Since its beginning, Final Fantasy XIV has dedicated itself to subversion above all. It eschews the tendency of fantasy stories to largely focus on nobles, knights, and specific figures by presenting many of its conflicts through the perspectives of everyday people. In doing so, it has solidified itself as a story explicitly about the people society deems discardable—the marginalized, the poor, and the oppressed—and the potential of collective power. Now, with its latest patch for the last act of Shadowbringers, it is questioning the individualism and narrative foundations that lie under the surface of the entire RPG genre.

“Whenever we say light versus dark, each person seems to have this subconscious image that light equals justice and darkness equals evil,” says Final Fantasy XIV director Naoki Yoshida in the first episode of a documentary series on the creation of Shadowbringers. “I kept telling the team we’re changing our perspective for how we’re looking at good and evil.”

Shadowbringers takes place in The First, a different world from the one you, as the Warrior of Light, had previously explored. Ravaged by a calamity known as The Flood of Light, those who survived it are confined to a final habitable region called Norvrandt. It is divided between two cities: The Crystarium—a sanctuary city and your group’s central hub—and Eulmore, the city of pleasures where the rich live in decadence at the end of days at the benefit of the poor.

Throughout Shadowbringers, you are the only one who can see and speak with Ardbert’s remaining spirit. At the end of the final battle, he merges with you to help you defeat Emet-Selch—the primary antagonist of Shadowbringers—and bring peace to Norvrandt once again. In order to give him and his friends justice, you spend the beginning of the patch restoring and rehabilitating his memory to the people of the Crystarium.

In the process, you're also rewriting an old legend. “Echoes of a Fallen Star,” the most recent story patch, focuses on how, long before you came along, The First had its own Warriors of Darkness who were led by a man named Ardbert. They were the ones who caused the disastrous Flood of Light and now, a century later, they are almost erased from history. The few who remember them do so with resentment and hate as "the Warriors of Light", oblivious to the group having sacrificed everything, including their lives, to save their people.

You spend Shadowbringers traveling these lands, defeating beasts created by the light known as Sin Eaters and Lightwardens. As you do, you restore the night sky to the people of Norvrandt and become their Warrior of Darkness. In the aftermath of the expansion’s main story, the people of Norvrandt are rebuilding as they learn to live with the darkness for the first time in a century.

But Ardbert is not the only character from this forgotten history to be returning. Elidibus, the person who manipulated him and his comrades into causing the Flood of Light in the first place, has chosen this moment to make his return. Disguising himself as Ardbert, whose reputation you have now changed to that of a martyr, his goals are as apocalyptic and evil as ever. But he takes a vastly different and more insidious approach from those before him. Unlike his predecessors, he doesn’t set out to explicitly oppress; rather, he operates like a demagogue populist, capitalizing on the hopes of the people of the Crystarium and manipulating them for his own gains.

With your inadvertent help, he raises their class consciousness and encourages them to fight for themselves and the future of Norvrandt—and, unknowingly, his own goals. Inspired by the heroism in you and Ardbert, these everyday people, who were presented as beings to save and little more, now possess an agency that threatens not just your work, but also your entire narrative.

This is a brutal, ironic twist in a story that has always centered class conflict.