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One thing I really appreciated about the write-up is that you picked up on a lot of themes and characterisation that I only really saw looking back from far later in the story. People tend to look at big picture stuff for Stormblood, like the politics and big military stuff, but the questions of national identity, hope and despair under oppression, and especially the nature of everyone's favourite inspiring adventurer. People often compare the wol and Zenos, pretty obviously, and there's fertile ground even if there's things Zenos would never understand. The main thing I see, beyond surface level power and desire for action, is that the wol brings out the best in people. Being a solid rock of kindness and justice that pops up and solves problems does a lot. Ishgard follows in their lead and becomes a Republic. The villagers of Namai rise against their oppressors. Alphinaud gets over himself a little bit. An overly dramatic miqote faces his destiny and takes over the crystal tower to await the glorious future you bring. Et cetera. Meanwhile Zenos brings out the worst in people. Fordola gets trained into a vicious hound, full of bitterness towards her own people. Yotsuyu probably wasn't great before but Zenos twisted her into a spiteful tyrant specifically to be sadistic. And finally he can't see the wol as anything but another bloodthirsty, motiveless warrior and tries to bring it out of you the same way he set up for revolutions. Everyone will have their own views on how that went. Stormblood equivocates imperialism and cycles of more personal abuse, and it leads to some interesting places and ideas even if it's a bit less cohesive than other expansions. I think you're right about the lack of anything so emotionally resonant as earlier. I'd expand on it to say there's not really anything in core Stormblood to become a loving freak about, a positive of the other expansions. Watch out for Eureka though. Anyway sorry about that block of text, I've got a lot of empty time today. Enjoy the content firehose of post-expansion content.
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May 2, 2023 12:16
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They should have made an ff6 callback and had a little 16 bit mini game of you getting fish as gosetsu to give to yotsuyu.
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May 2, 2023 12:22
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Let's take a moment to pour one out for Our Friend, Zenos. https://youtu.be/w75RMP-4JJA In the end he was actually a very uncomplicated guy. He really did want just one thing, and you gave it to him. What a mess he left to clean up though. A lot has been said about whether Zenos is intended to be a dark shadow of the Warrior of Light or even an inversion of the concept of a video game player character. I think going through DRK 60-70 shortly before the showdown and using that to inform your own thoughts on what Zenos represents (and how to respond to him) is about as organic and thematically appropriate as any take I've seen though, so kudos for that! Despite this being the vaguely Hamilton-themed expansion (several quests are named after quotes from the play or song names), I did think it was a little funny that everybody singing The Measure of His Reach was more evocative of the climax to Les Miz. But happier because everybody's not, you know, dead. I hadn't thought about it before but I think you're right that Stormblood is missing the emotional high and low notes of Heavenward, in exchange for more thoughtful ones. That may contribute in an unspoken way to how some players feel 4.0 was a weaker expansion than 3.0. It certainly has several characters that generate Discourse rather than being unambiguous in what they bring to the narrative. Speaking of, those last two stingers are quite a thing, huh? Please look forward to 4.x! Thundarr fucked around with this message at 13:32 on May 2, 2023 |
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May 2, 2023 13:25
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OK, we've done the 'bad bits' of Stormblood (Zenos and Shinyru is glorious though - if you ever want to do an Extreme, Shinryu is an awesome one), time for THE REAL poo poo. Patch MSQ, Raid series, trial series, alliance raids... absolutely top tier stuff from top to bottom. Excited to see what you think of it, Sanguinia.
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May 2, 2023 13:32
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The thing about changing the lyrics of the already established national anthem to be about how great your conquerors are is actually the kind of crafty thing that real life expansionist domains sometimes do. I can not in good conscience just ignore Zenos's voice actor, but to me it was a groundbreaking performance for this game atop an extremely one-dimensional character. It was like someone felt like they needed a Sephiroth analogue for one part of the game's audience, and an Arthas analogue for the other, and decided they should be the same character. I don't hate him, I just don't care for his bullshit, but it didn't help that Heavensward and FF15 both delivered us villains who had legitimate reasons to feel wronged, so rejecting him was easy as pie. I've said it before, but to me the thing about Stormblood is not that you walk up to the people causing pain and suffering to a country and punch them in the face, it's that you pull together a country to stand up and do the punching. Ala Mhigo starts out simply not wanting to fight, and Hien left for the Steppe because he believed Doma was likewise fatigued with the grinder of rebellion to slaughter. The final attack in The Lochs shows everyone standing together in a way that just doesn't happen in Eorzea for what are usually well intentioned but ultimately flawed reasons. Which is to say, our people back home have a lot to learn from this moment. Another note: Shinryu is the first fight whose Extreme feels actually deserving of the title for going beyond tighter DPS checks and smaller mechanic windows. I won't give it away so you can see it yourself, but it's worth doing, even if unsynced, just for cinematic spectacle.
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May 2, 2023 13:32
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Stormblood was good. I did like the Doma part of it but I also kinda lost interest because of how it's placed until the return to Ala Mhigo which made me get back into the story. Zenos is a cool villain because I like the idea that compared to previous antagonists who have greater goals in mind, he just wants to have cool shonen fights with people which ends up making him be more of a personal villain to the WoL through a variety of reasons. Like most people, I chose to accept him because it's a cooler option and makes some sense if you've finished the base DRK story. Anyway, Shinryu! Big dragon, one of the superbosses of Final Fantasy V alongside Omega which is likely the reason why they fought eachother outside of story-related reasons because someone thought the two superbosses of V beating eachother would be cool or something but I could be wrong. You fight him in V in the final part of the final area of the game which is a giant area made of crystal in space, hence the design of the arena in the second phase. He's also incredibly important to the Fighting RPG series, Dissidia.
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May 2, 2023 13:33
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As always Sanginia, thank you for your work. This LP gave me another review of Stormblood and actually improved my opinion of it. Also since nobody mentioned it, the arena for Shinryu P2 is a direct reference to the Interdimensional Rift from FFV, which is where you find Shinryu for the first time in the franchise! It gives us too the idea that Zenos broke the boundaries of time and space just to have a cool battle arena for his freneval 
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May 2, 2023 13:40
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At the end, fulfilled by your beating his rear end so bad and unable to give you the same Zenos gives you the only gift he can think worthy of you, his friend: a gnawing gaping void where you should find closure, a desperate desire to fill what this hunt should have given you, a drive for more. It's such a darkly beautiful character moment that perfectly fits because no one in narrative understands that or could ever understand it. Lyse calls him a coward, Raubahns just glad the enemy commander is dead, Alphinaud is vibrating with frustration at the whole thing. The only one who might could understand is you. To him, it's such a deeply personal gesture from a man who has never truly connected with someone else. It's burgeoning on Romantic and romantic in it's own hosed up way RIP Zenos you were a wildfire burning brightly and destroying everything as you spread. ZenMasterBullshit fucked around with this message at 14:05 on May 2, 2023 |
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May 2, 2023 13:49
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After Ultima Weapon was a snoozefest and Thordan was a joke, I remember being surprised to get to Shinryu and he was actually pretty hard. Shinryu is, incidentally, a secret boss from Final Fantasy V that pops out of a treasure chest in the dungeon before the final battle with Exdeath and he opens the fight with Tidal Wave. Apparently, the writers wanted to convey a similar idea in Stormblood, so he pops right out of the box Omega sealed him in to be the final boss here! I believe Protostar is a brand new attack made for him for Final Fantasy XIV, unless I'm mistaken. On a different note, I imagine it's not just the fact that Zenos kills himself and avoids proper judgment. It's the fact that Zenos basically got everything he wanted before he died, gets to make judgments about you as a person that essentially go uncontested, and basically smiles in the face of all of the atrocities that he just committed. It's the most unsatisfying win you could've gotten against him, and he doesn't even care! Sanguinia posted:
 Beyond that, I'll say that Nero returning made me smile, while Gosetsu being alive was a bit of a harder pill to swallow given all of the punishment he endured before his "death". Yotsuyu still being alive made me sigh. Onmi posted:I think they made a good choice not to make any trial a normal-sized person, even a bigger-sized person like Zenos. There's just... too much awkwardness in the gameplay of it. If anyone remembers old Praetorium, hell, remembers Nabriales, basically a dude tends to become a cluttered loving mess with 8 people, especially if, like FFXIV, the move towards more visual on-the-boss cues is becoming a prominent design feature. In the end, you don't just have to view the trial from its narrative perspective but from the mechanical game design perspective. And then, from there, the Extreme design perspective. Do you really want to have 8 people trying to visual-tell and properly position a tiny dude? No shot it's a miserable concept. I feel like Nabriales works okay since he does float and he also teleports around, which helps keep him visible. That said, for characters who CAN'T teleport, like pre-Endwalker Gaius and Lahabrea, yeah, that would be a mess to keep up with. Onean posted:Fun fact about Zenos in Ala Mhigo is that he'll chase you a surprising distance out of the boss room before resetting. I remember seeing a version of this clip where they paused when he powered up only to hit sprint when he started running at them again.
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May 2, 2023 13:58
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I enjoy Zenos a lot, he's a very fun villain (especially with LAG going seamlessly from unnervingly subdued to absolutely ham during voiced cutscenes, I'm sure other languages have perfectly good actors who did good performances in a vacuum but LAG is really the only Zenos voice for me), and people can call him uncomplicated but I think the simplicity of his motive ends up being a source of complication for him as a character anyway. I understand why it doesn't always land, especially since 4.0 bit off way more than it could chew comfortably and that means Zenos is in many places subtler than other characters in the game (for all that he has the subtlety of a bat to the face) so anything less loud than his main motive is easily glossed over, but I think having a single very simple desire works out for him. About the only broad reading of him I will reject outright as wrong is calling him inhuman (I don't think anyone here has done that yet, but it's a super common comment made about him elsewhere) because it is a very important point for both him and 4.0 as a whole that his being human is an extremely important part of why he is Like That.
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May 2, 2023 14:16
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SirSamVimes posted:I love the fact that the game forces the time to night for the Cid cutscene just to make it absolutely clear that Nero is the kind of rear end in a top hat who wears sunglasses at night just so he can take them off dramatically. There's also dramatic lightning when he arrives onscreen, which makes the moment even better.
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May 2, 2023 14:24
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Shogeton posted:One of the things I also note, is that Ilberd is given a final indignity. The monster he created with the express purpose of causing terror and pain to the Garleans, and also everyone else, the thing he gave his life and soul to create, the physical representation of his hatred and spite, ended up captured and subdued by the Garlean prince, and was one of the major threats to the liberation of Ala Mhigo. one of the bits of the symbolism I really like, that the empire knows, embraces, and welcomes the empty hatreds of its victims. then it leashes them and sends them back out to fight on its behalf. Shinryu is the spiritual apotheosis of a Fordola or Yotsuyu: if all you have to keep you going is your anger, the empire is going to twist that into a not-entirely-unwilling servant. further FF trivia: Shinryu kicks off its fight in ff5 with Tidal Wave as well, except for being FF5 it is just an incredibly strong all-targeting attack. the story of most players' interaction with it is 'I bet that chest has something good in it' ->boss music ->tidal wave->Game Over. the fact that most first timers to Shinryu in ff14 get the same experience is a delightful touch.
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May 2, 2023 15:27
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My opinion on Zenos, and the reason why I chose to accept him and found a lot of common ground between him and the WoL, can basically be summed up with this comic page: There's a lot the Warrior of Light has in common with Zenos - at the time I saw his relationship with Fordola as a twisted mirror of my relationship with Alphinaud - to the point that I can't help but wonder the degree that their positions would be reversed if Zenos was allowed to go free, meet new people and find giant monsters to fight to his heart's content, and if the Warrior of Light was isolated and alone, almost like what their darker urges embodied by Fray desired, but now chained to a throne and a cause where they can never really explore their own potential like they could as a free adventurer.
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May 2, 2023 15:35
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I'll echo what some others have said and not only thank you for the LP (though we aren't done yet!), but also to note that this has made me appreciate Stormblood a lot more. Well, not so much on the Othard side of things, but there's a lot I either skimmed over at the time or outright missed in Gyr Abania that paints a far more complete picture. Official word of dev is that Stormblood was always meant to be the tale of Ala Mhigo, but they felt Ala Mhigo itself was too small for a full expansion, so they added a mirroring tale of Doma later on in development. I think you can see that narratively; once you get back to Gyr Abania the plot starts moving significantly faster; there's more bite to a lot of the subquests, things are more connected to the greater plotline, and you have great moments like the Lalafell Magical Artillery (which I remember adoring when I saw it in-game, both because it's obviously fun and adorable, but also because it helped sell the idea of this being an event that involves more then just your WoL). The Othard side of things is more scattered, and several area don't feel fully baked. And of course, they did my girl Lyse dirty. As for the ending, it hits a lot of high notes. Everyone uniting to sing the anthem is a great scene; Zenos denying you the proper end to the fight likewise works great for his character. I don't remember if I accepted him or not when I played; given my WoL as they've been defined by now, I think they'd definitely accept, but it is pretty great how I can see the case for players to take the other option. The end stingers were all pretty hype at the time, too. 4.0 has an uneven reputation as is, and I think 4.x's swings far more into HW's brand of "high highs and low lows," with people disagreeing with which parts are the lows, so it'll be fun to relive those in here, too. The stumbles aside, though, it's still a good story, especially for an MMO. The worst FFXIV expansion still stands pretty drat tall.
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May 2, 2023 15:52
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I identified entirely with Zenos because my main draw to the game for quite a while at that point was nothing but the most challenging fights. I loved savage raids and extreme fights and only gave a gently caress about them. Anything in between was just filler to click through. I appreciate the story so much more going back through it again, but Zenos nailed me, and the sadness that took me when he took his life was that I just lost my best friend.
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May 2, 2023 15:56
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Blockhouse posted:Shinryu was definitely a lot more of a threat on release, a huge difficulty spike compared to how baby easy Thordan and Ultima Weapon were even at launch. That's going to be a running trend with expansion final bosses from here on. Even discounting the number of attacks that break ground or knockback so there's no recovery, the other attacks HURT on people fresh to that level. My first time doing it (I came in during Shadowbringers) I think I died the most of any single fight I've done, and memory of that kept me from doing Extreme for a long time. Which is a shame because that fight has one of my favorite music/gameplay pairings of the whole game.
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May 2, 2023 16:18
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For all its faults I think Stormblood from the pre-Ala Mhigo cutscene ("Let no man say we neglected to knock!") through the end is a very fun and very thematically satisfying ending. Zenos fully revealing who he is, the Shinryu fight itself, the suicide, the true Ala Mhigan anthem, it all works really well, imo (save for the technical detail that FFXIV is not a game that can really depict thronging crowds, but that's not the Stormblood team's fault). I like Zenos a lot! Most people have gotten into what I think works well about him (his voice actor really runs away with it for sure), but I wanted to highlight a moment in this scene I personally really enjoyed: when I started playing FFXIV I fantasia'd over to hrothgar ASAP after finishing the free trial because I thought it was funny to be like "ah yes, the scions of eorzea, who have many times defended us from the beastmen and their primals, and their hero, a giant beastdude with a tiny primal following him". and of course this is something the game can't account for here, since hrothgar weren't added until 5.0, but at the same time it works perfectly with zenos, who repeatedly calls you a beast and an animal as part of his whole hunt schtick. his second line here was one of the few moments in the game i went "jesus this dude is being fully video game racist to me" at the same time he was trying to friend-murder me and it worked perfectly to draw together all the thematic elements of the expansion into this single fight, and did a lot to establish zenos not as strangely separate from the garlean empire's other representatives that we've seen but as their apex. having decided that they are superior, and therefore different from others, due to their culture and technology and third eye/no aether control/super tall deal, the garleans divided the world into two categories and arrogated to themselves all the traits they call "civilized" and attributed to their opponents all the traits they view as "savage". in doing so, they have hollowed out their own culture, but this hollowing works towards imperial ends, because it produces men like zenos who can be induced to try to fill the void their culture has left in them and reclaim their full selves through adventurist violence. after gaius's too-pretty praet speech about man "raising himself through conflict" and the lack of a verbal response to his ideology in ARR, it's nice that stormblood literally takes the helmet off the garlean empire to be like, yeah, there's no one cool trick to how these guys do empire, it's just racism begetting violence begetting racism all the way down, war is horrifying and not an advancer of civilizations. Valentin fucked around with this message at 16:24 on May 2, 2023 |
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May 2, 2023 16:21
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Still liked Stormblood a lot more than Heavensward, even after having it all play out again in more immediately back to back fashion for comparison. I'll queue for the Royal Menagerie once in a while just for the hell of it, though I am sad it doesn't destroy newbies as much as it used to, 'cuz I loved getting it in Trial Roulette in its heyday and dragging pubs bleeding across the finish line.Sanguinia posted:When the battle begins, quote:The final phase is frantic, but before we discuss that, I should bring up the change in music. The theme for this part of the battle is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRp3p7Cjp5A Anyway, Hogama posted:I'll try and remember to come back to this after the next update. It's not a spoiler to Sanguinia but I'm keeping tempo with the LP. And also speaking of Dark Knight, I can tell Sang already knew at the point of writing it up by the filenames, but still: The Measure of His Reach before you hear it sung, if you do your Dark Knight quests before Stormblood (the quest).
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May 2, 2023 16:21
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Valentin posted:(good post) Yeah, among the many ways I feel like StB is a direct answer to player response to the Garleans before this point, Zenos himself is probably the most on the nose about directly addressing Gaius's Big Fash Prae Speech—Zenos is explicitly a creation of fascism and imperialism, as much a horrifying product of his environment as his named underlings, a man who only exists because he was fed imperial brainworms basically from birth. The writers are basically saying "this is the kind of person the ideology Gaius espoused in Praetorium actually creates", which given the problems you pointed out with the presentation of that speech is an appreciated addition.
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May 2, 2023 16:42
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Monathin posted:I actually have mused on this a lot, especially as someone who is from the era of "choices in games matter". A lot of people feel cheated if an option isn't meaningfully different. And while sometimes that can be true, I think a lot of people undervalue what I call the "Choice Greebles" - the points that don't actually cause the narrative to pivot at all, but are there as a personal touch. They're there for you to decide what the journey means to you. They're a choice that only matters insomuch as they say something about who you/your character is and how you are approaching the game. "Clementine will remember this" Seriously, Telltale made a bajillion dollars on this exact thing, and almost as soon as they died from over-leveraging it people were getting nostalgic for it.
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May 2, 2023 16:49
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Yeah, Zenos is ultimately a good / fascinating character in my eye because he is ultimately the natural conclusion of fascism -- someone who completely gives himself over to might makes right, an ubermensch who embraces violence for its own sake.
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May 2, 2023 16:57
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Patch content woooooooo!
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May 2, 2023 17:29
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Ah Zenos, this is such a good finish to his tale. I am not sure if I rejected or accepted him, but at the end I certainly got that we were his only friend. There are many keys lines of the game, 'a smile better suits a hero' for one, and joining them is 'Farewell, my first friend. My Enemy'. To me its such a powerful moment.
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May 2, 2023 17:32
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I have to wonder why the songs use the word "Worm" instead of "Wyrm". Was there ever a statement on that?Valentin posted:the garleans divided the world into two categories and arrogated to themselves all the traits they call "civilized" and attributed to their opponents all the traits they view as "savage". 
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May 2, 2023 17:52
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This was a fairly common practice for the British Colonial Empire: Pick a local song that's very strongly tied to their culture, have a Royally Approved Songwriter come up with new lyrics to make it a paean to Empire, declare that the new official song and suppress the original lyrics. That said, another interesting contrast is the way it's sung. The Measure Of Our Reach is sung with military precision by a professional choir that's very much aware that they're performing for the Crown Prince who has a habit of murdering people who annoy him. It's pitch-perfect, but that very perfection alienates it. The Measure Of His Reach is sung as a nation's anthem should be sung: By a great mass of voices, very few of them actually talented singers, but the sheer number causes the tune to even out, sung by a people.
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May 2, 2023 17:53
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One thing I like, now that we've wrapped the base expansion story, is how we see the Warrior of Light's role expand from expansion to expansion. ARR - The WoL works on a regional level to help repel threats. HW - The WoL overthrows an entire nation. StB - The WoL is cross-continental and begins the steps of liberating a continent.
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May 2, 2023 18:03
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9.0: the Space Warrior of light aboard the battleship Wild Rose liberates the local Galactic Star Cluster.
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May 2, 2023 18:09
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Valentin posted:and of course this is something the game can't account for here, since hrothgar weren't added until 5.0, but at the same time it works perfectly with zenos, who repeatedly calls you a beast and an animal as part of his whole hunt schtick. his second line here was one of the few moments in the game i went "jesus this dude is being fully video game racist to me" at the same time he was trying to friend-murder me and it worked perfectly to draw together all the thematic elements of the expansion into this single fight, and did a lot to establish zenos not as strangely separate from the garlean empire's other representatives that we've seen but as their apex. Hell, I felt the same way when he said that and my WoL's a suncat. I never really got Zenos back when I was originally leveling through Stormblood, but on reflection he's such a great villain -- the apotheosis of the Garlean ideal in one murderous, nihilist ubermench.
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May 2, 2023 18:13
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A Renaissance Nerd posted:Hell, I felt the same way when he said that and my WoL's a suncat. I never really got Zenos back when I was originally leveling through Stormblood, but on reflection he's such a great villain -- the apotheosis of the Garlean ideal in one murderous, nihilist ubermench. He's a fun villain who is serious without taking himself overly seriously the way Gaius did. He's just there for the vibes and to have a good time.
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May 2, 2023 18:43
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Ran Rannerson posted:I am somewhat miffed you left out the part of the fight that I find bizarrely hilarious, i.e. the adds phase where Zenoshinryu lays eggs. I'm pretty sure I've seen some WoL x Zenos fanart where Zenos announces that he has borne children to the family, in that fashion.
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May 2, 2023 18:44
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Mordiceius posted:One thing I like, now that we've wrapped the base expansion story, is how we see the Warrior of Light's role expand from expansion to expansion. WoL going through the Heroic-Paragon-Epic tiers of dnd. 4th Ed Supremacy 
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May 2, 2023 18:51
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Its Rinaldo posted:WoL going through the Heroic-Paragon-Epic tiers of dnd. Agreed. Soon we'll be arguing about what the WoL's Epic Destiny is.
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May 2, 2023 18:57
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Ran Rannerson posted:I am somewhat miffed you left out the part of the fight that I find bizarrely hilarious, i.e. the adds phase where Zenoshinryu lays eggs. I honestly did not notice that he created those dragons by throwing out eggs that they hatched from instead of just summoning them, I had to go watch a video to confirm it. That's... certainly a choice.
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May 2, 2023 19:00
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wdarkk posted:Agreed. Soon we'll be arguing about what the WoL's Epic Destiny is. It'll be drowned out by arguments over whether the WoL plays too much like a video game character.
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May 2, 2023 19:02
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May 2, 2023 19:13
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Looking forward to your Eureka content sang!!
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May 2, 2023 19:32
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Sanguinia posted:I honestly did not notice that he created those dragons by throwing out eggs that they hatched from instead of just summoning them, I had to go watch a video to confirm it. That's... certainly a choice. Two things that are interesting about this. The first is that as has been, I think, indicated elsewhere (Encyclopedia Eorzea material, I think, at this point?) dragons are of course capable of asexual reproduction. But the second thing is that the fight still has Shinryu talking, not "Zenos." Zenos is riding around in and pulling the puppet strings of a dominated entity which nonetheless, at this point, maintains its own (very limited) identity.
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May 2, 2023 19:36
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my original experience with the Anthem cutscene was nothing but petty bitterness that Lyse was the one walking in front of the parade instead of me. "she didn't DO anything!! i saved this country, not her!! UGGGGGGHHH" absolutely none of Lyse's story landed well with me, right from the very get-go with the whole name change/dead sister thing. i never wanted to share the spotlight with an NPC. my WoL (back then) was a Highlander, and i was sorely disappointed that the game never once brought up that fact. i wanted to feel a bigger connection to saving my character's own homeland, but all that was dumped on the replacement character instead and it completely fell flat. i was very happy with her decision to leave the scions.
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May 2, 2023 19:40
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Blueberry Pancakes posted:I have to wonder why the songs use the word "Worm" instead of "Wyrm". Was there ever a statement on that? Wyrm and worm basically have the same roots though in modern times, we obviously prefer wyrm because it's all fancy and pretty as a word. As for worm over wyrm, I'd consider it sort of harkening back to Shinryu being a dragon of old, comparable to Midgardsormr rather than one of the many dragons of Nidhogg's horde. Kind of like, this ain't your dad or granddad's dragon, this is a biblical dragon, y'know?
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May 2, 2023 19:55
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Lyse is a symbol for Ala Mhigans in a way that the WoL is not and cannot be, and that's why she gets top billing in singing the anthem. Also why she chooses to leave the Scions. All the principal characters know and fully respect the WoL's contributions, Lyse included. Sometimes the person that did the most work is better off letting somebody else have the limelight!
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May 2, 2023 20:01
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