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Still no working image-tag I guess? Ah well... just wall of text then!

After playing for a while upon (re-)release of this game.. I decided to sign up again for a bit. I considered writing down my opinion of it back then, but somehow didn't.. also because there were too many parts of the game I still couldn't completely grasp. Now however.. I still don't understand them.. but it doesn't keep me from commenting on it anyway : p
For the record, as of writing this, I'm a level 35 White Mage and a level 20 Botanist, so there's a lot of content I haven't even touched yet. I have watched a few high level players play through end-content though on various streams.
Edit: Turned lv50, farmed some currency, got bored, didn't renew my sub.

First of all.. on paper, Final Fantasy 14 is an excellent game:
[*]It looks glorious.. thanks to fairly high quality textures on top of a very FF'y world. Add to that a pretty okay running engine for all the lighting, filtering and stuff.. yeah, it does look very good.
[*]It sounds glorious.. thanks again partially to sticking to what Final Fantasy is.. for example, joining a fate encounter starts FF battle music, leveling up gives the FF-victory-chime, mounting a chocobo starts the catchy chocobo tune we've all come to love (and hate, if played for too long :D). The overall soundtrack is the best I've heard probably ever since the original Everquest bgm. 10/10 for FF14 music, definitely, it's that good. It even comes with an option to watch cutscenes in their original language, Japanese.
[*]The basic MMO system of the game is very well thought out. I really like the class/job system.. yeah there are flaws such as.. there are no quests available for additional jobs, since you've already done them as your first job. But the overall openness of it is nothing short of excellent, and levelling speed is not too slow even without quests (there are levequests anyway, and dungeons and all). Gathering is very satisfying. I don't understand how or why.. but I can just mash my axe at some logs for hours at a time without getting overly bored. I haven't tried crafting yet, I haven't really sunk my head very deep into the trading system yet either.. it works I guess.. and I do like the retainer npc, very cute.
[*]Dungeons are okay, the dungeon finder which has become standard in MMO's by now does work, especially now that there's a random daily option. The excellent thing here is the level downscaling part.. where no matter what your level is, you can do content appropriate to its level, by scaling down to whatever level it is intended for. It does however still take quite some time to find a group in late Euro-hours.. maybe the tool doesn't match people across servers and regions, even though there's a language picker? That's probably it.. no big deal anyway, imo.
[*]Character creation is awesome.. not only is it very detailed and elaborate.. it also lets you save your creations :D Another cool part of character creation is the whole surname thing.. Guess I'm biased due to having played Meridian59 and Everquest before, which both had surnames. I do however hate the part of this that allows nobility titles and -pre/-suffixes as part of your name (Princess, Commander, -chan, -sama, etc....)

Yeah, there's a long list of stuff that's done right.. but I STILL feel that these don't make a good overall package, unfortunately. Well maybe "good", but not "awesome". Again, I'm not entirely sure why I feel like this about the game.. other than a few things I can isolate about it:

[*]The combat is standard MMO combat as it was 10 years ago. You can alt tab during your casts, you don't have to mind your positioning very much, there is one optimal rotation for dps classes, and healing is whack-a-mole while staring at the healthbars part of your screen, instead of the beautiful world of Final Fantasy. At least there is some impact and feedback behind your attacks and heals, unlike in other games such as TESO and Aion. Also, I haven't played anything melee'y or even tanky yet.
[*]Most of the animations in the game are atrocious.. yeah I get that it's probably hard to get it right at this level of textures.. finding a balance of looking good and performance, and all that. But omg. Jumping looks like a falling sack of potatoes, jumping on a horse looks like I don't even know what it looks like. Casting and attacking animations aren't super bad, but not good either. PS: Emote-animations however are very nice.
[*]Some of the input (such as targeting, and menus) is very clunky and.. awkward and.. shit. This is probably largely due to the fact it's also a console game.
[*]Last but not least.. there are literally no FF14 servers located in Europe. So if you're living in Europe like me, you have to decide if you want a shit ping, by playing on servers in Canada, or an even shittier ping by playing on servers located in Japan. This is really not cool, and because it hasn't changed by now, I doubt it will in the future.
[*]Escort quests, escorting some NPC around with the use of /beckon. Worse than aids.
[*]Invisible walls. Everywhere.

Unfortunately, combat, animations and game-input and -lag are omnipresent parts of playing the game.. while basic ideas and fundamentals and stuff like that are things I notice once and then just play around it. Ah well.
The antithesis of FF14 I suppose is Tera Online.. which imo is an excellent game overall, but there's way too many shitty parts in it.