A Realm Reborn is a necessary, albeit, incredibly tough pill to swallow for anyone who is wanting to enter the world of Final Fantasy XIV. While a fun game when you are playing the dungeons and bosses, it is a game that is bogged down by needless padding, boring exposition, a shit ton of content that you will need to engage with in one way or another, and the general unfavourable task of being a game put together from a legendary disaster. But they got the ship in condition, and its time to move forward with your MMO, what’s next?

Heavensward is pretty much a straight improvement on A Realm Reborn. The first thing that happens is that Alphinaud’s voice actor immediately changes, as well as the entire cast, and it is almost a complete net positive across the board. The writing is tighter, the pacing flies by, the social aspect… okay it's basically the same, but for the sake of this, it felt better! XIV is a tough game to explain the general appeal of in terms of segments without just giving away story segments and boss battles, but Heavensward ups the stakes of the best part of the game in a major way. I can say without a shadow of a doubt that I am now fully converted.

I should say I’ve technically been done with Heavensward for like a month or so, and I’ve been waiting for the right time to truly “complete” it, and doing all the excellent post game content over the course of a month has truly made me fall in love with this one. One of the best soundtracks I’ve ever the pleasure to experience, there is a goblin rap with time centered music ques. It is has been an absolute wild ride. A Realm Reborn sort of knocked the wind out of me, but Heavensward is just an absolute triumph. I can’t wait to see where the XIV journey continues to lead from here on.

Time travel meets Jack Reacher.

I want to preface this by saying I played on PC Gamepass and it ran like absolute ass for some reason (Alan Wake 2 ran well on my set up for reference) so my judgment might be clouded. But even with that in mind, I think a lot of my problems aren't necessarily with the gameplay. Gunplay in this one can be really fun, and messing around with the time powers zipping around and using time powers is fun. But this suffers the fate of being an early eight generation game with a lot of ambition on its plate. Every interesting decision is really undermined by how undercooked everything is. When you aren't doing pretty decent third person shooter arena fights, you're going at a snails pace as characters in the game say "Hmmm, I wonder if theres an entrance round here."

The timeloop is well fleshed out, but its really hard to care about that when most of the characters are very one note, only elevated by mostly decent performances. With Aidan Gillen (I'm CIA) and Lance Reddick (Rest in Peace) picking up slack. Anytime they were on screen I perked up, but the writing in this one feels so flaccid in this one. Not helped by the fact that the optional written text/audio in emails and radio is mindnumbling long in this one. Anytime I bothered to read it felt like I was completely distracting from game flow. And that is to say nothing of the well-shot but ultimately very uninteresting television aspect of the series (of which it wouldn't load properly on PC Gamepass, this was a Microsoft funded project).

I think there are cool things in this game, but a lot of them can be found in other Remedy works before and after. Might be worth your time if you think it'd be up your alley, but I'm glad Remedy has made more interesting works after this one.