[Mobius]

Is anyone interested on this sequel? Seems a bit rushed if you asked me... what happened to Final Fantasy? Sigh.

Official Site
Wikipedia
GameSpot
Gamesource

[BloodEagle]

No.

[Jeff Vader]

Nah.

[General Battuta]

Everything I've heard says it's a disaster.

[Mobius]

Can you provide any links to reviews saying that FFXIV is bad?

[General Battuta]

Can you provide any links to reviews saying that FFXIV is bad?

Most reviews are not up yet, but the game has been getting hammered in previews for a while now, especially versus Guild Wars II.

Here, visit this newfangled website and type in:

metacritic final fantasy xiv

Or you can check out Kotaku, or here.

God, the user metacritic average is a 4.9. Aaaaand Sqenix has requested a 3-4 week review embargo. Remember how well that worked for All Points Bulletin? Great sign.

[The E]

Also, it's not rushed. FFXIV is a sequel to FFXI, it's an MMO.

But yeah, common consensus seems to be that it monumentally sucks.

[Littlejenny]

FFXIV is not really bad like many people said, however, no FF version can compare with FF 9 in my mind

[Admiral LSD]

As much as I like FFIX (compared with FFVIII it was great, but still not as good as FFVII as far as PlayStation FFs went), one thing indelibly scars my memory of it:

GRAND. ****ING. CROSS.

To elaborate, for those that don't know, the pace of FFIX, like FFVIII before it (a similar thing could happen in FFVII, but the longer ovaerall storyline made it less of an issue), is so quick that it's possible to breeze through most of the game relatively quickly. The trouble is though that if you do this you wind up at the final boss completely unprepared for what they'll throw at you. FFIX is particularly nasty since the final boss has this attack which, as you may have guessed by now, is called Grand Cross that casts every. single. status. ailment. At once. If you didn't level up all the various status defences over the course of the game you get raped, hard and fast. You're pretty much ****ed with no recourse but to start the game all over again from the beginning. Worst part though is that it's not even the most difficult boss in the game (that dubious honour goes to Ozma, an optional boss you fight by completing one of the minigames), neuter Grand Cross and he's a complete pushover.

[Mongoose]

(compared with FFVIII it was great, but still not as good as FFVII as far as PlayStation FFs went)

Funny, because I know several people who strongly dislike VII yet love VIII.

[QuantumDelta]

Those people are just screwed up in the head

[mister J]

I liked VII and IX, and I loved VIII.

It must have been the parallel life experiences going on at the time

[BloodEagle]

I liked VII and IX, and I loved VIII.

It must have been the parallel life experiences going on at the time

You were fighting goblins with 400,000+ HP, too? 

[Mongoose]

Those people are just screwed up in the head

Personally, I think anyone who legitimately likes Cloud is a bit wrong upstairs.

[QuantumDelta]

"..." compared to "...whatever"? ;D

[Admiral LSD]

Funny, because I know several people who strongly dislike VII yet love VIII.

It had some great ideas, it was just the implementation that was lacking. In order to balance the enormous power of the almost infinite flexibility they give you with the junction system, they made that ultimately end up ruining the whole experience.

Things like tying junction abilities to GFs and then giving each GF a compatibility stat that affects summoning time making it harder to switch them around. Which you have to,  because not every GF has every junction ability or even has the potential to learn every junction ability. Later on, you can find items that help offset this, but each GF has a fixed number of summon abilities so you have to remove abilities to make new ones fit.

The way magic is handled is a pain too. You can't buy it in shops, you have to draw it, either from the monsters or draw points littered throughout the world, or refine it. In both cases you're traipsing all over the map grinding for either the monsters that have the magic you want or the items you need to refine it.

Admittedly, none of these are particular major when examined on their own, it's just that when put together they make playing the game something of a chore. A pity, because there's a couple of things in there that it does well (despite suffering from the balance issues the rest of the game has). Having the enemies level up as you do is a nice touch, even if it does ultimately end up massively stacking the deck against you later on (it wouldn't be so much of a problem if not for all the grinding they make you do). Nothing annoyed me more in FFVII than going back through areas you'd already been through and fighting the same monsters at the same levels only to be able to dispense them in a single blow because you'd leveled up about 10-20 times since you last fought them. Especially when you only scored the same 25 experience points for your trouble. Ramping their levels in step with yours helped keep the challenge somewhat constant while having every level up cost the same 1000 experience points is a decent enough solution that I'm almost prepared the let the 500,000-1,000,000HP monsters in places like the Islands Closest to Heaven and Hell slide.

I like the way the "Quantum Leap" time travel plot is executed too. Particularly how, even after you realise what's going on, they never actually confirm that one vital thread that ties it to the main storyline. Even in the final cutscene, they preserve the mystery.

Overall, I don't really think it's a bad game as such, but rather one that had a lot of potential that it was never able/allowed to realise.

On a lighter note, I'll never be able to look at the cutscene where Quistis arrives the same way again after seeing this:

http://spoonyexperiment.com/2007/04/04/final-fantasy-viii-review-part-1/

The part I'm talking about starts at about 3:55 or so. Apologies about the ad, it certainly wasn't there when I first saw it. At least not that I remember.

[Mongoose]

* Mongoose pretends he knows what any of that meant

Sorry, I'm not an RPG type, so all of the mechanics stuff just washes over me. I think the people I know who preferred VIII just really liked the story (with the implicit acknowledgment that Squall is completely emo) and weren't all that fond of VII's.  The fact that the latter has been massively overhyped over the years doesn't help matters.

[Admiral LSD]

The fact that VII has been able to be massively overhyped is testament to just how much of a runaway cult classic it was and has been. Trying to fill such enormous shoes meant VIII faced an uphill battle before they even so much as started work on it. This may actually have been a big part of why it turned out the way it did. They wanted it to stand apart from VII and in doing so, simply bit off more than they could chew.

[TrashMan]

^^Oh, Spoony. I love him so...

And yes...his FF and Ultima reviews are among the best reviews ever made...for anything.