To preface this, I will start by saying I did enjoy it, and that I thought it was challenging.
I'll go through the most notable examples I noticed during my progression:
M9S
The part where you dodge the big saw near the start of the fight is literally just dodging aoes that are incredibly telegraphed and obvious. The normal mode version of this mechanic has an additional light party stack element to it that's just completely missing from savage.
M10 and M11 have extremely large sections of it where you basically do nothing, especially 11, which repeats the exact same mechanic for 6 minutes.
M12S
This is by far the biggest example of it, and the fight I have the most issues with, despite the mechanics being fun themselves. Phase 1 still has all the weird stuff from normal mode like the lack of boss voice over, his sudden appearance, and the extremely shoehorned unfitting music. In savage, the phase 1 fight is very bare bones. Phase 2 feels just as if not even more haphazardly thrown together.
1. No voice lines, again. You'd think for a second phase of the final savage fight of the expansion, we'd get something much more grandiose. It feels really hollow fighting a guy who doesn't even react to your presence.
2. No explanation on what the hell Lindwurm 2 is supposed to be. Is it folklore? Is it a glimpse of the President's look as a humanoid? Lindwurms in FF in general are just fodder over world mobs, so it's definitely not that. We never see the "ancient, mythical Lindwurm" that he is said to have injected himself with the soul of either, so..
3. Mechanics are usually very themed with the boss that casts them, and as far as I know, Lindwurms (low level overworld mob? Danish folklore? Arcadion President?) are not proprietors of elemental magic like how Lindwurm 2 does here, so was it just arbitrarily decided? (They're cool as a stand alone, don't get me wrong, but they have no connection to the boss as far as I can tell). I feel like you could replace this guy with a stock unity asset and it'd feel the exact same. I actually have a crackhead theory that Idyllic Dream was a scrapped FRU mechanic.
4. Music is reused from the cutscenes. It's a great track, don't get me wrong, but there's to my knowledge never been a savage only phase where the background track is reused from the story cutscenes.
5. Bugs. Quite a few them in the tier. Literally look at the patch 7.41 notes and you'll see there are/were bugs for every single fight in this tier. I'm not sure the wind tower bug in Idyllic Dream is fixed yet as of writing this either.
To wrap up, it just seems like they kind of rushed the the tier in a creative and mechanical standpoint, as well as testing in general. Anyone else feel the same way? It doesn't really fill me with much confidence in that they'll deliver all the things they're meant to deliver in this patch (and 7.5), let alone deliver them without issues. (They have to give us more OC/Forked Tower areas, criterion, more cosmic exploration, MSQ dungeon/trial, Beastmaster, AND a new ultimate?)
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I'll go through the most notable examples I noticed during my progression:
M9S
The part where you dodge the big saw near the start of the fight is literally just dodging aoes that are incredibly telegraphed and obvious. The normal mode version of this mechanic has an additional light party stack element to it that's just completely missing from savage.
M10 and M11 have extremely large sections of it where you basically do nothing, especially 11, which repeats the exact same mechanic for 6 minutes.
M12S
This is by far the biggest example of it, and the fight I have the most issues with, despite the mechanics being fun themselves. Phase 1 still has all the weird stuff from normal mode like the lack of boss voice over, his sudden appearance, and the extremely shoehorned unfitting music. In savage, the phase 1 fight is very bare bones. Phase 2 feels just as if not even more haphazardly thrown together.
1. No voice lines, again. You'd think for a second phase of the final savage fight of the expansion, we'd get something much more grandiose. It feels really hollow fighting a guy who doesn't even react to your presence.
2. No explanation on what the hell Lindwurm 2 is supposed to be. Is it folklore? Is it a glimpse of the President's look as a humanoid? Lindwurms in FF in general are just fodder over world mobs, so it's definitely not that. We never see the "ancient, mythical Lindwurm" that he is said to have injected himself with the soul of either, so..
3. Mechanics are usually very themed with the boss that casts them, and as far as I know, Lindwurms (low level overworld mob? Danish folklore? Arcadion President?) are not proprietors of elemental magic like how Lindwurm 2 does here, so was it just arbitrarily decided? (They're cool as a stand alone, don't get me wrong, but they have no connection to the boss as far as I can tell). I feel like you could replace this guy with a stock unity asset and it'd feel the exact same. I actually have a crackhead theory that Idyllic Dream was a scrapped FRU mechanic.
4. Music is reused from the cutscenes. It's a great track, don't get me wrong, but there's to my knowledge never been a savage only phase where the background track is reused from the story cutscenes.
5. Bugs. Quite a few them in the tier. Literally look at the patch 7.41 notes and you'll see there are/were bugs for every single fight in this tier. I'm not sure the wind tower bug in Idyllic Dream is fixed yet as of writing this either.
To wrap up, it just seems like they kind of rushed the the tier in a creative and mechanical standpoint, as well as testing in general. Anyone else feel the same way? It doesn't really fill me with much confidence in that they'll deliver all the things they're meant to deliver in this patch (and 7.5), let alone deliver them without issues. (They have to give us more OC/Forked Tower areas, criterion, more cosmic exploration, MSQ dungeon/trial, Beastmaster, AND a new ultimate?)
Continue reading...