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

When I first mentioned I was going to go back through the entirety of FFXIV, now that it was functionally complete with the release of Endwalker, I was given looks of concern. This will be the fourth time I’ve played what amounts as A Realm Reborn, and just that inkling alone is really fair enough for people to give me worry. It’s really only off the honeymoon sentiments that I can just stare at the screen going “Yes I will gladly scrutinize myself to play the bullshit parts again for the sake of being comprehensive.”


That is to say, A Realm Reborn is not good. Awful for most of it even. This return trip, where I plan to overturn every rock to give the whole of Final Fantasy XIV its fair shake with the combined 1000+ hours of experience I have with it now, requires going through this patchwork prologue. To an extent this is relaxing to me now, I’m so attuned to FFXIV’s world that I can just pop a reshade on and get lost in doing countless fetch this and do this quests and feel a sense of affirmation. I also get to experiment trying to find a more affirmative body in the world by messing with my character design. This might sound like a superfluous intro, but really the best thing ARR can offer as it is is a world to get lost in.

The real prologue certainly tries to bring you in, although haphazardly. I have a strong preference to Gridania start over the other two as it’s the only consistent highlight of 2.0’s main quest. It really gets the rags to full adventurer right as you help out with menial but nice lovely worldbuilding quests, even if tree-hugging The Shire clone is the most it amounts to. It feels good though, and it helps that the area is decently pretty. I can no longer stand Limsa’s pirate speak prose which poisons that affair, and Ul’Dah’s intro can simply fuck off for all the good Scheming Monetarists amounts to.

The rest of the main quest pretty much follows suit. I’d scorch earth it, as for all the good it does at creating political spheres and cultures to understand and vibe with, it never really amounts to much bar a few scenes that the patch story content would add. Especially where I stand now, where fundamentally so much of the region’s story becomes inconsequential and at best only leads to a couple pathos moments. I actually had more fun sidequesting, even if that never quite becomes good it at least affirms neat political stuff like Ul’dah’s failure to become anything other than poor business startups across the desert. There’s a quaint scholarly feel to seeing how the corruption of capitalism does not really lead to any wealth, while a dead monster’s remains has wealth of its own. A sidequest story describes how a monster near Camp Drybone saved countless fauna and flowers across its back during the calamity that led to a beautiful conservation monument in its wake. It fits so snugly into the region, this contradiction to how the most wealthy inspirational parts have to do with acts of good in people and ‘monsters’ both rather than any business venture will do. The general puzzle pieces of FFXIV’s world remain this solid, but what I’ve described alone is a needle in the haystack.

It’s most telling that the biggest sigh of relief was when I finally got through the awful Praetorium once again, collected a bunch of optional quests, and felt free. FFXIV’s 2.0 is quite literally stifling, forcing you through all of its areas in painful uninteresting nonstop introductions. Even its strongest moments are retconned or swept away. You do everything in your power to try to prevent region threatening gods from being born, and only succeed at stopping one and said one is so temporary that a few patches later it gets summoned anyway.

I want to talk about probably the most contradictory portion, a part of the main questline I used to say was the best part. The Coerthas story follows ‘the lowest point for the main characters’ and has you getting partially involved in civil warfare between religious zealots and devout heretics. On the surface it’s just far more interesting than what’s come before, because there is such an intrigue in how easily corrupt the theocratic institutions are and what the heretics’ truth could be. However, it’s the most painful area by design. You get one aetheryte to teleport to, and plenty of the quest have you going back and forth across the desert snow area that feels less like Cold Hell and more like overbearing busywork. You have to climb all the way to the top of towers five plus times not even including sidequests just to talk to two people. Alongside the most inefficient use of time and the region, the sidequests themselves work against the narrative being foiled. The heretics you talk to are literally insane, sacrificing to a ‘blood god’ (What?) and painting them as such an unjust evil that I was aghast at the thought that Heavensward really completely overturns this. A Realm Reborn isn’t just patchwork, it's quite literally writing themselves into a hole that they had to gracefully jump straight out of and act like the hole didn’t exist or was not as deep as it looked.

I’ve done a lot of kicking in ARR’s face which frankly it doesn’t completely deserve. Past its failures I ended up somehow enjoying my time, although it’s clear that a lot of that is from retrospection. Not to bring up its disgusting dev crunch, I’d rather push towards what it Does get right. The job quests, for the most part, are all enjoyable times. Bar the Archer’s sickening vibe that amounts to “earn the racist’s respect and force a family that hates each other to continue being with each other”, the vast majority have very earnest and funny stories. I love the Thaumaturge’s cute family, and their themes of facing cowardice and becoming their own mages. I adored the Pugilist story which is just a lighthearted boxer story. I especially gushed over the conjurer story which thankfully side-steps Gridania’s endemic issues in favor of giving a great narrative about listening. You watch a girl come to terms with her buried family and her own mortality as she is forced to understand what it means to have perspective, listening to the world to find beauty in it, while coming to terms with the loss that prevented it.

The patch story is also still a setup and takes a strong amount of the time. I found myself more bored on this playthrough, but I remember how happy I was when ARR was finally taking its characters with, well, character. It weaved threads, set up downfalls and arcs while beginning to critique the structure and ground it. There was finally an intelligence to how characters act and react, instead of say, pre-praetorium’s entire Mor Dhona arc where you simply walk into high-tech Fascist Mordor and everything just works. I’d still say it only really gets good from Hearts of Ice-onward, where things finally start coming together instead of going in such a roundabout fashion. But moments like facing the keeper of the lake hit me as much as the final glass that clinks on the floor with The Fall. Just excellent stuff that really lets the kickoff to Heavensward settle in.

Not to mention, it actually starts being rather fun to play around that time too. I still find it difficult to criticize the early leveling that much, but it’s certainly not fun to ever replay any of those sections. Working with an incomplete rotation where you pretty much hit one to three buttons at best for 10-20 hours is just not interesting, even if the idea is to engrain all of the moves in your head. I’m all for the tutorial making sure that even the people who skip Hall of the Novice have leeway to not ruin the whole party, especially since a lot are playing to care about the story alone. But that doesn’t change that the vast majority of the dungeons need considerable reworking, just so I don’t feel like I’m slowly going insane. They are by design this way since ARR was an experimental phase, but again, we can do better now. FFXIV is certainly not above redoing sections, and I mean, Yoshi-P announced he was going to fix the Cape Westwind trial of all things.

Still, it does get significantly better in the patch content, and ARR’s gameplay still brought me a few of my favorite moments! Coil of Bahamut is laughably poor for most of it, but Turn 9 is such a beautiful dance of mechanics that simply hasn’t been replicated yet. Titan Extreme too, which was my first hardcore content in general, is such an adrenaline rush and showcases exactly what makes FFXIV combat special. Not only having to fulfill your role to react to a profuse amount of mechanics at once, not only weaving your abilities appropriately, but being able to match how your team moves and filling in for their mistakes. 90% of the time, your party is not going to move efficiently and cover everything. But even as a single person, you have the ability to make up for that in most hard instances.

Even on Normal they’re all fun presentation wise, and while gear buffs and changed mechanics have rendered much of these instances at launch painlessly easy, I still enjoy them a great deal. Whenever I get Shiva or even King Moggle Mog I just smile, partly because the music for both is a perfect fit, but also just getting to be a bit attentive and optimize my attacks. Even in the most tedious moments of questing, the general gameplay is strong enough to make me grin when an instance unlocks as a result.

The patch content also does such a workload to fill in for much of ARR’s travesties. Besides the raid and extreme trials it also adds Hildibrand, simply one of the best comedic questlines that calls back to Garry’s mod era in a wonderful way. It's consistently good and lighthearted, where having it on the side while I continued the main quest was a lovely feeling. Also I love the Gold Saucer, and while I suck at mahjong, fucking around with triple triad this time around was weirdly satisfying. Can’t say I spent much time chocobo racing or doing much of the parkour though, that’s not really my thing but I did give it a shot and I moderately understand the appeal. The fashion show deserves so much praise just for simply forcing me to try glamour because I keep pushing that off to “endgame.” The RTS mode isn’t anything I’d put much time into but I love that it’s a thing simply for giving you an excuse to collect minions. The optional dungeons as well as the quests around them are quite neat and cute too, of various quality but still particularly memorable.

Certainly, not everything it adds is a hit. The moogle delivery quests are such a tedious apology, putting character backstories into nameless NPCs that barely had any before. That entire storyline should just be skipped completely. The beast tribe quests all culminate in the same too-serious points with only the Ixal crafting one being something I even moderately enjoyed. The PVP… exists. I don’t simply mean the deathball spiral carteneau stuff which just sucks on the face of it, but the 4v4 stuff too at best gives good looking gear. At worst it feeds into a nasty side of the community that didn’t really need to exist and is just a boring timewaster. Not to say that every player vs player multiplayer needs to have the depth of Destiny 2 crucible or WoW’s utility maximizing tactics, but I’d rather this just be excised at all if it’s not going to amount to much. Even as it is now with expansions later, it’s at best an experience grind.

There’s probably more I could cover that escapes me even after all the notes I wrote down, but I think I’ve added enough to this monstrosity anyway. This will serve as a first part that I hope to tie together as a big review on FFXIV as a whole. I know this in of itself isn’t really ascribing much meaning or giving a thoughtful look at the game. As much as I want to have particularly powerful things to say I’ve decided to myself that this is my current project for who knows how long, and for some bizarre reason beyond mortal understanding I enjoy it. I hope this perspective has at least been interesting to read through.

Oh if you wanted a conclusion, basically ARR sucks lol. No, it's still so hard for me to recommend getting into FFXIV this way. If you seriously want my recommendation and just find A Realm Reborn sooooo unbearing, just buy a Heavensward skip and then go to the waking sands to unlock New Game+. All you really need is the patch content main quest for context, I cannot stress enough how completely trivial and inconsequential the 2.0 story is.

As for job stuff in terms of how they play, I’m saving that for Endwalker. I really can’t find talking about all of the job’s leveling process interesting.

I had never played an MMO before this one, and I had always felt bad about my lack of exposure to the genre, since I’m someone who’s tried to experience the breadth of what gaming has to offer. The MMO experience is one that has drawn in millions and millions of people over the course of decades, with the most popular games becoming cultural landmarks, so it was a pretty glaring omission, and I was waiting for a perfect opportunity to jump in. Luckily, I had a friend who was one of the “XIV free trial up to the award-winning expansion Heavensward” cultists, and having seen the amazing positive reception of Shadowbringers, I began under his tutelage. This review is just a rough journal of my time in each major release of the game, which at the time of writing, excludes Endwalker. If I end up playing that, I’ll write a review on its own page.

I warn you right now, though: this is the most pointless review I’ll ever write.

A Realm Reborn
I had always heard that the FFXIV community was friendly to newcomers, but to my surprise, there was hardly a community at all. Not in the sense that no one was on the server, but in that I didn’t see anyone speaking to each other. The vision of an MMO hub that I had in my head was that of a bustling marketplace, people trying to get you to buy stuff, join their organization, scam you, any number of things. Instead, I was greeted by a giant cluster of Organization Thirteen lookalikes and catgirls silently standing in a circle around a giant crystal. I did my little starter quests in silence, occasionally intersecting with another newcomer who was doing the same thing, never speaking, just getting through the content as fast as possible. I attempted to follow the story of these quests, but so many were the sort of fetching and “prove yourself by killing a monster” quests that I tuned out of the story entirely. The friend who was serving as my guide agreed that this was the best way to play, at least until you started reaching the back end of the 2.0 content. So, for about forty hours, all I did was mindlessly run from one point to the next, not talking, no story to enjoy, and not enough abilities to have interesting gameplay in the dungeons along the way. It wasn’t exactly painful, the novelty of seeing all the different areas was nice, but these first forty hours were pretty evenly bland for me. However, committed to the task at hand, I pushed forward to Heavensward.

Heavensward
In terms of story and characters, this expansion ended up being my favorite, but it was also when I began to have problems with the learning curve. Specifically, the fact that the game doesn’t provide you with one, in a manner of speaking. You’re put through filler quests for a hundred hours, then into a dungeon with unique boss mechanics you’ve never been exposed to. If players are forced through the main story before they can queue for these dungeons, why do the quests not take the opportunity to teach mechanics? Veteran players swap memes about how terrible sprouts are for not understanding these things, but how in the world could they? Is the best path really to ask players to go look up a guide before even starting the dungeon, ruining any excitement for themselves? As you can probably guess, the raids and high level dungeons of Heavensward were the first time I received player communication of any type, which was usually of the “learn to play” variety. The problem with such statements is that the implication is that I should have already learned to play, not that I should continue the active process of doing so. As I shirked aggro to these players to provide them some downtime with which to consider this paradox, I thought about how there really isn’t a perfect solution to the problem. Some bosses are so intricate that loading up dungeons with simplified versions of individual mechanics isn’t a tenable solution, since the content is designed to work well in repetition. Having to replay a tutorial even once when playing a game in NG+ can be a drag, so redoing mini-tutorials hundreds of times could be terrible unless executed flawlessly. Even so, there are a lot more fundamentals that could have been included in the normal questline that would have helped immensely. Later expansions would go on to have enemies that use gaze effects and rotating zones of damage in the same way bosses do, but it was too little too late. The only reason I was able to make it through all the early content was because I had someone to explain all this stuff to me directly, and I can’t imagine the flaming I would have received otherwise. I may have even stopped playing the game altogether, which leads into...

Stormblood
This is where people thought I would stop playing the game altogether. The story of this expansion is pretty bad, with the focus falling on characters who are fairly uninteresting, namely Lyse, Fordola, Yotsuyu, and Zenos. The graphics engine may give these characters three dimensions, but the writing certainly doesn’t, and they stay stagnant and boring throughout the entire expansion. Splitting the action between two hubs was also a questionable move, with Ala Mhigo feeling boring and underdeveloped compared to the obvious love that went into Kugane. I wish there was more I had to say about this expansion or its gameplay, but it just felt like A Realm Reborn 2. Bland story content, running from place to place doing stuff I didn’t care much about, a drawn-out introduction to the much more interesting followup.

Shadowbringers
The way this expansion had been praised, you would think it was the best Final Fantasy game to release in the last decade, and I’ve seen it literally described as such fairly often. Some parts were pretty enchanting, and the characters received a notable improvement in their writing. I’m not sure how much I’ll remember of this expansion’s plot in the future, but my crush on Urianger will last forever, and I think that speaks to the quality of the characterization compared to Stormblood. The start of the DLC in particular grips you with one horrific moment that comes out of left field, so from that moment onward, I was totally invested in the story. The problem is, as good as the story is for an MMO, stretching it out over so many hours, over so many basic and mindless quests, the pace flows like a river of bricks. It was like watching a great movie for fifteen minutes, leaving to mow the lawn, watching another fifteen, then getting up and doing the dishes, over and over until the movie was over. It’s not that it makes the story itself bad, but the format is so clunky that it’s hard to stay involved.

Postgame
...otherwise known as “the game”. This is when I started doing the raids and trials I had missed during my run through the main quest. Even though it’s something that should have dawned on me earlier in this process, the same way it’s already dawned on everyone reading, this is when I started to realize that I might be closed off from MMO experience. Even though I was doing these raids, getting better stuff, and chatting with my friend while doing so, I just… didn’t care. I didn’t care about getting better so the parser-users would think I’m the best, I didn’t care about gear when it would be inevitably obsoleted by a future expansion, the appeal of the story was over, there wasn’t any content left for me. Even with thousands of hours of things to do, raid tiers and trials as far as the eye can see, I just did not care. The bosses weren’t as fun as the ones in my single-player action games, there wasn’t the expressiveness of a traditional RPG, I was always left thinking “I could be having more fun right now”. It’s emblematic of the way I approach games, where I’m looking for something focused and direct, not a game that I can get lost in, not a forum for enjoying time with a community or working with a team to get to the top. My goal may have been to get a taste of what it’s like to be into an MMO, but after hundreds of hours spent in the game, the only realization to be had was that there’s a lot more to that experience than just playing the game. You have to find people you like, you have to enjoy the lengthy journey, you have to find some heart in the game that lets you call it home. Even though I had decided to commit my time and energy, I couldn’t just decide to love it.

Post game
After spending all that time with XIV, focusing on it exclusively for a couple months, I was expecting it to heavily occupy my thoughts after stopping. I expected to sit down at my computer and think of something to do, only to feel the pang of wanting to go back to Eorzea. However, this ended up not being the case, and it slipped out of my mind to a degree where I had to google that name just now because I had forgotten it. Honestly, had I not developed such a crush on Urianger, I doubt I would have thought about the game afterwards at all. When the Endwalker trailer dropped, I was expecting another rush of wanting to go back to that world, but… nothing. I’m vaguely interested in it because I dumped so much time into this story already, but I could just as easily read a summary and be happy with it. To tell the truth, I’m a bit sad about how this whole MMO experiment went. I was hoping to open my eyes to a whole new style of game, to maybe find a nice, escapist home I could always go back to, but instead all I got was a reminder of how limiting taste and preference can be.

So, that’s what brings me back to the pointlessness. I played a game for hundreds of hours, and all I can say is “I didn’t like it because I don’t like MMO’s, and that’s fine because everyone has different taste”. At least I warned you, but thanks for reading all of this. I had to get it off my chest after wasting so much of my friend’s time, who explained things to me so patiently. Cherish your friends, everyone.

(Updated as of Patch 5.2. Spoiler-free. Covering A Realm Reborn to 2.x content only)

A Realm Reborn is one part a really boring standard mmo, and another a great joyous ride. The base game is very much in a messy situation, granted it's probably a better one than 1.0, there's really no way of telling anymore. In short, it's a cautious recommendation, one that I greatly enjoyed somehow, because in easy retrospect a lot of the stuff covered here is incredibly boneless. I still think it's good though, it's hard for me to say that I didn't enjoy every single hour, even if a lot of that was coasting off really basic things.

To start, A Realm Reborn as it stands right now is split in twain. You have the Level 1-50 base game, known as 2.0, and you have the full array of patch content and prologue-to-expansion story content added, known as 2.x. These are bastardized terms, 2.x has official terms like A Realm Awoken and Before the Fall, but for the sake of simplicity I'll be using those. This split is also how I'll be describing the game, or most of it, because there is an incredible quality shift between the two.

The base game's story, for lack of better word, is total shit. Actual trash. I played this game nonstop for a few weeks and there's so little meat on the bone of it that I can barely remember scenes from it. It's devoid of much character, or thematic text. It strictly follows a crystal gathering story that ultimately ends in a call against fascism, but none of it is engaging or interesting. There's so little drive to every plot point that it really feels like a rudimentary checklist, watching beats happen as your eyes roll back into your skull, waiting for it all to end. There are of course, little tiny diamonds of writing on display, that kind of paint a picture of this being an incredibly rushed affair. But in the end it's not a effort I feel is worth salvaging. In short, you could save yourself time and literally skip every cutscene, and read up a paragraph or two about what happened and who everyone is.

2.x is where the story really just sets off. It's such a massive leap in quality, with interesting setup building on themes of multiculturalism, corruption of a class-built society 'stabilized' on capitalism, and a great arc setting up the issues of missing perspective while attempting to forcifully unify. It's really great, even incredible at times with its nice added characterization and legitimately interesting cast. It does hold awful pacing issues that dragged down 2.0 as well, but ultimately it feels like the story on offer here is actually something that is maybe worth the grind.

In tandem with this, A Realm Reborn offers a pretty spectacular aesthetic and world to explore. It was really the thing that helped me coast through the entirety of 2.0, just the relaxing nature of going through each location with well produced music behind it captivated me in the mood. It probably helped too that I'm still stuck in quarantine by the time of writing. It doesn't match the aesthetic + music combo of something like FF7R, but it's great in its own immersive way and it never really faltered. Hell, 2.x especially adds some amazing tracks and locales for fights.

Speaking of that, there's actually combat to talk about here. The gameplay follows standard hotbar combat, with a lot of the depth and interesting gameplay coming from learning bosses and mechanics. For those who haven't played an mmo before, and this is actually my first, you're basically playing hardcore simon says. At its peak, you have to continuously be attentive to every single mechanic the game asks you to do lest get wiped, positioning in response and changing up your flowchart as things progress in the fight, while also playing a rhythm game with your hands so as to optimize dps or healing depending on your role. And there is a peak like this, the endgame last alliance raid had spectacular fights in which all of this was actually involved. However... I can not say this about the majority of the combat here.

There's nothing wrong with a lot of the story combat having bleh instanced combat, and putting the backload of actual involved combat into dungeons and raids, but that part actually doesn't matter. Because due to level creep and a bunch of mechanical changes done from further expansions, most of the mechanics that are in the ARR content are effectively null. I cannot stress enough that looking through guides seeing all of this really great content on paper that you barely do 30% of the mechanics on AVERAGE. The Bahamut raids especially are the worst culprit, in that they're figuratively impossible to play now, because you can't queue up to find people to do them with synced levels. You have to do them unsynced to see the cutscenes and finish the quests, which means they're pretty much gone from the realm honestly. I still personally think, from looking over all the footage that I can and hazarding how I feel, that the content here on paper is really good, and all there is now is a hope that it gets reworked for current. Granted, pretty much all of the trials and raid content are such excellent spectacles of their own still that I didn't mind how piss easy they are. There's a specific instance i can easily recall, where a trial has you fighting a powerful ice queen set to orchestral music while ice fires in every direction while you do a dance to miss aoes, and then halfway through she snaps her fingers, everything is encased in ice as an emo rock song just kicks into high gear. It's wonderful. The dungeons also stop being bad at right before 2.x, and even though they’re still a tad easy, are rather involved mechanically.

Lastly, I want to cover the numerous side content and class/job quests you can do, at least the ones with effort (there's a ton of skippable fluff quests for middling xp). While I can't speak for all the classes past a certain point, Rogue, Dragoon and Thaumaturge have pretty good writing and a somewhat interesting story to tell. The rest of them kind of average between middling and straight up boring, especially the crafting classes which are glorified jobs. However, the real star of non-main story content is Hildibrand, comedy quests added in 2.x that are simultaneously hilarious as well as a joy to play through. It's so charming too, the animations they use for the cutscenes are like machinima/garry's mod and it's an absolute treat, and I fear that just saying that might be spoiling too much.

Some miscellaneous stuff I want to cover, grinding is pretty shit outside roulettes and if you want to do more than one class it can become an absolute chore. It's kind of 'expected' with mmos but it's still not great, and far from ideal. There's also some literal unavoidable grind in 2.0, with certain level gates requiring you to fuck around doing either hunting log or roulettes at certain levels, adding on to the already existing frustration that is 2.0.

Overall though, I found it largely worth the tedium, still somehow mystified in the worst moments and definitely enjoying myself in the actual good parts. The best tl;dr I can say is, if you're not engaged in the first few hours, best to wait till patch 5.3 where they help the pacing of the 2.x content, or suffer through the grind in the promise of supposedly great expansion content and legit good 2.x.

(Further disclaimer: I did all optional dungeons, raids unsynced, and alliance raids synced. I did all jobs/classes up to their level 10 quests, other than Lancer/Dragoon which is my primary role, and Thaumaturge of which i did to level 15. I plan to update this review as patches come out that change things, as well as flesh out the job content side when I get to them.)

Disclaimer: I got the game for the social aspect and was extremely disappointed by the lack of it. No one in this game ever interacts with others. The world feels empty and dead despite hundreds of players romping about.

It's essentially a single-player game masquerading as a multiplayer experience. It looks great, I'll give it that, but if you don't have friends who play ffxiv, steer clear.

Everyone probably talks in linkshells or discord. Because why would you ever interact with someone outside your circle of friends in a multiplayer game right?

Total garbage (I guess this applies to all MMO's now).