View the original review at http://matthewleblanc.net/?p=1893
Experience with Final Fantasy 14 (PS4):
- 40 hours of game time in a two week span
- Levelled a Thaumaturge to 31, Mining to 10, Fishing to 3 (As boring as the real thing, BTW)
- Dungeon dove a few times
What I liked:
- It’s a solid MMORPG for someone new to the genre.
- Finding a party is streamlined, so diving into a dungeon doesn’t take forever.
- The quests are very story driven and gives the world and the player a sense of purpose.
What I didn’t like:
- Same old MMO formula.
- We still need to subscribe to these things?
- I’ve tried underhandedly selling my install disc to recuperate some of the cost. Nobody has fallen for it.
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It’s no secret that I love RPGs to death, so it’s safe to say that I’ve played more than my fair share of MMORPGs. When I heard Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn was getting a release on the Playstation 4, after its pseudo reboot on the PC and PS3, I knew I had to at least give it a chance based on the positive things I had heard. Forty-five dollars later, I kind of wish I didn’t.
Bottom line: It’s just the same old game you’ve been subscribing to for over a decade. It’s filled with fetch quests, killing an X number of enemies and delivering items halfway across Eorzea on the tired back of a chocobo. Even the dungeons were boring. You walk down a corridor to face off against one or two powerful enemies, repeating the process until you finally reach the boss for your chance at decent loot.
Since I brought up chocobos two sentences ago, by the time I earned my first mount, by slogging through mount side quests, I was pretty much over the game. I ran for 40 hours on my +4 Intelligence sandaled feet and when I finally sat atop a yellow beast, even the iconic “KWEH!” of the chocobo couldn’t stop me from logging out.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great MMO. It does a lot right, but it does a lot the same. Being able to change your class/profession on the fly is probably the most innovative mechanic the game has going for it. You can literally level every profession to max on just one character, but I could barely level my Thaumaturge past 30. I actually used the same skills (Fire and Blizzard) almost exclusively simply because there were no other skills. I think the idea is to level other classes so you can bring in a few of their skills. No thanks.
The game is pretty in motion and runs smoothly regardless of what’s happening, but you can tell it’s a last generation title bumped up. Everything is sharp, clean and definitely has that Final Fantasy art style fans are familiar with.
The controls are translated well to a controller from a keyboard (which you can still plug in to your console to use). I actually suggest having a keyboard handy just so you can chat. For some reason, there’s no voice chat option in-game unless you add people to your friend’s list, so you’re relegated to a chat window, circa 1995.
If you’re looking for an amazing MMO experience, go play Guild Wars 2. I can’t say enough good things about ArenaNet’s latest game. There’s no subscription and there’s more content at your fingertips than several MMOs combined. I’ve put 200 hours into GW2, completing every quest, dungeon and achieving 100 per cent map completion, and I still want to roll a new character.
