Between a rock and a hard place ffxiv forums
The knock on effects of our enmeshed identities with the virtual spaces and selves are tremendous in MMOs. I remember his early times on the official forums. Quick to assume blame, and while gracious about it, just as quick to redirect praise.
The labor for a 40 hour AAA game is massive, unthinkable. The labor required of an MMO on this scale? The team that did this would go on to do it four more times. In Heavensward, Stormblood, Shadowbringers, and now, Endwalker. With the exception of this most recent one, no expansion has been more than two years apart. And unlike games that get released and largely cut loose, XIV requires constant maintenance, tinkering, and major content patches throughout the time between expansions.
To repeat, this is a genre that is ludicrous and arguably bordering on the inhumane. In a field where these issues are often already such a problem, Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games are monuments to the absurdity of this industry. Endwalker, the latest expansion, was made during a multi-year global pandemic that has claimed the lives of nearly five and a half million people.
Writing a review for an expansion like Endwalker is a tricky thing. Are you still enjoying the virtual isekai after the literal isekai expansion? You might as well see this one through. Simply getting through to Endwalker will take at least hours. Probably a lot more. If you stop and smell the roses and do sidequests, it can be closer to Creating this game and bringing it to the state it is now was a colossal undertaking, and playing through all of it mirrors in a very small part the massiveness of that labor.
I say this not to dissuade you entirely, but be realistic about what your goals and enjoyment is. Go see if you even want what the game is selling first. Endwalker brings with it a lot of changes that I like. For starters, it finally remembers that the hallmark of Final Fantasy is walking around town and talking to dudes. Where previous expansions had questlines that involved an unconscionable amount of teleporting from one location to another, or frantically searching giant orange rings in the middle of a field for one point of interest to click on hiding behind a rock, Endwalker cuts this back.
Storylines are smaller and more intimate, the fetch quests and hide and seeks are fewer and far-between. But the sales pitch is flawed. Heavensward was a war between dragons and man that had a corrupt theocratic monarchy propelling the war onward. Stormblood was about revolutions. Shadowbringers was a post-post-apocalyptic isekai. The stories have been good, if comfortable and expected. Quest design in XIV has always been a mess. Too many, too gated, and done in frustrating manners.
Endwalker cuts that shit out. It recognizes that zone size and pacing were problems. That space becomes place through engagement and connection with the player and their avatar. And with maybe two brief exceptions, Endwalker better understands that I never want to not be playing as me in an MMO.
So it makes sure that the two major times you have to play as not you are brief and mostly poignant—one is a miserable stealth mission as Thancred, and the other is a miserable survival stealth mission that openly steals from the Square-Enix survival stealth game disaster Left Alive. I was sitting in a hospital bed and googling the statistics for my diagnosis. I spent two weeks in a hospital bed being tested and operated on and recovering. Every four hours someone would come by and siphon off a few tubes of blood and ask me how many milliliters I had peed.
It took no less than six people to image my arteries. Even more to implant the little robot that controls my heart rate and will zap it back into rhythm should I suddenly go into cardiac arrest. And when I got out of the hospital, I wanted to go back. Endwalker is a story of despair and the struggle to survive.
There are plenty of games about grief and the indignities of life. Endwalker posits a different way out. But it works. And in the middle of a global pandemic, maybe we need a story about the epic power of friendship and community? That through working together, upholding each other, and forging bonds even in the darkest of places that nothing is truly impossible and we can even smack the hell out of the literal embodiment of Despair?
Is this anything new? Teamwork and Friendship are evergreen. But I made it. Emet-Selch, an Ascian who founded Garlean Empire under an assumed identity, accelerates his plans to destroy the First, to restore Zodiark and the unsundered world.
Having avoided the Sundering, he claims to see sundered beings as not truly alive, and is thus willing to eliminate them to reach his goals. From there, the Warrior is summoned to the Crystarium and meets the Crystal Exarch. He explains he accidentally summoned the other Scions while trying to reach the Warrior. Due to time flowing differently on the First, the Scions have been present for one to five years.
He explains the First's pending doom: if it falls to Light, a Calamity on the Source will follow, destroying the First and ending civilization on the Source. Retiring to provided rooms, the Warrior meets Feo Ul, a friendly and adventuresome pixie, and Ardbert, one of the Warriors of Darkness met in Heavensward. Ardbert has endured a century of ghostly existence since Minfilia came with his party to halt the Flood of Light.
The others sacrificed themselves to help her, but Ardbert was denied the chance, becoming a shade and witnessing Norvrandt's slow decline. The Warrior first catches up with the twins, Alphinaud and Alisaie. Alphinaud is investigating Eulmore and its unusual prosperity, while Alisaie aids a hospice in an Amh Araeng, caring for sin eater victims before euthanizing them to prevent transformation.
Aided by them, the Crystal Exarch, and Lyna, the Exarch's adopted daughter and captain of the Crystarium guard, the Warrior saves refugees from the village of Holminster Switch and defeats a powerful sin eater called a Lightwarden. When slain, their light infects the person who slew them, creating a Lightwarden.
Hydaelyn's Blessing of Light shields the Warrior against this. The sky above Lakeland goes dark for the first time in a century, leading to rumors that the Warrior of Darkness has come to save them. Lord Vauthry, sends his general Ran'jit to investigate. The Exarch rebuffs Ran'jit, and reunites the Warrior with Thancred, who is accompanied by a young girl named "Minfilia," rescued from Ran'jit's custody.
They learn Titania, King of the fae, became a Lightwarden and trapt themself in their castle to protect their subjects. The Warrior, now called the Warrior of Darkness, gathers the necessary items to break the seal on Titania's castle. Feo Ul succeeds them, and leads the fae to defend Il Mheg as the dark sky returns. He offers cooperation and mutual understanding, to learn of the Ascians' true motives.
The Scions tentatively listen, knowing Ascian treachery, and travel to the Rak'tika Greatwood. After a tense reunion with Y'shtola, the Scions explore the ruins of the Ronkan Empire and meet the warrior-women Viis who protect them. They help the Scions find, and slay, the region's Lightwarden. Emet-Selch then reveals the origin of Hydaelyn and Zodiark: primals, created by his long-lost civilization. Zodiark was created to stop some terrible disaster, and Hydaelyn was created to imprison Him.
The Warrior later overhears Y'shtola questioning Urianger's motives and purported prophecy, as she can see the Lightwardens' aether affecting the Warrior. The Scions seek out the original Minfilia, as the other Lightwardens have gone into hiding, though this puts the soul of the young "Minfilia" at risk.
She bids the young girl decide her own fate, and willingly passes on, bequeathing her Oracle of Light powers. Renamed Ryne by Thancred, she locates the remaining Lightwardens. Lord Vauthry is revealed to be the final Lightwarden. An Echo vision shows Emet-Selch offering Vauthry's father a deal: to bind a Lightwarden to his unborn son, allowing the child to control the sin eaters. After the Warrior kills Ran'jit, Vauthry is forced to flee.
Aided by allies from all across Norvrandt, the Warrior hunts down and defeats Vauthry. A whole world's Light is too much, however, and they begin to transform. The Exarch, revealing himself as G'raha Tia, attempts to transfer the light into himself and then flee between worlds, knowing it will cost him his life. He is stopped with a bullet by Emet-Selch, who ends his truce as the Warrior has failed his test. He departs with G'raha to the ocean floor, the Tempest. Ryne temporarily stabilizes the Warrior, but the endless Light returns to all Norvrandt.
His timeline's Ironworks held together, opened the Crystal Tower and, based on the powers of Alexander and Omega, sent G'raha back to change history. The Scions pursue Emet-Selch, who has placed an illusion of his capital city, Amaurot, over its own ruins. A self-aware illusory man, Hythlodaeus, explains how three-quarters of his people willingly sacrificed themselves in summoning Zodiark, to save and restore the world.
Dissident Ancients opposed this and summoned Hydaelyn to stop Him. Emet-Selch tests the Scions again with an illusion of the Final Days that destroyed Amaurot, but remains unimpressed. The Warrior nearly succumbs to the Light before Ardbert, revealed to be the First's shard of the Warrior's soul, merges into and heals them. Emet-Selch casts aside his title, battling the Warrior under his true name, Hades. Defeated, he dies, with his final request that the Warrior remember his people.
The Scions reunite with G'raha before returning to the Crystarium, now looking for a means to send the Scions back to their world. In post-credit scenes, Elidibus flees Garlemald after Zenos reclaims his body. He murders Varis to ensure his father cannot interfere in his rematch with the Warrior. Meanwhile, the citizens of Eulmore decide to share their wealth and create a more equitable society with engineer Chai-Nuzz as their newly elected mayor.
The Warrior returns to the Source to inform their allies of their progress, Raubahn and Gaius updating the adventurer about Varis being killed with Garlemald falling into chaos, Gaius adding that he and Estinien encountered one of the Empire's newest Ultima Weapon-based prototypes during their escape.
After the Warrior returns to the First, the Scions decide to tell the people the history of the Flood and the original Warriors of Light. They learn Elidibus has arrived on the First, possessing Ardbert's corpse as he arranges for the residents to awaken their Echo, revealing it to be a fragment of their original selves' power, rather than a gift from Hydaelyn.
The Scions are suspicious of Elidibus's motives but cannot in good conscience oppose those wanting to follow in their footsteps, resuming their focus to research into aetherial transportation as a means to return home, while finding archive footage of the Ancient Venat who intended to become Hydaelyn's heart as Elidibus did for Zodiark's summoning.
Their plans are cut short when Elidibus puts the Warrior through a gauntlet based on their exploits. Y'shtola intervenes, deducing from the Ancients' records that Elidibus is a primal of his original self who separated from Zodiark's heart.
Furthermore, Elidibus is revealed to be the originator of the legend of the "Warrior of Light", and is using the peoples' faith to increase his power. Elidibus takes his leave and attacks G'raha and Beq Lugg to acquire the former's means of summoning others from the other shards, using one of the devices made from auracite and G'raha's blood to summon spectral Warriors of Light to attack the Scions.
The Warrior reaches the Crystal Tower and faces Elidibus as he takes on form of the first Warrior of Light, with the Warrior revealed to be the Source's shard of Azem, a former member of the Amaurotine convocation. They and G'raha defeat Elidibus and seal his essence in the Crystal Tower, but G'raha succumbs to overuse of his power in the process and fully crystallizes, infusing his memories into one of the auracites that the others use to return to their bodies in the Source.
The Warrior proceeds to the Crystal Tower and awakens G'raha, infusing him with his future self's soul and memories as he joins the Scions. Meanwhile, gaining an ally in the rogue Ascian Fandaniel who reveals everything about the Ancients to him, Zenos usurps the imperial throne and plans his reunion with the Warrior.
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