The original launch of Final Fantasy XIV Online back in 2010 was a train wreck. There was every indication that it could have ended up being the one Final Fantasy game that failed and disappeared off the market forever. But while it was an example of what not to do with the launch of a new online game project, it is also how – were you to ever find yourself in that unenviable situation – with enough hard work and resources, how you can win back the adoration of gamers. With future uncertain, the development team at Square Enix was shuffled up, and the game rebuilt from the ground up, launching in 2013 as Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. Building up its community again to be one of the biggest and most beloved in the MMORPG sphere today, the game’s original narrative has been expanded through regular patches and multiple expansion packs – Heavensward, Stormblood and Shadowbringers. Now at the end of 2021, we are at Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker, the newest expansion that brings the decade-long campaign against the Garlean Empire to its finale and paves the way for the next era of this online gaming monolith. But… was this conclusion to a decade-long arc fitting? Were the newly introduced gameplay concepts effectively realised? Read on to find out in my first impressions review of Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker!
First off, it is essential to address one of the game’s most significant talking points now right now, server congestion. Suppose you are on one of the game’s more populated servers. In that case, queues of 10, 20, 30 minutes or (substantially) more likely await you, as you join a line of thousands of other players hoping to fill the shoes of their Warrior of Light and dive into the journey that awaits. COVID-19, among other issues, means that some often-used server load mitigation techniques were not possible. Compounded by the increased interest in the game in recent months, kudos of general word-of-mouth, streamers and content creators, this was frankly to be expected, even if not to the degree players can crash the queue servers. My best piece of advice, where possible, is to start your character on a quieter server if new. Alternatively, use the world visitation system at login to bypass some of the queue for those with existing characters. Alternatively, there are some servers, such as the sleepy but very friendly Kujata world on the Elemental Datacenter, which has almost no login queue. While there is no confirmed end date for this in sight, Square Enix is at least compensating players with additional game-time to fill this gap.
Like all previous expansion packs for Final Fantasy XIV, the value of what you get out of the core story content depends on how much time you have invested in the main storyline. Have you played through the entire narrative from the start of A Realm Reborn or even sooner and loved it? Then I can certainly confirm that Endwalkers campaign, while slow in parts, is a gripping, emotional and satisfying tale. It balances giving each of the Scions and their associates chances to shine, while forging ahead with new ideas. It is an experience that truly feels like one we have worked towards piece-by-piece this past decade and not just tacked on. On the other hand, since Stormblood, Square Enix has allowed players to purchase Tales of Adventure tomes from their online store, allowing one of your characters to bypass the content of the base game or one or more expansion packs. These have their place… but it means that if you are new to Final Fantasy XIV and have story skipped to Endwalker, even if you have no interest in the story, you will spend a good couple of dozen hours doing fetch/escort quests, occasionally broken up by a dungeon or trial. I did this for Stormblood and quickly had to start a new character and play through the whole campaign to that expansion, so I could fully appreciate the story – as frankly – having to skip every quest is downright dull. I can appreciate, especially as the postgame content begins rolling out, that you will want to catch up and do activities with friends – and I don’t fault anyone for speeding through the story. But what is on offer is rich, and I highly encourage players to take it slow and appreciate everything that lies ahead of them.
When it comes to delivering the story, while the quest-by-quest progression hasn’t changed and it is very much a linear experience, everything feels a little grander and refined than it was before. The dungeons have much more relevance to the story as side characters join you for parts of it, the small number of trials built into the base game are all memorable, and every new locale you visit does not fall into “Generic City” or “Grassy Field” stereotypes. It feels very late in the development cycle to have added this feature in, but escort quests that saw you visually escorting the NPC from Point A to Point B were a nice inclusion, both around the defence element to some of them and the extra bits of dialogue should you stray from the direct path. More dungeons and trials would be welcome, as they are where the real meat of Final Fantasy XIV resides, but it feels like the development team has their approaches to progression fully refined and lined up at the end of the day.
With FFXIV still confined to the game engine that Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn was initially built on, the actual visual quality of Endwalker cannot match the graphical fidelity of some of the MMORPGs released in the 2020s. However, as I have shown in my Take That (In-Game) Snap series, this is not a hindrance to Square Enix providing an aesthetically pleasing game that is well-deserving of the GPose Screenshot community it enjoys on sites like Instagram and Reddit. Endwalker provides a range of aesthetically diverse in-game maps, dungeons and trials to explore. This is complemented by impressive boss enemy designs (Including some familiar faces from Final Fantasy X such as the Magus Sister and Anima), fabulous outfit designs to unlock, two ambitiously designed towns that are sizable but appropriately designed so you don’t have to walk too far to reach core landmarks, and a world that feels big but not overwhelmingly daunting. Having set such a high bar in Stormblood and Shadowbringers, here’s hoping that the post-launch content for Endwalker continues to match this high standard.
Many of each expansion’s most iconic music tracks come from post-launch content patches, such as today’s v6.01 Pandæmonium Raid update, which hopefully has something grand to offer. However, the base expansion provides a range of memorable tracks, homages to earlier expansions and content through remixes, and just some pleasant background music as you trek through each of the dungeons and maps. Of course, there is also the return of some fan-favourite music throughout the primary campaign and postgame content… for anyone who… say… has some chicken tenders, which they are ready to fry. Voice acting is also acceptable, with the Heavensward onward voice cast reprising their respective roles. The main issue I take with what’s on offer is that they were still very selective on what scenes received voiceovers and which didn’t. To be frank, I feel that most if not all of the main scenario should have featured voiced dialogue, which would put it on par with other modern Final Fantasy games.
The way I see expansion packs for Final Fantasy XIV, while your original purchase goes towards the main scenario quest at first, and access to two more years of ongoing innovation and content following that. This is probably more true with this expansion than others, with many very appealing selling points such as Cross-Data Center visitation, the Island Sanctuary, a new residential district and the usual trials/alliance raids being rolled out over the coming months and years. But that said, while you are likely to find yourself drawn to older content after the main campaign until Savage Raids are released next month (a wise postponement so that high-tier players don’t skip the story simply to become “raid ready”), what content we do have is adequate enough as players focus on grinding their favourite jobs to Level 90.
As with every expansion, many of the game’s jobs have been amended or shuffled around, enhanced and (hopefully) balanced to ensure fresh and fair gameplay no matter what job(s) you choose to focus on. Similarly, with the level cap increased from 80 to 90, new abilities for all job classes have been rolled out. One of the major overhauls of this expansion is the Summoner, which sees the job become more closely aligned with that of a typical Final Fantasy summoning class. Rather than pressing buttons until you can summon Bahamut and/or Phoenix for a limited time, which you can still do, how you manage summoning Carbuncle, Garuda, Titan and Ifrit is more involved. From what I have heard, the job has become more approachable and appealing to players, which is a good thing, given the Summoner’s drop in popularity (at least from my perspective) last expansion.
But many who purchase the expansion pack will want to dive into the two new classes – the Reaper (Physical Melee) and the Sage (Barrier Healer). While I have not had much opportunity to dive into the Reaper as of writing this first impressions review, as physical DPS hasn’t appealed to me for a while now, I have plunged into Sage up until Level 90 and found it to be a very satisfying experience. Outside of the jobs weapons (Nouliths) looking really cool, the class has a few cool quirks such as being able to augment spells with DoT/barrier properties with Eukrasia, mitigating having too many spells on your Hotbar. Its main healing gauge, the Addersgall Gauge fill up over time, compared to Scholar’s Aetherflow Gauge, which gave you X spells every time you used a specific spell. Therefore the choice primarily comes down to having a pet that auto-heals and a gauge that you can refill to full every 60 seconds (Scholar) OR a gauge that fills over time and access to a broader range of healing spells capable of both Barrier and limited HoT effects (Sage). Personally, I think Sage is a reasonable and more approachable choice for anyone looking to get into healing.
Since Heavensward, Final Fantasy XIV has had three healing jobs – White Mage (Traditional Healer), Scholar (Barrier Healer) and Astrologian (Through sects, could change between the two types). For endgame raiding they are shaking up how party composition is managed for healers, with White Mage and Astrologian now falling under the Pure Healer banner and Scholar and Sage falling under the Barrier Healer banner – with each raid having one of each. Most optimal party compositions already followed this approach over having two Scholars or two White Mages, but time will tell how this fares. With the content already available, any combination is perfectly fine.
Once you have finished all content available so far in Endwalker, you are given access to 6x Story Dungeons, 2x Postgame Dungeons, 3x Normal Trials and 2x Extreme Trials – which is par for the course in terms of expansion content. While none of the content offers difficulty that would serve as a significant barrier to getting through the main scenario, provided you know the basics of your job, the development team did up the difficulty a few notches. The first two trials, in particular, offered a nice jump in difficulty from its predecessors instead of simply reusing mechanics, while the third trial offered even more challenge as it tests the skills you would have learnt during not only Endwalker, but also previous expansions. The dungeons also shake up the mix a bit, but they can be mindless 15-20 minute crawls after a few run-throughs. The most fun you can get out of them is by getting partnered up with a party of those who have never played them.
Alternatively, the option to run through any dungeon with an NPC Trust party returns, which I highly recommend doing on your first run-through. A new trust party member (Estinien Wyrmblood) adds a much needed Melee DPS option to the tank and magic aligned scions. They also appear to test the waters with the addition of a Trust-based Trials, which I hope they implement in future trials as facing an enemy alongside seven other scions left me fanboying just a little bit.
The main disappointment for me was that Final Fantasy XIV’s Data-Center travelling system was not implemented in time for the v6.0 launch, which would probably have been chaos given the major congestion issues already, but was the one thing I was personally waiting for most. With eight data centres (soon to be nine) that have 67 worlds/game servers spread between them, if you were to meet a new friend who plays Final Fantasy XIV, it is statistically likely that you will not share a world or data center with them. Not having to upend your roots but visiting and playing with anyone experiencing Final Fantasy XIV would be a significant quality of life boost that cannot come to us soon enough.
It is still early days for Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker, and there is still a lot of time before this First Impressions Review could be considered a final review. But as someone who has been on-and-off the game for more than a year now, mainly jumping in for a day or two each month to experience a new patch or ensure I don’t lose by fancy mansion in The Mist, Endwalker has got me pumped enough to play it well into its third-week post-launch, with no end in sight. This expansion brought the first FFXIV major story arc to a close in a very fitting manner, albeit drawn out at times – and showed a lot of clear love, passion and dedication towards making this game that it is today. Of course, this assumes you can log in and play, which many players continue to struggle with due to the ongoing congestion issues. With the future now wide open for both Warrior of Light and the Scions of the Seventh Dawn, what lies ahead is shrouded in mystery, and I hope the development team can do it justice.
Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker’s Final Score
Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker is now available to purchase on the Windows PC, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, and unless bought as part of a complete edition, requires at least the base game to play. However due to recent congestion issues, new copies may not be possible to purchase as of writing.
A Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker Digital Collector’s Edition was purchased by myself for the purposes of this review.
