MoofiaBossVal

The main story starts out and decent, but then I lost interest by level 94. The main issue is that there is little tension and there is no doubt that you will succeed. There is no impetus to turn the page to find out what happens next. "Will the heroes succeed?". As wonky as Endwalker's story was, at least it maintained my interest up until half way through the final zone. I came back and toughed through Dawntrail's story but never felt satisfied. As for the new characters, I liked Gulool Ja Ja, Koana, Bakool Ja Ja as a villain, Zoraal Ja in the first half, and Wuk Evu. Sphene was pretty and sounded nice. Unfortunately, the main character of the expansion, Wuk Lamat, never becomes very likeable. I enjoyed the new land of Tural, namely the new city and the first two zones, and the third zone kinda. I liked the Pelupelu, Moblins, and Mamooja. Once you beat the story, there is little content to do. You can farm the 400 FATEs required to buy the city music rolls (which are good and for the first time I finished all six zones to buy the city themes for my house), but the FATEs are boring. You either zerg down non-challenging bosses, or you mass pull and cleave down lots of fodder. It baffles me that the more entertaining FATEs and Critical Engagements from Bozja have not become the norm for open world content. Dungeon bosses were engaging enough but no one is going to do them over and over like with Variant dungeons, which at least had portrait frames and mounts to acquire. The new Viper job is fun and cool to play, particularly the Awakened phase with the blue shounen battle aura and the rapid dashes. Some of the new job outfits such as Samurai look good. The first trial boss (the big bird advertised on the cover) and the giant snake monster world boss had cool designs. Final boss design was decent. I like the new grass. First two zones look good. Overall looks visually nice. The Tuliyollal day and night theme and the Solution nine were very good, nice enough that I farmed 400 FATEs to buy the music rolls for my house. The music for the first two zones is also good. The town themes, dungeon mid boss, and final dungeon theme were also okay. However, it is disappointing how the night themes continue to be piano arranges which we already have more than enough of and sound samey. Another issue is that the expansion reuses a lot of really old stock music that has been long since exhausted, from cutscene music to FATE themes. For a game that charges $200 per year to play ($15 monthly subscription + $40 box expansion every other year), it is baffling how Nihon Falcom creates more new cutscene and regular battle themes every year. Overall kinda fun but I would advise waiting to buy until there is more substantial content out like the new Eureka zones and Variant dungeons.

EoD brings the least amount of new content and features of any GW2 expansion thus far. No new SPvP or WvW maps. No new raids or fractals. No new transformative PvE features like gliding or mounts. You're pretty much getting a glorified living world story pack with new elite specializations, and that's it. There are only 4 new PvE maps. Seitung Province looks okay. New Kaineng is a little cool but the futuristic cyberpunk aesthetic doesn't fit the franchise. Echovald Forest looks like a prototype HoT map. Dragon's End looks overall meh, and centers around a poorly designed meta event, though it does have a cool boss fight at the end. The level design isn't on the same level as HoT's map design. There are no adventures (minigames) packed into these maps like in HoT, or even races like in PoF's maps. There is no incentive to keep playing these maps once you get the hero points and mastery points. The music is unmemorable. There are a couple of nice ambient tracks that play in Seitung and New Kaineng, but I struggle to recall the rest of the soundtrack. The new elite specializations are a mixed bag. Many of them are thematically cool, but a lot of them are just mechanically broken. It has been 8 months since release and the Untamed still hasn't been fixed yet. Another problem is that the new EoD elite specializations are overtuned and have powercrept older elite specializations (let alone just playing a vanilla class with no elite spec). The EoD elite specializations are also underwhelming visually. The Untamed for instance has no animation on its new teleport ability, Unnatural Traversal, and has no new animations when equipping an Aurene Legendary (unlike every other class). The new Thief spec, Specter, wields a scepter but reuses axe animations, which looks odd. And so on. There are a few other miscellaneous issues. EoD maps are capped at 60 players. EoD maps are constantly closing, causing all progress on an event chain to be lost and you lose all of your built up fishing or bloodlust or Dragon's End stacks when switching instances. The ascended weapons for EoD elite specializations are gated behind fishing up rare fish that have incredibly low droprates. Spending two hours fishing for a stingray for your Untamed hammer only to never get it is very demoralizing. The story is very bad. It is 11 hours long but there is only 2 hours of cool adventuring: the setpiece with the airship fleet at the beginning, and then the final battle at the end. The 9 hours in between is spent standing around listening to the pathetic melodrama of unlikeable, narcissistic characters. Much of the dialogue is horrendously awful and not even the voice actors can salvage it. There is also a lot of swearing all of the sudden, not just in the story but also in outdoor events in EoD maps. Don't play EoD with your window or door open. It is hard to believe that the same people who wrote the vanilla game or HoT or even season 4 wrote the story and dialogue for this expansion. Narratively, End of Dragons is an unsatisfying conclusion to the game's storyline. I overall enjoyed EoD, but only just. I would only recommend it if you are playing GW2 and one of the elite specializations appeals to you, or if you really like GW2 and have played through all of the content up to EoD and just want a little bit more GW2 to play.

Same problems as Legion. Lack of content and most of the content is abysmal. Terrible systems and grinds. Needless reworking of classes that makes them less fun to play. Music is still bad. Only good thing I have to say is that it looks aesthetically okay, and the boss fights are decent.

Really mixed bag. The aesthetics are great, but you get three years of the same theme of demons, black rocks, and green lava. There is a tremendous drop in the musical quality of WoW coming off of the prior expansions. For the first time, I found most of the OST to be a dud. Classes were once again overhauled and gutted for no reason, when they were fine as is in prior expansions. There is more content than in WoD but the quality has not improved. The writing of the main story is really bad. Legion also really suffered from RNGendaries and artifact power grinding.

Aesthetically great, but this is the beginning of the sameyness. We had three years of orcs and their black engines of war and their red, firey fortresses. Then we got three years of demons and black rocks and green lava. This is the last WoW expansion to have a banger soundtrack. This is also the first WoW expansion that is mostly voiced. There was a dearth of content in this expansion. No reputation questlines as in the prior expansion. Also no big, fleshed out capital cities. The main storyline was aborted halfway through. The lead writer left and this is when the WoW lore starts going stupid. Lots of classes were overhaulled and gutted for no reason.

Great aesthetics. Fantastic music. Tons of good questing content. Good raids.

The combat is now somewhat fun. The sidequests are a step up from the two prior games, but there are still some stinkers mixed in there. The characters are fun, and the main story is overall good. It's aesthetically more interesting this time. Music is pretty good.

Same flaws as FC without the benefit of having a good plot. It's a 60 hour long game and the first 40 are bad filler. Only picks up towards the end and even then it's not very good. The best thing the game has going for it are the characters, and setting up the broader franchise storyline.

The combat is really rough. The sidequests are mediocre, just stick to the main plot. The aesthetics are okay. The characters look good but the environments are very bland and samey. The story later on is really good but the first 20 hours are a slog.

While the first 2 games were fantastic, 3 is where the saga starts declining. The game is 130 hours long, but the first 90 hours are filler and aren't very satisfying. Nothing really happens until the last 30-40 hours of the game, but even then the writing is really wonky and unsatisfying. The cast of the first two games is ditched for a new party, and they aren't as fun to hang out with. The chapters also drag on for too long and outstay their welcome, becoming exhausting half way through. This game makes the bizzare choice of ditching the locations of the first two games you had visited and built up an emotional investment in. The new locations are just aesthetic rehashes of old stuff, but without your emotional investment in them. Some of the new combat changes are good on paper, but the overall difficulty of this game is way too easy and you never really get challenged, unlike the previous two games. The English voice acting is a mixed dub. The old characters sound great as usual but the new characters sound really rough.

Even better than the first game. Great aesthetics, music, english dub, combat, and story.

Despite being made for the PSP, the game aesthetically holds up and looks pretty good. The soundtrack is bloody fantastic. The English voice dub is also stellar. The turn based combat is also really fun, especially building your characters, and the game can be challenging at times. The story is also pretty good.

The combat isn't particularly fun from a strategic standpoint, but the cinematic presentation of the battles is enjoyable enough. The game looks aesthetically great. The music is a mixed bag, with a handful of memorable tracks but the vast majority of the OST being forgettable. Nothing particularly bad, though. The story for the first two discs, and the first few hours of disc 3 is really good. You're constantly discovering new towns and kingdoms and meeting new characters. Once you return to Lindblum in disc 3, the story becomes about dungeon crawling and sort of falls apart.

The combat is meh and basically boils down to having two knights in front blocking the enemy's advance while your army of archers shoots everyone. Lots of sidequests but I couldn't be bothered because of how meh the combat was. Battles take 30-45 minutes long, sometimes an hour. The story is decent enough but there is only like 1-2 hours of cutscenes in this 50+ hour long game. That being said, the story is much more satisfying than Final Fantasy Tactics, as the story of warring kingdoms is not hijacked by demons half way through the game. I wouldn't recommend that you play this game based off of the story alone, though. You really have to like the combat. Doubt I will replay this game.

The only game I ever refunded. The gameplay was quite shallow, with only basic customization and little to no combos/tactical choices besides mashing attack. Boring levels. Boring story and only like 5 hours of it. The only postgame was multiplayer, and aside from a handful of maps and only two vehicles... yeah, there wasn't much fun to be had.

Combat is decent enough and doesn't overstay its welcome. Music is okay with only a couple standouts but the rest of the OST being forgettable. Game looks aesthetically great. Plot is nothing to write home about.

The actual gameplay is meh. The real time, hybrid MMO hotbar combat is unexciting and boring. You're very dependent on AI party members to do combos or to heal but half the time they're stupid and not using the abilities they should be using at the right time. There are lots of sidequests but they're mediocre "fetch X" quests with no real interesting stories. The game's main claim to fame is its cutscenes. They're very well directed, and help carry an incredibly stereotypical and rather meh JRPG plot by distracting the player with the sheer spectacle of it all. About half of the main cast is likeable, while the other half are deadweight duds. The direction of the English voice acting is very good, though. The setting is interesting on paper (what if the world was giants?), but in game you don't really get to see that. You mostly see your typical fantasy RPG environments. That said, the art direction is good enough to make them visually nice to look at. Music is a mixed bag. There are some really great tracks, a lot of duds, and then a lot of really bad music that makes you want to mute the game or turn down the volume. Also, during battle, there is a cacophony of voicelines going off. You get used to it but that doesn't make it any less unenjoyable to listen to.

The combat is REALLY fun but the rest of the game **** hard. The main appeal of the game is that rather than playing as a JRPG party of 6 characters, you instead lead a warband of 5 parties of 5 characters each. You lead a small army of humans, fat fishmen with giant axes, little frog people, and four armed lynxes in cinematic turn based combat while awesome powermetal music is playing. On that note, the game is great. The rest of the game is bad. The game does not explain its mechanics very well and you need to consult a wiki or a walkthrough to understand what is going on. The main story is about 20 hours long, and there is 80 hours of optional sidequests. The vast majority of the sidequests disappear if you progress the plot, so you need to consult the wiki or a walkthrough to figure out when to do each sidequest and where to go. Most of the sidequests are tedious "collect bear asses", and that brings me to the game's awful layers of RNG upon layers of RNG. Whenever you load into a zone, the game rolls a dice to determine which enemies spawn. Sometimes you might have to spend several minutes running through a zone to a monster's spawn spot to see if it spawn or not. Then you have to reload, and keep doing it over and over until the monster spawns. Then, if you kill the monster, there is a chance for it to drop the item you need. And then you need to do this several times until you collect enough of the items for turn in... about 50-60% of my total 100 hours of playtime was wasted on this. I would strongly recommend playing this game using a cheat program called TLRplanner, as you can force spawn the quest enemy and guarantee that it will drop its entire loot table. It also allows you to just straight up teleport to the monster and get to the fun battles part. You will enjoy the game so much more. Story: the setting is interesting on paper, but the actual story we get ingame is rather barebones. The English voice acting for the main characters and the villain is good, but ranges from "okay" to hilariously bad for everyone else. I played the PC port with an AMD graphics card and got screentearing. There was no option to stop it. I tried using the Borderless Gaming program to get rid of it, to no avail. I eventually just gave up and endured it.

The cutscene direction, the English localization, and the voice direction makes the story REALLY enjoyable to watch. Sadly most of the main party you're stuck with comprises dry, unemotive characters. Vaan is the only character who is allowed to emote, and if he wasn't there I don't think I would have made it through the game. Aesthetically, the game looks great. The soundtrack is okay. A little too noisy for my liking but nothing particularly bad. The gameplay is meh. I liked the open zones, but I'm not a fan of the MMO combat. It's not as fun as the turn based battles with the cinematic camera shots and stuff. If you do like the battles, then thankfully there are a lot of optional bosses for you to fight.

First, I'm going to talk about the actual game. The cutscenes are unskippable, which is aggravating on repeat playthroughs. The turn based combat is okay, but the presentation of the battles with the camera angles and the unique stuff that happens during story battles makes it fun. I quite liked how each party member was different mechanically, with only Waka using his ranged weapon or a magic user being able to hit flying enemies, or Auron using his strength to shatter armored enemies, whereas Tidus' attacks will bounce off of armor. The Sphere Grid is a fake progression system that has no actual choice or depth involved and only exists to waste your time. The process of filling in a spot on the Grid takes several seconds for what should be a one click operation, and that times adds up when you're filling in the grids of 7 characters. The game aesthetically looks gorgeous and still holds up, much better than the brown hyper-realistic artstyles that became popular later on. The music is a mixed bag. There are some really good tracks but there are a lot of stinkers that are grating to listen to. The English voice acting is... okay. The game is disappointing when compared to prior games, as the game is linear. There is no world map. You cannot pilot any vehicles. As for the story, it's okay. The characters are likeable enough, but the story really stalls out around the half way mark.

The story is pretty meh. Unsatisfying conclusion to the Ul'dah plotline from ARR. The trailers for Heavensward promise an epic war against dragons, but it never really happens ingame. I wasn't really into the aesthetics of grey castles and knights in grey armor and grey dragons. However, Heavensward brings with it quite a lot of content, much more compared to later expansions, so I view it more favorably.

Fun adventure story and lots of content, much more compared to later expansions.

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.

The MSQ story is a mixed bag. Sluggish pacing with long stretches where nothing happens. There is also way too many cutscenes. Felt like I spent more time watching a 20 hour long movie than actually playing the game. Lack of stakes. The ending is a less effective rehash of ShB 5.0's final act. The two new jobs: Reaper is fine. Sage is probably the most fun healer to play but that's a low bar given how bad healers have been since ShB. Compared to prior expansions where we got dozens of job questlines, Endwalker only gives us 5 role questlines and 2 job questlines. Sadly, the mantra of "quality > quantity" is not in effect here, as all of the questlines are pretty meh except for the melee DPS role questline and the reaper job questline, both of which are decent (but not great). The amount of content FFXIV expansions add has been declining with each release. Endwalker content patches haven't released yet, but going by the downward trend I'm not optimstic. Endwalker already has a noticeable lack in new armor sets, with most of the 6.0 dungeons reusing old sets. One of the 9.0 dungeons also did not get a new theme and instead reuses a year's old boss theme. The game director, Naoki Yoshida, sure likes to talk about how Square is reinvesting its profits back into FFXIV and that it has a bigger budget than ever, but the increasing lack of content we've been getting says otherwise. Will update when the expansion is over.