➤ Final Fantasy strikes again 🎮

Normally, we should start this review with a boring excursus on the first version of Final Fantasy XIV, on what was wrong and on how we got to A Realm Reborn. In fact, we won't. Final Fantasy XIV is the past, Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn is the present, and in this case bringing up the past would be like doing a wrong against Naoki Yoshida and her team, which literally performed a miracle, turning a lost cause upside down and turning it into one of the best MMORPGs we've ever played in recent years. We will not even begin to describe in detail every single mechanic and feature of the game: we take for granted that you have read our previous articles (like this and this one) in which we mainly talked about the first steps taken on Eorzea five years after the "calamity" that closed the first version of the game. Here, therefore, we will talk about the impressions gained after more than a month of play, after reaching the so-called "endgame". Always remember that A Realm Reborn is an MMORPG, a game in the making that can get better or worse: the rating we assigned to it, however, refers to what we played until the publication of this article.

The Final Fantasy we wanted

Until recently, when we talked about Final Fantasy, we generally talked about good stories, emotions, characters that remain etched in the memory.

In recent years, however, the franchise has weakened, offering casts that are anything but memorable - apart from a few "fulminating" exceptions - and overly intricate plots, lost in a sea of pseudo-science fiction and petty philosophy. From this point of view, A Realm Reborn, despite its ups and downs, rewards all those fans who have patiently waited for a return to the themes and atmospheres of the past, immersing them in a completely fantasy world in which technology represents a foreign body and almost alien. The medium, however, is always that of a MMORPG, and you have to deal with its limitations. Those expecting an experience similar to that of Star Wars: The Old Republic may be disappointed: there are no choices that change the outcome of the story, the dialogues are often quite verbose and the dubbed ones are very few, the main missions of the story tend to lengthen the broth a little, proposing a moment before the battle with the terrible Garuda and the one after the harvest of meat to prepare a stew. But overall, especially from level 30 onwards, the plot of A Realm Reborn is a continuous crescendo of twists and epic situations, assisted by a perfect sound accompaniment in every situation, by decidedly spectacular non-interactive cutscenes and by an always interesting cast.

Unfortunately, there are some missed opportunities: in addition to the aforementioned drops in rhythm and some unoriginal narrative gimmick, you can especially feel the superficiality with which some key characters have been treated. Some supporting actors are excellent, such as the fantastic Biggs and Wedge or the gritty Y'shtola; wasted, however, the four "bad guys" of the Empire, who are eliminated without having had the opportunity to mature and blossom despite the promising introduction of their personalities. Behind the scenes the Ascians move, practically the XIII Organization of Eorzea, which promises to combine even more troubles in a post-credits cutscene with great potential. A Final Fantasy of other times, in short, set in a world that is finally alive and rich, strongly inspired by the unforgettable Ivalice and Vana'diel: if you decide to dedicate only the free month to the game to bring the main storyline to a conclusion, A Realm Reborn stands as a respectable iteration of the franchise, despite the atypical kind of belonging that makes the rhythm of the narrative a bit fluctuating.

The ignorant FAIRIES

The progression in the main storyline of A Realm Reborn alternates with the numerous "fetch quests" characteristic of theme park MMORPGs: kill a certain number of enemies, bring this item to Dude, talk to Gaius, collect this or that for Sempronio .. .we got the idea.

Fortunately, the number of actions required is always very limited and the sense of "grinding" that often plagues productions of this type is completely absent. Quests alternate with other ways of growing our character: levequest, guildhest, dungeon, FATE, hunting log, there is something for everyone. Unfortunately, not all of these systems are equally effective. Quests, in this case, sooner or later end: once completed they cannot be repeated, and the growth of a secondary class, in a game that allows, foresees and even encourages it, is entrusted to alternatives. Among these, the FATE undoubtedly stand out for practicality, comfort and efficiency, especially when you begin to feel a certain discrepancy between the experience necessary to level up and the available quests, noticeable especially in the last ten levels. FATEs, practically the Square Enix version of Guild Wars 2's dynamic events on paper, are the cross and the delight of A Realm Reborn. The idea is captivating, all in all it works, pays well in terms of experience points (less money) and makes every scenario much more alive. However, it is a strategy that "kills" the strategy and develops into a chaotic special effects saraband where it is not clear who is hitting what when, how and why.

The technology that supports A Realm Reborn often does not seem to bear the weight of all those dozens of players on the screen and the "culling" system, completely to be reviewed, hides precisely those enemies who are just waiting for our false step to take us out: it is even it happened that the entire server collapsed under the weight of the hundreds of players gathered to face - in vain - an invisible Odin or Behemot. The FATEs represent, in short, the vulgar way to level up, recommended especially for those who want (or must) grow another class in the shortest possible time, rarely satisfying also due to a community that abuses it by transforming itself into a swarm of locusts. ready to asphalt all enemies on the field. Much better the dungeons, in this sense, which promote team play, strategy, precision and perfect knowledge of your class. And that brings us to another chiaroscuro of A Realm Reborn.

The PlayStation 3 version

We mainly played the PC version of A Realm Reborn, but for the sake of the record we also downloaded the PlayStation 3 client and played a couple of hours to realize two things: first, the interface designed for the joypad and the console users is much more comfortable and intuitive than we thought; second, one feels the full weight of the generation now at the end. The uploads are longer, the frame rate is not always stable, the image is dirtier; Nonetheless, A Realm Reborn on PlayStation 3 is still a pleasure to watch and play, and bodes well for the already announced revised and corrected version for PlayStation 4. The only problem concerns the FATEs we just talked about, which in certain moments on PlayStation 3 they are practically unplayable: those with Odin and the Behemot, in particular, are delusions of particle effects in which the lag kills the fun more than the Zantetsuken.

I was sure I moved in time!

Just as happened with Final Fantasy XI, even in this new MMORPG signed by Square Enix the possibility of changing class turns out to be a winning feature able to make us overlook some structural and balancing problems.

Of course, a level 50 Warrior who decides to pursue the career of the Lancer will simply have to hold a spear to change classes, but he will start again from the beginning and will have to face a phase of growth without the quests already completed to help him; on the other hand, he will be able to rely on the equipment already collected, on the accumulated money, on the transport or combat Chocobo already unlocked, on the borrowed skills ready to be put in the hotbar. It's an interlocking game that literally makes us want to start a new class all over again without losing any advantage. The classes, in A Realm Reborn, are sufficiently diversified from each other, despite some small mediocrities: the peaks of excellence in the gameplay of the Pugilist / Monk, with his dance around the enemy, and of the Marauder / Warrior, with his regenerative skills from activate strategically, alternate with the more mundane rotations of Archer / Bard and Lancer / Dragoon, for example, but you never feel like you're always doing the same thing with just a different weapon. If anything, there is a strong feeling of a somewhat forced structure, built on the anonymous basis of the original Final Fantasy XIV to please the fans: everything works, attention, but the same system of the Jobs in which the predefined classes "evolve" , appears like a proverbial patch. Mixing skills at will is neither possible nor practical, and the limit of skills borrowed from other classes ends up transforming all the players at the level cap into clones of each other. In short, the system works within the limits of the possibility of changing the role and style of play at will, not in creating imaginative builds. The problems, however, are others. The entire combat system, certainly fun and functional, is plagued by two technical flaws that Naoki Yoshida, in our opinion, must absolutely solve if he wants his game to really break through..

The first is the "global cooldown" (GCD) which characterizes the use of practically any skill, preventing the immediate use of another: if on the one hand it makes the combat system a little more tactical and relaxed, on the other it makes the infernal life to roles of decisive importance and based on reflexes such as those of "tanks" and healers. A GCD at the wrong time kills, there is little to do, and in the most frenetic fights it feels a bit like you are banging your head against a wall, repeatedly pressing the keys as if in hysterics. The other flaw, however, concerns the absence of latency compensation. One of the most interesting mechanics in A Realm Reborn is characterized by the visualization in advance of the area in which an enemy's attack will fall: the player can then move and dodge the attack, and mind you that "can" to a some point it simply becomes "must". Well, a movement at the last second is not contemplated: the movement must occur well before the enemy completes the "loading" of the attack, and often this means that one must move with a reactivity bordering on precognition, under penalty of a good blow in face. It is not easy to establish the identity of the problem. Is it server side? Is it caused by the varying length of the animations? The code when establishing the interaction: at the end of the attack animation or at the end of its loading? In any case, it is a problem that must be solved as soon as possible, because in the most difficult fights it is very frustrating.

A Realm Reborn is the Final Fantasy fans of the franchise have been waiting for for years

Crafting: a world apart

Stopped the role of the warrior armed with a giant ax, just wield a hammer to become a blacksmith, a pickaxe to become a miner, a saw to become a if --- er, carpenter. Crafting in A Realm Reborn is, hands down, the best in the diverse MMORPG market. It is not an optional and parallel activity to combat, it is not a useless hobby to cultivate in spare time between one dungeon and another: it is a real separate game that requires the same commitment, if not even more, placed in the growth of a fighting class.

It is an intricate world, made up of interlocking recipes, materials obtained through different professions, frequent visits to the auction, continuous exchanges between players, whether direct or indirect. A better arrangement of focal points in cities (the auction or postman moogle, for example) would surely have alleviated that titanic but often incredibly satisfying feat of crafting a single bar of mythril. You can't just press a little button and sip a coffee while watching a bar rise by itself. Or rather, you can, but you have to be of a much higher level than that recipe if you don't want to waste resources and experience points. Each commercial profession learns new skills that allow you to increase the quality of the object you are manufacturing, to complete the work more quickly, but at the risk of failing it and maybe even losing the materials, and the various actions must be used sparingly, an eye to the result and the other to the available resources. In short, a game within a game that requires time and perseverance. The same goes for the harvesting professions (miner, fisherman and lumberjack) which are decidedly more boring and repetitive but in turn structured as a minigame that still arouses interest, without ever being an end in itself. We really enjoyed the crafting of A Realm Reborn, but even then there are some "childhood" issues that need to be kept an eye on..

Firstly, the very purpose of crafting is quite limited: everyone can produce anything, and most items soon lose value, apart from the really useful ones whose value is even too high. Crafting would allow you to independently repair your equipment, but just one click is enough to do it in one fell swoop from the appropriate NPCs. Crafting would allow you to embed matter in objects, but the differences are marginal and much of the pre-endgame equipment is simply disposable. Crafting tends to get too intricate: recipes soon call for materials from other professions, requiring strenuous simultaneous growth or a nice wallet that, once deflated, struggles to regain substance due to limited rewards and cost of materials. Nonetheless, crafting is a rewarding, challenging experience, to which one could dedicate oneself without even touching the combat classes for hours. The results take a while to arrive, and they are not always profitable, but in general the trade in A Realm Reborn is much more complex and "playful" than what the competition has accustomed us to in recent years.

The end (or the beginning)

A Realm Reborn is an MMORPG and as such it must aim in a very pragmatic way to stick with the players for as long as possible, so that they continue to play, paying the required monthly payment. Here is the usual trick of the stick and the carrot, with an "endgame" made up of equipment to be improved, weapons to be found, bosses to be defeated more and more difficult, but also increasingly profitable.

It is a tactic that always works and one on which other MMOs have built more or less vast empires for years, and we do not doubt that the same can also happen with the title of Square Enix. At the moment, however, the endgame in A Realm Reborn seemed rather incomplete. The main problem lies above all in the lack of content: just a couple of dungeons to repeat to exhaustion for loot and points to spend to buy better equipment, three "recycled" raid-bosses and a "piece" of raid-dungeon (Binding Coil of Bahamut) that ranks, as difficulty and rewards , after the raid-dungeon that has yet to be introduced in the game (Crystal Tower). It is a very confusing situation, once again caused by the first version of the game and by all the players who started A Realm Reborn by importing their old characters, probably already at the highest level and eager to face content within their reach. An unbalanced situation, therefore, which will take some time to settle down. While in, Naoki Yoshida and his staff will also have to solve the balance problems between the classes in the set of the various encounters designed, bearing in mind that the gamer community does not have the same sense of honor as the Japanese and will have no qualms about alienating the disadvantaged classes of the moment, preferring those that make life and progression easier.

Fortunately, from the point of view of game design, we really appreciated the variety and complexity of the various fights, which already from level 30 offer particular mechanics and which test not only the equipment of the players, but also and above all their ability to coordinate, play as a team and react to everything that happens on the screen. There are ups and downs, no doubt, but some bosses (like Amdapor Keep's Demon Wall or the battle with the King of Tonberry) have remained impressed despite the winks at mechanics already seen in other titles. If we really have to make a criticism, in this sense, we feel like wandering a bit the interface: at first glance clean, elegant and functional, in the advanced stages of the game it shows a bit its side due to some ingenuity that make it very more difficult to "read" the scene (for example, the enemy frames, rather generic). The endgame of A Realm Reborn, in short, right now is oriented solely to farming and will certainly appear repetitive and even a bit boring to those who reach the level cap with a great desire to do a fashion show and wield your "relic" weapon, but if we are to believe the content promised as early as the next patch, then it is clear that Yoshida and associates have clear ideas on how to balance the content equation. Now we just have to hope that they also know how to handle class balancing.

Nice to see

We've already spent 18.000 lines talking about what's going and wrong with A Realm Reborn gameplay; so let's dedicate a few lines to the technical aspect, starting with an absolutely amazing soundtrack which, hands down, is the most successful element of the entire production.

The variety of musical tracks is incredible and the whimsical Masayoshi Soken has managed to compose some truly unforgettable goodies accompanying some fights making it an experience that, without that same musical accompaniment, would not have been the same.. Battles like the one with Garuda or Titan wouldn't have the same effect without those fast-paced tracks, and even the most generic boss battles are framed by epic tracks that make the hugely popular Final Fantasy fanfare even more satisfying once the mission is completed. A Realm Reborn is a real riot of fan service, on the other hand: a real sign of affection for a franchise that takes itself too often seriously. So here are dozens and dozens of FATEs and quests that pay homage to television series, films, video games, anime and so on and so forth. A huge applause also goes to the localization team for the English language, which in addition to using a direct language - sometimes even a bit foul-mouthed - and understandable, has ventured into a superlative adaptation of each text. All of this, of course, embraces a first-rate graphic rendering that abandons the "photorealism" of the first version to offer a much lighter, cleaner and more dynamic client.

Unfortunately, there are some incompatibility problems that strain certain combinations of systems and video cards with a somewhat disarming randomness, but the discreet PC with which we tried the game, fortunately, never showed the side even with the maximum details. , offering us glimpses and panoramas of incredible beauty, thanks above all to an over the top polygonal modeling that forgives the often low quality textures. The implementation of a dynamic lighting system, an excellent day / night cycle and a sophisticated system of atmospheric effects (among the most varied and complex that we have ever seen) compensates a little for the generic aspect of the various settings and their rather small size, when compared to the freedom of movement offered by titles like Guild Wars 2 and World of Warcraft. On the contrary, we were surprised to discover that the various sectors into which each region is divided are sufficiently diversified, while following the same themes and clichés: the luxuriant forest, the countryside between the mountains, the barren and desert area, the snowy area and so on. If anything, in the world of Eorzea there is a lack of those distinctive and unforgettable traits that make the exploration and discovery of each area special, and that in A Realm Reborn, when they are there, seem to be placed there more than anything else to show off. But who knows that this too should not change in the future.

PC System Requirements

Test Setup

The editorial team uses the ASUS CG8250 Personal Computer
Processor: Intel Core i7 860 at 2.8 GHz
Memory: 8 GB of RAM
Video card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670
Operating system: Windows 7 64-bit

Minimum requirements

Sistema operativo: Windows® Vista 32/64bit, Windows® 7 32/64 bit
Processor: Intel® Core ™ 2 Duo
RAM: 2 GB
Video Card: NVIDIA® Geforce® 8800, ATI Radeon ™ HD 4770 or better
Disk space: 20 GB
DirectX: 9.0c
Miscellaneous: Requires an internet connection

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Your vote

Reviews are usually seen as mere "buying advice" - that's absolutely true, but they're also a guide for developers themselves and a way to communicate with them. In these over twenty thousand review lines, which we hope you have also read with the necessary breaks, we have criticized many aspects of the Final Fantasy XIV reboot, which has some rather serious flaws that should be solved as soon as possible. So how do you explain such a high rating? Well, it's actually pretty simple. Firstly, A Realm Reborn is a concentrate of fan service that will delight fans of the Square Enix franchise with no ifs and buts. Plus, it's a great MMORPG with plenty of room for improvement. Finally, and above all, we are no longer faced with that Final Fantasy XIV that three years ago clearly demonstrated the incompetence of its developers. Every little detail proves that those who are working on it now know the genre, the franchise and its fans. All that remains is to hope that Naoki Yoshida will keep an eye on his creature and keep all his promises: considering the monumental effort made so far, we feel decidedly optimistic.