"The Vaspati theme riffs off of the Radz at Han theme, which itself references the Endwalker theme-" "They kind of FLOW into each other" I cackled. It wasn't the intentional pun but I cackles anyway.

17:06 on the theme of endwalker, "they all FLOW together" lmao

"and when one asked 'what is the point?', there were none left to answer."

"and when one asked 'what is the point?', there were none left to answer"

Just gonna say that I absolutely love when you guys do lists like this. Nothing better than listening to two friends geek out about the minutia of something they both love.

Praise Ra-La! I like the ranking. Gj.

Tower of Zot's music is also a reference to another Final Fantasy game, specifically Final Fantasy IV's Tower of Zot music.

Yo, my first run of aitila, i was so hype for two-shield jenkins

Vanaspati isn't my favorite dungeon to play through, but when I think of Endwalker, I think of Vanaspati. For me, it's the iconic one.

My face when the 3 best dungeons are left and nothing has been put in C tier yet.

I always grow to despise the first dungeon because I have to run it so many times to level trust avatars! 😑

I really should start looking around in dungeons more. There is so much the visuals tell you that I just haven't payed attention to.

Island Sanctuary wasn't bad for what the devs told us what it was going to be. Yet so many ignored for whatever reason(s) the devs repeatedly telling us that it wasn't going to be X. Could it have been better or different? Sure and I hope if they give us another version of it that they will take a long look at what worked and what didn't. I personally would probably put Aitiscope in B and Babil in C with Vanaspati on the higher B.

I would never put Zot or Vanaspati over Aitiascope, honestly. I'd probably put Aitiascope in B on vibes alone, and the fights were fine. Adding story into it, I was glad to get some closure with Amon and seeing him doubt his chosen course, engage in some introspection as it were. Zot was just an opening dungeon for me. Great creepy terrain but otherwise meh. The bosses aren't bad, but way overhyped because the last boss fight just looks busy (but is mechanically very by the numbers when you break down the telegraph-fest). Oh, and the second boss is zz. Not that Aitiascope has great bosses, but a lot of people yank Zot up there based on the boss fights, so I had to mention it. Vanaspati is perfectly serviceable but ultimately is just another "IT'S ALL ON FIRE!!!!!" dungeon. It helps to sell the gravity and urgency, but other than that? It has no staying power for me. I do like creepy elephant head spider and the last boss, though. Hope the last boss becomes a mount someday (it looks to be using the Alte Roite rig... so maybe?) Would probably be this for me: S - Dead Ends, A - Ktisis Hyperboreia B - Tower of Babil, Aitiascope C - Tower of Zot, Vanaspati Tower of Zot and Vanaspati can also be B-tier and Ktisis Hyperboreia in S, but that'd put Babil and Aitiascope in A and I don't think either really justify themselves in A-tier.

"The danger of wind is not lost on me," Garrett says after a hurricane tears through the area.

Play warrior if you like swinging weapons, it feels physical.

Ketenramm... not bad for a 100+ year old. President Dragon's appearance was great... though I'm a little sad, he was not accompanied by Tiamat and/or Hraesvelar. I miss those two. And Midgardsormr's nap is also getting rather long. Summoning Ramuh against the Alexandrians would be a really, really bad idea. Their entire technology is built upon absorbing lightning... Otis and Hauchefaunt might be shards of the same soul, but with Otis being born more than 400 years ago, they are several generations/incarnations apart. The same would go for anyone, who we've met alive during the MSQ (outside of timetravel areas obviously). Thank you, whoever scripted this scene of Y'Shtola. For once someone does something, to stop the bad thing from happening and it only still happens due to other circumstance, instead of everyone just staring slack-jawed and letting it happen without even trying anything! Why can't we have that more often? Eren-mom was quite open about only remote controlling the floating bot remotely, so why would you assume she suddenly died? It's just her real self being over in the other reflection and with the gate closed, her signals can't reach the bot anymore. And with Sphene it's very likely the same. She didn't go through the portal, but she was over there the entire time, and just remote controlled robots over in the source. Personally I don't think a soul battery necessarily holds a full soul. They didn't kill anywhere near enough people in Tuliyollal to fill so many cells, not to mention the sustainability of the system for four centuries in isolation with a limited population base. So I suspect, that the energy of a single soul is enough to fill multiple cells. Or at least that is very likely the case for the Source citizens (and to a lesser degree the souls of the Aloalo refugees that fled from the source into that reflection centuries ago) and their multi-rejoined souls. Zoraal Ja had his robots cut down everyone, including children. Maybe that's what got to Sphene in Tuliyollal. She might be fine with killing adults, but draw the line at children. Or it was witnessing the fear, despair and suffering with her own eyes. Even if she thinks it's justified, she can still feel bad about the "necessary evil" of it all.

Yes, I care about the story. The personal story level 10 and 20 can be good, depending on your choices in character creation. But it can also be kind of boring. Then it gets "old". But after the first personal story, as soon as living world and the expansions start, I really like the story, and I am invested in it!!

Let's fucking GOOOOOOOOO, this content is always my jam

I thought this was a pretty fair tier list. Can't wait for the Trials tier list if it hasn't been posted already.

I don't disagree with the placements, but I do have to take one point of contention: Asahi showing up one last time to be a Simp even in death is just perfection.

I forgot you managed to get J&J for your Dead Ends run and it made me realize just how long ago that was.

Adding another comment to stand by Variant Dungeons! They're absolutely the best "normal" dungeons mechanically in Endwalker (gameplay is always king to me, everything else bonus, that might just somewhat elevate or downgrade) and I've only done all of the first one and about half+ of the second one. 5-6 really unique bosses (and not just "unique", actually fun mechanics), fun puzzles to think about that tie into some neat lore (Nanamo lore is not even the singular focus of Sil'dihn, it has Ul'Dah, the Amal'jaa and Sil'dihn lore, actually underdeveloped elements that I think really deserved that bit of focus they got). I also like them as this pretty side setpiece and it's been fantastic solo content for me to just jump into here and there until I get it done. And if I don't feel like doing the puzzle part, I just look up the solutions because the bosses are great. In terms of encounter design itself, I think in a general sense, EW dungeons are pretty generic/formulaic: there are relatively few bosses that do mechanics that are in any way unique to them. And that would be fine if these standard tropes weren't sometimes used in the least interesting way possible. An argument can be made "everything" is like this, but to me it really stood out in EW (and as it turned out, I wasn't alone in that with one of the main loud complaints that kept coming up during the EW patch cycle especially being the encounter design). For this reason, I think Tower of Zot is my favourite EW dungeon. On the opposite side, I think Ktisis and Atiascope are probably the best examples of this homogenization among the base expansion dungeons and my least favourites of the base expansion. I enjoyed them, in fact greatly enjoyed them on my first run especially (right now personally probably would rank Atiascope above Ktisis myself because I like the Rhitathyn fight and everyone paving the way for you), but there is almost nothing unique to either of those two dungeons on a gameplay level. Really pretty aesthetically and musically, cool narratively, but pretty empty otherwise and well, I'm still playing a game here. If FFXIV was just a walking simulator, this wouldn't be an issue, but at this point, it has shown it does want to be a game, as well. As said, I didn't hate any of these, but by the end and especially by the end of the EW patch dungeons, I really started to feel how everything was blending together and that kind of only happened with a bunch of the ARR optional dungeons, maybe some HW stuff. You can do fun stuff within these formula constraits (Dead Ends is the best example of this to me and probably my fave base EW dungeon next to Vanaspati) but DT ended up being a pretty strong (and unexpected because, as said, I still enjoyed everything) breath on fresh air on my part.

Aitiascope is an odd one. Probably my favourite duty support dungeon due to the different reactions from the Scions. Personally, found the double call-back to ARR a bit odd and expected more boss variety. On the other hand, Amon as the last boss felt somewhat fitting. It showed Hermes full decent into nihilism due to his time as Amon and the influence of Emperor Xande, as well as giving him closure. It also thankfully finally ended everything Asahi. Admittedly all this requires the cutscene. The dungeon w/o the story though ... yeah, ranking deserved alas.

what I feel hurt Atiascope as well was the fact that the cameos of your friends are easy to miss if you're not really paying attention and when you're in the middle of battle with spell effects going off and just pushing through quickly, it's very easy to miss the appearance of Tupsimati for Papalymo, Moenbryda's axe and Haurchefant's shield. heck I totally did not know that Y'sayle came to help during the fight with Amon until much later when watching the guys stream it

I've really missed this content! Glad to see it's back!!

"Why did they give us these magnets?!" Reminder about the gathering Tribe and the continuing story of Ultima Thule.

The final fight of Tower of Zot is pretty incredible, I agree 100%, but there's a whole other factor to it! That fight asks things of you that no other boss fight in this game does - you start off attacking a single-target when it's just Cindy, then you switch between one- and two-target optimizations depending on whether Sandy's joined in, and during the Delta Attack you've gotta -work- to keep uptime! And that's not all - with Mindy off to the side, you have three-target multidotting! This isn't a big deal for some classes, but for others, it's *incredibly* engaging. How often as a Samurai do you have three Higanbanas ticking, nevermind switching -back and forth- between two different rotations? Think about doing that fight as a Black Mage, as it was during Endwalker, sometimes using Fire/Blizzard 3 to swap states and sometimes HF/HB 2 if Sandy's there, sometimes spending Polyglot stacks on Foul instead of Xenoglossy, and then there's getting casts off during Delta! Thankfully, that was one of the *exceedingly* rare times it made sense to have three single-target Thunder 3s ticking away, feeding you those -juicy- Thunderhead procs all the more often. What an incredible fight!

I'm sure you've noticed, but Hermes uses the Ramuh skeleton, which is why he has the vine beard on the front.

This has nothing to do with the main topic of the video, but... I see that Escaflowne box set being used as a book end on the lower shelf, and I approve 🙂 I have the same one from back in my Suncoast employee days. Great series.

Man they REALLY need to do the "society" quests in endwalker and do the final alliance quest....

Love the video but idk who let you guys exclude the two endgame dungeons that literally came out in 6.0 in a video titled 6.0 dungeons i get separating patch ones but that line of thinking for those two dungeons isn't really hinting for me lol

I have bad memories about Vananaspati since on my first run i decided to heal that dungeon and ended up dying in the final boss but our group pulled through by some miracle, i felt so ashamed after that :D

I like the fit, garrett

Ktisis over Dead Ends, Garrett?! WHAT? Shenanigans!

Garrett: The music in Vanaspati is kind of a rif of the Endwalker theme. Kyle: Well, it kind of just FLOWS together. Vulgar amounts of “I see what you did there”.

I love Final Fantasy IV, and was mostly tickled by many of its references in Endwalker. However, of all the FF14 expansions, it tiptoed the line of 'shoehorning' in those prior Final Fantasy references compared to the more subtle approaches in Shadowbringers and before, so I'm not surprised that some of Endwalker's content can feel a bit off in style and continuity artistically.

IIRC there was a plan to first have a Garlemald expansion ending with Anima and then the Final Days expansion. It got cut because the writers were worried the story would become too long. Personally I would’ve loved the Garlemald expansion after the Final Days, but I can understand why it would’ve been cut short

Maybe one day these 2 assholes will play FF4 and understand the million references they threw into Endwalker.

Excuse me....but where are Smileton and Stigmascape? Those are also 6.0 dungeons. #RememberTheLopporits. In all seriousness though, the only things I disagree with is "Garlemald Express" not being memorable, and not mentioning the sheer amount of progress blockers as a sequence plays in Vanasparti.

Literally my first thought even as I saw the thumbnail: ooo! I think that is washi tape. Nice!

The Vanaspati theme has parts in it with swelling violins that just sound so mournful, the song is dripping with fear and pain and I think it's honestly one of the best dungeon themes from a thematic perspective.

I'm continually confused at how you two read the Zot music. To me it's pure dread. But of course, I've played the game the dungeon is referencing, so I'm not unbiased.

1:58:15 YES that shot of Zoraal Ja slashing Sphene really should have just actually cut the robot in half. All the robots just doing the default /playdead collapse animation when they die there was kinda disappointing

Having an all sphene dungeon would definitely have been really cool, but yeah Orgenics sadly wasn't that

Hard agree with atiascope being mid. I keep getting it in roulettes & all of the supposed "help" our friends' memories give us get ignored in favor of running through the mobs as fast as possible. (Other than Papalymo nobody really stops for Haurche's buff or angles the mobs right for Moen's axe anymore.)

Dead Ends is my favorite dungeon in the game. Second boss fight is probably my favorite dungeon boss fight. Glad you got it right. :D

23:34 Somewhat ironically, I would say that Rhitahtyn became an interesting callback after the fact due to his joke of a trial being changed to a solo duty that can be a a gear check and a genuine test of skill for new players.

The music in the second DT trial is probably my favourite track in the game. It's so good.