This game has so much game packed inside it.
Webring
On the right, links to a few sites that I've found super helpful and various sub pages devoted to specific things.
Warning that I've played through Endwalker and working through Dawntrail (yippee!) so these pages are going to have a ton of spoilers.
Technically speaking, I am a 1.0 player. I pre-ordered the collectors edition, played the open beta and pre-launch headstart and then the game itself for perhaps three months.
As is common knowledge nowadays, it was a bit... problematic.
So I didn't last long in 1.0, although one of my guildmates did and has his name on the ARR credit screen which I am only a little bit envious over.
Queue A Realm Reborn some years later. I remember "I really wanted to like that game!" so I... I want to say I bought it but now I'm wondering if ARR was given to me for free as I'd purchased the 1.0 previously as an enticement to come back. (editor: after scouting on the internet, it does appear the CE players got ARR for free). I'm on social media at the time so I post a bunch of times of how I'm looking forward to this and how much I'm hoping the game will be better as it's rumored to be. Queue some other random people in my social circle who also want to play, so me, them (husband/wife) and their friend hook up for the ARR beta and start a little four man guild.
(I bumped into OG buddy from 1.0 when I'm goofing around on my original character just trying to figure out the new layout of the game and that was a pretty sweet little moment, honestly. He wanted to know if I needed a guild (implication: join mine!) but I have to demur and say I've kind of committed to starting something with some other people. Alas.)
Note to self: never let somebody else make the guild. I let the wife of the pair do the founding of the Free Company because I didn't really care one way or the other and boy, did that turn out to be the wrong decision. She gets weirdly possessive over it, there's much drama as wife is suspicious of me (for what? having a good time archer'ing all over the place? Hanging out with dragoon-friend-boy in random corner of Upper La Noscea?). Then she's fighting with husband, literally in guild chat where we can all watch the sordid details of their love story scroll by instead of doing what real people do and yelling at each other across the living room. And she's the healer (note to self: never let anybody else be the healer), he's the tank (poor guy, she's yelling at him that nobody is supporting her so we get somewhat uncomfortable quasi-lectures about how tough it is to heal in this game and we need to try and help her out), me and friend are just the uninvolved DPS trying to keep our heads down... it's a mess.
So I get to level 50, I'm looking at needing to do the Castrum Meridianum fight which would be my first eight-man content and I just... give up. I'm stressed, what was supposed to be a fun excursion now just isn't, healer having a snit fit at random moments and refusing to heal you if she's feeling expecially snotty towards you that evening... so I bailed. Again. And wished t'god I'd stayed on my original server and hooked up with Wyyote instead.
Queue... 2021. Its around May, I don't know what to do with myself, it feels like I've played everything and its DLC already. And I remember good old FFXIV. I never did get very far with that, did I? And its an MMO, its got to have lots to do in the game, and I sure could use something toothy.
So I plop down my subscription fee for a lark and start a brand new character because I'm going to have to teach myself this from scratch again, and this time? This time it *sticks*. I get through ARR and into Heavensward feeling pretty good about things, all on my ownsome, playing a video game and talking to NPCs and hitting rocks for iron ore every now and again. Having a grand old time as it were. And then I meet Aymeric and Estinien and Ul'dah blows up on me and then shit, as they say, gets real.
I am just finishing up Shadowbringers in November of that year, I meet a dude on social media who likes the cut of my jib and the vibe of my FFXIV posts and we hit it off really well. I transfer to his server and this time *I* start the guild and here we are in (/checks watch) June of 2023, on the far edge of Endwalker in patch 6.4 as I write this and.. having a blast still. We have our little FC house for the two of us, I'm trying to get my own personal house in Kugane if that one little plot ever opens up and I can actually win the fucking lottery for once, and Island Sanctuary is something I've looked at but haven't spent any time in.
So - greetings from Mateus on the Crystal server! This game is so much game, it's amazing.
spiribia
I understand why people see venats “no more shall man have wings to bear him to paradise. henceforth, he shall walk.” as a #hardship breeds character #ease is bad statement but to me in the context of endwalker and in the context of Hermes’ whole deal it was more to me a “you are so fixated on heaven you think earth is a misery. I’m overturning the fast lane you are trying to pave to heaven. Everyone is taking the scenic route”
nights-at-crystarium
*holds the Elpis part of EW in one hand and ShB in the other* is this wolexarch role reversal
You time-travel to a doomed world and meet him, the man of cosmic importance to you personally, who's dead in your timeline (ofc you don't summon him and his allies to another world but that's technicalities) and, depending on the wol, there might be an urge to save him from the calamity he's yet heedless of.
You have to conceal your true identity, you're bursting with secrets and horrible truths that can't leave your lips. You stand out so much in this world, everyone remarks on your outlandish nature.
The man cosmically important to you that's doomed to die in the event of your inaction doesn't recognize you (not fully, at least) and is being distrustful and gruff with you (depending on the wol, some wols are big mad at Exarch for the Noncon Summoning at Wrong Time) yet he ends up cooperating because of duty.
I've no bigger point to make I think it's just a neat way to step into Exarch's shoes, perhaps unintentional, sneakily offered long after his story's concluded.
When a spear hits your eye
Like a bolt from the sky
That's Halone
anneapocalypse
I really just wish they would consistently allow Y'shtola to actually be blind. I loved the moment in Shadowbringers where she asked Urianger to describe the night sky to her. I loved her mistaking the Warrior of Light for a Lightwarden because she can't actually see their physical appearance, just the quality of their aether. But by default the writing assumes that her ability to see aether completely cancels out her loss of vision. She goes to the library and she can just... read print books. You could come up with really interesting and creative technological and magical accommodations for her disability, like mammets or familiars that read text to you! but instead she's just written 98% of the time like she isn't disabled and it's frustrating.
I want to add to this that my issue isn't really that I need an explanation for Y'shtola being able to read print books or interpret murals, or that the explanations given in canon aren't good enough. The thing about disability in a fantasy setting is that because you have magic and/or fictional technology and because you are the writer, you can make up literally anything you want. You can say that ink is infused with aether. You can say that anything containing even a hint of organic material contains enough aether for Y'shtola to recognize patterns and functionally "see." You can say, "Well in this world technology is sufficiently advanced that upper limb prosthetics are perfectly lightweight and easy to use with flawless haptic feedback in the robot fingers and so this cool robot arm is exactly as functional as a regular working arm, and also this character never experiences phantom limb pain or nerve pain and using the prosthesis regularly carries no risks or pain or discomfort, because I said so." You can say that. Who can say you're wrong?
But then I ask: is your character actually disabled in this fictional society?
If their perfect fantasy adaptation functions to seamlessly make them abled again with no meaningful changes to how they navigate day-to-day life, then are they any more disabled than, say, a person who wears contact lenses to see? In a world where visual aids didn't exist, my vision is absolutely bad enough to be a disability. My life would drastically change if I suddenly lost access to those aids. In fact my life would even change significantly if I lost access to contact lenses, because anything sitting on the bridge of my nose for more than an hour or so triggers headaches, something that was happening for over a decade before I was diagnosed with chronic migraine. But with contact lenses, I just put them in in the morning and take them out at night, and I effectively do not suffer the effects of my poor vision. I function in daily life like a person with normal vision.
And like, it's perfectly fine to write a character who uses the fantasy equivalent of contact lenses. But in any society, there are going to be people who have disabilities within the context of that society which affect their day-to-day life. In the notes several people have brought up Thancred and his inability to manipulate aether. In the context of his life and a world where aether is used to explain... basically everything, and where most people in his line of work need to manipulate it to some degree, that's an actual disability. Thancred needs adaptations for it. He usually has a companion with him who aids him in imbuing the ammunition for his gunblade, and that's great. We get to see how his disability affects his life, and the accommodations that he uses.
How cool would it be to see Y'shtola using a cane, or accompanied by a guide familiar? What if the Noumenon has the in-universe equivalent of a Braille collection (because surely Y'shtola is not the only person in Sharlayan who is blind)? What if there are accessibility mammets who function as text-to-speech programs? Or what if, in keeping with a lot of Y'shtola's characterization, some or all of these accommodations exist but she's still refusing to use them because she doesn't like drawing attention to her disability, and manipulating aether to the extent she does has consequences we get to see (instead of just hinting at those consequences and then never mentioning them again)? Sure, ink contains aether, but detecting it to the extent that small print text is actually legible is hard, and gives Y'shtola a migraine and she needs to go recover before the next phase of the quest can happen, at which point Krile gently pushes her to please use the accessibility mammet so she isn't hurting herself. Maybe Y'shtola begins to make use of a guide familiar, but one can only comfortably maintain so many familiars at once, so when she sends two into the Void for experimental purposes, she is without their assistance while they're gone. And maybe her request of Urianger in Shadowbringers isn't just a one-off thing, and she gradually becomes more comfortable asking her friends for visual assistance.
And I know animation is a resource-heavy change in a game, but it would be cool if we saw some kind of meaningful change where she doesn't turn and look people directly in the eye whenever they speak anymore.
Any fictional world needs to have some limitations on magic and/or technology in order for a story to have tension and conflict, and disability accommodations aren't all that different. You don't have to change a story drastically to give them some meaningful impact on the character's life, and it's more satisfying to see, I think. I think it's reasonable that blindness would still be a meaningful disability in this universe, and I think it would be neat if we got to see more of that.
voidsentprinces
One of my favorite details about Warrior of Light is how side character will see us fight a Primal and be both awe struck and terrified of us. Like they can't tell which one of us is the real monster out there on the battlefield. The Warrior of Light keeps Lolorito up at night, the Holy See would rather open its gate to the exiled Scions than to spurn the Warrior of Light, better to keep them clearly in direct line of vision and then send them out on a suicide mission to parley with Dragons than let them stay cooped up in Ishgard and constantly a threat, Ysayle is genuinely at lost for words after we fight Ravana saying she hasn't seen us fight like that since she and her fought and despite just being defeated by Ravana, she seems more afraid of us than she is of still being in ambush distance of the One Mind, Elidibus doesn't truly comprehend our power and after we activate the Crystal of Azem, he genuinely falters and asks who we are, Thordan sees us as a terror beyond terrors, his death not being a peaceful one as we are warped from his perspective, Fandaniel chooses Zenos and us to antagonize genuinely because we are literally the only thing on Eitheirys that could guarantee that Zodiark was vanquished and the Final Days unleashed, Ryne is drawn to us for a reason beyond any sense she knows at first much like her she can sense the powerful light like that of Warden and needs to know more of it, and the only ones who outgambit us (Ilberd, Fandaniel, Emet-Selch and Zenos) are not in their right mind to begin with in dealing with us. And then again, all they can really do is STALL us as we are a single person siege engine cutting through waves of soldiers, the Garleans despise us and yet also respect us for what we did in the Praetorium, Zenos is truly in awe of us and calls us Champion of the Savages in reverence. Very few who meet us at first are gladened by our arrival, some are genuinely nervous and unsure when they meet us for the first time. If they do not hear tales of our gentler side from those who know us best.
The Warrior of Light is a beacon of hope but also a power not to be trifled with lightly and its kind of amazing how they write us.
ainyan
Headcanon:
Azem's magic is summoning, right? Summoning the party. Bringing exactly what's needed to the fight. We regain this ability when we get our crystal from Hythlodaeus in Amaurot, and we've used it to really great effect since.
But if you think about it, we've always used a low-key form of this ability since we were wee bitty sprouts just starting out in Ul'dah, or Gridania, or Limsa Lominsa.
What is the one thing everyone knows the Warrior of Light can ALWAYS do?
Find anything. A person. A place. A thing. An idea. Anything that is missing, the Warrior of Light can find. The NPCs remark on it constantly throughout the MSQ and side-quests. Nothing can escape the Warrior of Light when they're looking for it.
And I think that's because even though we need the crystal to enact a full-out Summoning, it's innate to us, Azem, to be able to find exactly what we need when we need it. It's an integral part of Azem - the ability to always have a solution at hand.
After all, how can one be the Counselor to the People, the Warden of the Star, if one can't always find a viable solution to a problem?
Just some thought-rambles regarding Azem and the summoning and everything - but something I think might play into some Ancient/Post Original Final Days brainrot that I've been tinkering with. I thought y'all might like to think about it and play with it yourselves. <3
bnuuywol:
yo okay
am i the only one who theorized black rose would be able to stop lightwarden!WoL because it brings aether to a standstill
like would black rose actually be potent enough to neutralize all that Light aether?
food for thought
I don’t think it would work like that.
A Lightwarden is the strongest concentration of light aether in an area, and its mere presence causes others consumed by light to flock to them. Eulmore had a resident Lightwarden and it was clearly shown they kept the others around them docile and meek. I felt it was implied that the light-corrupted were aggressive only if they were too far from a Warden, hungry for aether if they couldn’t just lay down and bask in it.
So Black Rose, a reagent that amplified the stasis effects of light corruption wouldn’t have a toe-hold on a Lightwarden, who is already a light-well. A Lightwarden that the WoL was well on the way to becoming, the greatest of them all having eaten the others.
Black Rose would have just brought them to final corruption faster I would think and been absorbed. Like greasing a slide.
greatlordfluffernutter:
In retrospect it’s really funny how Emet Selch straight up did nothing until Shadowbringers like dude heard Lahabrea got forever-murdered and just went “sounds like Elidibus’s problem” for another whole expansion.
Emet-Selch was SLEEPING.
I dunno about you guys, but it definitely takes me a couple of hours to wake up enough in the morning to be of any use. He was probably groggy and trying to find his coat.
