Playing Summoner feels like an FF-series Summoner in a way it didn’t before. The term “class fantasy” and its ilk feel increasingly abused, but it’s a useful frame for talking about the success of the Summoner and Monk rebuilds. Considering that FF14’s boss design (and its emphasis on constant movement) has not changed a whit, this is welcome. The damage-over-time aspect is gone in favor of the class becoming just a non-stop buzz saw of repeated elemental summonings and attacks, most of which are instant and castable on the move. Summoner now, as of max level, goes right for that old school Rydia/ Garnet/ Yuna feeling: when you tag in Titan, that gigantic stone asshat shows up, taking up a huge amount of the screen and setting off an exploding earthquake that really does, the first few times you do it, give you that “DAMN, girl!” feeling. Instead of really providing the feel of a classic Final Fantasy summoner - bringing big-ass spectral beasts onto the battlefield to blast the bejeezus out of some poor sap with a huge lightning bolt, or whatever – FF14’s Summoner commanded tiny, almost cartoonish replicas of the game’s summon beasts (“primals”) that did not feel viscerally impactful. However, it was also routinely awkward as hell. It was a damage-over-time-based pet job, similar to World of Warcraft’s Warlock, and it worked. Arcanist – the base class for both Summoner and the healing job Scholar – was the new hotness in 2.0, particularly for returning 1.0 players, as it was the only new class at the time of release. Summoner’s rework makes it feel like a brand new jobĬhanges to Summoner are even more significant it’s effectively a brand new job. Many tank abilities, for example, now give the user a self-heal or regen to aid in survival. If you watch a playlist of job-change videos from FF14 content producers - I’m partial to Larryzaur’s, myself - you’ll likely notice that in most cases, the changes are few, and largely amount to shuffling strength values or adding/removing extra benefits. Most of the game’s playable combat classes (“jobs”) have changed very minimally between the previous expansion, Shadowbringers, and now. There’ve been plenty of things I have enjoyed. (For you non- FF14 types, when people talk about “MSQ,” this is what they mean: plot-focused progression quests that gate content.) At this point, I’ve seen most of the available Endwalker content. Between Endwalker’s early access and its first few weeks in the wild, I’ve managed to power through the game’s main story quest. Rather than approach all this as “should you play this game?” I think my aim is instead to talk about… well, how the journey felt. After all, some of the more common uses of a game review don’t really apply here folks who’d be inclined to pick up the game have likely already done so, and me asking if you’ve heard of the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy 14 feels like it won’t end well for yours truly. It’s useful to think of Final Fantasy 14: Endwalker as the end of a path, especially in the process of reviewing it.
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