The MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV is known for its extensive story, which continues with each expansion. A player decided to write them down.
What is this undertaking? Reddit user Eriyu shared on the Final Fantasy XIV subreddit that she’s working on a full script of the game. Transcripts of PS1-era JRPGs like this “saved her life” and she said she was surprised that Final Fantasy XIV hasn’t had anything like it yet.
So she took matters into her own hands, Eriyu said.
To give the uninitiated a sense of how massive this endeavor is, Final Fantasy is massive enough to keep players busy for hundreds (and thousands) of hours. According to Reddit user Cyberfunk3, the cutscenes of the main story alone have a total length of more than 100 hours (via Reddit).
And that’s exactly where the problem lies: Because although the cutscenes in the book The Neverending Journey can be viewed, it is not so easy to navigate to certain text passages or scenes. That’s where Eriyu comes in.
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Almost 300,000 words are just the beginning
What exactly does the script contain? So far, Eriyu has written the main story of A Realm Reborn and the Crystal Tower raids. She is currently working on the Heavensward expansion. The text contains all cutscenes of the main quests.
The player has already announced that she will also add optional dialogue, sidequests and removed content if she should eventually reach the current state of the main story.
The document already contains almost 300,000 words. Since the website on which Eriyu hosts her script caused a security warning for some Reddit users, we will not provide a direct link here and instead refer to the Reddit post.
However, Eriyu already seems to be looking for other ways to host her work.
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How does Eriyu do it? By playing the entire game on an alternative account and taking notes. She can copy a large part of the text from the events tab of the chat box, but formatting it is still a lot of work.
Although other 3rd party services would also offer quest dialogues for reference, Eriyu explains that some scenes are missing and that some errors have crept in. It would therefore pull “99% of the text” directly from the game.
Why all this? Mostly just for the love of the game. In practice, the script can be searched with the key combination Ctrl+F to find out the exact wording of a cutscene, to read up on certain story moments or simply to find out how often souls are mentioned (130 times so far!).
The work and effort that gamers put into projects based on their favorite games is always impressive. A fan of the loot shooter Destiny 2 simply took it upon himself to produce his own series and collected almost 56,000 euros via crowdfunding.
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