I respect it's attempt at providing insane amounts of lore payoff, telling a complex story where characters actively lie and switch side, and regularly changing the point of view. This is FFXI's big one. However, I did not come away feeling as positive as many do about it. Reading small text in long, jargon filled cutscenes that often have hours of tedium filled questing between them made it difficult to keep up let alone find myself invested. Even still, Prishe had me crying and that's worth something.

Continuing my chronicles through FFXI after the base game and the first expansion, Rise of the Zilart, this time we have the second expansion, and true ending to the game's original storyline, Chains of Promathia.

It's fucking amazing bro.

The scale of the conflict, the writing, the characters, everything lives, breathes and shits the best of the best of what Final Fantasy can offer through its most poignant narratives, this isn't just a good FF or a good mmo story, it's one of the best FFs period and has an inherent quality to it that wouldn't be out of place in that one other Final Fantasy MMO (you know the one).

The very stakes have been gradually ascending since the base game and it all comes to a head with the plot this time around, between potential omnicide by wyrms to reincarnated demiurges, this expansion is packed full with batshit crazy developments and twists left and right, as well as really interesting revelations concerning the very lore of the setting, it's Vana'diel at its most endangered yet fascinating form.

The cast is also at its most interesting here. I liked the tag-along characters in Zilart, but the relative shortness of the storyline meant not a lot of attention was given to the likes of Zeid, Lion and Aldo. This time however that problem is largely averted, with a nuanced cast of fairly fleshed out characters, who all have their time to shine and develop overtime. The standouts being Tenzen and Prishe of course.

Gameplay-wise, I made the decision to lock myself at level 80 for the whole expansion (I was overleved for like 4/5ths of it so it was a good call) and thus my experience shouldn't have been that different. However I acknowledge there's a lot more intricacy to the dungeon design this time around, not always for the better, but I can conceive this would have been really riveting content at release and I respect that!
Also the last thing I did right after beating the final boss was get my super kewl sword skill so I take that as a personal reward for my actions kyehehe...

Special mention goes to the music, which while not adding THAT many new tracks, is pretty much a straight upgrade in most ways from Zilart (except for the final boss music bweh) and how could I not talk about the absolutely magnificent ending song, Distant Worlds.

That shit made me cry dawg. Uncool.

All in all, Chains of Promathia is where FFXI truly grew the beard for me. It's a lot of cool concepts executed really well and while I'm not expecting the next few story arcs to equal, let alone surpass it, it still gives me great expectations from the kind of writing quality I might be getting in the future.

I'm fully won over now. I'll see this FFXI journey to the very end!

stuck in a perpetual state of "a little too much writing", too long overall, but pretty cool for what it is, anyway. the deliberately confusing at points plot is too much so but i appreciate the ambition and it hits in many moments. the final mission in specific is pretty tv show finale-y but in an actually sweet way

the characters not called nag'molada who's just a vaguely funny prick and louverance who's just nothing (though apparently there's more context for him in optional quests?) are all enjoyable, though the kids' bit gets repetitive in that one mission they have their moments, the shikaree sisters are fun, esha'ntarl has a strong presence (and she's bad as hell if you use your imagination a bit or see later official art of her), jabbos, ulmia, prishe, tenzen are all compelling. wasn't as moved as many seem to have been and this is def not one of the best narratives i've seen in gaming but it is good!

visually the cutscenes are mostly a step above serviceable, with a few more striking moments like when carbuncle shows up (carbuncle is super cute!!), but then randomly on chapter 8 they decide to go hard as fuck? (SPOILERS) winged selh'teus, promathia look badass, (SPOILERS OVER) the locations are cool as fuck, the shot composition game goes up. what the hell? it basically suddenly becomes cinema. i'm not complaining i just wish it went that hard more often hahah.

gameplay and presentation wise it's ffxi (so i like it well enough and it's got cool vibes). though they didn't add new jobs or anything here and with the level cap lifted it's a pretty easy task for 99% of it for a lvl ~80 character. i died once on the final boss due to getting silenced and other times elsewhere due to stupid mistakes, and i think that's it. the cutscene strings that happen a bunch of times really reinforce this walk and read nature instead of being more efficient wrt putting you to kill some creatures. i think rotz struck a more elegant ratio between talky and gamey bits but it unquestionably has a less interesting cast/narrative, besides cornelia on bastok missions rank 6 onwards who i love. anyway it's good! cute ending!

Note on all expansions: Every part of FFXI takes an enormous hit in my ratings for existing within the god awful, unconscionable interface, code base, and general design philosophies of FFXI. These things are the foundations of the whole game, and thus no expansion can fully escape these sins. Despite this I have chosen to log them all separately because they are each different beasts.

Chains of Promathia is what happens when your DM who is on the spectrum somewhere does some adderall and a line of cocaine and then fixation dumps his whole DnD campaign setting's worldbuilding on you in an incomprehensible word-salad hurricane. To call it "an ambitious story for an MMO in 2004" is like saying that that when Mount Vesuvius erupted it was a bad day to be in Pompeii. To be perfectly frank I believe that this glorious audacity blinds many to the deep, deep problems that haunt the writing of CoP.

While the base game and RoZ were quite notably underwritten, CoP is overwritten in the extreme. There is about 400% more text than there should be, and much of it is a garbled soup of overused jargon that would make Kingdom Hearts blush. This is a story that dearly loves its twists, and it's true that having twists AT ALL in such an era was virtually unprecedented, but CoP just doesn't know when to stop jerking the player around. Almost every major piece of information that is dramatically given to the player for most of CoP's playtime is a red herring that will soon be paved over with newer, similarly incorrect information. When the expansion is nearly over, it is revealed that none of these answers that have been painstakingly collected across these hours of gameplay are true, and that the truth is actually far less satisfying than any of them. As far as the plot is concerned, almost every cutscene can be written off as a waste of time which sends the characters on a dozen more hours of chasing their own tails because the game isn't yet ready to end.

Thank god then, that plot is not all that makes a story. With the exception of a perplexingly tacked-on elvaan dude and a triplet of tedious tarus, the character writing of Chains of Promathia blows its predecessors out of the water. It's characters and many of the scenes built with them are genuinely touching. I would, in fact, be willing to say that this is the first time in the genre's history that an MMO manages to accomplish this... but now we must ask again that dreaded question: Is it worth putting up with actually playing FFXI for?

Maybe. You actually don't have to even start RoZ in order to do most of CoP. You'd need to at least hit what was once the level cap in order to finish it, but the road to playing CoP isn't THAT steep, there's some worthy stuff to see, and with a few very notable exceptions (like climbing a certain mountain for a certain mandatory mission) the missions of CoP don't ask too absurdly much of the player. I'd say it's worth thinking about, but be wary of anyone who tells you that CoP is "one of the best stories in Final Fantasy." These people are narcs and frauds. People who tell you that CoP is one of THEIR FAVORITE Final Fantasy stories however are probably just cool weirdos and it's okay to hang out with them.

This is such a weird storyline, because it feels simultaneously super messy and confusing but also like it shouldn't be? Characters have mysterious motives and goals that probably shouldn't be mysterious, people have differing pieces of a larger puzzle that don't quite contradict each other as much as they should?

I don't really know how to put it into words, but I liked it. I feel like the atmosphere is a little let down visually - I think there's the seeds of a really fascinating, 'twilight'-tinged story of gods and mortals and what it means to exist but it's carried largely by the writing. I don't quite feel a holistic sense of tone - and tbf, part of this is at least probably playing it 20 years later without all the difficulty of the original.

This was the first expansion I started in FFXI, mainly because it started at the lowest level out of all of them. I was level 80 by the time I finished the expansion entirely, but it is not as if the missions actually helped me farm efficiently.

A good word to describe this expansion would be 'arduous.' Everything takes ages, and the story drags on and on. I played it this one first because it was the most accessible, not because it was fun.

I have no idea what even happened in this, because the characters give their exposition in the worst way, so my attempted summary of the plot would go "Promathia is bad god who is the source of all darkness. Prishe is important somehow. Sel'theus is important somehow. Nag'maloda is a dickhead. Everyone has darkness in them. Spooky apocalypse. Something to do with crystals." But the character motivations switch every ten minutes, so its hard to even tell who is on what side.

Putting the overly complicated plot aside, there's way too many side stories in this thing. About halfway through the story, it swtiches to introducing new side characters who are only tangentially involved in the story. While Shikaree Z was memorable because of the Mithra hunting squad and how annoying her mission was, the other two who I can't even remember the names of (that elvaan dude and the Galka who speaks slowly), have very little influence on the story, and are written very terribly into it. I don't know what their motivations were, or why they were here. At first I thought that Al tai'eu was underground because of how heavily they were harping on about Oldton, but that whole excursion turned out to be useless. And as for the other guy, I don't know who he is, why there is two of him, or what even happened in his final cutscene. You could take him out of the story and nothing changes.
Tenzen was fine, but I didn't understand his motivation towards the end, along with the three Tarutaru

The dungeons in this expansion are very very annoying and take ages to get through. The Sacrarium forces you to go back and forth many times because of its lack of survival guides, and then you always have to do some weird fetch quest that takes you all over the place to find items.

Al'Taieu makes it all worth it though. It is a very atmospheric and creative area, and I did really feel as if I had really worked to this spectacle. Really made a change from the boring location in the rest of the expansion. The other stand out dungeons were the promivyions, which were very spooky and atmospheric too. They could have been better if they weren't the exact same thing every single time, but I'll manage.

Overall, a mostly boring expansion that was passable to get through but did not do much to fix any of the problems I have with the base game.