010313
3 reviews liked by 010313
like part 1 proper, this dlc was joyous and silly and beautiful and expansive and reverent and operatic and imaginative and completely dumb in all the best of ways!!!! i love what they've done with yuffie here, how meaningfully they've expanded the wutai/shinra conflict and her role within it, love that we get to see a whole new mini scenario with Scarlet vamping around and being a camp cartoon villain, and i love the whole remake project in genny!!! sorry 2 be a simp gleefully nursing at the squenix teat unable to focus on people's many thoughtful criticisms about legacy/faithfulness/fundamental change in game aura/sometimes frustrating pantomime of naughty dog or marvel style mechanisms of story divulsion/obnoxious prolonged episodic price-gougey release strategy etc but this shit simply rules and is pure undiluted joy 2 me and i cant help but want to tell the haterz to go break their teeth on a da chao bean!!! get in the car ladies we're getting blasted at the happy turtle 2night!!!!
Back in 2015, when Heavensward was about to come out, I embarked on my FFXIV journey. "It's great!", a couple of friends told me.
Technical issues aside, as I ran the game in a notebook that could barely sustain 20fps, I found ARR to leave much to be desired - the story and characters were painfully dry, and scenes just dragged on, and on, and on, with nothing interesting to say - understandable, given the context of the development, but I can only excuse so much.
Fast forward to August 2021, where I decide to go back where I left of, around patch 2.1, and make all the way to the end of Shadowbringers in time for the release of Endwalker. And full glad am I that I did it.
Endwalker is an emotional rollercoaster, that is faithful to the long-lost spirit of classic Final Fantasy, as helmed by Sakaguchi. It's full of sentimentality, emotion, personal themes and yes, a bit of cheesiness. As I reached the end, I found myself hesitating for a couple seconds to click the conclude button in the last quest.
Final Fantasy XIV is a terribly imperfect story, and much of its woes come from being an MMO. Endless fillers, bloated quests, pointlessly huge overworlds that lead to pointless wandering around... even now I have this nagging feeling that FF14 would be a 10/10 in my heart if you removed all of the MMO fat. This feeling will probably never leave, as I will think back on this story and wish I could replay it like I do so many of my favorites - but I doubt I'll have it in me to deal with all those quests ever again.
And make no mistake, Endwalker's first half moves at a never-before-seen pace that truly made me feel like I was playing a single-player JRPG, but it quickly reminded me that yes, this is an MMO, and yes I will have to deal with this painfully annoying filler that has no bearing in the story. Not to mention a needlessly long narrative arc that was more due to faulty writing rather than MMO structure.
Is it a masterpiece in storytelling? No, definitely not. If I wanted to, I could list a number of issues in the writing. But it pales in comparison to the love put into it, to its absurdly satisfying thematic cohesion, to the sincerity and emotion the writers poured into this story, as flawed and imperfect and bloated as it is.
This has a MASSIVE barrier of entry - A Realm Reborn alone is enough to dissuade most folks - but I'd be lying if I said I didn't think it was worth it.
Technical issues aside, as I ran the game in a notebook that could barely sustain 20fps, I found ARR to leave much to be desired - the story and characters were painfully dry, and scenes just dragged on, and on, and on, with nothing interesting to say - understandable, given the context of the development, but I can only excuse so much.
Fast forward to August 2021, where I decide to go back where I left of, around patch 2.1, and make all the way to the end of Shadowbringers in time for the release of Endwalker. And full glad am I that I did it.
Endwalker is an emotional rollercoaster, that is faithful to the long-lost spirit of classic Final Fantasy, as helmed by Sakaguchi. It's full of sentimentality, emotion, personal themes and yes, a bit of cheesiness. As I reached the end, I found myself hesitating for a couple seconds to click the conclude button in the last quest.
Final Fantasy XIV is a terribly imperfect story, and much of its woes come from being an MMO. Endless fillers, bloated quests, pointlessly huge overworlds that lead to pointless wandering around... even now I have this nagging feeling that FF14 would be a 10/10 in my heart if you removed all of the MMO fat. This feeling will probably never leave, as I will think back on this story and wish I could replay it like I do so many of my favorites - but I doubt I'll have it in me to deal with all those quests ever again.
And make no mistake, Endwalker's first half moves at a never-before-seen pace that truly made me feel like I was playing a single-player JRPG, but it quickly reminded me that yes, this is an MMO, and yes I will have to deal with this painfully annoying filler that has no bearing in the story. Not to mention a needlessly long narrative arc that was more due to faulty writing rather than MMO structure.
Is it a masterpiece in storytelling? No, definitely not. If I wanted to, I could list a number of issues in the writing. But it pales in comparison to the love put into it, to its absurdly satisfying thematic cohesion, to the sincerity and emotion the writers poured into this story, as flawed and imperfect and bloated as it is.
This has a MASSIVE barrier of entry - A Realm Reborn alone is enough to dissuade most folks - but I'd be lying if I said I didn't think it was worth it.
10 Yakisoba Pans out of 10!!!
Vanillaware's greatest accomplishment by a landslide. Hyper-ambitious, utterly indulgent, and convoluted as all fuck, but miraculously never buckles under the weight of its own intricacies. 13 Sentinels pulses with a sense of delirious vitality and freewheeling passion that is so so rare in games with this level of production value and craft. 13S' disarmingly dense story construction feels a bit like the tangled web of plot complexity in the Kingdom Hearts series, but it actually uses those twists in service to its own emotionally resonant characters and conceptual intentions (instead of rendering everyone a charmless exposition machine giving you truly insane loredumps that ultimately dont impart anything that meaningful). The nonlinear, fragmented story delivery is filled with literally hundreds of galaxy-brain twists and turns and occupies dozens of genres at once; different character narratives make up an amalgam of pastiches including Evangelion, Perfect Blue, Macross, Sukeban Deka, Madoka Magica, Barefoot Gen, and more... and it all feels TOTALLY fitting in a game that's clearly a meditation on the experience of coming of age while awash in Japanese history and cultural memory--without a lens of pure nostalgia and nationalism. There's real nuance to the game's exploration of Showa Era Japan's wartime suffering/shame and its eventual globalized cultural/industrial recovery here, and I felt this deeply even from my semi-clueless outsider perspective. It's actual thought provoking stuff that the nonlinearity totally works in service to, and also happens to be an extremely well-crafted and fresh style of story delivery for its' own sake.
Much has been said about the gorgeous illustrative art within the Remembrance portion of the game, and I could gush about it for years (PLEASE MORE PUPPET JOINTED/PERSPECTIVE WARP 2D ANIMATION IN GAMES I LOVE IT) but I feel like the Destruction segments are being a tad undervalued! They're extremely snappy and fun (especially if you play on Intense, which is totally surmountable for average players like me but raises the strategizing requirements considerably). I've seen a lot of responses lamenting that Destruction doesn't share the vivid, illustrative style of the Remembrance segments and can see why people might think that from the trailers, but I totally disagree after experiencing the game. The depersonalized, infographic-style representation of truly harrowing, wide-scale mech carnage feels like a very conscious and effective creative choice to contrast with the intimate and sentimental visual novel sequences. Both visual styles absolutely work in harmony with one another, and the juxtaposition only serves to strengthen them. The combat music is some of the best shit EVER too, who needs fully illustrated mechs when the bops are this massive
Also, I was totally blindsided by the FUN AS HELL queer stuff in this game! It's definitely not "perfect", but said romance is so charming and allows its complicated, lovable characters to be confused, flirty, devious and loyal in ways that few other games do. While there IS some (funny!) humor surrounding one character's klutzy and confused queerness, same-sex attraction itself is never treated as an absurd joke, only validated: the joke is that said character is too bone-headed to admit to himself what's plainly obvious (and beautiful!!!).
anyway I lub dis gaem you should play it it's v special and a truly rare experience. Props to Vanillaware and thank you for toning down most of your skeevy fanservice to a degree where I'm not irritated by it constantly
Vanillaware's greatest accomplishment by a landslide. Hyper-ambitious, utterly indulgent, and convoluted as all fuck, but miraculously never buckles under the weight of its own intricacies. 13 Sentinels pulses with a sense of delirious vitality and freewheeling passion that is so so rare in games with this level of production value and craft. 13S' disarmingly dense story construction feels a bit like the tangled web of plot complexity in the Kingdom Hearts series, but it actually uses those twists in service to its own emotionally resonant characters and conceptual intentions (instead of rendering everyone a charmless exposition machine giving you truly insane loredumps that ultimately dont impart anything that meaningful). The nonlinear, fragmented story delivery is filled with literally hundreds of galaxy-brain twists and turns and occupies dozens of genres at once; different character narratives make up an amalgam of pastiches including Evangelion, Perfect Blue, Macross, Sukeban Deka, Madoka Magica, Barefoot Gen, and more... and it all feels TOTALLY fitting in a game that's clearly a meditation on the experience of coming of age while awash in Japanese history and cultural memory--without a lens of pure nostalgia and nationalism. There's real nuance to the game's exploration of Showa Era Japan's wartime suffering/shame and its eventual globalized cultural/industrial recovery here, and I felt this deeply even from my semi-clueless outsider perspective. It's actual thought provoking stuff that the nonlinearity totally works in service to, and also happens to be an extremely well-crafted and fresh style of story delivery for its' own sake.
Much has been said about the gorgeous illustrative art within the Remembrance portion of the game, and I could gush about it for years (PLEASE MORE PUPPET JOINTED/PERSPECTIVE WARP 2D ANIMATION IN GAMES I LOVE IT) but I feel like the Destruction segments are being a tad undervalued! They're extremely snappy and fun (especially if you play on Intense, which is totally surmountable for average players like me but raises the strategizing requirements considerably). I've seen a lot of responses lamenting that Destruction doesn't share the vivid, illustrative style of the Remembrance segments and can see why people might think that from the trailers, but I totally disagree after experiencing the game. The depersonalized, infographic-style representation of truly harrowing, wide-scale mech carnage feels like a very conscious and effective creative choice to contrast with the intimate and sentimental visual novel sequences. Both visual styles absolutely work in harmony with one another, and the juxtaposition only serves to strengthen them. The combat music is some of the best shit EVER too, who needs fully illustrated mechs when the bops are this massive
Also, I was totally blindsided by the FUN AS HELL queer stuff in this game! It's definitely not "perfect", but said romance is so charming and allows its complicated, lovable characters to be confused, flirty, devious and loyal in ways that few other games do. While there IS some (funny!) humor surrounding one character's klutzy and confused queerness, same-sex attraction itself is never treated as an absurd joke, only validated: the joke is that said character is too bone-headed to admit to himself what's plainly obvious (and beautiful!!!).
anyway I lub dis gaem you should play it it's v special and a truly rare experience. Props to Vanillaware and thank you for toning down most of your skeevy fanservice to a degree where I'm not irritated by it constantly