finaling my fantasy. fourteen

And Minfilia... clearly doesn't know what to do with him, or how much she should be deferring to him. Her response to his question about the matter of Ramuh being resolved reads as a caution against overconfidence, one which seems to go straight over Alphinaud's head because he simply has no real idea what the Scions have been contending with for the past five years. Yet Minfilia herself then hesitates, saying, "I take it we can proceed as discussed?" to which Alphinaud replies in a very smug tone, "Why do you ask? You scarce need my permission to act." The way he says it almost feels like a challenge, and it seems to leave Minfilia at a loss.

What really gets me is how he behaves after the attack on the Waking Sands, when he marches into the Church of St. Adama Landama looking for Cid. Declaring his intent to revive the Scions, he immediately starts talking about killing Garuda and sending a message to the other tribes.

Not a word about Minfilia. Not a word about a rescue mission. Not a word about locating the rest of the Archons--people he knows! people who were devoted disciples of his grandfather! Not even a word about Urianger, the guy who's practically family to him who was also taken in the attack.

Instead there's this:

I see now why the others rated you so highly. When you were caught in the midst of that aetheric bubble with the dragon, I was all but certain my next mission would be to find a new champion. Thank the gods for sparing me that inconvenience. I have quite enough to do already.

I think players have a tendency to focus on how Alphinaud speaks about the Warrior of Light here (understandably) but what I notice on a second run is how Alphinaud speaks about himself--as though it's self-evident that he is in charge. It's all I, my, me.

I don't think it's a reach to say that Alphinaud sounds as though already given the others up for lost, and sees this as an opportunity to take control and remake the Scions into what he thinks they should be.

And then there's like 18 quests entirely focused on getting into the Stone Vigil to find Cid's airship, and then another twelve quests to find and defeat Garuda, all with zero mention of the rest of the Scions.

But beyond just Alphinaud's character, it feels like some really bizarre writing choices were made here. It's not just that Alphinaud doesn't say anything about the missing Scions, it's that the Warrior of Light doesn't bring it up either. The Warrior of Light knows that several of their comrades were taken alive and are being held prisoner! The Warrior of Light knows that Livia sas Junius intends to torture Minfilia. There's no reason for us to assume they wouldn't tell Alphinaud what they saw in the Echo... but we'll come back to that.

I honestly can't tell whether we're truly supposed to see Alphinaud in such a sinister light, whether this was about prioritizing a certain duty order over storytelling, or whether something important got cut in the ARR streamlining. I'm not saying it can't be intentional--with the way Alphinaud is written and directed in ARR generally, I think we're meant not to see him in the best light, and it builds effectively toward his greater and more costly mistakes with the Crystal Braves. But in this particular case, I would be more confident in my reading if there was even a single line where Alphinaud acknowledged the kidnapping or even the possibility of survivors, but made it clear that he was deliberately prioritizing Garuda over a rescue mission, or even a line where the WoL raises the question and Alphinaud brushes them off. Without that, it feels not simply like a character moment, but like an important story beat is missing.

All the same, perhaps we are meant to read Alphinaud in exactly as harsh a light as he appears here, because there's a noticeable shift later on, after the Garuda fight. It is here that Gaius appears and goads Garuda into renewing her attack, slaughtering the captive kobolds and Amalj'aa whose dying prayers in turn summon Titan and Ifrit. Here, for possibly the first time since his arrival in Eorzea, we see Alphinaud caught off guard. Three primals at once was not part of his grand plan, and he stands there stammering, "No... No, this is all wrong..." until Cid snaps him out of it by shouting at him to run. He then watches with horror from the airship as the Ultima Weapon consumes all three primals, gaining their power. "Twelve have mercy!" he cries, his confidence finally shaken. "What chance have we against such an ungodly creation!?"

Even now, Alphinaud is eager not to appear on the back foot. When Cid explains who Gaius is, Alphinaud quickly replies that he read about him in his grandfather's journals. When Cid wonders aloud how the Ultima Weapon could have escaped the Alliance's attention, Alphinaud responds as though this question is directed at him, as though he can somehow speak for the entire Eorzean Alliance after his brief time working with the Scions. He is still quite eager to maintain the authority he feels is his due.

Still, now and only now (a full ten levels after "All Good Things," and that's ARR levels) does he speak of rebuilding the Scions. The Ultima Weapon seems enough of a wake-up call for him to realize he cannot do this all on his own.

Alphinaud's characterization upon returning to the Waking Sands is also a bit odd, feeling just a little out of sync with itself moment to moment. Upon deciding to return, he speaks of cleaning of their headquarters and honoring the dead, but again, not of any survivors. To hear this line in isolation, you'd assume he's genuinely unaware that there were any survivors, or that the Garleans took captives.

Yet upon seeing Yda in the Waking Sands, Alphinaud expresses no surprise whatsoever. And only when Yda collapses to her knees, speaking haltingly of returning to the Waking Sands to find it empty, its floors stained with the blood of her comrades, does his confident demeanor crack again. Perhaps he does realize, in that moment, the cost of not prioritizing survivors. (Y'shtola, it is worth noting, has seemingly been investigating the whole time, and by the time Alphinaud bothers to return, she's already figured out where the captives are.)

And it's easy to interpret the dialogue that follows as Alphinaud having been aware all along that there were captives... but given his pensive gestures, it's also easy to interpret it as Alphinaud putting it all together for himself, deducing for himself why Gaius would want an Echo-bearer to study.

The latter interpretation would imply that all this time, the Warrior of Light did not tell him what they saw in the Echo. Never once mentioned that they knew Livia took Minfilia and the others. Which would be an absolutely buckwild choice on their part. But we're left to assume that either Alphinaud knew and dismissed it as a priority, or the WoL chose not to tell him. Alphinaud doesn't come out looking great in either scenario, but he undoubtedly looks worse if he knew. Given his clear ambitions to take over as the Scions' leader, his disregard for Minfilia looks not merely callous but, if we want to take the even less charitable reading, potentially calculated. I'm not saying that this is necessarily true, but that the writing could lead one to conclude that, intended or not. But it's also just a bad move tactically, to leave someone with Minfilia's abilities in the Empire's hands. (And that's to say nothing of Tataru, Papalymo, and Urianger, who are also captive and in mortal danger if Livia does not get what she wants from Minfilia.)

But if we take the other interpretation, that Alphinaud truly didn't know about the captives, we're forced to ask why the Warrior of Light as written doesn't share what they know.

Considering all that mess, I'm forced to conclude that to some extent this is just bad storytelling. Whether due to quest consolidation, inconsistency between writers, localization issues, or simply haste to get the story written, I don't know.

Is this supposed to be an instance of Minfilia's Echo giving her information--possibly from Hydaelyn--that she shouldn't know, or is this a case of Minfilia directing us to the church because that's what the plot design document said? I don't know. I'm going to be charitable and assume the former here.

So here's the situation for the WoL as Alphy walks into the church for the first time:

You just saw more than a dozen innocent people get slaughtered by the Empire because they were looking for you. Most of those people were adventurers. Armed and armored and capable of putting up a fight.

Minfilia directed you to shelter here, where you've just spent the last day or so burying all the aforementioned victims of the Empire looking for you, and this was her last request. Both to you and to Noraxia. Was she expecting Y'shtola to come here, too? Was this Hydalyen's will? Did she think Iliud could hide you from the Empire? No clue.

The Garleans are already surrounding the place, watching Marques, making the possibility of another bloodbath occurring here extremely likely.

And Alphinaud strolls in, exactly as you're all worrying about a Garlean attack and loudly declares he's rebuilding the Scions and he's found the missing Cid Garlond.

This is, to put it mildly, the stupidest thing he could have done.

So now you have to leave the church immediately. Whether or not you were supposed to be waiting to regroup with any other surviving Scions, the Empire knows you're here because this kid just announced it.

Any possible confidence that Alphinaud knew what he was doing just evaporated. I don't think it's strange at all that WoL doesn't mention the captured Scions to him, he's just demonstrated that he would publicly declare you were working on a rescue mission to whoever was in earshot. Alphinaud is not trustworthy with any matter that requires tact or subtlety. And Cid is at this point more in need of help than able to offer any. You do not have an ally capable of planning a rescue mission until Y'shtola shows up.

On the Doylist end, this is probably due to a combination of plot timing constraints and an early-development assumption that the introductions in 1.0 would prove sufficient (a lot of game dev teams fall into this trap and forget that the way new players 5 years later who never experienced Part 1 relate to the story, will be very different from how their established audience in the present does; contemporary memes and references will be stale or even missed entirely) -- in short, writing that's not necessarily bad, per se, but certainly inadequate.

There's no firmly established indication why Minfilia sent the WoL to the church. The narrative could have established the church as a fallback shelter for Scions in the field in the event their cover is blown; we could have had more and more of them slowly regrouping there to discuss how to rescue their captured leadership before Alphinaud shows up. Instead we get the impression that the WoL is wholly alone and without any support, and Alphinaud is presented as their only touchstone. It's apparent, when the WoL reaches the church, that "Marques" is in danger, but the question of how Alphinaud knows Marques is Cid is never answered; it seems likely that Minfilia knew or suspected his identity, and that Alphinaud ransacked her diary before going to the church.

That entire section of the game is grating, because why are we following this mouthy teenager's instructions at all? Who does he think he is? When we get to Garuda, it becomess clear that dealing with her was exactly as pressing a matter as Alphinaud suggested, so he could be forgiven for prioritising the Primal over rescuing people, but other than that one bit of dialogue, he barely discusses the other Scions at all until the group returns to the Waking Sands.

@siderealcity You raise some really interesting points that I hadn't even gotten as far as touching on in the original post! The Scions' opsec in ARR is sort of a complicated discussion, I think, in part because the WoL only gets sort of a peripheral look at how the whole organization operates, and has operated for the five years before the WoL showed up. They have a remote headquarters and a secret code phrase so it's clear they do have some level of security. In light of that I was genuinely surprised myself to see them return to the Waking Sands following the attack! I remember yelling at my screen on my first playthrough, "NO! This location is compromised!" 😂

At the same time, the Scions have been working extensively with Eorzea's governing bodies, and the question you raise of why we are told to take refuge at a remote church in the desert rather than turning directly to our powerful allies in government is a very interesting one! The Doylist reason is obviously to set up Cid's return, and the location is set up in an earlier questline, but we don't get much on why that was Minfilia's first impulse.

If I were to look for an in-universe explanation, though, I don't think she knew about Cid--at least, I haven't yet found anything to indicate that. I'd be more inclined to say it might indicate that though they are allies, Minfilia does not fully trust the state leaders--not a surprise to me, since I don't think Minfilia actually trusts many people. She would have had only seconds to convey information to Noraxia, and at that point in time, she had no idea who it was who had compromised their location. That her first impulse was "Go find this trusted friend" and not "Contact the authorities" says a lot. And if her instincts told her the authorities couldn't be ruled out as the leak... she wasn't entirely wrong, given that we later find out a Garlean spy had infiltrated the highest levels of the Immortal Flames. Eline Raoille wasn't the leak this time, but she was still at Raubahn's side at this point, so... Minfilia might have had solid instincts, actually, in not sending us to Raubahn.

Whether that was the intent, of course I can't say, but honestly I'm willing to do the extra legwork when it comes to Minfilia's motives because it just sucks so hard that she was effectively written out after ARR, and what characterization she got (in a story that is extremely light on characterization) now unfortunately has to stand next to characters who got four more expacs of development.

You're not wrong either that Alphinaud's strolling into the church and brazenly announcing his attention shows a staggering lack of subtlety. And all of this, I think, can be seen as further foreshadowing the wedge we will see growing between Alphinaud and Minfilia as the Scions emerge from the shadows onto the world stage, and Alphinaud is determined to turn a scrappy underground organization into a world power in themselves.

@inqorporeal I agree that Scions appear to be in pretty dire straits at the beginning of ARR, and I don't even necessarily think this is a lack of context from 1.0--they actually are, and in fact the Minfilia short story explicitly establishes her as waiting for someone like the Warrior of Light to come along, because Louisoix told her to look for them. Obviously this is meant to convey to the player that their Warrior of Light is Special, but it does also speak to the situation before they show up. The Scions in the five years since the Calamity really seem to have been in a holding pattern--they have Echo bearers, but the Echo is just the bottom-rung prerequisite for surviving contact with a primal; being able to defeat them (repeatedly, as they grow ever stronger) is another matter. They've been watching with increasing dismay as the problem gets worse, sounding the alarm without really being able to offer a solution, until now.

ARR definitely does suffer from the assumption that we already know the major characters, and their relationships with one another. (I've complained before about how told and not shown Thancred's whole deal with Minfilia is.) I'm sympathetic to how that happened because the circumstances of ARR's development were just so unique--the team had one chance to resurrect a failed game, and given the choice between retreading a bunch of ground to appeal to brand-new players, and just leaving all that assumed and focusing on telling a story that would reward the fans who stuck with them, they clearly chose the latter, and honestly I think it was the right choice at the time, even if it hasn't aged as well. If it hadn't worked, we wouldn't have a game to age poorly.

Regarding the urgency of Garuda, I've been replaying ARR for a third time recently to level an alt, and it's really struck me how much this section of the game also suffers for its pacing. The first half of ARR being slow-paced isn't in itself a problem, and I still find it kind of a fun jaunt around the map as the game sets up its major players and conflicts. Then after the attack, urgency suddenly starts to matter a lot, but the pacing of the game doesn't fundamentally change--it's still long, meandering sequences of fetch quests and running back and forth, with long diversions into other subplots--the false accusations against Francel, the corrupted crystals. We are assured that it's necessary to do all this so we can get this one specific guy to fly this one specific airship to take us to Garuda, but by the time we finally get there, any urgency has been completely drained away by just how damn long the whole thing takes. It stops feeling urgent, and that's probably just as much of a problem as Alphinaud's dialogue. But that too, I think, is an artifact of its production. It's something we feel in so much ARR content, the sheer length of it designed to keep players logging in and the game alive while the devs figured out what it could become.