I’ve written before about games that are so big that you can find almost anything you want to look for in them. In games like Dragon Age: Origins, it leaves you with a game that isn’t really saying anything or that buries the things it would like to say in smaller chunks of storytelling so that you, the all-important player, can make whatever choices you’d like and still wind up doing some form of the “heroic” thing in the end. In games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, it never says anything but presents you with enough opportunities for you to say something about what you’re seeing that you will find a story emerging from your experience with the game. I’ve always preferred the latter, where the game relies on setting things up for you to discover or lend your voice to, because all of my experiences with things like the former have left me feeling satisfied with my video game time but unfulfilled. I’ve never really blamed games like that because how the hell are you supposed to write a story that can account for that much player choice without sacrificing a lot of the direction you’d like or rendering most player choice meaningless? How could you craft a story meant to have wide appeal that still makes a stand about what is good and what is bad in a way that will surely be alienating to some people? Well, Final Fantasy XIV does it mostly by (so far) taking a few weak but potentially alientating stands on some issues and letting everyone you skip all the cutscenes you’d like (with a few exceptions, but none of those ever seem to overlap with a story that has something to say beyond “hero good, villain bad”). Which I find incredibly surprising now that I’m digging into more and more of the story following the story that plays out over the first fifty levels of your character in the game given how it abjectly refused to do anything of the sort early on.

Now, I haven’t really changed my opinions about that part of the story. The early game is still rife with racism, defense of certain kinds of liberal colonialism, and ample sexism (despite all three of the main world leaders being women–though one of them has a male general who seems to do a lot of leading in her stead in this early part of the story), but the game seems to recognize this and start to more pointedly take issue with the world as established as I’m playing through the parts of the story that came out between the base game (A Realm Reborn) and the first expansion (Heavensward). Important characters actually have conversations about what it means for them to be unable to take in more refugees. A character from the non-governmental organization your player character is a part of (The Scions) calls out one of the leaders of the three local governments for forcing a lot of the “Beast Tribes” to rely on summoning their gods in order to keep themselves, their families, and their cultures alive. That same government leader literally responds by telling your ally “well, they were also trying to kill us and sure, there’s no contest without the gods they summon to their side partly by sacrificing themselves for that cause, but we didn’t want to die and isn’t it also our right to kill to survive?” while the game lets those statements hang in the air so long that you can’t help but read them as the hollow excuses they are. Sure, I wish the game went a little bit further or at least let the excuses fully hang rather than having the ally who started this whole pointed discussion walk away while essentially saying “well, gee, that’s a toughie. I hope we can figure something out soon.” but this feels like a pretty significant improvement over the unchallenged abject racism and imperialism of the first part of the story.

Despite how large and expansive the story is so far, it seems to actually be saying something. I’m not entirely sure what yet, since there’s so very much of it before I get to the next expansion and I have to juggle the normal activities of any Massively Multiplayer Online game on top of following up on the various quests that are available to me right now, but it definitely seems to be driving toward something. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, like I was with Sea of Stars, but I’ve yet to feel that same vague dread that there’s no way they’d actually follow through on the story they seem to be setting up. Maybe that’s because it’s still a somewhat milquetoast statement. While even that is still an improvement, it has hardly stepped beyond what would have once been considered a sensible, moderate position (at least in the US: I’ve got very little understanding of anything but the broadest strokes of Japanese politics and I wouldn’t presume to claim anything about that sphere). Right now, though, as it discusses refugees, immigration, reactionary politics, and even the despotic power of the ultra wealthy, it feels like it’s got something to say that at least the US needs to hear. It’s difficult to play through the parts of the story I’m at without seeing the micro version of the macro issues at play in modern US culture. Vague threats of some trouble on the horizon, a weak sense of unity that falters in the face of every new threat–real or perceived–and the ever-present threat of “the danger from within!” stoked by people with agendas and made literal, in this case, by giving the locals that central three governments displaced the ability to occasionally wreck shop until your player character can show up to stop them. There’s a lot of parallels.

Given that all those issues have been global problems for a long time and that this game came out in a geo-political environment not that dissimilar from the current one (it’s been a little bit over a decade, after all, which isn’t that much time), it is hardly surprising. What is surprising is that maybe this game is taking a look at the fact that, while none of the three “official” governments in Eorzea are called “empires,” they are nevertheless imperial states, each of them conquering and colonizing their locales (some more than others) as the people they push to the margins must fight to survive and thereby provide all the “justification” these powers need to continue to wage war against them. I know it’s a video game. I know that it probably won’t take that nuanced of a stance on any of this because, well, “if we don’t kill these guys, they’re just gonna summon their god to kill us and if we all gotta kill to survive, then we, the established and strongest groups, will survive. Just, you know, keep showing up to kill the gods so we won’t get wiped out by the people we’re hunting to the brink of extinction” is a pretty shit thing to put into a game with only mild push back that ends in a quiet admission that there’s nothing anyone could do so. I really hope it does take more of an issue with that crap, eventually. Or at least addresses it in some way. It game’s developers made a choice when they set up the world this way, with three major governments being threatened by an empire as they also threaten the indigenous peoples they’ve all displaced or enslaved. They didn’t need to have that many layers to this “terrors of imperialism” cake.

Anyway, I can’t stop thinking about this stuff and while I’m definitely still enjoying the gameplay side of things and hanging out with my friends online multiple times a week, I’m still very on the fence about the narrative of this MMO. We’ll have to wait and see how I feel about it as I continue through the game. At least there’s a narrative to analyze! I wasn’t really expecting a story with even this modest bit of depth to it, so I’m pleasantly surprised. For now. Barring some potential hard turns into imperialism or outright fascism (as opposed to the baby fascism/libertarian “rugged individualism” that one of those governments has going on). It would really suck if it went that way. I mean, I’d be out zero money, but I’m really having a fun time and I’d hate to have to bail out because the story uncritically accepts liberal imperialism. I get too much of that shit, and all the fascism, in reality to even put up with it in a video game.