tl;dr: I hate MMOs and will never play one again, but experiencing FFXIV's world and story is very much worth the bother for me.
After playing ARR (2.0), Heavensward (3.0), Stormblood (4.0), and now Shadowbringers (5.0) to Main Quest completion, across different roles (tank in ARR, DPS in HW, healer in SB, and DPS once again in ShB) and engaging in quite a few secondary activities (alliance raids, regular raids, optional trials/dungeons, blue sidequests, yellow sidequests, minor crafting, daily roulettes) I think I can say I hate MMOs.
My grievances go from culture (MMOs seem to encourage optimised play and I do not play videogames for optimisation; in single-player games that's a non-issue, but playing with other people means I need to at least meet them halfway), to gameplay (dungeons and trials were a price I paid to get on with the story and I seldom felt I was actually enjoying them), to socialisation (I prefer to socialise in outside of computers), to the mechanics of online gaming (let me tell you, dealing with latency is not a newfound pleasure, and waiting 30 minutes in queue in between mandatory multiplayer content does not help the narrative flow). This only became more clear with Shadowbringers, when running the game almost completely with NPCs becomes a reality and I could selfishly experience the game the way I wanted.
Even then, I stuck with FFXIV till now and will continue onwards to Endwalker. Beneath all those things I do not like, this is still a Final Fantasy game with all the bits I love about Final Fantasy. Even more than that, it is everything I love about this series given enormous scope and time, taking its story to a completely different level than what a self-contained game, with its limited amount of development hours and logistic/economic constraints, can achieve. The writers take their time setting up every major and minor narrative beat, achieving an impressive degree of narrative consistency and quality—not everything is great, but all these parts taken together make for an experience that is very hard to find in other games. Ever since the 2.x patches, every bit of content I played, from optional fetch quests to the main story beats, seems carefully designed and coherent with the overarching narrative and world.
Shadowbringers specifically is amazing. It learns from what worked in the past stories and put all its efforts there: charismatic characters, complex villains (excluding the final moments leading to the boss fight in which he devolves to run-of-the-mill bad guy yelling about infinite power, Emet-Selch is possibly one of the best JRPG villains I have encountered), fantastic worlds, and a plot that rarely flounders (Il Mheg being the only moment I really got bored).
After playing ARR (2.0), Heavensward (3.0), Stormblood (4.0), and now Shadowbringers (5.0) to Main Quest completion, across different roles (tank in ARR, DPS in HW, healer in SB, and DPS once again in ShB) and engaging in quite a few secondary activities (alliance raids, regular raids, optional trials/dungeons, blue sidequests, yellow sidequests, minor crafting, daily roulettes) I think I can say I hate MMOs.
My grievances go from culture (MMOs seem to encourage optimised play and I do not play videogames for optimisation; in single-player games that's a non-issue, but playing with other people means I need to at least meet them halfway), to gameplay (dungeons and trials were a price I paid to get on with the story and I seldom felt I was actually enjoying them), to socialisation (I prefer to socialise in outside of computers), to the mechanics of online gaming (let me tell you, dealing with latency is not a newfound pleasure, and waiting 30 minutes in queue in between mandatory multiplayer content does not help the narrative flow). This only became more clear with Shadowbringers, when running the game almost completely with NPCs becomes a reality and I could selfishly experience the game the way I wanted.
Even then, I stuck with FFXIV till now and will continue onwards to Endwalker. Beneath all those things I do not like, this is still a Final Fantasy game with all the bits I love about Final Fantasy. Even more than that, it is everything I love about this series given enormous scope and time, taking its story to a completely different level than what a self-contained game, with its limited amount of development hours and logistic/economic constraints, can achieve. The writers take their time setting up every major and minor narrative beat, achieving an impressive degree of narrative consistency and quality—not everything is great, but all these parts taken together make for an experience that is very hard to find in other games. Ever since the 2.x patches, every bit of content I played, from optional fetch quests to the main story beats, seems carefully designed and coherent with the overarching narrative and world.
Shadowbringers specifically is amazing. It learns from what worked in the past stories and put all its efforts there: charismatic characters, complex villains (excluding the final moments leading to the boss fight in which he devolves to run-of-the-mill bad guy yelling about infinite power, Emet-Selch is possibly one of the best JRPG villains I have encountered), fantastic worlds, and a plot that rarely flounders (Il Mheg being the only moment I really got bored).
Reviewed on Jan 09, 2023