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wirewitchviolet · 5 months ago

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The Entire Plot of Final Fantasy 14 Bonus Part- Jobs, Deep Dungeons, and Adventuring Forays

Over the course of all these other posts, I've definitely covered the main plot of FF14 to date, and for good measure also talked about the tribe quests and raids which for the most part are technically optional. But there's a few scraps of story here and there I haven't gotten into, some of it good even, so today we're going to be talking about... well the stuff in the title of this post. Starting of course with all the job quests... and all the class quests. Which are technically sorta separate things, for reasons of weird legacy code.

For historical reasons I'll keep these pretty much in release order, and for the first few we'll mostly go city by city. First though, let's just get the non-combat classes out of the way. We've got the three gatherers (miner, herbalist, and fisher), and eight crafters (alchemist, armorer, blacksmith, carpener, culinarian, goldsmith, leatherworker, and weaver). Each one has its own little storyline, but for the most part they are all pretty rote. You meet someone who teaches you the ropes of your new little profession. They are extremely impressed by your rapid progress. By the end of ARR you're pretty much the best there is and spend Heavensward showing someone else the ropes, and then during Stormblood you wander off to one of the new hub cities to either help people rebuild Ala Mhigo, or have a bit of cultural exchange in Kugane. The only real notable exceptions are that the leatherworker leader is weirdly hard to please, the alchemist storyline actually develops into a weird murder investigation that evolves into a confrontation with someone messing with immortality treatments, and the Heavensward arc of the culinarian quests involves a cooking contest and at the end we go all Ratatouille with the judge.

One weird quirk with FF14 is that which of the three starting cities you spend the first few hours of the game in is determined by your starting class. It's where your class quests start, after all, and getting between the three is annoying at first, so there's just three versions of the intro, three kindly innkeepers to tutorialize you, and different Scions in each region to initially bump into. The other weird quirk is that because once upon a time the game had this weird system where you had to unlock the proper iconic Final Fantasy Jobs by leveling different combinations of more generic MMO style Classes. They dropped that, but you still go from a Class to a Job at level 30, so the base game ones all have two different names to keep track of, and you pick based on the vaguer one. Anyway we'll be starting off with the Gridanian set, because Gridania is nice and boring!

Up first, we have Archer, which eventually transitions into Bard. You start off basically joining the militia, doing some target practice, dealing with some bandits, and helping a catgirl peer deal with how her family of hunters kinda suck a lot. Then you meet an old retired guy who's into music and whistful memories, do some traveling around the world learning his backstory, and helping some loser friend of his self-actualize. The whole thing honestly left the least impression on me of the whole lot, but when you do officially switch over to bard, you not only get songs as a combat ability, there's this whole surprisingly elaborate music performance system that unlocks for roleplaying. People form bands and hold concerts in major cities pretty often. It's neat.

Then we have Lancer, which transitions to Dragoon. Up to level 30 it's the same basic deal as Archer, but after that you go meet Estinien to learn how to jump around a lot. From Heavensward on, Estinien is a major character/party member, which is a nice upgrade for him, and means that after a bit of friendly rivalry as he teaches you the ropes and challenges you to a duel, the rest of this questline is inherently tied to the ongoing events of Heavensward and a bit of epilogue to it. You sorta take on an apprentice who's pretty sure she's going to turn into a dragon because she was low dosed with blood as a child (this was a whole thing, go reread the Heavensward summary) and later have to deal with an unruly dragon who wandered off to the east. Not bad stuff overall.

Finally we have Conjurer, which transitions into White Mage, and hey, this one has cool lore attached! I just called Gridania "nice and boring" in reference to how it's kind of this sleepy peaceful little rustic village, but it has some of the juicier background lore, it just doesn't tend to come up outside of this quest line. See the big ancient forest it's smack in the middle of is the home of these ancient elementals which are all weird and mysterious and presumably make things nice if they're happy, and definitely make giant tree monsters try to kill everyone when they're upset. Every so often a human (hyuran if you insist on making me look up dumb official names) is born with a big ol' set of pointy horns, which marks them as a padjal, weirdos who don't age right and can cryptically communicate with the elementals. This gives them the two jobs of governing Gridania according to the whims of their weird primordial spirit religion, and teaching people how to magically summon wind/rocks/healing spells in exchange for them directly taking care of the elementals' problems. So early on you are training with/mentoring a girl who thought she was just gonna learn how to heal people and does not get that she's also signing up to deal with this Evil Dead stuff on behalf of the elementals, then you learn some more of the history to all that, deal with a weird cultist during Heavensward, and in Stormblood discover this younh padjal whose mother freaked out and took her off to live in the middle of nowhere because she didn't want her taken away and given over to this weird cult with all the other horny people. Understandable, but she ends up doing weird magic stuff when she's upset which isn't great and also attracts demons like catnip so you and that girl who finally embraced rock tossing need to go teach her the ropes and keep her from summoning demons and keep her sick mom from dying in a moldy cabin in a blighted forest. This one is actually pretty good.

For some direct contrast with that, swinging down to Ul'dah, let's start off with Thaumaturge, which transitions into Black Mage. We've got some spooky lalafel nerds with a big ol' library who are way into magic, and do a bit of dealing with demons when rifts to hell open up and let some out. Mostly though these guys suck beyond the recluse who's really running the show, and serving as part of this secret shadow council whose other members come from the various "beast" tribes who you probably won't pick up on as not all just being evil monsters if you pick the class up early on. Once you're hanging out with them, the whole deal is handling demons with dangerous magic that kinda draws on hell as a power source. Which seems a lot less edgy post-post-Endwalker, but they've got this nice "seem evil, actually super good" thing going. Moving forward into the expansions, there's a bit of a conflict there, where some white mage who grew up on too much propaganda from the big ol' three-way mage war responsible for one of the less talked about past apocalypses, and needs some firsthand lessons that no, they're standing around the hell portals all the time because they're closing them, not opening them. And then there's an odd arc where the original black mage, who may or may not be the one who's a major FF11 character ends up posessing your mentor to fix a problem/brag/lead into a sort of out of left field love story. Not bad, could be better.

Gladiator transitions to Paladin eventually, but for Stormblood the focus shifts back to the gladiators, which is marginally the better of the two, but these are rough. Gladiatorial combat is the big sporting event of Ul'dah, and you EVENTUALLY get to participate in a bit of it first hand in the 60-70 range, but the bulk of the gladiatorial story is that the head trainer of the guild has this will-they-or-won't-they thing going with the old star of the arena who kinda skipped out on her to wander the world and right wrongs a bit and... the thing with these two is that both of them could really do better and they really don't have any chemistry at all. The whole thing gets old fast, too. In the middle of all this though, you sort of accidentally half-join the paladins who are largely the royal guard of the city, getting jumped in by a big boisterous guy who's kind of on the outs with everyone, and once you patch that up he immediately fakes his own death to lead some new paladin recruit (and you, his babysitter) on a big wild goose chase with no real payoff. Everyone seems to hate this whole thing.

Pugilist transitions to Monk, and eventually ends up where you'd expect, but the path is a weird one. We've got the local fight club, nominally run by this old guy who's kinda lost his mojo. You train with him but it's really more about you waking up his old fighting spirit than you learning much, and you also rough up some local gangs so that's fun. Then on formally becoming a monk you... help a scientst travel around the world taking readings because he's pretty sure all that stuff about "ki" and "fighting spirit" and such is total BS and people are maybe just getting high off fumes or something. Basically he's wrong in the end, and you end up with a rival-turned friend, and an evil rival dojo, and there's this whole light fist/dark fist conflict where facing each other powers both up, where eventually you defeat the dark leader and talk his students into the totally sensible arrangement of practicing both together because it's just kinda win-win.

Moving on to Limsa Lominsa, we have the star of the show, Marauder, which transitions to Warrior. In intro movies and such, this is the default class of the protagonist. They don't call you the Monk of Light. It's also the class of your dorky evil twin eventually. It's also pretty simple. Go to pirate town, have someone hand you an axe, learn to hit things really hard with it. Early on that's largely rocks, and large rampaging animals, with the nerdy sister of the lead axe-swinger helping you out because the famous self-healing of the class isn't until later. Then you meet a guy named Furious Gorge. Which, yeah. Roegadyn names are either Welsh if they're blue-ish or terrible rock puns if they're red-ish. It's a thing. Anyway Furious Gorge teaches you how to unleash/tame your inner berserker beast mode, and then it turns out he's actually really terrible at managing that himself. So you spend some time trying to help him get a handle on it with his nerdy brother, and then come Stormblood you're all training this tiny litle au ra girl with clear romantic tensions all around. Eventually Furious Gorge gets the courage to go up to her and go "hey, I know you've secretly been into me, and it's mutual" at which point she basically responds "what the hell? You suck dude, I'm hot for the protagonist." Which, yeah, you get that a lot, really. So that's... funny, ish? Mainly the name Furious Gorge.

The final starting class, Arcanist, is a weird mutant that transitions into both Summoner and Scholar, which then end up sharing an experience level as a result. It also has a further identity crisis in that it USED to be a pet-focused class where you had minions to order around while you focused on other things, as of Endwalker it's just a caster. I mention this because the early Arcanist classes still really play up your role as a battlefield tactician, discussing with your mentor how to split up and deal with large numbers of enemies and come up with plans like disguising her as a hapless floozy to track kidnappers to their base, and it no longer really makes sense. After level 30 this is less of an issue though as things branch away. The summoner quests are all about learning how to bring forth smaller, more controllable versions of the gods who were relevant in ARR from the start (Ifrit, Titan, Garuda, Bahamut, Phoenix), and dealing with an evil summoner bringing them about in a less safe fashion. Scholar quests are a bit more interesting, as you replace your normal pets with a fairy and start learning about the third faction in that three way mage war, who were afflicted with a weird disease turning them into those good ol' knife-and-lantern spooky pals the tonberries. They're not actually murder monsters, just suffering from a horrible mutating skin condition. Whoops. This one too ends in a love story between a normal lalafel and a fishy hooded one.

In the post-ARR patch cycle (when the Doman refugees show up), we did get a third Limsa-based class, but they aren't available when first creating a new character. Rogue, which transitions to Ninja, has this whole secret society thing going, where you can start leveling it it as soon as you unlock multi-classing at level 10 or so, but you need to be tipped off about where they meet. You'd figure the secrecy is because they're a bunch of criminals, but the actual deal with the rogues is that they're basically Limsa Lominsa's secret police. They're still all about the backstabbing and hiding and getting a mug skill, and they're still a bunch of charming low-lives who speak thieves' cant, but the idea is that when you have a whole city-state of pirates you need to draw a hard line between jaunty adventurous crimes like plundering Imperial shipments, and hardcore crimes like kidnapping people to sell as sex slaves, or large-scale terrorism. Rogue quests are actually really fun and varied, sneaking around spying on people, identifying targets based on how they're dressed, running all over town hacking up terrorists and disarming bombs. Good good times.

At level 30 there's a real shift in things as you instead hang out with some ninja, looking for their sacred scrolls and dealing with their honestly pretty goofy rival, but there's still some variety getting someone drunk in a hot spring and spying on people from rooftops. And much like with Paladin, come Stormblood they realized which crew is more fun and you're suddenly back in it with the rogues. This is a genuine high point of the whole game that really stood out to me at the time, and like several others, oh, turns out that the woman who took over as head writer for Shadowbringers handled these.

Moving on to Heavensward, the impressive number of alternate meanings that title has includes the stuck-up blueblooded order of holy knights making up Ishgard's military. As they are just the worst, some nerds form the Machinist job and work on constructing guns and training the common people in how to use them. There's an active rivalry there, and the gun nerds are generally pretty likeable, so there's some nice investment. While not as bad off as Arcanist had it, there was a bit more tactical consideration when the quests were first written making things awkward, and after proving that guns are great, there's a bit with proving this one gun prodigy gal is better sticking with this than marrying some noble or whatever. I feel like I'm forgetting a whole arc here too.

We also have a girl with real cool looks coming down from Sharlayan (AKA Nerd Town) to teach these primitive screwheads how to be Astrologians. It's like a white mage, but with more tarot and constellations. Very scientific. Everyone in Ishgard freaking sucks so they all think it's witchcraft until you use it to personally save their lives, and the whole field trip turns out to be unsanctioned, with the lead trainer's father sending hit squads after her. Eventually she gets a haircut and switches to manlier clothes to avoid him. This may be a low-key early transition thing. Oh and then we combine this with similar far eastern traditions.

Then there's Dark Knight, the job with hands down the best writing in the game. You meet someone named Fray in cool all-concealing armor, crumpled in a back alley in the slums, with a stupidly big sword they aren't in any condition to use, so they offer to teach you to be a Big Sword Edgelord too. There's a lot of cryptic talk about tapping into your inner darkness and hearing some powerful voice, and also just a lot of hanging out with your cool new friend who hates the religious classist scumbags running Ishgard as much as I do, so you end up killing a lot of them to defend the common people as Fray becomes more and more depressed, and more inclined to kinda half-break the fourth wall, asking if you're getting as burnt out as they are over how many boring pointless quests you keep having to do for every NPC who apparently can't even bring a bag of groceries home from the store without needing you to come along and help. And yeah, we are still in the portion of things where the filler quests are unforgivably common instead of just way too common. Then somewhere in the middle of dealing with other people's problems, one of your respectable Ishgardian friends comes up to talk to you about how apparently you're being accused of heresy because aside from killing the local jerk knights a lot, someone says they've been seeing you having one-sided conversations with a corpse in an alley lately.

Neither Fray nor you particularly take the revelation that uh... Fray was absolutely a random corpse in an alley when you first met, and you just kinda lifted a cool sword and a job crystal out of their cold dead hands, and have kinda just been psychically projecting your own depression and irritation with boring filler quests into an imaginary friend, so after killing a bunch of these jerks trying to arrest you, the two of you have a bit of a fight, Fray's mask comes off, you get a cool glowing eyed wraith sort of look before we go proper evil twin mode.

Then while you're sitting there dealing with the fact that you kinda hallucinated your best friend in the world here, some au ra guy named Sidurgu walks up and just kinda goes "hey! Someone told me you knew my friend Fray?" So... yeah? You start hanging out with him, sharing stories about a probably more alive Fray and learning about how he has this whole thing going where he rescued this little girl from her horrible religious zealot mother and he's her big defender now. They have a weird relationship where she correctly calls him out as not really having her best interests in mind and just being caught up in playing the role of hero. You wander around with them, do some soul searching, and eventually confront her mother, fight her, and try to patch things up. She continues to unrepentantly shout about her daughter being a horrible demon who needs to be killed, kid basically says "well if you like your god so much, I guess you can go join her," and Sid, finally getting over himself enough and really learning to help her with what she really needs, cuts this horrible woman's head off, and you all go out for drinks. It's a great moment.

Then for the Stormblood quests (and yes I am giving the Dark Knight plot three or four times the space as the rest of these, it deserves it) some weird androgynous kid walks up (looking kinda like the halfway point between your two NPC pals who die at the end of Heavensward funnily enough), asks if they can borrow your job crystal as a battery for their cool ability to manifest people's dead loved ones and give them closure, and breaks it. So you have to follow them around while they do all the closure stuff on their agenda before fixing it for you, and consistently, turns out coming face to face with weird simulacra of their dead loved ones mostly just really distresses people and they aren't into it. Eventually when it starts to sink in that this kid is just you psychically manifesting your own hangups again, Fray just suddenly shows up, says some cool pal stuff, apologizes for the whole bit before with going full embodiment of your darker nature and trying to kill/replace you, and teams up to trash this little punk, after which you can summon them in combat, so that's cool. Again, hands down best writing in the whole game, and again, this is the writer who took over as lead for Shadowbringers, where things generally get more enjoyable.

But yeah, there's other expansions' jobs to cover too. These have less to them though, since Stormblood's don't start at a low enough level to squeeze in three arcs of story and just give you the one, and past that they basically phased out job quests in favor of role quests, so the classes from those also just get a quick intro really. In other words, lightning round!

The Red Mage quests are about helping some cool cat help a girl with amnesia realize her past doesn't really matter and she should try being a red mage too. Blue Mage is a mutant job you learn from a conman with a heart of gold, suckering people into signing up as blue mages and faking magic shows/duels to raise money to send to his lizard pals in fantasy America. Samurai's quests are your standard cool old guy with a sword has big regrets, trains you hoping you'll kill him to atone for stuff he's ashamed of. Gunbreaker is kind of also that but with a lot of wandering mercenary stuff first, and the amazing revelation that in this setting guns are called guns because the concept of bullets is derived from the magic cartridges used to give extra oompf to the swings of gunblades, and gunblades get their name from being the blades of Queen Gunnhildr. We'll circle back to her. Dancer like Rogue is a job where cool charismatic people have a secret mission, in this case killing these weird horrible emotion-based monsters after luring them out with sexy dance performances. It's kind of a preview of Endwalker's whole deal. Sage is about being a science nerd who heals people even when they suck. Reaper is about joining a found family of mostly Garlean ex-pats who make soul contracts with demons to get cool edgelord powers to fight demons, and keeping scythe-mom from going all self-sacrifice. Seems like a terrible idea when you can just kill them normally, but then post-Endwalker we learn most demons are actually pretty chill nerds who just want out of hell, so it's cool.

I think I already covered the role quests elsewhere, but real quick: In Shadowbringers, we help a set of mercenaries deal with the monster-angel forms of Ardbert's old crew while learning along the way how most of them were originally pretty cool people, and help some crafty types with humanitarian work and also with finding where invisible dinosaurs hang out. Then in Stormblood, we revisit every major city to help their leaders get fleshed out and deal with the one person each had suicidal enough to turn into a big monster, and then go help a bunch of college nerds awkwardly date each other and work out the secret of healthy bread that doesn't taste disgusting.

Next on the agenda- Deep Dungeons! At some point in the process of wedging extra stuff into this game, someone realized that tacking one of them randomly generated 100 floor dungeons where you can only use what you get inside is a welcome addition to basically anything, and FF14 has three of them. The Palace of the Dead is a horrible hole in the ground tied in with some of the spookier quests in Gridania where you finally confront a nasty ghost girl you had unresolved business with and some stuffy old necromancer. Heaven-on-High is a mysterious Jenga tower off the coast of Doma which turns out is actually a high tech training ground built forever ago. Eureka Orthos is a sub-basement under the crystal tower with conceptual ties to Eureka, which we're getting to, because... somehow the writers still had more to say about ancient Allagan superweapons, somehow. You know there's a bunch of apocalypses in this timeline you never really dug into right? It doesn't all have to be this ONE ancient evil empire. Anyway these are actually all pretty story light, I'm just covering my bases.

Finally, let's talk a bit about relics. Every post-whatever patch cycle has some set of weapons that have this whole multi-stage evolution to them whose acquisition is this WHOLE THING. ARR's just involve entirely too many sort of tedious steps replaying the whole game up to that point multiple times over with a vague reference to creating the weapons of the Zodiac Braves, you know from FFT. Heavensward has some weird nerd all about bringing into being this weird fairy-like new form of life by letting it hang out in your sword/stick/gloves/whathaveyou while you absorb elemental essence for a good long while, and has an unrelated side project where crafters can raid sky islands for supplies and help rebuild the lower levels of Ishgard as kind of a theme park. After that though, they made these pretty beefy chunks of game.

The Forbidden Land of Eureka is... that island Krile and her grandfather were hanging out on before it was suddenly wiped off the map while on the phone with Minfilia near the end of ARR. It just somehow... passed through the center of the earth and popped out by Kugane. It's kind of a wreck and is particularly all elementally imbalanced and supercharged, and it is basically a whole second MMO with older sensibilities stashed away inside the one you were already playing, as you explore a bunch of really well-rendered biomes, grind tons of monsters which had a surprising number of new art assets, actually deal with elemental paper-rock scissors mechanics, and get a bit of a retelling of FF5's backstory with Galuf's weird old friends as flashbacks between fixing up teleporter networks and dealing with Krile's evil little smug nerd rival... who ultimately turns out to have just been fake evil. The whole thing caps off with this homage to FF11's most infamously nasty content with a high stakes dungeon that gates some progress behind people out in the overworld killing bosses in sync with those inside. Very grindy but I actually like the vibe a lot.

Then post-Shadowbringers when we're re-building the hype of the Imperial threat and getting into how its various holdings are rebelling, we have the Bozjan Southern Front, where a bunch of Big Women and Cat Men are fighting the empire in full force with honestly a bit of a World War I vibe to it with the trenches and big tanks and such. There's some pretty cool grand assaults on major fortresses, and a bit of backstabbing intrigue with a spy who eventually uses the local resource of crystalized traumatic memories to brainwash a recreated-from-the-past version of the country's old leader Queen Gunhildr and then kinda merge with her in this like-summoning-Shiva-but-technically-this-isn't-a-god-it's-its-own-thing-but-yeah-people-still-get-tempered deal. This one is written by the same guy as Final Fantasy Tactics who wanted to have a much more involved storyline with way more NPCs but this got truncated down to fun facts on collectable trading cards, essentially. Still pretty neat and show-y though.

And... is that it? Am I done? I think I already covered the variant dungeons and made at least passing mention of the private island farming thing (which, I confess, I have not looked at... but I'm told Sadu and her girlfriend the other au ra leader swing by on a date at some point). I might quietly add that in later, but otherwise, that's really it. That is all the plot of FF14 as of this time of writing. There is nothing else left for me to summarize... until Dawntrail comes out like... this Wednesday, time of writing.

As usual, here's my patreon. Here's my Amazon wishlist full of other games I could be playing instead of talking about this one. I am in bad financial shape and these articles are a lot of work, so, maybe help me out?

#ff14 #ffxiv #final fantasy 14 #final fantasy xiv #Fray really is just the best even if they always freak me out in tough boss fights by standing still hacking away when it's time to run awa

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