In Rich Burlew’s long-running webcomic Order of the Stick, there’s a moment early in the comic when a fire has engulfed the inn the characters are staying at. Haley, the group’s rogue, realizes that she can only take some of the bags of gold she has hoarded at once, and thus would have to leave some bags behind as the fire rages. She expresses her angst at the choice to her partner, Vaarsuvius, because the two of them can take only one trip before having to walk through fire.
“Stop being so blasted melodramatic,” replies Vaarsuvius. “It’s nonmagical fire, it inflicts a mere 1d6 points of damage. We’ll make three trips.”
This is a great gag for what is a pretty consistently good comic, and the whole point of the humor is derived from the obvious dramatic tension. Mechanically, Vaarsuvius is right. Taking the world as being narratively coherent, Haley is right. But I bring it up not just to repeat a gag but to point out that the difference here is something that a whole lot of Final Fantasy XIV players have still not gotten, and it comes up a lot whenever someone asks why the Warrior of Light doesn’t just kill whichever minor villain is currently a problem.
This has definitely been a problem in Dawntrail, but it is by no means new to the game. Back in the days of 2.0 there were people asking why the player character had to flee from the Blades at the end of 2.5’s MSQ instead of just standing and fighting. Those guards can’t be higher than level 45 and you’re in max-level gear; you can kill these dudes for days. Why are you running away from these losers?
And it’s not exclusive to that problem, either. Why doesn’t the Warrior of Light just avoid being knocked unconscious in Heavensward? Why can’t we beat Zenos in Stormblood? You know the sort of complaint, and if you’re the sort of person who makes them, you’re probably adding your own examples wherein the Warrior of Light can kill [INSERT LIST, LITERALLY DOESN’T MATTER], so why are we bothering with this problem?
It is a wrong argument for many reasons, but let’s just focus on one of the most obvious problems: These characters do not know they exist in a video game.
Even the most relentlessly bad-faith argumentative sort knows on some level that this is true. Y’shtola does not know she is in a video game. She does not know that she is going to get back to the Source before she dies because it’d be an anticlimactic way to die. Urianger does not know that he has to survive because he has to be a questgiver in the game where it’s relevant. But the thing is that not realizing you’re not in a video game goes beyond the obvious elements here.
For one thing – and I cannot believe this needs to be specified on any level – nobody in the world knows what a “hit point” is. They do not know what level your character is, and if you told them, they would think at best you were making up flattering fiction for yourself. For all intents and purposes, the world of FFXIV works the same way our world does, and that includes the assumption that if someone shoots you with a gun or a bow, that is dangerous and you might die.
In our world, you have probably done Castrum Meridianum more than once. In the world of the game, those events happened once, and you know it was just once because Livia dies at the end of it. And everybody treats that as being a final and kind of sad death. They’re said not because she is dead but because she didn’t really die for anything; she just died. It was a little pathetic. That’s how her life ended. So it goes. Heck, that’s the case for most of the dungeons in the game.
And it’s remarkable how often people who are playing the game forget that as far as the characters are concerned, they don’t live inside of a video game. Oh, sure, in the context of the video game it’s easy to say that the monsters outside of Mor Dhona aren’t remotely threatening to the majority of the population; just get some levels and you can ignore them and camp out without a care in the world. But that’s because it is a video game. The numbers change, but the idea of “this is a dangerous place surrounded by monsters” doesn’t exist because of that game balance.
But this also extends to how people – NPCs in the story – solve problems.
Odds are pretty good that if you encountered someone you thought was a bad person and threatened to kill them on the spot in the real world, you would be at best socially ostracized. “Oh, but that’s real life, this is a video game.” Yes, but once again, the characters do not know that.
The Warrior of Light does not see Zoraal Ja as a threat and say, “Well, better kill him right away before he does anything” because that’s not how life works. That’s just murder. Oh, sure, sometimes the characters could theoretically solve a problem immediately by making use of immediate and overwhelming force, but there are often compelling reasons not to do that. Not the least of which being that if your immediate thought on solving a problem is attacking people, you’re less a hero and more a bloody psychopath.
It’s not the story that the writers want to tell. And you can tell that because it has never been the story that the game has been telling. The Warrior of Light’s power isn’t killing stuff; it’s forging connections. Sure, forging connections enables you to kill a bunch of stuff that needs killing, but the connection part is the important element. That’s not the subtext of the game’s story; it’s the text. Zenos even gives a final dying speech about how the WoL forging connections is the difference between the two of them, and that’s why he lost.
In the story, the Warrior of Light sometimes getting sucker-punched or being unwilling to fight through hordes of soldiers (no matter how sure you are that the soldiers could easily be killed) is just consistent writing. Having the WoL take a backseat is also consistent. If you want a story in which the main character just fights ever-greater threats and keeps getting more powerful along the way… well, that’s not FFXIV. That’s Dragonball Z.
You’re allowed to want that, but it isn’t what the game has ever been. And trying to argue that the video game side of things makes it logical is missing the point because the characters in the world don’t see themselves that way. Wanting them to feel like they do exist in a video game is once again not the same story.
Feedback, as always, is welcome via mail to eliot@massivelyop.com or in the comments down below. Next week, I’m going to draw on my history with multiple games to consider where it seems that we’re going to be heading with the remainder of the Vana’diel alliance raids, most notably the bosses.
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.
