Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers is My Favorite Expansion So Far

It’s time to talk about Final Fantasy XIV again!

Last year I finally played Stormblood after the winner of one of my contests picked a Stormblood playthrough & review as her prize, and that same winner won the Celebrating All Things Romantic contest back in February and picked the same for Shadowbringers.

(Yes, February. Shadowbringers took me a while.)

Note: talking about Shadowbringers is impossible without discussing its premise, so if you don’t want to know anything about what leads up to this expansion, stop reading now.

The post-Stormblood patches started out on about the same mixed level as Stormblood itself, but they quickly became more exciting as they began to build toward Shadowbringers. I’d say they were the most exciting patches yet, even beating the intensity of the patches after A Realm Reborn.

And so after a dramatic lead-in that brought us to another world, Shadowbringers began.

Different parts of Final Fantasy XIV have had different tones, and Shadowbringers is the closest it’s come to horror. Set in a world overtaken by the light, the survivors live in danger from the monstrous sin eaters. It’s filled with unsettling moments and creepy events that made me joke I’d started playing a horror game instead.

This also flips the usual situation on its head, as we see firsthand that an abundance of light is just as catastrophic as letting everything be overtaken by darkness, and although the main character has been known as the Warrior of Light, we now step into the role of the Warrior of Darkness trying to bring back the night.

It’s a great way to kick off the story with a decidedly different feel, although for the most part everything still follows the tried and true Final Fantasy XIV formula.

Maybe too much so. For the most part, the structure of Final Fantasy XIV has started to feel very formulaic to me. That goes double for dungeons; there’s now a system that lets you do main story dungeons with a party of NPCs, which I absolutely love, but even though I can theoretically explore to my heart’s content, there’s nothing to explore now. I disliked doing dungeons with other people because they always rushed through without giving me time to look around, and now that I can take my time, dungeons are basically a straight line from start to finish anyway.

But that’s not an indictment of Shadowbringers itself. In fact, a major change starting in the post-Stormblood patches is that there are occasionally set piece duties where you play as a different character. There was even a solo duty with some interesting mechanics besides just fighting. Things like that shake up the formula, so I hope to see more like it.

Now, the story is pretty interesting, although it does hit a bit of a lull in the middle parts. The end makes up for it, though, as it hits those same high notes as in the beginning with pretty exciting parts. I even ended up with a new favorite character.

So it started out strong, leveled out in the middle, and then peaked again for an epic conclusion. After thinking about it, I’ve decided Shadowbringers beats out Heavensward to become my favorite part of Final Fantasy XIV so far.

As always, I still need to get into the post-expansion patches before I’ll have completely wrapped up this storyline, and I intend to move on to those soon instead of taking such a long break this time. Endwalker is on the horizon! Although the next expansion is already out as well, there’s finally a very real chance that I’ll be caught up in time for the next one after that.

What did you think of Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers?