#oneaday Day 1098: Shadows close in

Finally finished Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood! As in, finished the main story through all the patches, plus Omega, Ivalice, the optional dungeons and the Hildibrand questline. I haven't delved into Eureka because there's no real "need" to right now, but I am curious to give it a look at some point. Another time, though.

That means Shadowbringers is up next! I've been very excited to get into this, but have also dragged my heels far too much in getting here. Still, I'm here now, and I can't wait to see what it's all about. The finale for Stormblood's postgame storyline was absolutely excellent, and that was quite a cliffhanger at the end, too. I imagine that must have been quite frustrating if you then had to wait for Shadowbringers to actually release!

Playing Final Fantasy XIV with all the story available from the outset has been a really fun experience. I like the gradual reveal of the main story when you're playing it "up to date", but it's hard to deny that everything is just… better when it all flows right into each other. I mean, you can still see when the patches were — one quest ends with a character basically saying "come back later" and the next starts with them saying "welcome back, it's been a while" even if you haven't moved from in front of them — but for the most part, it's a nicely coherent, flowing story.

Anyway. I'll write more about this on Rice at some point in the next couple of days, I'm sure, because as always, the game's done a great job of "uprooting" you before the next expansion — something which I've previously written about. And this time around, the "uprooting" is probably more drastic than ever before — but it remains to be seen exactly what that all means.

Somehow I've managed to remain completely unspoiled on some very exciting and genuinely shocking revelations, and I suspect there will be more to come. For the benefit of those even further behind than me, I won't share them for now — but suffice to say there are some great scenes the further you go.

Anyway, as tempting as it is to start Shadowbringers right now, I'll save it for another day; I was ready for bed at about 8pm this evening and now it's quarter past 11!