thank you to mikoto komori for helping me get screenshots for this page!

i have a far longer history with FF14 than just this fully finished playthrough, i first played the game at launch on PS3 back in 2014, a version of the game old enough it's not even playable anymore, i got a good few hours in but never very far, not even out of the starting zone even, i hadn't realized it was an MMO and by the time i did i'd already paid for it, i also realized far too late that it was a sub service game and never ended up trying to pay for another month, i was just confused by it more than anything. i tried again a few times over the years, never getting farther than ifrit, sometimes getting bored or just giving up, one time being so upset after a bad dungeon run where the other players were really cruel and mean to me which kept me off the game for a good 4 years, but this time i did manage to push through and finish it and i started to really understand the appeal that i could never quite get with it. i think part of what helped was just taking my time with the world, exploring and making a character i really liked, before i always tried to make myself and was never rly happy with it for one reason or another, but this time i made a catboy and i made him look just, so pretty, like seriously i love this man and he always looks so cool in fights and just posing in fun locales, it helped me a lot for developing a real attachment to the world and my time with it, i want to get him to cooler places and have him in cooler armour with cooler classes. i'm mostly coming at this game from the place of someone with no experiance with MMOs, but a lot of experiance with final fantasy, i've played basically every other major FF, spinoffs included to completion bar a few small ones, the only mainline ones up until now i hadn't beat in some form were this, 11 and 16 so my going into this solely as a longtime fan of FF, but not really of MMOs or games like this, this is all new to me.

the main thing that i think stopped me dead in my tracks a lot of the time was the pace, it's a really slow game, which like yeah it's an mmo of course it'll be slow, but if you aren't used to MMOs like me that can be a pretty big barrier especially if you maybe choose a zone you don't like, from what I've seen this seems at its worst in thanalan which is a zone I've never cared for (though the music here owns), i'd recommend gridinia personally since every zone here has perfect vibes and of the 2 starting cities I've played, it's the best one, though limsa isn't bad either and has a fun set of quests. it's a slow game regardless of zone though, it'll take you a good 10 hours to even get to where the main quest really starts and even then it takes another 10 for you to really hit where the story gets good , it's like this for a reason though, the game really wants to focus on the worldbuilding and making you care about this world and to make you want to help it and it does a really good job here, but i can imagine it being super offputting or some. for others though this'll be one of its best aspects, you can just take it slow and chill and see all it has to offer, you can just ditch combat and go be a chef for 12 hours or make cute clothes or fish and i did all of these and it does so well to endear you to the place. they did try and both make it more accessible and speed up the tone over time at least if you did play this near launch and didn't take to it, leveling up is much faster to the point where you don't even really have to do sidequests if you don't want to because you'll still be high enough level to take on the main quests and they cut a lot of the more egregious fetch quests, plus you can play with NPC's if you really want to take it all at your pace and treat it like a solo rpg! though don't expect the storytelling in the basegame to be quite as good as a solo FF rpg, it gets there at points but it's still very much on that MMO wavelength at least in this chunk of the game, it's something the expansions reporedly do much better.

though again the story is not bad at all despite its issues with the pacing, I've even seen people say it's the best written FF in some of those later expansions like shadowbringers, though this basegame doesn't showcase that for its whole runtime. though when the story is good, like with the last chunk from when you hit the snow area onward, the sylph storyline and the titan storyline or the last chunk once you hit the final city of the basegame and the swamp zone is some really great stuff that is on par with at least many of the earlier FF games, especially the infiltration mission which i think is the games peak and they can feel really cinematic sometimes with cool cutscenes (though not many CG ones sadly) and some really great dubbed voice acting, but there is a lot of very dry missions here and some sections that are outright a little bad that does make some chunks of the game a real slog. the ifrit section was where i quit the game the time i got the farthest before because it just went on for so long with so little happening and it ended up showcasing the games writing and pacing at its worst . the reason for this is that this is the darkest FF so far, really only supplanted by 16 and it doesn't always handle this dark subject matter well, the ifrit questline shows off the worlds refugee crisis and while this is well handled and interesting, it also dips into uneeded edge and brings up and throws in sexual assault to the story when it really didn't need to, the gravity of the situation was already well convayed enough and did not need this and it made me need to take a break for a few days just because it really upset me, its an issue i know only gets worse as the game goes on into some of the lesser expansions (stormblood reportedly the worst for it) and its something i do need to warn about going in, it doesn't ruin the game for me yet, but its something i can see being a major issue as it goes along, this questline also has the other issue with the story on full display.

the game can have too long stretches of not much happening, as much as i love the scions there is a lot of dead air in those early questlines for them, many many fetch quests with little really going on or going and talking to one person and then having to go somewhere else and talk to someone else about very little, sometimes in zones that aren't too fun to explore (thanlan) and sometimes even being thrown into wild goose chases (the game even makes fun of itself for doing it in the garuda questline which was very funny i'll admit) but your milage will vary here, for some who like the grind and the exploration and don't mind the repitition, this could be a real strength since there is a ton more flavourtext and worldbuilding here in these downtime quests and if you just enjoy being here then i mean, it's more stuff to do. some other great quests for me were the hero mercenaries questline, which has you saving a towns wine industry and finding fake heroes, it's a lot of fun and a really funny time, the final two dungeons are also a highlight, so many hype moments and some great music and even a fun gimmick section where you get to take control of a mech for a while and use its weapons! but it is a matter of getting this far, i do ask you to really give it a try though, at least give it until after titan because i do think titan is where the game really picks up and hits its stride, that section really shows the ways the team can handle things like humour and tone well when given the chance to.

but like, how is it as a final fantasy game? it's a good one, i think it's very different to the FF's i love though, this is much less on the cooler FF side like 7 or 13 or 8 and much more like those super early FF's like 4 or 6 or the ivalice games, less focused on cool things happening and more on worldbuilding and that sense of adventure stuff and the writing feels very much inline with the likes of 12 or even tactics in places, it's nice, though for sure not as exciting to me as those cooler more cg cutscene heavy FFs, at least so far, this could very easily change, but if you do prefer those earlier ffs? this is a must play because outside of bravely default it's the closest you'll really get to those games from square, it even has some ivalice stuff later on! and the viera are playable (male viera my beloved......) it is still more in line with modern square in some ways though, like the more stylish character designs with the catboys and stuff and the UI and sound design is *very* modern square, it feels like a mix of the different eras in that way, the team is clearly more influenced by those old games but they're still steeped in the new, it's cool. 16 would also be a good comparison here with how it handles some of its worse themes and the darker tone in general since they were both made by many of the same people, both games are much more influenced by those earlier FFs and by more western fantasy on the whole, though it doesn't quite fall into many of that games worst trappings yet, the game has tons of cool women who advance the plot and have their own agency outside of the male cast! imagine that FF16, if only you could be like that. most of the important cast here are women which is so nice to see, two of the three starting cities have you team up with the women of the scions (though gridania is a duo but shh) and two of the three main cities have women as their leaders, it's really refreshing to see how well the game handled it after some recent FF games didn't, it also makes what happened with FF16 all the more confusing, this team got it right the first time!!

the game does well to establish a fun FF party with its writing, sure you won't really play with the characters much like you would in a solo rpg but the scions are a fun group that makes up what would be your party in a more solo focused FF, they're really the only notable characters here outside of the city leaders, who are a lot of fun, and your class questline characters who can be neat, but the game isn't focused on character much outside of the scions mostly, but again this could very easily change with the expansions and i have to imagine it does, but anyway the scions, they're a fun group, with Papalymo and y'da being my favorites i think, they're like a fun bickering manzai duo that help you a lot in the gridania questline and i like minphilia the leader of the group a lot, she's probably my other favourite, i just like her vibe and she has the coolest outfit in the basegame, y'shtola is also a lot of fun and i like how mysterious she is, for how much she appears in a lot of side-games like dissidia you don't really learn much about her here which was surprising to me, but she's so cool and when i started in limsa this time i was happy to see more of her, alphinoud is probably the most developed and gets the most screentime of the scions and he's really cool too, he's a big focus of the latter half of the game and i like his funny interactions with the protag and cid a lot (like casually buying expensive items for you before you even get there to pay just because he can), though cid is a lil uninteresting here, but biggs and wedge make up for that, wedge has the funniest animations in the game i swear, the other two i didn't see much of though, the hooded guy whos name i forget and thancred, i assume thancred is who you team up with in the thanalan questline but i'm not sure, but he does have a fun role later on in the story that i won't spoil, i hope i get to see more of him in the expansions. sure it might not be the most involved party in an FF game, but they're a fun group and there's a lot of room to expand on them, i have some high hopes for how the writing will progress here because i hear so much good about the character writing later on and if it's at least this good so far then i can imaging these expansions really being something special.

it was my first time with real endgame dungeon runs too which i think is where the gameplay does shine a lot, especially with a healer, i tried scholar at first but didn't take to it since it felt really complicated and like there was a lot to keep track of, so about 20 levels in i switched to healer and never went back, i trained this all the way up to the white mage job upgrade even and i'm still happy with this class, it's all cooldown based but slowly more and more ones get added and it gets a bit more interesting than the 1 on 1 enemy stone aero combo, when you need to keep track of group heals and status buffs and your own pool of cooldown buffs for your own spells as well as applying things like aero to the enemy, it makes for a fun, if a little stressful, time during those later fights like the very cool imperial boss fights and the primals! it reminds me a little of a more complicated take on what i remember of FF12 or the xenoblade games. this was my first real MMO (outside of some FF11) so things like the boss mechanics and having to do positioning and group co-ordination were all new to me, it was a really cool experience and i thankfully had tons of help from some really nice people. the other classes that interest me are mostly the expansion ones, like astrologian, mechanist, reaper and gunbreaker, so i'll try those as i get to those expansions, but i really did enjoy white mage as my real intro to the game, the others do still seem super fun though, i did love the pets that scholar had and the melee combat classes seemed very fun, same with black mage, i did briefly try archer once and it was really fun too, i might give it another try sometime to see if i take to it more now that i'm a lot more into the game, especially knowing you can become a bard with it, that sounds so fun to try. plus there's tons more to do even outside that, a whole gold saucer with minigames ( there was a fall guys one at one point) triple triad from FF8 is back and it owns, you can cook or focus on gathering materials, there's fashion systems that seem really fun, i'm excited to get some really cool expansion outfits for my catboy, you have the fishing and just so much else, you can really get lost in it if you want to, which i guess is how MMO's are, it was a long game, i think i must have spent at least 70 hours to get to the end of the basegame, but i'm not totally sure, it's a real time commitment either way, but at the very least it's an easy game, especially if you have people there to help you through the tougher dungeons, the playerbase seems friendly enough that i'm sure you can very easily find a group to pair up with.

the games zones though are so good, even thanalan has its highlights, the best for me were the two end zones and gridinia. gridinia is one of the all time best forests to just wander around and get lost in, so many nice places and it has so much variety, i love just chilling by some of the rivers here and listening to the music, it's the nicest starting zone. the end zones also, there's an amazing snow zone that has one of the better town themes for its lil first town you go to and the zone itself is just so nice, full of cold lakes and really nice looking snow, i love just existing there and knowing the first expansion has tons more of it makes me super excited, the final zone is really nice too, it's a big swamp with a really cool castle town, it's full of malboros and huge frogs and it has an amazing alt rendition of the main battle theme for it, there's even some really cool looking huge crystals. and the towns!!! new and old gridinia are so nice to wander around and get lost in, i love the bustling market and all the little rivers, limsa is even harder to get around and even it looks amazing, the bustling pirate port is a perfect vibe, even if all the naked dancing catgirls and public ERP'rs make me really uncomfortable, but when you aren't dealing with that its a top tier game town. even uldah is nice, though not as much a vibe as the rest, shoutout the fountain corpse. the snow town too!!! dragons head i think it was called, my least favourite town music but G O D the falling snow and the fire-lit towers are such a perfect vibe, if it had cozier music it could be my favourite, even the last zone has a great town with revenants toll, a cute little merchant town with one of the nicer town squares and a really great song to accompany it, all of these places are full of people and are just nice to hang out in, there's even a ton of smaller towns to visit too, like ports or cute little hotsprings or jungle towns and there's even a cute beach town called costa del sol that's this big resort suspended over water, it's a personal favourite and i love the little river town you visit for the murder mystery quest! i'd love to just sit and look out at the cute little ponds there all the time when i passed through, its enough alone to make me want to push through to the expansions just to see what cozy towns they'll bring me to! it's a shame you can't see them running on ps3 though since that version is super dead, i'd love to see how some of these later zones looked on there.

and the music!! this has a seriously great OST, it's not in the top tier of FF, it's not quite there with 8 or 13 or the 10 games, but it's for sure an amazing ost thats on a tier with the likes of 6 and 12. the town themes were absolute highlights, gridinia at night and uldah at night are my favourites and both get me super emotional, the amazing little town theme in the snow area (thats sadly only a minuite long), the swamp theme is amazing, the battle themes are fantastic, even their remixes (though the snow area remix i'm not as much into) there's even an area boss theme that is from one of the older games, there's so much good here, i know it gets even crazier as the expansions go on and the main composer Masayoshi Soken ( who also did FF16 plus some other FF's like some work on stranger and the theatrythms, dawn of mana, mario sports mix, some work on drakengard 3 and even lord of arcana, a game everyone needs to check out ASAP) you get different themes for night and day too! the nighttime themes are usually my favourite, they're always so calming and chill and make you want to just chill in town for a while before you go do your quests, they make these areas feel so safe, like a resi save room or something. the scions theme too! this one was one i've been a fan of for years, before i even played the game fully, because i had a ps4 theme for the game that used this song and it was my favorite, it's such a nice song and any time i'm there i just remember some of my better memories on that console, its nice nostalgia :)

you can play the game pretty much anywhere too, it's not on the switch, sure, and the ps3 port is long since dead which sucks since it was the version that i started with so long ago, i don't think it even made it to stormblood, sadly, but i still have my day one physical copy! which is naturally useless. the ps4 version is still up and running fine and its even on ps5 now with some fun additions, like how the haptics will react to walking over different surfaces, it's very cool! it's even on xbox though I've heard some bad things about that port (apparently it needs xbox live gold to even play?) but playing is easy pretty much regardless of device, it's on pc too i guess but i don't know anything about that. the game is free up until the end of stormblood, the second expansion, so you'll have a lot of game to play if you decide to play and you can play it all for free, everything I've talked about so far is just that launch basegame, i played all this and didn't even touch the expansions! though be warned that if you bought the game on ps3 like me, you'll be a little screwed over since you won't be able to use the trial at all even on new characters, i had to set up a whole new account just for this, which sucks! but what can you do really, it is what it is, it's £9 a month after that once you hit those expansions which is a lot, but it's worth it i think, especially since by the time you get there you'll have gotten so much playtime out of the game that i really don't think you'll mind paying it to support the game, though there is also a cash shop too full of MTX :( but i won't touch that, i refuse lol. it's still going along at a very healthy rate too, with an expansion, dawntrail, having just released and bringing with it 2 new jobs and tons of new zones and even a new race (with another job seemingly on the way soon too!).

this team and it's director Naoki Yoshida, who has became the face of the game and a meme in his own right, appearing at fan festivals in full cosplay and seeming super passionate about the game, plus the composer even went on to work on the more recent FF16 as i mentioned earlier, though naoki is no stranger to working on other square games, being involved on the dragon quest builders games also, plus some strange outside square games like, of all things, bomberman 62: the second attack and record of agarest war, the ecchi rpg on ps3, which i'll need to play soon because that sounds kind of crazy that it had such a high profile name as the assistant director. overall i'd reccomend giving the game a try, i had some issues with it but i think the games strengths more than outweigh those and the game seemingly just keeps getting better and better as it goes along , it can be easy to write the FF mmo's off as not being real final fantasies because of the online stuff but i think that if you do have the time and you are willing to commit to it, you will come away from it enjoying your time with it a lot, this and 11 (which i'll cover also one day) are super solid games in their own right and i think are worth playing at least for a while, oh and watch final fantasy 14: dad of light, it's a japanese netflix drama about a family reconecting over FF14 after the dad retires, it's not something you think would be good but it's surprisingly heartfelt and sweet, it's pretty great!