Final Fantasy XIV, Part 8 (A Realm Reborn!)

Happy Easter motherfuckers

We did it! Continent's saved, Empire's defeated, game's over, gg y'all. Sometime late on Good Friday, the Owlbears assembled and we ran through the end-game of A Realm Reborn. I had been drinking strawberry mead for the better part of two hours previous, and we had a pick-up pugilist who was aggressively pulling aggro, but somehow we still managed to keep our shit together long enough to shatter Gaius van Baelsar's hopes of Eorzan conquest.

These screenshots really sum it up for me. The vibe, I mean. All these heroic figures standing together to take on a larger-than-life villain. It doesn't really matter who or what they're up against; what matters is that they're facing it as a team. It's a mood.

Here's what it looked like in the moment. This screenshot is actually a lot calmer than the penultimate fight. Pure chaos.

So - How does this Final Fantasy experience stack up against the other ones? That's a difficult question for me to answer, mainly because this is my first real experience with a Final Fantasy game! Oh, I played a little bit of FF6 twenty years ago, and I marathon'd FF7 in an energy-drink fueled weekend once, but those experiences are so anecdotal that they're not really valid as a basis for comparison.

My friend Aladbross Siracha, however, is much more experienced with regard to these matters. In our Slack chat, he shared the following thought:

Ranking FF games is so hard because they’re very different games.  Comparing XV vs VI feels nearly impossible because they have different merits.

Instead, I’ll do awards:

The Most Quintessential James Fantasy:
FFX - From the weird aesthetics to the turn-based battle system X is the most on-brand Final Fantasy.  Love story, dope cast, stage mesh of magic and sci-fi.  It also holds up the best relative to when it was made.

The best FF character:  Cloud Strife.  Cloud ostensibly sucks.  He’s an anti-hero but such a wiener about it.  But what the games does with Cloud using certain reveals is awesome, especially considering the meta-commentary of many 90-RPGs at the time.

Most Overrated FF game:  FFVII.  Aside from the themes, FFVII isn’t great.  The art has aged atrociously and it’s combat system makes me feel hurried.  It also feels like the most linear game.

The FF that’s dreaming big:  FFXV.  Just a stab in the dark here, but I think a lot of Japanese game developers played Skyrim and said “LETS DO THAT!”  FFXV takes the open-world adventure and imagines it as a bachelor-party camping trip fighting demons with a recently disposed prince.  And I stan that energy.

Best FF of my childhood: FFIX. We used to swap our N64 for a friend’s PlayStation so it lends to us trying to binge Final Fantasy games while he breezed through Banjo-Kazooie.  We played so much FFIX my dad got concerned and made us trade back.  We also renamed all the characters to swear words.  We were cool sixth graders.

FF game I want to play that I haven’t: FFXII.  People lose their shit over this game and I have no idea why.

Best Music:  FFX.  Cash me outside tho

Where does FFXIV fall into this?  I couldn’t say.  While there’s obviously that FF energy, there’s so much that’s different.  I do miss having a fleshed out cast of characters and an ever-expanding world.  But I love the social aspect and the Dungeon-heavy design.  I could never pitch this game to someone casually, but I want all my friends to play it.

I have to give this game high marks, with the asterisk that, yeah, it's not a casual experience. If you're gonna get from it what we got from it, you pretty much need to marathon it during a pandemic. When I started playing, I was very resistant. I don't like MMOs as a rule, but these are strange times we're living in, so I caved and downloaded it. I nearly rage quit during installation. Twice. The early game wasn't thrilling, either, and with all the side-quests and grinding to get to a place where I could actually start running dungeons, it all felt so boring and dumb. I think those were my exact words. Very pretty, but also, very dumb.

I definitely would've quit if it weren't for my friends egging me on. And I'm glad they did. I'm glad that I stuck with Final Fantasy until I met Jihli and she sold me a bunny mask. I'm glad that Evil George Washington made me crack a smile, and then picked a fight. I'm glad that my early adventures nabbed me some outrageously sexual body armor, and that I wore it with pride as I beat up a mess of giant crabs. Why?

Because those moments are the game! And the more you play, the more of them you get to experience.

I'm glad that the Owlbears stood in a circle of flames, facing down a mechanical dragon together as a team. I'm glad that this year's Hatching-tide has been such a success! I'm glad that I finally completed my marauder training and went on to meet Curious Gorge and spar with him under a waterfall. Heck, I'm even glad that Drippy was able to help the wayward youths of Ul'dah when they needed a role model.

A Realm Reborn has a pretty good story. It's got a lot of satisfying narrative elements, a couple twists and turns, and a few fun and memorable characters. It's a Saturday Morning Cartoon on a massive scale (note: I think Aericka said this first, but I absolutely agree). It's fun, it's wild, it's silly, and yet somehow, it still has heart.

And was it just me, or is Gaius van Baelsar actually Julius Caesar cosplaying as Rita Repulsa?

But these are questions for another time. Heavensward awaits!