Most disappointing game of 2010. Avoid.
FFXIV is one of the worst games I have ever been hyped to play. The letdown I felt after 5-6 hours of playing through the game was nothing short of staggering. I actually FORCED myself to continue playing through the game for another 20+ hours, just so I would be sure the game was really as bad as I at first thought it was.
FFXIV is a game that tricks you into thinking that there might be more depth than originally thought.. that the lack of things to do an innovations are just a mask for something FAR more rewarding later on. Let me be the first to tell you - it isn't. This is the single most shallow mmorpg on the market, by a mile. I'm actually including all those freebie mmos in this equation as well.
The opening cinematics are breathtaking, let me tell you. If there's one thing that SquareEnix does better than anyone else - it's CG movies. If only this game had more of them, eh? But alas, that opening cinematic just sets the bar for the rest of the game to a height that the game doesn't even seem to stretch for. No, the rest of the game doesn't even pretend to want to innovate or excite their customers.
Make no mistake about it - 95% of your gaming time will be spent doing one thing and one thing only - killing identical creatures over and over and over. No exciting quests or storylines and nothing to truly look forward to. Every 10 or so levels there are a few main storyline quests but these pale in comparison to what should have been and are over as quickly as they came. There are mini-quests that are called Guildleves which are basically run-and-fetch scenerios or run-and-kill-10-rats scenerios. You can do 8 of these every 1 1/2 days. You heard me correctly. 8 baby quests every couple of days to help break up the monotony of grinding the same mobs over and over. The crafting is more tedious than the combat, so I only dabbled before my common sense told me to stop before it blew my brains out.
I'm not really sure what else to say. The controls make the game feel like a console port. The graphics are decent but could barely be called current-gen. The fact that NA and Japanese players share the same servers means that you'll be constantly bombarded by Japanese text that most NA players won't understand - yes, even worse than gold spam. Atleast gold spammers you can halfway understand.
Overall this is the worst MMORPG I have ever played and I have played every major MMORPG on the market. To say I'm disappointed as a FF fan is an understatement. Giving this game a 1 is giving it too much credit. The devs at SE are far too talented to have made this abomination of wasted development time. I actually feel the world is worse for having this game in it and feel even more horrible that die-hard FF fanatics will end up defending it because SE put the "Final Fantasy" logo on it.
1/10.