FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Reviews

really fun. if you want a story to be good in a mmo this is it.

This game was really fun before everyone else started playing it and got really weird about it. If I had a time machine I would go back and play this game for the first time again as a person that is sane and loves Final Fantasy XI. Overall, good game. Overoverall, ehh.

after playing this game for quite a while I have yet to enjoy the convoluted mess of a story and find the characters to range from boring to annoying. I have not finished the main story but my friends keep telling my I'm almost there. I feel like I am being gas lit and refuse to spend more money.

The game is like any other MMO yes, it has its differences though. After all, it is square enix, and they deliver. New players are drowned under quests, but the lore/story is really good and interesting. The graphics are what they are, nothing to complain about. Gears/outfits for classes and races not too bad, I would let the race ones be usable by others though. The glamour thing is a little hard to understand, I need to look at a guide on the side myself and a friend of mine doesn't understand it very good as well. There is always people to help you with a dungeon too, it doesn't take forever for parties to form and I like that. Leveling would be super long if we didn't move to another server with double XP though, they should make it a bit less complex on that side (Since it's not different from any other questing mmo) but at the same time, it's not that painful (you can skip most of the cut scenes). I recommend this game, it's nice and me & some friends are enjoying it (I had a big apprehension about Final Fantasy before I tried this one.) We'll see, but after 80+ hours played, I can at least say it's fun!

i have a few hours in this game and i am not even close to having finished the story (i reached shadowbringer). the story is absolutely fantastic so even just for it alone, i can suggest playing this game! this game is honestly so much fun and looks great. the community is incredibly friendly and even though i have not made many new friends in the game yet, it is just great to talk to other people. (me not really making friends is due to social anxiety anyway, the game itself gives a lot of opportunities to actually talk to other people and i feel like most people are always open to chat!) this game also gives me the opportunity to hang out with friends that live far away, so we can just meet up here. one day i will invite them into my house but for now, i still need to save up a lot of gil and a lot of luck to get one! there is no pay to win, only pay to get specific cosmetics or emotes or mounts. just a lot of optional things you don't necessarily need. please try this game. the free trial is long, so you will already play a lot without even paying anything! it isn't even expensive either, especially if you go for the entry level (being able to make 8 characters is already a lot).

I thought for a long time, if I can recommend FF14 and Dawntrail was a dealbreak in that regard. Endgame content is lacking. Combat is mushy, server tickrate is pisspoor. It can be fun, sure, but it doesn't stand up to competition of wow or guild wars. And as much as rabid fanbase of this game will defend it with foam at their mouths that it's perfectly balanced and such, if you look to the charts for 0.1 second, you will notice that it is far, FAR from it. To the point, where certain group comps couldn't clear certain content on my memory period. This bleeds into many other systems: glamour (aka transmog) is a violation of geneva convention, the amount of obsolete systems that clutter the game is just absurd. Like storage being ADDITIONAL subscription fee in already highly-priced sub-based mmo? 1.40£ per retainer per month? Yeh, no. In many ways, game both expects it's problems to be fixed via modding community and at the same time, holds strict "no mods" policy, at least publicly so. Viera hats where, Yoshi P? Mods do make experience tolerable, and yet it seems SE team is dead-set on keeping eyes and ears shut, and not addressing reasons people use mods to begin with. And yes, we were promised chat bubbles (revolutionary addition in 2025, I know), and even half a year after Dawntrail they are nowhere to be seen. This leaves us with one thing alone: MSQ. Main story of FF14 has ups and downs. ARR can be a slog, Heavensward is awesome, Stormblood and first third of Shadowbringers can be a slog, latter part and Endwalker are good. But that is the main issue with it: If MSQ sucks, entire game falls apart. And Dawntrail sucks fucking hard.

I genuinely believe this game has the best story in the MMO space, and one of the better stories in gaming in general. With that said, Square is struggling right now to make this MMO more than just a story game with a co-op raiding scene and some social aspects that haven’t seen any real iterations to their core in almost a decade. The focus of new Non-Story game content primarily sits in endgame raiding and several patch-long (drip fed updates across several months to a year) closed game systems that have little impact to the rest of the game outside of cosmetics that will no longer see updates once the next expansion releases. Classes and stats have been homogenized and made mostly inoffensive. In this MMO, there are no builds or managing stats to create a different way to play your class. DPS classes all have the same outcome with little variation. Burst windows that arrive every couple of minutes. Some are more utility based, but still follow the same formula and often aren’t worth bringing for their utility because the name of the game is simply outputting damage. Healers are either primarily healers or shielders, but do both. It still just comes down to damage mitigation, healing, healing over time, and doing damage to provide some damage while continuing to heal. Tanks just need to damage mitigate and not die. This all sounds obvious, but in other MMOs, a single class can fill several roles all in different ways by adjusting how the abilities work and by tuning your stats. This is not a thing in FFXIV. Gear exists simply to increase your numbers so you deal a bit more damage, have more health, or heal a bit more. They are just stat sticks to make sure your numbers are comparable with the content you are doing. They have no meaningful impact on how you play. The high level raid and trial encounters are one of four main pillars for content to play once you have finished the several hundred hours of story content the game has. It receives the most love from Square with several new additions in some form every patch and expansion. Most of this content will not be experienced by most players. Optimistic estimations place Savage raid participation at less than 30% of endgame players. There’s a whole additional tier of difficulty even after Savage. Ultimate clear rates seem to be in the single digits. Granted, it likely takes less manpower to create this content than entire questlines and overhauls to old systems. However, it really demonstrates Square’s priorities when this style of play sees new content sometimes several times in the same several month path cycles, but housing has seen zero major update, iteration, or innovation since it came out like a decade ago AND Square continues to enforce artificial scarcity by limiting available plots for housing. Next is PvP, which sees updates with maps, cosmetics, and other typical PvP content. I can’t speak on player interaction with PvP, but in the 30 people I’ve met in XIV and spent time with, maybe 1 or 2 spent more than a surface leven amount of time with the PvP. Next is the Social aspect of the game. This comes in Roleplaying, Trading, Community-led events, Free Company (guilds) Activities, and Housing. These systems, despite carrying the casual part of the playerbase, very rarely see updates, iterations, or innovation. Housing hasn’t seen any meaningful updates in years outside of allowing the insides of houses to be as large as the player wants. Trading is the same as always. Gather and craft for major patches that include new crafted gear and for consumables for new raids every several months. Free Companies got crafting projects in Heavensward, almost 10 years ago and then had one more crafting project added back in Stormblood in 2018. The social aspect of the game, which is the most interacted with pillar, is almost entirely upheld by the community at this point and is augmented with modding that is actually against SE’s terms of service, but won’t ever actually be fought against because the RP community would crumble without it. Square actively refuses to innovate or make these systems more accessible. The last pillar is the amalgamation of whatever new closed-loop non-evergreen content they release in the post-msq patches. Diadem, which was a gathering/crafting centric event where Square had the community build up a district back in 2020. Some parts of this are still interact-able and is even a great way to level crafters and gatherers in lower levels. Bojza, a wartorn area where you raise reputation, complete public events, gain levels for combat classes, and get unique cosmetics. Island Sanctuary, you gather materials, build up some facilities, and implement production schedules to get some cosmetics. These additions have a couple of problems though. They are often complex systems that are added to over the course of several patches, so they take a fair bit of resources to build, but after the post-expansion patches cycles they’re a part of are over, they are never revisted. They effectively exist in their own bubbles and the only stuff that carries to the rest of the game is cosmetics and whatever levels you gain from the ones that provide it. Once you’ve gained the cosmetics you want, the content is done for you and there’s no point in interacting with it again. Island Sanctuary doesn’t use the existing crafting and gathering classes and the crafted items do not leave the island. Even the products of the production schedules are non-tangible items. Novel experiences like this ARE worthwhile additions to the game, but when they are the *only* new content casual players ever get is content that effectively expires when you get the couple of items you want, there is no meaningful long-terms goals for casual players. Aside from these pillars, even the story of the game has been stale since the first post-patch of endwalker. Dawntrail was downright awful narratively. Even aside from that, the community has been pointing out lately that the last three main expansion MSQs follow the same structural formula. 6 areas, the last area is all about learning about the past to cope with the present. A final boss you defeat to show the error of their ways. A split path in the second waves of quests for the msq and you have to do both. The problem is Square is seeing people start to get burnt out on doing the same stuff again and again but they REFUSE to change up the formula. So, why do I not recommend XIV? Despite my hours and the love I have for the story? Square has been given years of grace and love by a dedicated community only to continue to refuse to innovate and uplift the game past what it has been for years. The cracks in the foundation of the game have just become easier to see now that the story is poor and doesn’t cover it up. Is it because they’re scared of changing things? Is it because they think they just don’t need to? I don’t know at this point, but FFXIV has a massive problem, and that problem is that they actively refuse to innovate a 10+ year old MMO with dated systems, mechanics, and combat.

[h1]Do not purchase physical game time cards or risk losing your entire account.[/h1] You heard me. They will permanently terminate your account, with all the games and content you purchased on it, if they so much as "suspect" your game time card is suspicious. Which shouldn't be if you purchased it from a store. Had the wildest conversation with their customer support about the physical card I purchased being flagged as fraudulent, said even if it was a bank issue I get nothing back. And *bam* I was perma-banned for the first time in a game. Ever. Fuck you Square Enix. [b]The way I see it, y'all just robbed me.[/b]

I am going out on a limb here but I actually enjoyed Dawntrail so far. I did not enjoy it more than other expansions but it was what I expect and more for an intro to a knew story. And I mean new as it ten years of story had ended in Endwalker and Dawntrail is the start of another ten-ish years. And I have yet to find a reason to not continue playing Final Fantasy 14. This is just an opinion though.

This account system + launcher is the fucking worst. I tried several different paths to try and understand what my ID is (the recovery function doesn't work). The password reset step either opens a weird buggy overlay window in their BS launcher or on the web page gives me a technical error without further description. Basically, if you ever forget your account credentials for this game there is no coming back because Square Enix never thought it would be necessary to invest into the launcher / account management experience and functions.