(Hear) Follow (Feel) Wander (Think) Stumble (Teach) Listen Suffer (Feel) Promise (Think) Witness (Teach) Reason Final Fantasy has never once let you forget Haurchefant’s sacrifice, and for that, I’ll love this game forever. The game remembers the sadness you felt in that moment and brings it back for you to feel again multiple times though it’s been several years and two expansions since, the same way real grief can suddenly reappear unbidden. In conversations with your companions, Endwalker will suddenly flash back to a snowy grave and a broken shield, reminding you of Haurchefant Greystone, a friend who died protecting you way back in Heavensward. By contrast, dealing with real grief isn’t a linear process.Įndwalker acknowledges grieving’s messy, winding road. In a video game, the death of a major character might evoke a singular moment of sadness wherein the game acknowledges a beloved friend died, before returning to normal, the death barely or never again recalled. The technical and financial limitations of video game development mean that the way stories are written and how characters act rarely reflect how real people behave and how real emotions are felt. Walk free, walk free, walk free, believe. Endwalker, more than any of Final Fantasy XIV’s expansions, feels so alive I barely noticed the extremely late sleep-deprived nights I spent working my way through it. It’s in the way the developers wrote the characters, the way the game lets me respond to those characters, and even the way the game makes my character emote in cutscenes. Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker is a game that gets the closest to piercing that veil. Games are immersive and interactive, but there will always be an impenetrable veil between my real life and the fabrication of life a game presents. I derive pleasure from suspending disbelief, imagining the characters I interact with as alive, their words and deeds organic and authentic, not a series of 1s and 0s strung together by someone else. I play video games because I love stories, and video games promise me, more than books or movies, the opportunity to live in a story. What follows is a 60-plus-hour feast of emotions that wrap up the last 10 years and four expansions’ worth of story in the most perfect of bows. Though this quick and dirty plot summary and Endwalker’s trailer would have you believe Zodiark and the moon are your end goals, you conclude that plot in the first quarter of the expansion. Because this is a JRPG and a Final Fantasy game, besides, the plot isn’t as straightforward as that. Through the events of the previous expansion, you learn that the malevolent force Zodiark is key to unlocking the mystery of why the Final Days have returned, necessitating a trip to his prison on the moon. In Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker, the latest expansion of the Final Fantasy XIV MMORPG, your character and their rag-tag group of mercenaries for hire masquerading as a benevolent, non-governmental organization are tasked with averting the second occurrence of The Final Days, an apocalyptic event that sundered the world and all its people a millennium or so previous. Look to those who walked before to lead those who walk after The soul yearns for honor, and the flesh the hereafter To all of my children to whom Death hath passed his judgment To all of my children in whom Life flows abundant (Not Final Fantasy VIII, though - that game is about child soldiers and hot dogs.) However, despite Endwalker’s unflagging commitment to “the power of friendship,” it’s the game’s unvarnished look at the other side of hope - oppressive and omnipresent despair - and the real strength it takes to maintain that hope in the face of such despair that makes it the best Final Fantasy experiences I’ve had in 30-plus years of the series’ existence. That’s not really a unique descriptor since, to some degree, all Final Fantasy games, MMORPG or otherwise, are about hope. The easiest way to describe Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker is to call it a game about hope.
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