I would normally call anyone who spends 100 hours on a game they hate an idiot, but i did on this game because everyone and their mother goes "it gets good on heavensward bro trust me". I want to love this game so bad, but i just can't. Every quest is boring, every character is flat and has no personality barring a few, the dialogue is slam my head on a wall tier, the zones are bland and unmemorable and i just havent been able to get invested no matter how hard i try.

Well im about to finish the ARR patch quests soon so we'll see if i wasted 100 excruciatingly boring hours of my life spread out over the course of the past 5 years that i've played this on-and-off or if its actually good, but i dont think "it gets good after 100 hours" can be justified no matter how kino heavensward and shadowbringers may or may not be. I'll rate those seperately once I play them tho

I dont want to report to alphinaud or speak to minfilia at the rising stones anymore i just want to be happy

This review will be mostly partial to the Level 50 (2.X) content that existed before the first Heavensward expansion dropped.

I completed Shadowbringers on release, and went into FFXIV hibernation until the Endwalker trailer got a few friends interested in giving the game a whirl. Eagerly jumped at the opportunity to make a new character on a preferred server, if only to see what impact the long-coming quality of life alterations had on the base game content.

As long as they pick the 'preferred server', newcomers receive a hefty exp bonus that I'd say nearly destroys any need even to do an unimportant sidequest or levelling duty finder. By the time the credits rolled, I already had two classes at level 50, which slaps hard. Considerable alterations were more recently made to the overall length of the 2.X quests - removing something like 18% of main story quests, and heavily abbreviating the ones that remain and adding the ability to use flying mounts in the old zones.

This all sounds really boring and granular, but honestly, it goes a long way into shortening what I'd essentially call the absolute worst content the game has to offer.
In general, it's not until you hit level 50 for your class' toolset will finally feel something close to 'fullness', allowing the player nigh-constant engagement with skill rotations and cooldowns.
It's also not until the post-credits content where the story gets promoted above... boilerplate? Characters become more clearly defined, and the story takes a turn into a fairly convincing political drama. That isn't to say admirable themes of growing into a legend while bringing the world together to heal the wounds caused by the calamity aren't present from the start, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

The base game is A Realm Unseasoned, but I find it all worth the effort. Not only is the writing fun in a quaint enough way, but the foundation for great things to come has been made a whole lot more painless to trudge through. I don't envy the FFXIV team's task of adding ever more floors to the monolithic retrofitted nightmareskyscraper that is the game's life structure. The first content you see is the oldest and most naive, and you just have to be patient enough to watch the game grow into something spectacular as you progress through the MSQ. One thing I find particularly impressive is how well the game eases players in with evenly spaced tutorials and tools you have to play to unlock. Far too many live-service games in rotation nowadays do a terrible job at teaching the player anything in a way that isn't intensely overwhelming.

I was going to pen this review when the first credits rolled and I thought this game did a good job when it finally picked up of capturing a sort of “classic” spirit of the series. Not the most fulfilling and the first 30 hours from lvl 1-35 is a terrible grind unless you break things up with sidequests, triple triad, and chocobo racing. But god damn does that pick up at the end!

I had a really rocky relationship with this game, but the fun that came with soaring around, picking up all of the love-letters to other series entries, scratching the surface of understanding the dungeon and raid mechanics, and seeing them actually pull off rendering some of Amano’s iconic designs in 3D(which they need to do much more of from this point on, you could have a VISIONARY look that Nomura just doesn’t match up to, sorry), this game made my little fan heart swell quickly and won me over again. If anyone told me I’d hear Terra’s theme remastered as I stomp through the snow in Magitek armor, I would’ve beaten this game even sooner! A reprieve after hearing that damn chocobo theme for so long.

Playing solely for story, I’m so glad that I’m finally getting bits of this great writing I kept hearing talked about. It seems that the team here does want to make the series “grow up” and I cant wait to see what they do with the next mainline entry, where Yoshida can finally have a budget and a real protagonist with an arc. Thanks for all the players who have helped me along the way with duty roulettes and boss strategies! I wouldn’t have made it through this free trial without ya. Finally on to Heavensward!

I didn't want to start this game. I don't stick very well to slow beginnings, but friends and girlfriend were all playing it. I agree that A Realm Reborn is pretty dry and tedious. It takes a while to get through, but they have trimmed it to around 40-60 hours, depending on how familiar you are with MMOs. It does pick up in Heavensward, and it just gets better from there.

There are the familiar MMO trappings of fetch quests, kill 3 insertmonsters, etc., but the world is rich and even as someone who hadn't played any Final Fantasy games before I didn't feel totally lost. I could write a lot about this game because there's so much content in it, but I'll leave it at this. By the time I finished patch 5.3, I had played for around 700 hours, and I felt like every single second was worth it.

For ARR: Way too many filler quests and busywork, and I heard that they even removed a lot of them over time. The story only got good at the end and leading to the next expansion.

For the game as a whole, my God this is a 500 hour game minimum. There is way too much story, but there is still a lot of good story in there.
I did a bit of savage raiding in Shadowbringers, but there isn't really anything that makes me want to keep playing. There's basically no appealing endgame content that is not raiding.

Why do I play this.
Am I even having fun.
I haven't got to the "good part" yet.
But I'm 25 days of gametime in.

...All glory to the Thaumaturge guild.

I am practically the "played a game for thousands of hours, thinks it's trash" meme incarnate. To clarify, I don't think the game is trash, but I'd struggle to recommend it to brand new players.

(fair warning, I wrote a lot of words here, probably way more than I'll ever care to on any other game I'll log on this website)

I first played this back in 2014 before Heavensward was released and had already spent a large amount of hours in this game. The game looked oh so pretty (and still does, despite the dated engine and graphical limitations), it was full of references to older Final Fantasy games, and the core gameplay of cooperating with other players to tackle various types of dungeons, boss fights and open world events was so addictive. But the more I played, the more apparent its issues became.

While the world was full of neat little details and backstory, the main story was very simplistic, and this becomes even more grating as the game is full of silly quests, which makes the plot progression even longer. This doubles down as a negative towards the gameplay as well, for these numerous quests are mechanically simple (kill 'x' monsters, fetch 'y' items, go talk with that person and then come back) and they offer meager rewards.

Thinking about getting through these mind-numbing quests to get to the "good part" that is the endgame reminds me of the old internet arguments surrounding FFXIII: "it gets better after 25 hours!", except FFXIV took waaaay longer than that (and now, 3 expansion packs later, it takes even longer). And after defeating the silly main story villains and getting to the endgame? I'd meet a lot of toxic and/or lazy players. I'm not even talking about Extreme trials or the Binding Coil of Bahamut, no, just trying to run "casual" content like Pharos Sirius or The Lost City of Amdapor was a struggle. It sure felt good when everyone worked together to beat Diabolos, or one of the EX primals, or Twintania. But more often than not I'd get people playing the blaming game, insulting each other, and then abandoning the group (which would most likely disband afterwards due to low morale). On top of all that I was paying a monthly subscription to play this game with all these faults.

It's the year of 2019 when, among all the Shadowbringers hype, I finally decided to go back to FFXIV. I'm not going to comment much about the expansion packs here. As far as the base game is concerned, it is still a slog to progress (you may have heard they removed some of these quests somewhere mid 2020, but it still takes way too long to progress). The power creep makes old dungeons, like the aforementioned ones, much easier to beat, which is... a mixed bag. On one hand newer players can progress much more easily than before, but on the other they're much more boring and won't be teaching the newer players anything about the importance of mechanics, or the importance of combat rotations, or the importance of working on your gear.

On top of that, the old EX trials and the Coil raids are pretty much abandoned (but the former are still required for quest completion, and the later has a pretty interesting story, surrounding the events of 1.0 and the fan-favorite character Alisaie, that many players will simply miss altogether). What a fantastic experience for brand new players it must be, to join an EX primal after a long queue wait, only to be yelled by a "mentor" telling you to stop queue'ing for older EX primals (you can thank the Mentor Roulette for that).

But on the bright side now you can experience all that for free.

Although it manages to be a great improvement on a very stale formula, A Realm Reborn serves mostly as a good, dull activity to accompany podcasts or music listening binges and stave away depression. I'm convinced that MMO playing is a form of meditation. The story doesn't really take off at any point, and despite making a vow to focus on reading all of the lore, I managed to mash through way more of it than I should have, finding myself completely uninterested. If you are looking for an MMO, this is probably the best of its kind, but don't expect anything to blow you away about the experience of levels 1-50.

Current status: DRG51, patch 2.1 content, 4 days playtime.