Wisdom of Nym: Final Fantasy XIV patch 6.35 content is mixed

So the patch is here! It brought quite a lot of content! And the content is… pretty mixed actually, if I’m being honest. I wouldn’t say it is bad by all imagination, but it’s definitely not all sunshine and rainbows for this particular mid-patch update Final Fantasy XIV. There are some decidedly low notes, and unfortunately those low notes are places where I really expected the game to throw things out of the park.

Then again, it’s not like 6.35 was an open disaster or somehow didn’t work at all. It’s just not a universal slam dunk, that’s all. So let’s talk about the stuff that works, the stuff that doesn’t work Why the stuff that doesn’t work doesn’t work at all, make some gestures of acceptance towards the stuff even though it doesn’t work, and I end up figuring out what I want to talk about next week. You know, standard procedures around these parts right here. (Minor spoilers will follow if you haven’t done any quests, for the record.)

Finally something good [Redacted] Hildibrand

I’ve long been willing to give the Hildibrand series a lot of leeway, not least because the 2.x Hildibrand quests were easy outrageous fun. Unfortunately, well… the skyward Quests weren’t nearly as fun, and the Stormblood they caught me off guard too. Even the first few installments are there endwalker didn’t work for me. I was really fed up.

So I’m happy to be the first to say that the Hildibrand quests land like a land this time goddamn Manderville Meteor in the face. I was Cry.

It took us a while to get back here and I don’t know why, but every single part of these quests worked. The failed clone. The RPG battle. The follow-up with Godbert and Gerolt, and yes I count that as part of the same overall sequence. The jokes were sharp and silly, the scenes were well directed, everything was ridiculous, and I was overjoyed to just get back into the comedic groove for all the absurd antics.

Heck, I even like the meta joke that the next level of relic quest is… exactly the same as the first level. It made me smile and I appreciate it, and if we ran the joke throughout the expansion it would just be so utterly ironic that I think it’s perfectly appropriate.

I have criticisms of the patch as a whole, but I have no comments on Hildibrand beyond good. That was fun and funny and spot on, and for the first time in a long time I’m really looking forward to more episodes in this series. It’s worth the wait.

Eureka, I discovered Tedium!

At this point, the developers have turned Deep Dungeons into a kind of science. Unfortunately, Eureka Orthos feels like a reminder that sometimes science says the Easter Bunny isn’t real.

It’s not like Eureka Orthos bad, it’s just… boring. I don’t find it too hard to get through, and I even guess the designers mixed in more of the enemies that will happily kill you on the earlier floors, rather than picking them up for half the optional floors. And it’s not like you don’t have a chance to deal with these enemies. You know how Swinge works by this point, right?

The thing is, while these are all things to deal with and prepare for, it just makes even the lower floors…slow. Boring. And that’s a shame because we’ve got some really cool aesthetics here and some decent boss fights mixed in along the way. But I find them less than worth the anemic kind of rewards and the simple boredom to get through most of the floors on the way down.

What I really like about this particular dungeon is that it’s the first time I’ve remembered that there’s not even the vaguest hint that you’re averting one disaster or another. If you never went to Eureka Orthos you would be fine. Nothing bad would happen. The reason for the gamble is not to prevent disaster; because this may be your last chance to see something worth understanding.

It’s also another reminder of how the Allagan Empire worked, which feels like another little nod to Meracydia. They’re piling up, aren’t they?

But at the end of the day, I just didn’t like Eureka Orthos that much. It’s hardly an unqualified disaster, but it’s all the familiar parts of a deep dungeon mixed with a lot more gotcha mechanics along the way. If it does that for you, you’ll be happy, but it doesn’t do it for me.

And Buny

That’s pretty much what I expected from these quests. Which isn’t really a celebration or a condemnation, but it does mean we still saw the entire Loporitt storyline Really now overwhelmed. Again, it’s not that I don’t like our stupid bunnies, it’s just…we get the joke, there’s only the one joke, and you won’t make a better version of it than what was already done during the Omicron quests . you are only not.

The goal seems to be “if we can’t hit it, just hit … the same notes again, but softer,” but the result is that the MSQ’s most pointless plot dead end now gets a coda that explains things we’ve got not asked. Damn if anything removed some of the sharpness. Instead of Loporitts leaving the moon and coming to Etheirys, they basically lock themselves back in their grave. In other words, it doesn’t really work!

Mechanically, the quests are fine, of course. And the story isn’t bad; It’s told with just the right amount of charm and the necessary callbacks to everything that happened through the MSQ. It’s just a coda that answers questions that nobody asked or didn’t need to be answered at all. Just don’t work all the way beyond one thing.

Hopefully it will pay off because hopefully this time we’re actually getting a tribal coda; we weren’t in shadowbringer I can imagine that there are several reasons for this, but I would be disappointed if we didn’t get one this time. Still, it’s only possible that we don’t, which would ultimately make this feel…well, even less consequential. And could we just get a tribal crafting quest for once where we don’t help little idiots make things? We had three Now.

Feedback is definitely welcome in the comments below or by emailing eliot@massivelyop.com. Next week I want to take a look at something we usually have a pretty good idea of ​​by now, but don’t right now: where our next expansion target is most likely to be. I keep alluding to this in the abstract, but I feel like things are starting to take shape a bit and it would be nice to weed out the main contenders.

The Nymian civilization harbored 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 investigating Final Fantasy XIV each week in Wisdom of Nym, hosting guides, discussions, and opinions without a trace of resentment.

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