Q: How do you instigate a revolution designed to overthrow the world’s biggest imperial power in not one but two separate countries simultaneously?
So I’ve been playing Stormblood, the second full expansion to Final Fantasy XIV, and my thoughts and feelings about it have been all over the place. I don’t know how long I’ve been puttering around Ala Mhigo and Doma/the Azim Steppe, but my total playtime is sitting at about 183 hours now. A lot of that time is, as is customary at this point, me doing all of the sidequests like I’m a nonbinary Henry Rollins on another international spoken word tour: with vigor and voraciously out of fear of what I’ll have to deal with if I stop moving. That being said, I’m at Level 73 as a Bard and I know realistically the only thing that can beat me is laziness, so this process of steamrolling through the sidequest content while leaving MSQ stuff alone for hours at a time has honestly been really enjoyable. Getting the ability to dive and breathe underwater literally changed the game for me, and I’ve been doing that at any and every opportunity, even when it wasn’t necessary. Additionally, the game is as pretty as it’s ever been, and I’d argue Yanxia and Azim specifically are the most beautiful locations in the game up to this point. Unfortunately, the Scions of the Seventh Dawn aren’t here to sightsee, and the chill-ass sidequests do eventually run out.
Stormblood‘s story picks up where we left off in the Heavensward/3.x patch content. The sudden appearance of a primal that was more powerful than Bahamut and wiped out all the Garlean soldiers (and the Ala Mhigan rebels fighting for Ilberd Feare under the moniker of the Griffin) at Baelsar’s Wall in the East Shroud has shaken all sides in the war against the Garlean Empire. The Scions and the Eorzean Alliance see the sudden power vacuum at the Wall as an opportunity to reclaim territory from the Garleans, and Lyse, who we formerly knew as Yda, wants to use this sudden interest in beating the Garleans back as an opportunity to further the cause of the Ala Mhigan Resistance. Once the Alliance has set up a base of operations at Castrum Oriens, the Scions rendezvous with a member of the Resistance who shows them to Rhalgr’s Reach. They strike up a pact with the leaders of the Resistance and begin to fan out into the Gyr Abanian countryside to see how the locals have been faring in their fight against the Empire.
As we quickly find out: shit’s bad.
In Ala Gannha, almost nobody who is of fighting age is left to recruit, with the bulk of new radicals from the village having just been slaughtered at the Wall thanks to Ilberd’s accelerationist-but-make-it-magical bullshit. The town elders specifically rebuke Lyse’s attempt at polemics, basically telling her to BTFO as soon as we get there. It’s not that they’re not aware of their oppression or are suffering from a “false consciousness” here, it’s that they’ve literally given up everything to the Resistance and have received nothing back in return. They have nothing else to give, and sorely need aid in the meantime. The Garleans are obviously content to suck the Ala Mhigans dry of every resource they have, because to the Empire this land doesn’t really hold any value to them aside from being literal space to put their forces in order to keep pressure on Eorzea. There’s even a storyline about chemical weapons testing gone awry on an Ala Mhigan village near the Eorzean border. Shit sucks. The Empire is Extremely Obviously Bad, and this is going to become a big motif of Stormblood overall.
This is the part where Final Fantasy XIV actually weaponizes the Warrior of Light’s penchant to do small tasks for people for no reason in the game itself. After Lyse gets her ass handed to her in the proverbial QRTs, Alisaie, Lyse, Meffrid and our WoL regroup and come up with a novel idea: find out what resources people need, what work needs doing, and, uh, do it. So like, points for recognizing this activity as mutual aid, FFXIV. Not sure how I feel about using the evidence of our doing a couple of odd jobs around these decimated villages as a specific recruitment tactic, but maybe Yoshi-P and Co. didn’t know that “Propaganda of the Deed” hasn’t really been en vogue among radicals for a hot minute, due to everyone figuring out that it doesn’t really work. I’ll give them that benefit of the doubt.
But because this is a video game, word does eventually spread about the pack of outsiders who are doing nice shit for Ala Mhigans in exchange for a crumb of military-age men and women to fight their war against the Garleans, and by the time we head back to Rhalgr’s Reach to prepare for a big offensive against Castrum Velodyna, the once-empty encampment is now bustling with life and the energy that comes from everyone believing in the possibility of reclaiming freedom from their oppressors. It’s cool, and it genuinely seems like Lyse learns not to be a shit about other people’s willingness (or lack of it) to fight without solidarity in return.
But, of course, lmao. This couldn’t last. It’s too early in the expansion. We gotta stretch this shit out a good and solid 40 more hours, minimum. So as we set up to do a midnight raid of Castrum Velodyna, Rhalgr’s Reach is attacked by an Imperial force consisting of Garlean regulars and Crania Lupi – The Wolf’s Skulls, led by Fordola rem Lupis, an Ala Mhigan fighting on the side of the Empire. While we’re able to dispatch her no problem, another unwelcome guest is Zenos yae Galvus, the son of the Emperor himself. Zenos proves to be a big bastard, not just in size but in power, and we who have defeated gods like we were doing the dishes get our shit utterly kicked in, effortlessly, by this weeb nerd. I’ve heard this was an unpopular move, and was not received well at the time. But as somebody who has complained, time and again, about FFXIV‘s power creep and the penchant for every supporting character to use the Warrior of Light as their hyuran/elezen/rogaedyn etc. shield, I was kind of glad to be humbled for once. Not that I’m calling for realism in a fantasy game, but there absolutely should be high stakes like this. We should be at risk of losing, not just occasionally, but often.
Now here’s the thing about Zenos. He’s also a Huge Sicko. He lets us live because he wants to foment hate in our hearts for him, which is the only thing that gets him off will bring him any joy. In him we actually see the kind of character we might become if we could just effortlessly defeat every enemy, mortal or divine, who gets in our way. Dude’s got the fuckin’ One-Punch Man syndrome, or worse: Mr. Masochist (from Yakuza: Like a Dragon) syndrome. And you might think to yourself, “big mistake, shitfucker! Letting me live means you signed your own death warrant!” But here’s some Endwalker spoilers for you: he’s still the villain in Endwalker. I have no idea how we’re gonna get from here to there but even without playing the rest of the video game I can tell you with certainty that Stormblood will not end with Zenos’s head on a pike or somesuch shit. Though he does deserve it. Creepy bitch.
With all of this out of the way, we can move on to the rest of Stormblood (that I have played). I’ve got about 46 quests left in the MSQ, and I may or may not play more after writing this post (but after this weekend I’ll be taking a break to just. lose myself to Destiny 2. Absolutely get back on my bullshit. Be a true sicko myself). But I feel like I’ve played enough to get a pretty good sense of the politics of Stormblood, and here’s another spoiler: I don’t like them!
Real quick, the rundown after we get our shit shaken like a smoothie at Rhalgr’s Reach: the Scions of the Seventh Dawn and the Eorzean Alliance decide that the best way to fuck up the Garlean Empire in Ala Mhigo is to fuck up the Garlean Empire on an entirely separate continent. We get set to travel to Doma, the main Garlean protectorate in Othard. Before we get there we are waylaid by two principal diversions: all the fascinating Cold-War-Era Spy Shit going on with our guy Hancock and the East Aldenard Trading Company in Kugane, Hingashi (a mishmash of Yokohama, Osaka and Kyoto), and our time radicalizing the pirate Confederacy on the Ruby Sea. This is where we obtain the diving mechanics mentioned earlier, meet some new characters and groups of people, and generally shake off the worst of the mid-expansion back-and-forth grindage that has effected previous expansions. I think, square-footage-wise, the Ruby Sea is bigger than all of Ishgard, but it never feels like that because you’re more or less confined to small sections of the map at all times. Quests don’t typically make you run across the entire fucking map like in Heavensward, and for that I am grateful.
One of the prime characters we meet is Yotsuyu, one of Zenos’s cronies and acting viceroy over Doma while the big boss is off in Ala Mhigo doing fuck-knows. She is, like her boss, a Massive Sicko. She gets off on watching Domans specifically suffer. This isn’t subtext, it’s just text. Here’s a screenshot of Yotsuyu stepping on Gosetsu, a Samurai main and one of the major characters we met last expac.
I don’t mention any of this to kinkshame either villain, but it is interesting. Garleans have been “bad” before. Some have even been murderous in plain view of our WoL, but I think a deliberate choice was made to ramp up the narrative awfulness of the Garleans to whom we are exposed. We need to know and Stormblood needs to tell us that not only is the Garlean Empire Bad™, they are in fact the worst, and that any action taken against them is ultimately justified. Making villainy a fetish object here, couching evil in what I’d call the visual language of BDSM, is ultimately how they’ve decided to do that, for better or worse.
And hey, I’m not too big to admit that the move is working on me. I do in fact think Zenos is a big ol’ pile of shit after playing through as much Stormblood as I have. For as many problems as I have with the Scions’ plans in Doma/Azim Steppe, I’m going along with them. I’m in-for-a-penny-in-for-a-pound on all this shit, and nothing has happened that has made me ultimately go “nope, I’m done.”
Okay. So we get past all the business in Kugane/The Ruby Sea, and now we’re in Yanxia, a small province adjacent to the Doman castle. We enter a village – Namai – expecting to be greeted warmly and are instead firmly rebuked, as we were in Ala Gannha. Namai has been so brutally beaten down by the Garleans both during the rebellion and after that everyone is constantly afraid of even looking like they might have radical anti-imperial tendencies. This psychological warfare occurring over decades, on top of the physical warfare of the rebellion, has brought the villagers in Namai down to the absolute nadir in terms of belief in their own efficacy and in the effectiveness of revolt. Like the Ala Gannhans, they are spent, and they have received nothing but pain and death for their trouble. And once again, individual Scions respond to this lack of enthusiasm in their revolution with disbelief and distaste.
So like, okay. The moment where the Scion landing party arrives in Yanxia is really the first place where I actually had the thought, “oh shit lmao, the Scions need this revolution more than the Domans want to revolt.” In order for the Scions’ plan to work in Ala Mhigo, the Garlean Empire needs to be stretched thin across two continents. In order for that to happen, a meaningful Doman resistance needs to sprout up, because the Garleans simply won’t give a shit if a small gang of foreign interlopers are just puttering around the Othard countryside griefing their forces. Warrior of Light in the mix or no, a single sufficiently powerful guy like Zenos can wipe out that small band of agents provocateur no problem.
And to be clear, it is a bummer to be sure to see folks utterly broken like this. But while Yugiri and Gosetsu have a connection to these people, the Scions simply don’t, and watching folks like Lyse and Alisaie react with frustration or disgust that the locals won’t simply take up arms against the Garleans – it kind of sucks, to be honest. Again, not enough suck to cancel out or surpass the horrid nature of the Empire, but like, is this really how we want to do shit?
Once again, the game turns to narratively weaponizing the player’s penchant for sidequest crammage. We get to know the people of Namai, what they need and what they want, and what they need doing – we do it. There are a lot of fun moments and even more endearing characters. More diving happens. I’m in heaven here. But again, it’s used as a tool of manipulation: see, we did stuff for you; fight our war for us now please? And this time, it doesn’t work. After our sidequest binge is over, the villagers once again reject us out of fear of what will happen to them if the Garleans find out they’ve been harboring terrorists (their word, not mine). Surprise! What ends up happening is that a bunch of villagers are taken captive, not because we’re here in the village, but because of what we did in the Ruby Sea part of the game! So we have to go with Yugiri to rescue them. And wildly, when we successfully set them free, the villagers continue to say they don’t want to be in the revolution! How ungrateful!
Here’s an important detail I’ve left out so far: if Yugiri and Gosetsu find out that the Doman people don’t want to revolt against the Garleans, their master, Lord Hien, next in line to be the king of Doma, will offer his head to the Garleans in exchange for leaving everyone largely alone (an agreement which the Garleans almost certainly won’t honor, specifically because Zenos and Yotsuyu are sickos). So when Yugiri is faced by a handful of villagers she just saved from a lifetime of crushing labor who tell her to her face that they have no energy to fight, it’s kinda really fucking rough on her. And I get it. More than Lyse’s disappointment, more than anyone else’s disdain that the Domans won’t just go along with their great plan, Yugiri (and Gosetsu, to be fair) has personal stakes in Doman liberation. She hates to see the people’s spirit broken like this, and it fucks her up a little bit, justifiably. She finds out that Zenos is coming to Yanxia, and decides unilaterally to assassinate him. Only the Warrior of Light agrees to go with her. A villager overhears, and the way it’s set up we think he’s going to tell the Garleans about the plot.
It’s a doomed fucking mission, but ultimately I get the rationale more than I would have if anyone else had suggested it. And for the first time in the campaign I feel like “hell fucking yeah let’s kick this shithead’s ass.” I know we’re not going to win, but this is what desperation does to a motherfucker. And hey, it’s no “summon a primal stronger than Bahamut to annihilate your enemies” level of recklessness. And to our credit, we almost kick Zenos’s ass.
Almost.
For the second time in 40 hours, the Warrior of Light gets her shit kicked in. This time, though, we put up a fight ourselves and got Zenos to expose the sicko part of himself – his face – in broad moonlight. And it turns out that the villager we thought was going to betray us, uh, didn’t. Instead he rallied the whole village and the rebels at the resistance camp to come back us up. And this show of force gets Zenos to retreat, though I do get the feeling it was less out of fear and more out of bemused boredom. We’re allowed to regroup, and we devise a new plan: get Lord Hien to return and lead his people to revolution over the Garleans.
Except that’s not really how that goes. Because uh, Hien isn’t technically in the country right now, he’s actually in the next country over – the Azim Steppe, Final Fantasy XIV‘s analogue to the Mongolian Plateau – and he’s planning on “uniting” the over 50 nomadic groups that make up the people who live on the Steppe so that he can return to Doma with a bigger army than he could get with just in-country rebels.
And this is really where the politics go south for me. We’re expected to take part in Hien’s plan and “peacefully colonize” the Xaela of the Steppe.
Now you might be asking yourself, “how can someone peacefully colonize anything?” And the answer is, well, you can’t, what Hien is going to do is take advantage of specific rules and traditions that govern the status quo of the Steppe to assume power “legitimately” through a ritual contest of force and then use that essentially stolen power to marshal all the warriors to fight for Doman liberation. It’s not stated nor am I going to assume that once Doma has been liberated the Xaela are going to be allowed to return to the Steppe as free nomadic people rather than “Doman subjects.” Hien has specifically enlisted both our WoL and Lyse to join him in the ritual contest of force. But wait, it gets better. While gathering shit (literally) to use for campfire fuel, one of the Mol tribe children ask Lyse what’s so great about nations anyway? And man, when I tell you I left my body at the pure fucking nationalism on display here, it’s just wild.
Lyse launches into this impassioned speech about how nations are not only a place but they exist in your heart, and you carry them with you everywhere you go. They’re an implacable part of who you are, and they are you at your essence. Literally we’re six quest steps from fucking impersonating nomadic warriors of a different culture than anywhere in Eorzea through a “clever” use of rules-lawyering and we’re out here talking about how Nations are Just The Most Important Part Of You, Man. I hate it. I hate it so much.
Is this counter-imperialism shit worse than anything the Garleans are doing? Who can fucking say, I guess lmao. Narratively, I don’t think it is purely because the Garleans are 100% ultrafascists, but if I was judging the Scions’ actions by the same rubrics I judge states today with, it’s definitely still goddamn bad! I made a small joke at the end of my Heavensward article about the neoliberal astroturfing of a revolution, but yo that’s exactly what the fuck is happening here! Technocrats and “foreign policy experts” playing people like chess pieces with no real concern for the personhood of who is fighting for them. And sadly, the Warrior of Light is stuck on both sides of this equation as a leading member of the Scions and as a “martial pawn.”
If Final Fantasy as a series is a science-fiction/fantasy mashup, with each entry telling us a little bit about the world its writers want to see, then Final Fantasy XIV thus far believes that the world we have now is the best it could ever possibly get, and that no amount of technological advancement, no amount of literal magic or divine manifestation, can make things better than technocratic neoliberal capitalism. I almost dread coming to the end of this expansion, because when everything gets tied together nicely with its little bow on top, somebody’s getting fucked. I feel it, intimately. And we are just going to have to accept that in order for the status quo to improve even at all in the power balance between the Garleans and the Alliance, someone else will have to put on chains.
A: Very carefully.