FINAL FANTASY XIV Online

Two years in, and Final Fantasy XIV remains one of the most distinctive MMORPGs on the market—but not always for the reasons it aspires to be. At its heart, FFXIV is still a game that thrives on patience, experimentation, and camaraderie. For players willing to go off the beaten path, some of the game’s most rewarding experiences aren’t found in the latest Savage tier or Ultimate clear, but in older content approached under minimum item level conditions, or blind runs of current dungeons. These unscripted moments of challenge and discovery revive the communal sense of wonder that defined Eorzea’s early years. Unfortunately, that spark has been steadily dulled by the very community that once nurtured it. The endgame scene, once a mythical proving ground for teamwork and perseverance, now bows to the grind of “World First” races and an ever-expanding library of guides and walkthroughs. Rather than feeling like an epic conquest, raid progression often resembles cramming for a high-stakes exam—where a single mistake can lead to Discord scoldings and group disbandments. In this hyper-optimized culture, mastery isn’t learned. It’s downloaded. The obsession with parse numbers, two-minute burst windows, and performance meters has created a suffocating atmosphere that favors efficiency over enjoyment. Ironically, many of the players who rush to clear content do so only to immediately disengage, citing burnout or boredom. It’s the MMO equivalent of scarfing down a five-star meal just to brag about it on social media. This tunnel-visioned pursuit of progression has led to an ironic neglect of FFXIV's greatest strength: its sheer breadth of content. Entire zones, dungeons, and trials—brimming with lore and design—go untouched because they’re not "current." Players who cleared a fight years ago now treat it as beneath them, missing the fact that mastery without memory is hollow. Even midcore content, which once promised a relaxed but meaningful path of progression, has devolved. The most recent relic weapon system introduced Demiatma farming—a one-time grind that generously unlocked weapons across all jobs. Yet within days, players were mass-optimizing routes, burning out, and posting that there was “nothing left to do.” When even the low-pressure content becomes a chore, it’s clear something has broken. Dawntrail, the latest expansion, was supposed to be a tonal shift—a vacation arc, a light-hearted breather for the Warrior of Light. Instead, it feels more like an off-brand detour. The player, once the narrative center, is shoved into the back seat of their own story, watching events unfold with little agency. While there are flashes of charm, the core 80% of the main scenario is plodding, filled with recycled themes and a lack of narrative urgency. What’s worse, the payoff never comes. The afterstory focuses on characters introduced late and lacking relevance, making the final act feel detached—an epilogue stapled onto a tale that never quite knew what it wanted to say. There’s no denying that writer Megumi Onozuka’s influence brought tribal narratives into sharper focus, but her style clashes with Dawntrail's intended pacing. What might have worked in a side arc dominates the main narrative, leaving long stretches of the expansion feeling like filler—an unearned breather in a game that had already slowed to a crawl. Verdict: A Realm Reborn Again... and Again At its best, Final Fantasy XIV is a masterclass in worldbuilding and cooperative storytelling. It offers a rich, living world where players can forge bonds and find purpose in their shared adventures. But increasingly, it feels like that world is being filtered through spreadsheets and speedruns. The community that once gave the game its soul is now, at times, its own worst enemy—trading passion for performance and discovery for disposability. The content is still there. The world is still there. The magic is still there. But increasingly, it feels like the players aren’t. Ultimately, at the end of the day, you’re often left sitting AFK in Party Finder, staring at an empty recruitment board, gambling on whether your group will even fill before someone ragequits after three pulls—or lies about their prog point just to squeeze into a clear group. It’s a system that punishes patience and rewards deception, undermining the very collaborative spirit the game so proudly markets. FFXIV encourages you to play multiple classes—a feature that once felt revolutionary. But the shine wears off quickly. Instead of enabling flexible builds or personalized GCD tuning through materia, you’re shackled by the game’s inventory and gear limitations. You can’t store duplicate gearsets you already own, and there’s no alternate materia page to let you tailor your stats across jobs. Want to optimize your dragoon and your ninja separately? Too bad—hope you enjoy unmelding and remelding every time you switch. Loot, meanwhile, is still bottlenecked by archaic weekly lockouts. Gear drops are tied to RNG-laden chests, with “books” offered as a pity system. In theory, it’s a fair catch-up mechanic. In practice, it leaves you praying that your progression isn’t stunted by bad luck—especially when your teammates are walking into clears with better gear from sheer fortune alone. Balancing, too, feels increasingly misguided. The game dulls class identities under the guise of "accessibility," while simultaneously claiming that certain jobs are stronger because they’re “harder to play.” It’s a hollow excuse. In reality, most classes have been boiled down to a 1-2-3 rotation, followed by strict adherence to the two-minute burst window—a design philosophy that’s turned once-distinct jobs into rhythm games with identical BPMs. Originally, this shift toward uniformity was seen as a positive—a way to focus on mechanics instead of juggling complex rotations. But now, it’s gone too far. “Weaker” jobs are dismissed not because they’re unplayable, but because they’re easier—as if simplicity were inherently shameful. The truth? Even “complex” classes have been reduced to flowcharts, with every decision mapped out in advance. The idea that giving up a global cooldown to play it safe is a mistake, rather than a tactical choice, reflects a community obsessed with spreadsheets over situational awareness. The one refuge left is in the healer role, where there’s still a glimmer of reactive gameplay—resurrections, triage healing, and role-based mitigation. But even there, the pressure to optimize overrides the joy of playing in the moment. FFXIV has always tried to be a game for everyone. But in trying to please every kind of player, it’s steadily lost the flavor that made each class—and each choice—feel meaningful. What’s left is a game that still looks beautiful, still has depth, still has heart—but increasingly demands that you engage with it in only one very narrow, very optimized way. And for a game once defined by freedom, that’s perhaps the greatest tragedy of all.

This game is printing money, and yet it’s not getting enough funding, so they had to cut back on content??? Borderline budget for their cash cow, stupid collabs, shitty merch, overpriced cash shop... No other company disrespects its own customers as much as Square Enix does. I love this game, but I’ve never felt so insulted as I did during the last live letter. I pay a monthly sub to play a game that is well-maintained and frequently updated with new content, and not to finance all the other garbage this dumb company is shitting out.

I love this game i really do but the community and the devs just make it so damn hard to continue enjoying it. Im tired of the same broken promises and the same damn issues every expansion. Im tired of the dumbing down and simplifying harder content. Im tired of the stupid server sided issues to the point where reset day has measurably higher ping. Im tired of the toxic positivity in this community where people will be lazy or even straight up deadweight and not only will they be angry if you ask them to contribute but SE will punish you for it. Im tired of getting a different story in ENG because some [strike]failed writer[/strike] localizer thought that the original vision should be changed. Im tired of the cashshop charging such a ridiculous amount of money for such simple basic cosmetics. Im tired of this game lacking even basic support for being able to measure your own performance. The only reason i play this game at this point is to spend time with my friends and if i was a smarter man i would find more enjoyable ways to spend time with them.

Finally completed ARR msq, can't wait to see what kind of awesome stories the game has to offer! :D

Developer is just extracting as much money as possible without investing into the game.

WARNING FOR PEOPLE WHO DON'T UNDERSTAND HOW TO BUY THIS GAME The 'demo' free trial lets you play the game for as long as you like with no time limit, with the base game story and the first expansion story as content. So do everything you possibly can in there first before you even think of buying anything else. The moment you buy anything else from this game, like the 10€ "starter edition" or the current expansion you unlock all the other parts; however now a 30 day countdown has started in which you have to complete this content, this is the "30 day free trail". When this countdown is over you are locked out of the game and need a subscription to play again and you are unable to return to the free trail. Don't be stupid like me and buy the 10€ version because you wanted to add your friend to your friendlist.

If you like leveling and learning a game while enjoying a good story, characters and lore, you will love this game.

I mean, the free trial lets you try out the first like 200 hours of this game, so there's not an aggressive reason for reviews.

dawntrail story is horrible, cliche, predictive, repetitive etc, bad story writing, bad character development, bad voice acting the big bad guys are evil just because they are throwing a tantrum, they magically steal and/or get key items without anyone noticing for to progress the story, Krile could have avoided everything but she didn't said anything, all the group was there just looking how the big bad guy kill and important character and no one did anything? rly? we can go to the edge of the universe but we cant stop one person 2 feet away? kill a GOD but not this random person... also... talk to Wuk Lamat...

I can't use my existing account for this, and they don't tell you that until you dig for the information. $20 unrefundable, down the drain! Don't waste your time.

It's the best MMORPG out in the market. If u pay attention to shadowbringers and endwalker story, you're in for one of the best stories in gaming, but it's kinda hard to endure getting there or paying attention while you're at it because the story comes in the form of MMO quests (sucks). Overall, you're bound to make friends, live wholesome moments, be part of a community, enjoy the story, and enjoy boss fights. I'll say this tho: if you don't have at least 400 hours to commit to this game, then don't bother.

These devs are pretty damn lazy. They basically dont ever meaningfully update the game because "game old". They are NOW adding hats for hrothgars after thats been a thing with modding since like yr 1 when they came out. There are so many dps that queues are inflated to an insane degree, 4 tanks and 4 healers? Why? Any class below lvl 70 is very boring, the combat actually gets fun after lvl 80 and up, mostly into shadow bringers. Which shouldnt be okay, thats hundreds of hours of AAR to shadowbringers, its nuts they expect people to stick around to play through it to that point with lackluster combat. Yes the writing is good, but AAR is a slog it made me just end up skipping through. Dont get this game

Game is sadly in quite a downturn since the latest expansion. There is still plenty to do but the game defiantly peaked years ago with shadowbringers, nothing since has been able to live up to the hype. More than anything the devs seem to have lost touch with the players and just make strange decisions that manage to upset everyone.

This game suffers greatly from "trust me it will get good in 100 hours" syndrome. I have been playing this game on and off for way too long, made multiple characters and I tried to like it. But the new player experience is a slog. A Realm Reborn the 200 quest epic basegame is basically one long tutorial that slowly, ever so slowly teaches you the most basic stuff to the point that sidequests are more engaging. So much of the main story quests or MSQ as they like to call it are tedium, boring fetch quests and busy work where you teleport across the map to talk with an unvoiced character to then fast travel back (kinda like Starfield in a way). But I decided to actually pay attention in the hopes that I would get some value out of my money and understand the main quest and it actually got kinda insteresting at the end, the final dungeons are fun and even challenging at times and it all ends in one big finale, okay cool time for the first expansion I heard so much about that also looks so many classes and class quests behind it and.... oh wait no we need to step on the brakes and do about 100 side quest level MSQs where we do a bunch of busy work, jump from setting to setting without resolving much and completely burn that bit of narrative drive and interest that was going on for a subplot of another guy trying to get a big doomsday weapon, right after the last one. I don't care if the game might get good in a 100 hours I want it do be good now, it is a subscription game and one of the more expensive ones and for that I expect something, not just filler and padding that feels like it was designed to get me to spend more money. it doesnt help that the basic combat is relatively boring, yes this is a tap target mmo, I can't expect much but the main challenge in combat comes from dungeon gimmics, those areas on the ground you cant step on, and has almost no depth beyond that. Basically every class has a solved rotation so combat is more of a rhythm game than making any sort of tactical decision. In the end it can be fun and I can see glimpses of good writing, I actually enjoyed some of the job sidequests and even some of the main quests. But the ongoing subscription costs is constantly hanging over everything, pushing you forward through so much filler that it honestly feels like a chore to play. I know most people probably are already done with all of the early game and so Square has little reason to change or overhaul it but the rift in quality between this and the later stuff, especially the expansions seems to be dramatic. Basically everything good you have been told about this happens dozens of hours into the game and unlike other games you can't just skip the early game for better or for worse.

I have been playing this game for around 4 and a half years at the making of this review. I started playing on PS4 and then switched to PC after acquiring a computer. This is one of the best MMO's I have played, gives me much more enjoyment and I really love its play-style and its more centered on PVE. With the current Dawntrail patch, however, I will admit the game isn't as fun as it was when i first started playing. The Re-use of content instead of implementing more fresh, difficult content given the level cap being 100 now. Even so, I do still find enjoyment in the social aspect of the game, with helping my Free Company members or new players in general, going around and doing maps with friends, or any other things. I really wish that they'd make more new things instead of recycling old content and increasing the difficulty, but i digress. I still really love and really enjoy this game.

cant suggest this game as it currently is Dawntrial IS FFXIV's BFA (battle for azeroth) the writing is terrable enough that it feels like a slap to those who stuck with the game since its 1.0 issues ( i have 35k hours in the game not all of it is recorded on steam) the only reason i continue to login is because i own a home on it its recycling content such as eureka bozja with the dawntrial relic i don't recommend this game to those who value there time and the only good thing about dawntrial is the raids which inless you enjoy that kind of content there is nothing for you skip this expan and wait for the next or play any other mmo i recommend elder scrolls online / star trek online and even mabinogi OR FFXI over this game mmos are a dying genre and square enix is milking FFXIV and its loyal fans while giving very little content im reminded of pso2:NGS

I can't believe after 3 years of playing this amazing MMO I never reviewed it. I looked at this game for the few years it was starting to get praise and scoffed at it. I've never really been interested in the Final Fantasy games besides 7, 13, and 15. I thought the HUD looked crazy (almost as bad as Black Desert) and I wouldn't get into it. BOY WAS I WRONG. After getting through based expansion and starting Heavensward I was hooked. The many jobs and classes to choose and play from with their own stories, the fun and mostly kind community, and the story of most of the expansions. I give this game a 9/10. Still a few gripes I have when it comes to how grindy the game can get for specific items I want but as a whole THIS is the best MMO I have played imho. Better than most I've played at least.

This game is boring and mechanically very outdated. The story is initially good, but gradually becomes tiresome due to its slowness and ends up not being engaging.

This would a been an easy positive review if it was 2 expansions ago, now however, they have streamlined content in a way which makes it so boring and easy. The playerbase is also taken over by a, let's just say 'odd' section of people who just idle around being beyond cringeworthy. It's sad these are the loud minority who have ruined this game. Hard content now is like easy content years ago. 16 people die in a raid? No worries, you can still do it lol And people feel like these changes are good...I can write an essay but I won't. Just know if you want a decent challenge playing, this game does not have it. It's braindead.

50 hours in, not enjoying it. "It gets better." 100 hours in, still not enjoying it. "It gets better." 200 hours in, really not enjoying it. "It gets better." 300 hours in, actively hating it. "It gets better." If it does get better, it's after 500 hours, 1,000 hours, 2,000 hours, who even knows. Maybe if you pay to skip 90% of the existing content you'll have a good time. I wish I'd tried that before the game put both barrels through my enthusiasm. Play literally anything else.

Most people will not sit through hundreds of hours of terrible MSQ to wait and see if the game actually gets good. The gateway to entry for new players is probably the worst of any MMORPG in history. The game is decent if you are a masochist and willing to grind through all the archaic gameplay. The storyline gets great but the combat is mediocre and classes have become ultra homogenized. The graphics are mediocre and the latest expansion has been a content drought for over a year- they don't know what to do with the game.

I've never seen a game harbor and nurture toxicity for so long that they outlive the gameplay design. As the game hurtles itself into the modern zoomies trend of extinguishing any form of skill expression in favor of some twisted vision of "equality", some of the most expert, creative, and skillful gameplays are made by griefers who believe themselves immune to criticism, blame, nor responsibility for playing a certain role in this RPG. Remember kids: asking others to play their role is harassment, but utilizing the kit the game gives you to kill partymates who do while you spam sound effect macros to terror rout them is not

If you are someone who troubles with addiction, I highly don't suggest this game, I have over 207k hours in this game, yes some of its afk time, and some of my playtime isn't even registered (You used to be able to start it without steam turned on) but 207k hours is too many. The game was great, when I started 7-8 years ago, its no longer great, things are too easy, loot drops are being given out like candy, there's no community to do stuff with because you can literally solo everything till you get to the hardest content if you wanted. Storys great, but thats all it'll ever be for me, addictions a terrible thing, if you have ever found yourself in this spot, and your reading this review, make some choices for yourself, MMOs aren't good for people who can't reign in addictions.

purchased game thru STEAM .... created Square ENIX ID, gave them my Email Address, And created a password for the game. Now they refuse to let me play the Game .... they clame my Enix ID doesn't exist, my password doesn't exist and my email address has nothing to do with the game. So i spent money for a game run by a Company which took my money and then tell me to F...K Off

If you're looking for a fantastic game that'll make you sad sometimes, this is it. Great story, gameplay is pretty MMO-standard but it feels so good, and the music is the best I've heard out of any game. (I do recommend sticking with the free trial as long as you can, should get you at least 100 hours probably)

Teammates are better than in r6, unless they posses the crown of lobotomy

good game, rough community, just find a good group of friends and enjoy everything from content to socialising. you will have a blast if you stay away from the drama that often comes with this type of mmo.

Was recommended to play this game by a friend who has quite a bit of time in this game and I'm glad I listened. pros: lots of content, great player interaction capability, customizable UI, very long story, very easy to get a group together to play with. cons: can be a tad boring if you're completely by yourself, story takes a bit to ramp up. overall, if you're willing to invest time into the game it'll definitely pay off, I'm still relatively early in the game cause I've been AFK a lot and got sidetracked with crafting and mining, but long story short it's pretty great.

honestly just a really cool game. If you don't like slow-ish progression you might not like that part of the game but I personally think it's worth the grind seeing as there are a bunch of classes with SICK moves and gimmicks

The early game is so outdated and janky, it's meant to get better as you progress but I'd rather not put myself through it.

Lots of lands to explore and millions of quests! It was decently controller friendly, but I couldn't figure out healing with controller.

I wasn't too sure how I felt about the game at first, seeing as how I'm more of a "cozy" gamer, but the more I play, the more I'm loving this game. Don't be fooled by the haters, this game IS for every one, man or woman. It takes some getting used to, but its a good game, and even better when playing with friends.

Great game! Has hundreds of hours of game play. I'm only in the dlc and i've been playing for over 200 hours (Free trial and main game).

I had an issue launching the game, i fixed my issue by closing steam all the way but don't exit ff14 launcher. The game will start, there's a conflict with steam and launcher somehow. Game runs fine.

A vibrant, heart-wrenching (at times) story line and immersible side quests! The NPC's show growth of character throughout; the villains are tragic and relatable; and the heroes all have their faults, making them believable and interesting. The best game I have ever played. I am an "older" game player, and I find this game challenging, frustratingly so, at times...but not so much to make me give up. I have my gamer sons around to help me. It's awesome!

Some interface and navigation that I think could be improved for those who aren't that familiar with these types of games, but overall fun to play. I skipped past all the story parts but im still having fun. I'd recommend if you like grinding games or have friends to play with

A game where you can be pretty and kill gods. 10/10 would spend another 2,200 hours playing it.

This game will REDEFINE YOUR LIFE; in a good way. THE BAD A Realm Reborn SUCKS, feels slow af, the plot isn't as interesting and nothing really game changing happens. The first 10-20 hours of this game, if you don't buy an ARR skip (mogstation expansion skip), you will more than likely only enjoy the game if you have other veteran player friends guiding you and helping you, otherwise you will not like how slow the gameplay and the leveling feels. THE GOOD LITERALLY EVERYTHING AFTER ARR IS GOD TIER STORYTELLING, GOD TIER GAMEPLAY, AND GOD TIER CHARACTERS. The game TRULY does begin in Heavensward.

Great MMO with an amazing story and fun gameplay.

Games Fun as heck and huge amount of game play for free trial definitrly recommend

Great game and great community

This game is the reason the most important people in my life are here. I've met hundreds of people through this game, and my most important OC to me is who I play as. I've never been a multiplayer, or MMO person, but this hooked me. Currently, my spark is dead, and I'm burned out, so I haven't played for a while. But I know eventually, I will come back and fall in love all over again.

Honestly, a really great mmorpg. Great character customization, a lot of different wide open areas and monsters to level up and fight against. Just wish the creativity on monster idea's was a little better. Rather than just mushrooms and rodent like creatures for the most part in the beginning. Yeah you gotta pay every month to play as well, but i'd rather do that and have little to no bugs in the game it seems than otherwise. Just my opinion though <3

just started playing this, looks fine

Sadly i the way to buy this game and get it to work is so convoluted that i cant even play it. My Steam key is already registered but not on this steam account. Which technically should be impossible. Come to that that i can NOT buy another copy of the game on steam and therefore cant get another key and also cant use a non steam key for the steam account i literally cant play the game. Therefore: Fuck this game.

Final Fantasy XIV is an action adventure JRPG MMO first released by Square Enix around August 2013. This 12 year old behemoth of its genre shows its age more than many other games from its time, and while a lumbering beast for sure, the behemoth lacks in lung capacity, haste or sharpness of claw, ultimately, and tragically, affecting its poignancy. The story of FF14 consists hitherto of the base game and five expansions, of which the base game and first four expansions cover the first, highly praised arc of the game. The oh so lauded tale of heroism starts out with a 50-60 hour chore of a quality so abysmal, that it is baffling. A Realm Reborn (the game’s original story, after the failure of its 1.0. launch) is a hastily cobbled together mess, which is supposed to get you not only somehow interested to continue, but actually get you to care about even a single character in the story, which it fails at in terrible fashion. But okay… what’s next, oh Heavensward! Oh, the story of the tragic 1000 year war betwixt man and dragon… and oh, your character, a blank self-insert Mary Sue, on the level of the average teenage boy’s OC, who has every single power their favorite comic book hero has, and the personality of drywall, just so happens to solve the entire conflict in the in-game span of a few days. Also, the areas of this expansion are some of the worst and least traversable of the entire game, and the whole story loses any semblance of steam halfway through, after the level 55 dungeon, and any semblance of effort once you chart your course for its final area. Stormblood, an expansion, which, some filler – typical for the quantity over quality philosophy Square Enix employed in every square inch of this title – notwithstanding, is the only expansion where the stakes feel truly real, where your identity as “super space jesus” (or “Warrior of Light” as the game says) is never relevant, and brought up maybe a grand total of two times. It is a realistic and brutal story of displacement, war and imperial occupation and it is, for the most part, beautifully executed. Shadowbringers is fine, not the best story of its kind, but certainly a much stronger and more philosophically and morally rich offering than anything from the menagerie of padding that is ARR and Heavensward. It features some strange filler in it, at the weirdest of times, and often where it doesn’t make sense. To experience the entirety of the story you have to experience some of the worst side content in the game, where they make you watch an annoying whiny brat be annoying and whiny, before randomly dropping crucial information at the end of a series of pointless, unvoiced cutscenes. You also are asked to level up four different kinds of jobs (this game’s name for classes) up to level 80, which takes weeks of unimaginative grind. Sometimes the story makes you go “huh?”, sometimes it bores you, but it isn’t quite bad enough to outstay its welcome too much. What does however go against it, is that every enemy and boss – from the main story to the side content – is incredibly spongy and thus boring, and overly long to fight, because the developers rebalanced things poorly, broke the balance for the entirety of Shadowbringers, fixed it in Endwalker, and then never bothered to fix it back in ShB. Are you mayhap noticing a pattern here? A throughline of quantity over quality? Filler, neglect, poor decisions and even poorer resource management, grindy, prosaic side content, horrendously greedy monetization schemes, poor rewards for your time (partially because the best looking cosmetics and mounts are often the ones that they put up on their poorly designed real money store, after already making you pay a ludicrously high subscription and full AAA price for the base game and every subsequent expansion). This is the reason why I ultimately ended up quitting Final Fantasy XIV. Its mechanical difficulty is non-existent, a large chunk of its playerbase so bad at the game that you would’ve been better off queuing for the content with NPCs, its tutorialization is broken, not mandatory, and teaches genuinely bad practices for some of the game’s many jobs. Leveling is a slog, and every new job they add starts 10 levels below the newest content, so you can’t even enjoy the expansion with something fresh, because you’d have to spend a week grinding to do something halfway interesting (the main story). There are four tanks who are functionally the same, four healers who fit into one of two categories, and 12 DPS jobs, who are the most varied and fun amongst each other, but if you play DPS, good luck getting through a queue before your hair goes gray, because everyone wants to play them and only them; this ended up forcing me into tanking and healing for the entirety of my time with the MSQ (other than ARR) so that I could be a slight bit less frustrated about FF14’s terrible queues for older content. On top of all of these boring, grindy mechanics, resources fed into subpar, unvoiced side content and pointless grinds, to keep the addicts addicted and the whales spending their hard earned cash, they couldn’t even bother to fix most of the main story or main content. ARR is just as bad as it was 12 years ago, only being made a few merciful hours shorter. The English voice acting for most of the game is subpar, but for ARR it’s been atrocious and has remained atrocious for 12 years. Side content is unvoiced, main story cutscenes are voiced once every blue moon, and sometimes it’s only half the cutscene that ends up getting voice acted, before you’re inevitably launched into another, comically stiff unvoiced sequence, where the characters don’t even try to look alive or conjure up any illusion of being actually living, breathing things that you should be immersed in. They just flap their arms around, like stiff action figures, and mime along generic lip movements, looking worse than any amature SFM animation. Go play literally any respected story-based indie game released in the last ten years and you will find a more tight, more interesting, more experimental and less predictable story, with often good, or hassle-free gameplay, which will not ask you to slog your way through 100 hours of story ranging from abysmal to just about passable before it actually goes anywhere and remembers to give its characters flaws and personalities and arcs… and hey, if it's bad, at least it will likely be bad in interesting ways, unlike this game, which, while laughable in its greed and mixed bag of quality, commits literally all of the typical sins that sound-minded adults have come to expect from the AAA games industry for the past decade or two (at least). There’s a million more things to complain about and criticize this game for, but not only is this review probably already hard to read through, but I’m wasting my breath, since it won’t ever be fixed anyways, and the sunk cost fallacy fanboys and fangirls, who have probably not played a single other, better game to be able to compare this money sink to will defend it to its dying breath. At least I might be able to buy an emote from some actually good indie games points shop for any jester emojis the sycophants decide to send my way. P.S. If you want to find content that you have to plugin your keyboard for... you'll be waiting for hours in the game's Party Finder, which literally prohibits you from doing basically anything interesting that isn't just siting there AFK and waiting... and then you need to watch guides, cause the difficulty is never mechanical, never reaction time based, just based on how well you can memorize what comes next and how easily you can discern piss poor excuses for telegraphs on random things like vulnerabilities and instant death casts. Nobody wants to do any older content synched, because 99% of the community hears the words "challenging" or "engaging" and vanishes until SE adds the newest "turn your brain off" grind extravaganza!

You have to fight three separate interfaces to log in, i.e., Steam, Final Fantasy, and Enix. Horrible design.

Great community, soooo much to do, and the story is simply amazing

Very fun, and amazing community!

The game fell off HARD after stormblood. Haven't played since Endwalker but based on what I've checked in on there is no hope.