Final Fantasy XIV. One of the biggest MMORPGs today, with even more players after every patch, never mind every expansion. Final Fantasy XIV has it all: an intricate, exciting story, fun dungeons and tough raids, and slaving away to farm those materials and levels needed for your classes and items.

Why am I so obsessed with this game? Oh, well, I mean, aside from the obvious handsome dragon men and alluring catgirls. It’s got to be the story. Storytelling and world building are one of the most important aspects of any game, but especially for an MMORPG. That’s why most people play these games. Not only to roleplay and get a little, ahem, saucy in the main hub of the big cities, but to experience the vast and expansive world and story.

The Storyline and Character Development

While it starts off as something simple and basic, slow and hand-holdy, it picks up pace, speeding up, slowing down, placing you at a cliff’s edge. It drags you in and rips you apart to put you back together as you trudge through all the lore and character development.

All the characters are so easy to get attached to because it’s almost like you’re really personally involved with them. You quite literally are almost always traveling with them, watching them evolve and grow as people. Even the villains of the game are lovable even if you absolutely hate their personality. The depth of the characters in tandem with the story really makes you feel a part of it yourself. You as the ever reliable, Warrior of Light.

That’s why it’s so amazing. Well, not the only reason. The other is raiding and running dungeons.

Raiding And Dungeon Running

One of the most thrilling aspects in the game aside from the story are all of the hard raids and dungeons. While not all are hard, a lot of players make this their main goal, to run through these raids and do them on the hardest difficulty possible. Every raid and dungeon boss have their own mechanics.

Different attacks do different things and team synergy is just as important as knowing the battle itself. I believe every part of running dungeons and raids is fun, even if it makes me extremely aggravated at the incompetence of my party members… or my own failings.

Raids usually are single, multi-phase bosses that are tanky and already difficult on their own, with tricky mechanics and heavy hitting raid-wide attacks. Dungeons are usually multi-part, alternating add and boss sections in a large map.

The fun of both, is the multiple (or lack of) wipes and learning of the mechanics and caveats. Again, they don’t necessarily have to be hard to be enjoyable, but a little bit of a challenge makes it just that more exciting.

So what else makes this game so alluring?

Miscellaneous Activities

There’s other things to do like gambling at the Gold Saucer and playing minigames, grinding your gathering and crafting classes so you can dominate the player market boards and become rich, housing, and well, role playing! There’s an abundance of other things you can do in Final Fantasy XIV.

Gathering and crafting are an essential part of the player market system. In order to rack up your wealth, it’s pretty important to be able to gather materials for your crafting classes and be able to craft everything that people want and sell it for an exorbitantly high price.

If you’re tired of the grind, maybe you can release your pent up stress by playing games in the Gold Saucer, where events are held and you can rack up your currency to buy special items found only in that area. Having these little other things that you can do really contribute to the longevity of a player’s experience.

The Bad?

As much as I praise and gush about how amazingly good this game is, there are some minor annoyances.

The biggest problem: overpopulation of servers. Now, don’t get me wrong, that is a good thing in terms of the popularity of the game and I absolutely love the fact more and more people are trying out this game. However, that doesn’t mean that overpopulation isn’t a problem. It’s not really something I can fault the developers for. There’s just too many people and not enough capacity on every server. Just on the North American servers alone, there’s a lot of servers that have been closed to the creation of new characters, with the common ones being Gilgamesh and Leviathan.

This problem is obviously exasperated during new patches and especially new expansions. During the time Endwalker was released, the servers were so heavily congested that it would take hours for people to even get into the game, if they weren’t hit with an error beforehand and kicked out the queue.

Of course, there’s always going to be people who just don’t like the game. Minor gripes like the fact that the story isn’t as engaging or is too slow to get into at the beginning. Or that the battle mechanics are too difficult. I’ll be honest, I don’t really have many dislikes about this game and I’m not afraid to say so.

Conclusion

Between a great story, fun raids, and an abundance of extra content to keep you busy, the game sucks you in and doesn’t let you go. Personally, I get way too attached to the characters and I’ll be honest, I’ve cried because of the story. That’s just simply how absolutely enamoring this game is. So, go forth, Warriors of Light!