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I Really Want To Love Final Fantasy 14

There’s something special about quietly meandering through the forests of Gridania on chocoboback, soft music gently humming to its measured but mild stampede up the towering tree bridging the immense vertical gap separating low grassland from the tiered town above. The shores of Costa del Sol are kind and charismatic, the ports of Limsa Lominsa are as rough as they are raucous, and even the humble, makeshift camps of Ul’dah’s Ala Mhigo are imbued with an assured sense of self. Final Fantasy 14 is, without a shadow of a doubt, one of the most successfully impressionable games on the planet when it comes to creating excellent, enduring environments – it’s a shame, then, that no matter how hard I try, I can’t commit to playing it in earnest.

I really enjoy Final Fantasy 14 – not all that long ago, I wrote a dense breakdown of how it uses clever codeswitching and fictional regional dialects to imbue spaces with a sense of place. As well as its phenomenal environmental design, Final Fantasy 14’s writing is so consistently smart that even its most MMO-esque fetch quests are riveting in a similar way to their counterparts in single-player, ostensibly more focused games. I don’t think I’ve ever played through a quest in Final Fantasy 14 without cracking a smile or fighting a frown.

Related: Final Fantasy 14 Community Spotlight: The White Hare

Paradoxically, that’s part of the issue. For people who have been playing for years – who have been through Heavensward and Stormblood and Shadowbringers – this isn’t a problem. You’ve already exhausted most of the core content and can focus more on leveling other classes, building houses for your free company, or just chilling out in Eorzea for a couple of hours after work. For anyone else, though, this game is largely impenetrable – particularly so if you write about games for a living and can’t devote every spare minute to a single one.

Every time I go back to Final Fantasy 14, I play it for around five hours straight, several days in a row. It’s usually during the week – I’m not going to the pub because I have work in the morning and the cold Irish weather often makes it pretty difficult to organise other evening activities. When I’m in that zone – that fugueish obsession with what is objectively a remarkably excellent game – I love every second of Final Fantasy 14. Whether it’s an hour of breakneck pacing about primals and the Garlean Empire or 30 minutes of rinsing and repeating fetch quests to close a level gap, this is a game that is designed with care and tact and extraordinary talent. Despite most people having qualms with A Realm Reborn – which, to be fair, is extremely slow-moving – I don’t think it’s bad or even less than very good. It’s packed to the brim with moments worth experiencing – the problem is that there are just too many of them.

Back when Endwalker was originally announced, I said I’d try to catch myself up by launch. Several months later and I’ve yet to roll credits on A Realm Reborn. By my count, I’m only around five or so levels off Heavensward, with around one and a half more main scenario quests to boot through in order to polish off ARR. Everyone always says Heavensward is where 14 gets really good – it’s less sluggish and more aligned with the kind of qualities that made Shadowbringers the most unanimously critically acclaimed Final Fantasy story in almost two decades. None of that has convinced me to play though – no matter how good the material is, there is just so, so much of it. You can purchase items to skip entire expansions, but that’s doing a disservice to the brilliant creativity on display.

It’s a petty complaint – ‘this game has too many excellent quests and ideas and places and characters.’ I’m not unaware of this being a strange issue to take with something, but in an MMO of this scale, I think it’s valid. At this moment in time, my choices are a) drop everything and commit to Final Fantasy 14 for an unspecified and potentially unwieldy amount of time, or b) continue to not play Final Fantasy 14 in order to play dozens of other games while also making time for hobbies and socialising outside of games. The amount of hours I would need to put into Final Fantasy 14 between now and Endwalker in order to be able to play it at launch would be comparable to being in a legitimate relationship with someone – it’s just not feasible.

Final Fantasy 14 is and continues to be one of the single greatest games available to play right now – it’s just a shame it’s so weirdly difficult to do that.

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