Recent reviews by gatto depresso

I did not want to write a review for this game but I feel like I wasted a good amount of my time (I had more gametime in the free version of the game). So here we are.

I spent hundreds of hours trying to experience "the best MMORPG" and "best RPG story ever" but FFXIV ended up being a dull and uninspired grind, much like an endless anime filler episode.

From the start, the gameplay is a repetitive loop of running, teleporting, and endless talking, with minimal combat. You quickly become best friends with everyone, face overly dramatic villain speeches, exaggerated reactions, and countless unvoiced cinematics.

Many of the enjoyable aspects of MMORPGs are confined to single-player, instanced content. The game focuses heavily on its narrative, but that narrative is a slow, tedious story about a select group of characters, told through dialogue rather than in-game events. The story and the world feel completely disconnected. Major events happen in instanced rooms, and imagined battlefields, leaving no impact on the game world. The map doesn't reflect the geopolitical conflicts mentioned in the story. The community is friendly, but any criticism of FF14 is met with hostility, as if negativity is censored or attacked.

FF14 feels like a lackluster single-player game pretending to be an MMORPG, with design choices that go against the genre's power fantasy.

Ultimately, FFXIV fails as both a story-driven single-player game and an MMORPG. For a better MMO experience, try Guild Wars 2, and for a compelling narrative, consider Disco Elysium, which doesn’t require 200 hours to deliver a single impactful moment like Emet-Selch in Shadowbringers.

However, I'll continue to play it a little bit more since Vieras are hot.

I ♥♥♥♥ hate Astarion, but the game's a masterpiece.