Listen to the Rain

Shadowbringers is the second big piece of FFXIV news I remember paying attention to after the news that Kefka was being added as a raid boss in Stormblood. Once again, it was an article on Rock Paper Shotgun and reading the tweets of nova_crystalis as they covered the Live Letter reveal of the title and basic plot. Travel between worlds. The Warrior of Darkness. Unyielding light devouring all in its path. I remember being interested mostly because World of Warcraft had done something similar with 2014's Warlords of Draenor that, by 2018, was widely acknoweldged to be a complete disaster. Could FFXIV really pull off a story of alternate worlds and time travel?

Well, Warlords of Draenor has a 4.8 user score on Metacritic and Shadowbringers has a 9.1. So.

I will say at the outset that I do not have unmitigated praise for Shadowbringers the way that most of the internet seems to, but that may be because it's hard for me to compare it to anything else since I only started playing when ShB was half-over already. The only systems and skills I've ever known have been ShB ones, even when I'm doing lower-level content, so it's possible I'm not giving ShB its clear due because I've never experienced an FFXIV where Tactical Points exist or where crafters are a gruelling nightmare grind to level. My view is ultimately skewed by being a latecomer.

But you're reading this because you want to know what I think, so here we go.


The end of Stormblood involved the Scions of the Seventh Dawn hearing a portentous voice shouting mysterious phrases--"Throw wide the gates!" "Let expanse contract, aeon become instant!"--and one by one, falling unconscious and being looked after by Krile and Tataru. At the beginning of Shadowbringers, the Warrior of Light finds a device underneath the Crystal Tower, after which they immediately hear "Now...now I have you!", and are pulled into the rift between worlds. They fall through a void of stars, surrounded by the memories of their past, and awaken on a bed of violet leaves under a sky filled with coruscating, unending light.

Like any good TTRPG GM, the FFXIV story team is constantly throwing out plot hooks for later so they can pick them up if needed, and ShB picks up on the Warriors of Darkness from Heavensward's Patch 3.1. After some conflict, the Warriors of Darkness explained that they came from a parallel world called the First, one of thirteen such worlds, where they had defeated the Ascians who threatened them, but in striking down the Ascians they had caused a terrible catastrophe--a Flood of Light that was slowly and inexorably annihilating all life. In the end, they return to the First with Minfilia Warde, who promises to use her powers to end the Flood of Light. A fun post-Dragonsong War story and a way to provide an end to Minfilia's character arc, and until partway through Stormblood that's all it was. The designers were asked if they had planned all of this from the beginning and they admitted the answer was no, but that doesn't matter. They're as good as the best GMs at taking threads they had laid down previously and making the story look like it had been planned out from the beginning.

Minfilia's power saved the First from total destruction but it's still on the brink of annihilation. Although the Flood of Light was stopped, only the region known as Norvrandt survived, with the rest of the world turned into grey dust or sparkling crystal. The people and animals who were not destroyed were filled with light and transformed into sin eaters, voracious monsters who hunted down the survivors without mercy. Worse, some sin eaters were so suffused with light that those they attacked were infected and transformed, furthering the cycle of destruction and ensuring that the end of the world had only been delayed. "What if angels were bad?" is a pretty common modern trope, but the infectious nature of the sin eaters is the perfect twist. Relatively early on, a character is infected and the horrifying transformation reuses previously-comedic animations from the Hildibrand questline--after they double over, vomiting up pure light, they raise their head and reveal white eyes and a distended mouth before being swallowed up in a feathered cocoon and emerging as a new-born sin eater. A small taste of the eventual fate of all the surviving people of Norvrandt.

From hereon out there will be massive spoilers for the entire plot of Shadowbringers.


After wandering for a bit, the Warrior of Light comes to the Crystarium, a city built around a structure that looks exactly like Mor Dhona's Crystal Tower, and meets a robed man who calls himself the Crystal Exarch. The Exarch explains that he summoned the Warrior of Light to Norvrandt and it was his initial attempts that called all the Scions there as well, and that they are there to save the world. The Ascians' grand plan to free Zodiark requires them to destabilize one of the parallel worlds to the point where it collapses, killing all life on it, and its energy flows back into the Source, which causes one of history's Calamities. The seven Umbral Calamities each marked the death of an entire planet and the First is almost set to become the eighth. Previous attempts to stem the tide of sin eaters by killing the Lightwardens, overwhelmingly powerful eaters who maintain the unnatural glow over each part of Norvrandt, have failed because the slayer inevitably absorbed the Lightwarden's aether and was transformed into its successor, but the blessing carried by the Warrior of Light makes them immune to sin eater corruption. If the Lightwardens are slain, the sin eaters will no longer be an apocalyptic threat and perhaps the world can be saved.

After hearing that the Scions are spread around Norvrandt, the Warrior of Light travels to meet Alphinaud outside the decadent city of Eulmore, whose ruler can control sin eaters and promises safety to all who are chosen to dwell within, and Alisaie in the deserts of Amh Araeng on the edge of the world, where those infected by the sin eaters go to live out their days before their caretakers kill them to prevent their transformation. On their return to the Crystarium, they receive word that a massive force of sin eaters and their Lightwarden is advancing on the town of Holminster to the north, and the scions deploy to Holminster Switch--and the Japanese is definitely more impactful here, 殺戮郷村　ホルミンスター "Holminster, the village of slaughter"--to stop them. This introduces the Trust System, carryover from Final Fantasy XI that finally turns even the dungeons of FFXIV into a single-player experience. Rather than using the Duty Finder and playing through with other players, you can take the Scions as your party members, so I went in with the Crystal Exarch tanking, Aliphinaud healing, and the Crystarium guard captain Lyna as my fellow DPS. Both sashagee and I always went through dungeons with Trusts the first time, so we could see the Scions' dialogue and have them show us how to do the mechanics correctly.

After stopping the invasion, the Warrior of Light travels to the fairy kingdom of Il Mheg to find Urianger and defeat its Lightwarden, and while there, they meet the Final Fantasy villain that's even more popular than Sephiroth--Emet-Selch.


Emet-Selch first appeared at the end of Stormblood in the body of Solus zos Galvus, founder of the Garlean Empire, and revealed that the Garlean Empire was an Ascian project to cause chaos and prepare the Source for another Calamity. He freely admits the same thing to the Warrior of Light, that he wants to resurrect Zodiark and destroy the First, but offers to travel with the Scions around Norvrandt and, as he does, he reveals the secret history of the world.

According to the Word of the Mother in Heavensward, Hydaelyn and Zodiark existed in balance before they came into conflict, and Hydaelyn was forced to sunder the world into the Source and the thirteen shards in order to weaken Zodiark enough to contain him on the moon. According to Emet-Selch, there was a marvelous civilization before the Sundering, whose people lived in harmony and prosperity thanks to their magic. The Ancients had the power to turn ideas into reality, to create objects and buildings and even living things simply by imagining them, of which the modern summoning of primals is the merest shadow. For unknown ages they lived in splendor until a "Sound" appeared from the depths of the earth, turning their creation magic against them. At first an isolated regional problem, the Sound spread until it encompassed the entire world and all the fears and nightmares of the Ancients came to life. It was the Final Days--the sky rained fire, misbegotten monsters walked through rivers of blood, and in desperation the Convocation of Fourteen, the ruling body of the city of Amaurot, summoned Zodiark, the eldest and most powerful of primals.

With Zodiark's power, the Convocation stopped the Sound, but the world was ruined--described in a nod to Final Fantasy I as "the land was blighted, the water poisoned, and even the wind had ceased to blow." Half of the survivors had sacrificed themselves to create Zodiark and save the world, and a further half sacrificed themselves to restore life. Before Zodiark could restore all those who were lost to the Final Days, a group of Ancients who disagreed with the Convocation's plan to sacrifice all the new life to fuel Zodiark summoned Hydaelyn, she sundered the world, and the Ascians have been trying to restore their lost home ever since. Just as Zodiark was split in fourteen parts, Emet-Selch explains, so too was all life on the world divided and lessened. Emet-Selch, Lahabrea, and Elidibus alone retain the full measure of the Ancients' power--even the other Ascians are only sundered shards of their former glory.

Emet-Selch is not a hero--the Japanese title of Shadowbringers is 漆黒の反逆者[ヴィランズ] (shikkoku no viranzu, "Pitch-black Villains")--but the point of ShB is to ask how far you would go to save what was lost. For Emet-Selch, nothing else matters except the glory of Amaurot, and he explicitly states that he does not consider any sundered life an actual person. They're just obstacles to restoring the Ancients.


And that's my major problem with Shadowbringers--Emet-Selch is basically a Nazi and it's impossible for me to sympathize with him.

The specific trope of the grandiose, flamboyant villain is one I'm neutral on, so when he first appeared I shrugged and moved on. When the Scions were held at bowpoint in Rak'tika Greatwood and Emet-Selch abandoned them citing boredom, I got annoyed, and when he explained that he didn't consider killing a sundered lifeform murder and called the inhabitants of the First "half-men" I just wanted him to die. There's a German phrase, Lebensunwertes Leben ("Life unworthy of life"), that the Nazis used to designate those people who were deemed to be useless and targeted for death. Like them, Emet-Selch thinks that real people don't count as people, and sure it might be because he needs to make himself feel better about his plan and as a way to deal with survivor's guilt and the pain of loss, but having played through multiple games next to the Scions it's very obvious that they're people. And despite Emet-Selch's claim that the Ancients were many times stronger, longer-lived, more intelligent, and so on than the modern inhabitants of Hydaelyn, the game never actually shows this. It in fact undermines it, since sundered humanity already killed Lahabrea and figured out how to move people bodily between shards, something Emet-Selch admits that he can't do.

Emet-Selch claims that the Ancients willingly sacrificed themselves to Zodiark, but he also admits that Zodiark tempered the Convocation after he was summoned. I find it extremely suspicious that after the summoning, every single one of the Convocation's plans went:

1. Sacrifice a bunch of people to Zodiark.
   
2. ?????????
   
3. The world is reborn and all is as it should be.

Considering that a trait of every single primal is that they need increasing amounts of aether to survive, it's interesting that all of Zodiark's plans seem to focus on gathering aether first. Sure, it does what its creators want--it did restore the world--but did it need so much aether? Was all that death really necessary, or just the desires of another hungry primal?

Every time Emet-Selch spoke, I remembered that as an Ascian he's directly responsible for the deaths of billions, and that his grand reasoning is basically like your racist uncle who thinks that the Indian and Mexican families who moved in ruined the neighborhood.


My annoyance at Emet-Selch aside, ShB has an amazing run to the end. After defeating the last Lightwarden at the pinnacle of Mt. Gulg, the Warrior of Light's luck runs out--they absorb too much light for even the Blessing of Light to contain. As they collapse, wracked with bursts of pure light and the sounds of shattering crystal, the Crystal Exarch reveals his plan: to absorb all the light himself and teleport to the rift between worlds, saving the First at the cost of his own life. As he casts the spell, his hood falls off to reveal...the Sharlayan Archon G'raha Tia.

I feel bad for the people who finished 5.0 before ever doing A Realm Reborn's Crystal Tower raids and had their big moment of revelation being some catboy they'd never seen before. As I said, one of Final Fantasy XIV's big strengths is tying past story beats together with the present and the end of 5.0 is the moment that benefits from all of their previous groundwork. Emet-Selch kidnaps G'raha Tia for his knowledge and back in the Crystarium, Urianger reveals the truth--his "prophecy" of doom that he saw during his time between worlds was merely what G'raha Tia told him, because G'raha Tia is from a future where the First collapsed, light flowed into the Source and enhanced the Garlean Empire's Black Rose chemical weapon to apocalyptic levels, and most of the population simply died. As nations collapsed and the survivors fought over food and water, Cid Garlond and the surviving Ironworks engineers retreated to Mor Dhona and, inspired by the example of the Warrior of Light, who had died in the Calamity, they set up a long-term project to find some way to save their world.

For two centuries they studied and they built and they experimented and finally they succeeded. From the primal Alexander (Heavensward), they unlocked the secret of time travel. From the extraterrestrial weapon Omega (Stormblood), they learned how to manipulate dimensions and cross the rift between worlds. And using the unlimited power generation of the Crystal Tower (ARR), they were able to build a device that could transport the Crystal Tower itself to the First, before the Eighth Umbral Calamity occurred, and allow its caretaker to summon the Warrior of Light to the First and prevent the Calamity entirely.

I don't care about Emet-Selch's sadness but this gets me. People fighting against overwhelming odds is my weak point, and especially here, where the Ironworks engineers know that even if they do save the world it won't be their world they save, and in fact they'll probably be erased from existence as the Calamity never occurs...it hits me right in the heart.

There's a story on the official website, called An Unpromised Tomorrow, about Garlond Ironworks' efforts to save their world and what happens afterwards.


The Scions follow Emet-Selch to the bottom of the ocean where they find the Ondo, the First's version of the Sahagin, who tell them about lights in the depths. They descend through caverns, deep to an ocean trench, and there they find Emet-Selch's recreation of Amaurot and confront him for the final time. Emet-Selch tries to justify his actions with more genocidal rhetoric, and Alphinaud points out that Emet-Selch and the Scions aren't the same. Emet-Selch is fighting to restore something that is already lost, a loss in which the Scions played no part, and the Scions are fighting to defend people who are currently alive whose lives the Ascians are explicitly threatening. Emet-Selch finally abandons words and challenges the Scions directly, leading to one of the other major revelations of ShB--the Warrior of Light is, themselves, a sundered shard of Azem, once of the Convocation of Fourteen known as the Shepherd, who thought that neither Hydaelyn nor Zodiark was the answer to the world's troubles and left to find their own path. Emet-Selch has a moment of recognition but refuses to believe it, and in the end, to the sounds of Invincible, the Warrior of Light summons all the Lightwardens' absorbed light into a blade of light and strikes Emet-Selch down.

Good riddance. When he said "Remember us. Remember that we once lived" I really wanted to answer "Nah."

The tragedy is, I suppose, in the tempering. Emet-Selch admits that the Convocation were tempered, and I mentioned above how all of their plans involved funneling aether to Zodiark. What I suspect is that because they knew they were tempered, they thought that they could compensate for their tempering somehow and retain some measure of free wheel, but it was an illusion. If Emet-Selch's tempering is partially responsible for his actions--if Zodiark demands the Rejoinings in order to free himself--then all of his objectionable beliefs are self-justification for his tempered actions. He can't be the single worst person to ever live, a mass murderer on a planetary scale who is personally responsible for the deaths of billions, because they aren't really people. If they aren't people, he hasn't killed anyone. He's just doing what needs to be done to restore his friends and his coworkers and the people of his glorious city.

Maybe that was why he smiled, at the end, as he was dying and the tempering faded from his mind. With clear sight he knew that he had been deceived, and that mankind were indeed a worthy inheritor to the world.

Maybe if the game had explored this a little more, Emet-Selch wouldn't have annoyed me so much.


Unfortunately, the later villains don't work for me either. Emet-Selch does succeed at making the Ascians more than cartoon cutout villains by giving them reasons for what they do, even if I think he's personally loathsome, but Elidibus and Fandaniel are even worse. Elidibus has been mysterious for most of FFXIV's run, seemingly opposing the other Ascians for no reason and wearing white while they all wear black, and ShB reveals that Elidibus was the heart of Zodiark and essentially a primal version of his old pre-sacrifice self, now embodying hope. Unfortunately, that doesn't really fit with his previous characterization of being an agent of balance, working to prevent either Light or Darkness from becoming too strong (while still trying to cause Calamities and killing billions), but okay. Elidibus succeeds based on the strength of his voice actor during the death scene and by having a smaller model at the very end so tons of people assume that he was a child despite never previously being depicted as such. He suffers by being enigmatic and mysterious for so long and then only having a couple patches (5.2-5.3) to get any real characterization before dying. If you look at pre-ShB Elidibus threads online, they're all wondering what his plan is, if he's going to ally with the Scions, is he working against the other Ascians, etc.

It works if you assume that Elidibus was just lying to the Warriors of Darkness and Unukalhai and Cyella and all the rest in furtherance of causing more Rejoinings, but it definitely makes me less sympathetic if he's just another lying mass murderer.

Zenos also exists and has no motivation other than fighting the Warrior of Light, which makes it difficult to care about anything he does. And Fandaniel, the Ascian working for Zenos, is explicit that he has no motivation other than recreating the Final Days to kill everyone and finally cease to exist himself. "I want to kill the world because death is better than life" is common for Final Fantasy villains but it doesn't really leave much room for nuance.

What I'm saying with all this is that Nidhogg is still my favorite FFXIV villain, because 1) he's a dragon and 2) he's at least angry about things that were done to him personally by the people his rage is directed at.


The raids were mixed.

The Nier raid had amazing glam--dyeable for the first time in an Alliance raid--and the actual fights were fun and introduced mechanics that weren't just one of: stack in pairs, stack in fours, clock positions, or tethers. The music was transcendent, and even though I really dislike the Nier raids they justify their existence by music alone. Weight of the World - Prelude Version, Kainé (Final Fantasy Main Theme Version), City Ruins (Rays of Light) [currently playing at my character's house!], Song of the Ancients (Atonement)...I'm going to run out of superlatives to describe them if I keep talking about them.

But the story is garbage. I've read multiple quotes from people on the internet who've played Nier or Drakenguard about how meaningful the Nier raids are to them, and how they tie together forgotten story beats into a whole, but as someone who hasn't played any of those games, what I got was an invasion of extradimensional alien robots that somehow none of the major powers of Norvrandt had ever noticed or previously interacted with. I got a crashed alien starship that was just over the mountains from a dwarf village that had no idea it was there. I got villains whose motives were inexplicable--2B literally says "Don't worry about it. There's no actual meaning behind anything machines do." And I got an ending that was like the story was just dropped because the writers got tired of it. Weeks of quests, one per week, about the aftermath of the robot attack and one of the dwarves acting weird, and in the end the dwarven chief is just like "Oh, I don't know what was wrong but he's fine now." Yokō Tarō's thing is mystery and a struggle against impossible odds that's almost certainly futile but which must be done anyway, I get that. But there was zero attempt to make the Nier alliance raid, one of the central content pieces of the Shadowbringers expansion, fit into FFXIV. It's constructed like the FFXV collab, where Noctis shows up in his car, hijinks ensue, and then he drives through a portal back to Eos, except it's three raids and a bunch of quests. They were fun to play but the story was literally HEY GUYS IT'S NIER, YOU LIKE NIER RIGHT??

We could have had a Ronka alliance raid, or a Voeburt alliance raid, or literally anything that expanded on the actual lore of the First, and instead we got an advertisement to buy Nier Replicant ver.1.22474487139, now out for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Windows.

I did not do Savage raiding this expansion so I cannot speak to that, but I generally enjoyed the Eden raids more even though I wish that the story had been given more time and better paced. People really like the characters--if you look online you can find a lot of fanart of "baby lesbians" Gaia and Ryne, and because of that I was expecting an actual love story. It's true that the Eden raids speedrun the plot of Final Fantasy VIII, with Gaia standing in for Squall and Ryne for Rinoa, but the most romantic thing that happens is that the two of them go to the Crystarium together to eat cookie biscuits after Gaia spends a while insulting Ryne. Gaia doesn't even show up for a third of the raid tier, and since the story requires the Scions to leave the First and return to the Source, Urianger and Thancred vanish and aren't around for the last third of the raid tier. It does explain why the Flood of Light happened--making Emet-Selch look like even more of a dick in the process--but that explanation introduces a male stalker/love interest(?) for Gaia which undermines the FFVIII parallels.

It's odd--I'm not entirely sure what they were going for, and having seen it makes me think that people are seizing on any possible scrap of representation and investing all their hopes and dreams into it. I guess we'll find out if we ever return to the First.


One of the big showcases of Shadowbringers was the Save the Queen story arc, which continues from the Dalmascan liberation story in the Stormblood Ivalice raids. The neighboring country of Bozja also seeks freedom and hires master weaponsmith Geralt to reforge "Gunnhildr's Blades," the ancient traditional weapons of Bozja. This leads to the relic questline, the Eureka-like area, and several raids all at the same time. While both HW and SB included a deep dungeon area for leveling, ShB does not, so Bozja is also the place where everyone went to level all their jobs to 80.

Unfortunately, Bozja suffers from the same problem the rest of ShB does for me, which is that I can't care about people's tragic backstory if they're constantly committing crimes against humanity. The IVth Legion wants to build a successor state out of Bozja and Dalmasca rather than take a side in the Garlean War of Succession, one explicitly committed to equal opportunity and prosperity for all, but they're also using auracite to transform people into monsters and conducting mad science experiments on captured prisoners. At one point, one of the resistance officers defects to the empire due to past mistreatment from their common birth, which would be sympathetic except that they deliberately set up the tempering of most of their former squadmates and then use auracite to fuse them together into living weapons. Deliberately tempering people is about the worst thing you can do to someone, and when the choice came later to execute the traitor myself I gladly picked it and then rolled my eyes when the game had them die of their injuries first. Especially because I learned that if you don't want to execute them, an NPC does it for you!

The innovation for Bozja was the Field Notes, a collectible hunt to learn more about various characters. It's not just the new characters, either--familiar ones like the ninja trainer Oboro Torioi or Dalmascan General Fran Eruyt have notes as well--and getting them all awards that hoverbike that Fran rode in FFXII. The odd thing is that the Bozjan story ends in the field notes. The plot goes through the defeat of the IVth in the Southern Front and then a confrontation in Zadnor, after which an Imperial general gets away to report to the Legatus what happened. And then, in the field notes, we learn that the revolution was successful, the Legatus was killed, and the IVth mostly scattered. Originally fans thought that Matsuno, the creator of Ivalice, had been fired thanks to a confusing English tweet by Matsuno himself, or that there had been a third Bozjan zone that had suffered from pandemic cuts, but Yoshida and Matsuno later revealed that the Bozja storyline was always meant to end where it did and any continuation was always planned to happen after the liberation of Dalmasca. On the one hand, I appreciate that not every major event in the game happens because the Warrior of Light does it, but on the other hand the story the notes tell doesn't seem to follow from the story we see in the Bozja quests. I guess we'll find out if there ever is a continuation.

I have to say, I like Eureka better than Bojza. Eureka had more varied environments--Bozja is mostly a brown and grey, war-torn battlefield--and the people there were more courteous. When a Notorious Monster popped in Eureka, people called it out and assembled outside, waiting until other people showed up, and then pulled at a specific time. In Bozja it was almost always every man for himself and there were many times I'd start running toward a skirmish as soon as it appeared and arrive just in time for someone else to land the killing blow before I could get credit. I found Eureka to be a generally chill experience but Bozja was more frustrating. Maybe the Bozjan-goers will mellow out once it's no longer the main focus.


I do have to specifically call out Shadowbringers' visual and audio design, both of which are fantastic. The arrival on the First really sells being in a different world, with a violet forest under an eternally golden sky, and the fairy kingdom of Il Mheg is filled with rainbows and flowers with the castle in the center, visible from everywhere in the zone. Rak'tika Greatwood is the first forest since the Black Shroud that actually has enough trees and canopy to feel like a real forest, but with a twist--it's called the Greatwood because the trees are gigantic, hundreds of feet tall with branches just as big, leaving the forest floor in shadow even as there are wide paths to traverse. And Rak'tika also has one of the most-memed-on music tracks in Final Fantasy history with Civilizations, or as most people know it, LA HEE.

That screenshot above is from Emet-Selch's recreation of Amaurot, the lost city of the Ancients, and it's absolutely perfect because of lodonarrative consonance. It's all art deco, straight lines and street lights and wide boulevards, like a 19th century view of what New York would be in 1950 and while the Scions have never seen anything like it before, the player has. While the Scions are talking about how strange and wondrous Amaurot is, the player looks at it and thinks it looks familiar.

Of course it does. The Warrior of Light--Azem--once lived there, long ago.

The Amaurot theme is Neath Dark Waters, and it starts with a clock. Talking to the recreated Ancients in the city, they're eternally in the day before the Final Days, knowing that something is looming on the horizon--and Mortal Instants, the dungeon theme for Emet-Selch's recreation of the Final Days, does not have that clock because their time has finally run out. The theme of Titania, King of the Fairy Folk, is the bouncy What Angel Wakes Me that actually has the lyrics "fa la la la la." On Our Fates Alight, the mount theme for the amaro, is possibly the most relaxing song in the entire game. A Long Fall, the theme for the Twinning dungeon that combines the Crystal Tower, Alexander, and Omega themes the same way the Garlond Ironworks combined their knowledge, which was so well-liked that the Primals did a dance from a meme based on it in an official performance.

I could go on, but I'll end with To the Edge, the theme for the Warrior of Light/Elidibus battle and a song that Soken wrote while in the hospital recovering from cancer treatments and is basically the Ascians' version of iconic song Answers.


The best part of Shadowbringers's story for me was Ardbert. The former Warrior of Light, responsible for the Flood of Light that destroyed his world (or so he thinks--it was actually mostly Emet-Selch's fault), he came to the Source at Elidibus's urging because he was told it was the only way to save his home. That was true, though not for the reason Elidibus told him it was, and when he returned to the First he suffered the punishment that the Ascians should have suffered--rendered an incorporeal shade, able to see and hear but unable to be seen or heard. For a hundred years, he was a silent witness to the slow decline of the First, watching tragedy after tragedy with no way to stop them. Until the Warrior of Light arrived.

Ardbert follows the Warrior of Light through their quest, and in lieu of class quests, ShB has "role quests" for tanks, healers, physical DPS, and magical DPS that each focus on one of Ardbert's adventuring companions. We learn about Lamitt the dwarf's rejection of tradition to save her sister from a disease that turns people to stone, Renda-Rae's pride after the death of her previous companions, Branden's fight against the strange transformations of innocents into monsters in Voeburt, Nyelbert's attempt to rescue his fellow mage who was lost in an experiment with rift magics, and a sixth member of the group, Cylva, who seemed to vanish from memory. The bodies of the others have been claimed by sin eaters, and the Warrior of Light works with four hunters who want to kill those sin eaters in order to finally bring peace to Norvrandt.

I get what they were going for here. Ardbert is the opposite extreme from Emet-Selch--both of them feel that they lost something unbelievably precious, and both of them feel immense sadness and guilt over it, but while Emet-Selch has the personal power try to change the world, Ardbert can only watch. But the difference between them is that while Ardbert thinks the Flood of Light was his fault, 1) he's wrong and 2) even if he were right, he didn't deliberately cause the Flood. As he says back in HW, "We did everything right, everything that was asked of us, and still, STILL it came to this!" Meanwhile, Emet-Selch is a self-justifying mass murderer. As the meme goes, they are not the same. Ardbert's story is about perseverance even when it seems futile, how you need to keep trying to do the right thing no matter what--there's a scene of him trying to save people from sin eaters even though he has a century of evidence that there's nothing he can do--and Emet-Selch's story is about how grief combined with power turns you into a irredeemable monster.

The blade of light that the Warrior of Light uses to kill Emet-Selch is in the shape of an axe, Ardbert's favored weapon. It's fitting.


That's Shadowbringers for me--very close to greatness in many ways, and absolutely a gorgeous experience, but undermined by its attempts to get me to sympathize with genocidal racists. Being Jewish probably has something to do with my eyerolling at Emet-Selch and Elidibus's portrayals, since the internet as a whole thinks they're some of the greatest characters ever, but it can't be the only thing, can it? Does it only take a sassy attitude, a distinctive handwave, and a tragic backstory for the audience to fall in love with a character?

That's a dumb question. The answer to that is absolutely yes.

I'm excited for Endwalker, but I don't have the overwhelming, burning hype that some people seem to. I worry that they're going to try to do the same tragic backstory thing to Lahabrea, everyone's favorite Praetorium cackling evil guy, in the new Pandaemonium raid series. I'm unsure about Zenos and Fandaniel as villains since at least Emet-Selch had enough information about him to make me dislike him, whereas Fandaniel explicitly has no motivation and Zenos is just an MMO player grinding on random mobs until he can face the Warrior of Light as a boss, and at this point it'd be very late to pull a Zeromus or Necron out of nowhere. But I am excited for all the Final Fantasy IV references, and I'm pretty sure FFIV will be the next review that appears here. Please look forward to it.