This is in, some respects, a kind of retrospective after finishing the MSQ “In from the Cold” in Endwalker - as much of a retrospective as it can be when I had finished it hours earlier. Initially I had written some things down in my daily journal, but to no one’s surprise, I just have more shit to say, so into my garden do my thoughts go. I’ll throw in the thoughts I had jotted down in my journal for starters.
Having just finished a portion of the Endwalker MSQ that Tori had been hyping up on, I feel compelled to write my thoughts on it after just letting it sink in after a while. Firstly, gameplay-wise – I am a huge sucker for stealth games. Dishonored was basically my entry drug. So, when XIV introduced that portion of the mission, I was genuinely so excited. The intensity of the mission with the timer, layout of the enemies, and restricted gameplay mechanics just made it all so damn refreshing. I absolutely loved playing through it and wouldn’t mind doing so again.
Story-wise – oh my GOD I also absolutely loved it. The stakes were so incredibly high. Tori had hyped up the mission so much that I ended up dreaming about thinking of what the mission had in store for me, and I don’t know what it says about me when my guesses were rather bad. My assumption was that the pendants preventing the tempering would fail, as I was also assuming that whatever primal was being summoned in Garlemald would be powerful enough in its influence, therefore rendering everyone to be tempered. Alas, that’s not exactly what happened, and a damn good thing too. And the entire dinner scene and how incredibly fucked up it all was? Delicious. Thank you for the meal, because this was the kind of stakes that I wanted from Shadowbringers. I wanted it to get absolutely personal, and that’s exactly what I got, so thank you thank you thank you Yoshi-P. That was incredible. Please may I have some more, so on and so forth.
Now let’s expand on what I wrote in some more detail, since there’s only so much I can write in an A6 sized journal.
I’ll say it – I’m a sucker not just for stealth games, but games that also test you in general. I love it when shit gets stressful in games, and it doesn’t matter how. It’s like some part of my brain activates and I turn into a focused mode where my sole goal is to just get. It. Done; and the way the quest was implemented was absolutely a perfect trigger for that mode. In fact, the way everything was weaved together was just perfect (I have a feeling I’ll be using that word a lot here).
Like I had mentioned earlier: the stakes were so incredibly high, and the gameplay made you feel it. With the control of your body essentially being snatched from you by someone who would absolutely not hesitate to kill your friends and everyone you love just to get a high from your reaction to what he does, of course the stakes would be high, and what better way to implement that than with a timer off to the side telling you just how long you have before he actually goes and kills your friends and found family? It also made you feel powerless too, and really hit home with how powerful the Warrior of Light truly is. The game likes to say so here and there, but you don’t really, truly understand until you’re suddenly shoved into a body of someone of a race that can’t manipulate aether in the slightest (which, by the way, is kind of funny in a fucked up way – Garleans truly are just Normal in the world of XIV. You’d think that the Hyur are the basic ones, but no; I’d argue that it’s actually the Garleans, because they really just decided to throw in Regular Humans in a fantasy world).
So there you are, fighting for your life against one (1) tempered soldier, and you finish it and you’re literally below half health and it’s not regenerating. A core mechanic of the game is that HP refreshes per tick after a fight, and the fact that they take it away from you while you’re playing as Unknown Imperial really tells you how dire it is. Again – you are in a powerless body (relative to the WoL) and you have to fight through basically a contingent of tempered Imperials to get to your friends across the map in time, and to suck up that time even more, you have to find medkits to ensure your survival. There is no Second Wind-ing this, no Bloodbath, no kind of healing whatsoever. Now take the fucking medkits and run for it… except, you can’t actually run for it, because, hey there, with the way you are now, you absolutely have to be stealthy unless you just want to Fucking Die.
What else is there to say about the stealth mechanics, anyway? You’d have to have a good idea of how pull radiuses (radii?) work in the game to make the stealth as painless as possible, and considering that the mission occurs four expansions in since base game, I’d be surprised if you didn’t have a good idea; so in that regard, the stealth section was rather easy. It was just existing as a weak soldier in that point in time that amped up the difficulty, and how you have to pay attention to where the enemies moved.
Anyways. TL;DR: gameplay section good. Brain likey. Would like more please. Moving on.
The story that was thrown at you in this mission was also delicious. “Tamsty,” even. Adding on to the list of things I am a sucker for: angst. That said, I prefer a very specific flavor that I prefer for angst that I tend to not find in other forms of media (or maybe I’m just not looking very well… but historically I do have a tendency to be bad at picking up media in general). That form of angst that I prefer is usually between characters and things get personal, as opposed to stories with angst that are done rather cynically; think of “end of the world” stories found in more mainstream media, for example. Now, when you take my preferred kind of angst and slap it on between two characters that I know are so fucking bad for each other, you’re straight-up just giving me a good time at that point.
Take one of those characters: specifically, the one that is simultaneously homicidal and suicidal, and he’s going through some downright nuclear-grade pining for the WoL but in an incredibly fucked up way. He is nihilistic to a San Andreas-sized fault and brother, the WoL is the only thing that keeps him going. He would do anything to feel alive again. It’s just too bad that the thing that makes him feel alive is when the WoL exhibits negative emotions and he gets a kind of high off it. Knowing all of that, what does he do? Well, he hasn’t seen his bestie the Warrior of Light in a while, so he starts it all off with a rather violent re-tempering of the Imperials, throwing the base into chaos, and then spiriting the WoL away from the chaos Ascian-style – both literally and figuratively.
When the next scene opens to a literal dinner scene, I was basically shriek-laughing. I thought that shit was hilarious. The entire time I’ve known Zenos since Stormblood, I would constantly joke that he should take me out to dinner first, and in this scene he actually goes and fucking does it (this quote that constantly rattles around in my brain comes to mind: “…it felt like everything that I loved; it felt like, somehow dark comedy, and most importantly it felt like DINNER THEATRE” - KennieJD). To top it all off, the reveal that he and Fandaniel somehow stole your soul and placed it into a body was also really, really cool. For me as a player anyway, and not for the WoL. I was left wondering how they managed to even do it – or hell, what even happened beforehand, how much time it took, etc. – until they mentioned that Garlean scientist’s name and everything clicked. That man is down in the grave but I wonder how he must feel with the massive impact his work had been having on the world of XIV as a whole.
Furthermore, the entire dinner scene was just so wild that I didn’t even take the time to consider where the WoL’s actual body was until they pan over to it after Zenos walks over towards it… which, by the way, the thought just strikes me – they really went and stole the WoL’s soul from their body, put it in some Imperial’s body, took the WoL’s body, and put it in a chair in the middle of a room that can only be seen by walking though a hallway where the candles dramatically light up as you pass through it??????????? I fucking LOVE how dramatic this villain duo is oh my GOD
Anyway, I digress – what I mean to say through this quick rehashing of the dinner scene is that this time, they made it personal. The fight with Shinryu was kind of personal with Shinryu being the primal summoned by Ilberd’s machinations, but it’s different now. This time, he took the WoL’s own damn body and set out to kill their friends and allies. Nothing can get more personal than that. They’re not just the enemy anymore because they pose a very real threat to the existence of the world, but because they tried to strike at the heart of what matters to the WoL (generally speaking). In Rune’s perspective, this would absolutely get them on his shit list. They already were on a technicality – really, anyone that poses a threat to the world automatically gets on the list, but when you fuck around and try to hurt his found family? Brother, you’re about to find out.
Speaking of which, I have to think about how this all affects Rune in the end. No sugarcoating it – this would 1000000000% be a traumatic experience. For Rune specifically though, let me outline what would probably happen with him afterward.
- Immediately following the aftermath of the entire thing, Rune would at most feel mildly uncomfortable but would be very, very much relieved that he got his body back and that his friends are unharmed. No time for that, though, since it’s time for the next part of the mission now that things are speeding up at an incredibly rapid pace. His mind will just jump from one thing to the next, with the main focus being to get to the goal. End the mission and make sure everyone is alive while doing so. Other things can come up later. As a result, he pushes it all aside and ends up thinking that he’s fine.
- When everything ends and he finally has time to breathe and relax, that’s when it starts hitting him in ways that he doesn’t expect. Some days he gets up, looks at the mirror, and doesn’t recognize who’s staring back at him. Other days it feels like some kind of veil is torn in front of him and fluttering in the wind, and the open shards of the veil let him see through a kind of unreality. His mind feels stuffed with cotton on the times that happens, and during the times when it’s especially bad, he very nearly resorts to hitting himself just to take that feeling of fogginess away and regain his sharpness. Sometimes, though, the sting of his own slaps against his face isn’t enough to take away the cotton. He does eventually find that an incredibly cold shower helps.
- Sometimes, he wakes up from incredibly violent nightmares – both a residue of the time Zenos’s soul had spent inhabiting his body and from the things he had seen while trying to make it back to Camp Broken Glass as an Imperial. He is particularly sensitive to such events due to his extremely vulnerable state at the time. Sometimes he dreams of being unable to save his friends. Sometimes he dreams of the Garlean citizens that he fought alongside with, faceless and desperate, all dying in the blast of the exploding Magitek Reaper. Sometimes he dreams of the cold finally taking him as his attempts to get back to the camp slow to a literal crawl and an eventual stop, not being able to reach them in time. Ultimately, he ends up having a lot more sleepless nights afterward.
- A particularly bad string of nightmares over the course of several days renders him very much sleep deprived and lost in a state of heavy dissociation. He goes missing for a while after this, unreachable via linkpearl, leaving the Scions in a panic. Initially they had thought that he went to the First and had just forgotten to tell anyone, but G’raha had told them that he felt no presence enter or leave the Crystal Tower. Eventually, they hear from Estinien that he was found in central Coerthas and sent to Aymeric’s home to be taken care of and to rest in a relatively quiet and private area. This disappearing act left the Scions wondering as to how exactly he ended up in that situation, and this was when he confides in them regarding his nightmares - omitting certain details, of course. It’s only with Aymeric and Estinien that he tells the full story.
- At the heart of it all, one would expect Rune to harbor a deep-seated hatred for Zenos, and it definitely does. It elevated Rune’s desire from simply stopping the Telophoroi and their plans all the way to “I’m going to kill him, and I’m going to make it hurt” territory. This of course plays into Zenos’s hands about getting a reaction out of him for his own personal benefit, but Rune’s fury coalesces less into a fiery explosion and more of a quiet rage, murderous and cold. And yet, a part of him laments that Zenos was the only one to truly understand him, and that leaves him at a very unfortunate and uncomfortable crossroads. He still very much wants to kill him at the end of the day, but the underlying secret conflict that he has is something that he has trouble navigating for a long, long time. He remains a thorn in his side even after the former crown prince’s presumed death at the edge of the universe, in a world ruined by dynamis. After all, how can one forget someone that understands your heart but has also committed unforgivable acts towards you and your friends? It’s too easy to say to just drop him, in the end, especially for someone like Rune. There is no “dropping” Zenos, as much as Rune wants to, and the effects of this whole ordeal will haunt him for a very, very long time.
Anyway. I should probably put a rest to this since I’ve been rambling about this for nearly two hours now. Overall, I absolutely fucking loved this entire quest. I love it when things get from bad to worse on characters that I care about. It’s great, it has flavor, and I can’t get enough of it. Endwalker is shaping up to be the expansion I’m hoping for it to be, and I can’t wait to see what else it has in store! 💗