Look, I know what the title says, but this review is not actually going to be any shorter than normal. If you were worried about that, don’t be. (You probably were not.) But patch 6.45 for Final Fantasy XIV is here, and it brings with it three things, basically: more mainhand enhancement content, more Blue Mage content, and another Variant dungeon. And… well, is it any good?
Yes! Actually, pretty much all of it is either as good as it has been in the past or better, with only a couple of small missteps along the way. But we’ll get to that as we go.
Unlike a lot of interstitial patches, this one actually has a fair amount of story to it aside from just the content; you’ll notice that what I listed above basically omits the entirety of the Hildibrand story, which really reached an apex of hilarity in this patch. (I’m so happy that this run took a break for an expansion because these quests have yet to miss.) I’ll do my best to touch upon the stories as we go, though, even if they’re a bit on the simple side. Onward.
Rokkon, Hingashi
Mount Rokkon fixes most of the issues that Sil’dih had, and for that I’m glad. It’s not quite all of them, but Square fixes one problem up front by making the basic version of the dungeon actually have, like… rewards you might want in exchange for currency. The hairstyle and emote are valuable, not as maybe one glamour piece you might stash away but for new players, other players in the future, and so forth. That’s a good thing. It doesn’t fully fix every single problem that the content has in terms of rewards, but it is at least a step forward.
The bigger problem is just the reality of whether or not people actually wanted much harder four-player dungeons and how they influence player habits. But that’s a discussion for another day.
Rokkon is also absolutely gorgeous and offers three routes that are both more distinct than the ones in Sil’dih and also offer novelty. We don’t have multiple expansions and stories already exploring the history of Hingashi as we do with Ul’dah and its royal family and backstory; in fact, we know little about the nation, so this is a welcome additional exploration. If anything, I just wish that our guide hadn’t been Hancock of all the people in the world.
The encounters remain novel and interesting as well, and the hidden boss during the “secret” route has an especially interesting spin on what is fundamentally a familiar type of gameplay. I appreciate that. I have very little negative to say about this spin on the formula as a whole, in other words. While I think it’s still struggling a bit to find a real space in the ongoing reward format, it definitely seems less likely to fall into the same sort of void where I’ve gotten all my rewards and have no use for ever setting foot in here again. An improvement on the first round.
Blue in the face
I’ve long been a supporter of Blue Mage. I still really like the promise of Blue Mage. But the most recent update really did disappoint me a bit because it runs into a problem that the game has been kind of dancing around for a while: Blue Mage doesn’t have any content, and the developers don’t want to give it any.
In this update in particular, you can get three spells from the open world. Three. There is one new stage in the Masked Carnivale. None of the new spells is used for specific challenges; they’re almost all in place to make BLU better at performing all three roles under the right circumstances. They’re cool spells and they have fun synergy, but at the end of the day Blue Mage has become just another way for people to experience older content in a level-synced fashion and possibly to run friends through things in a smoother format.
This isn’t helped by the fact that the new Masked Carnivale boss is also far into being a very different sort of challenge. Your difficulty in the boss fight isn’t dictated by spells that offer you special tools, really; it’s mostly about a couple of spells (which are old spells, to boot) and basically perfectly dodging everything because more often than not one hit means death. It’s not about your weird and wonderous toolkit, just the same skill you’ve always had to use honed to a razor edge.
Lest you think this is some sort of skill issue subtweet, I literally got my umbrella from the fight. I have two or three skills left to farm, none of which will be terribly difficult. I have eaten well, and I have genuinely enjoyed Blue Mage as it stands. But instead of being a different sort of content or gameplay loop for people to enjoy, it’s just the same gameplay loop that’s less standardized. I consider that something of a failure. This patch is a good expansion of Blue Mage’s skill list and a good set of tools for further enhancing its gameplay loop, but far from being a solo-oriented job, it’s just like wedging 1.0’s skill paradigm into the current game’s actual gameplay.
Mastery of the hands
As other people have pointed out, if you’re annoyed about the lack of a new field area for grinding relics, you’re not actually annoyed about Island Sanctuary or the relics; you’re annoyed about Variant/Criterion dungeons. That’s what is here instead of that stuff. The new relic step is the same as the last one, and it’s fine, just skipping the tedious part. This is probably another column altogether, but I’ll leave it there. I am definitely in the camp annoyed by people who are trying to rewrite history and insist that everyone loved Eureka when, y’know, the records of people hating that stuff and not even loving Bozja are not faded texts requiring detailed analysis to decipher.
We’ve also got another set of tasks to upgrade our crafting and gathering mainhands, which feel a bit… perfunctory? I do like this content, but it definitely feels a little bit rote insofar as you just do the same tasks as always and then get a better mainhand. Still, unless you want to grind out a whole lot of seals, it does take a while to do, and so partitioning it out gives you a task for a while. Which is… kind of the point.
You can rush through this stuff as much as you want, but you have only yourself to blame if you go nuts with rushing forward and then find yourself with nothing left to do. That is a self-imposed issue, you feel me?
Anyway, keep your feedback in the good vibes space this week, but as long as you feel like spreading good vibes you can leave it down in the comments or mail it along to eliot@massivelyop.com. After all, this week we’ve got the fan festival! That’s some good vibes right there! Next week I’ll be talking about it. Get hype.
The Nymian civilization hosted an immense amount of knowledge and learning, but so much of it has been lost to the people of Eorzea. That doesn’t stop Eliot Lefebvre from scrutinizing Final Fantasy XIV each week in Wisdom of Nym, hosting guides, discussion, and opinions without so much as a trace of rancor.
