This piece contains spoilers for Endwalker. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
I want to start this piece off by saying that no video game is truly “perfect.” Throughout my playthrough of Final Fantasy XIV, I have often found myself irritated, annoyed, upset by or downright mad at what I was being presented with, what I was compelled to do in the course of the main scenario quest line; I have made no secret of this in my various write-ups. Perfection is not – cannot be – the metric by which we measure endeavors like these, because that would only guarantee failure and disappointment.
But god damn did Naoki Yoshida and crew try to get there.
Endwalker is, as so many other reviewers have put it, a culmination of a decade’s worth of world-building, narrative-crafting, character development and technical plate-juggling. There’s layers upon layers of things happening in this video game expansion, and they all manage to work toward this ultimate goal: simply finishing the damn story, and doing so in a way that is emotionally satisfying. The fact that it largely works at all is incredible. The fact that it works so well is nearly unbelievable.
The expansion picks up at the end of the Shadowbringers patch content. The Scions of the Seventh Dawn have discovered an actual cure to tempering, the process by which someone’s aether is tampered with so that they become more suggestible; prior to this discovery, the only way to deal with a primal-tempered thrall was to kill them. This advancement allows Limsa Lominsa to begin to heal their relationship with the Kobolds, and other city-states and so-called “beast tribes” follow suit. Unfortunately, this happy turn of events is followed by a fairly negative one: one of the last Ascians, Fandaniel, has popped up as a “telophoroi,” and is promising the end of the world in a kind of mass-murder-suicide pact. Around the world, massive eldritch towers have appeared out of thin air; they generate a tempering field and pump out modified primals like an assembly line. Endwalker begins in earnest when, after taking down one group of pseudo-primals, the Scions and our Warrior of Light travel to Sharlayan to figure out a way to stop Fandaniel in earnest and forestall the coming of the so-called “Final Days.”
From there, the story is pretty straightforward: we learn about a secret plot the Sharlayan Forum has been hatching for centuries; we travel to Thavnair to discover a way to protect against the towers’ tempering effects; we go to Garlemald to assist survivors of the Empire’s fall and destroy the central tower at the heart of Fandaniel’s plans. Along the way, our Warrior of Light starts getting visions of a blood-red moon, stars falling from the sky, and an ocean of screams. It’s roughly around here that the story starts taking left turns – towards the cosmic, the existential, the symbolic. We’re in JRPG final chapter territory now, baybee, and the tropes start hitting faster and faster. Do we attack and dethrone god not once, not twice but multiple times? That’s for me to know and you to play and find out.
What I will say is that by the time you reach the final third of Endwalker‘s narrative, your enemy is no longer a person but an emotion. Despair works against you at every turn, weakening your friends’ and allies’ faith in themselves, that they can rise to the challenge before them. It manifests physically, turning panicked and afraid people into literal monsters akin to Sin Eaters; only once we defeat these monsters, they don’t leave anything behind. The force that transforms them erases their aether in the process.
The question becomes: how do you fight an emotion? A reasonable emotion, at that? The world is coming apart at the seams: disease, war and violence abound around every corner. For the first time, the Scions of the Seventh Dawn are at a complete loss, because they’re forced to try to answer a question that, in fantasy or reality, nobody has ever really answered sufficiently. Of course, anime bullshit (complimentary) ensues, we save the world eventually, but for a brief moment you get a sense that the writing team wasn’t talking about Eorzea, or Final Fantasy XIV at all. It’s hard not to get that impression, considering Endwalker‘s production period ran right through the worst of COVID, to say nothing of the looming threat of climate change and other existential nightmares.
Here Endwalker easily could have toppled over from the weight of its narrative. FFXIV has tried and failed to tackle such heady themes before, to wildly varying degrees of success. With Shadowbringers, however, I think the developers found a good means of storytelling delivery, choosing to focus on smaller moments that were individually digestible yet taken as a whole amounted to a beefier tale that was more rich with complexity than previous expansions; they carry that system over to Endwalker, and it works. We focus more on the characters, what they’re going through, how they deal with the various trials being thrown at them.
As we move methodically along, we find momentary digressions from the tried-and-true FFXIV gameplay; notably, a stealth section with Thancred that left much to be desired, and a (blessedly short) moment where we, the player, are forced to control a Garlean soldier without our powers. Both of these scenes took place in Garlemald, and both are thankfully not repeated in the course of the game. Endwalker plays with a handful of similar mechanics: there are a few tailing scenes where we have to follow someone from a distance, and the mechanic feels as bad and overused here as it does in SEGA/Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio’s Judgment series. There’s also a forgettable moment where we are turned into frogs to do espionage.
More welcome are the scenes where we have to guide one of our friends along a predefined path, and as we go along we can have little bursts of conversation with them. These moments are all entirely optional, but they go a long way toward making the process of moving the narrative along feel much more natural and pleasant.
All of this culminates in a series of final area encounters that left me quietly sobbing as I pressed on to the very end of the game. Final Fantasy XIV is a rare game that has given us time – literal years, a full decade, even – to get to know our NPC friends in the Scions. We learn their hopes and fears and desires; we supported them through their struggles. And the game chooses to acknowledge this in a way that feels natural, even if it also felt cheap. I’m genuinely glad for the deus ex machina that reverses this decision right before the final boss encounter, but I would be lying if I said it didn’t work on my messy ass.
Endwalker is not a perfect expansion, and Final Fantasy XIV is not a perfect game. But as the game itself goes out of its way to demonstrate: perfection is boring, there is real value in embracing our messiness, and even in the moments where we feel the deepest possible despair, we can still work together to make meaning for ourselves and press on for a brighter future.
