First, I would like to say that i have been a avid Final Fantasy player my whole life. Most of my favorite games are from the FF series. I have played mostly all of them and the spin offs as well, as silly as some may be. But as of late, the past ten years or so, I feel there quality has diminished greatly. In my opinion, it all began with the merger of Square and Enix. But that is a story for another time. I would like to tell you my experience with FF14 ARR so far. Now keep in mind i am still a NEW player when it comes to MMOs in general. Have had very little if any experience with them at all. Never understood the Pay-to-Play aspect of them. In my mind i already paid for your product why should i have to play a monthly fee to continue to enjoy it. Now being older i understand a LITTLE more how it works and why they need to charge us.

When I first heard about FF14 it was back during its 1.0 era. I new very little about what happened only that is was a broken game and was shut down to fix major issues or something like that. I Dismissed it, being that i had no real interest in playing MMOs at that time anyway. Fast forward to middle of August, i started hearing about it again and it grabbed my interest. So about 3 days before the official release date, i did some research, and the more i did the more excited i became. read up on the collectors edition and really liked what i saw. I for one do NOT pre-order games, especially not semi popular ones, mainly because i never had to.

8/27. Go out to my local game store. "May I have a copy of Final Fantasy 14 A Real Reborn: Collectors Edition for PS3." The man looked at me laughed and said "did you pre order it." "No i didn't, should i have?" "Yup!" He informed my that they only received the amount they had pre-orderd. Upset i left to try to find the game somewhere else. called more then a dozen different stores all either said the same thing or didn't have the game it at all. FAIL. Sure, I could have gotten the game online, but you can call me old school or somewhat of an impulse buyer i guess, i like to get things in stores. Finally I gave up and settled on the regular edition. Get it home and after a hour install from the disk. I am prompted to put in a code to register the game. Low and behold my code is invalid. Now after some RESEARCH i find out that this is actually a SONY issue and i just need them to update there store or something. this has happened to me before so no big deal you get a pass on this one Square-Enix.

So wait half the day and boom now my code works. Have a lot of fun with my family in the character creation screen for a good 40 mins. and after lets just say, somewhat of a hassle trying to get into a NA world, I give up and try a JP world, works fine, "hmmm" i think to myself. Now i don't want to play the game over in Japan so i run around checking it all out. This game truly is pretty sweet, had a lot of fun. but eventually i'm like ok lets actually get this game going. Now i pumped! But still have trouble logging in! What the Hell! After MORE RESEARCH i see that everyone is having the same problems, not just me. this makes me feel a little better for awhile but that quickly fades. After more then 2 hours of research and spamming different things i finally give up, i figure its the first day everyone is trying to log in at once so i call it a day.

Get up the next morning EARLY and after like 20 mins of spamming the 1017 i get into a Query. Nice to see something new, its says im 153 in line, and after about 3 seconds it goes to the loading screen, and i'm IN! HELL YEAA! with no problems after that. I am able to make this happen the first two days and have a really good time. When i actually get to play the game it seems pretty damn sweet. NOW THE FUN REAL BEGINS! After the first 48 hours of the launch i have not been able to log in at all and am hit with a different error message almost every time. 1017, 2002, 90000, Etc, Etc. Gray start button, unable to load worlds, both NA and JP. sometimes the first screen wont even load, sometimes my system crashes, etc, etc.

It is now 9/2, 6 days after the official release date, and its the worse its been. the more and more RESEARCH i do NOW is just really turing me off. the fact that JP players are not having nearly as many issues, that SQUARE new about these problems before launch and did nothing, the official announcements are extremely vague are scarce, that today there closed. horrible planning. worse communication. Square-Enix has really let me down countless time in the past years and am really beginning to think that they will never be the company they used to be. its almost like they don't care about there fan base anymore or the NA ones anyway. and that really is sad being that i have had so many good memories with them.

In closing i just would like to say that yes, from what i did get to play Square did do an amazing job with this game, and i really enjoyed what i did get to see so far. i wish there staff would have planned this better or something. i will still continue to play this as soon as its running smoothly again, for my 30 days, i mean i did pay 40 freaking dollars. but no i don't think i will be paying $15 a month to a company who looks as its NA fan base as secondary...