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.