My Life As A Writer: Final Fantasy XIV: A Narrative Reborn (Part Four)

Hubris Leads To Downfall

There is a dramatic reversal of fortune, but because a MMORPG cannot allow for the player to make the wrong choice this agency is instead rendered to a supporting character. In this case, the reversal comes from the boy wonder Alphinaud Levelleur. His smug face though ARR, and his too-confident attitude that he knows it all even alienates his twin sister Alisaie early on, acted to forshadow this.

The climax of ARR's launch content is a pair of dungeons where the Warrior of Light leads a commando team against the Garlean Empire's two key installations in Eorzea, places where Ultima Weapon--a reawakened Allagan Primal-eating mecha--is repaired at and (respectively) deployed from. All of the Garlean antagonists are defeated by the end of this arc, and the reborn Eorzean Alliance celebrates victory.

In a more concise narrative, this would be it and the protagonist would move on to his next adventure--i.e. to the Heavensward (HW) expansion--but extra-narrative issues delayed that. Making a virtue of necessity, the narrative team used the intervening patch cycles to play out the logical consequences of tensions and attitudes already expressed during the 2.0 story.

In short, we have a filler arc.

Rather than come up with a sidestory that had no lasting consequences, the FF14 team decided to use this to make a stronger narrative bind between ARR and HW. The means was the act of hubris that manifested as Alphinaud's decision to raise a private standing army with no loyalties to any extant government, but instead to be the military adjunct to the Scions. This was the Crystal Braves Grand Company.

This was a very good display of competent storycraft on the part of the writers. They ensured that the downfall to follow was properly grounded beforehand; it was well-known that Ul'dah was riven with corruption, that the Monetarists were little more than gangsters with good publicity, and others regarded the Scions as a nuisance if not a threat. Forming the Grand Company was the act that forced these hostile parties to act against the Scions, and therefore against the protagonist.

This "filler arc" had the protagonist not only deal with unraveling a hostile spy network tied to the Garlean Empire, itself foreshadowing the reveal of there being such a network in action, but also had two apparently disparate narrative threads woven together. One was the Shiva thread regarding Ishgard, setting up the transition to the next expansion in one direction, while the corruption thread out of Ul'dah pushed it from the other; the latter supplying the former with resources being the hidden connection.

The climax comes with the apparent defeat of the Shiva threat to Ishgard, when the protagonist comes to Ul'dah to meet with the embattled Sultana only to be framed for her murder in a most farcical manner. The betrayal by the Crystal Braves is revealed, as the Ul'dah Syndicate is shown to have owned the Braves since its formation and used it as cover for wetwork and covert operations under the Scions' noses.

The surviving Scions are exiled to Ishgard, and thus the downfall sets up the next expansion's story with the protagonist and Alphinaud in a situation nearly as weak as when ARR opened.

A Narrative Graded

ARR's narrative, if rendered pure in cinematic form:

It would be considered competent, but not extraordinary, in its quality. As a novel, or novel trilogy, it would not be any differently regarded. It is solid, journeyman work.

The evaluation rises when the very short timeframe (for a MMORPG) and resources (ditto) are accounted for, but that still doesn't put it up there with MacBeth. What makes the ARR narrative worthy of study is in how the narrative structure got successfully dual-purposed for a MMORPG, not that the quality itself is anything to write home about.

For the TLDR crowd: It is not bad. It's good enough.

However, it is clear that if the team had the time and the resources, they could make a truly great feat of storytelling happen using the MMORPG medium. We would see this first with HW, and subsequent expansions only improve in storycraft quality.

A Realm Reborn: 7 out of 10 points.

You will be satisfied with the story. You will be entertained by it. You will not proclaim it as a classic, ala FF4 or FF6, but neither shall you overrate it (FF7).