Story was pretty interesting and much better than FF1 and 2. Cecil is a great character and Golbez was a decent villain. There are some really sad moments in the story which previous games were lacking (haven't played FF3 yet so only basing it off of 1 and 2). The areas are generally very interesting to explore and the endgame area is incredibly cool. The overall plot isn't anywhere as strong as titles that came after it though.

Gameplay was good but not that much deeper than before.

Incredible OST as expected of a Final Fantasy title. Theme of Love, Troian Beauty, Into the Darkness, Overworld theme to name a few.

This game was so much better than FF1 in almost every way. You can see the first attempts at a narrative and story telling in this one that isn't "Save princess from evil dude". Wish the backstories of your three main party characters were explored, but the rest was interesting enough. The Emperor was weak as a villain though and I preferred the final boss of FF1 to this.

The mechanics get hated on for no reason. It's actually very fun to level up in this game. Putting a shield on all my characters to level up their evasion had such a great payoff for the harder parts of the game. I never attacked myself to gain HP the ENTIRE game. I don't know why you would do that and complain that you have to do that when you don't. You also get access to a location on the map to super grind if you wish to overlevel your stats and it's right next to a castle with a pub (FF1 also had this magic pixel area with harder enemies to farm but the pub was pretty far away).

The key word mechanic was also pretty cool. Didn't have issues with it personally.

Decent game but very far from the best of what FF has to offer.

This is only for ARR as that's all I've played so far.

I had a lot of fun playing with my friend and getting to learn the mechanics of the game. When this game is good, it's really good.

The primal fights and other dungeons were all really fun and engaging for me. The combat mechanics are simple enough to pick up but also have a lot of depth for you to get better. New dungeons and bosses steadily push you to get better.

I started playing for the story, so I was a bit disappointed with how slow it is in ARR. Having said that, I was pretty focused on the story and paying attention to all the dialogue. The political intrigues up until the last third of the game (for my playtime anyway) were interesting, but nothing special. The "beast men go apeshit and bring back primal and we barely miss the timing to stop them so here's a primal fight" story loop got pretty stale. But thankfully it really picks up near the end. The last MSQs really sold me on the story going forward. It was the kind of thing I'd been waiting for the entire time. Also want to mention how great the voice acting was (I play with Japanese voices). The script in English is sometimes offensively different, but then again, they're using different scripts. Not really a problem but it makes it really distracting sometimes to digest two different scripts at the same time.

I can completely understand if you'd wanna drop the game before the 50-60 hour mark if you didn't start the game with the intent of making it to Endwalker like I did, given the pacing. I think the pacing might have been a lot better if I had access to a mount way way earlier and had access to flight around the same time I got a mount. There's a lot of time wasting going from A to B, which flight almost completely alleviates.

I have high hopes for Heavensward and I'm really looking forward to how FFXIV improves.