Finishing Shadowbringers

In The Subject and Power (1983) French philosopher Michel Foucault argued that in order to fully understand the nature of power relations, we needed to examine those places where they are being resisted: “opposition to the power of men over women, of parents over children, of psychiatry over the mentally ill, of medicine over the population, of administration over the ways people live,” and so on. The reason Foucault gives for these particular subjects of analysis is that they ultimately… “revolve around the question: Who are we? They are a refusal of these abstractions, of economic and ideological state violence, which ignore who we are individually, and also a refusal of a scientific or administrative inquisition which determines who one is.

To sum up, the main objective of these struggles is to attack not so much “such or such” an institution of power, or group, or elite, or class but rather a technique, a form of power. This form of power applies itself to immediate everyday life which categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others have to recognize in him. It is a form of power which makes individuals subjects. There are two meanings of the word “subject”: subject to someone else by control and dependence; and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to.^[1]Foucault, Michel. “The Subject and Power.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 8, no. 4, July 1982, pp. 777–95. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1086/448181.

In the context of Final Fantasy XIV, our Warrior of Light is an ideal subject of power in the sense both that they are subject to someone else by control and dependence (as we literally control their movements and actions, but also as the story being told by the game unfolds in a single direction, constraining their possible actions) and that they cannot help but be subjugated by their own self-knowledge of their identity as a “chosen hero.” However, this power arrangement doesn’t stop here: we as players are subjects of power as well, acted upon as we are by the encoded ideologies in the game and those that we ourselves bring to the table. (Taiari 7) As Foucault mentions, these power structures are entangled with each other; “They entertain complex and circular relations with other forms.” (Foucault 6) The Warrior of Light themself subjects others to domination or subjugation as a matter of course.

But power is not just this snakelike mechanism that wraps itself around us, constraining or facilitating movement at random times. Brazilian anarchist Tomás Ibáñez viewed power as a “polysemic” concept, that is, an idea with multiple coexisting meanings, that could be defined along three axes: power as capacity, power as asymmetry in power relations, and power as structures and mechanisms of regulation and control.^[2]Ibáñez, Tomás. “For a Libertarian Political Power: Epistemological and Strategic Considerations around a Concept.” Volontà, 1983.^[3]Corrêa, Felipe. “Towards An Anarchist Theory of Power.” Black Rose/Rosa Negra Anarchist Federation, 24 July 2019, https://blackrosefed.org/towards-anarchist-theory-of-power-correa/

In the first sense, power can be represented by strength, wealth, or simply the ability to move freely in the world/a given social sphere. A lvl 90 Bard is more powerful than a lvl 01 Archer, despite both actors being able to perform the same basic function. Similarly, a lvl 90 Bard probably has enough material wealth on hand to participate in any of Final Fantasy XIV‘s non-combat activities, like Gold Saucer or a housing lottery (lol), and a lvl 90 Bard also probably is able to show off the aesthetic trappings of their power accumulation in the form of raid gear, rare bows, and other assorted accoutrements.

While the lvl 01 Archer is less powerful than the lvl 90 Bard, this doesn’t make them fully powerless, however. Here the game itself fulfills the power-as-regulation-mechanism on behalf of the Warrior of Light, facilitating interactions with enemies that the player can easily navigate and providing a meaningful amount of experience points – and therefore power progression – in the process. On a macro level, Final Fantasy XIV is a cognitive and computational assemblage, “an arrangement of systems, subsystems, and individual actors through which information flows” that is able to adapt and evolve based on inputs from various human and non-human cognizers^[4]Taiari, Axel Hassen. The Heroes We Never Are: Interpellation, Subjugation, and the Encoded Other in Fantasy CRPGs. Lund University, 2020.. That it can also be an instrument or device of power as defined by Ibáñez, or a site of entanglement between subjugator and subject as defined by Foucault, or even a space where power may conceivably be critiqued, is not unaccounted for. “Of course, there is no guarantee that power necessarily leads to self-expression. Instead, the game hints at the possibilities granted by power. These possibilities saturate the site of projection, and the [Warrior of Light] exists across two temporalities: the hero as is and a hero to come.” (Taiari 23)

In Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers, we are constantly in an ongoing conversation about our – that is to say, our Warrior of Light’s – purpose. Every aspect of the game from the narrative to the mechanical pushes against our power. We are regularly visited by the aetheric ghost of Ardbert, our predecessor on the First, who serves both as a companion and interlocutor on the nature of power within the context of the game. Ardbert exists only as a phantom, truly powerless as we have defined power in the previous section: without capacity to act upon the world, no longer privileged in terms of asymmetrical power relations, not even acknowledged by the mechanical and regulatory systems of the game itself.

In one tragic moment, Ardbert tries to intervene as a Sin Eater bears down upon a group of Crystarium guards. The blade of the axe passes through the Sin Eater entirely without effect, and Ardbert is forced to watch the gruesome display of murder play out in front of him. Interestingly, Ardbert does have the power to interact with us, first through discourse and then through physical contact, eventually rejoining our Warrior of Light in a way that mirrors the rejoining process our enemies the Ascians are trying to enact as a means of boosting our own power late in the expansion. Without him we are insufficiently powerful to continue, and we remember his actions as a sacrifice for our benefit, as opposed to the last agential thing he can do – the last drop of his power-as-capacity.

Another way Shadowbringers challenges our power as Warriors of Light is through a new mechanic introduced with the third expansion: power sync. Power sync is fairly simple: it increases the power-as-capacity of regular enemies to match your in-game power level. If you’re sitting at lvl 87, monsters you encounter in certain scenarios will also be lvl 87. Most power-synced enemies are nonetheless relatively easy to take down, but careless players can still get squashed if they’re not paying attention. This regulatory mechanism is a statement that no matter how much power we have amassed as players, we aren’t invincible. At one point I was doing something in Kholusia and one of the side quests I had to complete involved me fighting a squirrel; I looked away for just a moment, I think to check my phone, and when I looked back at the screen I was staring at my Warrior of Light’s unconscious body. The squirrel had bodied the Warrior of Light without even a second thought.

A third way in which our power is problematized is through the role we assume in the narrative, first through a return to a basic wandering adventurer and then as the so-called “Warrior of Darkness.”

Our transportation to the First, one of the 14 dimensional shards of Hydaelyn, is essentially a soft reboot of the game, reputationally speaking. We know very few people here, and all of them originated from the Source as well. In order for us to gather information and immerse into the story being told, we’re not leading armies or walking into dungeons alone as we’ve gotten accustomed to in previous expansions – instead we’re harvesting barley and delivering packages across mildly lengthy distances as we did back in the early hours of A Realm Reborn. The idea here is that while our power-as-capacity isn’t in question – the person who transported us here, the Crystal Exarch, knows what we can do – our position within the existing power structures of Norvrandt is an unknown quantity. Even as we prove ourselves, even as we defeat Sin Eaters and Lightwardens and reclaim the night sky, we’re intentionally not thrust into the fore.

Off to the side a little bit, it’s interesting how Shadowbringers deemphasizes our status as “Warrior of Light/Darkness” here, both as a tactical concern (the Crystal Exarch wants our character to continue to fight and defeat Lightwardens without also having to deal with people getting in our way) and as a way to explore alternative mythmaking paths. NPCs we deal with seem to sense that we’re powerful, but don’t really make the connection that we are the ones reclaiming the night sky until late in the campaign. What this does is it allows all the people we fight alongside, all the people our actions affect, to develop a sense of their own efficacy. This is later preyed upon by an antagonist, but ultimately, people realize that they don’t need a savior from another dimension – or even a small group of heroes from their own – to do the hard work of saving their own world, including in ways that don’t ultimately foreground violence. This stands in sharp relief to the way our Warrior of Light has become almost a walking myth in the Source, Eorzea’s version of Achilles, and its this idea that power is not consolidated in the hands of any one person – especially not the Warrior of Light/Darkness – that acts as a major reset to the game’s status quo.

There is one last move Shadowbringers does to reframe our relationship with power, and it happens in the post-expansion patch content. Through the story content we learn about the various members of the Convocation of Fourteen, the Ancient Amaurotine order that brought Zodiark into existence to stave off the apocalyptic Final Days. One of those members, Azem, resigned from the group in protest of summoning both Zodiark and Hydaelyn. Azem has a markedly different role from the other Convocation members in that they are expressly tasked with leaving Amaurot and exploring the wider world. In contrast to the collective-minded Convocation, those who held the position of Azem were known for solving problems themselves, with the people they met out in the world, rather than reporting back to the Convocation with what they saw and learned.^[5]Inc, SQUARE ENIX. “Tales from the Shadows.” FINAL FANTASY XIV, The Lodestone, https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/special/tales_from_the_shadows/sidestory_07/. Accessed 24 Apr. 2022. While our Warrior of Light is not said to be related to anyone specifically by blood, the game connects our soul to the sundered shards of Azem’s soul, linking us – as adventurers, as Warriors of Light – to their legacy. While this move might otherwise feel deeply strange given how connected we are with Hydaelyn and the already-extant mythos of the Warrior of Light in general, the idea that we’re a sundered remnant of someone who valued working with people they met to solve problems is really interesting.

Ultimately Shadowbringers is asking a lot of its audience. We are beckoned to consider the role of the heroic and its relation to power repeatedly, implored to question whether this power is legitimate and if so, who should have it, and even shown examples of how power/heroism can affect a people over time. There are also plenty of places where power is shown to corrupt, as in the case of Lord Vauthry, but this is a bit more expected fare from a game in the Final Fantasy series. What makes all this interrogation work is the entire presentation. Everything from the music to the writing to the individual side quests we receive is geared toward this introspective goal, and it results in certainly the best Final Fantasy XIV expansion so far.

Will we continue along this line of questioning in Endwalker? Only time will tell.