I’ve been subbed to Final Fantasy XIV for over a year now yet I don’t have a single fond memory of it that comes from actually playing it. I have no stories that were prompted by exploring a dungeon or fighting a boss or coming to the aid of a stranger while traversing the world or dying a weird death. I am pretty sure every moment I treasure could have happened in almost any other online virtual space. It just would have been uglier. Or maybe prettier, if the game were text based. My brain takes words and paints beautiful pictures – such a powerful organ!!
Yet I spent 2 months playing Final Fantasy XI back in 2003 and experienced a handful of encounters that will likely stay with me until the day I die. I posted about one once. The price I had to pay for such moments was huge and definitely not worth it – dozens of hours spent spent on a beach, bopping crabs, surrounded by half a dozen nerds who only communicated when it was time to unleash a limitbreak or whatever – but I came away with something that was mine, y’know? Unique experiences that arose because of the game’s bullshit rules. I know I’m never gonna get something like that in FF14.
Unless I go to Eureka. People keep telling me some shit goes down in Eureka. But it takes hundreds of hours to get there, and it is easy to miss, as proven by the fact that I still haven’t gone there.
And it’s, like, fine that FF14 is more of a hangout game. I think it’s incredible how they’ve managed to make a relatively safe place with the nicest player community I’ve ever encountered. So much of its design seems to be focused on minimizing player friction. I haven’t run into many griefers or heard many stories about poison guilds where the worst kind of players gain influence and wreck it for everyone else in their social circle. You can easily dip in and out of the game and there’s little pressuring you to keep grinding or subscribing forever and ever. It’s really remarkable in many ways! It is so completely unlike FF11. I do not feel like the game hates me.
But I also don’t feel it respects me. I still have to pay an enormous time tax to get to the bits I enjoy. It’s nice that I don’t have to spend 20 hours a week crushing crustaceans in order to accomplish anything but like…is walking around a world almost entirely devoid of challenges so I can watch one long, barely animated cutscene after another really much better? It’s just another form of padding, and when I see people going on about the merits of the game’s plot I want to pull out what’s left of my hair, because this story is told in one of the most bloated, least visually interesting ways possible. I refuse to believe anything of value would be lost if most of these cutscenes unfolded in, say, a snappy visual novel-style. I am pretty sure all its big emotional beats would hit as hard or harder if you didn’t spend literally hours watching Alphinaud do the same unskippable resting-chin-on-hand-while-thinking animation before speaking all his lines. Like, this game made me cry! More than once! It has some really cool stuff! There are rare moments where it actually displays some panache and you get fancy cinematography and dramatic action scenes and things that are actually worth watching but on the whole it employs a form of visual storytelling that you will only find in video games, and that is not a compliment. One night about a month ago I tabbed out during a 40 minute cutscene, which meant I couldn’t see the graphics and the music was muted. So I just listened to the 5 second silences between every spoken line of dialogue. It was revelatory. Imagine listening to an audio book like that. Imagine going to a play where the performers only emoted between lines. Imagine a TV show doing a bottle episode totally devoid of tension, or comedy, or character development. Imagine 45 minutes sitting in one room with two camera angles watching half a dozen wooden characters delivering exposition with absolutely no climax or cliffhanger. Just a To Be Continued. That doesn’t happen! Because audiences would not tolerate it. This sort of thing sure happens a lot in video games though! It’s a very cost effective way of adding content! And it fuckin’ blowwwwwws…!!
And if you do skip the cutscenes it just further exposes how hollow all the solo content is. It doesn’t help! I will never be satisfied.
Anyway I am not voting for this game, because I think for every great thing about it there are two things that suck shit. And all the things that suck shit are canceled out by my friends in BUTTS, who I love to death. They have greatly improved the last year of my life. So I don’t regret playing this! But I resent how bad so much of it is. Like, sometimes I think “Would I be playing video games if I wasn’t disabled?” And that’s not a pleasant thing to think about, that’s something I try and drown out, but God, it’s so fucking hard to ignore when I’m dealing with the solo bits of FF14. Yet I never thought that while playing Yakuza 0, even though it suffers from many of the same storytelling issues I’m griping about, or Disco Elysium, which doesn’t. And I sure as hell never thought about it while playing Ikaruga. So I’m voting for that game, fuck FF14.
Glad I got that off my chest!! Now I’ll never complain about FF14 again, I’m sure.
Everyone should play it, it’s pretty fun.