I finally finished all of the patch content for the Stormblood expansion of Final Fantasy 14. Well, the Main Scenario Quest parts of it, anyway. There’s still plenty of quests, the raids, and who knows what else still available for me to do, but I’ve done most of the content quests (the ones that have their quest marker filled in with a plus sign on a blue background) and all of the story stuff, so I’m pretty much done with it other than slowly working through the other stuff as I have time, inclination, and enough friends online. I finished it just a couple days before my friends returned from Japan, actually, and had to slow down since I’d promised to wait to start the next expansion until they were back in the US and could get my reactions to it live. So, I’ve spent a few days noodling on the expansion as a whole and even spoke with some of my friends about it, to see what they thought. The general reaction to it seems to be pretty muted, since most people don’t seem to hate it or love it. I mean, the most common reaction was “you did the entire expansion in two weeks???”” but the second-most-common reaction was “it was fine.” More people hated it than loved it, but it really seems to have not made much of a lasting impression on people and while some of this is likely the result of how tired I am this week, I’ll admit that it is already slipping from my mind as well. It wasn’t bad and I enjoyed my time running through the plot, but it made it through the entire expansion without really making a statement about rebellion politics, reform, justice, or the particular cruelty of empire.

There is a parallel set up by the entire story of the Stormblood expansion. In both of the rebellion stories, your local adversary is a member of the culture you’re trying to assist in rebelling who has turned against their people by aligning themselves with the empire that conquered them. As you get through the base expansion, you learn more and more about these two women without getting too much in the way of specifics. Each one of them was treated poorly by the people of their homeland, one because her parents aligned their family with the empire in order to survive as well as possible and the other because individuals in her life put her in a position to be used and abused by their culture at large. One faced mass anger from her people resulting in the death of her father, rejection by the culture her parents tried to assimilate into, and repudiation of everything she did by her culture as she tried to find a way to force the empire that had conquered her to treat her as she believed they should. The other faced abuse akin to slavery from her adoptive parents, was married off to an old man to aid her adoptive family’s position in society, and then was sold to a brothel to pay off the old man’s debts when he died. One faces hate and rejection from all sides and the other faces a life of misery and ill-use because she slipped through the cracks in a way her society was all too willing to accept. They’re very different in their particulars, but their stories are largely the same up to a point.

One, an Ala Mhigan named Fordola, rises in rank via ruthless military service at the expense of her people, proving herself a loyal citizen of the empire by beating and killing her people in a way that makes it clear that she’s just as willing to kill them as their conquerers are. The other, an Doman woman named Yotsuyu, betrays her people in exchange for being placed in charge of the empire’s government and uses this power to make as many of her people suffer as she can manage. Both of them are responsible for an untold number of deaths and both of them show a ruthless willingness to kill even the people aligned with them in order to follow their orders or achieve their goals. As the main expansion’s story ends, though, both of these women are in a state of relative powerlessness, unseated by your main character, and the game turns from it’s larger focus on rebellion and politics and what it means to earn and preserve a country’s freedom to zero in on the stories of both of these women. Ostensibly, the game is making a statement about the importance of intent and the differences in redemption when it is accepted along with full responsibility for your actions and when it is largely rejected via a lack of repentance, but it muddies the results by trying to make both characters sympathetic despite all the awful things each one of them has done.

Fordola, in the expansion, is shown killing her friends, the people you eventually see her join in a vow to do whatever it takes to gain some measure of acceptance within the empire. Sure, she’s doing it on behalf of her people, but she and her friends go on to become the most feared killers of their people, showing a ruthlessness that even the empire can’t match. She’s left alive though, by the actions of the NPC hero of this faction, in order to have her face some kind of justice for her actions and, as is often repeated in heated scenes, to see that it was possible to create a better future for everyone without serving the empire. She’s eventually even offered redemption by the game’s storytelling, trying to depict her as sympathetic by showing her losing her father to an angry crowd in a surreal scene that feels forced in it’s anger (and is an utter failure to depict how these kinds of empires ACTUALLY work) and repeating the idea that she was just trying to do right by her people. It then offers it more concretely by allowing her a moment to use the power the empire granted her to protect the new government that is imprisoning her, showing her as still trying to do what she thinks is best for her people by being a willing protector and then returning to her cell without issue once that is done. It’s a strange scene that is then never followed up on as if that single act as enough to undo the storytelling done in the base expansion to show how much everyone hated her and how willing she was to sacrifice her friends and soliders when told to by the empire she served. I feels so out of town and so incredibly opposed to itself that I still can’t reconcile the two depictions of this character.

On the other hand, the story of Yotsuyu stays incredible consistent and ends in a fairly satisfying way, which feels funny since the game is depicting Fordola’s story as the “good” outcome and Yotsuyu’s as the “bad” one. In the end, Yotsuyu’s feels more fulfilling because they actually succeed in making her feel a little bit sympathetic but never really try to force it because it has been clear from the start about how her actions have been a result of her desire to inflict misery and pain on other people rather than some misguided attempt to help her country survive. Yotsuyu is shown to be a product of her upbringing and the foibles of her culture in a way that feels consistent since, unlike Fordola’s story, doesn’t hinge on a single painful event that feels incredibly out-of-character for a conquered people who have been so ground into the dirt that they can barely muster soldiers for a rebellion by the time she’s in her early adult years. Yotsuyu’s story is one of abuse, of neglect, or the failings of an entire people to care for its people even as it tries to find a way for them to all live under the boot of empire, but it is largely mitigated by the story’s admission that this isn’t the results of the culture at large but the actions of individuals within it. Sure, the culture makes those actions possible and “reasonable” in the mind of Yotsuyu’s parents, but care is taken to show that her adoptive family are just terrible, horrible people, turning her into the tortured husk of a person who can only feel when she inflicts on other people the kind of pain she felt all her life.

Her redemption is offered by her rescuered and the game as a whole seems willing to accept it given that she lost her memory during the events that should have killed her. We spend almost the entire duration of the post-expansion patch content trying to figure out how to navigate the fact that the loss of her memory makes her a new person with none of the pain and visciousness that she displayed while grinding her country beneath the boot of empire. It asks if it would be just to put her to death, who should be the people to make that decision, and what does it mean to try to heal from an abuser who lacks the ability to take responsibility for their actions. All of which is being casually interrupted by the machinations of her brother who wants to restore her to her old viscious self in order to disrupt the peace talks he is leading with a degree of plausible deniability literally no one else is willing to give him. He eventually succeeds, Yotsuyu lashes out at everyone and everything now, inflicting her pain on anyone within reach, and eventually being killed for real this time by your protagonist, but not before she gets to kill the people responsible for making her the way she was. Importantly, though she feels a degree of internal conflict given that she’s been offered redemption and care by some of the people she hurt, she is largely unrepentant. She goes to her death knowing she’s underserving of the kindness she was shown while lacking her memory and we get a really satisfying story involving a complex character who is bad, yes, but is also a product of the worst parts of her culture rather than someone who has chosen to be vile for “good reasons” (which is how Fordola is largely depicted).

So yes, Yotsuyu’s story is more satisfying, but the game does what it can to avoid leaving you with questions about whether or not Yotsuyu deserved repemption, if she could have actually changed, or how people should react to someone who can’t be held responsible for the pain they inflicted on an entire country. It takes all those questions and either presents an answer or does the work required to make them irrelevant, which sucks. I’d much rather have finished the story wondering if she might have turned out different if she’d been given more time before recovering her memories or if she might have made different choices if she hadn’t been constantly reexposed to the sources of her trauma by her shitty brother, but instead we get the answer that no, this was always who she would be one her memories came back and that there was never going to be a path to redemption for her. And then, back on Fordola’s side of things, the actual work of her redemption is never revisited following the moment she “proved” that she’s willing to do whatever she thinks her people need. We never get an exploration of whether or not she should be held accountable for just how wrong she was to do what she did, on whether or not she would face anything resembling justice, or what might happen with all the people she hurt when they fight out that she’s apparently allowed to leave her cell to fight when necessary. It just never comes up again at all! At least not yet.

It’s frustrating to play through some of these stories since the game always falls short of actually saying something interesting, or even asking interesting questions. And it’s impossible to tell if some of this stuff will ever be revisted because I’m so far from the end of the game’s story but an entire decade has passed since this game was started on its current course. I’ve gotten through half the game in three months, but it took this game half a decade, at least, to get through the same stuff, so my entire sense of time is incredibly distorted. I have no idea how much time has passed in-world and while it is possible that not much time has passed so that all these questions about Fordola’s redemption are still relevant in-game, it is impossible to say that they’re still relevant out of the game given how much time has passed since they first came up. So now I’ve just got this weak half-statement about redemption and all I can do is push into the next expansion and hope that it is everyone’s favorite because it actually has a story to tell that makes a statement about literally anything at all. Hell, I’ll even take one or more interesting questions about the nature of the world, if nothing else. I’ll take anything at this point that isn’t a firmly closed-off answer.