Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker (2021)

After 544 hours of playtime, my time with Final Fantasy XIV is at an end (for now). I set out to play through the main story content as well as some side content along the way and now that I've finished Endwalker I'll be moving on to Final Fantasy XI.

This expansion sets out to bring all the long-running plotlines from the base game to a close and I think it does a fairly good job overall. There are a few characters that end up kind of forgotten among the now unwieldy roster but none that I think really bothered me with their absence.

As I started up the first quest for Endwalker I felt very unsure of where exactly the story intended to go. There really wasn't much after the end of Shadowbringers that I felt made sense to jump off of into a whole new plotline from. Thankfully my worries were put to rest fairly quickly. This expansion opens up with an area that NPCs have been talking about at various points throughout the game's overarching story and it's very nice to finally be able to explore it firsthand. I had a lot of fun exploring all of the other new areas as well. There's a good variety here and the maps are on par with the level of quality found in Shadowbringers. That is to say they are simply gorgeous and nearly always a delight to spend time in.

While I was pleased with the various locales, this expansion has a major issue with pacing its story. It's pretty fair to argue that when pacing a story you want to sort of follow the "roller coaster model", where you split up high tension segments with low tension ones to create a sort of balance. The writers clearly understood this basic concept, but didn't seem to understand that you can't just have 10 quests of high energy, then 10 quests of low energy, and 10 more high energy over and over. That is way too much downtime for the story, and very quickly forces any momentum it has going to grind to a halt.

This becomes especially egregious late in the expansion when the literal apocalypse is happening and there are multiple large groups of quests all dedicated to either giving or taking a leisurely tour of some large hi tech facility. The Loporrit segments are downright dreadful for the story's pacing and the fact that this occurs twice is wild to me. I'm sure they had like a minimum expansion length they needed to hit or something but surely they could have done better than this. We'd be better off with that content just deleted, to be honest.

All that said, when the story is actually developing, it's fantastic. Setting those lame sections aside, from the midpoint onwards it felt as if the plot was firing on all cylinders. The Elpis portion is the definite highlight of the whole thing in my eyes. And the Scions each get a very respectful sendoff by the end, even if the ending cutscenes overstay their welcome a tad.

Gameplay is more of what you'd expect from this game, which is a big positive for me, as I very much enjoy the relaxed feel the game has. There are a few new mechanics thrown in like having NPCs walk around with you during certain quests. You can talk to them to get additional insight and lore tidbits relating to your surroundings, which is a nice little touch for those like me with a love for the world of FFXIV.

I don't intend to play Dawntrail right as it releases, if only because I expect to be busy with other games. However the premise of a "vacation" for the main cast sounds very appealing after spending so much time mired in end-of-the-world level stakes. I fully intend to return to Final Fantasy XIV in the future because it's become such a great comfort game for me in the year(ish) since I started playing.

(please appreciate my bucket minion; I spent so long grinding for it)

I've been playing FFXIV ever since 1.0 was re-released for the newer players (post-Cataclysm). I've always enjoyed the story, even when A Realm Reborn felt like a sluggish mess to play through due to issues with pacing, quests that could be chalked up to your standard "fetch-n-meet" .

Heavensward was probably this game's peak narrative and gameplay wise as the dungeons, the raids, the ultimates and the trials were all amazingly done, with unforgettable songs that still make the clear image of the boss they're attached to pop up in my head.

• Favorite Trial: All the Containment Bay trials + Ravana.
• Favorite Song: Knights of the Round + all the Containment Bay themes + most of the Alexander Raid themes.
• Favorite High-end Content: Alexander: The Creator and Living Liquid, all Containment Bay, Ravana.
• Raids: Alexander was an experience and you just had to be there to see it.
• Alliance Raids: none were that cool, not when compared to Rabanastre, Orbonne and Ridorana.

Stormblood was my favorite expansion despite what everyone will say about it: it felt epic, it felt as if we were going up against the odds, against a power that was a bit too much just for our characters - which is incredible as we are known as eikon-slayers through and through and yet, it felt as if having an Empire willing to do whatever it took to win the fight was an insurmountable hurdle.

• Favorite Trial: All Auspice Trials + All standard story trials.
• Favorite Song: The Jade Stoa (Byakko) + The Wreath of Snakes (Seiryu) + Emanation (Lakshmi) + The Royal Managerie (Shinryu) - almost all of them - honorable mention: Chicken Tenders (eScape)
• Favorite High-end Content: Omega M/F, all the extemes.
• Raids: Delta/Sigma/Alpha were some of the most fun and challenging raids I've had the pleasure to do (not that the others were less challenging).
• Alliance Raids: I felt as if they had beaten themselves with the FFXII themed raids, they were challenging and in theme with the story as it went.

Shadowbringers was okay: it gave us some NPCs which we still remember fondly to this day (one of them was utterly ruined by the narrative, but how else are we going to appease the fan-inserts?) and some tear-jerking moments that genuinely made me want to close the game and hide under the bedsheets. The patches unironically added so much more to the story and made me connect with it on a deeper level. But I had started to feel the distance between the storytelling and the fact I was always stuck with the same NPCs for which I felt like the game was trying to make me care about for the nth time by adding characters such as Ryne.

Signed the beginning of extreme connection issues for multiple players, unsolved to this day. It also marked the start of horrible sound issues due to internal changes to the game.

• Favorite Trial: The Crown of Immaculate + Seat of Sacrifice + The Dying Gasp + The Dancing Plague + all the Weapons.
• Favorite Song: What Angel Wakes Me, To The Edge, Insanity.
• Favorite High-end Content: All extremes.
• Raids: the Eden Verses were pretty fu to play along albeit I loathed the story behind the peak tier as I did not care enough for Gaia/Ryne's arc.
• Alliance Raids: the beginning of the trend of 'pray your connection is okay for as long as the team can get the ball rolling' and make me realize that the trials had become just a matter of moving fast enough to dodge things and muscle memory (some of the others did insist on these, but the Nier Raids truly signed the beginning of this weird trend that never sat right with me). Okay bosses.

At the start of Endwalker I started to draw a blank: I felt like the premise of the expansion was weak, felt like what had started in Shadowbringers's other planet was going to happen but I found myself deeply uncaring on whether or not it truly happened because there was never a true sense of urgency, never a true sense of 'oh it's going down!' - it was just up to you to interpret it that way but considering the nature of an MMORPG, even as the sky started falling down, I just felt like I could go afk-crafting and nothing would have really happened.

The characters were more or less the same, the only one I showed interest in died to give the 'actual' protagonist the spotlight, I still can't stand Alisaie and I grew to really not care about anyone of the Scions. This premise made me lose the excitement of the "Big Fight" (the one we've been gearing up for a while, handled in a easy - both in NM and EX modes - trial that made me feel nothing upon beating it, thanks Zodiark) and the 'twist villain' worked just about as good as being kicked in the shins and being told you should be grateful for it.

I don't remember anything worthwhile in this expansion. Not the villains, not the friends we kept along the way... I only remember Elpis, and the other face of two characters that felt so genuine and caring, goofy and unchained by the emotional turmoil that characterized them - rightfully - in Endwalker.

Pandaemonium gave us more of that storyline and I felt grateful it didn't just end as it was but expanded on pivotal people we've seen in older instances of the game.

Endwalker made me think the game would kill off some of their characters for good, for once, but it quickly turned around and told me "no, we're going to keep them for Dawntrail". It asked me to care about Zero - a character I just loathed having around rom the moment I retrieved her from her 'prison'.

And in the end, the only characters I cared about were the ones we had a finite time with: Elidibus, Hythlodaeus, Venat, Lahabrea, Erichthonios...

I will never regain my love for the game, I'm sure of it: it had changed too much and for the worse. Questionable calls for downgrading classes to their lowest common denominator (press button combo), the predatory housing system that relies on manufactured limitations on something that most people in an abundance of MMORPGs can get easily and the only way to keep it forever is to, unironically, keep paying your sub. The way raids and alliance raids have become a matter of dodging or a sequitur of mechanics that require you to pay more attention to skills happening around you, requiring a quick movement of camera and immediate adjustment else you will die.

And with the predatory community selling mods monthly or making you pay for the commodity of having an hairstyle ripped from a mobile game scarcely adapted to the scalp of your character, I'd say I reached the end of my passion with this game.

FF XIV is a great visual novel! Sometimes there's also gameplay and even online elements. But from the beginning of the game all the way to Endwalker there was pretty much only cutscenes, to a point where I almost stopped playing because I felt robbed of doing...anything.

I don't have a problem with cutscenes. I love the Persona Series. But for god's sake please get to the point. Often Characters are talking in circles, making it painfully obvious that they're trying to pad the game out.

With all content being locked behind the story I can't say if this is a good MMORPG. I personally like it more than any I've played. It's just that sometimes I miss getting a quest and mindlessly doing it without anyone telling me their life's story for 10 minutes.

2/5

Unfair of me to score this expansion so low, but it's my honest opinon. I've put a bunch of hours into all the expansions to this point, and I definitely enjoyed some of my time. However the MMO nature of the games is just not for me. I played probably 10ish hours of Endwalker, and there are simply too many good single player games coming out for me to enjoy, to keep grinding through the MMO style quests here for what is apparently a good story. Power to all the people who love this game and its expansions, happy for all of you - I'm out.

Endwalker is an outstanding finale to the Hydaelyn/Zodiark saga that began in A Realm Reborn that has some of the most creative gameplay segments of this entire game, a story that not only lives up to the bar set by Shadowbringers, but actually surpasses it with an even more emotional, heartwarming, & gut-wrenching story about life, its meaning, suffering, despair, & joy, and great pacing for a story that actually was the result of two expansions combined into one. Endwalker has become my new gold standard for how to end a long-running story arc. Believe the hype around this game's story. It is well deserved!

10/10