Final Fantasy XIV Review

Just going to say this straight: If you're a fanboy of everything about Final Fantasy XI, you will like this game. If you are the other millions of players that didn't like it for the multitude of reasons not to, you will not like this game. Here is my first statement of this game: This game is junk and is not worth any kind of subscription fee. That being said, lets talk about it.

The game is in shambles in so many areas, but we'll talk about one of the most important features of any game: It's User Interface. The UI is utter crap and severely outdated. If you played FFXI through and through, then you're used to this old and broken UI for the most part. If you played almost any other MMO, free or otherwise, you will understand how terrible and clunky it is. Adding a friend to your friends list as well as just trying to get them into your party is tiresome and overly complicated to extremes. They don't tell you the commands to add friends to your friends list, let alone help you figure out how to do 90% of what's required of you in the game. Have fun guessing your way through it.

Exploration, where do I start? It's slow, tedious, overly long, boring. Do I need to use more adjectives to describe it? When the average MMO lets you use some type of mount type system to travel around, and for good reason mind you, this one doesn't. It baffles me as to why when the world is as large as it is, because it's huge. It would also help if the maps were a bit more intuitive as they can be cumbersome to try to navigate if you can navigate them at all for that matter. For instance, Kotaku.com found 90 some odd exact copy and paste areas of the map in a single area. Holy shit that's a ton of laziness and that was just one map! Don't worry, the environments suffer the same copy/paste problem as well.

Then there's the quests. Oh questing, how terrible you were. Here's a good example: QG(Quest Giver) "Go north and talk to <bob the fake npc>" Me: Oh ok, where north kind sir? QG: "North." Me: "Any general direction? How far north?" QG: "North. Do you not understand what direction North is?" Yes it's truly that open ended. They honestly just want you to wander and find it yourself. This isn't all that fun when you're level one and are having trouble just navigating the large town you start in. Yes, this is truly the quest you're given at level 1. Good luck and have fun.

The one thing I can say that's a positive is the graphics are astoundingly gorgeous for an MMO. They just look utterly fantastic, if your rig can run it (which mine could). I can say I haven't played a better looking MMO out there to date.

I don't think I need to say much more about this game, so I'm not going to. It's unfinished, unpolished and extremely rushed. Unless they just wanted to copy FFXI and make it prettier, which is probably what they were doing, except removing the Auction House in the process (Seriously, WTF were you thinking Square-Enix?). You will ONLY like this game if you played a LOT of FFXI or are completely new to the MMO genre and don't know better. Otherwise, go elsewhere. F2P MMO's are better designed and more polished than this. Steer clear and don't waste your money on this one.