https://www.eurogamer.net/final-fantasy-14-like-a-tv-show-that-new-players-shouldnt-skip-through-says-yoshida
While this weekend's announcement of Final Fantasy 14's next expansion Dawntrail was huge news for fans, for new player…
This is a pretty good analogy. You could start watching "Stranger Things" from season 3, and you'd figure everything out well enough to follow the story, but the character interactions would be much less meaningful and you'd miss out on a lot of background details that make the setting richer.
Playing the game, it was clear to me that they didn't have the whole story mapped out in detail from day one. Minor plot threads get dropped and some of the lore isn't 100% consistent. But that's also true of a lot of TV shows with continuing storylines. On the whole, the game does an impressive job tying a decade's worth of expansions together into a single coherent storyline where each part builds on what came before. It's definitely too much of a slow burn in the beginning, but the setup eventually pays off and it's one of my favorite stories in all of gaming. Skipping to the last chapter would rob it of a lot of its impact.
When would you say that story really picks up? I played about half of the first expansion and so far it feels like typical anime craziness plot (not a bad thing, but makes it hard to see how the diffent threads interact).
You'll start to get hints of it later in Heavensward, but I'd say the second expansion (Stormblood) is where you start to really get a strong sense that the story has a destination in mind, and especially that the recurring villains have a more specific motivation than "serve the dark god."
The next expansion (Shadowbringers) starts off feeling like an unrelated side story, but then you realize that it's actually tying together some of the seemingly unrelated plot threads from earlier in the game by showing you a different perspective on the lore and some of the characters.
The last current expansion (Endwalker) is where you have to address the reason the villains have been doing what they've been doing, and it ties a lot of things together including the part of the story you're on right now. Without spoiling any details, suffice to say that Ishgard isn't the only nation that has a history with dragons.
There's always going to be a certain amount of anime craziness, but the big picture does come together much more than is apparent from where you are in the story right now.
I pushed through vanilla to get to Heavansward, because that’s where everyone said it was a truly astounding narrative experience. Got through it thinking.. that’s all? Got maybe 1/3 into Stormblood and burned out. At this time I can’t recall a single plot point from any of it except for dragons trading their eyes around like Pokémon cards for magic power. I sometimes feel like getting back into it to see the hype for Endwalker, but I worry I’ll be just as unimpressed, and have to put massive time in just to find that out.
I just never got it - I’m a huge FF fan and have played and loved every single game multiple times... 14 just does not do anything for me, from the gameplay to the characters, setting and story. The raid mechanics are fun enough to not feel like I’m wasting time, and the music is good. Am I just missing something?
In my experience 1/3rd of StB is the 3rd common point of burnout, because relatively nothing happens, Lyse is unbearable and the whole thing is like an exposition without substance (villians do not make sense since the player have already interacted with Ascians, which are obviously the real villians in every circumstance).
Well, StB itself is really just an exposition for wider world, as ARR was for Eorzea. Ascians plotline is obviously the main one and is the centerpiece of ShB and is basically resolved in EW. The exposition is long because the story itself is enourmous.