There were already few deals better in video games than the free trial to Final Fantasy XIV. Over the past few years, to the point of meme-ery, Square Enix’s MMO has slowly opened up past content to let newcomers try for free—first, the base game’s revamp from 2013 as A Realm Reborn, then eventually its award-winning expansions, Heavensward and Stormblood, all without restrictions on playtime. But it turns out your steak can get juicier, and your lobster can get further buttered.
In the midst of announcing the game’s latest expansion, Evercold, last week at the Final Fantasy XIV Fan Fest convention in Anaheim, Square Enix also confirmed that, starting today, XIV‘s free trial would grow even further. Now trial players could experience 2019’s Shadowbringers too—and with it, access to what might be one of the most beloved Final Fantasy stories in the franchise’s entire history.
XIV‘s free trial was already an absurd amount of bang for your buck (which, again, is zero bucks!), essentially the equivalent of three entire JRPGs’ worth of content—complete with a lot of the quality-of-life changes that have come in the years of the game since its launch—being handed over with fairly minimal restrictions compared to a paying subscriber to the MMO. But if A Realm Reborn reforged Final Fantasy XIV out of the ashes of its disastrous launch, and Heavensward started to get some people’s ears pricked up about the narrative strength of the MMO, then Shadowbringers arguably is what made XIV into the titan of the field it is today.
The expansion sees your player character, the heroic Warrior of Light, cast aside their usual mantle and become the Warrior of Darkness, travelling to a different “shard” of Final Fantasy XIV‘s splintered universe and to a harsh world on the edge of obliteration, a land subsumed by overwhelming and corruptive light. It takes on a much more brutal overtone than much of what came before in the game, further expanding your understanding of the game’s overarching narrative in interesting ways while also telling tons of smaller, intimate stories within that broader struggle.
It introduces more challenging questions towards what players knew and expected of Final Fantasy XIV up to that point, introducing more complex narrative ideas and politics into its story of good versus evil. It’s where you meet Emet-Selch, not just XIV‘s most interesting villain, but arguably one of Final Fantasy at large’s all-timers, a tragically villainous figure that can flit between pure evil and an understandably compelling foil when necessary to create remarkable tension with the player (including an incredible performance in the game’s already-very-solid English-language dub, by René Zagger). It’s perhaps just as importantly where you meet Jonathan Bailey in what remains one of his standout roles even after his big Hollywood breakout, a cat boy who is both filled with unyielding, adventurous hope and also absolutely down bad for you in ways few MMORPGs ever allow a supporting NPC to be.
Shadowbringers remains a high watermark for Final Fantasy XIV that it arguably still, well, exists in the shadow of. Its follow-up, 2021’s Endwalker, managed to put an end cap on XIV‘s overarching narrative up to that point and live up to the massive expectations (and mass influx of players) Shadowbringers laid out. While its successor and current expansion, Dawntrail, has had a somewhat more mixed reception in comparison, even our brief glimpse of Evercold last week and its parallels to Shadowbringers‘ premise has players feeling like even the developers are longing to bring back the kind of vibe and reputation Shadowbringers carried with it. Even when it came time to represent Final Fantasy XIV to a new audience in Magic: The Gathering‘s tribute to the franchise last year, it was Shadowbringers that formed the bulk of that representation.
It’s perhaps fitting, then, that if so much of XIV is still defined by what it achieved in Shadowbringers, then now Shadowbringers can speak for itself and be experienced by anyone who wants to jump into Eorzea and see what all the fuss is about. Shadowbringers isn’t just Final Fantasy XIV at its best and most emblematic, but Final Fantasy at large—and anyone who wants to understand that can now do so with very little in the way of restrictions. Well, after completing the aforementioned hundreds of hours of content that lead up to that point, of course, but when it’s free, who’s complaining?
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