I have been playing this basically nonstop for a few months. As far as a review goes that's pretty succinct, but God help you if you think I come here to be succinct.
The big thing you will hear about the Fourteenth Finals Fantasy repeatedly is that is has "The Best Final Fantasy Story." It will be worded in that exact way, an implicit admission that the standards we are judging it by are so low that you need a whole archeological team to find it. I am writing this review about specifically A Realm Reborn content, but I've gotten all the way through to the postgame story of Stormblood, and I have yet to obtain the elusive "best final fantasy story" despite having 300 hours in this thing. The fans who try to sell you on it this way are doing the game a disservice, and that's a shame because it's good! I like it a ton! But if it doesn't get good until Shadowbringers you cannot sell it to people who don't like MMOs. You just cannot do that.
This is most evident in ARR because the story is simply terrible. I will write about Heavensward next, which is where I actually start liking the main story, and I think it's starting to get there by the time you hit the expansion, but there is just nothing good to say about anything pre-credits here. There's ungodly amounts of filler. The villains are completely not a factor until three seconds before you fight them and they spill their entire Deal on you, which are all broadly-drawn cliche'd motivations. Very few of your pals or other important NPCs really have much development. Everyone is just constantly praising you to absurd hights for doing things like "delivering two letters" so that even when you start killing gods the reaction is exactly as strong.
On that note, there was definitely like one writer on this thing who noticed how incredibly gross the whole "beast tribes" thing was because every once in a while someone will correctly note that the city states' governments are incredibly evil and it's just kind of brushed aside because the plot has to happen. Or sometimes it's all about mind control but other times it's about them being afraid or whatever. This inability to deal with its own themes will continue through the expansions, I suspect.
BUT since this is an MMO, it's not all about the mains story. Final Fantasy is kind of always at its best when it is an unholy mix of melodrama and comedy, and there's plenty of room for smaller scale stuff that has a lot more fun with both here. The Hildibrand questline in the postgame, in particular, manages to take a genre of slapstick that I have literally never had work for me anywhere else and just nail it. There's a shitty "man in a dress" bit but otherwise it's very funny and good. The crafting and gathering storylines are pretty astonishingly fun for having your superhero main character just do extremely normal stuff for a while.
Frankly all of this is secondary to the real game: fighting big bosses while cool music plays. And the music kicks ass. The Shiva trial? Astounding music. Amazing stuff. Even manages to portray character through the musical transition. There are so many absurdly faithful homages to other games in the series, which I like because I am a brainless oaf who claps like a seal when I see they put the cerberus boss in the world of darkness like in FF3. I can live my dreams of being a catboy twink in the game. This is all great. This is all upside. I have never gotten deep into an MMO before so most of the mechanics are entirely arbitrary nonsense to me but gradual changes over the game's long life, and cultivating a reasonable community, has made that not much of a problem! These are all great accomplishments.
This is a big enough game that I don't feel the need to sell anyone on it. You can already play the free trial featuring the award-winning Heavensward expansion. It's also too big to really cover in the sort of extreme depth that part of me would like. The real purpose of this document is just to whine about the fanbase needing to calm down and stop pretending this thing's the greatest of humanity's literary achievements and since I will never accomplish that, I am at peace. Go with Hydaelyn my friends.
The big thing you will hear about the Fourteenth Finals Fantasy repeatedly is that is has "The Best Final Fantasy Story." It will be worded in that exact way, an implicit admission that the standards we are judging it by are so low that you need a whole archeological team to find it. I am writing this review about specifically A Realm Reborn content, but I've gotten all the way through to the postgame story of Stormblood, and I have yet to obtain the elusive "best final fantasy story" despite having 300 hours in this thing. The fans who try to sell you on it this way are doing the game a disservice, and that's a shame because it's good! I like it a ton! But if it doesn't get good until Shadowbringers you cannot sell it to people who don't like MMOs. You just cannot do that.
This is most evident in ARR because the story is simply terrible. I will write about Heavensward next, which is where I actually start liking the main story, and I think it's starting to get there by the time you hit the expansion, but there is just nothing good to say about anything pre-credits here. There's ungodly amounts of filler. The villains are completely not a factor until three seconds before you fight them and they spill their entire Deal on you, which are all broadly-drawn cliche'd motivations. Very few of your pals or other important NPCs really have much development. Everyone is just constantly praising you to absurd hights for doing things like "delivering two letters" so that even when you start killing gods the reaction is exactly as strong.
On that note, there was definitely like one writer on this thing who noticed how incredibly gross the whole "beast tribes" thing was because every once in a while someone will correctly note that the city states' governments are incredibly evil and it's just kind of brushed aside because the plot has to happen. Or sometimes it's all about mind control but other times it's about them being afraid or whatever. This inability to deal with its own themes will continue through the expansions, I suspect.
BUT since this is an MMO, it's not all about the mains story. Final Fantasy is kind of always at its best when it is an unholy mix of melodrama and comedy, and there's plenty of room for smaller scale stuff that has a lot more fun with both here. The Hildibrand questline in the postgame, in particular, manages to take a genre of slapstick that I have literally never had work for me anywhere else and just nail it. There's a shitty "man in a dress" bit but otherwise it's very funny and good. The crafting and gathering storylines are pretty astonishingly fun for having your superhero main character just do extremely normal stuff for a while.
Frankly all of this is secondary to the real game: fighting big bosses while cool music plays. And the music kicks ass. The Shiva trial? Astounding music. Amazing stuff. Even manages to portray character through the musical transition. There are so many absurdly faithful homages to other games in the series, which I like because I am a brainless oaf who claps like a seal when I see they put the cerberus boss in the world of darkness like in FF3. I can live my dreams of being a catboy twink in the game. This is all great. This is all upside. I have never gotten deep into an MMO before so most of the mechanics are entirely arbitrary nonsense to me but gradual changes over the game's long life, and cultivating a reasonable community, has made that not much of a problem! These are all great accomplishments.
This is a big enough game that I don't feel the need to sell anyone on it. You can already play the free trial featuring the award-winning Heavensward expansion. It's also too big to really cover in the sort of extreme depth that part of me would like. The real purpose of this document is just to whine about the fanbase needing to calm down and stop pretending this thing's the greatest of humanity's literary achievements and since I will never accomplish that, I am at peace. Go with Hydaelyn my friends.