This review is mostly only regarding the main scenario quests of the base game. Starting this game is an awesome experience, when you’re running around a huge beautiful world for the first time it’s jaw dropping. The gameplay feels pretty tight, but it’s also very simple until you’re nearing the end. The overall art direction, UI design, and sound design carry everything for a really long time, and I mean like 80 hours or so. The story starts out sorta okay, then gets incredibly boring for hours and hours before it finally hits a point where things start getting interesting. The last 20 hours or so of the story are legit awesome, with fun dungeons and an actually challenging boss fight or two, and by this point you’re starting to actually care about the characters. The final battles and cutscenes are great, and while it feels more like the setup for a bigger story, it’s a pretty satisfying conclusion to the main conflict. It’s weird to review an MMO like it’s any other Final Fantasy game, but you can now play the entire base game (and I believe some of the expansions?) as basically a single player RPG so it sorta works. It was a long, mostly dull road but by the end I only felt excitement to get further into it. Is it worth it? I don’t fully know yet, but just experiencing the world for the first time is enough of a reason to give it a shot.