I loooove expressive boss fights. Breaking the battle halfway to introduce how the character's memories of despair are feeding into her pain is extremely cool! It's something I wish this game did way more often and maybe it will in the later content! That being said, the narrative just kind of flops. A trend for the Stormblood patches!
In this patch we learn that Yotsuyu's plot never really held any agency to begin with, but she was merely a pawn to be used in the bureaucracy of the empire (or the ascians? who knows!). This isn't to say that Yotsuyu has no reason to exist narratively. However, that reason is largely for her to bookend the Stormblood arc with a dump of memories aiming for us to feel sympathy for her. And....outside of the cool fight I mentioned I don't think it works that well.
I think it feels pretty cheap to spend an entire expansion fighting against a fascist tyrant, finish their arc, and then as an epilogue bring them back for a couple hours to give you a backstory dump to sympathize with them. If you wrote her trauma to engage with the systems of the world we have engaged in over hundreds of hours then maybe it would be better. If you integrated this with the story even the slightest during the expansion's narrative then maybe it would be more effective. Yet instead they just lazily throw in that her parents sold her to a brothel as a one note trauma-shock for the player to forget the bigger picture. Then she has to die again! There's no actual care to engage with her sale into sex work, there's no care to engage how those systems exist in Eorzea. It's really just a one minute note and I think that's so lame!
Right now I am most interested in how the alliance between Doma and Garlemand may lead to displaying how the tensions of bureacracy restrict actual material action from happening. However, Asahi was the primary character expressing that area and he's gone now so we will see what happens!
Haven't done the guest designed Ivalice dungeon but excited to!
In this patch we learn that Yotsuyu's plot never really held any agency to begin with, but she was merely a pawn to be used in the bureaucracy of the empire (or the ascians? who knows!). This isn't to say that Yotsuyu has no reason to exist narratively. However, that reason is largely for her to bookend the Stormblood arc with a dump of memories aiming for us to feel sympathy for her. And....outside of the cool fight I mentioned I don't think it works that well.
I think it feels pretty cheap to spend an entire expansion fighting against a fascist tyrant, finish their arc, and then as an epilogue bring them back for a couple hours to give you a backstory dump to sympathize with them. If you wrote her trauma to engage with the systems of the world we have engaged in over hundreds of hours then maybe it would be better. If you integrated this with the story even the slightest during the expansion's narrative then maybe it would be more effective. Yet instead they just lazily throw in that her parents sold her to a brothel as a one note trauma-shock for the player to forget the bigger picture. Then she has to die again! There's no actual care to engage with her sale into sex work, there's no care to engage how those systems exist in Eorzea. It's really just a one minute note and I think that's so lame!
Right now I am most interested in how the alliance between Doma and Garlemand may lead to displaying how the tensions of bureacracy restrict actual material action from happening. However, Asahi was the primary character expressing that area and he's gone now so we will see what happens!
Haven't done the guest designed Ivalice dungeon but excited to!