Holy hell, finally.
It took me nearly a year and 15 hours shy of 400, but I finally beat Shadowbringers. Which makes Final Fantasy XIV the game I’ve played for the longest amount of time, by a healthy buffer of about 150 hours.
if you’re considering playing this game and this number scares you, don’t let it! you can easily get to Shadowbringers in, I dunno, maybe not under 100 hours but probably around 150 pretty easily, judging by how many sprouts I saw in the Crystarium. I assume not all of them level-boosted (paying to jump to the most recent expansion; unless you’re on an alt character for some reason, don’t do this). Play a healer or tank, don’t level any other classes, don’t get sidetracked (easier said than done), and you’ll be fine. I just love wasting my time.
Shadowbringers arrived in a truly unenviable position (for me): with deafening hype accompanied by total exhaustion. I finished the 4.x (Stormblood patch) content at about three hundred hours, and very nearly threw in the towel. I liked Stormblood, actually, but I find all the post-game patches kind of non-urgent and oddly-paced (maybe they’d be better drip-fed over months, as originally released), and have ended up leaving the game behind for about a month in the middle of all of them (like all my FFXIV reviews, I’m writing this after finishing only 5.0, not the 5.x patches, since if I was a real video game critic (lmfao, can you imagine) that’s how I’d be reviewing it, and it’s not really easy to decide when Expansion N is mostly wrapped up and the foundation for Expansion N+1 is getting started, unless you use the first credit roll to demarcate it). A couple weeks post-4.0 spent grinding Praetorium for irregular esoteric tomestones left me feeling generally tired and unenthusiastic. I thought “Man, I am burnt out on this game, I might cancel my sub and uninstall...maybe I’ll get back to Shadowbringers the month before Endwalker,” knowing in the back of my mind that if I deleted the game then, I would never, ever finish it (“finish it” of course in the largest of air quotes).
Then I thought, well, c’mon, you literally started playing this game in order to play Shadowbringers, what’s wrong with you, just do it. So, I did it.
Like a lot of people, I only really took note of FFXIV once its fans started shouting about Shadowbringers, with claims about it having “the best Final Fantasy story since FF7” or “since FF6” or “in any FF game.” “Best FF story since 7” is not huge praise: I love 9 and it’s my favorite but I don’t think it’s really the story that’s so great (more widely, I struggle to recall a video game I love specifically because of the story), then the only other heavy competition I see is 10, which I haven’t played--8 is controversial (and I haven’t played it), 11 is another MMO and I had fun with it for the 8 hours I played, 13 is divisive (also haven’t played), and 15, well. I didn’t like 15. But “best FF story since 6” is getting a little dangerous, and “best FF story ever” is...high praise.
And it’s: good! Probably the best of the expansions. I love the atmosphere of Heavensward more than Shadowbringers (I have a “thing” for winter in games, I guess; it’s like 80% of the reason why I like Skyrim, and winter is my favorite season in Forza Horizon 4, an opinion held only by three other people in the world, I imagine), but the storytelling is more confident, more consistent, and doesn’t “bite off more than it can chew” in the way I feel Heavensward does. (Heavensward is great, but pays a lot of lip service to the slow, unchanging hearts of dragons that actually get changed pretty quickly, in a way that makes victory somewhat cheap, and it has a few character moments that ring extremely false for me, which Shadowbringers mostly avoids.) I don’t feel comfortable claiming what section of Final Fantasy stories it trumps, largely because I haven’t played all of them, and the ones I have played, I haven’t all played as an “adult.” But it’s good.
Other people have talked about what makes this good, and I honestly don’t really want to. What I do want to talk about is kind of my “issue” with FFXIV storytelling in general. Simply, FFXIV keeps getting in its own way, fighting between “JRPG” and “MMO” mode far, far less confidently than you’d think one of the, I dunno, five most popular MMOs for many years now still would be. Because this is what kind of bugs me about these stories, and it’s impossible to escape it as this game exists, and it’s that the story is just the cutscenes. That might sound a little silly, but I mean...I’m actually going to use Heavensward as an example here, partly to avoid spoiling the similar problems in Shadowbringers, and partly because I think this is still just barely the most egregious example of what I’m talking about.
Okay, Heavensward, you push through the 2.x content and find yourself on the run from the law, entering a foreign nation as refugees as you try to clear your names. Great hook! But it instantly deflated for me when I realized I could still go back to Eorzea, I could go anywhere and I could do anything, because I was special. Hell, I teleported back to Revenant’s Toll shortly after starting Heavensward and walked right up to a member of the military force seeking my imprisonment, and talked to them, and there was just some text box about, like “Ahh! You’re that criminal!!” or something. And then in Shadowbringers, the most egregious example is a mega spoiler, but let’s consider the “hook” here, too. You’re traveling to another world separate from the one you’re from, all your BFFs are stranded there, and the world is dying. At its best, Shadowbringers has an incredible apocalyptic doom mood, but it’s, again, deflated because you can literally zap back to the Source (the world you’re from) whenever you want, go anywhere, do anything. Because you’re special. The world, too, is kept in a kind of stasis, because it all needs to stay about the same throughout the story, because it’s being accessed by players at all points in the story.
Which is not to say that Shadowbringers is bad. It is good. I had a ton of fun with it, I played it for 400 hours (just about), there is a point in this game where I felt a guilt and despair I have never felt in a video game, and many other points where I’ve felt a joy I’ve felt...maybe in one or two other video games, I mean...what more could I say? Look at the rating I gave it! I just fear that we’re never going to get an expansion better than Shadowbringers, unless we get one that really embraces the limits of the MMO, namely, that there can’t be limits. That the gameplay is always going to be sort of unattached from the story, that the pacing can be interrupted at any point, that the super secret abandoned landscapes we uncover are crawling with people on flying mattress mounts. But yeah, Shadowbringers is as good as this game could get, I think, without being a different game entirely. I suppose that’s the big takeaway. Writing about why it’s good is harder, and, again, I don’t wanna do that. Maybe when my alt character catches up to me (I found myself getting nostalgic for the game’s opening hours a couple months back and started a new character, though still a conjurer from Gridania, so I’m not even seeing any new stuff...on one hand it’s absurd that I’m getting nostalgic for an experience I had less than a year ago, but on the other, a lot has happened since then) I’ll feel more confident.
So, the big question: Will I keep playing FFXIV and will I play Endwalker? It’s a little hard to say. There is a lot I want to do, still, in this game, and by that I don’t just mean the kinda grindy sucky parts (eg. beast tribes, which I’ve been doing a little after ignoring them for 400 hours). I have the vast majority of classes unlevelled (WHM close to cap, with PLD at cap and RDM at 2 levels below the cap (I play through the story as PLD but keep my RDM at close to the equivalent level. Why? As previously established, I love wasting my time! And very occasionally I decide “I wanna DPS this fight for the first time [instead of tanking]”) and there are at least a few other classes that sound fun. I have a bunch of group content to unlock and do (the only Alliance Raids I have unlocked are the Crystal Tower series; I don’t really do Alliance Raids to level but I would like to see the others). I like crafting and wanna level my crafters (though that’s pretty grindy: they’re all at 20 right now, except carpenter which is at 50 because I’ve been doing some Ixal beast tribe quests with it). I have never used a glamour prism (leveling happens so fast I never felt I had gear long enough to glam it). And honestly, my favorite memories in this game aren’t really the big story moments, but the kind of time-waste-y hanging-out moments, when I decide I just “want” to do something, and so I go and do it. I’m not cancelling my sub, unless I become suddenly unemployed, but I’d be surprised if I still logged on multiple days a week, as I have been. But...unless the 5.x stuff really sucks (which it might! As soon as the credits rolled they started another endless “Imperial monologuing” cutscene. God if you told me back in 2.0 that the Imperials were gonna stick around until at least 5.0 I would have uninstalled then and there. Could not make a group of characters that interest me less if you were explicitly trying) or my computer dies (which it might! There’s nothing wrong with it now but eh you never know), I’ll be around for Endwalker.
And if you read this far (why? I didn’t even read this far), then—
Scions RANKED (spoilers up to Stormblood but not Shadowbringers):
- Y’shtola
- Tataru (the one lalafell I don’t dislike)
- Thancred
- Alisae (I can’t tell if I like Alisae a lot or I hate her brother so much that she seems great in comparison)
- Urianger (never really liked him, until this expansion)
- Minfilia (hard to place her, for obvious reasons. doesn’t really have any personality in the parts of the game she’s actually in (none of the Scions really do in ARR) but since then has grown in interest in my mind, her scene in the 3.x patches I remember was one of my favorite Heavensward moments---perhaps controversially? I feel I’ve read people don’t like that, but maybe I’m remembering wrong.)
- Lyse (more than any of the Scions they really had no idea what to do with her in ARR, or Heavensward, and then realized she wasn’t a character so they just made her someone else for Stormblood. That said, I started in Gridania, where she and Papalymo are the first Scions you meet, and I was really intrigued by her, and she still carries that kind of nostalgic curiosity I had that very first cutscene we met. Wish she was actually interesting, though. She has moments in Stormblood)
- Papalymo (lalafell)
- Alphinaud (detest)
It took me nearly a year and 15 hours shy of 400, but I finally beat Shadowbringers. Which makes Final Fantasy XIV the game I’ve played for the longest amount of time, by a healthy buffer of about 150 hours.
if you’re considering playing this game and this number scares you, don’t let it! you can easily get to Shadowbringers in, I dunno, maybe not under 100 hours but probably around 150 pretty easily, judging by how many sprouts I saw in the Crystarium. I assume not all of them level-boosted (paying to jump to the most recent expansion; unless you’re on an alt character for some reason, don’t do this). Play a healer or tank, don’t level any other classes, don’t get sidetracked (easier said than done), and you’ll be fine. I just love wasting my time.
Shadowbringers arrived in a truly unenviable position (for me): with deafening hype accompanied by total exhaustion. I finished the 4.x (Stormblood patch) content at about three hundred hours, and very nearly threw in the towel. I liked Stormblood, actually, but I find all the post-game patches kind of non-urgent and oddly-paced (maybe they’d be better drip-fed over months, as originally released), and have ended up leaving the game behind for about a month in the middle of all of them (like all my FFXIV reviews, I’m writing this after finishing only 5.0, not the 5.x patches, since if I was a real video game critic (lmfao, can you imagine) that’s how I’d be reviewing it, and it’s not really easy to decide when Expansion N is mostly wrapped up and the foundation for Expansion N+1 is getting started, unless you use the first credit roll to demarcate it). A couple weeks post-4.0 spent grinding Praetorium for irregular esoteric tomestones left me feeling generally tired and unenthusiastic. I thought “Man, I am burnt out on this game, I might cancel my sub and uninstall...maybe I’ll get back to Shadowbringers the month before Endwalker,” knowing in the back of my mind that if I deleted the game then, I would never, ever finish it (“finish it” of course in the largest of air quotes).
Then I thought, well, c’mon, you literally started playing this game in order to play Shadowbringers, what’s wrong with you, just do it. So, I did it.
Like a lot of people, I only really took note of FFXIV once its fans started shouting about Shadowbringers, with claims about it having “the best Final Fantasy story since FF7” or “since FF6” or “in any FF game.” “Best FF story since 7” is not huge praise: I love 9 and it’s my favorite but I don’t think it’s really the story that’s so great (more widely, I struggle to recall a video game I love specifically because of the story), then the only other heavy competition I see is 10, which I haven’t played--8 is controversial (and I haven’t played it), 11 is another MMO and I had fun with it for the 8 hours I played, 13 is divisive (also haven’t played), and 15, well. I didn’t like 15. But “best FF story since 6” is getting a little dangerous, and “best FF story ever” is...high praise.
And it’s: good! Probably the best of the expansions. I love the atmosphere of Heavensward more than Shadowbringers (I have a “thing” for winter in games, I guess; it’s like 80% of the reason why I like Skyrim, and winter is my favorite season in Forza Horizon 4, an opinion held only by three other people in the world, I imagine), but the storytelling is more confident, more consistent, and doesn’t “bite off more than it can chew” in the way I feel Heavensward does. (Heavensward is great, but pays a lot of lip service to the slow, unchanging hearts of dragons that actually get changed pretty quickly, in a way that makes victory somewhat cheap, and it has a few character moments that ring extremely false for me, which Shadowbringers mostly avoids.) I don’t feel comfortable claiming what section of Final Fantasy stories it trumps, largely because I haven’t played all of them, and the ones I have played, I haven’t all played as an “adult.” But it’s good.
Other people have talked about what makes this good, and I honestly don’t really want to. What I do want to talk about is kind of my “issue” with FFXIV storytelling in general. Simply, FFXIV keeps getting in its own way, fighting between “JRPG” and “MMO” mode far, far less confidently than you’d think one of the, I dunno, five most popular MMOs for many years now still would be. Because this is what kind of bugs me about these stories, and it’s impossible to escape it as this game exists, and it’s that the story is just the cutscenes. That might sound a little silly, but I mean...I’m actually going to use Heavensward as an example here, partly to avoid spoiling the similar problems in Shadowbringers, and partly because I think this is still just barely the most egregious example of what I’m talking about.
Okay, Heavensward, you push through the 2.x content and find yourself on the run from the law, entering a foreign nation as refugees as you try to clear your names. Great hook! But it instantly deflated for me when I realized I could still go back to Eorzea, I could go anywhere and I could do anything, because I was special. Hell, I teleported back to Revenant’s Toll shortly after starting Heavensward and walked right up to a member of the military force seeking my imprisonment, and talked to them, and there was just some text box about, like “Ahh! You’re that criminal!!” or something. And then in Shadowbringers, the most egregious example is a mega spoiler, but let’s consider the “hook” here, too. You’re traveling to another world separate from the one you’re from, all your BFFs are stranded there, and the world is dying. At its best, Shadowbringers has an incredible apocalyptic doom mood, but it’s, again, deflated because you can literally zap back to the Source (the world you’re from) whenever you want, go anywhere, do anything. Because you’re special. The world, too, is kept in a kind of stasis, because it all needs to stay about the same throughout the story, because it’s being accessed by players at all points in the story.
Which is not to say that Shadowbringers is bad. It is good. I had a ton of fun with it, I played it for 400 hours (just about), there is a point in this game where I felt a guilt and despair I have never felt in a video game, and many other points where I’ve felt a joy I’ve felt...maybe in one or two other video games, I mean...what more could I say? Look at the rating I gave it! I just fear that we’re never going to get an expansion better than Shadowbringers, unless we get one that really embraces the limits of the MMO, namely, that there can’t be limits. That the gameplay is always going to be sort of unattached from the story, that the pacing can be interrupted at any point, that the super secret abandoned landscapes we uncover are crawling with people on flying mattress mounts. But yeah, Shadowbringers is as good as this game could get, I think, without being a different game entirely. I suppose that’s the big takeaway. Writing about why it’s good is harder, and, again, I don’t wanna do that. Maybe when my alt character catches up to me (I found myself getting nostalgic for the game’s opening hours a couple months back and started a new character, though still a conjurer from Gridania, so I’m not even seeing any new stuff...on one hand it’s absurd that I’m getting nostalgic for an experience I had less than a year ago, but on the other, a lot has happened since then) I’ll feel more confident.
So, the big question: Will I keep playing FFXIV and will I play Endwalker? It’s a little hard to say. There is a lot I want to do, still, in this game, and by that I don’t just mean the kinda grindy sucky parts (eg. beast tribes, which I’ve been doing a little after ignoring them for 400 hours). I have the vast majority of classes unlevelled (WHM close to cap, with PLD at cap and RDM at 2 levels below the cap (I play through the story as PLD but keep my RDM at close to the equivalent level. Why? As previously established, I love wasting my time! And very occasionally I decide “I wanna DPS this fight for the first time [instead of tanking]”) and there are at least a few other classes that sound fun. I have a bunch of group content to unlock and do (the only Alliance Raids I have unlocked are the Crystal Tower series; I don’t really do Alliance Raids to level but I would like to see the others). I like crafting and wanna level my crafters (though that’s pretty grindy: they’re all at 20 right now, except carpenter which is at 50 because I’ve been doing some Ixal beast tribe quests with it). I have never used a glamour prism (leveling happens so fast I never felt I had gear long enough to glam it). And honestly, my favorite memories in this game aren’t really the big story moments, but the kind of time-waste-y hanging-out moments, when I decide I just “want” to do something, and so I go and do it. I’m not cancelling my sub, unless I become suddenly unemployed, but I’d be surprised if I still logged on multiple days a week, as I have been. But...unless the 5.x stuff really sucks (which it might! As soon as the credits rolled they started another endless “Imperial monologuing” cutscene. God if you told me back in 2.0 that the Imperials were gonna stick around until at least 5.0 I would have uninstalled then and there. Could not make a group of characters that interest me less if you were explicitly trying) or my computer dies (which it might! There’s nothing wrong with it now but eh you never know), I’ll be around for Endwalker.
And if you read this far (why? I didn’t even read this far), then—
Scions RANKED (spoilers up to Stormblood but not Shadowbringers):
- Y’shtola
- Tataru (the one lalafell I don’t dislike)
- Thancred
- Alisae (I can’t tell if I like Alisae a lot or I hate her brother so much that she seems great in comparison)
- Urianger (never really liked him, until this expansion)
- Minfilia (hard to place her, for obvious reasons. doesn’t really have any personality in the parts of the game she’s actually in (none of the Scions really do in ARR) but since then has grown in interest in my mind, her scene in the 3.x patches I remember was one of my favorite Heavensward moments---perhaps controversially? I feel I’ve read people don’t like that, but maybe I’m remembering wrong.)
- Lyse (more than any of the Scions they really had no idea what to do with her in ARR, or Heavensward, and then realized she wasn’t a character so they just made her someone else for Stormblood. That said, I started in Gridania, where she and Papalymo are the first Scions you meet, and I was really intrigued by her, and she still carries that kind of nostalgic curiosity I had that very first cutscene we met. Wish she was actually interesting, though. She has moments in Stormblood)
- Papalymo (lalafell)
- Alphinaud (detest)
Talketsu
2 years ago
1. Graha'tia
2. Thancred
3. Alphinaud
4. Alisae
5. Minfilia
6. Y'Shtola (if I could rank based on looks she'd be first)
7. Lyse
8. Urianger
9. Krile
10. Papalymo