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.
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Final 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.
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