#this is WILDLY early Heavensward

[laspocelliere]

Day Ten: Stable

It happened in the night, and no witnesses survived to tell the tale.

The foundations hadn’t been stable since Dalamud, but no one would admit it. The Elders preached their sermons of light and redemption, and the youth snuck into the lower caverns of darkness and debauchery, and not a soul was the wiser to the cracks that had begun to fracture and warp the structures that had taken centuries upon centuries of painstaking craftsmanship to build. Their homes, their communities, their very lives, all nestled safely within the thick stone protection of the mountain, carved carefully within its heart where no one could find nor threaten them.

Until the threat came, at the worst possible moment.

When the ceilings caved in, there was barely time to scream. When the hulking forms of dying dragons slammed like falling gods into the sides of the mountains, the structures couldn’t – wouldn’t – withstand it. Not after the Calamity had fractured them from their very foundations. 

They didn’t stand a chance. Those who lived didn’t suffer long, buried alive beneath the ice and stone and sanctity of the secretive world that had once housed them so well.

When the floors cracked apart and yawned open into a bottomless pit from which there was no return, there was no time to mourn. Lives were lost in an instant, the darkness swallowing whole neighbourhoods without ceremony. There was no time to think, or breathe, or cry. 

There certainly wasn’t time to remember.

If there were, none present would have remembered someone who wasn’t there. A little girl they’d tried their whole lives to ignore, to explain away, to smooth over in their minds. Her sullen eyes and her brooding temper and her curse, her curse, her curse.

If they remembered her, in those last instants, surely it was the curse they remembered the most.

Surely it was her curse that had come to them at last.

They’d thought it had been Dalamud, at first. The Calamity had struck Coerthas with a ferocity that was felt ever afterwards, fire in the sky plunging them into a sentence of eternal ice. They’d clung to each other in the half-light as the red moon fell, whispering prayers and linking arms and taking comfort in the fact that they were there, they were together, they had done their best.

Meanwhile, that strange child had stood alone in the darkness, staring up at the fire above, unblinking and detached. Her fingers had trembled, and her eyes went glassy, and those who saw her swore that she’d coaxed the Calamity down upon them then, as though she’d planned it from her cradle.

Why else would she have left so soon after? Guilt ran through her veins like water. She was no blood of theirs. Not anymore.

Her parents stayed behind, and breathed relief at the loss of her.

Years later, they breathed ash, and dust, and nothing at all, and they didn’t think of her once.

There were no witnesses to explain the destruction. No one left to spread the news of an entire community, lost to the war, alone inside the mountain. Traders found blocked passageways, and assumed they’d simply closed off again, moved on, cloistered further into their ancient beliefs and archaic traditions. 

A pity, they might have said, had they known. A tragedy. Instead, they took their carts and their chocobos away, and thought nothing at all.

In the darkness, one of the last great standing Duskwight clans lay in a silent tomb, forgotten by the world.

Malms away – closer than one might expect – the Warrior of Light drew closed the heavy damask curtains of her rooms in the Fortemps Manor. The window gave her an exceptional view of the mountains she’d been raised and loathed in. Some nights, when the remembering was hard and pressed angry fingerprints across the inside of her skull, seeing the moonlight on the snow was too much to bear. The night watch in Ishgard clanked loudly beyond, and the dragons in the distance screeched their fury at more children lost to man’s spears.

She had no way to know that her entire family was already dead.

In the night, and in the quiet, she extinguished her candle, and went to sleep alone as she’d always done; with no one to miss her, and no one to miss.

[wirewitchviolet]

The Entire Plot of Final Fantasy 14, with all the expansions, and some serious analysis of how good it actually is. (Part 3 - Heavensward)

Continuing from last time, our hero, The Warrior of Light, some kid who’s mother dresses him in a really questionable way, and their secretary, are on the lam, fleeing the three countries they just saved from a fascist invasion to... hands down the absolute worst place you could possibly live in this setting. Oh and from here out, we have narrators going over a little bit everytime you reach somewhere new. In this case it’s some noble guy who after this bit writes it all in an in-universe book he calls

Heavensward

Also I should probably explain the joke that when hyping up the whole free trial thing there was a ton of ad copy talking about it with some deeply cumbersome language and it was a big internet running gag to quote the entire thing when mentioning the game or shoving it into stuff like this for some reason.

Also for real if I’m trying to explain these things I really do have to point out that for the entire base game Alphinaud and Alisae are running around dressed in identical outfits that are kind of a lot.

It’s like this weird turtle-necked sleezy sci-fi girl jumpsuit with this shredded up coat over it. Just looks super super weird, but fortunately Tataru’s true purpose is to make new outfits for every character who’s good a bit without a wardrobe update so first thing day one he gets this less ridiculous look.

Which of course still features the thigh high boots and the earring because FF14 is just like that. Your equipment slots are weapon, hat, upper torso, gloves, shorts-or-stockings, thigh-high boots, earring(s), choker, bracelets, ring, other ring, regardless of gender. Just a random side note. Anyway, we pick up where the end credits dumped us in the city of Ishgard which is both absolutely just the worst, and also honestly depicted as just wildly out of scale with everything else in the world. Every other major city is kinda just the commercial district with the residential part of town in a separate area we can instance out for reasonable player housing, maybe a dozen buildings, and then you get to Ishgard and like... we have this pretty impressive city to begin with and then if you look over a ledge you see the part we’re running around on is like the uppermost tier of this 30 or so tier thing?

Most of it isn’t actively inhabited though. I think what they’re going for is that they’ve been at war with the dragons for so long that they’ve just repeatedly had to abandon old battlements to disrepair, and I’m told that prior to the end of 1.0 apocalypse it wasn’t the sort of land of eternal winter thing, and now most of the population is living in the inner-most noble district with the big church. Or more accurately most of the population is living in this ramshackle wooden death trap on the edge of that district exposed to the elements and dying of exposure and starvation. Ishgard sucks.

You’re kind of adopted by one of the nobel houses immediately though. The lord’s son was running the southern outpost you did like 50 sidequests in in the base game and he really put in a hell of a word for you. So that’s your base of operations for most of the expansion, plus the local bar where Tataru just pulls up a seat and does not leave until the expansion’s over. You take a bit to get acquainted with this absolute hellhole, the starving commoners, and the incredibly strict church that calls damn near everything heresy. You can’t bang the dragons. You can’t have long one sided conversations with corpses in alleyways you pretend are talking back. You can’t kill church-protectorate knights by the dozen in the middle of the street. You can’t replace those knights with an army of peasants with rifles. Fortunately you can get out of heresy charges through one of those trial by combat deals, so early on you make one major slip-up, get to beat some jerk up for it, and afterwards they kinda let you do whatever you want. Which is good because banging dragons is the only thing on that list you aren’t going to do if you aren’t trying the three new classes that open up here. And hey, they have nice little storylines that really sell the new setting.

Mechanists are the “I have a gun” class and really lean hard into the classism thing. Astrologers are a healer class from Sharlayan, the island of insufferable nerds, and you’re helping someone out who is off spreading that knowledge to people who didn’t pay the full tuition, how dare you, AND going around healing a bunch of religious creeps who largely think keeping them from not dying makes you a witch.

And then there’s the Dark Knight class which has probably the most interesting writing in the whole game. You find someone named Fray lying in an alley looking hurt with a stupidly big sword, who takes your efforts to see if their OK as a sign of a good character, and starts training you in being a proper Big Sword Edgelord. This involves a lot of honestly baffling cryptic mutterings about embracing your inner darkness and listening to voices and such, and also a lot of killing the hell out of people abusing positions of power.

Meanwhile Fray has really wild mood swings, going from hey, gotta follow your heart big damn hero stuff to thinking about dead old friends to kinda breaking the fourth wall to gripe about how every damn minor NPC with a sidequest is apparently so helpless that a farmer can’t even like go pick his own vegetables if you aren’t volunteering to help. Anyway I kinda already foreshadowed this, but after getting the class up to about level 50, you get confronted about how people keep saying they see you standing around in an alley talking to a corpse, and what the hell is that about?

Around then Fray comes clean and explains that yeah, that person you first went to check on was dead, and this whole time you’ve just been running around with a giant sword talking to yourself. Which is all straightforward enough, except after resolving this, another dark knight walks up and goes “oh, you know Fray too?” But then rather than dive into what they’re going for with that, his quest line is this whole thing about whether he’s just acting as the personal bodyguard for this kid with an abusive religious fanatic of a mother out of genuine concern for her, or because it gives him an excuse to fight more terrible temple knights. And of course the great thing about that quest line is that while it totally sets up some sort of reconciliation sort of thing, by the end her mother is still basically calling her child a witch who deserves to burn, and the daughter just kinda going “OK cool, guess you get to be with your god when you’re dead then” and has him kill her. Atypical, but, you know, real satisfying.

So again, Ishgard is just a terrible place. The surroundings are neat though. Really detailed frozen wastelands and flying islands. You tour around a bit before finally picking back up on that whole “Lady Iceheart’s rebels” story line, tracking her down, learning more about where she’s coming from, and basically working out, eventually, that the best way to deal with the problems in the region is to make peace with what dragons you can, so you end up on a big road trip with just you, Alphinaud, Ysaile, AKA reincarnated Shiva, and for reasons I can’t fathom but won’t object to because it’s amusing, Estinien.

So... if you level up as a dragoon, from level 30 on the main NPC you’re dealing with is this guy Estinien who is, in no particular order, the biggest big shot dragoon in Ishgard, very much an homage to Kain from FF4, and a huge idiot with terrible social skills. It’s honestly quite interesting to have him as this major main storyline NPC as a promotion from a class trainer NPC (which he still does all the way up through the end of the next expansion, when those stop being a thing). Normally those people just kinda stay constrained to their own storylines, but not this guy. Ysaile’s cool too. They don’t even make a big deal out of how she’s a terrorist leader and you’ve kinda been trying to hunt her down. She has actually good motives, and she’s only killing the military of Ishgard who, let’s face it, are awful and deserve it.

So in addition to being good at what he does and bad at obeying the laws of gravity, Estinien’s big claim to fame is that he’s officially in charge of protecting the Eye of Nidhogg, which sounds like some big fantasy gemstone or something but, no. The actual disembodied eye of a big dragon. He just carries it around with him everywhere, and casually whips it out any time it’s relevant to a conversation. Can you see why this is maybe a bad guy to send out on a diplomatic mission with dragons?

So there’s this whole thing we get into where dragons’ cool magical powers are all concentrated in their eyes, and according to a story that gets revised a lot, the whole noble line of Ishgard started with this group of big damn heroes managing to gouge this one out of the head of the one dragon everyone generally agrees is just a huge jerk who’s never going to see reason. He’s also incidentally one of the first generation of dragons born on the planet, along with his brother Hraesvalgr who Ysayle claims to be the reincarnated wife of, and his sister Tiamat, who was the main summoner of Bahamut and is in this real I deserve to suffer, wrap me up in kinky chains and put me on display headspace. Also another sister whose death kinda kicked the whole war thing off, and one more they totally retcon in much later.

Anyway, Hraesvalgr seems cool, so you’re mainly off to see him. First though you have to cut through some absolutely bonkers-huge maps because they decided everyone could handle those now, hardware wise, and meet with some younger dragons. The first group of these has a serious problem where they’re worried that they’re all going to be killed by a bunch of bugs. This really isn’t doing much to make them seem like a huge threat to Ishgard but to be fair the bugs in question all have guns.

They also have this whole hive mind thing, and a god they’ve been summoning, and it’s around here you really just start to feel like a god exterminator. Not a big huge hero about it, just, you know, they call you, you show up in a van, quick in and out thing. These bugs are also first on the whole “beast tribe” list here, because every so often one wanders too far off and loses their link, and they all formed a little village. They’re worried about being reabsorbed into the collective if they come from them and the whole thing kinda has a queer kids with estranged abusive family vibes. I dig it.

Next up you meet moogles in their fabled homeland in the sky. They’re kinda spacey, you end up helping them restore a monument to an era of peace between them humans and dragons in this like permanent storm of floating rocks... and here my memory gets a little fuzzy, but I believe hereabouts is where you finally meet Hraesvelgr, who is in fact cool. Really most dragons are. Visually they’re really varied, but aside from ones who are being jerks and picking fights, they all have this vibe of being just incredibly tired. Exhausted. Can’t lift their head to look at you, but nice. It’s interesting. Anyway Hraesvelgr really bursts Ysayle’s bubble and explains she absolutely isn’t the reincarnation of his dead wife, and the Shiva she turns into is just her own imagined idealized vision which is honestly kind of offensive to him, but hey she seems nice.

It’s also hard not to notice that Hraesvelgr is kind of unfathomably huge, which really makes you wonder how the whole thing with hooking up with a human even worked, and uh... short answer is vore? Like dragons apparently parthenogenetically lay eggs and romance for them is mainly a cuddling thing but he totally ate his wife when she died of old age to absorb her soul which is why he’s so sure this girl doesn’t have it. She’s seriously really broken up about it though because this was kind of her whole thing, and the lyrics and general punk vibe that kick in halfway through her boss fight really suggest to me that she was just a real disaster lesbian before having this personal religious moment.

And/or kinda suicidal. Oh and the actual start of the big elf/dragon was was some elves finding out that dragons have magic eyes, so they killed the above-mentioned dead sister and ate her eyes to get cool powers. This ticked off Nidhogg in particular and being the extra spiteful sort he decided to wait a bit and then start taking advantage of how the descendants of all these eye-eaters (read, like, the whole population of Ishgard) have enough dragon magic in them that if they drink a little dragon blood they full on turn into dragons. Once people broadly learn this there’s a lot of horrified realizations that all these dragons their proudest warriors they’re putting down used to be elves like them, but personally I’m kinda relieved to learn it’s kind of all hateful idiot infighting and all the proper dragon-born dragons are chilling out where it’s safe.

After this revelation though we’re kind of at an impasse because Nihogg’s hard to reach, so we check back in on things back home. Rauban’s in prison, needs busting out, and this is also when we have the horrible retcon I mentioned where that cool plot momentum-y assassination of the Sultana gets walked the hell back. She’s actually alive and... agreeing to call off that whole democracy thing and be a figurehead since otherwise she’ll just get assassinated for real I guess? I hate this. Also there’s a new Emperor over in the Empire. Apparently they were distracted for a bit with the whole succession thing but now they’re ready to get back to killing you and sending down some massive flying fortress deal. Anyway Cid makes you and Estinien some personal high altitude mini-airships to get to Nidhogg and at least get that whole thing resolved, and since we’re no longer dealing with base game levels of padding, yeah, goes pretty well actually. You handle most of the fighting, Estinien comes in at the end for some “I literally just don’t care about gravity” shenanigans, rips that other eye out, gets totally drenched in blood in the process which turns his armor red from there on out (they’re probably going for some magical infusion thing but I like to think he’s just the sort of gross weirdo who never thinks to wash it off), and yay, mission accomplished. Also now Estinien has TWO giant eyeballs to whip out in polite company!

... Except wait this other eye is yellow. It’s supposed to be red. Time for a bunch of flashbacks. Turns out the big famous heroes of Ishgard back in the day actually nabbed both of Nidhogg’s eyes and he’s been using a loaner from Hraesvelgr. Sweet of him really, too bad he was a jerk. The upshot here though is that the extremely horrible church of Ishgard totally has a spare dragon eye hidden away, always has, and they have evil plans for it. Also they totally made up this thing about the 4 noble houses being direct descendants of big damn heroes. Also those heroes sucked, actually. Basically they’re just the worst and lie about everything and it’s high time they get called out on it. And the pope hangs with Ascians. Specifically Lahabrea even the... technically final boss of the base game who left no impression and I guess was less dead than advertised. Oh and his personal honor guard can go all giant god-like knight.

So when called out on being Just The Worst, the pope tries to kill you, and his secret son Aymeric who’s just a real nice well-meaning guy, but you’re saved by Haurchefant who dies in the process. Oh no! Poor noble sweet Haurchefant! Uh, who the hell was Haurchefant again? For real I totally forgot who this guy even was when I got to this point but oh right, he’s your main Ishgardian contact in the base game who you help with a bunch of stuff and got you into Ishgard in the first place. I’m sorry I just kinda spaced through his quests and then didn’t see him for a while.

Anyway the pope runs off on an airship and the empire’s showing up with their airship and everyone’s after this secret forcefield protected floating continent lifted into the sky forever ago by those wacky Allagans where they keep all their raddest and least responsible stuff. But... to crack it open you need a special key, and it’s on a flying island, and that flying island gets eaten by Bismark, another of these pesky gods,in the form of a giant flying whale, summoned by the nastier members of our next race of cool monster friends, these giant owl people who settle all their dispused with dance contests, bake cookies, and adopt cats with adorable little wings.

Anyway you gotta kill Bismark. Always love me a sky whale. It’s kind of a disappointing fight though. You hook some air tugs up to a flying rock and jump off it onto his back and all, but even the extreme version of the fight is a total cakewalk. And of course after you kill him the pope swings in and steals the key, so, damn it, gotta find another way to pierce that forcefield so you can kill that pope.

Also hey, you know how you used to have like seven or so Scions to help research technobabble like this? What ever happened to them? Oh right, they did dramatic last stands escaping The Incident. They’re all fine though right? Well, no. Y’shtola, the white mage who tried the risky teleport thing is totally missing in particular.Turns out she kinda got uh... stuck halfway and has been disembodied and probably like disintigrating all this time you’ve been chilling with bugs and dragons and dancing with owls and yeah whoops. So you go do some technobabble and track down her long lost sister to help recover her and it mostly goes pretty well, but her eyes are screwy and her clothes don’t come with her. Guess they’re just floating around in the lifestream or whatever.

Side note, you change classes by equipping whatever weapon that class uses, and all equipment has a level requirement plus if not bound to a specific class tends to only be wearable by a broad category of class. So unless you remember this is a thing and switch to all level 1 gear, whenever you first pick a class up, you suddenly aren’t qualified to be wearing any of your other gear and all your clothes just kind of explode off your body. Probably while you’re standing in the middle of a super high traffic area. It’s pretty consistently hilarious, but basically we’ve all been where Y’shtola is here. She actually does kinda switch from being a boring white mage to mostly-a-black mage around here, too.

The eye thing is some good writing by the way. Her old mentor, in a little bit, notices her eyes are pure white now and lectures her on using that risky spell, which is about the comment anyone makes on it, and the writers show remarkable restraint in honestly never explaining this outright, but she’s blind from here out. However she also gains this sort of innate magical aura vision which mostly means she functionally can still see just fine, but, there’s weird stuff with it later. I dig it.

She’s no help on this forcefield front, but does have a lead. Her old mentor knows a lot of esoteric stuff, and she lives in a cave near the ruins of Sharlayan, a big ol’ nerd town that got wiped out in the apocalypse. The twins and their grandfather kinda grew up there too. Presently it’s occupied by a bunch of goblins, some of whom are in a weird cult but most of whom are pretty cool and getting a little endgame town up and running with the help of random drifters. Goblins have a weird naming scheme though where they have kind of a thing they do and the suffix -ix or -ox depending on gender so like... is twich gonna be mad at me for posting this image?

You have to help them deal with some stuff for a bit because you always have to hang out with the locals some when you go somewhere new, but eventually you go meet with Y’shtola’s mentor and it’s freaking Matoya, the old witch from FF1! She’s got a cool cool hat. Also her cave totally plays a remix of the song.

She’s also got talking brooms with backwards hints, little frog wizard pals, and a cool upsidedown tower in a back room. This whole section’s pretty great. She’s pretty helpful too but she needs a special book from that cool library dungeon from FF5 with the book monsters flipping around pages and such. Anyway you need a big anti-forcefield ram and it needs some super powerful magical power source. Like say that dragon’s eye Estinien has been carrying around forever. So cool, off to Azys Lla already.

Problem is the empire’s headed that way too and they have this cool flying fortress. So... time for a real big splashy areal combat cutscene.

So I think I said this before but when this game decides it wants to kill a major character off they have a real good batting average for getting a really well done death scene out of it. Often they ruin it later by bringing people back, but, Heavensward’s deaths tend to stick.

Azys Lla has such incredibly good Final Area energy that I’m convinced they didn’t think they were going to have any future expansions and it was time to really just go all in. It also has the freaking Warring Triad from FF6 in it, each with their own boss fight and some real neat gimmicks in those. Also despite Ysayle’s cool death scene, the Empire does get in here too, which isn’t too bad because the guy leading this expedition kinda has a general Leo thing going and despite having this absolute ridiculous monster man helmet he’s pretty willing to team up with you to try and stop the pope. And then he dies too.

There’s some dumb lame Ascian stuff and I still don’t care. Lahabrea and some other jerk kinda get eaten by the pope when he uses that other eye to turn into a big boss fight. Then he screws up though and talks about how he now has power akin to a god, and I swear your character’s face lights up like someone asked you if you want a Scooby Snack. The pope actually sees this and tries to backpedal but nope, you’re a god now, extermination time. He semi-godifies all his bodyguards too so we get this whole Knights of the Round fight.

Once he’s dead Estinian shows up to grab that second Nidhogg eye and says he’s gonna go stash them where nobody can find them. On the way in he was channeling the power of just the one and almost getting possessed for his troubles, but he’s pretty sure he can handle it. He is, however, I can’t stress this enough, a complete idiot and IMMEDIATELY gets possessed by Nidhogg and flies away. What I love is when you head back to the airship you don’t even bother to mention this to anyone else. Just, like, of course that idiot would go and do a dumb thing like that.

Anyway you go back to Ishgard. At this point the whole dragon war is over, the incredibly evil pope and his inner circle are dead, so, peace is restored after like literally thousands of years, the pope’s son is in charge and immediately proposes a new democratic system (albeit with like a house of lords still), and while not disbanding the church their power is getting curbed and they’re generally being asked to chill, and hey now that they’re no longer having to fight all these dragons the really impressive army of Ishgard can get in on this alliance to deal with the empire. They’re also going to rebuild some of the destroyed parts of the city to deal with that slum thing. Or, really, they’re going to let you level the hell out of crafting jobs by doing it for them. Pretty happy ending except the whole bit where Ysayle is freaking dead.

So... I actually don’t like Heavensward. The back end gets pretty good mind you, and it’s a big improvement over the basegame in that all the major characters who show up get developed nicely. Ysayle and Estinein play off each other really well. Alphinaud is basically the main character and has a whole lot of personal growth proposing peace talks and long term plans and not having a giant ego about things. Y’shtola interacting with Matoya fleshes her out a lot as this sort of flippantly self-confident sassy turbo nerd. We get more of that later so like, everyone eventually absolutely loves Y’shtola.

The problem is that Ishgard and most people who live there just suck so incredibly much. There was already a problem in the base game where there really isn’t a good reason to root for the three main city states because we’re leaning too hard on the morally grey stuff, and that is just SO much more pronounced here. You can root for the dragons though, they’re cool. I do however really like a lot of stuff in the gap between Heavensward and the next expansion. In particular let me just tease that the culty jerk goblins are mainly concerned about the most interesting landmark in the ruins of Sharlayan.

We’ll get to that next time in Post-Heavensward. In the meantime, maybe throw me a little money?

Oh and the title of this expansion was pretty good. You’re constantly climbing to higher and higher elevations, trying to improve people’s moral character, dealing with the wardens of a pope, and eventually building out a nice high elevation residential area for people who are dying.

[xpiester333x]

Idek how to rank my favorite expansions really cause what are we talking about? Favorite main story? Because then it would go:

Shadowbringers

Endwalker

Dawntrail

Heavensward

Stormblood

ARR

But are we talking about favorite overall story? Because post Endwalker was really bad so it would look more like:

Shadowbringers

Heavensward

Stormblood

Endwalker

ARR

(DT gets eliminated too because it's too early on to fairly rank)

But are we talking about the amount of content and how I enjoyed it? Because that's crazy different:

Heavensward

Stormblood

ARR

Shadowbringers

Endwalker

(DT eliminated again for the same reason)

Are we asking how I felt about each one personally. Like overall how each one stuck with me and what I feel for them?

Heavensward

Shadowbringers

Dawntrail

ARR

Stormblood

Endwalker

Usually when people ask me "what's your favorite expansion" I go with the last list of just my overall impressions but as we can see for any given specific reason that list could be wildly different.

[laeorinel]

FFXIVWrite2022 - Day 3 - Temper

Set sometime vaguely in the Heavensward patches.

---

While Samara had always been known for having a temper, this was different. She had changed. 

She snapped at the slightest provocation, her hand moving towards her axe, only to pause and relent when the one who annoyed her crumbled and begged their apologies.

Alphinaud could hardly blame her. Ishgard was an unforgiving place for most, especially for those like her. With Ishgard closing itself off from the rest of the world, there were no Au ra around bar one. A lone warrior in the Forgotten Knight that largely kept to himself in a shadowed corner with his back to the wall. 

He and Tataru had heard rumours in the early days of their arrival, whispers from the townspeople of House Fortemps mingling with Dravanians. Something that confused the two of them to no end, at least until Tataru sucked in a breath and let out a stream of curses that would curdle milk. 

"To anyone in Ishgard…what would a person with horns and scales remind them of?"

He cursed himself now for overlooking something so obvious. It was no wonder she was on edge within the city if everyone inside of it saw her as a potential enemy. How many scathing looks and ill-hidden whispers had she heard since arriving here? Still, even if her anger was understandable, it worried him greatly. 

Before the bloody banquet, her anger was akin to a firepit. Contained and controlled for the most part, but still prone to flaring up wildly. Now though, it was akin to a wildfire. 

At first, he put it down to stress. Their companions were still missing, they were forced to contend with Ishgard's zealotry and isolationist ways, and then there was simply the monumental task ahead of them. But slowly and surely, they started making progress. The wins began to outmatch the losses. They had found some of their companions. Yet her spirit continued to deteriorate. 

Which is ultimately what led to this moment. From a distance, he watched over Samara as she cut a bloody path through a group of knights still loyal to the Archbishop. A greatsword had replaced her typical axe, her regular leather and plated armour from her homeland replaced by a more heavy set of plate that was designed in such a fashion that it could well be classed as a weapon itself.

The look on her face as she performed her deadly dance through the crowd sent a chill down his spine. It had an almost manic quality to it. She was smiling. He had to look away, not just from her, but from what she was doing. While these men were trained fighters, they were clearly outmatched. She did not need to kill these men. She chose to. 

This was not a battle; it was a slaughter. And all he could do was wait until the chorus of screams and the clashing of blades stopped. 

Alphinaud swallowed thickly as the sounds of battle ceased, and all that remained was the sound of this breathing and plated footsteps walking through the snow. He did not turn around, but he had to ask the question. "Are you satisfied?'

The response came with a faint laugh that made Alphinaud's stomach twist in knots. "With the slaughter? Yes! With your reaction? No." He finally turned towards Samara. She was practically covered from head to toe in blood. It was an all too unsettling visage as he tried and failed to make contact with her eyes.

"What's wrong little lordling? Can you still not handle the sight of blood even after all this time?" Samara joked as she tried to lighten the mood. The young elezen still did not meet her gaze, causing the older Au ra to frown. "Alphinaud. Look at me." She took a step closer to Alphinaud only to watch as he instinctively took a few steps back. 

Samara paused, looking towards Alphinaud, confused. "You...are you afraid of me?"

He hated how hurt she sounded and knew that what he would say next would likely hurt all the more. But it needed to be said. "You do not frighten me, Samara; your anger frightens me."

Samara lets out a weary sigh as she wipes away some of the blood on her face, but it only worsens things, given that blood coats her armour as well. "How many times have we been over this… my anger is me. It is a part of who I am, Alphinaud. If my anger scares you, then I scare you."

Alphinaud lets out a steady breath as he shakes his head. He makes contact with Samara's eyes before speaking. "You are wrong. You do not scare me. Because when I see you, the real you, I see a brave warrior who will defend her allies to the last, not because she is ordered to, but because she chooses to."

He steps towards her as he watches her face, her confusion still palpable. "I see a woman who has known suffering but refuses to speak of it, thinking only of how to ease the hardship of others." Samara frowns, confusion giving way slightly to a quiet sorrow. 

He takes another step forward, getting bolder and braver with every word. "I see a woman who cares deeply for those around her. One who shares equally in all their triumphs and losses." Samara crosses her arms, armour uncomfortably digging into the flesh underneath at certain places, yet she remains silent. 

Alphinaud now stands in front of her, the pair at a nearly equal height so he can look directly into her eyes. "I see a woman so afraid of losing what she has that she keeps everyone at arm's length. Because it is easier to put on a mask and show the world this furious and savage warrior who lives for the sake of battle and nothing else than acknowledge your heart's desires." Her gaze drops to the ground, and her mouth opens and closes as she struggles to find something to say. 

He places a hand over her breastplate; his voice wavers for a moment as he struggles to keep his emotions in check. All the fear and worry of late is making itself known. "I have seen your anger, my friend. It is pure, controlled, and born out of your love for others. This anger you feel now. It is different. Unbridled and chaotic. It is not your own, and that is what frightens me." She remains stoic and quiet, moving from the hand on her chest to meet Alphinaud's gaze again. 

He foolishly believes he has gotten through to her for a moment until she shrugs off his hand. She speaks in a low tone, almost sounding resigned. "You are welcome to keep thinking that, Alphinaud. But it does not make it true."

She moves away from Alphinaud and stares at him with a hard, unflinching look. "Remember this, Alphinaud. Remember all the lives these self-righteous sons and daughters of Ishgard have claimed. How much sorrow has been wrought because of the lies they continued to uphold? How many innocents have been cut down because they despise anything they see as impure?" 

Samara gestures out towards the unforgiving hills and valleys surrounding the pair. "An entire tribe of my people is buried beneath the snow. Their songs and stories are forever silenced and lost."

She practically spits out the following few words, unchecked fury boiling just beneath the surface. "And all for the glory of Ishgard. They are proud of that heritage, Alphinaud. You may have turned a blind eye to it, but I cannot. I will not."

She raises her head an ilm higher, an attempt to look more intimidating and make it clear this discussion is over. "This anger is my own. I have just decided to stop holding back. This land is harsh and cruel, and the monsters within it are undeserving of mercy. One day you will understand." And with that, she pushes past the young Elezen without much more than a glance and begins the long trek back to Ishgard, the still wet blood from her armour and sword leaving a trail for him to follow. 

"And one day, you may regret the monster you have become..." he whispers faintly as he turns to watch her fade into the distance. He tries and ultimately fails to stop his tears from falling once he sees her fade from view. 

[tiredassmage]

🕶canonverse or au?

I tend to prefer mostly canonverse, perhaps with a few minor tweaks in story beats. For example, say the lil AU in my head god I need to write stuff down somewhere for Astor where he stays in Dravania instead of leaving around the time of the Calamity and ends up working with Ysayle is pretty much completely canon-compliant. It relies on another character being the Warrior of Light (instead of him, as usually is the case since he's my main) and instead has him coming in as a side character in the events of Heavensward that eventually joins the Scions, though he does still have the Echo.

There's like one or two modern aus I have thoughts in that entirely change up the plot and focus, but use my ocs/XIV characters, but they're more like fun little scenarios for me to think of than full-blown AUs. XIV has such a good story as-is that I haven't felt the need to go off and change things in broad leaps and bounds. xD OH, and I do technically have a longer fic idea for something semi-based in XIV lore, but still... changing, altering, or repurposing things, but it's still so wildly in early stages of development and it's been months since I've worked on it, so I'll refrain from torturing with details unless asked. I can't promise I'll ever actually write it all out, but I do have it mostly start to finish figured out in my head! Okay, maybe just a general overview. It focuses primarily on a conflict of mages, basing their abilities primarily around Black and White Magic, Zodiark and Hydaelyn, and such associated elements from Astral and Umbral alignments, and does a more... idk I guess more usual fantasy thing where magic is a rarer ability rather than something widely accepted. So the tldr is the mages don't necessarily get along with one another. And there's a certain Empire very interested in using their abilities for their own nefarious conquering quests. 👀 And... it all started from a really weird dream I had once, lol.

Something like the MCU is a completely different story, but there's so much there that upset me that I barely managed to sit through Civil War, so let's... not get into that one. x,D It was fun while it lasted, but oh well. I used to take canon out back and throw it in the river, but that particularly playground was pretty vast and eventually it was just more exhausting and frustrating to keep liking X thing when it wasn't what actually happened, so I moved on to other interests. :)

[thesteadydietofeverything]

Top 10 Games of 2019

This was an extremely good year for games. I don’t know if I played as many that will stick with me as I did last year, but the ones on the bottom half of this list in particular constitute some of my favorite games of the decade, and probably all-time. If I’ve got a gaming-related resolution for next year, it’s to put my playtime into supporting even smaller indie devs. My absolute favorite experiences in games this year came from seemingly out of nowhere games from teams I’ve previously never heard of before. That said, there are some big games coming up in spring I doubt I’ll be able to keep myself away from. Some quick notes/shoutouts before I get started:

-The game I put maybe the most time into this year was Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. I finally made the plunge into neverending FF MMO content, and I’m as happy as I am overwhelmed. This was a big year for the game, between the release of the Shadowbringers expansion and the Nier: Automata raid, and it very well may have made it onto my list if I had managed to actually get to any of it. At the time of this writing, though, I’ve only just finished 2015’s Heavensward, so I’ve got...a long way to go. 

-One quick shoutout to the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy that came out on Switch this year, a remaster of some DS classics I never played. An absolutely delightful visual novel series that I fell in love with throughout this year.

-I originally included a couple games currently in early access that I’ve enjoyed immensely. I removed them not because of arbitrary rules about what technically “came out” this year, but just to make room for some other games I liked, out of the assumption that I’ll still love these games in their 1.0 formats when they’re released next year to include them on my 2020 list. So shoutout to Hades, probably the best rogue-like/lite/whatever I’ve ever played, and Spin Rhythm XD, which reignited my love for rhythm games.

-Disco Elysium isn’t on this list, because I’ve played about an hour of it and haven’t yet been hooked by it. But I’ve heard enough about it to be convinced that it is 1000% a game for me and something I need to get to immediately. They shouted out Marx and Engels at the Game Awards! They look so cool! I want to be their friend! And hopefully, a few weeks from now, I’ll desperately want to redact this list to squeeze this game somewhere in here.

Alright, he’s the actual list:

10. Amid Evil

The 90’s FPS renaissance continues! As opposed to last year’s Dusk, a game I adored, this one takes its cues less from Quake and more from Heretic/Hexen, placing a greater emphasis on melee combat and magic-fuelled projectiles than more traditional weapons. Also, rather than that game’s intentionally ugly aesthetic, this one opts for graphics that at times feel lush, detailed, and pretty, while still probably mostly fitting the description of lo-fi. In fact, they just added RTX to the game, something I’m extremely curious to check out. This game continued to fuel my excitement about the possibilities of embracing out-of-style gameplay mechanics to discover new and fresh possibilities from a genre I’ve never been able to stop yearning for more of.

9. Ape Out

If this were a “coolest games” list, Ape Out would win it, easily. It’s a simple game whose mechanics don’t particularly evolve throughout the course of its handful of hours, but it leaves a hell of an impression with its minimalist cut-out graphics, stylish title cards, and percussive soundtrack. Smashing guards into each other and walls and causing them to shoot each other in a mad-dash for the exit is a fun as hell take on Hotline Miami-esque top down hyper violence, even if it’s a thin enough concept that it starts to feel a bit old before the end of the game.

8. Fire Emblem: Three Houses

I had a lot of problems with this game, probably most stemming from just how damn long it is - I still haven’t finished my first, and likely only, playthrough. This length seems to have motivated the developers to make battles more simple and easy, and to be fair, I would get frustrated if I were getting stuck on individual battles if I couldn’t stop thinking about how much longer I have to go, but as it is, I’ve just found them to be mostly boring. This is particularly problematic for a game that seems to require you to play through it at least...three times to really get the full picture? I couldn’t help but admire everything this game got right, though, and that mostly comes down to building a massive cast of extremely well realized and likable characters whose complex relationships with each other and with the structures they pledge loyalty to fuels harrowing drama once the plot really sets into motion. There’s a reason no other game inspired such a deluge of memes and fan fiction and art into my Twitter feed this year. It’s an impressive feat to convince every player they’ve unquestionably picked the right house and defend their problem children till the bitter end. After the success of this game, I’d love to see what this team can do next with a narrower focus and a bigger budget.

7. Resident Evil 2

It’s been a long time since I played the original Resident Evil 2, but I still consider it to be one of my favorite games of all time. I was highly skeptical of this remake at first, holding my stubborn ground that changing the fixed camera to a RE4-style behind the back perspective would turn this game more into an action game and less of a survival horror game where feeling a lack of control is part of the experience. I was pleasantly surprised to find how much they were able to modernize this game while maintaining its original feel and atmosphere. The fumbly, drifting aim-down sights effectively sell the feeling of being a rookie scared out of your wits. Being chased by Mr. X is wildly anxiety-inducing. But even more surprisingly, perhaps the greatest upgrade this game received was its map, which does you the generous service of actually marking down automatically where puzzles and items are, which rooms you’ve yet to enter, which ones you’ve searched entirely, and which ones still have more to discover. Arguably, this disrupts the feeling of being lost in a labyrinthine space that the original inspired, but in practice, it’s a remarkably satisfying and addicting video game system to engage with.

6. Judgment

No big surprise here - Ryu ga Gotoku put out another Yakuza-style game set in Kamurocho, and once again, it’s sitting somewhere on my top 10. This time, they finally put Kazuma Kiryu’s story to bed and focused on a new protagonist, down on his luck lawyer-turned-detective Takayuki Yagami. The new direction doesn’t always pay off - the added mechanics of following and chasing suspects gets a bit tedious. The game makes up for it, though, by absolutely nailing a fun, engrossing J-Drama of a plot entirely divorced from the Yakuza lore. The narrative takes several head-spinning turns through its several dozen hours, and they all feel earned, with a fresh sense of focus. The side stories in this one do even more to make you feel connected to the community of Kamurocho by befriending people from across the neighborhood. I’d love to see this team take even bigger swings in the future - and from what I’ve seen from Yakuza 7, that seems exactly like what they’re doing - but even if this game shares maybe a bit too much DNA with its predecessors, it’s hard to complain when the writing and acting are this enjoyable.

5. Control

Control feels like the kind of game that almost never gets made anymore. It’s a AAA game that isn’t connected to any larger franchises and doesn’t demand your attention for longer than a dozen hours. It doesn’t shoehorn needless RPG or MMO mechanics into its third-person action game formula to hold your attention. It introduces a wildly clever idea, tells a concise story with it, and then its over. And there’s something so refreshing about all of that. The setting of The Oldest House has a lot to do with it. I think it stands toe-to-toe with Rapture or Black Mesa as an instantly iconic game world. Its aesthetic blend of paranormal horror and banal government bureaucracy gripped my inner X-Files fan instantly, and kept him satisfied not only with its central characters and mystery but with a generous bounty of redacted documents full of worldbuilding both spine-tingling and hilarious. More will undoubtedly come from this game, in the form of DLC and possibly even more, with the way it ties itself into other Remedy universes, and as much as I expect I will love it, the refreshing experience this base game offered me likely can’t be beat.

4. Anodyne 2

I awaited Sean Han Tani and Marina Kittaka’s new game more anxiously than almost any game that came out this year, despite never having played the first one, exclusively on my love for last year’s singular All Our Asias and the promise that this game would greatly expand on that one’s Saturn/PS1-esque early 3D graphics and personal, heartfelt storytelling. Not only was I not disappointed, I was regularly pleasantly surprised by the depth of narrative and themes the game navigates. This game takes the ‘legendary hero’ tropes of a Zelda game and flips them to tell a story about the importance of community and taking care of loved ones over duty to governments or organizations. The dungeons that similarly reflect a Link to the Past-era Zelda game reduce the maps to bite-sized, funny, clever designs that ask you to internalize unique mechanics that result in affecting conclusions. Plus, it’s gorgeously idiosyncratic in its blend of 3D and 2D environments and its pretty but off-kilter score. It’s hard to believe something this full and well realized came from two people. 

3. Eliza

Eliza is a work of dystopian fiction so closely resembling the state of the world in 2019 it’s hard to even want to call it sci-fi. As a proxy for the Eliza app, you speak the words of an AI therapist that offers meager, generic suggestions as a catch-all for desperate people facing any number of the nightmares of our time. The first session you get is a man reckoning with the state the world is in - we’ve only got a few more years left to save ourselves from impending climate crisis, destructive development is rendering cities unlivable for anyone but the super-rich, and the people who hold all the power are just making it all worse. The only thing you offer to him is to use a meditation app and take some medication. It doesn’t take long for you to realize that this whole structure is much less about helping struggling people and more about mining personal data.

There’s much more to this story than the grim state of mental health under late capitalism, though. It’s revealed that Evelyn, the character you play as, has a much closer history with Eliza than initially evident. Throughout the game, she’ll reacquaint herself with old coworkers, including her two former bosses who have recently split and run different companies over their differing frightening visions for the future. The game offers a biting critique of the kind of tech company optimism that brings rich, eccentric men to believe they can solve the world’s problems within the hyper-capitalist structure they’ve thrived under, and how quickly this mindset gives way to techno-fascism. There’s also Evelyn’s former team member, Nora, who has quit the tech world in favor of being a DJ “activist,” and her current lead Rae, a compassionate person who genuinely believes in the power of Eliza to better people’s lives. The writing does an excellent job of justifying everyone’s points of view and highlighting the limits of their ideology without simplifying their sense of morality.

Why this game works so well isn’t just its willingness to stare in the face of uncomfortably relevant subject matter, but its ultimately empathetic message. It offers no simple solutions to the world’s problems, but also avoids falling into utter despair. Instead, it places measured but inspiring faith in the power of making small, meaningful impacts on the people around you, and simply trying to put some good into your world. It’s a game both terrifying and comforting in its frank conclusions.

2. Death Stranding

For a game as willfully dumb as this one often is - that, for example, insists on giving all of its characters with self-explanatory names long monologues about how they got that name - Death Stranding was one of the most thought provoking games I’ve played in a while. Outside of its indulgent, awkwardly paced narrative, the game offers plenty of reflection on the impact the internet has had on our lives. As Sam Porter Bridges, you’re hiking across a post-apocalyptic America, reconnecting isolated cities by delivering supplies, building infrastructure, and, probably most importantly, connecting them to the Chiral Network, an internet of sorts constructed of supernatural material of nebulous origin. Through this structure, the game offers surprisingly insightful commentary about the necessity for communication, cooperation, and genuine love and care within a community.

The lonely world you’re tasked to explore, and the way you’re given blips of encouragement within the solitude through the structures and “likes” you give and receive through the game’s asynchronous multiplayer system, offers some striking parallels for those of us particularly “online” people who feel simultaneous desperation for human contact and aversion to social pressures. I’ve heard the themes of this game described as “incoherent” due to the way it seems to view the internet both as a powerful tool to connect people and a means by which people become isolated and alienated, but are both of these statements not completely true to reality? The game simplifies some of its conclusions - Kojima seems particularly ignorant of America’s deep structural inequities and abuses that lead to a culture of isolation and alienation. And yet, the questions it asks are provocative enough that they compelled me to keep thinking about them far longer than the answers it offers.

Beyond the surprisingly rich thematic content, this game is mostly just a joy to play. Death Stranding builds kinetic drama out of the typically rote parts of games. Moving from point A to point B has become an increasingly tedious chore in the majority of AAA open world games, but this is a game built almost entirely out of moving from point A to point B, and it makes it thrilling. The simple act of walking down a hill while trying to balance a heavy load on your back and avoiding rocks and other obstacles fulfills the promise of the term ‘walking simulator’ in a far more interesting way than most games given that descriptor. The game consistently doles out new ways to navigate terrain, which peaked for me about two thirds of the way through the game when, after spending hours setting up a network of zip lines, a delivery offered me the opportunity to utilize the entire thing in a wildly satisfying journey from one end of the map to another. It was the gaming moment of the year.

1. Outer Wilds

The first time the sun exploded in my Outer Wilds playthrough, I was probably about to die anyway. I had fallen through a black hole, and had yet to figure out how to recover from that, so I was drifting listlessly through space with diminishing oxygen as the synths started to pick up and I watched the sun fall in on itself and then expand throughout the solar system as my vision went went. The moment gave me chills, not because I wasn’t already doomed anyway, but because I couldn’t help but think about my neighbors that I had left behind to explore space. I hadn’t known that mere minutes after I left the atmosphere the solar system would be obliterated, but I was at least able to watch as it happened. They probably had no idea what happened. Suddenly their lives and their planet and everything they had known were just...gone. And then I woke up, with the campfire burning in front of me, and everyone looking just as I had left it. And I became obsessed with figuring out how to stop that from happening again. 

What surprised me is that every time the sun exploded, it never failed to produce those chills I felt the first time. This game is masterful in its art, sound, and music design that manages to produce feelings so intense from an aesthetic so quaint. Tracking down fellow explorers by following the sound of their harmonica or acoustic guitar. Exploring space in a rickety vessel held together by wood and tape. Translating logs of conversations of an ancient alien race and finding the subject matter of discussion to be about small interpersonal drama as often as it is revelatory secrets of the universe. All of the potentially twee aspects of the game are balanced out by an innate sense of danger and terror that comes from exploring space and strange worlds alone. At times, the game dips into pure horror, making other aspects of the presentation all the more charming by comparison. And then there’s the clockwork machinations of the 22-minute loop you explore within, rewarding exploration and experimentation with reveals that make you feel like a genius for figuring out the puzzle at the same time that you’re stunned by the divulgence of a new piece of information.

The last few hours of the game contained a couple puzzles so obfuscated that I had to consult a guide, which admittedly lessened the impact of those reveals, but it all led to one of the most equally devastating and satisfying endings I’ve experienced in a video game recently. I really can’t say enough good things about this game. It’s not only my favorite game this year, but easily one of my favorite games of the decade, and really, of all-time, when it comes down to it.