To depart from all the usual negative posts on the forums, I thought it was a great expansion and all the people I've seen talk about it in the game loved it as well!
At the beginning, you are thinking "is this it? it's just going to be a political campaign trail the whole way?" Albeit a well-executed one.
A well-executed political campaign story in the sense that it wasn't boring. It felt expansion-caliber in its execution, despite not seeming like an expansion-caliber story. New amazing feeling zones, amazing new music, lots of sidequests...
For example, Urqopacha, Kozama'uka and Yak T'el are easily my favorite zones. Both the look and the music make me want to stay in them. So even had it remained this simple story the whole way through, it would have been fine to me personally.
But the expansion throws its first curve-ball... (spoiler tagged)
50% of the way in it abruptly ends and you are led to believe it's all suddenly over. Expansion completed. It acts like you beat the expansion. But you're not stupid. You're only at the level 95 quests.
The next zone feels quiet, almost like the expansion has just split like Stormblood did.
But in reality, it's all building up to telling a single story and it will all come together...
In retrospect, it all feels good with the hindsight of knowing what it all amounts to. I just wasn't sure it would be well-received when I was doing it, since Stormblood wasn't.
But really, what it all amounted to was as big-expansion feel as any other - like Shadowbringers and Endwalker. They pulled off lots of emotion as well, which is impressive, given it felt like there was nothing much left of the lore after Endwalker.
As promised, Wuk Lamat evolved from this naive character into a leader that had learned a lot of lessons, but she also was aware she needed to learn these things.
The expert dungeons are also more interesting mechanically. Still easy to push through with item level and vuln stacks, but a lot more threatening really than the in-out mechanics that have been done for years.
All in all, it was a great expansion and not the holiday lots of people were dismissing it as.
As for negatives:
Continue reading...
At the beginning, you are thinking "is this it? it's just going to be a political campaign trail the whole way?" Albeit a well-executed one.
A well-executed political campaign story in the sense that it wasn't boring. It felt expansion-caliber in its execution, despite not seeming like an expansion-caliber story. New amazing feeling zones, amazing new music, lots of sidequests...
For example, Urqopacha, Kozama'uka and Yak T'el are easily my favorite zones. Both the look and the music make me want to stay in them. So even had it remained this simple story the whole way through, it would have been fine to me personally.
But the expansion throws its first curve-ball... (spoiler tagged)
50% of the way in it abruptly ends and you are led to believe it's all suddenly over. Expansion completed. It acts like you beat the expansion. But you're not stupid. You're only at the level 95 quests.
The next zone feels quiet, almost like the expansion has just split like Stormblood did.
But in reality, it's all building up to telling a single story and it will all come together...
In retrospect, it all feels good with the hindsight of knowing what it all amounts to. I just wasn't sure it would be well-received when I was doing it, since Stormblood wasn't.
But really, what it all amounted to was as big-expansion feel as any other - like Shadowbringers and Endwalker. They pulled off lots of emotion as well, which is impressive, given it felt like there was nothing much left of the lore after Endwalker.
As promised, Wuk Lamat evolved from this naive character into a leader that had learned a lot of lessons, but she also was aware she needed to learn these things.
The expert dungeons are also more interesting mechanically. Still easy to push through with item level and vuln stacks, but a lot more threatening really than the in-out mechanics that have been done for years.
All in all, it was a great expansion and not the holiday lots of people were dismissing it as.
As for negatives:
- I didn't like Solution Nine. It's a great zone, but the cyberpunk style overdoses me on technology to the point I feel sick looking at it and I don't think I will spend much time there. I am very concerned about Arcadion overdosing me on this as well so I sincerly hope they change the look of each floor drastically.
- Heritage Found has something of the same problem for me, but I really like the music in the town so it's worth visiting it just for that alone.
- I can't fathom why one of the best games in the FF franchise's primitive lore was copy+pasted then catastrophically mudied with advanced technology and such depression. Could we have not related to some other FF game's lore, or a brand new lore, being mudied in this way? Maybe it was to make sure we felt sad for them but it just has the side effect of making us ask why SE would wreck FF9's lore this way.
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