Reviews// Final Fantasy XIV

It appears to me that every facet of the game was designed without thought that someday someone might get to play it. It’s a game designed by people who know every feature and function, how each quest works, what they need to do and where they need to go to complete it, but who never felt that they’d need to impart this information to the player. It’s a game sorely in need of an explanation.

Grinding Backbone
Take shops, for example. There is currently no way to discern what a shop might sell until you enter into dialogue with the keeper. Shopping trips involve running up and down the arcade speaking to every NPC until you find the one who sells the item you require. This is inconvenient at the best of times; when you’re working to a quest-imposed time limit you just don’t have the time to track down salespersons and pore over item lists.

The game doesn’t even present you with a list of required equipment for your quests, turning them into exercises in trial and error. “Run to this location and fish! Oh, but now you’re here you need a rod - run to the shops and buy one, then come back here! Oh, but you need some bait - run back to the shops and buy some. Oh, but you’re out of time. Try again tomorrow!”

“Oh, but you’ve quit the game.”

Not that the quests - or “Levequests”, in the game's parlance - are worth playing. Existing extraneously to the main thrust of the plot these quests form the grinding backbone of FFXIV, and are as tired as MMORPG quests can get. At one point I was on three different quests to kill sentient mushrooms in a wood, but it might as well have been three quests to kill bees, or marmosets, or some of the fiercer critters dwelling out in the wider world - there’s so little variation even by MMORPG standards.

Quests can be taken each day, but there’s a limit imposed on how many quests you can store, and sometimes accepting a new one involves swapping others - including quests you’ve already completed - out to accommodate it. I’m not sure how this process works or what it signifies because there was no tutorial to educate me, but really, in FFXIV, that’s par for the course.

Discouraging
I’ve already said that it’s as if Square Enix didn’t want me to play their game, and this is made perfectly clear the moment the game loads. There’s a warning to the player telling him not to neglect his friends or family, to not be absorbed into the fantasy world they’ve created. In case these caveats don't suffice, they’ve implemented a fail-safe in the game itself: after eight hours of gameplay in a single week, the rate at which you accumulate skill points diminishes. What kind of game discourages its gamers from playing it?

Aside from all the niggles I’ve mentioned above, there are others I haven’t... yet. Try... the game displaying a server error and throwing me back to the start screen when I dared to purchase a fishing rod. Try having to wait in a given area for upwards of a minute for the laggy NPCs to materialise. Try the time-limited Levequests that become greyed-out when failed and don’t reappear until the next day.

MMORPGs are notorious for blocking swathes of content from players who don’t spend inordinate amounts of time playing the game, so in that respect I suppose FFXIV should be a breath of fresh air. But if you’re paying upwards of £8.99 a month in order to play it, wouldn’t you want to get your money’s worth and not have the game tell you you’ve played it for too long by denying you access to content?

It’s telling that since reviews of Final Fantasy XIV started to appear that Square Enix have offered players a month of free play time while they strive to fix the myriad problems from which the game is constructed. It’s even more telling that - in what’s going to remain a mark on Square Enix’s slate for many years - one fervent fan was so dismayed with FFXIV that he sold his 1% share of the company, sending Square Enix stock plummeting.

Even at my most generous I have to say that Final Fantasy XIV is in a shocking state of disrepair. Anything that exists outside of the game’s sumptuous artistic design is broken, unintuitive, and non-responsive. Far from being a finished project Final Fantasy XIV is more like an alpha prototype of a game I just don’t want to play, and no amount of glorious CG intros can fix that.

Conclusion
If video games were babies Final Fantasy XIV would be in the NICU with tubes up its nose. Bugs en masse and a lack of user friendliness help to mask core gameplay that is middling at best - but don't be fooled into thinking these are problems that can be easily ironed out with a patch or two. FFXIV is underdeveloped, unfinished, and barely playable. No matter how big a fan you are of the franchise, do yourself a favour and watch the CG intro on YouTube rather than waste money on this wretched excuse for a release.


SPOnG Score: 20%