Final Fantasy XIV is probably my new favorite MMO of all time (at the very least, it gives Wildstar a run for its money) and a large reason for that is the story.
Ironically, I will not say that FFXIV’s story is good. I will instead say that it is entertaining. It is a story of immense highs and lows, booms and busts, prosperity and recession. And for a long time I’ve been wanting to make a retrospective on it all.
Now that I’ve reached Dawntrail, a section which very well may end my experience with the game (more on that later), I feel now is the best time to do it.
(Warning: this is NOT one of my smart articles. This is more of a “I have things to say so I’m going to say them” sort of deal. If you’re looking for an intellectual discussion you might want to look elsewhere on the blog.)
(Oh, also, virtually none of this will make sense if you haven’t played FFXIV. Though maybe you can still get some tidbits about writing and storytelling — especially on such a large, online project — even if the specific references don’t make sense to you.)
Final Fantasy XIV 1.0
There will never be a better MMO than the concept of FFXIV 1.0.
The trailer for 1.0 is still probably one of my most loved trailers ever. This thing had a strangehold on me as a kid, and set me on a lifelong quest to discover — or create on my own — the sense of wonder presented in it.
The concept is made pretty clear in the trailer: you are a lone adventurer, a person with a unique set of skills, who travels the world going to different adventurer guilds to gain new jobs. You work these jobs either solo, or with others. At the same time, a bigger story — one involving an empire and a rebellion — happens around you. But you need not be part of it. Since this is an MMO, you are not the protagonist — you could join a side, or at least have some sort of opinion, or you could never touch it and just see the burning zeppelins from a distance like everyone else.
This does describe very well another game, though it isn’t Final Fantasy — it is Neverwinter Nights, the famous American multiplayer RPG taking place in the world of Dungeons & Dragons. NWN proved the success of such a formula, and later attempts by Larian Studios to revive it were equally fruitful.
But that’s not what I was after.
You’ll notice that I specified that NWN was American. This is because a lot of the magic behind 1.0’s trailer is that it does not come from the viewpoint of such boring and traditional of a fantasy world — it is instead birthed from the Japanese fantasy tradition of the mid-2000s, one that was built upon and inspired by the likes of Fairy Tail, Dragon Quest, Fullmetal Alchemist, and Final Fantasy X and XII. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the concept and CG artists that created the 1.0 trailer also created rendered cutscenes of XII in particular.
But alas, we know where this story is going.
Final Fantasy XIV 1.0 was dogshit.
It was dogshit in a way you cannot even get nostalgic over. It was just bad. And a lot of it had to do with with fundamental underlying design choices — the entire game was based on the framework of FFXI, an already esoteric design system which in itself was based on the first Everquest. But this wasn’t *Everquest’*s era anymore, as World of Warcraft had already been dominating the market for six years and brought with it perfected MMO mechanics that every other MMO on the market used — including Everquest II.
It may be hard to believe, but at the time it was assumed that FFXIV was irredeemable — there was no coming back for the title, and perhaps even the franchise. But little did we know what things were in store.
A Realm Reborn
Final Fantasy XIV was the lowest point in Square Enix’s lowest moment. It was the game that made the SE production committee — the same people who greenlit Lightning Returns — say it was all just too bad and had to be euthanized. It was a pivotal moment in gaming history — perhaps the only other example that’s even close is Sony’s Concord.
The problem with 1.0 was that Japan as a whole was behind in the MMO race. As I mentioned in the last section, World of Warcraft dominated the MMO market all across the world — except for Japan. Japanese games tended to favor either the now antiquated system of Pre-WoW MMOs or the grind-heavy slow-paced MMO structure borrowed from Korea (one that was popular in Asia but not so much in the rest of the world). If Square Enix wanted to make their money back on Final Fantasy XIV, they’d have to do it by tapping into an idea they had only barely heard of.
So, what did Square Enix do? Simple: They brought in one of the only game designers in Japan who played World of Warcraft.
Naoki “YoshiP” Yoshida was always a strange member of the Square Enix production roster. He heavily favored western styles of fantasy, and got much influence from the medieval styles of fellow SE producer Yasumi Matsuno. At the same time — and rather contradictorily — he loved flashy visuals and intense fights more reminiscent of games by Clover Studio than games by Square Enix.
Unfortunately, YoshiP’s rise meant that the ‘2000s JRPG Neverwinter Nights’ dream was dead. This new realm of FFXIV was destined to be more grounded, plus its want of flashy cutscenes meant that you were almost certainly going to have a single, linear main story.
Fortunately, his rise also saved the franchise.
Yoshida is a very smart guy: he knew he had to outsource what SE wasn’t good at, and keep in what they were. This meant most of the game design team became brand new hires (many of which were YoshiP’s fellow WoW guildmates) while the story, art, and music teams stayed mostly the same. They worked on a brand new game from scratch, and in 2014 — two years after the death of 1.0 — finally released it.
The end result was… okay.
In a relative sense, ARR being ‘meh’ was a huge accomplishment. The game went from being one of the worst MMOs ever made to a game that was entirely serviceable, and the manpower required to lift it from that muck even a little was a tremendous feat. Final Fantasy fans (who, to be fair, are notorious for buying anything) seemed to take this improvement on its head and begin to rejoin the game. At this point, however, the wide majority of the MMO world still scoffed at ARR.
Of course, now that we’ve reached ARR officially, we can finally start to talk about the story. The truth is that I dedicated most of this section to the development history purely because ARR’s story is pretty nonexistent. It sets up some later important characters, and there are some decent scenes here and there, but for the most part its safe. It is a pure, cookie-cutter version of what you’d expect from a Final Fantasy story. But hopefully now that you’ve seen the history, you know why it was so generic: they were focusing on the gameplay. Spoiler: this prioritization of gameplay over story will show up a few more times in the story of FFXIV’s development.
One thing I will give ARR credit for is the creative way it handled 1.0’s death. It could’ve just pretended 1.0 never happened, but instead the story is a direct continuation of 1.0, and 1.0’s death is actually immortalized by a destructive near world-ending occurrence in the games universe. Talk about meta storytelling!
Of course, there is one more time where 1.0 will rear its head, but that won’t be for later. For now, we have to talk about…
Post ARR
I used to think Post ARR was the worst that FFXIV ever got. Now I’m not quite so sure, but I do still believe it comes close.
If you were to play Post ARR now, you would only be getting about 1/10th of the experience as OG players. That’s because large chunks of the filler that so dreadfully injected into the post game of ARR has since been removed or modified in more recent updates. My understanding of why such filler existed is that on the back-end they were busy preparing what exactly they were going to do to not fuck up again. In other words, another time where story was cast to the wayside.
FFXIV does however have a now long running tradition of preparing the stories of expansions several years in advance, something virtually no other MMO company does [1]. And I’d like to think that tradition started here — giving themselves some time to recuperate and focus on the next big thing.
And then there’s the ending. That ending. An ending which lives in either fame or infamy, depending on who you ask. The finale of Post ARR is a sequence that is the first of many truly stand-out FFXIV cutscenes. However, while I do love the scene on its own, I have to admit that it has aged terribly. To understand what I mean, this time I’m going to have to explain the scene word for word:
Alphinaud spends the majority of Post ARR building up a new league of protective good-guy militia known as the Crystal Braves. This all comes to a head in a Red Wedding style betrayal (YoshiP is very fond of Game of Thrones) in which several minor characters are killed and the main cast is either imprisoned or split up. Your protagonist, now a wanted fugitive, must go to the long isolated kingdom of Ishgard in a last ditch effort to save your friends. This opens us up for the beginning of Heavensward.
This is a very good ending and cliffhanger for a sequel… if it were a singleplayer game. But as an MMO, you can poke a lot of holes in this story immediately. Holes we’ll get to when we talk about…
Heavensward
It is pretty much universally agreed that Heavensward is the start of the Final Fantasy XIV golden age. Ironic, since it opens on the worst scene in FFXIV history.
As it turns out, locking the player out of Ul’dah — the largest city in the game — is a really bad idea if you’re an MMO. It means that the player is now locked out of a lot of quests and merchants, and it becomes harder to meet up with friends or receive invites to groups for people who are not on the same expansion.
Now, if you’re particularly story-focused (or particularly ballsy), this lock-out could actually be really cool — it gives the player the feeling that real stakes are at play, and incentivizes you to get through the main story in order to let you back into your former hub. But if you’re a project already teetering on bankruptcy with the desperate need to improve public opinion, this doesn’t float well.
So the XIV team had to walk it back. Walk all of it back, and fast. This meant that the first few quests in Heavensward are a bizarrely dysfunctional and outright dismal set of attempts to reverse the events of the Post ARR ending. A meeting with one of Ul’dah’s elites (one who betrayed you in the first place!) allows you to get back into the city, and your friends are all freed and rescued in virtually no time at all.
So now you can see why the Post ARR ending leaves a bitter taste in many people’s mouths.
Now, the good news is that the Heavensward story proper is a great improvement over ARR. You’re at the center of a human vs dragon war which features the first of many shonen-esque “maybe they aren’t the bad guys! maybe we should all just get along!” story beats we’ll see across XIV’s storyline. A religious conspiracy also keeps things interesting, and in the vein of the Post ARR ending they prove themselves unafraid to kill off some (minor) characters for drama purposes. Plus, your rival from the Dragoon storyline — Estinien — makes his first appearance as a major character. Dragoons stay winning!
Gameplay wise, there are some more improvements in the right direction. We’re beginning to see in this era the movement towards much more fast-paced, intense bossfights that focus on quick and clever AOE dodges rather than focusing on stupid gimmicks. There are still some gimmicky fights in Heavensward, but for the most part they’ve now been relegated to dungeons (unlike Post-ARR… oh, Crystal Tower…).
As I’ve mentioned, it’s here where the reputation of FFXIV as a whole finally begins its upswing. Hearing about how good the story of Heavensward is, many now begin to join the game and take it seriously. I remember the HW era being the first time I had heard about XIV since 1.0 — by that point, I didn’t even know they had attempted to remake the game.
I still wouldn’t join, mostly because I was still young. But there was quite a path left for XIV to go.
Post Heavensward
The golden age of XIV continued into Heavensward’s post-arc. Post-arcs in XIV are usually defined by a series of miscellaneous adventures which set up future expansions, and it really was Post HW that established this trend.
It is within Post Heavensward we get our first major character death — while finally finishing off the remains of the now evil Crystal Braves, Papalymo falls in the fight. As far as I can remember, outside of Minfilia (who herself is a weird case) he is the only major party member to have perished in the course of the game’s story [2] — a rare brave moment we will almost certainly never see again.
Post Heavensward also introduces us to the shadowbringers, something which will not be brought back up again for another 3 or so arcs! Invaders from (they claim) another world, they attack our party in order to take our resources to save their homeland… but wait a minute, aren’t these the same guys from the 1.0 trailer…?!
At this point, the concept for Shadowbringers looks really, really good. There is something incredibly bold about putting these two worlds against each other, alike in every way and really both morally in-the-right. You can almost immediately picture the scenes of these two parties fighting it out, major characters falling, and the bitter knowledge that one world will almost certainly fall and perish, and there will be nothing one can do to save it.
There is also, of course, a metanarrative in relationship to 1.0. The hopes and dreams Square had when building their direct sequel to XI, versus this new — more successful, more loved, yet also partially bastardized — new version of XIV which exists. It is shockingly introspective for a company of its size, and given the narrative strength of Heavensward there is an immense excitement that this might be what’s next.
It was almost if it were too good to be true.
Of course, we’re not at Shadowbringers. There’s one more expansion we need to get through before that…
Stormblood
Stormblood is a controversial expansion, for what I think are the wrong reasons.
All complaints about Stormblood boil down to two things: Lyse (who is almost completely ignorable over the course of the story) and the pacing (which only becomes poor in the post-arc). It’s honestly a shame that the pacing has gotten such a bad reputation, when the expansion itself has arguably the best pacing I’ve seen in a XIV expansion (and, if I’m going to be honest, most JRPGs). There is a cutscene near the beginning of the arc that lays out almost the entirety of what you will need to do and in what order, and the story virtually never strays from that original idea. Even the zones this time around are developed in a linear order, so you can always tell how much you have left to go. The pacing in Post Stormblood is indeed a bit shoddy, but… we’ll get to that in a bit.
Stormblood is also notable, of course, for its villain — the main villain of XIV [3], **and arguably one of the greatest villains ever written for Final Fantasy.
There’s a lot to love (and love to hate) about Zenos. He essentially serves as a Vergil to your Dante, a rival who respects you purely because you’re the only person around who is on their level, and their quest is one of unlimited power. Zenos is an obviously hyper-evil antagonist, but he has those interesting moments of chivalry and personal morality that makes all good villains. He is also just a lovely boss fight, every time he comes up.
Alas, FFXIV’s three arc streak of good content comes to an end here. Because while Stormblood itself was another fantastically written expansion, its post-arc didn’t quite stick the landing…
Post Stormblood
Final Fantasy XIV has a problem with killing characters.
Or maybe Final Fantasy does. Or JRPGs. Or, hell, the entire Japanese creative narrative industry. I don’t know what it is — I don’t know if its a cultural thing, a business thing, or a moral thing. But I’m honestly sick of it.
There are two major deaths at the end of Stormblood — Zenos, the main villain of the arc, and Yotsuyu, the secondary villain. These deaths make sense — these characters played out their roles, and got their just desserts in the end. They succeeded in their purpose as a narrative device.
They are also brought back to life within the first few hours of Post Stormblood.
Zenos I’ll ignore for now, since he does end up getting used well later in the story. But the Yotsuyu revival is just embarrassing. She magically wakes up amidst the wreckage, goes on this entire arc where ‘oh, she’s lost her memory, and now she’s a really sweet and innocent person!’, then suddenly snapped by Asahi/Fandaniel/whatever this stupid fuck’s name is now, and just ends up back to her evil self. Then dies. Again.
Now, this is a pacing issue. There was literally no need for any of this section of the story — a version of FFXIV would play out the same with or without the Yotsuyu plotline. But, like I said, the XIV team hates to kill people off.
And it’s about to get so much worse.
Shadowbringers
I don’t think I’ve given a real controversial take in this article thus far. My opinion of all the arcs have been more or less what the overall XIV community has felt — I may have rated Stormblood a little more highly, but that’s probably only because some people don’t recognize the existence of post-arcs. Alas, that all ends here.
I hate Shadowbringers.
Shadowbringers is arguably the most popular of all the XIV expansions, and I can see why this is. In a vacuum, the narrative is good — it plays to the same strengths and topics that other series such as Nier Automata, Chainsaw Man, and Berserk do, series that XIV shares an audience with. But to me, within the scope of XIV, it is a complete and utter disappointment.
To understand why, we have to compare the Shadowbringers we were promised in Post Heavensward with the Shadowbringers we got. As it turns out, there is no war — the entire original concept is thrown out yet again. To be fair, this is a bit more justified in Shadowbringers than it was with the Crystal Braves fiasco: in the time it took us to get through Stormblood, their world had already been mostly destroyed. But that still doesn’t forgive the fact that a more interesting story could have been here — a more interesting story that would have also played much more into the overall scope of XIV.
I mentioned that Shadowbringers’ story would sound good in a vacuum. Well, part of the reason why so many might enjoy it is because it is a vacuum — this is the first expansion that has absolutely nothing to do with the main story of XIV. They give a floundering attempt by saying that the curse which effects this new world can also kill of Eorzea (world-ending cataclysm is the staple of lazy storytelling, so not really) and also that this curse is in part generated by a big bad in the main XIV plot (but by members of that association we have really only got to know now). Shadowbringers once again fails the ‘would skipping this have made a notable dent in the story’ checklist rule.
It also fails the ‘did you obviously bait a character’s death and not actually have it happen’ rule.
Thancred’s infamous scene in Shadowbringers is probably the worst case of death-baiting in the entirety of the Final Fantasy franchise. He is defeated to an inch of his life, gives an entire 15 minute long ‘I’m about to die and here are my last wishes’ sequence, and in the very next cutscene shows up with minimal injuries! It is an oversight so egregious that I almost feel as though some internal development conflict might have caused it, though I couldn’t find anything about such a thing online outside of a few writer switch-ups that occurred during the Shadowbringers era.
Most of Shadowbringers’ downsides come from the fact that there are virtually no stakes here — I have no incentive to give a shit about this world I just now found out about, and the threat to my own people is pretty slim. However, I would be overly negative in saying nothing about Shadowbringers is good.
If there is one good thing about Shadowbringers, it is Emet-Selch: the man established as the overall leader of the Ascians, that ‘big bad’ I mentioned a little while back [4]. He is almost the exact opposite of Zenos — a man who is purely evil out of necessity, whom the more you get to know him the more you realize he is actually not power hungry, but rather simply fighting for his beliefs. Despite being completely different to Zenos, he is just as strong as a character — this diversity in good antagonists shows a key strength in XIV’s writing.
Shadowbringers also does do some cool things with referring back to earlier material. While that 1.0 metanarrative never materializes, there is a pretty major callback to what most XIV players before thought was a complete waste of their time: the Crystal Tower raids.
One thing that the XIV team does a great job of is making things worth it that were once not. They were able to turn the 1.0 disaster into a key important plot point, and they were able to turn Crystal Tower into the crux of Shadowbringers’ plot. G’raha Tia, the young miqo’te you meet during the Crystal Tower storyline, also becomes one of the main party members from here on out — with roughly 200 hours of gameplay since you last saw him! It’s a great nod which shows that, even with my disappointments, the XIV writing team still knows what they’re doing. I wonder how the post-arc will hold up….
Post Shadowbringers
Truth is, there is not too much to talk about in Post Shadowbringers that was not already brought up in Shadowbringers proper. Presumably since Endwalker is the last part of this first series, they wanted to make the post-arc a lot more linear this time around rather than introducing a bunch of new ideas. Because of this, Post Shadowbringers is more or less all about wrapping up loose ends in Shadowbringers and getting us ready for Endwalker. Because of that, it has pretty much all the same flaws as Shadowbringers did — though there are a few cool moments in here, such as the Warrior of Light fight.
Time to go straight to the juicy stuff.
Endwalker
Endwalker is what Shadowbringers would be if it was good.
The writing is the same, but with one key difference: things actually matter! Yes, we finally have an expansion pack where we can say XIV would be very much different without, and for good reason: this arc wraps up everything we’ve witnessed so far. Ascians, Hydaelyn, Zenos, that one weird Void Ark raid in Post Heavensward everybody assumed had nothing to do with anything — it all comes in full force here.
Because of this, the stakes also really matter. When I saw people die or suffer in the First, I didn’t really care because — to put it bluntly — I just now met these characters and didn’t care about them at all beyond how helping them might save Eorzea. I don’t get that sort of luxury in Endwalker. Places like Garlemald and Sharlayan I do care about, because I’ve been told about them constantly throughout the course of XIV. So even if none of the main party is directly in trouble, I can still feel the pain and suffering of the people.
If I did have one complaint about Endwalker, its that it really does feel like a lot of it was retrofitted to tie things all together, and very obviously so. If you’ve ever played Metal Gear Solid, you know what I’m talking about — characters, factions, settings which end up connected and make you go ‘really? did you really intend for this from the beginning?’. Not a deal breaker, just something that’s slightly annoying.
Overall, Endwalker represents the peak of the FFXIV formula: boss design, gameplay, writing, zone art, music — all the proficiencies that XIV had been building up across the years, all come to a head in Endwalker. While I used to say Post Heavensward was the best XIV had to offer, that was easily dethroned here.
A side note of important historical context: It was upon the release of Endwalker that Final Fantasy XIV finally defeated World of Warcraft as the most popular MMO of all time. It’s an important piece of MMO history that I cover in more detail in my post on MMOs, but it’s really wonderful to see the series have grown from a complete trash fire into the biggest fish in the tank.
So, FFXIV has finally hit its stride. Things can only get better from here… right?
Post Endwalker
In my section on Post ARR, I said that I used to think it was the worst arc in the game’s history.
That all changed when I played Post Endwalker.
To be fair, just like with Post ARR, there are reasons as to why Post Endwalker is so bad. The devs were very clear that they wanted to take a break from the story to focus on various quality of life issues that XIV suffered from over the years. At the same time, the core team was busy working on Final Fantasy XVI, the newest installment in the singleplayer version of the franchise. All this lead to very few resources being allotted to the XIV team during this time.
Still, this is a review of XIV’s story, and the truth is that Endwalker’s post-arc is oh so dreadfully boring. A throwaway plot with throwaway rushed characters that more or less serves (at its best) as a dedication to one of the new classes and a reference to Final Fantasy IV.
No, really, nothing notable happens during this post-arc. I played it relatively recently and I still don’t have anything to say. If you really are curious, I did play through the arc in almost its entirety on my gaming channel.
Dawntrail and the Future
The hope on everyone’s mind was that Dawntrail would bring something that Post Endwalker didn’t. We’d all see the same quality of writing as Endwalker and point at the screen, saying “See! I told you! It was all just for padding!”.
I was definitely one of those people. While I did think Post Endwalker was objectively bad, I didn’t particularly hate on it because I knew its flaws were justified and temporary. The hope going into Dawntrail was still high — especially as the start of a brand new main story.
But the dead weight was still there. Dawntrail isn’t quite as bad as Post Endwalker — its environments are beautiful, characters interesting, classes dense, and bosses powerful. But its story is still boring. It feels as though this is the first proper expansion where virtually nothing interesting happens — an expansion whose pacing is so bad that even the Stormblood haters are beginning to change their mind.
And this is the bittersweet note we end on. The truth is that we don’t know whether FFXIV’s story will stay good. I’ve since paused my subscription — partially to focus on other games, but partially because I want to see where this next set of content is going before I lock in again. The truth is that I was so mind-numbed by Dawntrail that it became the first XIV expansion that I straight gave up on. It hit a point where even if I had quit right before the stellar content landed, it still would not be a good expansion because of the time sink involved with getting there.
I guess we’ll just have to see now where time takes us.
[1] – Well, they say they do. Dev studios love advertising how “well-prepared” they are for their live service games, but in reality they’re usually too bundled down by whatever is going on currently to be planning that far ahead. At best, they usually just have some vague sketches of where they want to go. The FFXIV team, meanwhile, had dialog written for Shadowbringers by the time Heavensward came out.
[2] – About three days after writing this, while trying to remember parts of Endwalker, I was reminded of Moenbryda’s death as well — something that also happens very early on in XIV. I think there’s something you can say about the fact that XIV used to have this bravery, but it has since seemingly disappeared.
[3] – The main villain of the first main-arc, which is ARR to Endwalker. Since I’ve already mentioned arcs and post-arcs (technically “subarcs” in this context), I didn’t want to further confuse readers, especially since there’s only been one full main-arc thus far.
[4] – Some of you will point out that, despite me saying Shadowbringers is completely unrelated to the main story, the Ascians are in full-force here. My argument is that although Emet-Selch is claimed to be the secret man we’ve been fighting this whole time, he is never actually mentioned in any work previous. If people had been whispering his name since ARR, my opinion would be different here. Otherwise he looks like a character who was thrown in last minute.
