Reviews// Final Fantasy XIV

Some people will tell you that Final Fantasy XIV is the best game ever made. These are the folks who’ve spent months drooling in anticipation over every screenshot, video and snippet of information Square Enix has deigned to throw them. Such people are absolutely not to be trusted.

Others will tell you that I’m a bitter man with a lousy PC, and while Final Fantasy XIV is by no means a fantastic game, it doesn’t quite deserve the barely-restrained kicking I’m about to give it. These are the people you probably should be listening to and, to be honest, they’re probably right. Still, they ain’t around to argue with me right now, so pull up a pew, settle yourself down, and let me spin ye a tale of a game that plays like balls.

Cocksure
You can tell it’s Final Fantasy because it opens with an obscenely beautiful CG intro full of pointy-eared heroes who look like girls; squiggly-limbed monstrosities and flying totem battleships. The lingo is dense; the action slides in and out of slow motion like the Wachowski brothers playing the trombone. It couldn’t be more Final Fantasy unless it pulled out that theme tune for the title screen. Which, of course, it does.

Perhaps that’s why FFXIV is so disappointing. Final Fantasy games have always been polished and cocksure, and the cutscenes are only a part of that. I expect slick menus from Final Fantasy games. I expect impeccable artistic design, memorable characters and a thrilling air of adventure. The series, though it should be bogged down by its clumsy dialogue and antique fighting systems, has always had a certain slickness about it.

Final Fantasy XIV is not slick. It is lumpen and unintelligible, and a total betrayal of what the series stands for.

There is adventure, of course. There are titanic struggles against blind angels, woodland gods and monsters that look like your Auntie Prudence’s bottom, and because this is Final Fantasy, before you see any of that you have to wade through cutscene after cutscene.

But before you even get to the cutscenes the game displays a certain off-putting arrogance. Like a lot of modern games there isn’t a proper manual included in the box - there’s only a flimsy pamphlet detailing how to install the game and set up your server-side account.

Being a vast and complicated MMORPG, surely there should be some indication of how to play the game in the manual? Or how the in-game menu system works? If not, if the game really has to rely on an online manual then surely there must be one hell of a tutorial included in the game itself?

Of course, there isn’t. You’re plunged into the game head first with only the most meagre of lessons in how to perform tasks, and left to fend for yourself. It’s the designers arrogantly saying “You should know how to do this!” and having to spend so much time working out how to do anything saps the fun from the game.

Menus vs Boys
The menus are confusing. Hell, even the map is confusing. Trying to find your location in relation to the quest that you need to reach is an exercise in advanced orienteering. I was opening and closing both the quest map and the main map, trying to work out where I was on one in relation to the other based on tiny kinks in the drawn landscape and failing utterly. In one instance I couldn’t find my way to an area because the map led me to a dead end, and neglected to tell me there was a underground tunnel hidden a scant metre down the road.

There is an on-screen compass that points you to your next quest, but I couldn’t see it because I had the game running in 4:3 on the lowest resolution to try and draw some extra frames per second from the resource hungry graphics engine. The developers had also neglected to account for non-widescreen resolutions when it came to certain on-screen widgets.

Though the compass existed it had been rendered off screen. I needed to open the game in widescreen mode, relocate the compass towards the centre of the screen, then reopen it in the original resolution. There’s no way to change the graphical settings from the in-game menus. And I wouldn’t have known the compass existed or that there was a fix for my problem if I hadn’t read some unofficial forums for help.

The other menus are equally unintuitive, and suffer from terrible lag. Even something as simple as equipping your character requires a series of button presses that aren’t explained in due course, as they should be. On numerous occasions I went into battle unprepared, being unable to tell I was in the wrong stance because the only graphical difference it made was my character affecting a slight slouch. Perhaps a set of hotkeys - that old MMORPG stand-by - would have come in handy here?

The default keyboard layout is taken up by camera and movement controls, with no way to repurpose keys. Considering most people are likely to be controlling the camera using the mouse, the way they do in every other PC game, this feels feels like a lethargic, half-hearted slap in the face from developers who don’t care. The rest of the game feels much the same way.

Patchy
Want to know how desperately unintuitive this game is? Even the patch updater is unintuitive, as in, it refused to download the patches needed to play the game. It was practically an adventure in itself getting the thing working, visiting seedy bars, asking tattooed blokes named ‘T-Bone’ if they had ‘the stuff’, then taking the illicitly downloaded patches home to let my PC snort it in a single glorious installation. Having to jump through so many hoops just to get the game running made me question if the folks at Square-Enix even wanted me to play their game.

Some hours later, I was still wondering.