Culture

In the 20 hours I have spent with this game since its launch I have discovered a huge amount about it. However, as those of you who have played MMORPGs will know, 20 hours is barely enough time to scratch the surface of what these types of games have to offer. With that in mind, this article will serve as a preview rather than a review. But despite the fact that I have only just delved into the world of Final Fantasy XIV, the game has already displayed its few strengths and its many weaknesses.

This isn’t actually the launch of the game, but rather the re-launch. Final Fantasy XIV was originally announced at E3 in 2006 and was finally launched in late 2010 to overwhelmingly negative feedback from critics and players alike. In the truly relentless style for which the Final Fantasy brand has become known, the developers thus began a complete overhaul of the game.

The overhaul has been re-released as Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. It retains the lore, setting and story arc of the original, but has redesigned or improved almost every aspect of the game itself: a new graphics engine has been implemented, the map has been greatly expanded, and the gameplay is far more varied.

My first step into Square Enix’s revamp was creating my character. The character creation allows you to choose between five races, and then offers you a series of options to specify your character’s background and fighting preferences. The five races are all pretty standard fantasy fare, but considering Final Fantasy actually created many of these conventions this is easily excused.

Your character’s physicality is customisable, with each aspect having several options regarding both size and shape. At first having only a few options seems limiting, but there are so many sections to customise that your selections end up making your character very much your own. Despite highly enjoying character creation and liking my final avatar, however, the way in which your choices will affect the gameplay is poorly explained. It was only by doing further reading that I discovered how your selections would affect your character’s stats.

On loading up the game the first thing you will encounter is a cutscene explaining the world in which the game is set and the events that have shaped it. I may be wrong, but I think it’s something to do with crystals and a dragon that lived in a moon. Only the most dedicated of Final Fantasy fans will be able to keep up with a story that is so overwhelmingly Eastern in every respect. Regardless of the differences between Eastern and Western storytelling techniques, the game still fails, both in its introduction and in its opening scenes, to create any sense of cohesion between the story, the world and your character.

MMORPGs aren’t known for their storytelling (except BioWare’s Star Wars: The Old Republic) and not many fans of this genre expect a clear, or even coherent, storyline. However, I am of the opinion that by not giving your character a proper context in which to complete tasks and objectives, MMORPGs become the mind-numbing, soul-draining experience they are often accused of being. It becomes something akin to reading a senseless jumble of words solely for the sake of reading.

Despite not knowing who my character was, what his motivations were, or what was happening in the world around him, I ventured on. The series of uninspired and uninteresting fetch quests I was presented with filled several hours before I was finally able to try out combat. The combat is fairly standard. My Marauder used a heavy axe to auto attack, which I supplemented with special attacks earned by levelling up. The wider world also has level-based events in which players from the area cooperate to dispatch a threat of some kind.

Final Fantasy XIV offers nothing new, and implements the overused conventions that it does use poorly. This, combined with a characteristically confusing Final Fantasy story and zero character motivation, made me reluctant to waste any more time on it. I do not doubt that Final Fantasy and MMORPG fans will find reasons to keep playing, but I think it is time that we demand a higher standard from this genre.