#also can i just say i'm over the whole voidsent sculptor stuff

[astralartefact]

after all that happened you still think they made nymeia, the incest sister god, look like manah on accident????? it was 100% an accident

FFXIV 6.3 Thoughts and Feelings - Heavy Spoilers (kind of turned into a weird rant? sorry)

First off I feel generally pretty positive about 6.3, I liked it, Euphrosyne was nice, I'm not in a 'Everything is going downhill' mood at all, I'm thriving, Bunny Boys finally have short hair, I'm super excited for Eureka Orthos (bc of the music q.q my favorite ff theme is comingggg)

...but...

I'm hardly the first person to point out that the writing in 6.3 was... pretty meh.

And I had a bit of a thought about why it felt like that, because on the surface, I'm fine with what happened. I like Zero and her arc about making friends and her starting to care about others, I like the reveal that the twelve + 1 are Venat's group (When they pointed out that the thirteenth god might be the moonwatcher I legit gasped, I don't know why, I began to care about this guy at some point and didn't even notice)

But like. All of the writing was kind of flavorless, which made it a bit boring tbh.

Zero learns the magic of friendship through another mo-cap eating animation bc people liked the Graha Burger scene i guess (what is it with Endwalker and animating eating please use that cutscene budget for something else I don't want to see it anymore)

Rubicante and Cagnazzo exist I guess. I love their designs and fights, but the other two had a little bit more build up and it shows imo. (We fought Scarmiglione twice, Barbariccia had a quest of voidsent being absolutely terrified of her arrival, with these two we only have "I have a plan Cagnazzo, come with me")

All of the Twelve are friends :) No conflict, no chaos, just happy people being absolutely unnuanced nice and non-controversial :)

Instead of actually learning about the gods we get to meet a weird cultist as a nod to 1.x whose conflict felt like we already did that thrice (at least i hope that was a reference, bc if it wasn't then why???) and we got a crumb of Krile development. Which is good and I love her. (I hope the 6.5 raid reveals her new outfit, If she isn't our company for the last raid I will be upset.)

I guess there's a lack of superfluous-ness in this patch that's usually there. Like in Lapis Manalis, one of the group (I think Y'shtola) goes to the village to search for lore/information/whatever. Usually the game would let you do that. "While Vrtra is sad, let's check out this village." And then you get to go around and the writers spoon feed us the lore we crave so much. It's superfluous in a good way.

Like imagine we go to a new place, we need to find something out, Y'shtola is with you when talking with a local. That local tells you "And as everybody knows Light Aether is black!" Cut to Y'shtola doing /ponder. "Interesting. Thank you for your time." The conversation ends and Y'shtola pulls you to the side and explains to you what exactly you were supposed to get in that situation. Actually, Light Aether is white, so why do they think otherwise? Here are some hypotheses based on the lore we know that either are correct or will explicitly be ruled out later on.

Of course we could also come to all those conclusions ourselves - and in another questline game you would be expected to do that work for yourself. And in my opinion both of these approaches are perfectly fine - But since ffxiv generally does it one way it needs to be done on purpose if you suddenly do it differently. Especially if you suddenly stop doing it from one patch to the other in the main story.

But this time Y'shtola comes back and tells you: "No, I looked and there's nothing here worth mentioning." Get a barrel and carry some fuel. You don't get to learn more about Galatea the Puppetmaster or Drusilla's home or some weird new piece of Reaper lore. Go and reread the three notes in the Dungeon if you want that. We have stuff to do so go ahead and waste play time with this engaging filler quest.

The gods say "Yes, what people tell, feel and think about us affects us and our being." And then nothing happens. No examples given, even though several are kind of right there and it's a lot weirder that they don't adress them. Not even something basic like "Althyk and Nymeia are siblings, some people think they had children together, but that's actually not true." And of course nothing like "For example, Nophica and Halone were actually good friends, but the stories of the people literally created hatred between them and turned them into rivals, even though nothing actually happened between them."

I am bitter they erased their feud. Justice for Nophica.

Anyways, that's a lot of words to say "It was fine." To me it's at most a worrisome precedent, but I doubt this will continue? Again, the general outline is fine, it's just filling the gaps between it that didn't work out great. They probably just took it easy on this patch or something, who knows what happened behind the scenes. Maybe XVI needed help with something, maybe somebody quit, we'll never know.

And even if this continued, the music and the art design continues to amaze me and they'll have to do a lot of things wrong to make me consider dropping this game anytime soon lol