Final Fantasy XIV Review

Final Fantasy XIV A Realm Reborn have been out for awhile now. After its failure years ago, have Square finally created a great MMO? let's find out.
The first thing you'll notice would be the graphics, and I must say the game does look amazing. The designs for the whole thing are just beautiful, you can witness the beautiful landscape, architecture, monster and characters all look great. Aesthetically, the game is definitely very pleasing to the eyes, although I do think some of the armor design looks...disappointing. But I guess there will always be boring or bad-looking armor in every game. Technically, the game looks good and runs pretty smooth. There are some pretty low res textures around if you know where to look but overall the game looks amazing and definitely an eye candy.

Character customization offers quite a lot of options but I do feel like they could have added lots more hairstyle choices as it feels pretty limited in that regard. Everything else is good though, with plenty of choices to pick from.

One of the most important change(from FFXI) that I am really grateful is the controls. I haven't played FFXIV before A Realm Reborn but I have played FFXI and that game has one of the worse controls for an MMO in my opinion. The fact that FFXIV ARR actually uses a PC control scheme(if you don't use a gamepad) is a huge difference between shit and playable for me.

The graphics, the UI, the music, the design, everything you see and hear in FFXIV A Realm Reborn are just polished to a shine. However, this doesn't mean that the game is perfect in fact I believe it is far from perfect. Now with all these good looking world and character I believe they forgot to do something.

They forgot to innovate. There is no innovation to be found in this game and everything the gameplay offers just screams generic MMO. And this actually disappoints me a lot, to think that what was supposed to be Square's latest and greatest MMORPG is nothing more than a generic MMO trying to play it safe.

Combat? it's as generic as they come. Target-based combat is so generic it's making me sleepy after just a few battles. Questing? ridiculously generic with your usual "kill X monster", "get Y item" or "interact with Z object/NPC" come on now, where's the innovation?

And don't even try to tell me that the FATE, Levemete, Guildhest are unique and innovative, because they're not. Those are just your usual questing but given only a somewhat different packaging and name. The FATE system is even more disappointing for me as I expected something along the lines of Guild Wars 2's Dynamic Event. There is nothing dynamic about FFXIV's FATE, they're basically just quests that randomly pops out on the field. And some of the FATE isn't even designed properly. Dynamic Events with lots of enemies spawning in GW2 works well because every attack in GW2 doesn't need a target. Now imagine having to fight loads of attacking enemies with you having to target before attacking. Most of the time you'll be targetting enemies that'll die on the next 1 second and you won't get credit because you did minimal damage.

I'm calling FFXIV what it is, a solid MMORPG which offers no innovation. Everything might look good but at it's core it is just the same old MMO formula put in a shiny new packaging. For those who are Final Fantasy fanboys or doesn't mind the generic gameplay, this game might be for you. But for those who are sick of the old MMO formula and wanted something new and fresh and thinks that "old MMO formula" isn't worth the monthly fee, then avoid this game like the plague.

Oh and don't even get me started on the character creation limitation on the servers, which is just stupid. Or the dialogue(at least the english translated ones) which just sounds pretentious. Is FFXIV a bad game? no. Is it a great game? no. It's just another MMORPG like any other you've seen before.

Well, that's what I think of FFXIV. If you agree, feel differently or just want to flame me because "omg y u not like FFXIV u noob!" then leave a comment below.