FFXIV: The Japanese Horror Story Continues!
Spoilers: If you haven’t played Tam Tara Hard Mode.
A little over a year ago, I lauded the writers of FFXIV for a series of ongoing events that culminated in a pretty cool Japanese horror story in the game.
This is, of course, the story of Edda, a conjurer-turned-necromancer, whom you first meet as a low level adventurer. Her failures as a healer at first seem to echo what you’d normally see in a player party who is struggling to make it through an instance. We all know that feeling of having a bad player in a PUG.
But we later discover her failure led to the death of her fiance, who, unlike us blessed by the Mother Crystal, was a real death. He’s dead dead. And she’s carrying his head around in a bag.
If that’s not disturbing enough, once you reach level cap, the events of Tam Tara Hard Mode (which I’ve yet to play) continue the twisted story. Apparently Edda’s been busy in her insane struggle to revive her beloved. The demonic powers within Tam Tara are just eating this up, of course, and you have all kinds of messed up things to fight before you finally kill what remains of Edda’s fiance as the final boss.
At the end of the dungeon, a distraught Edda backs herself over the edge of the summoning platform and seemingly falls to her death. But not before she gives you a really creepy smile.
Shortly after, as you talk to one of Edda’s previous adventuring partners, who took part in the Tam Tara Hard Mode storyline, he sees a disturbing visage that your character does not…
What has become of Edda? As of last year when I wrote the first horror story article, people were getting a momentary glimpse of her “ghost” as she appears with a 1% chance in one of the three main cities at night.
But now, it seems that her story may continue!
Deep Dungeon Horrors
We don’t know a whole lot about the upcoming Deep Dungeon, Palace of the Dead. We know it’ll be located in the South Shroud. We know we’ll be fighting undead. But it wasn’t until we saw the first footage of the dungeon that speculation began rising. Because, within that video, we got a quick glace at what was a decidedly female figure. Who seemed to be dressed up for a wedding, perhaps?
Who has a strange, floating head-like creature on her shoulder…
This instantly got the community speculating… could this be Edda?
It seems this could be possible! In a newer interview, Yoshi-P acknowledged:
Well, it’s still good that it will have a variety of purposes. By the way, from name of the content with the word “dead” and what you’ve shown, we’re expecting Edda to be involved… can you speak about that?
Yoshida: Well, a certain woman was shown in the trailer, but please wait until the content is implemented. After you complete the Deep Dungeon for this patch, there will be certain side quests that occur, and once you clear a certain quest, a certain character’s story will be completed. However, if you want to know all of the truth around that, you’ll have to wait until more floors are added. Hopefully players get excited to find out more and challenge the new floors.
I was already hyped about the Deep Dungeon, but if they really do continue the story of Edda in such a way, this will make me really happy. It just goes to show how the writing team takes notice of even the little details, carefully weaving a history that builds up to something much bigger and unexpected. This is how good storytelling works.
I hope we’ll see Edda again! I want our FFXIV Japanese Horror Story to continue!