It’s impossible to play a 10-year-old game and be online without spoilers, so I thought I knew what to expect about Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward‘s big death long before I experienced it. It would be sad, I thought, but surely not as meaningful as folks made it out to be. After all, character deaths aren’t a big deal for me in most stories. I often find them annoying — shallow emotional ploys that work too hard to make you feel A Thing without providing much reason for why you should feel it. A single death couldn’t elevate Final Fantasy XIV’s story that much, right? How wrong I was.
[Ed note: This piece contains spoilers for the finale of FFXIV: Heavensward.]
In an emotional scene, Haurchefant Greystone dies in a heroic moment of sacrifice that still sticks with me. His final words are “a smile better suits a hero,” a line that made our list of the 100 greatest video game quotes. That parting sequence is as big of a deal as everyone said it was and not just for Heavensward. It’s the moment where FFXIV finally comes into its own.
It’s hard to say FFXIV has much of a vision before this point. A Realm Reborn, the game’s rebirth following a disastrous 1.0 launch, meanders for hours and falls into the typical fantasy trap of easy morality and clear heroes. There’s a bad empire and an even worse magical person influencing that empire, and being a good guy just means knocking the baddies around. Other Final Fantasies make the same mistakes. They throw in moments of complex character development, like Cloud learning that he has to take responsibility for himself and help others instead of floating through life or Cecil realizing that no good deed will ever erase the stains of his past sins. But they’re ultimately still about one person defeating another.
I’m reminded of Ursula K. LeGuin’s stance on fantasy and heroism. In the afterword of LeGuin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, she wrote: “All too often the heroes of fantasies behave exactly as the villains do, acting with mindless violence, but the hero is on the ‘right’ side and therefore will win.”
FFXIV‘s violence isn’t mindless, but it is too straightforward in exactly that way for too long. Events quickly become more dramatic in A Realm Reborn‘s post-game quests leading to the Heavensward expansion, and then more satisfyingly complex once Heavensward finally starts. Heavensward takes the RPG trope of “church bad” and turns it up to 11. Ishgard, the city where it takes place, is a highly stratified theocracy ruled by an aristocracy as eager to protect their dogma as they are to protect their reputations. The nation has fought a war against dragons for 1,000 years, but the archbishop (basically Ishgard’s pope) guards a secret about that war that, if known, would turn Ishgard’s entire spiritual and social foundation upside down.
It’s beautifully written and feels more like a classic Final Fantasy story than A Realm Reborn ever did. There’s also a well-crafted outlaw subplot, where the protagonist and their friends are accused of regicide in another country, that pushes you into a special relationship with Haurchefant, previously just a minor character in A Realm Reborn. But, I wondered, was this whole thing just another clear-cut conflict between good and bad? (Yes.) And would repeated variations of that be enough to keep me going through three more expansions? (Definitely not.) “It gets better,” I was told.
And it did. Near the finale, after you confront the archbishop and he makes an airship getaway, a hidden assassin launches a spear of light at you. Haurchefant, the man who took you in when all others had forsaken you and who believed in your cause without fail, leaps in the way of the attack to block it with his shield. The shield shatters. He’s pierced through.
The moment is tragic on a personal level. Haurchefant sacrifices his life long before his actual death, turning against his home country, the gods of his youth — all the things that typically give someone a sense of identity and belonging. At the moment of his death, he doesn’t regret his actions or wish he could see the new, better society he dreamed of. He doesn’t think of himself at all. He asks you not to look so sad because “a smile better suits a hero.” After a moment of hesitation, you smile. And he dies.
I remembered a seemingly throwaway comment from another character in the quests leading up to Heavensward: “For those we have lost. For those we can yet save.” FFXIV suddenly came into perspective. Yes, defeating the bad guys is important, but it isn’t what mattered. Heroism in FFXIV is honoring the legacy of those whose sacrifices made it possible for you to be where you are. It’s about making sure they see you smile when you want to weep. Your legacy is the happiness and safety of others, not valorous deeds and vanquished villains.
From that point on, Square Enix took the idea very seriously and built it into everything that came after the end of Heavensward. It’s in the post-expansion quests where you honor Haurchefant’s memory and in the lead-up to Stormblood, the next expansion, where one of the quests is even called “For Those We Can Yet Save.” It’s the entire point of Shadowbringers and the central theme of Endwalker. And despite Dawntrail beginning a new saga, FFXIV is still evolving the concept there, exploring it in more intimate ways like how one honors their family or what legacy looks like when people forget the ones you loved and what they achieved.
From a practical perspective, Haurchefant’s death scene is just good writing. It’s a death that goes beyond the shock factor of just killing off someone you liked. But on a wider level, it frees Final Fantasy XIV from the mundane constraints that so often hold fantasy stories back and imbue it with a weighty sense of purpose that sets it apart from other Final Fantasies and the rest of its peers.
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It has been spoken
