One of my goals in content to beat before Endwalker was to finish the Four Lords questline on Ben. I know… I know… you’re probably saying – but this was content from two expansions ago. And you would be right!

A long, long time back, I did beat the Byakko fight. But that’s where I stopped once I realized there were going to be a series of trials for this quest line.

My common approach to trials that are not included in the MSQ is to skip them. Trials in general are one of my least favorite types of content in FFXIV, so much that I’ve done most of the Heavensward ones unsynced and don’t know a thing about the fights. That’s why I never run Trials on roulette – I don’t want to put myself or my party through that pain.

I didn’t know that I only had two more trials to face in the Four Lords questline to finish it. For some reason, I had the idea there were a lot more fights to do. So I put it off and put it off until this past weekend.

With the help of FC folks, I managed to make short work of the remaining two fights – Suzaku and Seiryu. We did them in a duty finder party – so no unsyncing these – and I went in blind to both fights.

There were a few snags and a lot of learning to be done on my part. Suzaku was a lot easier than Seiryu was for me, though it took me to discuss some of Suzaku’s mechanics later with FC folks to understand the whole quadrant explosion thing.

Seiryu got hairy (or should I say scaly) more than once during the process. But both seem to be learn-able fights overall. Nothing so bad that I’d swear off doing them ever again. Not like I will have the chance (or want the chance) for that, though! XD

While I obviously wasn’t super invested in this storyline (since I dropped it in the middle as I did years ago), it had its interesting parts. I was especially curious about the elements that suggest Tenzen may have been not just a Warrior of Light from the previous time, but even a previous incarnation of the player character.

This lends strength to a few lore ideas I’ve had for my own stories – things that FFXIV doesn’t explicitly state but only suggests. This is something that I really like about how the game handles lore. It gives enough wiggle room for players to say “this is a possibility” or to simply ignore something if they don’t want to apply it to their own character.

Anyhow, it felt good to finish up this lingering quest line, earn the /hum emote and mark one thing off my list. I still need to do the entire questline of Werlyt on Ben… but that’s something to tackle some other time.