In what should probably not be a surprise to anyone who knows me and my video game habits but is probably nevertheless a surprise to everyone I know, I’ve gotten really into Final Fantasy XIV. To be abundantly clear, given the way some people get super obsessed with this game, I’m playing it a normal amount. I’m slightly less into it than I’m into Baldur’s Gate 3 every time I start playing that again and much less than I was into Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which means it will probably become a sustainable habit. Which is probably what is surprising to the people who know me since I’m not really into Massively Multiplayer Online games. The only two I’ve ever played with any regularity are Overwatch and Destiny 2 and have bounced off literally every single other MMO I’ve ever tried. Hell, I eventually stopped playing Overwatch and Destiny 2 as well. Those were extenuating circumstances, though. I stopped playing Overwatch after a couple years because they changed the game to support play at their league level and that made all the things I enjoyed doing absolutely unpleasant to do unless I had a solid team behind me (and that almost never happened). I played Destiny 2 for years and only stopped because the people I played with were no longer available to me due to my connection to them revealing himself to be undependable in a way I couldn’t overlook or let go. Neither of those reasons has anything to do with a commitment or my attention span, but every single other MMO I’ve tried–like Guild Wars 2, WoW, Runescape (back in the day), League of Legends, and so many more–fell by the wayside in less than a month. Even Palia, as much as I enjoy it, rarely lasts a month before I forget it exists for six to twelve months. But Not FFXIV, though. At least not so far, anyway.

I’m less than a week into playing the game as I’m writing this, so it is entirely possible that all of this stuff I’m writing is incredibly premature and I’ll wind up sheepishly eating my words a couple months from now when I realize I haven’t played it in weeks. I don’t think that’s true, though, because not only have I been looking forward to playing this game with the friends who got me into it, but I’ve been looking forward to playing it on my own as well. I like a game I can just putter around in, doing little projects and making things that will benefit myself and my fellow players. Which is basically the entire non-combat job system of FFXIV right there. And a lot of the side quests, which most people don’t bother doing since they’re more capable of resisting the siren song of “there’s quests on your map that haven’t been done!” that has me absolutely at its mercy. I mean, I’m still MOSTLY doing the main quests and trying to level up my healing job, but I’ll pick up quests in one or more areas while I’m there and slowly chip away at them as I’m running around doing Main Scenario Quests (or the MSQ as the player base calls it) rather than devote a bunch of time to doing side quests or energy to ignoring side quests. I did just get my first mount, too, so I should be able to do all this stuff a little more quickly now. By only a little for now. Eventually, as my now much more experienced friends have shown me, I’ll be able to fly around and move even more quickly, which means I’ll get even more puttering done when I just want to hang out rather than focus on getting things done.

I have a few ideas why this game seems to have lodged itself in my head in a way most MMOs and similar games don’t, but there’s still plenty of time for these to fail. I just know myself and I’m pretty sure this one will stick since it checks a lot of boxes I enjoy and, you know, there’s gotta be a reason a game like FFXIV has been going strong for as long as it has. I mean, I love being able to make an absolutely giant character so that almost every single NPC is forced to crane their neck in order to talk to my character and making you change your outfit every time you change jobs (a thing required to use most of your skills, depending on the individual clothing items) is a great way to make skill applications more interesting and fun than they usually are in MMOs. That said, I really also can’t undersell the quality of a game that’s been such a strong player in the modern MMO space. I mean, I don’t want to oversell it either. There’s a LOT of troubling racism early on in the MSQ of this game, but I’ve been told that the game course-corrects as you get deeper into it. Which, you know, doesn’t fix the early game and all of the authoritarian undertones and racist overtones present in a frankly alarming amount of quests, but I will say that it isn’t in the majority of the quests. It’s in a lot of the big ones, at least in specter form, but I can go entire play sessions without encountering it. And it seems mostly confined to the story quests rather than the player base, which is quite a thing to be true. I’ve stayed away from too much player-on-player interaction, though, but everyone seems fairly decent at least.

There’s pretty significant portions of the game that I just don’t have access to right now since I’m playing the Free Trial of the game. I’m going to give it a solid month before I decide whether or not to spend any money on it, partly because of the startlingly racist stuff in the early quests and partly because I’m not sure how much space my life has for a relatively endless video game, but I’ll admit that I’ve been tempted to buy the full thing more than once in the few days I’ve been playing. It’s a lot of fun and the things I lack access to seem to mostly have to deal with the social side of things so far, which my friends both say is part of what makes the game as fun as it is. There’s some inventory restrictions, but I think it’ll be a while before I run into those since I’m not being that much of a hoarder and I’m certainly not trying to get massively rich while I’m slowly moving my way through the early parts of the story. I am in no rush, so why start paying subscription fees until I’m out of game or inventory space or whatever? Honestly, the fact that I’ve gotten this much fun out of the game without paying a thing for it has done a really good job of selling me on the game as a whole, on top of it being fun to play and decent to look at. It feels like it was perfectly setup as a gateway into a years-long subscription for me. If it can deal with it’s unfortunate story-based racism problem and get rid of the weird authoritarian undertones of the whole “gotta rebuild our armies and alliances” thing, I might actually get REALLY into an MMO for once in my life…