To start this column off, I want you to think about something. I want you to take one member of the Scions in Final Fantasy XIV and kill them off. Yes, you read that right. One member of the cast dies. They will never appear in any subsequent stories. But here’s the trick: The person you kill off has to be the Scion that nobody would miss. Someone you have never seen anyone produce fan art of or post about or express affection for. The Scion nobody likes at all has to be the one you get rid of.

I imagine that you are immediately having a hard time coming up with who to pick. It doesn’t matter who your favorite member of the cast is (and I certainly have my favorites); what matters here is that I cannot think of a single member of the main cast who does not have people who are major fans. This is where we run into a little bit of a problem, especially when it comes to the fact that the main cast crystalized pretty firmly just before they finished their character arcs.

You cannot really nail down a “main character” of FFXIV. That is intentional. The Warrior of Light is indistinguishably the character’s viewpoint, being a player avatar, but as in many long-running works of fiction, there are several characters who wind up taking the “main” spot over time. Through the course of Heavensward the story tended to center around Alphinaud, Aymeric, Estinien, and Ysayle to varying degrees. Shadowbringers gave every member of the Scions a fairly prominent arc. But while that cast has shifted back and forth between patches and expansions, the main group of Scions remained consistently present in the background.

It wasn’t until Shadowbringers that the cast really solidified, though. By the end of that expansion, we had a core lineup. Y’shtola, Thancred, Urianger, Alphinaud, Alisaie, and G’raha Tia were now decidedly the main cast. And Endwalker only further solidified this concept; it added Estinien to the lineup after he’d orbited a bit in the distance, but it definitely felt like these characters were the primary supporting cast.

This makes sense. They’re characters who have been a part of the story since the earliest days, after all, and they are largely free of ties to any specific nations that we’ve traveled to or from over the course of the game. The only real problem is that this cast lineup was finished in Endwalker… which was also the point where their arcs finished up.

Now, let’s be clear about something: The character arcs wrapping up is not some sort of subtle bad thing or a problem. Thancred fundamentally completing his growth from being a reckless bon vivant haunted by the times he’d failed to being the front lines and a shield for his closest companions, for example, is a good thing. And that’s not the same as these characters having nothing to do, precisely. After all, Alphinaud finished the Endwalker story and immediately has plans about going off to Garlemald.

The difference is that Alphinaud, as a person, has finished his major arc. He’s gone from believing he’s a brilliant and peerless leader to realizing that he’s a planner, and not just being all right with that but embracing it. He’s learned humility but also a deeper understanding of how to help others, and that’s what he really wanted. It’s a good arc! But it does mean that the Alphinaud we’re now adventuring with is an Alphinaud who doesn’t actually want anything beyond accomplishing his immediate goals.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be a problem that a character has reached the end of an arc. But it becomes a problem when you realize that in the broader strokes, these characters are FFXIV. It’s one of the main selling points.

Final Fantasy IV: The After Years is not a very good game, in no small part because it’s already a sequel to a game that isn’t very good. But one of the problems that it has is that The After Years sets up the younger generation to be inheriting the mantle of the older adventurers from the first game… except that’s not what happens. It can’t be what happens because the whole selling point is the cast from FFIV, which means that you actually wind up pretty strongly encouraged to use the cast from FFIV all over again while the kids all get sidelined.

You could, conceivably, have a sequel where you only got to play one or two of the original series cast, like perhaps Rydia (who was previously the youngest in the lineup), but then you’d have people outraged that Rydia got to be playable but another character that served as that player’s personal favorite wasn’t included. The net result, then, is a compromised product that can’t ever be about something other than the old cast getting back in the saddle, primarily because someone has to.

This is the same problem we have with our cast of Scions. I could argue, for example, that we should really be dealing with a new cast that consists of three familiar Scions and otherwise all-new characters. And yet I know there are people who would be absolutely outraged if, say, G’raha weren’t part of the returning lineup. This cast is the main cast at this point. You can’t just get rid of them.

Much of this is compounded by the fact that the existing cast developed organically. There was no one who planned to have the group consist of four Elezen or a cast wherein five members all have stark white hair. It just sort of happened. But it does mean that now this is the lineup, and that’s hard to really change mid-stream. It’s why Dawntrail needs to bend a bit to keep all of the Scions there despite their technical disbanding, and it’s why I feel rather confident our next expansion will once again contrive reasons for the gang to wind up together again even as we’re told that the Scions are not officially a thing any more.

And you can see how it happened, too. It’s easy to say “well, we should have just gotten a whole new cast with Dawntrail,” but there’s always the desire to anchor with some degree of familiarity. It leaves us with a story in which the actual characters are important but we also have to contrive reasons for the usual characters to show up… but none of them really have much interesting to do, hence why Y’shtola shows up, spouts a bit of exposition, and then gets sidelined by the plot almost immediately because she doesn’t have a reason to be here.

It’s a problem that the writers are going to have to deal with moving forward because we can’t just keep circling the same stories endlessly with the same cast. It’s just also a tricky one to deal with because even if you can see there’s not much reason for these characters to still be hanging around, you can understand why they wind up here after all.

Feedback, as always, is welcome in the comments down below or via mail to [email protected]/topic/y. Next week, I’ll be talking about patch 7.31 once it’s live.

The Nymian civilization hosted an immense amount of knowledge and learning, but so much of it has been lost to the people of Eorzea. That doesn’t stop Eliot Lefebvre from scrutinizing Final Fantasy XIV each week in Wisdom of Nym, hosting guides, discussion, and opinions without so much as a trace of rancor.