On Bygone Serenity and Sitting With the Uncomfortable

This is a feature story from Unwinnable Monthly #198. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.

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(This essay includes spoilers for the end of the latest Final Fantasy XIV expansion, Dawntrail, and the patches that follow it. Consider playing this OST song as background music/second monitor ambience as you read.)

Underneath Alexandria’s futuristic technology and smiling faces lies an uncomfortable secret.

In the second half of Final Fantasy XIV’s Dawntrail expansion, your player character travels to Alexandria, a kingdom located in a different dimension from your own world. There, you meet the kingdom’s people, who don’t need to fear death due to the regulators they wear, and Queen Sphene, a leader who would do anything for her people. Your companion, Wuk Lamat, who recently became co-leader of her own nation, forms an understanding with Sphene, albeit with a healthy dose of suspicion.

As you explore this new world, however, the mask comes off. Alexandrians get to avoid death at the cost of remembering other citizens’ deaths and the souls of the dead powering regulators. And once someone dies a death a regulator can’t prevent, their memories turn into an Endless, a walking, talking copy of their memories that lives in “the cloud.” Sphene turns out to be one of these Endless, and she has the goal of siphoning aether, a fundamental life energy, from wherever she can to keep the other Endless alive. Since her world is quickly running out of the aether needed to meet the Endless’s high demand, her next target is your world.

Your adventuring group’s goal becomes clear: You must shut down a major part of the “cloud,” Living Memory, and Sphene with it. As you make your way around Living Memory’s nostalgic world, you connect with its inhabitants, many of whom represent people close to your companions. Interacting with them feels just like interacting with their full selves, and there’s a sense of grief when you shut down each of Living Memory’s terminals. Living Memory’s soft lights dim section by section, and Sphene is all that’s left.

At this point, Sphene consists only of her desire for aether, and you and Wuk Lamat defeat her in combat. Before she fades away, she finally agrees that her hunt for more aether would always end in the Endless’s demise when it logically runs out. Despite her uncontrollable drive to steal energy, she became something of a friend to your group, and there’s grief here, too. With Sphene and the Endless gone, though, both Alexandria and your world can finally move forward.

The story of the Endless teaches us that we have to hold others accountable for their impact on society, even when we care about them. Even though the Endless represented parental figures and friends, it was time to say goodbye and give them the sendoff everyone needed. Their existence did not justify the massive amounts of aether they would need to live, which would come at the cost of others’ lives. And when someone you like or care for contributes to oppression, you should address it, even when it’s hard.

This principle applies to plenty of FFXIV’s characters, including one of my favorites, the magnate Godbert Manderville. While he adds a lot of comedic relief to the game and helps people in need, he also discourages the sultana of his country from giving refugees unconditional aid because they’ll begin to “rely” on it. And he says this as one of the biggest employers of those refugees. His position unfortunately echoes that of people in the extreme upper class of the real world, so even though I laugh when he chases his son around in his underwear, I have to side-eye him a little.

But the need for accountability becomes much harder, yet also much more critical, when the person is real. The actions of the team behind FFXIV itself demonstrate this point. Naoki “Yoshi-P” Yoshida, the producer of FFXIV, earned a positive reputation among fans for bringing the original version of the game back from real-life and in-game destruction. Fans also love FFXIV’s localization director, Michael Christopher Koji Fox, for his sense of humor and versatile talents. But during both staff members’ involvement in creating Final Fantasy XVI, they missed the mark on discussing the representation (or lack of) in the game. While Yoshi-P essentially said FFXVI couldn’t feature many non-white people due to “realism,” Koji Fox deflected a question about strong female characters to say that the female characters in the game would support the male main character.

Both creators got flak for the above interview and state of representation in FFXVI, including from dedicated fans. But, there’s a chance they listened. While I’m not privy to where they were in Dawntrail’s development during this time and how much exposure they had to the criticism, they improved on both gender and racial representation in this latest FFXIV expansion compared to FFXVI. Dawntrail’s story heavily features complex female characters like Wuk Lamat and Sphene. And according to a GameSpot interview, the FFXIV team actively worked with consultants to flesh out a continent based on Mesoamerica and South America. I can’t outright speak for the results, but the sentiment I’ve seen from Latine and Indigenous people has been pretty positive.

Perhaps the FFXIV creators would have created Dawntrail the same way whether people spoke up about FFXVI’s issues or not. But people who brought visibility to the interview and FFXVI’s representation continued an important conversation about representation in games. Plus, we don’t want to fall into the “new hat” trap that Rob Rich discussed in a previous Unwinnable Monthly issue. The people behind FFXIV may have created a beloved MMO, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t hold them accountable for making games where everyone feels welcome.

In the story patches that follow Dawntrail, it turns out that the original Sphene is still alive – just kept in a coma until she could receive proper care for her illness. Your character and Wuk Lamat make friends with this new Sphene for real this time, and she ends up taking up leadership in a new capacity for her kingdom at her people’s request. This Sphene can help her people in meaningful ways where Endless Sphene could not. We can’t change everyone’s minds, but the hard conversations and decisions can be worth it.

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Melissa King is a former free company crafter who now spends her time honing her ninja skills and painting pictures of Moogles. She is three feet tall and has a bright pink pompadour… wait, that’s her Final Fantasy XIV character, Bobot Bobot! Or is it?