Game Review: Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker (final review)

[dorchadas]

I usually don't review the same game twice, but MMOs are different. With most games, I play them once, I do all the content, and I'm done. Even with games that receive extensive post-release updates like Wasteland II or Divinity: Original Sin that had enough post-game changes to warrant doing another review, I avoided it by not playing them at all until years after they came out, long after all the additional changes had been made. But I've been playing Final Fantasy XIV for years at this point, through every patch and with all the changes that come out, so I've seen the game as it developed. And my original Endwalker review only covered the story and none of the mechanical changes and was written over two years ago before the patch content. A lot has happened in the game since then!

As before, this review will contain spoilers for Endwalker's story.

Cutting bits out of the plot so what's left makes no sense.

I'm not going to repeat everything I wrote in the previous review since it's linked above and you can read that too if you want, but I will say that almost none of the patch content helped with any of my criticisms or elevated the story for me. The ultimate villain was still a space bird girl introduced two-thirds of the way through the story, there were multiple major retcons which actively harmed my enjoyment of the story like confusing the Echo and the Blessing of Light--the classic problem of "If you don't care about the fictional background of your world, why should the rest of us?"--or changing the Sound from within the earth, introduced literally in just the last expansion, to "a bird girl singing in space to end the world." The entire moon plot made no sense because if the source of the Final Days was from space, then using the moon as a spaceship would not have actually saved anyone. It still should have been two expansions because then the first half of the story would have had room to breathe and we could have had more geopolitics and less elementary school level shōnen "the power of friendshipDynamis overcomes everything!" nonsense. The use of time travel again, and a completely different model of time travel than the previous time they used time travel, raised way more questions than it answered. The Scions not having to suffer any losses in an expansion entirely about having to accept loss and pain as a part of life was still jarring.

Speaking from the future of having played Dawntrail, I can tell you that Dynamis is not mentioned in a single Dawntrail quest.

There was one quest in the patch series that helped assuage my annoyance at the 6.0 content. In a sidequest, you learn that the little Omega replica that's been around since Stormblood actually had a copy of Omega downloaded into it moments before Omega's destruction at the Warrior of Light's hands, and since the replica body poses no threat--Omega is forced to admit that a child could defeat it in combat with its current capabilities--you take it around to various places and talk about the Ancients, the Final Days, and the plot of 6.0. And at the end, it asks you, who was right? Was Hermes right, and if people cannot find meaning in their lives and attain happiness then they do not deserve to live? Was Hades right, that the old world was better and it is worth sacrificing all the inhabitants of the shards to resurrect the past? Or was Venat right, that life is meaningless without overcoming challenges and the Sundering was a necessary step to prevent the original world from eventually stagnating and giving up?

And you can look at Omega and say, "None of them were right."

And that is the correct answer, because each of those choices has the fatal flaw of the Ancients in it--all of them assume that they have the wisdom and the authority to make the choice on behalf of everyone else. The first assumes that if people cannot articulate a reason to live then they would be happier dead, the second that the dead would approve of having billions die to resurrect them, and the third that the only way to avoid stagnation is suffering. All of them demonstrate overwhelming arrogance, that they alone are worthy to make that choice, for no other reason than that they have the power to do so. Weirdly, Hades is the most cognizant of this, in the final battle against him in Shadowbringers where he says:

The victor shall write the tale, and the vanquished become its villain.

There is no morality, only power. If Venat's choice of the Sundering had led to the destruction of Hydaelyn, then she obviously would have been wrong, but since her long-shot Bootstrap Paradox plan worked, she was right. It would have been nice if any of this were reflected in the original story instead of being how Venat is our magical crystal mommy, but at least it showed up at all.

You and me both, lady.

The 6.1 to 6.5 patch story was "You like Final Fantasy IV? Cool, here's Final Fantasy IV."

The best part of the patch was the view of the Thirteenth. Previously, there was basically no difference between voidsent and classical demons. They were summoned by cults, they ate people and drank blood, and their iconography was all unlit haunted houses and lightless caves and desecrated altars. The Endwalker post-patch content turned them into dark faeries and I am here for it. The Thirteenth was destroyed by the Flood of Darkness, and since Darkness is the active principle in XIV's cosmology the result of this is that death no longer exists there. No only were all the inhabitants of the Thirteenth warped into weird monsters, they cannot die--if killed, they are absorbed by another, stronger voidsent, and if that voidsent dies everyone they consumed simply reforms again and the cycle continues. There is no rest, no peace, only an endless struggle for aether where weaker voidsent pledge themselves to stronger voidsent for the promise of aether and to avoid being eaten. The most important thing to the voidsent is the contract, the agreement between two parties that prevents their entire society from descending into war without end.

With this as the background, Golbez's plan makes sense. He wants to force open a massive gateway to the Source, where the Lifestream actually works, and allow the voidsent to invade so they can actually die for real. There's no explicit explanation as to why the plan requires an invasion when their goal is to die anyway, but I think it's pretty easy to intuit--ten thousand years of rage. The voidsent are all (as far as we know) the original inhabitants of the Thirteenth transformed by the Flood of Darkness, so the more clear-minded ones remember the old world. They remember the wind in the trees, they remember the sunlight on their face, they remember waking up next to their loved ones and having breakfast and the smell of eggs and tea, and they remember the end of the world and millennia of knives always at their back in a constant struggle to survive. Of course they're angry and not thinking straight. Of course they don't care about the plan that would work the best for all possible parties. They just want an end, and if means the death of another world, whatever. Plus this fits in with the constant theme of FFXIV, and Final Fantasy in general, that it's wrong to harm the living for the benefit of the dead.

The main plot involves you following around Zero, the voidsent that worked with Zenos, as she somehow manages to come with you to the Source. She learns about sunlight, about eating, and about friendship not based on cold calculation of aether amounts gained and lost. It's a classic "What is this thing you humans call love?" storyline, where Zero has to remember when she was human and the emotions she's kept suppressed for ten thousand years, we go to her domain where she protects other voidsent who are trying to opt out of the endless struggle the voidsent all participate in, she meets the Scions, and she does her "tip my hat" emote roughly a thousand times. She was a good straight man and a fun character to spend time with, and I have no complaints about her.

The problem is that the actual progression of the plot is just FFIV. The greatest part is when we go to Troia--in FFXIV, "The Fell Court of Troia," with a minor key harpsichord remix of FFIV's "Troian Beauty" as the theme--and see the fallen grandeur of what must have once been a glorious kingdom when the Thirteenth still had light and warmth, and I also enjoyed the time at Zero's domain. But once the Four Fiends are introduced, you know we're going to fight them, you know what order we're going to fight them in, and all of that happens. The one twist is that Zero does not actually become Zeromus like people thought--instead, she uses some of her absorbed Light from a brief sojourn on the First and does the Cecil paladin transformation. I did not see that coming and then as soon as it happened I was like "Of course!" I was annoyed that they just let Golbez off the hook for his evil schemes when he claimed to be turning over a new leaf but...well, he lives in the Thirteenth. It's not like they can kill him.

The biggest disappointment is that they went straight into another "save the entire world" plotline when we were supposed to be just having cool adventures. It was a fine plot by itself, and if it brings the "save the Thirteenth" plot, previously all in side content that the devs cannot be confident any individual player has done, into the main story for the inevitable Thirteeth expansion, then I'm happy. But something a bit more interesting would have been better.

The welcoming committee.

Myths of the Realm, the Alliance Raid series, was about the Twelve, Eorzea's pantheon of gods. I was pretty excited for this and man did they whiff it.

You start out with the news that something weird has appeared over Silvertear Lake, and when you go check it out, it turns out that it's the fabled realm of the gods. You go in to investigate it and the gods appear, saying that they're not mere primals, they're real 100% genuine gods, and they have a diabolical plan that they will enact unless you fight them. So you do, and then they drop the facade and say that they need you to fight them for reasons they'll explain later. And when they do explain it, the explanation is that they're robotsPrimal guardians created by the Ancients.

I hate this for so many reasons. The first is that it strips all the mystery from a fantasy setting to neatly tie everything back to a single source. The Allagan Empire? Founded by Ascians, who were Ancients. The Garlean Empire? Ancients. The elementals in the Twelveswood? Ancients. Who made the behemoths and Ixion and all the weird monsters? Ancients. Who made the Twelve? You guessed it, the Ancients. Sure, the Ancients were the original civilization from which all others derived but that was twelve thousand years ago, more than enough time for all sorts of things to happen in between, and tying everything back to the Ancients is too pat and narrows the scope of the world immensely. One of the best lines in The Fellowship of the Ring in terms of world building is after the company fights the Watcher in the Water and when asked what it was, Gandalf says:

"I do not know [...] but the arms were all guided by one purpose. Something has crept, or been driven out of dark waters under the mountains. There are older and fouler things than Orcs in the deep places of the world."

because it leaves space for "Here there be dragons," one of the single most important elements in maintaining a feeling of discovery. Once all the mysteries of worldbuilding are solved, what's left?

The second is that it does very odd things to the setting. The Twelve are Eorzea's pantheon of gods--their images are all over, they have temple and shrines and so on, but in this raid we learn they are the guardians of the entire planet and yet no one outside of Eorzea has ever heard of them. The characters theorize that sightings of them as they watch their charges in Eorzea led to religions being built around them, but wouldn't that happen elsewhere on the planet too? And the revelation that they're actually Primal constructs, albeit ones with aetherotechnology designed to prevent them from being warped too much by prayers, means that Gaius van Baelsar's much-memed speech in the Praetorium:

"Are the 'Twelve' otherwise engaged? I was given to understand they were your protectors. If you truly believe them your guardians, why do you not repeat the trick that served you so well at Carteneau, and call them down? They will answer--so long as you lavish them with crystals and gorge them on aether. Your gods are no different than those of the beasts--eikons every one."

...is completely correct. I was excited to meet Thaliak, my character's patron god, but all these revelations came out by the time I got to him so I didn't care anymore. Why should I feel honored to meet a robot?

And speaking of robots, the point of the raid is that the Twelve say that with the Final Days averted, their purpose is over and so they want to lay down their guardianship and return to the Lifestream. This is weird because while they are based on real people they are not actually real people, but fine. But the weirder part is that you fight them and they dissipate, and it turns out they built a machine to absorb all the prayers so uncontrolled Primal mockeries of them aren't created. So we literally replace the gods of Eorzea, who were already essentially automata based on people (Ancients), with an actual robot and literally no one brings it up. We spent all of Heavensward in Ishgard, a theocracy ruled by the Church of Halone, and no one brings up that they might want to know that Halone is dead and they're praying to a computer.

The fights were fun--there are arenas that aren't just a square, you get to fight Rhaglr on a giant statue of Rhaglr, so if you fall between the fingers of the hand it's instant death--and the models of the gods look really good, but it didn't overcome the story for me. It came off as the developers being like "Alright, time to wrap up all the loose ends. Better kill off the Twelve. Let's make them former Ancients and have them die'Return to the star,' that'll solve things," came up with at 4:45 p.m. on a Friday. Very disappointing.

Welcome to Castlevania.

In contrast, the Pandaemonium raids were great. I know I've been harping on the Ancients, but it helped that we knew this was about them before going in. In Elpis you learn about Pandaemonium, a containment facility built by the Ancients for creations that were too dangerous to allow to roam free in even a limited capacity, and you also learn that the group in charge of Pandaemonium is the Word of Lahabrea.

Lahabrea is interesting, because he died way back in Heavensward before the Ancients were even a concept to the devs. They inherited the Ascians from 1.0, so they didn't have a set goal or a purpose, and they were like, "Well, we'll just have them do evil wizard things until we figure out what their plan is." That's why Lahabrea is a cackling supervillain who wants to cast Ultima for poorly explained reasons before he's revealed as one of three Unsundered Ascians scheming to rejoin all the shards for the glory of Zodiark. But because he was dead before all of these revelations, he didn't get any character development other than "Oh, he body-swapped too much and went crazy." Pandaemonium gives him that character development so we learn his real name, Hephaistos, as well as that of his wife, Athena. True to his name, he's crippled, but in a crazy Final Fantasy-esque way--Athena is a mad scientist who was experimenting on their son in order to learn a way to fuse Ancients with their creations and become gods. When Lahabrea confronted her around it, she told him to merge with her (like the Igeyorhm/Lahabrea fusiono in the Aetherochemical Research Facility) so he would truly understand her. When he did this, the understanding came with a fragment of her mad ambition and hubris, so after executing her for her crimes, he took that part of his soul, cut it out, and imprisoned it too, leaving only a cold, duty-focused man who lived for his job, and hoped he would be able to raise his son into a well-adjusted young man.

And, well, he wasn't able to do that.

There's a lot of family drama and I liked how it wasn't all neatly resolved, a rarity among Endwalker's tepid plots. It doesn't much matter when Hephaistos's son Erichthonios learns why his father was also such a jerk to him, because it doesn't erase all those memories of dismissive glances, harsh criticism, and conversations cut short. We learn that the Heart of Sabik, a mystery since the very end of the original A Realm Reborn, was created by Athena based on the study of a mysterious meteorite that landed in the far-distant past and has some tie to Ultima the High Seraph, the mystery being from "elsewhere" at the end of the Stormblood raid series. It answers some questions while leaving room for future expansion, which was something that the FFXIV team used to be good at before they decided to wipe the slate clean with Endwalker. Also, you fight a giant castle, evil pikachu, and Athena yells:

"And from the deepest pit of the seven hells to the very pinnacle of the heavens, the world shall tremble!"

...before she does her super attack. Unleash Ultima! They were fun fights with a good story, a rarity in Endwalker.

Ah, a classic Rotate the Statues puzzle.

Moving away from the story, the two major expansions in content for Endwalker were Island Sanctuary and Criterion dungeons.

Island Sanctuary was hyped to high heaven before it came out, but mostly by the player base who were hoping for being able to play Stardew Valley while also playing Final Fantasy XIV. The devs repeatedly said that it's not going to be that deep, that people shouldn't get their hopes so high, and so of course people didn't listen. They were hoping for something they could dive completely into and that would absorb all of their gaming hours and of course it wasn't that. It could never be that, because Stardew Valley is its own game and FFXIV has the main story, the raids, PVP, and a bunch of other content to handle as well as the farming sim. So people ground like crazy and hit level cap in the first day and then complained that there was nothing to do.

Well, I didn't approach it like that. The big complaint people had about Island Sanctuary is that it was a spreadsheet where you only needed to go there for ten minutes a week, but I liked that part. You can turn over most of the actual management to mechanical workers and that's what I did, spending a little time trying gathering some materials occasionally and enjoying the cutscenes where various characters came to the island to visit the Warrior of Light. Sure, there wasn't any of the building a farm and organizing of buildings that farming sims usually have--the places you can put the buildings are fixed, and your choices are mostly constrained to which decorative building you'll place--but I didn't care because I have a house, so my decorative urges already have a place to come out. And also after a few patches, they added the ability to put outdoor housing items onto your island, so people finally had a place to use all of those items that they would get for holiday events. But I still haven't done that because I already have a place to put them.

People wanted Island Sanctuary to be a complete replacement for a house and also an entire massive game mode too, but that was never going to be the case.

The other big content addition were variant/criterion dungeons, three (it turned out) dungeons that weren't the on-rails corridor model that most of the dungeons have since become. Each dungeon has three paths, and each path has four solutions. People didn't like these because they ground out the entire thing in a single day, following a guide or coordinating with Discords or something similar, and then they ran the criterion harder version once and the savage version once. Now, the people who said that the criterion and savage versions did not have good enough rewards are absolutely correct--other than a title, the savage only really gave you materia, which are easy to get elsewhere--but the people who blew through in a day definitely did it wrong. I played through them over a couple weeks with sashagee and aaron.hosek and we solved them ourselves. We tried different strategies, we read the records that came with successfully completing different paths for clues, and we gradually solved all of the routes. The best one was probably finishing off Mount Rokkon, the second dungeon, when we found a storeroom and sashagee pointed out that there were four lanterns, one of which were lit, and three chōchin obake that exploded when they died on the level above, and what if we lit all the lanterns? We did, a secret door opened, and we finished the map.

I really hope they keep the variant dungeons going because they're a great way to put in extra lore. The first dungeon was all about Sil'dah and Ul'dah, once twin cities until one was destroyed by a zombie plague. Since it's "old content" it's probably not going to come up in the main plot anymore, so a dungeon that's entirely about lore is a good place to put it. And for another use, the third dungeon seemed to have nothing to do with anything in the plot so far and then turned out to be integral to the plot of Dawntrail, so that's another way to use them. I'd happily play through one of these each patch. Hopefully they'll put one in for Gelmorra.

Limit Break.

One very controversial decision was tying the relic grind to the Manderville quests. If you're not familiar with either of those, in every expansion FFXIV has a set of superweapons that you can spend the entire expansion building. In A Realm Reborn these were classic Final Fantasy weapons based on myths, like Excalibur, the Stardust Rod, the Lance of Longinus, and so on. By Endwalker they had mostly cycled through all of these and needed something new, and the Manderville quests had taken time off in Shadowbringers, so they decided to combine the two concepts. This did not play well with everybody.

The Manderville quests are some of sashagee's favorite content in the game, but they're definitely cut from a different cloth. I've heard it described as the main game is canon to the Manderville quests, but the quests are not canon to the game. In the main game, Lord Godbert Manderville is a member of the Syndicate, the six richest merchants of Ul'dah who advise the Sultanate, having made his money through the Gold Saucer and with a somewhat eccentric son. In the Manderville quests, Lord Godbert Manderville is an invincible gigachad, the only goldsmith who can Limit Break, who can blow all his clothes off with a single flex of his glistening muscles, and his son Hildibrand is a buffoon who styles himself Eorzea's greatest detective. It's extremely anime so I can see why they're divisive, but they'd always previously been optional side content that you didn't have to engage with at all. All of a sudden, it was the only way to get the Endwalker relics. And not only that, the requirements were just "get 1500 tomestones."

Tomestones are the standard currency for buying most everything endgame, but for relics in the past there were usually other requirements as well, like needing to complete certain dungeons or needing to engage in specific side activities. The variant dungeons or even island sanctuary seemed like something the relics should have keyed into, but instead you could simply run the dungeon roulettes that you were doing anyway, take those tomestones and give them to Gerolt, and get a weapon out of it, and people were annoyed by it. It reminded me a lot of the Trial of the Crusader raid back during World of Warcraft's Wrath of the Lich King expansion, where after years of players complaining about how long it took to do the raids, how they didn't like the trash mobs, how the bosses were the only thing that mattered, Blizzard made a raid that was just a boss rush and people hated it. People complained about A Realm Reborn's book step, they complained about having to do Eureka for Stormblood, they complained that FATEs were the most efficient way to do Shadowbringers, and they finally made a relic where you could do it any way you wanted and, of course, it annoyed people. Gamers have no idea what they want, but the definitely know what they don't want.

I didn't mind it, just like I didn't mind the quest, though part of that is that I still had all the old relic content that I had to do. In much the same way that doing Stormblood relics gets you tomestones that you can use to buy the ingredients for Heavensward relics, I used the tomestones I got from hunts and dungeons--that I was going to be doing anyway--to buy relics. And when the quests seemed to be setting up the idea that the Manderville family were secretly descended from parasitic aliens called the "Mandervillians" and that was the source of the family's legendary strength and resilience, I didn't roll my eyes, I thought, "They're clearly doing this to set up a joke about how someone got adopted and the alien bloodline died out." And I was right! In an expansion where so many stories just didn't hit for me, I enjoyed the lighthearted silliness of the Hildibrand quests.

And they had better bring Brandihild back. He was the best part of the new quests.

Pictured: what bosses start doing right as you're going to do your burst phase.

Okay, plot stuff aside, it's time to talk about the single biggest mechanical change in Endwalker, the infamous Two Minute Meta.

Most jobs did not get too many new actions in Endwalker. They usually got some expansion to an existing combo that auto-changes a previous button, because unlike old World of Warcraft's skill list--sashagee was astonished when I told her my balance druid raided heroic raids with six skills for single target and then another two for AoEs--FFXIV characters have dozens of skills, but the devs are careful to try not to increase the number of necessary skills above 32 (i.e., two pages worth of controller hotbars). The bigger adjustment was that every job's buffs and cooldowns were all adjusted to bring them in line with each other, so that every two minutes the entire group pops all their cooldowns and goes berserk. This produces most of the damage done by some jobs--ninja does 40% of their total damage in the fifteen second burst phase!

However, people are pretty neutral to negative on it. For one thing, it means fights are even more predictable than they were before, because every job needed to be adjusted to fit into the two minute meta. If they had shorter or longer cooldown cycles, their burst phases would happen outside the general buff windows so they would do much less damage than they otherwise would have and their own buffs wouldn't line up. Since gamers are obsessed with The Meta, the jobs would just not be invited to raids. It'd be like Heavensward where you brought a ninja for Trick Attack, a dragoon for Disembowel, a bard for group buffs, and then black mages, summoners, machinists, and monks all had to fight for that last slot. However, changing jobs to fit the meta means they all start playing more similarly to each other, because they all have some resource or cooldowns they save, dump them in the burst phase, and then just hit a few buttons in the downtime until their cooldowns come back up again. Also, since the burst phase is so short, it's highly susceptible to whether you crit or not, and being slightly unlucky can trash your damage compared to hitting the top if you had gotten a few more crits, especially on your end-of-combo abilities that are often three or four times more powerful than your basic skills. And finally, it makes fight design more homogeneous too. The devs know that every two minutes, players are trying their hardest to squeeze out tons of damage, so they put all the complicated boss phases every two minutes.

The absolute worst part is when you pop all your cooldowns then get hit by something and die. That's what the devs are aiming on, that you have to avoid dangerous situations and get out all your damage anyway, but it's one of the worst feelings in the game.

One of the reasons to have all these jobs is because they play different or at least feel different to play. I wasn't affected by some of these changes because red mage already had distinct burst phases where you charge in, do your sword attacks, and leap out, so the only thing that really changed was the timing on some of the raid buffs, but jobs like paladin had much more extensive reworks to fit the model. Job imbalance has always been a problem (see above about Heavensward), but a little bit of imbalance is better for the feel of the game than jobs starting to feel the same. You have your two-minute raid buff, your 0-100 gauge, your ability that gives you 50 to that gauge, your power cooldown that takes 50 of that gauge...sticking to this too hard means that we'll know how all future jobs play before they even come out. I don't do high end raiding and I mostly play red mage, but when I go to other jobs I notice they play closer to red mage than they used to and I don't really like that.

There you go, an objective review.

So in the end, Endwalker was my least favorite expansion so far. They squandered ten years of buildup on an emo bird girl, they went through trying to clear the slate in ways that diminished the weight of other plot elements like the Twelve or the elementals in Gridania, and the post 6.0 plot was mostly workmanlike painting by numbers.

Now, it's possible that I'll look back on this in a few years as naive nonsense. When the Warriors of Darkness showed up in the Heavensward 3.1 patch, people wondered what the point of it was and called it a filler arc and a distraction from the Nidhogg/Estinien plot, even if it did bring a bit of closure to Minfillia's fate. And then five years later, we got Shadowbringers and that little filler arc turned out to be one of the most important plot events that happened in the entire game. Maybe in a few years when they do the inevitable Thirteenth expansion and Zero and Golbez become major characters again, I'll look back at the void quests as the introduction to beloved fan favorites. But this is a review about how I feel now, and right now I'm just disappointed. Final Fantasy XIV's distinguishing point is its story. Unlike World of Warcraft, which has compressed its story and plot and removed crucial contextual quests to the point that it's basically impossible to know what the backstory of what you're doing is unless you've been continuously playing for twenty years (and read several books published outside the game), FFXIV prides itself on its story. To this day you still have to do hundreds of hours of previous story to get through to the current end game, so while it's true that you only play through the story once and the gameplay can make up for a mediocre story (the general opinion on Stormblood), the story matters. Almost none of the story for Endwalker really hit for me, and for a big chunk of the expansion sashagee was too sick to play together with me, so I wasn't left with a lot to draw me in.

They promised a new beginning with Dawntrail. We'll see how well they follow through.