FFXIV Heavensward: A Pictorial Journey to the Churning Mists

Spoilers and such! I’m going to try not to give too much away, but screenshots will be posted!

I really meant to blog about our progression in Heavensward last Friday. But I got lazy and didn’t get around to it, sadly. So that means I have twice as much to blog about now, and moreso. And man, what a ride it’s been!

When I left off at the last blog post, we had yet to defeat Ravana at level 53. We have since beat him and moved ever deeper into the winding Heavensward story. I remain totally impressed by the complexity of the story as well as the gradual and sometimes moving development of NPCs around me.

Here’s a secret: I didn’t start out liking a number of NPCs when they joined my story. As a dragoon main class, two of them had acted as either a rival or an outright enemy to me… both for complex reasons of their own. I love how Heavensward reaches back to characters from 2.0 and starts to show you how much more there is underneath what you thought you knew.

Syn commented on the darkness of the story. It is dark, and sometimes it feels like the dangers we face are too big to overcome. But I responded that I feel the little victories as I watch our NPC companions change. Like good writing, it’s often small things that they do and what they come to realize. When they start to grow as characters, I feel it’s a positive and important step forward for everyone.

I love how the characters I doubted and viewed with mistrust or apathy… turned to groan-worthy… then to characters I start to admit that I’m beginning to like… to me finally saying, “If they do something bad to this character, I’m going to be sad!”

This is the first time FFXIV has provided a long-standing party of characters who journey with you at this length. And I think that it worked very well.

Syn and I are currently level 56 and have left off in the story at that point. Seeing that she’s out of town for at least a week, I don’t know how much progression I’ll make on Tai. But I do expect to work on leveling up Zuri in her absence!

So, to start with, we beat Ravana and befriended dragons.

Once that was done, we were granted access to Sohm Al, where we fought many dragons and crystals did funky things.

After passing through that trial, we came out into the vast, beautiful Churning Mists. Here, we met with moogles. Lots of moogles. And some very awesome sky weather.

Moogle quests award some… interesting looking armor. I think moogles were secretly laughing at us when we weren’t looking. Thankfully, we outgrew the armor quickly.

Our party rests under the stars as we draw nearer to the object of our journey. We reflect upon the trials of the past and consider what is yet to come.

I think I’ll leave off here as the rest of the story in this zone is much more spoiler-filled.

I really enjoy the Churning Mists (despite the fact I was under leveled and had to take on millions of moogle quests). It’s nice that the zone gets you flying pretty early on in, which makes access to just about everything much, much better.

Looking forward to where this story is going to take us!

Comments