Game Review: Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood

[dorchadas]

When I first started playing Final Fantasy XIV, Stormblood was the final frontier. Oh sure, Shadowbringers had been out for over a year by that time, but I started playing because sashagee got me into it and she had last played in 2018, when Patch 4.3 was current. As I watched her play while she tried to convince me to join her, I saw the quest text "Use the Duty Finder to confront Tsukuyomi in Castrum Fluminis" or "The airship has arrived above the remains of Dalmasca's capital city. Set off into the Estersands and locate the missing Jenomis" on the side of her screen as she roamed around the broad plains of Yanxia while Drowning in the Horizon played. And when I started playing A Realm Reborn, she waited for me to catch up for six months, so I'd be doing low-level quests in the starting zones and she'd be galavanting around the far east, talking to mysterious beings and performing tasks whose purpose I simply couldn't fathom.

Consider it all fathomed.

Stormblood took me longer than any other expansion to date--three months instead of two--because I had to wait on sashagee to get through the story too! Previously I could just forge ahead at my own pace whenever I wanted, but now that we were playing the game together, I couldn't outpace her too quickly or she'd get annoyed at me. So I spent some time doing other things and we played together when she was feeling well, and in the end we both charged through the fire and smoke of the Ghimlyt Dark together and moved on into Shadowbringers. It's the ending she always hoped for when she got me into the game, even though I took me months and months to get there.

"Oh come ye wayward brothers bereft of hearth and home
Beneath yon burning star there lies a haven for the bold
Lift up your hands and voices and fill your hearts with pride
Above the churning waters we stand strong and unified"

Stormblood is different from both ARR and Heavensward because it's almost two expansions. While ARR was focused on the three Eorzea city-states and the fight against the Empire and the Primals and the Ascians behind both of them, and HW took place entirely in Ishgard during the Dragonsong War, SB splits its focus. One half--the only half that I expected, honestly--is the liberation of Ala Mhigo, the city-state bordering Gridania. Ala Mhigo had plenty of previous focus in the plot, since there's constant reference to Ala Mhigan refugees in Ul'dah and even a town called Little Ala Mhigo, and the general of Ul'dah's army the Immortal Flames is from Ala Mhigo. Quests in Ul'dah allude to the problem of so many homeless refugees, the plight of people who just want to work and make new lives for themselves but are assumed to be lazy layabouts. The main story run up to Heavensward, with its political intrigue in Ul'dah, betrayl of the Crystal Braves instigated by an Ala Mhigan patriot, breaking of the Scions of the Seventh Dawn, and flight to take refuge in Ishgard, is a plot by an Ul'dahn nobleman to remove the sultana by exploiting tensions between native Ul'dahns and the refugees, and the post-Dragonsong War quests are about rising tensions on the Gridanian-Ul'dahn border as a radical faction of refugees launches an attack on Baelsar's Wall.

The second half is also forshadowed, but to be honest somehow I thought they were saving it for its own expansion even though I saw sashagee run around multiple East Asian-themed areas. That's the liberation of Doma, a kingdom conquered by the Garlean Empire decades ago and whose recent rebellion led to a refugee exodus to Eorzea. There's a whole questline involving resettling the Doman refugees where Ul'dah turns them down because they already have troubles integrating their Ala Mhigan refugee population, and an addition quest in Heavensward with the "Doman Adventurers' Guild" where Doman children try to emulate the mighty deeds of the Warrior of Light. The Doman ninja Yugiri Mistwalker assists the Scions with multiple operations and eventually she and the samurai Gosetsu travel back to Doma seeking their master Hien, son of Kaien the former King of Doma.

The problem I had is that while there were connections between the Domans and the Ala Mhigans during the lead up to Stormblood, there were very few in Stormblood itself and that contributed to the two expansions feel. The first part of Stormblood takes place entirely in Ala Mhigo as the Warrior of Light aids the local resistance factions until a crushing defeat, after which the Scions suggest liberating Doma as a way to play more pressure on Garlemald. So the crew takes a ship off to the east, to the lands of ninja and samurai and geisha, and that's where the majority of the expansion takes place until the finale brings everyone roaring back to Ala Mhigo for a final battle with Doma, the Ala Mhigan resistance, and the Eorzean Alliance (now including Ishgard!) all fighting together as one.

It's certainly very pretty.

If you're reading this, you probably know that I lived in Japan, I speak some Japanese, I play games in Japanese, so obviously I should love the way that most of Stormblood takes place in fantasy East Asia, right? And the answer is "I guess."

There are two major problems I have with the way that Stormblood is structured. The first is that the defeat of the resistance and the decision to travel east brings the momentum that's built up through the end of Heavensward to a screeching halt as Alphinaud, Tataru, and the Warrior of Light wander around Kugane with a sketch of Yugiri and Gosetsu trying to find where where to go next while all the action stops in the west. I know that it's JRPG tradition that nothing happens when the protagonists are not physically on location, but it was still very strange to deal with awakening Omega to fight Shinryū, the massive primal summoned by a rogue faction of the Ala Mhigan Resistance, as well as a massacre in Rhalgr's Reach, and then having to listen to a lecture from a factotum of the East Aldenard Trading Company and cross the Ruby Sea and talk to a bunch of pirates and turtle-people while searching for the lost leader of Doma. The game doesn't really pick up again until about halfway through, after the Warrior of Light finally tracks down Lord Hien on the Azim Steppe, and after the liberation of Doma it's a wild ride through to the finish. While I did love the assault on Ala Mhigo itself and the final battle where you get to see Aymeric, Kan-E-Senna, and the other faction leaders all fighting alongside you--there's a wonderful moment when you pass a Temple Knight standing guard and as you run by he yells

"Ishgard remembers, Warrior of Light."

it took a long time to get there. That's part of the other reason I took so long to finish Stormblood; I kept dropping off the main quest to do other things and needed sashagee to push me forward. Once I got Hien off the Azim Steppe I was back on the train and it took me only a week or two to finish up the 4.0 story, but all that wandering through the Ruby Sea and Yanxia was taxing.

Speaking of locations, the second problem I have is that while Eorzea is very Final Fantasy-esque the East is just...fantasy East Asia. Hingashi is shogunate-era Japan, with ninja and samurai and geisha and kami and the entire country closed off except for a single port where foreigners are allowed to build embassies and trade with the country and multiple references to an "Age of Strife" or "Age of Blood" that is almost definitely Final Fantasy Sengoku era. Between Hingashi and the mainland is the Ruby Sea, controlled by a group of pirates called the Confederacy and clearly modeled after the historical 倭寇 wakō pirates. On the mainland is Yanxia, which is clearly aesthetically modeled after China with its Chinese pine trees, Zhangjiajie Park-style mountains, and theme song on erhu and guzheng, except it's also Japan, with ninja and samurai and people named Gosetsu and Makoto and Hayabusa and Kurobana. North of that is the Azim Steppe, which is populated by the dragon-like Au Ra Xaela clans whose people ride horses and herd sheep and eat buuz and live in yurts and wear deel and participate in the Naadam once a year to determine which tribe rules.

Final Fantasy has always pulled names and inspiration from around the world. The pivotal dragons in Heavensward, Nidhogg, Midgardsormr, Hraesvelgr, and Ratatoskr, are drawn from Norse mythology. The ARR Primals are all based on human mythology as well, as are the names of many monsters and weapons (those that aren't drawn from D&D, anyway). Thordan and his Knights of the Round is obvious. But there's a difference between inspiration and imitation. Wutai in Final Fantasy VII is inspired by Japan but it's not literally Japan like Hingashi is. The novelty of being able to read the various untranslated names left in the game like the Rasen Kaikyo (螺旋海峡, "spiral straits") wore off pretty quickly as I realized that everywhere in Othard, even places mentioned but not visited like Nagxia (Vietnam), were just copies of the real world. I don't blame a Japanese company staffed by Japanese employees for wanting to put Japan in one of their biggest games, but I wish they had done a little more work in making it a Final Fantasy world and not just our world, Final Fantasied.

I demand likeness payments.

I'm also lukewarm about the villains of Stormblood, even though one of them looks creepily like me.

Let me start by talking about colonialism. In both ARR and HW, the Garlean Empire has been portrayed if not sympathetically, than with understandable goals. Both Gaius van Baelsar and Regula van Hydrus had the same motivations--to stop the scourge of Primals from inciting wars and free humanity from the dominion of overwhelming supernatural forces. As Gaius says:

"For the world of man to mean anything, man must own the world."

Lacking the ability to manipulate aether and thus use magic, the Garleans were oppressed by everyone around them and driven to an island off the coast of the continent of Ilsabard. Not until they invented magitek were they able to effectively fight back and once they could, they carved out an empire dedicated to bringing order to the world. Their empire is officially atheist, not because they don't believe in any gods, but because they believe all the gods that exist are merely Primals and allowing any worship feeds them.

That's the party line at least, and the Garleans before Stormblood did a good job of exemplifying it even if they also oppressed all the beast tribes and talked about unity through strength and might proving the right to rule and so on. But it turns out that an oppressive colonialist empire is an oppressive colonialist empire, and since Stormblood involves going to Garlean territory that's on full display. The governor of the imperial provinces of Ala Mhigo and Doma--they're on the opoposite side of the world but he's the governor of both of them--is Zenos yae Galvus, the crown prince, and he's basically an in-world MMO protagonist. His entire character motivation is to fight dudes to get stronger to fight stronger dudes, except he's already the strongest dude so he's bored with life and commits random atrocities to encourage people to hate him and develop their strength so that someone can actually challenge him. He's grinding on mobs until a boss shows up except that the mobs are real people. It's interesting in an abstract way, considering how many people the Warrior of Light has killed over his career, but it doesn't make for a compelling villain to me. It's one step down from the JRPG nihilists ranting about how oblivion is better than existence like some kind of Thomas Ligotti character because Zenos doesn't even have a personal philosophy other than "I need a challenge." This is at least consistent, since he doesn't kill the injured Resistance members in Rhalgr's Reach because they're no threat to him and the entire reason he lets the Warrior of Light live is so that he can finally have a worthy opponent, but it all comes down to "rich dude toying with poor people for sport." This is great at reforcing that the Garleans are colonizing jerks but bad at making me interested in Zenos as a character.

The second villain is Yotsuyu (from 夜露, "evening dew"), the viceroy of Doma. She's basically evil Cinderella--her father sold her off to an abusive noble and then she had to become a courtesan to pay his debts after he died. She defected to Garlemald and for her ruthless ambition attained the viceregency, which she uses mostly to take revenge on the Domans. Her introduction involves her holding court in the fishing village of Isari and, under the guise of rooting out traitors, ordering two men to shoot each other and then telling the survivor to murder his parents, so she's an irredeemable monster. But not an unbelievable one, since exploiting internal tensions was and is absolutely a practice of colonial empires throughout history and her appointment was after Doma rose up in rebellion, so in Garlemald's eyes her actions are punishment for their disloyalty. She was more interesting, especially during the arc where she has amnesia and has to decide what she wants to do with her life while the Domans have to decide what to do with her, and she's a great example of what living in a massive expansionist empire that relies on shows of force was actually like. I like her better than Zenos because she has believable motivations. But she's no Nidhogg.

Thunder God Cid looks different than I remember.

I was also split on the other raids, which you can see is becoming a theme with this expansion. I'll talk about the Omega raids first, since those were the ones I was less into. All post-Heavensward raids are split into three tiers, with one set being 8-man and one set being 24-man, and the 8-man raid tiers are four single-boss combats fought in featureless circular arenas. In the Alexander raids there was at least a little running from the raid entrance to the final boss, but all of the Omega raids are just a circle. The fights are interesting, don't get me wrong, but I'd rather have fights in interesting places too. The story was also mostly an excuse to have a bunch of disconnected fights, as Omega creates an extradimensional space and forces combatants to fight in a giant tournament so that it can assimilate the techniques and strategy of the victor. Omega is a robot that knows only how to kill, which makes it an even less interesting villain than Zenos.

On the other hand, the actual fight content was a blast of nostalgia straight to my face. Even though I've never beaten Final Fantasy V, I've played a bunch of it and I know about Ex-Death. The second tier of raids were straight from Final Fantasy VI, with the Ghost Train--tragically, without a Suplex duty action--the Haunted Painting, the Guardian outside Vector, and Kefka himself. The Savage version of the Kefka fight even involves a phase change where he transforms into his World of Ruin form and starts casting Heartless Angel on the raid while "Dancing Mad" plays, and if you kill him he drops a mount based on the Air Force boss. I stopped paying attention to all FFXIV news around the time it was obvious 1.0 would be a disaster, but what drew me back in and got me to follow nova_crystalis to keep up was an article on Rock Paper Shotgun about Kefka being added as a boss. Even if the Omega raids were mostly a series of disconnected nostalgia, I wasn't immune to it.

The 24-man raids, called "Return to Ivalice," were written by Matsuno Yasumi and I feel kind of bad that all the people who love Final Fantasy Tactics have to play 300 hours of a triple-AAA MMO in order to get to the sequel. I'm being glib, of course--like so much in FFXIV, the Ivalice raids are a mix of references and remixes, with Final Fantasy XII taking place in the modern Warrior of Light era and Tactics in the long-distant past. The imperial province of Dalmasca is a shattered wreck after the Garleans razed Rabanastre to the ground and killed Princess Ashe in the rebellion (or did they?), and Fran is left to lead the resistance movement. A Garlean playwrite named Jenomis who believes so strongly in the legends written in the Durai Papers that he named his children Ramza and Alma comes to Kugane seeking passage to Dalmasca to look for the ruined Ivalician capital of Lesalia, which he believes is somewhere in the country. To cut a long story short, he's right and the rest of the plot involves Lucavi demons, the spirits of Ramza and his compansions, and defeating Ultima the High Seraph before they can fully manifest on Hydaelyn. I had played Tactics and sashagee had played FFXII, so I loved all the Ivalice references and she loved all the Dalmascan references...but they were still references.

He's some kind of Joker or something.

I know that Final Fantasy XIV is a giant love letter to the series. That's part of why so many people are drawn to it, but there are a lot of people who are new to the series who can still enjoy FFXIV because it's a game in its own right as well. You don't need to have played FFXI to understand the human/elf/big guy/catgirl playable species selection in the original ARR, and while the Crystal Tower series of quests are inspired from FFIII it's not so direct that I (who have never played FFIII) couldn't enjoy them. That's a good reference, one that's blended well-enough into the rest of the game that people who get the reference have an extra level of appreciation.

I'm not sure Stormblood does that. sashagee hasn't played Tactics or FFIV-FFVI, so all the Stormblood raids fell a bit flat for her. The Omega raids were literally just a series of arena fights against bosses she had never heard of, and it wasn't until the battle against a simulacrum of Midgardsormr on the Dragonstar in the fullness of his power that she really got invested. And no wonder--that was the only fight that had any in-game background behind it! I saw the same pattern play out in the actual game locations too, with me constantly appreciating the effort that the designers went to to include Japanese customs and sashagee just shrugging because it didn't mean anything to her. ARR and HW didn't have that problem because they were based on more general archetypes instead of being specific places: Gridania is the hidden village of the elves, Ul'dah is hypercapitalist jewel of the desert, Limsa Lominsa is piratetown, and Ishgard is Catholic Minas Tirith. In contrast, Kugane is very specifically the island of Dejima off the coast of Nagasaki during the reign of the Tokugawa shoguns.

There are plenty of threads out there of people saying that the Return to Ivalice raids went over their head because they've never played FFT. Even though I got emotional during the performance when Jenomis's theatre troupe recites the words from the intro:

Sword in hand, a warrior clutches stone to breast
In sword etched he his fading memories
In stone, his tempered skill
By sword attested, by stone revealed
Their tale can now be told

...sashagee just blinked because it was meaningless to her. There's way more time spent on explaining the plot of Final Fantasy Tactics than on "what is Ultima the High Seraph's plan and why do we have to fight it?" If a work relies so powerfully on references to mean anything to the player it's just not very good storytelling and most of Stormblood was references. The original-to-FFXIV story involved the Ala Mhigan liberation/restoration of Gyr Abania, and maybe that's why I wish more of the expansion had taken place there. It would have been a better game.

I did appreciate seeing Agrias as a literal avenging angel and Mustadio as a sniper-rifle-wielding Gundam, though.

And also our fantastic fashion sense.

I've waited for two reviews to talk about the mechanics of Stormblood because now I can finally talk about two things I spent so much of my time in FFXIV with--red mage and blue mage.

Red mage is one of the original Final Fantasy classes going all the way back to Final Fantasy I, but its implementation in most of those games would be very difficult to translate to an MMO context. Red mages are all-rounders, able to cast damaging black magic, healing white magic, and use weapons, but not able to do any of them as well as a black mage, white mage, or warrior can. Hybrid classes like that do well in open-world MMOs where combat is unpredictable and could be disrupted by other monsters or rival players at any time, but in instanced dungeons where the fights are predictable, hybrids' versatility is generally outweight by their lack of raw power in their current role. I had that problem in vanilla World of Warcraft when I played a druid--the developers considered the ability to heal so powerful that druids' damage-abilities suffered in contrast so druids were almost always forced into healing.

Red mages fortunately avoided that fate because FFXIV doesn't have any form of class customization (anymore). Red mages are damage-dealers, so even though they can heal ("Vercure") and cast resurrect ("Verraise"), they're brought to groups to DPS. The way the developers implemented red mage's white and black mage casting is through giving them two types of damage-dealing spells, some based on black magic (Verfire, Verflare, etc.) and some based on white magic (Verstone, Veraero, etc.). Casting one type of magic builds that mana type in a special gauge, and when both mana types are over 80 the red mage unleashes its "melee combo" where they dash in, perform several sword slashes, and then jump back out and go back to casting spells.

sashagee thought I would like red mage and suggested I pick it up and she was right. I do like hybrids because I like always having the ability to heal, but I think there are two main aspects that draw me to FFXIV's red mage. The first is that playing them is relatively simple compared to other classes--cast white and black spells in sequence, cast the various insta-cast attacks on cooldown, charge in when mana is full. It's more complex than WoW--in WotLK my druid had half-a-dozen buttons to press in raids most of the time--but less complex than most FFXIV classes, which mostly are needlessly complex. I feel like there's a button quota the designers have to fill, and several classes have extra buttons that are totally unecessary. Ninja has a skill called Dream-within-a-Dream that applies a buff called "Assassination Ready" that allows ninja to use Assassinate, which is a separate button. Since Assassinate will only ever be used after Dream-within-a-Dream, why aren't they the same button? The same thing happens with dragoon's High Jump and Mirage Dive and probably other classes that I'm not thinking of right now. Playing red mage allows me to sidestep all that fake difficulty and just play my job.

The other aspect is that red mages are the most stylish class. Feathered hats, fantastic coats, a consistent color scheme? I have several red mage glamours I put together like this 30s detective or a government agent-style man in black(red?) or my currently steampunk vermage and they're all great. I have glamours I'm happy with for other classes but they're not as stylish.

Except use the Duty Finder.

Blue mages are another thing I learned about from a Rock Paper Shotgun article and they were one of the original classes I wanted to play (white mage, black mage, red mage, blue mage, and dark knight) before I decided to just level everything. Blue mages are Final Fantasy's generalists, able to learn a huge variety of magical skills from various monsters and use them in battle. The FFXIV designers were stuck between the tank/healer/DPS MMO trinity and blue mages being able to do everything and decided to sidestep the whole problem--they made blue mages FFXIV's first "limited job," able to engage in open world content and groups of all blue mages, but not able to participate in standard group matching or PVP, and with a level cap of only 50 at a time when the usual level cap was 70.

Blue mages are FFXIV's opportunity for puzzle fights. In the normal course of the game, the usual Final Fantasy standards of immunities and weaknesses don't apply--Ifrit doesn't take extra damage from ice attacks, nor is he immune to fire attacks, because that would completely screw up black and red mages who tried to fight him. That means that elemental attacks are usually just flavor, but since blue mages are barred from doing current high-level content and so can't upset end-game balance, they're allowed to exploit vulnerabilities. This mostly comes out in the Masked Carnivale, a series of solo fights where blue mages have to figure out how to use all their skills to succeed, but can also be used in solo dungeon runs--Shadowbringers added a blue mage skill called Base Instinct that doubles healing and damage output as long as the blue mage is alone in instanced content, allowing blue mages to beat at-level dungeons with a bit of clever play. Soloing also relies on crowd control--something absent from normal dungeon runs--with skills like Ram's Voice to freeze enemies, Mind Blast to paralyze them, Chirp to put them to sleep, and various other combo skills that do extra damage to enemies with one of those status effects, including a newly-added skill called Ultravibration that instantly kills any frozen enemy.

One of the older complaints about blue mage is that despite them being described as a solo-friendly class, learning most of their skills requires getting groups together and doing potentially very difficult content. I spent an hour at one point in Shiva (Extreme) to learn Glass Dance, and awhile we did eventually get her down and then kill her again afterwards to get the skill for people who missed it the first time, it definitely would have been completely impossible to get solo. With Base Instinct, I was about to get several skills myself without having to worry about finding a group or wiping for an hour only to realize that the host had sent us in without leveling-synching so we didn't get the skill. Without Base Instinct and the reliable ability to do dungeons by myself, there really wasn't a lot of use for all those skills blue mages learn--I don't have a group to fight the savage raids and get the Marlboro mount, so once I filled out most of the spellbook, my blue mage collected dust until the update that raised the blue level cap to 70 and added Base Instinct. Finally, I could run Stormblood dungeons myself for the drops I wanted and those last few spells I hadn't gotten. I can see why people complained about blue mages during Stormblood when the limited job design seemed to relegate them to side content only. Now that blue mages really can do everything themselves (that's not Shadowbringers dungeons, anyway), they're in a much better place. I'm curious to see if Square will expand the concept to something else, like beastmaster or geomancer. With the lessons they've learned from blue mage development I think they'd be a lot of fun to play.

The guy shouting to ask for help really is the icing on the cake here.

Stormblood does have another Palace of the Dead-style Deep Dungeon called Heaven on High, but I admit I haven't done it yet. I've been waiting for sashagee to want to do it and she's been focused on starting up Shadowbringers. Instead, I spent time in the Forbidden Land Eureka. The name Eureka comes from Final Fantasy III, but the gameplay is straight out of Final Fantasy XI and I can prove it with six words: you lose XP when you die.

Not your normal XP, of course--that would have led to riots. Eureka has an entirely separate XP track called "Elemental XP" that is gained almost entirely by killing monsters. The key is chaining enemies, since every enemy after the first in the chain provides increased XP and increased chance of drops. When Stormblood was current the monsters were powerful enough that grouping was basically required to progress at all--another throwback to FFXI--but nowadays there's a 150% buff to damage, healing, and health while in Eureka so I was able to do most of it solo. The only part I needed to group up for was fighting Notorious Monsters, the boss enemies that would appear when enough of the smaller enemies had been killed and which dropped the crystals I needed to upgrade my relic weapon and the lockboxes I needed to get the prizes available in Eureka. FFXIV generally does not have a lot of random drops from monsters out in the open world other than crafting ingredients, but that's not true in Eureka, where chaining enemies together results in increased chances of lockboxes or logograms dropping. Enemies also have an elemental weakness that can be exploited by assigning the appropriate magicite in the magia board, which is the circular interface in the screenshot above.

I'm not going to claim that the plot elements of Eureka are engaging content. The story does pick up a dropped plot thread from ARR, about the Isle of Val that was thought to be destroyed in a magical explosion but was actually transported to the other side of the world, but story is doled out very slowly. There's one short quest for every few hours of killing monsters, but honestly sometimes that's just what you need. Some people watch television shows they've already seen multiple times, some people read fluff, and I grind in JRPGs. When I was feeling a bit overwhelmed by something and didn't want to put in the brainpower to read the text in Final Fantasy VIII, I'd head into Eureka and kill enemies. I spent a lot time in Eureka Anemos, the first of Eureka's four zones, trying to get the t-rex mount that I posted about here, and I put a bunch of time into upgrading my red mage gear, red mage relic weapon, and buying tank gear to make a Cecil-esque paladin glamour.

I haven't beaten Eureka and I know that the end has a complicated raid called the Baldesion Arsenal that has several FFXI references in it, including the infamous Absolute Virtue that took FFXI players over three years to finally beat (and it took the world-first linkshell an 18 hour battle to do so. If you think MMOs are timesinks now...). If you like that kind of old-school design with elemental resistance and required grouping and vicious bosses--or if you just need the relics--then go to Eureka. If not, and especially if you're playing FFXIV primarily for the story like sashagee, then there are better uses for your time.

This place looks great. I wish there were some reason to go back.

There is one mechanical aspect of Stormblood's design that stood out to me: the empty space.

Since I came to the game so late, there's already been years of design patches and changes in the game before I got here. sashagee tells me that red mages used to have haste, white mages used to have protect and stoneskin, and there were similar lost skills across the other jobs. Every job gained five skills in Heavensward and another five skills in Stormblood, so in order to prevent skill bloat--already a problem, as I mentioned above--the designers removed several lower-level skills, consolidated some skills, and otherwise tried to trim down the lower-level kit a bit. This results in drastic gameplay changes as classes level, to the point that people talk about how much they hate doing lower-level content because the way they play their job revolves around a skill they get much later. One obvious example is the black mage skill Enochian, which allows black mages to cast Fire IV and Blizzard IV as long as they maintain uptime without dropping stacks of Astral Fire/Umbral Ice. With the free Fire III procs in level 50 and below content, maintaining those buffs is easy, but Fire IV/Blizzard IV don't refresh the Astral/Umbral buff, so there's a risk/reward element in how many Fire IV's to cast before throwing in a Fire I. Healers change drastically in higher levels, going from spending a large chunk of time using long-cast-time spells to heal to using almost entirely instant-cast heals thrown in between their damaging spells. Dark knight gains The Blackest Night at 70, a shield that lets them use their mana-intensive damage-buffing attacks for free if it breaks during its duration. This also means that all the expansion classes that start at higher levels are weird whenever they're doing low-level content, because they never had a natural progression of gaining abilities.

There's nothing wrong with class playstyles changing with expansions, and honestly it'd be strange if it didn't happen. The reason this is so jarring is that FFXIV is unique among MMOS that it's completely sequential and it's impossible to get to Heavensward without beating the entirity of A Realm Reborn, so there's plenty of time to get used to how your job plays, develop muscle memory, set up your hotbars, and then have to redo everything once you pass a certain patch. I'm not sure how to fix this--FFXIV already has too many skills on several jobs, and without totally redoing how many skills you get and at what levels for every single job, there's no way to prevent these wild swings in job playstyle, but adding more skills at lower levels would also solve the problem of doing lower-level content and only having one or two buttons to press.

In the most recent patch they just decided to sidestep the problem by preventing any group from entering a leveling dungeon more than eight levels lower than the lowest level among the group. I'll be happy to rarely set foot into Sastasha again, but this just puts the problem off rather than actually fixing it.

The other aspect of space was in the zone design. ARR's zones were mostly pretty compact, often as a kind of room-and-corridor design with small areas that had passages connecting them. Even in Thanalan, the desert zone, there are still distinct barriers walling off large portions of the map from each other. The first Heavensward zone is Coerthas Western Highlands which is just a gigantic open bowl, probably four times bigger than any ARR zone, and this continues throughout Stormblood. Every Stormblood Zone is a giant open area, sometimes with a mountain range in the middle, always with a few interesting points scattered here and there, but mostly it just feels empty. The ARR maps have about the same number of interesting points per map but they're much smaller, so they don't have the same feel of overwhelming emptiness found in the Stormblood zones. This is worst in the Ruby Sea, which is almost entirely empty water, and even the addition of swimming to the game doesn't help that much because there's rarely a reason to go underwater other than for botany or fishing. MMOs feeling more like a lobby where players teleport from point to point is a bigger problem than in just FFXIV, but the expansion zones being so large and empty doesn't help. In the ARR zones I'd run into other players relatively often when I was out in the world. It was much rarer in later expansions. It's nice to be able to fly, but if I don't have anywhere to go there's not much point.

Breaking limits as only a true Warrior of Light could.

In conclusion, Stormblood is an expansion of contrasts.

I joke, but not really. Stormblood is a good expansion but I think the divided focus prevented it from being a great one. A Realm Reborn had to pick up the pieces from 1.0, introduce everything to new players, establish the primals and the Garlean Empire as threats, and lay the ground of Heavensward, so it's no surprise that it drags sometimes. Heavensward was almost entirely focused on the Dragonsong War and that's why they were able to tell such an incisive story. Stormblood's division between west and east harmed the storytelling, and I really think that they should have picked either Doma or Ala Mhigo and focused entirely on that. If I've complained too much throughout this review, it's because I feel like Stormblood is so close to being great but doesn't quite make it. You always have more to say about something you love that falls short than you do about something mediocre.

I talked about nostalgia above, and while I think Stormblood makes too much use of it I'm not immune. I loved the brief reveal when Gosetsu called Hien "Shun," his childhood name before his 元服 genpuku ceremony and also the name of Cayenne's son in Final Fantasy VI. Seeing magna roaders as Garlean warmachina was a treat as well. However, I think it's notable that the developers recently stated that they would return to original stories for raids in the upcoming Endwalker expansion, after Stormblood's Return to Ivalice was followed by Shadowbringers's YoRHa: Dark Apocalypse Nier crossover raid. Shout-outs can be great for people who are in on the reference because they feel like they're discovering a secret, but there's a problem when a work becomes too self-referential. Jessie is in FFXIV but she's not an ecoterrorist--her existence is a reference but I don't miss anything by not having played Final Fantasy VII. If Stormblood did more of that, pulled in more classic characters but told original stories with them, I wouldn't complain. Hien was a great example of this--Shun ("Owain" in the original localization) wasn't really a character in FFVI, so they took him, put him in FFXIV, and developed him there. More of that and less retellings of other games but with twist happy endings.

I've heard that Shadowbringers isn't just the best FFXIV expansion, it's one of the best Final Fantasies of all time--sashagee is certainly blasting through it already. I'm not sure how much of it I'll get through before the baby arrives, but I'll try to get through as much as I can. There's still a lot of FFXIV left in front of me!