Final Fantasy 14’s Post-Endwalker Story Feels Like A Mini-Expansion In The Best Way

In the wake of saving the universe from a time-ending calamity, the question that remains for the world of Final Fantasy XIV after the events of 2021’s Endwalker expansion is: How do we move on? This question sets up the quests immediately following Endwalker’s climax to become an arc that perfectly acts as an epilogue to everything that came before, punctuated by an excellent character in the form of newcomer Zero. With a decade-long overarching narrative also having come to an end in Endwalker, the post-expansion “patch quests” serve as a great blueprint for the future of the game.

To get it out of the way, I know I’m late to the party. As I’ve documented already, I’ve recently been making my way through FF14’s many expansions and haven’t quite made it to Dawntrail yet. Post-expansion patch quests are nothing new. As expansions typically have two to three years between them, the team at Square Enix doles out smaller story and content updates to tide players over. With past expansions, these patch quests have often worked in two parts. The first wraps up the story of the preceding expansion and the second sets up the next. For Endwalker’s patch quests, the team had a unique opportunity to buck that formula, since the expansion’s release served as its own finale and an ending to the overarching Hydaelyn-Zodiark saga of the MMO’s past ten years. That meant that the Endwalker patch quests could be their own contained story.

The new freedom turns the post-Endwalker quests into a mini-expansion of its own. They introduce new characters, locales, dungeons, and a big bad for Warriors of Light to deal with. But, so as not to start entirely from scratch, the story deals with the Void, a world engulfed by darkness that has come up from time to time in the past. It’s a setting that has always seemed prime for an expansion, and while this isn’t quite that, the smaller approach works to its benefit.