I had a longer review written, but... Hmm...

There's this interview that plays in my head a lot. Someone brings up how popular Zero (a dashing genderweird character introduced in 6.1) is and Naoki Yoshida - the game's producer, director, and member of Square Enix's board - awkwardly mumbles out that he didn't quite expect people to love her so much.

This is innocent on the surface, but to me it was a huge head tilter at the time.

See, FFXIV has a problem with misogyny. Whether it's inconsequential shit like "Minfilia polled terribly with players, so we killed her and turned her into a mcguffin", Yotsuyu's weird allergory for comfort women turning sour in Stormblood postpatch, Ysayle/Moenbryda (self-explanatory), the double standard invoked with the fates of Fordola compared to Gaius Baelsar, the incredible overuse of sexual assault references in dialogue up until late Stormblood, or Lyse getting written out of the story because people hated her, there's a lot to chew on regarding misogyny.
It's sort of a "joke" (insofar as banal reality can be humorous) among woman-liking FFXIV fans that pretty much any new woman introduced will probably either die or be written out. Venat implicitly (in the Japanese text, explicitly) being denied reincarnation while the setting's equivalent to Super Hitler gets to constantly appear in flashbacks was just the nail in the coffin.

I bring this up because 6.5 is bad. It's not bad in the same ways 6.0 was bad - Natsuko Ishikawa's uncomfortably Imperial Japan sympathizing fingers are at a minimum barring 6.4 - but it's bad in more banal, eyebrow-raising ways.
To avoid burying the lede: 6.5 smacks of both swift, lazy rewrites and also creative sterility.

After 5 patches of overwritten, backtracking-padded, unsatisfying buildup, 6.5 just dispenses with most of the stakes and conflict to say "Beat Zeromus and Golbez will be a good guy!". You get an admittedly decent trial out of it before Zero abruptly becomes a Paladin with little fanfare (mirroring Cecil's iconic moment from FF4, but terrible) and surprise Golbez is a good guy.
Zero thanks you for your friendship and aid, before declaring that she's going off to the same not-relevant closet as Lyse and demanding you don't ever come knocking for her.

Honestly, as an aside: XIV's format is killing it. There is no real reason for 6.4 to not have the Scions immediately leap in to fight Zeromus other than the devs needing to do another patch. It sucks so much.

"Zero was intended to die but they changed their mind last minute" is, at the time of writing, a conspiracy theory. Nonetheless, it's a believable one.

What's really telling to me, both about the void arc's development and also the reception Endwalker got, is that this patch opens with an incredibly lazy and overbearing Shadowbringers nostalgia trip. Needing Light for a storyline that should've ended last patch, you and Zero hop over to the First and meet all of your Shadowbringers friends! Hurray!
Except... Look, even putting aside my negative bias (I consider Shadowbringers the worst XIV expansion) it just reads incredibly poorly. It's an abrupt plot stopper, is mostly unvoiced filler dialogue/quests that serve no purpose than to tug at the player's nostalgia, and genuinely does not matter at all until the very end.
This is alarming, at least to me, because they did this after Stormblood (an expansion Japan infamously despises to this day) what with the sudden surge of Ishgard/Heavensward references and Aymeric being your BFFL all of a sudden in Ghimlyt, the nuking of Stormblood plot threads in Shadowbringers, plus the very abrupt resurrection of Zenos and the sudden announcement of a whole event centered on Ishgard - the first and so far last of its kind.
Lastly, the dungeon of this patch is a cheap rehash of Amaurot but because nobody gives a flying fuck about the storyline it has all the impact of picking up a plate with a towel and it sliding back into the basin.

All of this combines into a package that, honestly? Pisses me off personally. The Void and everything around it has long since been one of the most int- [remembers what games I'm talking about] least boring parts of the setting and it's essentially gelded, its sole promising voiced NPC neutered, all to... idk, shove the single remaining plot thread from pre-Ishikawa days in the trash and move onto Dawntrail?

Other reviews have said it already and I'm adding my voice to the chorus: I think FFXIV has went on too long.

I only have so much tolerance for drab cutscenes with the same canned animations, the same WoL responses, the same bad audio mixing that feels like mics are about to peak, the same annoying placid and uninventive BGM that I've been hearing since 2013. I have even less tolerance for quest design that hasn't changed since I left education - and it was the same when I went into it!

I want to lie and say that maybe Dawntrail will be better, but... Will it?

I forgave a lot of XIV's bullshit because the writers had a series of curtains drawn that I was eager to peek behind.

The curtains are open now, and despite my hopes they are indeed blue.

Will Dawntrail be any good? Will it deviant from dungeons/trials at odd levels, playing Machinations whenever it's safe to skip a cutscene, overly choreographed duties that're aimed at people who have panic attacks when asked to use tank stance, mediocre writing which betrays the writers' uncomfortable opinions on Imperial Japan's colonization efforts, and music which occasionally rises above "fine" but is mostly just forgettable BGM unless you're in a duty?

Beats me.

[The review has functionally ended here, I'm now just talking to myself.]

I've seen a lot of comparisons to TV shows and the MCU when talking about how exhausted FFXIV's formula is, and while I agree to an extent (I am an ex-Red vs Blue fan.) I think with games it's actually worse.

I alluded to it up above, but games being tired and going on too long is far more noticeable than in other mediums besides maybe music (shoutout to BFMV for making Fever for a decade straight).
It terrifies me that FFXIV is somehow one of SE's top earning games (barring this year, where their MMO division lost money for the first time in a while) but it feels so cheap. The same animations, the same music, the same format. For a decade, nothing but empty field areas and inconsequential yellow quests and 3 alliance raids and 12 normal raids and Hildebrand and five post-patches. A trial before you hit level cap, then a back-to-back dungeon and trial. Main leitmotif for the final boss. Final boss is a well intentioned extremist.
Over and over and over...

It's strange, too. I've recently gotten super into Granblue Fantasy, and it feels like a mirror into a better world. A better FFXIV. It, too, is a decade-spanning pseudo-MMO that's had to deal with the pains of being a GaaS title, yet it's managed to innovate within itself. Fights only get cooler and cooler as time goes on, characer kits manage to be relatively interesting without being a straight upgrade to existing characters (though these still exist), their writing has matured from its infancy, and the art/visuals/music only get better every month.

Sure, it has gacha money, but FFXIV is one of SE's top earners, yet it feels cheaper than some games I've played that were literally made by 10-15 Chinese folks in a shed.

I don't actually think CBU3 are entirely to blame. They are absolutely to blame for XIV's weirdly conservative stances on things, bad writing, and overexertion of creative control (STOP FORCING SOKEN TO MAKE ORCHESTRAL MUSIC.), but I think most problems I've talked about here can be traced back to both the very strict "5 post-patches, then an expansion every two years" shit and chronic mismanagement/underfunding.
I know Naoki Yoshida is everyone's parasocial best friend who can do no wrong, but c'mon. Fumbling FF16 despite having infinite Mainline Final Fantasy money can't say anything good about his capabilities.

As I wrote this all out I found myself longing for Stormblood. I don't like Stormblood (or anything in XIV anymore, really, I just came back to get my IRLs prepped for Dawntrail) but...
Hm.
I don't know how much the devs really care about FFXIV, especially as Yoshida continually looks more withdrawn and disinterested with each fanfest, but as a simple end user it just feels like Stormblood was the last time they were firing on all cylinders. The duties were great - in side content especially - the field areas were gorgeous, the music had so much flavour compared to ShB and EW's morose slop, and for just a brief moment in this game's gargantuan lifespan I was actually interested in where the individual location plots went.

I don't feel the same way about everything after it. Shadowbringers was, in hindsight, the developers panicking after Stormblood's reception and throwing the player into a world divorced of the icky plot threads/women they so despise, and Endwalker was Endwalker.

Am I just projecting my own discontent? Probably.

But when you offer the player a dialogue choice to voice their discontent at being forced to meddle in Tural's affairs, only for G'raha Tia to smile and tell you "nawwww it'll be fun :)" I can't help but wonder.

P.S: This patch was so bad I actually forget Vrtra was there, despite Azdaja being the instigating incident. Imagine.

"Life is a series of journeys, my friend, and there's no telling what awaits us on the long road."

(Impressões da MSQ dos patchs 6.1 - 6.55)
Aprecio muitas coisas no pós-Endwalker, a tentativa de criar um novo arco para uma nova estrela foi algo bem audaz mas faz jus ao legado da Endwalker como um fechamento de arco, então nada mais justo que o pós abrir margens para explorar novos horizontes, porém isso somado ao lançamento pausado dos patchs cria a sensação de uma queda brusca de qualidade de escrita no pós-endwalker, optei então por esperar todos os capitulos dessa jornada estarem disponiveis para desfruta-los.
O formato de seriado nos patchs geralmente ajuda por já termos uma longa continuidade e interesse nesses personagens, e até a 6.3 isso não era o caso justamente por essa proposta nova, o unico personagem já trabalhado que recebe mais aprofundamento aqui é Vtra, que tem um protagonismo ao lado da personagem nova, Zero, que é uma otima adição ao cast e rapidamente se tornou uma das minhas secundarias favoritas graças ao trabalho tematico nela e sua evolução como personagem que referencia diretamente Final Fantasy IV assim como a maior parte do pós-Endwalker, a sensação de desinteresse também foi mitigada graças a adição de mais dungeons e trials, ao menos uma de cada em todos os patchs, e na 6.4 começa a ser trabalhado sequelas de Garlemald que é brilhantemente amarrado ao arco da Zero, ajudando na construção dela e na evolução de um dos arcos mais interessantes e emblematicos da Endwalker e do jogo como um todo, apartir dai as coisas ganham mais foco e proposito e culminam em um fim de jornada satisfatorio. o 5.55 serve como uma rapida ponte para o proximo arco dessa jornada, e me animou muito para a Dawntrail, ter mais interações com os personagens que eu amo e momentos de acalentar o coração marcam o fim do pós-Endwalker e o inicio da jornada para Tural.

[This Review is for FF14 Patches 6.1-6.55]
The long and short of it is that I like EndWalker as an expansion. Ultimately not as much as Shadowbringers, but it's a solid second place.
To preface, I didn't see all the content included. I did not do any Savage or Ultimate Raiding, though I did clear all Extreme Trials at least once. That said, I did enjoy all the battle content I did.
The Pandaemonium Raid series was fun and had some pretty cool designs and music. The new Variant Dungeons are a welcome addition to duty modes, feeling like there's proper dungeon puzzle solving and is a good challenge to try and clear solo. All the trials except one tied into the MSQ which made for them being a good climax for each patch with a lot of good interpretations of old FF4 bosses into a modern MMO fight. All the Tribe Quests tie directly into stuff from the main story, which is something rare to see but always appreciated. Eureka Orthos was there. There wasn't a Field Operation for this expansion which at first I understood then cursed when I went through its replacement.
Island Sanctuary sucks so much as it docks a full point off of this expansion for me, omg. It's such a nothing mode of content that takes forever to do for virtually no reward other than having a beach episode with some side characters. It's the first form of this content they've done so they better do this better in Dawn Trail. Similarly, the Relic Weapon series cut down basically all grinding, but it's become so nothing as a result. With this expansion, it's nothing more than quest to check off on patch day to get a new stat stick. Which could be seen as a larger complaint of the expansion overall, there really isn't content to chew on in lax manner. So much of it, while high quality, is very one and done.
Finally, the patch MSQ is probably the best it's ever been. A problem with previous MSQs is that they're split between being closure for the previous expansion's story while also setting up the next one. The problem with that is some of those don't feel all as well done as the original MSQ or can come off as fluff that doesn't actually mean that much for the larger story. Not to say it's bad per say, but going into a new storyline for the 5 patches feels more cohesive. And it makes it feel less awkward when you dump 40+ hours into the initial MSQ then have to wait months at a time to get to the big conclusion of that original story. Pretty much all the trials being moved into the MSQ also working in the same vein in that all of them feel climactic and adds weight for the story in having real threats more present. It is a doubled edged sword however as it limits the amount of side quests that can be conflict driven to only really having one single trial at the end of the Relic Questline.
Now, my experience with previous expansions has been admittingly very different to End Walker. Being able to burn through an entire MSQ, Raid Series, and other pieces of content really quickly when ever I wanted to do them is very different than doing everything in steps patch to patch. That said, I don't think I can say I enjoyed End Walker as much as Shadow Bringers as an expansion. The variety of content in ShB was all stuff I ended up enjoying more than EW's, even with the flaws I'd complain about for both. Not to mention that the way ShB's story is written acting as a massive recontextualization of everything that's come before, the amazing moments it has, and the set up for the finale of EW ends up meaning more to me than just how well EW capped everything off and set up a new path for things to follow.
Even with the problems I have with End Walker, I'm excited. I think Dawn Trail can only come out stronger and better.

This chapter reaches its very predictable ending, with everyone who's still alive redeemed, and a clear narrative thread left alone but ready to be picked back up in a future expansion. It's as fulfilling as this sort of in-between content can be, and I'm honestly overjoyed I won't have to endure the cringe of Zero tipping her hat every time people talk about feelings any longer. I'm curious about Dawntrail, but this curiosity is tempered by my feelings about gameplay.

I find myself again dreaming about this exact game, with the exact same amount of content, the same story, classes, characters, lore, and so on, but as a single player experience not beholden to the requirements of a traditional MMO.

Though I can appreciated FFXIV's gameplay in small doses, I once more reach the conclusion I just…deeply dislike it. The scripted nature of its fundamental mechanics (every class has its own rotation and deviating from it is always bad) and the very sparkly Simon Says of trials and raids, paired with the inevitable focus on optimisation that is part and parcel of MMOs, just makes for a miserable experience for me.

the golden age of final fantasy xiv is officially over.

it's one thing to have crappy writing (this happens a lot; ffxiv is more often one of the most mediocre final fantasies than it is one of the very best ones). it's another thing entirely to not only completely ruin the arc of one of the game's most promising characters but to completely neuter all the mystique, allure and intrigue to a part of the game's lore that has been built up over the past 10+ years of storytelling (while completely neglecting the characters originally entangled in said lore).

i could elucidate my feelings on what it's been like to follow the post-6.0 patch cycle but i think this image sums up capping things off with 6.5 more eloquently than i could ever hope to: https://i.imgur.com/uo6iffw.png

Part 1 MSQ Review: The emotional core of Vrtra trying to save his sister has kept all of these patches engaging. Zero is a fantastic addition to the cast, and this patch just further reinforces how great she is. Golbez started out as a pretty basic villain, but they ended up doing a lot of surprising things with his character and role in the story. I'd say XIV's greatest strength is taking seemingly one-dimensional villains and elevating them to the highest degree.

Part 2 was basically just a prologue for the next expansion, but it did its job well. I can't wait to see what happens in Dawntrail.

using this as my pandaemonium review

hoooooooly fuck this was awesome. it takes a bit to get going but once it does, it gets GOING. gives you a new perspective on characters while also providing fun battles! also scream and the p12 theme are some of my favorite ost in the game

anyways i have to remake my character tier list, THATS how good pandaemonium was lol

(Using this for my thoughts on 6.1-6.55)

Good! Not my favorite patch content but good! I think the story was serviceable even if it repeated some of its own beats too many times. I love FF4 but even I have to admit they were laying it on pretty thick by the end. Most of my favorite stuff was in the “optional” content. I enjoyed most of the EX trials, alliance raids, and a decent amount of the Pandemonium raids. Didn’t get very into Savage but the ones I did were neat. Tataru’s quests were fun. Good set of Manderville quests. Fun Blue Mage update. About what you’d expect. I’m looking forward to Dawntrail after 6.55 both for the narrative and loads of content.

Final Fantasy XIV: Growing Light (6.5)

Está bien el parche en general, no tengo mucho que opinar, la raid me ha gustado aunque recicle mecánicas. La mazmorra me ha gustado mucho. Y la trama está bien.

(7/10)

A ver que tal plantean el hype de Dawntrail.

Dude who plays a single game for 4000+ hours: Ya know the game is just so boring now

Anywho patch is the usual. Dungeon, Trial, Raid, etc. I loved it in spite of some narrative issues and personal wants for the story. Genuinely wanted Zero to be part of the gang because they spent 4 patches making her fun and interesting to hang out with and then just dump her once the void stuff is done. It doesn't help that, as of writing this, the next expansion seems to be entirely about something else.

Nevertheless I feel like people have their expectations in completely wrong places because of the way 6.0 wrapped up everything. That ontop of developers listening to players complaints from previous expansions now hearing the complete opposite of what people wanted back then only means that there is going to be a rift set between people playing the game and people making it and far more than usual.

GaaS and MMO players in general dig their own holes and then complain when it's not to their liking and it's the reason why something half-decent like this might end up below the dirt, though certainly not anytime soon

6.5 is about what you'd expect from a x.5 patch, maybe even more when you consider the relatively low stakes build up to each subsequent expansion that took place in 2.5, 3.5, 4.5, and 5.5. But I think for me, what makes 6.5 feel so much lesser is how tired the game feels. The plot's main thrust has been resolved; much of the wonder and mystery the game held has faded. Final Fantasy XIV has been pushed to its conceptual limits multiple times already, and it happens roughly twice in 6.5 between the MSQ and the Alliance Raid questline.

The content is as competent as always, but I can't help but feel it's reduced to only being serviceable thanks to it being effectively identical to every other patch. The same dungeon trash, different but eerily similar bosses, blink-and-you'll-miss-'em trials, cutscenes that are utilizing decade old BGM and 3D animations -- it legitimately gives me existential dread when I hear the same hokey backing tracks that have been in cutscenes for the past decade while my avatar smiles placidly at some mundane situation. And perhaps it's my fault for playing the game for so long; of course I'd be tapped out on enjoyment to some extent. But honestly this is a GaaS we're talking about, and the past two patches have been revelatory in their failure to meaningful build upon a game that even at its worst moments could make you wonder what was next around the corner.

Like a TV show that's go on for a season or two too long, everything starts to blend together. There are no more layers to peel back, and even seemingly important moments feel unaffecting to the point of unflinching apathy, reduced to post-Avengers: Endgame MCU caliber quality (even down to having its own 'The Eternals', of sorts). It makes me wonder if it was ever truly that good in the first place, or if it was just the novelty of unraveling this world and seeing what it had to offer. Stories don't need to extend themselves this long, and 6.5 has really proven that further.

I'm certain Dawntrail will be of significantly higher quality than the patch-by-patch MSQ of Endwalker, the side stories of Endwalker's patch cycle, and hell, probably Endwalker itself (whose story I think grows increasingly worse the more I think about it). But I'm not convinced Dawntrail won't share the same issues as its predecessors. We'll get a dungeon at every odd level, three trials, a new set of 8-player raids, fancy new moves for all the jobs, a story that's well-written (to a fault) with a genuinely strong sense of adventure at its highest highs. But ultimately it'll falter as a holistic gameplay experience thanks to it being stuck within the framework of an MMO, doomed to never truly have a naturalistic gameplay structure beyond same-y field areas and identically structured instanced content that are carried by bespoke art direction, music, and 3D assets.

FF14 is a respectable multimedia project with lofty ambitions and a growing overconfidence in its own subject matter that would make the FF7 compilation blush, but as an MMO and a game it's gradually depreciating patch by patch thanks to the fact that by its very nature it cannot disrupt its own status quo. Profit and longevity are king in live service games, even in ones that are largely full of meaningful experiences like FF14. Tbh tho as long as it's where the gay people are hanging out, I'll keep coming back, prolly.