Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers

Shadowbringers is a step above anything that has come before it. The perfect blend of captivating gameplay and a truly memorable story that rivals those heralded by fans for decades. It’s time to step out of the shadows and become what you must Final Fantasy XIV; the best MMORPG in the world.

Shadowbringers has only further solidified XIV's status as one of the greatest Final Fantasy games ever made.

Shadowbringers is not just a fun and juicy MMORPG thanks to some intuitive design choices and amazing dungeons and encounters, but also a different take on the overindulged "hero saves the world" story with lots of twists and turns.

Shadowbringers is one of the best MMO-Addons, we have ever played. The emotional main story is breathtaking and in its own right the best reason to play this game. Moreover, there is so much great content with the new zones, dungeons and raids or fresh features like the Trust System. A Must-Play for every MMO-Fan.

Final Fantasy 14 set a high bar with its previous expansions, but Shadowbringers stands above the rest. Expected additions come in the form of new regions and the new jobs, Dancer and Gunbreaker. Both bring their own flavor to the game, though the Dancer is the standout. More importantly, Shadowbringers tells a tale that not only contains some meaningful real-world connections, but also provides an experience that's firmly Final Fantasy-esque. Great writing, solid voice acting, and an excellent soundtrack wrap Shadowbringers up in a package that should satisfy Final Fantasy 14 fans and neophytes alike.

The new features included in Shadowbringer further refresh gameplay and storytelling of this remarkable MMORPG. Even with the typical weaknesses of the genre, which however requires several hours of repetitive activities such as FATE events and secondary quests to level up, Final Fantasy XIV still proves to be among the best massive multiplayer online experiences, especially together with a close-knit group of friends.

The active story events of ShadowBringers are good fun, but due to the grinding nature of the genre, it suffers from some terrible pacing issues. If you are invested in FFXIV, this DLC will probably excite and please you. It's a fun but forgettable romp that runs just the wrong side of boring during its hours-long retelling and bland A-B mission style. If this tickles your fancy, be sure to start and play with a team of friends - it will easily be 10 times more enjoyable, if infinitely longer.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

An MMO expansion is not just its story. Yes, the 5.0 MSQ storyline is great. Yes, the 5.1 through 5.3 storyline is overall good. However, the rest of the expansion was noticeably lacking compared to prior expansions. We've gone from getting 3 dungeons per patch, to 2, to just getting one. Instead of getting 4 grind zones, we instead only get 2. No Hildibrand questline. We went from getting dozens of job questlines, to only 4 role questlines and all of them are meh, not even scratching "decent". Instead of getting 3 jobs, we got 2. We get fewer new armor sets and more recolors of old stuff we already got. There is a noticeable lack in the amount of new music produced for ShB, with one trial boss reusing the generic dungeon boss theme, the 5.3 trial boss not even getting a second theme for his second phase, no new dungeon boss theme for 5.4 and 5.5 dungeons, and Bozja pretty much just reusing FF12's ost.

Ok, first of all Story is a goddamned gem, 11/10, beautiful, pulls all your heartstrings as long as you're already emotionally attached to the characters, one of the best Final Fantasy stories ever created, and by far the best MMO story I've ever experienced. Now that we got that out of the way let me tell you why this isn't a 10/10. Well for starters it's the formula. it is the same formula that we already got used to over and over the years. The maps are still the same old, you do killing events for mediocre rewards that have no actual soul put into them, the maps feel static, dead. The classes got a bit of revamping but mechanical wise they are the same, except now they are normalized and each class does whatever te other class of the same type do for the sake of "balance". Well, it just made them boring. No, it did not make them faster to play as some in here might make you think, there are still GCDs and the rotations work the same way as before, the core class concept was not changed at all. The graphics, well, if you like the graphics from ARR, HW and Stormblood then you're gonna love the ones we have right now cause they are absolutely the same. MMOs nowadays upgrade their textures, meanwhile, FFXIV still is pixelated as crap. After 6 years they haven't updated their engine at all, they still have several limitations from FFXIV 1.0 and I doubt they are ever going to fix them until they make a new FF MMO. Seriously don't even get me started at looking at the game from above (flying) it looks like a game from 2008. Yes the art style is awesome, yes once you get used to it it gets a little better but whether you agree or not it doesn't matter, the textures are not in a place where a 2019 game should be.

If you don’t like the Trial / “Realm Reborn” take my word, you won’t like any of it… New players hope you are ready for 200+ hours of MSQ which is mainly reading text. I fell for the recent hype. To all the people who says “it gets better” seriously, what is wrong with you? This constant insincerity is what kept me going. IT DOESN’T GET BETTER (a least to the point it serves as a valid argument). I just finished Shadowbringers 5.5 MSQ, and let me tell you, this is an “interactive Novel” more than it is a video game. Sure with each expansion the game (novel) gets a little better, in terms of graphics, animations, storytelling, but the CORE of the game doesn’t change, it is still this outdated mmorpg tab targeting, with its main FOCUS on MSQ, which is basically walls of text. Your quests in order of occurrences is: talk, travel, click objects, kill NPCs, do dungeons/trials/story instances. They added one different mechanic in Stormblood lol, which is to “click stuff in FPS mode”. I can count the EPIC moments of the story in one hand! 3 of them were in Havensward and 2 in Shadowbringers (forget RR and SB). The main focus of this game is the MSQ, but the problem is; the MSQ is 90% fluff pointless writing and storytelling, you could cut out 80% of this writing and still get a concise accurate description of the story, albeit just more on point. What Square Enix is doing is inflating game time content with more and more text and sloppy animation screens, which I’m not kidding stretches the MSQ than it really needs to be. I’m not even talking about important background build up, I’m talking about content you won’t even remember because it served no purpose in the grand scheme of things. (Anything you wont remember a month from now isn't worth reading about). Because the MSQ is mainly storytelling, and single player orientated, why not just play better solo video games that are much, much better technically advanced in gameplay, like GTA 5, Witcher 3, red redemption 2, and hundreds of others titles? There were times I was so desperate to just “play” the game, because there is so few dungeons/trials and killing quests in-between all the walls of text. One could always pay a story skip potion, but the fact is MSQ is the focus of this game, the endgame is extra stuff. Players and Square have both said that MSQ is the focus of the game, and the more casual player base. WoW = focuses on repeatable endgame content after a short introductory (and often crap) storyline. FF14 = 200 hours of MSQ (at minimum) at which point you can cycle through some endgame content and get max ilvl gear fairly easily. But levelling others job/crafts, which has its own questlines seems be one of the most popular things to do. I won’t be buying Endwalker. People who enjoy reading fluff for hundreds of hours to see one good cutscene here and there, you do that, enjoy! I’ll watch it in a recap YouTube video and do more productive things with my life than read FLUFF MSQ content, which is intentionally used to extend game play time. “You can always make more money, but you can’t make more time” think about if you’re really enjoying that 200 hours or if you’re only enjoy small amounts of it. Whilst the epic moments were epic, the pain of going through so much unfun content to see it was not worth it. The balance is definitely not there. Even most fans think the post RR quests are so bad, yet square hasnt fixed it by just removing it for new players short narration cutscene to bring players up to date for havensward. (And i heard it was even worse, oh dear God).

Great story, great raids and dungeons, great content. The best online game experience out there. EDIT: For quite some time I would have rated it 10/10 BUT: Square simply can't make content work. The new resistance weapons are a senseless grind (completing raids over and over) and require you to play bozja - which for itself isnt bad BUT: Players only join and ask for the big event and dont play the zone whatsoever, the event has a player cap which locks unlucky players out... The new content delivered during the current update and the current patches is nothing but a senseless grind in content, which square tries to make interesting again, but turnes out to be a total catastrophe and not fun in the slightest. Raids and Trials (even extreme, savage and ultimate) are far to easy. The ignorance on squares side to bring features to the game, the biggest part of the playerbase would like to see shows their low appreciation for their customers in a perfect way. The only thing that keeps me playing are friends that still play, the content simply cant entertain me anymore.