Customer Reviews

Final Fantasy XIV Collector's Edition

5 star:		(28)
4 star:		(26)
3 star:		(15)
2 star:		(36)
1 star:		(78)

 

 

From the account creation process (and subsequent cancellation) to patching the game to finally playing it, there isn't anything that feels natural or works well about this game.

You'll need to create multiple accounts to initially get logged in, from a Square-Enix account to a service account to a credit card billing company account. When I finally canceled the account I had to read the instructions on the web page to do so, something I've never had to do with another game before this; it should also probably be pointed out that the instructions on the site refer to options and terminology that didn't even actually exist on the page, so chalk up another thing that's incomplete and more complicated than it should be. Add to this that the game is $9.99/mo, plus $3/mo per character without your first character included, making it ridiculously expensive when compared to other MMO's to have more than one or two characters in this game.

Nothing about the game is designed for the PC, even though it's a PC game whose counterpart console version is months from release. The game is nearly unplayable without a controller, and even with a 360 controller in Windows where everything is recognized the game doesn't have any of its own keybinds already assigned and pre-configured... You'll need to set up everything yourself from scratch with their configuration utility. Literally nothing works like you'd expect it to; logging in to the game requires you to click the Login button, just pressing enter like every other program you've ever used doesn't work. It's something that seems like a minor gripe, and it definitely would be if this kind of behavior wasn't what you'll see with virtually every other interaction you do with the game.

A good example is a chest. You find a chest on the ground in the game, and to open you can't just click it, or select it and then open it. You move up to it, click to open a menu, select the chest from the menu, and then the chest opens. You then need to reopen the menu and select to loot the chest to gather its contents. Inventory would be another good example, since you can't just press "I" like every other game you've ever played. You'll need to navigate through the menu system to find your inventory and equipment. You'll do this for most interactions you have in the game.

The graphics in the game are very nice and mostly well done, but screen tearing was noticeable every time I played it. Even with Vsync forced to enable from video options for the card (there isn't an option in the game itself) it was still there every time I moved. Despite running fairly well with little slowdown, pop-in from other player characters made it nearly impossible to proceed with quests in some cases in the early game because an NPC would not appear unless you knew exactly where to look for them and manipulated the camera to ensure there were few enough people in view that the game would show them to you.

The game has been heralded as a return to old-school mechanics in that it doesn't force feed you information to guide you along your gameplay path, but the reality of the game is that it doesn't even give you the basic information you need to get started. I was able to complete my first story quests and my first levequests (a sort of daily quest), but afterward was unable to obtain more and had no idea where to go to continue. I chose a non-combat class to start with and was given no recipes to craft, and was only able to craft items while on a quest to do so, and hit a brick wall of being unable to progress. Letting you figure things out on your own would be perfectly fine if the game followed conventions that were even remotely familiar; things seem designed specifically to be obscure to impossible without involving yourself in a community outside of the game...

...because there is no community actually IN game. Hours of play time and I saw someone speak maybe twice, which was unreal. The chat system is difficult to navigate and controllers are practically mandatory so maybe that's why it's avoided, but I've never played an MMO before this where people weren't even talking to each other.

There wasn't a single minute I spent with this game that was fun rather than frustrating or felt like it wouldn't have been better placed elsewhere, and it is absolutely impossible to recommend to anyone. I would strongly urge anyone considering it to look elsewhere, or at the very least find a way to try it before purchasing it to be sure you aren't wasting your time. As this is a review for the CE of the game, please also note that the CE is very light on things to make it worthwhile for the average buyer, with its best incentive to purchase being an early start to the game that has already passed.

I liked the World of FF 11, Square's last mmo, but the combat system was so archaic, and it was so hard to find groups (for many reasons) that I couldn't handle it, but I had heard they had fixed many of the problems that plagued FFXI at U.S. launch so I had high hopes for FFXIV.
To be perfectly honest, it feels like FFXI all over again, but for complete different reasons. I must say I'm trying to like it even now, but it could use a lot of work. I could probably write 5 pages of review, but I'll refrain from getting into the nitty gritty and gloss over the things that stood out.

Pros:
1. Gorgeous, looks amazing no arguing that, this in turn means fairly steep system requirements, I'm not sure how well optimized it is but I digress.
2. Feels like a Final Fantasy, if you've played them you know what that means. You kind of feel like you're in a story even though it's an mmo.
3. Combat - the funny thing is that even though I wouldn't say that it's as advanced as other mmo's, if you played FFXI when I did, it's leaps and bounds better, it's a more active combat system than it's predecessor.

Cons:
1. Not very user friendly, there is a small tutorial for some of the quests and whatnot, but there is very very little explanation when trying to figure stuff out. Some of it's logical but some of it is very confusing without direction, I found myself on google quite a bit.
2. Clunky interface, from everything from selling items, to crafting, sometimes you'll wade through 5 menus before you actually get to doing what you want to do. From what I've heard SE doesn't allow custom interfaces? Makes me want to cry, there's a severe lack of custom hotkeys too, very restricted on what you can change.
3. Inconvenient, granted I don't want this to be WoW, where once you hit cap you could pretty much never leave the town and still get anywhere in the game you wanted, but FFXIV takes it a bit too far in the other direction. There is no auction house, trying to buy items means clicking through literally hundreds of player-owned npcs to look at their individual wares to find something, the problem with these npcs is there's no way to know what any of them have! They appear in different locations, with different items each day.
4. Chat system seems pretty bad, maybe there's a way but I'm not sure how to create different chat tabs, pretty much any message spam goes into the main chat log, it gets really hard to talk to people when you're seeing "John Bonjovi made 10 logs!" "Fred Flinstone failed the synthesis" on top of talk text. As such I feel like there is very little communication in game as of right now. There aren't any chat channels for things like help, recruiting, etc. As a result even though things like lack of auction house really make it important to communicate, people rarely do.
5. Game just feels incomplete, it's missing many things that I liked about FFXI, good things, things that everyone liked, why aren't they in game? If I've got to wait 3 years before early game and just overall gameplay is where Square wants it to be, maybe I should come back in 3 years.
6. Interface lag, ugh, this one's a doozy, from every single combat action, to opening menus, to talking, everything has a second pause, it drives me crazy and I'm not sure if it's because of system lag or if it's how the game was designed but it's really annoying.
7. lack of classes? They say it's got 15 classes, but really half of those classes are "professions", crafting can be fun but I don't consider chopping wood a class.
8. lack of things to do? You get some daily quests to do, but let's say I only want to level my gladiator class, I do the three daily quests I can get (which are on some strange timer, night 1 quests are there for my friend and I, night 2, quests are there for me, but not him, night 3 quests are there for both of us, night 4 they aren't there for me), those are good for maybe 15% of the level? Then what? Either wait for the quests which aren't always there, or get grinding? That seems like a huge lack of content, there's the main storyline which may or may not give you anything, then there's a piddly amount of quests.

I realize it's early stages of the game but it still feels like things were rushed, heck "open" beta was what, 3 weeks before release? Anyone who knows anything about games knows there are different teams set to complete different tasks. Where was the "help" team? The team that took time to explain how to do things in game? I don't want to be spoon fed but I don't want to have to fumble around not knowing what I'm doing wrong.


Post review:

Brief examples: I decided to become a blacksmith, I buy my blacksmith hammer, put it on, voila, I get to crafting. I do this without a hiccup for a couple days. I hit 10 on my physical level, go back to the blacksmith, try to use his forge, and he says "hey only members of the guild of the hand can use our forges". So here I am, being stupid, thinking, "weird maybe now that I'm 10 I need to find this guild of the hand to join". I'm looking around, talking to all the crafting guys, etc etc, 5 minutes later I realize it's because I didn't have my blacksmith hammer on. I didn't realize putting on my hammer meant I joined the guild of the hand, and taking it off removed me from said guild, why can't the guy just say "only blacksmiths can use this"?. There are dozens of things that are logical yet will make you pull your hair out the first time you have to figure them out. Once again really not any in game help with most things.

Rantish review... My aim is bound to change targets (you have been warned)

After nearly two weeks of trying to really, really like FFXIV I can say with out a doubt that this game is absolute rubbish and a complete waste of money. I bought the collector's edition and other than the joy I had of seeing the huge box arrive, FFXIV has been nothing but one disappointment after another. The CE itself is cheap paperboard, the included bound book a few paged of colored pics with the rest wasted and repeated watermarked pages. The only thing "special: about is was the FFXIV version of the security token as even the DVD case box art is lame cgi.

As for the game itself it is one hassle after another... Make SE account if you don't have one. Add FFXIV to SE account. Add token. Add third party payment account. Verify third party payment account. Find out third party payment option is one of the worst in the business and get endless calls from my credit card company stating as much. Enter bonus codes again and again until server accepts them. Install... Patch... Try to play...

Windowed mode requires window frame... Yuck!!! Exit... Change settings... Fullscreen!!! Alt+Tab... CRASH!!! SE still knows how to make computer users hate life. (back to windowed mode it is)

It looks pretty standing still, until you move. Even with a 3.8Ghz 6-Core and SLI'd GTX 470s I only get 20-30fps in the main areas (damned windowed mode). It runs like a bad console port and the shadows, even when set on high) make all the characters look like crap. Outland areas cap at 60, so I guess it has that going for it. Quests and combat aren't that horrible but get stale/repetitive rather quickly.

Of course SE didn't forget to take everything that should have been a no-brainer cut and past from XI and leave it out of XIV.

No Ctrl+"key" menu short cuts
No seek party flag
No Auction House (seriously!?!?)
No way to sort inventory
No map markers
No party/npc targeting through F1~8 keys
No way to quickly do anything!!!

Add in...
Unresponsive GUI (requires ACK from server)
Mobs that pop after they agro if you use Herme's boots
Slow menus that are 5 layers deep
Partying is useless due to low Skill Points earned
Having to check through 20+ slots to figure out what gear is damaged
I can go on and on and on...

Horrible game is horrible... If you plan on buying this wait at least a year. This game will either be fixed or dead by then.

I really want to like this game... I wonder if I'm even reaching with giving it 2 stars. I can't stand playing it, quite honestly. It's so clunky (and not graphically, just the UI. Graphically it's gorgeous, and I have a great computer to handle it on max settings. This is the one (and maybe only) major plus).

Pros -
Graphics are great

Cons-
Everything is confusing, and you'll get no help.
EVERYTHING is confusing! Unless you played FFXI, you will probably be very lost trying to figure out what to do.

No storyline. Where is the story?? There's a VERY thin main quest...but it's pretty lame (at least the one starting in Limsa Laminsa is lame). And you can only do 1 main story quest EVERY 10 levels!!! So once a week you get to play a crappy quest in return for your grinding away all week?

Everything is a con in this game. I'm a huge Final Fantasy fan... waited for this game holding my breath for months. I very much regret buying the collectors edition...it doesn't really come with anything worth the extra money... the 8 days early access was why I namely bought it. But the servers have been so slow I've been kicked off nearly 20 times in a week.

Square Enix... PLEASE fix this game. It does have POTENTIAL to be good... maybe I'll start playing in a couple months after things have been ironed out, but for now........ and I HATE to say this..... this is the worst final fantasy experience I've ever had.

As my title says, this game is not at all ready for launch. There are problems at the core of the game that need to be addressed before anyone but those hardcore for this game will play. The absolute biggest complaint I personally have is the lack of an auction house or anything even remotely like it. Instead, players must go to a section of town in which throngs of npcs(most on top of the other) are left by players to sell their goods. This is the most idiotic market system I have ever seen. It is far too time consuming and confusing. Whoever implemented this system should be fired and no longer allowed to work on games. This problem alone makes the game unplayable for me. At level 13, I am still(mostly) wearing the same gear as level 1 because I cannot find any gear for my level. Absolutely frustrating.
The targeting is ridiculous. The mouse absolutely cannot be used in combat or you will constantly be losing your target. There is no default attack, so you must mash buttons to attack at all. Ridiculous.
The only good thing I found is the gathering classes. I enjoyed botanist quite a bit, but really, who wants to play an MMO just to collect branches to sell? No thanks. It would have been a great combo with a combat class but since the money is useless(again, I can't find any gear) there is no reason to use it at all.
If the game gets a massive overhaul in the future, I would love to try again, but as of now I'm out $80. Oh well.

I was a huge fan of FFXI back in the day, but found this game to be terribly disappointing. There is a lot of potential, but several aspects of the game seem incomplete.

The economics system is miserable, which was an especially big let down after the super efficient auction house system in FFXI. Buying involves entering a large, laggy room with hundreds of NPCs and checking each one to see if they happen to be selling anything you want. 99% of the time, they won't have anything you want, so you go to the next one, wasting hours of time. Trying to buy anything in specific is so tedious that I've often quit playing without seeing the item I wanted. Sellers have no idea how much to price anything for, because they have no easy basis for comparison.

The crafting system could be great. All the crafts are very interdependent on other crafts. Unfortunately, the inability to easily exchange goods or services makes most crafting a waste of time and gil.

I found the fighting system to be unchallenging. FFXI required some degree of skill and an optimal party to achieve an ideal XP level. In FFXIV, a solo Conjurer wearing starter armor can earn XP quickly by completing simple guildleves.

Hopefully future patches will fix some of these issues. Nonetheless, I'm very disappointed that I purchased the Collector's Edition, and I plan to quit the game altogether once my free period expires.

A little backstory. I played FF11, and left about a year ago because it was too time consuming. Final Fantasy 14 was supposed to appeal to the casual player, and I was real excited to get on board with it. I participated in the last round of Beta, and while I wasn't real excited about what I saw, I saw potential, and like alot of people, had hoped the bugs and poor interface would have been fixed by the time I shelled out nearly $80 for the Collector's Edition. I even bought a brand new computer, in part, for this game because the specs required such a high computer, a Studio XPS Dell ($1500). So it pained me to cancel my subscription last night after spending so much to enjoy this game.

Needless to say they didn't fix what the problems was.

The game doesn't play like a polished game. I can save you time in reading this review and just refer you to IGN's which hits the mark more eloquently, if not more gently. Most sources agree this game plays like it's unfinished.

Graphics - 9/10
You won't find an MMO out there right now with better graphics. You can view youtube, or anything else and see for yourself, but don't be fooled. This is Final Fantasy 14's ONLY saving grace... or atleast it would be if you didn't need a power house of a computer to run it. Currently the PS3 version is being held up because the requirements for the game are so heavy. A one month old $1500 computer, could only run it at regular settings, and still showed lag and hiccups (which were worse at larger resolution), run the Benchmark software to check you computer BEFORE buying... it's fairly accurate. That's really the only criticism I can give to the graphics is that even with an average new computer, it will still lag. Their are also times where characters fall off the map, show invisible, become untargetable, but not sure that can be blamed on Graphics.

User Interface - 2/10

The game was intended to be played with a joystick, but even with a joystick their are some options of the game that require the use of a mouse. Their are three screens for inventory items, one for equipping, one for viewing/dropping/placing in bazaar and one for eating items. The latter of which isn't a menu option and requires you to move the cursor down to an icon of a pouch.

Targeting is a mess in this game. There is currently no auto-target system, and it's easy to mistarget mobs, if you can target anything at all as you cycle through every creature on the screen to find the right one. It's possible this can be remedied through macros, but I've lost patience to try. Curing team mates is equally complex, and difficult without macro setup, as in a hurry you might find yourself curing the enemy (which thankfully does nothing).

Controls are clunky, I can only assume it was SE's intention that every player use Macros for everything. Without macros, as I played, you have an action bar that can equip about 10 actions, with three bars that you can toggle between. At the end of this bar is a button that is used for an action called "Battle Regimens" which essentially stacks your next action with someone else's, but you have to trigger it's release. When using exclusively the game controller, it's easy to accidently activate, and then your action gets held up in limbo waiting for you to click the same button again to release it. The attempt by SE was to make a skillchain like effect, but it's difficult to coordinate, and when accidently used, you may be standing their 10 seconds doing nothing because you've an ability locked in. You can lock in any ability.

Gameplay 2/10 -

I've already said some of the above. Your main souce of income in this game, aside from spending hours crafting, is by doing "Leves". These are quests you can do that take up to 30 minutes each, but generally take half of that, where you follow arrows on the map to kill things. This starts off being fun, but quickly becomes repetitious as you do the same leves over and over again.

You get to do 8 in a day, but if your not interested in fishing, mining, or harvesting, you have to travel to different cities to pick up more than 3. Traveling between cities either takes hours of walking or use of Anima, which quickly runs out if you want to visit each city each day, or travel between camps. At this time their are no chocobos to rent.

The easiest way to level up in this game is through crafting. Yes... Crafting. Killing mobs you may get up to 500 experience for your physical level, assuming it's not considerably higher than your job rank (yeah their are two types of leveling up in this game). But you get double by cooking, or some other craft, for each successful recipe. So it's easier to get a high Physical Level by crafting than by going out killing things... which for someone who doesn't enjoy crafting, SUCKS.

Economy - 1/10 -

There is no auction house. Each person gets an NPC. They stand in a room in your city with a bazaar bag over their head. You have no idea what they are selling, or the hundred other random NPCs in the same room on 12 different random floors. SE promises to fix this... but the only suggestion I've seen is by penalizing the player for selling different items types on the same floor.

... you know.. I'm just going to stop. If you've go so far as to read all this, and still want to buy this game, good luck. It was a huge disappointment for me, maybe in March with the PS3 release SE will get their act together, but right now, the game is just painful to play. Read the professional reviews... they hit the nail on the head. It's a beautiful mess. I hated 12 and 13, but loved 11 and thought maybe this would share some of the same traits, but it didn't and doesn't. It's not a near miss, it's... just atrocious. I can't believe I paid so much for this to get what little I've gotten. I just hope they fix it, and maybe it'll be worth comming back to one day.

Even if you are a devoted fan to both Final Fantasy XI and the FF series in general, do yourself a favor and skip this game. The design choices are ridiculously bad and the game suffers from a complete lack of thought and creativity. The game's world feels lifeless and dull, the maps are repetitive, there is no lore, hardly any story, and most of all, no fun to be had. The game was released in an unfinished state and while people will cry out and tell you that "The game just came out!" or "Give them time to patch it!", the truth is that the problems with the game aren't the missing content or bugs, but the core fundamentals themselves.

If you really want to play an online FF game, go ahead and join FFXI with your friends. Don't waste your money on this trash like I did.

Having played and been hooked on FFXI, I fully expected to be enthralled and love this game. I was SO wrong.

The UI and combat are clunky, unintuitive and unexciting. We'll start with these.

UI: Rather than a 2D overlay, it's rendered along with the rest of the game, which makes the game run even worse. If you're going to purchase this, be sure your PC can handle it first by hunting down the FFXIV benchmark. There are no keyboard shortcuts and it takes 3-4+ menu clicks to get anything done. Vendoring items from a full inventory takes a good 5-10 minutes due to UI and server lag/menu driven interface. The chat window is not separated, so in the same window you get NPC speech, player speech, emotes, shouts, linkshell, party and other chat you also get combat and crafting notifications for everyone around you unless you disable the notifications altogether. The reply function only works after YOU send a message to somebody, and you must open the chat window before pressing ctrl + R. The chatbox allows you to type maybe two sentences max, if you're lucky and they're short sentences. There's no search feature in the game to find friends. You cannot see party members on the map unless they're in range of your mini-map. Linkshell/guild invites? Yeah, you still have to be right next to the person to invite them. Was pretty cool getting invites out to a max capacity linkshell. In a recent interview when somebody asked the developers about implementing the ability to invite players to linkshell from a distance, the developers were floored and thought it was something totally revolutionary and a good idea. LOL.

Combat: Every melee class is essentially the same. The targeting system is so awful, healers had to be given AOE heals by default. You essentially have to tab through every member of your party until you get to the right one, if you were wanting to heal them individually. The mob animations are dull and uninspired, and weapon skills animations of yours only actually show up on screen about half the time. The server lag is awful and the combat system essentially feels like a point and click system.

The grind: Once you finish your guildleves, or daily quests, the only option you're left with for leveling is grinding. Don't get me wrong, every MMO has the grind in one form or another, but this is literally just setting down somewhere (solo, because you are not rewarded for grouping in this game) and farming the same mob for hours on end. Until you become 'fatigued', which basically means you can no longer level that class efficiently for a specified amount of time. Luckily, Square Enix decided not to notify you in the form of UI or debuff of what exactly your fatigue level is. I'm pretty sure there are Asian grind MMOs out there which you can play for free, with a hell of a lot less lag than experienced in XIV.

Want to craft?: Great. Again, we're not given recipes and there is always a chance to randomly fail. Luckily, there are some decent databases online to provide you with the recipes you need. The only catch? When you're crafting, you essentially cannot talk to anyone in game. The chat windows constantly bugs out and closes itself while you're crafting. This is simply an RPG when crafting.

There is no bank/auction house?: Square-Enix decided to throw something revolutionary our way instead in the form of 'retainers'. These essentially work as a bank and a bazaar for you. They hold onto your items and sell your items for you in designated market wards. How does this work, you ask? Well, you take your NPC retainer to the designated market wards and wade through hundreds of other retainers to find a decently empty spot. Once you set your retainer down, you can transfer your items to them one by one. You can't just right click or double click the item you want to give to them through an open interface though, no no no! You once again must navigate a painstaking amount of menu windows to get your retainer one measly item. Even more if you want to sell the item. This isn't the best part though.

The fun part comes after you set up your retainer and are in the mood to buy something from the market wards yourself. Keep in mind the 20-30 player loading limit the game has imposed on us. This applies to retainers as well. So only a small percentage of them load, and you have to navigate through your menu on every retainer individually, to see if there's anything in their bazaar you want to buy. I know what you're thinking: "This is like an Auction House, just search for what you want!". No beans, sorry. There is no search function for this revolutionary system, which essentially means you spend hours browsing retainers for the item you want, or you just forget about buying whatever it is you need. Your choice.

New features: Luckily, there will be new options not present in the open beta, right? Such as chocobos, airships and dungeons. Right? Wrong. Chocobos and Airships are completely unavailable still, and there are no dungeons to be found.

So, the good parts of the game?: Honestly, other than the environment and character detail, there appear to be none. This doesn't feel like a PC game, but a lazy port from a console. Which is funny because the PS3 version isn't available yet.

Save yourself the $80 and subscription fee and wait for Guild Wars 2 or try LOTRO for free. Maybe this will get on track with the first expansion, much like FFXI. I doubt it considering most of the game flaws seem to be with the foundation and design. Good luck, friends!

I was excited to hear about FFXIV and couldnt wait to try it out. Now that I have had the CE's for a week, the experience has rapidly changed for me. I will not talk about any of the classes, how crafting works, how the systems work etc being as if you are interested in this game, there is information on how it works all over the internet and chances are you already know. I will only be discussing what I personally liked and disliked about the game.

First off the good. The graphics are stunning. This is one of the best looking games I have played. The character models all look wonderful as well as the cut scenes spread throughout the story line. I also was very happy that there WAS a story to follow. Its not totally fleshed out yet, since most people are not at max level yet, but it is nice to have a a sense that there are things going on in the back ground shaping what the player is doing. Crafting, though this is also in the negative section, I actually had fun doing. I always attempt crafting in MMO's but most of the time it ends up being terribly boring and/or just a money sink and the rewards are pretty minimal. While the crafting system is not perfect in the game, I did find it to be enjoyable, much more so than in other games.

The negative. Unfortunately, the longer I played, the shine and glimmer of the graphics and everything being NEW started to wear off as the negative aspects of the game started to rear its ugly head. For some unknown reason, Square Enix has to their own admission, ignored the rest of the MMO market and have not seen what the competitors are offering. Thus this game may look like one that will still be looking wonderful years from now, but plays like something from 8 years ago. Several of the choices the developers have made simply make the game needlessly difficult to operate.

To begin with the games performance. While the game does look great it is an immense system hog. Dont bother even attempting to run the game unless you have a very good rig. The game is optimized very poorly and should be performing better on many peoples computers than it actually is. Everything seems to be done server side, meaning there is a lag for every single action, be it cycling through your inventory to trying to attack a monster. The targeting system is one of the worst I have ever seen. Friends say it is the same it was in FFXI, which if it was since I cant recall, then my memory of FFXI certainly has been clouded. There has been so many times where I would be fighting two monsters and after the first one died I would try to target the other, only to have accidentally targeted another player on the screen, or myself, or a mining spot.

The interface as a whole is immensely difficult to operate. There are menus, leading to menus, leading to a menu for such simple actions its rather silly. I found myself feeling as though I was fighting the interface instead of the monster, as if the simplest action was a mini game itself. Things such as checking an items durability for example. You have to pull up you menu, go to items, select the item, and then go into a sub screen for that item where it will show your durability for it. And this screen does not show the durability for all your items, oh no. You have to go back, select the next item, then back, select the next, and so on and so on. Surely there has to be an easier way, say, I dont know, showing the durability on each item on a tooltip that you could mouse over? In the items screen it could show the durability there, not in a sub screen? This is not being lazy this is asking for a system that is not archaic and is user friendly.

The chat screens are not very good at all and not user friendly to use. Choosing your skills for your character and moving them around on the tool bar is more difficult and prone to lag than it needs to be. As of right now you cannot flag your self as looking for a group. You can search for a group that is recruiting but the group does not know that you are seeking a group. There is no search function for the market wards, you must go through all of the retainers hoping you find that one item you are looking for. There is no log of the crafting skills you learn. They scroll by in the chat log when you learn a new recipe and then they are gone. You either have to write it down or go to a fan site that has a database of known recipes.

The actual zones themselves seem small and hard to navigate. The area of Gridania is particularly bad as it is filled with narrow passage ways that spiderweb all over the area. This area felt very much like playing in FFXIII with how linear and claustrophobic it felt. It does not feel like a huge open world at all to me.

For SE to say they wanted to make a more casual friendly game they seemed to have made some odd choices. Many of the games mechanics are never explained, Battle Regime mode for one, and there are very few in game tutorials. Which leads to people having to go to fan sites to learn how to perform tasks or find out what something means or is supposed to do. Plus the system requirements are so high most casual players will not be able to even play it. It has one of the most difficult control schemes and interfaces of any current gen game out there. Yet it is supposed to appeal to casual players? If you need to get somewhere quickly you can teleport with Anima. Wait a minute though. You start with 100 Anima and it takes 4 to teleport somewhere. It regens at a rate of 1 point every 4 real hours. So you basically get 1 teleport a day in for free. Yet Chocobos and airships are not implemented yet. So to travel you either walk or use your points. But are then punished for using them by having to wait for them to recharge?

I could go on and on about things that are bothering me about the game but I have typed enough. Is it an absolutely terrible game? No and I hope over time some things will be fixed. I know that some people will enjoy it and I am glad they will. I wish I had liked it much more and I really wanted to. It could have and should have been so much more. People should not have had to pay full price for the state of the game as it is. It is very clear that Square Enix wanted to release the game now to get their foot in the door before other highly anticipated games hit, WoW Cataclysm, Guild Wars 2, Star Wars The Old Republic. Yet they have delivered what actually feels like an incomplete game. But that seems kind of shady to me. Telling customers that there is so much great things in store for you down the road, but we cant tell you about them, but please give us your money now and just trust us. Well unfortunately, I dont trust them any more.