FFXIV: Here's my Review!

[C i d]

You can post your review of Final Fantasy XIV in this thread.

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[Linnaete]

DISCLAIMER: At the time of writing, I have concluded my fourth month of the game, with plans to resubscribe in due course. In addition, if you were to picture a Venn diagram with casual and hardcore being the two variables, I consider myself part of that overlapping middle. I alternate between attempting hard dungeons and trials one day, and casual gathering and crafting the next. As a result, there is still a wealth of content that I've yet to experience:

- 24-man raids (Crystal Tower): Labyrinth of the Ancients, Syrcus Tower, World of Darkness
- Binding Coil, Second Coil and Final Coil of Bahamut
- Extreme Primals
- Storyline content from Patch 2.4 (Dreams of Ice) onwards
- High level crafting
- Ixal, Amal'jaa, Kobolt and Sahagin Beast Tribe quests
- PvP

As such, this will not be a review penned by someone from a hardcore perspective who has dedicated themselves to the game since launch. I write this from the perspective of a semi-active player who has yet to fully dive into everything the endgame has to offer. I hope this review will be more useful to a fresh green player, or a prospective player thinking of joining our Eorzean ranks in the near future.

With that being said, let us begin.

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Pictured: non-characters
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Primer

• Story
• Quests
• Combat
• Dungeons and Trials
• Gathering and Crafting
• Community
• Soundtrack
• Closing statements
• Addendum

Story

So you came into FFXIV expecting a tale so rich and lore so engrossing that it can proudly stand on the franchise pedestal of storytelling. Well, perhaps you were a bit misguided to expect such a thing. An MMO by nature has to curb back on narrative strength. You are not going to see an expertly woven narrative that a single player game can accommodate. Final Fantasy XIV is no different.

There are plenty of praises to be had about the writing. There is a rich lore to be explored, covering a vast array of topics from the mysterious doomed Allagan Empire down to the life story of certain NPCs. Great lengths have been covered to construct a world abundant with character and life, so there is rarely ever a case where this theme park world suddenly becomes empty and inauthentic. Certain quest lines are damn hilarious, and it wouldn't do if I were to go through the entirety of this review neglecting to mention Hildibrand Manderville - a comical storyline of its own parodying Inspector Clousseau. Even the most seemingly banal of quests such as the Moogle delivery missions feature heartful, personal explorations of lesser NPCs players have encountered around the world on their way to their first Level 50. Often, such optional quests bring out the quality of writing and storytelling far more effectively than the actual main scenario itself!

So what is the main scenario like? Well, if anyone has complained about pacing issues in FFXII and a villain that lacks a constant presence, FFXIV will multiply that issue for you, and then some. You start off as what I presume to be one of the Warriors of Light brought forward in time by the Archon Louisoix after the near-destruction of the realm rained down by Bahamut during the Battle of Carteneau. Blessed by the Hydaelyn, the Mother Crystal, you set about making a mark on a recovering world that does not remember who you are. Gradually along the way, you attract the attention of the Scions of the Seventh Dawn (a politically neutral organisation sworn to combat any threat that befalls the realm, especially the Primals), and you uncover a malevolent threat posed by a group of shadowy, ethereal immortals known as the Ascians, who plan to halt the life of the world's current matriarch deity, Hydaelyn, in favour of their "one true God", Zodiark. In the meantime, a more immediate threat lingers in the form of a renewed invasion project by the Garlean Empire, and its chief Legatus, Gaius van Baelsar.

Given that the entirety of 1.0’s storyline is now inaccessible, there may be a cause for concern to be had regarding new players getting into the story at such a seemingly odd time. Fortunately, the game does bother to provide necessary lore and storyline exposition, even if it’s done through reams of optional text, to ease the player into the ins-and-outs of Eorzea.

Egregiously, the memorable moments of the main scenario are too fleeting to be had. When pacing and progression is naturally walled by the dictates of MMO design, the result is a story that feels like it incessantly drags on, nary building up to a crescendo, if indeed, there is a crescendo to be had on the horizon. There is a long episode in the level thirties (based on the level of the class or job you are using to progress through the base storyline) where the story simply stops, while you run a torrent of banal errands for some NPCs, including running through an entire dungeon simply to attain a hyper-delicious type of cheese for a banquet. I am not kidding.

Notable characters remain static and one-dimensional. Never do you feel the plight of any members of the Scions of the Seventh Dawn, if indeed there is any personal plight you can detect in them! Everyone is terse, one-note, and their dialogue is often a repetition of salient details you are already aware of. The Antecedent of the organisation, Minfilia, exists simply to laden you with quests, while she idly remains in her room twiddling her thumbs. Balthier’s voice actor, Gideon Emery, appears to be the only able voice actor in the game, and he’s wasted on an Elezen character who rarely has dialogue (and when he does, he speaks in faux-Elizabethan). In rare instances, these characters are granted a chance to shine in action, but they’re very fleeting. I can barely describe these characters without referencing their looks and their previous actions.

That is not to say there is nothing entertaining about the main scenario. Once you get past the base 2.0 storyline, the patch content do seem to be gradually building up to something major, likely for whatever the expansion will have in store. Unravelling the Ascians’ directives and motivations is genuinely fascinating, as well as the anticipation of discovering what sort of man the new Golbez-cosplaying Garlean emperor is. This is all pending however, and relies on a satisfactory climax that has yet to come.

Quests

Oh, deary lord. This is definitely where the game does not shine in any way.

Quest design is as vanilla and uninspired as they go. A quest giver sports a conspicuous yellow icon above their head, and he or she will likely ask you to either slay an arbitrary quantity of wildlife just thirty feet away from the hamlet or city, collect, or deliver something. It is as painfully pedestrian as they come, and you’re left feeling less like an unbreakable Warrior of Light, and more like the unloved serf answering every whim of your aristocratic master. These quests get especially frustrating when they require you to embark on journeys to and fro that require a tonne of Gil to cover the teleportation costs.

Seriously, there is nothing good, let alone remarkable, about the game’s quest designs. The cutscene content may be entertaining, but the actual tasks you have to do to fulfil these quest demands warrant no praise from me. Your map and journal will straight up tell you what you must do and where you must go. There’s no flexibility; there’s no open-ended way to complete these quests. You go here, do this, and maybe go over there next. All they do is provide you with an illusion that you’re making progress (well, you kind of are making some tangible progress, as quests obviously grant you EXP and an occasional good item), while you’re swimming in an existing ocean of menial errands to tick off.

This is not fun, Square-Enix. Mix up your quest designs, and inject some creativity into them that you solely seem to dedicate to dungeons.

Combat

Some MMOs feature flashy action-oriented combat. Final Fantasy XIV eschews them in favour of a standard tab and click style of gameplay with cooldowns (GC rate of 2.5 seconds). On PC, this is very pedestrian. You lock on to an enemy, cycle through a rotation of skills and repeat until said enemy drops dead on the ground. For healers, you may find yourself occasionally switching from a primarily healing role to a secondary DPS role, depending on the situation of which you are assessing. With controllers, this works surprisingly well. So well in fact, that I am expecting another console-bound MMO to replicate it. The only potential problem is with classes that have pet action bars as well. It is too easy to fumble around and get lost between these tabs as I do, that it hampers your performance and even jeopardise the survival chances of your party in a high-level dungeon. For organised PC players, this is a problem you shouldn’t have.

I mention rotation of skills. This is what combat mainly is at its very core, which can be very rigid, especially so for jobs such as the Black Mage, as there is rarely a deviation from it. Rinse and repeat until the enemy is dead. Healers and tanks have other things to watch out for, and arguably a dungeon from their perspective is leaps more exciting and multifaceted. For fans of RPGs who expect a tonne of depth to be had, I may have to stop you right here. Final Fantasy XIV is, to be brutally honest, just a standard MMO, without much of the actual trappings of an RPG fans of the franchise are used to. At no point does anyone have to pay attention to logical mechanics such as elemental strengths and weaknesses. A Black Mage can hurl fireballs at Ifrit and still exponentially harm him. It invites the accusation that this is only Final Fantasy due to the skin, and not in any way how it plays. This is true. Your time in FFXIV will be overwhelmingly spent doing standard MMO fighting through tab and click, dodging telegraphed AoE attacks, and juggling the various mechanics and gimmicks that dungeons hurl at you.

Endgame players may also have to bear in mind that there are certain job balancing issues that are still waiting to be addressed. Summoners easily run out of MP and in a long fight, will not sustain constant DPS, while by contrast, Black Mages have a latency of having infinite MP assuming the player adheres to the correct rotation. While the game does do a superb job of balancing jobs and skills, Summoner is perhaps one of the more challenging jobs to play right, which can sadly have adverse consequences.

Dungeons, Instanced Fights, Trials

DPS players will be faced with longer dungeon queues than tanks and healers (though the queues of the latter I suspect to be growing as of late). Understandably, this irks plenty of new players, with the queue for the first dungeon often being the point where many cease to bother continuing. The best thing to do when faced with regrettably long queues is to simply do something else. Find some FATEs to partake in, or do Levequests. Alternatively, you can put your Free Company resource to good use and persuade a few other people to party up with you, thus negating most of, if not the entirety of, the queue wait.

Lower level dungeons should be very simple. They’re there for levelling up, and they prepare new players for the myriad of mechanics that the game has in store. They lack the need for smart playing and usually involve the mindless slaughter of mobs until the occasional boss room is visible. It is not until considerably later that dungeons genuinely become something to write home about, as melees of unique mechanics and gimmicks eventually trickle in to put new players on their toes. As expected, endgame dungeons are where smart playing and careful eyes are truly needed to avoid unwanted wipes. There is a huge wealth of fascinating boss encounters and mechanics, from the Demon Wall of Amdapor Keep to the chaos of the Tonberry King boss in the Wanderers’ Palace. One of my personal favourites is the Diablos fight in Lost City of Amdapor, with the coordination and communication required to survive it. It’s just a shame that it takes considerable time, effort and dedication to get from the beginning to the interesting dungeons and fights.

However, the challenge can be deflated if you land yourself with an overgeared party. By “overgear”, I’m referring to item levels of weapons and armour. A party tackling a hard dungeon with an average gear level of 60 will likely have a noticeably tighter time than one with a level of 110. Once again, this will be something you have to make provisions for yourself if you don’ fancy being “carried” through a fight or dungeon by your party.

Gathering and Crafting

You won’t find much fun here.

Crafting, fortunately, is intuitive. It doesn’t rely on RNG like some other MMOs have been mired in. With a pseudo-minigame, players have actual control of the turnout of a craft: control over whether it succeeds or fails, and whether the finished product is high in quality. Still, you need the patience of Job to see through every crafting class to 50 and beyond and reap the rewards from it.

Gathering is arguably the most monotonous and tedious thing imaginable in Final Fantasy XIV. I can’t pass too much blame on the development team. I have no idea how to make mining or harvesting exciting either. It’s only semi-interesting when you reach endgame gathering, have sufficient gear in hand to boost your chances of success, and have very finite swings at a rock or a tree to attain potentially lucrative and rare items.

Crafting and gathering require an inhuman amount of time, dedication and Gil to be rewarding. Good luck there. Plenty of players understandably don’t bother.

Community

Your time in Eorzea will heavily revolve around the company you keep. Our server’s community, as I have found, is overwhelmingly pleasant, let down by a few unsavoury players who will surely get far in this game, and the deluge of irritating goldbots that never go away. Random players you are grouped with for dungeons and trials through the Duty Finder function can be hit and miss, but my experience has mostly been positive. It is part and parcel of any multiplayer game. You will likely find an arsehole somewhere. Fortunately, there’s never been a case when my chat has been littered with randomers expressing any racist, sexist and homophobic sentiments.

New players must be wary however, of more seasoned players who make it a habit of rushing through a dungeon. Typically, this commonly occurs in the final two dungeons of the 2.0 main scenario, Castrum Meridianum and the Praetorium. While there is no guarantee of it working out, new players to these dungeons should quickly alert the party from the get-go that they are new, and communicate with them your desire to see things through at a pace more comfortable to you. Often, your party will get the memo and adjust to suit the new player (they get bonus rewards for having a new player in the party, after all!), so it is absolutely recommended. Unfortunately, certain parties may be zealous enough to boot party members out of the group at will if they deem that person’s performance to be dire. Again, this is part and parcel of a multiplayer game.

Most players join a Free Company, which is where the bulk of social interactions take place. Of course, this is dependent on the people who make up the Free Company, and how well you gel with them. I haven’t been in enough different FCs to attain a semi-decent idea of how things generally are, but online communities generally say that it is beneficial to be in a good, active FC to find people to run dungeons with, and people to craft and meld Materia for you. My last Free Company before Sector 7 (currently headed by @Ethics here) was unfortunately clique-ridden at the very top.

Soundtrack

Some themes are hit and miss. Some are downright fantastic. For example, give Susan Calloway’s “Answers” a listen, as it is arguably the best vocal theme in the franchise. Pay attention to how the Praetorium track develops (“Penitence”). Put on the Ultima track. Bask in Garuda’s theme (“Fallen Angel”). Indulge in “Rise of the White Raven”. If they’re too dramatic, there’s also a wealth of quieter, more atmospheric tracks like the Ul’dah theme at night. The Thanalan theme “To the Sun” also warrants a mention.

While most of Uematsu’s tracks from 1.0 have been made obsolete, Soken’s portfolio for this game (at least most of them are Soken’s work, I believe) has been amazing, and certainly not half-hearted work. True, he isn’t the subtlest of composers, as his tracks have a tendency of incessantly beating you on the head with what it wants you to take away from it, but he delivers.

Closing statements

Advocates of MMOs that stray from the theme park feel spearheaded by the vanguards of Blizzard's World of Warcraft will certainly have to look elsewhere. While A Realm Reborn is an exquisitely polished modern MMORPG and effortlessly holds up in today's market, it is a theme park MMO to the hilt. The game does little to cultivate the sense that you're a lost adventurer in a vast and forbidding landscape with totally open objectives and approaches. Rarely, if ever, will players be challenged to think outside the box. Icons abundantly scatter the map, and objectives are unambiguously spelt out for you in the journal. It is practically impossible to be lost, when the game incessantly strives to guide you in all its PvE content. World traversal and progression are standard in their flair, and conform to the maxims that were solidly placed in foundation by WoW. This brand of game design inevitably dilutes the feeling of discovery that fans of Final Fantasy XI have probably long been accustomed to.

That is not to say the theme park nature of the game is an inherent flaw. The MMO market is overwhelmingly comprised of games that have pilfered leaves from Blizzard's grimoire, because World of Warcraft was arguably the first MMO that was able to find that special Goldilocks zone in the Venn diagram between the elitist crowd and a wider, general audience. Yoshi-P's team have created just that; an invitingly accessible game that does not alienate new players and frighten gamers completely new to the MMO genre, while packing enough content to satiate the more hardcore of endgame raiders. This is not a game that demands you make a full time job of; a player can log in after 8 hours of toil at work, spend a good couple or a few hours in the evening, and log off with some form of accomplishment. Gone is the old FFXI need of idly waiting in one of the city states for a solid couple of hours just to wait for a party to be put together just to journey to a dungeon.

Strip away the Final Fantasy elements and really, this is an MMO that does not strive to be unique. Perhaps after the dismal disaster of the original incarnation of FFXIV at the hands of Tanaka's team, the company could not risk indulging in a single risk; otherwise the entire foundry could probably collapse around them if a second failure were to happen. I have seen people complain that Black Mages don't feel like Black Mages; Summoners don't feel like Summoners. That is true. This is very much a standard MMO first, and a Final Fantasy RPG second.

With friends and a decent static for harder content, this game is a blast. For a lonely new player having to indulge in the myriad of bog-standard fetch and kill quests, perhaps less so. Like any MMO, your best bet to maximise your enjoyment is to have some form of company around. If you can’t, there is still enough here for you to pretend that this is a spiritual successor to FFXII. BUT. There will be a lot of repetition and you will still have to dedicate considerable time to the game before it can truly deliver in terms of tangible enjoyment and rewards.

Addendum

RNG. We all hate it. It can sometimes work out very well for you; you may have received the loot you wanted without having to run a dungeon or trial for fifty more times. Mostly, it will be the bane of your time in the game. There are tales of people who have to run a 24-man raid for nearly a hundred times just to get the full set of armour that they want just for ONE class! Be prepared to scream at your Lord and Tormentor RNGesus.