FFXIV - Not all that fantastic.

Ridrith

I'll get a few things out of the way first.

 

My Computer:

SLI GTX 275 Nivida 1792mb video cards - x2

I7 960 3.2 GHz processor.

6 Gigs of Ram.

Windows 7 64 Bit

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Now, onto the game "review".  This isn't as much a review as it my opinion of the game and my experience while playing the game, granted, I only played for a little over an hour.  However, to me, that's all it takes to figure out if you're going to enjoy the game or not.  Because one hour in, you'll learn all the basics, etc, etc.  It's pretty simple.

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Graphics: 9/10

The game just looks amazing, it's that simple.  The world is unique, at least as unique as Final Fantasy can get.  It's got the feel of a final fantasy game down and of course the game looks great as most of Square's games do, and mostly always have.  There's really not much else to say, I ran the game at a constant 35-50 frames a second.  No sign of interface lag or any other complaints that people are having.  Turn the graphics down, or get a better computer.  That's the issue if you're having trouble with something like that.

 

Gameplay: 4/10

I can't really say I'm a fan of the combat in this game, to me, it's just out right boring.  Despite them attempting to speed up the speed of combat it still felt really boring and lifeless.  The combat isn't visceral to any degree, which is okay I suppose.  However, when I hit something.  I like to think my character actually HIT something.  I want to see it stagger, I want to see it hurting.  Sure, the monster jiggles around a bit but that's about all.  The animations are decent enough but nothing extrodinary.  The controls ARE kind of clunky, they're not all that smooth and as far as I could tell there's really no way to bind your keys at least not to the extent that I'd like to.  As a lot of people have said, this game seems like it's a console port to the PC.  It feels like it's made for a controller, not a mouse and keyboard.

Character customization is very limited, to a laughable degree almost.  There's very few hair styles, very few face styles, etc.  Think back to Guild Wars.  You'll have a good idea of what kind of character creation you'll be looking at.

 

Over all, this isn't the kind of game I'd ever pay a monthly subscription for because to be honest.  It's not that great, the graphics are amazing, sure.  However the game is a little too slow paced for my liking.  Some people may enjoy the combat, I'm just not one of those people.