Square Enix: “Don’t Review FF14!” Players: “38%”

well thats actually a decent amount of reviews on amazon.
i didnt really expect much from Square these days anyways, their days of awesome are long over... what happened to making games like Chrono Trigger/SMRPG/FF6/FF7?
plus they are trying to compete in a market already saturated by WoW, the game known as the "destroyer of lives". I can really use a great JRPG right now... there has been a short supply of that for a while.

Those days where they produced quality games in Japan seem to be over. Obviously chinese quality can earn them enough without any effort due to cheap production costs.

Damn, got logged out. I forgot to add:

At least they have thought so. Seems there are first doubts...

Rie Tanaka is gonna weep.

Anonymous
20:56

only people who can topple wow if they put there minds to it is the everquest 3 team.

remakeing everquest, the game that got over 400,000 people playing at once, before mmo was even known about by general masses.

If this game would be cheap this would be reasonable, or at least without monthly fee.

The game may be dead before it came out of the womb, but the (futa) hentai doujins of it is bristling with throbbing life..!

Comiket Winter...

Come forth and sweep away our sorrows and disappointment (through schliking/fapping) with FF XIV (futa) hentai doujins!!!

*holds up a poster of a futa Mithra*

warhammer online got 8/10 and it sucked ass . If MMO gets bellow 8 its utter failure .

@alidan:
Guild Wars 2 will definitely kick WoWs ass.

sorry, but this sheep was in the beta, and every other alleged detraction aside, the combat was absolutely awful

and yea, i'd agree with that guild wars 2 comment, except i'm pretty cheesed that they removed healers from the game

still looking forward to it though

Anonymous
05:05

guild wars 2 will have a place, but its not an mmo, at least in the traditional sense.

guild wars, the first one, i have factions, has a level 20 cap, and most of the games progression after you hit that cap is upgrading items.

every game where upgrading items comes from combining seemingly random items into something better always leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

now, guild wars 2... i have no idea what kind of game that is going to be, i havent looked into it to much yet, but if it has a level cap higher than 50, it will be a force to be reckoned with, but if it keeps that model of not leaving anyone behind, its going to suffer badly.

now there is another mmo, i forget what its called, that is in the same catagory of mmo as guild wars. its possible that both snuff each other out because they are competing for the same people.

but as a traditional mmo goes, the people who play guild wars will also play another mmo, a more you play it now or be left behind, kind of mmo or not play it at all.

I can already see the bright future game industry shall have in the upcoming decades...

I would've blamed the economy if this was their first mishap.....but I'm starting to think that the current management in Square Enix is just plain stupid and ignorant.

Shouldn't surprise anyone.

No MMORPG should be reviewed near it's release, and any journalist (or wannabe journalist) that does so simply lacks the credibility and integrity to do that job (or hobby).

Reviewing a game fairly requires playing at least a majority of it. better actually finishing it.
Reviewing a MMORPG fairly, as complex creatures as they are, requires even more time. You simply cannot review a MMORPG over the first few levels and a few scrawny hours of gameplay. It's like reviewing a normal game having played just it's prologue.

"3 or 4 weeks" of gameplay are more or less what it takes to know a MMORPG deeply enough to write a fair review of it. There's no escape from this, and if you find a review written much earlier than that it's a clear signal that you're reading a review written more out of hearsay, wishful thinking and hot air than actual facts and experience.

Also, you simply can't review a MMORPG fairly based on the usual inevitable launch idiosyncrasies that normally will be cleared a couple weeks or so after launch (actually FFXIV has been fairly smooth in that, with rather stable servers and client compared to the average, but still)

People that think that the media should review MMORPGs earlier than that should remember the Age of Conan debacle. The game was reviewed hastily by journalists that played only the first few levels (that were fantastic), but were followed by ages of nothingness, boredom and lack of polish. It got chains of 9 and lots of customers were tricked by the revews into buying the game, only to find themselves sorely disappointed as soon as the first few levels were past them.
There's an easy lesson to be learned there. Lots of journalists lost any credibility they had with those 9s.

Oh, by the way, of course if you take Sankaku Complex seriously, you really are in a bad position. They always had a huuuuge agenda against Square Enix and any of their games. They simply have no credibility in any matter regarding them. Reading any of their past articles will show that.
Even in this case, they're warping reality to make it look bad:

Square Enix didn't "Demand" anyone to hold off review. As a reviewer myself I've been contacted with the same message everyone received.
They asked quite nicely and there were no demands, threats or anything like that. They actually didn't even say to hold off writing about the game, and suggested to post impressions and similar things before the review.
But of course in a site that's intentionally trying to spin it negatively, this simple request has turned into a "demand".
Personally, I think it's fair, and I wouldn't have posted my review earlier than that anyway. I want to offer my readers something more solid than educated guesses, hearsay and wishful thinking.

Also, are we really talking about Amazon reviews here? Since when 2chan goons dragged down dragon quest 9 to 1 star (exactly the same thing that the same people did with FFXIV), everyone should know that they ceased to be any form of news.

Bottomline, Sankaku Complex isn't exactly a source of fair or honest reporting about this game or any other Square Enix game (actually, any game). Pay it no heed and move on.

If people play an MMO and its not even entertaining enough to keep people playing in the first 30 min its has already failed let alone 3-4 weeks of testing. After having watched hours of game play hoping for something to shine in my library i have only seen a complete and utter sorry excuse of a game. This is in fact more of a movie with the ridiculous amounts of cut scenes and senior citizen speed of game play. The environment are rehashed and mostly confusing hallways. The game is beautiful no doubt about it but thats about all. This is nothing more then a massive pretentious failure.

If a game is unplayably bad...if it is so flawed that the flaws reveal themselves immediately, and it is impossible to overlook them, then it is okay to not proceed any further.

That's why I stick to the (futa) hentai doujins...

Less grinding, more fapping...

Speaking of Final Fantasy XI, I have something that might interest you involving a Futa Hume and a Female Tarutaru...

You can go to my profile and download them if you want...

I also have other Final Fantasy goodies there that you might also love...

Well put, Arte.

As far as Anon goes, all your bitching tells me is that you're a terrible MMO player. Not necessarily a bad thing.

[spoiler]Enjoy your HALO REACH.[/spoiler]

@Artefact

I'm a Hentai Fiend...It's in my nature...

Just like how everyone (except anons) here have their certain 'thing' that they do/like...

@Artefact

I'm a Hentai Fiend...It's in my nature...

Just like how everyone (except anons) here have their certain 'thing' that they do/like...

My roll is what you see...

And for Me it is THE BEST Mmoorpg i have played ^-^

what other mmorpgs *have* you played?

Setsuna Toshirou: I love squenix dick! is so big and smelly! herp derp

There, i fixed it for you, you should be more honest.

I just love how trolls get their bait. >:D

We got us a FF fanboy here who can't cope with the facts apparently. Why would you take a game with such a large original fan base and then make it so shitty that only the most diehard fans would still want to play it? It's not serving to a niche player base, it's deteriorating quality is what's creating the niche player base. Niche player base in this case meaning people who don't mind playing china quality games that obviously the publisher hardly cares enough about anymore to put forth an effort to making enjoyable.

18:02,

You could always, I don't know... maybe not be here?

@ 18:12
Damn it, I hate when I get logged out and forget to log back in before commenting.

Umm, I didn't follow the local 'campaign' against FF13, though I'm afraid I'd join with the critics since to my taste the game was very uninteresting.

As for the FF14 - I've tried it already and to my personal feelings the game is a complete failure, at least in the state in which it is right now which looks more as an incomplete alpha version which had to be put on the market because the developing company has depleted all its funds and the only way to finish the work is to try and sell an incomplete product to build up some money to finance project's completion.

And yes, FF14 is not a "f*cking World of Averagejoecraft", at the moment it is much worse, a sane person, not a fanatical worshipper of FF series, with personal experience of playing FF14 can't argue that the quality of the game is way below average.

Good grief...PLEASE don't bunch guys like him with real fans of Final Fantasy. Actual Final Fantasy fans stopped following the series when they decided to make final fantasy 11 (and pretty much each subsequent game) an mmorpg with a tenth of the story length of previous games. Honestly, with all this unlimited disc space, why aren't games longer???? j'emmerde ce merde.

Real fans are the ones who don't care at all about new installments of a series...?

uuuumm.... hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...

FF stories were always lacklustre, generally involving collecting magic rocks as you chase a bad guy around the world, always showing up too late, or if you catch them, being too weak and letting them get away. However, in the older days, they did without as much of the shoddily written melodrama, the games would have a few amusing characters, and the gameplay would be excellent. Rather than less story, it seems from X onwards they've been trying to infuse more story, without realising it has always been, and continues to be, the weakest part of the series.

I consider myself a FF Fan, I've played them all and enjoyed most, although I haven't finished them all for certain.

I stopped playing XI when I found you just cannot level solo, at all.

XII was great for 40 hrs then you realise its pretty much playing itself.

Regardless of what anyone says I enjoyed XIII, I don't really care about the linearity or the shops, how often does a Lv 40 say, I really need to go bash some rats in the first dungeon.

XIV has probelms certainly, but it is pretty. It seems that almost any innovation from the last 10 years of online play has been left out, but it also seems intensional. It not incomplete, its like they said 'we really want the game to feel like real life, if you want to walk to the next city its supposed to take hours, and how many critters really live in deserts, they're supposed to be empty. Oh and maps just show you an area, they can't do cool sat nav stuff in real life'

Its an online game so it may change, but it seems they decided on a game ethos and are sticking to it, regardless of what players may want.

What I most want is a proper inventory system myself, its just a list, no games done this since the 80's.

I'll play until my free month runs out and then decide, but don't forget, it is pretty.

Oh by the way I forgot to mention that I'm still waiting for any part at all of the game to be fun, it is pretty though

Actually, FFXI had a awesome storyline... until the end of Chains of Promathia. Then they totally dropped the ball in ToAU, partway through the WTF campaign had me quitting and swapping to WoW.

For the old-time Square whores, that'd be an insult.

It'd be 'It's Squeenix' or 'It's Square-Enix'.

@anon 17:40
this

the old square games were awesome.
it's really too bad this went down the drain,
i have a sad.
this funeral isn't only for FF only, but also for the square in square-enix.
i'll go play some front mission in memory of a once great company.
too bad they killed that franchise as well by creating FM Evolved.
what the hell are you people doing, seriously guys.

Comparing Square with Squeenix is like comparing Japan with China.

*does 70s hippy tone* Duuuuude.. dont be such a SQUARE....enix.

Interesting.

Gotta love all the China hate.

Getting old fast.