Reviews// Final Fantasy XIV

Posted 22 Oct 2010 17:18 by
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.
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Comments

Jonathan Leack 22 Oct 2010 19:47
1/6
Bought the Collector's Edition for a premium price then quit within a week. This game is a travesty in its current state. Square Enix needs to implement some major patches in order to make this a game worth playing.
Bob Saget 23 Oct 2010 03:56
2/6
I bought this game a week after it's launch because I was bored and wanted to try a new game. I read all the horrible reviews on Final Fantasy XIV but decided to try it anyways. Not having high hopes for the game I began to play it. I quickly found out the game wasn't as horrible as all the reviews said! Sure it was hell-hard to learn at first but that's where common sense like reading a quest-log or looking at the map or even asking other players come in. The game is very realistic but definitely doesn't cater to less-intelligent people or people who don't want to bother trying to learn. These type of people should be playing WoW in the first place, I don't know why they'd try Final Fantasy.

I'm no Square Enix or Final Fantasy fan. The only Final Fantasy games I played before this were Tactics and Crystal Chronicles on the Gamecube. But I think too many reviewers are jumping on the 'ffxiv is the worst game evar!!' bandwagon here. Sure, it's got a lot of issues. Sure, SE should've waited to sell it. But I don't think it deserves all the hate it's getting.

I must mention though: I am a very casual gamer. I'll play a game for a hour or two a day at most. Which may be one of the reasons why I like the game because they catered to the casual gamers with this game.

Anyways, I personally think this game is worth a try if you have $50 bucks to spare. The review is accurate with all the games problems but it's harsh like all the other reviews. Square Enix is trying there best to fix the problems but it may not be worth the $50 in it's current state.
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Bob Saget 23 Oct 2010 04:04
3/6
Oh, and ps:
I installed the game on both my Computer AND Laptop and didn't have troubles setting it up on either. Also wasn't hard to set up my account either (Took me 5 minutes...) I don't see the problem people are running into with this.
CB 23 Oct 2010 09:38
4/6
Accurate, yet harsh? Casual, yet difficult to learn? Worth a try at $50, yet not worth $50 in its current state? Which is it?

This is the first review I've written for a game on launch, and the first review I've written before the embargo's been lifted other reviews have been released. The reason why it came in after the others was because I wanted to give the game the benefit of the doubt. There was no jumping on review score bandwagons - what would be the point?

It's not the worst game ever - it's a lacklustre game with pretty presentation, that's hamstrung by faults seemingly everyone except you has run into. But you should be glad you're enjoying it and think it's a competent product (or not; you seem rather confused on this issue) but plenty of other people - including gamers, reviewers, stockholders and apparently Square Enix themselves - don't think of it in such glowing terms.
Rob 2 Nov 2010 22:38
5/6
Take no notice of the guy pretending he isnt a fanboy of the serious or a suare employee !! everything this review said is true, and the only way this game is different to any other mmo, is that its the worst one ever.
a 4 Nov 2010 12:20
6/6
What has happened to the FF francise? I think FF7 was so good that the bar was set too high for future releases. I have heard that this game is too linear, RPG's should never be linear.
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