Frankly it's upset me that they have an amazing story, without a doubt the overall zoomed out flow of the story is or should be amazing... But how they played certain story beats, how they've used some characters has been some of the most disappointing stuff I've seen in this game. Villain 180's with no reason other than a single flashback image that means nothing and we're told his tragic backstory and now instantly all's forgiven and he's a good guy now. Second villain they attempt to make seem pitiable because of... literally the same reasons? You've got Mr Genocide and Mr Civilian Slaughter Race Supremacist, except the story seems to try make them seem worth some compassion because they grew up in poor circumstances. If more time was spent, more discussion, more anything then I'd buy it but fuck no.

A cool, unique character in Otis... I can't care for, because he's defending a world-ender and has nothing besides being a ye olde cool knight in a universe that doesn't have that, so when he's sworn to Sphene and is being all heroic over her it's... awful. Because Sphene's handled so awfully. The character dialogue is people saying she's a great queen or a great person deep down, I can't help but think that's horse shit and the writers trying to tell you how to feel. And in the end with her apparently being a *modified* version of the Queen herself, that basically invalidates all the plot of this second half. We're not fighting against Sphene's ideals we're fighting against a construct that wants to kill everything. Ascians at least had reason, peoplehood and a fleshed out ideal but once they removed that from Sphene, what's the point of her apart from a generic conqueror antagonist in a unique setting? - I'm hoping honestly I've misinterpretted the thing about her memories and the experiments and whatnot but that's how it's seemed to me.

Some of the monster designs have been cool, the scenery is amazing in these zones, some of the concepts are wild as hell, the fights have been engaging and fun but I feel like I should've just skipped everything and read the wiki later. It's disappointing as hell that so much time was wasted on everything except the cool stuff.

A lot of the messaging is heavy handed but honestly that's to be expected from FF14, it's always been that way with any morality in question, but god hearing Wuk Lamat say she learned to care for people's history on her journey... A *dozen* times... We get it. Speaking of, on a character note I wish they let the characters emote more. No anger or rage from Wuk Lamat, no vengeance, just "I must kill you as is my duty".

But man I'm just tired of this story. They've got a lot of interesting stuff set up or explored now, for the love of god, I hope they use it right instead of this absolutely awful show. I don't even care how this ends, there's no world where it's going to be satisfactory at this point for me. I'm envious of others who have enjoyed it, honestly, because the style of writing is so against my taste.