Plenty More Story to Come
Final Fantasy XIV’s story reached a climactic point during its recent Stormblood expansion and according to main scenario lead writer Natsuko Ishikawa and localization lead John Crow, it’s far from over. Ishikawa also suggests that its direction might not be exactly what you’d expect from a Final Fantasy story.
“It’s interesting because Square Enix games tend to always have this sort entity like an empire, fighting against an empire, or something similar,” he said. “I’ve played a whole lot of Square games throughout my childhood and I feel that I’ve absorbed those different games through my early formative years. That being said, I’ve added my own twist to things in Final Fantasy XIV.”
But that doesn’t mean that there won’t be references to series classics, or even other Square Enix games.
“You might actually see a reference in Stormblood somewhere in the Doma region,” Ishikawa said. “Also, in the Omega raid, you’ll see some Final Fantasy VI. I didn’t try to mimic or copy anything from those games but there are references in these areas.”
The story is already mapped out well in advance, although the pair wasn’t able to confirm whether the next story progression will come in the form of a patch update or official expansion.
“I’m afraid we’re not able to comment at this point,” Ishikawa said.
“At the moment we’re primarily focused on individual patchwork and we’re not doing any detailed writing for 5.0,” Crow said.
But no matter what direction the story goes, Ishikawa and Crow are determined to maintain continuity as much as possible, taking care to always be aware of story elements established in the past.
“We are very careful in establishing which elements need to go, which do we take and carry over or reinterpret, or interpret as new elements, and bring it into A Realm Reborn and beyond,” Ishikawa said. “We’re very mindful of how we choose which elements are necessary to go forward with.”
“There’s a tremendous sense of history that endures all the way back to 1.0, and we try to keep track of all that and to keep as much of it in our head as possible, but also we utilize the tools that we have to try and search everyone’s dialog and search all the old quests,” Crow added. “So we can say oh this person had this type of personality, and said this thing, so if we decide to bring them back or reference their past actions and we can try to render it accurately.”
“Mistakes happen but you’ve gotta try,” he said. “It is tough, I don’t think anyone has the whole world in their head. Maybe some of our fans do more than us, but jeez, I don’t know.”