As I’ve played through Final Fantasy 14, one common refrain from a lot of the NPCs every time I hit what should be a lull between expansions is just how tired my character must be and wouldn’t I enjoy a break. Most of the time, I’ve gone immediately from that “go relax for a bit” end-of-expansion message to the “You look so rested after your downtime!” start-of-new-content message, which isn’t really a problem since I can acknowledge that the game was not meant to be played in so compressed a fashion as I have, but it has always struck me as kind of funny. It took on a bit of a different note during Endwalker, though, as the game started to build in little moments of downtime and inaction for the primary NPCs and your player character, focused as it was on the development of those relationships in preparation for the finale, almost all of which were far too short or actually cut short by events proceeding without us. So, this time, when I hit the end of the expansion and was told to go rest, I didn’t pick up the next mission. I, personally, took most of a week to rest and do whatever tickled my fancy rather than continue my constant grind of progression through the game’s quests. Last weekend, though, I started dipping my toes back into the expansion content, focusing more on the side activities than the story quests that I knew would start setting up whatever is coming next. One of them in particular caught my attention (mostly because one of my friends started on it immediately and her talk about it made it seem like a lot of fun), so I made sure to set some time aside for starting the Island Sanctuary process.