FFXIV is a great MMORPG. As someone who had little experience with MMOs (I've played my fair share of them, but never for too long, and only free ones), I wasn't expecting to spend so much time on this game as I did. Especially since it's the first game with a subscription system that I've played, and I wasn't expecting to pay an additional month after the free one I got from a friend. But honestly? There's a lot that FFXIV does right, that made me stay and pay more, going as far as getting the expansions as quickly as I could.

The story: I'm not an expert when it comes to judging stories and storytelling, but the story of this game is captivating (though not always, but definitely the majority of it). My favorite one is the story from the first expansion, Heavensward, but I haven't finished Shadowbringers yet and it looks promising. (Update: I did play it, and god how I love it. First place ex aequo with Heavensward.) It's not perfect, for sure; sometimes I could predict what was going to happen, or sometimes I didn't really feel invested, but those moments were to be expected as no story is perfect. Besides, even the sidestories are interesting, whether it's the job questlines, or even the oh-so-hilarious Hildibrant questline (if you haven't done it yet, what are you waiting for?). I'd give the story a 7.5/10.

The gameplay: On point. The game starts off easy and gets more complex as you progress... duh. But the way it progresses lets you assimilate the new mechanics fairly quick and unless you do the very difficult endgame content, it doesn't punish you for not exploiting the full potential of your skills right away. One of the best things is that you can have all the classes and jobs on a single character, ALL of them! How many MMOs allow you to do that?
However, the changes to all the jobs that were brought in alongside the Shadowbringers expansion have caused a bit of controversy. Many people complain about the current state of healers, who were changed a lot and quite suffered from it. I agree with those people and though I still enjoy playing healer from time to time, I feel that the changes were disappointing. Some other changes feel strange too, but there ARE good changes, such as tanks being able to keep aggro more easily thanks to the new tank stances, and Machinist being actually decent for once. Overall, I'd give the gameplay an 8/10, 9/10 if it wasn't for the changes to healers.

The content: This section is a bit vague because it contains a lot of things.
First, gear. Sadly, there isn't a lot of variety when it comes to a job's best gear. You usually find a good armor that gets you through a few levels, then find a better one to replace it, and when you reach max level there are only a few options for the best gear you can get. Of course materias and melding allow you to add bonus stats to your gear which gives some sense of customization, but that's it. Do note however, that FFXIV lets you play all the jobs, so the variety you normally get from different builds goes towards this instead.
Then, PvE. Raids, dungeons and "Trials" galore. Raids (8-man or 24-man content) are the main talk, since they're the harder ones and get added sequentially with updates. Trials are basically big boss fights (like some raids), and usually come in a regular version and a harder, challenging version with new mechanics that require some coordination (like some raids... I'm noticing a pattern here). Dungeons are mainly used to develop the story, but there are "max-level" dungeons and non-story related dungeons that are fun to go through. All of those have their own mechanics and look, and appart from a few dungeons that are annoying (I'm looking at YOU, Aurum Vale and Dzemael Stronghold) or boring (the very first ones, since you don't have a lot of skills) they're all interesting to go through.
PvP... I haven't done a lot of that. In fact I only participated in PvP once. I didn't enjoy it, but I've heard that there's a good part of the community that does, so... Can't really tell you. You'll have to find someone else to explain it to you.
Finally, the true endgame: glamours. Basically, you can give your gear the appearance of any other gear you have in your possession. And it's great. Let's say you get that new, stronger gear, but you don't want to look like that when your character goes into a cutscene. Or you simply have an idea in mind and want your character to look awesome. Then you can have your character look cool, ravishing, cute, fancy, edgy or whatever, and still keep the best stats. It's not new in games, but it's really cool: you can save multiple glamour sets and change into those at will as long as you're in a big city.
Overall, all of the content in the game deserves an 8.5/10.

To conclude: I wrote huge blocks of text, but honestly this game deserves those. My final score? 8/10, but once again I'm not a professional game critic, only a gamer dude. FFXIV is one of my favorite games ever, and I hope it lives on for even longer.