Final Fantasy XIV’s patch 6.5, Growing Light, is an interesting cap to the Endwalker era.

Firstly, this patch fills the traditional role of the x.3 patch, in that it caps off the story told through Endwalker’s post-launch patch content, but where in prior expansions the launch story would be continued in that way, here, a new story started in 6.1 and was wrapped up by 6.5. While we still have a part two of the 6.5 MSQ to come in patch 6.55 in January, that story is, quite clearly now, going to be the start of a new story arc – that leads in to Dawntrail.

The Endwalker post-launch story has been…contentious, to put it mildly. While Endwalker’s launch content made a lot of cheeky Final Fantasy IV references, the patch content has been, putting it simply, the story of FFIV ripped almost whole from that game and transplanted into FFXIV with small tweaks and changes alongside an FFXIV-specific justification for why that works. How effective and good the story has been to you likely depends a lot on how attached you are to FFIV – if you loved it in your younger years and have a fond nostalgia for it, Endwalker patch content has been a veritable playground of references and characters you’ve likely loved. If you didn’t like or didn’t play FFIV, how well it hit for you depends on some other factors.

My take, which I can solidify now that the full story is out, is this – I really wish there was more connective tissue and effort to build the FFIV references into FFXIV instead of simply transplanting them as they did. Too many elements of the story were just recreations of the identical beats of FFIV, and where there are differences, they serve mostly to attempt to anchor the story into the world of FFXIV. The Thirteenth is a good blank canvas as a world we only knew engulfed by darkness, so here it is to take the place of the setting of FFIV. The main player character cannot be Cecil, cannot go on the journey from Dark Knight to Paladin (well, in a forced way, at least), so we put Zero as a stand-in to be Cecil (with the better and more edgy Reaper job to stand-in for Dark Knight). Golbez isn’t a secretly good guy who is the brother of the protagonist – he’s a misguided good guy who almost allied with Zero previously and figures out where he went wrong as the story begins to conclude.

Final Fantasy IV, Established Narrative, and Missed Opportunities

FFIV has a good story, and the retelling of it here in FFXIV isn’t bad by any means. What I will say and reinforce here from my prior post on the matter is this – FFXIV’s referential story arcs and crossovers are at their best when they weave an original tale with the wink and nod to the nostalgic original, and they are at their worst when the game just throws its hands up and goes, “here’s the characters and old story you like, I guess.” As soon as the story pivoted towards the Thirteenth and made the FFIV crossover clear, anyone with passing knowledge of FFIV could tell you exactly the overall shape of the story. Sure, Zero is a different edgy job before becoming a Paladin. Sure, Golbez and his face turn are handled ever-so-slightly differently. Yeah, FuSoYa is the Watcher and we just never use the FFIV name. But the route we took through the story was the same down to the little details – like the headfake return of the Four Archfiends in the finale, the artwork of Zeromus, and the conclusion seeing Golbez finding something resembling peace with the hero of the tale with whom he shares a deeper bond.

I haven’t played all of FFIV, but I was familiar with its story, and so this arc was disappointing to me because it wasn’t nostalgic to me and it leaned too hard on the nostalgia, too hard on being this modern reimagining of FFIV, and not hard enough on solid storytelling fundamentals. The FFXIV constructs around the story were, to me, the strongest part of it, because they are mostly explained and fleshed out within the game itself. The FFIV aspects want me to be familiar with the characters and lore, but don’t get too deep into explaining it, and here some of the FFXIV elements even fall apart. The whole idea of Memoriates and the Contramemoria as a concept are cool-sounding, but they exist almost entirely as a construct to explain why the Thirteenth is FFIV-land. Almost as quickly as the concept was introduced and explained, it was pulled back, and it only reappears to explain when things are really bad (why we cannot immediately banish Zeromus in patch 6.4) or to quickly flashback to pre-Void Thirteenth for an exposition dump. I liked Zero as a character, and her arc through the patches she was present for was a highlight for me, but it also feels kind of bad and compressed, like we did the Cecil speedrun and now that it’s done she’s on the backburner until we do Void restoration or some side-content in a few patches or expansions. I know we’ll come back to her, to Golbez, to the Thirteenth, but the ending was both a satisfying overall conclusion (of the Void-related patches, I do think the MSQ of 6.5 was overall the strongest) and yet also a disappointment, because I’d like to have seen us do more with these characters, integrate them more into FFXIV.

In fact, a lot of wasted opportunities exist around the Void in general now in FFXIV because of this story. Our initial excursion in the Crystal Tower raid series could have been fun to re-explore through this new lens, as would the stories of Unukalhai and Cylva, and yet short of a mention of them you can do if you’ve done their content (the entire Heavensward trial series and every role quest in Shadowbringers respectively), they never come up. We literally go to the First with Zero, where both of these former heroes of the Thirteenth are, trying to figure out how to help their world just like Zero and yet we never think to bring Zero to them, bring them to Zero, or even mention them while we’re there?! What the actual fuck? A lot of players will make excuses for the development team here by noting that their arcs are optional content and it could be confusing if they came up regardless, but to me, it is not a good excuse and we should absolutely have done more than just mentioning it far too late to Zero. Gaia shows up in the quest regardless of whether or not you’ve done the Eden raids! Don’t tell me we can’t just pull the bandaid off and do the thing anyways! That line coming up right at the end almost actually made me mad, because there is such a good story hook there to explore and for now it has been fumbled in the worst way. Sure, yeah, we’ll probably revisit the topic soon-ish, but I sure wish that we took advantage of how serendipitously things aligned to put all the remaining heroes of the Thirteenth on the same world, in the same city, at the same time!

But to a lot of fans of FFIV, a lot of these points don’t matter as much. I know plenty of FFIV fans and they’ve been pretty hooked on the story of Endwalker’s post-patch MSQ, and I think that’s great. I just think there was a huge opportunity to tell that story better within FFXIV, to integrate it better and smooth the seam of the two, and I think that the story team failed at that here. FFIII’s story beats are well-captured in Crystal Tower and yet end up being original enough to FFXIV that you don’t really notice without knowing that it’s a reference beforehand AND those story elements become an integral part of the overall FFXIV narrative that leads to Shadowbringers, to G’raha Tia and to some of the game’s biggest fan-favorite moments. On a scale of NieR collab through Crystal Tower, Endwalker post-patch MSQ is closer to NieR, which is a shame (no shade to NieR, I like the raids, but the story is absolutely not bridged into FFXIV well).

The Shortening of Content

I intend to talk about the gameplay side of this coin more in a future post, so I won’t say much on that here, but Endwalker did an interesting thing as an experiment of sorts – it merged the traditionally-sidequest trial series of the expansion into the MSQ, meaning that all players doing Endwalker story must do all of the trials in Endwalker. In the past, for those unaware, FFXIV’s content structure has 3 launch trials that are a part of MSQ – usually around the 3rd and 7-9th levels of new vertical progression, and then a story capstone at the new level cap. Extreme versions of the first two are the first bits of high-end content in an expansion, and then in x.1 the story capstone gets an EX version. In each patch afterwards, a new trial series starts, with a story-required trial in x.3 and 3 optional trials that exist as a side-quest series in x.2, x.4, and x.5. These sidequests vary in complexity and storytelling, but they generally add about 30 minutes of story content to each patch the optional trials are present in and allow the game’s narrative to pursue sideplots and interesting beats aside the MSQ. Shadowbringers, just one expansion prior, told an incredibly strong side-story through the Sorrows of Werlyt trial series, following up on the troubled once-villain of FFXIV, Gaius, and showing a side of his backstory and narrative that was gripping, intense, and deeply emotionally resonant. I cited this story as an example of a redemption arc narrative done well when contrasting how Blizzard handled Sylvanas Windrunner in Shadowlands on the WoW side of things, because I think the Sorrows of Werlyt story saga embodied so much of what it was clear Blizzard wanted to do with Sylvanas but did not have the deft touch of storytelling to accomplish.

So Endwalker smushed the trials into the MSQ, meaning now players do every single one of the Endwalker trials as a part of their MSQ progression. It means these stories can be built up a bit more and have more narrative hooks with the main story, and in theory, that’s good, right?

Well…maybe not?

What I think was kind of bad-feeling about the Endwalker trial series is that it clearly feels truncated and short comparatively. Sorrows of Werlyt was actually longer in story terms than most trial series, adding an extra instanced solo duty and having longer and more intricate cutscenes and story development compared to what came before, so perhaps it is a recency bias thing since that series was right before Endwalker. However, I think it is undeniable that there was less story content in Endwalker overall, because instead of the trials having extra content to setup and define the story being told there, you just kind of traipse through MSQ until suddenly a boss appears and you fight them in a trial. The MSQ as presented in Endwalker’s post-launch patch cutscenes comes in, currently, at 12 hours, 30 minutes, and 6 seconds, a reduction from Shadowbringers post-launch MSQ cutscenes which were 12 hours, 58 minutes, and 44 seconds. Now, granted, there is still a part 2 of the 6.5 story to come, and that will likely squeak over the line from Shadowbringers, but keep in mind that the Shadowbringers total is not including trial series time, while Endwalker does. If we add the Sorrows of Werlyt cutscenes to the Shadowbringers total, it gains nearly 4 hours of additional storytelling, putting it far ahead of Endwalker.

It is worth saying at this point that story length does NOT equal story quality, that brevity is the soul of wit and all that. However, I think it is worth also saying that the trial series stories have traditionally been some of the best story content in FFXIV, and I feel like the Four Archfiends in particular suffer the most for the cutting of sidequest trials this expansion. While many elements of the FFIV story are presented quite shoddily in the Endwalker post-patch story, the Four Archfiends are missing so much for not having their stories fleshed out, especially because the Voidsent stories we get after each of the first handful of trials add this flavor and texture that I wish we had gotten more of. If the intention was to roll them into the MSQ, I would have liked to have seen more context and detail around their motivations and aspirations, and instead they feel like speed bumps. We mow down Scarmiglione in a dungeon and solo duty, and Cagnazzo doesn’t even get a solo duty. Barbarricia’s fight was one of my favorite trials to progress this expansion on Extreme, but her story feels like there is so much that could have been told that we just don’t get. Rubicante seems cool and even has a begrudging respect for us in the end and yet we don’t really explore that adequately either. Even the FFIV throwback element of having them all reappear at the finale is done just as fan service, because we don’t even interact with them or fight them – they’re just projections and we see them appear in a cutscene and get cut down by our NPC partymates in the same cutscene. Oof.

As a running theme through Endwalker, we encounter instances where the development team prioritized different ideas to develop the game and establish a firm foundation for the future, but it came at a cost. That cost in regards to story is, consistently, context and establishment within FFXIV’s overall story for the narrative elements borrowed from Final Fantasy IV.

Overall, Still Enjoyed It

However, in spite of all of these points, I still enjoyed the Endwalker post-launch MSQ overall. I think it hit a decent number of interesting plot points, used the story of FFIV as a narrative device to return to the Thirteenth and establish that we could maybe fix it just like we did the First, and the ending in 6.5 is a stronger narrative setup than a lot of the patches that feed into it, with a better-told story and interesting conclusion, even if that conclusion is two separate plot points from FFIV making out in the janitor’s closet. On the merits of the FFXIV-specific ideas, I think there’s a decent amount of good stuff here that both brings back existing plot points and furthers existing narratives, which gives us a lot of good ways to proceed forward. The darkness of Zeromus could be used on the First to restore the balance of elements, perhaps something similar exists for Light that we could do the same with on the Thirteenth, Zero and Durante are a duo now seeking to fix the Thirteenth while Unukalhai and Cylva wait off-screen on the First, and we have our first clues about the actual story beats of Dawntrail, with Erenville coming back with the internet’s favorite disembodied legs while Krile has a seemingly-separate petition to the Students of Baldesion with the Green Mage charm, which heavily foreshadows a central role for Krile and a job change to boot.

For me, I think that comparison is the thief of joy here, because the launch story of Endwalker, even as my opinion of it has lessened slightly over time, was bombastic and still quite good, and that came after the exceptional story told in Shadowbringers, and in the context of the relative hot-streak of storytelling FFXIV has been on, anything even just slightly lesser was going to feel worse due to that comparison. I still think storytelling is a strength of FFXIV and the way the game has continued to sell itself on that merit is a benefit the game has over other contenders in the MMO space. Even then, while Endwalker promised to break the formula of post-launch story content, other than the number tied to the patches for each act of storytelling, it felt very much like a standard FFXIV story cycle with the exception of how it made hyping Dawntrail feel somewhat harder (missing those two patches of in-between story impacts that slightly).

In a lot of moments, the post-patch story of Endwalker did still have some shine and presented a good-enough story overall. I like that we continued to visit Garlemald, continued to help the dragons, furthered the political subplots of the story by trying to help in that old Scion way while the Scions as a group are disbanded as far as everyone knows, and it seems to foreshadow some of the tensions we could see in Dawntrail that have been hinted at in the first Fan Fest. To the extent that I have complained here, I want to be clear and say that my main beef with the story is that it obviously could have been bigger, more grandiose, and better-integrating of the FFIV side of the plot. But just like any patch cycle in FFXIV, it had story highs and story lows, moments of emotional resonance and interest and other moments where you might scratch your head. It is an interesting bellwether for what the future might hold, as fanbase darling Natsuko Ishikawa is no longer the main writer but instead the story supervisor, meaning other writers are doing the work under her leadership and so I am curious to see how the storytelling strength of FFXIV is developed with this changing of the guard.

Based on the original elements to FFXIV, I am excited to see what comes, but taken as a whole with the FFIV elements, I am a little wary. How valid either of those feelings are remains to be seen, but we should get some more solid clues in just a few short days at EU Fan Fest.