Ill-weather Friends
-Time passes. Aymeric has still not returned from his confrontation with the Holy See where he kindly requested that they expose themselves as liars and give up massive structural power.
-His lieutenant, Lucia, wants to stage a rescue operation. We need allies.
-There are revolutionaries within the city disgusted by the Holy See and current power structure. Sounds like friends! (…As long as they ignore that House Fortemps is part of the current power structure.)
Haurchefant is all in.
[Later edit: ]
-Tataru’s been camped out in the Forgotten Knight bar. She must know who’s who in the underground.
-The revolutionary leader is “the Mongrel.” That name is all I get. The poorer citizens are clearly protective of the Mongrel and don’t want to give up any info about her.
---
A Child Apart
-The tavern proprietor of the Forgotten Knights tells me a story of how common it is for noblemen to sleep with poorer women and abandon them when the woman gets pregnant.
-He sends me around town talking to specific people. I keep hearing a story of a girl, the child of one of these affairs, who was abandoned by her mother to an orphanage.
-This is who “the Mongrel” is. An orphan of an Elezen nobleman and a Hyuran maidservant. Red eyes, black hair.
---
Fire and Blood
-Tataru has been asking around about the Mongrel. Too much. Her supporters suspect Tataru and attack Tataru.
-The Mongrel herself appears to stop them before they hurt Tataru. Her real name is Hilda.
“Enough! Leave threatenin’ women and children to our ‘betters!’ We don’t have the knack.”
-Look, FFII’s version of Hilda was fine. A rebellious fantasy princess. FFIX’s Hilda was hilariously chill and detached. FFXI had a Hilda too, however briefly. An innkeeper in Bastok iirc?
But HOLY SHIT FFXIV’S HILDA IS IMMEDIATELY THE BEST!
A badass gun-toting revolutionary with one of the coolest character designs in the game.
My initial impression is that she’s a good and moral person and hates the ruling classes in the city.
-We head to a nearby tavern to speak privately. We tell our story, about the secrets within the Holy See. The current story is that noble houses gain their nobility because they trace back to King Thordan and his twelve knights. The reality is that everyone – “lowborn” and “highborn” alike – traces back to that lineage.
(Again, I don’t know when we learned this, but I accept that it’s just something they said and I missed.)
-She’s intrigued. Hard to say whether she’ll fully join our cause, though it sure as hell aligns with her own desire to restructure the city’s power to treat the lowborn more equitably.
-And suddenly, the most villainous looking dude of all villains enters. Charibert of the Heavens’ Ward.
”The unmistakable scent of heresy.”
-Shit’s about to go down. And unlike some in the Heavens Ward, this guy CLEARLY knows he’s a corrupt asshole.
-Hilda pulls her gun on Charibert, but the bullets bounce off a magic shield.
We take the fight outside.
-It’s a tough fight against Charibert plus a bunch of knights. These fights can get confusing with the amount of enemies thrown out, and I still struggle a bit with targeting.
-Lucia sees him, swoops in and charges. She leaps at him and Charibert goes full anime escape. He flips away to a nearby rooftop, bows, smiles, and runs.
-The Holy See imprisoned Ser Aymeric for heresy and relieved his Temple Knights of duty. The Heavens’ Ward is now fully in charge.
-Hilda was on the fence before. No longer.
She’s with us.
---
A Knight’s Calling
-We first approached Hilda because we thought she was one of the folks who threw open the gates to the heretics. Now she says that wasn’t her. (We know from seeing Thordan’s scene that he was behind it.)
-Our two next goals: apprehend the archbishop and rescue Ser Aymeric from the Vault. My party will go for the archbishop while Hilda, Haurchefant, Lucia, and Alphinaud will go rescue Aymeric.
-The dungeon is again quite beautiful. It’s a giant cathedral suffused with orange sunlight. It’s like something out of the Dark Souls series. Like Anor Londo or Heide’s Tower of Flame.
Anor Londo:
The Vault:
-Most dungeons in the game have been monster-centric. This is a nice change of pace, since all the enemies are human temple guards, and gives the dungeon a unique feel, being in the center of a city.
-The bosses are members of the Heavens Ward, protecting the Archbishop. Before each boss fight, they transform into giant versions of themselves with major armor upgrades.
-The final boss is Ser Charibart, the jackwagon from before. Feels good to beat him.
-He retreats into the cathedral on defeat. We pursue.
-Thordan is here. He’s getting a ride out of here on an airship.
-SER AYMERIC! He’s okay. The others broke him out.
-Aymeric is unusually emotional, yelling for his “father” as Archbishop Thordan boards the ship. He begs Thordan to renounce the lies.
-But Thordan won’t do it. He thinks those lies are the pillars of this society, its strength.
-We run after Thordan, hoping to catch him before the airship takes off. But he’s got a guard on top of the cathedral protecting him. Some Undyne-looking dude forms an energy spear and launches it our way.
Frigging Charibert.
Lord Haurchefant raises his shield to protect us. The spear pierces through and just obliterates him, hollowing him out. The scene is unusually bloody for a Final Fantasy game.
The archbishop flies away for somewhere called Azys Lla. Archbishop Thordan is looking more and more like the end boss of the expansion.
We huddle around the dying Haurchefant and say goodbye. RIP.
-The party regroups at House Fortemps. This is awful. Haurchefant is Count Fortemps’ son.
Count Edmont de Fortemps is devastated but understanding. His words echo Haurchefant’s before we set out to the Vault:
“A knight lives to serve. To protect. To sacrifice. There is no greater calling.”
As he says this, he breaks down weeping.
(The music here is epic af.)
---
Uneggceptable Losses (Easter event)
-It’s Easter in FFXIV! An egg-based holiday called “Hatching-tide.”
Eggs (and egg puns) everywhere.
-The game doesn’t provide a lot of details on what Hatching-tide is all about, but it seems to be something centered on a prophet named Jihli Aliapoh (like Mihli Aliapoh, the FFXI healer?). She dreams up visions about eggs each year.
-Alas, Jihli has not had her dreams this year. Eggs have been stolen and I have to help.
-The Hatching-tide npcs wear amazing egg hats.
-Leih Aliapoh (related to Jihli?) is my main contact as we hunt. She’s one of the main npcs from the archer storyline. Nice continuity, bringing her in here.
-My search turns up broken egg crates with coarse black hair/fur. Spriggans are behind this, those bouncy dust-bunny critters.
-We find one spriggan in town happily running around with an egg. Leih shoots it, injuring (but not killing) it. But apparently we got the wrong one? A “Miqo’te Mender” runs up and stops us.
-The miqo’te is friends with this spriggan. Riggy the spriggan!
-This miqo’te tells us a different pack of spriggans stole the eggs. Riggy was helping recover the eggs. And since the spriggan is in So it was a different pack of spriggans that stole the eggs. Only Riggy can crawl into the spriggan den and reclaim the eggs.
-OKAY THIS IS AWESOME
What follows is a side-scrolling mini-game where I play as Riggy, collecting eggs and dodging bombs, mean spriggans, spikes, and other enemies.
-After collecting the eggs with Riggy, the miqo’te who vouched for Riggy says something suspicious. One of those exchanges that makes it clear she was behind the theft all along. Like:
MIQO’TE: “You should go return the eggs to Nonotta!”
LEIH ALIAPOH: “…wait, how did you know the eggs were stolen from Nonotta?”
MIQO’TE: “…Anyway BYE GOTTA GO!”
-We go back to Nonotta to turn the eggs in. Jihli Aliapoh, the Dreamer herself, shows up to thank us for our helps… and she’s the same “Miqo’te Mender.” Jihli was behind the egg-napping.
-She explains. She did in fact have a prophetic dream this year. The dream was about her telling people she didn’t have a dream and then hiding the eggs, leading to an awesome event.
JIHLI: “I apologize for my trickery. But tell me, did you not enjoy meeting the charming Riggy, or the manner in which you recovered the lost eggs?”
Touche. I enjoyed both those things.
-I said earlier that I didn’t understand what Hatching-tide is about. Now I do. It’s a celebration of finding odd paths and spontaneous encounters.
OH SHIT I WAS RIGHT ABOUT THE MIHLI ALIAPOH REFERENCE! Jihli’s MOTHER was Mihli! Jihli and Leih are cousins. Another happy surprise.
-The quest reward follows the holiday’s theme of “unexpected wonders.” It’s a minion, an egg. Every once in a while a jester automaton pops out, balances on the egg, then crawls back inside.
-There’s a repeatable epilogue to this main quest where I can go to a spot in Gridania, hide an egg, and watch various characters from Gridania find it and meet each other. It’s sweet and awesome.
-First encounter: Leih Aliapoh tries to get her frenemy from the archery storyline, Silvairre, to admit he’s having fun hunting for eggs.
-Second encounter: the Keeper of the Entwined Serpents, a leader in Gridania’s grand company, meets Kan-E-Senna, the Elder Seedseer. He has a massive crush on her and struggles to navigate this meeting.
-Third encounter: the conjurer guildmaster meets a cute li’l kid. The conjurer looks young but is old, and acts super awkward.
-Final encounter: the lancer guildmaster Ywain and a kid. The kid thinks Ywain looks worn down (from the events of the lancer storyline) and lets him have the egg. This teaches him he needs to take a break if even a random kid is noticing the strain on him.
The true spirit of Hatching-tide.
---
Random Stuff Around Eorzea
-A dude in Ishgard approaches me. He’s must’ve warped in from Ivalice, cause he’s with Clan Centurio.
-There’s a hunt-board here. The marks are ranked, with the easiest as rank one.
- The hunts are good experience. These hunts so far are just for regular enemies, not named tough enemies. Those probably come later, at higher ranks.
-A random cat-loving player, Nyanyan Nekolove:
---
Next time: pursuing the archbishop.
