Final Fantasy XIV? Am I a weeb?

I have finally reached the end of the base patch of Final Fantasy 14’s latest expansion… Shadowbringers. I guess now is the time where I give my opinion that no one actually wants to read…

The only reasonable comparison I can make with final fantasy xiv is towards my main MMO for over 10 years, World of Warcraft. I liked WoW for almost all of the time that I played it! I thought the game was good. I thought the art was great, the story was great and that Final Fantasy was just a game populated by weebs and furries. That was until I tried it

The Story

Oh boy. The first thing im mentioning is probably one of the biggest differences in the games. The Story…

So at the start of my adventures into FFXIV, I really couldn’t care less for the story. It was very cliche and had absolutely no draw for me. I even ended up skipping a bunch of cut scenes simply because I wasn’t invested in the story. It was all just fetch quests and peoples crops being taken by some thugs. But still, I would log onto twitter and see people raving about how good the story was. So I decided to push on until the end of ARR (which is essentially the base game of FFXIV)

I still thought the story was shit.

I really was concerned about the game at this point… Had I spent this long getting to the end of the base patches for FFXIV’s base game… Surely if the base isn’t any good, theres no point continuing on. After all, It’s very hard to build a good story off a shit foundation. But again. I kept finding people raving about the story on line. So in a final act of desperation… I decided to give it 1 (one) more try, and get up to Heavensward

And boy… Was that a phenomenal decision

The game changed. I found myself actively reading dialog that I could have easily skipped, that i WOULD have easily skipped beforehand. I noticed the story writing completely shifted into a more political based story…

And the cutscene

The hour long cutscene

It was phenomenal… And it was all up from there. The story for Heavensward is amazing and Storm Blood had probably my favorite story in any video game ever! ShB is also great. But the main thing, is that FFXIV storytelling completely blows World of Warcrafts storytelling out of the water.

The Community

I think the telling moment that the community was different, was being on voice with Velk (my WoW guilds old tank), and not understanding what he meant when he said “They’re playing Disney music in Limsa”

I had absolutely no idea what the heck he was talking about. And then I stepped into Limsa for the first time… And was first struck with the beauty, and then degeneracy, and then the blatant disregard for intellectual property. It was all beautiful

This was end game

And then I found the golden saucer

I probably would have finished the game in half the time if i hadn’t gotten addicted to the golden saucer. I farmed all the emotes, all the hairstyles, and of course… I farmed the bunny costume. It wouldn’t be right not to after all. I also ran into a friendly Roegadyn named “Big DaddyRoe” who has shown me a lot about the game on my adventures.

Also having people wait for you to watch your cut scene before fighting the last boss of a dungeon is super nice, and really helped me get further into the story! So honestly, while I have had a few bad experiences, they were nothing compared to the daily bad experiences I had in World of Warcraft.

(Side note. I re-subbed to World of Warcraft and did 2 dungeons. In the second one, there was a super toxic priest whom made me not want to come back at all. RIP dream of having Ahead of the Curve, and KSM season 2)

The Art

It’s different. I don’t know if it is possible to compare the art of both games. WoW has always done art in a very unique way, which makes it hard to hate for me, but Final Fantasy also does art nicely.

I think that the music however, is far superior in FFXIV. If we ignore the Twinning theme (Which we realistically have to because it’s so good), It’s still not even that close. I put this mostly down to FFXIV having the bold decision to incorporate many genres of music into their environments. For example… Titans Theme which sounds a lot like Whats up People by Maximum the Hormone… (Although this could be because im not big into JRock). Another track of note is La Hee… Which is pretty funny, even though it gets annoying pretty quickly. But its still quality.

Also Hades theme… (Spoilers)

The Combat Game play

I think WoW has the better actual combat game play of the two games. Although thats not to say that I think that FFXIV has a bad combat system. I think FFXIV has a more interesting combat system, but its not as ‘spammy’ as the World of Warcraft combat.

FFXIV relies mostly on the concept of GCD’s and OGCD’s which essentially means that some spells are on a shared small cooldown, and some aren’t. Weaving spells without this cooldown into the cooldown of the other spells is a core mechanic into how every class plays. I think its pretty neat. It’s however never going to be more fun than spamming 1 for frostbolt is in my opinion.

The Class design however is MILES ahead of wow. The class fantasy is real. I mostly play an Astrologan (Although looking at swapping to White Mage for Endwalker), and I am always enjoying my rotation and finding new ways to improve it.

I think one of the things that turns people off the FFXIV gameplay is that the concept of weaving is presented too late in the game… and I think a lot of people don’t make it that far, so don’t understand why the GCD’s are so long. I know for White Mage, you pretty much need to wait for Heavensward to get your cool skills… And if you need to play 50+ hours of a game in order for it to get good… I can understand why some people do not want to put in that commitment

Final Words

Give it a shot. If you are the sort of person who will happily go through a 50 hour slog in order to have 1000 hours or fun, then this is a game for you! There is so much to do in this game (Too Much) and I’m sure there is something you’ll find to enjoy. Be it Limsa Barding, Glamouring, Savage Raiding, or Cock Racing

My Quick Facts List

• Fordola is best girl
• Goatsex is best boy
• I hate the pope
• Paladin worst tank

Thankyou’s are in order

Thankyou so much for Seny for constantly helping me with encounters, and allowing me to blindly experience the content in a reasonable time frame

Thanks again to Velk for constantly shortening my Queue times and consistently pulling wall to wall in our levelling roulettes.

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Keep your realities separate...

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