About a week ago, give or take a couple days because time is blurring together and I genuinely can’t remember how long it has been, I finished the Stormblood expansion of Final Fantasy 14. I’ll freely admit that I went into it a bit miffed and resentful because I’d just finished a bunch of storytelling about other worlds, the loss of balance that had a world being swallowed by light rather than darkness, and the sacrifices we make to see our vision for the future come to pass. The game took all that interesting, intriguing storytelling that it had been building towards for quite a while and tossed it all aside to focus on a popular rebel who used charisma and emotional manipulation to gather an army he could sacrifice in order to summon a god to unleash on not just the empire that conquered his homeland years ago but every single conquered people between him and said empire, including his own people. He was clearly cast as the villain in this moment, creating and then betraying a grassroots rebellion, but the story didn’t sit super well with me because, out of all the characters I’d met, his general politics matched closest to my own and yet the game was constantly casting him as a villain. All of which was further complicated by the fact that he was one of the few people of color in the game and had come to represent the resentful refugee who was not content to live in squalor and take whatever scraps he could beg or steal to keep himself alive, often in wars that defied logic and actual revolutionary practice just so he could be horrible and villainous in a way that advanced the plot.
Anyway, the expansion starts shortly after he kills himself as the final sacrifice required to summon that god (which is then beaten, or at least disabled, in a cutscene), which ultimately pushes your allies to start a military intervention campaign to not only prevent retaliation from the empire he provoked, but also help liberate his people since they were already there anyway. You start to get involved, acting as a neutral party to get permission for these foreign countries to show up so they don’t look like just more invaders, the story progresses predictably for a bit (the rebellion builds, you do some heroic stuff, and foster cooperation through small but meaningful victories against a larger force), but then the rebellion is smacked into the dirt by the intervention of one man, representing the empire, who beats up everyone. Since this is a video game with a protagonist, the game spends a lot of time dancing around the “one special person” theory of action and change, where one person can reshape the world, and this time we get to see the villainous side of it as you take a scripted loss forcing the rebellion to be shattered, several NPCs to be sidelined, and you to go explore a second new area after only spending a little bit of time in this first one.
In this other area, the “far east,” you show up, meet up with some friends, foster another revolution by garnering popular support, recruit outside forces to help you win, and then topple the local branch of the empire because the guy who kicked your butt last time kicks your butt a second time (in another scripted loss) but less severely than the first time and he’s some kind of weird battle pervert who decides he wants to see how this plays out if he doesn’t topple your jenga tower of rebelliousness. Absent his intervention, your heroes are able to do their intervention thing, take out the empire, and reestablish the monarchy (but it’s a good monarchy because this monarch knows people’s names and doesn’t lord over them in any way but via his literal title as their lord), all before returning to your original rebellion that has managed to recover just in time for you to win it this time around, just as you win the fights you have against the empire’s hero guy because they stopped forcing you to lose them.
It’s all fairly standard rebellion stuff that has some fairly interesting and relevant politics if you just watch it all skating around on the surface. Once you dive into the details, though, it starts to get troubling. For example, the leader of the first rebellion gets killed in the later stages of said rebellion and passes his mantle of leadership onto the pretty, white and blonde woman who has been one of your allies this entire time, rather than any of his own people or his literal second-in-command who has been a sidelined feature of this rebellion the entire time. Sure, this white, blonde woman is also from this country, but it’s a bit conspicuous that she’s one of the only white and blonde people you meet who hails from this country. Everyone else is a person of color (or, well, a catperson of color). It isn’t exactly a white savior narrative, but it’s basically a white savior narrative with the detail tacked on that at least she’s from the country she’s white savior-ing. It doesn’t make it that much better, especially when she later on decides that one of the people who grew up in this country and sided with the empire–who also committed numerous war crimes, tortured and killed civillains outside of the context of a war, and even sacrificed the lives of her compatriots and soldiers in order to get acceptance from the empire that was treating her conquered people as second or third class citizens even if they tried to assimilate–should be kept alive rather than, I don’t know, tried and hung for her horrible crimes against the populace. I’m pretty much against prisons and the death penalty and I really like the potential idea of rehabilitative justice that seems to be simmering underneath this particular chain of events, but it really kind of sucks that other people just get killed or imprisoned, apparently, but this one person is going to get a shot at something else despite being the second worst person we encounter in this expansion.
It’s difficult to draw firm lines here because the general ideas this story tells in FF14 are good ones, but there’s a lack of depth or exploration of what they actually mean that really undercuts the intent of them. We’re supposed to side with these rebellions and emotionally invest in them because they’re aligned with the world we’ve occupied up to this point in the story and the empire is clearly the bad guys, but there’s little actual exploration of the rebellion beyond being someone who swoops in to solve the problems any rebellion might face without ever trying to grapple with what it might mean for a rebellion to become so dependant on a single heroic figure or outside support. Or even the difficulties of bringing various rebel factions together! We’re just supposed to accept the quick description of “good” rebellious ideals, accept that everyone can come to gether in the end, and never question what any of it means beyond “well, the opressed, conquered peoples that we care about are now free.”
It’s frustrating to find something that has so much surface and in-the-moment appeal only to have it all fall apart as I think about it after the fact. I couldn’t even say that I was caught up in it, since most of what kept me going and prevented me from being side-tracked by the hollowness of the rebellious ideals is that the characters kept taking a step past the point I thought this game would go, but then never actually followed through on it. It was a constant refrain of “wow, I didn’t expect them to actually espouse this kind of liberal ideal” followed immediately by “wait, this is where they’re stopping this?” and then “well, maybe they’ll come back to it later like they did in the previous expansion, so I guess I’ll hold off on judgment for now.” I don’t know if any of this will get explored further in the patch content for this expansion, but I’m not sure that would make it any better even if they did. It would actually really suck if they left all the nuance to the patch content this time around since they could have very easily just limited themselves to one story line rather than going through two. It all just feels very messily put together in a way that felt intriguing and interesting in the moment but that just looks like a mess of half-baked mental exercises in retrospect.
I’m still enjoying my time with the game, though, this difficulty with the latest chunk of story nonwithstanding, so I am committed to continuing. The next expansion seems to be everyone’s favorite, more or less, so I’m interested to see where that goes and how it continues from this very grounded and real but still underbaked exploration of counter-empire war, because I just really don’t see how we’re supposed to get to what I suspect is coming based on what little I know of the next epansion (namely that it returns to the “other worlds and maybe too much light is a bad thing” narrative from the end of the previous expansion). There’s still so much war and post-rebellion stuff to handle that I’m worried all the nuance will be brushed past in order to get to where the story needs to go next.