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.

For instance, there’s multiple points in the Shadowbringers expansion where you’re able to reference important lines from past characters, spoken at some of their most pivotal moments. Some, you deliver verbatim as characters old and new struggle with things you’ve already dealt with in previous chunks of the story. Some you put a spin on as you deliver the essence of the line, cut and shaped to fit the moment. All of them, though, are big moments the game builds toward. Each is it’s own separate climatic moment as your character pushes to the heart of the problem and the heroes carry on despite the odds. Because the story has slowly built toward this moment, expanding upon things alluded to or shown outright from the very beginning to this major point of convergence, every beat hits. Every blow lands. Every moment of emotion rings true. There is no story like this one because no story has the time to tell itself like this one has. Sure, novels can come out over the course of decades, each taking it’s necessary time to unfold each major step in the narrative, but they are still only books, measured in hours, and your experience cannot how to compare to the passage of time reqiured to play through to this specific point in Final Fantasy 14. It took me nearly one thousand hours and while I’m sure there are things I could have done to keep myself more focused and moving foward, it is still a monumental amount of time to be picking your way through the story.

After all, because so much of the game’s content is locked behind story progression, even running dungeons over and over again is just experiencing parts of the story again and again. Yes, doing your daily Main Scenario Quest dungeons can be onerous and it can eat a huge chunk of your time if you get unlucky, but it is still the story unfolding. There are still secrets to learn and nuance to consider as you learn more and more about the world and the people inhabiting it. Some things will look different, once you’ve gotten far enough away from them, and these onerous, slow experiences are no exception. Even the boring, noncommittal raids from the first portion of the game come to mean something else if you play the game long enough. I might get bored with some of the repetition, but I am never annoyed by it. After all, without this stuff to keep things fresh in my mind, I might have forgotten some important things by the time I got to my current part of the game. The experience would have been all the worse for having forgotten them.

Which leaves me wondering how people who played this all out over years were supposed to remember any of it. I mean, I know it because I did it all in a matter of months since I’ve got absolutely no chill whatsoever, but I can’t imagine my memory being as sharp or as clear about the meaning behind some of the dialogue choices if it had taken years to get there. Which wouldn’t really take away from the game, if I didn’t remember. The moments and options are natural enough and strong enough that they can stand on their own, whether you remember or not, but the thought of missing every little nod, every little clever incorporation of what came before, makes me glad I didn’t have time to forget any of it. I think it’s possible that someone taking the time to play through the game more slowly could also easily internalize it, as could someone who might have alternate characters they’ve played as or some of the New Game+ chapters done as they’ve revisited things over the years with friends or new players. I mean, I remember a lot of the pivotal moments of games I’ve played multiple times over the years despite how long it’s been. After all, these things are high notes for their individual story moments that seem like ends unto themselves and it is only the clever, careful storyweaving of Shadowbringers that reveals them to be loose threads to be tied into the current story rather than just bits of string dangling from knots, and I genuinely can’t express what an amazing moment it was when I realized that this story was doing that.

Every beat is a moment of masterful storytelling, whether it bears immediate fruit or not. I cannot emphasize enough how wowed I am by this. Nothing I’ve ever experienced before has prepared me for this and yet it seems like the logical conclusion for what to do with a game like Final Fantasy 14, that will be running for years and years to come. It makes every MMO that has been abandoned, left to rot, or tied off at a moment in history feel like a failure of imagination by whoever made that call. Sure, I haven’t played a lot of MMOs, so maybe this type of storytelling is more common, but the only one that has ever felt even nearly as fully interwoven was Guild Wars 2 and even that feels like it pales in comparison to the immersive, player-centric storytelling that comes to fruition in Final Fantasy 14.

I have a lot more to say about it, but not without getting into heavy spoiler territory for basically every expansion of the game, so I’m going to save that for a later post. This one will be yet another recommendation to invest your time in this game if you’re looking for something new and fresh and excellently told. And, you know, have one thousand hours to give to a single game. I cannot emphasize how important a part that is. You will not have as much fun if you come in with only thirty to one hundred hours to give. The game is just starting to get truly interesting around then. You gotta be in for the long haul and expect this story told over the better half of a decade to take a while to spin up to full capacity. It’s definitely worth it though, in my opinion.