Game Review: Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker (Story only, through 6.0)

[dorchadas]

I'm excited for Endwalker, but I don't have the overwhelming, burning hype that some people seem to

Well, that turned out to be accurate.

Normally I'd be waiting years to do this review, after all the patches and systems and everything was put into place, and I'm still going to write that post eventually once we wrap up patch 6.5. But Endwalker's story is structured differently than previous expansions--in something like Heavensward, the main x.0 patch resolves many of the story beats but leaves some open, and it's not until x.3 that they all finally come to their conclusion. Patch 3.3 was the final defeat of Nidhogg and the real end of the Dragonsong War, for example, and then 3.4 and 3.5 built up the Garlean Empire and the war in the east that eventually led to Stormblood. Endwalker is different, with patch 6.0 being much bigger than a usual x.0 patch and resolving all the story threads--the 10 year Hydaelyn and Zodiarc arc, as the marketing puts it--in one single journey. Patch 6.1 is called "New Adventures" and represents a clean break into a new saga, to the point where they've said that maybe some day in the future it could represent a new entry point for players who are intimidated by the hundreds of hours of story that FFXIV makes you play through to get to the end. That also means that I can write a review of the story now without having to see how the patches resolve things.

The general consensus is that Endwalker is a masterpiece, but I can't agree with that.

(Obviously, massive Endwalker spoilers below)

This is what I thought most of Endwalker would be about.

My biggest problem with Endwalker is that I think it should have been two expansions. There was an interview in Famitsū where they confirm that two expansions was the original plan, one dealing with the Garlean Empire and then one about Hydaelyn, Zodiark, and the Final Days, but they changed it due to the overwhelmingly positive reception Shadowbringers received and not wanting to lose the story momentum that they had built up. I think this was a mistake, that the seams of the two expansions clearly show in the finished Endwalker, and that it's responsible for the weird pacing in most of the expansion.

When Endwalker starts, the Warrior of Light takes ship to Sharlayan to consult Eorzea's foremost scholars about Fandaniel's plan with the towers. Once there, you're given a choice--to stay in Sharlayan and investigate the government's secret plans, or travel to Thavnair and study the tower. I feel bad for everyone who picked Thavnair, because the story is very clearly written assuming that Sharlayan is first and Thavnair was only added as an option to avoid every single player being in the same place at once. Picking Thavnair results in a cliffhanger as a Thavnairian alchemist is captured by Fandaniel right after discovering a means to protect ordinary people from Primal tempering, and then...the Warrior of Light sneaks around Labyrinthos, the Sharlayan biological research facility, in frog form and pokes through samples crates while poor Nidhana is having her life drained out to fuel a Lunar Primal summoning. Done the other way around, you explore Sharlayan until the Forum finds you out, says "Stay out or we'll throw you out," and then you go to Thavnair to pursue another angle. I know why they did this--to prevent server strain--but everyone who picked Thavnair first (like sashagee) has an objectively poorer experience.

I bring this up because the entire Fandaniel/towers/Garlemald plot is all compressed into the first third of Endwalker and if it had more room to breathe, there wouldn't be this weird pacing problem in literally the first zone (for half the playerbase). If Thavnair were the third zone, or a zone that you return to when the tower activates after finishing up stuff in another zone, this could have been avoided.

There's been a lot of that lately.

I'm also saying this because Garlemald is my favorite zone in Endwalker and I wanted more time with the Garlean Empire. In the game, after collapsing the Thavnair tower the Eorzean Alliance decides to invade Garlemald itself and arrive to find it in ruins, overrun with tempered soldiers, and an enormous and ominous tower in place of the imperial palace. Attempting to provide humanitarian aid, the Eorzeas find a suspicious populace who has been trained by decades of propaganda to assume that everyone else is their natural enemies and that only one society can win. To the Garleans, life is a constant struggle with only winners and losers. They were exiled from their homeland in the past, they were constantly oppressed by everyone around them due to their lack of magic, and when they developed magitek they determined that since someone had to wear the boot and step on faces, they were going to wear the boot from now on. There's a fantastic scene with Quintus van Cinna, legatus of the First Legion, when he asks Alphinaud why, if the Eorzeans only want peace as he claims, did they not simply submit to Garlean rule? The Pax Garleana would have provided the peace they desire. Alphinaud says nothing, and I got annoyed about this at first--Alphinaud was first in his class at rhetoric and he doesn't have an answer? What about freedom? Garlemald is an expansionist colonizing slaver empire!

But that's the point. That answer would prove van Cinna correct, that the Eorzeans' first priority is not peace and that they value their own interests like "not being enslaved" higher. To him this is only natural--of course the Eorzeans would put Eorzea first--but it also means that their peace offer to Garlemald must have the ulterior motive of making sure that the Garlean Empire is subordinate to Eorzea, just another move in the eternal competition between empires.

I find this kind of conflict a lot more interesting than everything with the Ancients, but I recognize I'm in the minority.

I've seen people online say that a Garlean expansion would have been Stormblood 2.0 but I don't think that's true. Stormblood's story problems were because it was split into two halves that were only tenuously connected. An expansion starting in Thavnair and dealing with the towers, then going across the sea to Locus Amoenus--G'raha Tia's homeland and the place the Garleans were exiled from--and working our way overland to Garlemald, with Anima as the final boss of 6.0, could have been great. Stormblood took place when Garlemald was still at the height of its power, but let's call it "Imperium" would have been after the collapse of central authority. Some provinces would be in rebellion, some could have been trying to hold on to the benefits of empire, some might have been dealing with the Garleans pulling a Roman Britain and saying "Welp, good luck citizens, you're on your own now." Some legions would have been trying to make their own successor states. There's a huge amount of conceptual space they could cover.

They talk about the ten-year-old Hydaelyn and Zodiark arc but that's not really accurate because neither Hydaelyn nor Zodiark ever showed up in 1.0. The enemies in 1.0 were the Primals and the Garlean Empire. The Garleans caused the Seventh Umbral Calamity, the Garleans attacked Eorzea again in A Realm Reborn, the Garleans conquered Ala Mhigo and drove the plot of Stormblood, and the Sorrows of Werlyt questline in Shadowbringers showed that they were preparing for another attack on Eorzea. Garlemald is the real ten-year-long plotline in FFXIV and by the time you arrive in Garlemald itself, it's in ruins because Fandaniel took a Nihilism 101 class and Zenos wanted a WoL boss fight.

One small step.

The best part of Endwalker for me is actually the middle, from the moment you arrive on the moon to the end of the return to Thavnair. As much as I'd prefer two expansions, the part of Endwalker that really works is that you go to the moon at level 83 and then the first trial is Zodiark, the Ascians' one true god. In a two-expansion scenario, Zodiark probably would have been the final boss of 6.3 in the expected location, but as a level 83 boss Zodiark really blows open the doors of possibility. If Zodiark is the mid-boss, who's the final boss? They've been building up to this moment for years and now it's over--what's next?

The answer is moon rabbits, but it's all a big Final Fantasy IV homage so I thought it was great. The loporrits are a delight, mixing technological supremacy with near-complete ignorance of what life is actually like on the planet below. It's cute, it's funny, it has the FFIV town theme playing in the background, and it's suspenseful because when Zodiark dies, the Warrior of Light stands on the lunar surface and looks up at the planet and has an Echo vision of rot appearing and spreading to cover the entire surface as a voice hisses, "At last..." And then there's one night of peace in Sharlayan before the Final Days are upon you.

The Final Days in Thavnair really sold that it was the end of world. Whereas the Ancients' creation magic was utilized to bring forth creatures of nightmare, this time the Final Days simply transforms its victims. Those who fall to utter despair--the despair of, say, being chased by horrible monsters or seeing friends and loved ones transform into beasts--transform themselves, and at the end of the world it's easy to lose all hope. There's people being eaten alive, entire families wiped out, and during the scene where a baby starts emitting the black mist that precedes transformation, I really thought they might have pulled the trigger. I did all the sidequests in the zone afterwards, helping people process the tragedy and the orphaned baby find a new home, and that's the part of Endwalker that sticks in my memory even though what came after was far more directly relevant to the plot.

After learning the source of the transformations, the Scions are out of further avenues to pursue until the Warrior of Light remembers "Elpis" (ἐλπίς, "Hope") the name of a flower that was significant to the Ancients and which responds to emotions. G'raha Tia reveals that Elidibus isn't dead, he was sealed within the Crystal Tower, so the Warrior of Light returns to the First to question him. Elidibus says that Elpis is a place, and then says that he saw the Warrior of Light there and that they must use the Crystal Tower to go back in time, millennia ago:

I've seen multiple streamers have this moment ruined for them by foggy weather.

For a lot of people, Elpis seems to be their favorite zone, but for me it's where the story lost me completely. Emet-Selch and Hythlodaeus were two of the most popular characters in Shadowbringers--I knew who Emet-Selch was before I even started playing FFXIV, but I didn't learn who Ryne, Ranjit, Vauthry, G'raha Tia, etc. were until I actually got to ShB--and Elpis serves as a means of bringing them back. Except in my case, I don't like Emet-Selch and I was already annoyed that he was the narrator, so him showing up again didn't do anything except make me roll my eyes, though his interactions with Hythlodaeus were cute.

Emet-Selch and Hythlodaeus are in Elpis to speak to its overseer Hermes about his nomination for the seat of Fandaniel, "Pursuer of extant phenomena," and in the course of this job interview the Warrior of Light learns that Hermes has doubts about society. The Ancients create life and test its suitability, and then uncreate that which they deem unsuitable. What gives them this right, he wonders. What does it mean to work for the betterment of the world? What is the meaning of life? And to that end, he--alone with no supervision--created a hive-minded group of beings called the Meteia who can manipulate Dynamis, the power of emotion that is weaker but more abundant than aether and which had never previously been mentioned before Endwalker, and sent them out into the universe to seek out other worlds and ask them about the meaning of life. Alright, fine.

As they wander around Elpis, the Warrior of Light meets a woman named Venat who looks exactly like a vision of Hydaelyn they had from earlier, and within moments she tells the Warrior of Light that they have the mark of her magic on them. A "traveler's ward," she says, meant to protect their aether, and she asks how they got it, and so the Warrior of Light sits them down and explains everything to them--the Final Days, Zodiark and Hydaelyn, the Sundering, the Rejoinings and Calamities, the Ascians, everything. This happens even though Elidibus explicitly warned the Warrior of Light that they couldn't change the past, since if they did they'd annihilate the future they were trying to save, and long story short, the past does not change because of the introduction of another plot point--memory alteration.

It's not a phase, mom!

There's a long sequence where Hermes tries to prevent Emet-Selch from taking possession of the one remaining Meteion that serves as a link to the others, to the point of flying away with her into the dangerous life containment facility of Ktisis Hyperborea, but in the end Meteion delivers the Meteia's report: all other worlds they encountered are dead. Most worlds had past evidence of life but only ruins now, and some worlds had civilizations in the process of destroying themselves. Even on their dead worlds, the souls of the dead remained in their worlds' Lifestreams and cried out for release, and so the Meteia have decided to destroy the universe and since the Ancients don't have therapists, Hermes thinks "Huh, maybe they're right" and sides with them. He activates a machine to erase everyone's memory and lets Meteion get away, so that it will be a "fair" trial of Ancient society. Venat and the Warrior of Light escape, Venat wonders what to do, Hermes accepts the nomination to the seat of Fandaniel, and the Warrior of Light returns to the present which is exactly the same as when they left.

And that's the problem for me. Venat knew everything, the whole time, and didn't try to change anything. She never told anyone about Meteion even though she placed some kind of tracking spell on her, she knew that the Sundering would destroy Ancient society and lead to millennia of suffering and pain, as well as the death of millions with every single Rejoining, and she did nothing.

She didn't actually kill those millions herself so she's not as bad as Emet-Selch, though she did singlehandedly eliminate Ancient civilization. She had a plan to use the moon to evacuate the planet if the Final Days could not be stopped, which she knew was pointless because the Final Days were not actually caused by a "Sound" from within the earth the way that Shadowbringers said it was, it was a group of nihilist goth bird girls. She Sundered everyone except Emet-Selch, Lahabrea, and Elidibus not because there was an actual reason but because the Warrior of Light told her that's what she had done. It's all a big bootstrap paradox, where Hydaelyn's grand plan was never invented, she did what she was told, and she was only told it because it had already happened.

And to top it all off, all of this is impossible because the Warrior of Light is dead.

Not in this timeline, of course. But a major plot point in Shadowbringers is that the Warrior of Light died in the Eighth Umbral Calamity, as did much of the world's population, causing Garlond Ironworks to dedicate centuries of work to figuring out a way of traveling back in time to change the timeline. But if the Ascians and Calamities and Rejoinings only exist because the Warrior of Light told Venat that she had spared the three Unsundered, and if the Warrior of Light died at the Ghimlyt Dark and thus never told Venat about Hydaelyn at all-



You can have "time travel changes the timeline" and you can have "the timeline already accounts for time travelers trying to change it," but if you try to have both it gets very awkward very fast.

Genocidaelyn.

Endwalker also removes some of the moral complexity from the story in a weird way. Hydaelyn in the past was occasionally very questionable, like when she told Minfillia to essentially kill herself back at the end of A Realm Reborn; she definitely lied about Zodiark and her existence, painting them as gods predating the world when they were constructs of humanity instead; and she claimed Zodiark attacked first when she was literally created to attack Zodiark. Some of this is probably because the actual backstory wasn't finalized until midway through Heavensward and before then the Ascians were just doing evil wizard things, which is why Lahabrea, Speaker of the Convocation of Fourteen, one of three remaining Unsundered, turns a scorpion giant and evil and then sics it on the Warrior of Light in the Thousand Maws of Toto-Rak. At the time when Hydaelyn gives the speech about how she used to exist in harmony with Zodiark, it might have been true, but it's very suspicious in retrospect.

Endwalker is not interested in exploring this at all other than one single dialogue choice at the very beginning. Everything else paints Venat as a caring individual who secretly works to shepherd the world through the Final Days, only becoming Hydaelyn and initiating the Sundering when the Ancients prove that they are unable to get over their tragedy and seek to return to exactly what was lost. The morality of turning a group of harmonious immortals into multiple short-lived species who die of war, famine, or plague is only mentioned once, and afterwards brushed aside by Hydaelyn reaffirming her love:

"My love will be with you forever, my dearest children."

There will be no questioning of Crystal Mommy.

There's similarly a lot of emotional flatness in the Scions of the Seventh Dawn's reactions to the events of the story. They can't be sad about it, because by falling into despair they'd turn into monsters, but it means that their only reaction to seeing horrific tragedies one after another is "Grim determination." This isn't even necessary, since plenty of NPCs in Thavnair cry or act depressed during the course of the Final Days without transforming, indicating that good vibes only is not required to avoid monsterization, but it doesn't touch the Scions. Only one thing affects them and in the end it doesn't matter.

In the ashes of dead worlds.

After slamming the breaks on the pacing and moving some more boxes around in Labyrinthos, the Scions of the Seventh Dawn discover the Forum has built a starship and commandeer it to take them to the ends of the universe where the Meteia lurk: Ultima Thule. When they arrive, Meteion confronts them and stops them with the overwhelming power of Dynamis, slowing their movements and freezing their hearts, until Thancred sacrifices himself to create an actual physical surface for the Scions to land on. This scene was good, except that every further obstacle was followed by another sacrifice. The moment I stopped caring was when Y'shtola offered to sacrifice herself and then Urianger was like "me too" for no reason except that they needed the Warrior of Light to be alone at the end and didn't have enough sacrifice points.

Sure, I never actually expected the Scions to stay gone because the game has been unwilling to kill a major character since Papalymo (remember him?) back in Heavensward, and you could make an argument that these sacrifices were more about the Scions' willingness to do whatever it takes to aid the Warrior of Light rather than an actual giving up their lives, but in an expansion that's completely about accepting the bad with the good, that there will be sorrow in life and attempting to eliminate it leads to much worse outcomes than facing it head-on and dealing with it, it's odd that the Scions undermine that by being returned to life after all their sacrifice. The Ancients gave up their friends and family, their high civilization, and in the end their whole world, and stopping the Ascians' attempts to bring it all back is half the plot of Final Fantasy XIV. The people of Thavnair are told to remember their friends--who turned into monsters and murdered their other friends, remember--but to continue on with their lives and rebuild. But the Scions don't lose a single member. At the end of the world, get you some plot armor.

That said, the actual zone of Ultima Thule was amazing. The music is called Close in the Distance, and starts as an echoey, distorted track that gets more into focus the further into the questline you go, ending with vocals about hope's triumph over sorrow. It's all artificial, born of the memories of worlds visited by the Meteia, which means that you get to interact with aliens in a very science fictiony way. The dragons make an appearance, as do their enemies the Omicrons--physically weak aliens who uploaded their minds into robots in order to conquer all opposition and lost their purpose when there were no enemies strong enough to fight them--but my favorite were the Ea, who achieved immortality, abandoned their physical bodies, and fell into despair when they learned that the inevitable heat-death of the universe meant that nothing is eternal. The final dungeon, ominously called The Dead Ends, contains the Grebuloff, aquatic aliens who conquered the dry land with flame and sword until a mutagenic plague killed all life on their planet; the Peace Keepers and Freedom Fighters, whose uneasy truce was broken by the arrival of one of the Meteia and thereafter annihilated themselves in a global thermonuclear war; and the Plenty, whose robed and masked inhabitants had conquered death and suffering but could not answer the Meteia's question about why their lives had meaning, and so summoned a god of their own making called Ra-la to grant them oblivion. Parallels to the First and the Flood of Light, the war between Eorzea and the Garlean Empire, and the eventual fate of the Ancients. "Tales of loss, and fire, and faith," as the lyrics to Close in the Distance run. Or so the game tells us.

Ugh, this guy.

"Or so the game tells us" is really a big problem with Endwalker, since there's a lot of things both that we previously thought were important that get ignored, or that were never mentioned that suddenly become major plot points. Take Zenos yae Galvus, for example. The writers clearly weren't expecting him to be so divisive, since he was built up in Stormblood, brought up and doing mysterious deeds in the background during Shadowbringers up until he murders the Garlean Emperor and starts the Garlean War of Succession and builds the towers across the world. A major villain, right? Well, maybe in the never-made Final Fantasy XIV: Imperium, he would have been, but in Endwalker he's a secondary character at best. After breaking Zodiark free, he shows up on the moon ready to fight and then just leaves because he recognizes the Warrior of Light's heart isn't in it. This happens again, and then he shows up one final time right at the end to help fight Meteion. The dreams he had of the Final Days? Never once mentioned. The reason he's a reaper? Also never mentioned. It's a very weird way to end the arc of a character whose tragic backstory is only explained in a tie-in short story.

At least we get to literally knock his block off during a final battle at the edge of the universe.

Dynamis also suffers from this, since it's key to the plot, to the mechanics of the Final Days, to the defeat of the Meteia, and it has only vaguely been alluded to in the past. Other than a couple lines of dialogue across the base game and three expansions and the buff you get when doing story battles that says "Brilliant Conviction: breaking limits as only a true Warrior of Light could," the most abundant power source in the universe is never mentioned. Meteion is also never mentioned previously, and not even until the last third of Endwalker, so the classic Final Fantasy tradition of "Oh, you've beaten that guy but it is I who am the true Final Boss" continues. I can respect that, but it's a little odd that there was years of spectulation about the cause of the Final Days and the answer turns out to be the personal project of some guy with the masculine urge to create an group of oversensitive empaths, send them out with no oversight into a universe that's already suffered from the Great Filter, agree with their proposition that life is meaningless, and wipe your own memory so you can subject your species to a high-stakes test of their right to exist rather than go to therapy.

How do we know that the Ancients were on their way to eliminating sorrow and following the fate of the Plenty? The developers said so in an interview. Why do all the other civilizations give in to sorrow? That's just the way the universe works, apparently, except it's not because even in the game we have evidence that the Meteia's own empathic despair led to the deaths of multiple civilizations they encountered and if they had found the Plenty first rather than seventeenth, maybe they wouldn't have wiped themselves out. Why is the Sundering good, if even Sundered humanity is still striving for perfection and may eventually attain it--the biological Omicrons were weak until they turned themselves into perfect immortal machines--and thus reach ennui and seek death? Trust Crystal Mommy.

I don't feel like a lot of the conclusions in Endwalker natural follow from the previous flow of the story. Things were bent to create the most cliche JRPG story in existence, the rag-tag band that takes on the omnicidal maniac and wins through the Power of Friendship, which is a far cry from Emperor Varis's eleven-dimensional chess plan to literally explain the Ascians' goals at the peace conference as though they were his own

Varis zos Galvus: "To the Ascians, we are all but tiny, momentary specks within an indifferent universe. We cannot hope to oppose them until we have been made whole once more."
Nanamo: "Are these truly the words of Garlemald’s ruler?"

while acting like a cackling villain, thus priming the Eorzean Alliance to stop the Ascians from manipulating everyone in the guise of stopping the Garlean Empire.

Well, maybe. Varis was a way better villain than Zenos and they had Zenos kill him, so maybe it was all just psyching us up to fight Zenos. It didn't work on me.

The one and only.

I guess what I'm learning from Endwalker is that I prefer smaller-scale JRPG storytelling. My favorite part of Final Fantasy VIII storywise is the first disc, where it's a war between countries with empowered soldiers caught in the midst, and one of my favorite JRPGs of all time is Trails in the Sky, which is contained almost entirely in a country about the size of Lichtenstein. You don't need to make the stakes the entire universe, and in fact it's often better if you don't. For one, there's less ground to make weird plot holes on.

Now, all that having been said, this is not to say that Endwalker is bad. I've often heard that Stormblood is the best expansion not because of the main story, but because of Eureka, and the later raids, and the class changes, and the PVP changes, and everything else that happened over the two years of expansion run time. With the Loporrit tribe quests, or the Restaurant at the End of the Universe in Ultima Thule, or housing sanctuary or any of the other things that patches will bring to Endwalker, maybe by the time it's all done I'll think it's the best one yet. But at the moment, I'm still in Heavensward's camp.

Heavensward's writer is apparently working on Final Fantasy XVI, though. Get hyped.

Part Two of this review, covering all later patch content, can be found here.

Comments

[symbioid]

I love that I was wondering when I'd see a next post and I scroll down to find it and see I missed this!)

[dorchadas]

It's been hard to find the time to read or write lately, but I should have another post coming early next week about what's been going on! And then I'll go back as far as my reading page lets me and catch up.