Disclaimer: I am not a high-end raider. This is all from the perspective of a casual player. I played this game for 3.5 years. TL;DR this expansion sucks. I have actually fallen asleep going through quests in this expansion.

Coming back to this game (and this review) after 6 months to grind a bit for mogtomes---my opinion on this expansion has not changed much. Outside of raiding, there is virtually nothing new for casual players to do. Gameplay is still the 1231231234123-type gameplay we've known for years, and dungeons are still straight lines so your female au'ra dark knight can waste no time getting back to afking in Limsa in their dollskill-tier "goth" glam as soon as possible. It seems the developers have taken notice of that, as they're dumbing down old content and completely revamping PVP maps that don't need it because I guess the community is too stupid to look at their map for more than 5 seconds and actually PLAY the game. If they change up any of the Stormblood trials to compensate for the fact that trust AI is braindead, it will spell the end of any remaining fun content in the game.

There is little reason to log into this game every day. In fact, now that I think about it, I haven't seen any hunt trains whatsoever in the 2 years since this expack came out, and I played for a good year after I finished the main story. Yes, I am well-aware of their "we want you to play other games!" spiel and lots of people LOVE whipping that one out to deflect criticism, but that doesn't change the fact that the content they're putting out is sloppy and low-effort. New content can be beaten in a 2-3 weeks, maybe even a week if you feel like it, and the patch cycle is every 5 months. Who is this game even for anymore? Where is the longevity, the challenge? Casual players won't stick around for short-lived content and hardcore raiders won't stick around for half-assed raids. If FF16 isn't taking developers away like people deluded themselves into believing, what the hell are they doing over at Square??? WHY DID IT TAKE 10 YEARS TO ADD PHYSICAL/MAGIC ATTACK INDICATORS???? This is THE most profitable Final Fantasy game TO DATE. Where is the money going? Modders can fix up the game's horrendous UI (amongst other things) in a few days, but the developers drag their feet and claim "it's too resource intensive :/" when asked about QOL changes.

The story right now is just FF4 fanfiction, and quest design has gone down the tubes (it was never that good in the first place, honestly. I don't know how I put up with it for 2000+ hours). I'm not sure how many more "go talk to person A, talk to person B, report to person C and go back to A" and pseudo-stealth quests I can handle. Alongside this, the whole "power of friendship" theme is getting a bit tired. Using it as the main theme of Endwalker and now FF16 has turned it into an empty platitude and made the writing painfully predictable. I have no issue with this sort of story, but when it's poorly executed (like how this and 16 was) it starts to get grating. It's such a messy wrap-up of a decade-long story that it's actually incredible. They spent 10 years beating into our heads that summoning primals is bad and tempering is dangerous but at the end of 6.0 they summon Garuda and all the other primals to hitch a ride on our spaceship because who gives a single flying fuck about consistency anymore. I don't even remember WHY they summoned them in the first place. Aether supply, maybe? That's usually how they weasel their way out of bad writing. Things happen in Endwalker not because it's the natural flow of the story, but because the writers needed it to happen. For example, the threat of the Telophoroi is instantly negated within 5 minutes of MSQ because we just so happen to create this invincibility device that we just so happen have the ability to mass produce. Crisis averted! Zenos can also bodysnatch people for whatever reason. He had ample opportunity to throw the WoL off the nearest cliff or incapacitate a Scion, but no, he decides to just stand and stare at them like a fucking moron. God forbid we have any stakes in the literal end-of-the-world expansion, right?

In conclusion, after 3 years of this game, I think I'm ready to throw in the towel. Unless they drastically overhaul the gameplay system, the quest design, get better writers, and actually give Y'shtola a fucking character arc because it's been 10 goddamn years and she's still a cardboard cutout (and kill Thancred because he sucks), I don't think I'll be coming back to this game anytime soon. A shame that it ends like this because I really did enjoy the game prior to this expansion, but with the dumbing down of content, said content being formulaic, and the devs barely taking feedback, I don't see the point in dropping $15 to play this game anymore. I wouldn't mind a week-long subscription to be quite frank, since that's about the amount of time I play this game anymore. They already nickle-and-dime you for basic shit like changing your name ($10 btw) and transferring worlds, what's a $5 sub tier going to hurt?

If you read this far, thanks for sticking around, you also probably think I hate this game, and if you haven't played any FF games before, I would not recommend this as your first. It is nowhere near the other FFs in terms of quality, so play literally any other game in the franchise. Any criticism of this expansion, whether it be about the lack of content or said content being lackluster is always met with "Just play another game", or "Just do old content!" and it drives me up the goddamn wall. This is an EXPANSION, it's supposed to add NEW content to keep you playing. Telling people to just play old content defeats the purpose of an expansion pack and is also a blatant deflection of criticism. I don't really care if it's "kino" or whatever you lot describe everything as, Square isn't going to give you a sub discount for defending their milquetoast output. Maybe I'll actually sub again and go through the rest of the patches to write another review before Dawntrail, but I literally had to drag myself through the first few awful post-patches in 2022 before I just quit the game completely. It truly blows my mind that people praise this as one of the best JRPG stories ever written. Sure, if you haven't played anything else! Anyway, the music is the last remaining positive of this game, and even that is wearing thin. There's more to music than nondescript chanting vocals.

One of my favorite games ever. I first played this in 2020, but for whatever reason I didn't finish it until 2021. I think it was because of the framerate issues that made the game a powerpoint presentation and the fact that I hadn't played a Wii game with the nunchuk control scheme in well over a decade.

This game has so much charm. I think the character development of Zael and his friends is what made me love this game so much. In the beginning, Zael's mercenary group gave off the vibes of "We're only together for the job, we're not really friends", but by the end of the game it's clear that they truly care for each other. I thought it was really sweet.

This game isn't very hard, in fact I learned that one of the jokes people made about this game was that it was so easy it practically played itself. It's also only 25 hours long, so if you want an RPG but don't want a 100 hour game then this is perfect. The only times I struggled was during the Kraken fight because of the wallrun move's wonky detection and the Zangurak fight because of the sword-stealing mechanic. Fortunately by the climax of the story, the game dumps experience points on you, so I was able to get leveled up from lvl 35 to 60(?) in the last stretch. I never tried out the multiplayer because it obviously requires homebrew and I didn't feel like doing that.
Not a day goes by where I don't think about this game. Mistwalker loves developing games for systems that nobody has or for systems that are on life support. Please play it.

Massive wet fart of an ending to a 10 year long buildup. Things are introduced and never brought up again, Zenos can body-snatch for some reason, hey we just killed a god on the moon, we should go back to earth and check things out, nah let's go hang out with these obnoxious rabbits for 20 quests! The writer's aversions to killing established characters is greatly harming this game's writing and story potential. Obviously, killing off main characters doesn't automatically make the story good. But with a character like Yshtola having a fake-out death in every single expansion, can they at LEAST shake things up for once?
The fanservice by the end was lowering my already low opinion of this expansion. Zenos waltzes into Sharlayan despite being known far and wide as an extremely dangerous person, and the people in Sharlayan just let him hitch a ride to the WOL? Why???

Elpis was okay I guess. Everything bad in the universe being caused by a socially awkward bird girl who we just met 10 minutes ago is kind of....not a good explanation at all. They could've improved it with creative shots of a blue bird or a blue feather interspersed in cutscenes leading up to the arc, but I suppose symbolism is lost on this community, considering there are people who genuinely think Zenos is the next coming of Sephiroth. Hythlodaeus was obvious fujobait and neither he or Emet contributed much to the plot except for blatant fanservice. I barely remember Hermes because I was just so bored at that point it went in one ear and out the other. Post-patch story also blows but I haven't played this game for any more than 20 hours this year so I'm not writing about it (yet).

Gameplay is okay. They keep homogenizing the classes into "build up gauge to use big move" and it sucks really hard, but the trials and content make up for it a bit. ONLY a little bit, though. The Aglaia raids were supposed to match Ivalice's levels of difficulty, but they very much did not. It started off strong but petered off into ARR-esque AOE dodge fests. I didn't finish Panda raids so I don't have much of an opinion on those.
As another review said, there is no real action or combat in this game, just dancing around mechanics and keeping your rotation up. Customization is practically nonexistent in this game. Gear progression is an unending uphill trek, which is standard of MMOs but that doesn't mean it's not boring.

If this is your first exposure to Final Fantasy, there are way better games to play in this series. The constant catering to people who do nothing but afk in Limsa for 8 hours a day is starting to really harm this game.

What would you do if you were standing over your kid's grave, mourning him and reminiscing about the memories you have of him, and your new wife next to you says "I want you to cum in me and impregnate me". What would you say.

Actual review: Extremely sloppy story, for example why does Ethan have blackouts? Oh it's a cut story element! Leave the cutscenes in, make your bad story even more confusing because who gives a fuck! Characters are paper thin and talk to themselves CONSTANTLY (fuck you Cage for damning us with this trope). Madison is a journalist, apparently, but it's only mentioned once and then she's Ethan's sidepiece for the entire rest of the game.
The color palette ranges from a dark grey to grey-brown. Better enjoy that opening cutscene because they're the only vibrant colors you'll ever see in this dogshit game. Voice acting is mediocre, nobody can seem to pronounce origami right. Dialogue is terrible. Overall garbage game and I truly wonder how Cage was allowed to have a career after pushing out said piece of garbage and I immediately ignore the opinions of those who say this is good.

Really good. Love the noir writing, even if it does get cheesy at points. The comic-book style for cutscenes added a ton to the atmosphere, and the loading screens are beautiful. The spattering of white paint/filter to look like snowflakes was a genius idea. Movement is kind of janky though, it's difficult to keep running in a totally straight line. Whenever I walked on a narrow pathway, Max seemed to like tripping on his shoelaces and plummeting to his death. The first baby maze turned from "oh sweet cool set-piece" to "this fucking sucks" because of the movement and constant lag. The sight of him flopping around on the ground after a shoddy bullet time is pretty funny though.

The PS2 port, however, is a piece of garbage. I am not a 69 terashits per megafart type of gamer, but man does this game turn into a powerpoint presentation sometimes. It runs at 30 fps except when you're around fancy lighting or whenever you're in a fight, the latter being nearly every 10 seconds. The Lupino fight nearly made me nauseous because of how laggy it got and I was incredibly worried my 23 year old PS2 was going to shit the bed right then. I couldn't be bothered to keep restarting the final level because of the combination of terrible lag, console aiming, and the adaptive difficulty not adapting so I just turned on infinite health and blasted through it.

Besides that though, I enjoyed this game and I now understand why people love Remedy's games. Not sure if I'll play 3 though because I reallyyyyy do not like Rockstar's games. 1 star off for the horrendous PS2 port and wonky movement.

Legitimately awful gameplay. I loved everything else, I like Caim and Inuart, the cutscenes are great. I even like the soundtrack!
But goddamn, I think I learned to time travel playing this game because I would spend 15 minutes on a level and the timer at the end would clock it as 30 minutes and vice versa. Was it my PS2? Was it the game? I will never know, because I sold it not too long after this.
At some point in the game (it all looks the same) I used magic to maintain some crowd control and pressed pause quickly after, and the game froze for about 10 seconds. Can you really be surprised that there are "I've only played Automata" Taro fans when this is one of the games he has to offer? I am honestly impressed that he managed to have a career in the industry after this piece of trash. I would rather have him make another one of these though instead of working on a Japan-only mobile game that gets shut down within 10 months though.
Again, everything else is good, and I understand the message Taro was trying to communicate with the repetitive gameplay and long levels, but you actually have to make a playable game to communicate these themes. Just watch a playthrough on youtube and save yourself the effort.

95% of the reviews for this game: no you don't get it the gameplay and controls are SUPPOSED to be absolute dogshit, the game lagging when you use magic and sound effects blowing out your speakers is an artistic choice. Having only 4-5 moves in a combo is good gameplay gaiz!!111

Quitting a game that plays like shit=/=being filtered, please play an actually difficult game for once in your lives.