Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn has been, bar none, one of the most difficult to swallow pieces of media I've ever tried to experience.
It's been an uphill battle to try and sell it to me. Friends over the years would try and rope me into playing the game. Many were met with failure. For a while, it felt like a disease. Then a cult. Then a drug addiction. The game would swirl up into the noses of 3 separate friend groups, and soon after, they would try to peddle the game to me. New friend groups would emerge and there he is, that same damn crack dealer that's been in my neighborhood for years. It would become a consistent talking point among us, and would become fairly annoying after a while. Friends who have been on my side in all of this, in a stroke of tragedy, had been taken in by the game, doing the same peddling as the others. It was like I was going insane.
For many years, I've been able to fight against the drug addled minds of the hopelessly addicted. Listing all my grievences would be like unraveling a comically large scroll, but the jist of it has always been this;
-Whenever I would try an MMO, I'd usually feel like there was a disconnect between pressing the button on my keyboard for an action and your attack. (It's a hard to really describe, but this was a major point of contention regardless.)
-Movement in the game always felt weird to me, and I never liked how it felt (This is probably one of the biggest complaints)
-Attacking was primarily done by auto battling, something I dislike
-Content is always stretched so thin due to the nature of being an MMO
-Giant time sink holes (I usually like to play many different games of different genres)
-I have no interest in Final Fantasy
-I loathe medieval fantasy and all the tropes that come with it
The scroll had always proven to be useless, however. The peddlers would still insist on having me try the game. And trying to be open minded, I did. 3 or 4 times, I've tried sludging through Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. And this time, I finally managed to beat it.
If you know anything about XIV, you are more than aware at just how bad this early game is at pulling a player into it's world. A lot of the quests are meandering about in an aimless manner. You'll be doing a multitude of quests to earn the trust of people around you, generic "kill these enemies for an item to give to an NPC", and teleporting back and forth between areas you just were. When you finally enter into a new area, you get to do the same thing over again. In between all this are the dungeons, which tend to be poorly designed and rarely put their best foot forward. Bosses are a joke and some of the layouts of the dungeons tend to be an annoyance. Map layouts in general can be head-scratchingly weird to navigate. Some are needlessly long stretches of land that go on for far too long without a checkpoint or a way to speed up until much later, some of the major cities have incredibly confusing layouts that make very little sense unless you're used to them. All of these settings playing into a story that loves to drag it's feet, attempting to establish a world that's as boring as the character writing. Nothing sells you on this world, nothing makes you like any of these characters you've been introduced to. Ontop of this, as a more personal pet peeve, I have a disdain for the very old English style of writing that this game tends to adore, making it feel like an extremely tedious read. Each line of dialogue feels like it's stretching out a sentence to it's longest possible length. It's such a hard pill to swallow.
You may be wondering then, how I finally managed to do all of this, despite despising my time with it? Well, besides stubbornness, there was a proverbial water I took to take this proverbial suppository horse pill. Somehow, it was using a fucking controller.
Against all odds, against my firm belief that it would be extremely difficult to even play a game like this with a controller, the controls worked surprisingly well. They're really intuitive, and they somehow ended up fixing the first two problem in my big complaints list. Suddenly, combat didn't feel so disconnected. Suddenly, the movement felt way better to control. Suddenly, it became a lot easier to stomach things. Suddenly, I was much further than I ever had been in my previous 3 attempts. And remarkably, the game began to click in my head much more than it ever did.
... The thing is, it's only until around the point I got to Titan, (which was about 38 hours into the game), that I actually managed to squeeze some kind of enjoyment out of the game. And even then, it tends to wane in quality after that point. The story begins to actually have a small bit of a pulse. Characters start to take shape and become actual characters, instead of being cardboard stand-ins. There's an actual drive to the plot that isn't just boring fluff to pad out the game's content. Some of the boss fights start to be kind of okay, utilizing mechanics more interestingly. It's not great, but at the very least, it's an improvement.
Mind you, this is something I thought would not happen. I thought I would get to this point and say I didn't enjoy anything. So as a testament to the game, it's managed to at the very least, prove itself that it's capable of being better. Is it so far, worth mucking through 38+ hours of a game I was not at all enjoying? No. But there's some things of value to be found here.
What's been keeping me coming back has honestly been the community. I've met a multitude of different people, all of whom have been very friendly, fun to talk to, who've all goofed off with me. Having a woman send me a private message to join her Free Company, only for me walk up and slap her character and giggle as I ran away, only for THEN to have her silently chase me as we ran around New Gridania trying to slap me back filled me with childish glee. Meeting a group of people and having one of them play Schism by Tool on a fucking fake instrument was really funny and memorable. Having my friends show me the ropes and just going around, doing dumb things, talking to strangers, and walking around with me as I did quests has been so, so fun. Everyone has been treating me like I'm the prettiest girl at the ball, (which in reality, may be a grooming tactic to enlist me into their cult, or FC, or both.) Either way, it's been a fun experience primarily because of the social aspects, and it's been what's really driving me to stick around even when the story had me drained.
It helps too that I tend to really like the way worlds look in this game. It can be a very serene feeling of walking around these fantasy landscapes and soaking in the ambience of it all. Some of the areas can be kind of boring looking after a while, but some places are fairly pleasant and give off a very strong mood. I'm big on this type of thing, so it's been nice.
The ending, while not perfect, at least feels like it's doing something. It's left a bit of interest, but nothing within the plot's movement so far has really wowed me. It's difficult to discern just what exactly has it's grip into the many friends around me, but I hear things begin to improve much substantially after the post-patch content.
I feel conflicted. I'm somewhat, kind of, enjoying my time with XIV. Not necessarily for all the reasons that I should be as a game, but still, I'm enjoying aspects of it. That's something worth admiration. But a large portion of the game I still genuinely hate. The feelings I've gotten from playing this game have been so fucking draining at times, and yet there's still aspects I've managed to enjoy about it. Maybe it's Stockholm Syndrome, maybe it's indoctrination, maybe it's the crack starting to kick in.
I'm hoping my crack dealer moves onto bigger and better things, but he may just keep selling me stuff that's horrible for my teeth. We'll have to see.
It's been an uphill battle to try and sell it to me. Friends over the years would try and rope me into playing the game. Many were met with failure. For a while, it felt like a disease. Then a cult. Then a drug addiction. The game would swirl up into the noses of 3 separate friend groups, and soon after, they would try to peddle the game to me. New friend groups would emerge and there he is, that same damn crack dealer that's been in my neighborhood for years. It would become a consistent talking point among us, and would become fairly annoying after a while. Friends who have been on my side in all of this, in a stroke of tragedy, had been taken in by the game, doing the same peddling as the others. It was like I was going insane.
For many years, I've been able to fight against the drug addled minds of the hopelessly addicted. Listing all my grievences would be like unraveling a comically large scroll, but the jist of it has always been this;
-Whenever I would try an MMO, I'd usually feel like there was a disconnect between pressing the button on my keyboard for an action and your attack. (It's a hard to really describe, but this was a major point of contention regardless.)
-Movement in the game always felt weird to me, and I never liked how it felt (This is probably one of the biggest complaints)
-Attacking was primarily done by auto battling, something I dislike
-Content is always stretched so thin due to the nature of being an MMO
-Giant time sink holes (I usually like to play many different games of different genres)
-I have no interest in Final Fantasy
-I loathe medieval fantasy and all the tropes that come with it
The scroll had always proven to be useless, however. The peddlers would still insist on having me try the game. And trying to be open minded, I did. 3 or 4 times, I've tried sludging through Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. And this time, I finally managed to beat it.
If you know anything about XIV, you are more than aware at just how bad this early game is at pulling a player into it's world. A lot of the quests are meandering about in an aimless manner. You'll be doing a multitude of quests to earn the trust of people around you, generic "kill these enemies for an item to give to an NPC", and teleporting back and forth between areas you just were. When you finally enter into a new area, you get to do the same thing over again. In between all this are the dungeons, which tend to be poorly designed and rarely put their best foot forward. Bosses are a joke and some of the layouts of the dungeons tend to be an annoyance. Map layouts in general can be head-scratchingly weird to navigate. Some are needlessly long stretches of land that go on for far too long without a checkpoint or a way to speed up until much later, some of the major cities have incredibly confusing layouts that make very little sense unless you're used to them. All of these settings playing into a story that loves to drag it's feet, attempting to establish a world that's as boring as the character writing. Nothing sells you on this world, nothing makes you like any of these characters you've been introduced to. Ontop of this, as a more personal pet peeve, I have a disdain for the very old English style of writing that this game tends to adore, making it feel like an extremely tedious read. Each line of dialogue feels like it's stretching out a sentence to it's longest possible length. It's such a hard pill to swallow.
You may be wondering then, how I finally managed to do all of this, despite despising my time with it? Well, besides stubbornness, there was a proverbial water I took to take this proverbial suppository horse pill. Somehow, it was using a fucking controller.
Against all odds, against my firm belief that it would be extremely difficult to even play a game like this with a controller, the controls worked surprisingly well. They're really intuitive, and they somehow ended up fixing the first two problem in my big complaints list. Suddenly, combat didn't feel so disconnected. Suddenly, the movement felt way better to control. Suddenly, it became a lot easier to stomach things. Suddenly, I was much further than I ever had been in my previous 3 attempts. And remarkably, the game began to click in my head much more than it ever did.
... The thing is, it's only until around the point I got to Titan, (which was about 38 hours into the game), that I actually managed to squeeze some kind of enjoyment out of the game. And even then, it tends to wane in quality after that point. The story begins to actually have a small bit of a pulse. Characters start to take shape and become actual characters, instead of being cardboard stand-ins. There's an actual drive to the plot that isn't just boring fluff to pad out the game's content. Some of the boss fights start to be kind of okay, utilizing mechanics more interestingly. It's not great, but at the very least, it's an improvement.
Mind you, this is something I thought would not happen. I thought I would get to this point and say I didn't enjoy anything. So as a testament to the game, it's managed to at the very least, prove itself that it's capable of being better. Is it so far, worth mucking through 38+ hours of a game I was not at all enjoying? No. But there's some things of value to be found here.
What's been keeping me coming back has honestly been the community. I've met a multitude of different people, all of whom have been very friendly, fun to talk to, who've all goofed off with me. Having a woman send me a private message to join her Free Company, only for me walk up and slap her character and giggle as I ran away, only for THEN to have her silently chase me as we ran around New Gridania trying to slap me back filled me with childish glee. Meeting a group of people and having one of them play Schism by Tool on a fucking fake instrument was really funny and memorable. Having my friends show me the ropes and just going around, doing dumb things, talking to strangers, and walking around with me as I did quests has been so, so fun. Everyone has been treating me like I'm the prettiest girl at the ball, (which in reality, may be a grooming tactic to enlist me into their cult, or FC, or both.) Either way, it's been a fun experience primarily because of the social aspects, and it's been what's really driving me to stick around even when the story had me drained.
It helps too that I tend to really like the way worlds look in this game. It can be a very serene feeling of walking around these fantasy landscapes and soaking in the ambience of it all. Some of the areas can be kind of boring looking after a while, but some places are fairly pleasant and give off a very strong mood. I'm big on this type of thing, so it's been nice.
The ending, while not perfect, at least feels like it's doing something. It's left a bit of interest, but nothing within the plot's movement so far has really wowed me. It's difficult to discern just what exactly has it's grip into the many friends around me, but I hear things begin to improve much substantially after the post-patch content.
I feel conflicted. I'm somewhat, kind of, enjoying my time with XIV. Not necessarily for all the reasons that I should be as a game, but still, I'm enjoying aspects of it. That's something worth admiration. But a large portion of the game I still genuinely hate. The feelings I've gotten from playing this game have been so fucking draining at times, and yet there's still aspects I've managed to enjoy about it. Maybe it's Stockholm Syndrome, maybe it's indoctrination, maybe it's the crack starting to kick in.
I'm hoping my crack dealer moves onto bigger and better things, but he may just keep selling me stuff that's horrible for my teeth. We'll have to see.