I've tried so very hard to like this game. I love most of the single player Final Fantasy games, but what I love most about them is that they have a gripping story that feels, to me, like I'm playing a great novel, or series of novels.

FF14:ARR didn't feel like that in vanilla at all. The vanilla game was very boring and an abysmal slog to me by comparison, chiefly because it dawdled so long on things that I felt weren't useful or necessary to moving the story forward. It spends A LOT of time on fed-ex and collect-bear-asses quests that I find to be nothing more than filler, and it tries super hard to stretch a single plot point out into twenty go-here-fetch-this-go-there-talk-to-so-and-such quests.

That changes a bit in Heavesnward. Heavensward felt to me like it almost became a proper Final Fantasy game, and I very much enjoyed my whole playthrough of the Heavensward content. It's an excellent expansion with a story that starts strong and keeps punching clear through to its magnificent conclusion.

And then you hit Stormblood, which feels to me like an abandonment of everything good about Heavensward in favor of returning to what made vanilla ARR suck - excruciating filler, stretching a single plot point out into 10-20+ meaningless fetch, fed-ex or collect-bear-asses quests and not nearly enough gripping story. It gets much more interesting at the very back end when you're ramping up to the conclusions, but Stormblood felt so boring to me that I quit the game twice, for several months each time, because I just couldn't stay interested in it.

I'd log in, spend sometimes upward of 8-10 hours playing and hammering out main story quests and be left feeling like I basically did nothing, got nowhere and couldn't for the life of me remember a single genuinely interesting thing that happened the whole time. Was it all technically germane to the story unfolding? Sure.

And yet, I feel that if Stormblood were a movie, it would be one of those artsy movies that's 12 hours long and makes you watch the protagonist sleep, in realtime, for 8 of those hours. Just...lay there, sometimes toss and turn, sometimes move around a little bit, maybe get up once in the middle of the night and seem almost like they might maybe possibly do something interesting but they actually just needed to pee, and then went back to sleep for three hours.

And when they finally get up and get moving, you have to watch every...single...thing they do in their morning ritual. You have to watch them brush their teeth, from beginning to end. You have to watch them pick out a shirt and trousers. If it takes them 14 minutes to make and eat breakfast, you're watching them make and eat breakfast for 14 minutes. And you're getting a completely unnecessary close-up of the floral print on their coffee cup for four of those minutes.

Stormblood takes everything I felt was wrong about vanilla ARR and makes it somehow worse. Whether you agree or not is entirely your own, but me...I think I'm pretty much permanently done with FF14 because of it.

Whether or not this particular MMO is for you, I've been left feeling too often like it's a game that tries far too hard to waste my time on meaningless drivel while scraping too little good story out over too many bedamned fetch, fed-ex and collect-bear-asses quests.

I've tried so very hard to like this game. I love most of the single player Final Fantasy games, but what I love most about them is that they have a gripping story that feels, to me, like I'm playing a great novel, or series of novels. FF14:ARR didn't feel like that in vanilla at all. The vanilla game was very boring and an abysmal slog to me by comparison, chiefly because it dawdled so long on things that I felt weren't useful or necessary to moving the story forward. It spends A LOT of time on fed-ex and collect-bear-asses quests that I find to be nothing more than filler, and it tries super hard to stretch a single plot point out into twenty go-here-fetch-this-go-there-talk-to-so-and-such quests. That changes a bit in Heavesnward. Heavensward felt to me like it almost became a proper Final Fantasy game, and I very much enjoyed my whole playthrough of the Heavensward content. It's an excellent expansion with a story that starts strong and keeps punching clear through to its magnificent conclusion. And then you hit Stormblood, which feels to me like an abandonment of everything good about Heavensward in favor of returning to what made vanilla ARR suck - excruciating filler, stretching a single plot point out into 10-20+ meaningless fetch, fed-ex or collect-bear-asses quests and not nearly enough gripping story. It gets much more interesting at the very back end when you're ramping up to the conclusions, but Stormblood felt so boring to me that I quit the game twice, for several months each time, because I just couldn't stay interested in it. I'd log in, spend sometimes upward of 8-10 hours playing and hammering out main story quests and be left feeling like I basically did nothing, got nowhere and couldn't for the life of me remember a single genuinely interesting thing that happened the whole time. Was it all technically germane to the story unfolding? Sure. And yet, I feel that if Stormblood were a movie, it would be one of those artsy movies that's 12 hours long and makes you watch the protagonist sleep, in realtime, for 8 of those hours. Just...lay there, sometimes toss and turn, sometimes move around a little bit, maybe get up once in the middle of the night and seem almost like they might maybe possibly do something interesting but they actually just needed to pee, and then went back to sleep for three hours. And when they finally get up and get moving, you have to watch every...single...thing they do in their morning ritual. You have to watch them brush their teeth, from beginning to end. You have to watch them pick out a shirt and trousers. If it takes them 14 minutes to make and eat breakfast, you're watching them make and eat breakfast for 14 minutes. And you're getting a completely unnecessary close-up of the floral print on their coffee cup for four of those minutes. Stormblood takes everything I felt was wrong about vanilla ARR and makes it somehow worse. Whether you agree or not is entirely your own, but me...I think I'm pretty much permanently done with FF14 because of it. Whether or not this particular MMO is for you, I've been left feeling too often like it's a game that tries far too hard to waste my time on meaningless drivel while scraping too little good story out over too many bedamned fetch, fed-ex and collect-bear-asses quests.