Heart Of Darkness

Final Fantasy Xiv: Shadowbringers is an emotionally-charged and cathartic climax.

- Steven Messner

Final Fantasy XIV used to be my favorite MMO that I hated to recommend. Playing it requires an enormous investment of time—at least a few hundred hours to get caught up—and even though I love it, I worried that others might ultimately find that long journey boring and unsatisfying. But after beating Final Fantasy XIV’s latest expansion, those worries are gone. Shadowbringers is the Avengers: Endgame of Final Fantasy XIV, an emotionally stirring climax that draws on six years of character development, storytelling, and worldbuilding to weave an epic, dimension-spanning story rooted in the relationships of its chief characters.

If you’re not familiar with Final Fantasy XIV’s story, it’s difficult to describe Shadowbringers’ premise without spoiling everything that comes before. With three expansions and hundreds of hours of the story under its belt, the world of Final Fantasy XIV is so complicated and nuanced you should be able to get a degree in its history. It’s intimidating to newcomers— especially because the first part of the game’s overarching narrative is a slow burn—but as a long-time player, I love how rich and vast the world and its characters have become.

The gist is that, after the events of Stormblood, the world of Hydaelyn is on the precipice of an apocalyptic war orchestrated by the evil Ascians, immortal beings who want to plunge the world into chaos as a means to revive their dark god. To help tip the first domino, the Ascians are hoping to cause an apocalypse in an alternate dimension that'll cascade into Hydaelyn, so my companions and I have to adventure to this parallel world, called The First, to save it and in turn save Hydaelyn. It’s exactly the sort of plot you’d expect from the likes of Brainiac, Dr. Doom, or Thanos, only wrapped up in an anime-inspired high-fantasy aesthetic.