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A realm reborn is excellent

Beautiful art coupled with gorgeous vistas make discovering new areas very appealing

The release of Final Fantasy XIV back in 2010 was met with an all-round negative reception. But even though it was broken and suffered from endless numbers of bugs; game director, Naoki Yoshida decided not to give up on his baby, and re-launched it last year as, Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. Originally released on PC and the PlayStation 3, it recently went into open beta for the PlayStation 4. After playing through the beta for a few days, it’s safe to say that A Realm Reborn is not just a successfull re-release of the game, it also proves that it’s entirely possible to make a good MMORPG on a console.

The visuals may not be stunning, but A Realm Reborn is very pleasing to look at. Beautiful art coupled with gorgeous vistas make discovering new areas all the more appealing. Also, it has a fairly standard character customisation toolset and you can choose one of the eight classes available. Unlike other MMOs, where your starting area is dependent on your race here it relies solely on your class.
The combat in Final Fantasy XIV is very similar to other games in the genre. The age-old system of targeting an enemy and mashing hotkeys to use abilities is still present, along with almost every other MMO mechanic. In fact, A Realm Reborn is pretty generic, one that doesn’t take any risks and implements features introduced in other games. This is most notable in the quest structure, which gets boring and repetitive very quickly. You are often tasked with slaying a set number of monsters or collecting a set of objects.

But even though it feels just like every other MMO, A Realm Reborn has the exact same appeal. The promise of new loot and abilities will keep you locked in for hours, as you perform one mundane task after the other. All three starting areas are beautiful worlds begging to be explored, and the stylised combat makes every encounter a visual treat. Barring the use of DualShock 4’s touch pad as a virtual mouse and the small font size, the UI is very easy to use. Your abilities are mapped to the face buttons and the D-pad, and it’s also very easy to cycle through different sets. But the beta suffers from drops in frame rate, which can get extremely frustrating during public events, also known as Fates. Overall though, since there aren’t a lot of games like this, A Realm Reborn does many things right and is a great way to experience this genre for console players.

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