One existential crisis at a time
I finished Final Fantasy XV’s main story earlier on. It was a spectacular conclusion, but that’s not what I want to talk about today. Instead, I want to talk about the game’s “secret” dungeon, the Pitioss Ruins.
As you have probably surmised, spoilers are ahead, albeit not story ones, since the Pitioss Ruins is a purely mechanical challenge. I am going to talk about all the different aspects of the dungeon, though, so if you want to encounter it for yourself, look away now.
When I’ve not been playing Final Fantasy XV, I’ve been giving Pokémon Moon a serious shot, as I’m determined to try and understand the obsessive appeal the series has. And I think, finally, I’m starting to “get it”.
Part of this is, as I described a few days ago, the fact that Sun and Moon have refined their systems and interfaces to a level where I’m not frustrated by a lack of information any longer, although I do feel there’s a certain amount of “assumed knowledge”; an understanding that many of the people who are playing this have previously played at least one Pokémon game to death. This leads to a certain amount of flailing around in the early hours as you try to figure certain things out — though pleasingly, the game does actually take the time to point out what common series abbreviations like “TM” stand for, which is something I don’t recall X and Y doing.
Pokémon has evolved considerably over time. I played Red and Gold when they first came out on Game Boy, then set the series aside until X and Y which I gave a go for a bit but didn’t really feel, although there were certain aspects I did like. Chief among these was the amount of customisation there is in the game, which has really come to the forefront in the 3D installments. I’m a sucker for any game that gives me the opportunity to play a cute girl and dress her up in cute outfits, and Moon certainly hasn’t been disappointing in this regard, with plenty of hair and clothing options to choose from. (I actually found myself not wanting to customise X and Y’s default female character because I liked her standard look so much, though I understand there was a similar situation here.)
Moon’s online feature — the Festival Plaza — is a little peculiar in that true Nintendo “no direct online interaction!” way, but it’s charming, endearing and friendly in, yes, that true Nintendo way. Not only do you get the opportunity to ogle the wonderful avatar creations of other players — both from your friends list and randomly gathered from online — but you also get to interact with them in various ways. Perhaps the most appealing part of all this is the fact that it’s possible to populate your online profile with a questionnaire covering all manner of different topics, and there are a wide variety of different responses you can give to the prompts — some sensible, some nonsensical. This allows players the opportunity to express themselves and their personality without the potential for unpleasantness that unfiltered direct online communication often brings with it.
As for the main game itself, the setup has been enjoyable so far. In typical Pokémon fashion, you set out from your childhood home to have an adventure, largely prompted by the local crazy professor. Along the way you encounter a rival (who is more of a friend in this character than in some previous installments) and a recurring team of villains (who are, as usual, comedically incompetent in this installment, with the main difference being that the general populace of the Alola region knows how comedically incompetent they are rather than living in fear of them) as you seek to prove your might as a Pokémon master.
I like the fact the structure of the game has been shaken up a bit from “get to each town, visit gym, defeat everyone in there” from the previous games. The new “trials” concept covers the same basic ground, but seems to handle things more like a traditional RPG dungeon, with objectives to complete along the way followed by a boss at the end. I’m interested to see how this develops further in the game — I’m still on the first island at present.
I’m not yet quite sure if I’m “doing it right” with regard to my team makeup and levelling strategy, but I’m sure there are no mistakes I might make that can’t be corrected with a little grinding or, if the worst comes to the worst, catching a fresh new Pokémon of a particular type. In the meantime, I’m genuinely enjoying Moon, and I’m keen to see how the game develops in its later hours.
I decided to give Pokémon another go with the latest installments Sun and Moon, specifically Moon, since Andie picked up a copy of Sun.
I’ve only spent a little over an hour with it so far but already it looks as if Sun and Moon have addressed some of the things I found frustrating about the previous installments, and that, coupled with reports from friends who say it’s a lot more story-heavy than previous Pokémon games, makes me think I’m probably going to enjoy it a lot more.
One of the things that always frustrated me about earlier Pokémon games was the fact that it was pretty vague about things like debuffs and suchlike. “Pikachu’s attack fell!” the game would say. “How much?” I would want to know. “Does that debuff stack if the opponent keeps using the same move?” Neither of those answers were particularly forthcoming in previous installments — or if they were, I certainly didn’t know where to find them.
In Sun and Moon, however, there’s a handy mid-battle status screen that allows you to see that yes, debuffs do stack, and how many times your Pokémon has been inflicted with a particular debuff. (It still doesn’t tell you how much your stat has been reduced by, but you can make an educated guess as to the impact according to the levels of your Pokémon and your opponent.)
Even better, Sun and Moon use information from the Pokédex to allow you to quickly see which moves are effective, super-effective and not very effective against your current opponent, negating the need for constant flipping back and forth between menu screens or keeping copious notes on what was weak and strong against what. Doubtless for some purists learning all this stuff was part of the appeal, but the way Sun and Moon does things is a lot more friendly to people like me who haven’t invested thousands of hours in the series as a whole.
These niggly little features aside, I’m impressed with the overall presentation of Sun and Moon, a lot more so than previous installments. While X and Y had some reasonably nice character models, their proportions were a bit weird in comparison to the official art. In Sun and Moon, meanwhile, the characters look just like their hand-drawn counterparts and are animated well, to boot. The only sign it’s running on the underpowered 3DS hardware is any time the camera gets a bit close to a character and you can see big jagged pixels on the textures.
I’m not far enough in the story to be able to comment on it as yet, but the early introduction of the character Lillie — current darling of the fanart community, from what I can tell online — gives the story some interesting momentum right from the get-go, and the incidental characters are appealing and fun. In particular, the protagonist’s mother is extremely likeable, helping to make your character’s home feel a lot more… well, homely.
I’m looking forward to seeing how it develops further; I’m going to give it a proper chance this time around, even if I am currently attempting to juggle it with Final Fantasy XV, which is monopolising most of my gaming time at present. Perhaps I’ll finally understand why people go apeshit for each new Pokémon release.
I am still on Chapter Three of Final Fantasy XV, appropriately dubbed “The Open World” — the point at which the majority of the main map opens up to you and you’re let loose to go and piss around doing whatever you want before progressing the main story.
The fact this moment occurs so early in Final Fantasy XV is a curious inversion of the usual formula for Japanese RPGs in the Final Fantasy mould. The typical format is that the game spends anywhere between 10 and 30 hours sending you on a linear quest that takes in most of the major locations around the world, conveniently introducing you to all these places and gradually providing you with increasingly unrestrictive means of transportation between them. At some point in the game — usually not long before the final confrontation and the end of it all — you are effectively given the “keys” to the world and complete freedom to explore, usually in conjunction with some particularly convenient means of getting around such as an airship.
Not so in Final Fantasy XV. Here you’re given the open world almost from the very beginning of the game, and there are a hell of a lot of things to do in it. I have been finding the myriad sidequests and hunts enormously entertaining and compelling, so much so that I haven’t advanced the story beyond the party’s arrival in the major town of Lestallum, and yet somehow I’m 30 hours deep in the game and past level 40 on all my characters.
There’s an argument that this kind of structure kills pacing somewhat, and it’s often a bugbear of mine with open world games. But I sort of feel like it makes sense this way around: that “open world” bit at the end of older Final Fantasy games often felt a little peculiar, as the narrative was demanding that you fend off some sort of imminent disaster, and yet there you were breeding chocobos, investigating crashed planes underwater or collecting frogs to get through a forest. The narrative demanded urgency, in other words, but the gameplay discouraged it.
In Final Fantasy XV, meanwhile, after the dramatic opening of the game, Noctis and his companions are simply out in the world, attempting to operate incognito while developing their own skills. While the Empire’s invasion of Noctis’ home city of Insomnia is something that needs Sorting Out at some point, the Noctis at the beginning of the game is not ready to face up to that responsibility, nor is he skilled enough or familiar enough with his unique powers to be able to simply charge in and take on a whole empire. It makes sense, then, for him to travel around the world, coming to understand it with his friends, developing relationships with people who could prove useful to know in the future, and improving his own skills in the process. The Empire will still be in Insomnia tomorrow, after all, and retaking a capital city is not the sort of thing you want to rush.
Practically speaking, it doesn’t really need all that much justification, as exploring Final Fantasy XV’s world is simply fun. Today I particularly enjoyed encountering the Rock of Ravatogh, a dungeon at the far Western side of the map that is actually a landmark you can see from the far Eastern side. Yes, it’s that old open-world favourite “if you can see that mountain, you can go to it” — or in this case, “if you can see that mountain with weird pointy glowy bits sticking out of it and smoke billowing out of the top, you can go to it”.
The Rock of Ravatogh, despite being an outdoor location, is treated as a dungeon rather than just a hill that you have to find your way up. This makes it a much more enjoyable, spectacular experience to climb, as it’s been designed and paced to feel like a real trek up a mountain, rather than simply walking in a straight line up a sloping grass texture. There are sections where you need to avoid slipping, there are sections where you need to climb cliff faces, there are sections where you need to pick your way along perilous paths with sheer drops to one side of you. And there are some amazing views of the game world along the way, plus a great reward for making it to the very top.
The Rock of Ravatogh is only the second dungeon I’ve encountered in Final Fantasy XV, but it’s very different to the first, which was a series of dark, underground tunnels with scary noises behind closed doors. This gives me hope that other dungeons in the game will be similarly varied and interesting to explore; I’m looking forward to encountering them for the first time.
(Should have been posted last night, but I forgot to hit Publish!)
A little over ten hours into Final Fantasy XV so far and I’m well and truly on board.
Pro-tip: if you’re finding the opening a bit slow, make an effort to not get sidetracked by sidequests and instead push the main story on at least until you’re able to get into the Duscae region. From here, the game opens up a whole lot more and you’ll have had a taste of various different experiences you can expect to see a lot more of throughout the rest of its duration.
One thing I was very pleasantly surprised about was the discovery that Final Fantasy XV has proper dungeons. This isn’t particularly unusual for a Final Fantasy game, but it is relatively unusual for an open-world RPG, to varying degrees. Games like The Witcher 3 have kinda-sorta dungeons dotted around the place, but these often tend to feel like “oh look, another cave” rather than an exciting place to explore and loot. Games like The Elder Scrolls series have hundreds of the bloody things everywhere, but are often designed in a somewhat copy-paste manner, meaning that few of them feel “special”. And games like the Xenoblade series pretty much do away with dungeons altogether; Xenoblade Chronicles X did have some underground areas, but again, like The Witcher 3, they felt more like part of the scenery than a discrete experience in their own right.
Relatively early in Final Fantasy XV’s main story, you’re taken to your first dungeon, and it works in traditional Final Fantasy manner: it’s self-contained, it has its own music, it has secrets and branching routes to explore, and it has its own lineup of monster encounters. It felt like a significant gameplay moment to step into this place, and it was exciting and rewarding to explore. There were some surprising and interesting scripted encounters within, and the whole thing felt authentically… well, Final Fantasy.
And I think that’s part of the reason I’ve never really found open-world RPGs to do dungeons in a satisfactory manner for my tastes: you often end up doing exactly the same thing in them that you do out in the open world, whereas Final Fantasy XV’s dungeons look set to have unique mechanics, puzzles and methods of exploration. I’m looking forward to discovering more of them.
I think that sums up Final Fantasy XV’s approach quite well, actually. It knows when to use scripted sequences effectively — dramatic confrontations, boss fights, dungeons — and when to use the more freeform, unpredictable and emergent gameplay more typically found in open world games. Purely emergent games (I’m picturing the Elder Scrolls series in particular when I use this description) often end up feeling a bit sterile and characterless because nothing has had any real soul put into it — it’s all driven by mechanics. Final Fantasy XV, meanwhile, will surprise you with unscripted encounters out in the wilds (its equivalent of the random battles of yore), but also knows when would be a particularly effective time to have a monster burst through a wall or a villain to make their first appearance to make a speech and attempt to defeat you with Their Infallible New Weapon.
I like Noctis and his friends a lot; their constant banter, while occasionally repetitive, adds a lot more personality to wandering the fields than Skyrim’s mute protagonist, and by restricting the party to those four core members (and occasional guests) the conversations can flow naturally rather than having to work by triggering responses to one another as in something like Xenoblade. Already I’m feeling that core theme of “brotherhood” coming through very nicely indeed. The supporting characters are great, too, running the gamut from all-business badass (Cor) to the flamboyantly colourful and gorgeous (Cindy).
I’m having a blast, in other words. I’m looking forward to my next day off, when I’ll be able to really get stuck in.
Well, it’s Final Fantasy XV day and I’ve spent a good five or six hours playing it this evening.
It’s good. Real good.
I haven’t progressed that far in the story as yet as it’s simply fun to wander around exploring, doing sidequests and listening to the soundtracks of old Final Fantasy games while the gang drive around in their car. However, I’m very much looking forward to the world opening up a bit more — I’m penned in to a relatively “small” area at the moment by barricades that prevent going more than a certain distance by road or on foot — and seeing what is out there to discover.
Even in this fairly fenced-off starter area it’s clear that it’s going to be a fun ride, though. In particular, I’m very much enjoying the combat; far from being a hack-and-slash action game along the lines of something like Kingdom Hearts, it manages to blend what looks like fast-paced action with relatively strategic, cerebral combat that rewards careful positioning and exploitation of enemy resistances and weaknesses.
And the world of Eos is one simultaneously filled with wonderment and pleasingly familiar mundanity. In the first few hours, I’ve spent time at a seaside resort, a motel and a truck stop, but also fought recurring Final Fantasy monsters such as goblins and flans, and run away screaming at the sight of an Iron Giant. I’ve hunted down groups of monsters and fished up a meal for a stray cat. And I’ve witnessed the devastation that Niflheim wreaked on protagonist Noctis’ home city of Insomnia.
And the music. Dear lord. I already knew that the soundtrack was going to be something special from the preview tracks I’d previously heard, but the full experience is something else. Multiple battle themes according to the context make me very happy indeed, particularly as they’re all wonderfully energetic, blasting pieces full of drama and excitement. But the more incidental music is very pleasant, too, changing according to the time of day and your surroundings and, in settlements, adjusting its mix according to whether you’re inside or outside.
The whole concept of it being “a fantasy based on reality” has been pulled off very effectively so far. The world and the places you visit are all very plausible and realistic, but overlaid on the top of all that is the wonderful sci-fi/fantasy blend that Final Fantasy has been so good at for years. It really, really works as a setting, and I’m looking forward to exploring it in more depth over the coming weeks.
For now, though, as I have an eight-hour shift to work tomorrow and I have a cold coming on, I should probably call it a night there. Probably.
Shadowrun Hong Kong continues to be an excellent game. The best thing about it, I think, is quite how varied the different missions are — and how the game is structured, allowing you to accept multiple missions at a time, but forcing you to focus on a single one at a time once it begins. This approach helps prevent the problem a lot of Western RPGs have, where you get completely bombarded with quests and have no idea where to go and which order it is “best” to do them in, leading to an unfocused, meandering experience.
Shadowrun Hong Kong, meanwhile, features missions that take maybe 30-60 minutes to complete, tops, each of which has its own set of objectives and mini storyline to follow through. And they’re not all a matter of “go somewhere, have a fight, get out again”.
Over the course of last night and tonight, I’ve completed a variety of missions and no two have been alike. In one, I had to infiltrate a museum and steal the most valuable artifacts possible without tripping the alarms. In another, I had to solve a serial murder case — this had the option of concluding without combat were I to let the culprit go free. In another still, I had to disrupt the qi flow in the offices of a company that took great pride in its geomancy.
What it kind of feels like — which is fitting, given Shadowrun’s background — is a tabletop role-playing session, with discrete adventures linked together to form a campaign, each of which features its own story, evocative narration and interesting characters. Where Shadowrun differs from other games that have attempted to evoke the feeling of tabletop roleplaying sessions, however, is that it keeps things focused and trims the fat.
It doesn’t have Baldur’s Gate’s problem of pretty much everything being lootable, only for you to discover to your dismay that 95% of the containers in the game house identical rubbish shortswords and suits of leather armour. It doesn’t have The Elder Scrolls’ problem of everyfuckingthing being pick-upable, making it extremely difficult to distinguish meaningful, helpful items from pointless window dressing, particularly if, God forbid, you drop a key item in the room where you’ve been storing all the thousands of wheels of cheese you’ve been hoarding “just in case”. And it doesn’t have the older Dungeons & Dragons games’ problem of sticking a little too rigidly to the tabletop ruleset and consequently not really taking full advantage of the benefits of playing on a computer.
The combat in Shadowrun takes this approach, too. It doesn’t overwhelm you with tactical options, but it does allow you to do things like take cover and use your weapons in a variety of different ways according to your proficiency with them. Not everyone in the party is necessarily a “combat” character, either — my protagonist, for example, is a Decker, which means she’s more suited to marking targets using her knowledge of technology than actually firing a gun or going toe to toe with opponents — though I must admit, this didn’t stop me from outfitting her with retractable cybernetic claws for close combat should the need ever arise. Who doesn’t want to be Cyber-Wolverine?
All in all, Shadowrun Hong Kong has been a pleasure to play so far. It’s telling an interesting story and its mechanics are really solid. Its graphics are nothing special but, having grown up on Baldur’s Gate and Fallout, this really doesn’t bother me all that much — and, like those old classics, Shadowrun’s visual shortcomings are more than made up for by its spectacularly good sound design, with excellent music complemented by ambient sound that shifts in volume and position according to where your character is standing on the map. It’s incredibly atmospheric and does a great job of immersing you in the setting despite unfolding from the typically rather impersonal-feeling isometric viewpoint.
A winner, then. And cheap in GOG.com’s current sale! Grab yourself a copy now and you won’t be disappointed.
GOG.com has a sale going on right now; it’s really rather good. Like their previous sales, they have a tiered reward system where if you complete various arbitrary tasks on the website and/or buy a couple of games, you’ll get some freebies, no questions asked. This seemed like an ideal opportunity to acquire a few titles I’ve wanted to grab for a while, even if I didn’t want to play them immediately.
Among the titles I nabbed in the sale today were two of the new Shadowrun games: Shadowrun Hong Kong and Shadowrun Dragonfall. I’ve spent a bit of time with the former this evening and come away very impressed — and a little surprised.
I’m not particularly familiar with the Shadowrun setting, but it’s a concept I like: combining hacking, grime-and-neon cyberpunk with orcs, elves and magic fantasy brings together two of my very favourite things, so Shadowrun was always something I was interested in. I’d just never gotten around to checking it out.
I went in expecting something along the lines of the old Infinity Engine role-playing games — that is to say, largely functional graphics, excellent writing, deep character and party building and a non-linear storyline in which you were free to pursue all manner of different sidequests at your leisure before deciding that yes, now was the right time to go and confront The Big Bad, whoever it was this time around.
What I got from Shadowrun Hong Kong was… almost that, but with enough differences to the standard formula to give it a very distinct identity.
I’ll back up a moment and give you some background. In Shadowrun Hong Kong, you play a player character of your own design, who can be male or female and any of the main races found in the setting: human, ork, elf, dwarf or troll. You can then either pick a starting class or build your own by spending “Karma”, the game’s skill point equivalent. There are no traditional experience points or levels in Shadowrun; you simply gain Karma in varying degrees for accomplishing various tasks. Consequently, you can build some interesting characters without having to “grind” as such.
The opening of Shadowrun Hong Kong sees you contacted by your onetime foster father Raymond Black, who urges you to come to Hong Kong to discuss something very important. When you arrive there, you’re met by your adoptive sibling Duncan, an ork man that you grew up with but subsequently became estranged from following an unfortunate run-in with corporate security in your past. Your reunion is far from joyful, since Duncan doesn’t quite know what to make of you having spent so much time apart from you, and before long it becomes clear that something very bad indeed is going on. A group of mercenaries that Black hired to escort you are murdered along with Duncan’s superior officer Carter, and all of a sudden you’re on the run, thrust into Hong Kong’s seedy underbelly to wipe your old identities clean and take up the mantle of Shadowrunners: individuals who work on the fringes of society, often doing illicit deeds for whoever will pay the most. Your eventual aim is to determine what has become of Black, and perhaps to make sense of some mysterious dreams you start having shortly after the story begins.
So far so RPG. Where Shadowrun Hong Kong diverges from what I expected is in its structure: rather than unfolding in a large open world that you can explore at will a la Baldur’s Gate or the first two Fallout games, Shadowrun Hong Kong is instead mission-based. There’s a “hub” area from which you can interact with NPCs, purchase equipment and accept new missions, but each of these missions are self-contained areas that combine a variety of different gameplay styles, each telling their own mini-story along the way, ultimately — I presume, anyway — combining to tell the entire narrative.
The missions are pretty varied; none of them appear to be simple “get to point X” or “kill Y”. Rather, you’re often given a fairly vague objective — perhaps with some optional additional tasks along the way — and then left up to your own devices to decide how to handle it according to how you’ve built your character and the party you’ve brought with you.
One of the first missions in the game, for example, sees you having to deliver a message from the local crime lord Kindly “Auntie” Cheng to one of her underlings, who has started to take things into his own hands a little too much. In order to get to the recipient, you can fight your way in through the guards that block the entrance (in which case you’ll fail the optional “don’t kill anyone” objective), or you can sneak across the rooftops, or you can hack the electronic locking system in the basement, or you can learn the keycode to another “secret” entrance. Along the way, you’ll encounter a number of side objectives, including assisting a young woman who is researching qi flow in the area and retrieving a stolen credit stick from an old man who is mugged by one of your target’s henchmen. Most of these side objectives can be resolved in multiple ways, too; for example, when attempting to recover the credit stick, you can fight the guy and take it by force, attempt to smooth-talk your way through the situation or use your knowledge of criminal culture (assuming you have it) to appeal to his sense of “honour among thieves”.
If and when combat does erupt, the action switches to mechanics straight out of the more recent XCOM games. Each character has a number of “action points” per round, and these can be used on moving, using items or performing various attacks with their weapons. More powerful techniques, spells or items tend to take multiple action points to perform, and some also have a “cooldown” of a number of rounds before they can be used again. There’s a simple cover-and-flanking system in play, allowing you and your enemies to gain tactical advantages over one another through careful movement, and as your characters grow stronger they have more and more different abilities available to use.
Hacking, meanwhile, results in a gloriously abstract minigame straight out of a 1990s RPG whereby you control an “avatar” of yourself in cyberspace, attempting to avoid the various security measures or brute-forcing your way through using “combat” programs if necessary. Reach your eventual destination — be it a valuable piece of data or simply the method to unlock an electronic door — and you’ll have another minigame within the minigame, whereby you’ll have to remember numerical combinations and then decrypt a sequence of glyphs before time runs out. And, in true cyberpunk tradition, fucking up hacking can damage your physical body, so you have to be careful.
The whole thing is tied together by a wonderfully evocative script written by people who actually know how to write, combining vibrant, descriptive narration with believable dialogue. In many ways, it’s as much a piece of interactive text-based fiction as it is an RPG or tactical strategy game; whatever it is, I really like it so far, and am looking forward to playing some more as a much-needed break from all the Palace of the Dead in FFXIV!
I’m going to do a more detailed write-up on this over on MoeGamer when I’ve read and thoroughly digested everything in this massive tome, but I thought I’d give some initial thoughts here.
Encylopaedia Eorzea is here! Yes, for a long time the Final Fantasy XIV team had been suggesting that a lore book might be on the cards, and at FanFest last week, it was finally revealed. It was put up for sale at the start of this week and seemed to develop a waiting list very quickly; fortunately, I managed to get in early and snag a copy.
£34.99 gets you a formidable hard-backed book over 300 pages in length, printed on gorgeous thick, parchmenty paper and presented in full colour. The book is heavy enough that it would probably do some damage if you smacked someone with it — and you all laughed at Arcanist, Summoner and Scholar’s auto-attack!
The tome as a whole is split into eight different “books”, each dealing with a different aspect of Eorzean lore.
The first, and shortest, concerns “the basics” of the planet Hydaelyn and what makes Her tick, including geography, the relationship between Hydaelyn’s light and Zodiark’s darkness, the Twelve gods in the Eorzean pantheon, and the basics of “aetherology” — the underlying (fictional) science of how the elements interact with one another to create life, magic and other effects.
The second, and one of the longest, concerns Hydaelyn’s history, reflecting on the world’s cycle of Astral and Umbral eras, with the latter’s arrival being heralded by a Calamity of some description — each elementally themed in the case of the first six, and the seventh (used as the initial story catalyst for A Realm Reborn) covering all elements in the sheer magnitude of its disaster. This book is particularly interesting because it gives some background reading on the mysterious ancient civilisations of the Amdapori, the Mhachi and the Allagans, all of whom are explored to a certain degree in the game itself. It also provides a good primer of the storyline for Final Fantasy XIV 1.0, which is no longer playable, but which is concluded through A Realm Reborn’s cycle of raid dungeons, The Binding Coil of Bahamut, The Second Coil of Bahamut and The Final Coil of Bahamut.
The third book provides a primer on the different people of Eorzea and where they came from. It only explores the playable races of Hyur, Elezen, Lalafell, Miqo’te, Roegadyn and Au Ra — those hoping for some information about the Padjali or a hint as to whether or not we’ll ever see Viera in the game will have to keep theorycrafting.
The fourth book is the longest and concerns the geography of Eorzea, including all the zones from A Realm Reborn and Heavensward as well as short look at Ala Mhigo (subject of the upcoming expansion Stormblood) and the Garlean Empire (recurring villains).
The fifth book concerns Hydaelyn’s “servants”, and explores the various characters that you come into contact with throughout the game, right from the main “protagonists” the Scions of the Seventh Dawn to the recently introduced Warriors of Darkness. This section also includes information about groups involved in sidequests in the game, too, such as Hildibrand’s Agents of Inquiry, the organisation NOAH who spearheaded the investigation into the Crystal Tower and a section entirely devoted to more minor NPCs such as those who served as the face of the Relic quests, and poor old Edda, who has had a rough ol’ time of it both during life and in death.
The sixth book looks at Hydaelyn’s “disciplines” — in other words, the playable classes in the game. Interestingly, the book makes no mention of the base classes on which the more familiar “Jobs” are based; the focus is entirely on the higher-level incarnations of the Jobs.
The seventh book concerns Hydaelyn’s “burdens” — the various beast tribes of the realm, and the Primals associated with each of them. This section also looks a little at as-yet underexplored groups such as the gigants, as well as the eikons of the Warring Triad, which we’re halfway through the story for in the game at the time of writing.
The eighth and final book is a bestiary of monsters from around the realm, divided into the various “-kin” categories. It also incluides a look at voidsent, elementals and chimeras.
There is a lot of information in this book, and it’s presented in a clear, enjoyable to read manner. The thing I’ve found most beneficial about it is that it provides a good summary of the various storylines that have unfolded during the game since its launch; this is several years ago now, so it’s not surprising that some details may have slipped many players’ memories! The lore book acts as a good reference guide for those who may have forgotten some of the finer details.
Above all, though, Encyclopaedia Eorzea is clear evidence that the team behind Final Fantasy XIV have built more than just a game. They’ve truly built a world for people to inhabit, which has its own history leading up to today, as well as many more stories yet to tell. And if you flip through it’s pages, you’ll understand just why so many people still like to call Eorzea home.
Final Fantasy XIV patch day has come and gone, so I thought I’d share a few thoughts. I’m going to mostly talk about the Main Scenario quests in this post, so I’ll put in a Read More link for those browsing the front page who don’t want to accidentally see spoilers.