A Storyteller’s Point of View on Final Fantasy XIV

[kindar1]

I thought that here would be a good place to pause and explain how I am approaching my look at Final Fantasy 14

I understand video games will tell a story differently than novels, just like a movie and TV will. Just like visual novels and web novels. Each medium will approach storytelling in its own way.

But the thing is, that they are all telling stories. And stories have conventions that the person consuming them expects to be respected. They don’t have to be respected. Sometimes, not respecting them leads to masterpieces no one ever thought could be made.

Most of the time, it leads to some level of disappointment.

I am only looking at storytelling because that is what I enjoy in any medium where telling a story is present. Game mechanics aren’t something I pay attention to unless they get in the way of me enjoying the game.

One of the core conventions of a story is the plot.

The plot is what drives the story. It is the reason the story exists. Something needs to happen. That something is the plot. It can be simple, it can be complex, but it should be.

I see the plot of a story as the trunk of a tree, where the branches are the subplots connected to it. There can be unconnected subplots, they are saplings growing around this trunk; other trunks, with their own branches. Some branches from one trunk might even intertwine with another. But, if a subplot is important to the plot, it should be directly connected to this trunk in some fashion.

The MSQ is the plot of FF14. There may be other plots around it, sub and otherwise, but since nothing can be unlocked without going through the MSQ, that makes it the plot. What this means to me is that any quest that has information that is important to the plot needs to be connected to the MSQ and any that doesn’t should be turned into a side quest. Anytime a viewer has to tell me, “oh, you need to go there and go through that quest to understand what’s happening here” I consider it a failure of FF14’s storytelling.

The plot must also make the person consuming the media want to continue to consume it. Books with boring plots get set aside and are rarely finished.

MMOs benefit in that they appeal to a variety of people. The gamer probably doesn’t give the storytelling much thought, but I expect they can go on for hours about that one mechanic in the game that bugs them.

A story should include all the information I need to understand what’s happening. That information doesn’t need to come all at once. Actually, it should be sprinkled throughout the story, but it must come in time for me to make sense of those two strangers who barged in on my adventure, make comments, and just leave. Especially if they add nothing to what happened.

[Silvarer]

A story should include all the information I need to understand what’s happening. That information doesn’t need to come all at once. Actually, it should be sprinkled throughout the story, but it must come in time for me to make sense of those two strangers who barged in on my adventure, make comments, and just leave. Especially if they add nothing to what happened.

That information literally will be coming to you though, and it won’t take that much longer from where you’re at now. You say information should be sprinkled throughout the story, and it has been. The problem I’ve seen in your posts so far is that you don’t really seem to have the patience to wait for it and it comes across a lot like you expect all the information to be given to you at once. You also completely gloss over a lot of the cutscenes that do foreshadow things that will happen later or give other information without any real acknowledgement of them. If you want to look at the storytelling imo you’re honestly going about it in the most boring and bare bones way possible.

[Iscah]

A story should include all the information I need to understand what’s happening. That information doesn’t need to come all at once. Actually, it should be sprinkled throughout the story, but it must come in time for me to make sense of those two strangers who barged in on my adventure, make comments, and just leave. Especially if they add nothing to what happened.

Here's a concept: introducing something the audience doesn't fully understand at the time, then revealing the significance of it later. They are supposed to be unfamiliar and confusing in that first scene. It sets up a question in the audience's mind that will be answered when they get further into the plot.

No. Who we are will be revealed later but this is wrong.

No, nothing ever gets revealed about "who we are" – our personal character deliberately gets no backstory ever.

Our soul is special, but that says nothing directly about us, besides possibly base-level personality.

It does always feel slightly contrived (and increasingly difficult to believe as we explore the wider world) that we apparently need the concept of aether explained to us as if there are places where it would be unfamiliar despite being as common as atoms. It's like they intended to go the route that you just literally woke up in this world and you're not from anywhere.

[Jeeqbit]

The MSQ is the plot of FF14. There may be other plots around it, sub and otherwise, but since nothing can be unlocked without going through the MSQ, that makes it the plot. What this means to me is that any quest that has information that is important to the plot needs to be connected to the MSQ and any that doesn’t should be turned into a side quest. Anytime a viewer has to tell me, “oh, you need to go there and go through that quest to understand what’s happening here” I consider it a failure of FF14’s storytelling.

You might not have considered something here. The MSQ gives you all of the information you need to understand the plot. What some sidequests do is provide extra context to the plot and allow you to see aspects of the plot from a different point of view, but you will enjoy it completely fine being ignorant of this. For example, you met a character. You don't need to know a lot about this person, just enough to know if they are a friend or an enemy, but the story often does tell you a lot about them. But a sidequest might tell you even more about them, such as about their friends and family. There are a lot of cases where information from sidequests then make its way into the MSQ if it becomes relevant again, but it doesn't always become relevant again.

Usually the sidequests that provide this level of extra information are normal raid quests, alliance raid quests, trial series quests, class/job quests, role quests, collectable quests (crafter/gatherer) and I don't think beast tribe quests are very significant but they tell you more about those tribes so you don't see them as, well, beasts.

A story should include all the information I need to understand what’s happening. That information doesn’t need to come all at once. Actually, it should be sprinkled throughout the story, but it must come in time for me to make sense of those two strangers who barged in on my adventure, make comments, and just leave. Especially if they add nothing to what happened.

It does include all of the information, but don't expect it to necessarily be quick. Questions are left in your mind on purpose for a very long time (multiple expansions). They are not afraid to take their time because they are not pressured to tell the story in just 3 hours like a film is.