Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn

A blog post nearly four years in the making.

I played this on PC.

Sure, Final Fantasy XIV is another Final Fantasy game, but more importantly it's a Final Fantasy MMO. Well, a second one. I've mentioned before that I don't have too much history with the series, and that's true, but the most time I'd put into any of the games prior to last month was when I (briefly) played this back in 2022.

Here's a screenshot I took back then.

So, FFXIV. On account of this being an MMO, and particularly a long-running MMO, it's accumulated a ton of mechanics and stuff over the years that can be fairly daunting if you're not used to these sorts of games. It's got an in-depth crafting system which makes use of random drops from enemies as well as resources gathered out in the wild, the combat operates on a system with a global cooldown so no attack strings (that I experienced, at least) ever felt particularly satisfying, you've got reputation with various factions you're slowly building, as well as a variety of currencies to collect, I could go on but the point is there is a whole lot of video game to this video game.

This isn't even half of the UI you might have onscreen at one time.

Now, I am someone who is not a stranger to MMOs. I've played several hundred hours of Star Wars: The Old Republic including all eight class stories (which is something I may write more about in the future) and, heck, growing up I was obsessed with AQWorlds. I still haven't fully engaged with some key features of MMOs, mainly stuff involving group content, however. I've never done a raid, or even a long dungeon or instanced event, with other people as the thought of failing and disappointing other real-life people fills me with anxiety and keeps me away. But I digress. What I mean to say is: I've spent a lot of time playing MMOs so FFXIV, while home to its own quirks and issues, was a fairly easy thing for me to jump back into after (almost) four years.

However, that's a double-edged sword. This game is also, unfortunately, filled with a lot of the filler and tedium that you'd expect if you've ever played an MMO. Most of my quests upon returning to the game involved either killing 5 bears and getting their pelts, or running across the map to talk to a different NPC, or killing 3 rats, or talking to a different different NPC, and so on. I don't remember the specifics, but I wouldn't be surprised if this monotony is what made me drop the game in the first place. It's not all like that, but a lot of A Realm Reborn is, sadly, going to feel like meaningless busywork. There are shades of good things throughout but, well, there's a reason I stopped playing this game in 2022.

There is a lot of this.

I've been calling this "A Realm Reborn", and I suppose I should clarify what that means. This game, if you weren't aware, launched to pretty tepid reception. Things were so dire that Square Enix made the decision to effectively relaunch the game with a 2.0 update that not only overhauled the game to  make it better than it was (somehow? I'm not entirely sure what they changed if I'm being honest), but also represented a sort of a clean break in the story. The 1.0 story, here, is treated as a-thing-that-happened-years-ago that your new protagonist (probably) had nothing to do with, and 2.0 instead presents a new world-ending threat for your character to stop.

There are returning characters and, from what I understand, a few events that effectively play out the same way both times, but I think it's fascinating that the game that everyone talks about as "Final Fantasy XIV" is, really, "Final Fantasy XIV-2", with the original no longer existing in any real form. In some ways I think this is actually quite bad, as it's not that far off from Bungie removing old campaigns and expansions to make way for new content in Destiny 2, but on the other hand it's a testament to the quality of 2.0 that their gamble paid off. I feel like just about every failed live-service game has been chasing the newfound success of this but nothing else has really managed to pull it off, maybe with the exception of No Man's Sky.

A lot of great sci-fi and fantasy, and just storytelling in general, exist in worlds with history, where there's a sense that events occurred before the narrative began (and thus will continue after it's over) and this game, sort of, stumbled into that. Yes, there are a number of people who played 1.0 and have firsthand experience of it, but everyone else is forced to either take things as they come in 2.0, or play historian and watch lore videos and summaries of what happened prior to starting the game. A friend linked me two videos (Video 1 and Video 2), and with them I was able to not only pick up where I left off several years ago but to actually have a better understanding of this world than I did back then (as I don't remember doing this sort of deep-dive into the game in 2022).

The game opens with a cutscene detailing the end of 1.0.

The story is fairly standard fantasy stuff, but when it finally gets going it's pretty enjoyable. The final act shines because Things Start To Happen and the game gets a bit more creative with its mission design which, after dozens of hours of busywork, really stood out. I don't really think I have too much to say about the narrative of this game but the world is decent enough and I'm interested in seeing where it goes from here, as a big reason I jumped back into this game was because I keep hearing fantastic things about the expansions.

They do another title-drop right before this.

I still have quite a bit more game to play before I get to the first expansion (I'm in what's known as "Post-ARR") but at least now I've seen that this game can be good when it tries. You may have noticed in the image at the start of this blog post, but I am currently still on the free trial for this game. In all honesty, I'm not sure when I'll get off of it. This free trial includes access to most of the content and features of the base game as well as most of the expansions, so I should theoretically try to ride this out for as long as I can.

Unlike SWTOR, once you start paying for a subscription you can't go back to being a free-player. Your account will still be there, but you (I believe) can't play the game again unless you fork over the $15/month. Because of that, I'm sort of incentivized to milk this free trial for all it's worth and to put off paying for the game until I absolutely have to,  but I've already run into a few of the restrictions placed on free players and thought, "I could just pay to not deal with this" so, uh, we'll see how I'm feeling when I update you again. And I do intend to update you all again after each expansion, as I imagine each of these will (hopefully) leave me with something interesting to write about, at the very least.