I’ve spent, I’d say, a distressing quantity of the final month with my eyes streaming tears—not for work obligations, private causes, and even actually “still in that Global Pandemic” causes. If something, I’ve been doing it for enjoyable, as I’ve labored my method via Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker, and the explanations it’s hit me so keenly have made it a narrative effectively value ending one other wildly difficult yr on.

Endwalker is the newest enlargement for the reborn MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV, a sport so fashionable proper now you literally cannot buy it, as writer Square-Enix desperately hopes to have fewer individuals clogging up login queues as gamers likewise desperately hope to work their method via the occasions of the critically acclaimed sport’s lengthy and winding story. Endwalker specifically has been billed by its creators because the climax of a narrative eight years within the making. Your character, the noble Warrior of Light, works to cease a long-prophecized apocalypse often called the Final Days, and Endwalker seeks to wrap up plot threads, character arcs, and mysteries which were interwoven in XIV’s huge, ongoing story because it was saved from shutdown and rebooted in 2013 as A Realm Reborn. It’s all there: stunning villain twists, heroic stands in opposition to sure doom, massive lore reveals, fights in opposition to gods, extra gods, and some extra gods for good measure, a story that stretches throughout eons of time, generations of civilization, and into the very stars of the universe past the world your heroes have known as residence for one of the best a part of the last decade. Endwalker is the grandest of grand finales, a scale in contrast to something XIV has thought-about earlier than. But it’s additionally extremely sentimental, and excellent for the endless second we’ve discovered ourselves up to now few years.

Endwalker would possibly often be about that almost all beloved of all Japanese RPG tropes, combating god and defying destiny. But its easiest of truths is that, finally, beneath all its worldbuilding and its bow-tying on previous plot threads, it’s about hope, and combating in opposition to seemingly unstoppable despair. Quite actually, the the climactic battle of the sport is about you and 7 of your closest mates/random individuals you queue up with within the group finder beating up a residing embodiment of the idea of nihilism.

Let’s take a step again from that significantly bizarre, however cathartic edge, and clarify. About midway via Endwalker’s storyline, you uncover the true supply of the Final Days—a cataclysm that, eons beforehand, laid low the precursor human civilization that known as XIV’s world Etheirys residence, and noticed it sundered into 14 completely different shards of itself in an try and cease it ever occurring once more (spoilers: oops it begins occurring once more, and it’s partially your fault? Don’t fear about it). The cataclysm is embodied by an empathic hive-mind known as Meteion, created by one in all that historic civilization’s strongest mage-scientists, who was set out into the cosmos past Etheirys to hunt out life on different worlds, and reply the easy query posited by her grasp: what objective have these civilizations present in residing?

The reply Meteion finds breaks her and her mentally related sister our bodies. Each completely different bodily side of Meteion’s type despatched out into the celebrities, it seems, discovered worlds both misplaced to wreck or within the technique of tearing themselves aside—every of their civilizations wracked with despair as their very own developments in makes an attempt to create a utopian society, ones purged of struggling, finally damned them. Her empathic skills overwhelmed with the unhappiness of untold ending civilizations, Meteion turns into remodeled right into a darkish model of herself, drowning in a nihilistic perception that the one option to finish struggling is to finish the very existence of all life—threatening you and your family members on Etheirys with a returned apocalypse, one which sees skies blaze purple with meteors, individuals overwhelmed by their very own despairs to be remodeled into horrifying, chaos-wreaking beasts, and common havoc. It’s not supreme to say the least.

Endwalker’s story will not be a very unique riff on apocalyptic fiction, admittedly. Yes, it relatively delicately builds on hooks and worldbuilding blocks laid over Final Fantasy XIV’s historical past—even ones left deserted when its initially troubled launch was rebooted as A Realm Reborn—and attracts upon its beloved, long-running forged of supporting stars within the Scions of the Seventh Dawn to carry some touching moments of character work that repay arcs which were unfolding throughout years of a number of expansions at this level. But at its core it’s fairly easy: you’re confronted with the tip of the world, and also you go and cease it. But it’s what occurs alongside the way in which that makes Endwalker such a heartstring-plucking, emotionally cathartic expertise. The Warrior of Light’s place in XIV’s story is each as a vessel for the participant to imprint themselves on, but in addition as a beacon of hope for the individuals round them. No matter the percentages, irrespective of the losses, irrespective of the darkness swirling round your adventures, time and time once more you’ve stood by your mates, united allies, and introduced peace and justice to the world.

Endwalker throws the metaphorical kitchen sink at you throughout its cataclysmic story, threatens a number of instances to have confirmed that even your noble hero has their limits, and time and time you as a substitute persevere and persist, with each a superheroic sense of power and the love and assist of total nations’ value of supporting characters at your again. You get knocked down, spiritually or bodily, and also you rise once more to the event, irrespective of your individual despair, irrespective of what number of tense anxieties you burden. So with regards to the ultimate battle, to face the host of Meteions—to persuade them, by your phrases, your power, and the literal prayers of mates at your aspect, that there’s a motive in having struggling alongside the trail of life to stress its joys and triumphs—you ship a blow to the grim idea of nihilistic despair itself, averting theFinal Days to face proud as a vibrant mild of hope in a sea of darkness. It would possibly simply be an enormous raid battle in a web-based online game, however after hours of emotional wringer after emotional wringer, I couldn’t assist however break down as I accomplished it lately and Endwalker’s narrative made its remaining curtain calls—it was a shocking cathartic launch of feelings that its story had saved repeatedly bringing to my floor.

That catharsis is undoubtedly additionally knowledgeable by the world wherein Endwalker has launched in. FFXIV, like so many issues the previous few years, has been hit by the covid-19 pandemic. Patches of story content material between expansions within the final yr noticed a delayed launch schedule, and even Endwalker itself got here out a pair weeks later than deliberate. Even the continued points about server overload have a root within the pandemic past the truth that XIV has turn into majorly fashionable as individuals keep at residence and search for massive, long-term video games to dive into—producer Naoki Yoshida has apologised publicly (and profusely) a number of instances that deliberate server expansions have been hampered by each provide shortages and the pandemic curbing in-person work. But there’s additionally the emotional toll it’s taken on us all, as we come up on almost two years of making an attempt to wrestle with a basic sea-change in the way in which we reside. The yr 2021 has been tough for lots of people, myself included—specifically the previous few months. Escaping into fiction from the stresses of the true world is nothing new (we’ve all been doing it currently!), however one thing about Endwalker’s story of hope within the face of overwhelming grief—and questioning if all of the struggling is absolutely value it—struck significantly near residence with the present state of our personal world. A story of cataclysmic hardship, and communities and nations rising up collectively to confront it. A story of individuals acknowledging that hardship sporting them down, however enduring and overcoming all that ache, loss, and horror to come back out the opposite aspect of it with a way of togetherness.

Trials and tribulations in a online game are not often, if ever, going to match trials and tribulations in the true world. But Endwalker giving me the easy launch to actually stare despair itself within the eye and slash it to items with a scythe the dimensions of my Warrior of Light’s total physique was a welcome fantastical instrument in combatting the stresses of the true world—each bit the becoming conclusion to the present story of FFXIV, and each bit the becoming conclusion to 2021.

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