1 Month in impressions/criticisms...

[zipzo]

Hey. If you don't like "whine" threads then turn back now, as all of this is simply my opinion and it could be very prone to you not caring. I bought the original 1.0 CE and didn't play past the first month because the game was literal trash. I came back when ARR released, but again, never subbed. It wasn't because the game was bad, I was just too focused on other games, but my impressions were good. This time I've subbed with the intention of playing for the long term (life finally allows). In the little time I've had to get all caught up, I've managed to get 2 lvl50 classes (Monk and Ninja), a lvl34 Dragoon (for B4B), and a lvl15 Marauder and before engaging Heavensward content I plan on unlocking Ishgard (jesus almighty the story is neverending) and leveling up a Dark Knight (and hopefully a healer too sometime later). So that's where I'm at in my progression so you have context, now on to my impressions/whines.

1. Combat - Excellent!

Long have wanted to know that the game I was playing satisfied the dignity of a well-mechanized classic MMO combat system. Most games just don't quite nail the form factor that WoW perfected over the years. FFXIV has maybe a few small janks that stick out to me (characters not budging when you swivel them), but for the most part combat and moving while casting skills feels great. It successfully provides you that feeling of freedom of movement while casting a your arguably quite robust rotation, nothing feels to rooted or choppy. It feels good. The rotations themselves are great as well. They provide a sense of complexity that I feel is great for a modern MMO. The cycles themselves are long if you wish to actually detail the order of moves you might do in a given theorycraft, so most of the time you're executing the rotation based on "If this is already up I do this" type logic, which is great. My brain is always on during boss fights because I have buffs to maintain, and debuffs to keep up, all while dealing with the boss mechanics. It's a certain kind of masochistic thrill that's hard to describe, but for the most part I feel the combat is in a really good place and I can't wait to see how square moves forward in future MMOs with it. There are a few nitpicks I have particularly with Ninja in how the mudras work. It just doesn't feel very smooth, and sometimes the action bars just don't keep up with how quickly you want to combo them, but that's a personal, class related gripe.

2. Leveling up - Excellent!

Not too slow, but not break-neck too fast without its challenges. The first class level-up experience is buffered with the story, which fills all the holes necessary to get to 50. There's a huge variety of ways to gain experience, either through logs, dungeons, fates, and leves...you always have something else you can try if what you're doing is starting to wear on you. You have options. Options are good. My 2nd 50 was not quite as intuitive, but with all the things mentioned, there was still a good pace leveling up. It meant I had to do a bit more fate grinding, but the buffer experience from logs, dungeons, leves and challenges always made it so there were options for me. I think they have a good mix of activities for the player who likes to level a lot. I haven't leveled a crafting profession past 10, so I can't comment on that. Only the combat professions.

3. Bosses - Excellent!

The design team in charge of bosses is doing some serious work. All of them have some sort of challenge to them, and the variety of challenges each one presents has a tendency to be quite unique. Obviously, low level dungeons present very little in the way of diversity, but the higher level bosses (the 50 ones) are all amazingly well designed. There's a variety of mechanics and it always feels epic as you're fighting them. The telegraphs don't interfere with the immersion too much, you gotta be on your toes...and many of the bosses are pretty great to look at, along with their according closed-space environments.

The spirit dragon boss where you must take out the 2 proxy dragons one at a time sitting out front, while the keeper of the lake is doing his very best to make you slip up...this encounter was just awesome. So much to focus on, and the pretty colors! Very creative design, and inherently challenging for what it is, and an absolute joy for a player like me to participate in.

Midgardsormr Fight

4. Music - Excellent!

This is a personal category of mine I must always bring in to the light, because I am a music person and as such music can be a deciding factor a lot of the time on whether I like a movie/show or even a game. It's that important to me. The music in this game is fantastic. Especially on the bosses. The boss music is just so amazingly epic, it's the only game I won't turn it off to play my own music. There are certainly a few forgettable tracks among the leveling content itself, but for the most part the soundtrack as a whole is quite exceptional for an MMORPG, and I do plan on purchasing it for my own leisure.

I especially love the track played during the iceheart encounter. The first half of the encounter is so whimsical and dainty...then she snaps, and in-comes the female vocalist punk rock. It's just such an awesome moment for someone like me who visualizes himself within the game as I play it. The tracks during the ultima weapon encounters too where decidedly epic. All in all I think the music in this game is a landmark for all MMORPGs to follow in its footsteps.

Iceheart theme with Boss fight in the background

5. Graphics - Good!

This is a minor category for someone like me, but worth mentioning. It's great to be playing a game with higher graphical standards than other MMOs I've been playing long term in the past. Spell effects are second to none. This category was notched down from excellent however and I will explain my reasoning. Lighting is just not very good, especially in relation to your characters. In the shade, your character becomes "dull". The colors don't shine or pop, and your skin looks like a matte finish. In the light, it adds weird shadowing to your face that looks..irregular. It has ruined many a cut scene for me when my face looks like a weird over-exposed photo. Characters look best in minor/little light sources. Directly under the sun creates and over-exposed look, and in the dead shade, makes your character look...dull. A good example that's always present is when you bring up the character pane. The way your character looks there is what I'm referring to. I think it might have been a mistake to keep the 1.0 models nearly intact, as I think there are better examples out there of "life-like with a slight touch of anime inspiration" type 3d models out there.

Also I don't like how the game renders environments. Characters looks pretty nice, I run the game at maximum settings at full frames, and the foliage tends to make the screen look really "grainy". It makes the screen look like it's fizzing even. Even when it's not foliage, there's just a certain sense of graininess. I have speculated that these are just jaggies from a lack of proper anti-aliasing, so I've been meaning to hard-run some form of anti-aliasing, as I don't think FFXIV's default anti-aliasing option is doing very good work.

These, however, are nitpicks! It's still landed in my "good!"

6. Story - OK.

While not exactly Shakespearean (no MMO story will be), it's more fun to follow than that of other competing MMOs. It's very centralized on you being the gary stu and that has its pros and cons in its own right, but in this particular case it doesn't hurt anything. My problem with the story is that the characters are not memorable. At all. None of them leave lasting impressions, and the only characters that do leave lasting impressions only do so because the game forces them on you constantly like Alphinaud, who I can't bring myself to take seriously because he reminds of a FOnewman from PSO, he just looks dorky.




The voice acting does well in making some characters more endearing and like-able (Miyuki Sawashiro voicing Minfilia makes her a babe). In general the voice acting is quite good, and helps a lot to portraying the intensity or drama. I can't speak to the English voice acting as I've never used it but I'm sure it's similarly good if they held them to the same standards as the Japanese ones. The scene where the Uldah Princess cries on Raubaun's shoulder? Very touching. Moenbryda? Also touching. There are some pretty good moments that are washed in to the sea of what is mostly a lot of "meh", which is why this averages out to be in the "OK" category.

7. Character Customization - OK.

This could have been better. The options are somewhat limiting and in some cases a bit irritating. For example, I am an Au Ra, and yet I cannot select a face independent of her horns? How does this make sense? The hairstyles lack freedom, and most of them are quite un-exciting. Hairstyles are, hands down, one of the most important parts of character customization to most people, standing far above correcting their eye shadow or nose angles. I just wish there had been a bit more passion put in to the Eorzean hairstyles, as this has lead to a feeling of "meh" about the look of my character, and if not meh then "It could be better". There are several pages I think they could take out of a book from PSO2 when it comes to customization, which provides new ways to customize your character almost bi-weekly (that includes hairstyles, costumes, and accessories). In general, there simply needs to be more options. Even WoW has more face options than FFXIV in its vanilla retail form, and that's simply pathetic. 4 faces to choose from? I mean really?

As a personal nitpick, I am really disappointed that they decided to release any hairstyles during a limited-time event and not provide a means to obtain them otherwise. I'm of course referring to the lightning/snow hairstyles, and while I do not care for having the event itself return (as I understand it's happened multiple times), it really does not make sense to disallow players from further customization. There are many ways for you to allow players to differentiate themselves above the rest, either through the glory of gear obtained from bosses that provide a hardcore challenge, achievements, or other similar things. An item that was quite simply really easy to obtain, never obtainable again simply because "timing" is blatantly obtuse and serves no purpose but to frustrate those who missed out, nobody is special just because they had the ability to play during those events. I think customization options (if they are deemed so special) should at least be added to the mog station, and if not then the Gold Saucer gambling place. Having a good number of the population sport a hairstyle I wish I could sport myself is a sort of exclusivity that is jarring and frustrating when no amount of skill or hard work will earn me that haircut.

Glamours seem like a really good development but I've yet to really get my hands dirty with that yet. It's likely something I'll be putting to use, but for now I can't comment very much on it.

8. The Teleporting - NOT GOOD.

The teleporting in this game. It's certainly convenient in most cases, but having done a lot of questing all bunched up together, my opinion on this feature has soured to a very negative point.

The story quests are literally designed around you teleporting. I'm quite sure they don't expect you to run all the way back from city to city when they have quests that are sending you across a region to simply talk to one dude for 5 seconds and then go all the way back to the previous region? It gives the questing a sense of very poor format. You do so much retreading that it's absurd, and you'd be doing more if you didn't use the teleport. This game uses way too much Fedex, and to make matters worse, they do it over long distances. Many of the quests in this game should have been condensed majorly for less back-and-forthing, because it is not enjoyable, and it doesn't make the story any better, it just makes it irritating to get it to move along. I understand I need to go to Uldah to ask the princess for permission on so-and-so, but why must I then return to give Alphinaud the word given to me by the princess, only to then again return to the princess to give his response? This is just plain bad formatting for fedex-like quests. Why must I run out to a grave that is a decent distance from a teleport spot (meaning you have to hoof it) to pay my respects, only to then 1 quest later run out to the same grave with a different character? The aethernet in main cities is helpful for the same reason, but it's the same problem on a small scale. Having to teleport multiple times between the conjurer's guild and the aetheryte plaza because this guy wants to let this guy know something is just janky.

I'm sorry but this is such a glaring issue with the game. I feel as though putting teleportation in the hands of the player has its benefits and overall its very helpful, but this game didn't have to give us so many reasons to have to teleport all the time. I sometimes feel like I spend more time loading up than I do actually reading quest text, much less actually fighting, as I'm going through the story. You might say that I should just not teleport then, and take the shoe leather express to all my quests turn-ins, but I would stop you because you know that argument would be ridiculous, and that would only make my "retreading ground" nitpick several times worse.

If the quests were more condensed so that less back-and-forth was necessary, it would help a lot. Going from capital to capital makes sense in a "rally all the leaders" type quest, but it's tiresome and needless when simply garnering some random NPC's opinion on a situation (usually 5 lines of text and that's it go back to the other city).

9. The localization - TERRIBLE!

This is aimed squarely at the localization team or whoever made the decisions concerning the translations for the game.

Now, I live in Japan (and thusly speak Japanese), however my parents are english/japanese and so I speak both fluently. English has always been the language of my parents at home, so you could say my native language is English and thus I prefer reading English, but I'm actually much better at listening in Japanese (this is hard to explain so I won't bother) so I actually prefer to have both the Japanese voice while reading English text, it just makes my information intake more..."full"? Anyways, now that you have context...I am really, really disappointed with the English localization. Disparagingly so. Few things.

A. You converted their dialogue in to a sort of ancient knights of the round table type speak. This is wholly absent in the vocalized dialogue (unless you count occasional keigo), and thus made for a pretty severely contradictory viewing experience while reading along. Some of the choices characters use to speak I'm pretty sure aren't even real pseudo-ancient turn-of-phrases, possibly made up to sound unique. I've seen some of the most horrific collections of words I think I've ever had to endure in story text...and putting "Pray" at the beginning of every sentence is just the tip of the iceberg.

"Pray naught why to not for be it to ask..."

I'm sorry WHAT? Why do you go through the effort of garbling up the English language so hard just to create some kind of immersion for English speakers? This stuff is more often than not forcing me to raise my eyebrow and reread things multiple times to even understand what you were going for, and I find myself ignoring the text altogether and just skipping the cut scene unless it has voiced dialogue. If the dialogue wasn't bad enough, the name localizations also deserve mention.

B. I have seen names without any primary vowels. There's some NPC I crossed named Sylfsr. What is wrong with you?. This isn't a name it's a collection of letters meant to not bear similarity to a functional earth-like name. This doesn't create immersion or make you think you're in a fantasy world it's just awkward and weird. Immersion is created in the personality of the world, not the weirdo names and word choices.

EDIT : It would appear that these names are meant to bear similarity to names of Welsh, or Scandinavian, or other closer countries in descent, which would mean this is an opinion of ignorance. I am not well studied on names there so consider this simply a first impression reaction.

C. The translations are often unfaithful to the originally intended dialogue.

I became particularly bothered by these things during a particular scene...where you are killing the Ascian guy. The English text says as he is being vanquished "I am eternal! I am immortal!". However, in the voiced dialogue, he was (there's no perception bias here, the words he used were straight forward) saying "I don't want to die! Somebody save me!". Why does this bother me? The translation is utterly unfaithful. In the voiced dialogue, he's revealing a sense of weakness not present in the text. He never thought he could die, so how does it feel that he just might?! He was so sure of it that the level of fear in his voice showed that the Ascians are penetrable indeed to their mortality, and that this method was something they never could have expected.

Saying "I'm eternal! I'm immortal!" just expresses that they are clearly wrong about that, given the situation. It doesn't convey nearly the same emotion, and thus the presentation of the scene is compromised.

This scene in particular came to mind, but this sort of stuff is present through out the story as a whole. Some characters are utterly mis-portrayed frequently in their words chosen, and many of these situations call in to question why they needed to do so. A lot of times, the Japanese dialogue gets to the point, and the english dialogue will say things that the character didn't even SAY, usually just to fluff it up with all that ridiculous other-worldly speak that, as I said, is utterly needless in the first place.

I strongly feel that the localization team was unfaithful to the original intended message of much of the dialogue, and that the grammatical pretext used within the characters speech in the English text is wholly unnecessary and obtuse.

IN CLOSING...

And that's that. Overall, if you couldn't tell, I'm generally satisfied with the game and I plan to move forward with my multi-class leveling plan, and hopefully (eventually) get in to Heavensward content soon, where I hope the story and questing pace/format was better handled than in the "vanilla" 2.0. Big thank you to Square as a whole making what I believe to be the next "big" thing. Mark my words, the subscriber count is due to keep going up. This game is hot. I'm playing an MMO religiously again and loving every minute of it. Keep it up.