I’ve been slowly progressing the Main Scenario Questline once again in Final Fantasy 14. A little bit at a time. A few quests here or there, a dungeon, a trial, a little bit of support work, and so on. Slowly but surely, I’ve been getting closer and closer to the final parts of Endwalker–little threads that need wrapping up as whatever is next gets slowly referenced and eventually (I’m assuming) revealed. It’s been nice to move at a moderate pace, to make steady progress as I continue splitting my attention between a few different activities or goals, and it has given me plenty of time to chew on what’s been happening. I’m going to avoid details because I’m getting pretty deep into spoiler territory for the events that have been unfolding for the past four major updates to the Endwalkers expansion, but I’ve been having a lot of conversations with one of my Final Fantasy 14 friends about the story that have also given me plenty to think about. For instance, while I instantly agreed and had thought about it much the same way, I didn’t think of the conclusion of Endwalker as “fighting depression itself” until she put it that way. This particular vein of thought prompted me to take a step back from my “what does it mean to be a hero” line of thinking and consider other elements of the story that I hadn’t focused on up to that point. All of which feels a bit silly to admit considering that one of my favorite jokes about the Final Fantasy franchise is that the conclusion to most of the games can be boiled down to some form of “attack and dethrone god.” Which is kind of what happened in Endwalker, if you get just a tiny bit more metaphorical with it.

Instead of attacking and dethroning god, you attacked a metaphor for depression (I’m not going to get specific or even talk about how this all plays out, so don’t worry). There’s actually a lot of discussion of negative emotion and the way it almost seems to be beating down on people as a whole, waiting for a crack in anyone’s armor it can exploit in order to crush us all flat or turn us into something we, and those who care for us, might no longer recognize. Which feels a little frighteningly timely since I’m currently on the road to what seems like stability–and maybe even recovery if this keeps going long enough–after a decade or so of gradually worsening depression and am more and more aware of the way that my depression had turned me into a pancake of a person. Not literally, of course, and not a pancake without depth (like a shadowbox rather than a full 3D model), but I can feel myself stretching and growing in ways I haven’t in years now that the weight of it all has been even just partially lifted from my shoulders. This flattening was not instant, it was incredibly gradual, but I cannot deny the aptness of the metaphor at the heart of much of the latter half of Endwalker even though I’d certainly like to. It is not a comforting thought, to be confronted by the truth of how much of myself I’d lost sight of in the haze of depression that so consumed my life, but I’m not one to shy away from those kinds of thoughts and am even less of that than ever.

It helps that while the base story was about depression and the way it can warp you (or at least that reading of it is one that takes very little reaching to grasp), the main story of the post-expansion updates is a mix of recovery metaphors. Characters in isolation, literal and metaphorical, characters who put themselves aside in order to focus on others, displaced emotion as a coping mechanism, and the reality that it often takes someone else’s offered hand for a person to pull themselves out of these habits is all central to the past four expansions. Sure, the story is slowly unfurled, but that’s just Final Fantasy 14 and the dawning realization of what this story is saying through some of its central characters, even while vaguely hinting at what is to come, has been an absolute delight. It has shown me a series of almost scarily accurrate parallels to my own situation ONCE AGAIN that is absolutely hammering me in the heart every single time I see one of these characters feel a way I have just been grappling with as I, slowly but surely, pull myself out of the pit I’ve sunken into over years. I see all the things I did in the past to cope with my depression and isolation as they grew worse, that I did to keep people from worrying, that I did to try hiding how bad I was getting from people, and the absolutely stark contrast between those decisions and the ones I make now as I feel almost like I’m being flung up and out of the depths. It feels almost like I finally found the emergency life jacket and pulled the ripcord that would cause it to inflate and send me rocketing towards a surface I’d somehow lost track of. I really want to say more, but I know at least one of my friends who is a bit behind me in FF14 often reads these posts and I don’t want to spoil anything beyond the vagaries I’ve already mentioned.

All-in-all, I don’t think I could have asked for a better or more timely metaphor for what I’ve been going through. It’s just so funny that I decided to take a month off progressing the main story of FF14 only to get back into it at exactly the right time for the expansion’s patch-content story to overlap almost perfectly with the sudden changes in my own mental health journey. It genuinely feels almost unbelieveable how perfectly this has lined up but here I am, having seen it align in real time. Which, you know, kind of explains why I was so affected by the story. I mean, I didn’t even really talk about this with my friends who went through it with me since it was a bit too raw to talk about at the time (and I was a bit too emotionally overwhelmed by it all to verbalize this anyway, even if I’d felt like it), but it all just felt so relateble via the depression metaphor. It took little effort to put myself into the place of my character as I played through the final chapter of Endwalker because I already felt like that. I just hid it, denying it to myself and others because I knew there was nothing I could do about it, nothing my friends could do about it, and that talking about it would just make me feel worse as it stripped away my lone defense of just not thinking about it. It was very cathartic, to put it mildly, and I only wish I knew back then how close I was to things starting to change so deeply and completely that I’m still having a difficult time believing how different things are despite having been present in my life the whole time. I didn’t miss a beat and it still feels so radically different that I keep checking in with myself to make sure it’s real and still going on. Good thing I’ve got this whole arc of FF14 to help me process it all.