warriors of darkness

Ardbert’s first appearance is in Patch 3.1 of Heavensward. To provide some context on the plot, one of your Scion friends, Thancred, is currently missing. You head to Dravania and ask the locals if anyone’s seen him, armed with a sketch of his likeness.

Unfortunately, the news you get is unwelcome. Yes, people have seen a strange Hyuran man about, but he was last seen headed for the Gnath hive. Oh, and the Gnath have again summoned their primal, Ravana, who you slew not long ago.

You return to the Gnath hive and encounter not your friend Thancred, but a mysterious group facing down Ravana and slaying him with apparent ease. At their head is a Hyuran man wielding an axe.

It’s at this point that I have to direct you to the A Realm Reborn trailer. It’s not hard to recognize the group, much less the man at their helm.

Only… it’s a trailer. The trailers aren’t canon, they’re advertising. The characters are meant to be stand-ins for you and your friends, because this is a MMORPG. What are they doing in the actual game?

And why are they calling themselves the Warriors of Darkness, of all things? You, the player character, are the Warrior of Light. Is this supposed to be the evil version of you, or something?

Initially, you learn little of the Warriors of Darkness. Admittedly, there’s a much more pressing plotline going on — a thousand-year war has just ended, and you’re a little busy trying to bring peace to Ishgard. The Warriors of Darkness are an intriguing mystery, but not a pressing one.

After things in Ishgard settle down, however, the Warriors of Darkness return to the forefront. Word comes that they’re attempting to summon the primal Garuda, and as the resident primal-slayer of Eorzea, it’s up to you to stop them. And so you head to Xelphatol, hoping to cut them off before the Ixal can summon their goddess.

The good news is, you manage to get there in time to stop the summoning. The bad news is, the Warriors of Darkness are right behind you. At long last, they deign to tell you their purpose: they're from another world, a shard of the one you live on, that has fallen to the power of Light. Their world is on the brink of annihilation, and the only path they see before them is to rejoin their world with yours, so that their home might be saved.

In other words, the Warriors of Darkness intend to save their world at the cost of your own. Unthinkable, and yet — can you really say you wouldn’t do the same thing, in their position? If the only way to save the only home you knew was to sacrifice someone else’s world, wouldn’t you make that choice? Or would you strive to find another way?

The next time you encounter the Warriors of Darkness, they’ve decided on a change of tactics. Rather than go about summoning primals all over the land, they’ve decided to strike at the person who’s been foiling their plans: you.

This results in an instanced duty battle against the Warriors of Darkness. While much of the gameplay focus in FFXIV is in multiplayer scenarios, the main story has dozens upon dozens of solo battles for the player to partake in. In this case, you fight the Warriors of Darkness alongside your longtime allies, the Scions of the Seventh Dawn.

Only… it’s not that simple. Every time you take down one of the Warriors of Darkness, they revive and continue fighting. It becomes clear before long that your only choice is to defeat them over and over. Eventually you come up with a plan to channel your aether into your ally Alisaie's sword, so that she can stop them all at once.

Even then, the Warriors of Darkness still stand. They are like your immortal enemies, the Ascians: they cannot die. In their case, it’s because they’re already dead.

Warrior of Darkness: At long last, you see. To save our world, we gave our lives. We were just adventurers trying to make our way. An odd job here, a favor there ─ we never aspired to be Warriors of Light. But word of our deeds spread, and soon people were calling us heroes. They placed their hopes and dreams on our shoulders and bid us fight for all that was good and right. We fought and we fought and we fought... until there was no one left to fight. We won...and now our world is being erased from existence. We did everything right, everything that was asked of us, and still─ still it came to this! You of all people should understand! We cannot─ we will not falter. We brought our world to the brink of destruction, and now we must save it.

(As a sidebar, this scene is incredible in English. Joe Dempsie, Ardbert’s voice actor, does an amazing job with this dialogue. View at 15:30.)

Before you can really dwell on these revelations, you find yourself transported elsewhere: the aetherial sea, where Hydaelyn dwells. There her chosen devout, Minfilia, appears before you with an offer: she will take the Warriors of Darkness back to their world in hopes of saving it, and there remain.

The Warriors of Darkness agree to her plan, asking only that you don’t follow their misguided path, and instead forge a better future. With that, they disappear.

Now for some context.

The Warriors of Darkness storyline takes place primarily in patches 3.1 and 3.4 of Heavensward, which is otherwise a story about a war with dragons. The following expansion, Stormblood, is about freeing territories from imperial rule. Stuck in between those we have this wild storyline about the Warriors of Darkness that, frankly, feels out of place. What on earth does this have to do with the overarching storyline about an evil empire and immortal beings who want to kill everyone?

Add to that the revelation that the Warriors of Darkness are from a parallel world and it’s like, what? I really have to emphasize here that the story leading up to this point is not remotely about this kind of thing.

And then they go back to their home world, and you don’t hear about them again through all of Stormblood and its patches. You would not have been off base in thinking it was just a weird, one-off storyline that’s never getting touched on again.

Except here’s the thing you have to understand about Final Fantasy XIV: they lay their foreshadowing in early. Famously there are a hundred eighty quests between the end of A Realm Reborn and the start of Heavensward, the vast majority of which are worldbuilding and foreshadowing. Some of the things they touch on don’t come back into play for multiple expansions. (A more notable example is the Crystal Tower raid storyline, which became so relevant to later plot that what was once an optional questline became mandatory for story progression.)

More than anything else, FFXIV rewards the player who pays attention. Never mind that there’s an entire expansion between the Warriors of Darkness and when they actually become relevant to the main plotline. The base worldbuilding of Shadowbringers is laid out in this initial storyline, right there for you to see: a world consumed with Light, teetering on the brink of destruction. It’s worth noting that the writer for patch 3.4, which depicts the battle against the Warriors of Darkness and lays all of this groundwork, was Natsuko Ishikawa, who later was the main scenario writer for Shadowbringers.

As a final note of interest, the Warriors of Darkness use aliases while in the Source. Personally, I think it’s because the writers hadn’t thought through the naming schemes on their home world yet — Lalafell and Miqo’te, for instance, have very particular naming schemes on the Source that tie to that race’s background. Only a few names are actually given in game; further details were made available in the first Encyclopedia Eorzea lorebook.

I bring this up mostly because Ardbert’s chosen alias was… Arbert. Honey, please.

top of page ∗ site index
FINAL FANTASY is a registered trademark of Square Enix Holdings Co., Ltd. © SQUARE ENIX.
No infringement intended. Ghost of You is © Larissa, 2026