Recent reviews by Garun

FFXIV is quite a ride. It has been released on September 30th 2010. Can you believe that it’s been already 10 years?

From MMORPGs I’ve played (that includes all most popular ones like WoW, GW2, ESO etc.) I’ve enjoyed the time spent in FFXIV the most. Reasons for that are:

1) This game respects your time.
I think this is the most important. In FFXIV developers focus in the first place on the quality of content. Especially in MMOs you see all those artificial ways to prolong your game time by grinding and forcing you to do content over and over again. In FFXIV it’s totally okay to take a break, play some other games and come back later for another patch. If you do high-level content you can relatively quickly get the best gear.

2) Best RPG story in years.
Writers for this game are amazing. It’s hard to tell when you start the game because FFXIV was released in terrible shape (so bad in fact that Square Enix publicly apologized to all players and re-released it 3 years later as Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn on 27th August of 2013). I recommend Noclip 3-part documentary that is over 2 hours long about the game. Link below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xs0yQKI7Yw4

Story at the beginning is mediocre and starts slow but later expansions grow in quality (writing, improved cutscenes, character facial expressions etc.), especially latest one Shadowbringers (from patch 5.0 to 5.3) is one of the best stories ever told in a videogame. It gives you so many payoffs for following story and shows you how all NPCs that you are involved with grew over many years. It’s amazing. If you let yourself immerse in this world you will have good time.

3) Most helpful and chilled community I met in MMORPG.
Game has “Novice channel” where everyone who starts game or returns to it after a long break automatically joins. There you can ask questions if you are confused about something or need help. When I compare groups in FFXIV to other MMOs in general they are without a doubt more friendly, helpful, and patient.

Other reasons to play the game:
+ It’s always better to play games with friends but in FFXIV it’s not mandatory. You can do the whole story solo with party groups for dungeons. In newest expansion (Shadowbringers) you can do all of it alone without any players (two exceptions: trials and raids).

+ There is insane amount of content for you to enjoy (as mentioned at the beginning game is over 10 years old). That includes:
• Over few hundred hours of mostly voiced Main Story Quest that is mandatory for all players (luckly story is one of biggest strengths of this game)
• Other side story lines (your class quests, Hildi story line, factions reputation, raids and so much more)
• 4 player Dungeons (game uses holy trinity system that is tank, healer and dps)
• 8 player Trials (1 Boss "raid")
• Raids
• mechanically boss fights are a lot of fun
• robust Crafting and Gathering systems
• no P2W (pay to win)
• hundreds of collectibles like glamour (cosmetics), minions (think pets), mounts, unlockable emotes, music from the game to play in your own jukebox
• in-game housing system for free companies (guilds) and rich players
• in-game theme park (Goldensaucer) filled with mini games

+ Beautiful art design

+ Amazing soundtrack

+ Highly customizable user interface (unfortunately there are no addons or mods)

For all those reasons FFXIV got from me the “2020 Steam Labor of Love” award for the game that keeps on giving amazing content 10 years after release.

Can't stop playing. It's been too long since last good SoulCalibur game. This one is on PC too!

Gameplay is most similiar to SoulCalibur II. Simple, addictive and fun. Without doubt better than SC IV and SC V. Will this one be the best? I'll let you know in next year.

See you in ranked and welcome back to the stage of history!

EDIT:
Here we are year later. Last week SoulCalibur VI received Season 2 patch. Rework of game mechanics and every character got new moves. Right now game is better than ever and it'll still be polished for next year.

Without doubt SoulCalibur VI is the most balanced SoulCalibur yet!

Is it the best one in the series? Nostalgia still tells me SoulCalibur II. But if you want to play competitively, it's SoulCalibur VI for sure. Training mode is great and game automaticly saves your last 50 games. Thanks to that if you struggle against any specific character you can check what setup exactly gives you problems. What's even better, you can check opponents input history so you can quick and easily replicate setup in training mode.