If someone asked me, what my favourite game series is, Final Fantasy would be the first answer that came to mind. I’ve been playing them since I was a child, and although I do not like every single game in the series, most of them hold a special place in my heart. Despite my love for the games and my love of earning trophies, I had not taken on the challenge of earning all of the Platinum’s in the series. There were a couple of things holding me back. The first was my dislike of Final Fantasy 13, a game I played on the Xbox 360 when it was released initially, but had little desire to go back to, and the second was the second MMO game in the series, Final Fantasy 14.
In 2023, Square-Enix released the Pixel Remaster collection on PlayStation, a collection of Final Fantasy 1 through 6, and it meant that except FF11, all of the mainline Final Fantasy entries now had a Platinum Trophy. This development pushed me to aim for a new goal, to earn all of the mainline series Platinums. I finished the Pixel Remasters, replayed Final Fantasy 13 but then with only 14 left I had two options, the PS4s less grindy but time-gated list that would take months, or the PS5s much grindier one that could potentially be quicker. I started working on the PS5 lists, but eventually grew bored, needing to take a break around halfway through the grind. It wasn’t until I finished Stellar Blade, and the realisation that my next Platinum would be my 250th, that I knew there was only one choice to mark that milestone. I would Platinum Final Fantasy 14. And so I did, so let’s take a look at what that journey was like.
In 2014 there was a beta for Final Fantasy XIV released for the PS4 that I found by chance. I had never played Final Fantasy XI and was intrigued by what the MMO Final Fantasy games were like. I did not play the beta for long. There was something about the game that didn’t appeal to me at all, so I stopped playing, and every time I saw talk online about it I thought, “Nah, that game isn’t for me”. I tried it again in 2017 but dropped out before even completing the main story.
My desire to replay the game resurfaced in 2019 though with the release of Shadowbringers. An expansion that received an incredible amount of acclaim, especially for its story. For me, the stories of Final Fantasy games are the things that draw me in, and I had always written off the story in 14, because it was an MMO, like, how good could it be? So I went back, to try one more time but this time something clicked and my love affair with Final Fantasy XIV began. While it has never been a constant game, instead something that I drift in and out of with various degrees of obsession. I would play for a few months, playing almost nothing else, and then I drift away, and then come back for another few months, and my interest renewed.
Because of this habit, and how big the game is now, it’s actually quite hard to really talk about why I love the game so much. I could talk about how great the story of the conflict between Hydalyn and Zodiark has developed from a story I thought was quite cliche to something great. I could talk about how much I like the cast of main characters that make up the Scions of the Seventh Dawn, and how I’ve enjoyed seeing their character arcs progress. Maybe I could talk about how much I have grown to love the setting, and the globe-trotting adventures you can go on in it. But all of this comes with a huge caveat.
There are 4 expansions to the base game, Heavensward, Stormblood, Shadowbringers and Endwalker, and a new expansion called Dawntrail is imminent. These expansions are really good, with each of them improving the game and adding to it in different ways, but depend on you playing for hundreds of hours just to get through the main story, and hundreds more if you want to see all of the side stories there are as well.
To make matters worse, the base game, A Realm Reborn, is not great, and there are parts of the game that were genuinely frustratingly slow to get through. However, without some of the things set up there, the narrative payoff that comes later would lose its impact. Shadowbringers is in my top 5 Final Fantasy stories, I love it and think it’s a brilliant JRPG experience. However, so much of my enjoyment is because it 3 previous campaigns worth of story to build on. Each expansion improves and builds upon the story and world of the one before it, so it is hard to separate them, but it also makes it a hard sell because “Stick with it, it gets good after 50 hours I swear” is not a great pitch.
This issue is compounded by the repetitive nature of the game’s quest design. Quest structure is almost always the following; go talk to someone, watch a cutscene, go talk to someone else, watch another cutscene, then go examine 3 points of interest or kill 5 enemies or talk to 3 more people, then when this is done go talk to the first person for another cutscene, quest complete, talk to someone else to start the next quest. This pattern persists throughout all of the expansions, although admittedly they have made attempts to try and mix this up in some quests by adding things like stealth missions or quests where you control one of the Scions for a short time. This would be an issue for me, but the narrative and characters of the game are so good, that I find myself driven forward despite the quests. It is easy to forgive the repetitive steps of a dance when the music is so damn good.
As a side note, the soundtrack of 14 is killer, and easily one of my favourites in the series.
Despite how it sounds though, it hasn’t just been the story that has driven me to play this game for over 1000 hours. I enjoy the gameplay a lot too, running through dungeons or raids and trying one of the 19 main classes you can choose to swap between taking on one of the three main player roles, although being the tank is by far my favourite. I particularly enjoy the mechanics of the boss fights, especially the later ones when they become more complicated than just avoiding the orange circle on the floor, and fighting these is a highlight for me. Although combat in the game is mostly just remembering your rotations, a series of ability combos that will change depending on your job and role in the fight, when you add on top of this the evasive and defensive manoeuvres you need to take, it becomes more chaotic and complicated in a way that feels like you are having to juggle back and forth between offence and defence.
Even the crafting and gathering classes are fun to play, giving you an engaging gameplay loop of travelling the world hunting for materials before settling into craft the items you need. This is one of the best ways to make money in the game, so you can craft your own gear, or sell enough homemade furniture to just buy it outright. There is so much to do in the game but thankfully FFXIV’s community and developers seem to embrace a player-friendly approach, encouraging breaks between content, more like a vast single-player experience than a traditional MMO. There’s always something to do, but the game never feels like an obligation.
The world and story of Final Fantasy 14, feel like a theme park for fans of the series, full of little nods, and references to older titles. There are bosses in certain raids that are just bosses from older games like Kefka, or Ex-Death. You can visit locations that share names and similarities but are slightly different or reimagined. Doma from FF6 or Dalmasca from 12. Hell, there’s even a whole Gold Saucer area inspired by FF7 where you can play the card game Triple Triad from FF8. It’s all of these little things that feel like a love letter to the series, that give 14 a special place in my heart.
The varied locales you visit as you trek across the world of Hydaelyn are great looking too. A Realm Reborn is 11 years old now, and although the graphics are not incredible, the game does a great job with its artistic direction and creativity, with each of the zones you explore feeling unique and having interesting things to look at as you travel, so even running on old hardware the game still has the capability to make you stop and look at a nice vista for a while.
That isn’t to say it’s perfect though, there are some issues I do have with the game other than its quest design. The game has an issue with homogenisation, the further you go on through the game, the more similar dungeons begin to feel, with each having the same similar steps in the same way the quests do. In the early game this actually was less of an issue, dungeons felt more expansive and unique and had different mechanics in the dungeons themselves, not just the bosses.
By Endwalker though, the dungeons are streamlined, fight 3 packs of monsters, then a boss, then 3 more before another boss, then 3 more before the last boss. The bosses are fun, and give you the drive forward that the game needs, but the bits in between the bosses are just there to stand in your way.
The first Raid of the game is the Coil of Bahamut, a raid I had never tried before I needed to for one of the last trophies I was missing. I ran it unsynced, which at max level meant I could solo the whole thing to make it quick but I found myself enjoying how different it felt from the other raids I had done in Stormblood and Endwalker. There are parts of the raid that are just exploration puzzles, or waves of regular enemies. Despite it being the oldest raid in the game, it felt refreshing to go through this when compared with the newer Raid series that I had done in Stormblood and Endwalker. In the new raids, you just fight bosses. They are cool bosses with interesting mechanics, and they have interesting stories tied into them between fights, but it felt less like a journey through a location that you are raiding, and more like you were just entering a strange tournament.
And all of this is a shame because in some ways the game has so much variety in what it offers but in others, it all feels so similar.
My only other real issue with Final Fantasy XIV is the trophies. They were bad enough for me to initially ignore and write them off completely when I first played the game in 2017. The version I ended up getting was the PS5 version, which includes such incredible trophies as “Gather 8000 Collectables” “Complete 3000 fates” and “Complete 2000 dungeons or trials”
To give you an idea of how much grinding there is, even with having finished Endwalker and all of its post-game quests, and having 2 classes at Level 90, I had done less than 500 dungeons. The collectables are an insane grind, why anyone would need to gather 8000 things or craft 5000 of them is beyond me. It is an unreasonable ask. The PS4 version only asks you to do 1000 of these things, which seems much more reasonable but that has its own trophy that time-gates you to how many of a specific quest you can do a day. Grinding these out was incredibly dull and even spamming the quickest methods for these took hours and hours of repetition. I managed to watch 4 whole seasons of X-Men on Disney + while doing the bulk of the Fates dungeons and collectables because it was such a mindless repetitive task.
Beyond the grinding trophies, the trophy list also requires you to spend a lot of time actually playing the game. You need to get up to the end of Shadowbringer’s main scenario and complete all of the Regular and Alliance Raids that are available until the end of Shadowbringers. There is one regular raid series and one alliance raid series for each expansion that all have a story and cutscenes to go through so they are not short things.
These are all really fun to do though, and have some great stories and bosses behind them, I had actually done most of them before even going for the Platinum because of how much I enjoy that type of in-game content.
You also need to reach level 80 with at least one combat class, as well as one crafting and one gathering class. These are not difficult to level at all, and you will probably end up getting these on your way to the collectable trophies anyway.
I love Final Fantasy XIV, and even after suffering through a horrendous grind to try and make it my 250th Platinum before Dawntrail comes out, I am actually really excited to go back to the game in a few weeks when the expansion drops. I don’t feel burnt out at all, which I’m grateful for. I would recommend it strongly to anyone who I think would enjoy the story, and get on with the MMO gameplay. If you are looking for a game recommendation to get a platinum in though, I would suggest looking elsewhere as this is a painful one. Despite this though, FF14 is a game I think I will keep coming back to, as long as Eorzea keeps offering me more things to explore.
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