So there’s only so much space in the header of a column, but I want to make it very clear what I mean right away. Final Fantasy XIV will never again have another expansion in which we travel to another reflection of the Source as we did in Shadowbringers. I don’t mean that in the sense of it will never be as good as it felt then at any time; I mean that we will never have another expansion reveal like the one for Shadowbringers, and we will never again have a whole expansion that shocks us with a new reflection like that.
We probably are going to travel to another reflection at some point, but it’s never going to be like that.
Yes, the title and opening paragraph are just a little bit of trolling on my part, but I do think there is a bit more that is worth talking about beyond the bait-and-switch joke there. I do think that looking at the way that Shadowbringers stands apart is important when we talk about the game’s overarching plot, what the future will bring, and where the game’s story is going.
Let’s start with the most obvious point: In Shadowbringers, crossing to another reflection is a very specific one-time thing. This is not something that has happened with any and all subsequent travel.
Canonically, the Warrior of Light is the only person who can still go back and forth easily to the First. But this isn’t the case for the other two reflections that we’ve visited. The Thirteenth is not actually hard to visit, in the broad strokes; it’s hard to survive a trip there unless you’re a voidsent, but actually getting in and out is reasonably straightforward. And the Ninth at this point has a perpetual portal open.
We don’t yet have hard confirmation that the Fourth, Eighth, and Eleventh are the other reflections still out there. But it seems pretty clear that we’re going to be exploring this more in the story. So what exactly makes this so different from Shadowbringers? Well, the whole reason behind our visit, which is kind of the point.
Sitting in Las Vegas as the first teases of Shadowbringers was shown off, players didn’t know what to expect, and while a lot of people were speculating pretty early that it had something to do with Garlemald and surrounding areas, I was vocally opposed to the idea because the vibes were off. From the start. This seemed, at least to me, to be transparently not a case of going to anything we knew.
And that was definitely the case. Shadowbringers pulled us into a reflection that was on the verge of a rejoining, which meant learning what the rejoining even was and why the Ascians were so intent upon it. We found ourselves there through no intent of our own, stumbling into it at the whims of someone who only introduced himself as the Crystal Exarch from the start.
That isn’t going to happen again. I don’t mean just that another shard maybe has another G’raha Tia kicking around, I mean that rejoinings are over as a major goal for the all-powerful Ascians. The Ascians are in disarray at best. There’s no more Zodiark. We aren’t going to be averting the Eighth Umbral Era again because it already got averted, and then the mechanism by which it might happen at all got derailed.
None of this is to say that the Ascians are no longer a threat; after all, I noted back when 7.2’s MSQ dropped that the fact someone in-universe called the Unlost World the Ninth means that the Ascians kinda have to be involved in some capacity. But the mechanism that saw us stranded on the unfamiliar shores of Norvrandt trying to figure out what was even happening at first just no longer exists.
And in the broader strokes, this isn’t surprising because we’ve never really had any two expansions that gave us the same motivation for what we were doing.
In Heavensward, we were literally fleeing. In Stormblood, we were trying to start a revolution based on some unimaginable jerk forcing the issue. In Shadowbringers, well, we’ve been talking about that, and Endwalker was fundamentally trying to stop something transparently and horrifyingly bad from happening. Dawntrail is the only expansion we’ve had where we have wound up going someplace mostly because it’s there.
But obviously there are more things going on, more problems to deal with, and that summer vacation ended. Now we’ve seen that the various worlds are getting drawn ever closer together, and while a rejoining may be off the table, there are plenty of other dangers that are on the table now. We, collectively, have to deal with them.
So what does all of this mean? That we’re not going to have another Norvrandt, but as we start going to the other reflections, we’re going to have other motivations from the jump.
My suspicion, at this point, is that the next expansion will still be on the Source. That being said, I have no real reason for that, and there are at least a few different spots on the Source where it could be. It would not shock me enough to pop my monocle if, say, our next expansion brings us to the Thirteenth again. But when we get there it is not going to be us going in without goal and intention; it’s going to be to accomplish a specific goal.
However, I also think it’s going to feel very, very different. For one thing, we are not going to be traversing to any reflection with military force at our back; the Scions are officially disbanded, and the nations of the Eorzean Alliance have their own problems to deal with. For another, the last time we collectively went charging in someplace to save people, it was Ala Mhigo. And Ala Mhigo already had a revolution being fomented. It had a space for us to occupy as we tried.
If a bunch of hyper-competent people from another dimension showed up in the Eighth promising that they were there to save everyone from some unspecified threat, I can’t be absolutely certain, but I don’t think most people would react with joy. And I wonder if wherever we wind up going next is going to involve dealing with some of that energy. It’d certainly make things feel a little bit different than when everyone was happy to see the Warrior of Darkness.
Not that I don’t want our next destination to be Meracydia. It’s just fun to type that out, and gosh, I’ve been waiting for this one for ages.
Feedback, as always, is welcome in the comments down below or via mail to eliot@massivelyop.com. Next week, in fact, we have a column that’s inspired specifically by a mail that I got asking what I want or expect to see in a hypothetical Final Fantasy XVII Online. It was a fun concept and a fun letter, so I want to dive into that next week.
The Nymian civilization hosted an immense amount of knowledge and learning, but so much of it has been lost to the people of Eorzea. That doesn’t stop Eliot Lefebvre from scrutinizing Final Fantasy XIV each week in Wisdom of Nym, hosting guides, discussion, and opinions without so much as a trace of rancor.
