The cutscene that introduces the Scions of the Seventh Dawn is only ten minutes long. That I say 'only' suggests I'm building up a tolerance to the narrative style of Final Fantasy XIV.
The next two dungeons - Tam-Tara Deepcroft and Copperbell Mines - follow directly on from Sastasha in the MSQ, and since I'm currently running ahead of the minimum level for both I did them one after another with nothing much in between. These are slightly more complex than Sastasha, and there's two boss fights in Copperbell that can be tricky to anyone unfamiliar with the mechanics involved.* Neither are hard though, and both runs were smooth and enjoyable.
*I'd like to take this opportunity to issue a belated apology to the players I ran Copperbell Mines with on my first character. I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing in the Ichorous Ire fight and can only assume I lucked my way through it.
After that I took some time out from the MSQ to work on hunt logs and run Fates. I know what's coming next and I didn't want to get into that in the last hour or so of this run, but I also didn't want to start my next run with a bunch of cutscenes so I did hop back onto the MSQ and follow it down to Vesper Bay and the Scions of the Seventh Dawn.
To some extent the Scions have a similar role in FFXIV as Makos and his fellow adventurers do in Neverwinter, being characters who make appearances across multiple story arcs, acting as familiar faces and at times moving the plot along with their actions. The difference is that the Scions get a hell of a lot more screen time. It's the sort of focus that would be given to playable party members in a singleplayer Final Fantasy game, but seeing as this is an MMO it can come across rather as if the game is more interested in their stories than in that of the player character. That the player character is a voiceless cipher with essentially no motivation of her own doesn't help alleviate this impression.
I'm well aware that this is very much the way JRPGs tend to tell their stories - eschewing even the illusion of choice offered by western RPGs in order to tell a very specific story in a very specific way. There's no room in Final Fantasy for the kind of irreverance that livens up many of the conversations in a Bioware game, or to go completely off the rails in the ways that Bethesda not only allows but encourages in Fallout or The Elder Scrolls. To be fair that would feel extremely out of place in this game.
FInal Fantasy XIV is rather closer in style to Lord of the Rings Online in that respect. LOTRO takes it as a given that the player character is all in on the need to oppose the Enemy - so much so that the necessity of doing so never even comes up. Then again I doubt that anyone playing LOTRO would ever think of saying no to Gandalf or Aragorn, even if it were an option, and perhaps the role of the Fellowship in that game is a better comparison to that of the Scions in FFXIV.
Perhaps this is a question of personal bias - I've read The Lord of the Rings many times, and am far more invested in that world than I am in that of Final Fantasy. The Fellowship have earned their place in that setting, and as I wrote some time ago LOTRO makes the right decision in not allowing the player characters to overshadow the real heroes of Middle-Earth. FFXIV leans much more heavily into the Chosen One narrative for the player character, but also assumes I care much more about some of the supporting cast and the things that happen to them than I actually do.
Perhaps the tendency of Final Fantasy XIV to never use one word when a hundred will do is rubbing off on me, since over the course of this first run I've written some of my longest posts to date about this game. Partly that's due to wanting to tackle a couple of the big subjects early on - like the MSQ and the dungeons - and partly it's due to there being a lot to say about this game.
FFXIV is a contradictory beast. It's an MMO that at times plays so much like a singleplayer game that it makes The Old Republic look like the last word in multiplayer, and yet at the same time it commits to group content in a way no other PVE focused MMO of the last fifteen years would dare to do. If I've spent even more time than I usually do drawing comparisons to other MMOs it's because this one stands as such a sharp contrast to them.
Is it a good game? Undoubtedly it is. FFXIV is extremely high quality, and as lavish in its production values as any MMO I've ever seen. It always looks good and sounds good, and as for the music... I'm not doing any disservice to the soundtracks of other games in this genre to say that the music in Final Fantasy XIV is on an entirely different level. Lacking a musical education I literally don't have the words to describe a lot of what this game does with its soundtrack, but I don't need to know the technical terminology to know that what I'm hearing is phenomenally good.
FFXIV is not without faults but then no game is. I've touched on a few of my criticisms during this run and I daresay I'll revisit some of those, along with a few others, when this game next comes up in my rotation. None of it is a dealbreaker though - even if the lead up to Heavensward does its best to be exactly that - and I will come back to Eorzea soon.
There's still so much to say.
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