Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn
In 2010, Square Enix launched Final Fantasy XIV Online, and it was just the worst—buggy, over-complicated, unfinished; a mess. The developers spent three years rebuilding the game from the ground up, and the end result is one of the finest massively multiplayer online role-playing games ever made. It’s everything fans love about Final Fantasy—lush artwork, strong story, gorgeous music—only bigger, all wrapped around a traditional MMO framework. It’s that Square Enix polish that sets it apart from its competitors, earning it a spot in this list.
After a very peculiar end to 2021, going off sale due to its own servers not being able to cope, things seem to have settled down.
A Good Match For: Fans of fantasy role-playing video games looking to take the massively multiplayer plunge. The original Final Fantasy XIV was a tangled mess of conflicting ideas, when all players wanted was a standard MMO game with the familiar features of a Final Fantasy game. That’s exactly what A Realm Reborn is.
Not a Good Match For: Folks afraid of monthly subscriptions. Despite the MMORPG genre as a whole moving towards free-to-play payment models, Final Fantasy XIV stands firm by its monthly subscription plan.
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