...and I did so with only 14 hours to spare before the servers go down for final maintenance. Come tomorrow morning the servers will be offline for 24 hours as they perform maintenance and get them ready for the Endwalker release this coming Friday.

I'll post an early warning that this post will contain spoilers for the Shadowbringers story.

I posted about Starting the Final Push Before FFXIV: Endwalker Releases about five weeks ago. At that time Endwalker was meant to be released in three weeks. It was a daunting task for sure but one I was quite set on making. Turns out it was actually to big of a task for someone who works 40+ hours every week but with some help from the developers who delayed the expansion by two weeks I actually made it albeit just barely.

Shadowbringers has been a wild ride. I started the expansion 16 days ago which was marked by this post: Final Fantasy XIV - Shadowbringers has left me in awe. That was only three days before Endwalker was supposed to be released. Shadowbringers had me in awe when I started it and that lasted all the way through. This expansion definitely has the coolest theme of all the expansions so far. The story wasn't better that Heavensward though. That expansion had a masterpiece of a story.

The Story of Shadowbringers

Shadowbringers has us traveling to a whole new world. Towards the end of Stormblood, the previous expansion, we and our comrades experience some weird visions and voices in our heads which eventually has them dropping like flies. Their bodies still live on but it's like they're in a coma. We're the last one to be transported only we're lucky enough to be abducted with both body and soul.

Soon thereafter we travel through what looks like a void of space and time before we find ourselves in a lush pink forest. The sky is lit up by this yellow hue even though apparently it's night time, as one of the locals tell us. We can make out pretty quickly that we're in a whole other world.

We quickly end up in another scenario and conflict of saving this world. What more is that the calamity of this world will also spend the end of our own world. That is why we were summoned here by this mysterious person who calls himself the Crystal Exarch.

This world has almost ended once already with the world being about to be swallowed by a flood of light. That was stopped just in the nick of time by someone we know all to well but we won't be going into the details of that today. When that happened the skies were bathed in an eternal light and mysterious dangerous beings known as Sin Eaters started appearing, murdering everything and everyone in their path.

Out job is to rid this world of the Sin Eaters influence and end the flood of light in the skies. We're here to bring the night back, hence the name Shadowbringers. By traversing the land and doing so we end up becoming knows as the Warrior of Darkness in this world. Quite in contrast to us being known as the Warrior of Light in our own world.

That's the basic story at least but there's of course a whole ton of left out details. We're ever in the presence of our eternal enemies, the Ascians, and towards the end of the expansion we get to delve into the history and past of the Ascians, learning a lot about who they were and what their motivations are. This was a really awesome part of the game and one that had me on toes all the way through.

A Prelude to Endwalker

Once we finish the main story we go through a couple of patches worth of content that leads up to Endwalker. With the build up they did in those post story quests it's quite safe to say that Endwalker will be huge. It's gonna mark the end of the story arch that they've spent almost 10 years writing and going through. There's no way that cannot be huge!

I'll return with more details on Endwalker once I delve into the expansion come Friday. As long as I'm not to invested in it that I forget. That may just end up being the case. We'll have to see.

So we look to the moon.