4.5/5 ★ – NN010's review of Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn.

Final Fantasy XIV has undoubtedly come a long way since it was initially released in 2010. It went from having one of the disastrous launches in the history of the MMORPG genre & nearly killing the Final Fantasy franchise and Square Enix to being at the top of the MMORPG industry & setting a new bar for similar games to aspire to. Similar to World of Warcraft back in 2004, it takes the MMORPG and makes it accessible to a new audience. One that doesn’t have as much free time as the stereotypical MMO fan, one that values great stories with memorable characters to get attached to, one that likes to have a variety of things to do, some of which don’t even involve combat. Final Fantasy XIV has been described as being a Final Fantasy game first and an MMO second. More of an RPGMMO than an MMORPG. I’d say that is very apt (this is coming from someone who could never get into WoW and bounced off it after a couple of hours before & after I started playing FFXIV). You can even play almost the entirety of Shadowbringers & Endwalker solo thanks to the addition of the Trust system & the prior MSQ content is also very solo player friendly too. The OST of this game is an absolute banger as well! Whilst legendary Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu contributed to this game's score via reused themes from 1.0 & the end credits themes up to Stormblood (Answers, Dragonsong, & Revolutions) and some other tracks, the bulk of this game is scored by Masayoshi Soken. And this man is a musical GENIUS! With a variety of musical styles ranging from rock (ex: the main themes of Shadowbringers & Endwalker, To The Edge), the more orchestral tracks akin to traditional FF games (ex: Torn From The Heavens, The Maker's Ruin), the emotional tracks that will make you cry (ex: Tomorrow & Tomorrow, Flow, Fragments of Forever), and the more offbeat stuff you don't expect from a game like this (ex: LAHEE/Civilizations). There's so many more amazing songs, but I don't want to keep you here all day! This game is not perfect though. The housing market in this game is as horrific as it is in real life. Good luck getting one without giving up your social life! The English voice acting in A Realm Reborn (the base game) isn't all that great, but it does get a lot better when you reach Heavensward (note that this brings with it a recasting of almost all the ARR era English voice actors though) and only gets better with time. Be forewarned that the English localization does diverge quite far from the letter of what the Japanese script & voice actors say & do (with some characters even having entirely different personalities in English than they do in the other languages) and that the French & German localizations tend to hew closer to the letter of what the JP version does. So mixing & matching English with other languages in this game can yield some dissonance between what the text is saying and what the voice actors are saying as a result if you do this. The English localization is pretty good at sticking to the spirit of what's happening & the intended tone (there are also no major plot alterations whatsoever). It just takes more liberties in translating that for a Western audience. I should also mention while I'm on the topic of localization that the English localization team (especially team head Michael-Christopher Koji Fox) do have a more direct hand in crafting the lore & narrative of the game. So it's not a conventional localization in that sense. But I'm sure this won't stop subs over dubs die hards from playing the game with JP audio throughout anyway. The MSQ pacing can be slowed down by filler quests at times (especially in A Realm Reborn), but this becomes less of an issue over time. Regardless of its faults, with a booming community, a development team at the top of their game, a design philosophy of respecting your time & not making you log in every single day, hundreds of hours of great stories to sink your teeth into, and a wide variety of content to experience once you are all caught up to the current endgame, Final Fantasy XIV can easily keep you busy for months upon months. And with a new storyline set to begin in 2022 that will possibly last the next ten years, it’s safe to say that Creative Business Unit 3 isn’t going to wind down FFXIV’s content pipeline any time soon. I can’t wait to see what the future holds for FFXIV, and I’m hyped to see what this studio can do with a single-player game when Final Fantasy XVI releases at some point in the near future. I just hope that Square Enix don't shove NFTs into either game (or any of their games for that matter) somehow... 9/10 (base game and it’s story alone are more of an 8, but this is for FFXIV as a whole). Worth every penny of it's price tag & subscription fee (at least for me).