Cartoony style graphics....

[Rokien]

I'll take gameplay over graphics any day. You can have the prettiest looking piece of crap in the world and in the end, its still a piece of crap. no matter how "bad" these graphics are it still looks 100% better than FFIV but i had way more fun playing that then i did the 1.0 launch of FFXIV.

The lighting is what makes it look better, but really the textures and models don't look as good, you don't have to sacrifice gameplay for worse graphics in this case. They could have kept the same model for most things and added the lighting to it.