Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn Review

The context is the story. The 2010 original was a disaster serious enough to force a public apology and a change of leadership, and rather than patch it Yoshida's team ended the world in a live event and shipped a rebuilt game on the same servers. That alone would be notable. What makes it matter is what came after, because the expansions escalate into a genuinely sustained piece of writing, with Heavensward's religious war and Shadowbringers' inversion of the hero role standing among the best stories in any game.

Mechanically it is a conservative theme park with a job system that lets one character be every class, and dungeon and raid encounters that teach their own vocabulary cleanly. The cost of entry is the honest problem. A Realm Reborn itself is a long, dated stretch of fetch quests that new players must cross before the good material starts, and combat only opens up around level fifty. Patient, generous and enormous.