This review contains spoilers
A significant step down in terms of story, but it makes up for it with a ton of great gameplay content.
The story this time takes us to both Ala Mhigo and Doma, two places that we've had a lot of teasers for up until now, and tries to take us through the liberation of both from the Empire. While this sounds good on paper, in theory I feel that the writers bit off a bit more than they could chew here. Cramming all of the worldbuilding and story and liberation of two entire unrelated nations into one expansion leaves both of them feeling kind of rushed and underwhelming. More than anything it makes the liberation feel anticlimactic - and Ala Mhigo suffers from this much worse than Doma due to how the expansion's story is laid out. Ala Mhigo's story begins at the start of the expansion, and then right when things are starting to get interesting it gets put on hold while we go to Doma. The Doman storyline plays out from start to finish mostly uninterrupted, and then we pivot back to Ala Mhigo at the end. The problem here is that by the time we return to Ala Mhigo I've forgotten or stopped caring much about what was established there earlier, and the time between going back and successfully liberating the nation is so short that it ends up feeling way too easy. If the two nations' storylines played out in full one after the other it might've felt a bit more like two unrelated stories slapped together, but at least it wouldn't have undercut the climax so badly.
Related to this are my problems with Zenos. When he's first introduced as a powerful edgy pretty boy villain I was all on board - I am a Final Fantasy fan after all. When he beat me in battle multiple times I was excited to see how we would eventually defeat him. The answer is... you just kinda beat him. He comments about your time in Doma making you stronger, but why exactly would it have made me that much stronger? I understand that mechanically I'm level 70 instead of level 63 or whatever but that doesn't really jive with me as a canonical reason - if you start acknowledging levels in canon then you start needing to ask why there are packs of sheep in the sewers of Ala Mhigo that could easily defeat the Ultima Weapon. Sure I defeated a few primals in Doma, but nothing stronger than what I had already beaten dozens of times previously. I just don't get why my character went from barely being able to touch Zenos to suddenly winning.
On top of that, I felt like I was being teased with some master plan Zenos was cooking up regarding "The Hunt", and that I would be lured into a trap or he would have some way of quashing the rebellion at the last minute. But then "The Hunt" turned out to be just... fighting me. And he loses. And that's it. Considering that a number of earlier Ala Mhigan victories happened because Zenos intentionally let us win in order to facilitate "The Hunt", in retrospect it feels like the only reason we won is because Zenos is a total fucking idiot with regards to tactics and shot himself in the foot repeatedly for no reason. It's another thing that makes the Ala Mhigan story seem seriously anticlimactic.
Beyond that there's the other characters who by and large are, well, fine. Lyse is a perfectly serviceable shounen protagonist who's a little self-serious and fights for her friends, but I could never really shake the feeling that she was now a completely different character from the person I met in ARR. I know that's intentional, but it felt less like natural character development and more like a change of writers and of story priorities. If her goofy comic-relief personality still reared its head every once in a while it would feel more real. Alisaie is a little better in that she at least doesn't feel like her character was completely changed, and she's a good character overall, but she's a little too normal to be exciting, and she keeps getting random injuries that remove her from the story for long stretches.
The non-Zenos villains on the other hand are great. Yotsuyu and Fordola are the two best and most developed villains in the whole game so far and do a fantastic job of mirroring each other - they end up on fairly different paths by the end of Post-Stormblood despite having fairly similar upbringings and life circumstances. They were both highlights of the main story but their post-SB stories really shot them up into the highest tier of characters.
All in all the story was serviceable but really messy. A few more revisions could've done wonders for cleaning up the loose ends. The post-story is pretty great on the other hand, but it feels slightly unfair to credit Stormblood too highly just for having great Shadowbringers setup.
The GAMEPLAY on the other hand, that's a whole different story. Not only do you get into the levels where each job starts having quite a lot to do, but the boss mechanics start going crazy even in normal dungeons. The Trial and Raid bosses have some insanely flashy and cool moments, and many of the dungeons have memorable or unique moments even just in traversal. The breadth of content is also insane - not only do we get the standard-issue max-level dungeons, raid series, trial series (with extra dungeons included!), and Hildibrand (with duties!), but on top of that there's also a bonus Monster Hunter trial, the first Ultimate raid, a whole new Deep Dungeon, and an entire mini-MMO (Eureka) complete with an old-school WoW-style raid of its own. The sheer amount of content in Stormblood blows Heavensward out of the water, and the intensity level of that content is way higher on average which makes a lot of it really fun. This is also the expansion that added Blue Mage, so if you count that then it's an even bigger swath of content.
Overall this expansion felt very gameplay-first. If you're here mostly for the story you'll probably be disappointed until the post-expac story, but if you love hard bosses and having tons of stuff to do then this could easily be one of your favorite expansions. Personally I rate it lower than Heavensward, but not by much.
The story this time takes us to both Ala Mhigo and Doma, two places that we've had a lot of teasers for up until now, and tries to take us through the liberation of both from the Empire. While this sounds good on paper, in theory I feel that the writers bit off a bit more than they could chew here. Cramming all of the worldbuilding and story and liberation of two entire unrelated nations into one expansion leaves both of them feeling kind of rushed and underwhelming. More than anything it makes the liberation feel anticlimactic - and Ala Mhigo suffers from this much worse than Doma due to how the expansion's story is laid out. Ala Mhigo's story begins at the start of the expansion, and then right when things are starting to get interesting it gets put on hold while we go to Doma. The Doman storyline plays out from start to finish mostly uninterrupted, and then we pivot back to Ala Mhigo at the end. The problem here is that by the time we return to Ala Mhigo I've forgotten or stopped caring much about what was established there earlier, and the time between going back and successfully liberating the nation is so short that it ends up feeling way too easy. If the two nations' storylines played out in full one after the other it might've felt a bit more like two unrelated stories slapped together, but at least it wouldn't have undercut the climax so badly.
Related to this are my problems with Zenos. When he's first introduced as a powerful edgy pretty boy villain I was all on board - I am a Final Fantasy fan after all. When he beat me in battle multiple times I was excited to see how we would eventually defeat him. The answer is... you just kinda beat him. He comments about your time in Doma making you stronger, but why exactly would it have made me that much stronger? I understand that mechanically I'm level 70 instead of level 63 or whatever but that doesn't really jive with me as a canonical reason - if you start acknowledging levels in canon then you start needing to ask why there are packs of sheep in the sewers of Ala Mhigo that could easily defeat the Ultima Weapon. Sure I defeated a few primals in Doma, but nothing stronger than what I had already beaten dozens of times previously. I just don't get why my character went from barely being able to touch Zenos to suddenly winning.
On top of that, I felt like I was being teased with some master plan Zenos was cooking up regarding "The Hunt", and that I would be lured into a trap or he would have some way of quashing the rebellion at the last minute. But then "The Hunt" turned out to be just... fighting me. And he loses. And that's it. Considering that a number of earlier Ala Mhigan victories happened because Zenos intentionally let us win in order to facilitate "The Hunt", in retrospect it feels like the only reason we won is because Zenos is a total fucking idiot with regards to tactics and shot himself in the foot repeatedly for no reason. It's another thing that makes the Ala Mhigan story seem seriously anticlimactic.
Beyond that there's the other characters who by and large are, well, fine. Lyse is a perfectly serviceable shounen protagonist who's a little self-serious and fights for her friends, but I could never really shake the feeling that she was now a completely different character from the person I met in ARR. I know that's intentional, but it felt less like natural character development and more like a change of writers and of story priorities. If her goofy comic-relief personality still reared its head every once in a while it would feel more real. Alisaie is a little better in that she at least doesn't feel like her character was completely changed, and she's a good character overall, but she's a little too normal to be exciting, and she keeps getting random injuries that remove her from the story for long stretches.
The non-Zenos villains on the other hand are great. Yotsuyu and Fordola are the two best and most developed villains in the whole game so far and do a fantastic job of mirroring each other - they end up on fairly different paths by the end of Post-Stormblood despite having fairly similar upbringings and life circumstances. They were both highlights of the main story but their post-SB stories really shot them up into the highest tier of characters.
All in all the story was serviceable but really messy. A few more revisions could've done wonders for cleaning up the loose ends. The post-story is pretty great on the other hand, but it feels slightly unfair to credit Stormblood too highly just for having great Shadowbringers setup.
The GAMEPLAY on the other hand, that's a whole different story. Not only do you get into the levels where each job starts having quite a lot to do, but the boss mechanics start going crazy even in normal dungeons. The Trial and Raid bosses have some insanely flashy and cool moments, and many of the dungeons have memorable or unique moments even just in traversal. The breadth of content is also insane - not only do we get the standard-issue max-level dungeons, raid series, trial series (with extra dungeons included!), and Hildibrand (with duties!), but on top of that there's also a bonus Monster Hunter trial, the first Ultimate raid, a whole new Deep Dungeon, and an entire mini-MMO (Eureka) complete with an old-school WoW-style raid of its own. The sheer amount of content in Stormblood blows Heavensward out of the water, and the intensity level of that content is way higher on average which makes a lot of it really fun. This is also the expansion that added Blue Mage, so if you count that then it's an even bigger swath of content.
Overall this expansion felt very gameplay-first. If you're here mostly for the story you'll probably be disappointed until the post-expac story, but if you love hard bosses and having tons of stuff to do then this could easily be one of your favorite expansions. Personally I rate it lower than Heavensward, but not by much.