Games of 2021
To be refined come GOTY time, these are the games released this year that have struck me.
List items
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Representative of FFXIV as a whole as this is the year I've gotten into it. The thing the whole fanbase has repeated ad nauseum is genuinely true, once you get to the end of the mostly serviceable yet occasionally dreadfully boring launch content and start getting into the expansions, FFXIV is an incredible MMORPG with some of the sharpest fantasy writing and world building I've seen in any game let alone an MMO.
What was there at the beginning (or second beginning as it were) was remarkable just in the circumstances in which it was made, but retrospectively it's clear that concessions were made to the narrative just to get the game out the door. Characters are introduced and foundational pieces are laid but it's more or less a few dozen hours of proverbial wheel-spinning with little flair and a lot of fetch quests. The story content introduced in the patches between the launch and the first expansion is mostly dreadful but sets the stage for a major inflection point that leads directly into the first expansion, which is when things pick up so tremendously and so suddenly that I still feel whiplash from the rapid shift in my perception of the writing and characters.
That and everything up through Heavensward is part of a free trial account. That is tons of content and backloaded with so much great story that if you manage to exhaust it all you'll likely want to pick up the latest expansion (which gets you all the expansions up to that point, which I think is a great way of keeping players up to date with minimal investment).
Everything the fans say is true, this game is incredible. It of course has a thick anime stench about it but the writing is excellent and nuanced, and the encounter design and class design only gets more interesting as you progress through the levels.
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