#I just don't play a lot of video games at all for someone who ostensibly loves them a lot ^^;;

[blujayonthewing]

finally finally started playing hollow knight recently after having bought it on sale I literally can't remember when, and man it's been a long time since I played a platformer I forgot how fucking fun it is

[liketheinferno2]

Like any other series in the world, FFXIV does have it's ups and downs. No matter what though, I think you'll find things to love and enjoy in Stormblood and i'm personally quite excited to hear your thoughts as you go through it.

Truly the WORST I've ever seen FFXIV get was still really good for an MMO. I feel like fandom types tend to get skewed certain ways depending on stuff they've been into before but after digging in the ground for cohesive characters and story in shit like Borderlands and Far Cry for years of my life I'm like hey it seems like Final Fantasy is actually a big budget popular video game series that is good. Who'd have thought THAT possible.

Nier was similar for me, just, holy shit this game is narratively complete. I don't have to feel like a suckered-in narratively-cucked idiot for expecting it to satiate my artistic mind. For so long I was the Genuinely Expects Queer Rep In The MCU Guy of gamers and now I'm playing stuff where it's like the writing was taken seriously as a piece of art, god fucking forbid, y'know?

Excuse me hijacking this sweet ask to rant about vidya gaem fanwank but I just... I enjoy Final Fantasy very very much. Generally I prefer to play stuff that HAS that wealth of content and fidelity that you can only get from a big studio but I feel like that usually comes at a cost to tight writing and emotional impact. It'd be like, common practice to discuss what parts of the story we'd "fix" or delete entirely, to go over and over what parts we hate about the thing we're ostensibly enjoying, but I'm no longer someone who's like "fuck canon I rewrite my own better version" BECAUSE THE GAME IS ALREADY GOOD. THE GAME IS GOOD!!! GOT DAMN!!!!!!!!

Like fuck me I'm thinking about Estinien a lot right now as you can probably tell but it's because I've never had a game crack into that feeling this hard before in my life. We've all met this guy. Angry difficult traumatised person who you know is in a bad situation and maybe they could get better if you could just help them out, but they don't want to leave. In real life you probably cannot save this guy, but this is Final Fantasy!

And even then they don't make it easy, the consequences for people giving up on Estinien are fucking DIRE, but it's the way this story takes you as low as you can go before letting you crawl out of there together. The process of getting you to think of a certain person as a partner or best friend or like-family to your protagonist and then taking them out in a way that makes you understand for a moment why Estinien and Nidhogg have fallen so far in grief and anger themselves. ..

And what I really love about FFXIV is it gives you a space for recovery and reflection, it's not throwing tragedy at you just for spectacle or shock. When someone dies, you mourn. When you retrieve Estinien from what was essentially a kidnapping, he's in the hospital for a while. Shit like Aymeric reaching out almost desperately for companionship after the events of Heavensward and the way they build such a protective relationship between the player and Alphinaud is like there's so much CARE in this, they take feelings so completely seriously and really that's what you need to do in a game like this. When the literal situations are all JRPG levels of absurd nonsense it's like you either go hard on the feelings or you've lost me.

There's been a big push in recent years that art has to SAY SOMETHING or TACKLE THINGS but that attitude can often be antithetical to stories that are effective and cathartic and that feel genuine. The other thing I like about FFXIV is it's weird and atypical fantasy in a lot of places but it doesn't do any of this in service of defying or subverting the tropes to make a statement or whatever the fuck. You can just have weird stuff like the GO LITTLE BETA BOY GO thing with the Tias, or that their elf-equivalent is the racial majority instead of humans, or the massive height differences any time you interact with anybody, or that the Lalafell are the little gnome wombat ruling capitalist class, without knowing that it's only weird because it's trying so hard to not be normal.

I gotta stop before I carry on forever but there's so many little good things in FFXIV that (along with the overwhelmingly caring tone of the entire game) make it a very special experience; ESPECIALLY in comparison to the stuff I used to play, so I'm pretty much enjoying everything it throws at me. :D