The personal questline in Guild Wars 2 isn't really about me, which is ironic if you think about it.
Even discounting my inadvertent power levelling at the start of this run, I've been levelling at an insane speed recently - so fast I keep wondering if there's some double XP event going on that I don't know about. One effect of this is that I've spent a lot of time doing the personal questline recently, since by the time I'd finished the stage that unlocks at level 60 I was already a high enough level to go straight into the next part at level 70.
My opinion of the personal story is... mixed. The early stages are okay, the initial Durmond Priory stuff is good and Rat-Tastrophe is straight up fantastic.
At level 60 the focus shifts to the Risen. This involves a lot of big fights between our hero plus assorted allies and hordes of undead, and I do mean a LOT. It gets a bit repetitive, and since your allies are drawn from all of the races of Tyria and so are the Risen, it also acts as a really good example of why World of Warcraft did the right thing and gave each race a distinctive silhouette and kept them separated by faction, because without that - and with the overly busy armor designs characteristic of GW2 - these fights can get confusing and very messy.
A lot of these sequences are also very heavily scripted, and I've often had to rely on the minimap to keep up with what I'm doing and where I'm supposed to go next. It's not at all intuitive.
As I said, the story here isn't really about my character. A newly introduced NPC named Trahearne is basically the main character here, and while it's not quite as bad as whenever FFXIV decides that the Scions are way more interesting than you are, it's not far off it. There's also a lot of exposition - especially by this game's standards - while I get to watch Trahearne go through his Hero's Journey.
Oh, and Destiny's Edge get some screen time as well, which only reinforces how little I care about them and how much of a simp Logan Thackeray is. I get much the same vibe from these characters as I do from the Scions, in that I keep wondering if they were important in an earlier game (GW1/FFXIV 1.0) and the game is assuming I've played those games and am therefore invested in their story. I haven't, I'm not, and this game is doing nothing to convince me that I should be.
Speaking of story, the events here are big and epic and all of Tyria is at stake, and it was really jarring to go from that to doing mundane tasks to fill up a Heart in a lower level zone I was passing through. Of course this is an example of the classic story/gameplay disconnect in MMOs - yeah, you killed the Lich King, now go and get me 10 bear asses - but it feels exceptionally noticeable here. Up to this point GW2 has been good at keeping it small. The zones don't tell their stories through single arcs but by serving up a collection of vignettes that come together to give an overall picture of the area you're in as you work through the Heart quests, and it's odd to go from that to a narrative that gives you a leading role in the battle against Ultimate Evil, and then go back again.
I said about Rat-Tastrophe,
"Ultimately this questline tells a small story - it doesn't change the world or directly impact anyone other than those directly involved - but it tells it well and with absolute sincerity."
But these stages of the personal story do the exact opposite of that. These are big events with huge consequences, but the scale of it drowns the characters and none of the dramatic last stands and noble sacrifices come close to having the impact of the earlier, smaller story.
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