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…And I’m back already to talk about patch 7.3 for Final Fantasy XIV.

Of course, some of what I’m looking forward to is still to come in 7.31 and 7.35. That’s really my biggest disappointments right there. No new Deep Dungeon, no new Hildibrand. Yet. (Also, no new society, but Smudge and I are behind on the last two, so we can wait.)

The part I had lost track of is that the new treasure dungeon came out with the patch. We went in last Monday.

We got lucky. Two maps out of two got us portals to Vault Oneiron, and on the second try we actually got through all five rounds without being tossed out. We mostly got tougher encounters, and they were quite wild with extra adds nearly doing for us. I don’t know what the max ilevel is there, but I assume it’s higher than we’ve got, and this is still “tough mode”. At any rate, we’ve gotten to see it, and it lives up to the other roulette treasure dungeons; you can see what happened here.

There will be spoilers for 7.3 quests ahead!

For more mainstream content, I generally like the alliance raids more than the regular ones, so I was looking forward to the Second Walk, and it was also what we did first, so we wouldn’t miss a week or so of going in there. It has been quite a ride. The story is being relatively straightforward, with Sareel Ja looking for ever more powerful people to emulate and send at us. The raid itself is tough, and I feel like Square intends it as an answer to some people who’ve said that you don’t need healers in FF XIV. The various “trash” encounters can be very tough, and I’ve seen our tank go down twice to them.

The boss battles themselves are of course tough, and as ever there’s a few things I have no idea about. But there’s also a lot I do grasp, and the encounters have all the usual polish, and are only paced slightly too fast for me; three weeks in and I’m starting to do more VerRez than I need raising. I must say, I never thought I’d miss Bakool Ja Ja commenting and eating popcorn as he watches us fight, but I do. The reality is that I do appreciate the NPC commentary we’re getting in the regular and alliance raids, and Alxaal more annoys me in the first fight, and then he gets pulled away, so we lose the commentary for most of the raid. (And I’m sure his late appearance later will come back for part three.)

And yes, Smudge and I have gone through main story.

I was a bit surprised, we have indeed fallen back to the usual sequence. The first three patches are an epilogue story that wraps up dangling loose end(s) from the expansion, and the last two lay the groundwork for the main plot of the next expansion. I was thinking that they may actually play around with the format after they largely abandon it last time in the period between the close of the original main story arc and they started the new decade-long story arc.

But, here we are, finishing off the story of what will happen of Alexandria after the end of a five-hundred year crisis that has had them turn a dangerously expensive form of immortality after much of the population has been wiped out.

In general, this section is well written, and well-structured. In some respects it is a bit rushed; Sphene is in an arc of trying to figure out just who she is—who she will be—after waking up in what for her is an unimaginable future. I also think that part could have been handled better, though it’s not an easy one to write.

Part of the trouble also rears its head in quest writing: While we do have an impressively complex structure of plots, characters, and interactions, there is some need to keep things on simple end, and not risk loosing anyone too badly in any twists. On the questing side, we have an interesting diversion into puzzles, but it’s kept extremely simple. Getting stuck on a puzzle is not something that can be allowed in a long-form story-centric game like this. The idea of a puzzle room in the questing is good, and I’m hoping it’ll crop up again, perhaps in non-MSQ content, where they can be a little challenging without going all the way to very obscure riddles.

And we lose another secondary character. I have lost track of what the number of reasonably-important bodies is, but after five expansions, it is starting to pile up. Geode has been less memorable than some, which is a pity. The trouble is that he’s central to Oblivion as a group, but he doesn’t stand out as much to us as outsiders. One of the better parts of this expansion’s story is letting his death gain weight as we see the other members of Oblivion mourn his loss, and their stories bring him into much better focus.

In fact, that may be one of the places where FF XIV‘s writing is always at its best. Consequences of lost have ever been handled well. More complex issues and characters suffer because everything ends up with fairly simplistic answers. Admittedly, dealing with messy solution after messy solution would quickly drive a lot of fun out of the plot, so there no great writing answers, but story climaxes do often boil down to emotional appeals that feel unearned.

And we do get one of those here. Sphene’s speech was actually one of their better efforts, and seems to be meant as getting just enough reaction to give an opening, so better than we’ve gotten on occasion. Certainly, the rest of the action around the post dungeon & trial climax is very well done. Some of the lead up, not so much. I’m not really happy with how they rob Shale of her victory by having Calyx just lead everyone on as she finally gets somewhere with her investigation. It’s an unneeded robbing the party of agency.

On a more general note about FF XIV story, a small discussion recent made me think. As in all MMOs our character is supposed to be special. And we are. Our power, in terms of aether pool and the things we can do as a result is truly unparalleled (well, very nearly). But, you expect in most stories of this type, that short of a few specialty “brain” characters, we’d be given as being fairly smart as well. But, in the group we run around with, while the Warrior of Light may be fairly intelligent (really left up to the player), they are actually near the bottom as far as formal education is concerned. Much of the main group are either Students of Baldesion or other scholars from Sharlayan. Yda(/Lyse) and Estinien are the only two who are likely to fall below the WoL in this regard. They’re intelligent, but not formally educated at a high level. It’s a good thing we’re not the ones writing the reports.

As mentioned earlier, from here we’re looking at the next two major patches setting up for the next expansion. Given what has come up in the past (i.e., pre-Dawntrail) it seems likely we will finally get a look at Meracydia. Also, we may go back to meddle with the Thirteenth again. I have this feeling that they’re avoiding doing anything too central with the Void, so I’m not convinced that we’ll see that, no matter how much I’d like to drag Eden over there and try to start rebalancing things.