Tell me. For whom do you fight? Hmph! How very glib. Do you believe in Eorzea? Eorzea's unity is forged of falsehoods. Its city-states are built on deceit. And its faith is an instrument of deception. It is naught but a cobweb of lies. To believe in Eorzea is to believe in nothing.
Beaten: July 2019, about five full replays since
In 2014, I was gifted a copy of A Realm Reborn and started playing it. I got to level 10 and quit.
In 2019, after intentionally avoiding it for years, I finally decided to give it another try. I know myself, and I knew that if I was going to play a MMO, it was going to swallow me whole, so I had better be sure about playing it. The third expansion, Shadowbringers, was due to release at the end of June 2019, and was adding a new playable race to the game: female Viera. I've wanted to play a Viera since I played Final Fantasy Tactics Advance in 2003. There was no way I could avoid it any longer.
So I started the game, made my character, and set off to explore the world. And I found that I'd been overlooking a masterpiece for years.
Longtime FFXIV fans will tell you that A Realm Reborn is nothing to write home about. "It gets better in the expansions," they'll say. "Just get past the base game and it gets so much better." Here's the thing, though: I really liked the base game. I would not have gotten so attached to FFXIV if I hadn't. The base game has a thin plot with only a handful of noteworthy characters, and yet I was completely entranced.
A lot of this is the worldbuilding. FFXIV has one of the best built worlds in the entire series by virtue of its genre. Every single place you go feels lived-in, as much for the NPC dialogue as the fact that you're not alone exploring it. No matter where you go, no matter what time of day, you'll probably stumble onto someone else also wandering around the world, doing their own thing.
This being my first MMO, I had never experienced anything like it before. I'd never really played a cooperative multiplayer game like this. When I started playing, support for running dungeons with NPCs didn't exist in the base game, so any time I loaded into a new dungeon, there would be a handful of strangers to run with.
And everyone was so nice!
That's the remarkable thing about FFXIV, even years on. The community has bad eggs like anything else, but in general, nobody's going to get mad at you for being new and clueless. It's expected that you can play the entire game without looking up a guide at any point. There are other people there to help you through it all, whether friends or strangers.
A Realm Reborn is a slow burn. You start out as a literal nobody at level 1. Slowly, through the course of the story, you become a hero willing to face down terrible foes for the sake of saving others. And while the game considers your character to be the sole Warrior of Light, the truth is that every player is that same hero. We're all the heroes of this Final Fantasy.
Favorite character
ARR is light on characters and character development. This didn't stop me from getting attached to Alisaie as a friend carried me through the Coils of Bahamut raids. She doesn't show up in the main plot until later, but she immediately found a place in my heart.
My other two favorites also show up in ARR: G'raha Tia, in the Crystal Tower quests, and Estinien, in the dragoon quests. Both of these characters get much more development later on, but they were on my radar from the very beginning.
Favorite music
I have a bunch of favorites from ARR, actually! I think the soundtrack improves by leaps and bounds as time goes on, but there are some songs that have always stood out to me:
Favorite location
This is tied by Coerthas Central Highlands and Limsa Lominsa.
Coerthas wins for a few reasons: it's a huge zone, and it's filled with so much character. Ishgard gets much more development in the first expansion, but this first taste of it was more than enough to whet my appetite. There are all sorts of nooks and crannies across the massive map. Back in my day you couldn't fly in ARR, and yet I never really minded traveling through Coerthas.
Limsa Lominsa was my starting city, and I've always had great attachment for it. It's a very unique design, and it's easy to get lost, but it's beautiful, and I never get tired of going there. Which is good, because I picked the Maelstrom on my first character, so I'm there all the time!
Gameplay thoughts
It's funny to write this section because I've maxed out all the jobs multiple times, so it's a little hard to go back and think about just how it was in ARR. I started in 5.0, as a summoner, and these days summoner plays very differently!
Though I've since run each of the ARR dungeons dozens if not hundreds of times, I still think a lot of them are great. Haukke Manor is a twisty, atmospheric introduction to voidsent. Aurum Vale, for all its dangers, is a genuine difficulty spike. I did all of the optional dungeons along the way before moving on to Heavensward, and I can particularly remember enjoying Tam-Tara Deepcroft (Hard) and Pharos Sirius.
Also, I was crazy enough to get my first ARR relic before I hit max level... (I have since gotten all of them. Some more than once.)