I remember being at a game conference – E3 in 2010, if memory serves – when Final Fantasy XIV Online was announced. My thought at the time was: yikes, actually, that game looks like crap. It turns out my instincts were correct. It was absolutely crap! This resulted in a complete rework of the game. The developers practically destroyed the original FFXIV, subtitled it as A Realm Reborn, and fixing its many problems.
Not many people have good memories of whatever vanilla FFXIV was. But some of my friends have been playing ARR for a long time now, and all of them recommended it to me. It finally became too difficult to resist the temptation when the rabbit-woman Viera race was added to the game. I could ignore the siren song of sexy catgirls, but now I could become an Amazonian warrior bunny? All right, SquareSoft, you finally got me.
This is a review of A Realm Reborn and A Realm Reborn only. This is what it’s like to be me, a noob, playing FFXIV: ARR, in 2019.