Final Fantasy XIV is the grandest story in video games.
In this retrospective, I’m going to go into the lore, your friends, and your enemies, and explain just what makes them work so well in Final Fantasy 14.
But, that greatness comes at a cost. I’m also going to analyze why Final Fantasy XIV is not a story for everybody in this essay.
Final Fantasy XIV is an MMO in the vein of World of Warcraft, with a heavy focus on story.
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#finalfantasy #finalfantasyxiv #dawntrail #endwalker #gaming #gamingcommunity
Chapter breaks:
0:00 Introduction
5:43 Lore
10:52 Friends, Allies, and Companions
21:17 Antagonists
28:01 Storytelling comes at a price
33:50 Conclusion
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I'm glad to finally get this one out! Thanks for watching everyone
I like your video but minor detail, I think it would be important to add in the detail that Aymeric, while not born with high standing like the High Houses, was still raised to a privileged noble house and given the love and care that helped contribute to the man he is now. Just to say he was not born to nothing and rose to his position from something like sheer disdain.
FF14 has probably the greatest MMORPG story to date. I'll defer to others experience who have played not only FF14 but other MMOs when they say FF14 is has the best story amongst them.
My biggest praise for FF14 isn't just the story, but like any good game doesn't coerce you to play all the time. You can take breaks if you wish and I think that makes the game very flexible and open to try even if the entirety of the MSQ is hundreds of hours long.
“There are more important things to focus on other than length”. – Preach it brother, so sick of everyone always talking about length! Finally someone came out and said it.
Really love that you pointed out Aymeric and Hien's similarities and their personal stories. I sort of feel these are missed often. Pre-ShB had some amazing character writing. Subtle, but very well done.
Nice i finally played FF14 also and finished it 1 Month ago.
I didn’t wanted to start because I feared I get to addicted 😅.
Ohh Boy as a long time FF-Fan I was right I got 😂.
I play FF since 20 Years and I am now 28 and it’s such an Important Franchise for me.😊
It did help me to be the person I am today and I will always be grateful for that and I wish Square Enix to overcome the financial challenges and stay there and making Games for me so long I live.
There games always helped me in bad times of my life and FF have something special that other Games don’t give me 😊.
I would recommend you to play FF9 you will love that game Story-Wise.
The Theme of the game is the Meaning of Life and more I don’t wanna say 😊.
Nice Video hope this Video helps People to start with FF14 ^^ ❤😊.
I reject this meme that you have to sit through 70 hours of bad story to "get to the good part".
I enjoyed every part of the story from start to finish. Because thankfully, nobody deigned to poison my expectations with advance knowledge.
You are not a monolith, and by enforcing such expectations onto newcomers, you risk worsening an experience that could otherwise have been fun.
Just think, it used to be longer
Trails ffxi. Lets not forget zilart kulu from ffxi feels like ascians. Ff14s " great story" is literally a meld of other games. Its not " the greatest"
Only been playing a few months, just finished HW. So far FF14 is the only mmorpg (and I've played a lot in the last 20 years) where I've got invested in the story and really followed it through. It helps that it's got so many fully voiced cutscenes, because I'm not a strong reader lol, because games like WoW, which I played for over a decade, I just used to click through the text and have no clue what was going on and rarely even cared much either. Like, ask me for some of the WoW plot lines and I absolutely couldn't tell you.
I think FF14 just works so well for me because you keep the same characters alongside you through the expansions and constantly fight alongside tthem, so you get invested in their stories too. Aymeric has absolutely been my favourite so far. Loved seeing his development, and I went from being like "snore, boring diplomat, feck u" to "hell yessss lets go my pal, i'm with you all the way!" HW just really surprised me with the routes it took, and I'm a sucker for Dark Souls architecture (so much so that I just bought a house in emp), plus dragon drama, and elf politics lmao. Just kept ramping up and up.
SPOILER WARNING: I won't go into details, but reading this might set some "expectations" I don't want newcomers to spoil their experience.
I have gone through ARR four times on 4 characters (3x pre-nerf). I did Heavensward 3 times, and Stormblood, Shadowbringers and Endwalker 2 times.
What ARR might lack in terms of narrative, I feel it makes up for in terms of the feeling of (mmo)RPG progression. You level fast, you gain access to new things, gear upgrades feel impactful. This is a LOT slower in all subsequent expansions.
Heavensward has always started slow/as a slog for me. I feel like it only picks up a bit after the first few bits. In the middle, it can feel very linear, until it paces things a bit better in the latter half.
Stormblood starts okay in the first half, but I feel like they really missed some breathers in the second half. It's still a great story, but not told with the best of pacing.
Shadowbringers is peak. World introduction, world building, character introduction and development, overall pacing. Just peak.
Endwalker is the very hardest part to play through a second time. If Shadowbringers is an emotional sledgehammer, then Endwalker is an emotional Dempsey Roll. I had to take multiple breaks when I went through it a second time. It's AMAZING in how it brings everything together, but it's emotionally exhausting to go through and especially to do so a second time. It's also the expansion that had me sobbing uncontrollably twice T_T
Going forward, I feel that Dawntrail needs to become a second entry point. It's not that I don't want newcomers to experience the Hydaelyn x Zodiark arc, but it's just too much to ask of people to go through entirely before they can hit Dawntrail. I believe YoshiP prefers people play that arc, but I hope that he'll see that it's not healthy for the longer term. Players can still play the arc through New Game+, but might prefer to do so while being further up ahead in the MMORPG part of the game.
I have no idea what to expect from Dawntrail, I will go into it as I did ARR: completely blank. And that's how I recommend everyone start the game.
As a 1.0 player, the ARR story was a breath of fresh air. 1.0 was horrible. There was no MSQ to speak of. Kind of like job quests every 5 levels or so you’d get a story quest. Once that was done it was back to grinding out leves until the next level threshold. I never knew people had issues with ARR until a couple years ago lol.
People who don't like to read go away
Great video ! I want to recommend this game to some of my friends and family (who are big fans of Fantasy) but it seems so daunting for them so they never start (and they are not gamers to begin with). I've read lots of books and FF14 is still one of my favorite piece of fantasy across all media. Not saying it's without its faults but it left an impact on me like almost no story ever did and I feel like it's criminaly underappreciated by non video focused Fantasy circles because it is a video game and how big it is.
I hate how people's impatience led to a lot of hastily cut quests that added so many little but significant details to the world and characters in ARR rework.
Great video! I love the game I have been playing final fantasy games since they first released. I have spent countless hours in ff11. I have played ff14 since 1.0. The story is amazing. Shadowbringers will bring a grown man to tears. I wish everyone could experience it.
With dawntrail coming I am super excited to see where the story goes. That being said there is one thing I wish the developers would steer away from. Through the entire game so far they have this over bearing focus on the power of friendship. After hearing about the power of friendship dozens of times I am ready for them to just accept they are all friends and not have to constantly reaffirm that to each other. I think it would be nice to see a more mature set of characters who are not so insecure all of the time, who have had their development in the story and move forward. I have a strong suspicion however that dawntrail will still have a heavy focus on this with Krile and Wuk Lamat.
I think it's the one piece of mmos
no
dude, the Trails series, starting with Trails in the Sky is absolutely amazing. 13 games all connected and foreshadowed. everything you praise FFXIV for in the story, the Trails series has. the Trails series is the most ambitious JRPG franchise ive ever played, and ive played a lot of JRPGs.
an interesting thing about Ishgard, it's the only fantasy country with cities and fortifications actually designed for defending against dragons. all of those spikes that limt the sides of walls and at the top of the towers aren't there just for decoration or to exaggerate the steeped tower roofs of castle towers, but serve a legitimate defensive purpose. those spikes are there to prevent dragons from landing or flying into those areas. every other fantasy series, films, games, etc, ive seen that have a dragon war be a major part of the story and lore don't actually take into account the requirements of actually fighting dragons.
I am glad to have paid the price. A lot of modern story telling never takes the opportunity to cultivate the world or characters being created which directly impacts how much we care about them. These stories either demand that you care because of some perceived universality to the conditions of their character or try to entertain you with shock value, but neither of these options really trumps making the reader actually care about the world and its characters and becoming engaged with the story from that perspective. The little side stories that are seen as fillers are what provides color to the world and carry the important burden of describing to your reader what the character is truly like (not just the archetype they fulfill) when circumstances aren't forcing their hand. In their absence you are often left with one-dimensional characters whose adventures feel telegraphed rather than organically unfolding. The first Harry Potter book is 80% filler, 20% consequential plot, but that filler gets you to care about the characters and the world in a way that supports the rest of the story going forward. We see this "removal of filler" happen with adaptations a lot and it is usually this that makes adaptations feel lesser than the source material. For example, removing the penguins episode from the Avatar series makes sense if you are trying to tell a more concise story than the cartoon did, but it definitely robs you of the opportunity to build that relationship with the characters that makes you feel like you are personally "one of the avatar gang". The end result is that you don't care as much, and when people don't care about your characters and their world, the plot, however great, is immaterial. This does no mean every adaption fails, you fill your adaption with enough fireworks, CGI and nostalgia and people will come look at it out of curiosity but the experience is still diminished by the absence of those little moments. There is room for both types of story-telling of course, but one is still superior. Sometimes you do have to get by on a microwaved meal and that's okay, but there's no arguing that a fully developed homecooked meal is just better, even if (or maybe precisely because) it takes more time and effort to put together.
I Resonate well with it though i still think ffxi had a great story as well and will be returning to it once i complete dawntrail
The background worldbuilding to this game has such depth, and the side characters have journeys of their own. I can point out flaws I have with the storytelling, and I feel that I must even though I largely agree with your assessment:
For example, ARR is genuinely an awful and cliched experience, and this is coming from someone who didn't hear the "it gets good at Heavensward" talk that so many complain "poisons" the experience of new players.
As another example, the writers are afraid to kill of major characters. (To counterbalance this, there are usually good explanations for why a certain character isn't killed for good, and they often go on to have great arcs on their own – I'm thinking of two particular characters that get seemingly killed off and then goes on to be among my favorite characters in any story after returning from the dead.) It does lessen the impact of many moments when I see who is involved and say "yeah, that's not gonna stick" and I'm invariably correct.
Thirdly, the game's massive scope and at times rocky pacing does mean that important information may just be forgotten by the audience before it becomes relevant. I had literally forgotten what the Battle of Silvertear Skies was by the time it became important to the narrative. On my recent playthrough, I saw all of the exposition telling me about it some thirty hours before it is ever mentioned again… but on my first playthrough, all of that information disappeared from my head. There are a lot of similar instances where we will get foundations laid, only to be paid off 10-80 hours down the line. I do love that the game has so much depth that it can weave a story out of so many different threads – sometimes small personal stories, sometimes epic world-shattering tales – but if you do not get personally excited for a certain story thread or piece of worldbuilding, it may not stay in your memory long enough before it is brought into play.
And all of these are really nitpicky complaints! FFXIV is BIG in a way that I've never seen in any story, in any medium. (The only one that comes close is Legend of the Galactic Heroes – probably the most perfect epic ever written, although it has flaws as well.) The way it melds the big – the affairs of nations, the religious and cultural identities of peoples – with the small and personal – a defector fighting enemy soldiers he used to command faces a crisis of conscience when he discovers that his children are fighting on the other side, a young woman learning to bargain with the man who more than likely murdered her parents – is masterful. There are so many stories and characters in this game that are amazing, and the grand scope allows for a living world unlike any other.
final fantasy 14 is the one piece of gaming
I know its too spoilery to include, but with Elidibus, its amazing how the writers made you care about his struggle in just about 2 patches, which compared to a full expansion, is an incredible feat. Elidibus felt like a throw away ascian for a while cause of the story just not doing much with him, but, in such a short time, even his end in 5.3 gets you caring so much. Absolutely amazing work.
Endwalker is the best video game story I've ever experienced. It's just a super feel good story that can be applied to real life. It shows me that no matter how bad things are, you should never lose hope. Keep going and things will be okay.
I was one of the people who wanted to quit in post ARR and would have absolutely done so without my friends promising it would get better. That was before ARR was reworked. It just dragged on too much. God damn cheese hole.
The ending of ARR then completely blew my mind and I still get shivers thinking back to Edmund's narration welcoming us to Ishgard, walking heavensward. Finally something had happened in the story. Finally, there were stakes other than primals. And from that point on it just got better and better, though I still feel like FFXIV peaked in Shadowbringers so far – Endwalker took it a little too far for my personal taste, but don't get me wrong, I still loved every minute of it. I love this game with all my heart, and I can't wait to see what awaits us in Tural!
To be clear, XIV has a lot of content that is deeply inspired by other FF games. DEEPLY inspired. You don't need to know any of it to understand XIV's story… but the references are all there.
11:10 – Canon: Alisaie doesn't like pickles.
Live service gaming is never free. the choice is how you pay them. FF14 shows the magic that happens when you align incentives of the studio and the players.
I think you made a slight scripting mistake. you use the "warrior of light" title throughout, but forget to establish that that's the player character.
Emmet Selch… You can write a story where he is the hero of the tale, without changing any of what he does or why. In fact, some franchises have done so.