Cleretic, FFXIV Lore Dork 🏳️‍⚧️

It's got a weird niche fishing reference, so yes!

Azz figures out where Calyx is because she just rage-doxxes him

He's in EVERY Forum scene, framed pretty much perfectly to be noticeable but never the focus.

They literally framed all those scenes to make a tiny portion of the playerbase frothingly mad in a way nobody else would notice, it's so good.

I weirdly had the same feeling as a kid despite living in Australia.

Suburban people are the same everywhere but with different accents, I guess.

A lot of them definitely expect you to, but if they made the game they think they made is up in the air.

FFVI really expected you to be using the whole crew! ...but that's not the game they designed, the Tower and the Phoenix Cave are the only reasons you'd even bother leveling more than one team.

That's great, but only if you have previous incentive to use them, or ways to catch them up. Otherwise you end up with 'Level 12 Joe Fucko with a weird gimmick I didn't jive with now has to compete in the endgame'

A repost for the later crowd!

Putting aside everything about the story, I expect 7.3 to be a champion of 'WoL screenshot opportunities' in the future, there's some real good shots in this one, and I couldn't help myself but to include one.

I love Eureka Orthos' lore so much. Just out there entirely recontextualizing an ARR relic weapon outta goddamn nowhere, in the middle of Endwalker.

YouTube video by Cleretic FFXIV 7.3 Lore and Story Reactions

New FFXIV video day! Patch 7.3 has happened, so let's talk about everything we learned, all the stuff that happened... and, somehow, a weird amount about 25 year old sidequests from an entirely different MMO!

youtu.be/8XHiHS70Q_0

#ffxivlorevids

This is a problem that plagues Mario Maker, too. Good luck finding GOOD levels in that game that aren't Kaizo challenges.

The Field Station in 7.1 is an underrated approach to dungeon storytelling, though, that manages to articulate the story of the place you're in without a single line of speech, and should be looked at just as much.

I stand by calling them all 'Villainous Monologue Dungeons' (granted Subterrane isn't a monologue per se), but I do think they're worth looking at as a way to tell a story in a dungeon, which usually doesn't happen; dungeons are often a story-less experience that might have one story-relevant boss.

Honestly I even find the Azim Steppe an unimpressive pitch, but that's more of a 'meh' than active dislike.

Now you're just making me think I should pick FFX-2 up again, I dropped it once I realized I missed Paine's special dressphere.

There's absolutely a tier of media that everyone recognizes is great, but because of that nobody actually discusses WHY it's great, it's just accepted as fact.

It's why I've been working on a Shadowbringers critique for ages. People just accepted it as 'Best MMO Expansion' and never discussed WHY.

People love to flatten Ishikawa's work down to the two stories most alike in themes and perceived quality: Shadowbringers and Dark Knight. Largely to claim she's 'the good writer'.

Adding in the likes of Doma, Astrologian, and DT MIN/BTN just makes it harder to make blanket claims, so they don't.

...in retrospect it's a little weird that both Rockwell and Rickman were in both the HGTG movie and Galaxy Quest, which feel like very adjacent movies.

I think a lot of the reflexive dislike came from people not realizing that it was respecting how Adams did adaptations. Every version of HGTG is really different, because Adams liked every version playing to its medium's needs and strengths.

Also I have to add: Alan Rickman as Marvin, 100% perfect.

It feels like a backend technical problem that's somehow become actual business speak. Like they started using 'HD games' as the label back when it made sense to make the differentiation, and at this point it'd be more trouble than it's worth to rename the category and update all the hyperlinks.

More accurately, I think it was 'you fight the villain properly, and then THE VILLAIN'S GONE'.

Because I can think of other MMOs at the time that did one half of that, but not the other.

So Long is him really wanting to write something different, but still being willing to play ball. You can see the will to move on in retrospect, but he was honestly trying to bring us with him in that.

Mostly Harmless was ABSOLUTELY him making an entire book of 'please let me stop writing this'.

If you actually WANT to watch this self-destruction in a way that's still engaging: the Hitchhiker's Guide books. The last two by Adams, and ESPECIALLY Mostly Harmless, are written by someone who really wants to be done with this and go home, and who kinda hates you for not letting him.

If anything, I feel like a Sphenewife should be MORE okay with additional Sphenewives than people similarly into other FFXIV characters.

It's literally part of the APPEAL that there's more than one, right

They frequently mean 'a detached robot with the audience's level of omniscience'.

I don't use gpose much, and my advice is probably very basic, but: exaggerate the existing light sources in the space. It's a real easy shortcut to strong, but natural lighting, since the game's existing lighting is kinda flat.

Thankyou! Was actually just now working on the 7.3 reaction video!

All I know is that you can't trust anything that claims to be drinkable in this area

Other people are saying 'album cover', I'm reading 'sci-fi survival horror'

I want to check for pure Lore-Spouting Nonsense reasons: this is a change made by the patch itself, and not MSQ progress, right?

So the proper insulting term for them would be to call them 'kaching' games