When I first mentioned I was going to go back through the entirety of FFXIV, now that it was functionally complete with the release of Endwalker, I was given looks of concern. This will be the fourth time I’ve played what amounts as A Realm Reborn, and just that inkling alone is really fair enough for people to give me worry. It’s really only off the honeymoon sentiments that I can just stare at the screen going “Yes I will gladly scrutinize myself to play the bullshit parts again for the sake of being comprehensive.”
That is to say, A Realm Reborn is not good. Awful for most of it even. This return trip, where I plan to overturn every rock to give the whole of Final Fantasy XIV its fair shake with the combined 1000+ hours of experience I have with it now, requires going through this patchwork prologue. To an extent this is relaxing to me now, I’m so attuned to FFXIV’s world that I can just pop a reshade on and get lost in doing countless fetch this and do this quests and feel a sense of affirmation. I also get to experiment trying to find a more affirmative body in the world by messing with my character design. This might sound like a superfluous intro, but really the best thing ARR can offer as it is is a world to get lost in.
The real prologue certainly tries to bring you in, although haphazardly. I have a strong preference to Gridania start over the other two as it’s the only consistent highlight of 2.0’s main quest. It really gets the rags to full adventurer right as you help out with menial but nice lovely worldbuilding quests, even if tree-hugging The Shire clone is the most it amounts to. It feels good though, and it helps that the area is decently pretty. I can no longer stand Limsa’s pirate speak prose which poisons that affair, and Ul’Dah’s intro can simply fuck off for all the good Scheming Monetarists amounts to.
The rest of the main quest pretty much follows suit. I’d scorch earth it, as for all the good it does at creating political spheres and cultures to understand and vibe with, it never really amounts to much bar a few scenes that the patch story content would add. Especially where I stand now, where fundamentally so much of the region’s story becomes inconsequential and at best only leads to a couple pathos moments. I actually had more fun sidequesting, even if that never quite becomes good it at least affirms neat political stuff like Ul’dah’s failure to become anything other than poor business startups across the desert. There’s a quaint scholarly feel to seeing how the corruption of capitalism does not really lead to any wealth, while a dead monster’s remains has wealth of its own. A sidequest story describes how a monster near Camp Drybone saved countless fauna and flowers across its back during the calamity that led to a beautiful conservation monument in its wake. It fits so snugly into the region, this contradiction to how the most wealthy inspirational parts have to do with acts of good in people and ‘monsters’ both rather than any business venture will do. The general puzzle pieces of FFXIV’s world remain this solid, but what I’ve described alone is a needle in the haystack.
It’s most telling that the biggest sigh of relief was when I finally got through the awful Praetorium once again, collected a bunch of optional quests, and felt free. FFXIV’s 2.0 is quite literally stifling, forcing you through all of its areas in painful uninteresting nonstop introductions. Even its strongest moments are retconned or swept away. You do everything in your power to try to prevent region threatening gods from being born, and only succeed at stopping one and said one is so temporary that a few patches later it gets summoned anyway.
I want to talk about probably the most contradictory portion, a part of the main questline I used to say was the best part. The Coerthas story follows ‘the lowest point for the main characters’ and has you getting partially involved in civil warfare between religious zealots and devout heretics. On the surface it’s just far more interesting than what’s come before, because there is such an intrigue in how easily corrupt the theocratic institutions are and what the heretics’ truth could be. However, it’s the most painful area by design. You get one aetheryte to teleport to, and plenty of the quest have you going back and forth across the desert snow area that feels less like Cold Hell and more like overbearing busywork. You have to climb all the way to the top of towers five plus times not even including sidequests just to talk to two people. Alongside the most inefficient use of time and the region, the sidequests themselves work against the narrative being foiled. The heretics you talk to are literally insane, sacrificing to a ‘blood god’ (What?) and painting them as such an unjust evil that I was aghast at the thought that Heavensward really completely overturns this. A Realm Reborn isn’t just patchwork, it's quite literally writing themselves into a hole that they had to gracefully jump straight out of and act like the hole didn’t exist or was not as deep as it looked.
I’ve done a lot of kicking in ARR’s face which frankly it doesn’t completely deserve. Past its failures I ended up somehow enjoying my time, although it’s clear that a lot of that is from retrospection. Not to bring up its disgusting dev crunch, I’d rather push towards what it Does get right. The job quests, for the most part, are all enjoyable times. Bar the Archer’s sickening vibe that amounts to “earn the racist’s respect and force a family that hates each other to continue being with each other”, the vast majority have very earnest and funny stories. I love the Thaumaturge’s cute family, and their themes of facing cowardice and becoming their own mages. I adored the Pugilist story which is just a lighthearted boxer story. I especially gushed over the conjurer story which thankfully side-steps Gridania’s endemic issues in favor of giving a great narrative about listening. You watch a girl come to terms with her buried family and her own mortality as she is forced to understand what it means to have perspective, listening to the world to find beauty in it, while coming to terms with the loss that prevented it.
The patch story is also still a setup and takes a strong amount of the time. I found myself more bored on this playthrough, but I remember how happy I was when ARR was finally taking its characters with, well, character. It weaved threads, set up downfalls and arcs while beginning to critique the structure and ground it. There was finally an intelligence to how characters act and react, instead of say, pre-praetorium’s entire Mor Dhona arc where you simply walk into high-tech Fascist Mordor and everything just works. I’d still say it only really gets good from Hearts of Ice-onward, where things finally start coming together instead of going in such a roundabout fashion. But moments like facing the keeper of the lake hit me as much as the final glass that clinks on the floor with The Fall. Just excellent stuff that really lets the kickoff to Heavensward settle in.
Not to mention, it actually starts being rather fun to play around that time too. I still find it difficult to criticize the early leveling that much, but it’s certainly not fun to ever replay any of those sections. Working with an incomplete rotation where you pretty much hit one to three buttons at best for 10-20 hours is just not interesting, even if the idea is to engrain all of the moves in your head. I’m all for the tutorial making sure that even the people who skip Hall of the Novice have leeway to not ruin the whole party, especially since a lot are playing to care about the story alone. But that doesn’t change that the vast majority of the dungeons need considerable reworking, just so I don’t feel like I’m slowly going insane. They are by design this way since ARR was an experimental phase, but again, we can do better now. FFXIV is certainly not above redoing sections, and I mean, Yoshi-P announced he was going to fix the Cape Westwind trial of all things.
Still, it does get significantly better in the patch content, and ARR’s gameplay still brought me a few of my favorite moments! Coil of Bahamut is laughably poor for most of it, but Turn 9 is such a beautiful dance of mechanics that simply hasn’t been replicated yet. Titan Extreme too, which was my first hardcore content in general, is such an adrenaline rush and showcases exactly what makes FFXIV combat special. Not only having to fulfill your role to react to a profuse amount of mechanics at once, not only weaving your abilities appropriately, but being able to match how your team moves and filling in for their mistakes. 90% of the time, your party is not going to move efficiently and cover everything. But even as a single person, you have the ability to make up for that in most hard instances.
Even on Normal they’re all fun presentation wise, and while gear buffs and changed mechanics have rendered much of these instances at launch painlessly easy, I still enjoy them a great deal. Whenever I get Shiva or even King Moggle Mog I just smile, partly because the music for both is a perfect fit, but also just getting to be a bit attentive and optimize my attacks. Even in the most tedious moments of questing, the general gameplay is strong enough to make me grin when an instance unlocks as a result.
The patch content also does such a workload to fill in for much of ARR’s travesties. Besides the raid and extreme trials it also adds Hildibrand, simply one of the best comedic questlines that calls back to Garry’s mod era in a wonderful way. It's consistently good and lighthearted, where having it on the side while I continued the main quest was a lovely feeling. Also I love the Gold Saucer, and while I suck at mahjong, fucking around with triple triad this time around was weirdly satisfying. Can’t say I spent much time chocobo racing or doing much of the parkour though, that’s not really my thing but I did give it a shot and I moderately understand the appeal. The fashion show deserves so much praise just for simply forcing me to try glamour because I keep pushing that off to “endgame.” The RTS mode isn’t anything I’d put much time into but I love that it’s a thing simply for giving you an excuse to collect minions. The optional dungeons as well as the quests around them are quite neat and cute too, of various quality but still particularly memorable.
Certainly, not everything it adds is a hit. The moogle delivery quests are such a tedious apology, putting character backstories into nameless NPCs that barely had any before. That entire storyline should just be skipped completely. The beast tribe quests all culminate in the same too-serious points with only the Ixal crafting one being something I even moderately enjoyed. The PVP… exists. I don’t simply mean the deathball spiral carteneau stuff which just sucks on the face of it, but the 4v4 stuff too at best gives good looking gear. At worst it feeds into a nasty side of the community that didn’t really need to exist and is just a boring timewaster. Not to say that every player vs player multiplayer needs to have the depth of Destiny 2 crucible or WoW’s utility maximizing tactics, but I’d rather this just be excised at all if it’s not going to amount to much. Even as it is now with expansions later, it’s at best an experience grind.
There’s probably more I could cover that escapes me even after all the notes I wrote down, but I think I’ve added enough to this monstrosity anyway. This will serve as a first part that I hope to tie together as a big review on FFXIV as a whole. I know this in of itself isn’t really ascribing much meaning or giving a thoughtful look at the game. As much as I want to have particularly powerful things to say I’ve decided to myself that this is my current project for who knows how long, and for some bizarre reason beyond mortal understanding I enjoy it. I hope this perspective has at least been interesting to read through.
Oh if you wanted a conclusion, basically ARR sucks lol. No, it's still so hard for me to recommend getting into FFXIV this way. If you seriously want my recommendation and just find A Realm Reborn sooooo unbearing, just buy a Heavensward skip and then go to the waking sands to unlock New Game+. All you really need is the patch content main quest for context, I cannot stress enough how completely trivial and inconsequential the 2.0 story is.
As for job stuff in terms of how they play, I’m saving that for Endwalker. I really can’t find talking about all of the job’s leveling process interesting.
That is to say, A Realm Reborn is not good. Awful for most of it even. This return trip, where I plan to overturn every rock to give the whole of Final Fantasy XIV its fair shake with the combined 1000+ hours of experience I have with it now, requires going through this patchwork prologue. To an extent this is relaxing to me now, I’m so attuned to FFXIV’s world that I can just pop a reshade on and get lost in doing countless fetch this and do this quests and feel a sense of affirmation. I also get to experiment trying to find a more affirmative body in the world by messing with my character design. This might sound like a superfluous intro, but really the best thing ARR can offer as it is is a world to get lost in.
The real prologue certainly tries to bring you in, although haphazardly. I have a strong preference to Gridania start over the other two as it’s the only consistent highlight of 2.0’s main quest. It really gets the rags to full adventurer right as you help out with menial but nice lovely worldbuilding quests, even if tree-hugging The Shire clone is the most it amounts to. It feels good though, and it helps that the area is decently pretty. I can no longer stand Limsa’s pirate speak prose which poisons that affair, and Ul’Dah’s intro can simply fuck off for all the good Scheming Monetarists amounts to.
The rest of the main quest pretty much follows suit. I’d scorch earth it, as for all the good it does at creating political spheres and cultures to understand and vibe with, it never really amounts to much bar a few scenes that the patch story content would add. Especially where I stand now, where fundamentally so much of the region’s story becomes inconsequential and at best only leads to a couple pathos moments. I actually had more fun sidequesting, even if that never quite becomes good it at least affirms neat political stuff like Ul’dah’s failure to become anything other than poor business startups across the desert. There’s a quaint scholarly feel to seeing how the corruption of capitalism does not really lead to any wealth, while a dead monster’s remains has wealth of its own. A sidequest story describes how a monster near Camp Drybone saved countless fauna and flowers across its back during the calamity that led to a beautiful conservation monument in its wake. It fits so snugly into the region, this contradiction to how the most wealthy inspirational parts have to do with acts of good in people and ‘monsters’ both rather than any business venture will do. The general puzzle pieces of FFXIV’s world remain this solid, but what I’ve described alone is a needle in the haystack.
It’s most telling that the biggest sigh of relief was when I finally got through the awful Praetorium once again, collected a bunch of optional quests, and felt free. FFXIV’s 2.0 is quite literally stifling, forcing you through all of its areas in painful uninteresting nonstop introductions. Even its strongest moments are retconned or swept away. You do everything in your power to try to prevent region threatening gods from being born, and only succeed at stopping one and said one is so temporary that a few patches later it gets summoned anyway.
I want to talk about probably the most contradictory portion, a part of the main questline I used to say was the best part. The Coerthas story follows ‘the lowest point for the main characters’ and has you getting partially involved in civil warfare between religious zealots and devout heretics. On the surface it’s just far more interesting than what’s come before, because there is such an intrigue in how easily corrupt the theocratic institutions are and what the heretics’ truth could be. However, it’s the most painful area by design. You get one aetheryte to teleport to, and plenty of the quest have you going back and forth across the desert snow area that feels less like Cold Hell and more like overbearing busywork. You have to climb all the way to the top of towers five plus times not even including sidequests just to talk to two people. Alongside the most inefficient use of time and the region, the sidequests themselves work against the narrative being foiled. The heretics you talk to are literally insane, sacrificing to a ‘blood god’ (What?) and painting them as such an unjust evil that I was aghast at the thought that Heavensward really completely overturns this. A Realm Reborn isn’t just patchwork, it's quite literally writing themselves into a hole that they had to gracefully jump straight out of and act like the hole didn’t exist or was not as deep as it looked.
I’ve done a lot of kicking in ARR’s face which frankly it doesn’t completely deserve. Past its failures I ended up somehow enjoying my time, although it’s clear that a lot of that is from retrospection. Not to bring up its disgusting dev crunch, I’d rather push towards what it Does get right. The job quests, for the most part, are all enjoyable times. Bar the Archer’s sickening vibe that amounts to “earn the racist’s respect and force a family that hates each other to continue being with each other”, the vast majority have very earnest and funny stories. I love the Thaumaturge’s cute family, and their themes of facing cowardice and becoming their own mages. I adored the Pugilist story which is just a lighthearted boxer story. I especially gushed over the conjurer story which thankfully side-steps Gridania’s endemic issues in favor of giving a great narrative about listening. You watch a girl come to terms with her buried family and her own mortality as she is forced to understand what it means to have perspective, listening to the world to find beauty in it, while coming to terms with the loss that prevented it.
The patch story is also still a setup and takes a strong amount of the time. I found myself more bored on this playthrough, but I remember how happy I was when ARR was finally taking its characters with, well, character. It weaved threads, set up downfalls and arcs while beginning to critique the structure and ground it. There was finally an intelligence to how characters act and react, instead of say, pre-praetorium’s entire Mor Dhona arc where you simply walk into high-tech Fascist Mordor and everything just works. I’d still say it only really gets good from Hearts of Ice-onward, where things finally start coming together instead of going in such a roundabout fashion. But moments like facing the keeper of the lake hit me as much as the final glass that clinks on the floor with The Fall. Just excellent stuff that really lets the kickoff to Heavensward settle in.
Not to mention, it actually starts being rather fun to play around that time too. I still find it difficult to criticize the early leveling that much, but it’s certainly not fun to ever replay any of those sections. Working with an incomplete rotation where you pretty much hit one to three buttons at best for 10-20 hours is just not interesting, even if the idea is to engrain all of the moves in your head. I’m all for the tutorial making sure that even the people who skip Hall of the Novice have leeway to not ruin the whole party, especially since a lot are playing to care about the story alone. But that doesn’t change that the vast majority of the dungeons need considerable reworking, just so I don’t feel like I’m slowly going insane. They are by design this way since ARR was an experimental phase, but again, we can do better now. FFXIV is certainly not above redoing sections, and I mean, Yoshi-P announced he was going to fix the Cape Westwind trial of all things.
Still, it does get significantly better in the patch content, and ARR’s gameplay still brought me a few of my favorite moments! Coil of Bahamut is laughably poor for most of it, but Turn 9 is such a beautiful dance of mechanics that simply hasn’t been replicated yet. Titan Extreme too, which was my first hardcore content in general, is such an adrenaline rush and showcases exactly what makes FFXIV combat special. Not only having to fulfill your role to react to a profuse amount of mechanics at once, not only weaving your abilities appropriately, but being able to match how your team moves and filling in for their mistakes. 90% of the time, your party is not going to move efficiently and cover everything. But even as a single person, you have the ability to make up for that in most hard instances.
Even on Normal they’re all fun presentation wise, and while gear buffs and changed mechanics have rendered much of these instances at launch painlessly easy, I still enjoy them a great deal. Whenever I get Shiva or even King Moggle Mog I just smile, partly because the music for both is a perfect fit, but also just getting to be a bit attentive and optimize my attacks. Even in the most tedious moments of questing, the general gameplay is strong enough to make me grin when an instance unlocks as a result.
The patch content also does such a workload to fill in for much of ARR’s travesties. Besides the raid and extreme trials it also adds Hildibrand, simply one of the best comedic questlines that calls back to Garry’s mod era in a wonderful way. It's consistently good and lighthearted, where having it on the side while I continued the main quest was a lovely feeling. Also I love the Gold Saucer, and while I suck at mahjong, fucking around with triple triad this time around was weirdly satisfying. Can’t say I spent much time chocobo racing or doing much of the parkour though, that’s not really my thing but I did give it a shot and I moderately understand the appeal. The fashion show deserves so much praise just for simply forcing me to try glamour because I keep pushing that off to “endgame.” The RTS mode isn’t anything I’d put much time into but I love that it’s a thing simply for giving you an excuse to collect minions. The optional dungeons as well as the quests around them are quite neat and cute too, of various quality but still particularly memorable.
Certainly, not everything it adds is a hit. The moogle delivery quests are such a tedious apology, putting character backstories into nameless NPCs that barely had any before. That entire storyline should just be skipped completely. The beast tribe quests all culminate in the same too-serious points with only the Ixal crafting one being something I even moderately enjoyed. The PVP… exists. I don’t simply mean the deathball spiral carteneau stuff which just sucks on the face of it, but the 4v4 stuff too at best gives good looking gear. At worst it feeds into a nasty side of the community that didn’t really need to exist and is just a boring timewaster. Not to say that every player vs player multiplayer needs to have the depth of Destiny 2 crucible or WoW’s utility maximizing tactics, but I’d rather this just be excised at all if it’s not going to amount to much. Even as it is now with expansions later, it’s at best an experience grind.
There’s probably more I could cover that escapes me even after all the notes I wrote down, but I think I’ve added enough to this monstrosity anyway. This will serve as a first part that I hope to tie together as a big review on FFXIV as a whole. I know this in of itself isn’t really ascribing much meaning or giving a thoughtful look at the game. As much as I want to have particularly powerful things to say I’ve decided to myself that this is my current project for who knows how long, and for some bizarre reason beyond mortal understanding I enjoy it. I hope this perspective has at least been interesting to read through.
Oh if you wanted a conclusion, basically ARR sucks lol. No, it's still so hard for me to recommend getting into FFXIV this way. If you seriously want my recommendation and just find A Realm Reborn sooooo unbearing, just buy a Heavensward skip and then go to the waking sands to unlock New Game+. All you really need is the patch content main quest for context, I cannot stress enough how completely trivial and inconsequential the 2.0 story is.
As for job stuff in terms of how they play, I’m saving that for Endwalker. I really can’t find talking about all of the job’s leveling process interesting.
Pangburn
2 years ago