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In this video I give my first impressions of Final Fantasy 14. I have decided to start playing this decade in the making epic and give my honest opinion of the game mainly focusing on the story as it has been critically acclaimed to be one of the best MMO and Final Fantasy stories of all time.
I am a bit skeptical on this for a few reasons but I am confident there will be a lot to discuss so I will be documenting my thoughts as I go through the game. Is the story going to be just âokâ for a MMO or will it actually hold itâs own against other great classic final fantasy stories. Letâs find out.
My FFXVI twitch schedule PST:
Mon-Friday 7pm-9:15pm
Saturday 9am-12pm
â timestamps â
00:00 â Introduction
2:02 â First Impressions
4:08 â The Story
6:22 â Changes to the Game
8:20 â Outro
source
My FFXVI twitch schedule PST:
Mon-Friday 7pm-9:15pm
Saturday 9am-12pm
Please share any FFXIV videos that would be fun to react to!
Mhhhhh Classes were never gated ever. You could always play everything with every race
Iâm glad there are no consequences to beginning choices now.
Reason is,
A) It allows every player to be able to experience every part of the game without being punished for a decision they made 500 hours ago that they canât change without paying real money (and in fact, Iâd severely criticize them if they did)
B) It discourages discrimination for raiding. I could totally see a âKeepers of the Moon Miqoâte ONLY for casters in this staticâ happen, and the guy who became an elezen three years ago can either not raid, play a job they donât want to, or accept theyâll always be at a disadvantage, or fork over $12 to become a Keeper of the Moon, getting rid of the character theyâve grown attatched to for that small increase in casting damage.
C) A lot of the appeal in FFXIV, is that you only ever need one character. Consequences are built in: The job you pick will heavily impact how you engage with the game, BUT if you decide you like another playstyle better, itâs not fun to be told âtough luck, make another character and play another 300 hours or pay us $18 for a story skipâ, so SE decided to let you change jobs freely. You still have to grind levels on the new job, so itâs not for absolute free (ergo there IS a consequence) but itâs a consequence that feels fair: Want a new playstyle? Earn it.
You can dynamically change which strengths suit you best and which weaknesses you canât live with. Maybe you decided cast bars arenât fun to you, so you become a Melee. Now you do more damage but have to dodge more mechanics and maintain uptime on the boss. And then maybe, hey, all this uptime keeping isnât your cup of tea, so you become a Dancer and do less damage but can now move wherever and can support your team.
Itâs all a system based on always playing the game the way you think youâd have most fun, and the game enabling that.
Lastly, I think that, irreversible consequences are fine for games⊠just not games this long. On a playthrough of The Binding of Issac thatâs done in a sitting, itâs good to find weapons and power-ups that stay with you and for anything missed to have an impact on how you progress for the rest of the game, because you can start a new playthrough the next day.
My playthrough of FFXIV is at about 9,000 hours though. Iâm not gonna start a new playthrough, re-do everything Iâve done, just to get a second shot at making a choice I made in hour 1. Not gonna happen. So anything permanently missable, any permanent decisions, will be a source of frustration towards the player, and the FFXIV team smartly avoids that.
Dude. Dont give up at ARR, play Heavensward and if you are not sold by then then that's a good time to give up. Heavensward is really where the story starts to come into its own if you ask me ^_^ btw – they are right, the story is excellent in FF14
As a non-mmo player I'm sooo hooked into the story, that I now and then take a break from it. There's side-lore to read as well later on, not necessary though. I hope you enjoy and I feel you're the guy to follow…
ARR isn't exactly the pinnacle of story telling but i will say, take the negative opinions about it with a grain of salt. The ARR that a lot of players remember poorly doesn't really exist anymore. The devs have made a lot of small adjustments to it and even cut out some quests entirely to make it less of a slog and from what i've seen, nowadays most new players really don't mind the experience.
I'll also echo what others have said about playing Heavensward but to be honest, I'd be surprised if someone can make it to the end of ARR and not want to continue the story.
Itâs been a year since I started my journey to Eorzea. As someone who was a sprout not a long ago (because you donât lose sprout status until you start the newest expansion), I must tell you to pull through ARR. The story is nice, but it is painfully slow. However, Final Fantasy XIV starts to shine once you reach post ARR and are close to starting Heavensward. There is a reason why it is part of the free trial, and the reason why so many of us stayed playing the game until the end. The first expansion story is something Iâve never experienced in any other Final Fantasy game before. Itâs truly, as the game main song says, a tale of loss, fire and faith. A Realm Reborn is fun too, but it can be painfully slow. A lot of people give up and get overwhelmed by the amount of storytelling thrown at their faces, but if you are into that, you will end up appreciating the base game. Enjoy your journey through Eorzea, because once you are at the end and look behind, you will wish you could erase all memories and start all over again.
I would say the story kicks in at about main story quest lvl 30, before that it really keeps it slow to not overwhelm new players with both story drama and all the new game play systems. Gladiator class quests are pretty fun from 1-30 too but not a fan of the Paladin job quests it turns in too. Keep up with the MSQ guide and the smaller quests under it as it will make sure you up to date with your skills and story for your class/job.
Even MSQ withheld, thiere's a LOT you can hop into and enjoy with the various meaty amounts of side content there is in the game. Heck, even recently I discovered there's a crowd of people who exist to play the free trial through and exclusively JUST to enjoy mahjong in FF14, unironically, as their mainstay portal to playing that game online with others.
If you like FF stories you'll like this game. I don't typically like FF stories so 14 didn't really turn me around on it, but one expansion in particular I thought was dope
I started playing the free trial in april last year, when I heard that those guys were doing XVI, just to see what they could do. Having played through the whole thing and as a non-MMO fan, but as an avid FF fan who played through the whole series many times, I say bear with it!
Also, WORD OF WARNING! If you plan on doing reaction videos on the CGI trailers, they're awesome, but don't do it because of spoiler reasons, especially the Heavensward one that literally shows the ending to ARR…
Welcome aboard! đ
Guys quick advice before you get into the game, read the ToS, you can get banned for using the word crazy, and no I am not joking
Is it worth it! I've been playing for 2yrs! Yes it's worth $14.99 every month đŻ
I like tha fact that my female ROEGADYN, max height, is a beautiful NINJA đŻ đđŸ
You are the main character.
The MSQ will always level you up at the same time as it progresses, the game doesn't ask you to grind levels ever. In fact you'll find yourself above the MSQ level by a significant margin as the dungeons you have to complete also give you experience
Number one advice is to ignore all normal yellow quest symbols. Just do the one with a meteor shape: that is your MSQ (Main Scenario Quest). That one is also tracked on the top left of your screen so you can see where the next one is. Also below that are your job/class quests to unlock your class story and also unlock new abilities and at 30 you will evolve your class into a job. The quests that have a blue quest marker with a '+' sign are next on the priority list, but not necessary if you just want to experience the main story. They unlock extra content in the game.
level15…lmfao…just play on. you know nothing and that is a great thing.
I mean, the story is literally 99% of the reason to play the game. Most of the other features in the game are standard MMO fare.
I'm sure I speak for a lot of us emotional vampires when I say it would be great to follow along with your thoughts and feelings along the way without needing to watch entire vods on twitch. Maybe clips of moments where you feel you talked about something important, or summaries you put together later, or whatever you prefer =)
I hope you'll enjoy Eorzea! I pretty much fell out of FF after Sakaguchi left the franchise, feeling like the subsequent games were missing something. Lots of stories that attempted philosophical concepts but forgot the humans in the story who Sakaguchi did such a great job focusing on. With FFXIV, I feel humanity is back, and so is FF to me. It feels good to be home, and I hope you will come to feel this is home as well =)
Please, play at least through the first expansion, Heavensward. Oh and maybe watch the documantary from "Noclip" here on youtube. Anyway, i hope you enjoy your stay in FFXIV. đ
might not be a popular opinion but you should try if you like the japanese voicecast. theyre absolutely amazing and they also don't change (the english voicecast gets completely changed at heavensward, the ARR voice actors are…. an aquired taste i guess XD.)
I'm not actually in love with the story for ff14, overall. It has some great moments, I really like a majority of the characters and the world is great. My love for the game comes more from the different jobs, systems in the game, the music, dungeons and bosses and the world in general. There's so much to do and almost none of it is absolutely necessary, meaning that players like me who like (but don't love) the story, still have other parts of the game to really suck us in.
I acknowledge I'm in the minority, the story is one of a lot of people's favourite aspects. It definitely steps up following ARR, which serves much more as world building. From Heavensward on, I found the story was good to great most of the time and it has some very high peaks.
There's so much to love about ff14 and Eorzea, take your time, play around with different jobs because there's no penalty for switching. Once you're level 10 you can just equip the main arm for another job and that's yiu switched. I started playing just over a year ago and today I finished getting my final job to level 90 – something that I would have absolutely laughed at the idea of, about 10 months ago.
Enjoy! I envy that you are starting out for the first time, I have many fond memories of ARR, even if the story is a bit slow and weak and I'd happily experience it for the first time again.
Tip. Unless you actually want too you dont have to do any of the side quests. Just do the MSQ and they give you enough EXP to keep it chugging along just fine. Do just MSQ until you get to 80 or 90 exp. Although something to note. Some of those side quests do give you pretty great gear for that level although if you do dungeons you can just get the gear from them or if you want to opt to buy the gear from the marketboard that option is there too but that can cost quite a bit. Dont let catching up drag on too much you will bore yourself. Try to just focus on MSQ until you are somewhat caught up with the rest of us. As I said before though if you want to actually do the side quests thats of course totally up to you. I wouldnt suggest it though.
If you ever hit any "clunk" please watch a new player spoiler free guide. There's so many Quality of Life updates that were added over the years. I think Lucky Ghost has a good/modern one. The HUD can be customized to an extreme amount, and it's not intuitive to do that. Another example is the Glamour system to customize your outfit/look. ZeplaHQ has a great video on that feature. There's a new system called Adventure Plates which is super clunky rn as it was just added, so we expect it to be updated in subsequent patches. These last two examples are just fun avatar related things.
Universal FFXIV player consensus: ARR story is the LOW point. At that stage of the game the main reason to play wasn't story, it was the world, the characters in it, and of course the community.. Leading into Heavensward is when the story kicks off. That said, later in the game you'll look back on ARR and realize that, while the story was hardly amazing, it did a lot of necessary world building that allowed the later stories to be as good as they are.
The story doesnât get amazing until Heavensward. You should play until at least then. The ARR patch quests start to get good. But I wasnât hooked on the story until Heavensward.
HAAAAAA HAAAAAAAA HAAAAAAAA HAAAAAAAAAA
about the races you are a bit incorrect. in ffxiv the race NEVER mattered in the end, even in the beginning it was a minimal difference. they always pushed towards that selling point of having all the jobs on a single character that is really unique in the mmo genre.
it was FFXI were the race mattered more. not XIV
I will say since I've been seeing a lot of comments about 'taking your time' etc; to give you some extra perspective on one example of what this might mean is – Don't neglect NPCs. In MMOs a lot of NPCs (and I'm talking non-main/non-voiced ones) you just sort of stop 'seeing' as the player, they're set dressing.
While not the case with every NPC for obvious reasons, 14 does this really fantastic thing where the world and people move and react as you progress. Keep your eyes open in ARR for familiar faces near dungeons you have to go to to unlock, take a quick second to see if they have anything to say perhaps. Talk to your travel companions between MSQ quests, they might have some fun lore tidbits to share. Just keep your eyes and ears open and you may be surprised on how relevant, interesting, and bread crumbed some of these NPCs are! One of my favourite 'breaks' between MSQ was to wander between the NPCs and see what they were up to – as you move along your story theirs does too. To some people that may be boring, but I truly loved the care and effort the writing team put into this bits that are completely optional and missable, but if you take the time to look and smell the roses so to speak you will be well rewarded!
I highly prefer that I can be every job on one character. It's true that there's a lot less uniqueness to it, but it's just so convenient, and you get really attached to your character as you go through the entire game. It would feel kinda bad to have to make multiple characters and switch between them just to try different jobs, and making glamour sets for each one would be so much more annoying.
I feel like the way you stand out as your own person in the game is less about your class and skills and more with customization, not just from armor and achievements but even through housing. You don't have the flexibility that there is in WoW when it comes to gameplay, but the upside is that every class is very highly balanced. Very high level players may complain now and then when one job is like… 2-4% worse than another, but for everyone else every class is viable.
Following because I can't experience this story for the first time anymore, so I must live vicariously through others experiencing for the first time.
My only suggestion; base your opinion on the end of Heavensward rather than A Realm Reborn. I enjoyed ARR, but if you want something to determine if it's worth continuing, that will be a good baseline to make your decision.
I'm going to say something that has probably been said before. While ARR is rough, it's probably manageable. The biggest hurdle is undoubtedly after the end of the base story (2.0) in the form of its post-patches leading up to Heavensward. That would be 2.1 through 2.55, if I recall? Those can be a slog. Hopefully, you can see those through and arrive in Heavensward. Nevertheless, I hope you enjoy yourself!
One of the things I love about 14 is the ability to play every job with a single character. Because the game requires such a huge investment of time for its story (worth it!) and other things like gearing and clearing content to unlock new stuff – having to restart just to play a different class would be a massive time sink. Some people choose to to have different characters or re-experience the story with friends or what have you, but the game allows that to be entirely your choice. They respect player time by letting you try out everything on a single character. This is fantastic! I unlocked every job in the game and played them all to some extent. Being able to switch jobs allows you to try different things so you can find the right job for your play style. It's also nice to switch things up for a change of pace or to be able to take on different roles once you're doing group content and trying to coordinate with other players. It can even make you a better player to switch around, for example a tank who tries DPS will have a better idea of how to pull mobs and place bosses for up time, while a healer who tries tanking will have a better idea of how their mitigation skills work so they can coordinate their healing skills with what the tank is using. Also, if you enjoy story, each class has its own set of class stories (even the crafting and gathering jobs) so access to all the jobs gives you access to more story as well. So I'm really glad that they do NOT limit what race can do what, and that there are no racial bonuses that make certain races the 'right choice' for a given job. The freedom this game gives you to try things out and play around as any, or even all of the different jobs, is a wonderful feature.
The title of the video doesnât align with whatâs being said, even it doesnât respond to the question.
You are too early in the game to even give a better answer.
Your character is the main character.