Review Runs

Final Fantasy XIV
Star Trek Online
The Old Republic

Final Fantasy XIV

It took a while, and it has some flaws, but this is truly a fantastic MMO. Easily one of the best out there. Most classes don’t get good until later on, the dungeons take until Stormblood to really improve, the quests never get better… but the story ranges from good to excellent, and the core tenants of dungeons and raids are some of the best in the business. And it has a lengthy and involved trial for anyone wishing to partake. Hugely recommended.
Total Story Score: +466
Total Gameplay Score: +122
Golden Number: 437.35
Cheats: No (My friends are my power!)
Total Play Time: 54 Days // 475.94 Hours
Time Reviewed: 4-16-2022

Spoiler Pluses and Minuses +

Story Positives:

The storytelling tool of the Echo and what it allows us to see and perceive
The initial Limsa Lominsa arc stumbles a bit, but the down to earth storytelling, the gradual escalation from disgruntled to malicious to beast tribes, is quite well done
The Ul’dah city-state arc is easily the best of the three, with character introductions, ideas, and tons of world building…
…easily earning a second positive
Camerawork in cutscenes is actually quite good
The localization in the game is spot on…
…even with regards to adding in dialects and variances based on region
There is a fairly large amount of gameplay/story integration going on
The visual storytelling of the Noscea area
World building all over the place in Limsa, with the new civilization and attempts at reform and resistance thereto and the economics and structure of it
The visual storytelling of the Black Shroud, regarding the elementals, the tree, the people who maintain it, the casual anti-outsider mentality, and how precarious the area is to live in
The core theme, even early on, of being the inspiration to help others find their better selves
The Unending Journey journal and the ability to rewatch essentially every cutscene in the game you’ve already seen is a great way to catch up on things
The ARR opening cinematic of the destruction at Cartenaux and the Calamity of Dalamud is a very, very well done cutscene
Tempering. We get our first insight into it with Ifrit, and it is exactly as horrible as it should be
World building exposition of the three Grand Companies
The entire Coerthas arc is legit, noticeably better written and constructed narratively than every single quest before it (even having legitimate reasons to be embroiled in local affairs rather than excuses)
A second positive for the Coerthas arc. Tightly written, internally consistent, and well characterized
The big scene where the Ultima Weapon is unveiled after the battle with Garuda is, honestly, the first truly good in-game scene in the game
Edda’s story is a bit too tragic… but it’s well told, and weaves in and out of our story periodically, and ultimately it’s better than it is not
Visual storytelling of the third Coil of Bahamut
Tataru is a delight even in ARR
Thancred, for how relatively little screen time he gets, is pretty awesome…
…as is Y’Shtola
Acknowledging the support network under adventurers, aka consequence storytelling
Sylphs (and writing). They’re adorable, even outside of their daily
Foreshadowing (primals, ala mhigans, Garlean power struggle, Ishgard, etc.)
The Coils of Bahamut. It takes a while to get there (hence only one positive), but when it does it hits pretty well, and is arguably more MSQ than the MSQ was
A special positive for the final moments of Cartenaeu, awesomely presented and executed cutscene… and weirdly well earned, while simultaneously being a successful one-winged-angel moment
G’raha’s final farewell as the Eternal Wind plays really is just… feels
Periodic world building in the La Noscea side quests, and some cool individual side stories
The Thanalan quests were overall better story wise; while more contained, they were usually better focused on character moments or world building
The Coerthas side quests were really quite good…
…including several nice bits of world building and some great character arcs
The Hildibrand animation, storyboarding, and camerawork are astonishingly good, especially with regards to choreography…
…earning a second positive
The Botanist arc does a good job of showcasing a pacifist tormented by the ethics of civilian contribution to conflict
The entire Fishing arc is probably one of the funnier ones in ARR, but the quality of the dialogue is what really makes it shine
The Armorer 1-50 quest wasn’t super great, but it was an interesting contrast of two differing mentalities and a nice showcase of an Idiot Sith
The Weaver 1-50 quest was surprisingly sentimental and personal, being almost entirely about the budding relationship between the miner and the princess
The Goldsmith 1-50 quest was surprisingly enjoyable given how obvious its plot was, but it had some nice moments and Rorotan was legit
The Leatherworker 1-50 quest had some hiccups but a rather memorable guildmaster, and a nice story arc about quality vs. speed
The Alchemist 1-50 quest was interesting in how it seemed terrifying at first and veered right into legitimately sweet and sentimental
Culinarian 1-50 is nicely constructed and has some good worldbuilding, but also some weirdly well done descriptions of the food
The Kobold beast tribe has a nice, surprisingly touching, and well told story arc
The Sahagin beast tribe has a surprisingly well written character in Novv
The conclusive Beast Tribe collective quest at the end of the dailies is quite well done, with good cutscenes and touching moments… and a few moments of awesome to boot…
…earning a second positive
The Gladiator 1-30 quest was… weirdly good. Enjoyable characters which complexities to them, a good structure, good cinematography, it was…
…worthy of a second positive
The dialogue and intrigue of the Rogue 1-30 quests are legit, despite how hard they are to read at times…
…and some really great storytelling and cutscenes
The Pugilist 1-30 is way better than I remember, with good characters and it mostly being about us helping the guild lead be a better pugilist…
…earning a second positive for general quality and cutscenes (the youth as he punched!)
The Thaumaturge 1-30 story had some hiccups, but I enjoyed the world building and examination of voidsent, aether, and magedom in general
The Conjurer 1-30 quest wasn’t super amazing, but the story of Sylphie and her discovery of conjury, as well as the world building of the elements, is good stuff
DRG 30-50 is weirdly good, with lots of good world building (if bad exposition) and surprisingly good cutscenes…
…earning a second positive
WAR 30-50 is simple but effective, a nice zoomed in character piece with some neat worldbuilding about how Warriors function
Scholar 30-50 has some great world building and some neat, heart-warming scenes to it
Despite other issues, the Ninja 30-50 has some good camerawork, animation, and some good moments
The 2.1 and 2.2 Doman Refugee Crisis arc is great stuff
The initial developments of the new Grand Company is a great arc, with good cutscenes
A special continuity plus bonus for the 2.3 arc and how it acknowledges tons and tons of small but neat little points of continuity
Aymeric is awesome in literally his very first scene. He is smart, kind, pragmatic, and generally awesome
Consequence storytelling (especially with Garlemald)
Moenbryda is well voice acted and, honestly, a delight despite her relatively small amount of camera presence
Haurchefant is just kind of awesome.. Consistently, even in ARR…
…which is really saying something
Raubahn’s killing of Teledji is, honestly, the best part of the entire banquet
Alphinaud has his irritations (many, in fact) but you can really see the surface-level boy who really does not understand what he’s doing and is in way over his head
Merlwyb is a weirdly good character across ARR
The Sultana only has a few scenes but they’re critical and she herself is a very sympathetic, interesting character
Riol is actually pretty legit, and honestly I wish he got more screen time
Ditto for Hoary Boulder and Coultinet
ARR does a decent job of remaining internally consistent and having good internal continuity
Aggregate: Visual storytelling of Sastasha // The overall story arc of Haukke Manor, the murder mystery, and the… attempt at tone // While not much, Brayflox Hard is a neat and amusing little excursion
Aggregate: The final cutscene in Wanderer’s Palace (hard) is hilarious // There is one, solitary good quest in the Gridanian areas, and it’s actually quite touching (about the young gentleman and his sister) // The Miner arc has some decent world building in the background
Aggregate: There’s a bit of decent world building in the Arcanist chain, and the main character is alright // The decent character bits and good scenes really helped with the BLM 30-50 quests
The Heavensward opening cinematic is, as usual, pretty good
Count Edmont de Fortemp is yet another example of a reasonable authority figure, who in his very first scene is awesome enough to warrant a positive
Haurchefant continues his awesome streak
Visual storytelling of Ishgard (the city)
Artoirel is an interesting, fleshed out character who has a quick and interesting arc even in his initial presentation
The initial introduction to Thordan and the trial by combat sequence
The plot-point of cold, efficient pragmatism of Estinien and us going out to try and treat with Iceheart and, should we fail, at least delay their attack on behalf of Ishgard
The story sequencing of the early arc is well constructed. As we learn more, our plans shift, and as our plans shift, we go to new areas, learn new things, and plans shift again
Visual storytelling of the Dravanian Forelands
The big reveal of the nature of Primals is a good scene in general, but even more so…
…the very plot point of what a Primal actually is is a fascinating concept that makes for some great storytelling and will lead to great stuff down the line
The localization continues to be on point…
…even to the point of being better than before, especially with regards to…
…the dialogue being just fantastic across the board.
Dialogue mk. 2
Dialogue mk. 3
Lolorito’s plan (retcon or no) is a good one, neatly written, and ties up a lot of threads
Further, this entire arc (while badly positioned) is a great example of both external continuity and consequence storytelling and, despite the problems with its timing, deserves special mention for its quality
The overall plot has a wonderful layers upon layers of context style to it
The Echo remains a great storytelling tool…
…and speaking of which, the cutscene of the past shortly after the initial battle with Nidhogg is well directed, acted, and written
Honestly, Haurchefant’s scene where he just sorta… goes along with it when he sees us, Estinien, aaand Ysayle is just kind of awesome (good animation, very in character for him)
Core theme of the cycle of vengeance
The ‘we’ve got Aymeric’s back’ scene is awesome
Well written Star Destroyer storytelling
The Vault does some absolutely wonderful visual storytelling with its music, trash design, and visuals… and the fact that we’re fighting ‘bosses’ (aka primals) as regular bosses
For all the nonsense about the event itself, Count Fortemp just breaking down at the loss of his son hits to this day
There is a lovely symmetry to Aymeric and his relationship to his father… and Haurchefant and his relationship to his. Both illegitimate children, both risen on their own two feet, and both dealt with in completely disparate ways
Alphinaud is wonderful as usual
Alphinaud’s voice actor is great
Alphinaud’s character arc is fantastic, and really shows his growth as a character
Tataru continues to be an excellent character despite her limited screen time
The visual storytelling and contrast of the Churning Mists as well as Hraesvalgr and Nidhogg’s lairs
Ysale is, as usual, awesome…
…with good voice acting…
…and a great character arc
Estinien, too, is a triple bonus for being a great, complex character..
…but also well acted…
…and well arced
The connecting character threads between Estinien and Alphinaud
Raubahn finally comes into his own as a character, helped by his actor
Haldrath (the first Azure Dragoon) has precious little screen time but is awesome for it
Hilda, too, steals the scene every time she’s in it
Visual storytelling of the Dravanian Hinterlands
Matoya! Cantankerous, helpful, and well acted
Ysayle’s sacrifice, by contrast to some earlier ones, is very well done. Good cinematography, good directing, and it sticks
Visual storytelling of Azys Lla
Earning Midgardsormr’s respect and being granted his mount is a pretty awesome moment
The world building of the Aetherochemical Research Facility and just how bleh the Allagans really were
The Thordan fight was pretty legit from a storytelling perspective. The attacks from the previous knight fights, the FFVII reference, but best of all the final phase after his ultimate attack where he can’t even bring himself to do anything but flail helplessly against the party
The Alexander 12 fight is awesome narratively, especially with the portals being how we survived the cutscene prior to the fight
The time travel of the entire Alexander chain is actually quite tightly written, well foreshadowed, and well executed
Thordan’s overall plan is actually pretty horrifying, but the way it’s set up and the way he out-plays the Ascians is delightful
Lucia remains awesome pretty much throughout HW
Krile has so much character in so little time, I love it
Yet more foreshadowing (especially in the Warring Triad)
They actually subvert the usual hostage crap in the Weeping City, and actually make a good scene of it regardless
Stone Vigil 2 (Dusk Vigil) has a wonderfully horrifying backstory to what happened in the wake of the Calamity
Leveva is just delightful all around
The Sharlayan worldbuilding and general intrigue of the AST 30-60 quests are pretty cool… with problems
MCH 30-50 has a good core theme, some decent characters, and a nice arc for multiple of them
MCH 50-60 continues the good trend of good characters, and really does its job in expounding on the problems facing Ishgard in the wake of the revolution
A goodly amount of internal continuity with the three mage states across the expansion
The NIN 50-60 is weirdly competent and well directed, with amusing characters and a proper showcasing of ourself
DRG 50-60 has some issues, but is earnest enough and skips over most pitfalls of its arc to be engaging
The DRK 30-50 quests did a great job of acknowledging a lot of internal continuity…
…and are just, really great quests in general…
…earning a second (or third) positive
DRK 50-60 quests do some good stuff in general, with a nice if horrifying story…
…and general levity and excellence in scenes from the Moogles
WVR 50-60 was actually really sweet, down-to-earth, mundane, and wholesome
GSM 50-60 was surprisingly good, a heartwarming tale of two lovers and making them matching music boxes, well paced and well showcased
CUL 50-60 was mostly noise until the finale, when it was delightfully hysterical
LTW 50-60 is actually pretty well done, with solid character arcs, weaving through backstory of the setting, while advancing alongside the main quest
Aggregate: The Ascian lore of SUM 50-60 was pretty neat // ALC 50-60 did some neat things with the Allagans and clones, and the whodunnit was a nice direction to take it // CRP 50-60 had some nice moments with the son and father
Kal Myhk is adorable, and we learn a decent amount of dragon society (and biology!) while helping him, his brother, and his mother (Dragons follow the natural order)
Azys Lla’s side quests are surprisingly amusing while remaining absolutely horrifying insights into Allagan society
Hildibrand, as usual, has some great animation and camerawork
Hildibrand also has some surprisingly good character beats with Vivi and Cyr
The Scholasticate’s early quests are very well written internal politics
The Scholasticate’s quests themes of the severe and terrible inequality Isghard has shown, done in true in-person detail, are just… wow
Scholasticate (again) has some good general story construction and characters
Fractal Continuum has some wonderful, horrible Allagan lore in the ‘museum’ format
Good structure of the MSQ, both in when the big events hit, and in how much time is attended to the consequences
The return of Thancred cutscene is well acted and very well choreographed, despite its issues
Aymeric really is one of my favorite characters in the entire game…
…not only for his solidarity and genuineness but also his intellect and leadership skill…
…and finally his fantastic presentation and voice actor
The finale of 3.1 is convenient, but well constructed and very well serves the narrative, both in service of how Ishgard is dealing with things, Aymeric’s reactions thereto, and the impacts it will have furthermore
Matoya is a delightfully presented and constructed character
As much as I personally dislike the scene, the failed peace conference scene is well constructed and does a good job of showcasing the varying mentalities that lead to such terrorism and other such issues
The Final Steps of Faith cutscene is brilliant in so many ways I don’t know where to begin. The battle, the choreography and cinematography, the significance…
…but through it all, just us… walking….
…Star Destroyer
And yes, another positive for the outro, for being exactly as tear-jerking and powerful as it should be… with Ysayle and Haurchefaunt’s aid
A rare story positive for the Nidhogg raid fight. It’s literally the thematic core of the entire expansion built into the fight; letting go of the past, moving forwards, cycles of vengeance
The victory lap of the End of the Dragonsong War is pretty legit, with a lot of cool ‘what happened’ moments for a ton of characters
Ga Bu. He’s only there briefly, but he’s extraordinarily well utilized, and besides serves as a fantastic launchpoint for Alisae’s return to the party and the character arc she will have for some time
Ardbert’s big scene really does a lot in very little time, and the narrative beat of revealing his time right as the story has just followed a major arc about being willing to do anything for victory… and immediately before the Griffin’s foolish, foolish plan
Aggregate: An aggregate positive to Hildibrand for general humor and pacing // Honoroit is enjoyable, and pitiable, for the little screen time he gets // Emmanellain does get something of a story arc, brief though it may be
Ardbert’s voice actor is excellent even in this expansion
Count Edmont is a truly fantastic character, for much the same reasons Aymeric is…
…and stands as our adoptive father for good reason
The summoning, and Papalymo’s sacrifice
Thancred is, as usual, pretty legit
The Omega vs. Shinryu fight is not just fun spectacle, there’s actual design to how each side fights and how they compare and contrast each other
The recurrent usage of the NPCs and party members adding extra dialogue at most quests in the MSQ is a good storytelling tool
No-drama, logical consequence storytelling in the initial resistance groups of Ala Mhigo
World building throughout the early quests of what it’s like in occupied Ala Mhigo
Zenos second establishing scene does much more, better, with him
Doodad utilization is, finally, in
Substantially better usage of music in cutscenes
Visual storytelling of the Fringe
Tataru beautifully blackmailing the Ishgardian captain into helping us get to Doma
Kugane in all its splendor
Lyse kicking Gyodo was just kind of generally awesome (and well animated and cameraworked)
The verbal duel between Gosetsu and Yotsuyu is actually quite good, showing the depths of their familiarity with each other and using that to exposit
Visual storytelling and doodad utilization of Kugane
Yanxia’s thematic usage and portrayal of the consequence of the remainder oppressed is as gloomy and awful as it should be
The terrible, emotional, powerful scene where Yugiri and us successfully saving them only for the realization of how this doesn’t truly save them… is just as powerful as it should be
As much as I have severe issues with it, the scene where Zenos finally notices us is pretty legit
Isse is actually kind of awesome in general, a perfect personal viewpoint of oppression and a surprisingly human, well fleshed out person in general
For the first time in the game, we have a degree of visual continuity between zones (helped by the MSQ’s frequent ‘trips’ to the map)
Our little sidetrip to the Dotharl is nice in general, but what’s even better about it is how Gosetsu is fleshed out throughout
The entire Steppe arc is one of the better ones, despite being ‘side content’
Cirina is a delight for the presence she has
Tataru, similarly, is awesome up to and including the flight from Kugane
Hancock is weirdly engaging, moreso for his connection to Lolorito
Gosetsu continues his trend of excellence and general enjoyability
Yugiri is, in many ways, far more of a main character than Lyse is and does good stuff throughout
Alisaie gets some good character and screen time both
For all my complaints, I cannot dismiss Zenos’ voice actor
Alisaie’s voice actress
Gosetsu’s voice actor
Yugiri’s voice actress
Soroban is pretty awesome for how little screen time he has
Hien’s ponderings, and his conclusion; the flooding of Doma, says a lot about what kind of person (and leader) he really is
Gosetsu’s pre-battle scene and confession is a great character piece for him (helped by Alphinaud and Alisaie being adorable)
Good visual storytelling and significance of the Doma dungeon
Yotsuyu is horrible and evil, make no mistake… but she’s well acted, and there are decent layers to her and her horrible, horrible backstory
Kojin in general, especially culturally, are fascinating
The scene between Fordola and Zenos really is quite well constructed
As usual, Raubahn is excellent, arguably really coming into his own as both commander and leader of the Alliance
…and a second
Visual storytelling of The Lochs
Pipin remains an awesome character in general, and a good commander
The Ala Mhigo dungeon is a great capstone to the dungeon narratively
Zenos’ suicide and final cutscenes really do a great job of showcasing the character, and a surprisingly satisfying conclusion to his arc
Much as it pains me, Zenos does deserve a positive. The ruined, bored, genetically engineered freak
Omega is brilliantly horrifying in how detached and unconcerned it is about the horrifying things it does
Cid is pretty legit in the Omega line
The lonesome Omega logs segment before O12 is really just… awesome, and terrifying, and lends more ‘character’ to Omega, Midgardsormr, and the war than most anything else does
DRG 60-70 is nice but Orn Khai is just adorable
MCH 60-70 is a good tale of continuing to deal with the fallout of Heavensward, and some good character moments for Hilda
Four Lords, Soroban, Tataru… all good stuff…
…especially the flashback cutscenes
Fractal Continuum (Hard) continues the Allagan trend of expositing and background worldbuilding (the Ixal were built by Allagans!)
There is simple, wholesome, and down-to-earth storytelling in the Doman Reconstruction…
…wonderfully written and brilliantly human
The Echo of Delita, Orran, and Alma is actually really good. It says all it needs to, implies much more, and does a great amount in a short period of time
The WAR 60-70 quests are silly but… they’re legit charming, and got an actual laugh out of me
What can I say about the 60-70 DRK quests? They’re real, raw, brutal, and beautiful. Continuity, connectivity, consequence, the story weaves through our own as we face all we’ve been and lost, and in the end we are who we are… because we are.
A second…
…and a third positive earned thusly
The WHM 60-70 quest was a nice little personal story, with some good touches and good continuity
MNK 60-70 has some nice character moments and good backstory about the Mad King
RDM 50-60 has some decent stuff. Magic history, Ala Mhigan history, some continuity, and Arya
RDM 60-70 has good continuity and Arya continues to be adorkable!
SAM 50-60 is a straightforward samurai tale, but it’s not bad, and in fact hits its beats quite well
ALC 60-70 had great external continuity as well as a touching arc and general goodness throughout
Steppe culture is fascinating and well fleshed out in general
There’s some nice tidbits in the Steppes sidequests where we help people find themselves, especially a Dotharl rebelling against his name and Esugan (a cook) rebelling against his warrior brethren
GSM 60-70 is a nice bit of worldbuilding and consequence storytelling, being about methods of economic restoration for newly freed Ala Mhigo
CUL 60-70 continues the Culinarian trend of excellence by having a nice simple story about feeding refugees, and cultural drift
Arenvald is honestly just sort of amazing. A poor background and a good presence
Generally clever animation in cutscenes
The confrontation of, Echo of, and pain of Fordola’s (cutscene)
The surprisingly mature, dark, proper discussion of financial aid for Ala Mhigo
The big scene between Nanamo and Raubahn is just… all kinds of awesome. A great continuation and, arguably, conclusion of both of their arcs
Much as I absolutely despise the character, Asahi’s voice actor is legit… lots of tiny details and subtle nuances
Tsukuyomi fight…
…and the tragedy of Yotsuyu, the life that could have been
The hinge-point of the plot of Alphinaud going to Garlemald, the implications and foreshadowing thereof
As per usual, the usage of the Roleplay system as a storytelling tool is excellent
The Burn is just a wonderfully terrifying concept, it really is… it’s the first time we’ve really seen the actual impact of aether bleed
Fordola doesn’t get the screen time she deserves, for she is a fascinating and well done antagonist in her own right
The visual storytelling of The Burn (dungeon) is as fascinating and horrifying as it should be
Alphinaud continues his character arc and progression, and frankly just general character quality
Camerawork continues to be excellent throughout
The Burn (Savage)
The well-constructed political drama of the Alliance’s first true meeting as they discuss the Ascians and Garlemald…
…and the summoning of ‘the voice’ and the tension and suspense and mystery it adds to the proceedings
Alisae really has some good character moments in the final few patches
The scene which introduces Solus does so much and says so much and reveals a great deal about the lore and backstory of the world
The war council and parlay with Emperor Varis is interesting in hindsight, and surprisingly well presented (visual storytelling)
Foreshadowing! The front-loaded storytelling as of the 4.X patches is real
The Ghimlyt Dark and following conclusions are some awesome visual storytelling and war presentation
The down-to-earth personal stories of the Crystarium sidequests
Kholusia’s side quests do a good job of following through on the consequences of Eulmore and how normal citizenry are dealing with the fallout
The intro cinematic is the best they’ve had to-date, with symbolism, brick-laying, great visual storytelling, and…
…is just generally awesome
The opening intro does so much so well so fast
The visual storytelling of the eternal bright sky
The Crystarium is brilliant in its overall design, visual layout, and general presentation
The initial story arc of the Crystarium does so much, and builds up the world, and establishes many tiny plot threads
Music utilization for tone and atmosphere
The worldbuilding of Mord Souq and the very idea of ‘cracking the coinpurse’ and its connotations for requirements of interaction and citizenry
The very nature of Sin Eaters and the horror and obstacle they present
The beautiful visual storytelling of the wall of light in Amh Araeng… the macro
Tesleen. The conversion, the horror… the micro
Kholusia continues the world building quest construction of having to earn your way and insight into local function
Aaaand finally, Eulmore and its horrifying perversion of the ‘earn your way’ cultural norm of the survivors, and the classim it engenders
Eulmore deserves a second positive for the sheer nuance and layers that go into how messed up it is and how… resigned and despairing some of these people really are
Kai-Shirr and his weekly arc of renovating the Beehive and trying to turn it into a legitimate establishment with his friends is both wholesome and logical
Eulmore’s visual storytelling
The confrontation between Vauthry and Alphinaud is brilliant for many reasons, but really firmly showcasing a light on what Eulmore is and why is the best part
I have to give a purely subjective plus to this game for so powerfully, emotionally impacting me with its core, central theme… of idealism, both fulfilled… and crushed
Holminster Switch… the creature from the desert, Tesleen, and the horror of the village over-run
And the first night sky in a century
General world building of the Fae segment of the story
Watching the fae just… body the Eulmorians is just as immensely satisfying as it always is
Emet-Selch’s animation and motion capture
The initial confrontation between Emet-Selch and the party is brilliantly portrayed. Camerawork, voice acting, dialogue, foreshadowing…
World building of the Night’s Blessed, up to and including the service
Ardbert’s cutscene discussing himself, Seto, and ourselves
Ardbert’s cutscene discussing being adventurers, the mural… and how it all went
The cutscene of Vauthry v. Exarch is a brilliant one, not just a clash of ideologies but of surface vs. depth
For the irritation of the fake-out, Y’shtola’s return gives us some great characterization and moments for both Emet-Selch and Runar
The post Qitana Ravel scene is a hell of an exposition dump, but more than that, it is yet another wonderful character point for him, beautifully voiced
Ardbert opening up to us about why he adventured, and us sharing our concerns with him, is as always a good scene
Ardbert’s torment at having to watch the suffering die…
…followed immediately by the power of seeing us walking with the victors
Lyna’s lament in the wake of the battle
Thancred opening up and (finally) having a character arc in Trolley is pretty legit
For all the many, many other issues, the ‘final’ confrontation between Thancred and Ran’jit is an excellent bit of storytelling, primarily for Thancred and his arc moving forwards
Ryne is a delight throughout really, but serves a good purpose in the plot too; she’s the ‘outsider’ who can be and do what the others can’t
Ryne and Thancred’s interactions are good in general, but the dynamic between the two is something else
The Crystal Exarch remains a well constructed enigma; the shadow of a villain who never hesitates to aid and assist those in need
With precious few exceptions, the dialogue in Shadow in particular is exceptionally well constructed…
…easily earning…
…three positives
The incredible creepiness, build up to, and revelation… of Meol
The entire scene of Alphinaud speechifying to the Eulmorians, and their turnaround and assistance, is actually pretty awesome
Emet-Selch’s lowering of the mask as he speaks, for the first time, of Amaurot and the time of old to us… even mis-speaking for but a moment… as he lets his hope get the better of him
The overall cavalry moment of building the giant Talos is pretty wholesome and a good rejoinder of all the people you’ve aided thusfar
The final resting scene with the Crystal Exarch is brilliant in many ways
The brilliant visual storytelling of Mt. Gulg and the still-in-construction ‘new paradise’ he is building
The reveal of both G’raha Tia’s plan… and Emet-Selch’s interest in us
The entirety of Emet-Selch’s plan for cooperation, why, and wherefore
The plot structure of the expansion is interesting and very video-gamey, but works quite well for many purposes; World building, characters, party members, and the conclusion
Vauthry is a brilliantly constructed ‘villain’… a toddler that can speak, a base animal with precious little understanding of aught or all…
…helped by an absolutely fantastic voice actor…
…who, by himself, deserves a second positive
Surprise surprise, but Ardbert’s scene where he speaks of the past, the Warrior, and the people uniting
Let’s make this clear. Ardbert’s voice actor is absolutely phenomenal, doing nuance, layers, and gradients in spades…
…easily earning…
…a third positive
There’s a fantastic amount of Babylon 5 Effect going on with G’raha Tia throughout…
…second positive worthy
Feo Ul doesn’t have much screen time but they are quite awesome every time they grace the screen
Lyna is a weirdly good ‘guest character’, not a lot of screen time but good usage of most scenes, and good density of character
Alisae’s voice actress continues to kill it
There’s another great ‘connections between people’ scene as we are departing the Crystarium
Honestly the whole Bismark sequence was great
Lyna is an excellent supporting character, surprisingly multi-faceted
General voice acting positive
Uriangier really shines in this one, getting to show off his nuance, his care with the pixies, his care for Ryne, and the burden he bore…
…second positive territory
And a positive for his voice actor nailing it
The build up to and reveal of Amaurot is not just fantastic…
…but is the best bit of ‘characterization’ we ever see for the mastery of power Emet-Selch really has
The final send-off of the party right before the final dungeon is poetry, really
And call me a sop, but I have to give a separate plus for the feels as we talk to Ryne
Emet-Selch’s final rant at the party is honestly incredible…
…made even better by virtue of his truly fantastic voice actor, for which…
…he earns a full two positives
The visual storytelling of the Amaurot city is fantastic
The side quests of Amaurot do so much to flesh out the people and culture of the ancients
The Ancients in general are fascinating on almost every level
The storytelling in general of the Amaurot dungeon is insane, between the voice over, the visuals, the progression of enemy times…
…even the very map itself? I’m not sure I’ve seen better storytelling in a dungeon before…
…earning a third positive
The pre-final battle scene is poetry. You can tell Emet-Selch is holding back, still toying with us, still holding out that faint hope
And the way we array ourselves around and against him is fantastic, culminating in G’raha Tia summoning the other us’s (or however you interpret it)
The Dying Gasp… Hades.
Hades finally, finally no longer holding back, in his last desperate gasp that he just can’t help but hold onto, he unleashes his all against us…
…but somehow all of us, together, push back.
Remember us. Remember that we once lived.
The ending sequence in general is great. The swim, the people, Ardbert’s axe finally cleansed
Character positives for Ardbert
…x2
…x3
Character positives for Emet-Selch
…x2
…x3
The Bethric / Skip chain meanders a bit, but when it gets going it’s pretty heartwarming and has some good moments
The simple Lyna scene of her worrying about her ‘grandfather’ is lovely for many reasons
The revelation that the vision of the Final Days is a trigger of awakening one’s Echo, as a resultant of how much the Final Days caused literal planetary-wide, dimension-spanning PTSD, is kind of awesomely horrifying
Consequently, the cutscene revealing thusly is fantastic in its execution
Some good consequence storytelling in the restoration of Eulmore arc in 5.1
And it’s time to finally give the Chai’s their own positives, starting with Dulia…
…for general wholesomeness, complexity of character, and nuance
And of course two for Nuzz, for being a confident, competent, nervous, and suffering anxiety…
…and both being beautifully voice acted
The big speech scene in Eulmore is actually pretty legit, in framing, presentation, and the general moment of it
The scenes establishing and developing Elidibus do a great job of making him an interesting character despite the revelations about him being so relatively recent
While it does linger a bit, the Elidibus gauntlet quest is fantastic; It uses our journey, summarized, as a way to characterize him… or perhaps ‘it’
Elidibus is a properly written, brilliantly tragic… robot. A mind incapable of perceiving past its mission, something so far gone and so far lost so as to be diminished and, worst of all, is entirely self-aware of it… and further incapable of course correcting…
…easily earning a second positive
The entire ‘crystals and echoes’ quest
The Heroes’ Gauntlet is a great storytelling dungeon…
…most especially in how it carries us throughout the zones ventured thusfar, aided by those we’ve aided thusfar
G’raha Tia’s voice actor is fantastic
The animation, cinematography, and camerawork are just noticeably higher quality in 5.3
The overall theme of idealism, and what it does to us… good, bad, and in between
The overall theme of legacy, and what and how we pass on
The pacing and execution of the ‘breather’ episode in early 5.3… before things get bad
Alisae continues to be a fantastic character
Alphinaud joins his sister in being generally awesome
G’raha Tia is just kind of awesome in general… the earnestness, the counterpart to our inspiration…
…earning him another positive
Elidibus’ pre-battle cutscene is powerful in its tragedy, in the broken doll Elidibus has descended to
The Seat of Sacrifice boss fight has some wonderful storytelling throughout the fight
Elidibus’ final send-off is exactly as powerful, morose, and tragic as it should be
G’raha’s ‘send off’ is interesting, since it’s not actually a send off (he’s leaving with us after all), but it is instead the end of the ‘Crystal Exarch’ and the culmination of his quest
The final send-off quests in 5.3 are an excellent finale section in general but a few points particularly shine
…the Chais bidding farewell to Alphinaud and ourselves
…Seto getting to have his final moment with Ardbert
…and finally, the full Crystarium sending us off, with Lyna in tears at the ‘loss’ of her grandfather
Big plus for the ‘ending’ scene at the end of 5.3. It is a WoW level cutscene, in terms of quality, custom animation, and production values, in addition to the amazingness of the characters and how they all play off each other, especially G’raha…
…easily two positive range
“What’s the password?” (dramatic flourishing) PASSWORD!
The cure for Ga Bu scene is honestly heartwarming and smile inducing
Bonus consequence storytelling positive for the cure being… exactly what it should be; A first step, moving from 0% curable up to 1% curable, which is both huge and minor at the same time
So this may sound weird but the Relict Matoya is actually really good storywise… the visuals, music, presentation, cuteness factor, all do a great job of making it more enjoyable than it would otherwise be…
…earning a second positive
G’raha being adorably adorkable as he gets to be an ‘adventurer’ (read: kiddo) is just precious
Merlwyb’s speech to the Executioners is pretty legit, a bit more flowery and a bit more charismatic, but it’s core concept remains true; Evolve or die
The entire 5.4 arc does exactly what it needs to in terms of pacing; it’s a breather episode. The stakes aren’t gone, nor unimportant, but they are definitely lower, and that’s exactly what it should be in the wake of Hades and Elidibus
The confrontation between Gaius and Valens is actually pretty legit…
…and a special bonus for Valens’ death
Gaius himself is actually really quite good in the entire arc, weirdly enough, and gets some much needed character development and backstory
This is further aided by both Severa and Valdeaulin, both victims of his, who share their stories as they take their positions as his allies
Eden terraforming
Thancred and Urianger being dads for Ryne
Ryne wanting to connect with Gaia
Gaia’s memory issues and the utilization thereof as a narrative tool
E12 bridge
E12 outro
Gaia
Ryne and Gaia
The story of the heretic returned home and the reception he received from family and former neighbors
Ehll Tou is just adorable, and the alien mentality of being fascinated by ‘crafting’ is a neat world building touch
The orphanage chain of the Firmament is a very good, very ground-floor story about the orphanage
The Restoration itself is just good stuff all around…
…with good Internal Continuity…
…and generally heartwarming, well constructed characters
The smithing Mean quest is actually quite nice, it’s got good tone, good light hearted bits, and a nice heartwarming thing at the end
The fishing Mean quest is, similarly, pretty legit
The final Mean arc is simple, but a nice personal capstone to a series of nice, personal stories
The characterization and moments for Renda-Rae in the ranged physical quest are pretty nice
The magical dps role quest is actually pretty legit. It takes a moment to get going, but once it does it turns into a surprisingly powerful tragedy, yet retains positivity as Taynor now gets a chance at a real life after the Flood
The Bozja series giving us some good insight into Cid as well as the events surrounding Dalamud
And has some great cutscene construction regardless
Mikoto remains amusing and enjoyable
Misija has a weirdly large amount of characterization for someone they keep wanting to portray as ‘just evil’
The Mikoto and Misija scene is a great example of Mikoto’s character and how she can out-think so much around her, while being a fascinating bit of world building
The healer’s role quest as usual has some good Warriors of Light build up and storytelling…
…and deserves a bonus positive for Giott being generally delightful
Lilja is, in general, generally awesome
The tragedy of the tank role quest in general is good stuff
Granson himself is also pretty enjoyable and has a decent arc to himself
Cylva’s story is brief but powerful, a cute way to tie in 1.0 and a great cap to the Warriors of Light’s story
GNB 60-70 has some good character tidbits and background worldbuilding
RDM 80 is simple but nice, and a good capstone to Arya’s arc
PLD (GLD) 80 ties up the, uh, gladiator chain quite nicely and has some surprisingly good moments
WAR 80 was far more entertaining than it had any right to be
SCH 80 not only cured the Tonberries, but was adorable on several levels
SUM 80 has nothing to do with summoning, really, but has some good moments with Arenvald and Fordola
DRK 80 is the usual high quality stuff…
…but gets a second positive for the sheer continuity cavalcade as well as the interpretive last moments of who (or what) was really going on
Generally good level 80 quest continuity in WHM, NIN, MNK, DRG
The Void Quest is a good chunk of continuity, and lays some good bricks for future stories
The moment between Estinien, Alisae, and G’raha is just adorable
The entire arc of freeing Tiamat, and Estinian the dragon rider
Paglth’an really has some fantastic storytelling in its design and visuals, as the battle commences, aided by Estinien and Tiamat
The post-Paglth’an scene between Fordola, Alphinaud, and Estinien really bespeaks her broken idealism, and the wounded as they rail at one another
Fourchenault’s big jackass reveal scene, his disownment of his kids, is quite well acted and presented despite himself
Arenvald’s crippling, Alphinaud’s reaction, and the perfect capstone of legacy
Dialogue positive…
…mk 2…
…mk 3…
Persistent power progression in lore across the expansions
RPR 70-80 has some memorable characters and moments
RPR 70-80 worldbuilding, especially for Garlemald and Garleans in general
General fidelity quality of opening cinematic
Sharlayan (the city) is brilliantly laid out and indicative of the coastal town motiff
The Three Frogs of Light
The first Forum scene does a lot pretty quickly and efficiently; Introduces a new character, establishes the Forum’s method of operation, hints at several things, and changes the stakes into a more personal venue
The initial sequence in Yedlihmad, with aether sickness and Estinien’s… unique mercantile sense
While… weird, the whole Great Work moment with Estinien was great
The simple yet effective continued development of Allag as horrible during Amon’s flashback
Thavnair is visually beautiful and perfectly encapsulates the island trade nation
The build up and reveal of Vrtra is actually pretty well executed; Not dragged out for fake drama, but laid out and fulfilled in short order
The ‘chilling with food and friends’ scene is really just fantastic. It’s light hearted, heartwarming, and a great breather moment…
…and very well voice acted, animated, and stylized
Montichaigne’s lesson and relevant info
The ‘everyone’s gathered’ scene is just kind of grin inducing
And frankly, the sheer cavalcade of continuity deserves a positive all in its own
The entire lead up to Garlemald’s battle is well constructed and has some good character moments
Cold of Garlemald and its usage as a constant threat in the zone
Garlemald zone is generally brilliant visually and in background storytelling
Garlean indoctrination and the tragedy of the sisters
Jullus arc is great in general
Jullus himself is astonishingly well constructed as a character, in a very short period of time
The interruption scene, which is structured as a build up for a fight… only to be interrupted by the WHM representative
Sense-make logic of the ‘hostage’ situation, and Thancred’s shadowing
Quintus’s suicide is actually quite well done
The little things scene between the troops is exactly as powerful as it needs to be. Not because of defeating some great evil or stopping some horrible plot, but simply because things have gotten… better. In tiny, insignificant, microscopic ways…
…and those ways are what really matter
Honestly, a third positive for this scene. Dialogue, music, emotion, but most importantly of all… it is earned. Multiple expansions of build up are, honestly, rather well culminated in this moment. “It’s the little things, isn’t it?”
As much as it causes me personal trauma, the de-powering and desperate race back to camp is a very powerful moment for very good reason
Tower of Babil’s general visual storytelling and presentation
The initial journey to the moon is excellent in audio, visual, moments, and escalation
Hythlodeus and the echoes are a great additive
Tension of post-Zodiark… the axe has fallen, but yet to hit anything
Loporrit breather section is great in several ways
Livingway’s introduction scene is hysterical (and a necessary moment)
The ‘forest’ which is, honestly, just… heartwarming
Speaking of heartwarming, the Loporrits attempts at keeping us ‘away for our own good’ and how terrible they are at it…
…and Urianger’s moment of settling down with the crew, the significance of names
Alphinaud’s midnight scene is a perfect encapsulation of his idealism in positivity; the desire for the betterment
Alisaie’s midnight scene is a great example of her idealism in negativity; the fear of things going badly, pushing her to prevent
Thancred’s midnight scene is just so him. The pragmatist and realist who, ultimately, cannot detach himself from his personal connections that keep him going
Y’shtola’s midnight scene continues to be very her; snarking covering the concern and fear that drowns her, and her desire to make sure we’re recovered… always attending to reality
Estinian’s midnight scene is very him. For all his layers and pretensions, the man cares deeply and, more to the point, very much wants all those things like friendship, happiness, and hope fulfilled
G’raha’s midnight scene is just so adorkable and so him. The elder mage who is still nervous at just the thought of talking to us, and really just wants to help
Vanaspati’s storytelling is exactly as horrifying as it should be. We see despair propagate…
…and the escalating nightmare of the backdrop visuals
The scene where Matsya unknowingly and unwillingly spreads the despair wave is brilliantly horrible
G’raha’s standing up seamlessly into the leadership role in the ‘satrap’s demise is brilliant, and good consequence storytelling
Estinien finding himself and demonstrating his growth from Heavensward to Vtra
Matsya’s desperate, terrified flight, child in hand, hits me harder than most I imagine… but even ignoring my personal protective instincts towards the kid…
…the scene is a masterclass. It’s built up perfectly, the story hasn’t held any punches so you know it could have hit here… but even on top of that…
…Matsya never gave up. He held on, even as he began to turn, he didn’t cross that line. He did not give in. And in his defiance he saved that child’s life, as well as his own
The Healer Role Quest in general is a great, well constructed look at the layered tragedy that is prison hierarchy
And the final moment with Fordola, the kid, and Arenvald is great
For all its dreck, the Tank Role quest does at least give us some good backstory for Kan-E
Ranged Role did several bits of good, mostly for the little moments and private stories…
…but also for the very triumphant return of Gosetsu (twice!) and Hien
Two positives for Mage Role, it’s the usual good Ishgardian well thought out storytelling…
…but also a good outro and ‘now what’ about the church and its role in Ishargian society
Ktisis Hyperboreia does some generally excellent visual storytelling
Ktisis Hyperboreia also has some great story tidbits, not the least of which being fighting alongside those whom we do
Cutscene incompetence aside, the big confrontation scene with Hermes is generally awesome…
…made further so by the natural teamwork of Venat, Emet-Selch, and Hythlodeus
Elpis is in general fascinating, with some great visual storytelling
The time travel twist is admittedly a good one
Meteion is just adorable…
…but even more interesting is her nature and how it affects her interactions
Emet-Selch as narrator was an inspired choice
Emet-Selch in past is given a great amount of additional characterization and moments…
…earning a second positive despite everything for the continued nuance and construction of his character, visually, audibly, and in writing
Hythlodeus was always a good character, but he is fleshed out even more in the past…
…earning him, his presentation, his purpose in the narrative a second positive
Hyth + Hades make for fantastic chemistry and are fantastic every moment they’re on screen together
The wonderfully uncanny valley of the ancient’s culture and the fascination therewith…
…as they perceive life, death, duty, other races… and their unique form of stagnation
Hermes is a very well constructed example of someone who simply doesn’t quite fit with his surroundings, and so clearly struggles with it
The brilliant external continuity of the chain of dominos that lead to time travel
Theme of accepting past and moving through it
Venat. Just… Venat….
…who is fantastic for her relatively short period of screen time
The first Despair Wave
And the Meteion Report
The ‘avengers assemble’ moment where Alphinaud calls on the connections we’ve made across the last 5 expansions…
…really did some great stuff overall, showing the dominos where they lay
The ‘breather’ segment has some issues, but the payoff of the scene with Urianger is beyond words. He’s been legit this entire expansion, but the moment of his being embraced by Moenbryda’s parents…
…and finally allowing himself to accept and embrace in turn, not just them, but himself, and those lost
Erenville has only so much screen time, but is actually pretty awesome in every scene he’s in
Montichaigne is a great example of a good reasonable authority figure, who is helpful and enjoyable despite
Matsya has already had his moments to shine earlier but frankly deserves…
…two positives for how brilliantly they portray a simple fisher and the significance thereof
Vtra is yet another example of a reasonable authority figure who similarly manages to accomplish both being engaging and helpful, while still having his own concerns and worries to flesh him out
Nidhana is just fantastic in general, and delightful as utilized
Lucia actually gets some good time to shine this time around
Alphinaud is, as usual, awesome
Alisae is… as usual… awesome
Urianger in general actually manages to be even better than normal, this being one of his better …
…earning a second positive
Let’s go ahead and get some voice acting points out of the way. Alphinaud…
…Alisae…
Urianger…
Emet-Selch…
Hermes…
Venat…
G’raha…
…and three…
…general…
…positives for NPCs and other characters
The very concept of the Despair Wave is a wonderfully horrific idea on every level…
…and the game uses it to very good effect across the game
The loporrits in general are just a delight
Tataru doesn’t get much screen time but she, similarly, shines each time she’s there
The terrible burden of Venat
Internal Continuity is fantastic in this one…
…easily earning a second positive
But it doesn’t end there, because it also acknowledges the previous expansions (and stuff you personally have done)…
…thus a second positive for external continuity
Wonderful visual storytelling in the Aitiascope…
…and little callbacks and continuity moments
The breaking of Venat cutscene is very well acted, presented, and showcased
The pre-final battle scene with Y’shtola, Urianger, and Thancred is exactly what it needs to be. Fond, melancholy, showcasing growth, and hints of the ‘after’
The simplicity of sitting beside the sleeping G’raha and Alisae, and the friendly interactions with Krile
Estinien and Alphinaud’s moment is great (especially when Estinien admits, albeit briefly, that they are family)
Estinien being, as ever, the perfect person to cut through the crap and force the issue, to perfect musical cues
The G’raha Tia ‘goodbye’ scene is actually really cool, mostly because G’raha is really himself and dorks out beautifully
The Omicron quests about trying to understand connections between people are perfectly horrifying
Alisae and Alphinaud’s ‘goodbye’ is actually quite well done, especially on the voice acting axis
The End Walk
Calling back Emet and Hythlodeus, the blooming of the flowers, the recalling of Hermes’ words, and the crack in Meteion’s despair…
…is such a smile and tear inducing scene it deserves two positives
And one last positive for the final send off of Emet-Selch
Endsinger has great music, dialogue, visuals, presentation…
…and is made even better by the hyperbeam moment of phase 2
The Outro / Ending with the family rejoicing at our survival, and the ship journeying across the NPCs we’ve known and the places we’ve visited
The Stigma Dreamscape visuals and storytelling are very nice
And the quest chain surrounding the Stigma Dreamscape is further nice
The visual and background world building and storytelling of the Dead Ends…
…is really quite excellent, and gives us some great visual and audio flavor
The Studium Gatherer quests are actually quite sweet and heartwarming…
…but it gains a second positive for the world and culture building
Smileton is honestly one of the better visually designed dungeons in the game on sheer quality of brickwork and design
The Culinarian Studium quest is actually quite amusing in its absurdity
There’s actually several consequence storytelling sidequests in Sharlayan proper, one about Papalymo, one about Moenbryda, one about the Levilleur family, one about Alisae in particular… it’s good stuff
We finally (finally) have good side quests in Elpis, ranging from local flavor to world building to explanations of culture and species and discourses on how the ancients interact with each other
Elpis sidequests mk. 2
The Moon (yay!) has good side quests, mostly adorable stuff but also some good insights into how the loporrits function and are adapting to us…
…earning a second positive
The dragon sidequests in Ultima Thule were legit, with good, personal stories and more background for the dragon people themselves
Similarly the Ea sidequests in Ultima Thule were fascinating and horrifying in equal measure
The Garlemald sidequests don’t do much in general (a lot of fairly basic ones) but there are enough gems there to be worth notice, usually dealing with the aftermaths of the crisis or rogue 3rd Legion elements
As usual, the Ea regional quests are terrifying in their alien’ness
Aggregate: The Elpis Regional chain is pretty cute, and horrible as we make our worst enemies in the past // The Garlemald Regional chain is a nice moment of positivity in the otherwise gloomy zone // Helping Dreamingway was just adorable, really
The 6.1 Tataru cutscene is wholesome and adorable
6.1; Estinian’s cutscene with the vendor, the kid, and us is great
Dammit 6.1! G’raha is just… the best, really
6.1; Y’shtola waking up and being bonked isn’t just adorable and humorous, it’s also well directed and animated
6.1; General consequence storytelling in the re-establishment of trade, orphanage construction, and distribution of hoarded wealth
6.1; The simple yet powerful vows of support and encouragement for Vtra from his people
6.1; the final Role Quest acknowledging the mess and recovery operations of Garlemald

Story Negatives:

Inconsistent / absent voice acting in main story stuff
Empty text is a bit of a problem in the initial city-state quests
Bad voice acting isn’t all over the place, but there are several performances in ARR which actively ruin their respective scenes
Music direction is pretty problematic in ARR, with the same songs being played entirely too often
…a common problem…
…across entirely too much time
The entire pre-Titan arc is honestly just… awful. It’s too long, it’s almost entirely filler, and its plot and pacing and story are just… bad
There’s a general presentation problem persistent in ARR, which deflates scenes that otherwise should have impact, and detracts from story beats throughout
The entire pre-Garuda arc is just straight up padding filler…
…and, worse, we’re actively in a hurry and the quests literally waste our time (in lore!) while rubbing our faces in that fact
Minfilia is a flat, bland, empty piece of cardboard…
…which is made even worse by just how much camera presence she has, despite her bad VA, bad character, and absence of relevance
This isn’t quite a negative for Minfilia so much as for her constant presence, which makes her worse
The ARR MSQ has a serious repetition problem of having a serious repetition problem
The Castrum Praetorium has… several issues when it comes to the narrative axis. As an Outro it’s lacking at best, there’s several extended examples of cutscene incompetence, and the actual final thing is just… flat
Pacing has serious issues throughout the MSQ
The final escape sequence from the World of Darkness is silly on every level. Bad storyboarding and cutscene incompetence galore
A whole lot of boring nothing drivel in the La Noscea side quests
The Gridanian side quests are the worst of the lot by far…
…with so little meat to them and so much bleh nonsense
The Lancer 1-30 quests are… not good. Excessive repetition and honestly mostly drivel, with a tiny bit of nice world building and character right at the end making it merely one negative
Excessive amounts of cutscene incompetence…
…across all of the Beast Tribe quests, to the point where we quite literally might as well not have even been there
Ninja 30-50 honestly takes far too long and is a bit cliche’d, plus Karasu is just irritating
The entire Nabriales ‘chain’ is… weird. It’s critically important to the overall plot, with the White Auracite and the Ascians’ nature, and yet the scenes are just… badly done, and bad tempo, cutscene incompetence, and weird direction rob it of all significance
The ‘big drum beat, mission’ song is overused to the point where I actively hate it when it shows up, and that’s in addition to its nature tends to hit the same frequencies and registers as dialogue, meaning when it plays over voice acting it causes issues
Aggregate: WHM 30-50 is, at best, boring // BRD 30-50 is… you guessed it… boring
There is an exceptional amount of narrative cheating with the entire build up for the Ivy and how it is designed to completely remove any semblance of foreshadowing from the circumstances
Ilberd is just the worst. Screw him
The absolutely ridiculous nonsense of us picking up and keeping the vial for evidence deserves
There is a truly aggressive amount of cutscene incompetence going on with the main character in the Banquet scene
Yda and Paplymo staying behind is literally contrary to the entire point of us fleeing instead of fighting, AND the gate being closed behind them could have been done with them on the other side to the same effect!
The moogle sidequest is not great to begin with, but it’s made even worse because it’s a multi day delay when we’re in a hurry for no good reason
The story sequencing of the main plot and the Ul’Dah plot has issues. The two plot threads are interesting in their own rights, but it’s awful in its placement
There is an irritating amount of cutscene incompetence in the death of Haurchefant, which actively detracts from the entire sequence
Charibert and the Knights of the Round are just… cheats, honestly
Also there’s just general cutscene incompetence all around
For the second time in in the HW MSQ, we have pacing and sequencing issues as we go right up to Azys La… and then, while we’re on an obvious time crunch… we go off and do side quests for a while
The undoing of Y’shtola’s ‘death’ for no real purpose or consequence
Some pretty bad cutscene incompetence in the Alexander raids
Honestly Mide’s ‘love story’ is honestly kind of… bad, and sort of ruins the overall arc
Popping in and out and in and out of Alexander for no good reason (often times minutes apart from each other) is just stupid
There is no reason for us to be in the Mhach cutscenes half the time, and it leads to a lot of irritating cutscene incompetence as we literally stand there doing nothing in a scene that has nothing to do with us
The PLD arc is boring, actively nonsensical, and ignores its own continuity in favor of dull plot points that go no where and mean nothing…
…earning a second negative
WAR 50-60 is bad, boring, after-school-special…
…and, worse, is the same damn arc from the ARR one
General Empty Text issues
AST 30-60 just takes too damned long. Between empty text and repeating itself its bloated past reasonability, easily being three times the length of the other class quests and not in a good way
MCH 50-60’s hatesink Dzamael character was… not well done. Too overt, too sudden a turnaround at the last minute
MIN 50-60 sucks. It’s dull as dishwater, predictable to its detriment, and doesn’t do anything with its cliches
The Western Coerthas quest chains honestly kinda suck
The majority of the Dravanian Hinterlands quests are boring to the point of detrimental, following hunters doing hunting things and also pluckiness woo
The moogle quests. Just… what a waste of everything
As much as I love the overall scenes, throwing the eyes over the bridge is not only stupid, but leads to a lot of bleh
Aggregate: Emmanellain. ‘Nuff said. // While a minor point, being poisoned to set up the failed conference is totally unnecessary as we only had to be absent a few minutes at best. It could have been accomplished while we were out dealing with wolves // The way the Warriors of Darkness get portrayed early on is unnecessarily (and narratively cheating) evil muwa ha ha
Narrative cheating of the Griffin… again, sigh
Cutscene incompetence with the Griffin… again, sigh
The utter pointlessness of the reveal of Yda = Lyse and the total lack of follow through thereupon
The usual repetition problem
Zenos’ initial fight against us has him shrek us effortlessly which… I’m sorry, what?
So by the time we hit the Ruby Sea we start to run into ‘because plot’ reasons for cutscenes
The story sequencing of the early 4.0 arc is very, very disjointed
The pacing of the entire Ruby Sea arc really suffers
Magnai is an asshole, and that’s… ‘fine’ but the problem is despite repeated interactions he never truly gets his comeuppance nor does he get any better
External continuity with Ilberd being ‘right’ despite everything…
…and for the disjointed positioning of Stormblood relative to other expansions
Grynewaht who is somehow as good as Raubahn in combat, who is misplaced in both tone and execution as a bad combination of comic relief and horrific nightmare
We… stopped being the Star Destroyer for some reason in Stormblood. We build back up to it, but it’s undeniable, unexplained, and actively hurts the narrative repeatedly
Gosetsu and Yotsuyu’s death scene is honestly really, really bad on every level. Pacing, storyboarding, incompetence…
…a second negative for all of the above for three solid minutes
Lyse is not a bad character, but the narrative has no idea how to utilize her properly, and it actively hurts the overall story
The ‘ending’ to 4.0 is… weird. It’s misplaced, ignores consequence storytelling (we’re super free) and honestly just… tries too hard
I like him, and I like where it goes, but Gosetsu and Yotsuyu surviving is total bullcrap on every level
Ramza is an addlepated twit and literally called out in-universe for it
The entire wine self-insert chain is pointless drivel with very little to redeem it (Hancock was cool)
The pacing of the Ivalice arc is absolutely all over the place, rubber-banding between too-slow and too-fast with no rhyme or reason
PLD 60-70 continues the heady trend of PLD quests… sucking
SAM 60-70 was just straight up melodrama nonsense on top of cutscene incompetence
LTW 60-70 iiiis dull as dishwater boring drivel, with the formulaic after-school-special approach without anything interesting or fun (with the sole exception of the OBJECTION! moment)
ARM 60-70 is dull as dishwater
CRP 60-70 has problems with both of its ‘tones’ (silly vs. serious) and mishandles both
BSM 60-70 repeats the problems of ‘ha ha abusive dad is so silly’ and slants the whole story awfully
Cutscene incompetence with Lakshmi
There is an unacceptable amount of ‘because plot’ in the form of artificial drama, cutscene incompetence, and general lack of agency with regards to Tsuyu
Aggregate: Grynewaht really has no place in the Gosetsu v. Yotsuyu scene // Grynewaht continues to ruin scenes as he just sort of ‘theres’ in the Yotsuyu v. Zenos scene
Aggregate: The insistence in Zenos not suiciding by Lyse is just… tonally out of place and, as usual, forces Lyse into a narrative position she should not be in // WVR 60-70 is… weird, tonally inconsistent, and leans a little too hard in its slanting towards tradition
In hindsight, Tsuyu’s tragedy is really quite unnecessary, over-the-top, and done for its own sake
Hien finally becomes the negative character I misfondly remember in the patch content
Zenos’ arc conclusion (fourth thing)… which is utterly ruined by him being brought back from the dead…
…and rather than doing anything good with it, they just repeat his stupid ‘hunt’ arc
This is further compounded by the fake-out death itself
And finally, the flandardization of what was, otherwise, a decent character
Music utilization problem continues
As much as I like what came of it, Gaius’ survival is, honestly, yet another fake-out undo death thing
The war council and parlay with Emperor Varis’ first half honestly suffers some weird construction and content issues, with the leaders being (frankly) idiots in their moralizing and Varis barely even responding
General repetition issues as per usual
The time dilation problem remains, as it always did
Time dilation reaction problem; Alisae edition
Time dilation reaction problem; Alphinaud edition
Time dilation reaction problem; Thancred edition
Time dilation reaction problem; Uriangier edition
There is absolutely no good reason for the main character to participate in the rescue of Minfilia. The whole tonal, thematic point of this encounter is that the Crystarium is inspired by us to take action regardless of us… and then we go along to help them for some reason
And then there’s Ran’jit. Ran’jit, who is an asshole, who is a threat of the week, which is bad for all the reasons it usually is
Ran’jit continues to be terrible. He has less character than Minfilia (the original) and despite having purpose in the story (as Thancred’s opposite) he is consistently mis-used
Cutscene incompetence returns!
Toupasa, Ran’jit, and the usual mary sue / incompetence issues
As usual, fake-out deaths (Y’shtola) are a negative
The Trolley sequence has some decent moments, but has some serious pacing and padding issues
Ran’jit’s survival is… absolutely awful. Never explained, terrible even if it was explained, and the usual awfulness
Also I’m sorry but him kicking the cart aside is stupid for several reasons. Ignoring the obvious fact that it is a sudden power mary sue bullcrap, it also punches the player in the crotch after all the crap we just went through just to get the stupid trolley working again
…as usual, fake-out deaths (Thancred)
And finally, Ran’jit (sigh) fights us (sigh) again (sigh)
There are occasional pacing (and arguably padding) issues at a few points in Kholusia and the Tempest, when in both cases we’re in a bit of a hurry too
The irritation and aggravation of Konogg and Anogg is way over the top
There is entirely too much padding and empty text in the initial Nier quest chain
Konogg’s 180 in character is the usual exaggerated nonsense
An utterly unsatisfying, ridiculous conclusion to the Nier Raids
There’s… a little bit too much ‘get on with it’ while we’re under literally increasing ticking clock scenarios during the finale of 5.3
Zenos’ final scene in 5.3 is a little bit too much ‘and an even greater threat looms dun dun dun’ for me, and feels ill timed and worse applied
Cutscene incompetence
The big dramatic cutscene of ‘we’ve got to earn it!’ before two idiot children go off to die horribly in service of hindering their own plans for no good reason. Screw that entire cutscene
The Weapons arc has so many issues for me. Ignoring the obvious weird discomfort of jackass, there’s also the fake drama and needlessly irritating stupidity of the kids
A bonus negative for fake drama
A bonus for cutscene incompetence
And then there’s Creepface (bad hatesink? Get off my screen? Objectively badly written one dimensional character?)
There is such a cascade of idiocy in this entire chain it literally is idiot volleyball
This is in addition to the flubber-levels of bouncing around the tone of the entire chain has
The entire Emerald sequence of cutscenes… suck. Just… on every single level, across the board…
…earning a second negative
Creepface’s second cutscene is… entirely too creepy, uncomfortable, and arguably over-written
And then there’s Allie’s big ‘rebellion’ scene which, forgive me, I won’t go into detail on because quite literally everything is wrong with it…
…up to and including Valens taking a Diamond Weapon beam to the face and surviving
The ending of the Weapon chain starts off at a firm ‘neutral’ and between repetition, un-earned crap, veneration of all the wrong things, and after-school special
There’s just… meandering dishwater drivel in the physical dps chain, made worse by the literal ‘I hate you!’ (five seconds later) ‘please come back!’ bit
There is an aggressive amount of cutscene incompetence during the end of CLL cutscene, with multiple points where multiple people could do something (indeed, the hostage-taker literally kicks away their hostage at a certain point) but we just kind of… go along with it Because Plot
Cutscene incompetence in the tank role quest
The Dancer quest isn’t just disinteresting, it’s actively de-investing to the point where I didn’t want to do the quests. This is on top of the fact that it should be a big change to the setting but isn’t, and retroactively adds something that’s always never been an issue
Gunbreaker quest chain cutscene incompetence ruins an otherwise good scene
Some generally dull, boring quests in BRD, BLM, MCH at 80
The repetition of the story is repetitively repetitive
The SGE 70-80 chain is honestly pretty bad. It tries to engage on an emotional level and fails, and tries to have several big moments and… fails
Breather episode of Sharlayan and subsequent pacing issues
Breather episode of the Burrows and subsequent pacing issues
Cutscene incompetence
…more cutscene incompetence
Weirdly unnecessary and lengthy repetition of all we already know with the Forum when many things could have accomplished it with far less waste
The tank role quest is… bad. It’s dumb, meanders, and manages to be completely disinteresting…
…which by itself is worthy of two negatives, but then it pushes into actual aggravation as it turns out to all be about…
…the elementals, and how (frankly) awful they are and how we owe them everything and all that blegh
The early Ranged Role quest honestly sucked, and was actively angrifying
Okay I complain a lot about cutscene incompetence but we just stand there for literal minutes while Meteion (very slowly) recites her information (which we want to stop), allow her to turn (despite knowing what it is), and cause everything… all because we just stand there watching (all of us, even)
The main theme of the game is… weak, as it is excessively repeated to the point of aggravation
And further hampered by several thematic weaknesses which pull the plot down
Speaking of repetition, Meteion really does need to stop saying the same damn thing every time we talk to her, it starts to actually pull away from otherwise decent scenes
The final Zenos fight is mis-placed and unnecessary
The handwaviness of being able to casually travel back to the past and the edge of reality (regularly, for multiple quests) is a detriment to the story as a whole, especially given how difficult and costly it was for the initial transit
The inconsistent time travel problems, especially given how it’s using the same method
The Studium Weaver chain is boring as sin…
…and compounded by actively being insulting towards just about everyone
The Studium Smithing/restoration chain is dull and is terribly paced
The Labryinthos side quests are honestly drivel…
…no world building, no fleshing out, no nothing
Similar problem with Thavnair

Gameplay Positives:

The ARR Miracle x1
The ARR Miracle x2
The ARR Miracle x3
Character creation has a decent number of options and generally well designed structure to it
The HUD customization allows for you to move just about any element to wherever, and scale them smaller or larger, which is awesome…
…earning a second HUD customization positive
MSQ and Class Quest indicators (always shows you what your next main quest or class quest is)
Macros and malleability thereof
Gameplay/Story Integration
Lots and lots of gameplay options in the menus
Autoloot on enemies
The auction house is a bit clunky and awkward but there are a lot of options for how to search for what
The player icons (idle, do not disturb, new player, returning player, in cutscene)
Guildhests serve as a good (if not great) way to tutorialize people who are new to MMOs the concepts therein
The city’s aethernet is a pretty well designed and helps to get around, with a surprisingly well done menu system
Generally good fast travel system (find, warp to from anywhere) …
…earning a second positive
Housing in general is a nice system. Limited, but there are some good cosmetics and some actual functionality to them
The gear set list and the ability to just hit a button and instantly swap classes and equipment on the fly is extraordinarily useful
Smith tutorial quests and how they get players into baseline mechanics
Chocobo bank storage (accessible on the fly) is a great QoL feature
The chocobo companion system, giving another (customizable) tool to help soloing players
Minions form a good type of personalization and customization…
…as do mounts
The glamour system allows for a huge amount of customization in appearance, but limitations in what you can do and the workarounds on top of workarounds pull this back from being more positives
The Duty Finder is a great way to just zip to any dungeon / raid, queue for specifics, and go in certain ways
The roulette system in general is brilliant. It keeps old content relevant, it helps new players, it rewards everyone doing it, it’s even more rewarding if someone’s doing something new, and it has a bunch of options to customize it…
…earning a second…
…and a third positive
The Stone Vigil isn’t much, but it’s probably the first actually designed dungeon in the game, with actual thought put into layout, encounter design, balancing, and bosses
The consistent usage of vuln stacks as a way to apply penalty for failure without being too harsh (can recover from it, drops after a minute if continue to not get hit) and a way to tutorialize which attacks should be dodged
Tam-Tara Hard is a reasonably well designed dungeon; nice minibosses, good trash layout, and reasonable boss design
The new Praetorium is a substantially better dungeon than it used to be, with much truncated pulls and much better bosses
Further, the Livia and Gaius fights are much improved
The resurrection mechanic is a good system. It allows for gradient penalty for failure (you get a debuff, it’s expensive, and it’s time consuming, but you don’t have the snowball problem so many JRPGs have)
The ability to enjoy content at-level as an option is an awesome thing supported by in game systems and mechanics
Ifrit Hard is a pretty good fight. Consistent mechanic usage, fun gimmicks, and built in recovery periods
The Golden Saucer in general is surprisingly good fun, with lots of minigames and a good variety of rewards to them
Triple Triad itself is fairly well fleshed out, to the point of being its own decent minigame
The Lords of Vermillion minigame is… really surprisingly well done, and is a neat little minigame way to use your minions in a non cosmetic fashion
Lost City of Ampador is surprisingly good, since it actually uses some fun trash gimmicks and has unique (if simple) boss designs
Garuda Hard adds some nice layers to the fight, and is generally well designed (gradient difficulty, recovery mechanics, lots to keep track of but not too much, etc.)
The Nael fight, as frustrating as it is, actually has some really cool, well-woven mechanics
The Bahamut fight is pretty legit, with good spacing and pacing of mechanics and variance, just… I can’t summarize it, it’s legit
It’s so legit it actually gets a second positive
Sastasha Hard has a couple issues (the first boss is just way too damage heavy) but the rest of it is a well designed, amusing, fun revamp of the dungeon
Music is… honestly not that great, but there are some legitimately fun songs
The Labryinth raid is actually quite well designed, with some fun fights and good trash layout
Similarly the World of Darkness is pretty legit across the board, even the fights people have issues with are still good ones
Wanderer’s Keep (hard) has some surprisingly well thought out trash design and some fun boss mechanics
Ampador Keep (hard) is honestly pretty fun, with good trash layout and some unique boss designs
The second Gilgamesh fight in Ampador is legit, with great layered mechanics and a lot of fun gimmicks to it
The Phoenix fight in Coils is a really fun, well constructed dps race fight
Crafting itself is a very well thought out, balanced, well designed, in-depth, fun system to craft things…
…earning it a second positive
The crafting interface is easily one of the best I’ve seen in gaming, with a ton of good interface design and lots of different ways to search for recipes, items, flowcharts, etc…
…earning a second…
…and third positive
The Hunting Log isn’t great, and is abandoned too early, but it’s a neat additional way to reward players for seeking out specific mobs and hunting
Monk at 1-50 is actually surprisingly well designed, gradually but surely adding portions of the core mechanics of the class so it actually feels fun to play while leveling and at 50…
…plus its smooth weaving in between its three core combos, with plenty of utility on top of it, is great fun
Warrior 1-50 is actually enjoyable to play, gets most of its core functionality, and has good utility
Scholar 1-50 is substantially superior to WHM, with more utility, more mobility, and more variety in its design
Summoner 1-50 is just as well designed as Monk for different reasons, with all of its core mechanics frontloaded and an enjoyable and malleable rotation, while still looking cool…
…earning a second positive
Ninja 1-50 once again pushes most of its core mechanics (the mudras) forwards, and has most of its combos by then, but lacks some other things that help flesh it out later
Good King Moogle Mog XII–may he sing his awesome song forever–is a decent enough council-style fight, with one of each class doing their own thing and having to balance that all at once
The Leviathan fight continues the trend of good Trial fights by having a reasonable number of mechanics that layer into each other nicely
Try to be surprised, but the Ramuh fight is similarly pretty fun and well designed
Shiva, naturally, is a good fight. Multiple phases with consistent layered mechanics
Keeper of the Lake is the best designed dungeon in ARR, with good trash design and good ‘barriers to progress’ while having some fun bosses…
…earning a second positive overall
The Vishap fight, in its nerfed form, is actually quite fun. Tanks have to keep the adds in check, the dps runs the cannons and burns down adds, the healers frantically keep everyone up, and the entire fight is on a short enrage
Aggregate: Melusine has some visibility and consistency issues (typical of early fights) but it’s some pretty cool ideas and function // Hullbreaker Isle has some issues, but it has some neat fights (especially the Kraken)
QoL Features (quest log and map to find locations and warp to them, joining other people’s warps for free, notifications of nice long cutscenes, etc.)
The revamped Ultima fight is an actual friggin’ fight, and it’s got actual mechanics and presentation and markers…
…and has a phase 2 which is also an actual friggin’ fight
The Palace of the Dead is a reasonably good ‘trial’ system, letting players try out classes and mechanics, while also providing an alternate leveling system for progression
As with many other Trials before it, Ravana is pretty legit
Tioman is a pretty cool fight overall, with meteors, spread markers, etc.
The music is substantially better constructed and, frankly, better quality than ARR’s
The Vault is, blessedly, a well designed dungeon, with good escalation of trash and some fun boss encounters
A special bonus for the Ser Charibert boss fight
The Great Gubal Library in general is quite fun and well designed, with well placed and escalating trash…
…plus some very inventive and fun bosses
And a plus for the final boss of Gubal
The Ascian Primal fight at the end of the Aetherochemical Research Facility is legit
Alexander 5 is a pretty fun, complex fight with some neat gimmicks
Alexander 7 is actually pretty legit, good complexity and good variety
Alexander 8 is awesome. Lots of moves, tons of fun gimmicks, but best of all…
…no binary difficulty. Failure can be recovered from even despite the frenetic pace thereof
Despite requiring a dungeon journal to know what’s going on, Alexander 9 is a pretty cool fight
Alexander 10 is a good, properly tutorialized-within-the-fight boss, with good escalation of mechanics
With one notable exception, the music in Alexander rawks
Alexander 12 is legit, easily one of the best fights in the expansion…
…with lots of great, thematically appropriate, great mechanics and the awesome portals phase
Sophia is a legit fight, with some fun layering and escalation throughout
Zurvan, similarly, is a great fight, with only one niggling flaw in the whole bit
Arachne Eve is, as usual, a fun and good fight with good manual teamwork and nice ‘use detriments to benefits’ gameplay
Forgall is, surprisingly, another good example of a ‘use detriments to benefits’ concept with megadeath and the origination of the doritos
Ozma is a very fun fight, lots of moving pieces and nice big telegraphs (if you know what they’re doing)
WAR 50-60 is still a good tank (probably the best tank in the range), adding better spenders and self heals
WHM 50-60 officially ‘gets good’, with the core lily mechanic coming into its own, and even more ogcds to keep healing interesting
MNK 50-60 continues its excellence, adding Blitzes to the otherwise good combo loops
BRD 50-60 actually becomes rather fun, with the added dot refresher, new song and subsequent proc, and a few other tidbits
SUM 50-60 really starts to come into its own, with the added mobility of the Bahamut-related spells and more options for keeping the dps rolling
Fractal Continuum is a good dungeon with good visuals, good music, good trash design…
…and engaging and fun bosses
Saint Mocianne’s Arboretum is actually quite fun, with legitimately fun visuals and audio and some enjoyable bosses
Pharos Sirius (Hard) is actually pretty legit in its own right, with some fun mechanics and the music remains awesome
NIN 50-60 really comes into its own, having good viscerality and fun but let’s be honest, what really locks it in is its smart usage of cooldowns and charges
DRG 50-60 continues the trend of enjoyability, with a few extra extensions of combos and an additional ogcd
Amdapora Hard has some fun and unique visuals and presentation, but really comes into its own…
…in its boss design, with some fantastic and clever mechanics throughout
Hullbreaker Hard is reasonable enough. It’s essentially a series of trash fights, but there’s thought and care put into them
Gubal Library Hard has some fun stuff, but ultimately it’s the excellent boss design that really makes it work…
…earning a second positive
Sohm Al (Hard) continues the trend of decent HW dungeons
The Antitower has good visuals, good music, good trash…
…and good boss design throughout
Continuing the trend, Sohr Khai is a good dungeon with some fun boss mechanics
The final Nidhogg raid is probably one of the better fights in the expansion…
…with the usual fantastic interweaving of mechanics, and a wonderful escalation of all three phases
Baelsar’s Wall has fun (if simple) bosses, and good layered trash
Music is, as usual, pretty legit
A second music positive for general quality
Sirensong Sea begins Stormblood’s dungeon catalog on a good note, with good barrier trash and simple but fun boss fights
A weird but substantial positive for several QoL improvements added during Stormblood
Susano is, let’s be honest, a pretty enjoyable fight, and starts to really push the ideas of universal markers and positioning
Bardam’s Mettle is a good dungeon in general, with interesting trash and some very fun boss fights
The second boss of Bardam’s Mettle, Bardam himself, is good enough…
…to warrant two positives. In addition to being unique and fun, it serves as a tutorial of sorts for the universal markers that have finally grown to be, and is a well designed gradient difficulty conflict which allows for individual and group recovery while remaining challenging
The Doma dungeon is fun, interesting, engaging…
…but also has really fun, well tutorialized, properly complex boss design
Lakshmi is another good boss fight, introducing mechanics with longer timers and showcases so you can be tutorialized before escalating properly
Ala Mhigo is one of the best dungeons in the expansion, with great and proper trash design, bosses, and function…
…earning a second positive
Stormblood, finally, starts utilizing universal markers
The Shinryu fight is, surprise surprise, good… mean, but good
Alte Roite does the usual tutorialization, escalation, and is fun regardless
Catastrophe
Halicarnassus…
…part two
ExDeath is one of my favorite mage bosses ever…
…easily earning a second positive
Phantom Train is, similarly, a very fun fight
Kefka is a legitimately enjoyable fight, simple in concept but ultimately fun in execution
Kugane Castle is alright; simple, but fun, especially the Yojimbo fight at the end
Consequently, the second Jim fight is actually quite fun, with only a few issues here and there
Chaos 1
Chaos 2
Midgardsormr
Omega music… the whole kit, really
Much as I have issues with it, Omega 11 has a lot of nicely layered attacks and moves and is… well, Omega
And then there’s the beauty that is Omega 12
RDM at 70 is easily one of the better classes overall…
…with good viscerality, good kit, and a nice complex rotation…
…or two, which weaves nicely in and out of itself
NIN gets even better at 70, with two nice spenders and Ten Chi Jin
Byakko is a somewhat simple fight, but its big on spectacle and that it does well
Swallow’s Compass is reasonably fun, good trash tiering and some fun encounters, on top of some legit boss design in the first and third bosses
Suzaku has some really fun stuff in its design, especially the colored template thing
Seiryu has good layers and complexity, marred a little by some RNG and some camera issues, but still fun
AST at 70 has a huge variety of utility and nicely overlapping heals
Heaven On High continues to be a reasonably good ‘trial’ system, letting players try out classes and mechanics, while also providing an alternate leveling system for progression
SCH 60-70 is only a little different than before, but different enough to add some variety and additional ‘battery’ utility to it
Fractal Continuum (Hard) has some fun trash but ultimately leans on its music, visuals, and bosses
Saint Mocianne’s Arboretum (Hard) is actually really fun, with multiple good trash tiering and fun and innovative bosses…
…leading to a second positive
Mateus is simple but fun
General quality to the Rabanastre raid (trash design, some fun bosses)
The Argath fight is legit, clever, and does some fun stuff with its lie/truth mechanics
Belias and its time fun mechanics are really cool, mostly about paying attention and knowing in advance where to be
Famfrit is a hectic fun fest of waaagh
Construct 7 is, memes and jokes aside, really awesome. It’s a lot of fun gimmicks and mechanics on top of…
…the math segment, which actually buffs you for doing it right
Yiazmet is a good ‘chaotic’ fight, lots going on and lots to keep track of but essentially all dodgeable
Mustadio is a very fun pay-attention-check fight, with lots of tracking
Agrias, too, is a great fight that uses the Duty ability to good effect
The Orlandeau fight is a bit much, but it’s quite well constructed, with a whole lot going on and nice layering thereto
And big surprise, Ultima is fantastic. Multi layered, lots of different types of mechanics, and…
…it’s effectively two fights in one, with a proper mid-mission checkpoint even
General additional positive for trash design and visual fidelity…
…of the two later Ivalice raids
DRK 70’s quest is fun, interesting, appropriate, and thematic
WAR continues its trend of excellence with several new useful moves to the kit and a great cooldown
SAM has a little bit of a button bloat issue, but otherwise is fun, engaging, rewarding…
…has great viscerality, and is a great build/spend class
Blue Mage’s may be limited, but the Carnivale is a nice lengthy amount of puzzle mini-game content for them to enjoy
And a plus for Blue Mages variety of spells and the uniqueness and fun thereof
The Drowned City of Skalla is another example of a series of fun boss fights
Tsukuyomi is a fantastic fight, with great mechanics and a great bridge and great layering and great everything…
…easily worth a second positive
As before, the Roleplay system is used and used well and is a good variant on Princess Peach segments
The Burn (minus the last boss) has some very fun mechanics and good construction
The Ghimlyt Dark continues the trend of excellent dungeons, some very fun boss fights…
…and actual well done terrain and trash design with environmental hazards
Aggregate: Chadarnook is simple but fun // Ditto for Guardian // Genbu is a pretty neat, fun fight // Great Hunt (monster hunter fight) is pretty fun overall, and unique besides
Ocean Fishing is a nice, rewarding, lucrative little side mini game that is reasonably well constructed and reasonably enjoyable
Trusts are a good method to ensure you can do the dungeons through the MSQ and…
…the scenario mode allows people to continue to use it as an additional leveling tool
Music! Music music music
Holminster Switch has some good trash design (and some bad) and starts leaning into the tutorialized boss construct
Dohn Mheg continues the trend of good dungeon design…
…and gets a bonus for the final boss being especially good
The Titania boss fight is exceptional, easily one of the best Trials to-date, and one of the better ones in Shadow… tons of layered mechanics and excellent build up throughout…
…earning a second positive
Have I mentioned the music? Even early on the music is legit in Shadow
Music point number two
Qitana Ravel is honestly one of the better dungeons so far in Shadow. It uses trash as tutorialization, and actually bothers with engaging miniboss encounters…
…in addition to the generally good, if simple, boss designs
Malikah’s Well has a few issues, but it shines in its fun and layered boss designs
Mt. Gulg has a few issues in boss design, but is overall quite fun
The Crown of the Immaculate fight isn’t really anything special… but it’s good stuff, good and fun and unique mechanics neatly and nicely layered upon each other
Amaurot dungeon is a very well executed dungeon, with tutorialization in trash design, fun and engaging bosses…
…and great music and visuals throughout
The Dying Gasp is probably in the running for the best raid in the game on several levels…
…not the least of which being how well constructed it is, how well it layers on itself…
…and how it progresses
Copied Factory has some issues with padding and telegraphs but is still fun at times and has some legit music
Puppet’s Bunker honestly has some of the best trash in the entire game, earning its own unique positive
A general Puppet’s Bunker positive
And a bonus one for really clever bosses (especially the first and the last ones)
General positive for quality of visuals, music, and encounters in Tower at Paradigm’s Breach
Red Girl is a very creative, very fun ‘players in control’ fight with a lot going on but all of it manageable…
…easily a two positive fight
Her Inflorescence is one of the best bosses I’ve seen in this game. Complexity without convolution, fully tutorialized in the fight, lots of varying and fun mechanics, very unique gimmicks that are explained in-fight, brilliant visuals and music…
…easily earning…
…three positives for being just that good of a boss fight
SCH at 80 has some great utility and a good spread of abilities…
…further, SCH at 80 also has a good general mentality and variance to its healing from all other healers
The Grand Cosmos languished a bit in several respects, but makes up for it with some creative and fun boss mechanics
Aggregate: Improved quality of life changes including but not limited to; The new interface for synthesizing, the quest altitude indicators, retrying on overmelds, linking party finder directly from chat, new hairstyle interface, expansion vendors in major cities
New Game + and the way it allows you to redo old content
The Roleplay fight as Estinien is pretty legit
BLM is, at long last, a full class at 80. It has a full rotation, but what really makes it shine is the micro optimizations in which cooldowns you use where
A rare quest positive for the Elidibus ‘gauntlet’
Heroes Gauntlet has a bit of a health problem but otherwise is quite well constructed, as we fight our way through the (totally not FFV) classes from other shards
BRD at 80 doesn’t just have lots of utility and a good setup, but actually leans on a fair few number of different types and varieties of mechanics, with lots of neat complexity and variety…
…making it a pretty easy two positive class
AST at 80 continues to have lots it can do, and well
The Seat of Sacrifice is a fantastic fight, while not one of the best ever it’s definitely high tier…
…especially given how it actually has a mid mission checkpoint! Oh and lots of very cool, well constructed mechanics
DRK at 80 finally has a good overall rotation and presentation, with a decent amount of interweaving mechanics, making it a good… dps class
Matoya’s Relict is weirdly generic for how unique many of its boss mechanics are, and is buoyed up by said mechanics almost entirely
Music positive number three
The Ruby Weapon fight has a few decent mechanics to it
The Sapphire Weapon fight is a fun quest, with well designed mechanics and a fun fight with a neat song
Emerald Weapon is a good, well designed, well layered, well tutorialized fight with breather periods, good music, good visuals…
…earning a second positive
MCH is still good, but barely different, at 80
SAM really, truly comes into its own at 80, with the ‘follow ups’ to combos and more options and buttons to keep things interesting…
…easily earning a second positive
Diamond Weapon, for all the flaws surrounding it, is an excellent fight, smartly keeping tanks relevant while removing ‘threat’ in the traditional sense, with lots of positional and ‘pay attention’ checks…
…earning a second positive
WHM 80 finally has a true loadout of both lily-using abilities and regulars, as well as really uping the viscerality of the class with Glare and Dia
E1 is, shocker, a good fight. Relatively simple yet enjoyably frantic, with lots of leeway time on top of the hits
E2 is awesome. It’s mostly the same types of mechanics we’ve faced, but with the added layer of the ‘clock’ which ‘delays’ them, forcing you to adapt and move rather quickly…
…easily earning a second positive, especially for sound design
PLD 80 finally, finally became a full and complete tank class at 80, with good rotations and timing and utility
RDM continues to be a good class, with good utility, and good fun, only hampered by being barely changed at 80
E3 layers its mechanics very nicely, especially towards the latter half, though it fumbles a bit in several ways
Yet another music positive (this time for Eden stuff)
DRG at 80 is, as with all classes, truly coming into its own, not just with combos that finally loop into themselves, but the additional Life of the Dragon ‘phase’ also adds a lot to the class…
…earning it a second positive
E4 has several issues with it, but where it shines (its frenetic pace and the layering of mechanics) it shines
E5 has a few problems but is, as per usual, a good fight
E6 does the usual good thing with layering and positioning, with only a few small issues
E7 is exceptionally well tutorialized within the fight, with introduction of mechanics in a vacuum and safety before escalating and layering…
…on top of being a very well constructed, unique fight to begin with
DNC is a fantastic fight in almost every respect. At first glance it’s simple, but picking it up is very smooth for new players, and it’s well constructed even at lower levels, plus there’s several bits of player control over the RNG of the procs of the class, and it all layers and flows onto itself beautifully, all while looking and sounding cool…
…easily earning…
…three positives
NIN continues being a well done class, with a few additional bells and whistles (Bunshin being a big one) that allow for greater control over stacking
E8 is one of the better Eden fights in general, having multiple phases and the great bridge phase, as well as great music…
…earning it a second positive
E9 is pretty simple, but keeps things nicely varied, especially with the platforms mechanic
GNB is really a fantastically designed class all around. It has everything other tanks do but just straight up feels better to play, designed around DPS mentality and structured to allow for layering OGCDs while staying mobile and fun…
…easily…
…a three positive class
E11, once you figure it out, has some good music and some good presentation to a reasonably well done, if simple, fight
E12 first half…
…and second half
Akademia Anyder isn’t anything special, really, but it has some fun mechanics in its boss designs
WAR continues its trend of being good
Twinning has great visuals, great music, and fun bosses…
…earning a second positive
The Firmament is, problems aside, a great way to level your crafters all the way up to 80 and manages to be rewarding at the same time
Similarly the Diadems are a good, if brutally direct, way to level your mining and botany
The Varis fight is actually pretty legit
Bozja is lucrative for both cosmetics and leveling…
…and is a great way to ‘try out’ a class at 80 (provided you are already 71)
Brionac is an interesting and fun fight, made even more so…
…due to the other side of it, the lower Drill fight
Adrammelch is pretty legit too
The prisoner section is a nice ‘breather’ section and a good way to do ‘trash’, by rewarding the players for saving the prisoners instead of just typical trash
And finally, the last fight of beast plus Lyon is a neat little challenge
Delebrum generic quality boss positive
The Bozjan Phantom fight is actually really fun, despite its simplicity
The Trinity Avowed is, similarly, pretty awesome
Paglth’an has good trash fights, good viscerality, good boss fights…
…and some truly excellent boss designs. Special bonus points for the second fight, the ‘magitek reactor’ fight, which is at its face a basic elevator boss but is very well constructed in how it progresses (trash to boss to trash to boss) and lots of variable mechanics that vary things up as you go through, with little repetition
The Second Battle of the Carteneau Flats is enjoyable for many of the usual reasons, and deserves special mention for actually adding mid-mission checkpoints to the game (finally)
SGE tutorial quest actually properly tutorializes with an interesting and engaging mini dungeon
The RPR tutorial quest, once again, tutorializes both the class… and positionals!
The ‘party’ system and optional interactions system is a great way to add optional dialogue and flavor text
For one of the only times in the game, Sharlayan is actually well constructed from a gameplay perspective, with good layout and connections between vendors, warp points, and access to auction house
Mindi boss has some great pay attention checks and layered mechanics
Sindi has some really cool fake out mechanics and nice layering as well (a berserk right before a big hitting telegraph)
And the final Magus Sister fight is fantastic, lots going on and great presentation and general fun
The ‘everyone’s gathered’ scene actually changing and acknowledging what you’ve done to-date
Metal Gear Thancred is rather basic at its core, but well executed and with gradient failstate
The recurrent usage of the NPCs and party members adding extra dialogue at most quests in the MSQ is a good storytelling tool
The inclusion of portraits alongside the in-dungeon text is a good tool to ensure story is not missed, and is easier (and quicker) to understand
Greater attempt and work to create actual variety to quests
Music
Music x2
The de-powered soldier stealth section is both brave and new, but more to the point is good when it’s good…
Tower of Babil gets a generic quality positive…
…on top of some fun and engaging bosses…
…and the final boss, Anima, getting his own
Zodiark is, surprise surprise, a rather fun boss, with fun ‘pay attention to changing scenario’ mechanics and excellent layering…
…leading to a second positive
Vanaspati isn’t super amazing, but still has some fun boss mechanics
The Melee DPS Role Quest boss fight was actually pretty fun
The Venat fight is surprisingly well constructed and mean
Ktisis Hyperboreia is a generally well done dungeon across the board, visually and audibly
Ktisis Hyperboreia’s bosses are great, some fantastic stuff, including the Hrothgar prototype…
…the snake… thing…
…and finally Hermes himself, all with some lovely and well done mechanics and gradient construction and tutorialization
The victory lap fight at Garlemald as Alphinaud, Alisae, and ourselves is pretty fun
The Livia boss in Aitiascope is a good’n
The rest of Aitiascope is quite enjoyable, with a fun (if simple) second boss and a fun (if too long) third boss
The Hydaelyn fight itself is a generally well constructed fight…
…but further credit must be given not just for the Trust system itself, but for the ‘lives’ system they implement via stacks of ReRaise
The ‘forced’ End Walk works exceptionally well
Caustic Grebuloff (first boss of The Dead Ends) does some fantastic ‘blown exaflare’ mechanics on top of good sound design and general quality
Peacekeeper (second boss of The Dead Ends) is an absolutely awesome fight, with tons of great mechanics that beautifully keep things frenetic
Ra-La (third boss of The Dead Ends) has some visibility issues but aside from that (minor) issue, it’s very well constructed and wonderfully layered
Endsinger is honestly a fantastic fight, with great visual indicators (outside of telegraphs), wonderful mechanics, and awesome viscerality and music and everything…
…easily earning a full…
…three positives
Stigma Dreamscape has some very cool and fun stuff…
…earning two generic positives for general design…
…but a singular positive for the final boss of Stigma-4
Smileton has relatively simple boss fights, but all three are well executed and smooth…
…earning a second positive
Crystalline Conflict is frenetic, fast, fun, well interfaced…
…and so easily earns two positives for its overall mode
Alzadaal’s Legacy is in general good quality in music and design
Armored Chariot gets a bonus positive for the fun and gimmicky mirrors mechanic
The Looming Warden boss is similarly very cool and has a unique ‘driving’ mechanic on top of general fun factor
PvP distinct abilities and skills… essentially redesigning each class to be distinct and varied while also retaining some semblance of class identity in PvP is…
…a momentous feat which easily deserves…
…three positives just on the face of it
The final solo instance of the Tower of Babil as we deal with Nerva and crew

Gameplay Negatives:

The launch of ARR, while understandable, was honestly unacceptably bad
…good luck finding the option you want in the extensive, badly organized, sometimes badly labeled options menu
There is an obtuseness to the auction house menu which really has to be experienced to understand
Forced single player questing (especially MSQ)…
…which is easily the worst aspect of the entire game
Camera zoom out issue (especially on larger enemies and encounters)
ARR specifically has long, empty stretches of no music at night time out in the zones
…this is such a long term, irritating issue it gets a second negative
The costs for fast travel are, frankly, unnecessary and needlessly punishing on lower level players
The lack of proper trial or try-out of classes means you have no real way to know what you like before sinking arduously long periods of time into leveling first
The game forces you to unlock almost everything… which is essentially excessive handholding tutorialization, which even that would be fine if not for the total lack of option therein (no skipping, no choice to say “this isn’t my first MMO” or “this is an alt”)
The in game store is probably the most benign I’ve ever seen… but it’s still there, and it’s still microtransactions
The game removes your abilities when synched down in level, which is honestly quite awful for so many reasons (lots of content is below max level, removing abilities changes how you play the class and in some cases actively removes mechanics, etc.)…
…easily making this a second negative worthy
The ARR Relic is so bad I literally cannot summarize it…
…so instead I will just give it a second negative and move on
…no, three negatives. Screw those quests
The jankiness of dungeons and how limited they are and function is kind of weird (no way to replace people easily, can’t swap roles in mid dungeon, can’t access certain functionality while in dungeon, etc.)
There’s a bit of seconds in minutes problem in the overworld and travel design in ARR, with walking (and occasionally sprinting) just taking very long across big, empty tracks of nothing
The padding of the interaction bar
The game has a very inconsistent leveling curve for alt classes, with how many tools you have and the pace thereof varying wildly from level range to level range
The pre-Titan quests have many issues. Massive pacing and difficult curve issues, entirely too much straight up walking across a huge swath of uninteresting terrain
In general, the actual gameplay of the MSQuests in ARR are bland at best and actively time wasting at worse
The Unending Journey is… really terribly laid out and actively aggravating to find the cutscenes you want
Unskippable cutscenes… in the MSQQ
Aurum Vale is visually disinteresting, has actively bad trash encounter design, and has boring (at best) bosses
The second boss of Stone Vigil (Hard) is bad in every way. It’s badly designed vehicle mechanics on top of janky controls and even if you do it all right it’s a bad combination of boring and incredibly easy to wipe on
Halatali is honestly not great. It has entirely too much trash in entirely too spread out areas and its bosses are not just boring, but have paling mechanics
The entire pre-Garuda quest arc has long, sloggy areas that are irritating to maneuver through with high level, difficult mobs to deal with
The Sunken Temple of Qarn has multiple actually unexplained mechanics (bees, bosses) and does nothing to mitigate these issues
Dzamael Darkhold… sucks. It has poorly explained mechanics, irritating trash and boss design, and actively trolling design (roaming eye, standing in crystal near aoe, etc.)
Wanderer’s Palace has several issues with not tutorializing trash mechanics or boss mechanics, but worse than that most of the bosses aren’t interesting or fun
Pharos Sirius is probably the worst dungeon in ARR. A big, long, irritating slog through frustrating trash with too much health that hits too hard, first boss is one big irritation fest, second boss is entirely too obtuse, third boss is a speed bump, fourth boss is vanilla…
The Third Turn of First Coil of Bahamut is… not good. It’s trash, it’s easy trash, it’s mandatory, it offers literally nothing, it takes too long, and its layout is badly designed
The Fifth Turn of First Coil of Bahamut can go to hell, between binary difficulty and bad callouts
The First Turn of Second Coil has a bit of mechanic bloat with some inconsistent indicators which just makes it all a big mess
As much as I enjoy it, the Nael fight has some very serious binary difficulty issues, and absolutely no margin for error
As with WoW, the Coils is a form of locking mandatory, main story behind what is effectively ‘hard mode’
Ampador Keep has several issues with it. Visually, lighting, boring bosses, knock-down-out-of-fight problem
The (mandatory) unlock quests to access CT can go to hell. Entirely too much backtracking and no real gameplay
Squadrons… suck. The AI is pants-on-head stupid, it’s grindy as hell, even with full buffs dungeons just take too long, and the related mechanics are barely worth it
The La Noscea side quests are, at absolute best, boring wastes of time
The Thanalan side quests are no better
The fact that the quest tracker can only track 5 quests at a time sucks on several levels
The Gridanian quests just… suck, even more than the other zones…
…to the point of being a second negative
The Mor Dhona side quests… suck. They’re already the usual not-good variety, but then you add in a stupid amount of back and forth backtracking and it’s even worse
The inventory system has several… several issues, but really the worst by far is how limited it is in terms of crafting and the ridiculous inventory problem
So while the inventory itself isn’t really that bad… the related itemization bloat problem is a serious problem
The daily limitation of only being able to do 12 dailies is bad on several levels, literally artificially lengthening how long any given rep will be to raise
The Ixal quests in particular deserve special mention for being just… bad daily quests…
…being irritating, long, boring, and cumbersome to do
There’s weird, awful, and awkward limitations with the 1-30 classes and doing NG+ with them and related issues
The Marauder 1-30 quest has some really boring quests to begin with, but is made much worse via some of the worst ‘go here go there’ padding I’ve seen in ARR
The Rogue 1-30 quests have a bit too much combat but, far worse, way way too much padding and backtracking (mandatory Hide quests, unclear objectives, and sending you all over the place)
Casting pushback just… sucks. It can go on too long but, most importantly, too much damage while casting can literally just interrupt your cast
The Archer 1-30… really sucks. Bad quest locations with irritating quest objectives making the whole thing awful to play through
WHM 30-50 is some legitimately bad quest design. Zoom around across the entire continent to go to one dangerous area or another to interact with one thing before moving on
MNK 30-50 has the same quest design problem WHM did (arguably worse)
BRD 30-50 has the same issues but even worse, doing the ‘put quest objects behind high level, dangerous areas because screw you’ problem
White Mage 1-50 starts bad and crawls its way up to mediocre
Dragoon 1-50 has really bad ability placement (first AoE at 40… no second AoE at all), dull combos, and none of its core features outside of the jumps
Paladin 1-50 is serviceable, but suffers from two major flaws; It lacks viscerality and it is boooring
Black Mage 1-50 is just plain awful. It commits every sin of game design; it’s boring, it looks bad, it feels bad (immobile turret gameplay), and it lacks cool factor…
…equaling two negatives total
WAR 30-50 is easily the worst of the job quests so far. Long trips to distant, irritating areas to reach with lots of enemies to avoid or fight through, forcing you to equip the items, having to warp around Costa Del Sol for half of it, just… bad…
…earning a second negative
Ninja 30-50 has some of the usual issues and some real padding problems
Snowcloak is not great dungeon. Simple mechanics with poor trash and irritating terrain problems with a bad, irritating, repetitive song
The Nabriales fight is not a good fight. It has excessively simple mechanics that are still binary difficulty, and… that’s it. That’s all it’s got… except also being an HP Barrier boss
The decision to lock substantial meat quests behind no marker or signifier whatsoever is honestly really bad design
One…
…two…
…and three negatives for general quest padding design
Aggregate: Aggregate negative for Pharos // Haukke Manor (hard) has a few issues, but it’s not super bad // Haltali Hard isn’t bad it’s just… kinda boring
The Palace of the Dead has… issues. It’s entirely too sloggy, and the difficulty is very binary (you’re either fine or you’re dead)…
…and the interface and interactions therewith are clunky at best, especially with the nature of its ‘save’ system
Aether currents. They’re not the worst system, they’re not the best, but they make the critical flaw of locking behind the most useful traveling tool (flight) behind having effectively finished the zone
Coerthas West
Seconds in minutes quest design
Forced single player questing (especially MSQ)…
…which is easily the worst aspect of the entire game
The unlock problem continues (literally can’t go to certain zones, or find vendors…)
The Heavensward Relic quest is certainly better than the ARR one, but that doesn’t make it good, and it’s still a nice long slow boring grind
The Alexander 1 fight is just… you get what they were going for, but the fixate mechanic has issues and the massive delay between the add death and their puddle spawning is a bit eh, especially given how punishing it is to fail
Alexander 2 isn’t a great fight. Neat idea, awful execution, and worst of all it ends up just being boring
Alexander 4 is a good fight in mechanics but entirely too high in damage with way, way too much damage going out from everything… and thus is overtuned like much of Alexander
Alexander 9 is unfortunately another victim of the ‘needs a dungeon journal’ type of boss
Ultimately Alexander 11 just kind of sucks. It has lots of neat mechanics but several are badly explained (or not at all) and that song can suck it
The camera issue continues to show up periodically
As expected, the Void Ark is not a good raid. It’s not that bad (not really) but it’s a lot of boring and a lot of not-good, with unengaging trash and boss encounters in a dull grey surrounding
Weirdly, Dun Scaith wasn’t good either. Too long, too much HP on the last boss, and worst of all multiple examples of the dungeon journal problem
PLD 50-60 continues its trend of being the bland white bread of classes
The game removes your abilities when synched down in level, which is honestly quite awful for so many reasons (lots of content is below max level, removing abilities changes how you play the class and in some cases actively removes mechanics, etc.) (continued problem)
The Western Coerthas sidequests… really, really suck. Far too much pointless backtracking across a huge, vast, irritating zone (especially if you don’t have flight)…
…earning a second negative
Similarly, Dravanian Forelands side quests have the same general problem (less so), where they have a single quest chain of note which just involves an enormous amount of backtracking
Churning Mists sidequests aren’t as tedious as some others, but they’re substantially more frustrating, with a lot of ‘hide and go seek’ in complex areas with lots of verticality and no real guidelines… and they pull this trick multiple times
…a second negative for the Churning Mists endless chaining…
…and the nonsense pattern of quest distribution
Heavensward’s overworld design is honestly terrible. The zones are far too spread out with far too much irritation in traversal (even with flying in some cases), and with far too little distribution of aether crystals…
…leading to…
…three negatives
The ARM 50-60 quest is easily the worst of the already-bad crafter chains
Crafter backtracking is ridiculous, and almost all of them do it…
…leading to a full…
…three negatives
The backtracking in the Dravanian Hinterlands is honestly some of the worst it’s been in the entire game…
…earning a second negative
Neverreap has some serious issues, with irritating trash and aggravating boss design (including wasps, too much HP)
The decision to lock substantial meat quests behind no marker or signifier whatsoever is honestly really bad design
One…
…two…
…and three negatives for general quest padding design
The Roulette Problem begins. To explain in brief; The game rewards doing a roulette regardless of the roulette selected. This means people are de-invested as part of the mechanism of roulettes as a whole, and have a method to ensure they only get the lower level queues (by removing gear), and no built-in incentive not to. This problem only grows worse as expansions move on and later raids and dungeons become more complex, involved, and (most importantly) time consuming… for no additional benefit. Worst of all, this problem is easily solvable in a lot of different directions and no effort is being expended to do so
Raubahn Extreme (bad launch issues)
The solo Zenos fight in Rhalgr’s Reach has many gameplay issues with it, not the least of which being it’s a supposed-to-lose fight where (if you lose) you… fail and have to start the (lengthy) instance over again
Aether Currents continue to be bad
Low level ability removal issue
The second solo Zenos fight continues the trend of bad game design. It’s a supposed to lose fight where if you lose you start over, it’s a long fight (easily 5 minutes), it pulls a ‘gotcha’ second health bar, and finally and worst of all he pulls an ‘I win’ at the last minute (Beatrix Syndrome)…
…earning a second negative
The Ruby Sea sidequests have improved in some ways, but the zone’s design makes doing them a colossal chore, especially given the significant amount of backtracking involved in how they chain
Second negative for Ruby Sea backtracking
As usual, The Peaks sidequests have a truly egregious amount of backtracking (especially in the latter half)…
…second negative to The Peaks
The camera zoom out issue continues…
…and, honestly, is a more persistent issue than before
Aggregate: The ‘stealth’ mission in Kugane has several issues (no real tools, no real indicators, no real destination, and entirely too easy to have to start over) // The ‘find the sheep’ quest, and ‘find in circle’ quests in general, can suck it
Unlock issue as usual
Forced single player questing (especially MSQ)…
…as usual
Padding issue of interaction bar
Seconds in minutes issues periodically
This is a weird one but locking the awesomeness and fun of the ExDeath and Kefka Savage fights behind… y’know, Savage difficulty
New Game + and only having one save slot
Larboard.
PLD at 70… CONTINUES to suck, with barely different rotations and STILL lacking basic utility
DRG 60-70 quests kinda… suck, lots of backtracking and little else across large swaths of irritation
The BLM 60-70 quests
BLM at 70 is noticeably absent several skills that it really should have and feels incomplete
Heaven On High’s interface and interactions therewith are clunky at best, especially with the nature of its ‘save’ system
AST at 70 really has too many buttons, and some… oddities to it
The Doma Reconstruction weekly gating content sucketh
The Ivalice quests’ needless, pointless backtracking for wine
One…
…two…
…and three negatives for general quest padding design
As per usual, the Steppes sidequests just kind of suck in backtracking and design
Acquisition of Blue Magic sucks. Forced synching and related problems for bosses, and low percentage chance of learning, plus you have to be alive
The MIN quests suck. Arduous and time sensitive
The BTN quests suck. Arduous and time elongated
The FIS quests suck! Gah!
The Burn has some reasonable stuff to it, but the Mist Dragon fight can go to hell. It has some nice mechanics but the tuning on the final ‘mist’ phase is entirely too harsh, being very difficult (or impossible depending) to see where to avoid, no time to correct if you don’t see it coming, and the hit is way too punishing when it does
Several instances of problems with long solo sessions or lack of mid-mission checkpointing in solo instances
The Roulette Problem gets worse…
…and is actually probably one of the worst in the series…
…given both Ivalice and Omega raids being in the bundle
Only doing the MSQ will result in hitting level walls multiple times throughout the expansion
Ocean Fishing is entirely, entirely too dependant upon RNG to really go somewhere with it, to the point where it’s actively 4 layers deep of RNG (no exaggeration)
The first fight with Ran’jit is bad in every way. Too much HP, disinteresting mechanics, long and boring, and he pulls an I-win button at the end
The first Ran’jit fight is also a supposed-to-lose fight… where, if you lose… you have to start it over
Navigating the Crystarium honestly sucks with both verticality and the inability to jump off ledges at multiple points
Eden 12 is actually a great fight, except that you have to go through the same lengthy cutscene each time you fail and it’s right towards the beginning, after the easy stuff. No checkpoint, no skipping, and it absolutely destroys the tempo (story and game wise)
New Game + has some… serious jank. Minimal save slots, a multitude of basic actions (like the Journal, or REPAIRING) that you can’t do while in it, and its… weird in how it’s implemented
One…
…two…
…and three negatives for general quest padding design
The Unlock Problem persists as usual
The Ronkan ruins is… awful. No mid mission checkpointing and binary failstate
The Trolley section is, being kind, boring padding quest design… some of the worst in Shadow
Forced single player questing (especially MSQ)…
…as usual
The sidequests in Rak’tika greatwoods are very frustrating in navigation and quest layout
The bloom overglow of the initial Il Mheg is irritating and literally headache inducing, add onto that the frustration of navigating and questing in the literally-hard-to-see visuals
Screw weekly turn ins (as usual)
And finally, the final Ran’jit fight is pointless, dumb, padded, and boring
Camera zoom out issue continues its tyrannical reign
Low level ability removal issue
The in-between quests of the Nier raids are padding central, forcing you to go to Point B via 5 separate points, with entirely too much backtracking across areas without fast travel
…also they require you to walk through the entire area entirely too often, which is, yes, another backtracking issue
SCH at 80 is really hampered by a lot of little but multitudinous issues that feel like artifacts of older, more out-dated game design
Generic runback for bosses
AST at 80 continues to have a button bloat problem
The Roulette Problem gets worse with each expansion…
…earning a second negative at this range
The Ruby Weapon fight has a lot of issues. The tuning is a bit off, the visuals are actively detrimental, the music sucks
E3 nevertheless has some problems with some of its attacks being difficult to see and very punishing (no less than 3 distinct attacks that instant-kill)
E4 is entirely too punishing, with potential issues with snapshotting, it being extraordinarily easy to die instantly in multiple ways, and a bit of a dungeon journal issue…
…earning a second negative
E11 has a bit too much trial and error with nothing really indicating what works how in… any of his mechanics really
The Firmament’s interface issues are honestly pretty bad
The Diadems, while useful, are dull as sin and exceptionally grindy
The FSH Mean quests, uh… suck
The physical dps role quest is literally bugged, the NPCs screwing up and failing the mission… more than once
CLL’s inconsistent scaling made worse by inconsistent timing
Dalriada’s inconsistent scaling made worse by inconsistent timing
Delebrum’s sloggy nature and inconsistent scaling
Unfortunately Bozja is still fairly limited, gives you hardly any Mettle (which is required to advance), and (like the Diadem) is grrrriiiiiindy
Twice Come Ruin honestly sucks so much and I hate absolutely everything about it… but… there are much, much worse mechanics, and ultimately my main issue with it is it’s too binary, when there’s so many ways to make it more gradient
While I’m at it, the health of the bosses is entirely too high, even accounting for lost actions and the echo buff
The Relic quest is badly designed at several levels, requiring either excessively grindy activities to have a chance at progression, or doing content that’s effectively abandoned
Aggregate: The Thancred v. Ran’jit fight goes on just a little bit too long // E6 has a few minor issues which pull it a bit down // E7’s binary fail-state on several mechanics // Finally, E10 has a few issues which keep it from being… good, and not much to offset it
Even though there’s not much they could really do about it, honestly the launch status was unacceptably bad
The binary failstate of the ‘follow the girl’ quest along with other related padding issues
There are several issues that drag down the de-powered segment; Lack of mid mission checkpoints, ease of failure (any magitek that spots you is essentially game over), and issues with navigation and stealth indicators
Bestway Burrows is entirely too large with too few mechanisms in place to facilitate movement early on
The tail Urianger mission is actually worse than the earlier one in Garlemald
Aether currents. They’re not the worst system, they’re not the best, but they make the critical flaw of locking behind the most useful traveling tool (flight) behind having effectively finished the zone
Forced single player questing (especially MSQ)…
…as usual
Camera zoom out issue
Low level ability removal issue
The Trust system is excessively grindy (having to do a minimum of 5 runs of just the first dungeon, at around 30-50 minutes each, just to be able to do a second dungeon) plus you can’t level them all at once, so you have to do even more runs to level everyone
The terrible, terrible decision to replace the zone music with a short loop that grows old very fast over a long, long section of game is frankly awful…
…and earns a second negative for sheer duration
The ‘Sage Council’ quest is actually terrible game design. Massive explorative area, vaguely labeled, with no pattern to layout, with fake-outs…
…earning it a second negative for pure unadulterated padding in the worst way
It’s unfortunate but true that every zone shares the same problem; too large, too empty, too padding for not having fast movement and/or flying. Thus, Sharlayan…
…Thavnair…
…Garlemald…
…Zone 4…
…and Zone 5 all share the same issue
The ‘tail the kid in Garlemald’ quest is the same problems with the other ‘tail’ quests but even worse as the kid ‘jukes’ you… more than once
Zone 4 has some very bad pathing / terrain issues on foot
The Unlock Issue continues
Runback negative comes back
The final Zenos fight is entirely too padded given its placement and purpose
The fishing Studium quests honestly suck. The RNG involved is silly, even when doing everything right and using the right abilities, and on top of that it takes way, way, way too long…
…earning it two negatives
The game has an annoying tendency to repeat tutorial messages way, way past when it should… in short it does so every single time it pops up
The exceptionally bad indicators of which quests are which, especially on the map (sometimes it chains directly, sometimes it does not, you can talk to everyone or actually do every quest to see but otherwise there’s no real cohesive methodology)…
…and frankly this is so aggravating that it puts me off doing them at all
Crystalline content interface issues including can’t queue in a group
Aggregate: Padding issues with the last SGE boss // Visibility issues with Ra-La in The Dead Ends

Star Trek Online

The beginning sucks (as is true with all MMOs) and the gameplay is wonky as hell, but the core nugget of Trek is there and it’s awesome. I highly recommend playing Federation aligned and skipping as much of the early stuff as you’re able, as the story doesn’t really get good until the Solenae arc.
Total Story Score: +76
Total Gameplay Score: -18
Golden Number: 90.31
Cheats: No
Total Play Time: 17 Days // 804.00 Hours
Time Reviewed: 7-31-2022

Spoiler Pluses and Minuses +

Story Positives:

NPC Set Dressing is good in general
The TOS Intro is simple but good, digs into where STO shines best (continuity!), and sets you up for what’s to come quite well
Temporal Agent Chekov and his mission are simple, but good stuff, with some good moments and nice threading of the Babel episode
The final TOS mission does some good tying up of several threads, great foreshadowing, and ultimately serves as a nice cap to things
ESD is… decent, it looks very much like ESD should look, with good usage of NPCs and the ships in dock
The Klingon mission Manhunt is actually pretty good in general; Good showcasing of Klingon fake-honor, good showcasing of how corrupt the Empire is under J’mpok, and the big scene with the Bird is fantastic
Space skyboxes
Special praise to the early TOS missions for putting real and good effort into making everything actually look very early TOSy
Alpha (Klingon mission) is actually pretty good, sets up some good moments, has a few choices, and isn’t face palmingly stupid (a high bar for Klingons)
Afterlife (Klingon mission) despite pulling the ‘is it real or not’ crap, is still a great mission; good writing, good showcase of Klingon culture (literal or otherwise), and is honestly a pretty good connection and conclusion point for the Klingon story arc
The initial storytelling, animation, and some scenes and battles make sense, and the inclusion of Janeway actually helps quite a bit, with the new Federation Intro
Spectres mission, What Lies Beneath is genuinely horrifying and uses its concepts (a broken murderous hologram) to good effect
Spectres mission, Everything Old Is New, is a good contrast to the previous horrifying deathdoom
Spectres mission, Night of the Comet is a decent payoff to both Drake and the Devidians, and while the nerve tonic is aggravating it was nice to see Scotty in action
The Spectres build up mission is great (and I love the Omega Particle joke)
Bajor is neat, but I love the effort put into Mirror Bajor
I love the plot element and story sequencing of the 2800. Okay we’ve got a breather episode, cool, dealing with the Borg, cool, oh crap a gigantic fleet of Dominion show up and it’s the missing 2800 from DS9, and now we have a huge problem… well crap
The visual presentation of and general ideas around Boldly They Rode are great, and (narratively) walking on DS9’s surface to infiltrate it is great
The Romulan opening cinematic does a good job of immediately putting yourself in the mindset of the post-Hobus Romulans
And the Romulan Intro is probably one of my favorites, despite the obviousness of it it’s still well executed and enjoyable to boot
The initial Romulan story arc about struggling to get a crew together, help local refugees, and barely fighting back against the Elachi and the Tal Shiar is legitimately better constructed and generally more interesting than honestly the rest of the content to-date
I love the New Romulus finding, its connection to future arcs, and its connection to Romulan (and Vulcan) past
And finally, the Khitomer conference is a great mission; Excellent writing for the Klingon representatives (and captain), perfect understanding of the cultures involved, and some Babylon 5 Effect for Sela’s introduction to the narrative
The Charva arc and revisit of Virinat is pretty neat
Tal Shiar arc has some pretty big flaws but the payoff of Taris, Hakeev, and Sela is fantastic
Everything about the Mind Game is fantastic. The horror of it, the fact that you’re forced to (and can fight it but… can’t succeed), just the whole thing
Continuing the nightmarish horror, the entirety of Installation 18 is a great narrative payoff to the mind numbing dulldom of Nimbus 3
The Colisseum mission has its issues but that initial setup is legitimately excellent, deserving its own plus individually
The Romulan finale and its implications about the iconians, the final death of Hakeev, and Sela being (temporarily) removed from the board
The visuals and layout and styling of New Romulus is excellent
I love the actual ‘New Romulus’ arc itself; the last dying gasp of the Tal Shiar, the Hirogen and their willingness to fight whomever, and the slow reveal of the Dewans
The big reveal of the iconian gateway, still functional and related to the fate of the Dewans, now in the hands of the Republic…
Sphere of Influence has some good build up with the gateway and the slow, creepy reveal of the Solenae and how much they’re already planning…
…but the way they showcase their intel area, and the Omega bombshell, plus the implied politics of the entire situation, really nail it
A Step Between Stars deserves a positive literally just for the visual storytelling of that damned star and how terrifying it is
Continuing, the progression through the station and the reveal of what happened to the Jenolan Sphere was a great build up…
…leading to the big revealing twist with Cooper, and the unveiling of the Undine threat
The initial setup of Surface Tension is already awesome, with great moments with a lot of people (Garak, the xindi, Shon)
Surface Tension continues to do some awesome stuff, mostly with the destruction of ESD as well as the interactions with Cooper
The big reveal of the Iconians, finally, and the tilting of the arc is just… such a great moment
The entire mindscape with Tuvok is delightful and very well executed
I love the simplicity of helping the talaxians out with local, small scale issues as they prepare to colonize a new world
Capture the Flag has some good moments, but really working and interacting with the crew is what sells it
Dragon’s Deceit and the big reveal of the bluegills is fun in general, but the spy motif works amusingly well
Alliances defies expectations of its Voyager episode and instead is actually good, with several neat micro-stories of how we rope several sides together for the coming conflict
The final Vaadwaur mission (Takedown) is suitably well presented, a good payoff for the Delta arc, and the reveal about Gaul is exactly what it should be
Dust To Dust is excellent. Despite my… issues with the Kobali and their stupidity (gonna have words with ‘em, I swear!) I do love what they do with them, and the first Harry, and tying it all in to the vaadwaur and the Delta arc in general…
…easily earning a second positive
There are individual exceptions which will get their own positives, so for now…
…we will give…
…three positives for visual storytelling
Similarly the game does… decent doodads, earning one positive
The Babylon 5 Effect in this game is real
Excellent and consistent foreshadowing…
…earning a full…
…three positives
Obisek is a well written and engaging character, competent but still willing to bite back while still remaining diplomatic
The relevance of the PC in events honestly elevates my enjoyment overall
Tuvok is fantastic, big shock, but they use him to good effect
Neelix is excellent, not just for his usage and presentation but for absolutely nailing him and (surprise surprise) avoiding him being annoying
Seven isn’t quite as good as some of the others, but she’s still enjoyable and still manages good character moments re: the vaadwaur
The Doctor is The Doctor, played to perfection and generally excellent
Harry Kim is finally given a chance to shine, and despite the fact that he got positives in his arc he deserves a bonus one for the excellents of his performance
Which is a good time to talk about the voice acting of the original cast of Voyager. While some of the brought-back actors sway in and out of quality, the Voyager team just nails it
This is a good time to talk continuity. The game keeps legitimately excellent track of what it’s already done…
…earning a full…
…three positives for Internal Continuity
This is further added on by the big one. I have honestly never seen a game do this good with an external work, using external continuity to fantastic effect…
…so it’s not just three…
…positives, but actually…
…I’m giving a bonus fourth positive for not just the external continuity being excellent and adding to the work, but for just how well STO nails that particular variety of ‘here’s a one off alien from one episode of one show, and let’s make something of them’ that they do so, so well
The big moments of Uneasy Moments are good, though they do have issues
Blood of Ancients is a game changer; The massive loss, the erasure of the Preservers
House Pegh gets right back to being awesome, with a fun infiltration and some actually brain-having Klingons
…but bonus points must be given for Kahless. He went out like a boss, knew what he was getting into, retained his honor by challenging T’Ket, and held his own for several seconds against the foe
Time In A Bottle brings back the Krenim in a big way (foreshadowed earlier) and gives us some good actual exposition about the iconians (also our first time really seeing them as a group), plus Nog is awesome
Butterfly has a lot of issues, really, but it’s a fun episode by itself, especially the what-if scenarios
Okay so I have, have to give three positives for this because I absolutely love this. The fact that the majority of STO is in timeline 1, which is NOT the timeline of the shows, is amazing… the fact that we do an incursion, damning the Tuterians into becoming the Sphere Builders, which causes not only the events of Enterprise but also the entire Temporal Cold War, is fantastic …
…so this single plot point…
…earns a full three positives
Ancient Iconia is brilliant, just visually
The closed timeloop of Sela and the Iconians isn’t as brilliant as their previous temporal outing but it’s still a damned good one
I should further mention that I absolutely love how… how very Star Trek it is to make peace with the Iconians rather than to defeat them
Sela manages to be a surprisingly interesting character, with her own arc and her own… moments, up and down
I really like how we spend the entire Iconian War losing and barely holding on
Nog is Nog and he’s as awesome as ever, and it was great to have him
The Temporal Ambassador mission is problematic, but is still creative, fun, and a good way to turn things on its head
The general arc wielding of the Yesterday’s War episodes is enjoyable
Survivor is well acted, emotionally powerful, and a great final, true sendoff for Tasha and Sela…
…making it one of the more powerful individual quests in the entire game, earning it two positives easily
Sunrise is, finally, properly, the post-Legion story arc we needed; Almost entirely focused on exploration and puzzle solving, with enough hints and connections to the Temporal War to make it interesting
Stormbound has a couple of glaring flaws but is a nice way to arc weld several temporal plots together
Ragnarok has a lot of issues, but Chekov is legit, as is Scotty, and it was nice to see the conclusion of Noye and the final results of our meddling as well as the creation of the Prime Timeline
Echoes of Light is awesome on many levels. It’s the breather episode we needed after the Iconian arc, while also still helping to establish several future plot points, and finally resolving the fate of K-13
Rodek and Tony Todd are awesome as always
Kuumaarke is just such a breath of fresh air, great original character who manages to be positive and energetic without being annoying or irritating
Further her voice actress nails it so hard, showcasing a lot of range and nuance in a very short period of time
Another bonus positive as we keep getting further into the game for the quality of the skyboxes
Mirrors and Smoke is awesome. Great, great visuals, great storytelling, surprisingly dark but not too dark…
…just some lovely stuff all around, easily worth two positives
Brushfire brings back Kurn, which is awesome, ends Torg, which is awesome, and restores Martok, which is mega awesome
The reveal of the germanium eggs is a decent moment, and sparks a turn in the arc
The reveal of the Hur’q is honestly pretty awesome by itself
And the cliffhanger! Odo being back, and with just one line; “We need to talk.”
The Renegade’s Regret is a great quest really, tying things up nicely while also showing how horrible the Tzenkethi really were
The Victory Is Life cinematic really throws a lot of characterization for Odo into it, while setting up the stage for what is to come brilliantly
The jem’hadar intro is short, but sweet, doing a lot with very little time and sending tons of foreshadowing hints everywhere
DS9’s revamped interior is excellent; great doodad usage, showcasing of the station, and of course a nice place to just chill
Storm Clouds Gather is very, very talky, but it’s good talky. A whole lot of catching up on a whole lot of characters
Armistice is simple, but effective, and a lovely way to tie up loose ends and free Kira up to join the ‘party’
The big confrontation scene between Odo, Kira, and Garak is absolutely fantastic. Well acted, well portrayed, very Trek; dark, but with purpose and hidden idealism. It’s a massive, quadrant-level stakes moment and yet it’s all about the personal interactions of these three people…
…and so it earns…
…a full three positives
The Search is well acted and well presented and honestly just good damned stuff in general
Doomed To Repeat is just… great. The revelations about the Fek’iri, the Dominion involvement in history, Weyoun’s intervention, Kira and Odo’s dynamic, and of course the big shocker…
…all earning two positives
The entire Gamma arc has some great foreshadowing
And further, really builds itself up properly but quietly, lot of Babylon 5 Effect going around
Lek walking away from the explosion is legitimately so amazing that, even knowing it was coming, it still made me grin
The references and general humor of the Quark’s Lucky Seven is legit by itself
The banter between characters is, for one of the only times in the entire game, actually quite good across the DS9 crew
Quark talking down T’Ket is another type of awesome, but it’s still quite awesome
The general cleverness and tight writing of Quark’s Lucky Seven is just fantastic
Tenebris Torquent has cheesy but enjoyable atmosphere and general tone and vibe
Similarly, the lowkey payoffs of plot threads (the admiral, the backpack, the calling device) all work very nicely
But the big reveal about the female changeling, her role in the Dominion, is a hell of a twist that turns the entire Dominion on its head
Dukan’Rex goes through a wonderful arc across the Gamma arc, as he slowly questions, considers, and develops
Home kinda… sucks honestly, except for that lovely outro which serves as a great coda
Odo is just amazing, showing the layers of desperation, fear, care, concern, and his finding a place as both a founder and a good person…
…so two positives for him
Kira, similarly, absolutely knocks it out of the park, being one of the main characters throughout and being used to great effect…
…also earning a second positive
A bonus positive just for Nana Visitor, who is legitimately a fantastic actress throughout
Weyoun is exactly what he needs to be, broken and insane while supporting his founder
Bashir is excellent, and it’s great to hear Siddig again
Quark is very Quark, retaining his humor while also his sense of gravity
Rom doesn’t have as much of a role, but he’s still awesome
Garak. Garak is perfect for this, being someone who’s enjoying himself immensely while never taking his role and duties anything less than completely seriously, and staying a half a step ahead of most everyone else as he goes…
…earning him a second positive
And Andrew Robinson also gets his own positive for managing the nuance, subtleties, and excellence in acting
Tilly is legit, thankfully
Okay so I have… issues with how they just create life all willy nilly, but Anthony Rapp does a pretty good job with Stamets, not just in general but in distinguishing between Stamets Hologram and Stamets 2
Credit where it’s due, the Mycelial Realm actually looks and acts pretty legit, and tying it in to the Elachi works better than it should
The Discovery Patrols are actually pretty decent overall, brief but fun snippets with Stamets and crew
The big cavalry moment of all the Enterprises coming back, even though it was to sell the 10th Anniversary Bundle, is still pretty awesome
Credit to Seven in the entire 10th Anniversary sequence. She nails her character and her role quite well
Madran’s bit in the Klingon Stupid Arc was legitimately enjoyable and honestly amusing
Okay, I’ll give you this one, Gowron is great here. O’Reilley does a great job of the role and his presence honestly elevates an otherwise terrible story
I do love the way we out-think Cooper and get him eaten by his own ship

Story Negatives:

Cutscenes are hilariously bad in their storyboarding, animation, and blocking
Voice acting varies pretty wildly in overall quality
This is a good time to re-iterate the voice acting problems because holy crap. Between dull takes, readings that literally ruin lines, and repeats and bugs…
Daniels and his convenience stupidity
The gameplay and story segregation is pretty stark in this one, easily some of the worst I’ve ever seen, with events in lore having no real connection to actual gameplay…
…like us taking on dozens of superior ships and entire fleets regardless of logic or sense…
…and killing literally thousands of troops by ourselves without incident, all while being a normal officer in cutscenes
Klingon intro is… pretty stupid on several levels, to the point of being aggravating, made all the worse by how stupid evil we are
Worf is honestly… bad in the early Klingon stuff (and absent later)
The Klingon Mission Heir We Go Again stumbles over itself in its stupidity; the giant holes in security, the sudden turn-on-a-dime switch for Worf, the romulan Tal Shiar agent being mind bogglingly stupid, the aforementioned Tal Shiar giving away the identity of his co conspirator and then on top of that our refusal to acknowledge it
The Mars, Bringer of War mission is an old, crap mission and it shows… revamped to play better, but the story remains disjointed, clearly from back when the KDF wasn’t even a real faction, and disconnected from reality on so many levels it plays like a bad TOS episode
The Federation Intro is really, really, really aggressively stupid. Detailing it would take quite a while, but there’s a lot of nonsensical, disjointed, or otherwise plot hole elements throughout, and that’s before you even include the Borg…
…because the friggin’ Borg being the intro villain makes no sense on essentially any level, and they do it terribly
There’s a weird game / story segregation problem with how it does ranks, because we (very very quickly) get promoted to Fleet Admiral, while still acting like a captain, for no real good reason or purpose
The B’vat arc in its current, gutted state starts too late and literally only lasts two episodes, so no build up and no pay off, and it sucks
Pretty much the entire Cardassian arc as is honestly sucks. It starts off with the True Way, instantly shifts into the Terrans, bounces over to the Alpha Jem’Hadar only to immediately abandon them in favor of Laas. The chopped bits make you feel like you’re reading a book with pages torn out, which is appropriate, because you are
The writing and specific moments of the 2800 plot honestly suck
The entire Cold War arc is so bland it drifts into bad
I hate to mention it but during the Taris and Mind Game arc, there are bits of writing and voice acting that simply do not work
The Romulan finale cutscenes honestly kind of sucked, failing to capture what was actually going on the entire time
The Voth Fortress Ship is so, so dumb on so many levels… it’s a setting breaker, threat of the week nonsense, but worst of all it just doesn’t fit in Trek in general
Vaadwaur overblown as a big quadrant-level threat… even if it makes sense with their iconian backers, it still hurts the entire arc
There’s some weird dialogue issues in the Iconian arc, along with weird repetition
Delta Flight… weirdly sucks. The dialogue is bad and stilted, the voice acting is subpar at best and laughable at worst, the whole mission is just bleh
So let’s go ahead and mention something here; Butterfly is total nonsense, but what makes it negative worthy is how Jarok and everyone else are all gung ho about doing their first incursion
The Yesterday’s War episodes are horribly misplaced. They start without preamble or explanation as though you know what’s going on, and feel like filler despite being about huge scale death dooms, it’s weird
Let’s get this out of the way. The way they… use time travel in the Future Proof arc is so elasticy and so loosey goosey for the sake of the game that it’s ridiculous
Okay so for the most part STO bypasses the cutscene incompetence problem but good lord, the temporal arc is stuffed with it
Ragnarok has a lot of issues, easily earning up to a negative for the frustrations throughout
Admiral Tzen-Tarrak is just evil. Any possible nuance and layer is torpedo’d by virtue of him being horrifically evil and enjoying it
The Hur’q are too strong. Them being a challenge for a beleaguered Alliance? Sure. Them pasting the Dominion? Uhhh…
Home… falls flat, in several ways; the directing, the voice acting, the non relevance, just… bleh
The DIS intro being copy paste of the Fed one does it no favors (or vice versa)
The Plausibility of the Possible is… weirdly bad. It’s very surface level and simplistic, stating a point and doing nothing with it, and this is on top of the other issues with it
Impossibility of Reason begins… really badly. The shuttle nonsense is insanity on every level, and us being on the shuttle is even stupider
Amna’s death scene was absolutely terrible. It could have actually worked but they wanted to have the big sacrifice goodbye and so instead a woman walks over, hits a bomb manually, then spends half a minute giving a tear felt goodbye before dying
Melodrama. Just… so much melodrama
The cutscene incompetence has always been there but it really starts to rear its ugly head in the Discovery stuff
The very existence of the Pahvo weapon is by itself a negative; a super weapon that can nuke whatever at near infinite range nearly perfectly… sure
This also ties into a problem STO has in general, but is worst here in the Discovery stuff; insisting that each new threat is some big galactic scale conflict
The… absolutely insane level of cutscene incompetence displayed on Pahvo really bothers me on so many levels
Did I mention the super weapon can also beam you anywhere instantly?
The plot point of murdering tons of people to allow other people (who are just as evil) to return home safely actively aggravates me
The Pahvo missions are… just bad. BILLIONS will die!
Oh and J’ula’s super weapon simply by using it repeatedly can wipe out all life, in all universes, everywhere… right
The… ridiculousness of the Mycelial Realm is its own problem, but creating life (Stamets) just to bypass a bridge without even really addressing it is… what?
The childish moralizing in the Measure of Morality quest honestly irritates me. It doesn’t matter that it’s in character, it’s still annoying
The Mo’Kai Virus is a macbook hacking an alien mothership…
…it’s so, so stupid on so many levels and I hate its stupid face
The Khitomer Discord mission is just… peppered with bad writing, idiocy, and character assassination
Where do all these Mo’Kai come from? Her and a couple ships got warped to the future but she has fleets (plural) at her disposal in the present
The central plot of the Klingon Civil War (that we are literally working for J’mpok against the rebel J’ula) irritates me on so many levels
The fact that J’mpok’s ‘I’m evil ha ha’ is treated like some big reveal is… insanity
The big swap and ‘twist’ of J’ula actually being good all along and the Hero and the Good Guy is honestly the worst thing to come out of this game. It flies in the face of logic, reason, good storytelling, development, and personal opinion…
…earning…
…three negatives
The Kai Leng field engulfing the captains as we leave Khitomer and making them all stupid
The fact that the story wants so badly to have this ‘desperate, on the run’ take because J’mpok declares us terrorists is so stupid on so many levels I had to stop and think about how to properly explain it
J’ula’s actress… sucks, which is made worse because she’s surrounded by better Klingon actors
The sudden near-total absence of the Alliance during the Klingon Stupid just adds all types of aggravation to it
The fact that the PC is an observer in J’ula’s story legitimately hurts the narrative on several levels; Ignoring the obvious facts that have their own negatives, it also doesn’t really do anything with her story, and hurts logic and reason by having us be her uber driver without having us have any impact on said narrative
T’kuuvma keeps being talked up like some great and venerable leader who’s super awesome and they just keep hammering it in so often it’s aggravating (ignoring the fact that T’kuuvma was Klingon Hitler for a second)
I have other issues with it but at the end of the day, the introduction of Grethor as a real, actual place we can go and grab someone’s soul to drag back into a clone and the entire affair is a huge example of underthought. No real effort or thought put into… the huge, huge implications this has, just nope let’s do it
J’ula is a freaking mary sue, one of the worst ones in Trek
The excessive emphasis on how amazing L’Rell is bothers me on every level, especially since it’s all told and none shown
The primary plot of ‘go to hell to recover the soul of someone to serve as a legend/advisor’ doesn’t work on either level because we have literal living legends with us and much, much better advisors…
…on top of the fact that we don’t need any help beating what’s left of J’mpok’s pathetic empire which (in addition to losing a gargantuan portion of its forces during the a-year-ago Iconian War) just lost its unity as most of the Houses all fractured and splintered off. There is NO reason to bother getting this woman and yet it’s the central plot of an entire episode
The absolute ass kissing going on about how amazing L’Rell is and how amazing J’Ula is is legitimately sickening, and that’s before you realize that a 150 year old ship and a no-name idiot calling for help is what unified the friggidy Klingons
The dialogue in the later Klingon missions is just not good, lots of repetition and stating the obvious and general empty text
The Outro to the Klingon arc is bad in general, just across the board
Special mention for the use of the reset button with the Klingon Empire in the wake of the entire story arc (about the Empire being on its way out) and the thematic and literal narrative core of the rest of STO (reforming and moving forwards to better ourselves… see the Romulans, Dominion, etc.)
L’Rell is just not salvaged by her actress. She is an awful character who is terribly positioned and takes over the Empire for no damned reason
J’ulu’s consistent usage of the Kai Leng field can go straight to hell

Gameplay Positives:

Music is mostly licensed stuff, but what’s there and is unique is good
The character creation has sliders, modular outfits, good presets, and variable based on starter…
…easily leading to…
…three positives for sheer quantity and quality
The TOS Intro is good for what it’s trying to do; it’s a solid tutorial for the basic systems of the game and has surprisingly good level design and layout to guide you where you’re doing and what
Game is exceptionally co-op friendly, allowing you to do roughly 98% of the entire game with a friend, in addition to scaling and team matching…
…earning a second positive
HUD rearrangement
ESD is reasonably well laid out, with the three main spokes all relatively close to each other and nicely knit
The massive, insane amount of build customization… is totally optional
Ship selection is insane…
…with so many hundreds of ships it’s hard to even properly summarize the variety on display here…
…easily earning a full three positives
Ship slots and the variety thereof is similarly excellent throughout
Weapons variety in terms of reach, range, special abilities, and damage type are similarly astonishingly varied and contribute enormously to the Build gameplay…
…easily earning…
…three positives
Sets are great, often offering good bonuses and being worth building around
Consoles are just as good and varied as weapons, and so earn the same…
…three…
…positives
Specs are a nice way to add some additional customization on top of everything else
Traits are mostly neat, and worthwhile on their own…
…but what really pushes this is the starship traits you get for leveling ships
Bridge Officers (BOFFs) and their extensive and expansive abilities serve as still further excellent build and customization…
…earning…
…three positives
Duty Officers (DOFFs) aren’t quite as extensive, but still can be used to great effect if carefully set up
The tailor customizations is some good, if not great, cosmetics… mostly hampered by its interface, but still excellent overall variety…
…earning two positives
The usage of shields in space as a form of layered customizations for ships
Usefulness and rewarding nature of reputations
Usefulness and rewardfulness of fleet gear
Endeavors are a nice way to encourage you to go out and do things, and are a nice account-bound reward system
The Klingon mission Manhunt is a bit brief but still enjoyable, nice little jaunts, visuals, and flow to it despite the size problems
Ground weapon variety is actually surprisingly good…
…especially when you consider the kit of, uhm, Kits
Salvaging and re-engineering is actually a pretty great system, very accessible even to new, casual, and leveling players
The Afterlife mission is a decent example of visuals, audio, and some (minor) gimmicky fights
The ‘synch to team leader’ level thing is a great way for people to help people group up and keep things fair and fun
Into The Hive is surprisingly good, with an actual boss fight with actual mechanics that are tutorialized through the stage and everything
The ability to replay missions infinitely and whenever is a very effective form of New Game +…
…honestly one of the better ones I’ve ever seen…
…and easily worth three positives (why aren’t more MMOs doing this?!)
Aggregate: The Kobyashi Maru is decent enough; it’s an arena, but the hazards and suffixes help // Azure Nebula is decent enough // As is the Nukara hold the line mission
Borg space missions are still generally fun even after all these years
Mind Game is a simple mission but the choices and the structure of it are great for how they emphasize the narrative
The Vault (Tholian one) is actually kinda neat and fun, with a little gimmick and general enjoyability
Sphere of Influence has been much improved in the ‘roleplay’ section of piloting another ship (unique abilities for our unique crew help a lot), plus it’s nice to have a ground mission not lean on killing dozens of trash mobs
Finally we reach a point where the adventure zones are actually good. The various space zones are decent, but the ‘recurring events’ format actually worked quite well for it
A separate bonus for the Undine and ground Voth adventure zones and their event focused cycling and rewarding
The Breach does do some good stuff here and there, making the experience actually fun when it isn’t arduous
A Step Between Stars starts the chain of actually good quests, with some neat sections and gimmicks and actual gameplay in level design
Surface Tension serves as a new tutorial for the game, and does a good job of it
Surface Tension is fun, good layering objectives and good usage of unique gimmicks to vary up the combat
The Mindscape mission is easily one of my favorite quests in the game, even gameplay wise, using its conceits in new and creative ways to keep it fun and interesting
Undine Infiltration is actually pretty creative; It’s simple, but it’s still fun and enjoyable to piece together the infiltrators, and leans light on the combat
Viscous Cycle continues the modern trend of good TFOs, with fun targets and enjoyable semi optional mini objectives
The competitive ‘pvp’ TFOs are actually pretty fun…
…both of them
The enemy variety in the game is legitimately excellent, with a huge range of enemies and differing tactics…
…easily earning…
…three positives
Takedown is a great mission, between the layered areas which don’t reload the cell (persisting buffs and the like), calling in different allies with different results, and the final ground battle…
…it earns two positives
The Dust To Dust quest is actually pretty fun, between the lightning, the maze, and the collapsing platforms
Iconian 1 and unique platforming stuff
While it’s not much, the varied up gameplay and different focus of Sunrise is very welcome, and honestly is the type of mission I’d like to see more of
Days of Doom is actually pretty fun. It’s got unique objectives which aren’t irritating, encourages the team to split up and coordinate…
…and is topped off by a fun and enjoyable encounter you defeat through interaction and not just shooting it
Tzenkethi Front is decent overall, back to objective based actions and some neat give and take on offense/defense
The Renegade’s Regret is great, they do exactly what they should do with the ‘roleplay’ system and make the entire experience fun
The Dominion intro gets you into things quickly, tutorializes well, and hands you all you need to jump right into it
Quark’s Lucky Seven and the variety in gameplay and general fun is just… legit
Call me weird but I actually rather like the Tenebris Torquent gameplay; it’s flawed, but they branch out and do more than the typical ‘trash fights’ approach to it
The Pahvo Dissension mission is actually pretty fun, with the chained objectives and decent map design
Beneath The Skin is actually not bad gameplay wise, mixing it up a bit and having some neat little attempts at gameplay
To Hell With Honor actually isn’t bad on the face of it, with the layered objectives and the reward/penalty for rushing the bases
Mycelial Realm isn’t bad either, with real objectives and decent layouts which encourage multiple tactics
Sentinels is quick, rewarding, and fun
The advancing wall of doom while rescuing people in its path during Khitomer Discord was actually pretty clever, unique, and fun
Best Served Cold is when TFOs finally start to come into their own; base holding with dynamic objectives around defeating then protecting transports, and the exploding ships which we have to defeat before the stations get hit…
…earning two positives

Gameplay Negatives:

Bindings and options don’t share (or have the option to) across characters
Co-op issues with dialogue, triggers, and other nuisances
Tailor customization options locked behind in game store
The in game store, as usual, sucks
The way the game locks amazing stuff behind ludicrously overpriced bundles is asinine
The in game lootbox system is bad on so many levels. First there’s the fact that lootboxes exist at all
Then there’s the fact that they shove them into your face as regular loot, despite the fact that you can literally buy them infinitely for free
Then there’s the chat spam (which is admittedly toggleable) that tells you when anyone, anywhere, successfully gets a rare item
Speaking of which, the worthwhile stuff is ludicrously rare, and random
Then we add in the extra layer of predation by making the boxes free but you have to pay for the keys, adding that extra layer of crap
Each box also gives you a very small amount of lobi
Lobi itself is its own issue, as the only (reliable, repeatable) source of lobi in the entire game is the lootboxes
There is a degree of FOMO with regards to ships, consoles, devices, and traits
Vanity shields from lockboxes! Because of course they are
Also, no preview pane so no idea what you’re buying
Sector travel at low level sucks, really really badly, and only avoids more negatives by virtue of the transwarp to quest option
The load times are honestly ridiculous, even after patching everything
The game has the usual audio overlap issue a lot of games have, making it a bit too easy to miss dialogue (and being irritating regardless)
The ‘animations’ of ground combat are, let’s be as blunt as we can here…
…bad, bad, bad, easily two negative territory
There’s quite a bit of audio spam and no real way to avoid it (both in dialogue and in SFX)
The game has no real controls or safeguards over the dilithium in game economy, which has a knock on effect on quite a bit of the rest of the game
There is a fairly substantial lack of information in game on several key aspects of the game
The interface has to be ‘dealt with’ almost constantly… honestly being one of the worst interfaces in general and in an MMO in general…
…leading to two negatives
The grind time on reputation is unacceptable
The grind on procuring marks for the rep items is pretty bad too
The very nature of how Fleets … just… work is entirely too convoluted to the point of ridiculousness
So there’s an extensive problem with how fleets function. First, outside of the obvious social aspect, Fleets are there for Fleet gear first and foremost. Fleet gear costs Fleet CREDITS. You cannot earn Fleet credits, only Fleet MARKS. You then have to toss them into projects with limited basins and other irritating stuff to contribute in order to turn marks into credits. This has… all of the problems with it…
…and honestly giving it only two negatives is just because of how unnecessary fleet gear is
Crafting is arduous, grindy, and mostly vestigial
The entire DOFF system is barely explained and requires either looking things up on the wiki or dropping an obscene amount of in game (or real) money on the good ones for builds
There is a pretty bad early game syndrome going on here, as early combat (both ground and space) is mind numbingly boring
There is a lack of tutorialization and categorization for the massive, massive and extensive builds mechanisms in the game, leading to being lost in the candy store
Defara Adventure Zone. Ill defined quests which have no real feedback and aren’t good to begin with
The Arena of Sompek could be worse, but it’s boring and dull and infinite
The game kicks you from group (disbands it, actually) after leaving an instance
Any issues with instances mean bailing; Any bailing (under any circumstances) means a 30 minute penalty, period
Old Patrols just… sucked, so badly
They were boring, disinteresting, and sloggy…
…and plagued with issues reminiscent of older game design
The Spectres Flickering is honestly awful and literally causes client wide issues
Spectres backtracking
The Spectres nerve tonic puzzle isn’t bad at its core but is just arduous to slog through
Forged In Fire audio spam is above and beyond
Forged In Fire is also really bad about boss padding in health, even if it’s not as bad as it used to be, it’s still bad
The entire ‘forced to occupy Bajor’ quest series is bad, bad, bad. It’s excessively padded, boring as sin, and drags on longer than most entire episodes…
…earning its entirely necessary two negatives
Meanwhile having to deal with the ferengi twit and the swarmers and the shuttle AND the bugs… earns a negative
General audio mixing problems
Severe and multiple softlocking bugs with Boldly They Rode
Borg ground missions suck in general, regardless of the follow up missions which suck even more
The Cure Applied TFO can go straight to hell. It’s long, slow, boring, easy to screw up, has almost no feedback, and can literally bug out
Khitomer In Stasis isn’t bad until you get to the confusing cross team thing which is padding at best and confusing at worst
Exceptionally boring quest design on Nimbus III (very x of y)
Speaking of which the overworld design of Nimbus III is… not good, at best
Boring MMOy quests in New Romulus, on top of honestly pretty bad overworld design
This is in addition to New Romulus having long swaths of boring, bugs and irritations everywhere, and timed events that don’t share credit even across teammates
The Elachi station mission sucks
The Elachi TFO is identical to the mission and therefore… sucks
The Elachi patrols suck
The Elachi ground missions… suck (forced rebreathers in an area where the enemies do tons of status effects and damage)
The Elachi ground TFO sucks…
…and is identical to the mission. But let’s talk about why…
…shuttlecraft suck. They’re just ships. Fast, mobile, but with none of the massive build variety or options you get for ships. So they’re just ships, but… bad. And thus all shuttle missions independently suck
So, why does ground combat suck? Well it contains issues that space combat has, with none of the benefits… no facing to speak of, no variety of weapon arcs, and none of the extensive build gameplay. So it’s just bad…
…and easily worth…
…three negatives by itself
Then we get into targeting, which is some of the worst targeting I’ve ever seen in an mmo, bouncing back and forth between being better to hit tab, another hotkey custom bound, or mouse click depending…
…so targeting…
…is another three negatives
The Vault continues the trend of bad shuttle missions. Aside from the usual problems, the tight vertical space in a game that doesn’t support going up or down, on top of time wasters and irritants, makes the whole thing bleh
Vault Shuttle Event has established a new precedent as the worst MMO dungeon we’ve covered to-date. It’s a shuttle mission, with the verticality mentioned previously in the Vault, with boring trash that respawns, which is an escort mission, which takes forever to repair if you screw up, for an escort that doesn’t dodge anything, while requiring you to kill all enemies to progress, while nothing indicates that whatsoever, while enemies can get bugged and locked inside the terrain…
…thus earning us…
… a triple negative dungeon
The Coliseum mission has a few dozen constant little irritations and bugs to it
Having to redo the New Romulus missions is just whatever on so many levels
…uh, twice. Redoing the missions… twice
So both of these iterations…
…deserve double negatives
And they pull this crap AGAIN later in New Romulus…
…which continues to be awful in every way
Breach has some bad padding issues and it’s still easy to get lost at points (plus the loss of the ‘speed buff’ can screw over players)
Lazy difficulty settings
Audio spam problems return for the Iconian TFOs
Unfortunately the Iconian TFOs in general kinda suck. They tried some gimmicks but these ones didn’t work
The HUD has another problem; lack of feedback. It’s legitimately hard to see buffs and debuffs, both in general and in the field
Miner Instabilities has… some issues. The audio spam is really bad in the early part, the game isn’t clear about splitting up, and the progression triggers are buggy
The game’s in-game chat is… bad. Bad filtering options, bad options in general, bad presentation, just bad…
…worthy of two negatives
Tzenkethi warzone… honestly sucks. The scaling is off, it takes forever to progress and you can lose progress, and it’s barely rewarding (especially in terms of time investment)
Gravity Kills has some great ideas but awful implementation; between the pull issues with certain ship configurations, the literal instant respawning of enemies, the bad placement of hawking particles, just… everything really
The recurring ‘hold the line’ TFO format isn’t ‘bad’ really but it’s over-use drags it into bad territory
The Gamma ‘adventure zone’ sucks. The individual quests are alright but badly scaled and badly balanced and can get boring, fast
Home is one of the most boring missions in quite a while; it’s (literally) kill a bunch of trash, kill a bunch of ground trash, hold the line against ground trash, kill trash, kill ground trash, hold the line against ground trash. That’s… it
The DIS Intro being copy paste of the Fed one (or vice versa) is really lazy
Yet another negative for the continuing reliance upon the same boring one-note hold the line objective
Hold the line, dammit
To Hell With Honor has entirely too many turrets which are entirely too overtuned, and having to kill all the elachi at each step honestly drags it down
The first Measure of Morality quest isn’t… bad, but it has some weird and wonky issues, made worse by being forced to not have our BOFFs, and of course the irritation of the Control fight
The pure RNG bad design of the arena fight of Madran’s deserves its own negative

The Old Republic

Let’s get this out of the way; this game has serious, serious problems. But I still love it… well, part of it. If ever there was a game to cherry pick this is it, but I can strongly recommend the Sith side classes, partially recommend Consular and Smuggler, and recommend you subscribe when you play to make the experience not even worse.
Total Story Score: +294
Total Gameplay Score: -204
Golden Number: 81.03
Cheats: No
Total Play Time: 36 Days // 737.44 Hours
Time Reviewed: 10-12-2022

Spoiler Pluses and Minuses +

Story Positives:

Voice Acting: Ord Mantell VA
Voice Acting: Coruscant VA
Voice Acting: Taris VA
Voice Acting: Nar Shaddaa VA
Voice Acting: Tatooine VA
Voice Acting: Alderaan VA
Voice Acting: Balmorra VA
Voice Acting: Hoth VA
Voice Acting: Belsavis VA
Voice Acting: Voss VA
Voice Acting: Tython VA
Prime Opt: Ord Mantell and the showcasing of the messed up nature of both the Republic and the Separatists
Secondary: The Secondary Quests in Ord Mantell are good flavor and good world building
Prime Opt: Esseles is probably one of the better dungeons storywise, with some good characters and good decisions, and a surprisingly down to earth but worthwhile plot
Animation: Esseles also has some good cinematic direction and Animation throughout
Brickwork: Ord Mantell Brickwork
Brickwork: Coruscant Brickwork
Sound Design: Coruscant Sound Design
Secondary: Coruscant’s side quests do a good job of showcasing the gray on black nature of the planet, the Republic, and the Senate as we do quite a few quests with and for Senators, and we see a good spread thereof
Prime Opt: The Coruscant Primary is so-so, but the addition of the Gree, their unique and fun method of dialogue, and their relevance to the function of Coruscant are honestly awesome
Prime Opt: Taris primary quest absolutely nails just how… absolutely awful Taris really is, and how terrible of an idea it is for the Republic to keep burning men, time, effort, and resources on a project that is failing miserably
Secondary: Taris secondary quests do a good job of adding to the storytelling, world building, and personal stories therein
Prime Opt: Tatooine primary is a nice callback to the Rakata in general, and the way the Czerka try to mis-use and abuse it honestly fits in neatly with them
Prime Opt: Alderaan Primary drifts into decent, mostly with the politics and the proxy war actively going on
Prime Opt: The Balmorra Primary is mostly so so, but there’s some good moments and some good side characters, making the arc more positive than not (especially since the Madine is actually willing to accept that he’s wrong, a rarity amongst Republic generals)
Internal Continuity: Internal continuity of Balmorra between Sith and Republic
Prime Opt: Surprisingly, the Quesh Primary arc is actually pretty good. The affable yet intelligent sith, the manipulating Hutt, all surprisingly well written and straight
Prime Opt: Hoth’s Primary’s general plot is actually fascinating in its banality; Being all about salvage rights. This is further augmented by the general vibe and tone of the piece…
Prime Opt: …and a bonus positive for the decently well-written interactions and individual quests (especially the Republic > Imperial temp truce bit)
World Building: Voss’ quests are so so, but the world building they provide to Voss and their people and culture are pretty great
Prime Opt: The Voss Primary is actually pretty well written throughout; good moments and twists
Prime Opt: Tython and the showcasing of the incompetence of the Jedi Order
Humor: There are quite a few ‘so bad it’s good’ animations across the Republic quests, and they are (unintentionally) hilarious
Character: Elara Dorne is immediately a good character, in quite literally her first scene; She’s competent, professional, and manages to be well written enough to not be irritating or stuck up
Moment: Elara Dorne’s Taris reactions and responses are honestly fantastic (“I suggest you put a blaster bolt in his skull”)
Voice Acting: Elara Dorne’s voice actress nails the role
Character: Forex is simple, but forthright in what he is; the cheesy, ridiculous fun
Prime Opt: Elara’s quests, while flat (as all non-main companions are), her arc of proving herself despite her background and heritage is a neat one
Prime Opt: Forex’s quests are silly and ridiculous but they’re delightful, well acted, and of course the descriptions of his ops are hilarious
Moment: For the first time, in the entire Trooper storyline, there is a legitimately good story beat for Trooper; the trap on A-77, and the loss of Sergeant Jaxo
Moment: The sham trial with Zian and the option to literally shoot him in the face is just… hilarious
Prime Opt: The conclusion of Jorgan’s quest chain is weirdly satisfying out of no where, and even has decent elements of the grunts sacrificed vs. the agents sacrificing
Voice Acting: Companion VA
Internal Continuity: The choice regarding Galen, and how it keeps coming up later
MSQ: Taris in general is surprisingly well written for how brief it is, a lot of which sits on the strength of Watcher One and some legitimate dilemmas for the JK to face
Character: Lord Praven is a weirdly good and nuanced of not only a Dark Side user, but just an interesting character in general
Character: Okay so… honestly, credit for how the Jedi Council are portrayed; Arrogant, wise, patient, reckless, and disagreeing with each other constantly
Character: T7 is, let’s be honest, pretty legit. He’s only not more positives because of his lack of presence
Voice Acting: Generally good voice acting work for the JK
Voice Acting: Companion VA
Aggregate: By itself, the general horror of the Power Guard concept // Tol Braga is honestly a better Obi-Wan character than Orgus // Pak’s tiny arc on Belsavis is super brief… but more interesting than the rest of Belsavis entire, and a neat little bit of competency from the Republic Colonel on hand
MSQ: JC Taris is… actually pretty good. It’s got a decent section of options, surprisingly enjoyable dialogue, and works well dark or light
Plot: Act 1 stumbles a bit but is a nice build up for solving something that (at least hypothetically) is a non standard obstacle that (hypothetically) doesn’t require killing to solve
Dialogue: The dialogue in act 1 for Consular is some of the best on the entire Republic side
Voice Acting: The voice actress for the Consular is bland on light… but she’s actually legit when dark
Voice Acting: General VA positive across Consular
Writing: The way they portray the Dark Side is legitimately interesting for Consular; she can be cruel, but amusing, but in general is portrayed more as intelligent and pragmatic than simply a thug
Writing: Okay credit where it’s due, Morrhage is interesting, and the dilemma at the end of Act 1 is actually legit
MSQ: JC Balmorra is actually a pretty good story arc. The dynamic between Zenith and Tai is more than a simple zealot vs. politician, as both have shadings of nuance that help flesh them out, and the arc itself has several good layers it adds to your character
MSQ: JC Belsavis is surprisingly well constructed, shows some new insight on the Esh Ka, and continues the overall arc
Plot: JC Act 3 has a few flaws, but the overall thread of the Children and building up a web of supporters is actually pretty cool
Dialogue: The dialogue stumbles a bit, but is generally well written throughout
Writing: The consistent Dark Side portrayal continues to be amusing, interesting, and pragmatic
Character: Holiday is weirdly interesting in her own right, and exceptionally well acted
Character: Iresso is… weird. He’s bland, but reliable, and is probably our best ground troop character on the entire Republic
MSQ: JC Corellia does a good job of selling the terror of sleeper agents as its primary plot
MSQ: JC Corellia is… just weirdly good. The working with forces you’ve gathered, functionally leading (and actually choosing) how the battles go
Outro: JC Outro is actually really satisfying, acknowledges choices and reality, and feels more satisfying than JK (I know, low bar)
Character: Zenith isn’t much, but he’s weirdly engaging (no doubt helped by his actor)
Character: Nadia is in the same boat; the beginnings of a good character
Voice Acting: Companion VA
Intro: Immediate personal stakes in tutorial
Intro: Intro does a lot right, establishing stakes, tone, character, and stakes
MSQ: The Coruscant quests are delightful. The bounty hunters, imperials, general humor and fun side characters
Character: Bonus points for Miel just kinda being a bro throughout
Humor: The, uh, ‘trap’ set for us in deep space is absolutely hysterical
MSQ: Tatooine’s arc is quite amusing, playing the seductress sith against the completely innocent jedi
MSQ: The entire Darth Bandon arc is a hilarious and proper usage of External Continuity
Moment: Okay, the ‘duel’ on Alderaan was fantastic, a great moment
Plot: Act 1’s structure in how we meet and develop Risha before she joins helps her to be an actual character
Character: Skavak is, let’s be honest, occasionally amusing… mostly early on
Humor: The repeated Flirt options are legitimately amusing, especially since most of the people you flirt with just shut you down
MSQ: I love the Hoth arc; in addition to Guss, we also have a nice twist with Ailila and Trick
Storyboarding: Okay, the storyboarding and… amusement of framing the death of Raskurro on Rogun deserves its own positive
MSQ: Belsavis had some surprisingly decent stuff; Ivory was more complex than he could’ve been, and there were legitimately amusing moments
Humor: Smuggler consistently amuses, getting a Humor positive
Character: Spar is simple, but highly amusing on Balmorra
Storyboarding: There is periodic amusing storyboarding
Dialogue: The dialogue is a strong point for the Smuggler
Character: Risha is a pretty interesting character, further helped by having a pretty good and multi-faceted story arc..
Character: …earning her two positives
Character: Guss is similarly just kind of wholesome, humorous, well acted, and awesome…
Character: …earning him two positives
Voice Acting: General Smuggler VA positive
Voice Acting: Companion VA
Brickwork: The general ‘imperial’ Brickwork aesthetic is distinct and well designed, and adds to the atmosphere of their territories
Camerawork: Regardless of all other things, the presentation and camera usage of the Foundry is quite good
Brickwork: Korriban brickwork does a great
Visual Storytelling: Korriban visual storytelling
Voice Acting: Korriban VA
Secondary: Korriban sidequests
Voice Acting: Dromund Kaas VA
Secondary: Dromund Kaas sidequests are… actually really good, showing tons and tons of world building, characterization, variety, and general writing quality, and terror…
Secondary: …earning two positives
Prime Opt: Dromund Kaas Revanites
Brickwork: Dromund Kaas Brickwork
Prime Opt: Balmora quests are a good insight into how horrible the Sith Empire can be, the occupation, and of course the lead up to the eventual Balmorran story arc on the Republic side
Voice Acting: Balmorra VA
Secondary: Balmorra bonus series is surprisingly well constructed as a follow-through to the initial occupation (the Primary)
Internal Continuity: Internal continuity of Taris between Sith and Republic
Prime Opt: Nar Shaddaa’s initial Primary, with the Syndicate, is amusing and well written
Voice Acting: Nar Shaddaa VA
Prime Opt: While mostly the same arc, the Sith Tatooine Primary is still pretty legit
Voice Acting: Tatooine VA
Voice Acting: Alderaan VA
Secondary: Alderaan bonus and world building of Killiks and the order of killing them
Voice Acting: Taris VA
Prime Opt: Taris Primary and Thana and Gravus
Voice Acting: Hoth VA
Voice Acting: Belsavis VA
Voice Acting: Voss VA
Voice Acting: Corellia VA
Prime Opt: Corellian’s Primary is actually somewhat decent, mostly thanks to Darbin Sull
Voice Acting: Nal Hutta VA
World Building: Hutta’s world building is actually pretty good, between how the underworld works in general, the Hutts, and the Evocaii
Brickwork: Nal Hutta is exactly what it should be; a filthy swamp
Secondary: Nal Hutta’s quests are good for the vibe… of the Bounty Hunter
Voice Acting: Male VA
Voice Acting: Female VA
Voice Acting: Companions VA
Intro: Intro does a lot very quickly; establishes our character, the kind of ‘world’ we live in, our crew, and our goal
MSQ: Hutta’s arc is simple but enjoyable. It feels like we’re a relatively normal person just trying to make it in the business, and the vibe and atmosphere work for me
MSQ: Dromund Kaas continues to be amusing…
MSQ: …but more than that, the entire sequence is a great way to exposit on how the Sith Empire operates, from nobility to military to intelligence
MSQ: Balmorra is another amusing short story; working for a moron and dancing circles around him to get to our real target…
Internal Continuity: …while also helping sabotage Imperial efforts, leading to some connective tissue to the Republic Balmorra lines
MSQ: The Balmorra conclusion is immensely satisfying, especially watching Pirrell dissolve as things fall apart around him
MSQ: The Nar Shaddaa arc is somewhat simple, but the supporting cast really helps to sell it
MSQ: The Tatooine story arc is exceptionally well written, and engaging… it’s seeing a Han Solo / Jack Sparrow type character, except we’re not on their side for once and are going after them…
MSQ: …this is in addition to a showcasing of Tatooine’s functionality as the border world…
MSQ: …and of course I absolutely love the target we’re after
MSQ: Okay so the Alderaan sequence is brilliantly built up and paid off. First we encounter absolute snobs of nobility (already priming us for what is to come), then we are given formal opportunity to act as an official liaison, then we are given the option of doing some stupid sidequest… or…
MSQ: …we slug the guy, giving us a brief encounter before we can slug him AGAIN…
MSQ: …and at the end of it all, we’re actually thanked for it!
Moment: And THEN there’s when we are asked to kill a noble and we do it just so… perfectly casually and without hesitation, without even looking!
MSQ: The Act 1 final mission is quite satisfying, seeing Tarro Blood brought so low, and having the choice of how to kill him (and the fact that he failed a will check), awesome
Character: Tarro Blood is actually a pretty good rival. If you’re dirty, he’s a reflection of you. If you’re just that good, he’s what you’re fighting against. And in both cases he pushes you constantly, and fails
MSQ: The Taris quest is bland… right up until that last scene with Torian and his father, which is surprisingly good
Plot: The first act does have a good overall format to its plot; a sequence of mini stories
Character: Mako is a bit simple, but she’s a delightful little marshmallow
Character: Gault is fantastic. He’s a great character in Tatooine, and he keeps being a great character after…
Character: …probably helped by the fact that he has actual layers and depth to him
Character: Blizz is amazing. I don’t want to over-emphasize him, but the truth is he’s positive, upbeat, uplifting, helpful, and has some of the best little ‘companion moments’ in other cutscenes, and even his sidequest…
Character:…easily earning him…
Character:…three positives
Dialogue: Generally good dialogue throughout
Outro: Okay, that final bit with the Chancellor and Darth Idiot is legitimately good. It’s not built up at all, but it’s still good
Intro: The SW Intro once again immediately establishes itself. We know a lot about who we are and the tasks we’re being shoved into very quickly
Intro: The second quest, dealing with the three criminals, is fun and multi-faceted
Intro: The intro does a lot to immediately establish our potential and raw power without tipping into JK range
Character: Baras is very established very early on… literally in just two scenes we see what type of character he is. His devotion to the Dark Side and its tenants, but his absolute focus on out-maneuvering his opponents
Character: Tremel is a brief character but very well done for his screen time
Character: Baras actually varies in how he reacts to you dependant entirely upon how you deal with him, adding another wonderful layer to his character
Character: Baras also establishes very early on that he, ultimately, is very pragmatic. He does NOT give a damn how you do things, only that you get results… good, bad, in-between
Character: Baras also establishes his paranoia very, very early on… in a nice, subtle way that makes you not only skip over it, but also inclines you to think he’s right
Plot: The act 1 plot device of Jaesa’s ability is very well constructed, as a way to make her relevant to Baras and his spy network, and a way to make her twist one way or the other depending on your actions
MSQ: Dromund Kaas continues the general excellence of Warrior with several key insights into how the Sith operate…
MSQ: …and how Baras operates
Moment: The… option with Grathan and his wife is just hilarious
MSQ: The Durmat side bit is amusing, and it’s a good establishment of Quinn
MSQ: …but everything to do with Rylon and the reality of being a deep spy is brilliant
Voice Acting: Sith Warrior’s male voice actor is honestly amazing…
Voice Acting: …earning two positives
Voice Acting: Sith Warrior’s female voice actress is incredible…
Voice Acting: …earning two positives
MSQ: Nar Shaddaa’s quests continue to help establish Baras, Sith politics, and showcase Republic mentality along the way
MSQ: Nomen Karr’s initial introduction is brilliant. It establishes his cold calculus, his detachment, and his pride…
MSQ: …and no matter how you play things, evil or good, he still tries everything he can to kill you, a recurring trend
Moment: So let’s get this out of the way; the Tatooine cutscene is phenomenal. It’s well written, deep, interesting, and can go a lot of different ways depending on how you do it. It’s one of the better sequences in the game…
Moment: …earning it…
Moment: …a full three positives
Banter: Banter with Vette is consistently good throughout
Moment: Duke Kendoh’s deflation; build up, pay off, and then even further pay off
Moment: The entire sequence with the General
Moment: And finally the various options and paths with the parents
MSQ: The two jedi in the trap ship is absolutely hysterical when you’re good
MSQ: The good Act 1 conclusion is easily one of the most satisfying payoffs after a wonderful build up of the entire first act. The reveal of Karr, turning Jaesa, the game acknowledging your choices in lore, the entire idea of reforming the empire from within, and Jaesa joining you in the task…
MSQ:…easily earning itself…
MSQ:…three positives
MSQ:Then there’s the Act 1 conclusion if you are evil. Corrupting Nomen Karr, turning Jaesa with simplicity and honesty, and of course the subtle tidbits of how you are out-pacing Baras’ anticipations…
MSQ:…so it earns once again…
MSQ:…a third positive
MSQ: The way they use Pierce on Taris is actually pretty legit, and the ‘use your entire team’ sequence is actually awesome
Character: Further, while I don’t like Pierce much, he’s well used (if simple) and serves as a good contrast to Quinn
Worldbuilding: Everything to do with Wyellett is horrifying and awesome. Easily the best showcasing of Light Side corruption in all of Star Wars…
Worldbuilding: …earning two positives by itself
Writing: The build up and pay off of Baras’ attempt on our life is brilliantly handled
Plot: Similarly, the entire plot point of us becoming the Emperor’s Wrath is fantastic, and opens up a lot of narrative usages in the near future
Consequence Storytelling: Baras’ overall scheme to take over as the Voice is honestly just… really, really smart
MSQ: The Belsavis MSQ does a very good job of showcasing the internecine sith politics as well as the imperial military’s opinion and operations therearound
Character: Timmns is honestly a pretty great character, and is a good showcasing of a smart jedi
Plot: The slow descent of Baras into sloppiness, and then later panic, is great
Character: Jaesa’s entire character arc as a light side is actually pretty cool, even as it’s somewhat sad in how much resistance she faces
Character: Jaesa as dark side is… disturbing, like very well written disturbing
Humor: Dark Side can be hilariously funny, often…
Humor: …earning two positives
Plot: The precision strike that is the Voss MSQ is brilliant. It explains the 8 year silence, most of the events leading up to and through the game, and does a better job with Vitiate than in the entire JK storyline
MSQ: Thus the Voss arc earns…
MSQ: …three separate positives
Character: Despite everything, Quinn is still a fascinating and well written character…
Character: …earning him two positive
Storyboarding: The storyboarding in SW is, in general, much higher quality than most of the other classes combined
Character: Vette is just delightful, but what really makes her work so well is the nuance and multi-faceted nature of her character. She can be attentive, amusing, quirky, thoughtful, caring, considerate, brutal, snarky… and all properly showcased at the right time and to the right person, all on top of a great voice actress…
Character: …earning her…
Character: …three positives
Character: Bonus positive for general sweetness and positivity of the Vette romance
Voice Acting: Generally great companion VA…
Voice Acting: …for two positives
Camerawork: Surprisingly good camerawork throughout
Character: Let’s get this out of the way. Baras is easily one of if not the best written Siths in the entire franchise, and one of the best characters in all of (vanilla) TOR. He is pragmatic, adaptive, clever but flawed, forward thinking but focused on the moment, and he even has a character arc developing across all three acts. This is on top of being a major focus from the very beginning to the very end, giving him a huge amount of time to breathe and grow. Baras…
Character: …is easily…
Character: …three positives by himself
Voice Acting: Then there’s Baras’ voice acting and presentation, which goes above and beyond…
Voice Acting: …earning him two positives therefore
Prime Opt: Pierce isn’t much, but his quest is surprisingly good… a nice, if brief, showcasing of Imperial spec ops, as well as a (frankly) better spec ops plot than the entire Trooper arc
Humor: Moff Broysc is funny and brilliantly comedically timed
Storyboarding: Corellia’s SW storyboarding is… weirdly good, compared to the rest of the game
Humor: SW Corellia is… weirdly amusing, consistently
MSQ: The entire Corellia arc feels like it should be a ‘sidequest’ but it’s actually directly connected to the main plot of going after Baras
Character: Vowrawn is awesome. Smart, affable, well acted, and a long term thinker
Outro: While not as powerful or impacting as Inquisitor, the Outro is still generally awesome. The confrontation with Baras, the Council laughing, his slow descent into desperation and panic, and finally his ignoble death, and us walking away as the acknowledged Wrath….
Outro: …earning it…
Outro: …three positives
Theme: The two central themes are quite strong throughout the work. The first is the theme of personal power vs. political power and the dynamic and interplay between them…
Theme: …earning two positives
Theme: Then there’s the other big theme; duplicity. Virtually every character in the entire arc has a surface and a subsurface personality, and a huge amount of the work is about how those two contrast and compete with one another (most obviously with Jaesa)…
Theme: …earning it two positives
Intro: The opening is the total opposite of the awful JC one earlier; It establishes so much so fast. There is a lot of show not tell, we establish there are stupid, evil, and decent people on the Sith, we get our first interaction with our initial two obstacles (Harkun and our rival), and it’s just generally awesome
Writing: Sith Inquisitor immediately establishes its writing chops; We immediately see the very nature of the Sith philosophy in action; Harkun favors Ffon, and in so doing coddles him, making him weaker… while also making us stronger by virtue of forcing us to adapt and improve in the face of this excess opposition. We make ourselves stronger, and Ffon makes himself weaker
MSQ: The literal second SI quest is a fantastic quest, as it allows you to be good, evil, crazy, and none of the above are mutually exclusive. It is surprisingly well written and bizarrely entertaining
Voice Acting: Zash’s voice actress is absolutely fantastic, not just a delight to listen to but she manages a wide range of emotions and concepts
MSQ: The conclusion of the SI Korriban chain is honestly very satisfying no matter how you play it;
MSQ: The singular plot point of how Zash defeats Skotia is well built up, well earned, brilliant, and pays off fantastically. It also ties in neatly to the overall theme of the Inquisitor; out maneuvering your opponents rather than brute forcing them
Plot: Unlike both JK and JC where you’re just kind of awesome, the reveal of our connection to Kallig is nicely done…
Plot: …but even better, they use this connection smartly throughout the plot
MSQ: Balmorra’s arc has a few stumbles, but the way Major Bessiker and his son and the vault is both amusing and interesting
MSQ: The cult construction plot of Nar Shaddaa
MSQ: Though difficult to pull off, successfully outmaneuvering the assassins and the jedi is immensely satisfying
MSQ: The Act 1 conclusion is both satisfying and surprisingly well constructed, effectively boosting our power base and position thanks to Zash’s machinations
Plot: The very existence of Force Walk is legitimately brilliant in many ways. It gives us a gameplay reason to go around collecting Force ghosts, it gives us a narrative reason to garner them to ourselves, it builds in a narrative reason to choose Light (convince) or Dark (oppress), and finally it serves as a good in-universe explanation for how we are able to expand our power so vastly and so quickly…
Plot: …earning it…
Plot: …three positives for the sheer quality of the writing of this plot point
MSQ: SI Taris is a brief but enjoyable sojourn, moreso for how many ways it can go as you work around Ashara
MSQ: The Voss arc is actually pretty cool, showcasing in very tangible sense just how foolish our idea was to grab so many Force ghosts, and the lengths we have to go through to remove them
Voice Acting: The Sith Inquisitor’s voice actors are really quite good, in fact both of them are good…
Voice Acting: …earning a full…
Voice Acting: …three positives
Character: Darth Zash is a fantastic character, villain, and position in the plot. She guides us, aides us, betrays us, and serves as our growth and is well acted and is just generally awesome…
Character: …earning her…
Character: …three positives
Theme: The entire SI arc follows two central themes brilliantly. The first is the theme of out-maneuvering and out-thinking their enemies, and it consists all the way through our conflict with Thanaton…
Theme: …earning a second positive
Theme: The second Theme is that of freedom… from the obvious (the former slave), to the frequent (Thanaton’s enslavement to tradition) to the finale (freeing the Sith Ghosts)…
Theme: …earning a second positive
Character: Darth Kallig doesn’t do much, but what he does is nice
Character: Ashara is a bit mixed, but when she’s nice she’s nice
Character: Talos is just… so wholesome, so legit, and so wonderful that…
Character: …he deserves three positives…
Character: …for general awesomeness (and voice acting)
Character: Thanaton is, honestly, one of the most amazing villains in the entire game. He is nuanced, complex, varied, and wonderful in how he teaches us, treats us, and just… it’s hard to gush enough about him. HE pushes HIMSELF into the corner via his own beliefs and traditions, and as he loses more and more the only one who keeps making things worse is him… and all the while he is pushing us and making us do more and more, pushing him back…
Character: …so he effortlessly earns…
Character: …three positives
MSQ: SI Corellia does some good stuff, showcasing our ability to adapt on the fly and out maneuver Thanaton consistently
Outro: The final confrontation with Thanaton is absolutely amazing on every single level. Music, audio, visuals, writing, voice acting, just… amazingness…
Outro: …easily earning…
Outro: …three positives
Outro: The finale and ending are fantastic, satisfying, and more importantly…
Outro: …also takes into account your choices as you go
Voice Acting: Companion VAs
Character: The Sith Inquisitor is quite satisfying to play as light side twice over, for you can play as a ‘good’ Inquisitor…
Character: …and you can play as an ‘evil’ Light inquisitor
Character: Similarly dark Inquisitor is just as satisfying, allowing you to play a combination of insane to absolutely bonkers…
Character: …with literal delusions of godhood
Dialogue: While it has a few issues here and there, the dialogue just pops across Inquisitor…
Dialogue: …earning it two positive
Internal Continuity: The Inquisitor chain follows its own events very smartly, building and paying off similarly well…
Internal Continuity: …earning two positives
Storyboarding: Inquisitor does a good job with several of its cutscenes, really helping to sell the power involved
Voice Acting: The male VA is honestly one of the best in the entire game…
Voice Acting: …earning himself…
Voice Acting: …three positives
MSQ: The central theme of Intelligence operating in spite of the Sith is pushed very early on, as our literal first quest chain involves adapting to our plans being thrown due to just some random Sith dickwad who had a killing boner
Intro: Not as strong as the others, but the Intro is still surprisingly strong
Plot: Hutta’s overall framework is excellent; it’s tight, brief, but efficient; a perfect example of a typical operation, including ups, downs, and adaptation…
Plot: …earning it two positives for sheer quality
Character: Karrels is a surprisingly well written character for how brief he’s on camera, a common trend for Agent
Moment: Much as I hate him, Jadus’ opening cutscene does everything it needs to very effectively; He is intelligent, powerful, and has no problem throwing his weight and authority around
Moment: Okay so I’m going to give Jadus’ SECOND scene a positive too, for it helps to indicate exactly how monstrously horrifically evil he really is, all while said with a very calm tone of voice and very careful word usage, everything summarized by the simplest of phrases…
Moment: …the democratization of fear
Integration: Gameplay/Story Integration
MSQ: Dromund Kaas is all about build up… while Hutta was an entire operation from front to back, this resets the board by laying multiple bricks not just for Act 1 but for the entire story arc
Plot: The destruction of the Dominator is one of those funny things… such a relatively small thing, but it perfectly sets up the entirety of the remaining plot of the entire arc
Moment: The return to the destruction of the Dominator is a brilliantly constructed ‘military crisis’ scene, brilliantly written and acted
Character: A bonus point just for Keeper across Dromund Kaas. He is professional above all other things… not uncaring, not inhuman, not evil, just professional. Triage being a major element thereof
Brickwork: The brickwork of the Phantom is honestly completely brilliant; someone spent a lot of time thinking about what and how to design it and it shows
MSQ: Balmorra is yet another example of a good ‘op’, with good supporting cast and multiple paths through things…
MSQ:…earning it two positives
Writing: The very existence of a ‘superweapon’ (Cyclone) that actually makes perfect sense is fantastic
MSQ: The Nar Shaddaa arc continues the excellent trend of quest design and story intrigue, helped by the usual excellent cast and usual horrifying implications…
MSQ: …earning itself two positives
Visual Storytelling: Visual Storytelling: Periodic, but it’s there… little hints and tidbits
Writing: Under-stated emphasis constantly
MSQ: Tatooine attention to detail… and the double blind trap…
MSQ: …and of course the thematic significance of the ghost cell, the corrupt intelligence network with a decent person who wants to defect from it…
MSQ: The main arc on Alderaan continues the overall themes, and has some amusing moments with the Baron and his wife
Character: The Eagle is actually a pretty well written, interesting example of a zealot… He wants to return to the ‘good old days’ of isolationism and ‘purity’ and has some legitimately good points despite his overall zealotry
MSQ: Okay so let’s get this out of the way; the Act 1 conclusion is absolutely amazing. It’s honestly one of the highlights of the entire vanilla game. It is tense, terrifying, beautifully built up, properly foreshadowed, and at all times you feel the atmosphere of the moment…
MSQ: …earning it…
MSQ: …three positives purely on one axis
MSQ: Then we add in the dilemma that is presented; Defeat Jadus and lose thousands of lives, or spare them and him in turn. This is a great dilemma and very well presented…
MSQ: …earning it…
MSQ: …three positives
MSQ: Now we must acknowledge the routes this offers. We can join him or we can fight him and in so doing delay him and survive long enough to destroy his ship…
MSQ: …earning it…
MSQ: …three positives
Moment: But here’s the beautiful one; the out-maneuver option. Out-talking one of the most powerful and terrifying Sith Lords in the game sounds like bad comedy but it is all upheld by the sheer quality and magnitude of the writing on display. It flows naturally, it feels exactly how it should, and it is damned satisfying and possibly one of the best singular scenes in the entire game…
Moment: …earning it…
Moment: …three positives
Character: Zhorrid is horrid (ha ha) but surprisingly well acted and written, and is truly a reflection of her father’s insanity
Character: Jadus himself must be mentioned here. He isn’t at the level of quality of Baras or Thanaton, but he is an absolutely terrifying force, and is easily the most evil character in the game…
Voice Acting: …and his voice actor helps elevate him into two positive territory
MSQ: Act 2’s beginnings are already strong (double agent arc, change to status quo)…
Moment: …but are made much stronger by the out-of-nowhere reveal that our Republic handler has control of us due to brainwashing, and the questions that spawns
Theme: Taris wonderfully and quietly hammers in the quiet horror of the brainwashing. Chance claims he didn’t want to use the control code, but despite everything can’t resist doing so… twice… And so we see the dangers of such tools
Storyboarding: The great scene showcasing how bad our brain is breaking down is very well done and appropriately creepy
MSQ: It’s simple, but the sequence where we find out about the chemical and why it was used on us is a great sequence
Plot: While a bit weak, Act 2’s overall plot of the double agent plot is great
Storytelling Mechanic: Oddly the LACK of choices across Act 2 is absolutely amazing in how it shows just how powerless you really are while reprogrammed
Character: Ardun Kothe is a fantastically nuanced… a bad man and a justice lord who lives in a horrible ‘world’ that ‘forces’ him to be what he is. And he knows that… and he HATES it…
Character:…and it makes him a fantastic rival character
Moment: I know it’s a minor moment, but it’s so, so important for our character, when we reprogram ourselves… “No more control”
MSQ: The Belsavis arc is fairly straightforward… except for the inclusion of SCORPIO and her SHODAN shenanigans
Moment: The mental trap left on the calls of the Cabal is both clever and brilliant; it axes the war effort (explaining many other story arcs), it screws with our support base (but leaves our closest supporters, who were partially or not-at-all enhanced) functional…
Atmosphere: …and it adds to the overall vibe of Act 3, us being cut off and alone against a force substantially more entrenched
Characters: The supporting team (Watchers, Keepers) are great supporting cast
Atmosphere: Generally well done military tone throughout
Dialogue: Generally well written dialogue, easily the best in the game…
Dialogue:…earning itself…
Dialogue:…three positives
Character: Keeper is honestly fantastic. He is professional, secretly an idealist broken down by experience, he owns up to his faults and expects the best from others, holds himself to these same ideals and does all he can…
Character: …earning him an easy…
Character: …three positives
Voice Acting: The female voice actress is just as good as the male one…
Voice Acting:…once again…
Voice Acting:…earning three positives
Voice Acting: Generally good companion voice acting
Character: Kalliyo is damaged goods. A toxic, disturbed individual who abuses and uses everyone around her, but she is well written and well performed in her construction
Foreshadowing: There’s quite a bit of it, so much so that it dovetails into…
Babylon 5 Effect: Babylon 5 Effect. Agent plays a bit differently the second time around
Character: Watcher X is only present briefly, but is memorable for how they use him
MSQ: Voss shows why the Voss are neutral, gives great insight into their people, and has some nice politicking in the background
Consequence Storytelling: The game lives and breathes consequence storytelling… while it’s not the best I’ve seen, it absolutely gets credit for it
Internal Continuity: A huge amount of the internal continuity of TOR weaves in and through the Agent storyline
Plot: Build up to the dissolution of Imperial Intelligence…
Plot:…and the payoff thereof. And despite how mind-numbingly stupid the decision is… it fits horribly well
Character: Scorpio is appropriately horrifying and well voice acted
Character: Lokin is probably the best overall companion for the Agent by sheer virtue of how subtle and understated he is
Theme: The janitors; doing the unpleasant work that no one else can or wants to
Theme: Cost of service… the price of loyalty and what that really means when the chips are down
Theme: The temptation of tools, and the enabling of people’s true nature
Character: Main character arc…
Character: …dependent upon player choice
MSQ: General storytelling of just how devastating (deliberately) and mishandled (deliberately) the Corellian war really is, easily the best showcasing of it across the classes
Outro: The Outro is, of course, fantastic. Legitimately a conclusion to the entire TOR Vanilla arc, with lots of options and nuance and several powerful moments, including the showcasing of our ultimate rival as just another nobody just like us…
Outro:…all earning it…
Outro:…three positives
Storytelling Mechanic: The entire mail system as a Storytelling Mechanism
Visual Storytelling: Taris, visually, really showcases just how bad things are and have been since KotOR1
Brickwork: Lovely, lovely brickwork for Nar Shaddaa, honestly some of the most visually impressive zones in the entire game…
Brickwork: …earning two positives
Brickwork: Alderaan is legitimately gorgeous, truly excellent brickwork throughout…
Brickwork: …also earning two positives
Brickwork: Voss may be a bit of an autumn planet, but it too has legitimately good brickwork
Storytelling Mechanic: I do think the droid’s ‘binary language’ is a nice bit of storytelling mechanic
Doodads: So, doodad design is… off. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s very plain, and it varies so wildly that most individual places don’t qualify. Therefore the game, in general, gets… one doodad positive
Writing: The timeline placement of the entire game is actually quite brilliant; Very recently after a major war, so lots of clean up and consequences to fill two acts worth of content across many classes, then allowing us to go back to a ‘hot’ war thereafter as a status quo alteration
Writing: Further, the cold war itself has some great bits here and there
World Building: The general portrayal of the Republic is honestly the best I’ve seen in any Star Wars medium…
World Building: …earning it…
World Building: …three positives
World Building: The general portrayal of the Jedi is definitely the best I’ve seen in any Star Wars medium…
World Building: …earning them…
World Building: …three positives
World Building: The general portrayal of the Sith is absolutely fantastic, and again the best across Star Wars…
World Building: …earning…
World Building: …three positives
Plot: Hutt Cartel plot structure is surprisingly well constructed
Voice Acting: Makeb VA
MSQ: Republic Makeb Planetary Primary isn’t too shabby; it has some nice foreshadowing, and I enjoy the overall approach; We’re primarily fighting thugs and corporate greed
Cutscenes: Republic cinematics and storyboarding is… honestly surprisingly good, with actual destruction and something approaching actual cutscenes
Humor: Republic Makeb is… strangely amusing
Character: Dr. Oggurobb… the Happy Hutt
Character: Darth Marr’s intro establishes him very well and very properly; the pragmatic Sith who actually has a brain
Plot: The Sith Makeb starts very strong; We know what they’re after, but we have none of the resources or backing of both the Republic and the locals, instead we literally build a defacto base out of a crashed shuttle
MSQ: The initial Imperial Makeb quest is actually quite strong; We land, and immediately run around shutting down comm outposts and giving the all clear so no one knows we’re hear, keeping that ‘infiltration’ vibe going
Writing: General writing quality of the Sith Makeb series
Internal Continuity: The way the Republic and Imperial stories dovetail each other is really quite well done
Cutscene: The way Makeb ends on the Sith side, with public acknowledgement of the loss of Vitiate and the restructuring of the Sith Empire is a great cutscene
Atmosphere: Kaon actually has some legitimately great atmosphere
Cutscenes: Surprisingly good cutscenes (animation, camerawork) for the Czerka dungeons
Brickwork: Surprisingly good brickwork on Manaan
MSQ: Depths of Manaan was actually pretty decent, with a developing plot and some nice character moments
MSQ: The initial setup on Rishi is actually pretty legit, especially since we can choose to play along or not
MSQ: Weirdly it also serves as a good… beginning of a story. If TOR actually began here it would legitimately work as the start of a story, given how it does…
Exposition: …surprisingly good exposition very naturally
Writing: The initial build up across early Rishi is really good. Starts low (local pirates), connects them to the greater thread (Revanites), and escalates properly
Prime Opt: Rishi class quests for Warrior and Inquisitor. The search for eternal life, the reality of being the Wrath
Prime Opt: Aaand then there’s Agent, which is just legit pretty much no matter how you slice it
Prime Opt: But then out of absolutely NOwhere is Jedi Knight. It’s just… insanely well done, all about helping people and beautifully written to boot…
Prime Opt: …on top of the fact that it acknowledges the Vitiate crap in a proper way
Brickwork: I honestly really like how Rishi looks. It gets across a very nice atmosphere
Cutscenes: Cutscene quality in general remains high in the Revan expansion
Brickwork: Yavin 4, credit where credit is due, looks really well done. First zone in the entire game I will actually give…
Doodads: …the doodads positive to
Character: Lana is legitimately a great character. A bit rushed, but still well done for her screen time
Character: Theron doesn’t do as much as I’d like either, but he’s well acted and well positioned, and serves as a good counterpart
Character: Darth Marr gets even more screen time here, and he uses it quite well
Cutscenes: The initial in engine cutscenes are, honestly, really good. They use trickery and cleverness to make them look better than they are, but it’s all very well done
Voice Acting: Darin De Paul
Voice Acting: (general)
Moment: HK-55’s little montage moment was legitimately delightful
Moment: The way Valkorion tempts you with Lana’s death is actually legitimately well done
Brickwork: Zakuul’s brickwork is, legitimately, very well done (teleporting shuttles aside)…
Brickwork: …and deserves its positives
Character: HK-55 is a continuous source of delight, amusement, and surprisingly good timing and presentation…
Character: …earning him two positives
Storytelling Mechanics: Valkorion being in our head and poking in periodically is a great storytelling mechanic
Integration: The fact that they can swap companions in and out as the story demands is a great thing really
Doodads: Generally good doodad usage throughout
Camerawork: Generally good camerawork throughout
Humor: Okay, somehow the game is really making me laugh, like… more than I thought it would
Worldbuilding: The usage of random background dialogue to flesh things out is very well done, much better than in the vanilla game
MSQ: The Kaliyo chapter is probably one of the better ones so far.
Character: Okay I weirdly like Jorgan here. They use him well and he’s exactly how he (arguably) always should have been
MSQ: Okay I do like making a new lightsaber with the combined unification of the Sith and Jedi
Moment: Okay. Vette’s re-introduction to the narrative was legitimately delightful
MSQ: Chapter 13 is just kinda awesome in general… amusing, well written, well dialogued…
Writing: …but it gets bonus points for the creative intelligence of vaporizing the gold and stealing it that way
Humor: Bonus point to Chapter 13 for being legitimately hilarious
Character: Usage of SCORPIO
Character: SCORPIO in Chapter 15
World Building: Zakuul decadence worldbuilding
Character: Gault is a delight in how he’s used
Character: Theron continues to be great
Character: There’s a few stumbles but Lana continues to be rather enjoyable
Writing: Surprisingly well written and stretched storytelling around the new romance arcs
Cinematic: The cutscene was, really, quite well done on many levels
Cutscene: The opening cutscene leading into the assault on Voss is honestly really well done
MSQ: Chapter 1 does a lot well in a surprisingly fast order. The new status quo with SCORPIO and Vaylin, the choice with Arcann, Valkorion taking a more active role in manipulations…
Consequence Storytelling: …and the continuation of consequence. Voss and Gormak working together, the Sith Empire having finally mulched through enough morons to land on someone with a brain who wants an alliance
MSQ: Moff Lorman’s betrayal, combined with Saresh’s, the properly brief but enjoyable build up and pay off
Voice Acting: Darin De Paul again
Moment: The finale of Chapter 3 on the Gravestone was actually pretty legit
Character: SCORPIO continues to be as awesome as ever…
Character: …but the final outro for SCORPIO is a wonderful moment, and serves as an interesting denomount for the Agent storyline (of all things)
MSQ: The infiltration of the Zakuul palace mission is honestly great
Moment: Arcann slamming Valkorion is honestly a great scene
Brickwork: Nathema… Medriaas. The tomb world
MSQ: Chapter 7, Into The Void… and the terrible audio logs
World Building: Finally finally finally getting Tenebrae’s backstory on camera, and doing a good job of making him feel as horrible as he really is
Moment: Okay credit where it’s due, I actually felt it when they killed Torian, despite having never cared about him before
Moment: Vaylin’s death was actually quite well done
Cinematic: What can I say about this? It’s literally better in cinematography, symbolism, camerawork, animation, and emotional impact than a huge amount of what we’ve seen out of Star Wars in years…
Cinematic: …earning it two positives
Outro: The Inner Mind segment of Chapter 9 is LEGIT. Visuals, narration, audio, impressions, how it works with Tenebrae as a character, it even perfectly encapsulates the character, the build up, and is just fantastic payoff. Watching Tenebrae finally, finally, finally lose… is immensely satisfying…
Outro: …earning it…
Outro: …a full three positives
Character: Vaylin is really used so much better than in the previous expansion
Writing: The general quality of writing is some of the best I’ve seen thus far in the expansions
Cutscenes: The cutscene quality continues to be just generally awesome across the board…
Cutscenes: …earning it two positives
Pacing: Story pacing is substantially improved over most of the previous stuff
Character: I cannot believe I’m typing this but… Tenebrae is actually a legitimately good character herein
Brickwork: Zakuul is really very well done
Consequence Storytelling: The acknowledgement of resources being sparse, and being a major plot point
MSQ: General quality of the more lower-tier storytelling of Ossus
Character: Anri has relatively little screen time but they do a lot with her on Ossus, giving a great ground-level viewpoint of the Sith and the war in general
Brickwork: Onderon is quite lovely
Dialogue: The dialogue is actually pretty tightly written on Onderon
Character: Darth Savik is amusing, interesting, and well portrayed
Humor: Okay. King Hatesink is honestly really funny
Plot: Gault is always nice to see again, but the logic of having to convince a neutral party to get what we want is surprisingly well constructed
Cutscenes: Generally good cinematography again
Banter: Kira and Scourge are actually really delightful in how they play off each other
Humor: Okay, watching Tenebrae’s two cults fight against each other as they both try to out crazy each other is legitimately amusing
Moment: Okay I’ll give you this, game. The scene where everyone… just… everyone unites to burn Tenebrae down to ash is actually quite well done, and legitimately satisfying
MSQ: The Mandalorian arc is… bland, but it is a nice break from the norm
Voice Acting: Generally good voice acting
Brickwork: Dantooine
Doodads: Generally good, but special mention to the ship and Dantooine
Animation: Continuing the good usage of animation in cutscenes
Character: Rivix is probably being bolstered by Gideon Emery but he’s still cool
Character: I can’t believe this but I really do like what they’ve done with Malgus here
Cinematic: Okay that opening cinematic is very well done. General quality and badassness aside, it’s a great personal showcasing of the difficulties of the Jedi’s approach, and implications of Malgus’ overall plans…
Cinematic: …earning itself two positives
MSQ: The entire arc with Korrd and Norok is… surprisingly well done

Story Negatives:

Voice Acting: Alien VA has some issues in general (especially since you can’t increase the subtitle size), but the Ugnauts deserve special mention for being legitimately awful and ear hurting
Secondary: So, the Nar Shaddaa quests aren’t great to begin with (mostly disconnected side stories), but the bonus series is much worse
Secondary: The Tatooine bonus series is lacking, at best
Cutscene Incompetence: General cutscene incompetence
Secondary: The Hoth Bonus Series is… weird. It’s all about this Sith Beastlord but then starts an arc about using bioweapons against the Sith and then just… stops dead, it’s bleh
External Continuity: The way they completely mis-used the Exile is not great at best, and then add onto that how little presence or relevance they have and it’s just… what?
World Building: Belsavis simplicity, pacing, and world destruction
Secondary: Voss bonus series has several issues, but totally ignoring internal continuity with the… y’know, Voss primary is bad enough by itself
Prime Opt: Okay so the Corellian Primary is ‘fine’ but the way it ends is… not
Empty Text: This is in addition to the fact that Corellia has tons of Empty Text issues
Prime Opt: Tython bad writing and ridiculousness
Voice Acting: It’s hard to explain but the voice acting for the Trooper is… off. The male voice actor is acceptable but boring, but Jennifer Hale (who is, I remind you, Jennifer Hale) sounds like she’s trying too hard, coming across too forcefully, and too clipped…
Voice Acting: …making the voice acting, an otherwise positive aspect of the game, working out badly across the entire work
Intro: The Intro (Ord Mantell) is… boring, at best. A military story which can work… but doesn’t, instead coming across as a paint-by-numbers first-draft story
Moment: The ‘big reveal’ Moment of Havoc squad being evil is… bad. It’s a dumb reveal and it’s a dumb scene
Dialogue: Throughout Coruscant our character’s reactions and dialogue all boil down to the same thing; We’re A Dick, or Yes Ma’am, and it effectively removes us from even being a character
Gameplay / Story: Gameplay/story segregation issues (honestly Trooper just… does not fit, at all, in the overall game)
MSQ: Tatooine’s entire story arc is brief, blunt, and stupid. It’s badly placed, has little to do with anything, and is just… off
Fake Drama: Also the needlessly Fake Drama of Fuse’s ‘big sacrifice’ in a scene that’s honestly terribly presented
Character: Needles is evil muwahahahaha
MSQ: Honestly everything about the Alderaan sequence is just… more pointless filler, and worse, Gearbox is just kind of there and we just kind of waltz into his ‘not trap’ and the whole sequence is stupid
Character: Wraith isn’t quite as bad as Kai Leng, but she’s definitely that type of character
Moment: The bizarritude of just kind of… waltzing on board the Justice is utterly unexplained and so strangely off kilter that I legitimately thought I missed something
Character: The final ‘redemption’ of Tavus out of absolutely no where, for no reason, is not just dumb on the face of it, it’s very very badly presented and honestly I have no idea what they were thinking with this
Writing: Regardless of Tanno’s awfulness, his ‘because plot’ ‘we MUST recruit him’ crap is awful
Writing: The entire Act 2 of Trooper is all about telling not showing, and insisting on railroading for ill explained reasons
MSQ: And then Act 2’s big finale is a tepid battle on a superweapon ship which… is just kind of underwhelming
Dialogue: Act 3’s dialogue starts to honestly drag, even by this game’s standards; It’s hard to explain if you haven’t actually heard the lines, but they’re flat, honestly third draft material at best
MSQ: Act 3’s primary thrust? …recruiting. Again, if you’re paying attention
MSQ: Okay so. We’re on Belsavis to save these people for… some reason, and they’re actually innocent so that’s cool, but then there’s some actually bad dialogue swirling around it so cutscenes come across as wrong…
Storyboarding: …then you add in a healthy dose of bad Storyboarding making the scenes even worse
Character: Jorgan is, at best, a poorly written character who fails at what he’s supposed to be; the rogue vigilante (turn in your badge!)
MSQ: The Voss arc is, at best, weak, and at worst, nonsensical… also we are STILL running around recruiting
Prime Opt: Jorgan’s quest chain is… completely wasted potential, flounders and blunders onwards and does almost nothing until the very end where it suddenly pushes a very unearned (yet good) finale
Character: Garza could have been a good character. She is not. She is the beginnings of an interesting character that goes nowhere and does nothing
MSQ: The ENTIRE REPUBLIC is at stake because of this one stupid general! The whole thing! (Corellia)
Outro: Can’t forget that one last F U to the entire sequence; if you take the general alive, they immediately (and I mean MINUTES later) ransom him back to the Sith. Thanks
MSQ: The JK Tython segment is… not great. Inside of what can, at best, be a few days, we go from joining the Order to being a full fledged Jedi
MSQ: JK Coruscant… the second planet… is all about saving the entire planet from a superweapon, and it’s repeated (several times) that if we fail it will be disaster for the ENTIRE Republic
MSQ: JK Tatooine is… what? We have to save the ENTIRE PLANET from total annihilation, on a timer too
MSQ: JK Alderaan is sort of… whatever. The superweapon is silly, the cheating with the spy is out of no where, Thul is awesome but then everything is wrapped up weirdly….
MSQ: …but what really makes it stand out for bad is how they ‘kill’ Orgus off camera, then we find him, then kill him off again. Both incidents in a vacuum don’t work, but the two back to back make it much worse
Writing: While not universal, most of the Dark Side options come across as entirely too whiney
Writing: While not universal, most of the Light Side options come across as licking the Council’s boots
Writing: Okay so the Chosen One angle is hammered early and often (literally on the tutorial planet)
Pacing: Act 1 is very rushed. Very, very rushed
Writing: Act 1 in general has a common writing 101 problem; no establishment, just skipping to the ‘good stuff’…
Writing: …and in the absence of establishment it just falls flat
Character: Darth Angral was pathetic and stupid
Writing: JK uses a lot of cliches and tropes without anything good to offset them
Writing: Superweapons R Us could work, but the problem is it completely drains any oomph any of them could or would have…
Writing: …which really comes out during the destruction of Uphrades, which falls completely flat
Story Sequencing: The story sequencing across Act 1 is legitimately off
MSQ: General bad writing on Balmorra
Character: Okay so I’ve never liked Doc, but I was waiting to actually give him a negative… until I started talking to him. I could comment on how irritating he is, or how scummy, or creepy, but what really sells it is he’s so… obviously a poor attempt at a ‘jerk with a heart of gold’ attempt, and is done entirely too much and too hard…
Character: …then you have to take into account that he’s clearly designed to be a slice of humor in the storyline. Humor that relies entirely on unpleasant and/or creepy concepts badly executed
MSQ: The like 3 minute cutscene of ‘being evil’ is not just badly directed…
MSQ: …it’s a huge waste of potential (and a ‘three years later’ problem too)
MSQ: Act 2 is… weak, at best. A lack of build up to a lack of pay off
Writing: So the Act 2 timeskip actually has a huge number of domino issues later on in the narrative
MSQ: So Belsavis is… death cultists and their usual nonsense, but also we’re saving TRILLIONS from a lightspeed superweapon of doom
MSQ: Then there’s Voss, which has us going all in to not only prophecies and destiny (not actually explained, just… there) in order to save billions (there aren’t billions of voss by the way) oh and naturally we defeat Sel Makor, THE villain of the Voss, and the first part of it just… meanders
Character: Kira’s ‘romance’ is… badly written, similar to Corso and Doc, entirely too blunt and honestly badly written
Consequence Storytelling: So Act 3 has repeated, multiple examples of jedi knights and masters who helped us before who are… inexplicably evil. It’s implied they were turned by the Emperor, but when how and why isn’t even discussed, and even this is just left to the imagination…
Visual Storytelling: …leading to a presentation negative in addition to a narrative one
Writing: The Jedi Knight inexplicably being made supreme commander of the entire Corellian war is… so, so many levels of nonsense
Writing: Ssssso the jedi are all evil, presumably turned evil off camera by Vitiate. Cool. That’s fine, really, but why is NONE of this properly showcased or explored in any manner at any time? Everyone acts as if it’s the new norm and no one even reacts to it
Character: Rusk isn’t as bad as I remembered, but he’s a bland pile of empty nothing
Outro: Okay so the final big confrontation with Vitiate is so, so, so many levels of pathetic one very level I honestly don’t even feel up to explaining why…
Outro: …so instead…
Outro: …here’s three negatives
Outro: Okay so… the actual ending sequence is the usual KotOR aping problems… but then on dark side it suddenly shifts gear for no perceivable reason (with no build up too) so… that sucks on both sides
Character: Vitiate himself is the most generic sith imaginable…
Character: …earning two negatives by himself
Intro: The very very opening cinematic is… bad. Bad expectations, bad writing, bad usage of characters, bad amping us up to be some great prodigy
MSQ: JC Coruscant absence of story
Consequence Storytelling: JC’s act 1 lacks… acknowledgement of anything we do, like the consequences just do not exist despite being a story that really should have them
Cutscene Incompetence: Cutscene incompetence
Writing: So, JC Light side is… bland. Very, very… very bland, so a negative…
Writing: …for each…
Writing: …act
Character: Qyzen is… weird. I generally don’t like him, but his quest arc is… not just flat, but tonally dissonant. It honestly feels like Qyzen was designed to be our ‘evil’ party member, but they also wanted him to be our first and Primary companion, so the whole thing is bungled
Character: Qyzen gets a second negative for general suckitude
Character: Corso’s romance arc is terrible. Just terrible
Character: Skavak’s general flatness and lack of arc hurts him, and ultimately makes his ‘dark mirror of the Smuggler’ act fall flat, and there’s no real payoff other than ‘it’s over’
Plot: The anti-climatic and generally… bland end to Act 1 is weird after spending so much time building up to this great fortune, getting it, and then… absolutely nothing changes or is different
Plot: Act 2 is… off. In addition to the fleh ending of Act 1, Act 2 acts like we’re still just basic nobodies and refusing to acknowledge anything we’ve done to date, and worse it meanders pretty badly despite having a cool idea (Republic privateer)
Consequence Storytelling: So the game has this weird disconnect. It keeps insisting you’re super rich and building a massive criminal empire but doesn’t… do or show anything with it
Cutscene Incompetence: Cutscene incompetence is pretty bad across Smuggler for some reason
Character: Rogun the Butcher is… lacking, at best, for someone supposedly always present, and then the ‘big twist’ which falls completely flat
Writing: Speaking of which, the big twist falls completely flat
Character: Bowdaar is one-note and irritating to listen to
Character: The Voidwolf is a flat character pretty much across the board
Outro: The entire Outro and finale just… sucks. It’s hilariously bad, short, and empty significance
Character: Corso deserves a negative just for himself. He’s a badly constructed, well acted, bizarre mish mash of a hate-sink who’s supposed to be likeable…
Character: …earning him a third negative
Character: Revan. Bringing Revan back was already a mistake, but the way they portray him is weak at best and bad fanservice at worst
External Continuity: I also feel the total disconnect of Revan and HK and the Forge don’t work as well
Prime Opt: The Nar Shaddaa later Primary is honestly just… a weird disconnected bundle of short stories of middling to bad interest
Secondary: Nar Shaddaa’s Bonus series just… drags. It drags and it’s not interesting and it keeps involving some new bioweapon or intelligence report or generally doing the usual kind of mindless crap Bonus series quests usually are
Cutscene Incompetence: Cutscene incompetence rears its ugly head
Prime Opt: Honestly the Alderaan Primary is a bit lacking
Secondary: Similarly, Alderaan’s secondaries are of Bonus Series level quality
Secondary: Taris’ Bonus Series is stupid (let’s go fight more Republic military) and stupid (they’re also building a secret weapon… oh it’s a fleet! Being built on TARIS)
Prime Opt: So the Belsavis Primary on the Sith side is no better than on Republic, circling entirely around the Dread Masters and our desperate desire to… release them… for some damned reason or another…
Prime Opt: …which honestly the entire sequence is pretty weak, in addition to the total lack of options involved therewith (because of the raid)
Intro: The Hutta quest stumbles pretty early with the death of most of our crew entirely too early for it to really have any impact
Cutscene Incompetence: Several issues with the Hoth quests
Plot: Act 2’s plot… isn’t
Character: Skadge is a one-note thug who has nothing that salvages him…
Character: …which also is made worse by his, well, everything about him…
Character: …earning him one of the worst character slots in the game
Story Sequencing: Skadge is also our major quest giver for Belsavis, for seemingly no reason, leading to this weird disconnect as we lose sight of what and why we’re here (a common problem in Act 3)
MSQ: The Belsavis arc in general is a whole lot of nothing
MSQ: The Voss arc is brief, which is all that keeps this pure padding from being more than one negative
Character: Jun Seros is another in a series of TOR’s pathetic rival characters… shows up in late Act 1, fails to do anything whatsoever across his entire arc, fails to fulfill on any kind of theme or character, has a grand total of 4 cutscenes, and dies like a punk
Storyboarding: Storyboarding: The late Act 3 cutscenes start to try a few things cutscene wise… and fail
Character: Darth Tormen is the OTHER pathetic rival character; a completely bog standard ‘evil sith’
Prime Opt: Mako’s quests fumble pretty badly with how long they drag it out and how much they overplay the melodrama of it…
Prime Opt: …then there’s the fact that they never do anything with it and it just… ends
Plot: Siantide is every level of nonsense… and what’s worse, its an unnecessary plot point which isn’t actually true and finally is just stupid…
Plot: …earning two negatives
MSQ: Broonmark forced into party for, really, no reason
Storyboarding: The… presentation of Baras’ big trap falls flat of the reality that it is in fact
Character: Broonmark sucks. He’s such a nothing pointless character…
Character: …and a total waste of space
Character: Lord Draahg is a dumb character from the get go, but worse is how he’s touted as our ‘rival’… especially when our real rival (Baras) is substantially better
Character: Draahg’s unexplained and pointless Scion-lite
MSQ: Quinn’s final quest is a weird and honestly a mis-step in the story. It’s a betrayal with little build up and zero pay off
MSQ: Draahg’s final appearance just cements how stupid he really is. They try to do a fake build up with ‘the assassin’ and then talk him up like he’s some super amazing super power who can effortlessly kill a Darth WHILE fighting us, but no, he’s the same old Fat Chocobo
Character: Khem Val, and the super amazingness that is Tulak Hord
Character: Ashara… when you’re evil, just does not fit. Worse, she really should be much younger to fit her… whininess
Character: The game literally forces Xalek into your party despite all sense, reason, and characterization…
Character: …and he is a total nothing character
Aggregate: The finale of the Nar Shaddaa questline is unnecessary and out of place // While it’s a minor point, the ‘hey by the way the Rakata created alien life’ bit at the end of Belsavis is… odd
Primary Optional: The companions and their quests aren’t ‘bad’ per say, but don’t really fit alongside the main plot at all. This is on top of the fact that (frankly) most of the party members shouldn’t even be in ‘the party’, nor should ‘the party’ be as large as it is. Both hurt the overall narrative
MSQ: The torture sequence is… weirdly out of place. It’s badly voice acted, but-thou-must’d in a situation and game where we should have an alternative, and it has no real impact before or after
External Continuity: External continuity is… honestly just the worst. TOR doesn’t connect with Star Wars proper at all, not even its immediate successors…
External Continuity: …earning a full…
External Continuity: …three negatives
Spritework: Children models in general are… off
Secondary: Hammer Station is typical of TOR side quests; There’s a huge systems-wide super doom threat that has nothing to do with anything really and feels a lot like they’re just trying really hard to make us care when there is no reason to
Secondary: Athiss continues the trend of bad dungeons; We’re here to stop some evil super alchemist who’s a threat to everything… again… which deflates everything… again…
Secondary: So, Colicoid War Games is just… … …what?
Storytelling Mechanic: The storytelling mechanic of the droid language almost never stays up on screen long enough to properly parse
Secondary: Directive 7 is, once again, a big galaxy wide threat of doom, unearned, and just sort of whatever
Camerawork: Cameras. Quite a few cutscenes are actively ruined by bad camerawork
Voice Acting: Most of the alien voices are fine, honestly, but the wookiee ones are actually unpleasant, and terribly chosen (often going with the ‘yelling’ clip when uncalled for)
Writing: General timeline issues here and there
Writing: The game absolutely mandates that all companions A: Join and B: Stay in the party, regardless of all other considerations, and this absolutely does not work
Writing: The game is inconsistent about acknowledging your chosen species
Writing: General nonsense on Makeb… a space ship to evacuate millions of people, super mining, just… weird stuff
Writing: Revan’s back. Again. Yay for fake-out deaths
Writing: Lack of character relevance (this is a fairly lengthy and complex problem but it boils down to; You have 8 characters with multiple nuances available to them… and those are thrown to the wayside, essentially by requirement, in the expansions)
Plot: Let’s get this out of the way; the way they use Revan is not good and generally stupid
Character: Further, the… splitting Revan is nonsense and stupid
External Continuity: But here’s the big one. The way Revan is mistreated here is legitimately awful. It’s fanservice done badly, and does Revan a dis-service and players of KotOR1 a dis-service…
External Continuity: …earning it two negatives by itself
Writing: Vitiate just… isn’t engaging as a villain. He comes out of nowhere and is this escalating nonsense, but here’s the real problem; he’s portrayed as a Threat Of The Week, and all the problems that implies
World Building: There’s a strange insistence upon not only keeping the dynamic of the Reps and Imps going (for some reason), but also insisting the Sith Empire (against all reason and logic) hasn’t completely fallen apart yet
Prime Opt: Smuggler and Bounty Hunter are just… vacuous and bad
Prime Opt: But both pale to Trooper, which is so bad it gets its own negative
Plot: So. Vitiate already ate an entire planet, which we know from the JK storyline would be enough to kickstart his ritual to eat the galaxy. Naturally he then… peaces out to NOT do this for… some reason?
Plot: Meanwhile, we have a third superpower who’s SO strong they can challenge the Republic and Sith simultaneously and win… that we’ve never heard of before. Sure. This is probably the second dumbest premise in MMOs…
Plot: …earning it two negatives
Moment: Marr’s death?
Plot: So the Gravestone is a superweapon. Of course.
Writing: Worfing on Arcann
Cutscene: The entire vs. Arcann scene
Writing: Actually bothered to defeat Vaylin in cutscene, but then let her live… which is honestly worst of all worlds because it de-powers the actually strong one (Vaylin) but also ensures she stays around for the inevitable boss fight
Integration: The non Force users really… really should not be here
Integration: The really weird thing is periodically there’s clearly an agent/smuggler mission, then a trooper/bh one, and none of them really… gel well with anyone else
Character: Koth is… off. He’s generally a decent character except for the fact that he’s the character they make be the pro-fascist idiot regularly for no good reason
Character: Seylin and Arcann are both very, very, very basic level sith and they’re just damned boring…
Character: …earning both a negative
Pacing: The pacing of KotFE is just… off
Story Sequencing: The story sequencing similarly just sort of bounces around all over the place
Storyboarding: Periodic issues with storyboarding and cutscenes
Writing: There are presentation issues with the central plot that would take too long to describe. It feels like it went through several iterations crudely
Character: The writing can’t decide what it wants to do with Arcann and the character suffers for it
Theme: Forcing the player to choose the Empire or the Republic goes completely contradictory to the entire themes and build up of the entire previous THREE expansions…
Theme: …earning it two negatives
Writing: The choice itself is a complete reset button…
Writing: …and not a particularly good one
Pacing: Then there’s the fact that the choice is extraordinarily rushed. Literally one quest after the big ending of KotET and about a 3 minute cutscene of stupid…
Pacing: …earning it another negative
Moment: Okay let’s get this out of the way here. The scene with the faction leader and the activation of the superweapon is really dumb
Character: This is in addition to what I can only call character assassination (with Elara and Acina depending on your choices)
Moment: And finally, the total lack of build up to a ridiculous and hilariously awkward pay off with Theron’s dad is just awful
Writing: So Tyth is a big dumb evil droid obsessed with rage that can destroy ships from planetside but is weak to ship bombardment… Oh also it’s a machine god and… it’s… it’s a friggin’ threat of the week
Writing: Okay so… Theron’s a traitah! First of all I saw this from a mile away, but second of all the way they frame this is just… honestly awful. It also became apparent almost immediately that he’s actually a double agent, which DOES make it less bad, but doesn’t diminish the negative I’m currently typing
World Building: There’s grass on Nathema. There’s GRASS on NATHEMA
Internal Continuity: Let me reiterate. Inside of two years on the OUTSIDE there are TREES on NATHEMA cuz the Force came back!
Writing: So they decided to bring back class story characters for one cutscene then kill them off. Okay. Cool. Some of the choices are really reaching, and several of them actively make no sense
Character: Vinn Atrius… Who is yet another villain of the week!
Character: Then there’s Zildrog, who is stupid on every level to begin with. A superweapon which is also super amazing and ultra powerful and can hack systems and ships and fleets from light years away instantly…
Writing: …but what really pisses me off is the implication that this stupid one-off threat-of-the-week was behind all of Tenebrae’s power
Plot: So, choose between the two sides. No, really. No really really YOU MUST CHOOOOOSE
Writing: Somehow… Malgus has returned
Writing: Okay so the intro setup for Onslaught is stupid on so many levels I’m just going to ding it and move on
Plot: The plot of Onderon really is ‘just roll with it’
Worldbuilding: World destruction with infrastructure and…
Worldbuilding: …writing not supporting galaxy state in service of status quo
Plot: Status quo problems in general
Writing: Okay so… I’m sorry but the coincidence of killing Tenebrae’s body the same moment we beat him in our minds is too much of a coincidence even for Star Wars
Plot: Somehow, Revan has returned…
Plot: …again. Again again… again
Writing: Okay so Tenebrae is back… kind of. It’s Tenebrae 2, but narratively it’s still the same damned problem
Writing: Then there’s the fact that it’s all being done for no real point or purpose other than empty fan service
Voice Acting: THEN we have the fact that Tenebrae’s voice actor is bad enough to deserve its own negative for being the most generic Sith I’ve ever heard. Seriously, drop him on Korriban at level 3 and I couldn’t tell the difference
Writing: So we’re just sort of randomly hanging out around Manaan in our ship right when Anri needs us, without even knowing about what’s going on so this really is a coincidence… sure
Internal Continuity: Then there’s the fact that they’ve just sort of stopped acknowledging who we are (Alliance AND class)

Gameplay Positives:

Class: While it takes until the late 40s to go anywhere, the at-50 Trooper gameplay is… decent, with some good ability layering and decent utility
Class: Tank spec…
Class: …is awesome…
Class: Combat spec has good build/spend construction
Class: Shadow DPS spec
Class: Tank spec…
Class: …tank spec…
Class: …tank spec!
Class: The Sharpshooter spec is exactly what a properly glass cannon should be; it does a ton of damage, has a few ‘get away from me’ abilities, and otherwise is quite squishy…
Class: …earning it a second positive
Class: Smuggler healer is actually legit. Good variety, good utility, bad throughput, good mana design…
Class: …earning two positives
Class: Pyro spec is actually really fun, and its inverse resource mechanic is quite clever…
Class: …earning two positives
Class: Healing follows a similar flow, and so is decent enough to earn a positive
Viscerality: Pyro and the eternal flamestorm
Choices: Choices gameplay on Korriban
Choices: Choices gameplay on Tatooine in how it fundamentally changes the pool sequence
Choices: The variety of choices on Alderaan are honestly quite lovely
Viscerality: Viscerality for Sith Warrior is the best in the game…
Viscerality: …earning it two positives
Choices: Belsavis choices
Choices: SI Korriban choices gameplay
Class: Mage in general is decent; good spread and good interweaving of abilities, only really held back by how immensely glass cannony it is
Class: While not quite as good as the Smuggler/Agent, the healing spec is still quite servicable
Choices: Continued good choices gameplay for SI Taris
Choices: General choices gameplay throughout
Viscerality: What can I say, I like lightning
Choices: Lovely choices on Hutta
Integration: Gameplay/Story Integration
Choices: Balmorra and multiple paths and quests based on choices
Choices: Once again, Nar Shaddaa continues the trend of letting you have multiple avenues of progression
Boss: The Jadus conversation boss is honestly fantastic, well constructed and difficult to navigate…
Boss: …earning it two positives
Choices: A further positive for the length and depth of choices in the Jadus encounter
Secondary: Bonus objectives that are worth a damn
All Roads Lead To Rome: All Roads Lead To Rome quest design
Choices: Choice to decide character arc
Choices: The Voss choices and how it informs your character
Outro: The final dungeon is a neat little thing, and the finale acknowledging your choices and giving you quite a few options for an ending
Cosmetics: A very large and varied amount of cosmetics and options therewith…
Cosmetics: …even if a lot of them are locked behind the auction house
Cosmetics: The ability to sync dyes is a nice cosmetic feature
Cosmetics: Reasonably decent amount of options for character creation
Options: Pretty good Options…
Options: …earning two positives
Options: The HUD customization allows for you to move just about any element wherever, including scaling and locking…
Options: …earning two positives
Co-Op: The fact that other players can join conversations, locally and at range, and aren’t mandatory, and you aren’t penalized for what they pick, is easily the best solution to co-op conversations I’ve ever seen…
Co-Op:…earning, by itself…
Co-Op:…three positives
Camera: The camera lets you zoom way out, and all the way in to first person, which is damned good
Pacing: The ‘health refill’ ability every class get at level 1 is a quick and efficient way to keep gameplay flow up
Log: Story thus far
Info In Game: Info in game on stats and mouse-over for direct comparisons as well as summary…
Info In Game: …earning two positives
Cosmetics: In-game Outfits system is a good system for transmog cosmetics, allowing color changes, individual piece replacements, outfit loadouts, and a few other little options…
Cosmetics:…leading to two positives
QoL: In-game loadouts for different specs is a nice Quality of Life feature, allowing for spec, role, and gear…
QoL: …earning two positives
Co-Op: The game’s free tagging system across other players is rather nice…
Co-Op: …for two positives
Cosmetics: Decent variety of mounts (cosmetics)
Cosmetics: Housing system in general (cosmetics)
Cosmetics: Housing decor options (cosmetics)
Music: While we didn’t get to hear much of it during the stream, the music does have some good pieces
Map: In general the map is reasonably good despite its style
Core Mechanics: PvP objective based missions
Core Mechanics:Companions are, in general, good gameplay across the board
Core Mechanics:Companions are useful in combat…
Core Mechanics:…companions can be customized in gear and in spec…
Core Mechanics:Companions hotswapping in and out…
Core Mechanics:…and Companions easily working with other players, adding to co op
QoL: The ability to respec in a cantina between your various, uh, specs is a very nice feature…
QoL: …earning two positives
Level: For the first time in the game, a dungeon (flashpoint) gets a gameplay positive; Colicoid War Games’ little puzzle sequences are actually kinda neat
Level: My goodness, Kuat Drive Yards was… actually good. It still had issues, and wasn’t super amazing, but it was a noticeable improvement across the board
Level: As an aside, the general tendency to allow players optional shortcuts or bonuses with crafting in dungeons is a neat feature
Graphics: The game has generally good graphics fidelity
Choices: The ability to escape out of conversations is awesome for a lot of reasons…
Choices: …earning it two positives
QoL: Any class can be any spec, with some limitations based on unlocks, which holds it back a bit but is still a great feature
QoL: The ability to grab some quests anywhere via the quest window, and more importantly the ability to fast travel to some of them, is a nice feature
Choices: Choice gameplay on the Sith side of Makeb
Level: Okay so it’s not much, but the Depths of Manaan is… actually a dungeon. It has decent bosses and a good developing flow throughout
Choices: Rishi’s choices are rather delightful
Level: Blood Hunt is continuing the trend of increasing quality in dungeon design; short, sweet, minimal trash, and some interesting boss design…
Level:…earning it two positives
Boss: Surprise surprise, the Revan fight is actually really well designed. Color me impressed
Choices: For all its other issues, Ziost does have some good Choice design
Choices: Okay so uh, the non-voiced choices section is… weirdly good with the variety of choices
QoL: The very option to just open up the companions or quest tab to just warp to quests is a nice QoL feature
MSQ: Chapter 15 is, surprisingly, actually fun and interesting, with the traps, terrain, and unique usage of enemies
Minigames: The very existence of the vehicle sections and concept and how it can vary up gameplay
Boss: Actual boss fights!
Hyperbeam Moment: The Liberty Prime section was legit
MSQ: Love the ‘crash the party’ mission (Chapter 6) really
Pacing: Pacing is honestly very on point
MSQ: Multiple generally fun quests throughout
Outro: The final section where we play as Tenebrae is probably the best usage of the vehicle section concept in the whole game
Choices: Hatesink mockery is quite amusing
Boss: The Tenebrae boss fight comes close enough to quality that I have to mention its interesting mechanics. Could have been a truly good victory lap fight
Boss: Generally good boss mechanics
Choices: Surprisingly good, multifaceted choices on Manaan

Gameplay Negatives:

Town: The Republic Station layout, design, placement, and traversal is just sort of… dull
Level: The Esseles dungeon is one of the better ones in the early dungeon design… aaand it’s a bunch of long, empty corridors with literally hundreds of trash mobs, and bosses with no mechanics to them. Not great
Overworld: Coruscant’s Overworld design starts the trend of bad Overworld design in this game. Bad flow, lots of back and forth across huge swaths of enemy-infested terrain, combined with odd quest placement and lots of chokepoints
Secondary: Taris side quests. Some are inoffensive, others are ‘do X of Y at a slow respawn rate without sharing within group’
Audio Spam: Taris has some audio spam issues
Secondary: Taris quests are annoyingly backtracky and have a lot of irritation problems
Secondary: The Taris Bonus Series is literally uncompletable due to a bug
Secondary: Continued side quest issues on Nar Shaddaa
Backtracking: The backtracking in the Nar Shaddaa bonus series is genuinely awful by itself…
Secondary: …but add in the tons of elites and padded mobs? Bleh
Map: Also Nar Shaddaa’s map and quest tracker can go to hell
Secondary: So, Tatooine’s quests are ‘okay’… until you hit the Bonus Series and all the thrown-together, half-hazard quest design starts flooding to the surface…
Secondary: …this is in addition to the map, tracking, and frustrating enemy issues
Secondary: Alderaan’s quest flow and literal lack of vector quests isn’t great
Boss: Alderaan’s big Usurper fight suuucks on every level. Lots of high health high damage mobs, each progression marker spawns a champion droid you can’t avoid, and if you (personally) don’t destroy the shield generators you don’t get credit
Secondary: The Alderaan bonus series continues the trend of bonus series being glorified dailies, being entirely too sloggy and entirely too padded…
Secondary: …bonus points for the absolute slog that was this one micro dungeon which was absolutely filled to the brim with mobs that had way, way too much health
Overworld: Balmorra’s general layout is bad, but it’s made worse by the map and quest tracker being on crack
Overworld: Quesh continues its stellar track record of being generally crap. It’s simultaneously too empty and too dense, with the same general issues every other zone has combined with total boredom
Bugs: Hoth quests are really quite buggy
Prime Opt: Hoth’s quests also omega suck. In addition to the usual problems, the slow respawns on items is awful…
Secondary:…and the quest spread is just the worst
Secondary: So, Hoth’s Bonus Series is very, very long, very very sloggy, and very very awful in an already literally headache-inducing area…
Secondary: …earning it two negatives
Level: The two Revan dungeons on the Republic side are both typical vanilla dungeons; Trash fests with boring corridors…
Level: …so each gets a negative
Prime Opt: So then there’s Belsavis. We already tagged the negatives for zone design and map design down in the ‘all’ category, but then we have two problems. Quest design, which is the usual bad…
Prime Opt: …but much worse is quest flow, which isn’t as bad as Hoth, but it’s still bad
Prime Opt: The quest on Voss, The Trials, is super bugged. Bad tracking, bad updating, and bad progress in a group
Overworld: Voss’s map, quest flow, and overworld design continue to suck
Secondary: Belsavis Bonus and drop rates / backtracking
Secondary: Voss bonus series continues the wonderful trend of bad, boring quest design and backtracking…
Secondary: …and long swaths of irritating mobs bottle-necking access to quests in areas with severely restricted, irritating terrain design…
Secondary: …making it the worst bonus series by far
Prime Opt: Let’s get this out of the way. Corellia’s quests are the god damned worst. They are everything wrong with other quests in the game, but more and worse across the board…
Prime Opt: …earning…
Prime Opt: …three negatives, but then…
Padding: There’s the quest flow, which is actually awful, has no pattern rhyme or reason to it, and encourages awful backtracking…
Padding: …earning…
Padding: …three negatives for sheer padding
Gameplay / Story: Gameplay/story segregation with how we just don’t line up with the very process of being a PC in an MMO
Choice: The lack of Choice Gameplay for Trooper is honestly aggravating in a game built around it
Backtracking: Tatooine backtrackery
Prime Opt: Non-primary companion ‘quests’ and their general awfulness
Backtracking: Alderaan backtrackery fun
MSQ: The Balmorra quests can go to heeelll
Prime Opt: Jorgan’s quest involves a stupid amount of needlessly long, needlessly confusing, boring traversal
MSQ: Hoth Trooper dungeons suuuck
Prime Opt: Jorgan’s quest continues to have long, long padded gameplay
Padding: The later sections, especially Corellia and finale, are just padding central
Backtracking: Coruscant backtracking quest flow
Class: DPS spec and resource flow issues
Difficulty Curve: Many of the plot quests of JK Act 1 are way, way overtuned
Backtracking: You like backtracking, right?
Choices: Weird railroading and lack of options in Choices gameplay
MSQ: JK… Hoth. ‘Nuff said
MSQ: JK Belsavis and quest positioning and layout (and slooog)…
MSQ: …and then the absolute garbage of the final quest, where we have to not only fight a champion, but have a timed sequence of disarming spread out bombs which even ignoring irritations in finding them, there’s the fact that if you knew exactly where they were it’s still pure padding
MSQ: JK Corellia is just… juuust awful, easily the worst Corellia segment thusfar. Imagine getting a quest to fight through a dense area of elites to gain access to a shuttle to warp to three separate, sequential elite areas with all the usual awful enemy placement and encounter design…
MSQ: …leading to…
MSQ: …three negatives
Outro: Okay so the final boss fight against Vitiate is… what?
Padding: Usual final act padding problem
Backtracking: Tython’s backtracking to the temple every single step is getting silly
Padding: Usual final act padding issue
Audio Spam: Audio spam with the friggin’ laugh
Audio Spam: More audio spam on Taris
HUD: TOR Effect continues
Backtracking: Backtracking issues on Tatooine
Core Combat: So, half of Smuggler is cover based, and further into the game the number of enemies that can stun, grapple, or yank you (out of cover) increases, making your primary mechanic a liability…
Core Combat: …earning two negatives
Difficulty Curve: So the Voidwolf’s final ship attack is… hilariously, ridiculously overtuned…
Outro: …and the ‘final battle’ and ‘final escape’ from the Voidwolf is pathetic, boring, and devoid of energy
Level: Boarding Party continues the trend of bad dungeon design
Secondary: So… I hesitate to give a negative to a single quest, but honestly the one (and only) escort quest in the game in Balmorra is every kind of bad. Slow, interrupted by combat, easy to screw up, doesn’t share credit, etc.
Prime Opt: Balmorra’s quests in general have a lot of the vanilla issues (non sharing progress, items taking too long to ‘respawn’, etc.
Secondary: Balmorra bonus series and the cavalcade of X of Y vomit, and continues Balmorra’s track record of irritation in overworld design
Secondary: Nar Shaddaa’s bonus series gets back to bad design pretty much across the board; item layout, overworld layout, flow of quests, backtracking, just… slog
Secondary: Nar Shaddaa’s bonus series is also pretty buggy
Secondary: Tatooine’s secondary quests fall back into the WoW vanilla territory of rare drops for rare enemies in irritating bundles
Secondary: And then there’s how Tatooine’s secondary quests just won’t end, despite sucking
Secondary: Aaaand then there’s Tatooine’s Bonus Series
Secondary: Alderaan’s sith’s quest design and layout continues to suck
Secondary: Alderaan’s bonus series and drop rates galore…
Secondary: …in addition to the usual issues
Overworld: Taris’ quest flow and map indicators are literally not existent in some cases, and are actively confusing in others
Secondary: Taris’ bonus series is even worse on backtracking than usual
Secondary: Hoth’s secondary quests are blegh in general
Prime Opt: Hoth’s Planetary Primary is bugged to the point of aggravation
Secondary: The Belsavis Bonus Series can go straight to hell…
Secondary: …does not pass go and does not collect 200 credits
Terrain: Special negative for the elevators on the Sith side
Prime Opt: Belsavis Planetary Primary isn’t good
Secondary: Belsavis secondaries are absolutely terrible…
Secondary: …especially in their quest flow
Secondary: Voss bonus series continues the wonderful trend of bad, boring quest design and backtracking…
Secondary: …and long swaths of irritating mobs bottle-necking access to quests in areas with severely restricted, irritating terrain design…
Secondary: …making it the worst bonus series by far
Backtracking: Voss quest flow continues the lovely trend of backtrackery nonsense
Bug: The quest on Voss, The Trials, is super bugged. Bad tracking, bad updating, and bad progress in a group
Prime Opt: The respawn timer on Voss Planetary Primaries are ridiculous
Secondary: Corellia secondary quests are no better than the Republic’s… worse, they contain the same general issues the Republic does, though admittedly lesser…
Secondary: …earning two negatives
Prime Opt: Then there’s the Corellia Primary, which just kind of… drifts, with no real rhyme or reason to it
Backtracking: Backtrackiiiing more than meets the eye
MSQ: Taris is just awful gameplay wise. Lots and lots of needless steps, irritation, and stalling
Backtracking: Special mention to Hoth’s backtrackiness
Choices: Lack of choices throughout Belsavis
Padding: The encounter design, density, and health padding of the later BH areas are just awful
Padding: The Hoth quests start to show the ugly side of Sith Warrior… the padding slog
Padding: This is continued in their bridge quests, starting with the assassination on Vengean
Choices: So, the inability to kick or kill party members is a problem across the board, but its the most egregious by far with Quinn
Backtracking: Having to go back to Korriban frequently can get rather irritating, for the usual backtracky reasons
Padding: You guessed it, the usual padding issue
Padding: Usual slog problems
Backtracking: The usual backtracking problem (really starts to show up in later planets)
Options: The game will not save resolution settings, forcing a reset every time you launch the game…
Options: …which is just unacceptable
Options: Furthermore, you cannot manually set your windowed settings at all, you have to eyeball it while dragging with the mouse
Launch: Vanilla’s launch was pretty bad. I’ve seen worse, but it was bad
MTX: MTX
MTX: MTX shoved in face
MTX: MTX that make the game better, aka ‘quality of life features’
MTX: Collected items require individual real money purchases to unlock for alts…
MTX: …which is so many levels of ridiculous I can’t even put it into words…
MTX: …so that’s three negatives by itself
MTX: The penalization for non-subscriber status is real…
MTX: …and it’s insidious too, given how many different aspects of the game it makes worse and slower…
MTX: …earning three negatives
QoL: The entire Character Legacy screen is redundant and stupid
HUD: TOR Syndrome, so named for a good reason…
HUD: …is even worse than I remembered…
HUD: …three negatives
Bugs: Graphics bugs
Bugs: Gameplay bugs
Controls: General jank of controls, smoothness, and animations, as is typical for most MMOs…
Controls: …earning two negatives
Levels: Hammer Station is actually worse then Esseles really, though ultimately from a narrative perspective. In gameplay it’s long empty corridors with lots of trash and boring boss fights
Levels: Athiss is somehow even worse than Esseles, with all the same problems further burdened by entirely too much health on every trash pack (and as usual, boring bosses)
Levels: Cademimu has tons of trash, tons of health, boring bosses, and that damned elevator…
Levels: …on top of inconsistent area indicators and other QoL problems
Levels: In the Mandalorian Raiders dungeon, Braxx the Bloodhound gets his own negative for way too much friggin’ health
Levels: Mandalorian Raiders is just the worst dungeon thusfar. It has all the problems the other flashpoints have but worse…
Levels: …especially in light of the bosses, which are just so, so bad
Levels: So, Colicoid War Games. It’s been improved to no longer being ridiculous and stupid… but it’s still bad. It still has the same issues all the other dungeons do…
Levels: …in addition to the mind numbingly boring first two ‘encounters’ which are bad, bad, bad
Levels: So, Directive 7 has the usual issues, which is ‘fine’…
Levels: …but that last boss is an audio spam, badly designed pile of nonsense
Minigames: Space Combat missions are boring and stupid
Minigames: Space Combat missions have terrible gear-wall ‘difficulty’
Minigames: Space Combat missions ramp up so fast and in an awkward way that they discourage people from even doing them
Padding: Seconds-In-Minutes in layers between zones (stations, ship, multiple load screens, etc.)
Overworld: Taris even worse designed than Coruscant gameplay wise, with irritating roadblocks and a frustrating map with irritating enemies everywhere…
Overworld: …earning two Overworld negatives
Padding: Daze still exists…
Padding: …and due to the enemies essentially all having unavoidable de-mount abilities…
Padding: …is the worst daze mechanic in MMOville
Animations: The game has several pretty bad server tick issues, which leads to inconsistency in where you are and what you’re doing… odd animations, weird teleporting and rubber-banding, and dying after attacking…
Animations: …all earning…
Animations: …three negatives
Overworld: Balmorra’s overworld design is juuust irritating. Cliffs, lifts, and dazes
Overworld: Tatooine continues the trend of badly designed overworlds… big, empty, confusing
Overworld: And then there’s Hoth. Big, empty, big, empty, big, empty Hoth
Overworld: So. Belsavis. Belsavis is huge, with irritating terrain that uses obstacles and walls and cliffs to limit your movement, almost every single enemy has the ‘dismount you’ ability adding to irritation, also almost every single enemy pack is full of high health and high damage jackasses who can wreck you (especially if you’re solo), also there’s lots of chokepoints and a bad map which makes getting turned around easy, and all of this is on top of the place being huge and taking forever to traverse, and that’s on top of the quest tracker literally not working right thanks to the multiple flightpath methods…
Overworld: …Belsavis is one of the worst zones in MMO history…
Overworld: …and earns a full three negatives
Bug: Graphics stutter and non-optimization is pretty bad
HUD: Feedback problems. There’s a general disconnect from actions and results, damage barely feels like it’s even there, and it’s hard to pay attention to things like buffs, debuffs, and the like…
HUD: …earning a full…
HUD: …three negatives
Padding: Enemy health is entirely too high…
Padding: …for…
Padding: …three negatives
Padding: Enemy density is way, way, way too dense…
Padding: …leading for…
Padding: …three negatives
Enemy Variety: Enemy variety is severely lacking…
Enemy Variety: …earning two negatives
Encounter: Enemy placement is similarly irritating and tries to force encounters, making it awful…
Encounter: …given the aforementioned two problems
Padding: Enemy respawn rate is actively terrible, in many cases being capable of running into respawns on your face after doing a cutscene…
Padding: …for…
Padding: …three negatives
Padding: Worse, interactable respawn rates are absolutely awful (varying in time but up to 5 friggin’ minutes)… and this is ignoring the fact that interactables don’t share across players, so the more players in an area the longer even normal quests take, aka WoW Vanilla Syndrome…
Padding: …earning a full…
Padding: …three negatives
Minigame: PvP is still the same thing it is in the overwhelming majority of MMO’s; A big mess where gear reigns supreme and the issues with the game in general get in the way of the whole thing
Traversal Mechanics: Traversal across the board is too slow. Walking, sprinting, mounted speed, and the distances you have to travel, all a huge huge amount of padding on top of every individual instance thereof…
Traversal Mechanics: …earning…
Traversal Mechanics: …three negatives
Map: And also a negative for Belsavis’ map
Graphics: Hoth is, purely visibly, awful. The blinding white glare is not just painful and irritating…
Graphics: …it’s honestly bad design…
Graphics: …and literally headache inducing
Overworld: So. Corellia. It’s a big dumb maze with inconsistent traversal and long swaths of bleh on top of the issues with the tram…
Overworld: …easily earning…
Overworld: …three negatives
Map: Further, the map issue is even worse than in Belsavis…
Map: …earning two negatives by itself
Cosmetic: It’s a very minor issue, but in a game this large it does show up periodically; The game periodically just doesn’t have you actually use your weapon in cutscenes, instead defaulting to the, uh, default
Padding: Quest triggers are finicky and artifact, and often require you to do very specific steps even when there’s no reason to (such as go to a planet in your ship before going to a planet)
Difficulty Curve: The difficulty curve across 1-50 is legitimately awful… it spikes up frequently, and has no idea what it’s doing…
Difficulty Curve: …but it gets much, much worse when you get to the later worlds…
Difficulty Curve: …culminating in the nightmare that is Corellia and its ‘elites R us’
Difficulty Curve: Corellia deserves its own separate difficulty spike negative
Bugs: Inconsistent bugs with sharing credit even within group and while on the same quest…
Bugs: …which crops up more than it should…
Bugs: …and is awful to boot
Tutorialization: So the game tutorializes the basic stuff reasonably well… but as with all MMOs, there are several things throughout that just are not properly explained…
Tutorialization: …earning it a full…
Tutorialization: …three negatives
Bugs: Though inconsistent and periodic, occasionally the terrain’s collision is just… wrong, and leads to glitching and bugging
Traversal Mechanics: Elevators. There’s less than there used to be, but they’re still a problem. They’re slow, dangerous due to physics issues, and almost always tall enough to kill you if you try to bypass them
Bugs: Capes. The capes have some amusing stuff, buuut then there’s ‘the’ cape bug; where it gets stuck in your legs and just jitters there in cutscenes. It’s a very common bug, ruins the scenes it happens in, has been around for over a DECADE, and restricts cosmetic possibilities
Level Scaling: So… scaling. While this is different from Oblivion’s scaling (which is personal instead of group-related), but it’s still easily the worst group scaling I’ve ever seen in a video game…
Level Scaling:…earning it…
Level Scaling:…a full three negatives
HUD: The in game quest tracker is lacking. This is actually more of a Map issue than anything else, but ultimately boils down to bad filtering, bad color distinction, and bad options. There’s no at-a-glance, the game can literally send you to the wrong place (Balmorra, Belsavis), three completely different types of quests look identical, main and bonus objectives look identical, and nothing indicates a party member quest vs. your quest…
HUD: …earning it…
HUD: …three negatives
Core Combat: So, the game is heavily melee focused… percentage wise, almost every spec focuses on being up in melee range (even the ones equipping a blaster), and the general movement tech and pathfinding supports this as well. This is in a game that is swarmed with ranged-focused enemies, which makes combat… ALL combat, really… far more irritating and frustrating than it should be…
Core Combat: …for…
Core Combat: …three negatives
Choices: Continuing from story negatives, the fact that EVERY party member is mandatory both to get and to keep in vanilla TOR is unacceptable
Secondary: Non primary companion quests are honestly just the worst. Oh the actual story they go through can be good, but the literal fade to black ‘aaand it’s done’ crap is awful, awful presentation…
Secondary: …earning…
Secondary: …three negatives
Camera: The wobbly camera they added periodically can suck a lemon
Core Mechanic: Anti-stealth mechanics in place for overworld content, because screw you do our terrible combat dammit
Prime Opt: The very first Ilum planetary primary is to slog through two very long, very narrow corridors worth of overtuned enemies
Prime Opt: Same problem on the Sith side
Difficulty Curve: Ilum is way overtuned
Difficulty Curve: And again on the Sith side
Secondary: Ilum’s x of y quests are… not good
Secondary: Ditto for the Sith side
Bugs: The ‘can’t participate in this conversation’ bug just keeps happening on Ilum…
Bugs: …over and over and over…
Bugs: …and over and over…
Encounter Design: Ilum… just… Ilum… so much density of so many enemies
Encounter Design: And again on the Sith side
Bug: The game disallows universal hotkeys while in game. While this is obviously incredibly aggravating to streaming, it also gets in the way of more fundamental things… like voice chat
Level: Battle of Ilum is… well, it’s a TOR instance
Level: And so is the False Emperor
Bugs: General bugs…
Bugs: …but then the ‘group no progress’ bug rears its ugly head again…
Bugs: …and again and again…
MSQ: The Planetary Surgery quest is just padding, padding, padding (and bugged!)
Level: Kaon Under Siege has honestly all the regular problems the dungeons have
Level: Lost Island tries to be creative and… fails, but they’re trying!
Level: Then there’s the two Czerka dungeons which I won’t even bother listing their names…
Level:…cuz they both have the same damned issues
Boss: A bonus negative for all these dungeons having bleh or boring bosses
Bugs: The infinite load bug is infrequent, but it’s there
Level:: The gates absolutely friggin’ killing you once you start a boss fight is so many levels of nonsense, what the hell
Audio: Bad sound balancing
Co-Op: Co-Op hostile quests from Revan onwards… you can group, but you can’t share, so they’re just kind of along for the ride
Choices: Lack of character relevance (this is a fairly lengthy and complex problem but it boils down to; You have 8 characters with multiple nuances available to them… and those are thrown to the wayside, essentially by requirement, in the expansions)
Level: Battle of Rishi is actually pretty weak for this point in the game, dull bosses and too much repetitive trash
Overworld: Ziost is right back to being terribly designed, irritating enemy placement, padding nonsense
Padding: Somehow, Skytroopers have returned. They’ve returned so often that I felt the need to be snarky in this point because I want you to understand just how much of a chore slogging through fifty billion of these things was. This is Corellia levels of enemy, encounter, and health design…
Padding: The encounter spam is really bad
Padding: The health is really bad
Enemy Variety: The enemies are really bad
Enemy Variety: …times two
Co-Op: Co-op opposition…
Co-Op: …earning two negatives
Secondary: Alliance quest irritations with… Pierce
Secondary: …Bowdaar, Qyzen…
Secondary: …Blizz, Xalek, and Talos
MSQ: The Jorgan quests honestly kinda suck…
MSQ: …and then they just… keep… slogging… onwards…
Integration: The non Force users really… really should not be here
MSQ: The big ‘one with the Force’ quest
Level: The Star Fortresses aren’t… bad, really, but they’re very boring, and tend to be very padded…
Level: …and the repeated padding nature of them
Bugs: The bug cavalcade continues
Co-Op: More co-op hostile design (literal friendly fire in the walker!)
Bugs: Kill on quest item interaction
Hyperfail Moments: Vehicle sections sometimes out-last their welcome
Bug: The insane migraine inducing section with the mouse droid
Level: Uprisings are boring
Level: Uprisings are repetitive
Difficulty Curve: Uprisings are massively overtuned
Choices: The sudden forced irritating choice between Republic and Sith again
Minigames: Boring vehicle battles continue
Level: Crisis on Umbara tries to be cool and stumbles pretty hard
Level: Then there’s the Chiss dungeon which is even worse by being absolutely flooded with trash. Like, just flooded with it
Level: THEN there’s the bosses of each of these dungeons, which juuuuust suck
Boss: Okay so the Zildrog fight really really sucks. First the first phase of the fight is… okay, but way too much health as usual. Then there’s phase 2 which is just as paddingly. But then there’s phase 3, with enemies that ignore range and line of sight making the fight literally bugged. And all of this is on top of some pretty bad audio spam the entire time, so…
Boss: …the entire sequence…
Boss: …earns three negatives
Encounter: Enemy spam
Co-Op: Not-sharing co-op bug
Difficulty Curve: Overtuning
Pacing: Somehow general padding has returned
Padding: It’s not as bad as before but there’s still some padding issues on Onderon
Level: Way, way too much slog in Operation Meridian
Boss: Unfortunately the Tenebrae fight has multiple issues with it… unclear tooltips, weird phase transitions, arguably wrong mechanics, entirely too much health on everything, and it just…
Boss: …draaaags
Level: Spirit of Vengeance has all the usual problems TOR dungeons tend to have…
Level: …but then there’s the anti stealth bullcrap, and the slog gets even worse than usual
Level: Secrets of the Enclave continues the trend of TOR dungeon design
Launch: So the launch of Legacy of the Sith was… not good. I won’t go into details, it was bad…
Launch: …earning it two negatives
Bugs: They still haven’t fixed some of the crap Legacy added
Core Mechanics: General design flaws that Legacy added which screwed with… honestly the entire game, top to bottom
Bugs: So… you can just sort of get… stuck during the main quest. And stay stuck.
Bugs: And it kept happening
Graphics: So the engine is really starting to have issues by modern times, to the point where I had to actually turn the graphics down… for TOR

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