Scions and Sinners: A Final Fantasy XIV Reflective

What's up, nerds? I think it's about time I tell you all about why I've been AWOL for most of this year. There's a lot of reasons why... Well, actually there's really only one reason why. And that reason's name is Final Fantasy XIV Online.

I downloaded it on January 2nd of this year, after being influenced by a post on r/SteamDeck which showed the game running pretty well on the Deck. At that point, I was pretty bored of all of the other games in my library and wanted something else to play while laying on my couch. I had heard about FFXIV through one of my roommates at the time, who was enthralled with the game for the entire year he lived with me, only saying great things every chance it came up. So after giving the decision way too little thought, I said "Yeah, sure. Why not?" and started downloading the game's free trial.

...And thus began my descent into madness.

Oh, I cannot even begin to express my obsession with this game. In between all of the meetings, lectures, study sessions, and kanban board grinding I did last semester, I spent almost all of my free time at home working my way through this absolute beast of a game.

I'm not joking when I say that it's taken me literally six months to finish this one post because for the longest time it was so hard for me to articulate the intense love and admiration I have for this game. And every time I got exhausted of writing, I'd go and play more which would then lead me to form more opinions I wanted to write about and just turn everything into a big 'ol mess. Finally though, we're here and I think what I've written is at least somewhat coherent.

I started writing this post as a sprout still experiencing A Realm Reborn for the first time, but I'm now well into Endwalker content with about 770 hours on my playtime counter. I've unlocked Hyperconductive Hvergelmir for my Black Mage, solo farmed the ARR extreme trials for the Kirin mount, leveled all of my crafter classes to at least 50, joined a Free Company called Azure Infinitum, and spent like 1.5 million Gil on furniture for my apartment in Mist. This game really, truly, is great for an innumerable number of reasons. Where should I begin?

Final Fantasy XIV's story is genuinely some of the best writing I've ever experienced in a video game. Never before has a game had me so deeply invested in its characters, hooting and hollering during the good parts, holding back tears during the sad ones, and picking my jaw up off the floor during nearly every plot twist. I played Destiny 2 religiously for nearly four years of my life— I've played each campaign at least three times for each of my characters, experienced many of the game's best seasonal and raid stories, and even grinded out eleven seals and titles to show it all off— and I still don't think that Destiny at its best even remotely compares to Shadowbringers and the 5.3 Reflections In Crystal update.

Why is this? Several reasons, honestly. I think part of it is simply the game being much longer, which gives characters and concepts much more time to simmer, so to speak. Destiny expansions can usually be beaten in a single sitting on launch day, if you're motivated enough. Each FFXIV expansion however, has taken me upwards of a month to complete. Over the course of hundreds of hours, you'll grow attached to the various members of the Scions of the Seventh Dawn, and when something happens to them, you feel invested. I also think that having in-engine cutscenes rather than rendered CGI ones for major story beats plays to the game's benefit, allowing your character to be present in the moment, pick what lines you want to say, and generally just have more agency in the events that unfold.

Speaking of concepts, I also believe that FFXIV simply has more flexibility when it comes to what they can do with their lore. It's a common misconception that FFXIV is just another high fantasy game, when in reality it's so much more. The area that really solidified this belief in me was Heavensward's 6th region. The second I set foot on that island, I knew that the world was in good hands. Time and time again the game surprises me with its wide variety of areas, themes, and quest lines. Not to mention it also has crossover content with other popular games like Monster Hunter and NieR. Throw all expectations out of the window, you will be surprised.

Admittedly, the game's base campaign can be a bit fetch-questy and takes a while to get through, which is a turn off for lots of new players. I absolutely understand the criticism. A Realm Reborn's Main Story Quest (MSQ) was the child of a serious crunch project to refactor the failed 1.0 version while it was live, and as such, a lot of ARR's suffered as a consequence. Most of that update's release cycle was long and drawn out simply to buy time for Heavensward, the game's first real expansion.

But believe me when I say that the payoff is absolutely worth it. A Realm Reborn sets a lot of the groundwork for the next four expansions to build off of, and when major events finally happen like 2.4's trial or 2.55's hour long sequence of cutscenes, you'll be knocked off your feet. I'm not joking when I say that every time I now see the phrase "several cutscenes will play in sequence," I get giddy like a child on Christmas morning.

Heavensward is where the game actually starts, in my opinion. It finally sets the game into a solid groove that will repeat in every expansion from then on. Each expansion will include a roster of 6 new diverse areas and many more astounding (and much more concise) storylines. You'll finally unlock your first raid series, Alexander, which has an awesome plot plus many challenging and rewarding encounters that'll absolutely hook you into raiding. There's also the Anima relic weapon questline, in case you want a flashy weapon glamour. Generally, everything in Heavensward gets much more streamlined than it was in A Realm Reborn, and it's usually also the moment where players convert from light-hearted casuals into superfans.

A quick aside: To any players who might be struggling to get over the ARR hurdle, I would ask that you take your time and enjoy the game for what it is, rather than what you want it to be. Don't rush to the endgame content, you'll get there eventually. Take your time, immerse yourself into the land and lore of Eorzea, and if the story gets to be too much, take a break! Explore what else the game has to offer and return to the MSQ once you're ready again. And of course, this is an MMO after all! Be sure to bring a few friends along the way to run trials or the Crystal Tower raid series with. Once ARR's all said and done and you've finally made it to Ishgard, you'll be hooked.

Talking about progression for a second, FFXIV does a great job of designing classes that start out super simple but have lots of room for growth and skill expression as you get higher in level. Sure, you can play Black Mage by just spamming Fire I over and over until you run out of MP, but it won't be very fulfilling. The game gets loads more fun once you learn how to balance your GCDs and oGCDs, you learn a rotation, you get good at weaving and slidecasting, etc. Putting everything together usually results in a flashy, high damage (or high healing) combo that just feels good to execute.

I've played Black Mage for most of my time as a player, and recently decided to pick up Sage as an alt class, partially because I want to have a healer to use when playing with friends, mainly because it just looks cool. The first time I tried playing Sage in a matchmade instance was the Level 65 MSQ dungeon, and I cannot explain how many times we wiped and how bad I felt that my lack of skill made us resort to doing single pulls. But now that I've studied the abilities more, plus committed an opener and rotation to memory, and practiced a lot, I cannot put the class down. Playing Sage well in Shadowbringers and Endwalker content feels so exceptionally rewarding. The same could go for any other class really. Playing Black Mage well— maintaining Enochian uptime and playing around your ley lines whilst dodging all the AoEs sent your way— is also exceptionally rewarding. FFXIV rewards players who put in the time to practice, and playing the game well at a high level just feels awesome.

Final Fantasy XIV is also the first subscription-based MMO that I've ever played. Now, if you're a regular around here, you'll probably know that I absolutely hate subscription services and went so far as to spend thousands of dollars on my own homelab to host stuff, just so I wouldn't have to spend $5 a month on some cloud hosting service. (Ironically, this site is now hosted on DigitalOcean for stability reasons.) However, FFXIV is now one of the few services that I've made an exception for because I genuinely believe that its monetization model works towards the game's benefit.

FFXIV's steady source of income from subscriptions allows them to use dedicated servers, an architecture that I've never experienced before. This might seem archaic to sysadmins who are more familiar with scalable technologies like Virtual Machines or Kubernetes, but having physical servers allows for the game to have a level of persistence and sense of community that many other matchmade games simply cannot have.

As you progress on your server, you'll learn about the players and the community that play alongside you. You'll come to recognize the various niches in the game, like the role-players in Limsa Lominsa, the AFK macro crafters around every handler bell, the people doing the Manderville dance in front of the Ul'dah Aetheryte 24/7, and so on and so forth. You'll frequently see the same players while you play and you'll be able to visually see how you both progress over time. You'll come to learn about the active Free Companies on your server and frequently see their players all over the place. It's these little quirks that make the game feel more immersive and allow for you to forge more meaningful friendships with the other players you'll meet.

For example: Just one day after I had purchased the starter version of the game and was working on saving up for my first apartment, I was walking around Vesper Bay and met a Miqo'te player who was leveling their Blue Mage and practically begged for my help with it. They were underleveled and needed me to damage some Giggling Gigantoads for them so they could unlock the Sticky Tongue spell on their character. After panicking for a little bit since I was strictly a solo player at that point and not used to talking with other players, I eventually learned how to get onto their mount and helped them learn their spell after they flew us to the toads. Afterwards, we added each other as friends and went our own ways. Now, nearly seven months later, I still see them at the Gridania Aetheryte occasionally and we catch up, chatting about my thoughts as I progress through the main story. (Mai, if you end up reading this, thank you for being an awesome friend and guide as I was just starting out!)

Now to the uninitiated, most of what I've said so far might have just sounded like gibberish, but I promise that everything I've said has meaning. There genuinely is a mountain of stuff in the game for everyone to try, which tries to appeal to just about every type of gamer out there. What is there to do in specific? Well...

There's the MSQ, 19 classes/jobs to level, dungeons, raids, savage raids, ultimate raids, alliance raids, trials, extreme trials, deep dungeons, public events, hunt trains, treasure hunts, Eureka, Bozja, mining, foraging, fishing, 8 additional crafting classes to level, an in-game market system, an additional housing market, decorations/furniture for said housing, island sanctuaries, glamours, relic weapons, PvP, gambling, card games, a racing game, mahjong, jumping puzzles, Free Companies, the Blue Mage limited job, the Hildibrand questline, and so, so much more!

That list might seem daunting at first, but the only mandatory part is the main story. Everything else is just icing on top of the cake, and tries to give every kind of player something to look forward to.

In addition, nearly every multiplayer activity in the game can be match-made using the game's built-in Duty Finder tool, even raids! The only exception to this is endgame content like Savage/Ultimate raids and EX Trials, but parties for those can still be made in-game using Party Finder, the game's built in LFG system. And in case you want to complete the story without ever having to deal with other players or Tank/Healer anxiety, Duty Support allows you to complete nearly every MSQ dungeon with a party of NPCs.

But regardless of everything else I've mentioned so far, there is one critical aspect of any video game that, in my opinion, overrides everything else when it comes to how memorable they'll be in my head. The one component that sets apart the baby games from the big boys. The music. So, onto the biggest, most important question of them all: Is Final Fantasy XIV's soundtrack an absolute banger?

Absolutely and unequivocally, yes.

I would go so far as to say that Masayoshi Soken has swiftly skyrocketed to become one of my favorite video game composers of all time, up there with the likes of Michael Salvatori, Darren Korb, Chris Christodoulou, and Tee Lopes. (Can you tell that I really enjoy video game music?)

Like many other players, the first time that I heard Oblivion play during the second phase of the 2.4 trial, I was hooked. There are so many excellent entries on this game's soundtrack like Fallen Angel, Oblivion, A Long Fall, eScape, To the Edge, Scale and Steel, Locus, Exponential Entropy, Rise, Dragonsong, Heavensward, Who Brings Shadow, Pa-Paya, Eternal Wind, Triumph, and Footfalls, just to name a few. Soken's talent and range when it comes to making music for this game is truly awe inspiring.

And it doesn't even stop there! Soken and several other members of the Square Enix team (incl. localization director Michael Christopher Koji-Fox) have formed a band called The Primals that does rock covers of many songs in the soundtrack. I was never really a hard rock fan, but I genuinely enjoy the grittiness of their covers of Fallen Angel and Fiend so much that I'm seriously reconsidering that position. Great stuff.

I feel like the best way to round out this post is to just chat about the community for a bit, beyond the screen. Naoki Yoshida and his team (CBUIII) really do a stellar job when it comes to community management and staying involved with it. This starts with the game director's live letter streams every update with that detail what to expect, and goes way beyond whats required with extra things like canonizing player-led events in dialogue or the director doing interviews with popular content creators and knowing them well enough to banter with them.

Bi-annually, Square Enix also hosts Fan Fest conventions in the United States, Europe, and Japan. There, the developers reveal details about the upcoming expansion, usually have The Primals play a live show, and just generally joke around with the player-base in person. Some of the game's most memorable moments have come from these events. The devs exhibit a level of involvement within the community that you only really see from smaller studios like Hopoo Games, so to see a team as large as CBUIII stay involved as much as they do is really refreshing. (Also, a couple additional favorite dev moments of mine: 1 2 3)

The game's great. Really, truly great. I've spent over an entire month of my life playing it so far, and I've enjoyed every minute of it. FFXIV has become my new comfort game, for whenever I need a break from other games or I just want to shut my brain off and run around for a few hours. Simply put: It's everything I've ever wanted in a multiplayer game and more.

Between this and Final Fantasy XVI coming out last month, it's safe to say that I'm a diehard CBUIII fan now, and I cannot wait to see what the team will announce at the North American Fan Fest later this week.

In case you want to link up in game, you can find my main character on Aether DC as 'Aurelius Starbound@Midgardsormr'. If you're not playing yet and are interested in picking it up, I wrote a basic new player guide ages ago that can be found here, and might give you a solid starting point to build off of.

That's all I have for now. Until next time, hopefully next month if I'm not too busy playing this game again. We'll just have to wait and see... 😜