The Final Fantasy XIV Diaries, Entry #0: Bravely Disappointment

The Final Fantasy XIV Diaries, Entry #0: Bravely Disappointment   

 February 26, 2021; the day after my 32nd birthday.

    We once again had a president that, for his many flaws, did not retweet white supremacists and incite lethal, treasonous riots. Covid vaccine production, long-stalled to own the libs somehow, was finally ramping up. For the first time in as long as we could remember, the light at the end of the tunnel did not, upon closer inspection, transpire to be a giant anglerfish's lure, tempting us to our fangly doom like a luminous undersea gumdrop. I booted up my Switch, for the preordered day had arrived, and I slammed that icon like no Whammy in the world could touch me.

    But then, just when we thought we had left the darkest timeline, the unthinkable occurred: we were betrayed, by something we had all taken not just for granted, but as such a given that we had begun to build the next steps of our lives around it, like in that Taylor Swift song she clearly recorded at 3AM after watching The Great Gatsby half a dozen times in a row. No one could've seen it coming. No one could've prepared.

    Bravely Default II sucked, and my hope went dark, like a Crystal whose vestal had failed a button-mashing minigame, and so failed the world.

    Now, it's not a bad game, is in fact as competently made and well-polished as any Squenix offering, but whether something is good has little to do with its enjoyability. Con Air, for example, is definitely not a good movie but most emphatically does not suck, and in fact it fucking rules; Tenet, meanwhile, is a masterpiece of technical filmmaking but I would pay $12.99 right now to undo my $6.99 Amazon rental and get those two and a half hours of my life back, because Tenet sucked.
    Maybe it was my fault; maybe my memories of playing the BDII demo in the last days of normalcy before we'd ever heard the word "Covid" put a bloom upon the rose that could not be reproduced; maybe I expected too much of one JRPG, hoping it would rouse my heart and my life back to its feet as the world appeared to be restarting; maybe I'll come back to it in a year and fall in love, like how I was wrong as hell about not liking garlic all these years. I dunno, maybe the game just sucks, something might not actually be my fault for once.

    Regardless, I found myself stalled: here I was, primed for a game of an exceedingly specific kind, all Dressphered up and nowhere to go, and it was in this desperation and dissatisfaction with my long-awaited fix that I turned, perhaps inevitably, to the Hard Stuff: I started a free trial of Final Fantasy XIV.

    I’ve been, to use the technical term, an entire metric slut for Final Fantasy for longer than I haven’t, having at this point sunk more hours into every mainline game (except the onlines) and many of the spin-offs than I have into my bachelor’s degree, but my essential nature prevented me from venturing into the online waters: I had never played an MMO, or any kind of online game outside the odd ill-advised Borderlands 2 or Apex Legend jaunt with a pal whose Persuasion roll outweighed their Insight, and I was both bewildered and intimidated by the prospect.
    For me, video games are for playing alone in your room at 3 in the morning, jacked out of your mind on SoBe, Queen’s Greatest Hits in your earphones, your face aglow from the screen as Seifer fucking killsteals that robut right in front of everybody or Bartz and Galuf face unsettling questions about their masculinity aboard an abandoned pirate ship. I was an only child, and playing video games with others was a contradiction in terms. Furthermore, the idea of a game without an end-state or completable story, let alone for which one would need to pay continuously, seemed pretty bonkers to me. Also, as a grown-ass man with a wife and job and vague yet looming debt to at least two djinn, I detested the idea that my ability to play would be bound to other people, or that theirs would be bound to me.

    Imagine my pleasant surprise when, listening to an episode of The Besties video-gaming podcast, I was informed via Babiest McElboy that FFXIV:
    1. Has, in addition to its perpetual social, crafting, fashion and financial ecosphere, a coherent, finite storyline on par with or surpassing in quality any of the main-series games, and in fact four full-length campaigns at this point with the available expansions.
    2. It is perfectly possible to play the entirety of all four campaigns solo with a few specific exceptions, for which occasions the game will happily toss you in with a grip of like-leveled anonymous adventure-compadres with whom you can claim the day.
    3. Perhaps most winningly, the game's first two campaigns, A Realm Reborn and Heavensward are available to play for free, in which trial you can level your character up to 60, which is uh, pretty wild? It seems fairly wild to me you guys.

    Unable to withstand the sheer logic bearing down on me, I put that shit in my PSN cart and I was off to the races to play my first online game, my first MMO, and a hidden chapter of a thing I love with all my heart.

    These are my stories.

I remember piano lessons, the hours in freezing rooms