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Living Memory (Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail)
Going to have to put this one under spoiler tags, because it has huge spoilers for Dawntrail and the game being an MMO with a sequential story lasting hundreds of hours through multiple expansions means it's difficult to put a statute of limitations on spoilers. Technically even the name of the area is a spoiler, though shorn of context I think it's fine to put here.Best area
Living Memory (Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail)
The fabled city of gold had been teased in the final part of Endwalker, and the hunt for it formed a major part of Dawntrail's scenario, so it's not surprise you eventually end up there for Dawntrail's finale. Living Memory is the pinnacle of the Alexandrian civilisation's advanced technology and research into the preservation of soul and memories; a perfected artificial afterlife for its citizens where they can while away eternity in peace and splendour as the Endless, under the loving gaze of their Queen, Sphene Til Alexandros XIV, whose bust adorns the central Meso Terminal towering over the zone.
And you have to destroy it. You don't have a choice, because Queen Sphene, herself long dead and now the AI avatar of the Meso Terminal, is hardcoded to keep Living Memory going at all costs. And the cost is to plunder the fundamental energy of creation - aether - from the entire FFXIV multiverse, which would lead to a multiversal collapse that would end with Living Memory starved of aether anyway and forced to shut down. The plan is multiversal genocide for no real benefit, and Sphene knows it, but her hardcoding forces her to rationalise it and spurn any attempt to reason with her.
The zone itself is peaceful and serene, even the sad, haunting theme is called 'Bygone Serenity'. As you travel through the zone to shut down the smaller subterminals before diving into the digital world of the main Meso Terminal to confront Sphene, the characters of your party get to meet or say a final goodbye to loved ones from their past. But these loved ones are also AI copies, because Living Memory is, as one character puts it, a twisted mausoleum. The Endless are the reconstituted memories of the dead, but without their souls, which have been scrubbed clean and put to other uses. And yet the interactions your party has with them are no less real for it even as it is recognised as a desecration of the dead.
And that's the power of the zone - the fundamental dichotomy between knowing this isn't real but the interactions the characters have still being meaningful. Each little subterminal has its own arc, which ends with the subterminal being shut off and the relevant characters disappearing as their data is deleted, at peace with your decision to end their existence to save yours. Again, no choice is presented here, you have to do it to proceed, but it's still devastating to see these characters, even if just AI copies, disappear, and I spent most of the zone sobbing, which no FFXIV zone has previously done. Previously, you were a hopebringer, now you're a destroyer.
After you defeat Sphene and shut down the Meso Terminal, Living Memory is finished. The gold sky gives way to the natural sky of the world, the buildings and technologies are a dull gray, dormant and unpowered, its inhabitants largely gone save a few stragglers, and Bygone Serenity is replaced with 'Echoes of Memory', a version of the theme that is distant, fuzzy, and constantly fades in and out to convey the enormity of what you have done. You could abuse New Game+ to 'restore' the zone... but shouldn't your actions, even with the best intentions, have consequences?
Congratulations, you've saved the multiverse. You monster.
