Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn Review

Hi Guys! Good freaking god it has been a while since I wrote anything on here > <! I haven't forgotten it...its just I had nothing to write about, since I could make a video of it. I come to you with a game franchise that we are all familiar with. Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, has been in closed beta for a while and I had the pleasure of testing it out. There might be things that have changed after this is posted, but this is my experience with it.

To start off this review will start right at the beginning and that is character creation. The amount of customization that is allow here is quiet fair. There's nothing extreme like controlling the jaw line or face structure precisely the way you want, but at least your given a few presets.

There are 5 races in the game and they are:

 

 

There's nothing special if you pick a race over another. Where things do matter is when you pick the classes/job.So far we have the classes shown at the bottom, but there is more that will be added later like summoners and shamans of some sort.

 

 

   

After or before...I kinda forgot about now you get to choose the deity that you worship. There will be 2 different deity for every element. The elements stats you see in the description will be your stat resistant to that element. I would have to say it's not a big deal what you choose, but if you do want to be a bit more beefier toward other classes elemental attacks, then you might want to think just for a second before choosing.

After creating your new character and based on what class you pick, you'll get thrown into the world to start your adventure. The only class that is not reasonably close is the marauder class, but other than that the 2 other town you'll spawn in will be a few fields away from each other.

You won't be able to use the mouse a form of click and move and there is no auto routing in the game, but the game gives you a few ways to travel the semi huge maps. The sky ship above will be shown to you in later game play, but is solely used for traveling to the different starting cities. It does come with a ok price and beats teleporting to the city you want yourself. 

 

These large crystal will be found in the main towns and small towns in each map. They are like checkpoints that players can teleport back too. Teleporting does cost a few gils, but if you make a crystal your favorite it should cost less to teleport ( I think).  

 

This smaller crystal can be looked as the same as the bigger one except these are usually found in the main towns. These crystal allow you to teleport within the city, so that you don't have to wander around going from one place to another. Once you find all the smaller crystals in town, it will unlock a new place to warp too as well. 

 And who can forget are loveable chocobo! There is a few places where you can rent these little fellas for a limited time. The chocobo main purpose in the game is for timed traveling from one place to another. What I mean is that it will cost less, I think, than just teleporting yourself to the city, but it requires time to get there. Most of the time it will take you to get from point A to point B using a chocobo is about 3 minutes as far as I have seen, but I assume there are longer times out there. 

The last topic I want to touch on is the battle system. The improvement of the battle system compare to the earlier version of this game is 100% better, but it is still flawed. Depending on the class you pick the animation might seem a little boring. What I really detest about the battle system is still the slowness of it all. Again compare to the first version of this game it is way better and more intuitive, but the same slowness of the battle lingers. When using a skill all the other skills will be on cool down. Now I understand a lot of other games out there follow the same principle especially if your a wizard, but what makes this one worst is that even when the skill is finished you still have to wait for the cool down to go away. 

There are a few other features I'd like to go over. Starting with instances. the instances in FFXIV could use a bit more work on. Especially on how Square Enix decided to put instance quest back to back, instead of spreading it through the game. Another problem is how you access the instance. There is no need for you to actually be at the actual place due to dungeon finder, but the requirement to enter the dungeon should be worked on a bit. All dungeon requires you to have 4 people, but in my opinion we should at least be able to access it with 2 people and have others join in on the way. Granted the dungeon is probably only doable with 4 people I feel that having a little flexibility on how we want to tackle a dungeon should be left up to the party. 

The skills themselves are interesting due to a lot of effects when using certain skills and how skills "combo" with each other. When I say combo I don't literally mean it's the next button you should push, but with my experience with the puglist, some of the skill only work in certain modes and in order to get into that mode you have to use another fighting skills to achieve it. 

The UI is way, way better compare to its earlier form and easier to navigate and understand. I like how they used their FFXIII fonts and UI, since we are more familiar with it and it's appealing to the eyes as well in my opinion. Map wise, the improvements are noticeable, but could use a bit of tweeks to get it right. It was just a fuss that I had to resize my map window every time I wanted to look at it. 

A nice feature that I think most of us forget maybe is that we are able to change are class any time we want, by changing our weapons an going to the correct guilds. You'll start at level one when you change, but you won't lose your levels going back and forth with different classes. 

Crafting wise is a bit of a pain and is overall complicated. In order to craft you have to change your class, which is a bit confusing when I was learning, since I thought crafting was more of a job than a class. The method for crafting materials is also quiet weird. I read from other places that it's more of a mini game in a sense and you'll see why when you start crafting for yourself. There is no way to just craft a huge amount and leave it to do its thing. You have to manually be there and press the skill to craft your item. Along with crafting though you have a chance to not break the item your trying to make and have the option to better the item you're crafting. This all seems vague now, but if your serious about the game, trust me when you begin you'll understand what I am going on about. 

My overall thoughts on the game is that it's nice and interesting, but I still wouldn't pay a monthly subscription for it due to the many things I don't like about it. The main huge one is the battle system. The battle system for me in any game is critical and FFXIV still lacks in it for me. I do have other complaints about the game but those are just little knick picky things that I don't personally like.If the payment of the game was like Guild Wars than I would still give it a chance.