Game Review: Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn

[dorchadas]

I thought I was done with MMOs forever, but sashagee pulled me back in.

I followed the original development of Final Fantasy XIV haphazardly, mostly reading about how it was likely to be a disaster. At the time I was playing World of Warcraft and had no intention to switch, so I watched from the outside as the development ran into a bunch of roadblocks, the zones were empty cut-and-paste jobs, the gameplay was boring at best and infuriating at worst, the art team spent as much time and effort making a flowerpot as they did a player character model, and a private stockholder sold his entire 1% holding of Square-Enix in response to how terrible the game was in possibly the most epic ragequit in gaming history. But to their credit, Square-Enix didn't give up. Back then, every game was either World of Warcraft, or wanted to kill World of Warcraft, and they always came to one of two ends--they were World of Warcraft, or they died. Warhammer: Age of Reckoning, Wildstar, Tabula Rasa, Rift, all years in development and all gone now. Many others went free-to-play and scaled down their ambitions drastically. Somehow, Square-Enix threaded the needle and made gold out of dross. They made the game totally free, shut it down, and then restarted it, hence, "A Realm Reborn."

I went to Distant Worlds back in 2014 when they played "Answers" and showed the cutscene, and I kept seeing articles here and there on gaming websites I followed. The first one to really get my attention was about a phantom train and Kefka raid based on Final Fantasy VI, but by that point I had been done with MMOs for years. schoolpsychnerd wasn't nearly as in to video gaming as she used to be, and what's the point of playing an MMO by yourself, even if it is as story-heavy as FFXIV was supposed to be. But the whole time, I kept hearing the it was the best Final Fantasy of this millennium, and I thought that one day, I'd get to it.

Well, I got to it.

This is my desktop background now.

As with most JRPGs, A Realm Reborn starts you as a callow youth on the road to adventure.

Well...for most people, that's true. But one of the problems with talking about ARR's story is that it's essentially a sequel. The ending cutscene of Final Fantasy XIV shows the Battle of Carteneau, where the Eorzean Alliance fought the VIIth Imperial Legion of the Garlean Empire against the backdrop of the moon Dalamud crashing down from the heavens. Before impact, Dalamud broke apart and revealed that it wasn't a moon at all, it was a techno-magical prison built by the ancient Allagan Empire to contain Bahamut, and now he was free.

Hey, this is a Final Fantasy game.

Anyway, the good guys try to contain Bahamut, fail, and as a last-ditch effort Archon Louisoix Leveilleur teleports away everyone who survived Bahamut's initial attack. A Realm Reborn takes place five years later, with the scars of Bahamut's rage visible on the landscape everywhere (hence the new way the zones look) and the player characters from the original incarnation of the game revered as the "Warriors of Light." Anyone who played that game and then plays ARR gets a different intro, revealing that the spell hurled them alive and well half a decade into the future, and they can go forth into a changed world. New players, like me, get a cutscene of talking to an NPC while they both ride into one of the three major city-states of Gridania, Ul'dah, or Limsa Lominsa.

I'm impressed that Square-Enix was committed enough to not only remake the game but retain everything that happened in the original incarnation, but it did make getting into the story very difficult for me. All the secondary characters like Thancred, Y'shtola, Yda, Urianger, and so on were in 1.0 as well, so players who played the original game would have already been familiar with them and would have been the initial target audience for ARR. And I think SE did a pretty good job walking the tightrope, but for much of the early plot I felt like I was missing something and kept badgering sashagee with questions she refused to answer. I even bought the Encyclopedia Eorzea but sashagee paged through it and banned me from reading it due to spoilers. This turned out for the best, as most of my questions were eventually answered, but until the quests to stop the Primals started I felt like I was jumping into the middle of something.

Yep, a Final Fantasy game.

Speaking of the Primals, they and their exact nature is what the plot of ARR is built around. After the initial kill-ten-rats part of the game, the PC is sent as an envoy to the leaders of the three city-states to plan a commemoration of the victims of the Calamity, and then the plot changes to combating the Primal threat. Primals are the gods of the beastmen tribes, summoned into the world in times of danger, but their very existence is deleterious to the land. They require vast amounts of aether to sustain their physical presence, but devouring that aether depletes the Lifestream and causes the land to become barren. This sets up a cycle where the beastmen summon their god, its existence causes resources to become scarce setting up conflict, which increases the temptation to for other beastmen to summon their gods, and so the violence continues. Mankind, the in-game term for the races of Hyur, Elezen, Lalafell, Mi'qote, and Roegadyn, doesn't have its own Primals but they do engage in territorial disputes with the beastmen, adding to the cycle. It's not entirely clear what the distinction between the beastmen and mankind is--whether it's a political one and the Twelve deities worshipped by mankind are acceptable because mankind says they are, or whether there's some metaphysical property that makes them different. Figuring out what exactly Primals are and how their summoning works is part of the plot, and to avoid spoilers I won't go into it, but it's much more complicated than "they're gods made flesh."

Since it's a Final Fantasy game, the plot keeps escalating. The Garlean Empire finds yet another Allagan superweapon and attempts to deploy it to take out the Eorzean Alliance, and in the background the mysterious Ascians are apparently manipulating nearly everyone in service of some inscrutable goal. If you've played any previous FF game, you'll notice a ton of call-backs and references, both thematic and direct, in the plot, but nothing as direct as how Final Fantasy II rips off the plot of Star Wars. At least, not yet.

The major difference between ARR and World of Warcraft, the other MMO I've spent a bunch of time on, is that in ARR the plot is the showcase and is actually required. Before the mission to visit the other city-states, there's no way to get there other than running through a bunch of hostile land. Dungeons cannot be entered before they're opened by story progression. Before I beat ARR, I simply couldn't go to any of the areas in the first expansion even though they were right next to ARR areas. I bought Shadowbringers, the latest expansion after Heavensward and Stormblood, but it'll be a while before I see any of it. To my knowledge, this is unique in MMOs. It certainly wasn't true in WoW, where people often completely lost the thread of the plot because they outleveled the story and just moved on to new areas without ever finishing plot threads or entering the raids where many story threads concluded.

If you've played this game, you're hearing his voice in your head now.

The story cohesion and planning is probably the most impressive element of the game for me, though in some ways it comes at the expense of the multiplayer aspects. The player character is the Warrior of Light, singular, and is referred to repeatedly as an individual. There's a large population of adventurers roaming Eorzea in the post-Calamity chaos, but none of them are empowered by the crystals directly like the PC is. Cutscenes have the various secondary characters and the PC alone in them, and for story cutscenes in dungeons and raids, each player sees their character as the hero and the other PCs with them as associate adventurers the Warrior of Light assembled to help them in their quest. This allows a more classic Final Fantasy story even in the context of an MMO, and moving most story content to instances and cutscenes means there's less visible gameplay-story dissonance. There's no killing some terrible boss out in the world, turning in their head and seeing a parade, only to have someone else turn in the same head and get the same parade a few minutes later. All of that is fine with me, since I'm playing this primarily with sashagee and aaron.hosek and don't care about anyone else, but for anyone looking for a lively open world filled with adventure, this isn't the game for them.

I just recently saw that Yoshida Naoki, the game's director, did an interview with Destructoid where he talked about project management and planning the game, and I'm glad he did because coming from WoW, which seemed to lurch wildly from idea to idea with very little cohesion, FFXIV is a model of excellent planning. I used to read articles about it because I assumed I would never play it and so I know some spoilers about Shadowbringers, the third expansion, and I've seen hints from those plot revelations already being laid in ARR, which came out six years before Shadowbringers's release. I stopped playing WoW because I didn't care about the characters or the story anymore, but I doubt that'll happen with FFXIV. Even though I've only done ARR, I'm already invested and I want to see how this plays out.

Verily, 'tis so.

I also have to shout out to the localization. It's been consistently headed by a single person, Michael-Christopher Koji Fox, who also worked on The World Ends With You and War of the Lions, the relocalization of Final Fantasy Tactics, and it's that last game that provides a model for how the localization of FXIV was conducted. One thing about having played games in Japanese is that I know original Japanese scripts are generally pretty sparse on neologisms even for fantasy terms. Magicite is originally 魔石 (maseki, "magic rock") and a lot of terms like spell names are already taken from English to sound cooler in Japanese, so localizers have a challenge in adapting the work for a Western audience that often prefers more grandiose-sounding nomenclature. FFXIV follows the model of War of the Lions or Vagrant Story in deliberately adopting a more archaic mode of speech for all the characters, though usually not to the level of bad Renn Faire parody (except for Urianger, who talks like he was orphaned as an infant and then raised by The Complete Works of William Shakespeare). Eorzeans say "anyroad" instead of "anyway," "must needs" instead of "need to," "pray" for "please," and have a lot of fantasy-esque word substitutions like specific units of distance and time. Or "Ser" for "Sir," but anyone who's read Game of Thrones is already used to that one.

That said, earlier this week I saw a character run by named "Must Needs," so it's already reached at least minor meme status.

The localization really shines in the place and organization names, though. Like the 黒衣森 (kokui mori, "Black Clothes Forest"), localized as the Black Shroud. The Black Shroud used to be the sole domain of elementals and wild creatures who forbid mankind to live under its boughs on pain of death, and the name invokes the shadow of that history. On the other hand, the names of the Grand Companies attached to the city-states were given a bit more fantasy grandeur--双蛇党 (sōjatō, "Twin Snake Organization"), 不滅隊 (fumetsutai, "The Invincible Army"), and 黒渦団 (kokkadan, "The Black Whirlpool Group") became the Order of the Twin Adder, the Immortal Flames, and the Maelstrom, respectively. The literal Japanese translation makes them all sound like criminal gangs, so the localization process provided a much-needed tone shift. I usually play games like this in Japanese, or at least with Japanese voice acting, but I played all of A Realm Reborn in English because I thought the localization was worth it.

Well, also if I set my in-game language in Japanese it'd be very difficult to find anyone to group with.

Don't stand in a fire, it's the same in every game.

In contrast to the story where I had to play through A Realm Reborn in original order, it's hard for me to talk about the mechanics of the original game as distinct from later expansions because it is an MMO. I started playing in Patch 5.25, and even in the Patch 5.x sequence there were major changes from what came before. sashagee tells me about how combat classes used to have "Tactical Points," a separate resource from mana, to use their skills, but Shadowbringers removed them. Patch 5.3, which dropped a week after I started, added flying in ARR areas, which let sashagee use the fat moogle mount I bought her to cart me around from quest location to location. Even just the improved level cap and extra content influenced my game--by the time I completed the ARR story, my white mage was level 60 even though the original level cap was 50, and I spent a ton of time playing red mage and blue mage, both classes that didn't appear until Stormblood. That makes it essentially impossible for me to review ARR as it was. I can only review it in the context of Shadowbringers.

At its heart, FFXIV is a class-based hotbars-and-cooldowns MMO, like Everquest and most of its imitators and like its online predecessor FFXI. After picking a race, which has no effect other than aesthetics, you select a starting class, watch the opening movie, and then start getting quests, using your skills, gaining levels, all the standard MMO classics. I started as a conjurer in Gridania, but it's also possible to start as a lancer, a pugilist, a rogue (introduced in patch 2.4!), a thaumaturge, or any of several other classes.

What's different about FFXIV, though, is that class isn't a one-time choice. Due to being the chosen one, the Warrior of Light can adopt any or, indeed, all classes and swap between them simply by changing what weapon they have equipped. Picking a class at the beginning is just picking how to start the game, so while I started as a conjurer, I went to Ul'dah as quick as I could and picked up thaumaturge. There's not a lot of breadth to the playstyle of each class since playstyle choice is dictated by picking a new class, so rather than try to kill a bunch of enemies as a conjurer with my one direct damage spell and one damage-over-time spell, as a thamaturge I had fire and ice and lightning at my command and all it took was picking up a differently-shaped stick.

I keep saying "thaumaturge" and "conjurer," and haven't mentioned "lancer" or "pugilist" or "rogue" and so on, rather than the classic Final Fantasy jobs because at level 30, each job has an upgrade. Conjurers become white mages, thaumaturges become black mages, lancers become dragoons, pugilists become monks, and so on. This comes from following each job's questlines and acquiring the soul stone of the new job, which allows further progression and the acquisition of new abilities which otherwise stops at 30. Every once in a while, I'd see someone who didn't think job quests were important and is playing a level 44 archer or something and I wonder if they think the game is any fun? Almost half of each class's abilities come from job quests, and the story in ARR is the best part. If they're just running around using 3-5 skills over and over again, are they really having a good time? It's "spam FIGHT to beat the random encounter" in an MMO context.

That's me. I'm the best.

In addition to the Disciples of War (Jp: ファイター faitā) and Disciples of Magic (ソーサラー sōsarā), Final Fantasy also folds crafting into the class system with the Disciples of the Land and Disciples of the Hand (ギャザラー gyazarā and クラフター curafutā. Localization is important!). The original intention was for crafting and gathering to be fully realized to the point where people could only play them and neglect the fighting classes, and while that didn't pan out, the crafting system is still far more complete than in games like Dragon Age: Origins or Divinity: Original Sin where I carried around dozens of random pieces of junk in the hopes that eventually I'd be able to use them to do something. DoL and DoH both have their own gearsets and skills that that they learn as they level up, just like DoW or DoM, and their own rotations they use. Gathering involves trying to increase the chance of finding high quality ingredients while also still having 100% chance to get a particular item--each gathering node can have multiple items, including some rare items that only show up occasionally--and crafting involves increasing item quality and progress while not running out of durability. Various skills manipulate these three factors, increasing durability or reducing the rate it declines, adding extra quality or progress under certain conditions, or restoring CP, the resource crafters use to power their skills.

In practice, a lot of crafters just look up a macro and hit one button to do all their crafting, but one of the problems with video games, and especially with MMOs, is that if there's something that's 5% more efficient but 100% more tedious and annoying, all the players will do it and then complain about how much the game sucks. The only way to prevent craftbotting would be to remove macros entirely or limit them severely, and considering making a single item can take thirty seconds or more, I can see why people want to use macros to get past the tedium of making multiple items at he same time in service of further crafting. There's no crafting queue, and there were times when I was making wool thread to make wool cloth to make wool clothes and then realized I turned all my wool thread into cloth and I needed more thread that I wished the system was a bit less involved. So I became a macro-user too, but I can take pride that I wrote my own macro instead of looking one up. I understand the crafting system well enough to circumvent it, which is really the goal of most of humanity's attitudes about work.

Like in most games, the best gear doesn't come from crafting, but FFXIV has an additional layer in the glamour system. Using a glamour prism, any gear can be made to look like any other gear available to your class and level, leading to the common saying that glamour is the real endgame. The most powerful equipment comes from dungeons and raids, but some of the best-looking gear is crafted. Once I got to level 50 and acquired the best available gear, I immediately started trying to put together something that didn't look like "vendor-bought raid gear" and eventually came up with hardboiled detective red mage glamour. In various dungeons I've seen everything, from people in frog suits to angsty spike-armored dark knights to bunnygirls in lingerie to "Farmer Dan," a bald man with a moustache wearing a sweater and jeans. I'm planning to put together a chocobo suit getup myself, to run dungeons I've done a bunch already. Might as well make someone smile.

Cherry blossoms and sound of koto optional.

Even though most content in ARR is instanced, there are still some things to do out in the world. The one I participated in the most was Full Active Time Events, or FATEs, random timed quests which pop up around various areas. These are usually pretty simple, to kill a certain number of enemies or collect a certain number of items, but some of them involve boss fights or exist in chains that spawn right after each other. Every player in the area participating gets equal credit and contributes equal effort, so generally whenever I saw someone killing monsters in a FATE zone, I'd go over and help them. Much to sashagee's annoyance, because she was trying to hurry me through the main quest and I'd keep getting distracted.

Another fun part of the open-world I got into were the beast tribes--a name I'm still not sure about, but that's what they're called. In ARR, there are five of them: the sahagin, the kobolds, the ixal, sylphs, and amal'jaa. The bulk of each beast tribe are an enemy of the city-states in the service to their Primal gods, but there's always a splinter faction that the player can join and do repeatable quests for to get a small story and access to mounts, "minions" (pets), unique gear for housing, easier access to various clothing dyes or crafting ingredients, and so on. But I'm an old reputation junkie in WoW, to the point where I had The Insane title on my main, and so I did them to fill the bars up and get the mounts. There's only five! It's a lot easier than having to grind Bloodsail rep.

There's so much more I could go into because this is an MMO and even ignoring the content that I did from later expansions, I haven't talked about the Gold Saucer--I spent a ton of time playing Triple Triad, the best minigame ever created for a video game--treasure hunts, Grand Companies, guildleves, PVP, and everything else the devs included because this review is long enough already, but ARR is packed full of extra stuff to do and there's almost certainly going to be something that grabs your fancy. I actually enjoy healing in PVP in this game! Who would have thought?

More vibrant but less colorful than Outland's sky.

I've come all the way through this review without really comparing FFXIV to World of Warcraft, but that ends now. I played WoW for six years--I can't avoid it.

One of the things I liked the most about vanilla WoW was that there wasn't a single main story. The PCs were all just various adventurers out in the world, trying their best to get rich and powerful, and getting caught up in various plotlines along the way. The endgame involved multiple seperate stories--the Qiraji trying to break through the Scarab Wall, foreshadowed by all the Silithid quests in Kalimdor, the remnants of the Scourge in Lordaeron preparing for another invasion, the black dragonflight's infiltration and subversion of Stormwind, the Dark Iron Dwarves attempting to summon Ragnaros the Firelord, and all of these plots build up over the course of the leveling experience until the PCs became powerful enough to deal with them themselves. Assuming there were at least forty of them and they were in a raiding guild, anyway, which is why WoW gradually changed over time to be much less of a world and more of a guided theme park.

I preferred the world, and also Blizzard's storytelling in WoW was middling at best and got worse over time, so that's why I left. But the biggest problem is that they went from a story-focused game with a bunch of smaller plotlines to a character-focused game focused on other characters. The cutscenes and storylines weren't really about the PCs, they were about Blizzard's lore characters and the PCs were just random heroes who happened to be part of the Alliance or Horde and were powerful enough to accomplish great deeds. Except when they were retconned out--one of the breaking points of my caring about WoW's story at all was when the comics were released and canonized Varian "the Chinn" Wrynn and his bros killing the black dragon Onyxia. I was there! With 39 other people from my raiding alliance, true, but nonetheless I was there. I took Onyxia's head back to Stormwind and saw it hung above the gates. Giving that task officially to one of Blizzard's characters and de-emphasizing any role the PCs had in accomplishing anything of note on Azeroth just softened my resolve that had already been waving ever since I killed the Lich King and resolved the last of Warcraft III's hanging plot notes.

And I got lucky in even being able to experience the story. A lot of plot notes were hidden in high-end raids that only a fraction of the playerbase ever saw.

In contrast, Final Fantasy XIV's primarily-instanced storytelling means that every individual playing is the Warrior of Light and the other people in the world are various adventurers established to be roaming Eorzea in search of fortune and glory. There's none of the dissonance that occurs from seeing events play out for someone else that you know you did, because they all take place in cutscenes instead of out in the open world. Once that would have bothered me and I would have been all for using the Massively part of MMO, but as I've gotten older I've grown to appreciate the more tightly-focused storytelling of offline RPGs. There's a reason people keep trying to make multiplayer mods for Elder Scrolls games and it's not because they're the greatest games ever made, it's because even glorious chosen one stories are more fun when experienced with a friend.

The only real problem is that the Warrior of Light is mostly a silent protagonist, but even that's a throwback to classic JRPGs like Chrono Trigger. It's references all the way down.

Technically, both of these accusations are true.

It's often said about Final Fantasy games that they start off with a callow youth leaving their village and end with killing god, and one of the things I like about ARR the most is that it breaks that paradigm. It still starts with a callow youth, sure, and does involve killing various ancient gods, but it's like Final Fantasy Tactics in that it's heavily involved in politics and it's unlike FFT in that it starts with killing gods and ends with politics. The best part of FFT was the beginning, when Ramza and Delita were caught up in the machinations of noble houses who fought their wars without a care for the peasantry, and it tested whether friendship between a man of noble birth and one of common could survive the gulf in their respective statuses. The end of the game, where it turns into hunting down demons from beyond the stars, is certainly in character for a Final Fantasy game but loses some of the moral conflict that made the beginning of FFT great. Could the Corpse Brigade's grievances justify their methods? Is violent revolution the only way to overthrow an established power structure? These are questions that are very relevant right now, and when the Church is revealed to be summoning ancient demons, well, it kind of overshadows all other moral considerations.

The Corpse Brigade gets a shoutout in ARR, actually, as a resistance against the Garlean Empire.

In contrast, ARR starts with summoning ancient demons and ends with politics. Much of the plot is about combatting the primal and imperial threat, and trying to unite the fractious city-states of Eorzea against a common enemy. There's even a detour into the Crystal Tower in an extended Final Fantasy III reference where the Warrior of Lights deals with long-lost remnants of the once world-spanning Allagan Empire. But the very end of ARR is about the consequences of spending all your time fighting world-ending threats and neglecting to ask other people what they think about it. There's a reason that merchants outside the final dungeon always still charge the heroes even when they're going to fight a threat to end all life, and it's cashflow game-balance considerations, but the other reason is because even if the empire is invading, or ancient gods are threatening to rain devastation on the landscape, people still have to eat and raise their children and live their lives. The Warrior of Light might have saved Eorzea a dozen times over, but that's not relevant to most people's daily lives.

I also have to call out the lack of cutscene/gameplay dissonance. There was one incident, near the end, where a character was poisoned and the Warrior of Light watched in shock. Except at the time, my Warrior of Light was a white mage, one of the few people alive able to channel potent elemental healing magic, capable of bringing the wounded back from the brink of death and healing almost every ill. I could easily have saved them with one Esuna cast, but a lot of people going into the cutscene will be going in as a dragoon or a warrior or a black mage or someone who could do nothing but watch. The problem with everyone individually being the hero is that all heroes are the same, but that's the price of an MMO.

I was sitting there with a drink in my hand when she walked in. I always thought best with a bottle of Wineport red in front of me, but when I heard her footsteps it drove everything else out of my head...

As I said, I never thought I'd play an MMO again after the storytelling of World of Warcraft left me cold, but Final Fantasy XIV drew me back in. It has all the storytelling I thought couldn't really be done in an MMO format, and while there are still some of the disadvantages of playing with others, they mainly resolve through other players wearing lingerie or clown suits in cutscenes or, occasionally, being very bad at the game. But that's only a momentary annoyance and then it's back to the story, and finding friends can mitigate one or both of those problems. I've already put a lot of time into this because it's something I can do with my friends during the Plague Year where we can't see each other in person, but it's not just that. It is legitimately one of the best Final Fantasy games in the last 15 years.

I even came up with themed glamours for some of my classes, as the picture above indicates.

I am going to pull back now to beat Chrono Trigger, but I suspect I'll be playing FFXIV for a long while yet. And everything I've heard is that ARR's storytelling is the low point of the game and that it only gets better from here. So, onward and upward. Or, one might even say,

Heavensward.

Comments

[chippedpaint]

I just don't have enough friends who play and my social anxiety kicks in every time I have to play with strangers, some of whom don't have any patience for people who are new to MMO's. It doesn't bug me when they yell at me, but when they yell at someone who might be a kid or new to video games in general, I spend my time hoping they're new enough that they absolutely cannot keep up with the battle chat while they're trying to play.

Anyway, I think I would have had a different experience had I started with friends and gone into dungeons with them instead of randos. I did level up my gathering and crafting skills as high as I could without playing all the way through A Realm Reborn though. Level 50 I think. Also got far enough to be disappointed with ninja after I spent all that time leveling up rogue. This after starting as a tank and getting tired of being yelled at for not pulling a more MOBs than I was comfortable with in early dungeons with sprout healers and/or damage dealers just because some jabroni wanted to get some achievement or something I didn't actually care about. You want to go fast? Bring your own friends!I'm just hear to soak up the damage and point this boss away from you.

All that said, I was enjoying the story much more than I ever enjoyed WoW. I'm just sad it had to be multi-player because there's always a chance you pull someone who ruins the experience. To be fair, I just think that's proof that I don't like MMO's. I'd love to sit and play with 15 people I'm friends with, but I haven't had that many friends who I regularly hang out with in a long time, let alone friends who have the time to play a game with me. Perhaps once I retire. :D

[dorchadas]

The MMOness of FFXIV is honestly the worst part about it, and I feel like they recognize that in Shadowbringers with the ability to run dungeons with all the Scion NPCs. If they expand that further, it'll really be much closer to a single-player Final Fantasy game with MMO-like trappings. I haven't had a lot of bad dungeon experiences yet (certainly far less than WoW), but I'm sure they're out there, waiting.

Though it's true that the only reason I got into it is that sashagee got me into it. I did almost all my learning dungeons with her, so that really eased me into the experience.