Final Fantasy XI News & Events & Guides

Furthermore, if you're expecting that an online RPG originally designed for consoles and clearly derived from EverQuest would seem simplistic--or ugly--by the genre's current standards, you'd be mistaken. It's true that Final Fantasy XI is simpler in some ways than most other MMORPGs, but the simplified aspects--your character doesn't need to eat and cannot grow fatigued from running too much, for example--are mostly to the game's credit. Not all such omissions are praiseworthy, however. There's no player-vs.-player aspect to the game currently, though one is planned, and because Square Enix has delivered on its past promises for additional content (by introducing a higher level cap for player characters, new jobs, unique in-game events, and more), there's reason to be optimistic about this game's ongoing development. Additionally, FFXI Gil features better graphics, sound, and music than the vast majority of games like this. Since any Final Fantasy XI player will inevitably end up staring at those graphics and listening to those sounds for long stretches at a time, their quality does make a big difference.

The world of Vana'diel is consistent with the style and theme of many other Final Fantasy games.

Online RPGs are some of the most inaccessible games out there, for reasons that include their lack of an offline component, their steep learning curves, the time commitment they typically demand from the player, and their relatively costly monthly fees. Unfortunately, Final Fantasy XI doesn't buck any of these bad trends. In fact, Final Fantasy XI seems to do its worst to give you a negative first impression. Its mouse-and-keyboard control scheme is functional, but entirely unconventional, so it will take a good few hours to get used to it. Even prior to that, the time it takes from the moment you first open the box and begin installing the game to your hard drive to the moment you first set foot in FFXI Gil  world of Vana'diel is longer than an hour, between the extensive amount of time required to merely install the game data (more than five gigabytes' worth) onto your hard drive, the time it takes to patch that outdated data to the latest version, and the time it takes to slog through the game's convoluted front end, entering several different registration codes along the way.