Final fucking fantasy 22 3/4

[Thad]

Yeah, that's what I thought.

Thought it was non-elemental in T-Edition too, up until I used it on Ifrit and Shiva and it healed Ifrit.

[Thad]

There are some Espers now that you have to fight before you can get them.

Catoblepas was easy enough; just equip some relics that prevent petrify and Bob's yer uncle.

Carbuncle and Seraph, on the other hand, both kicked my ass.

Carbuncle -- okay so there's stuff that's Reflect-proof in vanilla that can be reflected in T-Edition. Maybe everything? Drain can be reflected, and so can spells cast by items. I feel like this one should be easy enough if I can learn Dispel, but Unicorn doesn't teach it in T-Edition so I'm not sure where to get it.

I might be able to take Seraph once I learn Shell.

Which brings me to: the auction house is still kinda bullshit, but maybe not as bad as in vanilla? At any rate I haven't hit any of the gag prizes yet.

I got Golem, so I can learn Protect and Shell now.

The next auction wasn't ZoneSeeker, it was something called PuPu. I don't know if PuPu replaces ZoneSeeker or if there are more Espers in this version than in vanilla. Given how Espers seem to teach fewer spells on average in T-Edition, it wouldn't surprise me if they added some. Anyway I couldn't afford it after I got Golem, so I'll have to try again later.

Haven't found any new locations, but I haven't swung by Thamasa yet. I'm guessing that, like in vanilla, there's nothing you can do there until it's unlocked by plot point, but I may as well check anyway.

Got Mog, learned every dance except the snow one. Might be hitting the limits of what I can do without grinding, so I'll probably just move on to the Cave to the Sealed Gate. Maybe do a quick look around the world map first just to make sure there's nothing new for me to check out.

[Newbie]

Square Enix had to suspend sales of Final Fantasy XIV last year because of the popularity of its Endwalker expansion, but in February, they finally got additional servers set up, so they reopened their store. I had decided it was time to try it myself, and I bought my copy the same day. I was curious how this would hold up to WoW, the game I'd spent the most time playing over the last decade; I also wanted to evaluate the claim I kept encountering that FFXIV's story starts rough, but over the course of its expansions, it grows to either rival or even surpass the story of other mainline FF games. I was skeptical about whether that last part could really be true.

Having spent a month with the game, I've now played through the all of the main storyline content provided when XIV originally rereleased as A Realm Reborn as well as the content from patches prior to the release of the first expansion, and I can at least attest to how well XIV adopted the conventions of World of Warcraft. The interface, controls, progression design, and game features are all extremely familiar for someone who has spent much time with WoW; I felt immediately at home. Deceptively so: with so many characteristics in common, it was all the more jarring when something was unfamiliar or didn't work the way I expected.

As a Final Fantasy game, XIV: A Realm Reborn is just as rough as they say. The original game was so flawed that they had to scrap it all and start over, but rather than erase or ignore what came before, they incorporated this into the story: a fanatical figure within the Garlemald empire's military called down the lesser moon, Dalamud, and summoned Bahamut from within it to scour the lands of those who had provided such irksome resistance to the imperials' ambitions. Although the Heroes of Light, i.e. the players, tried to stop this, they were ultimately unsuccessful, and only through their leader's sacrifice could those Heroes be spared the devastation that would follow. This event, the ultimate climax of the first draft of FFXIV, now serves as the opening cinematic of ARR.



It's worth dwelling on some of the elements of this cinematic. First, the music: I haven't been this satisfied with a Final Fantasy soundtrack since at least X. XIV's score leans heavily on the traditional themes, but it employs them well. (Possibly excepting the choice to play the chocobo theme every time you mount your chocobo—considering your mount is only a hotkey away, I was very relieved when I discovered the option to turn off the dedicated mount music in the settings menu.) The new tracks are also excellent, with frequent and effective use of vocalists. (The first time I joined a duty to fight Good King Moggle Mog, I was so distracted by the lyrics that I failed to notice important mechanics and died twice in rapid succession.)

Astute observers will also note the appearance in this video of several series staples: black mages and Bahamut, chocobos, a man who you might reasonably and correctly guess is named Cid—but also, Magitek armor! A man in armor that looks suspiciously like a judge from FFXII! It turns out that XIV goes a bit wild with incorporating elements from the other games in the franchise. Summoned enemies form the major threat driving the plot for most of ARR, styled here as "primals": godlike beings manifested through the sacrifice of an adequate volume of crystals by a person or group with sufficient conviction or belief. The Garlemald Empire considers the Eorzean civilizations' inability to control this primal threat an existential flaw that necessitates their subjugation, and they develop Magitek artillery of various types for that purpose. Meanwhile, the player character has been chosen by god(s?) to collect crystals and save the world from various dark malefactors as another Hero of Light.

This is all fine, more or less, except that the context through which you encounter everything going on here is as a member of an idealistic organization called the "Scions of the Seventh Dawn." A handful of the other Scions are shown in the opening cinematic: they're the four folks praying at altars, carrying optometry equipment with tattoos on their necks. Your player character isn't strictly a silent protagonist, but you aren't really one for conversation when plot's going on, so one or more of these four often escort you through missions to give background details and to react to plot developments. It's just too bad that the Scions suck for so much of the ARR story. They barely qualify as characters! Other than their physical characteristics and like a single personality trait each, they start out as complete ciphers. They only start to get more interesting right before the first credits sequence, and even then, they've got a lot of ground to make up. I hear the first expansion, Heavensward, represents a huge improvement in this department, so I hope to provide a less ambivalent update the next time I write about XIV.

[Thad]

That Locke is already looking for Phoenix is a bit of a plot hole, if you think about it. Cid, and thus the Empire at large, doesn't find out about magicite until the end of this sequence, when you get six of 'em at once to match the two you just picked up in the garbage dump. That discovery spurs Gestahl back to the Sealed Gate and eventually the slaughter at Thamasa... But apparently Gestahl has had one in his possession all this time, enough that rumors have spread about its power to revive dead people, and he never told anybody about it or figured out what it actually does.

Okay, I've spent entirely too much time thinking about this, and I think I get how it works.

When they get Phoenix, they describe it as really old and covered in cracks; the first time Locke uses it it shatters. (It re-forms, as Phoenices are wont to do, but they don't know it's going to do that.)

So okay. It's way too old to be one of the Espers Gestahl captured twenty years ago. That means it's a thousand-year holdover from the War of the Magi.

And nobody ever describes it using the words "Esper" or "magicite"; they just say there's a treasure.

So, at a guess: Gestahl's got a green rock that he knows is a powerful magical artifact, but he doesn't know that it's the remains of an Esper. All the Espers in his possession were captured alive; he's never seen one die and transform. This does require some suspension of disbelief -- not one single Esper has died, in twenty years of brutal experimentation? Or at least not died where anyone can get a good look at their remains?

And where it does become a straight-up plothole is, how does he know the mountains around Vector are going to get smooshed into a star shape fifteen minutes after he dies? And why does he choose to leave this information for people to find in a painting in Jidoor?

[Newbie]

Was the rumor that the treasure was in the Empire's possession, or merely in the Empire's lands? The latter situation still poses a pretty big obstacle to treasure hunters on other continents, and it would justify the treasure's ultimate location turning out to be in ancient ruins uncovered by apocalyptic seismic activity.

[Thad]

Was the rumor that the treasure was in the Empire's possession, or merely in the Empire's lands? The latter situation still poses a pretty big obstacle to treasure hunters on other continents, and it would justify the treasure's ultimate location turning out to be in ancient ruins uncovered by apocalyptic seismic activity.

A guy in the auction house specifically states that it's in the Imperial Capital, Vector, which I think at least strongly suggests that it's in the Empire's possession.

The item that tells you where to find it is called the Emperor's Letter, which I always took to mean the Emperor wrote it himself, though again, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense given that it directs you to a geographic feature that didn't exist until after he died. I thought I remembered some reference to the Emperor commissioning the painting himself, but I can't find that offhand so it's possible I made that up; I guess the letter could have been written by some rando who'd heard of the treasure and knew that there was a star-shaped mountain formation where Vector used to be.

[nosimpleway]

Albrook and Tzen are more or less in the same spot in Balance and Ruin, and Kefka's Tower is between them, and the Tower has a bunch of rooms and machinery from the Imperial palace inside. Pretty sure the implication is that Kefka built his god-throne on top of the old capital.

The mountains north of Tzen in balance have a few spiky protrusions that, with a bit of trimming, would make a star shape. Which would mean either the guy telling you Phoenix is in Vector was wrong, or that Gestahl had it hidden up in the mountains for whatever reason might motivate him to hide this one priceless treasure so far away from his vaults and treasuries.

The question is how cartography in the new world has made such strides that anyone recognizes the mountains as star-shaped, considering you've got the world's only birds-eye view from the world's only airship. Unless some of the leftover Imperial Air Force (IAF) are making maps and spreading rumors, how did anyone know?

[Büge]

Astute observers will also note the appearance in this video of several series staples: black mages and Bahamut, chocobos, a man who you might reasonably and correctly guess is named Cid—but also, Magitek armor! A man in armor that looks suspiciously like a judge from FFXII! It turns out that XIV goes a bit wild with incorporating elements from the other games in the franchise.

It doesn't stop at ARR, oh no. XIV is the Queen Greatest Hits of the Final Fantasy franchise.

[Newbie]

It doesn't stop at ARR, oh no. XIV is the Queen Greatest Hits of the Final Fantasy franchise.

That's what folks have been telling me! The various clockwork minions and character-specific articles of clothing were a pretty big giveaway, to say nothing of the occasional automobile flying overhead, but I have been reassured that the franchise-inspired raids are usually better integrated into the fantasy of the world. I actually just finished a raid series that seemed to explicitly depict the overarching plot of Final Fantasy III, complete with Cloud of Darkness as final boss...? I can't wait to see how the Ivalice and NieR raids hold up.

[Thad]

Cave to the Sealed Gate: pretty tough! Enemies who hit you with Toad, Blind, Zombie, Poison, and instant death. Had to stock up on Phoenix Downs before I went in, because nobody knew Raise yet (Terra learned it naturally over the course of the trip).

Did the start/stop thing a few times; eventually made it most of the way through, past another Gilgamesh fight and to the treasure room. Atma Weapon isn't where it usually is.

I knew I was near the end but I was pretty banged-up and running low on status-recovery items (and I missed at least one chest I want to go back and get), so I teleported out and decided to try fighting the Espers I couldn't beat earlier, now that I've gained some spells and levels.

Took a few tries but I got them both.

Seraph: Gau has weapons that inflict Slow, Sabin knows Shell, Edgar has Golem equipped (who, BTW, looks like the FF5 version, not FF6's steampunk version) and Terra has Kirin. So there's the first round. Subsequent rounds: get Shell on everybody, heal as needed, and when possible hammer Seraph with attacks (Pummel, Chainsaw, Thundara, and I don't remember if I ever put Gau into Rage or just used his standard attacks).

So hey, now I've got an Esper that teaches Cura and Raise.

Carbuncle: Edgar learned Shell at the end of the Seraph fight, so this time around he and Sabin Shell everybody on the first two turns. Edgar also knows Reflect (he learned it from a relic) so he casts it on himself; hit him with Slow (can't use Gau's axes to inflict it this time, because in T-Edition weapon-generated spells are subject to Reflect) and then hammer him with Thundara. Bit of a nice touch: if Edgar uses Bioblaster, Carbuncle says "Huh, weird. It's not exactly magic."

Anyway, that's two more Espers in-hand. There's at least one still available at the Auction House, but I don't have the gil for it so I'm going to head on back to the cave. I think Gau's probably learned every rage he's going to in there, so I'm going to swap him out for Cyan and see how that goes. I haven't used Cyan since the Decisive Battle and he doesn't know any spells, so that's fun.

New tracks: Carbuncle and Catoblepas both use the FF5 boss music. I couldn't place the track that played during the Seraph fight.

[Thad]

The Tintinnabulum doesn't seem to exist in T-Edition. When you complete the mail subquest in Mobliz, you get a relic called the Lunar Curtain that casts Reflect when your HP get low (and teaches you the Reflect spell).

After finishing the banquet in Vector, the Ward Bangle has been bumped up one slot as the second-highest-rank prize (where the Tintinnabulum is in vanilla) and you get a Ribbon for a perfect score (where Ward Bangle is in vanilla).

And after the banquet, the town music on the southern continent changes. I can't place the tunes in Maranda or Albrook, but in Tzen it's Ahead On Our Way from FF7.

[Thad]

Made it all the way to Crescent Island before hitting a point where I feel like I need to grind. The boss at the end of the burning house wiped me out -- it's the Mother Bomb from FF4, complete with FF4's boss music. I managed to beat its first form, but it wasn't easy, and then it took out Terra and Strago and split up into a half-dozen smaller bombs and berserked Locke so he couldn't resurrect them.

So I'm grinding a bit before I give it another shot. Terra's got Blizzara and Locke has Cura, so that should help. I'm going to put Kirin on Strago next time so he can Regen the party. (Stupidly, I left it on Shadow last time, and of course he fucks off before the burning house just like in vanilla. Also, moving back to the earlier discussion of shurikens being scarce when you first get him: the shuriken isn't just a throwable item in this mod, it's equipable. Wish I'd found it the last time he was in my party -- there's one in a treasure chest in Kohlingen but I didn't find it until later -- because it's not as good as the equipment he's got now.)

ZoneSeeker would be useful here -- assuming it exists in T-Edition and does a group Shell like in vanilla, which isn't a given -- but I don't have it. Terra knows Shell (from Golem) and I'm thinking I'll teach it to Locke before I go back in. Hit the boss with Slow, the party with Regen and Shell (and maybe Haste if I take the time to learn it in the meantime), and work it from there. Strago comes equipped with an Ice Rod so maybe I could throw Dragoon Boots/Dragoon Horn on him so he doesn't take so much damage.

Maybe slap something on Locke so he's immune to Berserk, too, but then I'd have to remove either the Thief Bracer or the Thief Ring. And I managed to steal a Fire Whip off the boss last time, so I'd like to take another crack at that. I'm not actually sure who can equip whips, but it seems like it might be useful.

T-Edition's been impressively well-balanced up to this point; this is the first time I've really felt like I hit a wall (aside from the Kefka battle, but all I needed for that was to go buy more healing items, and some optional bosses which I couldn't beat so I came back and fought them later).

[Thad]

Also: longer cutscene in Albrook. Before Locke finds Celes outside the inn, he talks to Shadow and Leo. And hey, it even uses Leo's laugh animation!

[Thad]

Sketch never fails. Its "failure" state is a standard attack that looks like a mix between White Wind and Interceptor attacking the target. I think it's a non-elemental magical but I'm not 100% on that. (Presumably this solves the Sketch bug, but I'm not going to go out of my way to test it, given that it can corrupt save files.)

Having Gau in your party and whittling Intangir's HP down far enough that it runs away is good enough to learn the Rage; you don't need to actually defeat it. Intangir is kind of a terrible rage anyway; it can be an effective way of defeating a really tough boss, but at the cost of just fucking sitting there doing nothing for like fifteen minutes. One of those neat tricks I tried once but don't really see doing again. But I figured what the hell, I may as well get it before I finish up the WoB.

And I think I'm about ready to do that. Apparently I missed an optional super-tough boss in the Cave to the Sealed Gate, but in this version of the game the cave doesn't go away; I could go back before I hit the Floating Continent, or it'll even still be there in the WoR.

[nosimpleway]

If Intangir rage doesn't instantly kill Gau it's better than in vanilla anyway. Vanilla Intangir uses Transfusion.

[Thad]

I haven't used it much but I remember I used it once in vanilla to beat the dragon in Zozo before I was leveled up enough to do it the normal way. Gau did it without killing himself (maybe just luck of the RNG) but it was so fucking tedious I don't know if I'd do it again.

[nosimpleway]

It's possible to use the Intangir rage by silencing Gau first but that's already twice as complicated as most strategies in FF6 demand

[Newbie]

I've been pretty busy for the last couple months with moving our household halfway across the country, but since I'm now about 90% finished with that process, I've finally been able to get back to the game.

Heavensward

A Realm Reborn had to spend so much effort on recontextualizing the original FFXIV story for its reboot that it felt a bit paint-by-numbers. Here are the three main cities; each of these has three(ish) Scion heroes to help you, and each one has three(ish) beastman factions that will try to summon primals, now please visit this procession of quest checkpoints as we tour you around Eorzea and introduce the factions of the world and the history of these conflicts, etc. etc. It hardly feels like anything is at stake until the second half—when they were setting up the conflicts that would lead into the first expansion.

On the eve of Heavensward, the game finally stands up for itself. "Tired of low stakes? Fine." And suddenly half a dozen characters are put in immediate jeopardy; though some will suffer more severe consequences than others, nearly all are transformed by the process. "Tired of revisiting the same locations over and over? Fine!" And now the player has a reason to get lost in the new zones and forget about the old ones for a while—admittedly this is only a narrative justification, since you still have access to those areas for housing and utilitarian purposes, but I was more than happy to play along. "Tired of primals? Too bad." To be fair, they weren't used that badly prior to the expansion, and in Heavensward proper they're less monsters-of-the-week than they are tools of the antagonists.

I was taken aback by how well some elements of earlier Final Fantasy games were used in this expansion. There's one particular character who's essentially transplanted wholesale from their original game—I don't even care about that game all that much, I never owned it, I barely played it, but the more time I spent in that environment, with that music, I started getting choked up. Elsewhere, there's an entire zone that's a remake of one notorious section from my favorite game in the franchise.

A lot of folks say that ARR may be a chore, but it's got a lot of narrative payoffs to setup, so if you can avoid skipping through quest text or boosting past it entirely, the rest of the game will be much better as a result. By the end of Heavensward, I can already see this is true. Unfortunately, they also say that the next expansion, Stormblood, is a bit of a step backwards by comparison. I guess I'll see in the weeks to come.

[pacobird]

when you take the elevator to the top of Shinra HQ instead of the stairs

[Newbie]

It may be 4 months later, but that's how long it took me to finish the expansion, so let's talk about FFXIV: Stormblood!



The trailer sets the stage without ambiguity. We have a tale of two countries: Ala Mhigo in the west, Doma in the east, each conquered by the empire decades ago, and the time has come to liberate them both. People say this feels disjointed; that the Ala Mhigo parts drag compared to the Doman parts. I can see why, but it wasn't too bad. The lands in the east have the advantage of feeling dramatically different from what we've experienced so far, and unlike our arrival in Ala Mhigo, we don't immediately show up in occupied territory: we have to figure out how to cross from neutral Hingashi into occupied Doma, so we get a zone and a half or so of political and navigational adventures before the story needs the empire to oppress some peasants at us again.

No, my bigger issue with Stormblood is more complicated. They keep reiterating how overpowered the Warrior of Light (WoL) is—lampshading it, even. The story has gone some distance to explaining this: the WoL is a veteran of a hundred dungeons and military engagements, dozens of attempted summonings, yes. They are also a recipient of "the Echo", a power that rarely manifests as a gift from the Mothercrystal as some form of extrasensory perception. (The WoL's version sometimes causes them to witness events from earlier in the life of the people they interact with. Other individuals with the Echo may have different gifts.) However, the WoL is exalted above even others with the Echo as the Mothercrystal's chosen champion, and this was portrayed in ARR through the collection of six crystals from major defeated enemies. It's never quite articulated how this strength manifests beyond certain metaphysical immunities, but they clearly want to justify exactly how the WoL can be an order of magnitude more powerful than the world-ending threats that they keep dismantling.

Having established this standard, Stormblood didn't play fair when it introduced a rival, someone who could completely best the WoL in a duel. "Oh, that's good," I thought, "now we're going to have to figure out the source of this dude's power so that we can have a hope of overcoming him. We'll learn his terrible backstory and break his malevolent pact for strength and it'll actually be a fair fight." But, well: it's never really addressed! Worse than that: in the climax of the 4.0 storyline, he junctions himself to the summoned dragon and should by rights be dramatically more powerful than when he kicked our asses, and yet we take him down like any other chump! He keeps saying that the WoL is getting stronger, but I dunno, that just didn't feel like an earned win to me. This is a completely petty complaint about the story they chose to tell, and 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.

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.

I haven't finished the optional Omega raid series yet (just finished Exdeath, for reference), but 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'll post more in... November, maybe? Sooner if I like it more, later if not.