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
