ARR Thoughts

So over the last week, I just kinda decided I wanted to give FFXIV one last try. Can’t even really say why or what made me want to do it - I’ve tried both FFXI and FFXIV and bounced during the trial period, level 11 in Xi and 17 in XIV iirc. So I’d heard good things about the later expansions in XIV and said “why not”.

If anyone wants the details, I’m on Siren, character name is Caryne Arminius. Caryne is my normal fantasy female name - it’s a portmanteau of my two sisters names, except rewritten to sound… more fantastical. Funnily enough, it originated on my FFXI character I abandoned.

I played the entirety of the ARR original story (still working up to Heavensward) and figured I’d give my thoughts on it, what it does well and what I had problems with. For reference, I played the entire game as a Conjurer/White Mage. That tends to be how I enjoy playing characters in similar games - I main support in League, I played Estelle on a play through of Vesperia with my sister, I was Elise on the coop Xillia run at RPGLB… etc.

First major positive - most dungeons were really really fun. Like, when things got going and there was a rhythm to it, it felt really good to go through. The layouts were fine, the general enemy placements worked, the music really drives things along well. It’s genuinely a better Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles as part of another game. The character dynamic works better, abilities work better, the dungeons are better, the art is better and Square understands why it works better (shoutouts to one of the worst ports of all time). Seriously, if there is any reason to play ARR, it’s the dungeons. A particular highlight was when our tank DC’d (looked like lag?) in the early part of my first clear of Toto-Rak. Ended up being just the two DPS and myself and we somehow made it through.

I also like how from a game design perspective they handled it. They didn’t want their dungeons to be specifically end game content and they wanted them to be a part of the story and generally… they did good at making that work. The level scaling is a bit… odd - losing abilities feels *really* bad at times, especially stuff like losing Cure 2 (and omg losing healing DoTs makes the game so much harder). Doing early dungeons genuinely messes with muscle memory - I wish they’d just overwrite Cure 2 with the early dungeon equivalent if I don’t “know” it. It’s not even unique - they did that for Stone and Aero. Also the introduction of higher level players who know everything about the dungeons can kinda…demystify them on first play through some, not that they could consistently fill the dungeons without it. More than a few times, the tank would just run, know exactly where to go and cheese the crap out of the dungeon. I genuinely wish it were possible to play the entirety of the game with just players who hadn’t seen a dungeon before but logistically, it was never going to happen.

But still, in general, the handling of those dungeons was a big positive, especially since they give players incentives to help out. I think the longest queue I had for a story based dungeon was about 4 or 5 minutes which is genuinely remarkable - getting a queue pop in league can take significantly longer despite many, many fewer options.

The length of the story was *fine*. I do wish it was shorter but I also totally understand why it was long - I mean, it was the full game at one point. Even with the shortening though, there were more than a few points where I kinda wished it would just… move along. Again, not necessarily the fault of the game and I wouldn’t even call it padded, just an interesting observation. It does mean that there’s a ton of game there. I think the play through took about 80 hours but a pretty good chunk of that was AFK/social/meandering around for fun… you know, the stuff you do when you play MMOs. I’d expect that a casual player could blitz it in 50 if they were super focused which lines up with the 16 hour speed run time. Speaking of.. that sounds like it’d be a fun dumb to do someday... I’ve done 18 hour streams before you know…

So the really good - the game is massive. Assuming you played one class the whole time and only did bosses and every dungeon, it’s probably 80 hours for ARR alone, I’m guessing the game’s free trial will get you all the way to 120+. I’m actually kinda amazed at the amount of “free game” on offer but also… they really want you to get past ARR and if you get past 120 hours of MMO, you’re probably going to start paying. It makes sense, it’s just an interesting thing to have on offer.

But yeah, going further, I was skipping quests literally everywhere, I have only 3 classes I’ve even started leveling in White Mage, Weaver and Botanist and there’s like 11 crafting and gathering classes alone. The game is absolutely the biggest game I think I’ve ever played content wise and I’m not even sure it’s close.

Lastly… and probably the most important… people have been really nice? I ended up joining an FC basically at random (someone jokingly cast a heal spell on my character because she was cute… I wasn’t arguing otherwise) and it’s been interesting being the “youngest” character in the FC and working through all of the little bits it enables. I’m basically just Grand Company levels from getting my own room in the FC house too which is pretty cool. But even going beyond that - I failed multiple trial attempts due to being… well new, and at no point did I get flamed or blamed or anything (and the healer is the one class that cannot die in the game… basically that’s game over if the remainder can’t just DPS the boss down quickly). People politely wait for cutscenes to end if others don’t skip them… Seriously, I dunno what it is but it’s a very positive culture for an online sphere and that’s probably the most important factor. I do wish it was a bit more… social at times than it is (there’s a lot you do by yourself) but I think that’s just the nature of what MMOs have to be for some portion. IIRC, early patches of FFXI infamously required you to party up to do basically… anything after level 15.

So with the good out of the way, I can get into the bad but before I go further - I think the base game is a really, really solid foundation. Assuming it was it’s own thing without ties to FF or being an MMO, I’d say it was a game with good ideas and a solid foundation, and I’d be curious what the sequel looked like.

So most minor criticism first, the story is very… average. The Scions outside of Minfilia, Cid and Alphinaud really just… don’t matter. I’m curious why Y’shtola was the character chosen for Dissidia since she was… fine but unremarkable. I’m assuming she’ll have a bigger role to play later. The others have their moments - I like Yda and Tataru a fair bit but in general, they all felt underdeveloped.

The villains though… they don’t really have any redeeming qualities. Gaius’s motivations and ideas are never really clear, and the girl has her badass moment of killing everyone but… why were there 4 of them? Why did they burn all of them? It’s very KH2 where they didn’t really *need* to remove these villains and replace them all immediately and they feel completely rushed and glazed over (seriously the end game of KH2 is like a boss rush against Organization 13 members with minimal interaction in the story so killing all of them back to back just makes none of them feel important or special. LIke… Xaldin and Demyx are the most memorable Org fights casually I’d argue which is not a good look for your end game). I think this is especially brought to a head on the final dungeon where you get a full 3 minute, non voiced cutscene of one of them crying that Cid was he chosen one and he was the genius blah blah blah… And it’s so forced and out of nowhere. Maybe they just cut those missions as filler and they were more involved on older patches but at the end of the day, it might as well have been just Gaius and the girl and NOTHING would have changed. Also if they cut that story and left some of those missions in… what were they doing lol.

So yeah, the main plot almost would have been better as “You have to collect the crystals because you’re the chosen one” and not even necessarily this weird plot with the empire that happens to look like FF12 Judges. Like it would feel similarly relevant. I’m hoping it leads into future stuff but I’m expecting them to be cast aside for better more interesting villains.

So a weird thing I did notice - lots of the voice acting feels really… stilted? Maybe that’s just the game showing its age some but also… FF13 had very strong voice acting, to say nothing of KH etc. It’s not a deal breaker but I think the direction was just a bit off? The voices didn’t sound bad even, just awkwardly paced. Given that Square tends to spend just absolute trucks of money on Voice Acting, to hear a game with passable at best voice acting is really unfortunate. I think the only real standouts here were Alphinaud and his sister and *maybe* Cid.

There’s a decent bit of fetch questing in there - not excessive by any means but a lot of go here, talk to this person, then do it again. Quick travel is nice, getting a chocobo was super great, and even one of the longest chains (the tundra/search for the airship) I’d argue was one of the best subplots in the story. I’d have preferred a little more creativity or that they’d add *maybe* two more dungeons to the base set but I also expect that a lot of the game was hastily crafted to replace the disaster of a base game.

I’m still not necessarily sold on MMO combat as a whole. This is probably League brain talking but 1 tank 1 healer 2 DPS actually seems somewhat off to me, I’d rather 2 tanks instead or go to a 5 party with 2-2-1 but given that Tank seems to be the hardest role to fill… I get why (I’d argue that’s a potential failing with the class system in general if one of the roles is lacking so heavily in player base). I think it also means that because your other missions have to be doable by Healers which as a class are not meant to really have high DPS, you end up with relatively simplistic solo fights where you can essentially drain tank your way through. I can’t imagine that these would be that much better as a DPS class or Tank either because the missions are universal. So it works in the context of dungeons but everywhere else… it’s both hands off and just kinda… there. I know it sounds really silly and unnecessary but… I really just am not a fan of games with auto attack systems in them as action RPGs. It can work and it’s not the end of the world but it’s not ideal.

Finally, the ugly - the last two dungeons are… just not good. Like at all. They’re long, they’re too easy… they’re so long that people just cheese them and when they do, new players get left behind on what’s supposed to be the capstone of the experience. Like I get it, you want this big long epic dungeon for your finale… but I don’t even think it was well designed. First, I thought I accidentally turned on auto text advance since I couldn’t speed it up. Nope, that’s turned on out of nowhere and all cutscenes are unstoppable. And there’s so many of them. I was curious, the SRcom IL for the Praetorium is almost 40 minutes. 40 minutes except it’s fully hurry up and wait. Take 3 steps, cutscene. Fight one enemy. Cutscene. And even when it’s not… There’s a part where you’re supposed to get a key to use Magitek armor. In every other dungeon in the game, one player picks up something and everyone gets access to it. They pick up a key, the other person can unlock the door. Nope. You don’t get your own key, you don’t get the armor. And it’s in another room so I had to go back down the elevator and back up and the grand finale was me running in magitek armor through an empty hallway trying to catch up to my comrades. Yeah… that’s not a good impression and a good ending is just… you can’t fuck it up this badly. Get rid of the hammer guy, remove the cheese points in the dungeon, split Gaius and Ultima Weapon so that Ultima is a Trial and Gaius is just the end of a dungeon, don’t randomly change how text boxes work… I get what they were going for and at least they swung hard. But it’s the biggest whiff I think I’ve ever seen in a game’s ending as far as completely missing why everything else good in the game worked. It’s even weirder when they’re also both the first 8 man dungeons and it doesn’t really feel necessary. It really just felt like it cheapened the experience and made the whole thing less special, not more. I dunno. It was just bad and it’s hard to find redeeming qualities to them beyond giving Square a big “You Tried!” sticker.

Oh one more thing - because I’d used a free trial, my account wasn’t eligible for the free to Heavensward thing. So I could create a new account but that would have been a pain so I just found a discounted subscription and paid. Not the end of the world or anything but like… If you want people to play the game, look at their accounts, see what they’ve done and don’t punish people for trying the game in the past.

So that’s ending on a really sour note but the base game was promising and I’ll definitely be keeping at it for at least a while. I’ve got another 130 days at minimum before my subscription runs out - we’ll see how long I stick with it.