ABSOLUTE SPOILERS on A Realm Reborn.
Well, that’s it. Credits rolled on A Realm Reborn for the second time. It was a fascinating experience, though less pleasant than when I reached the end of the Seventh Umbral Era. It was in these 2.x patches where Naoki Yoshida and crew laid the groundwork for years of Final Fantasy XIV expansions, and I plowed through all of the MSQ content in roughly 24 hours, or roughly three days spread out over two weeks of positively unhealthy play habits. I watched as the Scions of the Seventh Dawn ascended to new political heights, earned the respect of allies old and new, and tried to set the stage for a truly united Eorzea, only to be stabbed in the back by those closest to them. I experienced the pain of trying to muscle through dozens of hours of content all at once, ripping up context and timing everywhere I went. I learned what it meant to hold power, and gained new insight into how that power might corrupt anyone who touches it.
I played… a video game. And buddy, I played it wrong.
Before I get into how I did that, I want to throw out some passing thoughts on A Realm Reborn that I have on the whole. Eorzea is a wild place, and I don’t just mean because it’s a post-apocalyptic wilderness overrun with monsters. There’s a lot of Capital-P Politics going on among the four nation-states of Eorzea, and as in the real world, they mostly run along a spectrum of “pretty bad-to-holy shit.” On the whole, none of the nations in Eorzea are quite as bad as the Garlean Empire is portrayed, but they do get close! Ul’dah is probably the worst nation out of the three we interact with for much of the game, only beaten out later by Ishgard. It is hypercapitalist and anti-immigrant in a way that most, if not all Republicans in the US could identify with, to say nothing of a fair chunk of self-identified liberals. They actively turn away Doman refugees and treat the existing immigrants from Ala Mhigo like utter shit. Everyone, and I do mean everyone, believes first and foremost in: trickle-down economics; and pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. And there’s really no deviation from this. The defined political factions are literally Monetarists and Royalists, and every time I’m in Ul’dah is like accidentally looking at a fucking diary entry from some ultrareactionary nerd like Mencius Moldbug.
Things get better out in Limsa Lominsa, but it’s still not great. The home of Naval seafarers and former pirates, everybody’s on a pretty hardcore militarist kick. The leader of the Maelstrom, Chief Admiral Merlwyb Bloefhiswyn (gesundheit), is portrayed both as an iron-fisted ruler of the oceans and as relatively benevolent in her administration of law and justice on the island of La Noscea itself. It’s weird because her nation-state is probably the closest the game is going to get to like, idk, a libertarian-leaning democratic republic, but it’s still also very much not that. Her word is law at the end of the day, and if I had to liken the vibe on the island to anything it would be that of a criminal organization, mafia hierarchy and all, that has learned how to do state functions. It is absolutely better than Ul’dah, but not significantly so.
Gridania’s fucked up in some interesting ways as well. It’s run by a subset of hyur (humans) who have horns growing out of their head that apparently allow them to converse with so-called “elementals,” forest spirits who are representative of the different physical elements that make up the world. Gridania is portrayed primarily as a pacifist society, but underneath this veneer of peace and tranquility is a nation with the same problems as the others. This isn’t meant to be some shocking discovery, either – a major subplot deals with, once again, anti-immigrant sentiment towards Ala Mhigans. We have to assist a wounded and dying refugee because the local Gridanian officials won’t help him. “The elementals said no,” they tell us. My foot up your ass said yes, but anyway. Gridania is neither a full-blown monarchy nor a quasi-libertarian sinkhole, but instead a kind of technocracy. The so-called “seedseers” run everything, and law is based on their ability to interpret what the elementals are telling them.
We don’t have time to talk about Ishgard yet.
The Scions of the Seventh Dawn are populated by some of the most naive people on the planet, not least because they decided it was cool and fine to let some “mature for his age” teenage Reddit admin start a paramilitary organization out of its offices. Like, why on earth would you leave your home base to a neutral site just to start a more explicitly militarized subsidiary that readily falls into all the traps you were worried about falling into in the first place? Like the conversation literally goes like this:
Alphinaud: “We need to move the Scions from Ul’dah to Revenant’s toll. The city-states of Eorzea are starting to become much more expectant and we can’t fall into one of their clutches.”
Minfilia: “Absolutely.”
Alphinaud: “Also I’m securing funding from the Syndicate in Ul’dah to form an unaccountable police force modeled on the unilateral destructive power of the Warrior of Light.”
The Warrior of Light: “Don’t you think that runs the risk of us, uh, falling into the Syndicate’s clutches?”
Alphinaud: [Smiles So Serenely, Immediately Stops Thinking About This]
(Editor’s note: I am a significant way through Heavensward as I write this, I am very aware that nobody lets Alphinaud live his mistake down, especially not himself, but for such a smart kid he’s got an adult’s level of myopia in this first part of the game. Also I know this is not a realistic portrayal of the Warrior of Light, as they are, canonically, heart-big-head-empty-tasks-only.)
So after talking about how all these factions fucked up, how did I also fuck up? This next section should serve as both a post-mortem and a warning to anyone who is just now getting into Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn.
You need to know something as early as possible: There are two roll-credits on A Realm Reborn. The first roll-credits comes after you beat the Ultima Weapon, and marks the very end of the first campaign. The second takes place after some lengthy cutscenes in Ul’dah, with our beset-upon heroes arriving in Ishgard seeking asylum. The time between these two roll-credits is approximately 20-25 hours, give or take a few. The patches ranging from 2.1 to 2.5 are for all intents and purposes their own expansion pack, with a self-contained story and endgame content.
This is an obvious no-brainer to any veterans of the game, especially those who have been playing since the reset, but there’s a bunch of new players out there, you know? I know that I expected at most another four or five hours of content in the endgame, and when faced with what actually exists, I had a bad reaction to it! I won’t sugar-coat that. My bad time comes from the fact that I tried to marathon the content, and it legitimately backfired on me in several ways.
Set realistic expectations with yourself before going into the patch content, genuinely. Take frequent breaks, use the sidequests that pop up throughout this content to decompress, play a different game entirely or even – seriously – go outside. It’s healthier than doing what I did and trying to marathon it all. I beg you to take this seriously. It’s not that I was a “bad gamer” and “couldn’t get through it” in one go, it’s that there are purposely going to be sections of this game where you have to commit to sitting there, focused the whole fucking time, otherwise your full party or alliance raid team wipes and has to start over. Keep your batteries charged, both in your controller and in your body and mind, because you don’t do anyone any good when you’re run ragged.
Another result of my two marathon sessions through the patch content was rising irritability at all the stuff I liked about the game in the first place: the sidequests, the quippy dialogue, the digressions, the back-and-forth traveling, and so on. I kind of pride myself on not ever getting “gamer mad” while playing video games, but here I was groaning and cussing at the regular progression of the game. My expectations had so thoroughly poisoned my actual experience of the game that I can’t really look at the great story in these 2.x patches with any clarity. I can acknowledge it was great from the outside but it didn’t affect me in the way it should have had the chance to.
Writing this now (ironically after playing a shitload of Heavensward today, proving I will never listen to my own advice), there’s an added wrinkle where all the data centers are experiencing crushing peak loads and thus people can only get on at certain times/don’t want to stop playing for fear that they won’t be able to get back in if they leave or get kicked. And that’s something certainly worth acknowledging, it’s very hard to get into Final Fantasy XIV for just about everyone right now. But! Here’s the good news about this development. Use the server congestion to play healthily. This game is great, and it isn’t going anywhere. Savor your time in the game. Go slowly. Stretch things out. Play a little bit at a time every day. You’ll have a much, much better time than I did, and hey, maybe by the time you get out of the 2.x zone in two years the superconductor shortage will have been resolved haha! good times. oh man. fuck. anyway.
Long story short: there is a wrong way to play Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, it’s called trying to get past the patch content super quickly, it actually had a physical and mental health impact on me, and you should not do what I did. Practice healthy play habits. Drink water. Go outside.