Modern Final Fantasy: The Narrative

April 10, 2020. A Friday which I requested the day off from work. I woke up at the crack of dawn without an alarm, made a pot of coffee, sat in front of my PS4, and wrote the following in a notebook:

Prethoughts - woke up with sense of urgency, magic, and wonder not unlike a child on Christmas knowing that Twilight Princess awaits. This game has one job - reinvigorate the modern FF franchise by taking what once made it so great and reconstructing it for the modern age. They said they wouldn't make this until they felt FFVII had been surpassed. That clearly didn't happen. May this be a chance for the fellows at Square Enix to take a step back, reorient themselves, and learn how to eventually surpass VII with a wholly original game.

Let's mosey.

This was, of course, the release day of the decades-awaited Final Fantasy VII Remake. I wrote this as a preface to my various notes and live reactions as I played through the game which felt so important to keeping the dignity of one of my favorite franchises alive. We all know the narrative. After 2001's Final Fantasy X (my second favorite game of all time), the series had a rough track record. XI was "the online one." XII was generally well-liked but criticized for its protaganists and live action gameplay. XIII polarized everyone with overly linear design, zero exploration, lackluster characters, and gameplay you could easily auto-battle through (hey, at least the music was nice). XIV was another "online one", albeit this one with a horrific launch, landing a 49 on Metacritic. XV was a semi-return to form, but was stuck in development hell for a decade before release, and was clearly half-baked in more than one regard as a result. For a long time, the mainline Final Fantasy series has been middling in mediocrity. No recent releases have had those moments to cement themselves in gaming culture forever. Cecil's musings over committing genocide in IV. The opera scene in VI. Aeris's death in VII (so iconic even Robert Pattinson has admitted it made him cry). When was the last time a mainline Final Fantasy game embedded itself in the public consciousness?

The VII Remake was, all in all, definitely a return to form for the series, and I took copious notes while playing in hopes of eventually writing a definitive review on the subject. That review never happened. Truth be told, another game took the spotlight and occupied my thoughts. The very same weekend the VII Remake launched, I spontaneously took the plunge alongside a good friend from college into my first proper MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) game. I gave XIV a shot.

Best Kept Secret

Time to spoil my opinion - Final Fantasy XIV is, without a doubt, the greatest Final Fantasy game I've played released after X in 2001. I haven't fully played through all of its expansions, but I already get the sense that by the time I've finished, I'll hold XIV as the greatest in the series and as a serious contender for my favorite game of all time. This doesn't seem to be an uncommon opinion amongst fellow XIV players - I've seen countless players say that by the first expansion Heavensward, XIV has had the best Final Fantasy story in decades. I agree, and yet this runs counter to the common narrative outlined above. It's possible I'm just out of touch - after its disastrous launch in 2010, XIV exploded in quality while I was in college and too busy balancing Math, English, and Computer Science classes to pay attention to the current landscape of the FF community. I kept tabs on how XV was recieved and generally agreed with the overall consensus, but XIV completely evaded my radar for years on end. After graduating and finding a steady 9-5 (although lowkey the 8-4 life is way better and highly recommended), I found myself with oodles more free time to throw back into the gaming of my youth. All this free time was initially wasted(?) in stupid long JRPGs like Dragon Quest XI, Persona 5, and getting so good at Kingdom Hearts II that I made it to the Sora vs. Roxas fight on Level 1 on the highest difficulty.

Roxas, alas, still kicks my ass so hard that my Level 1 playthrough is as over as his summer vacation.

This naturally came with keeping closer tabs on the online gaming community's opinions, but even then, XIV and its expansions were hidden from view. The only reason I bothered to check out XIV was this video by JRPG enthusiast Clemps, where he cites the Shadowbringers expansion as his "Favorite Thing" of 2019. I'm eternally grateful that his video made me curious enough to check out the game, but it's bizarre to me that despite keeping general tabs on what the JRPG fandom was into these days, XIV's revitalization of the franchise seemed completely unnoticed. Instead, the JRPG subreddit won't shut up about the Trails of series. I bought the first one a few months back. Maybe I'll get to it next year. I still have all of XIV and One Piece to get through.

Look, I was one of those people too. In the above narrative, I called XI and XIV the "online games", and that's all I ever knew them as. Playing an MMO always had a stigma around it to me. You had to have a decent PC, you couldn't play very well on consoles, you had to be so invested that you'd pay a monthly subscription fee to continue to access content you've already paid for...this was antithetical to a younger me who grew up exclusively with consoles and buying used copies from GameStop to save a precious penny. I have zero data to back this up, but I would not be surprised if JRPG fans, the genre perhaps most adverse to multiplayer offerings (save for Pokemon), had similar reservations about MMORPGs growing up. Let's throw all that to the side for now. XIV is the revitalization the Final Fantasy series deserved well before I finally gave it a chance, and I can assure you that XIV has made the series great again.

An Exercise in World Building

I mentioned above that I'm reading the One Piece manga right now, and it has a lot in common with XIV. Both are massive undertakings that will take hours upon hours to get caught up on, without either story being properly concluded as of today. Both are subdivided into "arcs" ("expansions" in the case of XIV) which hone in on specific settings and their various internal strifes and resolutions. Both have lots of story in between these major arcs which end up impacting future arcs down the road, with clues and foreshadowing often left years in advance before the main plot turns its focus to these conflicts. Both take the time to build multiple internal settings which dive into the culture, history, politics, mythologies, religions, you name it of various locales. Both carry an attention to detail which reveals how much their respective writers care about their worlds and purposely make them as immersive as possible.

I have another piece in mind for how I think One Piece is the perfect Dungeons and Dragons campaign, so I'll leave the comparisons for another time. However, I really can't emphasize enough the depth of XIV's worldbuilding. Let's get the obvious complaints out of the way - the base game (colloquially called A Realm Reborn or ARR) isn't necessarily the greatest story. It takes its time to slowly introduce you to the world and has a lot of padding in between mission critical story beats. However, this is all necessary for slowly setting up some of the most compelling conflicts in the series.

Fair warning - I've just recently started the Stormblood expansion, and I'm told its follow-up Shadowbringers is easily the highlight of the entire experience. However, I still want to call attention to the post Realm Reborn (also called the 2.x patches) and Heavensward narratives. 2.x is a puzzle for me - I was warned for weeks on end that 2.x would be a brick wall to get through before you get to "the good stuff," and admittedly, this was true from a gameplay perspective. The quests were relatively boring to the point where I could only do a handful at a time before getting distracted by something else. However, the narrative that's built up here slowly weaves several different plot threads that were fascinating to keep tabs on, including:

  1. A refugee crisis being exploited by local merchants
  2. A denounced heretic slowly gathering followers in the name of a misunderstood cause she views as just
  3. A monarch hoping to revamp her current government into a proper democracy
  4. The rise of a group of cultists, neither living nor dead, hoping to manipulate each of your actions for their profit
  5. A close ally hoping to build his own military force independent of other nations and their squabbling politics

and so much more. My friend and I jokingly referred to this section as "Anime Game of Thrones" and frankly, the ending of the 2.x story is worthy of a penultimate episode in the best GoT seasons. All of the threads listed above intersect in a climax that has to be seen to believed. I won't spoil anything, but the finale leaves you on the run and taking refuge in the foreign nation of Ishgard, and it's here in the Heavensward expansion that XIV really comes into its own.

Heavensward spends the majority of its time as a case study of this new nation of Ishgard, and there is a lot to take in. You learn about its aristocratic make-up, its theocracy, its religion, its history, its motivations as a country, and slowly begin to unravel a myriad of falses beliefs the Ishgardians have held for over a thousand years. There's plenty of conspiracies, politics, and diplomatic relations with a nation of dragons to get invested in, and by the time the credits roll, you'll have a thorough understanding of the region and have completely upended its citizens' worldviews.

It would be one thing to stop there, but the story immediately after Heavensward gives a natural follow-up to the original game's climax. After uprooting an entire nation's national identity, there's bound to be some residual conflict, and XIV goes to great lengths to explore how various Ishgardian citizens respond to the aftermath of Heavensward. I realize I'm being vague as I don't want to spoil anything for newcomers, but this series of quests assured me that XIV isn't just about getting you your big climax with a visually awe-inspiring final boss (although rest assured, Heavensward has just that). This game is conscious that it takes place within a world and goes out of its way to explore the cognitive dissonance the players' actions have imposed on the world at large. The greatest compliment I can give is that I have sympathy for all sides in this conflict and still think about these issues, which in my eyes is the real triumph of XIV's storytelling.

Community During Quarantine

Despite its heavy focus on story, XIV is still an online experience. You will see other players running around the world. You'll see them performing...questionable actions to one another in the public eye. You'll team up with other adventurers to tackle various dungeons, bosses, and raids as you slowly explore the deepest corners of Eorzea. As the real world is currently plummeting into what feels like a post-apocalyptic isolated hellscape, this sense of community has been a powerful thing to experience during quarantine.

Hell, even the very few toxic players I've encountered have been warped into good memories. My friend and I tried out one of the earliest raids, the Crystal Tower, just a few weeks after starting. A fellow party member kept giving poorly worded advice, and when I complained that I was trying but having a hard time with it being my first run, he kept spamming "READING IS FUNDAMENTAL" to the chat. It stung a little in the moment, but my friend and I have never stopped referencing that phrase as a joke several months later.

In short, if Wholesome Hot Takes ever has a merch section, you can expect a "READING IS FUNDAMENTAL" T-shirt and laptop sticker.

Thankfully, these instances have been few and far between. The vast majority of the time, FFXIV players have been nothing but kind and generous towards baby-fresh-eyes newcomers like myself. I joined a Free Company (what other MMOs call "guilds") early on, and I've enjoyed keeping up with their antics in their private Discord and have receieved their help on more than a few occassions as I plow through the main story to catch up with them. When I arrived at the final dungeon of the base game, I was greeted with seven other supportive veterans who asked about my experiences so far, gave some pointers, and gave me a sense of pride for completing the base game for the first time.

My fondest memory in XIV, however, was entirely unplanned and had nothing to do with dungeons, bosses, or any gameplay elements at all. While playing online with my friend, we happened to stumble across a mass gathering of folks in the Gridania amphitheater. Upon further inspection, we realized that we'd stumbled into a virtual graduation ceremony for all the high school/university graduates who didn't get to celebrate their achievements in person due to COVID-19. One by one, the grads were introduced in the chat with their various accolades to step onto the stage and accept their "diploma". My friend and I then proceeded to crash their virtual after-party filled with music, streakers, and spraying virtual champagne on each other.

It brought a tear to my (admittedly at the time, tipsy) eye. My girlfriend thought it was kind of lame. Fair enough.

Look, COVID has been a rough time for everyone. As a software engineer who's well equipped to work from home, I understand I have it better than most right now. I've still suffered the pangs of loneliness during these last few months, and have resigned myself to the fact that life could very well be like this for at least another 12 months. The XIV community has been a surprising outlet during all of this. Between random mass gatherings like a graduation ceremony to a few simple exchanges between party members during a 20 minute dungeon, playing an MMO during these times has made a marked difference on my mood simply from the social interactions at play.

Game For All Moods

My mood's still going to swing back and forth, but thankfully, XIV is an expansive enough game where no matter what mood I'm in, I can always find something to mess around with. I'm a very narrative-driven person (my English degree can't be ignored), so the majority of my time is spent advancing the main story. However, there's plenty of days where reading through a bunch of lore-heavy dialogue isn't really how I want to spend my time. So what else is there to do in XIV? On random occassions, I'll find myself

  1. Wandering the world and taking in all the visual sights
  2. Redoing earlier dungeons with newcomers to get them sweet Experience Points
  3. Trying out some of the other "jobs" (classes). I'm mainly a Summoner, but I'm tipping my toes into the Dragoon waters as well.
  4. Working on getting my own room in my Free Company's house and planning its interior design (it's currently just a table and a poster and I couldn't be prouder)

and plenty more. XIV has plenty of content, and I'll admit that most of it is grindy, but it's always relaxing when you want to immerse yourself in the world without having to think too much about the main story. Interior design is its own black hole - when played in a certain style, this game is basically Animal Crossing: A Village Reborn.

A Series Reborn

If it's not clear by now, I'm head over heels for Final Fantasy XIV. I recently played through The Last of Us: Part II and was actively annoyed that it took me away from XIV's story. I can't stop humming its soundtrack. Its hooks are so deep in me that it's really the only game I'm actively interested in right now. As someone who's already a massive Final Fantasy fanboy, XIV has been a blessing for me during quarantine, and maybe it's the game for you, too.

FFXIV is currently free to play all the way through the Heavensward expansion - if this article interested you, give the game a shot and feel free to friend me. I'm a Miquo'te (...yes OK, I'm a cat girl because the outfits are more fun) on the Brynhildr server named Prinith M'whiskers, and I hope to see y'all on the fields of Eorzea and beyond.