Over the weekend, after about six or so weeks away from doing any kind of Main Scenario Quest progression in Final Fantasy 14, I’m back at it again. For the first time in my seven and a half months of playing the game, it ACTUALLY feels like I’ve been away for a while when I meet back up with the main cast of NPCs and they all remark on how well I look like I’m doing (and I look GREAT, btw, since my main glams all got updated renders in the latest patch) and how nice it is to meet up again after all this time. Generally speaking, there’s usually at least a few months between an expansion and each of its patch updates, so people playing the game as it came out got to experience the passage of time that the game softly implies–albeit usually a truncated version given the way people talk about finally seeing each other again (the game’s actual timeline is incredibly unclear, but I’d guess it’s maybe a fifth of the real-world passage of time if I had to suggest something). When you play through almost the entire main story arc of the game that exists today, you don’t really get the same breaks and breathing space that the game was (eventually) written to reference. It was interesting to see the way they went from tightly-spaced events with a degree of implied continuity that mmade it feet like there wasn’t much time between each major event to events spread out by gaps the characters suggest were significant when they reconvene. They took the nebulousness of in-game time and went from ignoring it–which implied not much time passed at all–to doing enough soft framing around the start of each expansion and certain patches that it implied a moderate passage of time. Perhaps most notably, this was a major component of Endwalker’s conclusion and, given my own feelings at the time, it felt like it would be doing myself and the game a disservice to once more dive into the plot immediately.
Continue readingFinal Fantasy 14
I Can’t Imagine What Final Fantasy 14 Would Have Like Without My Free Company
Aside from my very first month of playing the game, I have not experienced what it is like to play Final Fantasy 14 without being a member of a Free Company (the FF14 version of player guilds). The friends who got me into the game were members of one already, so I was already predisposed to joining that particular group from the get-go, but the warm welcome I received while I was still a new player on a free-to-play account solidified my decision to join. Since then, I have not regretted my choice. Almost everyone in the FC has been a warm and welcoming person who has done what they could, sometimes at mild to moderate inconvenience, to help me out as I’ve gotten further and further into the game. From free level-appropriate gear when I was reached the tough middle of my crafting journey to tons of free collectibles (music for the in-game jukebox, minions, clothing items, mounts, and more) more or less constantly, I would not have made the progress I have without the support of this FC. Nor would I have made as much money since everything I know about crafting to make money has been learned from people in the FC and almost all of the money I’ve made in the game has been made via crafting and gathering jobs for the FC’s leader (often as part of deals he has brokered with other very wealthy players). Joining this FC immediately upon becoming a paying subscriber to the game has irrevoccably altered my experience in ways I rarely stop to think about now that I’ve adjusted to it.
Continue readingHousing Opportunities In Final Fantasy 14
After a relatively short time, I managed to win the opportunity to buy a house in Final Fantasy 14. I know people who have been trying for well over a year to get a house in one of the few player housing zones in the game, but I got incredibly lucky and won on a housing plot in what turned out to be a relatively unpopular area, based on how few bids there were. Personally, I think parts of that area are incredibly underrated, which is why I added them to my list of possible locations. Normally, getting a house of some kind wouldn’t be as big of a deal as it has been this past year, but there’s been a few events in the US that had the local housing market locked in a way that it normally isn’t. Typically, if you do not enter your home for forty-five days, your house will be automatically demolished, your things put in storage, and some amount of the house’s cost refunded to you. This is to prevent players from purchasing and sitting on the nicest housing plots long after they’ve stopped playing the game. Sure, it’s still incredibly easy to just log in every so often to keep your house occupied, but that means you have to buy a subscription every month and a half, at minimum, and Final Fantasy 14 loves that. They want your money. So, prior to the massive floods and damage to North Carolina last year, this process happened regularly and houses would go back on the market at a fairly normal rate. Once those floods happened and huge portions of the US (well, not that huge in proportion the the US itself but still huge compared to most parts of the world) were unable to access secure internet and gaming time, Square Enix decided to put the timers on hold. A decision they relented on in December of 2024 and them immediately put back in place during the L.A. wildfires. As a result, until incredibly recently, most houses only became available because people actively sold them or moved into new housing of their own.
Continue readingStill At The Same (Raiding) Party Three Months Later In Final Fantasy 14
One of the activities I was most excited to do with the Free Company (what Final Fantasy 14 calls player guilds) was something called “Content Rewind.” This isn’t an official activity in Final Fantasy 14, but the name given to an FC activity by the founder that the rest of us have adopted. The idea is to go back to early raids and run through them in a way that resembles what it would have been like to play through them when they originally came out. Rather than the “MINE” method (Minimum Item level, No Echo) that is the hardest possible way to do the raids, doing them “synched, no echo” is a way to include a decent amount of difficulty without making them as difficult as possible. For MINE, you’re using gear that has been scaled down to the lowest item level (which represents the gear’s power, essentially) that the raid will allow. You’re also doing it with no echo, which is the game’s feature that makes repeating a fight easier after you’ve failed it by raising your hit points and damage by a certain percent. Synched, No Echo, on the other hand, limits your items to the highest level that would be allowed and while you’d be missing the boost from the echo as well, it doesn’t hurt as much since your gear is stronger. It’s supposedly even easier than if you’d gone into the fight with appropriately leveled gear that was available back then due to the slow creep of power that has occurred over the years. I have no experience with this since I’ve only been playing the game for six months, but enough people have said it independently that I believe it. What all of this means, ultimately, is that we get a group of eight players together and work our way through a tough boss fight, one strange battle mechanic at a time, until we eventually emerge victorious.
Continue readingDedication To The Craft In Final Fantasy 14
One of the things that has taken up a large amount of my time alongside running through the plot of Final Fantasy 14 has been not just leveling the combat classes I need to complete the plot-based missions, but also leveling the crafting and gathering classes required to repair the gear for those combat classes. I mean, I can also make gear for the lower-leveled classes I’m working on getting up to snuff now, but most of the purpose for all that leveling is so I can keep my highest tier of combat gear in tip-top shape without needing to rely on other players I might not have easy access to when I need the work done and so I can stop paying an NPC vendor to repair my gear. Getting it fixed by a player character is a much better investment since you can repair gear beyond what you’d normally expect to it’s “full” state. It’s a bit silly since all this does is set a new point for what counts as “full” integrity on your gear, but it is satisfying to see all of those blue lines (to signify full integrity bars) next to all of my gear whenever I open my character window. Still, having all this extra space before you need to worry about your gear breaking is one of the main benefits of crafting to the person playing the game’s content and, for a while there, I couldn’t actually fix my top-tier gear. In order to hurry through the last two expansions, I set aside my usual schedule of 2-3 weeks on content and then 2 weeks on other stuff (mostly leveling crafting jobs), so while the leveling I’d done previously was enough to keep my gear going in the 2nd to last expansion (Endwalker), it was not enough to fix the gear I got following that expansion. And some of the gear I got toward the end of the expansion, too.
Continue readingMy Island Getaway Turned Into More Work In Final Fantasy 14
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.
Continue readingPlanning For My Future In Final Fantasy 14
Now that is has been six days since I finished the base portion of the Endwalker expansion of Final Fantasy 14, I’ve finally hit the point where I can really start to think about what I’m going to doing next (as opposed to just sorta thinking about it). I’ve had a lot of this stuff on my mental to-do lists for a while, but I’ve been putting a lot of it off in favor of progressing the main story or doing the work required to continue progressing the main story. Now that I’m hitting a slow-down point and won’t be racing to get as much done as I possibly can, it’s time to turn my attention back to that stuff. Most of it is stuff I’ve been working on slowly, as a part of daily and weekly activities, but it hasn’t really gotten any focused attention from me in a couple months and now it’s time to shift my attention and reasses priorities. All of which is to say that my equipment inventory has way too much stuff in it and I need to get that thing cleared out by leveling up a bunch of classes. Also, I really need to put a bit more focus and effort into my gathering and carfting skills since I’ve hit the point where I can’t repair my own gear anymore and that’s no good. Gotta be mostly self-sufficient so I don’t need to rely on barely-fixed gear or finding a random person whose crafting skills are high enough to fix my stuff (it was a whole thing in my latest raid night with the FC). Lots of stuff that I meant to maintain as I played has fallen by the wayside as the demands of my life and the main story of FF14 have fluctuated and it is time to get everything humming along again.
Continue readingI Cleared Endwalker In Final Fantasy 14
I took me 173 days and approximately 1100 hours of gaming, but I did it. I cleared the initial expansion that brought an end to nearly a decade of Final Fantasy 14’s storytelling. I fought a lot of big bosses, dealt with a lot of poeple who seemed unreasonable at first, and cried my eyes out, all but literally. I cried on and off (mostly on) for about four hours as I wrapped up the expansion. I’m still occasionally getting misty about it as I reflect on how it all wrapped up and I finished it five days ago (as of writing this, nine as of it getting posted). I do not think I’ve ever experience ANY kind of story that has gripped me like this one has. I have never been so moved, either. Even five days later, I am still struggling with the “story hangover” feeling of wrapping up the story that has spanned so many hours of my life and expansions of FF14 and normally that feeling fades after a decent night’s sleep! I’ve never had one that lasted more than twenty-four hours and I’ve already passed one hundred on this one, with no sign of it abating any time soon. Truly, the cathartic experience of this has left me hollowed out and in a new state of mind from which I might never recover/be shifted. Which isn’t a bad thing. I don’t have a problem being changed by a story about hope and perseverence and friendship and heroism. All those are in incredibly short supply these days, in my life in particular (save perseverence), and most media depictions even approaching anything like them is filed down for mass market appeal in the form of modern superhero and action flicks.
Continue reading“What Does It Mean To Be A Hero?”: The Converging Throughline Of Final Fantasy 14
This post is going to contain some pretty major spoilers for every part of Final Fantasy 14 up through the start of Endwalker because I can’t talk about Shadowbringers in any degree of specificity without talking about everything that led up to some of my favorite moments. So! There will be spoilers in pretty much every paragraph, both vague and incredibly specific, so many skip this one if you’re going to play the game (see this post if you’re on the fence) and hate spoilers.
Continue readingFinal Fantasy 14’s Shadowbringers Expansion Brings The Storytelling To A Whole New Level
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.
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