ranzware
Many, many moons ago (read: 2019), Final Fantasy 14 director and producer Naoki Yoshida was asked at E3 (ha! Remember that?) if, with World of Warcraft Classic around the corner, he would ever consider doing something similar with the original 2010 release of the back-then-not-so-critically acclaimed MMO.
And you know what that man did? He laughed, guffawed, even, before uttering one single word: “Nightmare.”
I mean, I get it. Final Fantasy 14 1.0 was a hot mess, and not in the slightly sexy, wine-drunk at 3pm kind of way. It was a hot mess in the total lack of team communication, thousands-of-polygons plant pots, kinda way. Former PC Gamer editor Tom Senior scored it a 30 when he was, I assume much to his regret, made to review it, writing: “The kindest thing that can be said about the Final Fantasy MMO is that it has a good intro movie. That movie doesn’t take ten minutes to load, it maintains a constant framerate and you don’t have to traverse a labyrinth of menu screens to play it. In short, it’s everything the game isn’t.”
For how bad it was, it’s a small miracle that Yoshida successfully clawed it back into one of the most successful MMOs in recent memory. It makes sense that he wouldn’t want to revisit what was, presumably, quite a rough time for Square Enix and the Final Fantasy 14 team.
Okay, but like, what if we did get Final Fantasy 14 Classic?
But, what if I put my little sicko hat on, did a dance and imagined what a Final Fantasy 14 Classic looked like? Would I want that? Why am I sitting here even wondering whether I would?
Well, first of all, I think I would want to immediately discard whatever 1.0-shaped pile of burning garbage the original game was, and instead turn my attention to the 2013 re-release A Realm Reborn. After all, Jagex was wise enough to know that the 2001 RuneScape wasn’t the one people were all fuzzy and nostalgic for, instead opting to make Old School RuneScape a recreation of what the game was in 2007.
So therefore, I reckon it’s wise for Square Enix to go for A Realm Reborn. I mean, I also didn’t actually play the 2010 release—14-year-old me didn’t have the beefy rig to be running that, she was too busy with her third original Xbox 360, praying this one wouldn’t RROD on her halfway through Fable 3—so I’m with Yoshida on my total lack of desire to ever give it a go.
Final Fantasy 14 1.0 was a hot mess, and not in the slightly sexy, wine-drunk at 3pm kind of way.
I did, however, start my journey with A Realm Reborn very early on, partly thanks to the fact it was on PlayStation 3 during a time where I was still engaging in desktopless behaviour: My Warrior of Light was born roughly a year into the game’s second life, during Patch 2.3—before Square Enix released Ninja and subsequently had hundreds of Rogues somersaulting through the pastures of Gridania, back when Sword Art Online was grossly popular and you’d struggle to find a character whose name wasn’t some variation on Kirito something, Asuna whatsherface, Firstname Kirigaya or Yuuki somethingorother.
So now, allow me to pop on my rose-tinted glasses and entertain myself for a little while. In 2025, how much of A Realm Reborn’s good and bad sides would I actually want to deal with?
A cosy open world: Yes please!
I may be a filthy Limsa Lominsa dweller these days, but back in 2013 I was a Gridania girl, through and through. It was my starting city—Archer main, hello—and I rarely felt the need to branch out to the sun-bleached bricks of Limsa or the intimidatingly large Ul’dah which, mind you, didn’t even have a bleeding teleport near its market board at the time.
Unless it was for the story, my feet were firmly planted in the forests of the Shroud, desperately trying to stay out of the line of sight of treants and running many a levequest, back when those things were actually relevant. No flying mounts, just me, my chocobo, and my bow.
And you know, it’s something I really miss: Actually being frightened of overworld mobs, spending time soaking in all of the flora and fauna, and eventually knowing the lay of the land like the back of my hand. A Realm Reborn maps were dense and packed with life, something I just don’t feel as much these days from the giant maps designed with flying in mind
I say clip my wings and happily chuck me back into classic 2013 map navigation. Though maybe still slide those Vesper Bay aetheryte tickets my way, thanks. I’ve got my nostalgia goggles on, but I still shudder thinking about the trek to the Waking Sands.
Cross-class skills: Erm, hmm…
Fun fact: If you, as a healer, wanted Swiftcast for quick rezzes in A Realm Reborn, you had to level Thaumaturge (the prerequisite to Black Mage) to level 26. If you wanted Provoke as a Warrior, you’d have to get your Gladiator/Paladin up to level 22. Those two skills are now very much staple to their respective roles and integrated into the levelling up process, but they required a bit more work to nab back then.
Cross-class skills were kinda neat, in concept. It allowed for a degree of flexibility, and also made it worth dipping into other classes as part of the game’s whole ‘you can play everything on a single character!’ selling point. But at a point, the flexibility became a lot more rigid. Jobs had skills you absolutely needed to procure from other classes, lest you enter into a raid with half a toolkit and piss everyone off.
Hell, my Thaumaturge stayed at level 26 for an entire nine years before I finally started levelling it up last year, remaining as the final relic of me being forced to dabble in that bullshit job for my White Mage back in 2014. Sorry, Black Mage mains.
I’d quite like to return to cross-class skills, but in the same way I like to return to random Flash games I played when I was eight: Stare at it for five minutes, probably say “wow, this sucks” and then never engage with it again.
Job identity: I kinda miss it!
Adjacent to the whole cross-class skills buffoonery, jobs came with a whole lotta BS of their own that, in my own sick and twisted way, I do miss a little bit. Being a healer and praying everyone would stand still as a statue as I went around casting Stoneskin and Protect on everyone, before someone accidentally knocked their W key and pulled the boss. Stance dancing as a White Mage—Cleric Stance, swapping your Mind and Intelligence stats in order to let you deal a modicum of damage, while Paladins would slap on Sword Oath after grabbing enough aggro to up their attack a little. Bard having songs that drained their MP.
Hell, the existence of the freakin’ TP bar, which was used for non-magic skills—including Sprint, by the way. So if you used up all your TP in a futile attempt to kill an overleveled enemy and then wanted to make a quick getaway, you were outta luck.
Don’t get me wrong, in hindsight it kinda sucked. But we’re in a landscape where Final Fantasy 14 is facing some serious homogenisation problems. Jobs within each role barely differ from each other, and all of them being built around a two-minute burst window has Square Enix slowly drawing itself into a tinier square in the corner of the room. It’s no wonder I’m over here, in my rocking chair, smoking a pipe and saying “Back in my day, Conjurers had to level up to 26 to even use their resurrection spell in battle!”
So really, can you blame me for wanting to claw a little bit of that back, warts and all? Go on Square Enix, let me suffer through having to level my Pugilist to 15 so I could turn my Archer into a Bard again. You know you want to.
The quests: Oh god, please, no
There’s one thing I always say about Final Fantasy 14, and it’s that I’m grateful as all hell I played through A Realm Reborn back when it was all we had. It’s a story that is still sort of shackled to all of the stuff that came with 1.0, and boy there are quests.
A lot of them, I might add. Fetch quests, talking quests, this and that quests. It’s long, real long. Not so noticeably long when that’s all that’s going on, and I certainly enjoyed what I remember of it, but even then it could’ve stood to be about 15 hours shorter than it was.
As of 2025 Square Enix has, mercifully, removed around 15% of A Realm Reborn quests in the spirit of funnelling people along to the good stuff. I still remember taking a narrative break for a few patches in A Realm Reborn and then returning for Heavensward only to experience the horrors of how many post-patch quests there were before I could actually play the expansion I paid money for.
It’s no wonder I’m over here, in my rocking chair, smoking a pipe and saying “Back in my day, Conjurers had to level up to 26 to even use their resurrection spell in battle!”
Want to do this side dungeon? Oooh, sorry, have you done these five gazillion prerequisite quests first? Here, have this quest that should have been an email, now go do that another 20 times. It’s old-school in all the terrible ways, ways that do still linger in 2025, and I don’t think you could pay anyone enough money to go through every single one of A Realm Reborn’s quests again, sans flying mounts and easy teleport, not without a gun to their head anyway.
The dungeons: Bring back my silly little puzzles!
One of my biggest regrets is being a hater of A Realm Reborn’s dungeons. They’re entirely different beasts to what you’ll plough through in the likes of Dawntrail: ARR dungeons were puzzly, with nuggets of lore and branching paths. You’d rarely find today’s standard of ‘two packs of mobs into a wall’.
They could be a pain, sure, especially if you were saddled with a directionally challenged tank (apologies to everyone who dealt with me levelling Paladin in 2014 just so I could dress up like Lightning from Final Fantasy 13). Aggro was harder to hold, enemies felt like they hit harder, and the whole thing took a lot longer than it does these days.
Dungeons have largely become story breaks, a way to get you flexing your rotation muscle memory and give you some buttons to press for 20 minutes or so, before throwing some more story your way. With a bunch of A Realm Reborn dungeons being retooled to fit with the game’s current design—so long, Toto-Rak photocells—it’s hard to go back and experience them as they were.
It’s the one thing I’d love to dip back into: Eight-player Praetorium (flashbacks to when you were allowed to skip the cutscenes in that, meaning my freshly-level 50 Bard emerged to find half the dungeon already completed), frantically typing ‘DON’T HIT THAT ONE’ in the Good King Moggle Mog XII trial while trying your best to mark the kill order of its minions, and one thing I never got to do when it was current: The Binding Coil of Bahamut.
Apologies to everyone who dealt with me levelling Paladin in 2014 just so I could dress up like Lightning from Final Fantasy 13.
Relatively speaking, on-patch Coils probably remain one of the hardest things Final Fantasy 14 has ever put out. Not for anything mechanically, necessarily, but the whole thing was considerably more obtuse and relied a lot more on teamwork and communication. The Coils continue to be one of the most unique things in the game—Square Enix never really did anything like it again, and they’ve remained largely untouched compared to a lot of the rest of ARR.
I kinda would like to take a stab at them, with all their jank combining with A Realm Reborn’s into the biggest jankfest known to Eorzea. Just to feel something, you know?
Don’t get me wrong, I’d still play it
Despite everything, I feel like I’d get a real kick out of a few weeks spent in what Final Fantasy 14 was a decade ago. Do I think it would hit quite the same as a WoW Classic or OSRS? Honestly, no. Arguably the game didn’t really start hitting its stride narratively until Heavensward, and then it was 2017’s Stormblood where the design shifted into what we know today, before peaking with Shadowbringers hitting both its story and gameplay outta the park.
That’s a lot of kinks to work through to get to the good stuff, and I fear A Realm Reborn would fall largely the same way Fortnite OG and Overwatch Classic did—diving in and going “holy shit, we lived like this?” and then switching the whole thing off for the comfort of modernity.
But I also think it would be a great insight into some of the things that are sorely missing from modern-day Final Fantasy 14. The closeness and cosiness, how diverse each server’s economies were, the flexibility across classes with features like having to actually allocate stat points as you levelled up—though don’t get me wrong, I don’t want that back, it was something which made wanting to main both Scholar and Summoner a bit of a pain—capturing some of that more unique flavour I fear the game has lost in its mission to make it more welcoming to everyone.
So hey, Yoshida, I know you laughed at the idea of a 1.0 Classic. But hey, you never said “no”, and you definitely did not say no to A Realm Reborn Classic, so take this as my pitch to you right here, right now. Bring it back, give us a taste of what we’ve been nostalgic for… and probably make us more grateful for what we’ve got right now in the process.
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Kurt Indovina
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