Our retirement from saving the world is going poorly.
If my motivation for taking down the principal enemies of the Endwalker expansion was to keep the universe from dying, to make a better world “for those we have lost, for those we can yet save,” my motivation for beating the tar out of the current big villain, Golbez, is that he interrupted my vacation plans.
This might seem petty, but our Warrior of Light has been through a lot lately, and personally? I was really looking forward to a break. Instead of relaxing on our Island Sanctuary sipping tropical cocktails, the events of the post-Endwalker patch content have had us once again traversing the Void to another shard of Etheirys, fighting a new rogue’s gallery of Archfiends and uncovering a plot to turn our world into another realm of Darkness. And with The Dark Throne, Square’s official name for Patch 6.4, things might be coming to a head in ways we really weren’t expecting. A Warrior of Light’s job is never done, I guess.
Each patch unfolds in a similar way pretty much every time, as Mollie Taylor noted in her piece in this space back in March with Patch 6.3. We typically get some new story quests, a new dungeon, a new trial and a raid of some kind. Last time, that was Euphrosyne, the second Myths of the Realm Alliance Raid. This time, the third and final leg of the Pandaemonium raid series unlocked. With that new set of challenging raid encounters, we also got some fascinating backstory to one of our oldest enemies going back to A Realm Reborn.
OLD AND NEW
It’s of course been no secret that one of the major influences on Endwalker and its post-expansion content has been Final Fantasy IV. The 1991 SNES classic has lent characters, location names and even some vague plot details to the MMO, and as we inch closer to finding out what the next chapter in FFXIV history is going to be, that influence has solidified—to the point where we’re now fighting Golbez on the Red Moon, just like in the olden days. But not everything is a one-to-one transfer. Zero’s original storyline, for example, has been really satisfying to follow. Seeing her go from barely being a shadow, an automaton for one of the game’s bigger human protagonists, to becoming a fully fledged character with her own history and understanding of the world, and a sense of curiosity, and personal tastes, has been a joy. Watching her learn what good relationships are holistically, simply by being around the Warrior of Light and their friends, has just been very good and wholesome; now, of course, she’s going to be killed in some tragic but ultimately predictable way right as she’s learned the meaning of being a friend, and I’m going to be upset.
THE FOUR NEW STAGES ARE A BLAST TO GO THROUGH
Luckily, I’ll never have to worry about my friendship with Lahabrea, who sits at the center of the Pandaemonium raid series. We fight his ex-wife in the present day to keep her from becoming a universe-crushing god by devouring what’s left of her son’s soul, only to return to The World Unsundered to watch the man who would become our first big enemy abuse his employees and tell us that the next time he sees us, it’s on-sight. It sure is, buddy.
The four new raid stages themselves are a blast to go through, at least. You’ve got a stage where you fight a big crystalline man to keep him from eating the Aetherial Sea; another where you fight a whole cursed building; another where you fight Themis/Elidibus in his Ephemeral Justice form; and finally, a stage where you fight an empowered Athena right before she can reach godhood. All of these fights move quickly and their bosses pack a powerful punch, but the tokens they drop are worth the struggle.
We’re getting perilously close to the reveal of the next expansion, and with everything going on in these patch quests, it’s truly up in the air what we’ll even be doing. Will we visit a new land, like Meracydia or The New World? Or will we travel to another dimensional shard to save more people from calamities? Only time will tell, but hopefully we get a break first.
NEED TO KNOW
Release: May 2023
Developer: Square-Enix
Publisher: Square-Enix
Link: finalfantasyxiv.com
DARK SOUL
Who and What is Lord Golbez?
- Sword. That sword is probably the Ebony Blade, a weapon from Final Fantasy IV: The After Years.
- Body. Golbez’s suit of armor was already huge before the Flood of Darkness. Now that thousands of years have passed, he’s an absolute unit.
- Dragon. Golbez’s shadow dragon, a summon he performed in FFIV, is the Darkness-possessed form of Azdaja, one of the last living dragons of Etheirys.