Endwalker'la birlikte oyun tarihinin yazılmış en iyi hikâyesi kesinlikle.

"Pray don't forget us your bygone kin."

Ölene kadar unutmayacağız sizleri, rahat uyuyun yiğitlerim.

To get the negatives out of the way, the base game can be a slog to get through in terms of padding and the content feels like a downgrade from Stormblood’s. With that all said, Shadowbringers is excellent. The Scions are finally relevant and fun and almost every other character this expansion is great. The emotional highs are HIGH. The narrative itself is tight and engaging and thematically very, very sound. I said earlier that the content was weaker than it has been as of late, but this is mostly applicable to 5.0; the patch dungeons, eight person raids, and trial series are highlights in terms of gameplay that hold up to some of my previous favorites. In terms of presentation, FFXIV looks better than it ever has before and I’m excited to see how things will improve in Endwalker. This is all to say that- while I don’t believe that it is THAT much greater in terms of quality than its predecessors- Shadowbringers was well worth the praise that it gets. For all of the in-game buildup, I’d say it deserves it. Here’s to me hoping that Endwalker sticks the landing.

I only ever started playing FF14 because it was a social thing, because a group I was in was playing this game. I used to hate FF14 when it came out, not just because 1.0 sucked and was infamously bad, but because even when ARR dropped it had so many asinine issues with it that I didn't ever want to install. I hated that it was even a numbered FF game just like 11. One look at my profile and you can see what kinda man I am with the games I do and do not like. I don't care if you think I'm a weirdo, a contrarian, or even if you agree with me and accept that I am a true Kinosopher and lover of all Kino. The truth is, this game was an MMO and I don't like those usually. I didn't like their awful class system at the time with shared role actions, I hated TP, I hated how most of the duties worked, the story was sloppy as hell, I hated how you needed to make alternative characters to play with certain servers and data centers, and 1.0's taste was still fresh in my mouth. I would endlessly bash this game from around 1.0's release to just about the time the Monster Hunter World collab dropped, because THAT also sucked (for MHW that is). In hindsight? I was actually right to bash and hate on everything that I had. It was AWFUL. It genuinely sucked. After 2018 or so I stopped paying attention to it, and this is the time Shadowbringers dropped in. It went under my radar for so many years, and I regret not at least learning more about it.

While most of the MMO mechanics were still around at the time of this expansion's drop, I played it only this year since I joined around Summer of 2023. I got to play the game after every complaint I had about the game itself was changed and fixed. Literally everything above that I mentioned, it's gone. The game itself is massively improved. I went through the slog that was ARR but enjoyed specific moments of it. I played Heavensward which was narratively a bit better but god awful with its level design. I stomached the ass that was Stormblood MSQ (the non-MSQ content was great actually). I had heard great things about Shadowbringers beforehand from friends and others online, and I had moderately good expectations considering the main writer for ShB was the DRK scenario writer, a kinosopher who also clearly loves Berserk. Natsuko Ishikawa is a brilliant writer, and it is a shame she has not written much more than what she has for XIV. Genuinely it is a tragedy and a loss that she does not have more works under her name, solely because her quality of writing is so good that we could use more of it. Not only had I gone in expecting something good, I was assured that a good writer was going to make it consistent throughout the expansion.

I was wrong. It was not good. It was perfect. It far exceeded whatever expectation had placed for it. I expected an 8 or so but I got a 10. Half a star is missing for the usual MMO padding, a death that should have happened (but they are not allowed to kill certain characters it would seem), and for issues pertaining to XIV as a whole. That being said, the MSQ was fucking perfect and encapsulated the feeling of hopelessness and moving on from pain and loss. The story itself is next to flawless, but on top of that the quality of the individual lines written is top notch. The details are remembered and carried throughout the expansion. It's not just a great story, it's a well-written one at that.

This expansion is Square Enix's Metal Gear Solid 2. A perfect, life changing story written by a woman primarily (mgs2's story was rewritten and edited by a woman! Kojima doesn't like people knowing that!) and it will never be topped again or even met at eye level by the company producing the game. It is a shame that Natsuko Ishikawa has stepped down, it is super clear from 5.4 and 5.5's story (and what I have seen of Endwalker) that she has stepped down due to the quality of writing following her down the stairs. Stand tall, my gamer.

Really excellent story, Emet-Selch is fantastic. Genuinely unbelievable that even when the writing has improved so dramatically the game still manages to constantly run into the same pitfalls over and over and over- the big dramatic climax is randomly interrupted so you can go to a new zone and talk to some extremely boring fishmen. I get that it's a product of trying to simultaneously tell a story and be an MMORPG expansion that's obligated to introduce the new content, but it feels like even at its peak FFXIV is outright hostile to the concept of "pacing."

Still hate the art style; the washed out color scheme and enemy designs straight out of "What If Final Fantasy Was In Real Life?" fan art left the aforementioned fancy new underwater zone substantially visually duller than the average vanilla WoW zone.

The setup for XIV's isekai arc is, honestly, rather dumb: Mysterious Hooded Man (wink, wink), time travel, palette swaps of voidsent and so on. But other than that, you have a top-notch adventure in a land, which is a lot like Eorzea yet different; with same familiar faces who went with you through Heavensward and Stormblood, yet more...mature? That mix of old and new, culminating in a massive lore dump at the end, flipping everything you knew about the world of XIV upside down, is the reason Shadowbringers is the best thing ever done by Yoshida and his team.
Also, best trailer/cinematic since "Answers".

Writing this review having finished the MSQ last night. (None of the post-game patch quests, Alliance Raids, Regular Raids, Dungeons, etc).

I spent 2 and a half years playing FFXIV with the one singular thought in my mind. "I have to see why everyone says Shadowbringers is so good." I played through the whole game with this thought in my mind. The patch quests leading up to it had me instantly hooked and intrigued and even going into it I had no real idea what the story would even be about. I can say now, having finished it, that it was worth the hype. I'll avoid spoilers here, but what followed was an instantly enthralling story that I found far more engaging and better paced than anything I'd experienced in FFXIV previously. It wasn't without it's slow points, and in my experience FFXIV has a lot of those, but on the whole the story kept me interested the whole time. The finale as well is one of if not the best one in the game so far.

It's probably fair to say to some degree that Shadowbringers succeeds both because of and in contrast to what proceeded it. It's story works because you know these characters, because you know this universe that has been crafted here. As a standalone work the game would already be very good, but it's the careful tower that has been constructed that makes the foundation for it to really work.

I'm looking forward to doing all the things I said I haven't done yet. Alliance Raids tend to be my favorite part of the game and I've been looking forward to this series for a while.

Onwards in my unending journey.