We need to talk about this main story quest in a born-again empire

My journey through Final Fantasy XIV go ahead. My beard and black wizard are now at level 46 and I am currently searching through the icy Coerthas, which look strangely French with all the names ending in -x and -eau. When I first started playing, my circle of EK14-play friends all told me to be patient. A realm that is born again will be slow, but the story will start at the first expansion, Heavenly. I was expecting a slow burn, a gradual buildup after a major confrontation with the bad guys I had been chasing for the past 30 levels. What happened to me over the weekend was not slow but also not gradual, but rather Square Enix taking a fist through my chest, rooting in my rib cage before pulling out my still beating heart and in front of my eyes ate when I thanked them pleasure.

Final Fantasy XIV enthusiasts will probably recognize the quest I’m talking about – Bringing The Dead. Those who do not, here are spoilers.

This story begins 20 levels earlier. I had the task of visiting a village with silver – small flying insectoid-like creatures that looked like they were made of plant leaves. The silver has long been an ally of the local government, but the relationship has deteriorated over the years. It was my job to restore it and bring it back into friendly harmony. Once it was finished, the silver thanked me for my efforts and sent an ambassador along to help me and my comrades – the Scions of The Seventh Dawn – in our fight against the shadowy forces that threatened war. I leave the ambassador, named Noraxia, in my friends’ care at our headquarters and do my job.

Later, I returned to headquarters to deliver my latest report. When I first entered the city, I noticed a new group of “Concerned Citizen” NPCs standing outside the door. I realized it was weird, but I thought, ‘Oh, this must be my next quest. The Scions operate with little supervision, and they must make the locals uneasy. It will be my job to calm them down. ‘I walked into the head office, and nothing was wrong. I went down the stairs and through the door to get to my principal’s office, and I remember the complicated physical reaction I had to seeing the ground. dotted with the bodies of my comrades. “Oh no!” I scream.

This is not the first time I have been confronted with a senseless death in an MMO. It happens regularly. A place I once visited was full of life, and later it is full of corpses. What hampered me about this experience was that the game went to great lengths to remind me of it. I knew these people. In games, I’m used to bodies being indescribable and indistinct from other NPCs. They are usually a random variety of races and genders of the game, and all wear the same three sets of generic NPC clothing. But these were different models with a clear armor. These were the people in the bar with whom I imagined my character would sit and drink after a long day of Scion work. It’s really devastating to be able to pick someone out of a mass of bodies and think, ‘that person sold me drinks’ or ‘that person restored my armor’ or ‘the silver came here with me’. You see, Noraxia, the little silver ambassador, is dead too. Her death was uniquely disturbing. She was entrusted to me by her people and sent to save the world. I imagined they had no idea they would send one of their sisters to her death.

But Final Fantasy XIV was not content to leave me there with my sadness. They planned to make my injury insulting. After a few sorts in between, I was sent back to the scene of massacre, with the task of taking my comrades’ bodies to a wagon they would bury. When I got there, I met an extremely sensitive worker who basically said, ‘Oh, you look like a strong man, carry those corpses there and be quick, they start to stink.’ You accept the quest, and you are suddenly aware of the heap of bodies being thrown down an alley behind you.

The quest lets you pick up like any other quest, but with a devastating twist: the bigger the body, the longer it takes before you pick it up – the action bar fills up faster or slower, depending on the size of the body you ‘re interacting with with. Beefy Roegadyns takes longer to ‘pick up’ over the wild Miqo’tes. But no one goes as fast as the little silver, her small, leafy body lies in stark contrast to the rest. Then, just like any other search, the corpses go to your key store and you have to hand them over to the vendor. In most MMOs, if you pick up more than one item of the same type, it stacks up your inventory. In another cruel twist of the knife, Noraxia’s body does not stick with the rest. She gets her own stock slot with her own tasty flavor text.

When you complete a collection trip VF14, you must “hand over” the key item to the search NPC. When it’s time to “hand over” the corpses (represented by a white flower icon with some) completely inappropriate fragrance text), I did not want to do that. For a moment, my cursor hovered over the command “handed over”, and I could not click on it. I started tearing. And my reluctance was justified. When you normally “hand over” something, you never see the item in question. Your character goes through the movement of picking something out of your pocket, the quest that NPC accepts but never realizes. When I handed the bodies to the funeral director, they appeared in the back of the funeral car, their mouths slack in their deathly sound, their eyes open and staring blankly.

Fok, man.

I love it when the mechanics of a game reinforce the storytelling. In Final Fantasy XIV, the commands with which you used the whole game mindlessly to complete tasks – pick up, use, submit – are now invested with so much weight. The game forces you to think about what exactly you are doing, while the callous reactions of entrepreneurs teach you a meta-lesson in compassion.

In most MMOs you are a dealer of death. Up to this point, I have probably completed dozens of quests that ask me to shoot through dead bodies for some trinket. I lived it and without conscience, the dead are nothing but a search box to be ticked off.

The way the entrepreneurs talk to you and encourage you to rush up, and notice that the dead do not care for a bit of rough handling, the script is reversed. They are the senseless searchers who are eager to get the block ticked while you are the one left behind in the aftermath of devastation. How many times have I looked thoughtlessly through the text blocks of a widow mourning the fate of her husband? And now, if it’s done to me, I’m furious that I can not somehow kill these people with a Fire III spell.

This quest will stay with me for a long time to come. It became one of my ‘these’ video games made me cry ‘moments, along with the pacifist end of Undertale and the menu moment in Final Fantasy XV. Because of the pain and suffering this game has caused me, this is just the beginning of the way you tell it. I can not imagine how the game’s future storytelling moments can cope, but I’m excited to give it a try. When I went through this search, I thought about writing a strongly worded letter to Square Enix outlining my need. Here we go:

Dear Square Enix,

How dare you. What the fuck? How dare you!

I like this. Please hurt me again soon.

Love,
I

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