A Realm Reborn – Final Fantasy XIV

I know this article should have come out a long time before, yet Final Fantasy is a saga that will walk along with us forever (or so it seems), so it’s never too late to put out a something new.

What you guys are about to witness is directly taken from my (albeit limited) experience as a beta tester for phase 3 and phase 4 of the game. Even though I didn’t have the chance to go very in-depth, I must admit that this game really did something to me. I already posted a couple of “Final Fantasy-related” articles on this blog, so you should know that I always have very mixed feelings about it: on one side, I love this saga; on the other, I hate the heavy grinding experience since it is terribly frustrating and way too much time-consuming.

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FF14, on the other hands, offers an online experience which could make this grinding, if not easier, at least more fun.
Once you have built your own character from different classes and have customized him/her in every possible way, you choose the planet (server) of your choice and start your new adventure.
After a very inspired loading screen (Yoshitaka Amano RULEZ, as always), you’ll be prompted in an open universe full of inspired characters with a gazillion things to do and with unlimited customization possibilities. And as soon as you start exploring, here is what you see:

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The more you explore the more you discover, and you often end up inside live (and very populated battles) that remind me of the Ark Fall experience, even if Defiance came out in a later moment.
In the end, if you are searching for a cooperative, fantasy themed and very persistent online experience, FF14 online – A realm reborn could be the game for you. Be aware, though, that this game is a PC-inspired MMORPG, and as such …. if you wanna play you gotta pay!

The game itself won’t cost you that much (about 30Eu, with a single character with one month online pass), but afterward, it’ll cost you roughly 12Eu per month.
Every additional character can be bought for 3Eu, and every additional inventory-keeper (NPC) will need another Eu. It may be worth if you are very into this stuff, but for me, it was simply too much.

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Don’t forget to use a USB keyboard as well, since you will need it to chat and other stuff. You could face this game even without it, but it will take you forever even if, I must admit, all the different controls (about 1 million) seemed very well mapped to me.

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Thanks for your patience, and have a nice weekend.

Note #1: at the time of the beta testing (last August) I didn’t own a capturing device, so please excuse the low quality of the footage.

Note #2: the footage shows 15 minutes of virtually uninterrupted run through the scenario. If you consider that not all of the map was available for testing ….. this game is HUGE!!!