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.