Addictive game, but SE needs to fix the server problems
The story isn't amazing and is fairly generic (at least so far in), but it's not bad either.
The music is stunning like most of Final Fantasy's music is. Nobuo Uematsu is a composing genius in my opinion.
The graphics are visually pleasing, and the gameplay is a huge step up from XIV's original launch. The interface takes some time to get used to, especially if you're on a console like I am. At first it was a bit overwhelming, but you get the hang of it. At that point the game becomes straight up addictive.
There's a problem though. The servers. Whether you got early access like myself or bought the game upon release, the servers have been too full, unresponsive, and at times the game will experience random issues such as the sound dropping out on you requiring a re-log. The first day of early access the server wouldn't respond. After a few tries I got qued at 33, waited a few minutes and was logged into the world. I'm guilty of staying logged in and making myself go afk, because like a great many others I was worried about experiencing days of waiting and waiting to be let on like so many others (forums were packed with people having these issues).
The next day my sound dropped out and I had to re-log. I was qued at maybe 5-6 and was almost immediately let back on.
Yesterday though, I finally got qued at 1017 and had to wait over 30 minutes. I was frankly lucky. There's some people who have barely been able to get on if at all.
If you go to Final Fantasy XIV's website, you'll see frequent messages regarding troubleshooting updates, emergency server maintenances, region-based server issues, etc.
What's bugging a lot of people is that Square Enix decided to put a hold on allowing further character creation on about 18 server worlds to help with the server full trouble.
Hopefully these issues will be worked out.
I know it's a hassle still, but I only went afk for about 8 hours and then decided to log out when I wasn't playing to help out the log-in troubles. It isn't going to have a big affect on the problem, even if they implemented what a lot of MMOs have and timed out afk users for so many minutes of inactivity. They need to increase the capacity of their servers and it should at least help with the issues.
In spite of the server nightmare, the game is fun -not perfect, but fun- and I'm not so sure I'd be able to go back to the slower pace of XI again, even if I did love playing it.