so after i finished the patch quests i was so invigorated with FF14, even with the issues with the base campaign the game had really begun to hit its stride, great characters and cool storylines and fantastic music and some really damn cool dungeons, i mean one had a einhander reference, come on. the game had me hyped to start its first expansion, what people kept telling me is one of the games peaks and now that I've finished with it, i do kind of agree, it really is that good in many ways, though for me at least with its story and writing i don't think it quite hit the highest highs of the patch quests, but when it gives you towns this nice, zones this good, characters this interesting, arguably the games best jobs yet and some of the best music in the entire series? it's hard to really feel anything for it other than love, and from what i hear i haven't even hit the best parts of this expansion since I'll only be talking about the 3.0 stuff, I'll be talking about the patch quests for this expansion at a later date.

the zones here are some of the games best, easy. ishgard is outright probably the best town, it's between it, gridania and mor dhona for me but it's a very close race and I'd probably give it to ishgard, the snow and the music, the fact both halves have their own music and that both are *amazing*, the fact both halves are so distinct and interesting with one being huge and rich and grand with mansions and churches and nice little seating areas with tea brewing and the other is much cozier and homely, full of shops and workshops, the cool tavern and the fact the city itself has such interesting lore and politics behind it, plus i mean just look at it, it's beautiful and more than a little cozy when night hits and the place is lit by lamplight, with the snow falling and the calm music, it feels very homey, it's just the best. the other area's can be just as nice, sea of clouds is beautiful and huge, super fun to explore and it has arguably the best hub theme in the whole game, twice with its night theme included and it even has the coolest of the new factions with these cool bird people, though getting around without the flying you need to unlock now can be a bit of a pain. can't fault it much for that though since it is made to show that off, basically and it does make the place a whole lot more fun to explore, plus that starry sky view at night is downright unmatched. the new part of coerthas, the western highlands is a personal favourite of mine, a huge frozen wasteland covered in snow and dotted with abandoned settlements, cozy camps and ruins, plus a huge and really cool looking bridge in the middle, i looooove this area and it's one i always just go and chill in thanks to its great music and it's atmosphere always just calming me down, though it is a little bit too big i think, still one of my favourites in the game though.

the dravinian forelands and the churning mists I'm a little more mixed on though, i love the chocobo forest and the small town in the former and the moogle hideout in the latter, two of the coolest chunks of the expansion for me, though i just wasn't super into the music for either to explore, the mountainy aesthetic just doesn't do a lot for me and the former wasone of the least fun to explore in the whole expansion, that cave area near the end especially is a bit of a nightmare, the other area of dravania is a little bit of a step up with the hinterlands, the ruins of a scholar city with a cute little camp full of goblins and scavengers at the top of it, it has great music, it's super pretty and fun to explore and i love the goblins and their town, i loved looking around this one a lot. the last area you get i do outright dislike though, in fact it's the only one in the whole expansion i do outright dislike, Azys lia, this is a green smoggy ship with some ruined chunks and labs, it just looks unpleasant, i hate the green gassy colour to the landscape and while i do love the small forresty area with the pink tree's and the rivers, it just felt like a total slog to go through and i was super ready for it to end, the whole place being exploratory felt a little padding'y and it just felt like a total waste of a zone.

the new classes are all pretty excellent, mechanist is my personal favourite and the first DPS class I've really stuck with, you get tons of different ranged shots with combos you can execute for more damage, things like spread shots and debuffs for the enemy and even a cool thing that makes your whole party run faster, it's all very involved but it's a lot of fun to play and levelling it up has been really cool. there's also astrologian, a class i initially thought about taking on as my main though I've held off on that for now, it's like a more involved and more difficult to play white mage with a focus on things like buffs, it's a lot of fun when you get the timing down but i find it a little bit too hectic for me right now when I'm in a dungeon, but i do want to learn it better. there's also the dark knight for tanks and this is a cool edgy greatsword class focused on resource management with it's gagues, big burst damage and party buffs, it seems fun but i hadn't spent a whole lot of time with it, but of the tank classes so far it's for sure the one I'd pick. it's a really solid set of classes, all three are cool as hell and even the ones I've spent less time in are ones i really would love to learn, plus with one of each category you do get a ton of variety, you really can't fault the selection here.

you have some other things, a new race with the au ra which i don't think are really contextualized at all in the expansion but you can play as them and i think they look really cool, I'd love to make a character like that sometime! the level cap was raised to 60 which i blew right through and ended the expansion in my mid 60's, i liked some of the new white mage abilities i got here like assize that restores MP and does massive AOE damage every 40 seconds or so but the rest weren't quite as immediately useful to me, naturally all of this has things like new weapons and clothes which all do look really good, this expansion had by far my favourite clothes in this dept, though nothing quite as good weapon wise vs my moogle staff. you also have flying now, this was retroactively added to the main campaign areas but here is where it debuted for reals, you need to complete side quests first and find hidden aether currents across the map to access it but once you do you have your flying back and these areas are super built around that, azis sia and sea of clouds especially are super fun to fly around and you even get a few mounts made specifically for it with the manacutter and a whole dragon to fly with. this was also, effectively the last expansion released on the ps3 and looking back at gameplay is a real sight, i love how low res it all is (i never got nearly this far back when i played on ps3) and it even had a physical release on there! which i did end up importing a Japanese copy of, i mean check that box art up near the top of the page, it's really beautiful, after this it would get the patch quests and then once stormblood hit, the game moved entirely to ps4, it's a relatively minor footnote in the history of the game but i do think it's well worth mentioning, especially since i did go out of my way to buy a physical copy of this version (which is also super affordable!) this expansion also did something that i don't remember the basegame doing, the NPC's you can bring on dungeon runs are actual characters with dialogue! it's not every dungeon but its a good few of them and i think that's really neat and it helps make it i think more interesting for people who would prefer to treat this like an offline solo RPG, which is totally a valid way to play, it's not a hard game outside of raids and you can totally solo all the story content with NPC's if you wanted to! it will take longer though because the NPC's won't have as good skills as real people, and the game is already plenty long as is (maybe 40-60 hours for heavensward alone)

*spoilers* the story is a big step up from the base FF14 for sure, though i wouldn't quit put it on the same level as i would that games patch quests, while it had great characters and moments, love ysele, estinien, hilda and aymeric plus hauchefant continues to be the actual best, plus it's so good seeing tataru and alphinoud continue to be super interesting and fun but i did find its villains kind of weak and the focus on the dragon lore just didn't do a lot for me, i find a out of it a little boring and it dragged the pacing down a lot, even if i did love some of the reveals in there and the dragonsong war itself is a really interesting idea, even the political intrigue relating to the war was good, ishgard and its people are so interesting, though i just found it difficult to care about the dragon side of the drama, it made the middle sections in dravania slow for me to the point i do think it hurt the expansion overall, something the patch quests didn't quite have issue with to the same degree. it didn't have as many memorable moments either and i think some of its choices, like the decision to bring back the nanimo just rubbed me the wrong way and robbed parts of the story of their stakes, though the decision to start slowly bringing back the scions i did like a lot, i love the direction they're going with it and i think making yshtola blind is a super cool bit of disabled representation! it's an overall good story and it does pick up in steam just over halfway through, around the point where the rebellion in ishgard happens, it even managed to make me outright cry with one scene and another one made me at least tear up a little, i do think the reveals are really solid at times. though the expansion can have its good points dragged down a little with lots of what feels like filler.

it's not as long as the ARR stuff but because of how well paced the patch quests and the start of this expansion were it feels much longer and much more pointless, some of it is fine like with the vanu and their god which was a highlight because they're cool and the boss fight is great, but the other big people with the war god just felt overly pointless and meandering, i super didn't like this bit, not helped by taking place in a zone i found a little bland, though the patch quests do make good on this storyline and it helps to introduce one of the stories most interesting aspects, which i won't spoil. but again even with all this said, when its moments hit right they hit right, it has some of the highest highs of the game so far like i never think I'll emotionally recover from that scene (you'll know which if you've played) so it's really not a bad story at all, the good massively outweighs what little negatives i do have so i hope i don't come across as too overly negative, i just think it easily could have been a little better with a few changes here and there.

music is absolutely killer too, downright some of the best music so far, it's something that seems to be getting almost better with every expansion, sure some of the games best tracks are still things like those original town themes, but things like dungeon music and boss fight songs are for sure improving drastically and it's probably the thing that excites me the most about the game. Masayoshi Soken is back here again doing a good chunk of the music, as talked about before he's worked on tons of games before and after this, great stuff like dawn of mana, mario hoops, drakengard 3, lord of arcana and its sequel and more recently final fantasy 16. Yukiko Takada also worked on this as an additional composer, primarily working on this, stormblood, shadowbringers and trials of mana. a selection of the best tracks i'd recommend checking out would be the sea of clouds themes mainly, two of the best songs in the game if not outright the best songs in the game, the various ishgard themes, though i find pillars day and the main ishgard night theme to be the best, the coerthas western highlands themes are amazing, one of the new town themes (the one without bagpipes) is also great, shelter it's called. the dusk vigil, the dravanian forelands tracks, the night variant of the churning mists (not as into the day theme), the forgotten night which sounds like a resi save room track almost, the two bismark themes which are the best of the expansions battle music with some killer ps2 sounding drum and bass'y jungly tracks for both its phases, the dravanian hinterlands themes, with special mention of the town theme there being a real standout for the expansion even among the already great town and zone themes, it's by far the most FF11 sounding track of the expansion and its night version is a shoe in for what might actually be my favourite track in the game. the great gubal library is very likely the games best dungeon theme so far, even azyz lia has a solid theme song (though the zone is still pretty bad), the flying mount theme you'll hear in a lot of this zone owns too and the dungeon theme here, with aetherochemical research lab, is excellent. also worth mentioning is a vocal main theme for the expansion, i forget where in the game it pops up but it's really good and a good few tracks here use it's motif in their music, which is really neat.

even with my issues with the game it is all an upward trajectory, it shows they were learning and improving all the time and gradually getting into the swing of things, sure its not the game at its best, but it's pretty damn close, if it had some better pacing, slightly less focus on the dragons and some better ending zones, this could easily have been the best part of the game, but for what it is it's still damn fine and it has a ton of things to it that i will keep up with, like making ishgard my homebase and keeping with the mechanist class as my other main and it has be super ready and excited to see what comes next with the patch quests (which are already great!) and the next expansion: stormblood. the best part about all this is that heavensward is free with the games free trial, you don't have to pay a penny to play it, same with its patch quests and even the next expansion, so if you're planning to play 14 there really is no reason not to give it a try!