FFXIV 5.5: Reflections on Shadowbringers

Last Updated on: 21st July 2021, 09:51 pm

With the release of FFXIV 5.5 and the subsequent Patch 5.58, the story and general new content of Shadowbringers has finally come to a close. With the story fully lead up to Endwalker, the raid tier finished, and relic quests done, we’ve finally hit the dreaded pre expansion content drought. While this is usually the biggest lull in a MMO, XIV has been breaking concurrent player milestones around the world for a variety of factors. At the end of this content though, I want to give my thoughts on Shadowbringers as a whole.

Story: FFXIV 5.0-5.58 *Spoilers Ahead*

To start off simply, Shadowbringers is my favorite story in Final Fantasy XIV. While I found the 5.X story a little lacking, the story available upon release was a complete tale that felt generally well paced, engaging, and had the cast bursting with personality relative to prior expansions. I think a lot of this came from the lead writer of the expansion, Natsuko Ishikawa, notable for her work in the Dark Knight questline and Azim Steppe arc. She’s generally regarded as one of the best writers on the team and was given lead scenario writer for both Shadowbringers and the upcoming Endwalker.

While Eorzea is an interesting world, the conflicts that take place within it are rarely interesting aside from the political drama post Stormblood. The future looks more interesting than expansions past, but I think what made Shadowbringers so cohesive was its world. The First allowed to so much more creative freedom, being loosely tethered to The Source at best, to create a living breathing world where the central atmosphere and themes can be present without conflicting with past content. As such, the world of Shadowbringers through its pacing, prose, atmosphere, and exceptional soundtrack feels truly oppressive and dreary.

My only complains are regarding the very ending of 5.0 and the content afterwards. While the Warrior of Light/Darkness turning into a ticking time bomb near the end of the main story was a huge twist, being told to meander around The Tempest felt like a real pace breaker. It became hard to invest myself in a story which otherwise felt pretty well paced. While the main villains in Emet Selch and Elidibus are great and easily rival King Thordan, the story surrounding the post 5.0 quests are fairly average. When being forced to wait about 4 months between new story content, taking a full year to get the cast back to The Source seems a little stretched, and Eorzea’s general problems plague FFXIV 5.5 and 5.58

Overall, Shadowbringers is a fantastic story which looses a bit of steam at the end, but easily remains my favorite expansion story in Final Fantasy XIV due to its exceptional writing, atmosphere, setting, and soundtrack.

Job Design and Balancing

I’ve actually written a piece regarding this facet of Shadowbringers which will be linked below, but generally speaking the jobs are the best they’ve been in Shadowbringers. While there may be some jobs which people prefer in older expansions, it feels like the playerbase is the most content it has ever been regarding Job feel and balance.

READ MORE: FFXIV Patch 5.5: Class Balancing

Despite there being a whopping 17 jobs in FFXIV, the overall balance is surprisingly well done, especially in comparison to older expansions where some classes were near unviable. In regards to damage, almost all classes current are on a equal playing field relative to their peers, though physical ranged jobs lack behind.

In regards to feel, while some prefer the Tornado Kick Monk of Stormblood or one of the many past variations of Summoner, the playerbase generally seems content with job identity. At least in my own personal experience, this seems to be the case. While there is critique of healer and tank homogenization and of some DPS jobs’ feel like Summoner or Dragoon, the dialogue is mostly constructive. Quite a few classes have been changed to general applaud from the playerbase such as Ninja and Machinist.

While I understand fears of tanks and healers becoming even more similar than before, the complaints of this approach have been fairly loud. If the devs continue down that path, it’s a problem Endwalker will have to deal with, but my grievances with the jobs in Shadowbringers are few and far between.

Fights: Dungeons, Trials, and Raids

The gameplay of dungeons, trials, and raids are where I feel Shadowbringers suffers the most. While certainly not a bad expansion with poor fights, I personally felt most encounters in Stormblood to be more fun and engaging mechanically.

I’m going to ignore dungeons here and the approach for designing them has been long wall to wall pulls for years now, but I will note that dungeon quality in Shadowbringers is generally among the best of the expansions. This is definitely in part due to The First as a setting, but I won’t complain.

With regards to trials and raids, I want to preface that I don’t think these areas are poor. I got to endgame around the end of Heavensward and am aware that more harmful periods in the game’s life existed due to endgame progression and fight design. However, I still feel that, at least compared to Stormblood, Shadowbringers suffers a bit.

The raid tier primarily being reused Primals with a twist was charming at first, but ultimately became generally boring and predictable, even if the story attached to the raids was pleasant. Additionally, these fights tend to have a good bit of unavoidable downtime in Normal and Savage difficulties alike. Especially notable are cutscene transitions in any final Savage tier as well as the Leviathan phases where the boss is untargetable for 20+ seconds at a time. I enjoy fights with engaging mechanics that test your skill as a player, and some downtime will be unavoidable, but when one has to just stand around and wait while doing a simple mechanic…. Ehh…

This is certainly the most opinionated section, and I have friends who love the encounters Shadowbringers provides, but it generally felt about average to me, especially after the expansion release. It’s certainly the expansion where I’ve been unsubscribed the most since joining the MMO and likely has my least playtime among the expansions post A Realm Reborn.

READ MORE: When is FFXIV Data Center Travel? Everything We Know

Overall Thoughts by FFXIV 5.5

On the whole, despite my few grievances here and there, I think Shadowbringers is the best expansion we’ve gotten and the best the game has ever been on the whole. With a playerbase exploding in size as of FFXIV 5.5 and a hype filled expansion on the horizon, this MMO is about the most healthy the game could hope to be at this point. If you’re debating trying out FFXIV, or are already on your journey through the free trial, I can only offer praise to Shadowbringers as an expansion whose pros far outweigh the cons.