Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn – 01 – Welcome to Eorzea

In the first episode of my massive Let's Play of Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn, I create my character, do the opening quest and somehow wind up with my first choice for a character name being available to be picked.

Disclaimer: My commentary will contain a certain amount of swearing, crude jokes and so on. Thus, they are probably not suited for viewers below the age of 13.

Hello and welcome to my brand new playthrough of Final Fantasy 14. This is gonna be a bit of a doozy, as you can probably guess. And it will be either the longest or second-longest LP I ever do, most likely (probably second as my SWTOR Jedi Knight LP does exist and was ongoing for about three years). I will be doing as much of the content as I possibly can but a lot of the early game sidequests will be done off camera as they're kind of boring if I'm being honest. Also, while I will be doing all the dungeons on both normal and hard, I am likely to off camera the harder versions of boss fights since I feel they don't add much.

Final Fantasy XIV is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) developed and published by Square Enix. Directed and produced by Naoki Yoshida, it was released worldwide for Microsoft Windows and PlayStation 3 in August 2013, with clients for PlayStation 4 and macOS following later. The game, known as Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, is a replacement for the 2010 version of Final Fantasy XIV, which was shut down after negative reception at its launch. Final Fantasy XIV takes place in the fictional land of Eorzea, five years after the events of the original release. At the conclusion of the original game, the primal dragon Bahamut escapes from its lunar prison to initiate the Seventh Umbral Calamity, an apocalyptic event which destroys much of Eorzea. Through the gods' blessing, the player character escapes the devastation by time traveling five years into the future. As Eorzea recovers and rebuilds, the player must deal with the impending threat of invasion by the Garlean Empire from the north.

The original Final Fantasy XIV released in September 2010 to largely negative reception. As a result, then-Square Enix President Yoichi Wada announced that a new team, led by Yoshida, would take over and attempt to fix the issues with it. This team was responsible for generating content for the original version as well as developing a brand new game which would address all of the previous release's criticisms. Initially dubbed "Version 2.0", it features a new game engine, improved server infrastructure, and revamped gameplay, interface, and story, fully replacing the original.

The game released to largely positive reception; critics praised the game for its solid mechanics and progression, and they commended Yoshida for turning the project around. After a poor 2013 fiscal year, Square Enix executives attributed the company's 2014 return to profitability in part to the game's strong sales and subscriber base, reaching a total of over 18 million registered players by 2019. Since release, the game has had a number of content updates produced for it, including three major expansion packs: Heavensward (2015), Stormblood (2017), Shadowbringers (2019) and Endwalker (2020).