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.

One of the reasons I think the game clicked for me as quickly as it did is because I came into it starved for a roleplaying experience. I’ve long searched for a solid, regular tabletop gaming group that would give me the opportunity to focus on a single character long enough to REALLY dig into them. I’ve found one long-running group that met some forty times before the campaign ended, but no one in that group really wanted to roleplay. Every other group I’ve joined that had other players willing to roleplay fell apart before too long due to scheduling issues and burnout. So I turned to video games. Baldur’s Gate 3 was fun, but I couldn’t really roleplay the character that deeply. Everything you do in that game is about other characters and the only story that exists for you is the Dark Urge origin and that’s a difficult story to immerse yourself in. It gave me the hint of what I wanted (and a lot of fun playtime), but left me wanting more. Dragon Age: The Veilguard, where the roleplaying is present but still pretty light, gave me a “snack” amount of what I wanted, but left me craving a true immersive experience more than ever. And so I started playing a game I’d avoided for years when my friends prompted me to join them now that my Dragon Age franchise-playthrough was done, and I accidentally found exactly what I wanted despite preparing myself to play just another game that would lose me after a month or two when my friends stopped playing it as much.

You see, Final Fantasy 14 is a game that takes its time. Everything moves slowly in this game. Even when you can increase your movement speed using various traversal methods (mounts, increased speed effects on certain maps, and even flight), you are still moving slowly. Fast travel exists, but it is tied to hubs placed on the map not for convenience, but to suit the world the game takes place in. No matter what, you will still have to travel from where you are to where you’re going even when you think the game should have just taken you there automatically. And traversal isn’t the only thing that runs like this! Combat takes time. Quests take time. Clicking things to “survey” them takes time. Dialogue takes time. Everything moves at a pace that can feel excruciatingly slow unless you just so happen to figure out what is going on like I did. I can’t even claim any special talents or insight into the game, really, since I wouldn’t have figured it out if I hadn’t once looked up the reason behind one of my biggest frustrations in the Animal Crossing franchise and had the answer living in my brain ever since.

Final Fantasy 14 is not just an MMO. It’s a semi-immersive massive multiplayer online roleplaying game. The reason everything takes time is because it is SUPPOSED TO take time. You’re SUPPOSED TO feel the cost of performing whatever action is being asked of you. You’re SUPPOSED TO feel the frustrations of fetch-quests and the joy of being taken to new places by special cutsceness when you’re normally dropped right where you started. You are supposed to feel the things your avatar in the game is feeling. It’s intentional, carefully calculated, and probably the reason people talk so effusively about the game’s story. How could you not grow to love a story that has been given this much time and space to be told? So much of what fits into other video games is treated as a bit of fluff that lives on top of, or tied into, the mechanics of the game, not out of some lack of care for the story being told but because writing (and storytelling in general) is often not given the time and space it needs to unfold. In Final Fantasy 14, it is given so much time that whole scads of players miss this fact because they feel like it is wasting their time. They miss that this experience is supposed to be taken as an immersive roleplaying experience where you feel what your character feels.

This isn’t entirely on the players, mind you. The game itself could do with a bit of trimming in a lot of the quests (this is being said knowing that a lot has already been trimmed from the earlier part of the game). I mean, I love this game and don’t mind running around, back and forth, to do a bunch of dialogue-only quests, but even I struggle to stay engaged sometimes. There’s a lot of chaff that could be trimmed here but, over 750 hours into the game, I think that the developers erred on the side of caution and ultimately made the right choice because some of my favorite parts of the game wind up being little nothing missions spent running around to do pointless bullshit that nevertheless hooks me emotionally in a way only the major beats of a main story cam typically manage. Not because there is some grand, sweeping narrative unfolding in the minutiae, but because so much of what I wind up doing in this game is the little nothings that form the backbone of what it means to build and maintain relationships. It is the video game version of leaving my apartment on a too-hot saturday in the middle of the day to help my neighbor move stuff out of his apartment even though we weren’t really that close, will probably never see each other again, and neither of us expects this to mean anything beyond the momentary easing of a his burdens by splitting the load across two backs. It is going to grab a package off a porch for a friend who has to be at work simply because you aren’t chained to a specific schedule like they are. It is the same work we do constantly in our lives to form, maintain, and strengthen human connections and so few other games manage to not only make the people feel “human,” but the work of playing the game feel just as “human” as the characters.

Final Fantasy 14 is a game whose mechanics and general gameplay loop is strong enough to exist all on it’s own. It doesn’t need this long, laboriously and throughly built story to make it fun. You could probably make a pretty good arugment for splitting the two things entirely and letting new players access all of the end-game content without first forcing them to play through the game (or buy a story skip). Making that the default option, though, would do a great disservice to what is probably the closest I’ve ever come to an immersive simulation of what it’s like to live in a Fantasy Adventure RPG World and it does it at the scale of an MMO so you can form some connections with other Player Characters on top of the ones you’ve formed with the NPCs. Which, given that it’s a Final Fantasy MMO, feels pretty fitting. After all, so many of those games are about the bonds we form with each other and the world around us, at least in part if not in entirety.

Ultimately, I think I would recommend this. I’d recommend it with a lot of caviates, a link to some youtube videos, and maybe some probing questions about what you like about MMOs, Animal Crossing type games, and slow-burn storytelling. I might also recommend it with a heavy dose of priming so people know what they’re getting themselves into, which would make this the only game I’ve ever done that for. Typically I like to let people get into games without building up expectations, but I feel like some expectation-building is required to get people in the right mindset for experiencing this game as it feels like it has been built to be played. After all, so many people I know will dig into the quests and then bail out because of “fetch quests?!?!?!” rather than look at the game as it is meant to be played and see that what you’re doing is building bonds and connections across the world of this game. Still, there will always be exceptions to this stuff and there are more than a few fetch quests that serve little to no purpose, but so much of my real life serves little to no purpose that I can’t really fault a MMO/Fantasy Life Sim like this one for letting a few in for flavor. So, yeah. If any of this piqued your curiosity, check it out! There’s a lot you can play for free and will only lose the hours you’ve spent if you wind up bouncing off it. If you’re still skeptical but also kind of interested, you can watch this video (by JoCat) and get a longer and more-detailed explanation of what I’m talking about (with some differences!) from a player who bounced off the game multiple times before it finally landed. If none of this appeals to you, well, probably don’t try to play the game! I mean, it’s free and you’ll only lose some time if you try it, but there’s so much else out there that might be more up your alley that you probably shouldn’t risk spending hundreds of hours on a game you’ll eventually bounce off of. Everything doesn’t need to be for everyone, after all.