Review: Final Fantasy XIV Online (Switch 2) - An Expansive Port That Demands Your Commitment

Reborn... again

Final Fantasy XIV Online has been through quite a rollercoaster journey over the years on its way to becoming one of the most respected MMOs in the industry. Its 2010 launch was a disaster, plagued with performance issues and shoddy design that torpedoed its reputation.

Rather than pulling the plug early, Square decided to swap in a new director to salvage it, leading to a reboot in 2013 called A Realm Reborn. Since then, the game has mostly gone from strength to strength across over a decade of expansions and is now in the process of building up its second major arc.

Though this isn’t the first time Square Enix has brought Final Fantasy XIV to console, it is the first time it’s come to a Nintendo platform, and I’m happy to report that it stuck the landing. The full fat experience is here in all its glory, giving you access to a high quality and addictive RPG experience that’s sure to be in the running for one of the most content-rich games ever produced for a handheld.

The narrative places you in the role of a self-insert character in the land of Eorzea who comes into the picture just as geopolitical tensions are on the rise. After a catastrophic war five years earlier, the expansionist Garlean Empire was repelled by the city-states comprising the Eorzean Alliance, but its leaders desire revenge and are winding up for another grab at ultimate control.

Amid this, you’re also told through a vision by a mysterious goddess of light named Hydaelyn that you’re her chosen champion, and she tasks you with finding six magical crystals to ward off the servants of an approaching darkness.

Thus, we set off on the early steps of what came to be called the Hydaelyn-Zodiark Saga, a four-part fantasy epic that should take you no less than two-hundred hours to complete, and that’s assuming that you beeline for the finale and engage in almost no side content. After all that, there’s then a whole other expansion that’s in the early stages of setting up the next ten-year arc.

Suffice to say, Final Fantasy XIV features one of the richest storylines available in a modern RPG, weaving together the subplots of various nations, factions, and supporting characters to make for an impressively complex and deep narrative.

The downside to this, however, is that the pacing can be all over the place. The 60-hour story of the base game alone is basically an extended exposition dump detailing all the major players in the world and setting the stage for the building conflict to come, meaning you spend a lot of time scrolling through line after line of unvoiced text from NPCs telling you about very interesting story beats that happened some other time offscreen.

This leads to a narrative experience with some incredible highs and disappointing lows. Once the plot picks up steam and starts focusing more on current events, there are lots of awesome character moments and payoffs that make all the time investment up to that point feel worth it. Yet between those moments, it can sometimes feel like the plot really takes its time focusing on largely irrelevant or uninteresting subjects that you simply have to endure to reach the good stuff.

Gameplay design follows the expected structure of an MMO, giving you an enormous living world to explore packed with jobs and levels to grind, side quests to fulfill, minigames to fool around with, dungeons to raid, and a massive story to gradually uncover.

As long as you stick to the Main Story Quest chain, you'll be toured around all the main points of interest in an area and progressively introduced to core mechanics and objectives at a measured pace. Side quest content then fills out the world with more detail and texture, though tons of the quest objectives admittedly boil down to 'bring me three boar skins' fetch quests.

A big part of what makes the gameplay loop so addicting is the versatility of your character, who can independently level dozens of jobs that fill out various combat and non-combat roles. In a combat role, your job is built around a growing variety of cooldown-based actions, echoing the classic Final Fantasy ATB system that blends turn-based and action gameplay.

Every combat job has its own distinct gimmicks and features, such as how the Thaumaturge operates by repeatedly shifting between two passive states that bolster either damage output or MP regeneration. Mechanics like this keep fights from feeling too much like you’re just watching cooldown icons on a hotbar, and there are enough distinguishing traits to make the various classes all feel like they’re worth experimenting with.

Non-combat roles are just as dynamic, even without the pressure of attacking foes. If you're working as a Goldsmith, you can create various bits of armour and jewellery, and it's much more involved than merely clicking the 'Craft' button on a menu after you have the materials.

Instead, you carefully balance 'progress' and 'quality' by taking various actions as a given project's durability stat diminishes—push it too far, and you’ll end up with junk. As you level the class, you gain access to progressively more complicated project recipes and have access to more actions that give you finer control over your work.

The design of the job system means that there's never a shortage of something interesting to do at any given moment, and progress in each one inevitably synergises with your other jobs. If you're sick of fighting foes and grinding your hunting list, you can grab a pickaxe and go mine for a bit for something a little slower paced. Not only is that rewarding on its own, but the materials you get from this can then be used to craft new recipes for better equipment. Once you've had enough of that, this new equipment can then be used with a combat class to bolster its stats and enable you to battle foes and explore areas that previously were just a bit out of reach.

There’s a lot to chew into, then, but perhaps both the best and worst part of this release is simply the sheer volume of content that it has to offer. Though it does start off strongly, this is the kind of game that debatably takes hundreds of hours before it truly 'gets good', and there are months of content to delve into after even that point.

Over a decade of updates and expansions means that there's more content to play in this one game than there is present in many entire game franchises, and unless you decide to 'no-life' it, you'll probably never actually manage to experience it all.

If you're the kind of player who's looking for a complete and concise experience, the reality is that you won't really find it here—there's simply too much of a required time investment and new content continues to roll in on a regular schedule. Yet if you want to immerse in a deep gameplay experience that continually evolves the further in you get, there are few games that can deliver on that promise better than this one. It’s a worthwhile experience, but bear in mind this isn’t one that you can easily blitz through.

Given this is natively a PC release, I think extra praise is deserved for the incredibly intuitive UI and controls, which do an outstanding job of making an extremely complicated set of hotbars, menus, and windows designed for mouse and keyboard navigable by controller. If you want something a bit closer to the PC experience, you always have the option of using the Joy-Con mouse controls to click around the screen, and if you're playing in handheld mode, the touchscreen can be used as a replacement for mouse control.

Regardless of what control scheme you prefer, there's a bit of a learning curve for the complex setup, but the tutorialization around it is handled well as you're eased into different elements through gradual introductions.

As for performance and visuals, Final Fantasy XIV's decade-plus age certainly shows in some of the simplistic environments, models, and animations, but that doesn't mean that it fails to impress. Though stiff movements and dead-eyed characters are a common sight, the sheer scale of the world instills a persistent sense of awe and intrigue as you roam in search of the next quest objective.

Boss fights in dungeons are where all the spectacle comes in and where the game’s age falls a bit more out of focus, as the screen becomes awash in particle effects and AoE zones to dodge as you whittle them down.

All this plays at a modest level of performance, whether in docked or handheld. In more contained environments and when there’s not too much happening on-screen, the (uncapped) frame rate seemingly manages to touch around 60 FPS for a bit when playing docked. The vast majority of the time, however, is spent hovering close to the 30 FPS mark. While it sticks to 30 FPS pretty consistently, this still admittedly feels like a bit of a letdown, even if it is a relatively minor one.

Conclusion

Final Fantasy XIV is by far and away the biggest RPG you could possibly play on the Switch 2 right now, and if you’re the kind of player to whom it’s targeted, there’s simply nothing else like it that can scratch the same itch. An incredibly nuanced and lengthy story, intuitive control scheme, and tons of side content and activities to grind all combine to make for a game that can easily steal weeks from your life and still leave you wanting more in the best of ways.

I’d give this a strong recommendation if you're after an in-depth RPG experience you're not afraid to fork over a few hundred hours for—it’s a big long-term commitment, but one that’s worth it overall. Even if you’re not sure if this one’s for you, it can’t hurt to try the extensive free trial and see for yourself; it might just surprise you.