This shit is some hot ass, I'll probably do post ARR content when i finish the main series, but jesus this was not a good first impression of the game.
you know what i don't need to reiterate the flaws and the bs. what needs pointing out is, it is delightful to be a catperson. a tail? emotive ears?? i also have a big pompadour. my fur? pink. my pronouns? unsupported lol. i'm gonna transtasia into a hrothgar after hw which will make all the gendering more bearable
edit 1/12/2023: after a break of half a year, i went back and wrapped up 2.1-2.5. the pacing got so much better. some good storytelling. i am excited to continue unto heavensward.
edit 1/12/2023: after a break of half a year, i went back and wrapped up 2.1-2.5. the pacing got so much better. some good storytelling. i am excited to continue unto heavensward.
WELP! now that all the individual patches are available to be reviewed on their own! 2.0 is going down A LOT.
2.0 is a uninteresting story about a very basic fantasy world but I think it's mostly carried by elements outside of the story like friends, FC's and aesthetics. I was on the copium of hoping that it gets gud later, I didn't really connect with the gameplay because I couldn't understand dragoon. So playing through it gets good later for the first time was a genuine struggle, But I've been able to power through these games before.
Having 3500+ I definitely have high regard for the cities and the areas. there isn't a zone I don't like.
Coils is genuinely very good and the Crystal tower series was really great too.
2.0 is a uninteresting story about a very basic fantasy world but I think it's mostly carried by elements outside of the story like friends, FC's and aesthetics. I was on the copium of hoping that it gets gud later, I didn't really connect with the gameplay because I couldn't understand dragoon. So playing through it gets good later for the first time was a genuine struggle, But I've been able to power through these games before.
Having 3500+ I definitely have high regard for the cities and the areas. there isn't a zone I don't like.
Coils is genuinely very good and the Crystal tower series was really great too.
This review contains spoilers
A weak start would be an understatement. This game is so incredibly tedious simply because of how the story is told, by all means the story is honestly quite engaging and can be very interesting at times. But most, if not all the time the story gets ruined cause you have to deliver milk and get wine. They tried so hard to stretch this game out by making you do the most boring fetch quests known to man. It's sad because whenever an interesting plot point or story happens I get really into it, like its actually so good in those scenarios. (especially cid's backstory and graha tia's story, absolutely amazing)
the community and the gameplay def save this game, the gameplay really grew on me. I played dragoon and I had the time of my life jumping around like a fucking idiot. Gonna unlock more of the classes as soon as possible, thinking sage or dancer.
there's so much to do in this game and so many enjoyable scenarios i've had outside of MSQ that I don't think it'd be fair to only rate it on my story experience. The dungeons were fine, not amazing but just ok. The bosses were great, garuda and titan being my favorites cause of how banging the soundtrack is and how interesting the phases can be.
i had fun most of the time, none of that because of the MSQ.
Getting into heavensward soon, and I have a feeling i'll enjoy it way more than this. Also the OST is so fucking good in this game they creamed on it.
the community and the gameplay def save this game, the gameplay really grew on me. I played dragoon and I had the time of my life jumping around like a fucking idiot. Gonna unlock more of the classes as soon as possible, thinking sage or dancer.
there's so much to do in this game and so many enjoyable scenarios i've had outside of MSQ that I don't think it'd be fair to only rate it on my story experience. The dungeons were fine, not amazing but just ok. The bosses were great, garuda and titan being my favorites cause of how banging the soundtrack is and how interesting the phases can be.
i had fun most of the time, none of that because of the MSQ.
Getting into heavensward soon, and I have a feeling i'll enjoy it way more than this. Also the OST is so fucking good in this game they creamed on it.
total arse cheeks compressed into a game
The best mmo I've ever played but I still am not too fond of mmos.
My Run through FFXIV a realm reborn was full of ups and downs. The games looks beautiful on PS5 and the soundtrack stands tall among final fantasy legendary soundtracks. The locations in FF14 are enjoyable to explore with even the more genereic areas becoming great through world building and things you do in them
realm reborn is chock full with quests, events and minigames to play providing many hours of gameplay and fun activities to do with friends and members of community. The game has many classes to play around with and all the ones I toyed around with I enjoyed, with the dragoon being the class I used for majority of my game time.
The story of a realm reborn is full of fantastic world building establishing the world fantastically the story itself is one note and predictable but enjoyable. A tale necessary to set up the world perhaps for greater stories to come. Even the epilogue a realm awoken had a really interesting plot thread that gets me excited for the future.
The number of quests and the lack of variety in the campaign quests is the games weakest aspect and unfortunately make a realm reborn a chore to play at times The campaign certainly has great moments but they only encompass about 10% of the main quest the other 90% involved fetching wine cheese or fighting a certain number of enemies. Not very inspiring
The game shines in its dungeons and raids as the welcoming community of ff14 and its enjoyable combat leads to a match made in heaven as you battle iconic monsters from the ff series the highlight of my FF 14 experience for sure.
Overall I really enjoyed my time with FF14 the fantastic community makes you feel welcome at every turn and even its short comings can't bring it down. I can't wait to play heavensward in 2022 !!
realm reborn is chock full with quests, events and minigames to play providing many hours of gameplay and fun activities to do with friends and members of community. The game has many classes to play around with and all the ones I toyed around with I enjoyed, with the dragoon being the class I used for majority of my game time.
The story of a realm reborn is full of fantastic world building establishing the world fantastically the story itself is one note and predictable but enjoyable. A tale necessary to set up the world perhaps for greater stories to come. Even the epilogue a realm awoken had a really interesting plot thread that gets me excited for the future.
The number of quests and the lack of variety in the campaign quests is the games weakest aspect and unfortunately make a realm reborn a chore to play at times The campaign certainly has great moments but they only encompass about 10% of the main quest the other 90% involved fetching wine cheese or fighting a certain number of enemies. Not very inspiring
The game shines in its dungeons and raids as the welcoming community of ff14 and its enjoyable combat leads to a match made in heaven as you battle iconic monsters from the ff series the highlight of my FF 14 experience for sure.
Overall I really enjoyed my time with FF14 the fantastic community makes you feel welcome at every turn and even its short comings can't bring it down. I can't wait to play heavensward in 2022 !!
After a year of on/off play, I've finally finished the first campaign of FF14! As slow and tedious as 2.0 can be—it took me a year to beat for a reason—the combat, world, and ability to be a catgirl won me over. Bring on Heavensward!
Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn has been, bar none, one of the most difficult to swallow pieces of media I've ever tried to experience.
It's been an uphill battle to try and sell it to me. Friends over the years would try and rope me into playing the game. Many were met with failure. For a while, it felt like a disease. Then a cult. Then a drug addiction. The game would swirl up into the noses of 3 separate friend groups, and soon after, they would try to peddle the game to me. New friend groups would emerge and there he is, that same damn crack dealer that's been in my neighborhood for years. It would become a consistent talking point among us, and would become fairly annoying after a while. Friends who have been on my side in all of this, in a stroke of tragedy, had been taken in by the game, doing the same peddling as the others. It was like I was going insane.
For many years, I've been able to fight against the drug addled minds of the hopelessly addicted. Listing all my grievences would be like unraveling a comically large scroll, but the jist of it has always been this;
-Whenever I would try an MMO, I'd usually feel like there was a disconnect between pressing the button on my keyboard for an action and your attack. (It's a hard to really describe, but this was a major point of contention regardless.)
-Movement in the game always felt weird to me, and I never liked how it felt (This is probably one of the biggest complaints)
-Attacking was primarily done by auto battling, something I dislike
-Content is always stretched so thin due to the nature of being an MMO
-Giant time sink holes (I usually like to play many different games of different genres)
-I have no interest in Final Fantasy
-I loathe medieval fantasy and all the tropes that come with it
The scroll had always proven to be useless, however. The peddlers would still insist on having me try the game. And trying to be open minded, I did. 3 or 4 times, I've tried sludging through Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. And this time, I finally managed to beat it.
If you know anything about XIV, you are more than aware at just how bad this early game is at pulling a player into it's world. A lot of the quests are meandering about in an aimless manner. You'll be doing a multitude of quests to earn the trust of people around you, generic "kill these enemies for an item to give to an NPC", and teleporting back and forth between areas you just were. When you finally enter into a new area, you get to do the same thing over again. In between all this are the dungeons, which tend to be poorly designed and rarely put their best foot forward. Bosses are a joke and some of the layouts of the dungeons tend to be an annoyance. Map layouts in general can be head-scratchingly weird to navigate. Some are needlessly long stretches of land that go on for far too long without a checkpoint or a way to speed up until much later, some of the major cities have incredibly confusing layouts that make very little sense unless you're used to them. All of these settings playing into a story that loves to drag it's feet, attempting to establish a world that's as boring as the character writing. Nothing sells you on this world, nothing makes you like any of these characters you've been introduced to. Ontop of this, as a more personal pet peeve, I have a disdain for the very old English style of writing that this game tends to adore, making it feel like an extremely tedious read. Each line of dialogue feels like it's stretching out a sentence to it's longest possible length. It's such a hard pill to swallow.
You may be wondering then, how I finally managed to do all of this, despite despising my time with it? Well, besides stubbornness, there was a proverbial water I took to take this proverbial suppository horse pill. Somehow, it was using a fucking controller.
Against all odds, against my firm belief that it would be extremely difficult to even play a game like this with a controller, the controls worked surprisingly well. They're really intuitive, and they somehow ended up fixing the first two problem in my big complaints list. Suddenly, combat didn't feel so disconnected. Suddenly, the movement felt way better to control. Suddenly, it became a lot easier to stomach things. Suddenly, I was much further than I ever had been in my previous 3 attempts. And remarkably, the game began to click in my head much more than it ever did.
... The thing is, it's only until around the point I got to Titan, (which was about 38 hours into the game), that I actually managed to squeeze some kind of enjoyment out of the game. And even then, it tends to wane in quality after that point. The story begins to actually have a small bit of a pulse. Characters start to take shape and become actual characters, instead of being cardboard stand-ins. There's an actual drive to the plot that isn't just boring fluff to pad out the game's content. Some of the boss fights start to be kind of okay, utilizing mechanics more interestingly. It's not great, but at the very least, it's an improvement.
Mind you, this is something I thought would not happen. I thought I would get to this point and say I didn't enjoy anything. So as a testament to the game, it's managed to at the very least, prove itself that it's capable of being better. Is it so far, worth mucking through 38+ hours of a game I was not at all enjoying? No. But there's some things of value to be found here.
What's been keeping me coming back has honestly been the community. I've met a multitude of different people, all of whom have been very friendly, fun to talk to, who've all goofed off with me. Having a woman send me a private message to join her Free Company, only for me walk up and slap her character and giggle as I ran away, only for THEN to have her silently chase me as we ran around New Gridania trying to slap me back filled me with childish glee. Meeting a group of people and having one of them play Schism by Tool on a fucking fake instrument was really funny and memorable. Having my friends show me the ropes and just going around, doing dumb things, talking to strangers, and walking around with me as I did quests has been so, so fun. Everyone has been treating me like I'm the prettiest girl at the ball, (which in reality, may be a grooming tactic to enlist me into their cult, or FC, or both.) Either way, it's been a fun experience primarily because of the social aspects, and it's been what's really driving me to stick around even when the story had me drained.
It helps too that I tend to really like the way worlds look in this game. It can be a very serene feeling of walking around these fantasy landscapes and soaking in the ambience of it all. Some of the areas can be kind of boring looking after a while, but some places are fairly pleasant and give off a very strong mood. I'm big on this type of thing, so it's been nice.
The ending, while not perfect, at least feels like it's doing something. It's left a bit of interest, but nothing within the plot's movement so far has really wowed me. It's difficult to discern just what exactly has it's grip into the many friends around me, but I hear things begin to improve much substantially after the post-patch content.
I feel conflicted. I'm somewhat, kind of, enjoying my time with XIV. Not necessarily for all the reasons that I should be as a game, but still, I'm enjoying aspects of it. That's something worth admiration. But a large portion of the game I still genuinely hate. The feelings I've gotten from playing this game have been so fucking draining at times, and yet there's still aspects I've managed to enjoy about it. Maybe it's Stockholm Syndrome, maybe it's indoctrination, maybe it's the crack starting to kick in.
I'm hoping my crack dealer moves onto bigger and better things, but he may just keep selling me stuff that's horrible for my teeth. We'll have to see.
It's been an uphill battle to try and sell it to me. Friends over the years would try and rope me into playing the game. Many were met with failure. For a while, it felt like a disease. Then a cult. Then a drug addiction. The game would swirl up into the noses of 3 separate friend groups, and soon after, they would try to peddle the game to me. New friend groups would emerge and there he is, that same damn crack dealer that's been in my neighborhood for years. It would become a consistent talking point among us, and would become fairly annoying after a while. Friends who have been on my side in all of this, in a stroke of tragedy, had been taken in by the game, doing the same peddling as the others. It was like I was going insane.
For many years, I've been able to fight against the drug addled minds of the hopelessly addicted. Listing all my grievences would be like unraveling a comically large scroll, but the jist of it has always been this;
-Whenever I would try an MMO, I'd usually feel like there was a disconnect between pressing the button on my keyboard for an action and your attack. (It's a hard to really describe, but this was a major point of contention regardless.)
-Movement in the game always felt weird to me, and I never liked how it felt (This is probably one of the biggest complaints)
-Attacking was primarily done by auto battling, something I dislike
-Content is always stretched so thin due to the nature of being an MMO
-Giant time sink holes (I usually like to play many different games of different genres)
-I have no interest in Final Fantasy
-I loathe medieval fantasy and all the tropes that come with it
The scroll had always proven to be useless, however. The peddlers would still insist on having me try the game. And trying to be open minded, I did. 3 or 4 times, I've tried sludging through Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. And this time, I finally managed to beat it.
If you know anything about XIV, you are more than aware at just how bad this early game is at pulling a player into it's world. A lot of the quests are meandering about in an aimless manner. You'll be doing a multitude of quests to earn the trust of people around you, generic "kill these enemies for an item to give to an NPC", and teleporting back and forth between areas you just were. When you finally enter into a new area, you get to do the same thing over again. In between all this are the dungeons, which tend to be poorly designed and rarely put their best foot forward. Bosses are a joke and some of the layouts of the dungeons tend to be an annoyance. Map layouts in general can be head-scratchingly weird to navigate. Some are needlessly long stretches of land that go on for far too long without a checkpoint or a way to speed up until much later, some of the major cities have incredibly confusing layouts that make very little sense unless you're used to them. All of these settings playing into a story that loves to drag it's feet, attempting to establish a world that's as boring as the character writing. Nothing sells you on this world, nothing makes you like any of these characters you've been introduced to. Ontop of this, as a more personal pet peeve, I have a disdain for the very old English style of writing that this game tends to adore, making it feel like an extremely tedious read. Each line of dialogue feels like it's stretching out a sentence to it's longest possible length. It's such a hard pill to swallow.
You may be wondering then, how I finally managed to do all of this, despite despising my time with it? Well, besides stubbornness, there was a proverbial water I took to take this proverbial suppository horse pill. Somehow, it was using a fucking controller.
Against all odds, against my firm belief that it would be extremely difficult to even play a game like this with a controller, the controls worked surprisingly well. They're really intuitive, and they somehow ended up fixing the first two problem in my big complaints list. Suddenly, combat didn't feel so disconnected. Suddenly, the movement felt way better to control. Suddenly, it became a lot easier to stomach things. Suddenly, I was much further than I ever had been in my previous 3 attempts. And remarkably, the game began to click in my head much more than it ever did.
... The thing is, it's only until around the point I got to Titan, (which was about 38 hours into the game), that I actually managed to squeeze some kind of enjoyment out of the game. And even then, it tends to wane in quality after that point. The story begins to actually have a small bit of a pulse. Characters start to take shape and become actual characters, instead of being cardboard stand-ins. There's an actual drive to the plot that isn't just boring fluff to pad out the game's content. Some of the boss fights start to be kind of okay, utilizing mechanics more interestingly. It's not great, but at the very least, it's an improvement.
Mind you, this is something I thought would not happen. I thought I would get to this point and say I didn't enjoy anything. So as a testament to the game, it's managed to at the very least, prove itself that it's capable of being better. Is it so far, worth mucking through 38+ hours of a game I was not at all enjoying? No. But there's some things of value to be found here.
What's been keeping me coming back has honestly been the community. I've met a multitude of different people, all of whom have been very friendly, fun to talk to, who've all goofed off with me. Having a woman send me a private message to join her Free Company, only for me walk up and slap her character and giggle as I ran away, only for THEN to have her silently chase me as we ran around New Gridania trying to slap me back filled me with childish glee. Meeting a group of people and having one of them play Schism by Tool on a fucking fake instrument was really funny and memorable. Having my friends show me the ropes and just going around, doing dumb things, talking to strangers, and walking around with me as I did quests has been so, so fun. Everyone has been treating me like I'm the prettiest girl at the ball, (which in reality, may be a grooming tactic to enlist me into their cult, or FC, or both.) Either way, it's been a fun experience primarily because of the social aspects, and it's been what's really driving me to stick around even when the story had me drained.
It helps too that I tend to really like the way worlds look in this game. It can be a very serene feeling of walking around these fantasy landscapes and soaking in the ambience of it all. Some of the areas can be kind of boring looking after a while, but some places are fairly pleasant and give off a very strong mood. I'm big on this type of thing, so it's been nice.
The ending, while not perfect, at least feels like it's doing something. It's left a bit of interest, but nothing within the plot's movement so far has really wowed me. It's difficult to discern just what exactly has it's grip into the many friends around me, but I hear things begin to improve much substantially after the post-patch content.
I feel conflicted. I'm somewhat, kind of, enjoying my time with XIV. Not necessarily for all the reasons that I should be as a game, but still, I'm enjoying aspects of it. That's something worth admiration. But a large portion of the game I still genuinely hate. The feelings I've gotten from playing this game have been so fucking draining at times, and yet there's still aspects I've managed to enjoy about it. Maybe it's Stockholm Syndrome, maybe it's indoctrination, maybe it's the crack starting to kick in.
I'm hoping my crack dealer moves onto bigger and better things, but he may just keep selling me stuff that's horrible for my teeth. We'll have to see.
abyss fiction
so fucjkin g boring soley responsible for julius never playing this game
I want to know what they were thinking when they designed ARR and the patch quests. Making it through that is harder than actual in game content
É okay
Ya he completado la primera parte del juego, ha sido un camino largo pero lo he disfrutado mucho, después de todo esto seguro que sigo jugando porque me está encantando!
the last couple of hours saved this game honestly otherwise it would be one of the worst games i have ever played
The start of a great journey. The game starts like a traditional MMORPG. This helps build-up the world and the setting. Can be played even alone as a single player RPG
is it the best ff14 has to offer? absolutely not
it is better than most people say? yeah
it is better than most people say? yeah
The only good parts of ARR are Hildibrand's quest and the last patch before heavensward
A super solid MMO experience with an amazing community!
The story can be rather dry during ARR but the patch content leading up-to Heavensward picks up the pace and quality.
The story can be rather dry during ARR but the patch content leading up-to Heavensward picks up the pace and quality.
The best community in any MMO, hands down. This is a game bursting with all kinds of content, quality of life features, and... a very very long and boring story. It picks up in Heavensward, but it takes. A WHILE. to get momentum. In every other way, it's a STELLAR MMO.
I enjoyed maybe 5 hours of the 40 I played of this. Heavensward better be worth it
Honestly, while the beginning is very boring and littered with fetch quests that were clearly only there to pad playtime because there wasn't enough content, once you get past that, it can be fun. If you wanted to tackle this I'd recommend doing it with a friend though because that's just the best way to do so. That being said, Heavensward better be worth it.
I didn't like mmos before I played this game. Back in 2013 when the game first came out I decided to try it out because "hey it's a final fantasy and I love that shit". I ended up liking it a lot. I mained monk and white mage. The story after the main stuff drags on. I hear they changed some of it.
I want to love the 2.0 content, but I can't. The language barrier struggles me when comprehending the story, so I am not satisfied with the MSQ. It's hard to communicate with each other using only controllers, and I didn't know how to use Marco easily, so I bother myself when co-op with others.
I don't have collector's edition but it's the only one available
Post ARR: 6/10
Finally finished ARR... Working on the patch quests right now and I have never been closer to prematurely dropping a game I'm so invested in.
That joint was ass
i would let y'shtola do unspeakable things to me
ARR may be not as good as the following expansions but it build definitely a good foundation for the rest of the series.