I’m a gaming hummingbird. I like to flit from game to game and enjoy a wide variety of titles and genres. So I’ve never thought MMOs were for me: I don’t want to spend thousands of hours doing the same thing, the prospect of grinding anything makes my soul die a little, and I don’t really want to share my game world with a bunch of random bozos from the internet.
All of which meant my girlfriend had to drag me kicking and screaming into Final Fantasy XIV. She’s clocked thousands of hours on this game, maxed out damn near every job, and explored every obscure nook of Eorzea. I mean, if she enjoys it that much there’s got to be something worthwhile here.
Stepping into Final Fantasy XIV as a level one bozo really put some things into perspective. She’s throwing down against laser-spewing building-sized gods and I’m struggling to punch out a ladybird. Admittedly it’s a larger-than-average ladybird, but even so… In a sobering moment it also turned out I’m about 50 levels away from even being allowed to visit my girlfriend’s in-game house.
Time to pull up my leather booties, beat up those ladybirds, and crawl my way towards success!
Problem is pretty much everyone agrees that Final Fantasy XIV’s opening campaign is a bit crap, though I came in prepared to forgive that. After all, A Realm Reborn was assembled from the ruins of the disastrous 1.0 release, which ended with the world being destroyed and the servers shut down.
Over the next year the developers created an entirely new engine and completely rebuilt the world. That focus on long-term tech and world design over the main quest likely explains why so much of A Realm Reborn‘s narrative feels like wheel-spinning to pad out the run time. After all, if new players in 2013 ran out of content after just a few days they may have given up on XIV for good.
As such, hours of A Realm Reborn consists of running to dots on the map, clicking on an NPCs, then returning to the quest-giver. And then there are the Matryoshka doll style errands that almost feel like the developers are acknowledging how much of this is busywork bullshit.
For example, your objective is to take down a big monster. To do that you need to find the legendary heroes who last defeated it. After a few dead ends you find them, only to learn they’re planning a banquet. At this point you’re sent off on errands to get food and drink, eventually discovering the wine they want is from a lost breed of vine. You head off into the wilderness to discover if there might still be someone cultivating it, only to find that he has his own problems and goddammit when do I get to fight the big monster?!
Fortunately, A Realm Reborn is basically mindless thanks to patched-in XP boosts, so at least getting through to the end of the original campaign isn’t frustrating. Plus, if something was giving me trouble I simply summoned my lv. 90 girlfriend to pancake it and chauffeur me about in her flying car.
There were genuine glimmers of fun along the way that bode well for the future. Teaming up with my girlfriend and her crew to bring down the raid bosses was a lot of fun and I also enjoyed exploring the massive world and the sheer density of 1990s Simpsons references. But honestly, the most enjoyable part of getting through A Realm Reborn was finishing it and knowing that the best is yet to come.
Sadly before the award-winning Heavensward expansion I have to get through the ‘Seventh Astral Era’ questline – a stretch of game so universally disliked that Square-Enix stripped out 20% of it in a patch and it’s still apparently very boring.
Punch through that and, if the hype is real, Final Fantasy XIV becomes one of the greatest RPGs of all time. Well, after 34 hours of inoffensive dullness, it better get good.
Pixel Hunted 