Final verdict: FFXIV–
Final playtime: Fuck you.

A’ight, gather ‘round kiddies. Because what we’ve got tonight is a game so unbelievably awful that it transcends all previously imagined limitations on just how bad one game can possibly be.

I’m talking about FFXIV, the sequel to FFXI. Now, even before the game launched we already knew it was going to suck aggressive amounts of cock for two simple reasons: 1) it’s an MMO, and 2) it’s Final Fantasy. FFXI has already proved how devastatingly bad such a combination can be. I’m not gonna go into details, but just trust me, that game was bad. And I mean bad even by Final Fantasy standards, so I don’t just mean some run of the mill generic badness, this is the real deal.

Now lemme tell you something. FFXIV is so horrendous that it makes FFXI look amazing. That’s right, let that sink in, because if you’ve played FFXI and you’re not a complete retard, right now you’re going “What… but… I didn’t think it was even physically possible for anything to be worse than that”. Oh yeah, you’re not alone. I thought the exact same thing at first. I thought with that abomination we had reached a hard cap on suckitude but god was I wrong. As usual Square Enix proves that they ain’t afraid to pull out the big guns and show the world that they are literally the worst company that has ever existed. Hell, I bet that’s how those Mexican drug lords ease their conscience at night. “Yeah, my cartel may be entirely illegal and run on fear and murder, but at least we ain’t Square Enix”. Oh, what? What’s that you’re saying? “Oh hell no, did you seriously just compare a videogame company to the very real conflict going on in Mexico right now? How do you ease your conscience at night?” Bitch, I don’t have a conscience ‘cause I’m a professional douchebag. I ain’t like those Mexican drug pussies.

But where was I? Oh yeah, Jesus fuck FFXIV is horrible. My god, where to even begin. The amount of things that are wrong with this game are just so fucking daunting. Before we even begin, we obviously have the problems inherent in the MMO genre: gameplay ranging from horse shit to nonexistent, the fact that everything is a shitty boringass grind and basically a colossal waste of time, y’know, the usual stuff expected from the worst genre ever created. But FFXIV goes far beyond this by way of a series of absolutely baffling design decisions and a staggering amount of bugs and glitches.

What is absolutely fucking ridiculous is that there are tons, tons of things that FFXI got right but FFXIV magically didn’t, as if the developers weren’t paying attention to what they did on FFXI, it’s as if they learned nothing from their previous work, it’s as if they got amnesia and started over from scratch with no experience, or… it’s as if they outsourced the entire fucking development of FFXIV to a cheap bottom of the barrel Chinese developer. I mean, I’m not racist but FUCK China. Nothing good has ever come outta that shithole. Oh and fuck niggers too. And jews. And no, that had nothing to do with the subject. Just sayin’.

But seriously, a bunch of shit that you’d think would be common sense isn’t in this game. For example, it won’t let you move the camera with the arrow keys. If you didn’t play FFXI you probably have no idea how fucking annoying that is. That is fucking basic functionality that isn’t there simply because the designers are tards. Thankfully there’s a mediocre solution that lets you circumvent this faggotry by downloading a third party tool. As always, SE is so hilariously incompetent that the players have to pick up the slack and do their work for them.

I have actually seen people who defend this piece of shit game and say bullshit like “Ohh the game is still new, you can’t expect it to be perfect”. You STUPID. FUCKING. SHIT FOR SHIT. You did NOT just say that to me. Holy fucking shit. Now I swear I have seen it all. Since when the FUCK did we become such low expectation having motherfuckers that we take a clearly rushed, clearly incomplete, and clearly just plain fucking trash in general game and not only endure it but actually have the gall to go all defense force on it? NO. Your game is horse shit I’ma call you out on it. I don’t give a fuck, okay? And I certainly don’t give a fuck if this is the “norm” in MMOs or whatever. It’s dipshits like you that encourage companies to put out defective products knowing that they can just slowly patch it into a real game months or years later all while you take their bullshit and act like they’re doing you a favor.

Another example is the auction house, an easy and convenient way to buy and sell items in FFXI. You just go there, search for whatever item you’re looking for and bam, if someone’s selling it you can buy it. So of course FFXIV doesn’t have that. I mean, we can’t have something actually be convenient in our game now can we? No, we gotta make everything as much of a pain in the ass as possible. So the only way to buy/sell shit is to click on a character and then choose browse to look at what that particular character has up for sale. And of COURSE he won’t have what you’re looking for. So then what can you do? You can visit the market wards, where players can place their retainers (basically an NPC that bazaars your stuff). But this is EXACTLY the same as the other method. Of COURSE there is no search function or a convenient way to see what everyone’s selling. You have to manually click on every fucking retainer and browse their shit until you somehow stumble upon what you’re looking for among the sea of retainers. And FUCK there are a lot of them. There are so many that they can’t even load. You have to take a step forward, wait for a new batch to load (while the ones behind you disappear), then take another step, wait for a few others to load, etc. It’s like finding a needle in a god damn haystack.

And holy shit. You won’t fucking believe that there are actually people who defend this. “Well, FFXI didn’t have an auction house when it came out either”. Oh my fucking god. Not this shit again. Imagine me putting my face on my palm because that is exactly what I am doing right now. “Hey guys, our game sucked a bucket of dicks and we found something that makes it slightly better. But this is a new game so we obviously have to start over from square one!” Jesus fuck how can there be such dumbasses in the world. And whaddya know, just like the previous example, the players gotta make up for SE’s stupidity. There’s a site you can use with an actual search function where players can put what they’re selling in the game so others can find it. Of course this is a mediocre solution since it only displays stuff from players that sign up on the site, and even then if someone puts something on there it might be out of date and not necessarily in the game. But it’s a whole hell of a lot better than SE’s horse shit.

Edit: Recently SE put out a patch that divides the wards into categories, so there’s a weapons ward, a tools ward, etc to supposedly make things easier to find. This only further proves how fucking retarded they are. Instead of just putting in a simple fucking search function like everyone wants, they insist on keeping their horse shit system.

There’s even more painfully obvious things that were in FFXI that just aren’t in FFXIV for no god damn reason. Shit there is so much that I can’t even list it all. Painfully obvious things like being able to see where your party members or friends are, being able to invite people from long range, being able to deliver things, shortcut keys, keys to target party members or NPCs, macros to target engaged enemies, the command to let others know your position, being able to search for players, shit.

Then we’ve got the obvious stuff, like lag, walking through walls, things spawning underground or in the sky, getting your character stuck, doors not opening until you log out and back in, party members glitching out and the game not letting you target them, quests glitching out and becoming undoable, monsters recovering their HP for no reason or becoming unkillable, all the basic bugs you can think of, they’re in this game.

But that’s not even what pisses me off the most. I mean those are just accidents (retarded accidents which shouldn’t be there, but). No, what pisses me off the most is the stupid shit that isn’t an accident. The things that are just plain horrible design and were intentional. Shit like how they deliberately made partying not work. How did they do this? Firstly by way of the most retarded idea ever. Giving your character a physical level and a class level. One cool thing about FFXI (ugh, I can’t believe I just said that) was that you could change your job, so even if you were level 45 thief you could still party with your level 12 friends by switching to another job that was also level 12. It worked out well. But in FFXIV, your physical level is inextricably tied to your character. This means that if you’re level 30, it doesn’t matter what class you change to, you will always be level 30. And you can’t control how much you level this up either, because you’re constantly getting exp from everything you’re doing, even crafting or fishing or whatever. Plus, your stats are determined by your physical level, which means that even if you change to a level 1 class, if your physical level is 30 you’ll be able to take on higher level enemies that you shouldn’t be able to take. Do I even need to get into how fucking stupid that is? What is even the fucking POINT of having physical level. That horse shit shouldn’t exist. So you will never be able to easily be the same level as the rest of your party because it’s impossible to control your physical level the way you could control job level in FFXI.

Second, the exp you get from fights is FUCKING RANDOM. Yeah, you heard that right. So in a party, the person who is getting luckier will zoom past everyone else and level a bunch, and the ones getting the short end of the stick will lag behind everyone and the entire party’s levels will desync even if they WERE somehow the same. Jesus fuck, don’t even ask me how someone could possibly be dumb enough to implement this kind of system. This is fucking FFXIV, nothing ever makes sense.

Third, it is impossible to recover your MP normally without going to a camp and touching a crystal. Oh yes, you read that fuckin’ right once again. So what does that mean? You MAY somehow be able to get a party together, but fuck you if you think your mages will heal you for very long. This is FFXIV, bitch, you think shit is going to work here? No. It doesn’t matter how hard you try to make it work, it will fuck you in the ass even if it has to pull out the most incomprehensible shit ever.

Fourth, hate is absolutely fucking broken. In FFXI hate made sense. The amount of hate you got was directly proportional to how much damage you did or cured. And the amount of hate you lost to how much damage you took. Then abilities on top of that like provoke also made sense. But in FFXIV, you have shit where someone attacks an enemy 5 times and does shitloads of damage to it, then someone else comes, swings their weapon once, MISSES, and BAM they suddenly have hate for absolutely no fucking reason. Or maybe you never even took out your weapon. Maybe you’re just standing there minding your own fucking business while someone else has already taken the enemy down to half health. But the enemy is clearly like “Oh FUCK that nigger, how DARE he stand there minding his own business? I’m going to fuck his shit up.”

So that’s the huge problem. What is the fucking point of doing anything in this game if partying is impossible? The answer is that there isn’t, really. But hey, you should’ve known that from the start. I mean come on. This is an MMO and it’s Final Fantasy. I pity you if you were stupid enough to buy this game.

Edit: recently, the devs have said that they’ve heard everyone’s complaints and that they’re going to fix everything. Maybe. Eventually. In like a few years. And to make up for it they’ve extended the free trial to 60 days. Yeah. NOT GOOD ENOUGH YOU FUCKS. You should be paying me to play this horse shit, that’s how bad it is.

Shepton has told me that maybe we should give the devs some credit for the things they did do right, like how the crafting in the game is better than FFXI. But you know what? No. NO. Shut the fuck up, Shepton. What they deserve is my boot up their ass. And NOT in a good way. NEVERRR in a good way.

And you know what? Fuck it, I’ma wrap this up ‘cause FFXIV just has way too much horse shit to even bother talking about it all. In conclusion, fuck FFXIV, fuck Square-Enix and fuck you. This game is the worst thing in the history of ever. If you thought FFXI was bad, you ain’t seen shit. SE has totally outdone themselves this time. So much so that I can’t even wrap my head around how an actual human being came up with some of this stuff and somehow thought it was a good idea. There is just no fucking way. In fact, this game is so fucking awful that our review scale cannot accurately portray its shittiness. This game is beyond an F. It’s not an F–. It’s fucking FFXIV–. It’s not our fault, how could we know a company would be asshole enough to make something this bad?

Final Verdict: FFXIV–

Final Playtime: Fuck you.