3.5/5 ★ – sheldoman's review of Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn - Collector's Edition.

This is a pretty great MMO but a middle of the road Final Fantasy game in my opinion. For me one of the most important aspects of an MMO is the character creator and I think they nailed it. I had a lot of designing different characters and ended up playing a few different characters because I liked their look so much. My main character was a Rogue/Ninja that I changed into Red Mage after finishing the main game. I think the armour and stuff looks great on the characters and upgrading my look was a huge motivation for me. I like the map. There are a lot of different areas and this game has you traverse the map a lot. Lots of revisiting and passing through old areas, which is extra fun when you get a mount. Everything looks good and the music is pretty great. I like that most of the game can be played on my own. Like I enjoy seeing all the characters in the cities and interacting with people out in the field, but when it comes to actually playing the game, I hate having to rely on other human players. In fact one of my biggest complaints about this game are the moments where you need a party like the raids/instances. Every time I had to do an instance in this game I would run into some problems. Long wait times to find a team. I would log in some days and just sit around waiting for a group and doing nothing for multiple hours. Then when you did find a team, often there would be high level players who were running through them for some dumb reward and they would not wait for you to explore or find treasure or to really experience the instance. They were just bolting to the next boss and I'd get left behind by people who had played the dungeons a dozen times before. I think also I have to critique the characters and the story. My favourite part of most FF games are those two elements but in this, they really fail. The characters are mostly forgettable. A lot of them have this boring snobby British feel or a sort of generic anime feel. I can't remember any of their names. And the story is mostly fine but it gets a little dry and I felt myself wanting to skip through cutscenes a lot. Like so many moments in this game felt like wall of text exposition dumps and the characters would often just repeat what we already knew. I had a lot of fun with this and pumped in a lot of hours. I finished the main game and started on the first expansion. Every once in a while I feel the temptation to resubscribe and start playing again. Once I clear some of the games off my playing list I might jump back into this. It's certainly not perfect but it's definitely one of the better MMOs that I've played.