Pacing feels like a tremendous problem because you've just got so many things competing for space, and a lot of it isn't useful. Labyrinthos is a horrendously boring zone both times you go there. The first time you go there, it's genuinely just to get that stupid flower. Every 'hint' offered in the zone about space ark was already hinted at while you explored the city, and anyways everything is immediately explained the very second that you come back from your trip on the moon. So what was the point of that first fucking trip?
It fits badly within the narrative - at that point, the characters believe the weird towers are directly tied to the Final Days. Thavnair is a bit of an uninteresting zone on the whole, owing especially to its lackluster layout and environment, but at least it actually advances the fucking plot. You can boil Labyrinthos 1 down into "we get the flower" and you can boil Labyrinthos 2 down into "they are housing the ship in labyrinthos." Everything else is just there to waste your fucking time, could easily have just been explored within the city, and overall contributes to two of the absolute worst segments in the game.
Garlemald feels like a casualty of Labyrinthos. It also gives you the wrong expectations for the rest of the game. It sets you up to expect that the writing will be taking the kiddie gloves off, and it is where the expansion's themes on nihilism, purpose, and meaning really start to show up prominently in the narrative. The zone is distinctive and fairly interesting, with the urban areas being fairly unlike anything else that exists in the game. But don't blink - you'll miss it. It especially feels like a betrayal because the lead-up to Garlemald is fantastic: the companies and allies coming together, lots of callbacks to old characters, and a sense of motion and gravity that just feel good. It combines with that darker tone and the fantastic sequence where you become a faceless soldier (despite the lingering question of 'if you could do this at any point, why don't you stop me from preventing your plans?') to get you strapped in for a slog in that tower, the image of which has been building up for a long, long time. And then it's just a dungeon that leashes you to two packs per hallway and some pretty easy bosses. Anima looks cool, yeah, but I was introduced to him like five minutes ago - you sure it was worth having Labyrinthos and the second half of the moon instead of making Tower of Babil its own zone?
The trip up to the moon and the confrontation with Zodiark are a strong point. While it is a little disarming to talk to the Watcher about everything when you're expecting a mad-dash, it nevertheless contributes to the truly alien feeling the moon has while building up mounting tension. Hythlodaeus is re-introduced to bring the character back into the fore of your mind before you're even thinking about going to Elpis, and just how sparse and lonesome it is makes for a great atmosphere. Then we run into one of the recurring problems with the narrative: Zenos. Namely, that he's a Stormblood character.
He was supposed to be developed in Stormblood, but... he got the Stormblood treatment. He is set up in ShB and EW as your foil, a sortof counterpart to your never-ending do-good antics, a bit of a meta wink on the fact that the player themselves is more than likely just playing the game for fun than for an earnest desire to "do good." But he has nothing else. Zenos is supposed to be your revolver ocelot, except every time he shows up outside of the final fight, he just broods and complains. He talks about having some insane bloodlust for the world, and then just abandons it - I get it, he was only saying it to make the WoL want to fight him. But he has nothing other than "I want to fight you." The idea is introduced, again and again, that he - like you - is just magically good at everything and he never struggles to pick up on something, and he's amazing and incredible and a master of all trades. And that unlike you, who took this natural mastery over everything and turned it towards good and towards purpose, he instead saw distance made between himself and the rest of humanity because of his aptitude and grew bored of existence. But it's never fucking explored outside of him mentioning it here and there -- in part because that isn't something you would explore this late into the story. Problem is, in Stormblood, Zenos was just a shounen villain not even slightly written to be some kind of foil for the WoL. He carries that baggage and has real trouble carrying any weight otherwise.
The fact that you go from the spectacle and show of the Zodiark fight into the space rabbits is a black mark. Some sub-humans defend this by saying that after defeating who you had believed to be the big bad, you need a cool-down period. Yeah, that's true. Know a great place to cool down? Garlemald. What's happened to the place, now that Anima -and- Zodiark are defeated? Check back in with your worldly counterparts, tell them the good news, skip the awful and barely-existent Garlemald 2 section. Or maybe cool down in Sharlayan - have the characters all reunite and be jovial down on earth, cheery and peppy and relaxing that the final days have been averted. Oh-no, here comes angry papa to announce that the final days have indeed actually begun as an actual twist and reveal their space-ark plan to a group of scions who had a loose idea that that was their plan, but didn't spend four hours sitting through LITERALLY THE EXACT SAME TWO JOKES to learn it.
Nothing on the second half of the moon ties back into anything going on in the world. You are immediately deflated from your defeat of Zodiark, which isn't necessarily bad - "Oh no! It was all part of Fandaniel's plan! Shit, now the Final Days are actually on, what are we gonna do?" is a fine state to put your players into. To then introduce that sense of agency... and fucking immediately torpedo it. It isn't a cool-down section: it's a 0 Kelvin section. You get shoveled the "space rabbits don't understand humans!!!!" joke and a bunch of information that comes out of nowhere and builds off of precisely nothing in any of the previous expansions. Everyone's lines are slightly different from how they should be. Thancred and Yshtola, characterized everywhere else as pragmatic and not prone to faffing about, forget all their troubles about the end days so they can engage in some wacky wacky hijinks. Urianger becomes flanderized for the rest of the game. Here's some vacuous moralizing and a series of incredibly tedious, boring quests in environments that are thirty times larger than they need to be. You could rip this entire segment out, replace it with absolutely nothing, and the game's story and pacing are both better for it.
Thavnair 2 is fine. It's not really that interesting or that exciting, again owing to the zone just being way too uninteresting on its own, but it advances the plot. It explains what the final days are, shows how they get out of hand, actually references shit that was established earlier in the game, and keeps things moving long enough to create a sense of urgency. I want you to think how much better this section would be if A) it immediately followed Zodiark or B ) you returned to the planet after Zodiark with a false sense of security, and this section shocked you out of it. These are both far easier things to write and include than the entirety of the bunnies.
If in the same breath the sub-humans defending bunnies as a "necessary cooldown" go on to protest Elpis, they are retards. Elpis is an example of how you properly cool something down, even if time travel is stupid. Thing is, time travel has happened in the story already - something that the narrative actually acknowledges and discusses, which really gives you the feeling that the person writing this section is actually aware of the rest of the story. The urgency is melted away by the fact that you actually do have quite a lot of time to figure out what happened to cause the final days, owing to the fact that it's fucking time travel. You have a strange intermingling of that urgency with a sense of wonder and pause in an alien environment - sortof like how your chest was going to explode with light while you were taking a stroll through Amaurot.
Ultimately, Elpis builds on, expands, and calls back to much of the lore established in the best parts of Shadowbringers. The Final Days as a concept is only introduced in that expansion, so it hardly feels like a betrayal for the next one to further build off of the ideas. Emet-Selch, Venat, and Hythlodaeus being present may feel 'convenient,' but the reason they happen to be there makes sense within the world as-established, it explains why all of them acknowledge and vaguely recognize you when they encounter you in ShB, and it does nothing to betray any of their earlier characterizations. The lack of combat is hardly an issue to me, given 'kill 3 completely unchallenging enemies' has never once been good and I'll take reading over the fucking following quests any day. Hermes' turn feels somewhat abrupt, but the pressure has clearly been building on him all the time that you're there - if you talk to the NPCs standing around during quests who aren't the main one, you get a lot of little details here and there that contribute to that sense of unease. Elpis becomes a zone fixated on the search for meaning, and is ultimately to me the game's most ambitious zone for it - the narrative is no longer just some engaging-enough fantasy shlock, but a schlocky meditation on purpose.
Yet unlike other games that loosely brush on humankind's search for meaning, like Persona, this question is at least built up to within the frame of the story rather than just thrown out in the 11th hour for a cool boss fight.
Meteion being the big-bad who is ultimately revealed only in the twilight of the story as such doesn't strike me as too much of an ass-pull, because the character represents more a force of entropy and apathy than anything else. The story verymuch becomes about the conflict between Eros and Thanatos, with the worldly cast of characters ultimately being individually unimportant. This is a part of why Garlemald being so perilously short is such a huge problem - people looking for satisfaction for the ARR->SB story ultimately get shit on so that we can waste time in Labyrinthos and with fucking Space Bunnies. A more satisfying conclusion to the terrestrial conflict would remove a lot of the sour lemons about how trivial all of the geopolitical conflict becomes in the second half of the expansion.
It isn't helped by Garlemald 2. I genuinely can't understand why it's in here. It's incredibly brief, only used as a setpiece for a little duty thing, and is a really dumb way to say "Jullus totally agrees with us now guys, also all of the flavor the characters and dialogue had beforehand is completely gone." There are any number of things that would have been more interesting, up to and including defending Sharlayan itself or the refugees mid-transit to Sharlayan (rather than introducing 'they wanna use da moon teleporter' and then immediately dropping it). I honestly think you could rip this section out as well, since it seems pointless to have AKSHUN that brief if you're immediately going to follow it up with one of the worst parts of the game.
Labyrinthos 2 is the worst part of the game. I hate it. I was genuinely tempted to skip everything. Alphinaud's gambit is an interesting idea. Getting the scions' contacts to collect a bunch of crap from all over the world that's needed is a great idea. Following that up with "why don't you waste your time for four more hours?" is unfathomable. The rabbits return, and for this entire section we again stop hearing about anything else in the world. We stop calling back to old characters or lore. We again have the main cast talking in ways that are juuuust slightly off. Everything is again about rabbits - everything. The rabbits solve everyone's problems. What was that about the End Days? Forget it; let's get these rabbits to talk to people and make pudding jokes. OH THAT'S WHY WE HAD GARLEMALD 2, SO WE COULD EXPLAIN HOW THE RABBITS GOT HERE! Hey, do you mind if we resolve Urianger's whole thread about his dead girl's parents? Don't worry, we'll have him talk about nothing but rabbits before and after this point, and we'll make the entire conversation a little stilted and weird, like the parents have pre-prepared speeches.
Then comes the port section, where everyone pulls in with their goodies. I assume this is where the actual writers took over. Suddenly, the bunnies aren't fixated on in every single quest. They're mostly ignored, in fact. Suddenly, references to old characters and things that you did - including the sky pirates, of all things - start rolling out, and it's a veritable who's who of fun, memorable characters that take you back. It's fan service supreme, but it's baked in there in a way that feels natural. It's great. The plot continues apace, the fight with Hydaelyn is pretty cool - and then she gives you the macguffin. It's then you begin to worry "oh no, is all of the tension gone for the rest of the story?" Yes, yes it is.
But the moments before you blast off are enjoyable enough. The cast of characters you like all behave like themselves again, and you get a real sense of companionship. The WoL, through nodding and flailing their arms, feels like they actually fit in with the weird ragtag cast of characters. You feel properly motivated to go and kick the ass of those dark souls trading birds in space, and the bunnies are used tastefully for perhaps the only time in the narrative - some tiny little gags that are mostly visual comedy that run alongside the fanservice of primals bitching about having to help you. Wow, almost like if you don't have them take the entirety of the narrative focus and screen time at the expense of absolutely everything else, they can actually be inoffensive.
The final zone's really cool, though boy does that macguffin in my pocket make it completely unsatisfying. All these themes shoved in the game's story from the very beginning about sacrifice, about loss, about finite lives and existences, about choosing to live on even when things are tough... and I know from the moment I set down that Thancred isn't dead. It's terrible. You don't mind the zone that much when you're going through it, but it's after Y'shtola "dies" that you know everyone is coming back to life. How the fuck are you supposed to care? The game isn't following its own themes - just be a good guy, and you won't have to suffer. This is a huge problem that the game has, because it keeps recycling through the same two or three characters to go "remember them? they're dead - isn't it sad that they're dead?" Horchefaunt coming up once or twice would be fine; he is references like eight or nine fucking times, dude was not that important.
And so the only real way to enjoy the final zone's narrative is to ignore everything about the Scions. You saw that they let you take eight for that last trial, right? Well, there's one more trial, so they'll all be back. Maybe you were holding on to some slim, faint little hope that they'd be aether-ghosts and help you out that way, but still be dead... except there's no way they'd kill the entire cast off. So there's zero tension there; they're coming back, nothing matters, and it's just a long, annoying series of boring fetch quests and pointless back and forths. You can only get into the narrative of finding purpose and struggling against meaninglessness, accepting pain and suffering and so-on... but it just doesn't work with that macguffin. If the characters -were- dead, wowzers, it's a stark and great sensation. "You couldn't protect them - why live?" and finding meaning despite that failure, contrasted with all these civilizations that for one reason or another have given up all hope. That, like EVERY MAJOR CHARACTER HAS TOLD YOU FIVE TIMES, even in the darkest moments and when you're in the most pain, you have to see it through and believe in a better tomorrow, you could have actually realized that - but nah. They puss out. No-one is dead. No-one is harmed in the slightest. Everything works out.
So what's left? The instant your buds all come back from the dead, what's there to care about or be invested in? You're gonna win, and you're gonna "sacrifice" literally nothing. So it's just some cool spectacle from Zenos reappearing and that trial. It's a cool trial, a fun one, even if THE MAGIC OF FRIENDSHIP OVERCOMES ALL adds to the absolutely fucking caustic sting that is Endwalker's conclusion being ultimately tepid and uninteresting. You beat it, save the day, yay - oh, time to fight Zenos. Wouldn't it be better if he was, like, actually developed as a foil? And this, the final fight of the game, brought into focus those themes of sacrifice, of finding purpose, of grappling with meaninglessness, of friendship and purpose with others... you know, into the fore? Wouldn't it be interesting to really go at it with this character, have a whole sequence where you get multiple-choice answers to bark at Zenos, where you constantly push back against his nihilism and emptiness? Because Meteion wasn't human - how she gave into it isn't the same way that Zenos would have. Wouldn't it be cool if he explained why your fight gave him life - less because ME LIKE FIGHT, more because for once in his life he finally felt a kindred spirit and felt a sense of conviction, of opposition? Nah jk he says one line about how he finds life banal and empty and then dies after you whoop his ass while you're rescued by a deus ex machina (until it's explained, anyways)
then you come back, the expansion's themes of perseverance in the face of hardship, of sacrifice, of coping with loss... are all still completely absent, because everyone is OK and everyone's going to be OK and everything worked out just great and here's the hollywood sendoff and...
It's a conflict, because while I like the characters and it's good to see some number of them feeling happy, the complete lack of consequence of of sacrifice or of anything changing in the status quo of our main cast is immensely distressing. There's so little character development in this title for the main cast - you basically have Alphinaud, kindof, in that daddy comes around and ultimately understands him. The characters don't really change much from the end of Shadowbringers, and they mostly just spend their time repeating the same messages of DON'T GIVE UP IN THE FACE OF SACRIFICE, WE'RE HUMAN WE ACCEPT DA GOOD AND DA BAD over and over again in lieu of really grappling, on individual levels, with those arguments and calls towards nihilism or cruelty. "i've experienced a lot" says thancred several times, how about you explain how those experiences have tempered your perspective rather than flying off into the exact same GOTTA KEEP ON KEEPIN ON speech? But then you have that moment when you're with him at the cafe, and you can tell him he doesn't need to push himself for Ryne or Minfillia anymore, and he cracks - that was such a human moment, why was it restricted to this optional bit of dialogue?
wait no i lied urianger does have a big character arc, he likes teh bunnies xD
WHERE THE FUCK IS GOSETSU
