AM ff11 or FFXIV

[Malakhim]

Well to be totally honest,

I think the Ancient Magic from both games look pretty crap, although for different reasons, and naturally I'm going to give FFXI a free pass since it's a game built within the tech limits of 2002/2003.

There really is no excuse for how disappointing AM in FFXIV looks. Seeing it for the first time like this is pretty shocking, and were I a mage I'd be more than underwhelmed/pissed. Flare looks less like a star gone supernova and more like those firecrackers you toss/light on your garage driveway.

To be fair, the animations themselves look cool, they just need some serious steroids. Example: Tornado needs to last a few seconds and have a much larger/violent looking vortex swirling around, potentially turning the sky immediately surrounding the enemy dark, while flare should have much larger flame orbs and have something akin to the sound effects in FFIV/FFVI, in which it sounded like stars were literally crashing into your face, with maybe a sort of haze appearing over the mob for like a second after the main animation ends.

Seriously, I'm hoping that battle animations are a big part of the supposed overhaul they're doing. Those effects just don't do the game justice.

[Rentahamster]

There really is no excuse for how disappointing AM in FFXIV looks.

This. Ancient magic is a joke. Even the regular magic is a joke.

I thought those were just placeholders in the beta. When retail came along and I saw that the animations hadn't changed AT ALL, I had a very big :-/ on my face for a while.