also standard disclaimer that these are personal opinions and if u do not like them i do not care. so. i'm trying not to be overly negative bc i remember how assmad i was about going to the first before shadowbringers dropped and look how that turned out. that said..... not super excited, as it goes

it's possible i'm being uncharitable here, but i feel like the 'ooo u may end up on the opposing side to some scions ooooo' may end up being as toothless in practice as the warrior of darkness mantle was in shb

and honestly i'm pretty fed up of the scions: we had this ostensibly grand reset after endwalker and for what - more of the same with more of the same?? g'raha is cute but honestly should have died in 5.3, alisaie i enjoy, urianger is cute, estinien i don't care about, krile i don't care about, tataru is funny, y'shtola and thancred i would like to perish

i forgot about alphinaud but that says a lot. anyway. personally i would have preferred a swifter and more conclusive departure from the last story arc, and that goes for the location as well as the characters - i was hoping that the 'find a means to get to other shards' thing we're doing with the void would seague neatly into a new shard for the new expac

but i guess not. i mean it's possible we get another shard as a secondary location, but if so i feel like they'd have learned nothing from why sb and ew suffered from some of the pacing issues they did. and nothing from why shb worked as well as it did: it allowed for huge visual and cultural diversity of location within one tightly-woven focused narrative

i also do not see at all how the void stuff we've been doing is going to lead into what comes after, but i suspect they're being intentionally as quiet as possible about that so as not to spoil 6.5. which, fair, but i don't like it. if my girl zero isn't in the full trailer i'm gonna cover square enix's floor in lego (for legal purposes this is a joke)

tho!! i am glad for latin american ffxiv fans who are stoked to see where they come from represented in the story. whilst i'm not the kinda person who believes in One True Perfect Rep, i hope that se put their money where their mouth is and approach things with better sensitivity than they have in the past

anyway this has been: thoughts whilst i fish. there will, regrettably, inevitably be more of them