So, I beat Heavensward.
For as hype as the climactic battle in that game had me, you would think I’d be excited to write about my experiences with this expansion. But this is the eighth draft of this post, and instead of excitement I’m stuck focusing on the reactions I had to a lot of the major story beats and narrative themes that wove through the game. I desperately do not want to get in the weeds, not because I’m allergic to telling spoilers in these posts (y’all know I don’t care about that) but because it’s just so… boring to anyone who isn’t playing it right there and then.
Like I am absolutely the kind of person who gets fired up over Politics In Video Games™, but writing about the political intrigue in Heavensward is kind of like writing about a Biden Administration cabinet meeting: you know they’re there talking about how to screw over millions of people at home and abroad, but the line-by-line details are dry enough to make anyone who didn’t explicitly major in political science fall the fuck asleep. Heavensward deals in hefty themes of class divide, religious persecution and authoritarianism, and racial tension, but almost all of this is expressed through lengthy secret backroom meetings between exceptionally powerful people. Even when we encounter on-the-ground poverty and squalor, it’s presented to us through tourism.
Even describing all the principal characters in this expansion would involve running through a big list of knights and noblemen and all their houses and titles and what their connection to the Holy See is. It’s Proper Nouns All The Way Down, and as someone who did all that before with Destiny 2 I’m not exceptionally interested in doing that again here. The cool side of this coin is that we also get to meet or hear about a not-small number of the Great Wyrms – seven extremely old and powerful dragons brought to Hydaelyn by Midgardsormr – and we only really have to fight one. That’s a pretty good ratio, especially considering the circumstances surrounding the initiation of the “Dragonsong War” in the first place.
See how easy it is to get into the wonk weeds here? I almost just did it and I wasn’t even trying to.
This is Final Fantasy as seen through Game of Thrones or Skyrim or Dragon Age, and it reaches similar levels of abject absurdity at various points. Like, at one point we have to fight our way up a mountain to request an audience with the Great Wyrm Hraesvelgr to try and plea for peace between the dragons and mankind, once and for all. It’s a negotiation with a high probability of failure and an even higher cost if they fail, so what does one of our companions do?
She tries to impersonate Hraesvelgr’s dead Elezen girlfriend. Nobody stops her. This – understandably – does not convince Hraesvelgr to do anything to keep his brother Nidhogg from making plans to fuck up Ishgard.
This is definitely uncharitable to Ysayle, who legitimately thought she summoned the soul of the Primal, Shiva, into herself; but the fact that she actually used that summoning as a bargaining chip to get Hraesvelgr to act on the Ishgardians’ behalf – especially after we learn who really started the war – is just fucking wild. And entirely appropriately, Hraesvelgr tells the party to get the fuck off his mountain.
Final Fantasy XIV, to me, works best when it’s doing one of two things: plumbing the complex emotional depths of its meticulously fleshed-out characters, and explicitly positioning the Warrior of Light and Company as a procession of dumbass clowns who are simply stumbling slapstick-ily into problems and those problems’ solutions all at once. Consider for a second that our primary companion throughout almost all of Heavensward is a 16-year-old impossibly wealthy child whose last little oopsie was starting an unaccountable mercenary army of cops that turned on him and his NGO friends almost immediately. Consider that one of our principal allies, upon learning that the religious and political infrastructure propping up his entire society is a lie, thinks it’s a good idea to go to his dad The Pope and say “hey I know about how all of society is propped up by these fundamental lies. I am positive I won’t be branded a heretic for this.” (Spoiler alert: he is branded a heretic and we have to save him from the inquisition.) CONSIDER THIS: the best character IN THE GAME is a Lalafell who spends her every waking moment at the bar, slinging hot goss. Now tell me with a straight face that Final Fantasy XIV Heavensward is a serious game for serious people that talks about serious issues seriously. You can’t do it.
And so maybe that’s where I find myself in tension. Taken as an unserious game full of lovable clowns, I enjoyed every second of it. It is a genuinely effective game at affecting you emotionally. The part where you fight Nidhogg on the Steps of Faith is, as others have commented, genuinely one of the most “YOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO” moments of all time, in any video game I’ve ever encountered. Regrettably, I just couldn’t switch into a mode where I was able to consider the Big Hefty Themes the game tries to present with any kind of seriousness.
I think part of the problem is that the game has signaled to me in the past that it acknowledges these Big Hefty Themes, they are an integral part of this world, but also it just doesn’t care about them. Every single city-state in Eorzea is just by default xenophobic toward the local indigenous “beast tribes,” and any time one of these groups gets too squirrelly for the cities to handle they just call the Warrior of Light in to suppress them. Every city-state is shot through with social unrest, from poor starving people in the street to refugees being refused a life of dignity, and when things get a lil too spicy for a particular government to deal with right this second, the Warrior of Light is called in to “keep the peace.”
In Heavensward specifically, the Warrior of Light quickly goes from being a ward of House Fortemps to fighting alongside the Ishgardian military in ground skirmishes, investigating the movement of local heretics and stamping them out, and surveilling the local skid row for the nobility – and that’s all before we get to the big society-shattering shit with the Great Wyrms. Heavensward desperately wants to have a conversation about race and religion and class, but it can’t do so from any other position than “maintaining the status quo.” Even when we are fighting against the existing system we are doing so in the service of a man whose best idea for bridging the gap between rich and poor is to implement a House of Lords and a House of Commons. And – I don’t know! I don’t like that, especially when the status quo is a deeply divided society where the rich are born into their wealth and jealously defend it, and the lower classes are actively kept from trying to make anything bett- hm,
So where does that leave me? Well, I want to know how this story continues, of course. I am invested in this game, for better or worse. I really enjoyed the emotional path the game took, and thought the writing was generally improved over A Realm Reborn. When they’re allowed to happen, small moments shared between a couple of characters remain the best part of this game. I’ve heard concerning reports about how the politics of this game ramp up in Stormblood, so maybe the next post in this series will just be me yelling about neoliberal astroturfing of a revolution or something.