stroggo

I definitely vibe with this a lot.

Obviously I haven't done EX/Savage content at this level, but on the narrative side I definitely feel things have been lacking. Zero is a cool character, everything else is just okay. It felt like the last MSQ patch was meant to be the point where they humanised the villain beyond just 'big dude in silly armour' (christ, I've even forgotten his name) and it still just wasn't landing.

I definitely felt myself drifting through the raid storyline by the end, too. There were a few scattered fun character moments here between the WoL and the soon-to-be-Ascians, predicated on what you know and what they can only guess at, but the Ancients' characterisation felt pretty weak overall. Ericthonios's big crowning moment didn't really carry emotional weight so much as it reminded me "oh, right, that's what your whole deal was.". Also I really don't care how the magical macguffins got from A to B.

I've started logging in a bit more lately just to vibe and work on my gear, but apart from trying to solo Eureka Orthos, I don't really have any goals. It's all just Okayish.

I actually -liked- the island, but I can easily see how someone wouldn't. At this point it's basically reduced to a weekly stipend of firmament dyes and materia anyway, now that I'm done slapping furniture onto it.

I'm also basically checked out of the MSQ at this point. FF4 references would've made an alright trial series, it's not good enough to carry the whole MSQ. It's just... boring and the plot and main threat only really exists because we went and started it. I could make the same complaints about the raid series as well. The story's just... bad.

And don't get me started how the alliance raid is -really- weirdly positioned with the lore. They're burning 'the true identities of the Twelve' to say It Was The Ancients All Along, Again while not breathing a word about non-Eorzean entities. It's a weird sort of delving into some sort of 'truth of religions' which is at odds with how the game's handled people and their relationship to their spirituality up to this point.

If the beast tribes were bad, I definitely would've probably completely given up before now and gone to do something else.

Unfortunately, this is party finder at it's purest. It's 80% people who fall straight into the dunning-kreuger effect, and the other 20% can actually raid. No matter how hard the fight is, PFing is like placing your delicate parts in a vice and cranking it shut. Case in point, our static tank, who PFs on her native servers in NA, has only managed to get her first P9S clear just yesterday. I enjoy not having hypertension, so I avoid PF like the plague, unless my static buddies are PFing and want company.

Re: the post with Endwalker spoilers, you might want to put the meat of the post under a read-more or cw in case someone hasn't muffled the "endwalker spoilers" tag specifically. (You can just scroll past, true, but this makes it easier to!)