Watch Final Fantasy XIV NowI’m also making sure the plot spoilers are pushed very fast past the cut, so everyone who prefers to ignore them can do so with relative ease. Maybe you’re already through the story (much people are), maybe you can’t take into account spoilers or perhaps you may get them into action. Heavens know I’ve long advocated the idea that we get too relentlessly hung up on the idea that spoilers arrive as if you’re not spoiled or not. However, if you want to avoid spoilers, turn away now. This is your last warning. After a decade of storytelling, it turns out that the real plot and story impetus for the whole game, the events that all brought everything into motion, the real villain of the movie’s heart, was a certain interpretation of Fermi paradox. I think that’s a bit more cosmic than that I would have expected. Of course that’s not completely true. One thing that I think must be recognized even though people mark this as the end of a decade-long story is that I have not yet followed an original story with no breaks over the course of the course of a decade. There is certainly a decade of storytelling on display, but the main problem is that each individual expansion has its own internal act structure, its own storytelling conventions and its own rising and falling actions, independent of one another. With the end of the overarching meta-narrative that has been moving through the game for a long time now, its not really the resolution to a plot that had been a period of ten years running for a while. Is it a complication? I think it’s the opposite. Endwalker is better viewed as the culmination of its own narrative than as the culmination of the entire narrative; while it just closes out the meta-narrative, it isn’t the last chapter of the game’s overall story yet, rather it does end with the conclusion of something so long ago. It must work so itself, in no small part because this game pulls a horrendous trick wherein all the plot setup we had for this expansion was first act of the three-act structure. There were many people who said that, from an early point of the expansions plot to an early point, they didn’t have any idea where the heck it was going, a fact that is indeed a very simple three-act story. Act one is dealing with Fandaniel and Zenos, Act two is figuring out what the heck is causing the final days and act three is stopping them. Its generally more often than Shadowbringers, which has a short first and third act that becomes a quick ten-skin for a quest for second of two actions. But for those of you who don’t think about the plot structure, none of that is bad for either expansion; it serves the plot and is a beautiful story that was wanted in both cases. It is an atomic-responsor. Moreover, if only because the game succeeded only to remark to the first attempt, a large chunk of the game is spent in a zone that was never described and kept us in mind so we weren’t able to see it, the last day came back and the real explanation was that Final Days were again reverberating and the assumption that it was true. Not so much, no! The two were important, but ultimately, were both less important antagonists than our final destination to deal with the Final Days, which were, in the end, caused by a source, but even Fandaniel didn’t know a completely different story. Another reason I focus my attention on the meta-narrative rather than just the pure narrative is that the themes of Endwalker aren’t actually answering the basic theme and ideas that were laid out in the base game. It’s just a sleight-of-hand trick to use Answers as a resemblance to thematic callback, because answering the question for a short time has a very strong argument in thematic value of the topic and which is relevant to the endman or why we are meant to die, foregiven in our cries, it still hardly relates to the original story. It is the theme song there, but it doesn’t really really connect to any of these themes. In A real story which was used in this area mostly because of the plot people really experienced, the themes are really about rebuilding from disaster and finding hope when the situation is serious. From there the patches are moving forward to themes of love and acceptance, heavensward talks about faith and forgiveness, Stormblood talks about identity and redemption and Shadowbringers about hope and inheritance. Endwalker is the first that talks about the meaning of life and besides reverberating to plot elements, it still has very little callback to themes along the way. It’s pretty good. I think it makes this a larger general expansion, but that means the initial length of the plot is a bit shorter for the entire plot. I think that after finally getting payoff to something that happened back in ARR, that emotional payoff already happened. The emotional payoff that we get here is about the most recent expansion, putting a bow on the larger elements that had been long humming in the background. I still don’t know how much the plot threads I hoped to be finished was completely unconfirmed. This is also good. I’m curious, for example, what happens with the handful of Ascians still roaming in theory. Their plans for the rejoinings and the like have basically been closed at this moment. What are they going to do? What do they even want if they’re still around? And that’s what I love about this story. No, I thought it might be a little less powerful than Shadowbringers, but I still enjoyed that immensely, and I loved that the designers even hoared the fact that there are a lot more to see, like Emet-Selch and rattling a list of things that are still out there for the players to see. As long as I’ve got an idea, I don’t know how to do it, and it’s time again. That’s good. Feedback, like me, is welcome in the comments below, or by mail to [email protected] Next week, I’m going to talk about patch 6.01. The civilization of Nymia encased a lot of knowledge and learning but so much it lost to the inhabitants of Eorzea. Eliot Lefebvre has been debating the Fantasy of Paramount every week at the University of North America; instead, he has a penchant for the book Wisdom of the Man of the Man; therefore, he never runs the same kind of business as the actual man.
