Game Review #5
When I was only five years old, my dad introduced me to World of Warcraft. It was one of the first games I ever played, and it was magical. Back in those days, World of Warcraft, or WoW, as it’s usually called, was something that I could get lost in for hours. Every day when I got home from school I would rush over to my computer and log into the game, excited to find out what new adventure I would go on that day. My love for WoW persisted for years, and it continued to be the primary game that I played all the way into college. However, on August 14th of 2018, Blizzard Entertainment released the Battle for Azeroth expansion to World of Warcraft, and in many ways they permanently killed the game that I had loved since my childhood.
At the time I naively believed that the game would be good again in a few years (it wouldn’t), but in the meantime I was left with nothing to play. There was a period of a few months where I was lost, and I had no idea what to play. One of my friends from WoW told me that I should try out Final Fantasy XIV, or FFXIV for short, and I was skeptical. While I didn’t know a lot about the game, I had heard mostly bad things when it released a few years earlier. My friend then explained to me the history of the game’s launch, which I found to be quite interesting.
At this point it has become something of a gaming legend, so you may have already heard of it, but the story goes something like this: when FFXIV first released, it BOMBED. The gameplay was janky, the content was weak, and overall it was considered to be one of the worst MMOs ever created. This version of FFXIV is called “1.0”, and it was universally hated by critics and fans alike. Unfortunately, this is an all too common practice within the gaming industry these days; companies are more than happy to release an unfinished product and charge full price for it. However, Square Enix is not like other companies, and they were furious that FFXIV was ruining both the reputation of their company and the reputation of the Final Fantasy brand. In an effort to fix this, they fired the lead developers of 1.0 and brought in a new game director, Naoki Yoshida, who they promised would help to reboot the game.
When Square Enix announced this, most people were skeptical, as it was a feat which no major games had ever pulled off at the time. However, after years of hard work, the FFXIV team was ready to release A Realm Reborn, which is known as the 2.0 version of the game. By all accounts, this redesign was a massive success, making FFXIV one of the only games to ever recover from a disastrous launch; it could even be argued that it and No Man’s Sky are the only high profile examples of this in existence. While I wasn’t around to play the game at this time, I joined five years later when it was going through its second expansion. Overall I found the game to be fairly enjoyable, as it had an interesting story, fun combat, and well designed raid bosses. There is also a ton of side content present within FFXIV, such as a card game called Triple Triad, which I’ve spent way too much time playing. I considered the game to be a fairly solid MMO which I could enjoy playing, but it wasn’t good enough to replace World of Warcraft. And then, almost a year later in the summer of 2019, they released their third expansion, Shadowbringers.
Shadowbringers is, in my opinion, the greatest expansion ever released for an MMORPG. This expansion single handedly took FFXIV from a decent MMO to the top of the genre. The storyline of Shadowbringers is without a doubt the greatest piece of writing I have seen in my entire life, and I found myself sobbing at multiple points throughout it. To be clear, I almost NEVER cry at stories, and when Undertale managed to make my eyes water I considered that to be the greatest story I had ever heard. At two separate points throughout the expansion I was openly crying because of how emotionally impactful the story was, and while that may not seem like a lot, it’s still two more times than any other piece of media has achieved. This alone would have been enough to make me think the expansion was amazing, but if that wasn’t enough, they also added a new tank class that uses a gunblade as a weapon. I don’t know what else I need to say in order to prove that this expansion was amazing.
And finally, we come to the present day, which is two weeks after the launch of FFXIV’s newest expansion, Endwalker. While I felt the story was a bit weaker than Shadowbringers, as it only made me cry once rather than twice, the overall gameplay is still fantastic. However, I think the best way to describe Endwalker’s success would be to share a recent announcement from Square Enix: “…we have decided to temporarily suspend the sale and delivery of FINAL FANTASY XIV Starter Edition and Complete Edition.” There are currently so many people playing the game that they need to stop sales of new copies. They’re doing this for the sole purpose of attempting to improve the experience for existing players, as the servers have been undergoing immense pressure as of late. If this isn’t enough to convince you that FFXIV is a game worth your time, than I don’t know what is, and you should definitely pick it up whenever they decide to re-open sales.
