At this point, FFXIV not only has enough content to draw upon its own past as a foundation, it has players who are likely active and invested but never saw these things in their original contexts. We know that 5.3 contains a new form of content that is just directly re-tuned older fights we can face for a limited time. Our relic weapons are all about recalling memories and Project Meteor so far.
The Ruby Weapon fight ends with it explicitly summoning another reference back to the end of 1.0. Subsequently, we’ve had a dungeon that includes callbacks to Heavensward and the newest dungeon that is explicitly recalling the game’s very first dungeon in both mechanics and themes.įive of our eight bosses in Eden have been remakes of old Primals. The first one has not-accidental parallels with the end of 1.0 and the state of Ul’dah, the second is explicitly a nod to older fights, and the third even reuses parts of the Crystal Tower map alongside a rematch against Alexander. What were our first three Expert dungeons in this expansion? A fight through the catastrophe hitting Amaurot, a tour of an academy of created life, and diving into the depths of the Crystal Tower. (Also because Thancred sucks.)īut this has extended even further into our content directly calling back to the past. The Qitari are trying to reclaim the past, the bandits in Lakeland want the past to come back, Thancred is a dick because he wants the past version of Minfilia back. Most of the NPCs you meet are in some way haunted or defined by the past. It’s even alluded to elsewhere the entirety of the Copied Factory plays up the idea that these are combatants from a war that is already over, and the fact that our next destination is a crashed space station only redoubles that concept. Thematically, we all know that it’s there. The role quests all involve understanding the past history of these specific figures and how they handled problems and bigger moral quandries. Emet-Selch and the Ascians are literally trying to roll back the clock to their fallen city. The plot of Shadowbringers, meanwhile, is started by a character traveling back in time to change the course of events. While FFXIV has always been excellent about handling callbacks, it generally has stuck to callbacks to things from prior games or simply old dangling plot threads being picked up once again.
But this particular expansion is interfacing with that a lot more deeply from story beats to mechanical elements, and I think it’s an interesting route to take in what I personally feel is the middle of the game’s overall expansion cycle. That’s not a theme or even text, that’s the metatext.
You come out of the cutscene underwater, but you cannot drown due to having been given the ability to breathe underwater in the previous expansion ("Stormblood").Īdditionally, the story cutscene after defeating the final boss of Shadowbringers shows the NPC protagonists wash up on a beach, some of which appear to have almost drowned (don't worry, everyone is basically conscious or dazed - you can speak to all of them and they'll have dialogue).Play Final Fantasy XIV FFXIV as a title has always done a lot of stuff that’s involved mining out the past of the franchise, of course. However, in the middle of the expansion "Shadowbringers", you are confronted with a race of frogmen that attempt to drown people to turn them into more frogmen. One boss has a "drowning" mechanic that kills you if you don't catch air bubbles (no drowning animation is shown, and if you die only the standard "falling to the ground" animation is shown) There is also mention of drowning in some of the dialogue and some boss fights have an instant-death state if you fall into the water under/around the stage (implicated drowning), though no actual drowning is ever shown on-screen. There are zombie enemies and bosses throughout the game that are depicted as drowned seafarers.
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