I’ve tried to play Final Fantasy XIV twice. Both times I bounced off it after a half dozen hours or so, overwhelmed by the game’s imposing UI or losing interest in the early game grind before, as all my friends told me, “it really gets fun.” I suppose I’m just not an MMO person, and so I’ve been mostly sitting out of all the excitement as my colleagues get into the new Endwalker update. That said, I’ve picked things up here and there, and I feel like at this point I know a fair amount about the game. So, to celebrate the release of Endwalker, I thought I’d provide my sense of the story and world of FFXIV, cobbled together from conversations, memes, and my limited time with the game.
The Story of Final Fantasy XIV
Final Fantasy XIV is about a hot guy named Emet-Selch whose attractiveness is only matched by his fiendishness. He’s something called an Ascian, which is a kind of angel or demon maybe. He has a big plan to change the world in some earth-shattering way and it involves crystals in some capacity. People use the crystals to transport around the world but they use them for other things too.
There are a lot of different kinds of people in the world of Eorzea. There are normal people, little kids, big guys, dudes with junk all over their faces, cat boys, anime girls, hairy ones, and elfs. You can get all kinds of jobs, like knight, wizard, big spear, and sage. These jobs are about hitting monsters but there are jobs that aren’t about that too, like jobs where you sit on the ground and hit things with a hammer to make something. People used to wear belts but then everyone learned how to tailor good and nobody needs them anymore.
Every group of people in Final Fantasy XIV is represented by a big monster, like a lion or a snake or a large woman. Sometimes they fight and it’s like a Godzilla movie. There’s also a bunch of gods like Halo, Nard-Sard, and Chippy. Chippy is the god of Chocobos.
Anyway Emet-Selch killed someone everybody liked and then they realized he was a really bad guy and they collected all the crystals and fought him. But then he escaped to the moon. On the moon, there are space robots. They were sent to the moon by the evil Empire, which is made up of people who don’t believe in magic so they invented robots. They tried to kill everyone who can cast magic because they were jealous of them but people said no way and used their magic to beat them.
In Endwalker, the Warriors of Light have to fight all of the hot guy’s friends he brought back who are also hot and evil. They’re all on the moon now and you have to go there and use the Empire’s Gundams to finally defeat him and bring an end to the story of Final Fantasy XIV.
The Gameplay of Final Fantasy XIV
The critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV has an expanded free trial which you can play through the entirety of A Realm Reborn and the award winning Heavensward expansion up to level 60 for free with no restrictions on playtime.
Your first challenge in playing Final Fantasy XIV is to log into the game. You have to open up the game’s separate launcher and then wait in line for a long time because there’s only so much space available on the moon and if they let too many people in at once it would be a fire hazard.
Once you log in, Final Fantasy XIV is a game where you pretend to be a girl in order to trick your retired dad into playing with you and bond with him. Or you can walk around and fight big frogs and bugs. Everyone has a different role, like a tank or healer. There’s a lot of arguments about the different roles and everyone gets mad about it if you pick the wrong one.
Playing the game is like playing an RPG but also you can move around however you want. Sometimes you have to move out of the way of an attack before it hits you, like in a video game. You can drink a potion that changes your birthday and what god you believe in.
You can get married in Final Fantasy XIV and you can also roleplay erotic adventures too but you have to do it only in the servers where it’s allowed and you can’t do it as one of the Lalafell because they don’t know what sex is. In Endwalker you can finally be a bunny boy and everyone is very excited about that because they can fly by flapping their ears like Mario in Super Mario Land 2 for the Game Boy.
In conclusion, Final Fantasy XIV is a land of contrasts.
