Final Fantasy XIV Online

We can't recommend that you spend $50, and then $12.99 a month after the first 30 days, on a title that has as many flaws as FFXIV does. But we can recommend that you keep an eye on the news to see how this game evolves.

A worthy heir of Final Fantasy XI which improves some aspects of the original.

Final Fantasy XIV has a great potential, but it needs to evolve.

Eorzea is a beautiful world with huge potential for vast adventures, but it's just a shame that this first voyage into it is such a mis-step.

This new only Final Fantasy has the potential to become a rich, vibrant MMORPG, but this potential isn't used enough. There are a lot of technical mistakes and a lot of strange design choices that make it harder for players to fully engage themselves in this game. Maybe after a lot of updates and patches this game becomes what it should've been from the beginning.

With some obvious flaws that render the game difficult to play at best, Final Fantasy XIV will benefit from some updates in the near future. It's not bad by any means, but it's tough to recommend until the glaring issues have been dealt with.

Despite the huge post launch patches, Final Fantasy XIV still lacks content and shows many flaws in game design basics. It comes as a great disappointment, which you should stick to only if you're an absolute fan of the saga.

While there's a lot to consider when building your ideal class, there's far too little interesting structured content to chew on, resulting in an experience that quickly grows tedious and tiresome.

Positively, there is nothing to do in Final Fantasy XIV at the moment. It's not even close to a completed product. [Feb 2011, p.82]

Unless you feel like paying for an extended beta, wait for patches or an expansion pack to fix FFXIV's myriad problems. [Issue#185, p.71]

Somewhere out there, there is a player this game is perfect for. But he or she would still be advised to wait another six months before even thinking about Final Fantasy XIV, because Square Enix hasn't yet got its head around its own players.

It may be hard to believe, and painful to accept, but the last "official" chapter of Final Fantasy is a huge disappointment, and it not only becomes the worst chapter of the saga, but also one of the worst MMORPG we have played in a long time. It's obvious that Square-Enix is no longer what it used to be.

Final Fantasy XIV offers the potential but for now, it's lacking in too many areas to recommend.

Even if you spend the time to unlock your skills and build that warrior-archer-tank-damager behemoth you had in mind, what's the point if the activities you're engaging in are so threadbare and unappealing for the most part?

Final Fantasy XIV is in no way, shape, or form ready for commercial release. We suppose there is potential down the line for the experience to improve with patches and tweaks, but that doesn't justify why the game is in such shambles at launch.

MMORPG with great potential is sunken by fatal bugs and errors – first comes a catastrophic interface followed by the absence of player-to-player communication. [Issue#199]

For hardware nuts, Final Fantasy obsessives and PS3 owners, FFXIV does offer a fairly distinctive MMO experience. [Christmas 2010, p.94]

It's not possible to see anything different than the will to use a famous brand, like Final Fantasy is, in this new Square Enix production: behind the cool art direction, tons of weird gameplay decision and a lack of contents make It, at the moment, surely inadvisable.

It is woefully inferior in every important way to almost every MMO ever released - let alone recently.

It lacks character; bare-bones quests and audiovisual repetition fail to instill a sense of fantasy wonder. It lacks cohesion; communication failures, economic oddities, and stringent limitations leave you constantly directionless. And it lacks joy; the abysmal interface and boring monsters make it a struggle to stay invested.

Extended stretches of confused incredulity, punctuated now and then by bursts of intense anger. And yeah -- I just equated FFXIV with a filthy bathroom.

Sadly, it's just a pretty face, and there's not much below the surface. As a result, exploring doesn't yield much in the way of rewards, so odds are, you'll just stick to your daily routine of repetitive levequesting and crafting. And then you'll log out. And then, one day, you'll probably just decide to omit the part where you log back in.

Right now, playing FFXIV is like playing with a toy stuck in a plastic bag: it can be fun for a while and you can get the general idea, but you can't appreciate the full experience. Future updates will no doubt open the bag, but for now, it's sealed frustratingly tight.

A shallow, slow, grind-heavy MMO crippled by a horrible interface and nonsensical player limitations.