I Spent 1000+ Hours on the Final Fantasy 14 Free Trial.

come on yup that's me i bet you're wondering how i got here final fantasy xiv is a game that is almost universally praised through hard work and perseverance it is slowly managing to dethrone world of warcraft as the most popular and well-liked mmo and i think it's earned that praise i do however have a few wrong opinions about final fantasy 14. as anyone who has ever met me will tell you i am a very opinionated person this means i tend to have a lot of hard to defend positions when it comes to video games my favorite games in any given franchise are oftentimes the ones people seem to dislike the most i don't bring this up to say that i'm some kind of contrarian although it can be hard to say that when most of your opinions are mostly contrary instead i wanted to give you a bit of context of where i am coming from when i first started writing the script for this video i thought it would be a short little video where i talked about the top 5 things i liked and didn't like about the free trial of final fantasy xiv but as i started to write and rewrite it became clear that i had a lot more that i wanted to say about this game more importantly i wanted to be able to share my thoughts and experiences about my time with this game while i still felt passionate enough to do so this has been a journey that i have been on for about eight months now with some highs and lows in between i started the game on the trial back during christmas of last year with my only intention being to poke my nose in and see what it was that my friends have been up to you can now make fun of me as i have been poking my nose in for about a thousand hours now and i thought that the community might be interested in hearing about my experience with the game considering my unique circumstance all that being said i will not be doing a review of final fantasy 14 because for all intents and purposes and i'm sure the community would agree with me i did not play final fantasy xiv i played the trial specifically the expanded free trial which allows you to play through the entirety of a realm reborn and the award-winning heavensward expansion up to level 60 for free with no restrictions on playtime [Music] playing the game on a trial means that there are certain restrictions placed upon you there is a cap on your gill and you can only join a party if invited or by using the duty finder there is no access to the market board and you cannot trade other players or whisper them these were clearly put in place to stop bought accounts from harassing other players or adversely affecting the market but it has the fun side effect of imposing a number of challenges for long-term trial players that they will have to overcome it also means that for the most part you will have to be entirely self-reliant as other players are unable to interact with you for the most part outside of cues it makes you see things a little bit differently gill for one becomes worthless and players begin to look a bit more like npcs that become uncomfortable when you stare at them for long periods of time [Music] and that is what i meant about me having the wrong opinion as it is sort of hard for me to have a objectively correct opinion as a permanent free trial is something that square enix never intended obviously a free trial is meant to entice you into purchasing the full game so that you can lift the restrictions and finally experience the real thing if this were a supermarket square enix would be standing at their table offering a plate full of pepperoni samples or whatever with the actual product sitting just behind them hoping to entice new consumers however i as a connoisseur of sorts entered the store already knowing what i wanted i'll still take the free pepperoni though and it's good pepperoni don't get me wrong but i didn't come to the store for pepperoni i did however greedily eat four more samples when asked what i thought of those samples i reply it's good i like it a passerby may hear this and tell me that they buy that brand of pepperoni all the time and that the best way to experience it is with goat's cheese on a gourmet cracker to which i will nod yeah that does sound pretty good then i will take another sample and eventually leave the store with my pizza rolls or whatever i came there for originally i have no more food-based analogies for you so instead allow me to explain how i spent my time on final fantasy xiv as a permanent trial player it will be a sampler of sorts as despite the limitations of a trial account i managed to dip into some of the most meaningful aspects of the game that were available to me with some aspects i imagine even many full-time players have not experienced for themselves so why don't i start from the beginning talk about my experiences with each of those aspects and then give you my closing thoughts on what i thought about the final fantasy xiv trial as a whole so the first thing to do with any mmo is to find out what class you're going to play i pretty much exclusively played tanks if there is a holy trinity and so i started reading articles and watching videos to see what i was in for i was initially put off to learn that the only tank class that was available to me in the trial that had a gap closing move was the dark knight which meant that i couldn't play it right off the bat because it required some story progression i also had a hankering to use a sword and a shield but then i saw a paladin gameplay and i was noticing them standing still to cast and i like to be very mobile as a tank so that pretty much left me with the warrior the classic angry two-hander class so the next thing i had to do was to come up with a character that fit the warriors aesthetic character creation is very important to me and i will spend a stupid amount of time coming up with names as well as a general theme for my characters that i will be typically hesitant to stray from it is a role-playing game after all i'll really quickly mention the races as it is an interesting topic to discuss for any mmo immediately final fantasy 14 wins all the money because it is the only mmo i have ever seen to have the balls to put in a cat girl race this is slightly offset by the la la fell who are by far my least favorite tiny baby race in any game there is a disturbing amount of tiny baby races in mmos so clearly there is a demand for it but i cannot take them seriously at all show me all the evil babies with villain mustaches you want i will never be able to get past the full diapy walk cycle elves feel a little bit strange in final fantasy but they are a fantasy staple the aura are also an easy choice for new players especially if you're feeling a little bit edgy although they might take the cake for the least satisfying four-letter word to try to pronounce that being said i looked up a name generator for final fantasy xiv as i like my characters to fit into the world and i realized that unpronounceable names are all part of the world building there are of course vanilla humans as well as slightly bigger humans as well as a few other options that are only available after purchase and also shrek the character that i ended up making was other long fang a viking inspired character to fit with the giant axe wielding warrior class i found the character creator to be somewhat limited as you have the classic problems of there being only two beard options either yes or no this killed a lot of the other character concepts that i had as i wasn't satisfied with their finished product and it also wasn't too long before i ended up bumping into someone who was essentially my long-lost twin brother that being said i don't mind it too much as you can definitely have another problem when you have a very robust character creator in which your game ends up being filled with a bunch of immersion breaking gabools and meme characters it's a small gripe that i have but i do like it when the other player characters i encounter appear as though that they fit into the setting anyways with that out of the way i'm finally ready to see what final fantasy xiv has to offer this opening cutscene is a great introduction you get this amazing song and a good look at the starting town for the warrior lindsay minzy [Music] uh goofy name aside i really like lim salamenca and so does everybody else too apparently it has a rather unique looking nautical theme with a number of great vistas and these large tower-like structures with boardwalks connecting them and it's mostly populated by sailors pirates and these awful looking shreks and yellow shirts originally i had made a bard which starts you in the far more typical looking forest town which i thought was fairly unremarkable by comparison so i'm glad that i did the do-over so one of the first things you are made to do is to join up with the maelstrom which is essentially a pirates union uh like a sea thug company which is very funny to me so you join up with the bastards coalition and your first duty is to try and impress their admiral putting you on the track to become a heroic figure not unlike the stories of old one thing that always impressed me about ff14 was that it had the balls to try and incorporate the failure of the original 1.0 release as this sort of end of the world scenario where all the original warriors of light disappeared both literally and also figuratively from the minds of all the people living in the world it also gets reincorporated in a couple of interesting ways throughout the story that i won't spoil one thing i like in particular is how much the game borrows from final fantasy 12 in terms of both its ui and its game feel you'll notice small things such as the transitions between maps and the fonts that it uses as well as the markers that enemies place on you to indicate who they are attacking you can also chain enemies together for extra loot as well as there are some reused sound effects it also feels a bit like final fantasy 12 to play which is kind of bizarre considering this isn't your typical initiative based rpg system a friend of mine who i was in a call with made a joke when i told him that i was playing final fantasy 14 where he asked if the enemies that i was fighting were walking up to me slowly and then charging up an aoe enemies for whatever reason seem to latch onto the first target that aggroed them and they seem dedicated to try and finish their first action even if you taunt them giving them this weird sticky turn-based feeling that a lot of players seem to be able to take advantage of especially in the dungeons there is a definite initial sticky feeling to the combat that took me a while to get past almost all moves including the warriors first aoe are target based and when used will snap you around to face the enemy interrupting whatever movement that you might have been inputting which makes trying to use moves while also trying to move out of an aoe kind of dangerous tap targeting also never seems to quite get the guy that i want so i find myself simply clicking on targets it's not a deal breaker and i honestly imagine it probably feels a lot better on the controller but i thought it was worth mentioning as it is one of the first things i noticed while playing this game so let's skip forward and talk about dungeons as they are among the first challenges that you will encounter while progressing through the game eventually the main storyline will bring you to the first set of three dungeons when you get to that level you are directed to a character referred to as the smith who is also awkwardly placed next to an npc that offers equipment repairs which isn't confusing at all the smith offers to teach you the role of your class before you queue for your first dungeon which is honestly fine by me as i wanted to see if there was any specific tanking mechanics that were unique to final fantasy xiv as it turns out not really but it is a good refresher as the last few mmos that i played didn't really have traditional class rolls i'd recommend doing these not only because they give you a set of really hard to replace gear but also because it does a decent job of preparing you for a dungeon there are also guild hests which provide a similar tutorial function but honestly they're overkill as the queue timer plus the minimal rewards make them feel sort of extra so admittedly my first dungeon experience was a bit tainted i was focused on leveling at the time and i had been told by just about everyone that i had talked to that the main storyline was the way to do that the first three dungeons come one after the other in the story so if you want to progress you're going to have to hammer those out to continue i did not cue for satasha but instead i walked into the dungeon with two blue mages who proceeded to obliterate everything in one hit using a thousand needles and i didn't really fully understand what was going on so i just walked through the dungeon like an awkward third wheel as everything died before i could even read their names the next dungeon i actually got to tank and i was urged by my party to pull pretty much every single enemy all the way up to the first boss despite me not really knowing where that was i was hesitant to do this as i only had one aoe move at the time and i expected maintaining threat from the healer to be more difficult like in other mmos to my surprise in final fantasy xiv you can basically spit on an enemy and so long as you are taking stances on they will almost never ever break away from you and considering how the enemy ai works you can actually effectively outrun the enemies to prevent any damage being done to you this was completely baffling to me and it still sort of is it seems as though the developers caught onto this strategy as many if not most of the harder dungeons that come later employ some form of barrier to prevent you from grabbing the entire dungeon which i don't really feel like is the correct solution i mean if a group is strong enough to take out the entire dungeon why stop them it's possible to do this in other games as well although it does typically require a little bit of coordination and planning another small gripe of mine is that most of the dungeons are locked behind the story which i suppose isn't really a problem if all you want to do is to level up but i genuinely enjoy tanking and i would prefer to be able to progress through the game through dungeons if possible as it allows me to get more comfortable with my class that being said the dungeons seem to pull their punches until you get to about level 50 where the enemies finally start being able to hit hard enough to really [ __ ] you up or they will start channeling a spell that if completed will start to make things really hard for you boss strategies on the whole for these dungeons appear to be much harder to deal with as a dps or a healer as the tank's hp pull really lets you get away with a lot of nonsense especially if you're bringing potions with you one great feature that final fantasy 14 has is the ability to run dungeons with a squadron of npcs which is really great if you want to keep running the same dungeon over and over and over again and you don't want to deal with a queue which is especially useful if you're a dps class which has a much longer queue than a tank does and this leads me into discussing the next aspect of the game that you'll run into the grand companies i really like the idea of the grand companies i assume they don't play a large part in the current patch but they will take up a significant portion of your time during the trial you choose a faction between picking your favorite colors between black red or yellow there is the immortal flames led by this bull helmeted bad [ __ ] named raubon you can join up with the maelstrom led by amber old viralbib or there's the twin adders led by uh the third one each are essentially a military organization that you can join up with and gain ranks in by participating in world events which gives you access to a few perks such as emotes and items that you can use for specific crafting they are also how you unlock your first mount the best feature by far is the squadron which you are given command of past a certain rank which are a group of npcs that you can hire out to go on to missions and to earn experience and gain rewards to unlock new recruits you complete challenges and then you review new applications in your barracks and later on you can dress them up in whatever uniform that you want i went with a final fantasy 7 turks aesthetic because literally everybody looks good in a suit it becomes a daily ritual to pop in and to send your team on a mission so that they can slowly progress and as i mentioned before you can take these characters with you to run specific dungeons i really wish this idea was fleshed out a bit more but from what i can tell on the wiki page the grand companies appear to have been dropped in the later patches as there appears to be a series of unattainable ranks with no rewards attached to them i'd love to see these characters if they had a bit more unique dialogue so that there was more purpose to recruiting a specific character sort of like an animal crossing villager also imagine if their ai was given gambit similar to final fantasy xii it would probably feel more like a standard final fantasy game within a final fantasy game where you get to pick your party members and use your limit break however you want i could imagine people getting very invested in this system by far one of the best perks of the grant companies are the daily turn-ins which grant a ridiculous amount of experience towards your crafting and gathering professions and speaking of professions so let's just go ahead and officially award final fantasy xiv the does crafting and gathering the best out of any mmo award hey you've come a long way since 1.0 but you've earned it buddy so i initially discovered crafting after i stumbled into the ixel beast tribe quests as i was curious to learn why the angry green bird people who worship the objectively best primal were asking me to help as it turns out it's because you can help build these bird people a flying machine which is very funny to me these bird boys ease you into the system by giving you crafting missions that can be completed by any profession and they have you building out components for their hot airship balloon and by any profession i mean literally any profession as you can sit there and cook up an engine part which seems very ill-advised but it is very funny the idea behind the system is simple each profession has its own crafting class which starts out by using very basic components that you could just buy in order to craft weapons and armor and so on and higher level recipes require more complex crafting materials for the most part your three gathering classes are able to find these raw materials which are then refined by your crafting classes as you level these different professions you unlock new skills just like any other class with gathering classes these abilities will help you to find raw items in higher quantities as well as to improve their quality the skills on your crafting classes will increase your progress towards completing an item as well as to increase the chance that the item will become high quality which is further modified by the quality of the materials you use there is a neat mini-game here as you can expand your ability to try and give yourself the highest chance of a high quality product which are either a statistical improvement from a standard item or a specific requirement in certain quests after hours of crafting you will eventually learn what your optimal crafting rotation is only to then realize that there is a website that can do all that optimization for you you will learn pretty quickly that you can't ignore other professions as every profession requires components from the other only your armorsmith can make you rivets and your carpenter will need to craft the lumber and you'll eventually need to fish up a hammerhead shark and turn it into oil for some reason thankfully you can level your other classes using daily turn-ins at your grand company or the previously mentioned green bird people as a permanent trial player your inventory is going to be completely ruled by crafting and to a lesser extent your end game will also require crafting assuming that you actually want to use the items that you find off of bosses seeing as that you can't really sell them for money one of the most daunting tasks i have ever undertaken in any mmo has been to try and craft end game gear for both a realm reborn and heavensward with 99 percent of that struggle being due to the fact that i just didn't have access to the market board to simply buy what i was missing just like my ancestors i needed to toil in the mud collecting every iron-laced pebble in the land to build my equipment why go through all this trouble you ask it's simple fashion fashion [Music] as any experienced mmo player knows fashion is the true end game in this sense the trial is only really limited by the gear that is equippable at level 60 or below while this means that you will never wear the high level dark souls armor it also has the side effect of making your own fashions pretty unique as not too many players are using the harder to craft gear from older expansions a good portion of the player base typically uses modern looking fashion things from the cash shop which are a no-go for you or nothing at all which has been available to you from the start of the game you're already halfway there your best options are going to come from either level 50 and 60 crafting or from raids and boss trials as i mentioned before crafting my first set of fashionable gear was the first major milestone that i set for myself i found a few end game recipes and i saw how they looked together and i decided that's what i was going to go for with no idea as to how many dozens of hours that was going to take me do you know how expensive it is to try to make your own demi materia at level 50 very expensive i probably spent around 2 million gil just buying items to desynthesize in order to find other items that cost maybe 500 kill on the market board only to have to grind that cash back up and do it again similarly i would have to run these same few raids over and over again in order to hopefully maybe receive a single piece of allergan roots out of the 14 or so that i needed in total it took me about a month to create but in the end i was really happy with the finished product at this point however i was finally starting to dip into the other tank classes so i needed to find armor for them as well i decided i would try to farm the warrior of light armor from the very first raid as i have always been a fan of yoshitaka amano's artwork and you can really get a sense of it with the colors and shapes on this set [Music] man i deadass thought these websites were lying to me because i must have run this raid over 12 times before i ever saw a piece of tank gear drop by around 30 runs i had actually managed to loot four fifths of the set as being the only tank class in the party luckily meant that i had priority in total i must have run labyrinth of the ancients 60 times before i ever saw the bootstrap and i can't even imagine what it would be like trying to grind up a dps set from one of these raids i had similarly also tried to grind the crafted weapons from extreme trials to which i must have done titan and ifrit in particular about 20 times each and then of course i ended up getting ravanas and garuda's items instead on my first or second try there are also some more obscure items you can hunt down during your trial i was on the hunt for a unique looking eye patch for my character when i learned about the sable death mask which is an item you receive after maxing out your loyalty with all the beast tribes luckily my time with the bird people meant that i was already done the worst of it and when you are finished you get to unlock this unique quest chain which also has this cut scene [Music] and i thought that this was worth showing for some reason i think that's enough of the fashion for now as it's time to talk about the actual most important part of final fantasy xiv [Music] i feel like i've been here before [Music] now we're into the real meat potatoes of the mmo genre after spending hours at the fantasy star online 2 roulette wheel and now an equivalently embarrassing amount of time at the gold saucer i am now convinced that your game needs a casino for me to care at all this casino works a little differently as you don't really bet your earnings so much as you play mini games for golden saucer fun bucks yay there is actually a surprising amount to do here as another milestone of mine was to get the fenrir mount fenrir is a semi-prominent figure within the series and i wanted the big icy wolf mount as it went well with my grizzled viking man character anyways this sucker is gonna set you back 1 million fun bucks so it's time to start talking about how you're gonna earn those fat stacks number one on the checklist are the challenges which reset each week doing these are relatively simple such as completing three mini games which will grant you a flat 1000 mgp you're not the right cactus man get out of here next up is cactpot which is essentially a free lottery that you can enter into once weekly and it also has its cousin the mini cactpot which are a set of daily scratch tickets that you can pull the mini variety is what we care about as on average they provide a much bigger payout if you have your grand company squadron able to do high-level missions one reward that you can get is this ticket that increases your winnings by 15 pop one of these bad boys and then scratch your ticket in a triangle pattern like this you want to do it this way because you are trying to line up the numbers one two and three or seven eight and nine and this pattern ensures that you have all the information that you need to guarantee that you will either get one of those two so long as they are actually on that particular ticket the fashion show is the real breadwinner which allows you to win a prize of up to 60 000 mgp every week and is made completely trivial if you follow this guide by this fine gentle person on reddit now even with the guide it may take you a while on a trial to get your first set of 80 or 100 judgment points as more often than not the fashions will require you to have certain classes leveled up to at least the mid-50s and sometimes even that won't be enough even after reaching heaven's word it took me at least 6 weeks before i was able to get my first 100 points to unlock the title every once in a while you will hear an announcement for an event and these come in the form of a point-and-click shooter minigame an event where you have to avoid getting knocked out of the ring by yojimbo or his objectively way less cool buddy typhon or jump puzzles these are quick and dirty and they offer good rewards and also knock off a few more of your challenges you can also choose from a selection of more fleshed out mini games such as domin majon which is uh it's just mahjong there is lord of verminion which is this weird rts style game where you get to use the collectible minions that you can find which also has a few exploitable strategies you can use to get paid out in fat stacks then there is triple triad am i supposed to be doing something triple triad is a card game that was first introduced in final fantasy viii and when i found it here i won't lie i pretty much stopped playing the rest of the game just to see how far this thing could go i would wait around for hours to play in the draft tournaments and after steamrolling my first few i was a little bit embarrassed to find out that most of the entrants were just npcs which took the wind out of my sails a little bit on rare occasions you will actually get a tournament full of actual players but you are still at the whims of the game as to what rules you are playing by while i enjoy most of the rules of triple triad one rule which i almost never see which was something of a staple back in final fantasy viii is the open rule which allows you to see the cards that your opponent is using in a traditional card game this rule would suck wild amounts of ass but i've always seen triple triad as a game more similar to something like chess but with deck building elements it is a game of patience that involves exploiting whatever you or your enemy has set up with the same and plus rules on any two sets of numbers that touch each other has a chance of setting off a chain reaction that will essentially win you the game and without being able to see what your opponent is going to place anything that you try to set up will almost definitely blow up in your face i have found that the best strategy in this case is to place your cards in such a way as to avoid this from happening entirely and then hope to hell that your opponent leaves you in openings that you can place a card that they couldn't see and then completely devastate them in one move it's still a lot of fun but my preference is for the original as it lets you bully everyone into using whatever awful rule set that you've concocted so the surprise winner of the casino is chocobo racing at first i only did this because the challenges offered a massive payout towards my mount but by the time i was done i was actually spending more points than i was making chocobo racing is essentially a really slow janky version of mario kart and i hate mario kart so i have no idea why i like this so much there's an interesting pokemon-esque breeding mechanic which allows you to invest a stupid amount of time into creating the genetic super chocobo you can teach your chocobo a utility skill or a passive that it can use during the race such as a speed boost or increased stamina so it can run for longer and you can also inherit one of these abilities from the chocobos parent you can further customize your stats by feeding your chocobos certain foods so there's actually a surprising number of builds that you can come up with my chocobo in particular uses an ability called super sprint which when used maxes out your speed by burning through all of your stamina rapidly so almost all of my other stat investments are going to go towards stamina minimizing speed as it doesn't affect super sprint at all it works pretty well most of the time and i think there was something else that i was doing oh right the mount after about a month of grinding i saved up my 1 million fun bucks and purchased my wolf and for the first time in this game i was really beginning to feel invested cut to about a month later and i won almost 2 million fun bucks from this journal thing and so i ended up buying every other prize the casino had including this ridiculous thing which reminds me of the best joke that carbot ever made about world of warcraft mounts every time i ride it tell me for whom do you fight [Music] how very glib and do you believe in zia so this is the section of the video that i am most hesitant to talk about as the story seems to be something that a lot of players are invested in i have a few criticisms i want to get off my chest and if you'd like to skip ahead or end the video here please feel free you can also take the following with a heaping teaspoon of salt because i have only completed what story was available to me up to stormblood without getting into spoilers my biggest gripe isn't with the story itself but with how it's told in order to unlock content in this game be it the raids dungeons or even certain classes you need to get to a certain point in the story this is no small time investment either as there are something like 170 some odd quests before you even reach the end game of a realm reborn if this were a single player game i would have no problem at all going through the story at my own pace which is definitely what the community asks you to do and that was no secret to me when i started playing that being said having a very linear story set in an open world mmo feels like a strange choice to me and it started to feel like a chore that i had to keep hacking away at in order to get to a point where i could play with my friends which is why i started playing to begin with one of my friends in particular ended up quitting the game at around level 40 because when they learned how much of the story they had left to catch up on it seemed too daunting for them to want to continue it also doesn't help that a lot of the earliest parts in the story of a realm reborn feel sort of unimportant to the greater plot and by the time that i got to the introduction of sid my brain had already started treating these story quests like an obstacle i ended up looking up the main quest line and seeing what trials and dungeons they unlocked and when and then i would rush through until i could queue as a tank in something new as i wanted a change of scenery i did eventually go back to the inn and then re-watch the cutscenes that i had skipped all the way up to heaven's word and i don't really regret having done it that way nor do i feel like i have missed out on the story by having skipped those cutscenes during the dungeons a realm reborn is definitely the big offender here especially the grind at the end towards unlocking heaven's word as it really does begin to feel like a grind my biggest surprises came from cast from meridianum and the praetorium which serve as the end to the original story of final fantasy xiv and also feature unskippable cut scenes that you have to watch each time that you come here this includes a few that come during the middle of a poll which made me absolutely [ __ ] my pants the first time coming through as a tank as all i could do was imagine an army of invisible [ __ ] kicking my head in the whole time while the game was busy showing me a shot of the sky it sucks because the rewards for these dungeons are great and so there's a lot of incentive to keep doing them again and again although i wish the rewards were based on clearing a long and difficult dungeon and not sitting through what feels like an hour-long cutscene on a secondary note it feels a little strange to make raid content a part of the main story as i am used to mmos having some players who are only marginally interested in the pve content and might play a game for years without ever doing something like a raid i assume my opinion here is very unpopular but i also don't feel like i'm 100 alone in it either as it would seem that there is at least some demand in skipping the story altogether although i would never recommend doing that my preference would be to have no dungeons at all as part of the main story as i don't really like the idea of breaking up the pacing of the story by adding in a queue timer alternatively i'd replace those quests with a single player version of the dungeon that you would run through with the story npcs as i think that that would help to get you more attached to those characters as well as not force you to queue up for a dungeon if you aren't up to dealing with other people i get like that sometimes where it's late at night and i just want to play something as i begin to wind down for bed and i don't really have the energy to work with a party or potentially make mistakes in front of them or whatever else might happen all right i am done having a baby boy meltdown if you think that i was too unfair in this section feel free to unload on me in the comments but for now i'm going to move on to the most important part of any mmo and that is the setting the setting of final fantasy xiv is fantastic and it is easily the strongest aspect of the game you can tell that this game was made for the fans and it was probably made by the fans as well there is an incredible amount of love that is put into the reimaginings of some of the series most memorable characters as well as the music themes which i will get into a bit later final fantasy as a franchise is well known for its reuse and reincorporation of certain character designs which gives it a very strong library of references to draw upon when building its world i mentioned the final fantasy 12 references before and you can see a good bit of it in the designs of the garlian empire as well as obvious final fantasy vi references with certain models and even concepts being faithfully recreated such as the magitek the strongest of these references are the primals who as a group serve as the original antagonists of the setting alongside the empire and are also the largest demonstrable threat to the people living in this world they are also essentially near immortal god-like entities that have influence over a specific tribe of beast men with mind control like influence over their followers they are able to resurrect themselves so that they can enact their revenge on the land and the people around them making them more like natural disasters that can only really be mitigated rather than fully dealt with this is also the in-game lore reason as to why many of the bosses can be fought over and over again which i think is really clever i cannot stress enough how much i like the core concept of the primals and the influence these godlike creatures have over their followers and it's really cool to see how this idea gets expanded upon as the story keeps progressing even into the current patch with the primals in mind i am now going to reach in and pull out a double sampler here as i talk about my two favorite aspects of literally any video game as a developer the only thing that you need to put into a video game to make me happy is at least one medium to above average boss with a slapper of a boss theme and this game has both of those things in spades i've already gushed a little bit about the primals but man what a [ __ ] cool way to let your fans kick the heads off of all their favorite summons and bosses trials are probably my favorite format for a boss fight in an mmo setting aside the occasional 30 minute queue sometimes all i want is to be able to re-challenge a single boss because i liked fighting that boss so much and i don't really want to spend any time in a dungeon or a raid to get to that fight i feel like square really busts out the big guns for the trials in particular too as you can get really merciless with the difficulty if all you are fighting is a single boss this is where i think that a realm reborn actually really shines as it has access to the biggest list of fan favorites and it doesn't seem to pull its punches on the extreme trials so let's talk about a few titan my boy whom i will grapple with to the last is this huge sumo wrestler looking mountain oni who is looking to grind some over dwellers under his heel his fight involves five distinct phases each of which turn up the heat a little bit more as he slowly breaks away the stage and unlike some later boss fights which do nearly the same thing your body isn't going to be neatly recovered so that you can easily be revived by your healers no [ __ ] that you are just dead and that's great did i mention this guy has five boss themes one for each phase [Music] one thing i am not the biggest fan of is a mechanic called echo which slowly increases your stats as your group continues to wipe i don't really like the idea of rewarding the players for dying also i don't know about you but when you get to a frustrating boss in any other video game would you get the same catharsis for finally winning if you had to use a game shark to give yourself extra health and damage no i want to win without cheating i've encountered almost every single boss in a realm reborn and heaven's word and i can say that most of them are of really high quality and i'd love to have done them when they were still considered progression as a trial player the only boss that was available to me that i haven't been able to complete is bahamut as well as some of his associated trials as he appears to be the one piece of legacy content that doesn't have any cues associated with him and one boss partway through the second coil is particularly hard to do without a certain number of players being in your party so without access to party finder trying to find people to do this without a discord server was a little bit too hard for me alright so soundtrack so final fantasy xiv has one of the largest libraries of original music out of any game that i have ever played you could easily listen to nothing but tracks from this game all day and you wouldn't get bored with it for some reason the music in the game doesn't loop which was apparently an intentional design decision by the game's league composer and sound director who is a beautiful boy by the way nothing but love from me [Music] i do still wish it was an option though as my brain has a condition that needs there to be a constant white noise around me so instead i usually end up loading up a playlist of final fantasy music from the other games while i'm playing a lot of the boss tracks tend to include lyrics of some kind and i tend to find that very distracting especially if i'm on call with other people or trying to teach someone what to do and so i'll end up being forced to turn the music down or off entirely you know that's sort of the weird thing about final fantasy 14 music is that i actually end up listening to it more outside of the game than i do while i'm actually playing it also if you didn't know you can listen to almost every single main series final fantasy song on spotify for free including final fantasy xiv and all of its expansions i decided i would leave one last section to talk about relic weapons this is the last major milestone that i attempted to complete and it also represents the longest non-made storyline quest that you can engage in on your trial i also think i just needed a place to talk about it because of how much time i spent on these damn things and i really don't know why i did it so for the uninformed a relic weapon is essentially this game's version of a legendary in comparison to world of warcraft or guild wars 2. it's definitely a lot closer to a legendary in guild wars 2 in terms of these sorts of tasks that they will be having you running around and trying to complete in total i'd say that the relic weapon in final fantasy xiv is about half the total commitment and time wasting that guild wars 2 puts you through that being said the relic weapons are considerably more out of the way and there is no way to progress in the quest without being on the necessary step and actually doing what is required i started with the animal weapon series where i worked to craft an axe for my warrior now it's kind of funny but i was originally trying to get a completely different weapon i looked up online and found a specific vendor who could take materials that dropped off of certain bosses although i thought that the website said that they sold it when i tried to find her i realized she was invisible because she was part of a different quest line and so i did that quest line to unlock her by the time she became part of the quest line i was actually given a weapon that i liked even better but you cannot add this weapon to your glamors until you buy a replica of it which is only unlocked by completing the entire quest by that point i just said [ __ ] it and used minos the completed version of the axe as after all the effort it took to get it i didn't really like the idea of changing its look after engaging in that story i was sort of curious to know what the level 50 version of the relic weapons storyline was like and so i settle on a quest to unlock the excalibur for my paladin purely because it is one of the most iconic weapons in the franchise and hey i'm never doing that again now i have this book haunting my key items as a grim reminder of all the time that i will never get back by far the hardest part of this quest is gathering the materia which if you aren't on a trial is probably by far the fastest part but with no access to the market board that means you have to craft all 75 material yourself and because of rng it's likely going to be a lot more than 75 materia like a lot more but in the end i am glad that i went through it as nothing makes me feel more like a warrior of light than donning the classic armor while wielding both the legendary shield and blade so to wrap up this long ass video i wanted to share my thoughts on my overall experience with the game as a whole i would say that it has been a very positive experience and definitely worth the hundreds of hours that i have sunk into it i mean i wouldn't have spent this much time on it if i didn't enjoy what i was playing that being said i'm probably not going to end up getting the full game anytime soon as i am not looking to lock my character behind a subscription fee and i kind of feel like i already got a lot of what i was looking for out of the game final fantasy 14 managed to keep me logging in day in and day out for the better part of eight months which is a lot more than i can say for the last two games that i played one being the legacy of my favorite mmo and franchise while the other being the sequel to my favorite game of all time i can also say that it easily has one of the most generous free trials that i have ever taken part in and after going through the story listening to the music buying out everything in the casino and wiping on the extreme trials you really get a feel for everything that this game has to offer i think that mmos as a genre are nearly impossible to get 100 right and final fantasy 14 is probably doing the best out of all of its competitors at consistently pumping out new content for its loyal fan base also i wanted to give a shout out to the final fantasy xiv community as it is without a doubt the most positive feature of this game while i did run into a few people who were particularly bad at having fun there is still this overwhelmingly positive vibe from both the player base and its content creators anyways that is going to be all from me i want to thank you for watching this video especially if you made it all the way through i definitely didn't plan for this video to be this long but as it turns out i had a lot of things to say please leave your criticisms in the comments below i will see you later bye bye i love you

Channel: Seán C.C.

Views: 953,271

Keywords: Final Fantasy 14, Free Trial, Gaming, Retrospective, Review, Video Essay

Id: cjdSZidXE2Q

Length: 50min 12sec (3012 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 22 2021