Final fantasy XIV any good?

[Late Bloomer]

Yoshi P Speaks

But I would very much like to request something: I would really like to ask that people do not direct personal attacks to the voice actors involved in the development and also individual members of the localization team, because they are really doing their best to create something which is great for the creative process. It is really not that they are trying to bring forward an argument about a certain movement or anything like that. It’s just that they are doing their best for the development so I would really like to ask that the players do not direct personal attacks against them.

https://jpgames.de/2024/09/final-fantasy-xiv-das-sagt-naoki-yoshida-zur-kritik-an-wuk-lamat/

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Yoshi P Speaks

I would really like to ask that people do not direct personal attacks to the voice actors

Don't throw punches if you can't take them. If you want to be treated like a professional than shut your mouth and be one.

The backlash against Sena is of his own making. He applied to voice a girl character, and lo and behold he can't do it convincingly and it interrupts a lot of people's experience. And then he starts talking fluff on social media.

It seems that Yoshi-P is either being fed misinformation from the English community coordinators as to what is going on, and/or is willfully ignorant and is straight up lying about why players don't like things. But I'm sure he doesn't need someone to translate into English what's going on here. I imagine these criticisms are being reported on the Japanese forums too.

 

[Vyvian]

Yoshida knows exactly what the issues are he's just not gonna throw his team under the bus publicly.
I've been less than pleased with Yoshida lately but we won't really know either way until we see the patches and if certain characters fade into the background or not or if the writing changes indicating a change in MSQ duties.

There's still the Kate problem, she was fine at her job when she had Koji to tard wrangle her but now that she's in control it's only going to get worse.

 

[Thalstarion]

I think he's wanted out of the game for a while now. Even in the early years he implied that he'd rather take a step back and let someone else take over. Unfortunately he appears to have made some terrible choices on that front. Koji was fine - though he lost favour in the eyes of the nuttier elements of the community due to his dirty jokes some of which were later removed by Kate. Soken is also fine, though understandably he had health issues to wrestle with. Ishikawa is a mixed bag and too prone to retconning existing lore and sidelining characters and factions who deserve to be front and centre so she can steal that lore and prop up her blorbos instead. Not surprising given she's a fujoshi, I suppose.

I'm still annoyed that Garlemald was unceremoniously destroyed. I know a lot of people, myself included, who only invested in FFXIV due to the promise of an MMO inspired by the Ivalice games. Garlemald had the biggest potential for that. I loved how FFXII didn't destroy the Empire at the end of the game but instead left it intact with the concession of a free Dalmasca and strong ties between the new Emperor and the game's protagonists.

I'm also annoyed that Yoshi-P didn't put his foot down and allowed the game to be infested by lewd venues. One look at the FFXIV tag on Twitter shows a staggering amount of people who do not invest in the game for the actual game but because they mod it to be utterly unrecognisable. Which would be one thing if they kept it behind closed doors and to themselves, but they do not and they treat you as weird if you don't have Mare installed too. Now everything from furniture to glamour is so far removed from the classic fantasy vibes that it's just genuinely off-putting to me.

I do think Kate is largely to blame for the infantile style. Though Yoshi-P seems to have been mind broken by the pandemic and certain real world conflicts as he keeps citing them in interviews as a reason for wanting 'relaxing' content. Weird, honestly - such things have been going on all over the world for longer than any of us have been alive. Though he's probably the sort of guy to take the mainstream media at face value and work himself up into a frenzy at their command.

 

[Vyvian]

I kind of expected Garlemald to get sidelined entirely for awhile because Yoshida seemed to bristle when fans talked about them being cool or understanding them.
I feel like he wanted Garlemald to be seen as "evil" by the community and when people kept asking for Garlean themes and content he would always kind of recoil and act surprised.
I fully believe it's a reason why they assassinated Varis' character so badly in the later Stormblood patches. If you recall he was seen as a brutal but also honorable leader and his men looked up to him a great deal but then they just turned him into a complete idiot with no sense of honor or decency at all.

 

[Thalstarion]

I think he was also scared of the unhinged elements of the community that flooded the game right around the time the weird Twitter/Tumblr crowd became the most vocal portion of the fandom. Before that point, Garlemald was being built up in the background in such a way as to suggest that it would get its own expansion. It had many fans, many of us who posted regularly on the official forum, only to have the deranged nutters regularly threaten to kill us for being 'fascists'.

I also do not think he understands the appeal of Garleans and how - much like the Blood Elves of WoW - a race prioritising their own after nearly being wiped out and vowing to do whatever is necessary to survive is inherently more sympathetic than a bunch of juiced up self proclaimed 'heroes' who are granted every special power and are even brought back from the dead as opposed to suffering any real, meaningful losses.

Even in the context of the story, Varis losing Regula - a guy he grew up with and served alongside in battle for decades as his best friend - was far more tragic than Haurchefant who just wanted to bang the player character and knew the Warrior of Light for a few weeks or months at most. Of course, neither the game itself or the community acknowledge that and seemed to actively avoid following up on any of the original plot hooks established for Garlemald.

It's the same with how he approached FFXVI. Dion proved to be a fairly popular character but he was aligned with the Empire and never wavered in his loyalty to it. He wasn't present in the DLC and Yoshi-P deflected away from him in interviews. Unfortunate as Dion was one of the more tolerable aspects of the game.