koreth
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Totally fair! They did a good job of making the main storyline playable as a solo player, but the core gameplay loop is still unmistakably MMO-style and not to everyone’s taste.
I love that song in particular because (very minor spoiler) it works both as background music and as diegetic music. In the story, that boss is trying to entice you into going permanently to sleep and living in a dream world where you’ll achieve all your goals and desires, while becoming her meat puppet in the real world. When you’re playing the game rather than watching it with onscreen lyrics on YouTube, you are only sort of half-listening to the song while you focus on the battle, so you don’t realize right away that the battle music is the boss singing to you to seduce you into her flock even while you’re fighting her.
Final Fantasy XIV has a diverse soundtrack and a terrific story, but it is a huge time commitment. The story starts off pretty slow and takes a long time to build up.
A few boss fight themes as examples:
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.
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.
Maybe they can redo FFXII and finish the story. That one pissed me off at the time: the story was just starting to build up steam and then nope, ignore all the plot threads we’ve been weaving, here’s a final boss battle out of the blue, end of game. Apparently it was having major schedule and budget overruns and the original director left for health reasons halfway through the project.
Opinions vary on the combat, but I think the consensus is that the first game has the best level design. Some people even say it has the best level design of any game, period. Not sure I’d go that far but it is a work of art.
You will wonder why I say that until you get maybe 30-40% through the game. To say more would be to spoil one of the coolest revelations I’ve experienced in a game.
This probably doesn’t bode well, but there is at least one example out there of an online game doing a really successful soft reboot: Final Fantasy XIV. The launch version of that game was pretty bad, but the rebooted version is still one of the most popular MMOs a decade later and is regarded by many players as one of the best entries in the Final Fantasy series.
Hopefully that’s the model the MultiVersus devs have in mind.
GDPR protects things implicitly (albeit completely untested–perhaps even problematic)
I will grab my popcorn the first time someone seriously tries to pursue a GDPR erasure request for their fediverse content. I don’t think it’s even possible to honor such a request in theory, let alone in practice, given that nodes can come and go from the network and when they go, they could easily keep their local copies of everything.
I was impressed by an earlier mod along similar lines, Portal Stories: Mel. Hope this one is as well-done.