ITT: Trolls Trolling Trolls

[The Blackrose]

May this close and go into history gracefully...

Who am I kidding, Anti-G and EternalSnow just killed the epicness of the finale in two swift blows like the drunken best man at the afterparty. Way to go.

[Septimus]

Let me abuse my mod powers here for a second as I say something serious, because I am in need of a catharsis after reading all 25 pages of this. And I should probably spoiler tag this, but read on at your own risk.

Like many people, I felt a little more than slightly disappointed with the amount of content of this Expansion Scenario. (That was official Square-Enix wording.) There were 12 missions, but several of those were cutscenes- the only real missions of import are an uncapped dungeon crawl, a capped dungeon crawl and two BC fights.

The story itself seemed pointless, it would have come to the same conclusion had we not been involved. The worst part about the story is that in the end absolutely nothing changed. Look at the other expansions: Lion dies, Prishe becomes mortal, and Aphmau gains the confidence to lead her nation on a better path. And even though Lion later comes back to life at the end of Apocalypse Nigh, people in game still acknowledge that she made a great sacrifice and is miraculously alive again. This expansion was pretty much all a dream, there was no character development, just a big old reset button and the NPCs involved don't even say anything different. The point of this story was supposedly to tie up the loose ends from the opening movie, but it did not do that, the ends are as loose as ever. Would it have been hard to have Aldo and Mathilde have a little different text after you beat the missions talking about how nice it is to know that the other is alive so that the whole mission set wasn't so much of a mind screw, or maybe a post mission cutscene is Selbina where Mathilde and Young Aldo thank you, and Aldo shows up for a tearfilled reunion? Obviously.

But this is the heart of the problem with the whole mission set, it just felt like it was lazily done. Like it would take too much time to change the dialog of existing NPCs based off of what is going on. Another thing that bothers me is involved in the add-on's art work:

http://wiki.bluegartr.com/images/f/f...alline_Art.jpg

You see a young Mathilde in the background as a memory along with Tavnazia in ruins and Aldo as a child. But who are all of those other people there? What do they have to do with this storyline? Are these the people who helped Aldo escape from Tavnazia and become the man that he is today? I guess we will never know since only Aldo, Mathilde, and young Aldo were involved in the missions. It's almost like they had a direction for the story, but changed their minds and took it in a very different (and probably shorter) direction.

Is it our faults for expecting too much out of the Add-On? of course, we should have instead expected to spend $10 for a flimsy excuse to get one of three in-game items that don't benefit all jobs. The more pessimistic among us feared that it would be paying for a series of quests that we should get with our normal monthly fees, I am having ha hard time disagreeing with this assessment. Sadly, downloadable content and "pay for bonuses" are the hot new trend for video game companies, so there is a good chance that even the most cynical predictions may turn out to be a Pollyanna vision of the future.