overwrought and underwhelming
There's so much wasted potential here, so many great characters that get sidelined, so many plotlines that just run themselves in circles and sputter out, so many boring areas and ham-fisted themes that somehow still feel under-utilized. Coming off the high-minded royal court politics of Heavensward, I was genuinely excited to see a depiction of political change in this world from a ground-level perspective. And there are moments where the execution comes together and that's what I get! But most of the time it just feels like busywork, and not in an interesting, MGSV-ian "busywork of war" way, just the usual busywork of a big open MMORPG that demands a certain amount of hours from you before it can meander its way to a half-hearted ending. When FFXIV is at its best, it overcomes that feeling and its narrative feels more like a tightly-paced single-player RPG. This is not FFXIV at its best.
There's so much wasted potential here, so many great characters that get sidelined, so many plotlines that just run themselves in circles and sputter out, so many boring areas and ham-fisted themes that somehow still feel under-utilized. Coming off the high-minded royal court politics of Heavensward, I was genuinely excited to see a depiction of political change in this world from a ground-level perspective. And there are moments where the execution comes together and that's what I get! But most of the time it just feels like busywork, and not in an interesting, MGSV-ian "busywork of war" way, just the usual busywork of a big open MMORPG that demands a certain amount of hours from you before it can meander its way to a half-hearted ending. When FFXIV is at its best, it overcomes that feeling and its narrative feels more like a tightly-paced single-player RPG. This is not FFXIV at its best.