Mythmaking is what makes FFXIV’s first campaign shine

I know one thing for sure: for a game that really wants you to play it, Final Fantasy XIV is positively Byzantine to play through. It’s taken me nearly 70 hours to get through the game’s initial, eight-year-old campaign, titled “A Realm Reborn;” even as of right this second I still have about five patches’ worth of story content to do before I’m able to access the game’s first expansion, “Heavensward.” Despite imbuing my character with multiple high-level classes and jobs, I’m still getting new tutorial screens.

Maybe I’m not playing it right, I thought. It stands to reason; since my last article on the subject back in August, I let my subscription lapse for a solid two months and even as I returned in mid-October, I still only have played two massive, marathon sessions a week or so apart from each other. Realistically though, this only accounts for about 20-30 hours of extra in-game time, not even half of my total playtime (69[nice] hours and five minutes, according to the game’s estimation). In August, playing in furtive fits and starts, I racked up a solid 40 hours of play just getting my character’s first class, the Arcanist, to level 30, with the EXP boost on at full blast (in comparison on a whim I rocketed my character, whose name is Zephyr Lance btw i feel like i should mention that this far in, up to level 26 on the Gladiator class in two hours last night). This feels weird. This doesn’t feel possible. What is going on here?

Part of it is my experience as a player, that is to say, I have very little of it. I’m not an MMORPG person, and I’m planting a flag here: Bungie, you know I love Destiny, kind of, but your video game is absolutely not an MMORPG. It’s a live service looter-shooter with hints of aspirations toward MMORPGs, and that’s a perfectly fine place to be, but holy shit did y’all not prepare me for what I have been dealing with in FFXIV. I thought I knew. I thought I had any idea. I did not know. I was like a newborn baby coming in. I wasn’t used to the combat. I wasn’t used to dungeons just being a matter of course. I wasn’t used to the embarrassment of riches in terms of the class/job system. I wasn’t used to the hotbar. I have literally not even once played World of Warcraft. Playing FFXIV was in many ways like playing my first-ever video game for the first time; now that the scales have lifted from my eyes, I can’t return to the pastoral naïveté I once had. And so certainly, that lack of experience at MMOs has to account for like 15 hours of my first 40 hours of playtime, right?

Well, I don’t know about all that. I picked a couple classes right off the bat that are pretty good at giving you a sense of competency even though all you’re doing is mashing buttons unthinkingly until the enemy in front of you drops dead, like any other video game; so maybe it’s an exaggeration to say that I came into FFXIV with zero understanding of how games like this work. You know what isn’t an exaggeration, though?

The sheer fucking volume of sidequests.

This is, truthfully, where I spent most of my time. As Zephyr Lance, Eorzea’s Most Helpful Jane-of-all-Trades. Do you need, idk, fuckin, a letter taken from Eastern Thanalan to goddamn Mor Dhona? I’m your girl. Want me to gank a couple of weird slugs for your research? I’m fucking on it, bro. Need me to do your job for you and boost your band of mercenaries’ morale by doing a goofy fuckin’ jig? As long as the Gil keeps flowing in and spends right when I need it to, I’ll do whatever you want, mon frere.

From the moment I pulled in to port at Limsa Lominsa, I resolved to do every sidequest I came across, no matter how tedious it made doing the MSQ (main scenario quest, for fellow absolute infants at online video games). After some trial and error, I “developed” a “system” that helped keep things somewhat efficient, namely: grabbing the MSQ for an area, then talking to everyone with a sidequest marker over their heads and collecting those, then doing all the sidequests I just collected, and then finishing the MSQ and moving on to the next area. Rinse, repeat, and you have yourself a video game, babey.

That doesn’t stop there from being too many fucking sidequests in the first chunk of the game, though. Part of the problem is that while you only get one set of “starting missions” in the city-state you first arrive in, every sidequest imaginable is just there for all eternity. So sure, you have to wait until you become, say, Chief Admiral Merlwyb Bloefhiswyn’s (bless you) main envoy to go to Gridania and Ul’dah, but don’t worry – all the level 1 fetch missions in those regions will still be there, waiting for you.

Sixty-nine hours into the game, you might think, given my tone, etc., that I’m frustrated by all these little shitty tasks. To an extent, maybe that’s true! By the time I was near the end of the campaign I did absolutely start ignoring quests in an effort to make a beeline for the credits! But here’s the truly sick and twisted part: for the vast, vast majority of my playthrough, I actually liked doing the sidequests.

The broad mythology of Final Fantasy is that a chosen one or set of chosen ones goes on a journey through the realm to defeat some big bad and save the people from an impending calamity. Along the way, our hero(es) are met with diversions and distractions and detours that require a Gamer’s understanding of combat and puzzle-solving to overcome; necessarily, as our hero(es) come closer to the climax, our reputation amongst the people increases; it is our destiny to become “Warriors of Light” in these games. I am almost positive that this is just as inconvertibly true for FFXIV as with any other game in the franchise (or genre), but because I’ve put in the extra time to just simply be fucking helpful and nice to the people of Eorzea along my travels, by the time Minfilia and Alphinaud and the rulers of the Grand Companies are hoisting me up on their shoulders and calling me the “Warrior of Light” in this context, well, it feels earned.

Part of why this works so well for me as a storytelling device is because – putting aside shit like the Hero’s Journey, which does exist in FFXIV’s campaign, and I actually am not a fan of how they did it tbh – when you’re not talking about characters who are literally gods or demigods or children of divine royalty right off the bat but rather characters who are merely mortal and mundane and called up to greatness, their story is marked as much by their deeds as it is simply by who they are – what they did for their communities, for people they met along their travels, the relationships and connections they made as they neared their final destination.

This is where the game really grabbed me, though it certainly didn’t hurt that the last few campaign missions are pretty exciting in their own right (even if the very last dungeon, the Praetorium, is too fucking full of cutscenes Jesus fucking christ). No sidequest is even remotely difficult, unless you’re too underleveled to be in an area. And quest-givers often give out follow-up quests related to their first ones, sometimes doing so three or four times. So for a fee of minimal violence and even less frustration, you help folks out and learn something about their lives and their relationship to the area and each other. Even trying to maintain a certain level of critical distance from the game, I began to care about Eorzea because the people who “live” there care about it, and their sidequests showed this to me.

Of course I have my problems with many (most? All?) of the ideological undercurrents (and overt positions!) presented in this video game! Whether it’s the neoconservative capitalism of the Ul’dahns, the soft green protofascism of the Gridanians (especially when it comes to their worship of the Elementals and how that ends up utterly fucking a group of Ala Mhigan refugees), the utterly buckwild theocratic despotism of the Ishgardians in Coerthas, or simply the unfettered and open racism of Eorzeans in general toward the “savage” “beastmen,” there’s enough problematique shit in FFXIV to span a few book volumes’ worth of discourse. And I feel like I understand it intimately, like I understand intimately how, why and in what interesting ways the governor of my state, Kevin Stitt, is a fucked up fascist piece of shit (is it his views on nonbinary people? His repeated attacks on vaccines, abortion, and queer rights? His glib approach to incarceration and capital punishment, including the near-certainty that he is going to let an innocent man die on death row soon? Or maybe it’s his decision to treat indigenous people across the state like utter trash). Like, you don’t need to live somewhere to understand and make a value judgment on that place’s ideological worldviews, but living there certainly does fucking help quite a bit.

There is a version of this game that is perfectly valid, where you pay a few bucks and skip the initial campaign and even the first two expansions if you want, and are still known as the Warrior of Light, defender of Eorzea, the person who regularly beats the shit out of the Garlean Empire and keeps the world from plunging into darkness and all it took you was the time needed to put your credit card into Square-Enix’s online store. People want to experience Shadowbringers, they want to be ready for Endwalker; I genuinely get it. But for me, in my first-ever MMORPG, my slog through the deserts of Thanalan, the thick swamps of the Black Shroud, the idyllic seaside plains of La Noscea, and the black dungeons of the Garlean Empire’s most “impenetrable” outpost strongholds, I did something I have literally never done in a game before:

I played a role. And I got into it.