My Life As A Gamer: "Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood" Reviewed

I completed the Stormblood expansion in its entirety this past weekend. Time for my thoughts, but first here's the trailer.

Summary

Stormblood moves the story of the game to focus upon the previously mentioned threat of the Garlean Empire and its conquests of Doma in the Far East and Ala Mhigo on the border of Gridania.

It begins with a false flag attack upon the Gridanian border--the final events of Heavensward's final patch--by former Crystal Braves field marshal Illberd, forcing the Eorzean Alliance into war with the Empire because Illberd's men wore the uniforms of and used the wargear of their Grand Companies when executing the suicide assault.

You--the Warrior of Light--are tasked to aid the war effort, along with the rest of the Scions of the Seventh Dawn, in the first attempt to openly liberate Ala Mhigo due to the collective threat to the realm this development presents.

The Empire retaliates, of course, and you are forced to take a fall when you meet the Designated Primary Antagonist: Xenos, the Imperial Crown Prince and leader of the imperial forces in both Doma and Ala Mhigo. Yes, forced; you cannot possibly win no matter how good your gear is, no matter how well you play, no matter what cheese you pull off, or any other factor- you just get bitchslapped and curbstomped into the dirt.

This puts a halt to the campaign in Ala Mhigo, so to stop being pushed back you and the surviving Scions (since you take casualties during that event) decide to go to Doma to open a second front. After several misadventures, you find the rightful king of Doma and not only convince him to rise up but also force the locals to get behind him, and this time--thanks to Xenos' henchman, a petty and spiteful whore named Yotsuyu, running roughshod over Doma--the uprising succeeds.

Somehow this gets Ala Mhigo back on track, leading to a successful second attempt to push out the Empire and kill Xenos at the end.

In the aftermath, the Empire puts down several other uprisings elsewhere off-screen (these are mentioned while you do other quests), Xenos turns out to not stay dead, and the Empire does the logical thing and organize to retake lost provinces. They go after Ala Mhigo first, but fail; meanwhile a propaganda campaign saying (truly) that Xenos is really a corpse possessed by a demon gives rise to another round of uprisings.

At the end, the Scions are picked off by a supernatural actor yanking their souls from their bodies and taking them elsewhere--well, just the senior ones; the B Team is fine--with the Warrior of Light alone left at the very end. He meets the actor, who explains that another End of World event is coming no matter what he does in the war with the Emprie unless he comes to another world to save it from the fate intended for the original one.

Commentary

Remember how Marvel Cinematic Universe fans said that Iron Man 2 blew donkey balls? That's because it was merely decent, but followed the game-changer that was Iron Man. This is the same situation.

Stormblood suffers from the lack of tight focus that Heavensward benefited from. The lack of focus detrimentally effected both the narrative presentation and the gameplay of the expansion, and it comes early on, with the one good thing consistently delivered upon is making good on previously-implicit implications of worldbuilding elements that both A Realm Reborn and Heavensward made part of their plots.

What we have is a war-focused narrative. What we should have had would be focused entirely on Ala Mhigo and the liberation thereof from the Garlean Empire, with the Doma front given its own expansion. What we got is a world war with two fronts and a jarring disregard for verisimilitude regarding the distances involved and the ability of parties to move across them, injuring the verisimilitude required to get and keep a player's suspension of disbelief, and bad ludonarrative choices that leave bad tastes in the mouths of common players.

The tell that someone was amiss came before the expansion's release, when out of nowhere the character of Yda retroactively revealed that "Yda" had been dead for years and the woman we thought was Yda was really her baby sister Lyse and all of the other senior Scions played along until the primary member that enabled the ploy--Papalymo--died in action and his enchantment with him. That sudden, jarring, unexpected, and--most importantly--unnecessary change set the tone for Stormblood's earnest, but errant, narrative.

Lyse is a terrible character, such that she's been memed on by players regularly for being a Basic Bitch White Girl. Retroactively inserted into the Ala Mhigo narrative, she comes back out of nowhere, has an unconvincing mix of Survivor Guilt and Savior Complex play out before taking control of the Resistance and leading it into action against the Empire alongside the Eorzean Alliance's combined forces against the Garleans and their Crown Prince.

It is one thing to show the player the primary antagonist in a cutscene. It is another to put him into a gameplay scenario and then force the player--someone that has already slain many godlike beings--to lose to that antagonist in a fixed fight. This is a ludonarrative mistake; someone with proven supernatural potency put into a no-win scenario against someone clearly not established as being on the same or superior level regardless of what is revealed after the fact is not acceptable design. The player rightly sees this as a screwjob; he does not have any reason to believe that the antagonist has the might to being a literal godslayer when this happens, so has no reason to accept the result as valid.

Yes, this is revealed to not be the case but you have to be near the end of the primary story to get this information, and as such it severely damaged the player's suspension of disbelief for this to happen. "Wait, I literally ganked over a dozen Primals and similar enemies by now, along with several hundred lesser monsters and minions; how does this punk with a sword get a win?" is in his mind, and "Because not only does he also have The Echo, but his is even more powerful than anyone else that you've seen" isn't told to him before he needs to know it. This is bad writing, and thus bad design.

So you get forced to take a fall. The plan, at this point, is to open a second front? On the other side of the world? Why? Because the writers decided that they had to do something with the Doman Refugee plot threat established during ARR, so the Doma story got weaved into the narrative. You're put on a ship, which has a side adventure with a supernatural enemy on the way, and then you have another misadventure when you get to the Far East hub and you have to make your way into Doma proper.

Then you have to deal with resentful peasants that don't want to be beaten anymore, go to Totally Not Mongolia to find the lost king, convince him to come back--which ends up making him proxy-king of Not Mongolia, so he has an army behind him--and get the peasants to rise up behind him against the Empire. The only reason this succeeds is that Xenos, the antagonist, put in a petty and spiteful woman to be his agent in Doma; her constant need to degrade, humiliate, and flex upon the Domans ends up fueling the rebellion that unseats her and the Empire from Doma.

Yes, the story later humanizes her before finally killing her off in the aftermath chapters, but man this was rushed and as such felt like someone making an Abridged parody of the very serious story of occuption, subjugation, and rebellion that they wanted to tell in Stormblood. This sentiment persists across the board; everything felt rushed, and the narrative suffers for it.

But the gameplay?

Every single Job introduced up to this point suffers from a bloating of abilities, most of which are not needed and should be either folded into existing ones or culled entirely, making the practical play experience far too busy for common players to bother with; the many video guides on how to cope with it are proof of this. (Dancer and Gunbreaker are excluded, as they are Shadowbringers Jobs and so aren't afflicted at this point.)

Players are not only put into no-win scenarios, making gameplay pointless (might as well throw the fight and get it over with), but put into situations that introduce jarring difficulty jumps without warning and introduce totally new mechanics that autofail if you screw up. The former is most blatantly seen with Barden's Meddle, where the second boss doesn't conform to ANY previous encounter design and thus players have no reason to expect it to not be like anything else; they will autofail every single time, on a fight in a dungeon you are required to complete to finish the expansion, turning this into a hard wall without either consulting a guide (bad game design) or having a useful veteran to explain the fight before it happens. There is no encounter like it elsewhere in the expansion, so we can conclude that feedback was not positive.

As for another one, that is the Active Time Manuever; unless you did The Epic of Alexander series--and most did not--you never saw this before. It is as it says: a Quick Time Event where you have to click that mouse button as fast you can on a button on screen to fill a progress bar or you autofail and die in the encounter; this can wipe the group with ease if folks can't react in time. This too is bad design; you don't mix dissimilar ludo elements, as it too is a violation of expectations previously established. These also appear in required dungeons and trials, so they too can be walls without either external guide consultation or veterans on hand to warn people and walk them through it.

Oh, and "walk them through" almost never happens. The disrespect for one-another's time is real in this game.

Had there been enough time for proper ludonarrative development, none of this would have happened, as we saw previously in Heavensward.

The ludonarrative mistakes in this expansion also betray the lack of roots in tabletop RPGs that many Japanese RPG publishers possess due to tabletop RPGs being a trivial presence in Japan--native offerings not withstanding--because Western publishers and hobbyists had these lessons smeared in ther face for years, such that some wishing to push them made "storygames" to do so while others waited for Death Cult convergence to try again.

In short, there's plenty of fundamental mistakes in this expansion, and it is these errors that mar the gameplay experiences of many players such that they mark it down.

Now, the one good part: worldbuilding.

The building out of previous implications is strong here. The Empire has successfully replicated the Echo by artificial means, giving this in a very powerful form to Xenos and a weaker one to a minor antagonist, Fordola. This also means they are on the cusp of weaponizing the Tempering power of Primals, as Xenos' Echo is powerful enough to suborn Primals to his will. The cartoonish and stupid villainy of the Empire is also justified with the revelation that is was all an Ascian creation meant to compel those targetted to conjure Primals--yes, "conjure" and not "summon"--so as to weaken the aether levels of the land and increase the chaos such that conditions for a world-destroying Calamity arise no matter how things turn out.

As for the Primal question: we learn that Primal "summoning" can be done with blood sacrifices en masse, can be done with the power of prayers invested into objects regarded as relics, and--and this is key--the specific nature of the Primal is decided by the conjurer at the time of conjuring. This explains how the same being behaves and acts differently from one manifestation to another, in addition to their raw power being decided by the aether at their disposal.

(Yes, this means that the Archibishop of Ishgard was on the right track when he conjured Thordan.)

In short, "Primals" are not real supernatural beings. They are mortal desires and ambitions made flesh (or, in the case of Alexander, metal) and their Tempering ability is not only to ensure that they are sustained by prayers, but--like Clu 2 from Tron Legacy--are able to full their core directive programming by compelling obedience to it, as set by the conjurer (programmer) when created (compiled). It's nothing more than "rectifying errors in operations". Summoning, as such, does not exist.

Xenos's survival post-death is a development of an ARR quest event where you deal with a Leviathan priest that can take over the bodies of others when slain, which is also a power of the Echo (that you, Warrior of Light, seem to lack). It's also why he doesn't fear it; he is, for all intents and purposes, immortal as the Ascians themselves.

The problem is that these details are not put before the player until it is too late for it to have proper impact.

Other worldbuilding elements are, put plainly, either brain farts--e.g. the Xaela not-Mongols and their non-functional cultures (seriously; their incessant internecine fighting should have wiped themselves out or ended with one dominant tribe by this point--or have no real impact at present in the narrative but rather are more fanservice. (e.g. the Return to Ivalice series of raids and the Omega raids turn every single FF game before 16 into either a Past Era of 14 or a parallel world to it, mostly the former)

Conclusion

Stormblood is merely average, but average is unacceptable after the 10/10 that is Heavensward, and it needed at least another year--and far tighter focus--to be a worthy successor. As the final patch in particular sets up Shadowbringers, which is regarded as the true successor, Stormblood also feels like filler in retrospect and that is not without merit. In particular, I enjoyed the aforementioned Ivalice raids--which are required for a Shadowbringers zone or two--and Omega is a love-letter to yesteryear also. Eureka--the former Isle of Val, home to the Students of Baldesion--gets barely noticed these days which is a shame.

But since you have to play through this to get to the later stuff (barring buying a story skip), you will notice all of this yourselves in due course.

Stormblood: 6/10