It took exactly five months, from January 1st until June 1st, but I finally cleared all of Shadowbringers. This is notable since that particular expansion seems to be widely regarded as Final Fantasy 14 at it’s best and is the first bit of game content you can’t access with a free account, almost like they know they’re sitting on gold and want you to have to pay for it. Which is fair, in my opinion. I couldn’t possibly blame them for it, but then I bought the full game the instant I hit the 3.0 expansion so I could fully invest in all the parts of the game I’d been denied up to that point, so I’m clearly not someone who is going to suggest it might be unfair for game developers to get paid for the great work they’ve done. But that’s not what this post is about. This post is about the storytelling being done by Final Fantasy 14 and how it reaches what might be it’s pinnacle in Shadowbringers and the related patch content. After all, this expansion represents a moment years in the making, tying things together that have been dangling since the early parts of A Realm Reborn. There is clearly more to come, more that is being built towards and more surprises to catch me off-guard, but that stuff all feels like the final book in a series, meant to wrap up the throughline story while Shadowbringers is the penultimate novel that brings it all together and points it at the finish line so the last book can wrap it all up. It’s an impressive bit of work and while I’ve positively crammed my days with FF14 in order to get to this point in five months, it makes it that much easier to notice everything that has been brought together.