Val the Moofia Boss
Scholar
- Joined
- Feb 3, 2022
- Messages
- 1,281
If you want a 400+ hour visual novel/JRPG, then it's... fine. Don't get me wrong: the writing in the middle (ARR patches through Shadowbringer's launch) was pretty enjoyable, it's packaged in a format that can be difficult to sit through. For a 400+ hour long story, half of that time is spent watching cutscenes (many of which are unvoiced and feature stilted animations and finnicky lighting and are overall unattractive to look at), and the other half is reading paragraphs of text while the camera is zoomed out from the NPCs and doesn't frame them attractively. It is supposed to be a VIDEO game but much of the time it isn't appealing to look at like other video games or real visual novels that have 2D illustrations. Another issue is because FFXIV is willing to have unvoiced text, the writers forgot the art of brevity and you wind up with a script that takes 10x longer to get to the point than it should. The story is 400+ hours long but it is most certainly not 400+ hours of pure entertainment.
The story starts off as meh, but fortunately you can get through that "pretty quickly" (as in 50 hours). Once I hit the ARR patches, I began becoming more invested in the story. I found ARR through Stormblood's Eorzea to be a lived in setting, and I found the countries to be interesting, with their internal problems and their tensions with each other. Even the expansionistic empire wasn't completely evil and was interesting and was looking forward to adventuring inside it and getting to work for good Legatuses. Then the writers changed and by the time of Shadowbringers it became a Kingdom Hearts ripoff of dark vs light, the country vs country focus of the setting is discarded as everyone holds hands and sings kumbaya, villains are unceremoniously killed offscreen, every country turns into a boring democracy, etc, and I started losing interest. The current expansion story has had some conspicuously sinister messaging, but the biggest issue is that the setting is now boring. There is no conflict to get invested in anymore. Another issue with FF14's story is that the main cast are all scholars who came from the same island country with pleasant personalities. You don't get someone different (ie, is not a scholar and is blunt) until the last expansion and he's not enough.
Still, even with the story as bad as it is in Endwalker, I had fun enough to finish it, and I would much rather be playing this than whatever garbage is being shoveled out by Western game studios.
As an MMO, FF14 is lackluster. First, all of the game content is locked by story progression, and second, there is very little content actually worth playing with friends. Want to do MMOish stuff like forming a party and grinding mobs with a friend to progress? Well the earliest you can do that is Eureka, but you can't unlock that zone until you beat the second expansion's story, which is 200+ hours into the game. I guess you can go do treasure dungeons at anytime, and you can queue for unranked arena PvP with a friend, but that's it. The weakest part of FF14 is the combat. There is an input delay (can be reduced by installing Dalamud launcher and using the ReAction plugin). Classes are homogenous and boring. Overworld trash mobs are trivial. Boss fights are very homogenous. Every boss fight is against a single boss on a square or circular platform and is about running out of the orange AoEs. The only remotely unique boss encounters in this game were Steps of Faith, where you were trying to stop a humongous dragon from crossing a bridge while being assaulted by his minions, and the penultimate fight of the Dalriada in which you fight two bosses at once that have to be tanked apart from each other. If you want engaging combat, you have to go play WoW or GW2.
I think another thing that disappointed me about FFXIV was the overworld. Outside of a handful of zones, they're mostly very boring and mundane. Deserts. Plains. Deserts. Snow plains. And when you do visit a fantastical zone, often times the fantasy of it is stripped out after story progression (the huge magical gates in Yanxia deactivating forever. The magical sunfire skies of Norvrandt disappearing as you clear each zone. Etc). Not just the theming is usually boring, but the actual level geometry is usually disinteresting. There are only a few zones that feel fantastical, and only a few zones with some actually interesting level geometry (like the Eureka zones where you have to slow walk past the sleeping dragons, or carefully walk off a cliff to land on a short ledge below to enter a cave). Another frustration is that often times, the world depicted as the backdrop of the linear corridor dungeons looks way cooler than the wide open overworld.
Wouldn't this be a cool zone? Too bad. It's a linear corridor dungeon you finish in 15 minutes and never come back to.
This would have been a cool underground zone. Too bad it's a corridor dungeon.
Another corridor.
Also, don't expect a thriving RP scene here like in WoW. You don't see 200 players RPing as an Immortal Flames army marching through the streets of Ul'dah to go fight against a made up Garlean Legion. "RP" in FF14 is mostly just either light tavern RP, or prostitution at people's houses.
The nice thing about FF14 is the polish. Starting with the Heavensward expansion, almost everyone was recast and the English dub becomes great, way better than most games. I can think of few games with better voice direction. Maybe FF12. You have stuff like adventurer plates that display at the start of every instance or PvP match. There are some fun side activities to do, such as decorating your house, or playing mahjong. There are crafting questlines with characters and story arcs, and crafting itself has a kinda fun minigame.
The soundtrack is grossly overrated (I've heard plenty of games with high hit rates. The Uematsu FF games. Granblue Fantasy. Xuse games. Nihon Falcom games. Etc), but still good enough that I dropped $400 to buy the blu-ray albums.
Also, you can play the game with a controller and lean back in your chair. Pretty nice.
It might sound like I'm shitting on FF14. I'm not. I enjoy the game to still be subbed to it. My relationship to FF14 is similar to my love for WoW and Trails. I like it, but I just wish it could be better.
