure I must have fucked up once or twice. I'm playing tank, as usual, and from other games I'm pretty used to catching hell when literally anything goes wrong so it's been nice so far.

Here's my card I guess, though I'm still level bullshit. I've got more in fisherman than anything else at this point.
https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodeston ... /47345677/
Got a shield made of swords, a sword made of moogle, and a head made of empty so I'm ready for anything.

[Newbie]

Oh right, character cards! My character is Esoterica Tunks on Faerie/Aether. I'm kind of stuck on this one particular challenge near the end of the MSQ, and I refuse to lower the difficulty, so I thought I'd try leveling up some other jobs to try using instead.

[François]

I'm, uh, Alys Levarq, and Elisance Sorenceaux, and Perspicacious Fjord, and Zanfio Panfio, and Albayar Haragin. And yes, Twelve help me, I looked up 15th century Mongolian naming conventions to pick a lore-appropriate Xaela name. I can only be comforted in my nerdiness by the fact that there are three other characters with Albayar as a first name whose players thought it not entirely unlikely that medieval Mongolians might have sometimes called their children "Crimson Joy".