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osakasshitpit · 3 years

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I love Final Fantasy XIV

So I’ve been playing Final Fantasy XIV, and after playing for around 180 hours, I haven’t even finished A Realm Reborn. Normally, 180 hours is an insane time frame for a game to manage and hold my attention. Persona 5 Royal was 180 hours of game time, and that was slowly outstaying its welcome. FFXIV must be doing something right, because just recently I went to a convention and bought a Y’shtola Keychain in a heartbeat. I haven’t had time to play XIV a lot prior to this, since I was stupidly grinding Praetorium for days and got burned out. I haven’t played much in 2 months, and Y’shtola only really has a minor role during A Realm Reborn’s Storyline. Despite that, I started in Limsa and Y’shtola stuck with me since then. I just had to buy that keychain. My girlfriend asked me about it and despite me staying away from the game after being burned out, I explained to her in great enthusiasm why I loved Y’shtola and why I loved the game so much. I think that’s the first time I really realized how attached I was to this world, these characters, this game.

I came to FFXIV after having played WoW from Vanilla through WotLK, after having barely ever touched a MMO since quitting WoW. Honestly, I was very skeptical of XIV but holy fucking shit did it ever win me over. They are completely different games, mind you, but that is a good thing in my opinion.

So here is the longest tumblr rant post I have written so far, I think.

To be fair, the first 20 levels or so were kinda slow. You get thrown into the deep end and get bombarded with lore and characters, terms and phrases that you don't understand. For fucks sake, the opening cutscene shows Louisoix fighting Bahamut front and center. Its this big, epic moment of sacrifice, but to someone who has not played 1.0 and who doesn't know anything about the lore, this just zips right past you. During the main story of ARR, they keep talking about Louisoix and how important he is, but you haven't even seen the guy because he died before the game even started. I only really realized this today, it took me 180 hours and a look at the wiki to connect the dots. It really is a slow burn, but that slow burn was okay because everything else was so fantastic.

While the world can arguably be more subdued than Azeroth in parts, there is still this distinctive style that I quickly fell in love with. It’s fantastical, but it still feels grounded. Part of that has to do with how the game introduces you to the world, and how the main story quests explain to you the lore bit by bit. I feel like much of the world design of WoW was down to “the rule of cool”. Now, I’m not saying XIV doesn’t have that, but I feel like XIV always goes the extra mile to explain why this cool shit is here. Everything you see out there in the world feels like it has a purpose, a reason to be there and an explanation on how it works. The factions make sense, the political conflicts you get entangled in are believable. I feel like I am kind of biased to be honest. What got me to play FFXIV in the first place was seeing that Viera are a playable race. I’m a sucker for Final Fantasy, not in short part to my memories of Playing Final Fantasy Tactics and XII. XII is still my favorite game in the series, and much of that has to do with the world, Ivalice. Viera were always my favorite race of the ones seen in Ivalice. Seeing as you can play a Viera in XIV, I just had to try. Thinking about it, XII and XIV have a lot in common when it comes to world building.

One of the weirdest things to acclimate for me was how FFXIV handles story. I was used to WoW, where story was basically non-existent and you did what you did to see numbers rise and to unlock now content you could do. You are basically never involved in the story of WoW, you are just kind of there for the ride. In FFXIV, you are the main character. You are involved in what happens at all times, and that is kinda strange coming from WoW. At first I thought I wouldn’t like it, but the game made it work in my opinion. I also didn’t expect there to be so much of story to begin with. Kind of ironically the moment I realized just how much there was to experience was when I went through Ul’dah and saw a blue quest. Now, blue quest markers mean there is some content you can unlock by doing this quest. A lot of these are kinda short, with a bit of dialogue and some bits of lore for you to enjoy and I thought this one would be no difference. After all, the hook is basically just to help this lady mourn for the death of a friend. What I got was a fabulous detective adventure that spanned over the entire continent, where in I had to help the worlds most manly detective uncover the secret behind a mysterious phantom thief. To say the least, this 21 quest long quest line brought be hours upon hours of joy and had me in stitches throughout. And it was completely optional. I don’t think I even remember a single moment from any quest in WoW that made me this excited for it, optional or otherwise.

Ultimately these are very different games that try very different things.

Dungeons and Raids were a different thing. I remember when I rolled a new character for WotLK and wanted to do karazhan because I used to like doing that raid with my guild back in TBC. I could not for the live of me find a group willing to do it, because everyone was way more focused on the new content, so they could get better gear. Regardless, it just wouldn’t have been the same experience anyways I fear, because the new gear from the new Dungeons outclassed the raid gear from TBC, so karazhan would be way easier and a much different experience. In FFXIV, every dungeon is level synced by default, meaning if a higher level character joins, they get basically downgraded to the level the dungeon was designed for. Couple that with the Duty Roulette feature and suddenly, there was always someone to do any given dungeon with. I remember when I had to do the crystal tower raids and thought “why would they tie main story progression to a raid, I will never find a group to do that properly” but low and behold, I found a group within 30 minutes or less and raided through the entire set of raids within a day. Dungeons and Raids are generally a very pick up and play thing in FFXIV. To be fair, dungeons got easier and more pick up and play in WoW too, but Raids were always the endgame thing where you had to gear up and learn to play. In FFXIV, much more lenient. No corpse walking required. I say this, but I have yet to do the Coils of Bahamut or any Savage Raids. I have only heard that there is plenty of hardcore raid content for those who want that.

That’s nothing to say about the actual gameplay. FFXIV is a tab-target MMO, like so many others, but it manages to keep this kind of gameplay fresh by introducing a lot of mechanics that make the game more active than the typical “I stand here and hit my rotation a lot”. For starters, most enemies have special abilities that you can actually dodge by moving out of the way. There will a area marker on the floor and everyone within that area will be hit. It starts out easy, but later dungeons really start kicking your ass with this mechanic. You really need to say on your toes. In addition, every class is extremely different. They all have special mechanics unique to them, special meters and resources they will have to manage during combat and so on. For example, a Red Mage (the class I’m playing currently), has two meters that fill up as you cast spells. They generally have two types of spells, white and black magic. Each type fills its respective bar. Once they are both full enough, you can go in and do a more powerful melee rotation. However, if one bar is fuller than the other, the other bar will fill up slower. Since you need to fill both, you want to balance that out. You get instant casts for spells after performing a damaging spell, and you have some spells with a short cast time and good damage output that you want to cast and then use the instant cast of to cast a more damaging spell that has a long cast time. But these short cast, good damage spells require a you get from casting a spell of the respective type. So, in essence, you want to balance your use of black and white magic, but you also want to use the proc you get from casting your white and black magic, which means you cast more of the type which inherently unbalances your gauges. It becomes this micromanagement game you play with your procs and instant casts, so you can go in and do the big, flashy sword combo. And that’s just the red mage at around 50. Every class has something like this, and it’s all unique to them. Learning a class is not just learning the rotation and spells you have anymore, it’s really learning how to effectively play your class. Also, positioning. Some abilities do more damage from certain positions, so you will have to dance around an enemy to hit all the sweet spots with classes like monks. These complexities get introduced slowly as you level up, so you have plenty of time to learn the mechanics. My favorite feature might be the class system itself, though. In FFXIV, you aren’t limited to one class for the entire duration of your characters career. You can, from a certain point forwards, choose any class you wish and level that up instead. You can freely switch between classes outside of combat, too. If you are dedicated enough, you can level them all up to max, even. This means if you don’t like a class or the direction a class is going in, you can switch. I for my part started as an arcanist, so I unlocked Summoner at 30. I played Summoner up to 50 but I was just not meshing as well with the direction the summorer went in. So, I switched to Red Mage and after some getting used to, Its now my new favorite. Arcanists are special, because you actually unlock two classes at 30, so I also unlocked Scholars. Scholars are healers and that became my main dungeon class, since queue times are way shorter for healers. This would be unthinkable in WoW, and love the fact this is a thing here.

If I had to describe it, WoW is an MMO with RPG Elements, while FFXIV is a JRPG with MMO elements. I didn’t know I needed that, but in retrospect, it makes sense. The thing that really killed my progress in WoW was that I didn’t have anyone to play with anymore. My friends all dropped from the game and while I generally like doing solo content from time to time, I’m pretty introverted, after all... MMORPGs are usually most fun with friends. Final Fantasy XIV is a JRPG first, an MMO second. There is so much to keep your attention as a solo player, its nuts. All my friends who play this game, play on a different data center, so I can’t even visit them. Despite that, I had a lot of fun in my time with the game.

My experience with the game was incredibly positive, and I don’t think it will get worse from here. Everyone keeps telling me how great Heavensward is. I just have to finish 16 more quests and I’ll be able to see for myself what the fuss is about.

Honestly, if I had to say anything negative, it would be how longwinded ARR is. I mean, its not bad by any means, but I can see how someone could be turned off by this huge storyblock. Worst of all is, after you hit 50 and reach the end of ARR’s story line, there are 80 quests before you can even start with Heavensward. Since everyone keeps going on about how great it is, it’s kind of annoying how long you have to work to even get to it. In retrospect, it kinda makes sense though. These quests are meant to be played over months and months throughout a update cycle and bridge the narrative gap between one storyblock and the next, but holy fucking shit why did it have to be THAT long. They even cut like 20 of the quests from this already insanely long quest line. What the fuck. This is supposed to be an epilogue to ARR and it feels like I played a whole fucking JRPG in between ARR and Heavensward. Oh well. Thankfully, they learned from this and made the post-story blocks shorter.

I will just say that I can recommend this game. You should give it a try. Just... try not to drop the game before it gets really, really good.

#Rant #final fantasy #Final fantasy XIV

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