abomination-catboy

[abomination-catboy]

And we're back.

[abomination-catboy]

was thinking of fraysid bc i like feeling sad i guess 🥲

[abomination-catboy]

#Accurate

different ways of looking out for the wol

[abomination-catboy]

FINAL FANTASY XIV: STORMBLOOD The Abomination Review, Part 1

Okay, so here's something entirely unnecessary; a review of an MMORPG expansion that came out six years ago. Hooray!

A little bit of background; I've been slowly making my way through the FFXIV expansions, in fact very VERY slowly because my attention is being pulled in 20 different directions at any given time and this game is so very, very long. I share a Discord server with some good friends and there's a section for all things FFXIV, and opinions on Stormblood are probably some of the most divisive I have encountered so far. One friend, who we'll refer to as J, really didn't fancy it at all, whereas another friend, S, enjoyed it and thought it would be, I quote 'exactly your kind of bullshit'.

So now that I've finished Stormblood and have started engaging in horrors such as 'cartoon chocobo drags party to Computer Hell Fightclub' and 'a raid with FREAKIN' MATH in it' everyone wants to know what I thought of Stormblood. So naturally, I did the normal person thing and created a blog to write the review up on in detail. LET'S GO~

It's been ages since I actually started Stormblood, so some of my recollections will likely be off. Hopefully this will just add humour, as I don't really mind myself and will not be making corrective edits :^)

I am not American, so neither is my spelling.

Spoilers for FFXIV ARR, HW and SB and related patch content, obviously.

Introduction: Welcome to Ala Mhigo

After briefly being reminded of the overarching plot of the whole game and following the trauma of watching Papalymo explode, we're thrown into another 40-hour long sidequest as Omega Weapon ker-chunks over the wall into Ala Mhigo and Lyse-Not-Yda-in-Fact suggests this is the perfect opportunity to help her people fight back against the Garlean Empire and end the war. Cool. Cool cool cool.

This is your Warrior of Light for the trip, Yhen'a Astolya. Both he and his sparrowhawk are a little unimpressed that 'get the Weapon' has turned into 'save entire nation from a 10+ year imperial occupation', but at this point that's just #WarriorofLightThings so he's resigned to his fate. At least he's cute. None of his outfits suit his personality because the character I re-made him from liked to show off his assets if you catch my drift and I'm yet to change many of the glams but. You'll see.

So anyway, Gyr Abania. What a shithole. NO REALLY SSHH The fist map is really kinda boring, and I get why; it's hard to make a desert map too interesting while still retaining the classification of desert. And here we have a whole nation that is in mostly desert. For what it's worth I think Square did a great job with their concept, but I can't help but wonder what Garlemald saw in taking this land over. I know, I know, they think they're doing us all a favour by bringing enlightenment to the savage heathens, blablabla, like any ol' antagonistic empire. Sure. But usually that's a leading reason with other factors, you know, and things like resources and land position are taken into account. I guess it's a great and easy way to send invasion forces through to the rest of Eorzea, but what else was there?

See, other people on google wanted to know too!

The internet didn't tell me, it just kept trying to give me timelines and essays, but I'm sure I missed the answer in a section of dialogue I skipped or something.

UPDATE: I said I wouldn't do these but to avoid Experts coming in to school me, another friend of mine we'll call A has said the Garleans went through Gyr Abania cause it was the only way to get to Eorzea. And their aerial invasion failed pre 1.0, which is not content I've played. They don't have a navy, b/c they're landlocked, but they made this amazing big 'unsinkable' airship that was supposed to be able to single-handedly conquer the whole world, then Midgardsormr (or as A refers to him, Dragon Daddy) said no, and destroyed it.

Anyway.

So Lyse leads us to Rhalgr's Reach after a pretty harrowing side-quest concerning an abandoned town that was used by the Garleans to experiment with some kind of magical plant plague, which was honestly kind of interesting. The Garleans suck, man.

Rhalgr's Reach is gorgeous, a nice breathe from the drab map between Baelsar's Wall and it, but first a note on the music so far.

I enjoy the new battle music well enough; it's a mix between cowboy movie rifts and traditional eastern music that somehow really works, and also makes me feel a bit like Indiana Jones, but I'm not a fan of the national anthem of Ala Mhigo following me everywhere in different forms on the map. It's okay if it's a quiet refrain version, but when the bombastic brass comes into it, it just turns me off the flavour of the game entirely. I don't think this was intentional, its just a very nationalistic approach, which is all well and good for a story about a resistance who are clearly very patriotic trying to fight off invaders and its absolutely being used in good faith, but any band of patriotism is always a bit much for me so I played a lot of this expansion in Ala Mhihgo areas with the music turned down.

So we're trying to form an alliance, and getting resistance from the usual suspects. We get re-introduced to Arenvald around this time too, who is one of my favourite tropes of 'strong man softboi' so I take to him instantly. There's a few little battles and skirmishes, and Lyse is feeling pretty g about our ragtag little Alliance before things, as they do, go pear-shaped.

Enter Imperial Viceroy Zenos yae Galvus, otherwise known as 'golf douche'.

I cannot take credit for this amazing and hilariously accurate nickname. That would go to J. Leading up to this moment they were all 'have you met him yet, have you met golf-douche?' which honestly gave him an air of mystery he entirely did not deserve.

(seriously, I'm a cat-dad and Zenos has maybe two facial expressions, this one being his 'head empty no thoughts (but murder)' one, but the fangirls think he has a rich inner world. Nobody who owns a cat sees this face and thinks that.)

People seem to love Zenos online, and I can only assume it's because he's both pretty and disturbed; that Discount-Sephiroth face and hair, with hips and thighs so thick he probably cracks Ala Mhigan skulls between them, plus he waxes poetical about murder. You know, all the things the straight whyte girls who write yaoi love in a top.

Anyway, he's a bit of a fuckwit, and he has a fuckwit golf-caddy that he carries his extra swords in (sword-caddy?) thus the nickname, so it was a little embarrassing getting absolutely reamed by him. I was on Dark Knight too, so like, let's be real Squeenix, I would have won on sheer endurance AND edge if it hadn't been one of your fun 'you can't win this battle but have it anyway for dramatic storytelling purposes' moments that we all k̙n̘̝̻o͖̙̺̣w̷̫̞̤ ̮̙̤̝a̡̤̠ͅn͓̲̩̱͕d̷ ̦ͅͅl̶̺̪̟͚̼̣̞o̶͖̪v̘̜͎ͅè̥̮͎̘.

Our party decides that because golf-douche almost murderised all of us in one fell swoop and Lyse is still feeling pretty sensitive about the whole Papalymo thing, the best option is to travel to an entirely different and very far away nation, and help them defeat the Garlean occupation there so that a) the Garlean's and hopefully golf-douche will be distracted fighting a war on two fronts, and b) the other nation will then feel indebted to us and obligated (or strong-armed? They never quite clarify) to come help fight the Garleans in Ala Mhigo.

I am instantly a bit uncomfortable about this. It's presented both in a way that makes it seem like we're trying to do good by two nations rather than just one, but also very coldly as if we're playing war to suite our own overarching agenda, which will then force these people who have been terrorised and occupied for over a decade, to come fight another war they have less (if no) stake in.

I suppose 'the fate of the entire world and the Crystal Mother Lady' is a pretty good excuse when it comes down to it, but there's still a vibe of 'end justifies the means, and because our quest is an honorable one we'll make these tough decisions for people' vibe that just doesn't sit too right with me. These nations being freed from Garlean rule isn't the goal here, it's just a favourable side-effect of our actual plan. This feeling does lessen a little later when it's made more obvious that the whole team is very invested in helping out Ala Mhigo and Doma and it's more that we have to prove to the Alliance that it's a worth-while investment in a colder way. But towards the start, yea, felt weird.

Oh, and we met the Angy One! She's a great character, one of my fav antagonists in the expansion actually. But you don't know that yet at this point of the game, she's just a nation-traitor everyone hates, and for good reason. Actually, nobody really likes her, not even on her team, but she keeps going on ahead anyway.

Gaslight gatekeep girlboss~

I do also feel like we're leaving Ala Mhigo way too soon, before I really had a chance to become invested in it, you don't even get to finish the first map (The Fringes) and this isn't helped by the Doman leg of the game being by far more visually interesting and narratively compelling, but we'll get to that next time, in part two.

So far, a little underwhelming. Pros:

Learning more about Lyse's character, actually quite like getting to know her.

The battle music

Rhalgr's Reach design is pretty stunning

Good location names

The Hidden truth > Drawing a Blank questline

And a bit of a longer list, Cons:

The 'national anthem-esque' music

The Fringes is a boring map in visual and mechanics design

The story is slow to move

Golf-douche archetype is two-dimensional and ugh

Are we playing games with entire nations just to get to our shiney Omega Boi

Barely in Gyr Abania before being whisked away to a far more interesting area and narrative, as if the game devs didn't believe in it either.

Where the fuck are my aether currents let me fly you asshats

Entirely not ghey enough

I'll give this first length of the game a 2½/5. Until next time folks, unless the hyperfocus whisks me off forever.

[abomination-catboy]

Test post test post tra-la-la

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Lorem lorem ipsum ipsum. Lorem! LOREM!

And then what?