This review contains spoilers
While I did enjoy parts of it, it just never really did anything outstandingly well and there were lots of parts that were boring. I feel like the messages it tried to sell were undercut by awkward writing choices, and none of the characters were developed that well and were pretty flat. Your enjoyment of stormblood is probably going to be dependent on how much you can enjoy the surface level ideas and aesthetics it throws at you, and whether the characters are archetypes you are predisposed to liking.
I didn't even realize it until I had it pointed out to me that Ala Mhigo is also supposed to be south asian/middle eastern inspired, which makes Lyse jumping in and trying to save everything very white savior-y on top of her being just a flat out boring character. It's made even worse when she is pointed out to have no authority and that having Raubahn around is what gives her her strength and credibility......so then....why not just have Raubahn take up the mantle? His story feels better suited to him being the leader. God I miss when Lyse had a personality before all this.
It was when I reached the Doma section of the expansion that I started enjoying things more, and it felt a lot like the Ala Mhigo section was just kind of tacked on. Stormblood does not do a good job of balancing the two conflicts, and while I appreciate what they wanted to do with it, they ended up not expanding on either places in a meaningful way because they stretched themselves too thin. And maybe it was just me, but it definitely felt like it dragged on for way too long; there were places I thought were good stopping points in the Doma section only to find out that it just kept going on, and on, and on....
The post patches for stormblood are hands down the best part. I liked Fordola's development, and because I happen to like Yotsuyu I enjoyed most of what was done, though I personally did not like the resolution of her character, it felt very meanspirited after everything happened to her. The character arc of a woman betrayed by the world and doing what she can to survive, becoming a monster in the process, to finally be given a chance at happiness and understand her wrong doings, only to have a possible redemption torn away by an incredibly punchable and cheap villain that represents the problems she was about to overcome? When she had been shown to be capable of being better? It just didn't feel very satisfying to me, though that's my personal opinion. I can respect the "she has done too much to be able to atone properly" angle from it, but at the very least, I would have wanted her death to be from the people she wronged to hammer this home, not from her abusers that continued to take advantage of her until the very end.
They do that with Yotsuyu's character, and but then they turn have one of the player character's good aligned dialogue options be that you should have people change corrupt systems from within...even though Yotsuyu, being in the system, was utterly chewed up and destroyed. Even though that people who enter the system become corrupt themselves and turn on their countrymen just to survive and take care of themselves, even though they had to resort to this rebellion specifically because they couldn't do any of this kind of change from inside up to this point. The Stormblood expansion has you abolishing the system from the outside by uniting the people to take up arms...and it just feels really strange to have that kind of message thrown in there. Maybe I'm just nitpicking about that but again, there's lots of awkwardly handled writing choices that feel tone deaf and I guess all I can really say is it tried to do too many things at once (some of them even conflicting with each other) and did all of them in a subpar manner.
I think the best part of the expansion was definitely the Azim Steppe section, which I've heard was penned by the writer behind the dark knight quests and the Shadowbringers expansion. It wasn't written amazingly well because, again, they didn't really expand much on it since they stretched themselves out too thin, but it was fun and Magnai and Sadu have a fun dynamic that I'd love to see more of in the future. Natsuko Ishikawa please keep writing for ff14 I'm begging you
Everything after a prelude in violet is where things actually start getting legitimately interesting and good. That being said, it's mostly closing out Stormblood and doing setups for Shadowbringers, so how much can I really praise Stormblood for this? And when you get to Shadowbringers and how good everything is there, you really start to understand just how much this expansion was pretty average.
There's lots of other things I could nitpick about this but ultimately. Stormblood is pretty mid lmao
I didn't even realize it until I had it pointed out to me that Ala Mhigo is also supposed to be south asian/middle eastern inspired, which makes Lyse jumping in and trying to save everything very white savior-y on top of her being just a flat out boring character. It's made even worse when she is pointed out to have no authority and that having Raubahn around is what gives her her strength and credibility......so then....why not just have Raubahn take up the mantle? His story feels better suited to him being the leader. God I miss when Lyse had a personality before all this.
It was when I reached the Doma section of the expansion that I started enjoying things more, and it felt a lot like the Ala Mhigo section was just kind of tacked on. Stormblood does not do a good job of balancing the two conflicts, and while I appreciate what they wanted to do with it, they ended up not expanding on either places in a meaningful way because they stretched themselves too thin. And maybe it was just me, but it definitely felt like it dragged on for way too long; there were places I thought were good stopping points in the Doma section only to find out that it just kept going on, and on, and on....
The post patches for stormblood are hands down the best part. I liked Fordola's development, and because I happen to like Yotsuyu I enjoyed most of what was done, though I personally did not like the resolution of her character, it felt very meanspirited after everything happened to her. The character arc of a woman betrayed by the world and doing what she can to survive, becoming a monster in the process, to finally be given a chance at happiness and understand her wrong doings, only to have a possible redemption torn away by an incredibly punchable and cheap villain that represents the problems she was about to overcome? When she had been shown to be capable of being better? It just didn't feel very satisfying to me, though that's my personal opinion. I can respect the "she has done too much to be able to atone properly" angle from it, but at the very least, I would have wanted her death to be from the people she wronged to hammer this home, not from her abusers that continued to take advantage of her until the very end.
They do that with Yotsuyu's character, and but then they turn have one of the player character's good aligned dialogue options be that you should have people change corrupt systems from within...even though Yotsuyu, being in the system, was utterly chewed up and destroyed. Even though that people who enter the system become corrupt themselves and turn on their countrymen just to survive and take care of themselves, even though they had to resort to this rebellion specifically because they couldn't do any of this kind of change from inside up to this point. The Stormblood expansion has you abolishing the system from the outside by uniting the people to take up arms...and it just feels really strange to have that kind of message thrown in there. Maybe I'm just nitpicking about that but again, there's lots of awkwardly handled writing choices that feel tone deaf and I guess all I can really say is it tried to do too many things at once (some of them even conflicting with each other) and did all of them in a subpar manner.
I think the best part of the expansion was definitely the Azim Steppe section, which I've heard was penned by the writer behind the dark knight quests and the Shadowbringers expansion. It wasn't written amazingly well because, again, they didn't really expand much on it since they stretched themselves out too thin, but it was fun and Magnai and Sadu have a fun dynamic that I'd love to see more of in the future. Natsuko Ishikawa please keep writing for ff14 I'm begging you
Everything after a prelude in violet is where things actually start getting legitimately interesting and good. That being said, it's mostly closing out Stormblood and doing setups for Shadowbringers, so how much can I really praise Stormblood for this? And when you get to Shadowbringers and how good everything is there, you really start to understand just how much this expansion was pretty average.
There's lots of other things I could nitpick about this but ultimately. Stormblood is pretty mid lmao