Damn it they got me again. Last year when I saw Squarenix relaunch their troubled MMO Final Fantasy XIV I was awestruck at the amount of positive praise the game was getting from both the press and the fans. I even had one of my friends yammering to me for months about how he was excited for it. I thought it looked cool but I had sworn off MMO's. The last I had played was oddly enough Final Fantasy XI. I played it for about two years and had a ton of fun. Eventually though my time with it came to and end. Its no secret to anyone who reads any of my posts that I'm a huge Final Fantasy mark.

So when I saw XIV and subsequently heard the praise it was getting part of me really really yearned for that same experience again. Like a drug dealer all it took was for Square to give me the first hit free. Back in February they launched a four day beta period over a weekend where any PS4 user who wanted could try the PS4 beta. I was instantly hooked again. So I took the final steps and bought a retail copy at the beginning of April upon the PS4 launch.Its now been 30days and my trial period has ended and I've paid my first 14.99. Its also been the only thing I've touched all month.

So what hooked me again? Well, for starters FFXIV is an absolutely gorgeous game. It looks and performs incredible on PS4. The only noticeable slowdown was in the city Mor Dhona which is a late game area so naturally it attracts a lot of high level players. The other really noticeable thing for me was the battle system or rather how GOOD it felt on a controller. You can clearly tell the game was designed around a controller and it does it really well.

The final thing that really has gotten me excited is the community. Now let's be clear, there are the fair number of jerks you will run into. The Giantbomb Free Company (what FFIXV calls guilds) has welcomed me with open arms....furry cat-girl arms. Seriously though they've been great and I don't know everyone's GB names or how many of you actually post on the forums but thanks guys! Almost any time I've needed help with a dungeon people have been there to help me out. And they've been patient with me as I get up to speed and learn how to properly fill my role as a Black Mage in the dungeons.

It also helps that so much of XIV basically feels like a modern XI and is just in general full to the brim of FF series fan service. From Magitek to Moogles its all there. They even recently added Diablos as a boss and he looks almost exactly like he did in FFVIII! So then, what have I done in my 30 days? Well plenty! First off I managed to finish the story. The main scenario is about 256 quests long and actually tells a simple yet fairly compelling tale. It even has a few twists! And better yet it actually got me to pay attention to it since a lot of the characters are actually kind of memorable. I actually really enjoyed my time with it.

Along the way though I managed to level my Black Mage job to level 50. Which this marks the first time ever that I've maxed levels in a MMO. Oh, I guess I should also mention the Thaumaturge guild (the prerequisite to black Mage) was pretty great as well. I've also messed around with being a Botanist and a Weaver both which are non-combat crafting classes a little bit. I'm eyeballing furthering my Conjurer who is the starting healing class into a lvl. 50 White Mage but for now the scramble like all end game content in MMO's is for gear.

So, I've been doing a lot of farming for Allagan Tomestones of Mythology and Allagan Tomestones of Soildery both of which are the currency used to buy high level end game i90 and i100 gear. Doing so requires running dungeons quite a lot so I figured that I'd pick out a few of my favorite Dungeons and Trials and talk about them.

First up is The Wander's Palace this is a dungeon filled with everyone's favorite knife and lantern wielding bad-asses Tonberries. It has some fun and awesome looking architecture as well as getting to finally fight Tonberries was a real treat. It has some fun bosses and mechanics as well. Early on there is an unstoppable giant tonberry that is hunting you down and you must outrun him as quickly as possible. This is usually done by the tank pulling a fair share of the mobs a good distance before killing the entire group. The 2nd boss "Giant Bavaoris" is a giant slime looking creature who will summon smaller versions of himself that will heal him. DPS is a crucial part of this fight and downing him requires some fairly quick thinking to keep pressure on him and take him down. The last fight of course is the Tonberry King who while not that difficult is a fun fight for anyone who is a longtime fan of the series. I recorded my first encounter with him the other night. Yay PS4 video exporting!

I've talked about a Dungeon now lets talk for a second about my favorite Trial in the game. Trials are usually the huge set-piece bosses of the games requiring for the hard and extreme versions full parties of 8 people. Most of the Trials are revolved around known names from Final Fantasies past like Ifrit, Titan , Leviathan or my current favorite Garuda. First off flat out Garuda's music is the most bad-ass music in the game hands down. Nothing remotely touches it and that is saying something considering FFXIV has a killer soundtrack with ton of good tunes on it.

The boss fight is mostly straight forward on normal difficulty but when you play on hard or extreme things get amped up when you have to start dealing with garuda clones halfway through the fight. Failure to kill the additional enemies will result in the entire fight going sideways quickly. Also, Garuda is just the perfect kind of psychotic and really makes her seem like a legitimate bad-ass.

One of the more complex fights in the game is the recently added Diablos who I mentioned earlier. He despite taking the longest of any boss for me to beat is still one of my favorites. The big catch in this fight is walking in you'll see several doors around the circular arena with different symbols. Some of them match in pairs and about ten seconds after the fight starts the symbols disappear. This is extremely important because you need to memorize what doors are what. At various points through the fight diablos will cast an extremely brutal AoE attack that is capable of killing pretty much guaranteed 100% to everyone but the beefiest of tanks. Its an instant game over and the only way to avoid it is to time opening to of the same doors which temporarily sucks your party into a void in one door and spits you out of the other allowing you to dodge it.

So here I am 30 days in and I feel like the adventure is just beginning with more promised content updates in the future and a fresh influx of players from the PS4 launch there has never been a better time to get into XIV. And man am I looking forward to continuing playing. There are few games that capture my attention quite like Final Fantasy games and this one is no exception. I'm kind of glad I never ventured into trying the 1.0 version of this game as it sounded as dreadful as everyone was making it out to be. They have really seemed to nail everything with this game though. And the Giantbomb Free Company still has plenty of room left (I think) so if you decide to play make a character on Ultros and join up with us! I'd be totally down with helping fellow FC members out with whatever tasks I can. I just really wanted to write SOMETHING about this game and a review felt stupid and pointless since the game is constantly changing so I hope that if you actually read all this drivel you might give the game a chance or if you used to play sign back up and join us on Ultros!