Okay, I just need to write something about this god-damn game because the further I get into it the more desperate I become to start pulling my own fuckin’ hairs out. I have been playing Final Fantasy 14 (abbreviated as “FFXIV”) for several months now and racked up a total of 524 hours of game time. And you know, my first thought when I go into my Steam library and see a game I’ve played for 500 solid hours is “Wow, that’s a lot of time.” You’ve probably heard the phrase “time is money” several times before and there’s a reason for that; we are not immortal. Humans do not have infinite lifespans, and a good chunk of the time we do have is spent doing things we’d rather not do for the sake of being able to engage with the things we enjoy. Eventually people learn to accept that happiness is a fleeting thing because the effort they put in for it makes it sweeter. Therefore, the time we have to engage in recreational activities and hang out with friends is valuable to us.

MMOs are not a genre known for respecting the time of their playerbase. At the same time though, what’s important is not the amount of hours you expect me to spend on something, but their quality. A common falsehood I’ve heard since the early days of my childhood is that any and all time spent playing video games is wasted and would be better spent doing something “productive”. I’m gonna be brutally honest here; if you think this way, you are either completely ignorant or have no hobbies. Any time spent doing something that you enjoy is time well spent, whether that be playing video games, watching movies or YouTube videos, or whatever the hell else. It’s easy to shame other people for having hobbies you don’t personally enjoy, but it’s also childish and most people who do this generalize the particular enthusiasts they’re criticizing to a degree where a false picture is painted of whatever hobby is being discussed. Take video games for example; a person who talks smack about games being an addictive waste of time is likely to characterize all gamers as being fat, basement dwelling slobs who sit at their computers talking in 1337 speak 24/7 at a detriment to their real lives. Do people like that exist? Sure—most stereotypes have a basis in reality after all. But using those people as an excuse for why video games as a whole are bad is laughably small minded. Anything and everything is bad in excess; everything needs to be in moderation. If I sat at my computer playing Warcraft for a week with no food or sleep until I passed out and ended up in the hospital, that would be bad; but if I play video games during my free time as a hobby without neglecting my needs or responsibilities, that’s fine! It’s more than fine; engaging with the things you enjoy on a regular basis is an essential part of maintaining a healthy mental state, aka “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”.

The point I’m making here is that time spent playing video games is not wasted, and I actually like games with tons of content which keep me playing for hundreds of hours. You often don’t realize how quickly those individual hours build over the course of multiple play sessions when playing a game you really enjoy. I’ve got well over a thousand hours in Warframe and I don’t regret a single one of them because the moment-to-moment gameplay of Warframe is so endlessly satisfying; say what you want about it, but the core gameplay of Warframe is easily some of the best third-person-shooter action out there.

So take Warframe, a game I have gladly sunk hundreds upon hundreds of hours into over the course of years because each of those individual hours is satisfying, and compare it to Final Fantasy 14. Warframe is a game that—despite being massive in scope—respects the time you put into it. When I’m playing Warframe, I’m having fun! I boot it up, get into a mission within minutes and I’m having a good time. The story is deep, interesting and built upon well-established and fleshed-out lore—there are cool narrative set pieces and interesting quests but they’re mostly non-invasive. The journey the game takes you on is built upon the core foundation of its natural progression—so when a quest does happen, it’s a fun diversion, an important milestone and a big moment. There’s always something more to do and something else to build towards; but you never feel pressure to be the best or complete everything because you don’t need to in order to enjoy the game. I’ve played for like 1,500 hours and have powerful ass shit, but I’m nowhere near the meta and that’s totally fine be me. What the hell am I gonna use a perfect meta build for, 10 hour survival missions?

By contrast, Final Fantasy 14 is such a deeply unsatisfying, frustrating and fundamentally flawed experience it’s tragic. Before I say anything else, let me get this straight; I like narratively driven MMOs! Give me more! Too many MMO games place zero weight on their story and as a result make you feel completely disconnected from the world, the characters, the stakes, etc. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing, but good stories are something I personally enjoy and want out of the MMOs that I play. Still, I can recognize when a game simply doesn’t want you to care about the story and respect that design choice; I couldn’t tell you what the hell is going on in Warframe’s story given I started playing when the game might as well not have had one (which says a lot about how rock solid the core gameplay is). One of the primary reasons I was drawn to Final Fantasy 14 in the first place is its really strong narrative focus. In theory, it should be everything I’m looking for in an MMO; a really story heavy anime-inspired epic sci-fi fantasy where PVP is an afterthought and the experience of leveling in-and-of itself is a hugely important part of the experience. I should be the target audience for this game, dammit! But the thing about having a narratively driven MMO is that the narrative HAS TO BE GOOD. If it’s not good, then by God trust me, your player will resent it. I absolutely fucking hate this game’s story, it drives me crazy and I will fly into rants about it unprompted when I shouldn’t even be thinking about it in the first place. And you know why? It’s because the opposite of love isn’t hate, but apathy! I want to like it! I like this game! But God almighty, the story is an absolute fucking tragicomedy!

The story being bad in and of itself is this game’s core issue, and it feeds into what I’m about to talk about. Having a bad story is not necessarily the worst thing ever if that bad story is de-emphasized and made totally optional, but here they make the absolutely baffling choice to tie the main story to almost every form of progression; if you aren’t doing the main story of this game, you aren’t getting to the endgame, full stop (or much of the game at all really). It is required that you complete all of the main quests and you are actively punished for trying to explore or stray from the beaten path; it’s a deeply linear, guided and on rails experience placing all of its chips on its absolutely dreadful and horribly misguided attempt at storytelling, assuming that the story is just oh-so-fuckin’ good that you’ll continue playing to read more of it. The story fails for much the same reason that Elfen Lied failed; it attempts to be character driven and melodramatic except that every character is a fucking automaton and the dialogue is unbearably bad. One of the worst parts specifically regarding the dialogue is that for some ungodly reason, the English localization team decided to translate the original Japanese text into old English script. WHY? What does this add? The answer is that it adds absolutely fucking nothing! It is a pure detractor and the dialogue is changed so heavily the original script might as well have been put through a paper shredder and pieced back together by elementary school children! Maybe they would get away with pretending the original dialogue is also like this if not for the fact they allow you to change between English and Japanese voice acting in the options menu which I did because the English voice acting is absolutely dire and just starting out I felt keeping it on would be not only painful to hear but also unfair to the game. With the Japanese voice acting on, it becomes immediately and painfully obvious that the spoken dialogue doesn’t even come close to matching the English text; easily my favorite example of this is a “dialogue line” where the spoken Japanese line is literally just an anime grunt, whereas the English textbox is filled with dialogue! That’s not a matter of adapting the Japanese language into natural sounding or sensible English speech, that’s just a disrespectful and lazy butchery of the original source material!

You know what though, that’s not the problem, not really. If the original story was good before being put through the paper shredder in the first place, that would show here, but it doesn’t. The story and the characters are fundamentally uninteresting and bland, and the plot and universe are utterly nonsensical. I could go through the script of Mistborn and make everybody’s dialogue grossly Shakespearean, and it would still be good—not so much here, though. It just ends up being a cheap way for the writers to try and sell the idea that you’re in a fantasy world. Actually, there’s a character called Alphinaud who I absolutely fucking despise with every fiber of my being and one of the worst story moments in the game is a part where there’s some super shitty dialogue between two other characters talking politics with eachother and exchanging pleasantries or whatever—it’s totally robotic, hollow and uninteresting as the dialogue in this game often is—and Alphinaud’s sister, Alisaie, jokes about how instead of just saying “thanks” they have to write entire fucking poems about how thankful they are because politics which is accurate. And then this absolute asshole Alphinaud turns to Alisaie and he goes “That’s how adults talk, dear sister” NO IT’S FUCKING NOT. SPEAK FOR YOUR FUCKING SELF.

I’m already starting to go off the rails here, for God’s sake—I just cannot keep my cool trying to discuss this game. Have the writers never had a legitimately meaningful or honest human interaction in their lives? People—friends, no less—don’t talk like this! This is how people talk when they don’t know you and don’t fucking care to (and I can speak from experience since I’ve worked in customer service for several years). In fact, this game’s story and characters are an encapsulation of everything I hate about political intrigue. More than that, this game is a great example of why I dislike the “you are the hero” mentality of MMORPGs. Good silent protagonists and customizable avatars like Joker from Persona 5 or Byleth from Three Houses are not perfect heroes who can do no wrong and get heaped with ridiculous amounts of praise at every available opportunity. They’re flawed, interesting characters on their own, and you are given really interesting narrative and gameplay choices helping to shape their personalities and philosophies, letting them interact with the story and its other important characters in interesting ways. They also don’t steal the spotlight—when I think of Three Houses, I don’t think of Byleth hogging the limelight and solving everybody’s problems effortlessly because—shock horror—we in the business like to call that bad writing. Yet still I can’t think of a single MMO that doesn’t suffer on at least some level from this issue, and by golly FFXIV is one of the worst offenders I can think of.

I understand why this is a thing; it’s about making people feel special and pandering to the lowest common denominator—a cheap story in which they are the paragon of everything right in the world and every other important character constantly sucks their fucking dick and wants autographs for their Warrior of Light body pillows. And you know, video games are inherently about escapism and fantasy; that’s fine. The problem with this particular narrative trope, however, has less to do with the fact that you are the hero—which could be said for like the vast majority of video games that exist, especially within the RPG genre, MMO or not—and more to do with the fact that you don’t earn any of it. Being hailed as a savior of the realm and its people and recognized by passersby everywhere you go is great if you did something to deserve that treatment, but steamrolling your way through like every quest in the game with zero effort, barely giving a shit and then being hailed as a savior is deeply unsatisfying and shitty. The narrative itself is terrible, you don’t care about any of the characters, everything feels contrived as all hell and as a result of that in combination with the ease at which you curb stomp encounters, your victories feel hollow, your effort wasted, your accolades pointless and the admiration you are showered with entirely unearned and empty. Sure, every MMO struggles trying to make the individual players feel important amongst the crowd, but this is simply not the way to do it. Let me play a character with flaws! Let me work my way up in the world and force me to put some effort into becoming a hero and savior of the realm! Give me like one fucking non-villain character that doesn’t immediately suck my dick and shower me in empty flattery upon meeting me! Give me more dialogue options that actually matter instead of keeping up a poorly disguised illusion of choice and forcing me into a specific role with zero deviation! The game makes a pitiful attempt to endear you to its main cast of characters and establish you as having strong friendships and connections with them, except none of it fucking works because you the player are given no reason to care about any of them and it makes you resent it every time the game tries to tell you that you are friends with these people whether you like it or not. I absolutely hate it; I don’t care about these people and the more you try to force me into liking them, the more I hate them and the more biased I grow towards hating them even if the game does manage to pull some kind-of super good characterization straight out of its fucking asshole. The whole thing comes off as being pretentious, prideful and overconfident in its own lack of ability. I don’t like to generalize or assume, but you can’t help but get the feeling while playing that the lead writer is probably an arrogant asshole with an inflated ego—and it certainly doesn’t help that a huge and very vocal chunk of the community for this game cheer the writers on ad-nauseam. I almost feel bad for the writers (key word being “almost”)—drowning in such an overflowing sea of praise that the criticism doesn’t even register on their senses, leading to a vicious cycle of consistently repeated mistakes. That alone is definitely a big part of the reason why I am so harsh on this game—the amount of praise they get is so grossly disproportionate to the quality of their work that it legitimately disgusts me, and I am not a guy to shit on something for no other reason than the fact it’s popular. I loved Squid Game, for god’s sake! I decided to play this game because I wanted to hop on the bandwagon of people leaving World of Warcraft in protest!

The real shame here is that while the story and its characters are undeniably bad, there’s something here worth reading beneath it all (and make no mistake, there may be voice acting on occasion but you will be doing a lot of reading). It’s not a so-bad-it’s good unintentional comedy, it’s boring, frustrating and sad. There’s so much fantastic visual spectacle and cool action here that is utterly wasted. No matter how epic or dramatic any particular moment is supposed to be, all of them fall flat on their face because they aren’t earned. There’s a great lecture by Brandon Sanderson about his personal philosophy on plot structure, during which he talks about imagining the really cool scenes towards the end of a story and thinking backwards, asking himself the question of “How do I earn these scenes?” This game has either not asked itself that question or overestimated its own ability to earn the scenes in question, in stark contrast to Brandon Sanderson who understands how to build up to an epic or dramatic moment and give it genuine emotional impact. This game couldn’t make you shed a tear if you played it for 5,000 hours, save for perhaps the bitter tears shed upon realizing how much of your life has been wasted in the pursuit of something it is utterly incapable of delivering to you. In fact, that actually leads into another topic of discussion which I alluded to earlier—500 hours. That’s how long I’ve played this game. For most games, that’s a lot. Not so here; when compared to the amount of progression I’ve actually done, I feel like I should have like 50, if that. There is so much filler, dead air and uninteresting dialogue and exposition it’s not even funny. Like, seriously, it’s not funny. It’s frustratingly slow and disrespectful to you as a player.

A common trope I’ve seen applied to many other Final Fantasy games, MMO or not, is “It gets better after 100 hours!”. I am begging anybody who genuinely subscribes to this belief to listen to me right now—games should not take 100 hours to get good, and the quality of what happens later is lessened significantly because it’s supposed to be built on the foundation of everything which takes place prior to it. If the first hundred hours of your game are terrible, most people will not make it to the so-called “good” part of your game, and that good content’s worth is cheapened by the shitty 100 hours of gameplay and story that came before it! Saying that a game gets good after hundreds of hours is the game equivalent of saying an anime gets good 5 seasons and 200 episodes in. No fucking thanks.

The quests themselves are terribly designed! Most of the main story quests you get are either walking simulators where you talk to a bunch of people and watch a bunch of cutscenes in sequence, pointless filler quests where you collect boar asses or pick flowers, or roadblocks that require you to engage in mandatory group content in order to progress the story, and holy God there are so fucking many of these, it’s a slog (reminder that none of this is optional, it is all mandatory for every player regardless of what content they’re interested in). The “duties” are like the only somewhat interesting ones on occasion, little mini solo instances where you fight minibosses or partake in narratively important battles. That would be fun, but the vast majority of these are way too easy with few exceptions. In fact, this game being far too easy is a running theme throughout its entire main story. All of the actual mechanics of almost every big fight are simplistic and easy to deal with, meaning the vast majority of difficulty present in any given situation is just statistical and not mechanical. When there is a difficult fight, it’s fun! But these are so few and far between it is painful—the whole game panders so heavily to its casual story-loving crowd that it is at the expense of substance and skill-based gameplay demanding attention from you as a player. Most of the fun I’ve had is trying to do group content solo or with just one other person, but the game actively punishes you for playing this way and tries to prevent you from doing so (I fucking hate any DPS rushes, they require zero effort when playing with a full group but lock small groups out of tons of content). Perhaps the only saving grace of their shitty Level Sync system is that un-synced dungeon clears still count for quest completion, thank Christ.

Let me rant really quickly about forced player interaction. Having optional group content is totally fine; raids and dungeons are important MMO staples. But forcing people to participate in these in order to progress the main story is just shitty. It’s not just because I’m socially anxious that I dislike participating in these—it has less to do with that and more to do with the fact that I want to take my time enjoying the content instead of rushing through it and being expected to already know all of the mechanics of every fight. I don’t want to feel the pressure to hurry the fuck up and play flawlessly because that’s not fun and I am being forced into this gameplay experience against my will, hoping I get matched up with decent players. Worse still is that by refusing to interact with random players, I have to wait for an opportunity to play with my busy friends (who I don’t begrudge at all for this of course because it’s the game’s fault) meaning my progress through the game is completely halted for days on end! If I was playing entirely solo without friends to help me, I would’ve quit ages ago! Fundamentally, I don’t dislike group content, but I hate being forced to do it with random players, especially given that much of the difficulty of even extreme trials is derived from those random players not understanding the mechanics, refusing to learn and not engaging with party members because the game has set up a situation where they don’t want to be there, feel bitter resentment for their party members and aren’t having fun—there’s nothing worse than getting stuck on a boss because one guy keeps making the same fucking mistake over and over again, refusing to learn how to avoid whatever he’s dying to. Also, I’m playing through this game as a Warrior main, a Tank class (since this game uses the holy trinity); anytime I queue for a dungeon I immediately switch to a DPS class, meaning I have to level my Ninja alongside my Warrior through the story quests because being the Tank means you set the pace for the dungeon, have to know mechanics and I don’t feel like getting yelled at for taking my time and—god forbid—actually enjoying myself. I am not the only person who feels this way, and there is a huge audience of solo players who want to go through MMOs without being forced into player interaction; Josh Strife Hayes has a fantastic video on this in the “Wrath” section of his “7 Deadly Sins of MMO Design” series, go watch it if you’re interested.

There’re so many other problems. The super linear nature of the game and unlocking its endgame content means there is almost no point to exploring and it feels like there’s little content to enjoy in each individual zone despite the side quests and FATEs present in each one (FATEs are basically like events from GW2 only worse, most of them are pretty boring and not worth doing). When I say that the game punishes exploration, it’s because there’s no fucking point. What’s there to find? What interesting sights are there to see that the game doesn’t show you in cutscenes? I’m going through the Ruby Sea right now and found out after swimming around slowly for like an hour to uncover the map (finding nothing interesting in the process) that you unlock diving via story quests which allows you to use flying mounts underwater, making the whole process way faster! Not only that, but side quests in the zone only appear after completing main quest chains in particular parts of that zone! You can’t even do the optional content until you reach main story thresholds, you’re punished for trying to explore the area beforehand and all the zone transitions are walled off! For fucks sake, I just wanna look around and see cool sights without being forcibly guided to them by the game itself!

I really hate that the areas are split up by load zones. The world of Eorzea doesn’t feel interconnected and vast, it feels cramped, small and empty—made a hundred times worse by the fact that so many zones are barred from you until you put like a thousand hours into grinding main quests (and yes the main quests are a straight up grind—if they weren’t, you wouldn’t be able to buy story progression from the fucking cash shop). In fact, I mentioned diving earlier; why the hell is this a mechanic tied to high level story progression that I’ve only just unlocked after over 500 fucking hours of game time?! Being able to dive underwater should be something I can do at the very fucking start of your game! Granted, there aren’t many places to go diving in the base game and this is a mechanic added in this particular DLC—I understand that, but holy shit for a new player it is pure, terrible game design. If they had gone back and given everybody of every level the ability to dive by default upon the DLC’s release instead of tying such a basic mechanic to story progression, I wouldn’t be complaining.

Even class progression is tied to forced questing. Why in the absolute fuck do I have to go and do a quest to unlock new abilities for my class after I’ve already achieved the required level? This is just a shitty system, through-and-through—admittedly though, some of the job questlines have decent writing! That’s at least a step up from the main story. Actually, all of the good writing here is hidden throughout the game in random side quest chains that feel like they were written by a completely different person who actually gave a shit—probably a different member of the writing team given the creative freedom to actually make something competent since it wasn’t a part of the main story *cough*Hildibrand*cough*. And you know, maybe I’m giving the lead writer and overall writing team too hard of a time here; I can definitely see the big wig directors and executives being responsible for butchering the story here. But there isn’t really any way for me to know, so I won’t comment on it—I’ll go ahead and choose to believe for the sake of my own sanity that Yoshi-P isn’t plotting to destroy the few remaining fragments of my soul, even if I say so in jest on occasion.

Even though I criticized the lack of difficulty and simplistic boss mechanics of this game earlier, the gameplay itself at its core is fine; it’s a very traditional WoW style MMO about memorizing rotations, hitting a bunch of buttons and trying to cap your DPS. Some of the classes are simpler or more complicated than others—Warrior is pretty brainless sometimes which admittedly hasn’t helped with my overall enjoyment of instance running, but I do enjoy the fundamentals of tanking which are easier to focus on as Warrior. Dark Knight is a lot more aggressive and pushes a lot more buttons which is fun, but has less options for damage mitigation meaning actually tanking is a lot harder (their invuln is so fuckin’ bad but I still love playing them). Red Mage is a really complicated and fun DPS class focusing on proper resource management and requiring you to pay attention even in basic encounters, weaving together melee and ranged combat with both weaponskills and spells; it’s genuinely a lot of fun! Ninja is about keeping up your Huton gauge, adapting your rotation to the circumstances of individual encounters and memorizing Jutsu combinations with really quick movement and emphasizing proper positioning. All things considered, the core gameplay is solid and enjoyable if a bit slow compared to WoW or other WoW style MMOs. I don’t really mind the slower cooldown times personally, I’d say the main problem I have is how slowly the game introduces new skills and class mechanics to you. Don’t make me wait until level 90 to have a fun experience with your classes or drip feed me super basic additions to my rotation or overall kit—consistently give me cool new shit, constantly change things up and start me off with enough interesting abilities to make the combat fun from the very beginning! That said, I do appreciate that the game helps you to understand your class as you go along and unlock new skills; the only really confusing experience I’ve had trying to learn a class was with Red Mage since that starts you at level 50 and dumps a ton of complicated abilities and mechanics on you.

In stark contrast to that praise, let’s talk about some recent events! Firstly, Square Enix is responsible for the development of this game, and the big wigs responsible for monetizing and policing it are no friends of the community. Not only does this game have a rather expensive subscription-based model, but it also requires you to pay upfront for the game itself and its DLCs in addition to having a cash shop. Better than WoW at least, but still predatory and damn expensive—at least the cash shop is mostly non-invasive and can be easily ignored entirely (unless you get so sick of the story you decide to buy story progression which is a very real possibility I’ve considered on more than one occasion). I also don’t like how you can buy additional retainers at a monthly premium, meaning you can essentially rent more inventory space. Considering that both my retainers have full inventories and I get more worried about running out of room by the fucking day, that’s kinda fucked. Moving onto the aforementioned recent events, Square Enix recently put out a statement telling people not to use third-party software because it’s against the Terms of Service—enhanced UI plugins and things like that. Now, I can understand that this has always been in their TOS and they are forced to take action against people who openly and unashamedly break the rules, but that doesn’t mean I have to support the rules themselves. While I don’t personally use UI plugins because I’m not a hardcore raider or anything, a lot of people do and I strongly believe that this should be encouraged, not forbidden; people should have the ability to customize their UI however the hell they want. Saying that you’re going to improve the UI to meet demand for player-made plugins is laughable—any official UI changes attempting to add the functionality of player-made plugins will almost always be worse because far less time and effort is dedicated to them by comparison to the time, effort and passion put in by somebody who’s making only the UI plugin and nothing else. Regardless of whether or not official changes are made to a satisfactory standard, banning people for using UI plugins—a tried and true MMO staple for hardcore players—is just slimy. Be like fuckin’ Lord of the Rings Online, that game has a “Manage Plugins” button right on the main menu! Why not officially endorse plugins just like that?

Let’s talk about the artificial scarcity of virtual real-estate. Final Fantasy 14 is not the only game guilty of this, but it’s probably the biggest and highest-profile one I can think of. What the developers have done here is created a problem that doesn’t need to exist by designing a system adhering to outdated MMO design principles dictating that houses within residential districts need to take up space and be persistent, as opposed to instancing everything and completely solving the problem. The issue with housing in this game is that its rarity is designed maliciously for the sake of making people feel special for owning land at the expense of new players who will struggle to get so much as a fucking whiff of the housing system. At the very least this has improved recently with the lottery system (even if that system is broken at the moment, I can forgive those kinds of technical goofs, it’s no big deal). But even with a lottery keeping things fairer (as opposed to the old system of “first come first served” which was horrible), there is no reason why housing needs to be so difficult and the developers know it. There are countless other MMOs using instanced housing in order to solve this problem; the falsehood that there is no good answer to it is just that, false. The answer is literally right in front of you. Granted, this is something that would have to have been fixed before the game’s initial release unless they pushed a huge update completely overhauling the housing system which would be pretty impressive but definitely won’t happen due to the difficulties it would present and the fact the developers don’t actually care to change things in any meaningful way.

I know I’m being really harsh and pessimistic and not talking about a lot of the game’s good points, but I cannot overstate how much the singing praise this game constantly receives despite its myriad problems absolutely floors me. They have gotten plenty enough of that; if I could have the opportunity to talk to Yoshi-P and the rest of the dev team just once, I would love to just absolutely fucking rip apart this game right in front of them and drive home the fact that there’s a lot of shit here that needs to be improved upon—heavily. I could talk about just the story alone and how terrible it is for hours on end, but I’m not gonna do that here, I’ve already gotten across what I wanted to get across. Many of the issues I mentioned are small annoyances which pile up, but the linear, terrible story is the primary one and what ultimately kills this game for me. If the story was totally optional, I probably wouldn’t even be writing this because there’s a lot here to enjoy once you slog through the main scenario! Also, given that I’m a few zones into Stormblood now and the story is still mind-numbingly bad, I’m rather inclined to believe that—lo-and-behold—it actually doesn’t suddenly become amazing after a few hundred hours, who could’ve fucking guessed? Every fucking post I’ve read talking about the story always goes on about Realm Reborn being boring but the story massively picking up come Heavensward—listen motherfucker, I’ve finished Heavensward and that was arguably worse than Realm Reborn, the only saving grace is that it isn’t as fucking long.

I’m pretty much done for now, I might’ve missed some shit but I really needed to just sit down and have the cathartic experience of ripping this fucking game to shreds before I play any more of it—I’m now at the point where I’m continuing to play just because I want to play through the whole game with my friends, I’m feeling the sunk cost fallacy pretty damn hard, and I intend to find out for myself the truth behind whether or not Shadowbringers or Endwalker are actually well written as once presumed. Maybe I would stick around for endgame depending on how I feel, but I really can’t see how the endgame of this particular MMO would really appeal to me especially with the story being this damn bad, it’s simply not worth the effort it takes to get anywhere in this game with how god damn frustrating and slow the main quest is. Anyways it’s like 7:40 in the morning and I’m tired, goodbye.