FFXIV ARR did a very good job in Role Playing Part
I have already played final fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn for more than a month, and I think this game is not bad especially in role playing part. It is much better than any other mmo games.
One of the big issues is that MMOs don't actually allow you to build your character and progress some sort of history around, it's basically a series of fetch quests and a few boss fights designed around helping you level at a steady pace until you reach end-game. That's it. You might get in some crafting here or there but it's usually just a way to burn time or makes a little extra cash selling off goods to up-and-comers.
I started hunting in other tradecraft jobs as well as trying my hand as a lancer. The thing I found compelling was that there's this added meta-game to the whole of A Realm Reborn where you begin to see how you can build up and explore a non-linear character that, in a way, you craft through experience and mix-and-matching classes.
The possibilities of crafting a story around the game's classless boundaries really opens up nice a vista of role-playing options rarely afforded in other MMOs. If I did have a gripe about the player's character portrayal in A Realm Reborn it would be that they're basically a mute when it comes to anything story related, obviously done to keep the protagonist as generic as possible since it's an MMO.
Doing ffxiv power leveling in the game with a real story and some form of development that grows and evolves based on the tradecraft abilities you sculpt would have been an amazing thing for the traditional Final Fantasy games.