Final Fantasy XIV - Kiwi Free Company

[Fcret]

I still always get surprised and disgusted by how voice acting in America is ran like cutthroat cartel and yet the people who run it are some of the most banal people in the world that either make a mockery of their craft or are on the of the old guard who refuses to retire until they drop dead in a recording booth.

That's more how it's run in LA. As any production that has opted to tell the union to fuck off has discovered - there's plenty of talent in the country that's either just as good or better and costs less than a third as much. Every bumfuck town in America has a local theater group made up of amateurs that'd still act circles around the fucking bluehair trannies of the union.

There's a reason why every time a big company decides to cut the union out the VA cartel throws a fit on X and tries to stir up controversy to bully them back in line. It's because usually those companies don't come back to the union ever again and the power of the union wanes long-term.

Anyway, as always, the solution is Total LA Destruction.

 

[Not your Buddy Holly]

Every bumfuck town in America has a local theater group made up of amateurs that'd still act circles around the fucking bluehair trannies of the union.

Only problem is that they are probably also the bluehair trannies of that town, with how theater and acting is so ideologically captured.

There's a reason why every time a big company decides to cut the union out the VA cartel throws a fit on X and tries to stir up controversy to bully them back in line. It's because usually those companies don't come back to the union ever again and the power of the union wanes long-term.

I thought they won their strike against Mihoyo and a bunch of companies that were starting to use AI to replace voice actors?

 

[Troon Whisperer]

The VA strike was such a clusterfuck that those retards won their battle against AI replacement only to lose the war entirely because fans fucking hate them and companies now turn to Europe for their english VAs. Mihoyo wasn't even part of the strike, it was just a bunch of VA's getting together to try and force them to sign up with the union which would have fucked over a lot of their colleagues.

 

[estacks]

I tried to resub and play this game again recently and I legit can't bring myself to run over from the raid quest in Solution 9 to the 7.1 story arc. I ran through the giant, empty, dead city and I can't get through the first cutscene. I think I played the entire Dawntrail story while being completely blitzed to stand it and all I remember is the part where I was forced to participate in genocide against an alien civilization for having the audacity to try to live through an apocalypse. The entire Alexandrian arc is pure, utter, garbage and it, Kate, and the leftist troon drama that ensued since then have flat out killed the game for me. You kill their king, their queen, genocide an entire civilization without even trying to find an alternative, and now the killers have the audacity to crash their memorial so a retarded mary sue voiced by a troon freak can moralize even more. Then, to fuck up the morals even more, the raids are you participating in pointless bloodsports using the same tech that justified dehumanizing and killing their entire culture? I've never been put off more by the writing in any game I've played and the whiplash from how good Heavensward to Endwalker was makes it twice as bad. The dagger in my willingness to play this shit is all the nepotic tranny goblins celebrating terrorism and SE doing absolutely nothing about removing the hive of degenerate trash from their company or the thousands of pedophiles and beastiality freaks from the community.

I've wasted my money on FFXVI, FFXIV, and both FF7 remake games at this point and I haven't finished a single one due to shit pacing and writing. I think this is the last dollar SE's getting from me, and it's a shame because FF was a huge part of my childhood. It's really sad to see a once brilliant company just collapse into mud and troonery like this.

 

[Rion]

I tried to resub and play this game again recently and I legit can't bring myself to run over from the raid quest in Solution 9 to the 7.1 story arc. I ran through the giant, empty, dead city and I can't get through the first cutscene. I think I played the entire Dawntrail story while being completely blitzed to stand it and all I remember is the part where I was forced to participate in genocide against an alien civilization for having the audacity to try to live through an apocalypse. The entire Alexandrian arc is pure, utter, garbage and it, Kate, and the leftist troon drama that ensued since then have flat out killed the game for me. You kill their king, their queen, genocide an entire civilization without even trying to find an alternative, and now the killers have the audacity to crash their memorial so a retarded mary sue voiced by a troon freak can moralize even more. Then, to fuck up the morals even more, the raids are you participating in pointless bloodsports using the same tech that justified dehumanizing and killing their entire culture? I've never been put off more by the writing in any game I've played and the whiplash from how good Heavensward to Endwalker was makes it twice as bad. The dagger in my willingness to play this shit is all the nepotic tranny goblins celebrating terrorism and SE doing absolutely nothing about removing the hive of degenerate trash from their company or the thousands of pedophiles and beastiality freaks from the community.

I've wasted my money on FFXVI, FFXIV, and both FF7 remake games at this point and I haven't finished a single one due to shit pacing and writing. I think this is the last dollar SE's getting from me, and it's a shame because FF was a huge part of my childhood. It's really sad to see a once brilliant company just collapse into mud and troonery like this.

You're not mising too much.
7.1 is absolutely dogshit and makes Wuk's brother look like a retard
7.2 and 7.3 are improvements but in a very damage control sort of way, you can tell the Dawntrail feedback started to hit them around this point, but they're not engaging still and suffer heavily from having to build on what came before it.

I unfortunately bought my sub in bulk for raid reasons, I'm not planning on renewing when it expires at the end of the year, and I have no idea How this game is going to survive with Dawntrail's godawful MSQ forever being mandantory content that one must clear to go from Endwalker to 8.0

 

[Lou's Sentient Backfat]

I have no idea How this game is going to survive with Dawntrail's godawful MSQ forever being mandantory content that one must clear to go from Endwalker to 8.0

Quest you can pick up. You stop in a bar and get so blackout drunk that you wake up in Tural after all is said and done with no memory of what happened but you know you're level 100 and you have level appropriate gear.

 

[ChromaQuack]

How this game is going to survive with Dawntrail's godawful MSQ forever being mandantory content that one must clear to go from Endwalker to 8.0

SE execs are probably dancing on one foot thinking of all the MSQ skips it's going to sell, unfortunately for them people are going to skip the MSQ the free way. Unsubbing.

 

[Tanner Glass]

This tracks for me, to be honest, especially since Bayonetta isn't a particularly exposition heavy game (I think?) it'd be mostly quips and one-liners? 16 hours for a bunch of pain state noises, one liners and then some plot makes sense to me, especially if we're dealing with an industry professional.

It's not an exposition heavy game, but was very clearly the main character. Beyo in Beyo 1 probably had roughly half of the lines that Wuk had (that were voiced). There's a lot of unvoiced cutscenes to account for as well for Wuk - but I'd say it's a comparable amount.

I would love if Sena got the guild minimum though and got even less money then even I thought.

and I have no idea How this game is going to survive with Dawntrail's godawful MSQ forever being mandantory content that one must clear to go from Endwalker to 8.0

Dawntrail will be fine to blow through - just the same as the weak parts of Stormblood, Shadowbringers, and Endwalker. The main issue is that 8.0 needs to be worth getting to or people aren't going to bother at all. Dawntrail's biggest issue is that it very much was not a new story at all and if they're going to try and sell people on "We're doing the same story again" it's a very hard sell.

We didn't want to completely depart from this setting and the influences of the real world, North America, South America, and the indigenous people there," Cwynar explains. "But at the same time it's definitely a huge issue to be using elements from indigenous cultures without direct input from people from those cultures. So I think comparatively, when you see Dawntrail versus some of our previous works, stuff like Doma, you will see that we really tried to lean further towards inspiration, as opposed to something more appropriative."

I really don't want to beat up on Kate because it's popular but I'm not sure how you could reasonably have worked on Dawntrail and then talked about "inspiration" when most of the characters were just "inspired" from other Final Fantasies. The pelupelu (from FFX), Mamool Ja (from ARR, but just different for no reason and from XI and aren't different), Moblins (just goblins), Hanuhanu (which are just Hanuhanu) and Yok Toi (which are just FFXI trolls). Most interesting conflict happens an entirely different area (Alexandria) which has no inspiration from Meso-America either.

The Meso-American references feel entirely appropriative so much so that you could replace the entire setting any it wouldn't really change anything. It's the most surface level inspiration that FFXIV has ever had by an extremely wide margin.

She's really out of touch - like extremely out of touch.

 

[Kane Lives]

Dawntrail will be fine to blow through - just the same as the weak parts of Stormblood, Shadowbringers, and Endwalker. The main issue is that 8.0 needs to be worth getting to or people aren't going to bother at all. Dawntrail's biggest issue is that it very much was not a new story at all and if they're going to try and sell people on "We're doing the same story again" it's a very hard sell.

Iunno man. Dawntrail might be the first expansion that I would genuinely dread slogging through, I feel. And I'm the guy who generally enjoyed Stormblood even at its lowest (obviously the Doma section was far better than the Gyr Abania ones but still.) 8.0 would have to be something amazing for me to even consider coming back.

 

[Rion]

I don't think anything in Stormblood is as bad as Wuk Lamat.
At least everything in Stormblood still adheres to the logic of the world, there are legitimately enjoyable bits in Stormblood's MSQ, and it does still serve to push forward the larger narrative.

The first half of Dawntrail is a Dora the Explorer esque adventure lead by the FFXIV equivlant of Jar Jar Binks voiced by a tranny.
The 2nd half is a very sloppy and juvenile clone of Shadowbringers.
I cant think of a single thing I liked about the dawntrail MSQ.

 

[Pigeon Enthusiast]

I cant think of a single thing I liked about the dawntrail MSQ.

It ended.

No, wait, that was still polluted by that godawful song, never mind.



Anyway I think comparisons to Stormblood are not wholly unwarranted, but even at its worst points SB wasn't as bad as basically the whole of Dawntrail, and its high points are significantly better than anything Dawntrail manages to muster.
Stormblood's worldbuilding expands on stuff that had been semi-established before, like Ala Mhigo and the Far East, with a narrative that is at least somewhat coherent (even if it is a bit unfocused) and generally keeps its lore in line with the established setting. More to the point, the places you go feel real, they feel lived in, they are built up enough and populated by characters who feel like they exist in a real world.

Dawntrail is a trip through Mexican-themed Disneyland (Tacos! Tequila! The only thing missing is some sombreros and a mariachi band) where the world feels profoundly empty and unreal. It's a theme park, where all the scenery is just empty facades, and the characters are ethnically themed mascots. To boot, it wholly ignores one of the few bits of lore that was established about the New World, with absolutely zero sign they are going to acknowledge the existence of the Whalaqee whatsoever. (Admittedly I suspect this is mostly down to SE's boneheaded policy to never acknowledge side content in the MSQ, which has resulted in the Whalaqee being banished to the abyss because it's Blue Mage stuff.)
I would also complain about how Wuk Lamat, princess of this whole country, somehow knows basically as little as the WoL does about the country she lives in and is set to become heir of, but nah. There isn't enough substance to any part of the New World for her to know about anyway.
Then after meandering about with something completely pointless that ultimately proves not to matter at all for six levels, it pivots into retreading a worse written version of narratives that ShB and EW already explored, handles it even worse, and ends on a dollar store redo of the Endsinger fight except Wuk Lamat shoves you aside to take center stage as the true main character of the expansion.
It's a total mess.

But TBH I think it's not unsalvageable going forward, even if all future players will have to play through DT. Personally I got through it the first time with judicious abuse of the Esc button, after checking out of the story by level 91, so. I only played through it "properly" when I was levelling an alt for raid stuff later, and resolved to give it a chance. Big mistake.
I think the point where it would become truly unsalvageable is if 8.0 drops another DT-tier bag of flaming dogshit excuse for an MSQ on the playerbase's collective porch. They desperately need to follow up this Stormblood with a Shadowbringers, in terms of MSQ reception, if they're going to salvage this game's reputation for "excellent story".

 

[Tanner Glass]

No, wait, that was still polluted by that godawful song, never mind.

Oh god yeah the song. Holy fuck it's so horrible.

It had one of the worst landings in game I was shocked when I heard it.

New World, with absolutely zero sign they are going to acknowledge the existence of the Whalaqee whatsoever. (Admittedly I suspect this is mostly down to SE's boneheaded policy to never acknowledge side content in the MSQ, which has resulted in the Whalaqee being banished to the abyss because it's Blue Mage stuff.)

The do acknowledge the Whalaqee.

(It's the Dawntrail FSH questline, you meet a blue mage who gets skills from eating fish - that's why you catch the fish).

It's awful.

 

[Rich Evans Ayypologist]

I would not put it past this histrionic retard to think that they insisted on using their home setup (ostensibly because they have the 'perfect' settings that conveys their heckin' true and valid 'real' voice) which might've led to some of the compression

I still think that would be a ridiculous imposition on the studio. I mean, sure, anything's possible - but the idea of trying to balance out how the moron's home-setup sounded -- which would be so much worse than a professional studio - just gives me hackles. Especially for a voice as necessarily dynamic as Sena's: which is to say, it's a low masculine voice attempting to hit high-pitches.

However, the compression is an effect applied in post. That's why I put a lot of the blame on the studio for not mastering things elsewhere, with characters who aren't Wuk (as well as the terrible performances). The whole SPEEN! thing was someone intentionally cranking down lots and lots of frequencies by applying compression at certain bands, though I have no fucking idea why they did it or why it was approved. If I could be a fly on the wall - that's absolutely what I would want to learn about. How did that happen? How was that approved?

if you're doing a 'South America' expansion the talent pool is going to be bigger in North America than it would be in Europe or Japan.

It would be, but I mostly read that as 'cheaper.' Professional actors can learn to emulate accents, and anyways a broader market is not going to be able to tell the difference between a catalonian-spanish accent or an iberian-portuguese and a columbian-spanish one, to speak nothing of a third-generation pseudo-mexican accent. London being a locus for the new world to filter into Europe also gives them a better-than-average ability to grab Latin American talent that filters through.

It might be harder, but Dawntrail sortof shows why sometimes, you should opt for the harder one. GJJ is like the only good performance from the US studio, and I wouldn't even call it a good one so much as 'eh, it's enjoyable enough.'

The Meso-American references feel entirely appropriative so much so that you could replace the entire setting any it wouldn't really change anything.

Outside of aesthetic design, I don't think they even really adopted almost anything involving the culture in the entire game, yeah. If only just now occurred to me that the jungle-area was supposed to be the Amazon, and in the year and change since the game's release I've never once made that connection for how poor of an imitation DT is of everything. I guess I recognized that the mountainous place is supposed to be the Andes, at least.

 

[Lou's Sentient Backfat]

Outside of aesthetic design, I don't think they even really adopted almost anything involving the culture in the entire game, yeah. If only just now occurred to me that the jungle-area was supposed to be the Amazon, and in the year and change since the game's release I've never once made that connection for how poor of an imitation DT is of everything. I guess I recognized that the mountainous place is supposed to be the Andes, at least.

Doing better than me, I sort of got Tulliyolal was some kind of psuedo-Aztec design, but the only zone that I could really grasp was Not-Texas for Shaaloani. They really did fumble the whole thing quite badly.

 

[Tanner Glass]

Outside of aesthetic design, I don't think they even really adopted almost anything involving the culture in the entire game, yeah. If only just now occurred to me that the jungle-area was supposed to be the Amazon, and in the year and change since the game's release I've never once made that connection for how poor of an imitation DT is of everything. I guess I recognized that the mountainous place is supposed to be the Andes, at least.

That's because they took an "inspirational" tone.

The depth of the locations come from focusing on a specific time period and the problems therein. Heavensward had the subtext of the English Aristocracy and their classism, Stormblood dealt with the realities of rebellion and problems of the Meiji-restoration era Japan (Doma) and the reality that imperialism isn't bad for everyone (Ala Mhigo), and so on. Even villains like Emet Selch, Gaius, and Zenos all had points where they were unassailably correct.

None of the Dawntrail races really have flaws so they're one dimensional and boring - when the actual inspiration would have them being relatively savage warriors or having Galool Ja Ja be more of a Cortez style villian (who "tamed" the savages of the New World) but they avoid all of that. He was just a great guy that everyone was really happy to let be their unified king. That's why people don't like Wuk - because she doesn't have anything to overcome. She starts off "power of friendship" and it just works the entire time without fail.

Even Lyse (every one's second least favorite character) had the arc of "I don't care that much about Ala Mhigo, my whole family is dead and I've got my own family now" even if they did kind of do it twice with Rhauban.

They could have written a lot of interesting ideas with the setting - with how much Wuk would have to inherit if Galool was much more of a conqueror then a really swell guy. They could have even gone as far as to made him some other long-lived race (maybe even a dragon, since they are comfortable running countries) so it wasn't one of their own in charge. You could have a lot of the conflict be around the loss of tradition in the face of modernization (which they flirt with ever so slightly with Koana).

 

[Golfing on the Moon 1971]

Squaresoft Hawaii, which was home to the movie Spirits Within...which basically necessitated the merger with Enix.

I thought the Farms of all people would have known better than to regurgitate this myth but apparently not. FF10 was delayed to the next fiscal year and was a humongous success. 2 million copies within the first week and made back well over the money spent on the movie. Had it released within the same fiscal year as the movie, Square would have still been fine on paper. The movie was used as an excuse by the suits to oust Sakaguuchi in a corporate coup. Corporate politicking.

 

[Übertroon]

They could have written a lot of interesting ideas with the setting - with how much Wuk would have to inherit if Galool was much more of a conqueror then a really swell guy. They could have even gone as far as to made him some other long-lived race (maybe even a dragon, since they are comfortable running countries) so it wasn't one of their own in charge. You could have a lot of the conflict be around the loss of tradition in the face of modernization (which they flirt with ever so slightly with Koana).

That's not going to happen in a culture where journalists will attack this for being racist and the product of white supremacy

While this is praised for its diversity and wholesomeness

 

[Well Intentioned]

I thought the Farms of all people would have known better than to regurgitate this myth but apparently not. FF10 was delayed to the next fiscal year and was a humongous success. 2 million copies within the first week and made back well over the money spent on the movie. Had it released within the same fiscal year as the movie, Square would have still been fine on paper. The movie was used as an excuse by the suits to oust Sakaguuchi in a corporate coup. Corporate politicking.

I'm not super well versed in 20 year old financial dealings, so my bad. My understanding was that the Hawaii studio cost them a lot of money and they went from boasting a mild profit to having FFX be delayed and being like $150 million or so in the red due to Spirits Within bombing, with FFX-2 being an attempt to recoup their losses (this being the explanation as to why a Final Fantasy game was getting a direct sequel.)

But thanks for clarifying, that's interesting to know. From that I learnt that apparently the CEO who took over from Sakaguchi used a fortune teller to help guide some of his decisions, such as relocating Square's offices.

 

[Xerxes IX]

They could have written a lot of interesting ideas with the setting - with how much Wuk would have to inherit if Galool was much more of a conqueror then a really swell guy.

The writing is just so insultingly saccharine because they didn't take this direction. You're telling me he united the equivalents of North and South America under his banner, and this instead of some "imperialism le bad" character, (who would have had nuance if previous writers were still in charge) all of this peace and happiness schlock is legitimate?

Instead we get his retarded lizard son as the face of "conquest le bad because he...doesn't care about his people?"

 

[Golfing on the Moon 1971]

(this being the explanation as to why a Final Fantasy game was getting a direct sequel.)

My apologies for my earlier hostile tone. It was one of those things along with stuff like "Basch was actually supposed to be the protagonist of FF12!" which keeps coming up and being debunked but keeps coming up anyway which grates me.

The FF10-2 sequel happened because of a break down in Square's production process. From 1997 to 2001, Square always had at least three mainline Final Fantasy games in overlapping development so a new game could come out one year after another, which would satiate audience interest and keep the franchise going. After FF7 released, work on 8, 9, and 10 began. After 8's release, Sakaguuchi spun up production of 11. After 9's release, work began on 12. But then this stopped with 10's release, where for the first time they did not have a third upcoming game coming down the tunnel, when these games were starting to take 3 to 4 years to make. 11 released the next year, and 12 entered into development hell (the envisioned game was too ahead of its time for the hardware). They finally began FF13 in 2004 but it wouldn't come out until 2009. That was way too late. They should have been spinning up more FF games way earlier.

It was in this situation that a FF10-2 was commissioned, to try to rush out another game to patch in the holes in the franchise's yearly release schedule until a brand new mainline game released.

So why did Square's production process breakdown? Because the talent was evaporating. A lot of talent departures were happening at the time, a few years before Sakaguuchi got kicked. Takahashi (Xenogears), Masato Kato (Chrono Trigger), and Fujioka (Super Mario RPG) are the biggest names, but there were many others such as the composers Mitsuda and Yoko Shinomura. They left because they felt creatively stifled and weren't being supported to make the games they wanted to make. Same issue which would later befall Blizzard. Kitase (director of 8 and 10) did not get started on making a brand new Final Fantasy game or appointing one of his assistants to do so like Sakaguuchi did with him. Instead he wanted to do FF7 spinoffs. And Nomura started doing Kingdom Hearts.

What is baffling is that over twenty years later, Square has never gotten their act together. After FF12's release, they had FF13 in development until 2009, and then that was it. For 4 years, they had nothing coming down the pipeline. It was not until 2013 they decided to hijack Nomura's game and rebrand it as a new mainline Final Fantasy game, releasing 7 years after FF13. And then when that released, 16 began development and took another 7 years to come out, and apparently no FF17 or 18 or 19 in development during this time.

They are only just now possibly beginning work on a FF17, and looking at Square's history that game isn't going to come out until 2030 or 2031 at the earliest. And you have Yoshi-P saying he doesn't know who is going to direct it and being ambivalent about turn based when their customers have been begging them to go back to turn based. In the age when Honkai Star Rail - a turn based game built on classic Final Fantasy DNA - makes billions of dollars per year.

The only conclusion I can come to is that Square is a revolving door of headless chickens. When Yoshida makes statements like that, it really makes you wonder.