here’s an essay about video games. ok it’s about one video game. i play it a lot and i like it so i wrote about it. honestly though i have like. so much else i wanna say about ffxiv and i probably will say more about it in the future but for now here is what you get
if you’ve ever played live music with a band, you know what it’s like to play a healer class in final fantasy fourteen online: a realm reborn heavensward stormblood shadowbringers.
i realize that this is an insane thing to open an essay with, and yes that was the reason i used it as the first line because i am if anything a savvy essayist. but unlike most of the insane things i say this one i actually mean. i will back it up. i will also say some other things because i have a lot of feelings about healing in this video game. i’ve played it for nearly 3 years at this point which is a shocking amount of time, but it doesn’t get old to me. or at least hasn’t yet, which doesn’t have me holding my breath.
to loop back though: why am i comparing an mmo to playing live music? there’s no immediate throughline. healing in final fantasy xiv is as easy as pressing the appropriate button; there’s no nuance to the tone or immediacy with which you do so. there’s no explicit rhythm. there’s nobody else in the room with you to strategize with, at least not physically. music requires a skill that’s built up over years of time and experience and practice. final fantasy xiv is a video game.
and yet- and yet. let me paint for you a word picture. imagine: you are healing a final fantasy boss fight. (they’re called trials in the parlance of the game, but are essentially a boss fight prettied up.) you have one co-healer and 6 potential healing targets plus the boss itself. first you have to coordinate with your co-healer and make sure nobody’s abilities are rendered redundant. maybe this means switching from nocturnal to diurnal sect as an astrologian- switching from applying shields to granting regeneration, in other words. since the other two healers, white mage and scholar, are pure regen and pure shields respectively, it lets you work out how you want to heal in a little more granular detail. next you have to figure out what style the other healer is playing in, and adapt to fill in their oversights. most white mages prioritize damage over anything else despite being the strongest raw healers in the game, with a skill that will heal any target from any hp to full. most scholars are performing some kind of self-flagellation by playing scholar. astrologians strike a fun medium with the extra wrinkle of being able to provide damage buffs that can be further strategized into oblivion.
next, you have to actually heal, and that’s the part that feels like playing music.
i play a few instruments very poorly. it’s the usual round-up of bass guitar and keyboards, the hallmark of every kid who wanted desperately to be in a band but just didn’t have the friend group or general resources to do it. despite this, i was able to play music with people a few times in university. i don’t want to talk about the specific circumstances of these occasions because they are very embarrassing in hindsight.
there is a sensation when playing live with a group of constantly, feverishly, teetering on the edge of collapse. like riding a bike and being intimately aware of the momentum helping to keep you upright, knowing that as soon as you stop pedaling and slow to a crawl gravity will do its best to pull you down. man was not meant to balance on two wheels; man was not meant to play purdie shuffles. we do anyway, because the momentum of each movement pulls us forward unabashed. live music is a terrified run full of adrenaline, trusting everyone else on stage to play their part, filling in on short notice to fix anything wrong, using the momentum of the structure to move in time. you become aware of the timing of every motion through hours of practice. you get familiar with the shortcomings of your peers and the problems with your own technique. you get to the end of the same songs countless times but the direction you go to get there is always, always different.
this momentum exists in final fantasy xiv, from a different source. you’re not performing, there aren’t any actual stakes at risk. just numbers and pixels and abstractions of “health” and “damage”. mechanics to do, or to fail. strategies- do i do a full-party delayed heal with horoscope, or do i do a full-party regen with celestial opposition and hope that the regen will carry us all through a second attack? do i prioritize the samurai or the monk for damage buffs? i only have 2 essential dignity charges to use- do i evenly distribute them because of an upcoming tankbuster or do i go for broke? you’re pulling yourself forward through the fight, your only aid outside the party’s actions simple momentum.
the whole fight, you’re trying to stay in harmony with the other members of the party. and you’re moving- final fantasy xiv is notorious for being an mmo with a lot of movement mechanics. stand in a spot highlighted orange, and you’ll get hit. it’s simple, on the face of it. all you have to do to win is hit the boss and move at the appropriate times. easy.
final fantasy makes it hard by adding the dimension of timing to it all. every action, every attack, has a specific time attached to it. each cooldown takes a certain number of seconds to become available for use again. you have your global cooldown, a number that’s attached to your main skills and which is usually in the environment of 2-3 seconds. there’s also attacks or skills that have their own cooldowns. these are generally longer; for example, benediction, the white mage skill that raises one player to full health, can’t be used for 120 seconds after it’s popped. your toolset is not only limited by its breadth, but by your past choices. if you mess up, there’s a consequence that reaches two minutes into the future.
to further complicate things, there’s the added wrinkle of playing a caster class in the game. casters do large amounts of damage (black mage has long been touted as the single most damaging class in the game, given the correct circumstances. this may have changed due to recent patches but frankly i haven’t paid attention to that. point is black mage makes number go big.) but are hamstrung in a not immediately obvious way. casters cannot move while casting. since cast times on spells range from the short (red mage’s jolt/astrologian’s malefic, which both hover around 2 seconds depending on how much spell speed you’ve put into your character’s gear) to the long (9 seconds for a raise spell on any class/5 seconds for most black mage spells), it means that your poor character is stuck in place for what feels like an intolerable amount of time. the payback’s good, because casters do a lot of damage, but it requires an incredible amount of knowledge about each fight in order to play decently. sure, you can move to avoid an attack, but that requires sacrificing your cast, and with it that cast’s damage. it’s common for black mages in particular to find one spot in a fight that they can plant themselves in, moving as little as possible to avoid area-of-effect attacks and boss mechanics. this is, of course, difficult to do. we’re talking about healing in the game though. and healers are different.
while still operating with the same limitations and tools, healers are not just responsible for their own damage but for literally everyone else staying alive. the difficulty of this isn’t limited to just the boss they’re fighting but to the skill of the group they’re with. there are telegraphed attacks that hit the entire party, which is fine- healers have tools for that. but the untelegraphed mistakes, a party member being in the wrong place at the wrong time, force an instant response. there’s constant evolution in how you play any given fight. who knows how well the rest of your party knows the fight? who knows how well you know it?
which brings me to my next point. in music, there’s the phenomenon of the virtuoso. the sort of person who knows their instrument inside and out, knows their techniques to the point where they could take their most technically difficult piece and essentially play it in their sleep. someone with the kind of skill that allows them to not just play these technically difficult pieces but embellish on them; the upgraded version of the kid in high school choir who thought they were hot shit and did runs and such during the choir’s rendition of like a bruno mars song. these people are either really annoying or really cool and i’m not making a judgement about them. but i will say that there’s a point in anyone’s life where they look at a virtuosic performance (mine was eddie van halen’s “eruption” because of course it was) and go “damn, i wish i could do that.” most of us can’t, which is fine because that sort of mastery takes a long ass time and dedication and maybe we have more than one hobby or really aren’t that dedicated.
luckily this can be simulated. i myself am not a virtuoso of final fantasy xiv, nor do i really intend to be. despite that, there are times where i’ve felt a particular way while playing. pulling off something i know i shouldn’t be able to just because i know the fight well, for one. or the magic of slidecasting, only possible when you’ve internalized your global cooldown to the point where it becomes second nature. it requires knowing both where to go, how to get there, and the exact moment when your cast has reached the point of no return. once you hit that point, you can move early- which lets you cast more- which lets you do something that by design the game is trying to make it impossible for you to do.
it feels electric when you pull it off without meaning to. dancing around a boss, in lockstep with your party members, keeping an eye on your various gauges and responsibilities. are the tanks healed? yes. are the dps healed? yes. is there anything coming up to shield for? sure. do i have buffs to give? better give those. and then the damage rotation, once everyone’s accounted for. simple. a constant, refreshing checklist. to have all that in mind and effortlessly slidecast out of an attack that can kill you instantly feels like you’re about to be smote (smited? smitten?) by the hand of god. but you can do it again, and again, and again. you can refine this aspect of this video game into a work of infinite grace.
it feels weird to write so passionately about something so stupid. it’s a game. it doesn’t matter to anyone who doesn’t play it, and frankly it barely matters to the people who do. it’s like any other hobby. there are people out there who deeply excel at it because they want to, because it’s something they’re passionate about. video games simply have an extra layer of perceived disposability because of their digital nature. it’s not real, or at least not real in the same way that playing music is. and it’s not creative, necessarily- the parameters you can work with are set in stone. there is no way to create a new boss fight out of whole cloth the same way a new song can be written.
i love it anyway. i love that i can peek into the feeling of mastery of a skill without really being a master. i love the stacked challenges- the timing and the movement and the list of responsibilities. there’s always a new goal to work towards, if you want to find it. always a new way to improve. right now, with so much going on that i feel uncertain about the weeks ahead, it’s nice to have something to do like this. i like the structure. i like the community. truthfully, i play final fantasy xiv to heal others in the game, but i think it’s turned out to heal me. (niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice)
was that too cheesy? lmk in the comments/replies babey