At this point in time (Monday the 12th of May, 2025), as I near the end of the base portion of the Shadowbringers expansion after four and a half months of playing Final Fantasy 14, I am hesistant to recommend it. You might think that odd, considering that I’ve written about the game more-or-less weekly for the entire time I’ve been playing it. Who would spend this much time on a game they didn’t like enough to recommend? Who would still be playing this game, with it’s monthly costs and life-dominating time requirements, if they’re not having a good enough time to recommend it to everyone they know? I can’t blame you for thinking that. I’ve been chewing that exact question over in my head pretty much constantly since I realized that I’ve passed the 750 hour mark with this game. How come I’m not telling everyone I know to play this game? For a long time, whenever the question of whether or not I’d recommend the game would come up, I satisfied myself with that answer that it was because I knew how much of my time this game was consuming. “I could not, in good conscience, recommend something that might take over a thousand hours of someone’s life just to mostly catch up to the modern content” is about the shape of that thought, more or less, that I’ve kicked up again and again whenever I’ve gone looking for why I’m not trying to involve all my video game friends in the game I’ve easily spend the most hours playing (thus far in my life, at least). But, as I’ve gotten further into the story and grown to appreciate it more and more–grown to love the game as a whole more and more–that answer has continued to ring hollow in a way I can’t continue to ignore.