Tell Us Why
Given Life
Are we meant to die
Helpless in our cries

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It’s early 2014, I’m pretty sure. Maybe around March, or April? It’s been a bad year. It’s going to get worse. I’m falling back into bad habits. Not leaving the house as much. Not going to classes. I’m trawling through Steam one day when I see a marginal discount on Final Fantasy XIV Online: A Realm Reborn. Wasn’t this good now, I heard? I hadn’t thought much of this game since I laughed at footage of the 1.0 version at launch. It’s cheap and comes with a month free trial. I like Final Fantasy. Why not?

I make my first character, a male miqo’te gladiator, a classic new player mistake to accidentally opt in to Tanking because Gladiators are the only class that starts with a sword. I name them Woodaba Vacaum, a surname that is borrowed from a character in a game I will never finish making. “Vacaum” doesn’t mean what I think it means and apparently isn’t even a latin word like I thought it was. I play for a few hours, and have a pretty good time, but, y’know…exams are coming up, there are other games to play, and this “Ifrit” boss seems pretty scary. I log out, let the free month lapse, and let the game languish in my steam library for years.

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It would be an incredible understatement to say that Endwalker had a lot on it’s shoulders. Not only was it following up on the near-universally beloved Shadowbringers, not only was it the first piece of content released after the game unexpectedly skyrocketed in popularity in 2021 and became the nigh-mythical “WoW Killer” almost out of nowhere, but it also had the unenviable task of wrapping up a story that has been in the making, in some shape or form, since 2010, a story that had some whispering in hushed tones about being “the best Final Fantasy, now”, whilst not resolving it too conclusively to encourage people to stop playing Square Enix’s most profitable venture. Given all that, it’s maybe a little churlish of me to point out that, under the weight of all this, Endwalker stumbles, falls, and ultimately chooses to lighten that load to ensure it can reach the finish line intact.

I’ll just be upfront with this: I don’t think this as good as Shadowbringers. I’m not even sure it’s as good as Heavensward. Even Stormblood, increasingly the punching bag of the XIV community, for all it’s messiness, feels like it’s aiming for more ambitious and thematically interesting things than Endwalker. I think as the afterglow fades, we’re going to see less and less people somewhat embarrassingly referring to this as “peak fiction”. There was genuinely a point in the main quest where I felt crushingly disappointed that this was the direction they had decided to take things for the grand finale, that the game had, in some ways, become the least interesting version of itself, went for a storyline that I would sooner expect from, say, Star Ocean, than Final Fantasy. But at the same time, there were moments that had my heart soaring for how much they affected me, left me feeling awed at just how tight a hold this story had on my heart. For everything that irks me, there are things I dearly love.

Thinking about Endwalker is difficult, and I think that might be why we’ve yet to see many substantive pieces of criticism on it that isn’t just effervescent praise. It’s taken me a long time to write this piece. I’m still unsure how I feel about many things in it. I don’t know if I’m ready to write this review.

Let's try anyway.

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It’s summer 2016. I’m at the end of my final year of university. I’m leaving with a decent grade in a subject that is kind of worthless, especially since the uncertainty following the Brexit vote is about to obliterate the few job opportunities there are in this field. If I’m honest with myself, I never quite thought about what I would do after university. I was so fixated on the dream of the rose coloured campus life that I never thought about what I’d do after that. So instead of answering that question, I’m playing MMOs again. I’ve been revisiting my childhood fascination of Azeroth, but it’s slowly losing its luster. But then, I remember. Didn’t I have Final Fantasy XIV on steam? I keep hearing that it’s really good now. Maybe I should try it again…

Suddenly, I’m Woodaba Vacaum once more, picking up just where I’d left off over two years ago. The necessity of having to do group content to continue the story gets me over a hurdle that I’ve never quite managed to get over for an MMO, and suddenly, I’m hooked. Over the coming months, I play through the entirety of the A Realm Reborn storyline as well as the Crystal Tower raid series, the very first raids I’ve done for any MMORPG “properly”, and finally reach Ishgard and the Heavensward expansion, forgoing the Paladin job in favour of Dark Knight because events of the main quest suddenly make me feel uncomfortable playing Paladin and in that moment, realise that I’m invested in this world quite unlike any other before. The incredible Dark Knight quests only solidify that for me. In late November, having started somewhere around June, I’m officially, for the very first time “caught up” with the main story of an MMORPG, finishing the 3.3 Dragonsong War quests with a final confrontation with Nidhogg.

But it’s something I did alone. The duty finder is a godsend and encountering genuinely unpleasant people almost never happens, but I’m too shy to join a free company, or join in on any PF content for high-difficulty content. Bereft of MSQ, I log out for a while. Final Fantasy XV is coming out soon, after all. The book on the Dragonsong War closes in silence.

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Endwalker starts pretty slow, with Labyrinthos probably ranking as one of the lamer zones in the game and Thavnair taking a bit too long to go anywhere cool, but once you arrive in Garlemald, things pick up significantly, and the game dives headfirst into some of its most fascinating and thorny content in its history, and then, after a hugely surprising bodyswap sequence, the game slams down hard on the accelerator and leaves whatever expectations you might have for where the story is going to go far, far behind it. To leave me completely in suspense at where the story is going to go after this many expansions is a genuine feat that I appreciate, but it also means that sheer adrenaline and excitement does a lot to carry you through stuff that is maybe, in hindsight, more than a little thematically suspect. Still, my eyebrows went through the roof when I killed Zodiark in the first trial, and I spent the next couple dozen hours absolutely dumbfounded as to where the story could possibly go next, and completely enjoying that feeling of this game still being able to surprise me after all this time.

What’s also surprising is the quality of the battle content in the game thus far. The first two trials, in particular, are tuned to a notably higher difficulty than prior story trials, finally recognizing that if someone has three expansions under their belt they might be able to tackle some heftier mechanics than a stack or two. The dungeon bosses too are notably more demanding mechanically than even Shadowbringers’ bosses, continuing the style of that expansion of very simple layouts twinned with boss mechanics that would give a Heavensward boss a heart attack. The game in general seems more keen to prepare players for the jump in difficulty that comes with EX-level content, which is something I really appreciate, as someone who spent over a year of playing this game too terrified to even consider checking out some of the most mechanically engaging and satisfying multiplayer gameplay one can find. While I think The Seat of Sacrifice remains my favorite fight in the entire game, the fact that The Mothercrystal in particular is able to put in a decent fight for the top spot is incredibly high praise.

The new jobs are also two real winners, particularly Sage, which is positively electrifying to play, even in old content, thanks partially to the stat squish that has given a lot of old raids back some bite that they lost after Shadowbringers beefed up numbers so considerably. Getting O11 in Raid Roulette and finding it to be once again a tense white-knuckle drag race of a fight put an enormous smile on my face. Even stuff that seems rough at first glance, like Dark Knight and New Summoner, will continually evolve in both perception and tweaks as time passes, and already we’re seeing a re-evaulation of the initial backlash against Dark Knight after it unexpectedly found itself sitting atop the tanking DPS charts. Although I’m reviewing Endwalker now, as a period in the game’s life it is only just beginning, over the next couple years it will continue to evolve and change, and will succeed and fail in different respects, just like how Shadowbringers ended up as a mediocre expansion in the eyes of many who are strictly interested in high-level raid content despite being so beloved among those like myself who place a high value on narrative.

Ultimately, it’s that value that has my feelings on Endwalker so mixed. There’s so much to enjoy in this expansion, so much to appreciate, that the areas where it fumbles and falters are drawn into sharp relief, and ultimately it’s the areas of this story and this world that I value the most that Endwalker fumbles the hardest.

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It’s 2017. It’s a bad year. It will continue to be a bad year. Aside from a miserable fast food job I hold down for a couple months at the start of the year until one of the other workers there threatens to kill me, I am unemployed for the entirety of the year. I try a lot of things, and I fail at all of them. I am increasingly ill at ease with the person I am pretending to be. The details aren’t relevant. I am unhappy. But I still play Final Fantasy XIV, and, in fact, I find myself incredibly excited to take part in my first “live” expansion launch for an MMO, in the form of Stormblood. It’s certainly a rough one, and leads into something of a rough MSQ, but it’s one that I still treasure dearly as a light in a time where I had few.

I’m keeping up to date more regularly, I start doing content without guides, I level other jobs, and I find myself becoming a part of the community of the game in a way I simply haven’t before. As 2017 changes to 2018, FFXIV becomes more and more a part of my life, as starting a masters in a last ditch attempt to give my life a form of direction leaves me with far less time to play games than ever before, and FFXIV’s structure allows me to dive into content and experience the myriad stories within piecemeal in between work and classes. Whether it’s the Omega raids, the slowly unfolding MSQ, or getting into fishing while listening to revision notes, I have quite unexpectedly gone from someone who Plays XIV to a XIV Person. It gets me excited, helps me destress, helps me socialize, and is helping me in ways that I only begin to understand.

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When Shadowbringers discussed the Final Days as experienced by the Ancients, I thought what was happening was fairly conclusive: they encountered something that did not fit within their framework of understanding, and that lack of understanding led to a horrified revelation at their own limits and mortality, a fear of death that manifested via their creation magicks into demonic entities shaped like their own death. It was, I thought, quite clear and extremely resonant with the wider themes of the expansion vis a vis allowing old things to die and fade away and be replaced with better things, both the sadness and necessity of that. I genuinely wasn’t expecting further elaboration on The Final Days in Endwalker, but further elaboration is what we get, and the explanation only serves to narrow the scope of interpretation and resonance to such an extent that it arguably harms Shadowbringers in hindsight, which is maybe the most damning thing I can say about a story beat.

To put it simply, Meteion sucks. I know some people really like the birb but for me, she just blows, I’m sorry. This jokerfied Junko Enoshima wannabe is one of the lamer villains in the entire final fantasy pantheon, like if Seymour Guado was actually the villain of FFX instead of a distraction from the real problem. An evil bird-girl in space who is radiating Bad Vibes because she thinks life is meaningless and therefore everyone should die is something I would expect from an AI-generated parody of Bad JRPG plots, and yet, here it is, sitting as the culmination of this decade-long narrative. After the thoughtful theming of Shadowbringers I could not have imagined that its sequel would boil everything down to generalized Hopepunk but that is kind of what happened. No longer is the demise of the Ancients a result of the flaws of their own societal perspective that is resonant with real things, instead it is because a big ball of evil at the end of the universe turns you into a monster when you feel despair.

And yeah, I get that big loud themes of Hope facing Despair at the end of the universe is kind of a JRPG staple, but boiling things down to such primal themes causes a lot of friction with the kind of game Final Fantasy XIV, and, indeed, the series as a whole, has been up to this point. In Shadowbringers, you were fighting a near godlike entity at the end of their universe, but that godlike entity represented material things. They were an aging boomer who refused to accept or acknowledge the validity of the world that was coming in favor of their uncritical adoration of their idealized prelapsarian idea of the world as it was. In contrast to many lesser Hopepunk stories, Final Fantasy XIV has previously acknowledged that people feel despair for real, material reasons. The people of Ishgard and Dravania in Heavensward felt despair because they were trapped in a war built on lies and deception, a Foundation constructed to justify the unjustifiable. The people of Doma and Ala Mhigo in Stormblood felt despair because they were trapped under the boot of imperial tyranny and violence, of their cultures being taken from them and twisted beyond recognizability, of their lives being treated as sport by a spoiled brat born into immense power, an expansion who’s materialist concerns hit me particularly hard as someone living in a land occupied by a colonial power. And, of course, the people of The First in Shadowbringers despair because the ideology they were taught from birth was good and right and just turned against them and choked them to the edge of their life, and they overcame the despair by uniting to overthrow the (admittedly fatphobic caricature) eikon of greed and complacency at the top of it all. In Endwalker, people feel despair, ultimately, because an evil space bird with primary-school nihilist motivations makes them feel despair.

In the real world, people feel “despair” for many reasons, and more often than not, those reasons are directly related to the material circumstances that affect their daily lives. Not being able to pay rent, being unemployed, suffering heartbreak and depression, witnessing the callousness and greed of the people who hold positions of power in our world. Reducing Despair to an ontological narrative force completely divorced from the lived experiences of our everyday lives also divorces it from resonance with said lived experiences, and is what ultimately leaves Endwalker feeling intellectually hollow. Shadowbringers electrified my mind for months after I finished it and I am fairly confident the same will not happen here. When this reveal happened, Endwalker transformed from a story that had me literally trembling with excitement the more I played to something that, even if for just a moment, made me question whether investing in this world and these characters for as long as I have had been worth it after all.

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It’s 2019. I’m coming to the end of my masters, working on a dissertation project that is, hilariously, a “letterboxd for games” called…Backloggr. The release of Shadowbringers is imminent, and I am excited. Not like I was excited for Stormblood, no. Now I’m in and Shadowbringers is my most anticipated game of the year, and I’m planning how I can voraciously consume it whilst not letting my dissertation project suffer. What’s more, 2019 is the year I am finally honest with myself and others that I am trans, and my relationship with my FFXIV character finally makes sense. They are the medium in which I experiment with gender and gender presentation in a way that does not have the pressure and anxieties of experimentation in the real world, a way to experiment with an audience that won’t judge me in the way that I fear the most. This subject - and Final Fantasy XIV in general - becomes the subject of my first paid piece of games writing, and although I have mixed feelings on that article, the fact that I managed it at all is something that I hold dearly to heart. The article even goes up during my first clear of The Seat of Sacrifice [Extreme], my favorite fight in the entire game and one of my favorite moments in all of video games. It is the culmination of a story that has evolved from “pretty good, for an MMO” to a genuine contender for Best Final Fantasy Story, which I can only really express as the highest praise possible given that FF is probably my favorite series of games that contains multiple all-time contenders.

Final Fantasy XIV is a part of my life. I’m not going to credit it for the way I’ve grown as a person or a writer or say that it saved me or anything like that, I find the way people often give the media they enjoy the credit for accomplishing things like that disappointing because it deprives them of enormous credit. But during Shadowbringers especially, it helped me. It helped me work things out about myself, it helped me get work, it helped me develop my critical and creative writing faculties, it helped me make friends and it helped me get closer to old ones. And it helped make me happy when I wasn’t.

How do you even begin to review something like that?

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As a story, Endwalker is frequently and fairly consistently delightful and enjoyable moment to moment, but attempting to think more deeply about what it is trying to say causes a lot of friction, particularly when attempting to reconcile it with past expansions, and the Meteion stuff is maybe No.1 with a bullet as to why this is. I keep thinking about the scene where Jullus, one of the expansion’s most compelling new characters, rages with righteous anger against Zenos viator Galvus for destroying his home and people in his quest to fightfuck the player character, only for Alphinaud to tell him that he has to remain calm or else he’ll turn into a big evil monster the heroes will have no choice but to take down. Or how the fandom’s overly sympathetic lens of Emet-Selch and the Ancients in general has been absorbed wholeheartedly, leading to a shockingly uncritical depiction of a society that has a fundamental callous disregard for the sanctity of life, and particularly falls a little too much in love with Venat/Hydaelyn, sanding down many of the most interesting wrinkles of her character to make her a fairly unambiguous good guy at the end (which is not to say that her character is without depth - far from it - but the game does almost repel from the idea of really digging into that depth in favor of idolizing her), especially given things like the bodyswap and the conscious uselessness of the characters on the moon highlighting the fallibility of Hydaelyn and her plans, and casting a critical eye on the Scions’ uncritical adoration of her (you can even say “hey what was with Hydaelyn straight up lying to me in Heavensward ” to which an NPC says “huh dunno, probably nothing to worry about” which I thought for sure was Going Somewhere but no I was simply Not Supposed To Worry About it). And, frankly, only doom lays down the path of trying to parse any kind of statement out of the Final Days itself, what with it turning people feeling depression, righteous anger against injustice, and other true, human emotions unhelpfully grouped together and labeled “despair” into evil creatures who cannot be saved and must be put down lest they harm others.

Endwalker is a mess, both when it comes to reconciling what it’s trying to say with itself, and when it comes to how it interacts with prior expansions. But if it must be a mess? If it has to have this difficult and frictional relationship with the parts of the story I value the most? If it must end this way? Then let it be a beautiful mess. Let it be dumb and questionable with impeccable style, let it burn it’s bridges with impeccably dancing flames. Endwalker is many things at many times, but it is almost always doing what it is doing amazingly, with a confidence fully owned by a creative team burning with a confidence and passion found almost nowhere else in the big-budget space. Any time Endwalker goes somewhere, it does so in the most brash, confident manner possible, with some truly incredible visuals and direction that is genuinely staggering coming from a game that’s still kinda running on 13 year old FF13 tech. The music team once again does incredible work here, and if this soundtrack isn’t spoken of in the same hushed tones as all the expansion soundtracks before it, it’s only because Square Enix has become ever more draconian about allowing people to share this wonderful music. I said in a kind of cutting way earlier that Endwalker is consistently delightful and enjoyable moment to moment, but I want to stress that being continually entertaining throughout is something that many games utterly fail to manage, and the day I turn my nose up at a story that delights in its movements as much as Endwalker does is the day you can officially write me off as a lost cause.

And, hell, it’s not like the story isn’t worthwhile. I’ve been highly critical of the decisions made thematically, and I stand by those criticisms, but not only are the decisions not as disastrous as they could have been (in the incredible Answers scene the status of the Ascians as pining for a prelapsarian utopia that did not exist is upheld despite much of Elpis’ attempts to undermine that, which I felt was very important) but also there is still a great deal of resonance here to be found here. I truly think Garlemald, in particular, is a strong contender for best arc in the entire MSQ, and the character writing as a whole remains excellent. Thavnair is a cultural appropriation playground to be certain, but it’s also got one of the sickest characters in the whole game making his nest there, and I hope to see it developed further in future patches. The fact that I’m not as condemnatory of the Elpis arc as I think perhaps part of me wants to be is a testament to just how well rounded Hythlodaeus, Emet-Selch, Venat and Hermes manage to be. The Zenos duel at the end is obviously hysterical as a big dumb shonen finale but it also I think acknowledges a truth about this game and the people that play it that a lot of games (including this one, in the past) try to dance around. I may fundamentally disgree and find facile the game's argument that suffering is what gives life meaning, but it's in how that idea interacts with characters like the Ancients and Zenos, that this theme finds some purchase in my heart, an exploration of how people who have lived blessed, privileged lives of plenty are deaf and cold-hearted to the suffering of those less fortunate around them, and how that eventually twists into genuine malice as they become ever more desperate to maintain their comfortable status quo. Even if I find the root of why she has to do it fairly vacuous, Venat choosing to destroy her world for the sake of a potential better one is incredibly powerful. And above all, this story of people at the end of days finding something to hold onto, something worth living for, is something that I did find affecting and meaningful, even if I kind of have to avoid thinking about the details in order for it to have the biggest impact. Every day, I feel the crushing weight of the end of the world all around me, and I struggle greatly with just trying to live in a world where all around me are reminders trying to convince me that there is no hope to save our planet in the face of the people and systems killing it. And while I would caution against becoming addicted to Hope as a placebo against genuine change, there is still something to be said for making me feel like there is hope.

The answer that Endwalker ultimately arrives at, is that in the darkest of times, we find the strength to go on in each other, and in standing/working together, we can overcome anything. It’s a cliche, perhaps boring answer, but in many ways it is also the right one. The Warrior of Light has never walked alone, after all, they’ve always had a party of 3/7/23 others to journey alongside, to help carry them through their trials. Whether they saved others from death, took the fire for their friends, or slain the beasts that threatened them, we’ve always done this together. I know I have. I wouldn’t be here without those who have walked beside me, who healed me when I was at the end of my rope, who stood alongside me against my problems and granted me the strength to see them through. Whatever else I may think about what Endwalker has to say about living at the end of the world, I think it is right about that, at least.

Do I wish Endwalker handled things differently? Yeah, kinda. Do I think there are things about it that suck? For sure. Is this a fitting conclusion to a story over a decade in the making? Honestly, I still don’t know.

But did I have fun? Was it meaningful? Am I happy I made these friends, fought these battles? Am I glad I heard what I heard, felt what I felt, and thought what I thought?

Has my journey been good? Has it been worthwhile?

...That, I can’t deny.

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Whispers
Falling silently drifts on the wind
But I hear you

Our Journey
Now a memory fading from sight
But I see you

You're not alone.