Story Anatomy: Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward

I’ve decided to give something new a try, and I don’t know if this is going to work. It’s been months since I had any update, and I’ve been having thoughts about writing in video games, so I thought I’d give this a try on my off days. My novel is coming along nicely, I just need to find an agent for the first book to get it published, and the second one is about halfway done with work. Hopefully I’ll be able to move onto the third one, and the first one will be ready to go. You know, hopefully. Writing is, of course, hard.

Anyway, as I’ve said multiple times in the 7 years since I came back from my hiatus, I really want to focus on the good in gaming instead of the negative. Negativity is easy and simple, and it’s why it’s so popular on the Internet, since many people didn’t come here to think. They came here to escape the the things they have to put up with in their lives normally, so I get it. I don’t want to add to it, though, because I feel that nostalgia and negativity are the mind poison that has helped create some of the problems we have today. As such, I’ve been thinking about the bad writing in games that are often praised for their writing, and I knew I didn’t want to talk about that. So, instead, I want to focus on what made the writing in one thing good, rather than why I don’t like the writing in a bunch of games that won awards for their writing.

I know I shout these off to the void and no one really reads them, but anyone who does might remember I did something similar about trying to fix the bombing of Theramore in World of Warcraft. It was an interesting take, but I don’t think I’ll be trying it again. It was not the right fix for this blog.

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Copyright Square Enix

For explanation, I’ll be using feminine pronouns for the Warrior of Light, as my Warrior of Light is a female character. Yeah, I know, I’m a guy and I almost always play dudes in MMOs, but I won’t lie. The caster gear looks fucking terrible on male characters, especially male midlanders, and my female highlander alt was super hot. Like, I don’t like playing sexy ladies in an MMO, because it gets kind of embarrassing, because I don’t want to be that guy, you know? This time, though I’m fine with it. I don’t slutmog her or anything.

One of the things people say, when players start to get burnt out while playing through the Main Story Quest of A Realm Reborn in Final Fantasy XIV, either around level 35 or during the Seventh Astral Era Quests, is that it will all be worth it when you get to Heavensward. Heavensward is, according to fan legend, a huge improvement over the original game, and is the point where the story of Final Fantasy XIV really comes together. Even some of the most ardent supporters of the game will be understanding if a player buys a “story skip” through A Realm Reborn. That’s not to say doing that isn’t controversial, it is, but it’s less controversial than skipping through to the endgame to do raiding or jumping straight into Shadowbringers. They’re honestly not wrong, either, as Heavensward is a huge improvement over the previous version of the game, especially now since it’s much easier to level and play through, and players don’t have to go through the Alliance Raid to do anything later on. That Alliance Raid is pretty cool mechanically, but it does have the lamest story. However, what makes Heavensward so much better than A Realm Reborn is really hard to pinpoint, because it’s not just one thing.

However, one thing is really important to why this expansion is so much better than the last, and that’s down to my boy, Haurchefant Greystone. We’ll get into specifics later (not that one though, this is a no spoilers blog), but Haurchefant is the man, and he embodies almost all of the reasons that Heavensward is a huge improvement over the previous game. Haurchefant is the reason that the Warrior of Light, her accountant and her idiot friend, even have a house after the events of the banquet at the end of A Realm Reborn. At the end of her rope, with nary a friend to turn to, the Warrior of Light is offered the safety of Ishgard, a theocratic kingdom of “chivalrous” French elves, by Haurchefant and is given a lease on life she wouldn’t have otherwise. He’s kind, he’s got an awesome voice, and most importantly, he treats the Warrior of Light as a person. Sure, sometimes the way he talks, he’s more like a walking sexual harassment lawsuit (and it’s worse in the JP version! By a lot!) instead of a knight, but he still clearly loves the Warrior of Light and treats them as a friend and a person. This is the important bit.

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Bro Himself. Copyright Square Enix

See, one of the things about A Realm Reborn is that it’s very much an MMORPG, just this time, each fetch quest has a long cutscene or a lot of dialogue. It’s easier to read through the dialogue than the quest text in most MMORPGs, because they break it up as dialogue, but it’s still a lot of reading and listening to talking heads chatter about a big ass dragon, or crystals or whatever the Hell a primal is. Like, I’m down with this shit, I’m a fantasy writer, and I was coming off of WoW sometime around 7.1 pissed me off, this is the kind of shit I’m down for, so I was blown away, but that’s because I was expecting MMO writing. When everyone else is talking about how amazing the writing is and you get a Realm Reborn, I kind of get it, though. A Realm Reborn is long, kind of boring, and very, very weird. All of this shit makes sense eventually, and it becomes important, but that’s not for a while, and some of those things that explain this weird shit do kind of sound like things they made up way later to make sense of some of the dumb shit you have to do in A Realm Reborn. More importantly, for most of the game, the Warrior of Light gets volunteered to join the Scions of the Seventh Dawn, a group of learned adventurers who are trying to save the world. I won’t get into the specifics, but the reason the player character is the Warrior of Light is because they’re one of the few individuals with a power called the “Echo,” which allows them to fight all of the Final Fantasy summons without becoming a fanatical worshipper. It gives the Warrior of Light other powers, like being able to see AoEs before they happen and the past of people with perfect clarity, so it’s a pretty useful power. They’re not the only person who can do it, and they’re not the only person who the Scions recruit, but since the Warrior is the player character, they get to do all of the cool stuff.

The Scions, however, treat the Warrior of Light as a weapon. They basically tell her that there’s a beast tribe that’s going to summon Ifrit, Garuda, Titan or some other summon from one of the other games, and since anyone else will be brainwashed immediately irrevocably, the Warrior has to go kill it. Also, because the Scions are a political entity, they get saddled with some of the local politics, which, since this is a Final Fantasy, is being invaded by an evil empire. Also the Ascians, but I don’t have time to get into them. Anyway, the point is, it’s very MMORPG. The big organization does all the story important stuff, but you, the player, does all the real stuff. They get the credit, but you do the work. Also, they saddle you with the annoying 16-year-old genius who thinks that only he can save the world. Because he’s a genius, you see. That’s Alphinaud. I like Alphinaud, because I was also an insufferable teenage boy who thought he was the only person who could save the world, but also, because I figured he was going to be like every other NPC who travels with the Player Character of an MMO. You know, the guy who claims all the work that you do, because the PC is could be anyone, so they need someone to be the main character. Well, it turns out that Alphinaud and I were wrong, the Warrior of Light is the main character, and it’s Haurchefant who shows us the way.

The game later makes a point of trying to make the Scions feel like they are our friends, and we’re all very close. It’s successful, it does work, but in the beginning, they absolutely treat us like a weapon. We’re the guy they get to kill shit, while they do “important” stuff. Hell, the writers even manage to implement a meta-joke about it that I’ve kind of only just got while writing this in Shadowbringers, but those are spoilers. Even Alphinaud talks to us like a servant, although it’s actually quite a bit better than people give him credit for. He’s very polite and kind to us, but unfortunately, he’s horribly miscast as Sam Riegel in A Realm Reborn (all of the cast are recast from Heavensward onwards with much more fitting actors, with more consistent direction), who plays him as a smarmy, noble douchebag. Sam Riegel is a great voice actor, and could have done this job well, but his direction was all wrong, and people tend to get the wrong idea about Alphie. He is an arrogant know-it-all who thinks only he can save the world because he’s the special boy, but he’s not Ben Shapiro about it like the VA work makes him out to be. He’s actually pretty nice and kind, even before he learns his lesson in Heavensward.

I bring up all this stuff about Alphie as well, because much like Haurchefant, he too begins to treat us as a trusted friend, making the player actually care about his development and growth. What this does, and what makes the writing work in this whole game is that it makes the Warrior of Light an actual person in the world. It ties us, limits us in some way, to the world, and makes our character a person with friends and something to care about. They care about us, so we in turn begin to care about them. The characters in Heveansward grow and change, and they have a complex relationship with the Warrior of Light.

Characters are what people care about. I don’t like to use the term “fetch quests,” because they’re kind of derisive. A lot of the best quests I’ve ever done in a video game would be classified as “fetch quests,” but because of the characters involved, no one would ever call it that. I like to think about the Witcher III, a game where people say has no fetch quests. This isn’t true, almost every sidequest in the game is a fetch quest, and a few of the main quests are as well (seriously, looking for Dandelion when get to Novigrad, anyone?), but no one thinks about this because each quest in the Witcher III has a full story attached to it. They have characters who are interesting and nuanced. Think about the quest in the opening area where Geralt gets the frying pan for the old lady. The whole quest is literally going into her house, grabbing her frying pan and giving it to her. There’s some puzzle solving and it’s kind of a tutorial for Witcher senses, but what makes it memorable is because the lady is kind of crazy and gets weirded out when you find out that someone scrubbed her pan clean. Also, it references a character in the series and add some stuff to the lore. It’s just a small little quest, but it’s memorable because of the interesting character and how she interacts with Geralt.

Final Fantasy XIV learned that we care about characters, and Haurchefant starts it all. He’s a great guy.