I'll clarify that with a quick summary of my JRPG background. The first one I ever tried to play was a PC port of one of the Metal Gear Solid games; don't recall which one. My fuzzy memory of it was that 90% of the gameplay consisted of hitting the space bar over and over to advance through interminably long dialogue cutscenes. Recently, having never played a Final Fantasy game and having a friend's old PS2 camped at the house I gave Final Fantasy X a whirl to try and see what all of the fuss was about. I lasted about four hours and rank it as one of my worst ever game experiences. Gameplay again seemed to consist mainly of walking from cutscene to cutscene amongst one of the most irritating collections of characters ever assembled into one license.
My only other knowledge of square enix is that theirs is one of the names attached to Deus Ex 2, another train wreck of a game.
Suffice to say, I came into Final Fantasy XIV with pretty low expectations. These were not raised in the slightest by the game patcher which is done torrent style and which, accompanied by the sort of music you'd hear in a crystal and candle shop, announced that it was going to take around 27 hours to download the updates. A few minutes on google and I found a direct download for the 4.4 gigs of patches and saved myself about 25 hours.
Character creation was ok. The character art was good if of questionable design. We have the generic humans, the elves whose males dress in lowrider pants the better to display their rippling abs and manscaping skills, the FF version of a hobbit which seemed the bastard offspring of the Pillsbury Doughboy and a muppet and which I immediately wanted to stick knives into, a catgirl for the furry crowd and a big burly guy who I expect gets flocks of male elves fluttering around him wherever he goes. There are limited options for each customizable aspect but there are decent number of customizable aspects. Since they're all choices between presets it's pretty easy to make a decent looking character, provided you're not playing a male elf or a muppet. Sadly, turning music off in options does not kill the music that plays during character creation.
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| Really? |
Once in game I had to hand it to 'em. The graphics are gorgeous. The main quest lines, it seems, are chock full of cutscenes as I might have expected from previous jrpg experiences. However, be it the novelty of character centric cutscenes in an MMO or the quality of writing and animation, I quite enjoyed all of the cutscenes in this one. Mostly. The long load times at the beginning and end of each cut scene were a bit of a turn-off. There are three different starting areas, each with its own questline. I've done one of these questlines and dabbled in the other two. The eyebrow raiser is one that features, I shit you not, a flying musical kitten band that chases a big tree monster away. Points for originality, I guess. More points if they'd let me ragekill them and hadn't given them some absurd cutesy name. Moogies? Moogles? Something like that.
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| Ummm... |
The way the quests are conducted, however, is a throwback to ol' school EQ. Wanna get a quest from an NPC? Good luck. There are no indicators whatsoever of which NPCs might have quests to offer as opposed to flavor dialogue. During quests you'll get objectives along the lines of 'go talk to pullers at the fisherman's guild'. You arrive at the fisherman's guild to find fifteen NPCs lazing about and you get to run around and talk to all of them until you find the one that updates the quest and starts the next cutscene. An additional big part of the starter quests is running around the starter city. I was in some piratey city that consisted mostly of three hundred yard long bridges and ramps that you continually had to run along to get anywhere. Nice scenery couldn't prevent this from getting old pretty fast.
Creating another character in the same city and, consequently, skipping through the cutscenes that you've seen already reveals that, at the low levels at least, the majority of your playtime simply consists of running from one place to another to find the next cutscene.
Character animation is both good and bad. Good in that it's smooth and lifelike. Bad in that most characters seem to be possessed by twelve year old Japanese girls. Once you've done the wave emote once you will quietly vow to yourself to never, ever make your character do anything of that sort ever again. This is one of the cultural oddities of Japan that I've always found the strangest-how everything seems targeted towards young girls. Here we have the squeaky voices, the animations, the flying kittens, the muppets, the androgynous males with fabulous hair. In any case, if that's an important part of the Asian RPG experience for you then you will be able to find it here though, so far at least, it hasn't been as overbearing as it was in Final Fantasy X.
The UI is absolutely, hideously awful. Really, really bad. Chat is limited to 80 character messages. Most info like inventory, character, etc. is buried 2 or 3 layers deep in a menu system that is slow and must be interacted with with a software driven mickey mouse hand cursor that just kind of vaguely drifts along in the direction that you're trying to move it. Your inventory is split across multiple tabs in multiple menus. Want to clickdrag something to equip it? Tough shit. That's not how muppets roll.
I finished the starting questline with my character and am now in a position where I have no real idea what to do. There might be another quest for my level, somewhere, or there might be a hundred. I'm faced with the prospect of running around randomly talking to likely looking NPCs in order to find out if there is anything or not. Or I could do the "guildleve" quests. "Guildleve" is apparently a Japanese word that means "generic". These are the cutscene free go kill 6 rat type quests and I have the sinking feeling that these comprise the bulk of the play experience. These are all handed out from behind a counter rather than from individual NPCs in the gameworld. I did a couple of these, both of which sent me to an area just outside the city where I then had to click on a rock, select it from the menu, select to do a guildleve from the rockmenu, select which guildleve to do and then select my difficulty level. The game then did a complete 180 from its prior lack of quest direction. For the guildleves, it highlights the nearest appropriate mob on the map, surrounds it with a big glowy circle on the map as well as a directional arrow and then places sparkles over it on the landscape. Chat in this area was useless (more so than its normal uselessness) due to a goldspammer sitting next to the rock running a spam macro. He was still there when I logged back in 8 hours later which is probably an indicator of something.
So...
PROS: Great graphics and sound effects, well done animation, well done cutscenes and interesting storylines for the main story quests.
MEDIOCRES: Clunky combat, obnoxious running distances to get around the cities, unlabeled merchants, generic rinse and repeat grind quests.
BAD: Horrific UI, miniscule loot, elevator fantasy music, software mouse, quest direction either nonexistent or over the top, very little content unless you like grinding (supposedly only true for beta), locked keys, periodic supernatural possession of game designers by spirits of pack of Japanese schoolgirls.
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