Summary
- Living Memory is a visually stunning area in Final Fantasy 14, with unique districts and unforgettable sights.
- The theme of death and loss is prevalent in Dawntrail, emphasizing the acceptance of change and moving forward.
- The beauty of Living Memory being transient echoes this theme of loss.
There have been many 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy 14 areas that I’ve fallen in love with over the years. Not just locations that give us breathtaking scenery, but incredible backstories for the people that live there and their cultures too. It’s always impressive to see something brand new and unlike anything we’ve had before. Sol🎃ution Nine from Dawntrail, the futuristic, cyberpunky slick city, is a great example of this, but it doesn’t take the crown for Dawntrail’s most stunning area - that award goes to Living Memory.
Major Dawntrail spoilers follow for both the narrativ🔴e and late-game surprises.
Set in perpetual twilight with the constant glimmer and twinkle of warm lights surrounding every building and attraction, Living Memory is split into different districts that each offer unique and unforgettable sights. One area has tranquil canals with boat rides and impressไive fountains, elsewhere is a theme park with a Ferris wheel, a monorail, detailed star-speckled floor designs, and a whole medieval-style castle. Moving on from there is a coliseum, rainbow-coloured bathing pools, and mysterious recreations of a culture from another world. Over all this, a magnificent statue of a woman looms, bathing the city in her golden glow.
Final Fantasy💞 14: Dawntrail Review - Worth Its Salt
Much like the sunrise at dawn, Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail shines brightest when its had time to rise to the occasi✨on.
There is so much to absorb here that you’ll long to check out each and every little detail, but your time is limited. Living Memory doesn’t stay this beautiful for long, and eventually, it turns into d💮ark, drab buildings and empty streets that feel cold as the harsh light of the day returns to the land. And it stays that wa💝y permanently. But let me explain what Living Memory is all about first.
If you’re still here, you’ve accepted that big spoilers 🗹are inbound.
Living Memory is the fabled City of Gold that our Warrior of Light and friends have been hunting for, but it’s not quite what you’d think. It’s part of another reflection, a whol✅e other world. On top of that, no one here is alive.
By the time you reach Living Memory, you’ve become acquainted with the concept of Regulators that the citizens of Alexandria use. These little head gadgets store spare souls so that if someone has an untimely death, another soul gets u𝕴sed and they come back to life. Regulators can’t stop death from old age or illne🥃ss, but they offer a safety net for any type of mortal danger.
As part of𝔉 this process, souls and their memories are backed up to the Cloud so that people can regain their consciousness properly when they return to life. But this serves another purpose too. When people die, the proper death, not a quick comeback from a Regulator, the copies of who they were when alive can still exist through technology⛎, with Dawntrail referring to these people as Endless. It’s in Living Memory where the Endless reside.
Endless don’t require sustenance like living people, though th🅷ey can eat just for fun. They can also teleport to different areas at will in🐻 Living Memory rather than having to leg it around like a usual person. They are a digital, artificial upload copy of a deceased person’s memories and not a genuine version of their soul, but they do exist in physical space in that they can be touched and interact with the environment.
The problem is maintaining this technology requires a lot of aether from living people… so, you know, real living people have to die so that the Endless can go on ‘living’. Naturally, our Warrior of Light can’t let that happen, so as part of the Main Scenario Quest, you go around Living Memory getting to know the residents before switching off each terminal, deleting the saved Endless and removing the glorious faca💦de from an otherwise ugly location.
There’s a lot to unpack on the idea of Endless not being “real people”, which I won’t get into here. However, you can’t help but compare the idea of our Warrior of Light and their comrad🐻es deciding it’s ok to 🥀delete/kill Endless with Emet-Selch’s view of sundered people. Yet when he did it, he was the villain as we were the ones being killed.
It’s not an easy task to swallow to delete the Endless as Dawntrail goes to great lengths to challenge our morality gauge with this. Included amongst the Endless are characters we care for, and more im𝓰portantly, characters that our NPC friends have a deep emotional connection with too. The quests in this final section of Dawntrail explore these relationships, as well as learning about other Endless and showing us their bittersweet existences of being able to rekindle lost love after death or live a life they couldn’t have had in the real world.
Death is a prevalent theme throughout Dawntrail, and it explores the concept of living forevไer in more ways than one, as well as evaluating how those who live on deal with the loss of a loved one. One of the first examples we see of this is with the Yok Huy, who create tombstones for people before they die, carving their stories with the idea that people live on in the memories of others and so by recording them in stone, they will be remembered all the more.
Alexandria chases the same dream of living on forever but in a more literal sense. They also protect themselves against grief as when someone dies, all living people with Regulators have their memories of that person removed to avoid the pain of loss. As part of our journey through Dawntrail, we have to face the idea of death and loss head-on, and at the ෴same time, make others face the same reality whether they want to or not.
Living Memory in its prime is a phenomenal area to view and explore. It’s the best area that Final Fantasy 14 has ever given players, but it’s a temporary prize. With such love and attention to detail poured into Living Memory in both 🍒aesthetics, lore, and the Endless, it’s clear Square Enix did this to further emphasise the the꧑me of the acceptance of death and loss. Each time you switch off a terminal, you’re warned with a pop-up message that the area cannot be restored after that point. It’s made very clear that you are losing something by moving forward.
You could technically keep Living Memory ꧑beautiful by never progressing through the Main Scenario Quest, either as you play it now or when New Game Plus gets added for Dawntrail, but it would come at a cost. You’d be stopping the clock on a story that is forever evolving and growing, remaining completely stationary and never moving forward to the future, much like the Endless frozen in time in Living Memory itself.
I’m Worried That Square Enix Is Over-C﷽orrecting 🎀With Dawntrail
The community's lukewar🍸m reaction to FFXIV: Dawntrail seems to have Square Enix too eager to win back p🥃layer's favour.
