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 readingFFXIV
Planning 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 readingMeasuring Progress In Final Fantasy XIV
It might not be a Wednesday, but that doesn’t mean I can’t write about Final Fantasy 14! Not that I’ve got a lot to report, to be honest. I mean, I finished the base portion of the Shadowbringers expansion a couple weeks ago and spent, like, two hours a night for three nights in a row crying (good) on and off as so much great storytelling happened. I don’t know how to write about that, yet, since I’m just starting the patch content for Shadowbringers and have quite a bit of stuff left before the whole thing wraps up [I’ve finished most of it now, as of the day this posted, and am ready to talk about it all]. Not that I think it needs more storytelling to properly stand, just that I want to be able to fully couch it in all of the context the full expansion will give me when I write about it (like I did with all the other expansions). I just have been taking longer to get back to it because of the brain fog and being under the weather. I don’t want to play through this important, impactful expansion at a time when my brain isn’t working terribly well. It would be a shame to forget anything. Instead, in the time since I wrapped it up, I’ve turned my attention toward some of the other measures of progress I’ve been ignoring while I sped through the Main Scenario Quests. I’ve done a bunch of leveling of some of my classes, started working on some personal market projects to augment my income, leveled some crafting jobs, worked on some weeklies, and tried to get more invested in the roleplaying side of things. Which means I’ve made a lot of progress taken as a whole, but not a huge amount on any individual metric.
Continue readingAfter Four And A Half Months, I’m Finally Ready To Recommend Final Fantasy 14 (With Caveats!)
At this point in time (Monday the 12th of May, 2025), as I near the end of the base portion of the Shadowbringers expansion after four and a half months of playing Final Fantasy 14, I am hesistant to recommend it. You might think that odd, considering that I’ve written about the game more-or-less weekly for the entire time I’ve been playing it. Who would spend this much time on a game they didn’t like enough to recommend? Who would still be playing this game, with it’s monthly costs and life-dominating time requirements, if they’re not having a good enough time to recommend it to everyone they know? I can’t blame you for thinking that. I’ve been chewing that exact question over in my head pretty much constantly since I realized that I’ve passed the 750 hour mark with this game. How come I’m not telling everyone I know to play this game? For a long time, whenever the question of whether or not I’d recommend the game would come up, I satisfied myself with that answer that it was because I knew how much of my time this game was consuming. “I could not, in good conscience, recommend something that might take over a thousand hours of someone’s life just to mostly catch up to the modern content” is about the shape of that thought, more or less, that I’ve kicked up again and again whenever I’ve gone looking for why I’m not trying to involve all my video game friends in the game I’ve easily spend the most hours playing (thus far in my life, at least). But, as I’ve gotten further into the story and grown to appreciate it more and more–grown to love the game as a whole more and more–that answer has continued to ring hollow in a way I can’t continue to ignore.
Continue readingFaltering Redemption Stories In Final Fantasy 14’s Stormblood
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.
Continue readingFinal Fantasy 14’s Stormblood Is Full Of Big Ideas That Went Basically Nowhere
About a week ago, give or take a couple days because time is blurring together and I genuinely can’t remember how long it has been, I finished the Stormblood expansion of Final Fantasy 14. I’ll freely admit that I went into it a bit miffed and resentful because I’d just finished a bunch of storytelling about other worlds, the loss of balance that had a world being swallowed by light rather than darkness, and the sacrifices we make to see our vision for the future come to pass. The game took all that interesting, intriguing storytelling that it had been building towards for quite a while and tossed it all aside to focus on a popular rebel who used charisma and emotional manipulation to gather an army he could sacrifice in order to summon a god to unleash on not just the empire that conquered his homeland years ago but every single conquered people between him and said empire, including his own people. He was clearly cast as the villain in this moment, creating and then betraying a grassroots rebellion, but the story didn’t sit super well with me because, out of all the characters I’d met, his general politics matched closest to my own and yet the game was constantly casting him as a villain. All of which was further complicated by the fact that he was one of the few people of color in the game and had come to represent the resentful refugee who was not content to live in squalor and take whatever scraps he could beg or steal to keep himself alive, often in wars that defied logic and actual revolutionary practice just so he could be horrible and villainous in a way that advanced the plot.
Continue readingI Became The Unofficial Videographer For A Final Fantasy 14 Wrestling Federation
Well, recording the Final Fantasy 14 wrestling match (primarily for my friend who is out of town but also for one of the performers who asked for access to the videos when I spoke with him about getting permission to record) went so well that I’ve become the unofficial videographer of the group now. The wrestler shared it with the rest of the group and they all loved it so much that I offered to keep recording the events for them, sharing the videos via a throwaway gmail account I have. I was clear that I wasn’tmaking a commitment to record every single event since I’m sure there will eventually be some I can’t attend and I’m not going to let this game get in the way of my non-digital life, but I plan to attend each event as long as it’s my choice and I’ve got the ability to record them relatively easily so I might as well. It was a relatively easy process, after all. I spent some time earlier today (I’m writing this on the day of the wrestling match while I wait for the videos to finish converting and then upload) messing around with my settings so I could get the best possible mixture of recording quality and file size. I chopped the entire event into smaller pieces, too, so that people wouldn’t be stuck watching a four-hour video and could instead focus on individual matches or how the pre and post match banter or events looked. I even titled and numbered them so that it would be legible to anyone what was going on. It wasn’t a lot of work, mind you. It took about thirty minutes to configure my setup–which I used for streaming back in the day–by messing with settings, recording stuff for a minute or two, checking the output, and then tweaking more stuff, but now I’ve got that set up and all I’ve got to do from now on is manage the recording software, process the final videos, and then upload them to my gdrive for my throwaway email account. Easy-peasy.
Continue readingTaking A Day Off Final Fantasy 14 Against My Will
I might have a small problem. I’ve been playing a lot of Final Fantasy XIV and while I haven’t lost control of my life, I’m still showing up for work, and I’m still attending to all my responsibilities, I am also absolutely at a loss for what to do with myself tonight (the day I’m writing this) while the game is down for its next major update (going from version 7.1 to 7.2). I mean, I’ve got stuff I could be doing and that I probably will wind up doing once I’m done here, but I am absolutely feeling adrift as I think about the fact that I can’t just keep playing FFXIV with all of my free time. Aside from a few planned breaks here or there, largely intended to take care of specific tasks or watch some Hunter x Hunter to prepare for the next episode of Media Club Plus, I haven’t taken a night off of playing Final Fantasy 14. I certainly haven’t avoided playing it any time I’ve WANTED to play it. Until tonight. Tonight, I’ve had to refocus myself multiple times as my mind has wandered off to think about what I’d like to do in the game. It’s been annoying. Minorly annoying, sure, but annoying all the same. It makes sense the game would need to be down for maintenance in order for them to update all the servers and everything (that’s a pretty monumental undertaking), but I still feel modestly frustrated by it as I’ve had to think about what to start spending my time on instead. I mean, I haven’t really started ANYTHING since I began playing Final Fantasy 14, other than Slay the Princess. Closest I’ve come aside from that was playing a bit over an hour of Wanderstop and I had to stop that because it was going to make it more difficult to keep myself working. Which, you know, is a pretty moot point right now given that I’ve taken the rest of the week (as of me writing this) off.
Continue reading