Shadowbringers Endgame BLEW ME AWAY! - Final Fantasy XIV
8Just finished FFXIV Shadowbringer's Endgame and Patch Story content - it completely blew me away! I share my experiences and thoughts.
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Here's a spoiler warning before I start, this is going to be a load of big spoilers for the full Shadowbringers story, so tread carefully.
Now that's out of the way... HOLY SHIT!
FF14 has been incredible and I've finally experienced the conclusion to our adventures in the other world.
• Enstenien & Gaius and the story around them was awesome
• The Eden raid fights were consistently great, probably the best set of 12 raid bosses the game has.
• Bahamut is back - and I don't entirely understand how.
• There's loads of references and themes from Final Fantasy 7 & 8, There's even a surprise guest that makes a return from my nightmares...
• This has been an awesome experience, and I live to feed off these feelings from games but they're few and far between.
• You know those amazing feelings you get experiencing an awesome game for the first time? Like(ff6 to ff10, Persona 4, Dark Souls) Got this feeling in ARR but it died off over time into Stormblood where I quit.
• I really like the direction the story is going, when I was playing I was tempted to pace this like a fine wine. But I've gobbled it all up
Now where to start? Well I don't really sleep in an normal bed, as a black mage and master of destruction I prefer the comfort of my coffin. I've got my own apartment and room in our Free company, I lost my house when I was unsubscribed from the game for too long.
Welcome to my room, here I house some of my trophies from past victories, and over here I have my original Final Fantasy 11 character with his terrible name, don't ask why he's dressed like a pig.
So I unlocked the two base level 80 dungeons, Akadaemia Anyder which awesomely had the Guardian Force Quezacotl from Final Fantasy 8, but I want to focus in on the Twinning dungeon, no dungeon deserves a music track as good as this. [show music] It takes place inside the alternative side of the crystal tower and we come across the pretty awesome boss - Tycoon which has a very similar design to Alexander.
Quick thoughts on this, It has Cids' colour scheme and even their team logo on the back of the boss, the original Alexander could manipulate time, so does Cid build this machine based on Alexander in the future? And this Tycoon has time travelled back to the past? I'm sure someone's already worked it all out in a reddit somewhere.
The next step in my adventures really begin with the Patch 5.1 story content. It starts off quite slow paced we're helping the recently reformed city of Eulmore, nothing too exciting.
But towards the end of the chapter we cross paths with the badass Dragoon Einstinen and we get to re-live his recent adventures. So while we've been adventuring in another world, in our absence Einstinen and Gaius have been saving this world and battling the corrupt Garlemond.
Shit hits the fan in the capital city of Garlemond, they come across it's leader Varis murdered by his son Zenos and the brawl commences.
Here in Shadowbringers I see each of our 3 fighters here represents an arc of Final Fantasy XIV - Gaius the manipulated villian of A Realm Reborn, Einstinen the villian of Heavensward while under the corruption of the dragon Nidhogg, and Zenos the major villian of Stormblood and just general monster.
This has got to be the greatest in game cinematic battle of Final Fantasy 14... so far. The entire Garlean army comes down on our heroes, we then get to play Einstinen as the two try to make their escape. This part is very reminiscent of the Praetorium dungeon it even re-uses the same music. After splitting up our boi Einstinen takes on a new type of Ultima weapon which also just so happens to be the final boss of the original Praetorium, so there's a layer nostlagia baked in this for me.
I gotta say this left me with overwhelming feelings of awesomeness and it's laying the path to the final expansion Endwalker which is starting to look very promising.
Come the next chapter of the story we see Ardbert's corpse possessed by the Ascian Elidibus he's the last of the big 3 Ascians. Ardbert was the original warrior of darkness who's spirit helped us throughout Shadowbringers, so it kind of sucks to see his corpse being used this way.
We also see my most hated Final Fantasy 14 character return... Asahi, he's such a weasel, I thought we finished him off in Stormblood....