1977: To The Heavens

Well, it’s finally here: Final Fantasy XIV opened the doors to its first full expansion Heavensward today — for those who preordered it, anyway — and I’ve spent literally all day playing it.

It’s good.

The story follows on directly from the end of the 2.55 story arc, which I won’t spoil here for those who haven’t seen it in all its ridiculous and tragic glory. Suffice to say, however, that it provides good reason for the Warrior of Light (that’s you!) and occasional companion Alphinaud to head in the direction of Ishgard, a region which had previously been closed off to outsiders, but which became a little more open-minded after seeing how you (and seven friends) fended off an absolutely massive dragon towards the end of A Realm Reborn.

The city of Ishgard itself is beautifully rendered, being somewhat similar in design to a cross between Final Fantasy XI’s cities of San d’Oria and Jeuno. It has its own very distinctive character that is separate to the three previous city-states we had the opportunity to visit in A Realm Reborn — the verdant, nature-filled environs of Gridania; the tall towers and tall ships of Limsa Lominsa; and the juxtaposition between extreme affluence and extreme poverty of Ul’Dah — with an austere, almost unwelcoming facade and some beautiful architecture. The kind of place where you’d be slightly afraid to touch anything, lest you befouled or defaced it in some way or another.

Outside the city, things get interesting. Early on, the main scenario quest sends you off in two separate directions: in one direction lies the Coerthas Western Highlands — a snowy, mountainous region similar to the existing Central Highlands region, but with more in the way of sheer cliff faces and inconvenient but impressive-looking lumps of rock all over the place — while in the other lies the Sea of Clouds, a floating archipelago of islands in the sky where skies are often clear and blue by simple virtue of the fact that the islands are above the clouds, but whose altitude drops the temperature to less-than-inviting levels. There’s a huge contrast between these initial two areas; Coerthas is drab, monochromatic and somewhat grounded in reality for the most part (huge dead dragon corpse aside), while the Sea of Clouds is dramatically colourful, the stuff of pure fantasy. I haven’t proceeded further afield just yet, but the main story is shortly to have me heading for Dravania, home of the dragons, so I’m interested to see how that compares.

One really striking thing about Heavensward is its sense of scale. A Realm Reborn was no stranger to sprawling environments that were impressive to behold, but Heavensward takes it to a new level. Ishgard is gigantic and imposing in the same way an old cathedral is; meanwhile, the field maps are huge in terms of both surface area and variation in altitude — the latter aspect of which is, in part, designed to accommodate the new flying mounts you can ride around after completing the surprisingly enjoyable task of hunting down a number of hidden “aether currents” scattered around the region.

Another striking thing about Heavensward is nothing to do with its architecture, however: a good 80-90% of the original voice cast appears to have been replaced, meaning some characters sound quite different to how they sounded in A Realm Reborn, with several even having picked up regional accents (primarily Yorkshire so far) in the intervening period. It’s initially somewhat jarring, but overall the quality of the voice acting is much better than A Realm Reborn. This isn’t particularly difficult, however, because although A Realm Reborn had an excellent localisation (albeit one that diverged quite a bit from the original Japanese script and took on something of a life of its own) its voice acting was passable at best and woefully awful at worst. At least in English it was, anyway; the Japanese voice acting makes use of well-known voice talent like Rie Tanaka (Hyperdimension Neptunia) and Eri Kitamura (Senran Kagura) and as such has always been pretty good, but it’s clear that the English dub was perhaps, to put it politely, done a little bit on the cheap side.

It’s not entirely surprising, mind you; A Realm Reborn was a huge risk for Square Enix given Final Fantasy XIV version 1.0’s critical and commercial failure. As such, the decision to perhaps skimp a bit on the voice acting budget — many scenes in A Realm Reborn and indeed Heavensward also are unvoiced — was understandable. However, since A Realm Reborn achieved the seemingly impossible and rescued an all-but-dead MMO from oblivion, turning it into one of the company’s greatest success stories in the process, it’s gratifying to see that a bit more effort has been put into aspects of the presentation such as voice acting — even if the change in some characters’ voices is a little surprising the first time you hear it.

I’m yet to try out a huge amount of the new gameplay features — I’m concentrating on levelling my main class Paladin to 60 before levelling anything further — but the new skills for existing classes look interesting, and the altogether new classes seem to be really cool, though it looks as if “lolDRK” is going to become the new “lolDRG”. (Context for those unfamiliar: for the longest time, Dragoons (DRG) were notorious for dying a lot, due in part to their low magic resistance but also due to awkward animation locks on certain skills making it difficult to move out of the way of attacks; hence, “lolDRG” as the response to a Dragoon’s inevitable death; Dark Knights (DRK), however, appear to be ready to take up the mantle for themselves, from what I’ve heard so far.)

Oh, and the music is amazing. And the story is interesting. And I’ve fallen in love with this stupid game all over again. There goes the next few years of my life…