From what I've seen, it seems that the ARR campaign of FFXIV is considered as basically an extended tutorial/prologue that puts a lot of pieces in place for the later, far better parts of the game, which has me excited because what is here is already pretty solid stuff! I was particularly fond of the way it was so easy to just mess around with the different classes in the game without much in the way of a penalty beyond the time taken to level that class up, with a lot of systems in place to make that experimentation relatively painless. The story content had its ups and downs here for sure however, lots of very slow, aimless content near the start where nothing feels as if it's happening and while some of that is remedied by how pretty the scenery is, it's still dull, especially since a lot of it takes place before you actually get enough combat abilities for things to feel interesting.

Fortunately, things do get interesting towards the end once the pieces are in place and things actually start moving, with everything that takes place after the Coerthas storyline being full of cool setpieces and a steady sense of progression that culminates in the final hour and a half being especially great in this regard. The dungeons do an especially great job at keeping things interesting, with the way they quickly morph into a frenetic dash through waves upon waves of enemies being fun to deal with, especially with a group of friends all working together to make their way through these cooperative dungeon crawls. By the end of the campaign, I can safely say that I'm incredibly interested to see where stuff goes from here.

Also, I get to run around as a catboy in a dress so it's just inherently a good game.