(Shots by me.)
There's a random FFXIV sidequest that lives rent free in my head. I've been thinking about it for like a year now and the writing is just so goddamn raw that I don't know if I'll ever stop. Like I'm seriously considering getting a tattoo of a quote from this extremely missable bottom-priority sidequest. It's fucking raw!
Context
Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn (ARR, or 2.0) was rushed out in an extremely short period of time following the abject failure of Final Fantasy XIV 1.0. It's a completely remade game. As ARR was hastily put together, 1.0 was slowly sunset. The planned storylines were scrapped, and the world began to face a Calamity in the form of a moon (Dalamud) falling from the sky. This caused monsters to appear all over the place, and all sorts of other nasty things to occur - basically, everything went to shit ingame real fast.
In the (literal) final hours of 1.0, players built a human wall around the city of Ul'dah. They hopped aboard their Goobbue mounts (pictured above), and as the moon grew larger and larger in the sky, they blocked monsters from entering the city in quiet solidarity.
And then Dalamud fell. The servers went silent.
Five years passed ingame. For players, it was seven months before they could return to Eorzea.
In the Church
In the northwest corner of the early-game zone Eastern Thanalan lies a church. The main scenario quest (MSQ) sends you there a number of times, and within are a number of NPCs who provide yellow sidequests - these kinds of quests are pretty much only for learning more about the world, and provide extremely small amounts of experience and money. You can understand why the majority of players would skip them, particularly given the mixed quality of ARR's narrative.
One shining star in that jumbled expanse is Voyage of the Goobbue, given to you by a man named Barryn. He says:
The sun has shone upon a terrible sight today. One of the bereaved wished to place upon the grave of his beloved a sprig of Althyk lavender. He strayed far, for the flower is sparse in these parts─and was grievously wounded by fiends. Grief makes us all slow in wits and limb, and I fear that these attacks will not cease until the creatures are gone. I pray you, banish the foul things. They were last seen to the east, near the remains of a goobbue.
You accept the quest, of course, and travel a short distance to the east. On a small shelf at the top of a ravine, easily overlooked during normal gameplay, is your target: a pack of mandragoras. You dispatch them with ease, of course, because you're the Warrior of Light. But then you notice a unique sight, seen nowhere else in the game: a dead goobbue, covered in what must be a dozen kinds of plants and flowers.
When the Calamity struck, it sundered life everywhere—and not only among our races. Look around, and you will see how things have fallen apart. Feet, claws, roots—all have been torn from the earth they were planted on.
The dead goobbue was a child of Coerthas. The Calamity shattered its native mountains, and it fled before destruction as a caravan flies before a sandstorm.
Years, it wandered. We found it dying and received its memories. It had gathered seeds from every land it passed through, and they flower upon its corpse, a living map of its loss and exile.
North to south, mountains to the desert...cloudberry and shooting stars, marybells and cliff roses, Althyk lavender from lower Thanalan, even roselles from Bloodshore.
To wander is a dream and a nightmare. Adventurers such as yourself must know it better than I, but I imagine there are days when the flame of adventure gutters, and you feel yourself to be as bereft as those in Lost Hope...
...and upon us, no flowers grow.
After returning to Barryn and completing the quest, an NPC appears near the fallen goobbue. He provides extra context:
It is my belief that this goobbue was present at the Battle of Carteneau five years ago. After its rider was struck down in battle, it sought shelter from the destruction raining down from the heavens, passing through the Twelveswood before arriving here in Thanalan.
During this journey, the seeds of myriad plants came to cling to its body. Though the poor goobbue succumbed to its injuries in the end, these seeds would take root and eventually sprout from its carcass.
It's amazing to see such an amalgam of species from across Eorzea. To think that such beauty could arise from that terrible tragedy... The gods do indeed work in mysterious ways.
My favourite moments in FFXIV's narrative are the ones that are messy and heartfelt - the ones that have something to say. This quest speaks directly to my heart more than pretty much anything else in the game... and it's something that the vast majority of players will just walk straight past.
Isn't that wild.
