Final Fantasy XIV doesn't actually have that good of a story

[Fhaerron]

I miss titanmen.

[Bright-Flower]

I don't think that FFXIV's story is 'consistently' good. ARR had issues and wasn't super great even at its best IMO.

HW was good, except for where it was wrapping up ARR's cliffhanger stuff.

SB was a step backwards. It could have been great but the region split I think had consequences for the overall story and Zenos for me just wasn't an interesting antagonist. It briefly got engaging for me in 4.1 but then the Tsuyu arc drug it back down.

SHB was mostly good, with a couple rough spots like the first part of western ahm araeng up until the Ran'jit fight.

The quality of the story has ebbed and flowed.

[RyuDragnier]

I miss titanmen.

You don't know what you've got until it's gone. Such bad bait topics these days.

[Raelsar]

I played a lot of other Final Fantasy's and a lot of gaming sites say that FF14 has one of the best stories in the franchise so I tried it out. This is an issue of the hype killing the game.

While it's hard to deny that over-hyping the story does lead to some issues... it really sounds like you were expecting a different type of story and are taking issue with some of the game's near-unavoidable caveats (some of which are common to the JRPG genre).

Looking at the first point, the presence of "filler" is hardly unique to FFXIV; most JRPGs (heck, most LARGE GAMES of any genre) have seemingly pointless objectives, and quite often it's prevalent early on. That being said, these "filler questlines" usually have another pair of functions -- world-building and character development. Sometimes the best way to learn about people and the world is to see how it normally operates, not just to focus on the major events and turning points This is sometimes the issue with many modern games, they neglect (or at least poorly utilize) the "little things" that make the world feel more alive to focus on the spectacle.

For the second point... meh, about the only limitation I see here is that MMORPGs don't have 100% voice-acting and motion-capture due to budget constraints. Simply put, the scale of FFXIV makes it unfeasible to make a game with that much fidelity in a game this big. This issue has actually been holding back the single-player FF games for a while, they can't capture the scope of the earlier games because of costs; case and point, the FF7 Remake had to be split into multiple games (and most modern story-driven games are actually pretty short, almost always under 20 hours). Ironically, it's games like FFXIV (if mostly through accretion over time) and Xenoblade Chronicles (particularly the one on the Wii) that actually pull off the grand scale of the older RPGs; they feel more like classic FF games than the modern ones.

The lack of urgency has been a common issue for RPGs pretty much forever, especially when the majority of nearly every game's optional side-content opens up in the closing chapters. By design, you can take your time to do all this extra stuff. About the only way to definitively install a sense of urgency is to constrain the player to completing a particular sequence before something bad happens (solo duties in FFXIV would be good example) or have consequences if the player doesn't do the task promptly rather than at their leisure (which nearly no RPG has, it deters people from doing optional side content).

Of course, does that really answer the question of whether or not FFXIV is "one of the best" stories in gaming or even just within the FF series? Well, that's certainly debatable, but I would say FFXIV is more of a "triumphant return to form" in regards to the earlier entries; it's a slow burn with a big payoff at the end, not a rapid-fire emotional roller-coaster.

[ReynTime]

The story is good. Writing gets better after ARR, although it has highs and lows as with any story that takes 10+ years to be completed.

I'll say though, the real issues it has, is the sloppy way they toss in 2 or 3 subplots in parallel and keep haphazardly halting one to jump to another. Some subplots being wrapped up in a very rushed anticlimatic manner while others wrap up fine.
But still, it's jarring sometimes, and even in Shadowbringers they never stopped doing that.
It makes the lack of proper passage of time even sillier than it is.

EDIT: And I'm talking specifically about MSQ.

[Vasoka]

The Last of Us 2 is capable of making you feel sad, angry, and horrified because the game is designed in a very immersive manner. FF14 makes you read the dialogues which isn't as immersive as modern story games.

Tlou2 is a disgusting and revolting abomination of a SJW game which spat on our beloved characters from the first game. It murdered them and then it danced on their graves.

It's not to be used as an example of a good game under any circumstances.

With that being said, FFXIV has a pretty nice story honestly. It took me a while to adjust to the anime goofiness which rears it's head every now and then (coming from WoW), but once you get used it makes you laugh frequently.

The only other MMO which has better storytelling IMHO is ESO. Pretty grimdark and serious, medieval-set universe.

[Haru304]

An MMORPG doesn’t have an amazing, memorable and iconic storyline? Jeez. I’m shocked.

I will say though, there are some elements of FFXIV story telling which borrow heavily from decently put together JRPGs and that's primarily why I prefer it over other MMORPGs.

In general though, you're not going to get a 'novel' experience from a variety of game that's designed for quantity of entertainment over selective quality of entertainment. I suppose that depends on your threshold on what quantifies a 'novel' experience but while there are some games I think tell particularly good stories, very few of them come close to an experience I'd deem as superior over reading a good book. MMORPGs in-particular have a LOT of things to focus on and the storytelling has to appeal to a VERY wide range of people, so the writing is very limited.

[Jin-]

I miss titanmen.

He is still here with us. You just have to pay attention to it. Pattern and all that ^^

[demonofelru]

Shadowbringers story was the best FF story in over a decade.

This person speaks the truth. The last Final Fantasy game before FFXIV came out with what I would call great story was FFIX (or Lost Odyssey, because it closer to Final Fantasy than what Square has been pumping out). Square has been putting out mostly trash for the last decade+. XIV is the saving grace of the series. I'm have high hopes for XVI since Creative Business Unit III is making it.

[Dzian]

Shadowbringers story was the best FF story in over a decade.

I dunno about the last decade. I know in its day FfXI,s CoP was widely regarded as not just one of the best final fantasy stories but one of the best MMO stories ever at time..

On a personal level it's definitely on nof the most memorable. In all honestly so much of xivs story I totally forgot already but that again comes in part to the sheer amount of filler crap thay by the time you wake through you've actually forgotten what's going on with the main plot..

But then a big part of what made CoP so memorable was the friends I did it with. A story shared with friends is infinitely better than a story shared with no one. Which is why I think the msq in 14 should be entirely groupable.

When 3 friends andni are all on cold stell together why do we have to disband and all do it alone. Be much more fun doing it together. And would help the servers as there'd be less congestion. Meaning less people spending hours clicking the npc trying to progress.