[Review of 2.0, A Realm Reborn]
After 7 months, I finally got around to getting through my first proper experience of an MMO. However, I feel a bit mixed on this personally, but from what I can gather this chapter of the game sets up for what could be a lot better story in the future expansions.
Of course, with hindsight of 10 years ARR seems like a really drawn out, 50-hour long tutorial for the rest of the game. Most of the MSQs in this chapter boil down to meaningless fetch quests; about 70-80% of them are just like this. This is especially the case in the beginning and middle of the chapter. The highs of ARR are very few and far between. It gets quite cumbersome to do them at times, so I can't quite put my finger on why people stuck through this in 2013 but also it must be way better than whatever catastrophe 1.0 was.
That's really my only criticism, however. What I can appreciate about these sloggish MSQs is that they allow for so much open ended-ness with how you want to play the game. It opens you up into a universe of opportunities. Want to (mostly) solo the entire chapter as a Tank like I did? Go ahead, or if you wanted to you could also experiment with other Disciples as well. Want to host a fashion show instead? That sounds fun, go for it; or just stick with the clothes that give you the best stats and not worry about appearance at all. Want to just explore the environments before actually delivering whatever pipe bomb the MSQ forces you to deliver to an NPC's mailbox? Be my guest. (Oh, by the way, the scenery and soundtrack of this game are absolutely phenomenal. How they managed to pull it off in an MMO is crazy to me). There's so much you can do in this chapter alone, (fitting for an MMO at least) and I'm sure it'll carry over into the next expansions I play, whenever I get to them.
What's even better is the game doesn't really penalize you for doing anything outside of the MSQ either. Changing your job/class doesn't take anything except the time it would take to level up that class again starting from level 1. The community for the game is always receptive and nice, especially for Sprouts like me. At any given moment, it doesn't really feel like you could get bored of having nothing to do.
Towards the end of ARR, the story actually starts to pick up and it's super solid to me. There's more to come given that I'm playing this for the first time in 2023, so with what ARR sets up for I'm optimistic that it'll be able to top off what exactly happened now.
With how much the XIV community oversells this game, I was reluctant to finally step foot into it. But now I don't regret it at all. 7/10. Can't wait.
also i got to run around as a catboy in fruity outfits so it's just already an amazing game lmao
After 7 months, I finally got around to getting through my first proper experience of an MMO. However, I feel a bit mixed on this personally, but from what I can gather this chapter of the game sets up for what could be a lot better story in the future expansions.
Of course, with hindsight of 10 years ARR seems like a really drawn out, 50-hour long tutorial for the rest of the game. Most of the MSQs in this chapter boil down to meaningless fetch quests; about 70-80% of them are just like this. This is especially the case in the beginning and middle of the chapter. The highs of ARR are very few and far between. It gets quite cumbersome to do them at times, so I can't quite put my finger on why people stuck through this in 2013 but also it must be way better than whatever catastrophe 1.0 was.
That's really my only criticism, however. What I can appreciate about these sloggish MSQs is that they allow for so much open ended-ness with how you want to play the game. It opens you up into a universe of opportunities. Want to (mostly) solo the entire chapter as a Tank like I did? Go ahead, or if you wanted to you could also experiment with other Disciples as well. Want to host a fashion show instead? That sounds fun, go for it; or just stick with the clothes that give you the best stats and not worry about appearance at all. Want to just explore the environments before actually delivering whatever pipe bomb the MSQ forces you to deliver to an NPC's mailbox? Be my guest. (Oh, by the way, the scenery and soundtrack of this game are absolutely phenomenal. How they managed to pull it off in an MMO is crazy to me). There's so much you can do in this chapter alone, (fitting for an MMO at least) and I'm sure it'll carry over into the next expansions I play, whenever I get to them.
What's even better is the game doesn't really penalize you for doing anything outside of the MSQ either. Changing your job/class doesn't take anything except the time it would take to level up that class again starting from level 1. The community for the game is always receptive and nice, especially for Sprouts like me. At any given moment, it doesn't really feel like you could get bored of having nothing to do.
Towards the end of ARR, the story actually starts to pick up and it's super solid to me. There's more to come given that I'm playing this for the first time in 2023, so with what ARR sets up for I'm optimistic that it'll be able to top off what exactly happened now.
With how much the XIV community oversells this game, I was reluctant to finally step foot into it. But now I don't regret it at all. 7/10. Can't wait.
also i got to run around as a catboy in fruity outfits so it's just already an amazing game lmao