Endwalker broke me on many, many levels. It's a beautiful conclusion to the main storyline of final fantasy XIV, and I loved every bit of it. It really ramps up the spectacle for the final chapter and there were many moments I was in awe at what the game ended up doing. And it. Did. Not. Pull. Any. Punches. It is both painful and beautiful in equal measure. I lost how many times it made me cry. It keeps up the quality of combat from shadowbringers, and I can't wait for them to add more in the patch content. If anything, I'm a little bit sad that there will be more expansions and that the game cannot get a definitive conclusion, but I'm happy how they pulled it off.

One thing I immediately noticed when going into shadowbringers is that the pacing of the story is suddenly really, really good. There is never a single point in the story where I feel like I'd rather be doing something else. Not only that, the story glued me to my seat on more than one occasion. It really recontextualized how I view this game and its setting, and I fucking love it. The only complaint I can think of is that some side characters get less screen time than I felt like they should have, but even that's because I care about them so much.

The game takes the improvements in encounter design and player abilities from stormblood, and goes really far with it. The patch content duties are extremely fun, and both the trial and raid series made me actively lose my shit about how good they were. I really don't have much of anything negative to say, this is an amazing video game.

Compared to the excellent story of heavensward, stormblood feels much worse. It is still a good game and the character writing is still great, but the main story is merely okay. I feel like one reason for this is that they had given them two separate liberation storylines and it didn't make sense to handle them separately, but it makes the whole story feel very unfocused. It feels like an amusement park in that you are carted around separate points of interest and come out of it feeling entertained, but you don't get any deeper enjoyment out of it. The early parts of the story are even more of a slog than with HW. The patch content feels much more focused and has some of my favourite character moments in the game, but it feels a bit brief compared to all of 4.0.

The gameplay somehow improves a lot from heavensward. Something about encounter design really clicked, and all the new abilites you get are really fun. The two new jobs are some of my favourites. I enjoyed this expansion much more on a mechanical basis than the previous one, but it does not balance out the generic-but-alright narrative of 4.0 for me.