Final Fantasy XIV – The Road To Heavensward

I finally did it. Over the weekend I finally crossed the threshold into Final Fantasy XIV’s endgame. After four weeks of relentless grinding, I’ve gone from fledging conjurer to White Mage supreme, tearing a path across the enchanting realm of Eorzea. It’s been a fun and surprisingly sociable journey but I’d be lying if I said there weren’t times I wanted to throw in the towel. Still, countless hours later, my character now stands tall at level fifty, eagerly awaiting the challenge of XIV’s new expansion.

It’s the first time I’ve ever been in this kind of position. Despite having dipped my toes into the welcoming springs of many an MMO, few have compelled me to stick around for more than a few weeks. One exception was my very first foray into the genre, World of Warcraft. However, upon setting foot in the sprawling world of Azeroth, Blizzard’s behemoth had already enjoyed the launch of its first expansion with another on its way.

With Final Fantasy XIV, I’ve come to the party at the right time, or at least a more reasonable time. Heavensward has only just launched on PlayStation 4 and PC with returning veterans taking their first steps into unknown territory. It’s an exciting time to live in the virtual realm of Eorzea and and one that will hopefully take my adventure to new heights.

Getting to this stage, however, wasn’t without its fair share of difficulty – just minutes into my ambitious quest and I’d already fallen at the first hurdle. Despite having played Final Fantasy XIV when it originally launched on PlayStation 3, I was met with nothing but an obstacle course of red tape when making the leap to PlayStation 4. After ferreting around for various codes and passwords, I then had to go through several awkward processes just to get the right permits for my account.

The second hurdle also came clattering down too when I logged in, only to find that my original character had vanished. Poof, just like that. Although I was sad to lose some thirty or so levels of hard-earned progress, I was equally as excited to try something new, in terms of both playstyle and cosmetics. Therefore, I ended up rolling – “playing as” for you non MMO-ers out there – a female Lalafell conjurer.

It’s a complete departure from the characters I’ve often built in other massively multiplayer titles. Although mostly original – and never a sad attempt to emulate myself – they’ve all ascribed to that similar archetype; stoic, imposing, and lethal in close combat. With my little Lalafell I set myself up for a completely different MMO experience straight off the bat.

For those with only a surface knowledge of the game, Final Fantasy XIV allows players to pursue as many classes as they wish. Of course, unless you have a ridiculous amount of time on your hands, you’ll likely pursue just the one, taking up a small number of crafting professions too. XIV’s Conjurer is the closest you can get to a healer straight out of the blocks. Although lacking in damage output, their grimoire of support skills give them that all important durability needed in solo play.

Rolling such a character was a little disorientating at first. However, the payoff came as soon as I delved into my first multiplayer instances, known as ‘Guildhests’. These micro events have parties tackling all kinds of scenarios though my favourites have always been the boss fights. The first few guildhests are essentially tutorials, steadily easing players into the flow of multiplayer combat sequences. Although characters who specialise in DPS  (damage) won’t see much of a change in playstyle, healers will find themselves skirting the periphery with tankier heroes poised on catching their foe’s attention.

After a week back in the saddle, I was ready to tackle my first dungeon. Much like Guildhests, these are multiplayer-only events but much longer, usually weighing in at 30-45 minutes. They can be worthwhile, however, mainly thanks to their XP yield and the promise of rare loot.

One thing I’ve never really enjoyed much about Final Fantasy XIV is its story. Much like the series’ recent singleplayer offering, it comes in far too dense, hosing you down with all sorts of names and terminology before you take your first step in Eorzea. Sadly, this is a prevailing trend and one that eventually led to me simply skipping every cutscene I came across. I never felt bad in doing so due to their static nature with little in the way of spoken dialogue.

Still, I could make out Final Fantasy XIV’s overarching plot line. After a calamitous event, Eorzea essentially imploded, leaving its many factions and kingdoms to rebuild. Now, several years later, the evil Garlean Empire is on the march once more, looking to channel the mystic powers of an ancient race of primals. Sadly, it’s a story that never jumped out at me. As much as I tried reading through Wiki entries and attempting to forge some kind of bond with the characters, I just couldn’t.

The structure of XIV’s plot-driven quests never helped much. Although some feature pretty awesome set pieces, many have you bouncing from one region to the other, delivering messages back and forth. I suppose it’s a neat way to ensure that players see every part of Eorzea, yet it could have been done much better.

Upon hitting level thirty, I was presented with a sudden fork in the road. Up until then I had been beavering away, turning in quests and watching my experience bar fill left to right over and over. However, as they say, life begins at thirty, and soon I found myself advancing from lowly conjurer to White Mage, slowly gaining a repertoire of new skills.

This transition wasn’t without its own sticky tangle of red tape. You see, in order to access one of XIV’s advanced Jobs such as Lancer, Paladin, Monk etc. you need to have thirty levels invested in one class with fifteen in another. Therefore, becoming a White Mage meant going back to one of the three starting areas, and retracing my steps as a summoner for a couple of hours.

This isn’t the only example of Final Fantasy presenting players with weird and demanding requirements to access intermediate features. For example, crafting. There are numerous professions in this discipline ranging from culinarians and armourers to weavers and alchemists (such as myself). Although not absolutely essential, this part of the game is needed in order to fully understand Materia. These magic-infused crafting components work like gems in most MMOs and can be slotted into armour and weapons to unlock certain stat bonuses. They’re pretty handy, especially if you want to get the very most out of your avatar’s combat potential.

However, to gain these perks, you need to jump through a series of hoops. First off, a crafting skill of level 25 is required before venturing into the desert region of Thanalan to find a specific quest-giver. After expending several hours I finally reached this point only to find that alchemy is one of the only professions unable to ‘meld’ Materia. Bollocks.

It’s this lack of clarity that occasionally lets Final Fantasy XIV down. Too much of its content is locked behind trivial hidden walls that players will often only discover by trawling forums or wiki posts. For example, I missed out on two of the game’s dungeons – and therefore a ton of XP and loot – simply because they can only be triggered by a quest-giver out in the middle of nowhere.

In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter much, nor does the surprising amount of complication to XIV’s Materia system. Making the final push from level forty five to fifty was as straightforward as it gets. Travelling to new regions of Eorzea, I found myself mopping up quest chains left, right, and centre, occasionally spending the odd thirty minutes to join huge roaming FATE parties.

At fifty, the end was finally in sight. All I needed now was a final crack at the game’s laborious story missions, three of which needed to be played with seven other players. In a way, I saw these as a fitting end for XIV’s main plot line – after all, it’s an MMORPG. However, when tackling these with veterans – who are only after the rewards – they lose their impact somewhat. Whenever I stopped to watch one of the pre-boss cutscenes, my party had gone ahead and killed them before the short clip could end. If I were a bit more invested in how the story panned out, this would have no doubt irked me somewhat.

Still, here I am, momentarily resting before picking up the thread once more. This journey has certainly had some lows but these have mostly been negated by the sheer fun of questing alongside a mostly mature and sociable playerbase – the kind of which you’d rarely catch in any other genre of game.