Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Final Fantasy XIV Review

Where to begin with this game? For one, I can confidently say that it's the most shameful and poorly designed title Square-Enix has released to date. Nearly every feature will leave the player wondering "What the fuck were they thinking?". What makes Square-Enix's latest MMORPG so terrible you ask? Let's go down the list.

1. World Design - Five enormous zones make up the entirety of the game's world of Eorzea. Throughout each zone, you'll notice constantly repeating copy-pasted features and little to no landmarks that spark any sort of interest. The small towns compose of a few NPCs that provide one line of dialogue and the three starting cities are right next to each other. If it's exploration you seek, then this setting will prove very disappointing.

2. Content - Or lack thereof. Nearly all of the game's content revolves around repeating a few tired ass "Kill x amount of monsters" quests (Guildleves) every 36 hours and crafting. Real quests? Not here folks. There is an extremely limited amount of storyline and class quests but other than those five or so quests, you'll find yourself grinding guildleves and navigating painful crafting menus straight to the max level. What awaits at the max level? About four timed spawn monsters that a simple group of apes can kill within 15 minutes. No they don't drop anything cool.

3. Economy - No auction house. To buy and sell items, you hire an NPC to advertise your wares in an area called the market wards. You enter the market wards and it's just a room full of NPCs whom you must individually check in order to know what they're selling. There is a search feature but should you be selling, for instance, a sword in the tailor's ward, it will not show up in the search box. Basically it's fucking stupid and time consuming, like everything else in this game.

4. Combat - Shallow and mindless. If you're familiar with the term "zerging", it's basically what you do for every fight in the game. There is zero amount of strategy involved and the lenient class system which allows you to equip abilities from other classes means that no class has a true role in a group setting. Lack of auto-attack will have you mashing the 1 key and all spells having a wide area of effect make healing a task so simple that a toddler can master it within minutes. 

5. Misc. - Lackluster soundtrack, constant reuse of armor models and terrain features, no search function, painfully slow character progression, pathetic effect animations, poor optimization, and so forth. The list just goes on and on. If I had to say anything positive about this game, it's that it has good graphics and detailed character and monster animations. That's it.

The amount of flaws in this game is so staggering that I can't be bothered to list every single one. Avoid it at all costs as MMORPGs don't really get much worse than this one. Although it is free to pay until further notice and Square-Enix speaks of bright promises and restructured dev teams, hold on to your money until they actually deliver. If you're one of those looking for a good Final Fantasy MMO or just plain old wanna try something different from WoW, try this game's successful older cousin.

Verdict - 5/10

Upcoming review: Street Fighter III: Third Strike

17 comments:

  1. good to know so I can avoid the game... thanks

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  2. I've only ever played FF6 all the way through (for snes) I played a bit of 7 which I hear is one of the best.. from what i've seen in trailers the newer games look terrible, moder/futuristic settings..
    i dunno it all looks kind of lame to me

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  3. man I used to play so much FF back in the day, I need to get back into it!!!

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  4. never played ff :(

    http://allaboutneobux.blogspot.com/

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  5. Classic game that I never got to finish.

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  6. Mehhh, FF franchise is starting to dwindle, didnt like 13 much, and didnt finish :(

    hit me back!

    http://pinoykcin.blogspot.com/

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  7. Hmmm, making me want to pick up FF again. Thank you for possibly making me waste more countless hours in my life. lol

    following!

    hazdbot.blogspot.com

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  8. follow back fine sir, good blog

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  9. wasw going to get this game, then got high.

    following and supporting you daily!

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  10. thanks for the heads up; very disappointing

    http://springsci.blogspot.com/

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  11. So much potential just wasted. I don't think they will ever recover from this. Anyways it also looks like most of the team resigned after the pitiful launch.

    http://www.blizzardhacks.com

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  12. Thanks for the review!

    howtohackyourlife.blogspot.com

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  13. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  14. I hated this game.

    http://www.tameric.blogspot.com/

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