A huge setback from Heavensward, Stormblood really just feels like it’s A Realm Reborn 2.0.
The gameplay felt better, still boring but not to an excruciating level like it was at low level, tho part of it might be because i switched jobs (i played Dragoon for ARR and HS, and switched to Dancer once i reached level 60 and Reaper at 70) and started playing on controller instead of keyboard and mouse which feels way better for me. Some of the solo instances were actually close to being fun (mostly the Zenos fights), but I still have the same issues with the gameplay that I don’t think the game is ever gonna fix: 99% of the time you just do your rotation and while the bosses have mechanics, failing to understand them is almost never an issue because at worse they kill you and only you, and unless your entire team dies and you have to start over, all that means is that you’ll have to wait a few seconds before you can play again and you don’t learn anything, so the entire experience is mind numbing because if i don’t understand what i have to do before it happens there’s no real consequence, and since i don’t plan to replay dungeons/trials i’ve already done i basically learn nothing.
Story (and pacing) wise, the expansion drops in quality a lot compared to Heavensward. Stormblood is all about liberating an occupied country from the grasp of the empire, but there’s a twist: you do that twice! And that’s one of the biggest issue with Stormblood: not only is the prelude of the story pretty generic, but you quickly realize the expansion is gonna make you go through very similar events twice. Sure, Ala Mhigo and Doma are different places with different cultures, but you still end up doing the same thing twice. You go to a new region, help people by doing fetch quests, they start trusting you, you confront the empire and win, the place is liberated, rinse and repeat. There’s no big plot twist or anything too, you just liberate some cities and like i don’t think every story needs a plot twist to work but when the prelude of the entire expansion ends up really being what the entire story is about i’d at least expect to have something on the side to motivate me like some really really good characters you’d meet to really make you go “wow those are my friends i need to save them” and… Stormblood also fails on that front. Sure, I really like Gosetsu and Hien for example, but it’s just because they’re archetypes of characters i really like, because otherwise for most of the expansion, they’re kinda not really developed in my opinion. They have their moments every now and then (and the 4.3 storyline for Gosetsu was really good but more on that later) but I feel like they’re pretty one dimensional and not developed enough, I think the mainHeavensward cast (Ysayle, Aymeric and Estinien) was way better than the main Stormblood characters. On top of that, a big part of the story focuses around Lyse and I really think she might be the worst character of the entire game, not because she sucks but because of how bland and boring she is. I can’t think of a single thing she did during the story or any like big quality she has, she’s just there and kinda just randomly becomes a leader despite having no leadership quality, and when you compare her “development” to Alphinaud in Heavensward, it’s really night and day. And her development sucks: she doesn’t seem like she matured or anything near the end, and she only becomes a leader because… The previous leader decided to make her the new leader instead of choosing someone who’d fit the shoes way better like Raubahn or even M’naago? It’s just so weird.
As I said, the story really was bland for the most part, but the funniest part is that they decided to introduce a lot of new stuff and reveals for the like… 5 or so last quests of 4.0? So you basically went through an insane amount of quests (ARR asides it’s the expansion with the biggest number of quests and a lot of them are just empty fetch quests just like in ARR), to have a really not original story repeat twice (like seriously “the resistance fights off the evil empire” is nothing new) and just at the end the story introduces all this new stuff that get a bit relevant in the 4.1-5 MSQ and probably will be more relevant in Shadowbringers which imo totally sucks because that just means this really really long story i just went through was just a bunch of nothing to tease a future story. The 4.3-4.5 story bits were fine and all (i don’t really have an opinion on 4.1 and 4.2 they were just here to close some character arcs from the previous story) but like they were mostly there to introduce you to whatever the hell the MSQ of Shadowbringers is gonna be about, especially 4.5, which imo just goes to show how boring Stormblood is: the best piece of content in it is content that is mostly if not completely outside of its main story.
Even the music in my opinion is a step down in terms of quality. It’s not bad by any means, but I don’t think it’s as good as what Heavensward or even ARR had, and even worse it made me realize some stuff the game does with music i don’t like that has always been there. In this expansion, one of the song is a remix of Cyan’s theme from FF6, and it’s mostly played when Hien appears. And this made me realize that there’s no real character themes like in previous FF games, which i didn’t really think about during the previous expansions but realizing it now i really miss having themes linked to characters, but all this games has is themes for factions or areas. So the first (and so far only) character theme being a theme from a previous game makes it even worse like if he had an original theme just for him that’d be fine tho it’s weird he’s the only one with a theme, but it’s not even original so like why would they even make that
Overall Stormblood really was a mediocre experience for me. It’s not as actively bad as ARR was, but compared to Heavensward i can’t help but wonder what they were thinking because they managed to just ignore everything HS did well to instead go back to something more similar to ARR, which like is probably fine if you liked ARR but I hated it so this just looks like an insane decision to me.
The gameplay felt better, still boring but not to an excruciating level like it was at low level, tho part of it might be because i switched jobs (i played Dragoon for ARR and HS, and switched to Dancer once i reached level 60 and Reaper at 70) and started playing on controller instead of keyboard and mouse which feels way better for me. Some of the solo instances were actually close to being fun (mostly the Zenos fights), but I still have the same issues with the gameplay that I don’t think the game is ever gonna fix: 99% of the time you just do your rotation and while the bosses have mechanics, failing to understand them is almost never an issue because at worse they kill you and only you, and unless your entire team dies and you have to start over, all that means is that you’ll have to wait a few seconds before you can play again and you don’t learn anything, so the entire experience is mind numbing because if i don’t understand what i have to do before it happens there’s no real consequence, and since i don’t plan to replay dungeons/trials i’ve already done i basically learn nothing.
Story (and pacing) wise, the expansion drops in quality a lot compared to Heavensward. Stormblood is all about liberating an occupied country from the grasp of the empire, but there’s a twist: you do that twice! And that’s one of the biggest issue with Stormblood: not only is the prelude of the story pretty generic, but you quickly realize the expansion is gonna make you go through very similar events twice. Sure, Ala Mhigo and Doma are different places with different cultures, but you still end up doing the same thing twice. You go to a new region, help people by doing fetch quests, they start trusting you, you confront the empire and win, the place is liberated, rinse and repeat. There’s no big plot twist or anything too, you just liberate some cities and like i don’t think every story needs a plot twist to work but when the prelude of the entire expansion ends up really being what the entire story is about i’d at least expect to have something on the side to motivate me like some really really good characters you’d meet to really make you go “wow those are my friends i need to save them” and… Stormblood also fails on that front. Sure, I really like Gosetsu and Hien for example, but it’s just because they’re archetypes of characters i really like, because otherwise for most of the expansion, they’re kinda not really developed in my opinion. They have their moments every now and then (and the 4.3 storyline for Gosetsu was really good but more on that later) but I feel like they’re pretty one dimensional and not developed enough, I think the mainHeavensward cast (Ysayle, Aymeric and Estinien) was way better than the main Stormblood characters. On top of that, a big part of the story focuses around Lyse and I really think she might be the worst character of the entire game, not because she sucks but because of how bland and boring she is. I can’t think of a single thing she did during the story or any like big quality she has, she’s just there and kinda just randomly becomes a leader despite having no leadership quality, and when you compare her “development” to Alphinaud in Heavensward, it’s really night and day. And her development sucks: she doesn’t seem like she matured or anything near the end, and she only becomes a leader because… The previous leader decided to make her the new leader instead of choosing someone who’d fit the shoes way better like Raubahn or even M’naago? It’s just so weird.
As I said, the story really was bland for the most part, but the funniest part is that they decided to introduce a lot of new stuff and reveals for the like… 5 or so last quests of 4.0? So you basically went through an insane amount of quests (ARR asides it’s the expansion with the biggest number of quests and a lot of them are just empty fetch quests just like in ARR), to have a really not original story repeat twice (like seriously “the resistance fights off the evil empire” is nothing new) and just at the end the story introduces all this new stuff that get a bit relevant in the 4.1-5 MSQ and probably will be more relevant in Shadowbringers which imo totally sucks because that just means this really really long story i just went through was just a bunch of nothing to tease a future story. The 4.3-4.5 story bits were fine and all (i don’t really have an opinion on 4.1 and 4.2 they were just here to close some character arcs from the previous story) but like they were mostly there to introduce you to whatever the hell the MSQ of Shadowbringers is gonna be about, especially 4.5, which imo just goes to show how boring Stormblood is: the best piece of content in it is content that is mostly if not completely outside of its main story.
Even the music in my opinion is a step down in terms of quality. It’s not bad by any means, but I don’t think it’s as good as what Heavensward or even ARR had, and even worse it made me realize some stuff the game does with music i don’t like that has always been there. In this expansion, one of the song is a remix of Cyan’s theme from FF6, and it’s mostly played when Hien appears. And this made me realize that there’s no real character themes like in previous FF games, which i didn’t really think about during the previous expansions but realizing it now i really miss having themes linked to characters, but all this games has is themes for factions or areas. So the first (and so far only) character theme being a theme from a previous game makes it even worse like if he had an original theme just for him that’d be fine tho it’s weird he’s the only one with a theme, but it’s not even original so like why would they even make that
Overall Stormblood really was a mediocre experience for me. It’s not as actively bad as ARR was, but compared to Heavensward i can’t help but wonder what they were thinking because they managed to just ignore everything HS did well to instead go back to something more similar to ARR, which like is probably fine if you liked ARR but I hated it so this just looks like an insane decision to me.