I thought Ishgard was super interesting. Or at least, it had the potential to be super interesting.
Heavensward writing was a mess. The pacing was shitty and the focus was terrible. I have no hope that Ala Mhigo will be any better in the slightest.
I am not on board with the game's fetish for the Scions of the Seventh Dawn. I get that they're essentially the "main" characters and the vehicle our characters use to travel all over the place and beat up primals, but the characters are flat and completely uninteresting. I don't care! I want to see Ishgard. I want to delve into a conflicted theocracy undergoing rapid, sudden change. I want to see more of these cool characters, and not the ones I definitively do not give a single shit about.
Comparitively to the Scions, Aymeric is cool. Estinien was great. Ysayle was really good. Lucia was interesting. Those fucking Fortemps brats were more compelling as characters and had better character arcs than the Scooby-Doo Gang of the Seventh Dawn bopping around the world and killing primals. The Heavensward writing is flat, but I care more about seeing these characters than I do seeing the Scions.
I don't care about Thancred's missing pants. I don't care about Krile functionally replacing Minfillia. I stopped caring about Alphinaud when he had the audacity to tell the Warrior of fucking Light to hand out T-shirts to the Crystal Braves.
At no point does the story even attempt to portray that Thordan actually has a good point. People love the status quo and, as a whole, hate change. Pulling the rug out from under them by revealing the war should have caused more mass chaos, more conflict than Aymeric getting stabbed by a fruit knife and one crazy lady on a rooftop getting shot with an arrow. In no setting can you get me to believe that a militant, zealous theocracy centred around the waging of a genocidal war can smoothly transition to a two house democratic republic with no issues.
Ala Mhigo has the potential to have a lot of interesting themes and conflict. I just don't trust the writers to actually explore any of that, because who bothers exploring interesting themes and conflict when we can watch Yda be a princess or some shit? Look, Papalymo is hitting someone with Tupsimati! That's interesting, right?
No.
The Warriors of Darkness were pretty decent, but the conflict with the Ascians should really be a background thing, a sinister undertone that adds to the gravity of the Warrior of Light going around and saving the world. The instant you shove the mysteries in our face--repeatedly--it stops being a mystery and it takes all the proactivity away from our characters.
Here's how we handle the Ascians: we sit on our happy asses and wait for them to do something, then react. And maybe we'll save Ishgard on the side if we feel like it.
It should be the other way around. We should be proactively going to stop the Dragonsong war as our main motivation. We should be going to liberate Ala Mhigo as our main motivation. I don't think we should be going there with the Scions, waiting for the Ascians, and "Yeah cool the Ascians aren't doing anything, I guess we should liberate Ala Mhigo".
Heavensward writing was a mess. The pacing was shitty and the focus was terrible. I have no hope that Ala Mhigo will be any better in the slightest.
I am not on board with the game's fetish for the Scions of the Seventh Dawn. I get that they're essentially the "main" characters and the vehicle our characters use to travel all over the place and beat up primals, but the characters are flat and completely uninteresting. I don't care! I want to see Ishgard. I want to delve into a conflicted theocracy undergoing rapid, sudden change. I want to see more of these cool characters, and not the ones I definitively do not give a single shit about.
Comparitively to the Scions, Aymeric is cool. Estinien was great. Ysayle was really good. Lucia was interesting. Those fucking Fortemps brats were more compelling as characters and had better character arcs than the Scooby-Doo Gang of the Seventh Dawn bopping around the world and killing primals. The Heavensward writing is flat, but I care more about seeing these characters than I do seeing the Scions.
I don't care about Thancred's missing pants. I don't care about Krile functionally replacing Minfillia. I stopped caring about Alphinaud when he had the audacity to tell the Warrior of fucking Light to hand out T-shirts to the Crystal Braves.
At no point does the story even attempt to portray that Thordan actually has a good point. People love the status quo and, as a whole, hate change. Pulling the rug out from under them by revealing the war should have caused more mass chaos, more conflict than Aymeric getting stabbed by a fruit knife and one crazy lady on a rooftop getting shot with an arrow. In no setting can you get me to believe that a militant, zealous theocracy centred around the waging of a genocidal war can smoothly transition to a two house democratic republic with no issues.
Ala Mhigo has the potential to have a lot of interesting themes and conflict. I just don't trust the writers to actually explore any of that, because who bothers exploring interesting themes and conflict when we can watch Yda be a princess or some shit? Look, Papalymo is hitting someone with Tupsimati! That's interesting, right?
No.
The Warriors of Darkness were pretty decent, but the conflict with the Ascians should really be a background thing, a sinister undertone that adds to the gravity of the Warrior of Light going around and saving the world. The instant you shove the mysteries in our face--repeatedly--it stops being a mystery and it takes all the proactivity away from our characters.
Here's how we handle the Ascians: we sit on our happy asses and wait for them to do something, then react. And maybe we'll save Ishgard on the side if we feel like it.
It should be the other way around. We should be proactively going to stop the Dragonsong war as our main motivation. We should be going to liberate Ala Mhigo as our main motivation. I don't think we should be going there with the Scions, waiting for the Ascians, and "Yeah cool the Ascians aren't doing anything, I guess we should liberate Ala Mhigo".