War in Wonderland
Anyone who thinks of online role-playing games imagines a fantasy world garnished with dragons, magic, and knights—made up of forests, ice, and lava caves—where, as a poorly dressed loser, you have to slaughter rats and beetles for months just to stand a chance of emulating the veterans in their glittering armor and enormous mounts.
Final Fantasy 14 is no exception. The successor to various Super Nintendo and PlayStation legends appears at first glance to be a perfectly ordinary MMORPG with tanks and instances and buffs, with players connected via the internet merrily hopping over bridges, rivers, and meadows, facing end bosses that, as a beginner, make you wet yourself in sheer overwhelm.
The story is as old as it is uninspired. A tyrannical empire on the other side of the continent plans to seize world domination using monsters and machines. Together with a busty blonde, a yellow bird, and generally existence-weary people who also pay ten euros a month, the aspiring savior of the world tries to prevent this with skill—by swinging a sword diligently, learning spells, and occasionally hiding behind a shield when things get too wild out front.
Anyone who has ever been enthused by World of Warcraft, Guild Wars, or those countless Korean pseudo-anime games may safely doze off at such a plot—and yet Final Fantasy 14 contains far more soul than most of its competitors. Even in the first hours of gameplay, you sense a certain tragedy pressing down on this world.
The fact that Final Fantasy 14 was, a few years ago, a financial and qualitative fiasco that nearly drove its Japanese manufacturer Square Enix into ruin and was rebuilt from the ground up is not only noticeable in the game; it was also meaningfully integrated into the world of Eorzea’s history—as an apocalyptic catastrophe that was barely survived.
What remained was a barren, devastated desert landscape, in the center of which stretches the Sultanate of Ul’dah—a stone trading metropolis from which one can, and must, explore the surrounding city-states if one wishes to become one of the legendary adventurers who hunt bloodthirsty monsters across the prairie by day and invest their hard-earned gil in the local casino by night.
If you cautiously venture more than five meters beyond the city and accept assignments from residents that might lead you to the nearby mine, a small train station, or the ghostly graveyard, you see them for the first time: the refugees who managed to escape the so-called Garlean Empire.
They wear nothing but dirty rags. They live in damp caves and windswept tent camps. Their corpses line the roadside. The working population insults them, spits at them, and beats them. They had to leave their families behind. They have long since lost hope. Whether they even still want to live, they themselves no longer really know.
So while you cheerfully butcher monsters to the accompaniment of orchestral background music, thinking only of the next golden suit of armor and the diamond sword, you are watched from all sides by people who have lost everything—who had to flee a fanatical nation for whom nothing is sacred, who now vegetate together, crammed and homeless.
And suddenly I start to think. I draw parallels to our world. I think of Syria and the Islamic State and crisis zones we may not even hear much about. I deliberately take on quests that provide digital refugee children with medicine. And then I feel bad. Why am I helping a character in a game instead of real people out there who fear for their lives and those of their families?
No one would seriously have played a game called Refugees 3D—except perhaps the students who programmed it and the journalists who reported on it. But because the theme is embedded in a mass-market title like Final Fantasy 14, available for newer PlayStation consoles and PC, you start to reflect. You have plenty of time for that. The world is large, after all, and your feet are slow.
And when, in the next village, a farmer’s wife once again berates and drives away a group of refugees, I want to intervene. I press X. “Leave these people alone!” I want to shout. “Give them a piece of bread!” But the system ignores me. Compassion is not programmed into this scene. The farmer’s wife starts talking about the weather; the refugees stare blankly into the distance.
I also wonder how many of my fellow players bouncing around me—people with real lives, real friends, real families—actually engage with the deeper substance of this game. With the world, with those placed within it to tell a story. With the problems that arise when unscrupulous fanatics come to power.
Is there even a deeper meaning? Or is what Final Fantasy 14 pretends to be merely an edgy universe draped with a more or less developed scenario designed to lure me into collecting more experience points, growing stronger, checking off lists—more, ever more—so that I won’t cancel my subscription?
Collect ten marmot fillets here, forge three storm blades there, catch eight daggerfish on the other side of the map—perhaps that is all some flesh-and-blood players extract from Final Fantasy 14. Story, what story? Oh yes, that blonde with the big boobs—she’s great! What more could you want? And just because you’ve given a refugee in a video game a warm meal doesn’t mean you’ve truly understood anything—let alone accomplished something.
When I finally stand before the gates of the Garlean Empire, before the manifestation of terror, laden with gleaming armor pieces and a gigantic weapon, everything happens quickly. I am thrown, together with a motley crew of fighters and mages, into the end boss’s catacombs. A massive machine attacks us. Bored, we beat on the thing for fifteen minutes. It explodes. The end. If only saving the world and resolving the refugee crisis were that simple in real life.