Fairly recently (a week and a half ago, as of this going up, since I apparently finish major story segments of the game on Monday or Tuesday), I finally finished the Main Scenario Quests for the central chunk of the first major expansion of Final Fantasy XIV. This one, called “Heavensward” or 3.0, depending on if you’re into titles or major version numbers, features a section of the world that went largely ignored in the original part of the game (A Realm Reborn) because of its policies of isolation. This place, Ishgard, is a society located within a cold and dreary chunk of the world that withdrew into its major city (and surrounding defenses) as the thousand-year-long dragon war began to escalate around the same time the invasion of the surrounding area started ramping up. Following the end of the “patch content” between the end of A Realm Reborn and the start of Heavensward, you’re granted entry into this isolated city, adopted by one of the major houses (metaphorically, I mean, not legally), and then thrown into the societal problems facing this country like a Holy Hand Grenade from the Worms games. As is right and proper for the protagonist of a video game, you crash into a thousand years of lies, an ancient betrayal, and shine the light of true on the world shebang like you’re a nightlight in a dark hallway. And, you know, meet some memorable characters along the way.
Most of the people you meet are relatively new, introduced as part of this expansion or introduced right before it, during the lead-up to the expansion, but there’s plenty of familiar faces since the central issues of this expansion, the Dravanian-Ishgardian conflict, shows up in the last few levels of the base game. This initial conflict is expanded on as you meet your first named dragons, find out why this city-state closed its borders and it’s walls to outsiders, and then find out what they believe about the origins of the war that has dragged on for what everyone says is a thousand years. After that, you leave the city, explore the wilderness, meet some people from the other side, discover the side you were assigned to by the game is in the wrong, actually, and you can finally start being openly sympathetic to the side that was wronged, which I enjoyed because I’ve been shouting at my screen from day one that the oppressive religious culture that was just fucking killing people who were being accused of being “heretics” despite there being absolutely no evidence to support their guilt and tons of evidence exonerating them is probably not on the right side of the war. So it felt very nice to learn that I was actually correct all along.
Unfortunately, all my favorite characters died and that sucks. Which really didn’t feel great, coming out of A Realm Reborn, where everyone also died or vanished or just disappeared in a way that heavily implied their death but doesn’t seem to have really resulted in their deaths. I don’t know how I’ve managed it, but I seem to have developed a penchant for latching onto characters that are absolutely going to die in whatever story elements are coming up. It’s a little disheartening, but all of the deaths were done well and the story was significantly improved over the first one. There was still a little racism and imperialism stuff, but it felt much more intentional and depicted as something bad rather than sort of just showing up in what everyone was doing. I’ll admit that things wrapped up a little too nicely, in my opinion, but there’s still all of the patch content to go and I’m sure some of the threads they left dangling will snarl things up in interesting ways.
My general emotional reaction to this conclusion is a bit of confusion, if I’m being honest. Previously, almost everything wrapped up in the main story chunk and all of the patch content was dealing with new plot elements, wrapping up the few loose ends, and introducing the pieces that would become integral to the future of the various characters and plotlines. This time, I feel like I only got a piece of the story and it cut things off at such a point that I’m really not sure what’s coming next. We’re at a pivot point but there’s been no real indication of which way things are actually going to pivot. I have some suspicions of course, but the game’s pretty good about telegraphing things and while there’s a few I know will be coming, I’m completely unsure of what context they’ll arrive in. Add in the general sadness I feel at the death of my favorite characters and I’m genuinely considering taking a break from doing anything plot-related to give myself some time to process all of this and figure out what I want to do next. And, you know, carry on my quest to craft everything. Maybe continue leveling up all my other jobs so I can have a bunch of stuff set up and ready to start diving into dungeons whenever my friends and I want to do some leveling rather than critically engage with the story content or spend hours and hours crafting things for levels or money.
As this goes up, I’ll be at the end of two months of playing this game. I started downloading the game on the first of January and this post goes up on the 28th of February and I’ve played barely any other games since I started. I’m also getting pretty close to three hundred hours of play time, so it’s clear that I’m very invested here. I can count on one hand the number of games that I’ve played for over three hundred hours. I tend to play a lot of games into the eighty to two-hundred hour range, but I rarely break three hundred on anything but a game I absolutely love. Other such games include Skyrim, Breath of the Wild, Tears of the Kingdom (which is the only game on this list that I don’t actually Absolutely Love, but I want to love it really badly, so that kinda counts), Borderlands 2, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and Minecraft. It’s a full hand, sure, but that’s it. Everything else is below three hundred hours and I’ve never played anything but Breath of the Wild for more than four hundred hours. At least for now, anyway, since Final Fantasy XIV is absolutely going to get there. Hell, it will probably leave BotW behind before long and might even make into the quadruple digits! There’s just so much to do. Which makes it a pretty sound investment, even if I am going to need to start paying for a monthly subscription in another week or two. Still, that’ll be fifteen dollars (or whatever the cost is) well-spent since I clearly get ten times as many hours of fun from the game per month. A good investment these days, considering how much the outside world is changing. At least I’ll have this game to retreat to.