When I first played Final Fantasy XI, I wanted to be a Dragoon. I wanted this because I had never really given a whole lot of thought to the Coolest Job before then, but Dragoon wore cool armor, had a cute pet, and got to jump around in neat ways. So I aimed for Dragoon as my main job. This, however, did not happen; what I actually got to do was play White Mage, which I didn’t think was cool at all but actually gave me odds of getting parties in the amount of time I had in a given evening.

But going back to FFXI, this was not a concern. My Dragoon is 99 now. I can play Dragoon any time I like, thanks to Trusts. And I don’t.

Some of this is because there are other jobs I prefer to play. Rune Fencer, for example, is a fun job that didn’t exist when I was first playing the game but ties nicely into my desire to swap between tanky and DPS options depending on my mood and needs. Blue Mage is pretty cool in the game. But another reason is because Dragoon had an outsized importance in my mind due to being a job I didn’t get to play. It isn’t that any more. I can play it. But that also means that I’m sort of done with it… and that’s all right.

Something that MMORPGs are really bad at in general is the fact that people wind up being done. And to be clear, as someone who deeply adores MMORPGs in general, I know this is just… normal. People wind up done with games all the time. I didn’t decide that I was done with dozens of games I used to play based on some momentous event, I just was.

With single-player games this can be a lot easier. You can be done with the game when the credits roll, although sometimes you aren’t really done with it. But with continual games you just have to find a point when you are sated. You have had enough. You do not need to build another civilization in Civilization VI. Your factory in Satisfactory is refined enough for your tastes. There are going to be more patches in Final Fantasy XIV, but you do not need to see them.

And that isn’t a problem or a bad thing. That’s kind of how it works.

Understand that as I say this, I have almost definitely played more of FFXIV than like 90% of the playerbase at a minimum because I play a lot of this game. I really enjoy it. But I also understand that this game has been running now for more than a decade. It isn’t weird if the things that have kept you playing for the past decade just don’t delight you any more. That’s honestly normal!

We get bored doing the same thing for an entire decade. Everyone does. I play a lot of different video games on a regular basis, I even review a lot of different video games, and sometimes I get bored of them. I do a lot of other things, too.

None of this is a problem except for the fact that there’s a consistent opinion that FFXIV is supposed to provide perpetual new entertainment that never gets tiresome at all. (And to be clear, this is not limited to FFXIV, it’s every MMORPG on the planet, but this column is about FFXI and FFXIV so cool your jets.) Which is why I started off by talking about Dragoon in FFXI: For a long time, I thought that if I could get that up to 75, that would open up the world for me. I thought that it was my white whale. And yet when it happened I… mostly just felt done.

And that’s all right. It’s all right to be done. It’s actually fine to look back and say that I accomplished something I had wanted, and maybe it didn’t feel like I had expected it would, but that’s all right too. The end of the journey comes as it does; you don’t get to dictate those terms.

Things end. We can be mad about them when they do, sure, and maybe we aren’t ready for them to end. But no amount of slamming our heads against the reality will make things turn backward. When you are done with a game, you’re done, no matter how much you might not have something on deck to replace it. You move forward and you carry it with you.

Maybe it’s not that something fundamentally has changed in the game or the content. Maybe it’s as good as it has ever been, but you’ve just had enough of it. And maybe it might be kinda weird to say that because you don’t want to say goodbye, but continually insisting that you aren’t done when it just doesn’t delight you any more isn’t going to work either. Sorry.

Am I saying that I’m done with FFXIV? Nope, not at all. Am I saying that the only reasons to critique elements of the game are based on people being tired with it? Also no; I have no problem being critical of the game for problems both old and new. This is not a meta column in any fashion; it’s just something that is on my mind because we’re looking at a solid 23 years of FFXI and I find myself looking at that game, my first MMORPG ever, and generally feeling mostly done with it. There’s more I could do there, but I kind of don’t want to.

And that’s… fine. I will never not love that game. I will never not think about it. It will always have a special place in my heart. But it’s all right if the things I have to do in the game but have not done are there intentionally because I would rather have things I could technically still do than clear them. Like that one quest sitting unfinished in your journal because you’d rather not have an empty list. It’s all right to be done in every practical and emotional sense.

Yes, I realize that the internet in general has produced a bizarre sense of entitlement and a need for perpetuity wherein people get outrageously mad that the franchises they loved at age eight are not equally appealing at 43. I know that people have trouble understanding that a cartoon you liked in 1988 was a product of its time and it should not, in fact, be required viewing for a modern child who just wants to watch a funny cartoon show that uses the same names. But we can still fight against the idea that liking something for years means that it will be your Forever Entertainment. It is, in fact, all right to be done.

Feedback, as always, is welcome in the comments down below or via mail to eliot@massivelyop.com. Next week, obviously I’ll be seeing how the new field content feels to play! I mean, what else would I be doing? Rewatching Voltron Legendary Defender? Actually, I might do that too, but it’s not going to be going in the column either way.

The Nymian civilization hosted an immense amount of knowledge and learning, but so much of it has been lost to the people of Eorzea. That doesn’t stop Eliot Lefebvre from scrutinizing Final Fantasy XIV each week in Wisdom of Nym, hosting guides, discussion, and opinions without so much as a trace of rancor.