When I first sat down to write this post, I had an idea of what I wanted to say: Stormblood was a bad core expansion lifted up by its peripheral experience; it suffered from a narrative that gave too much focus to the game’s principal characters; in replicating the modern world’s political framework it was setting up a situation where the game’s heroes might end up being its villains inadvertently; it didn’t understand what made revolutions work.
I’m glad I didn’t publish that post, because that’s ultimately not how I feel about the expansion anymore – not after finishing the patch content, and not after playing through a couple dozen hours of the expansion’s side quests. Instead, I find myself falling deeper and deeper in love with Final Fantasy XIV as a whole, an experience I can’t say I’ve had in a hot minute. Every moment I spend playing is another moment I’ve become more deeply immersed in the worlds the game depicts. I don’t dread turning the game on to do the daily grind. I have yet to have a truly bad Gamer Experience. Whether in single-player mode or with a group, I’m having fun and getting more and more emotionally invested in the story and its characters.
That’s not to say I think Stormblood is perfect, politically or otherwise. It’s got problems! It is not wholly unfair to characterize this expansion as “Taylor Swift leads an indigenous revolution against a colonial, imperialist power!” It is not unreasonable to take issue with the particular political ideology Stormblood throws its support behind, or how it later complicates the ideological makeup of its major antagonist group! By God it is not out-of-hand to take serious issue with the Yotsuyu post-expansion storyline in particular, For Fuck Sake!
In that vein, it was wrong of me to make the politics the totality of my earlier criticism and prediction piece. Because in truth, Stormblood is big enough to hold all of these fair criticisms and still be so much more than them. it can be goofy, overbearing, underwhelming, and what I might describe as the narrative equivalent of “The DNC inviting Lin Manuel Miranda to put on a performance of Les Misérables for Burning Man attendees” at times; it can also be an incredibly beautiful, intimate and moving exploration of the bonds we form when shit gets bad and we have nobody but each other to rely on.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I think it’s very notable that within a couple hours of Stormblood‘s campaign, our Warrior of Light gets their ass kicked. Not because the character deserves it, but because the player does. There are very few – if any – battles we’re designed to lose in the expansions leading up to Stormblood; certainly nothing on the magnitude of the fight at Rhalgr’s Reach, or later, in Yanxia. When we face Lord Zenos for the first time, the expectation has long been set that we’ll be able to beat him, no worries. We’re the Warrior of Light, baby, the eikon-slayer. To have him then flick us off his sword like so much congealing blood is humbling, to say the least! It signaled to me that this asshole was no joke.
What might be more notable is that the game didn’t spend the next 20 hours making my Warrior of Light, Zephyr Lance, angst-fully swear revenge against the guy. The expansion was by far less interested in making fomenting revolution specifically personal for either myself or Zephyr or any of the other principal characters – and it very well could have, with some of the other narrative choices the game makes. Instead, in this regard, Stormblood takes great lengths to show characters showing restraint, making better decisions than “I’m gonna run in and beat the bad guys’ asses!” It is explicitly made clear that there are other lives than our own at stake here; our actions will have broader consequences outside of whatever actually happens to us in or outside of the story.
(I can’t help but compare this intentional narrative move to what happens in Destiny 2: Forsaken. After Cayde-6’s death at the ands of the Scorn Barons and Uldren Sov, our Guardian vows to get revenge against the Awoken Prince. It’s only after a blood-soaked campaign that shakes our Ghost’s faith in their moral framework and results in either us or Petra Venj putting an entire bullet between Uldren’s eyes that we find out that he was being mind-controlled by a Taken Ahamkara. Had we simply stopped to investigate the situation before we set off on our murder spree, maybe Destiny 2 would be in a different spot today.)
The key to my heart, and my ultimate enjoyment of Stormblood (and really, the entire game), lies in the dozens upon dozens of completely optional side quests available everywhere we visit. I’ve gushed about side quests before, but after Stormblood my position on them is rock-solid: they are a necessary part of this game, and ignoring them would lead to a less-contextually-dense experience of the broader narrative the game is trying to weave together. Many of them are goofy. And there are a lot of them, just looking at the numbers. But each quest is less a slog of “go to location A and pick up item B to deliver to location C” and more a meaningful interaction between Zephyr and someone new. We get to help someone! We get to talk to them about their lives and their problems, we get to perform a tiny kindness and watch as their day improves, even just slightly. We develop a richer understanding of the world we’re walking through. And when someone asks us why we still fight and we say, “For those we’ve lost. For those we can yet save.” there is real weight behind those words, because it isn’t just the Big Important Secondary Protagonists we’re talking about.
Sometimes the ancillary quest lines can be funny and meaningless to the broader story, like when you help a guy who just discovered he’s really good at punching and needs quick gains meet another guy who’s really good at cooking. Sometimes, the tone is more serious, elegiac and rooted in our past travails. Regardless, we gain more than we lose by doing them. We gain an appreciation for the world we’re rooted in and our purpose in defending it. We gain a better understanding of the stakes – what would happen if we failed. We get to take on a longer view – a sociological imagination, maybe – regarding the fight with Garlemald and why it’s necessary in the first place.
Maybe we don’t need a longer view – Stormblood has some real sons-of-bitches for villains, absolute sickos, I mean fuck, at the very end of the patch content the emperor, Varis zos Galvus, straight up admits that Garlemald was created by Ascians and that his entire personal goal is to create “one race – a perfect race – as we were when time began” to oppose them. Straight-up no-bones-about-it Nazi shit! But I can tell you right now that this moment of abject horror and disgust hits harder when you’ve been running around for 200+ hours in the messy, imperfect hodge-podge of people and their problems this man hates so much. Saving the world doesn’t mean shit when in the process you’ve destroyed everything and anything worth saving, when you do so with no concern for the beautiful and frustrating complexities of life lived free from the shackles of domination.
SAll of that being said, we do have to address some of the baffling decisions Stormblood makes in the course of its narrative arc, because at best they’re extremely puzzling and at worst they threatened to derail all the goodwill I had built up through the side quests. Let’s start on the low end: Stormblood is specifically obsessed with national identity to a degree I found fairly uncomfortable. There are only a couple of factions that could even slightly be said to be “anti-nationalist” in the expansion, namely the Xaela tribes in the Azim Steppe (who nevertheless adhere to a kind of tribal factionalism with cultural events like the Naadam) and the poorly-named Confederacy, the pirate army that guards the Ruby Sea – their members renounce all ties to their nation, families, and former lives when they join. Everyone else is super fucking into national identity, even as they’re trying to forge transnational alliances to stop the Garlean onslaught. This is on the low end because ultimately this is less some big statement the game is trying to make and more just the ambient vibe of the expansion you have to deal with.
Then there’s the whole Lyse storyline. This is genuinely pretty annoying, and the genesis of the whole “Taylor Swift leads a revolution” meme, but I’ll be honest: I resigned myself pretty early on to the fact that the game was going to try and shoehorn this particular character into a place of leadership and importance despite largely being a sporadic ally whose presence in your game largely depended on which city-state you chose to show up in at the very beginning. And as far as the actual story is concerned, what you see is what you get: as we travel around, Lyse watches other leaders do their thing, and ostensibly learns something from their actions or gets inspired by them. She becomes more confident in her decision-making, and eventually is thrust into the spotlight and compelled to lead. We can debate the minutiae here, like whether Conrad Kemp should have chosen M’naago over her, for example, but ultimately I find this whole situation to be less game-breaking than simply cringe. I will say I felt weird about how the game kind of undermined this narrative decision by putting Raubahn at the head of the Ala Mhigan military while Lyse became some kind of #resistance representative in their new House of Commons-style government, but again: nothing terminally game-breaking, just odd.
By contrast, nothing has made me want to quit Final Fantasy XIV more than the Yotsuyu post-Stormblood storyline. If you are (blessedly) unfamiliar, let me curse you: Yotsuyu is one of the secondary antagonists, and is a True Sicko who commits atrocities against the people of Doma for her own personal pleasure. The game really spends time making sure you understand how much this pleasure is sexual in nature, which is… kinda gross given what we learn about her past, not gonna lie, but in terms of villains we’ve faced thus far nobody is quite as campy or like, exquisitely Bad. I liked Yotsuyu for many of the same reasons you might be a fan of a wrestling heel. At the end of the Doma arc of the MSQ, she is presumed to have died in the collapse of Doma Castle along with Gosetsu, a major ally. But that ends up not being the case at all. Instead, they drift out to sea and end up on a deserted island. Gosetsu is more or less fine, but Yotsuyu is reported to have suffered a massive traumatic brain injury and is now completely amnesiac and childlike. Thanks, I fucking hate it!
Throughout the patch content we watch as Gosetsu becomes like a grandfather to the addled Yotsuyu, who he has taken to start calling “Tsuyu.” Well, okay, I say “grandfather,” but that adds I think undue nobility to the events that actually transpire, like the scenes – played off for comic relief – where “Tsuyu” is spoon-feeding him, and disrobing him to wash his back, and doing other “womanly chores” like cooking and cleaning. Far from being the kind of wholesome reversal-of-fortune the game wanted to portray, it all just ends up feeling exploitative as fuck! The thing that made Yotsuyu a good character was that she was agentic, that is to say, she had full control over her choices. She was in a sense compelled to rule over Doma, but how she chose to do so was fully within her domain, and she carried out her choice to be a cruel and wicked tyrant with relish. This is in contrast to the life she’s said to have lived before, that of a debt-bonded courtesan and wife, sold by her family to make them some extra cash. A life lacking in choice, lacking in agency, stuck in a hole with no way out and nobody even batting a sympathetic eye toward her in the process.
That she returns to this agentless state as the result of physical trauma and injury, reduced to an object to be moved like a commodity by both the “good” and “bad” sides of the broader narrative conflict, and this is seen as anything positive? It fucking sucks, man. The speed with which FFXIV goes from “this person is childlike and needs to be cared for” (gross on its own) to “this person is acting like a useful and docile woman should!” is wild, and it sucks, and I absolutely goddamn hated it. If the objective of this particular set of patch content was to make me sympathetic toward Yotsuyu at all, it succeeded only in this sense: I was totally rooting for her as Tsukuyomi to kick Zephyr’s ass as a complicit party to her momentary return to a life of exploitation. The fact that the game has the gall to make her death the reason why Gosetsu becomes a spiritual pilgrim makes me want to scream.
Some “honorable” mentions: Fordola gets a kind of redemption arc, but only because she was able to help us beat the newly-summoned instance of the Sri Lakshmi primal. Gaius van Baelsar is back as Solid Snake from Metal Gear Solid in a move spectators called “confusing.” Emperor Varis utterly fucks the Eorzean Alliance up at the parley, not with military might, but with knowledge of how each of the member city-states kind of suck in their own right, and like… not that I didn’t enjoy seeing them get a dose of the truth, but it was absolutely an instance of:
Anyway, I’m already knee-deep in Shadowbringers, and whew – what a weird expansion in comparison to Stormblood! In the next post, I’m going to talk about my Warrior of Light in further detail, including a decision I made toward the end of Stormblood that I think will really amp up my experience with the game as a whole.